Hill Towns, page 14
“Coffee first, before anything,” he said, and gestured for the waiter. The waiter smiled and called something, ending with Sam’s name.
“Do you know every waiter in Rome?” I said.
“Most of them,” he said. “I made a concentrated effort when I first got here. People think power is being invited to use the Vatican Library, but the ultimate power is knowing the most waiters. Well, did you get Yolanda home without an international incident?”
“No problem,” Joe said, just as I said, “Well, it was more of a domestic incident.”
We looked at each other. Sam laughed.
“Put the make on you, did she, Joe? I should have warned you. Past a certain blood alcohol level Yolie gets snuggly. It’s not necessarily a problem depending on the snuglee, but I wouldn’t have let you in for it if I’d been thinking. Your first day in Rome is tough enough.”
“She was fine,” Joe said crisply, and I simply stared at him. “But I’d hardly call it hardship duty if she had put the make on me, as you put it.”
Sam shrugged, still smiling.
“Definitely not that,” he said. “OK, this is going to be a foot tour, and I’m going to walk your asses off. We need to make time. It’s going to be hotter than hell by noon. Joe, the top of you is fine, but we might think about stopping and getting you some walking shoes somewhere. Cat, you’re just right. That dress will keep the sun off you and reflect heat, and you’ve got on crepe soles. Good. Y’ll about ready?”
We gulped our coffee.
“Am I OK for churches and stuff?” Joe said, studying his bare arms and chest. “This is literally all I had. Cat didn’t wash the shirt I had on last night.”
“Ain’t you got no han’s, boy?” Sam grinned at him over his shoulder.
“What?”
“When I was growing up in Demopolis, Alabama, we had a black woman who worked for us, and every time I acted like a little white prince and whined for her to do something for me, she said, ‘Ain’t you got no han’s, boy?’ Even now I wash my own underwear if I’m out. Ada thinks I’m a feminist, but it’s the early influence of that old martinet in Demopolis.”
Joe flushed.
“I’m not blaming Cat,” he said. “Of course she doesn’t have to wash my shirts. We both just forgot last night.”
“Maybe your bag will come today,” I said, feeling sorry for him even as I stifled the impulse to grin broadly. I did, in fact, wash Joe’s clothes on occasion. I was sure he would wash mine, if I were the one who was out of the house all day. It had always seemed more a matter of logistics than policy.
“I still don’t know why you wanted me to wear this,” I said to Sam, looking down in distaste. When he had called early that morning, he had asked me to wear the white linen I had had on last night. It was even more wrinkled for the night it had spent on the floor beside the bed, where I had dropped it when I shucked out of it.
“Humor me,” he said. “I’ll show you before the tour’s over.”
“It is just a trifle worse for wear,” Joe said, and I knew he was still smarting over the matter of the unlaundered shirt.
“Well, who cares?” I said, trotting off behind Sam. “I’m sure not apt to run into anybody we know.”
He took us first into the interior of the Pantheon. I felt a lump rising in my throat before my eyes even accustomed themselves to the cool dimness. Something about the sweet amplitude of space that swept up to the top of the great dome dropped a deep, abiding sense of calm, of refuge, down on me. I thought I would never be afraid here. The marble of its interior was radiant and lovely.
“It’s the color a gypsy’s flesh ought to be,” I said.
“Yes, it is, isn’t it?” Sam said.
He pointed to the aperture in the top of the dome.
“It was to let the smoke from the burnt offerings out, but there’s a legend that the devil made it trying to escape when it was consecrated as a Christian church. I’ve been in here when it was raining; it’s a wonderful thing to see, then. Just this column of radiant rain, coming straight down. It looks as if you could climb it.”
“The proportions are stunning, aren’t they?” Joe said.
“Pure classical geometry,” Sam said. “The diameter of the dome is exactly equal to the height of the walls. Who said mathematics wasn’t art?”
“God and geometry again.” I smiled.
“Like I said. All over Rome.”
From there we dogtrotted over to the austere little church that served Rome’s French colony. The three great Caravaggios in the Chapel of Saint Matthew bloomed into their rich, deep light when Sam fed a coin into the machine, and Joe and I simply stood mute and stared. I had never seen light like that before. The darkness of light, I thought, the power of dark light…. My eyes stung once more.
