The first: Tommaso heard these two words before his own name was ever spoken. They passed from mouth to mouth along the corridor, charged with that brisk animation which novelties impart to men bound to ancient tasks. He had obtained neither pardon nor reprieve. He had merely acquired a singularity. The death awaiting him would be an inaugural one, and this distinction occupied his gaolers far more than anything that had hitherto constituted his life.
He rose when the door swung open. Throughout the night he had kept his shoes on, fearful of being found barefoot; now he wished he might take them off, gaining by this diversion a few moments during which he would remain a man looking for his boots. But their eyes were already upon him. One of the men held a sheet of paper, the other the cords. Tommaso followed the motion of the paper, not that of the rope. A sheet might yet announce something else; the rope possessed but a single tongue.
They called him Tintori. He answered. The name raised no difficulty, and this untroubled ease struck him as almost offensive. If only they had mistaken a letter, if another Christian name had compelled a return to the clerk’s office, if the warrant had lacked a signature. The men had everything they required. Outside, Rome was beginning the twenty-eighth of February, 1810; he had only to consent with his legs to the manner in which this day must end.
French power governed the city. The uniforms, the commands, and the warrants had altered; Giovanni Battista Bugatti, whom the Romans called Mastro Titta, pursued his trade. In the records attributed to the executioner, the new rubric of decapitations performed under the French administration opens with Tommaso Tintori, condemned for homicide. The man enters this register as one enters through a narrow door: a name, a crime noted without a history, a date. Behind him, the ensuing lines already awaited the others.
In the passageway, Tommaso halted of his own accord. He had caught sight of a boy carrying water. This boy bore no part in his misfortune and could still turn to the right or to the left. The condemned man wished to ask an absurd thing of him: to recount outside that he had seen him walk. Not to say that he had trembled, or prayed, or defied his guards; merely that he had crossed the corridor placing one foot after the other. The boy lowered his eyes to his pail. The water stirred against the rim. Tommaso resumed his march.
As he drew near the open air, he heard the voices more distinctly. It was not an uproar, but rather a multitude of conversations to which his arrival was about to lend a single direction. He listened for the familiar sounds of the city—wheels, street cries, some trivial dispute; he found them all, yet gathered entirely around himself. Those who had left their labour to see him had not cast off their habits. They debated, compared vantage points, beckoned to a neighbour. His death did not require them to become other men.
Then he saw the machine. It rose higher than he had expected. He knew the French word, passed from mouth to mouth; in his mind, he had fashioned it into a kind of intricate axe. What he now beheld resembled rather an edifice contrived for an operation of which he was the very measure. Two beams of timber, a height, an aperture: everywhere something had been foreseen. This foresight seized him more forcefully than the steel. Men had laboured before his coming so that he should have nothing left to decide.
He looked for Mastro Titta among the men busied about the apparatus. He knew him by the way the others yielded him ground. The executioner did not appear to be inaugurating an era; he was verifying a piece of work. Tommaso fixed upon this figure with an almost involuntary reliance. The man could kill him, but he knew what was to happen. The soldiers watched the crowd, the onlookers watched the fresh timber; he alone appeared to regard the condemned man as the person necessary to the proceedings.
A movement among the spectators caused Tommaso to turn. Someone was raising himself up to see better. At first he thought he was being hailed, then understood that a man was merely demanding an unobstructed view. This minute error cost him more than all the rest. He had still expected from the crowd some personal reckoning. They expected from him only that he should not obstruct the spectacle. He turned back toward the steps and mounted them without looking to see if they were clean, as he might have done upon entering a house where he was being received for the first time.
Above, the wind seemed colder to him. His bound hands prevented him from drawing his coat closer. The gesture nevertheless stirred in his shoulders, that poor, ordinary motion to which the body returned in spite of everything. Mastro Titta drew near. Tommaso looked at his fingers, then at the place where he was directed to stand. He had dreaded a struggle; he met with a succession of brief instructions. At every moment, a very small thing was required: to step forward, to turn, to incline the head. Taken together, they formed the impossible.
He wished to ask a question. It concerned the speed; even before uttering it, he felt ashamed, as though asking how long it would take amounted to haggling over a price. The executioner waited. Tommaso opened his mouth, then closed it again. He found only a breath, and this sufficed to mist the air faintly before his lips. It was still something issuing from him, mingling with the world and vanishing without any order having been necessary.
He was positioned. He lost sight of the faces and had nothing before him but a piece of wood, a shadow, the edge of a material whose name he did not seek to know. The voices of the crowd still existed, but they came now from a place to which he could make no answer. He heard a step close by. His body stiffened, still hoping to delay by sheer muscular force that which depended on a mechanism. The machine accomplished its office. For the onlookers, the waiting had just ended; for the men on duty, another part of the labour was beginning.
Tommaso Tintori was thus the first condemned man executed by the guillotine introduced to Rome under French rule. The city had witnessed a novelty; the register received one additional name. Those who recounted the event might praise or curse the invention, compare the method to the ancient torments, debate what the French brought with their laws. In all these conversations, he remained the first. Yet, that morning, in a prison corridor, he had answered to a name that bore no mark of a beginning.