“Bullshit,” he said softly.
“Excuse me,” the European said. “I am not familiar with the expression.”
The apartment where we were talking that afternoon in March faced onto the street Garibaldi’s men had charged up and along. Across the way from the apartment building is a ruined house, shot to hell that day in 1849, and left that way as a kind of memorial. There is a bronze wreath on the wall. Like everything else in Rome, ruins and monuments alike, that house is lived in. I have seen diapers strung across the ruined roof.
The English lady really wanted to put a wreath on the Garibaldi monument on the thirtieth of April. She had her reasons for this. For one thing, there wasn’t going to be any ceremony this year. There were a few reasons for that too. Garibaldi had been much taken up and exploited by the Communists nowadays. Therefore the government wanted no part of him. And then there were ecclesiastical matters, the matter of Garibaldi’s anticlericalism. There was a new Pope and the Vatican was making itself heard and felt these days. As it happens the English lady is a good Catholic herself, but of a more liberal political persuasion. Nothing was going to be done this year to celebrate Garibaldi’s bold and unsuccessful defense of Rome. All that the English lady wanted to do was to walk up to the monument and lay a wreath at its base. This would show that somebody, even a foreigner living in Rome, cared. And then there were other things. Some of the marble busts in the park are of young Englishmen who fought and died for Garibaldi. She also mentioned leaving a little bunch of flowers at the bust of Lauro di Bosis.
It is hard for me to know how I really feel about Lauro di Bosis. I suffer from mixed feelings. He was a well-to-do, handsome, and sensitive young poet. His bust shows an intense, mustached, fine-featured face. He flew over Rome one day during the early days of Mussolini and scattered leaflets across the city, denouncing the Fascists. He was never heard of again. He is thought either to have been killed by the Fascists as soon as he landed or to have killed himself by flying out to sea and crashing his plane. He was, thus, an early and spectacular victim. And there is something so wonderfully romantic about it all. He really didn’t know how to fly. He had crashed on takeoff once before. Gossip had it (for gossip is the soul of Rome) that a celebrated American dancer of the time had paid for both the planes. It was absurd and dramatic. It is remembered and has been commemorated by a bust in a park and a square in the city which was renamed Piazzo Lauro di Bosis after the war. Most Romans, even some of the postmen, still know it by the old name.
Faced with a gesture like Di Bosis’s, I find usually that my sentiments are closer to those of my sculptor friend. The things that happened in police station basements were dirty, grubby, and most often anonymous. No poetry, no airplanes, no famous dancers. That is how the real resistance goes on, and its strength is directly proportionate to the number of insignificant people who can let themselves be taken to pieces, piece by piece, without quitting too quickly. It is an ugly business and there are few, if any, wreaths for them. I keep thinking of a young woman I knew during the Occupation in Austria. She was from Prague. She had been picked up by the Russians, questioned in connection with some pamphlets, then sentenced to life imprisonment for espionage. She escaped, crawled through the usual mine fields, under the usual barbed wire, was shot at, swam a river, and we finally picked her up in Linz. She showed us what had happened to her. No airplanes, no Nathan Hale statements. Just no simple spot, not even a dime-size spot, on her whole body that wasn’t bruised, bruise on top of bruise, from beatings. I understand very well about Lauro di Bosis and how his action is symbolic. The trouble is that, like many symbols, it doesn’t seem to me a very realistic one.
The English lady wanted to pay tribute to Garibaldi and to Lauro di Bosis, but she wasn’t going to be here to do it. Were any of us interested enough in the idea to do it for her, by proxy so to speak? There was a pretty thorough silence at that point. My spoon stirring coffee, banging against the side of the cup, sounded as loud as a bell. I thought, What the hell? Why not? And I said I would do it for her.
I had some reasons too. I admire the English lady. I hate embarrassing silences and have been known to make a fool out of myself just to prevent one. I also had and have feelings about Garibaldi. Like every Southerner I know of, I can’t escape the romantic tradition of brave defeats, forlorn lost causes. Though Garibaldi’s fight was mighty small shakes compared to Pickett’s Charge—which, like all Southerners, I tend to view in Miltonic terms, fallen angels, etc.—I associated the two. And to top it all I am often sentimental on purpose, trying to prove to myself that I am not afraid of sentiment. So much for all that.