Sam saw the tears on my face.
“Are you going to cry all over Rome?”
“Looks like it,” I said. “Are you going to be embarrassed if I do?”
“No. I’m intrigued. None of the women I know have cried in twenty years.”
“I’m embarrassed,” Joe said. “Pretty soon you’re going to be falling down in a swoon. The Stendhal effect.”
But he put his arm around my shoulder.
We walked for what seemed a very long way, through twisted, narrow streets, dodging across wide, traffic-choked thoroughfares. The sun beat down relentlessly. Sam trotted easily over the killing cobblestones. My feet were sore and burning, even in thick crepe soles, and behind me Joe was beginning to limp. I turned back and saw that he was pale and literally drenched in sweat. Joe played tennis four or five times a week, and was perhaps fifty pounds lighter than Sam Forrest, but he was not used to the heat and the cobbles and the constant, hammering noise of Rome.
“We need to slow down,” I called to Sam. “You’re going to lose two ugly Americans if we don’t.”
He was contrite. He led us around a corner and onto the Via Condotti.
“We’ll make a pit stop at the Café Greco,” he said. “I was planning to do it in a little while, anyway. I forget what these streets can do to you if you aren’t used to them. You’ll like this one, Joe; it’s where the foreign literati hung out. Byron and Goethe and that crowd. Buffalo Bill too, if I’m not mistaken. Oldest coffeehouse in Rome. I can recommend the caffé granita.”
Joe and I both headed for the restrooms. In the dim light of the old mirror I peered at myself. My face looked greenish and wavery, and my hair stood around my head in damp ringlets. The white linen was so wrinkled by this time that it clung to me like a damp, discarded towel. I seemed for a moment a woman drowned. I did what I could with my hair and put on new lipstick and went back to our tiny marble table. Smartly dressed women carrying bags from Gucci and Armani watched me, or I thought they did. Joe was already at the table with Sam, and they were talking intently. Or rather, Joe was talking and Sam was listening. He listened as he did everything else, with his whole person. When Sam Forrest focused on you, you were impaled on his interest, bled yourself for him. I saw gratification in every line of Joe’s body. I thought that, on the main, few people except me had paid much attention to Joe on this trip.
“What are you two talking about?” I said, slipping back into my seat and taking a long sip of the caffé granita, rich and cold and life-giving.
“Faulkner,” Sam said. “I didn’t know shit about him until Joe started telling me. You know artists don’t read. Now I’m going to go back and read everything he ever wrote. It’s probably going to take me the rest of my life. Jesus, nobody ever told me about him before. That’s like me. I grew up like that, in places like that, with those people.”
“Most of us did, one way or another, even if we’re not southern,” Joe said. “That’s the point. In a way Faulkner’s like a painter. Everything’s in layers. Everything’s impressionistic. Everything comes right out of the felt part of life. Or anyway”—and he looked a little embarrassed—“I’ve always thought painting must be like that. The most felt of all the arts. The most…directly connected to the primal things.”
Sam looked at him with interest.
“It is,” he said. “Good man. Not that there’s not a kind of…grid of intellect and form laid over it, but underneath it’s all felt. Or what’s been seen is translated into felt. Let’s get out of here before I discover there’s a formal theory behind my work—such as there is of it lately—and get flown with myself.”
Joe laughed and they walked out together ahead of me, two men who suddenly liked each other, if only for a small space of time. Two men who met on a common field of expertise. Trudging back out into the whitening heat of midmorning, I felt oddly abandoned. Sam was, by God, my discovery.
“Y’ll are bonded as hell,” I called ahead to them. “You going to squat in the middle of the street and beat drums?”
Sam laughed and reached an arm back to me, and Joe did too, and we walked together, the three of us, up to a plain brown church on a promontory over the Via Veneto where, Sam said, we were going to see death, Roman-style.
It was a nondescript building, and I could not tell if it was very old. Above the street that I associated with Fellini and fashion and attractive decadence, it was an island of quiet, almost cool in the throbbing white sun. Lord, how much hotter could it get? I pulled my wet linen away from me and fanned myself with my hands. Joe was looking pinched and white again, and there were pink splotches on the tops of his shoulders and along his collarbones. Sam, under the disreputable hat, was no more and no less red than he ever was.