The English lady was pleased and enthusiastic. She gave me the names of some people who would surely help pay for the flowers and might even march up to the monument with me. The idea of the march pleased her. Maybe twenty, thirty, fifty … Maybe I could call Rimanelli at the magazine Rottosei where he worked. Then there would be pictures, it would be in the press. I stopped her there.
“I’ll lay the wreath,” I said. “But no Rimanelli, no press, no photographers. It isn’t a stunt. As soon as you start mucking around with journalists, even good guys like Rimanelli, it all turns into a cheap stunt.”
She was disappointed, but she could appreciate how I felt.
And that was that. The expatriate poet started telling a long, funny story about some German scholars—“really, I mean this really happened”—who went down to the coast of East Africa somewhere near Somalia to study the habits of a group of crab-eating monkeys, the only crab-eating monkeys left in the whole world. These monkeys swam in shallow water, caught crabs, and ate them. So down went the German scholars with a lot of gear to study them. They lived a very hard, incredibly uncomfortable life for a year or so and collected all the data they needed. Then they came back to civilization and published a monograph. The only trouble was that the ink was hardly dry on the monograph before the monkeys, perverse and inexplicable creatures, stopped swimming entirely, stopped eating crabs for good and all, and began digging for clams.
Everybody laughed and our host poured out some more Strega.
Then it was almost the end of April. The English lady was in Vienna. I had been working on a novel, one about politics in Florida of all things, one that nobody north of the Mason Dixon was to believe as probable (south of the line it was taken, erroneously too, as a roman à clef) and damn few people were going to buy. I hadn’t seen anybody except my own family for a while. I couldn’t get much interest or action out of the people who were supposed to help pay for the flowers. Some of them were getting kind of hard to get in touch with. I had a postcard from the English lady reminding me of it all and wishing she could be there to be with me. I thought a little more about Garibaldi, read about the battle in detail in the library of the American Academy. Remembered Professor Buzzer Hall at Princeton and his annual show, the passionate “Garibaldi Lecture,” the same one every year, that drew enormous crowds, cheering students and half the Italians from Mercer County and Trenton. Hall could make you want to put on a red shirt and go out and die. I had some nostalgia about red shirts too. My grandfather had ridden with Wade Hampton’s Redshirts in Reconstruction days in South Carolina.
I walked in the park of the Gianicolo many times. The American Academy, where I worked, was on Via Angelo Masina, and I had hunted for Masina, found his bust, and found it defaced. Somebody had painted out Angelo and painted in Giulietta.
I was going to do it all right.
Then somebody stopped in my studio for a drink. He said I ought to think about it, maybe it was against the law or something. But how would I find out whether I was breaking the law or not? By getting myself arrested? Then I remembered I had a friend down at the Embassy and I thought I’d ask him to find out for me, even at the risk that he would get very excited and patriotic. I called and we had a conversation that went about like this:
“Hello, John,” I said. “Would you do me a favor?”
“What?�
��
“I’m going to put a wreath on the Garibaldi monument on the thirtieth of April. Would you find out if I’ll be breaking any law?”
“All right,” he said. “Don’t call me, I’ll call you.”
Not even in his tone was there the suggestion of a raised eyebrow. Strictly routine. It would probably be the easiest thing in the world. Then he called back.
“Look,” he said. “This may take a little time and doing. You sure you want to lay a wreath on the monument?”
“Well, I don’t know …”
“Do you or don’t you? I mean, if you do, we’ll fix it up. It’s a little bit complicated, but if you want to do it, we can fix it.”
I shrugged to myself. “Okay, see if you can do it.”
I wasn’t going to be able to hide behind the long skirts of the U.S. Government. This wasn’t the timorous State Department I was always hearing about. He now acted as liaison and as a buffer between me and the Italian Government. He, or his secretary, to be perfectly factual and to complicate things a little more, called me. There was a list of questions, some things they wanted to know before I got the permission. I would get the permission all right and it really didn’t make much difference how I answered the questions, so long as I did not object to answering them in principle. She read the questions over the phone, completely matter-of-fact, and I dictated answers. There was quite a list, among them:
“Why are you laying a wreath on this monument?
“What special significance do you attribute to the thirtieth of April?
“Could there be any connection between the fact that the wreath is to be put there on the thirtieth of April and that the next day is the first of May—May Day?
“How many people do you anticipate will participate in this ceremony?
“Will they march? Will there be banners, flags, music, etc.?”
And so on. The last question stopped me cold. I had also mentioned the bunch of flowers.