A monk in a plain brown habit sat at a small ticket station in the vestibule and took contributions. There was no fee, but Sam handed him a fistful of paper. I still could not decipher the notes; it seemed to me the smaller the denomination, the larger the note. I found some American dollars and gave them to the monk, who smiled and handed me a pamphlet and nodded but did not speak.
“Thank you, father,” I said, and blushed. I knew how, I realized, to address priests and bishops and even archbishops of the Anglican persuasion, but I did not know what you called a Catholic monk. Surely not “brother.”
“Brother, can you spare a dime?” I said under my breath, and Sam, who had heard me, threw his ridiculous head back and laughed.
“Not here,” he said. “The dimes come from the likes of you, Miss Cat. He’s taken a vow of poverty, though like most of the clergy in Rome, he does pretty well despite it. They’re Capuchins. Cappuccino is named after the brown of their robes. He could speak to you if he had to, but most of them have taken a vow of silence. It’s probably why their order has lasted so long. Come on. You may hate this, but I don’t think so. Children and other savages seem to like it.”
“Which am I?”
“Take your pick.”
We went inside and passed down into a long dim corridor and down a flight of stairs into the crypt. On one side was a simple, rough plaster wall, striated with the beauty that all old plaster in Rome glows with. On the other side were bones. Cubicle after cubicle, cell after cell, of bones. Human bones. Bones that formed intricate friezes and mosaics, bones that formed the entire walls of cells and small rooms, bones that made chandeliers and furniture and decorative panels. There were patterns to them; Sam said that most of the chandeliers were formed of sacrums and vertebrae, and the pillars of some of the chambers were made of long bones: thighs, arms. A few niches held skeletons, small or large; obviously whole corpses had been interred here.
“If you were particularly rich, you could have yourself or your children’s skeletons put here for all eternity,” Sam said. “There are a couple of children from the great old families, the devout ones. I bring everybody here. Kids inevitably adore it. But I’ve known more than one adult to just hit the floor. The monks are used to it. They have a modern first aid station across the piazza there. Look at the plaque.”
It was small and easily missed. I did not know what the Italian meant.
“‘As we are now, so shall ye be,’” Sam translated.
I stood in that place of bones and laughed. It was too much, it was too awful. Maybe it was wonderful. I could not tell. Part of me was appalled, but a greater part was oddly comforted. This place did not ignore death but put it right in your face. From there you could shudder and go out to lunch.
I turned to Joe and then turned away. I could see that he was profoundly disturbed.
“You going to be OK?” Sam said.
“Yes,” I said. “The bones are really very lovely, aren’t they? That rich, shining brown. Pear-brown Rome. Boy, it gets into everything, doesn’t it?”
Back out in the sunlight again, I unfolded the pamphlet the monk had given me and looked at it. It was a poem, execrably written, from the point of view of an aborted baby to its mother. Death and forgiveness seemed to be the main thrusts of it. I crumpled it up in repugnance.
“It’s antiabortion propaganda,” I said. “Ugh. How can they, in that place? It’s a little Golgotha. They’re death engineers themselves, but they still try to lay that trip on women.”
“God and physics,” Sam said mildly, and we went on out into the heat of noon.
We trudged, sweating, through streets that seemed to me to be devoted largely to couture shopping. I could not imagine who would want to brave this fearsome, living heat to buy clothing, but a great many chic women whose nationalities I could not fathom seemed to be doing so, most with huge Vuitton bags, clicking in and out of small, austere shops with the hip-swaying gait that predominated here, exaggerated by heels so high I could not even imagine walking in them. My own feet, cradled as they were in crepe rubber, were still sore and burning. I seemed to feel the impress of every cobblestone we had trod on their bottoms. Sam, well ahead of us in his steady dogtrot, was running sweat on every bare surface, but his colossal legs ground along as if powered by pistons, and the straw hat still rode at a jaunty angle. At my side I could hear Joe breathing heavily, and I looked at him worriedly. He was not speaking much now—had not, since we left the grisly hospitality of the Capuchins—but I did not know if the malaise was one of flesh or spirit. His silence bothered me. Usually, if Joe was slightly unsettled about something, he made a joke of it. If it was more than a slight discomfort, he simply asked that it be stopped.
We crossed a dingy modern street whose traffic, for sheer artistry of mayhem, matched that of the Piazza Venezia, and all at once I heard water. Not the plinking splash of the many little fountains we had passed but a deep cool cascade, proper water, running wild. Nothing had ever sounded quite so wonderful to me at that moment. We came into a small, nondescript little piazza and I saw it precisely as I had in innumerable magazine pages, in many technicolor movies: the Fontana di Trevi, the Trevi Fountain, its streamlets bounding joyously over its artfully artless boulders and spuming great Neptune with its exuberance. An extraordinary, playful, baroque, excessive fancy in the middle of one of the most cramped, even banal, little piazzas I had ever seen. I wanted more than anything in my life, just then, to simply step into it and lie down among the glittering coins.
“Oh, Joe, do you remember the song ‘Three Coins in the Fountain’? It was popular when I was a little kid. I thought it was the most romantic song in the world. Wasn’t it in a movie?”
“The only movie I remember about it was Fellini,” Sam said, fishing in his pockets. “When Mastroianni and Ekberg are about to have at it in the fountain and the water goes off and his pecker goes down, not to put too fine a point on it. At least, I’ve always been sure that’s what the symbolism insinuated. Here, turn around, both of you, and throw a coin in over your shoulder. Make sure you come back to Rome.”
“Maybe I’ll pass,” Joe muttered under his breath, as we shouldered our way through the crowds from the tour buses. I smiled at him.
“Just say to yourself, ‘Make it October,’” I said, and he smiled back, a stretched ghost of his old full smile, and we tossed our coins.
We made our way along the Corso and back up the Via Condotti to the Spanish Steps, so clogged with people photographing other people and vendors of every imaginable object and teenagers jostling and crowing and lunging that we could hardly see the monumental staircase itself. Sam pointed out the house where Keats lived and died and asked if we’d like to go in.
“Another time,” I said, frankly worried about Joe now. He was as pale as a wraith and nearly hobbling. Sam seemed to notice for the first time.
“Christ, I’ve nearly killed you,” he said. “If you don’t come down with Roman Foot on top of heat prostration it’ll be a miracle. Can you make it to the top? The Hassler has a good bar; we’ll get a drink and then we can get you some decent walking shoes and take a cab back to the studio. We’ll save the Ghetto and old Aldo Mori for another trip. You should have spoken up. Don’t let assholes run you into the ground before you have your second wind.”
“I’m fine,” Joe said thinly. I wanted to shake him; he was obviously very far from fine. “I think I will get a drink, though, and see if there are any decent men’s shops around here. I can’t spend the rest of my time in Italy in this getup; I look like a male stripper. I want you all to go on, though. I know there was more you wanted Cat to see, and I know she wants to see it. I’ll meet you back at your studio for lunch in…what? An hour and a half?”
“No, I’ll go shopping with you,” I began. “You don’t look so good; I’m afraid—”
“Cat, I really want to be by myself for a little while,” he said, in a low, fast voice, and I stopped. I could think of nothing to say. Joe had never before told me he did not want my company. My eyes stung.
“But you don’t know where the studio is,” I said, hating myself for going on.
“I’ll bet, if I ask him nicely, Sam will tell me, and I’ll tell a taxi driver, and he’ll take me there,” Joe said, with such soft sarcasm that I turned away and studied the bulk of Trinità dei Monti at the top of the hill, almost black against the furious blue-white of the sky.
“Sounds like a good plan,” Sam said, taking my arm. “Come on, Cat. Cut the guy some slack. He can get a cab in a second at the Hassler. There’s only one other thing I really wanted you to see, and then we’ll all go have lunch. Ada’s bringing it from home, and Colin and Maria are coming. Well, as a matter of fact, Joe, so is Yolanda; I forgot. Why don’t you buzz her room and see if she’s ready when you’ve finished shopping, and you can ride down together? She knows where it is. That is, if you can stand her, after last night.”