“Who is this Lauro di Bosis?”
I answered them all, each and every one. The secretary took down my answers, said she would relay them to Them and would call me back. A day or so went by before she called.
“It’s all set,” she said. “Go ahead and lay your wreath. They’ll have police up there to protect you in case anything goes wrong. Just one thing, though, they’re letting you do this with the full understanding that it doesn’t mean anything.”
“What?”
“They say it’s all right because we all understand that it doesn’t mean anything.”
“Just a typical American stunt. No implications, some kind of a joke.”
“That’s the idea.”
“Thanks a lot.”
I was left with it in my lap then. If I put the wreath on the monument and flowers beneath the bust of Lauro di Bosis, it wouldn’t mean a thing. If I did it, I was agreeing with that. They didn’t care much about Di Bosis anyway. “Who was he?” they had asked. I thought they were just testing or being ironic in the heavy-handed way of governments. They were not, it appeared. I had replied simply with the information that there was a bust of the poet Di Bosis in the park. The secretary told me this was news to Them. Even if I did lay the wreath, it wasn’t going to come close to fulfilling the intentions of the English lady. The hell with it. I would sleep on it and figure out what to do in the morning, which happened to be the thirtieth of April.
In the morning it was clear. The day was bright and warm and sunny. I walked over from my apartment to the Academy past the Villa Pamphili and along the route, in reverse, of Garibaldi’s fallen soldiers. I passed by the English lady’s apartment, the ruined house, the Porta San Pancrazio. Two horse policemen, mounted carabinieri, were in the shade of the great gate. A balloon man walked by, headed for the park in the Villa Sciara, which is popular with children and where there is a wall fountain celebrated in one of the most beautiful poems written in our time. Americans in the area simply refer to it as Richard Wilbur’s fountain. I watched the balloon man go along the wall and out of sight, followed by his improbably bright bouquet of balloons. I had a coffee and cognac at the Bar Gianicolo and made up my mind not to do it. I felt greatly relieved. I thought she would understand under the circumstances.
But, even so, it was a long, long day. The afternoon was slow. I couldn’t make my work go, spent the whole time fiddling with a sentence or two. I went for a walk in the park. Children were riding in high-wheeled donkey carts. A few tourists were along the balustrade looking at the vista of Rome. And there were indeed a few extra policemen in the area. I wondered what they thought they were looking for—some lone, crazy American burdened with a huge wreath—and what they would report when nothing happened, and who among Them would read such a report and how many, if any, desks it would pass over. I looked at Garibaldi. He wasn’t troubled by anything. He was imperial and maybe a little too dignified to be wholly in character. He wasn’t made for bronze. The traffic squalled around him and behind him the dome of St. Peter’s hovered like a huge gas balloon, so light it seemed in the clear air, tugging on a string. If you went over to that side of the piazza you saw sheep grazing on a sloping hill beneath, with that dome dominating the whole sky. Once there had been a shepherd, too, with pipes, or, anyway, some kind of wind instrument.
I went on, took a look at Anita Garibaldi, another bronze equestrian, but this one all at a full gallop, wide open, a baby in the crook of one arm and a huge, long-barreled revolver in her other hand, which she was aiming behind her.
Diagonally across from Anita is the Villa Lante and the slender, lonely white bust of Lauro di Bosis. I went over and looked at him awhile. Pale, passionate, yes glorious, and altogether of another time, the buzz of his badly flown airplane like the hum of a mosquito and of not much more importance when you think of a whole wide sky filled with the roar of great engines, the enormous bombs they dropped, thinking of my sculptor friend losing all his friends (and in war that’s all that there is) as they came up over the slight rise in the ground and rushed the village across an open field.… He said there was a tank destroyer captain with them. He had come along to see how it would go. He had been refused permission by Battalion to detach any of his idle tank destroyers to help the company out. He came just behind the assault, stepping over the bodies and weeping because just one tank destroyer could have taken the village and they never would have lost a man. Or thinking of all the brave anonymous men, bravery being a fancy term for doing what you have to and what has to be done, who fought back and died lonely, in police station basements and back rooms, not only in Rome but in most of the cities of the civilized world. It was a forlorn, foolish, adolescent gesture. But it was a kind of beginning. If Mussolini was really a sensitive man, and history seems to indicate that he must have been (perhaps to his own dismay), then he heard death, however faintly, the flat sound of it—like a fly trapped in a room. I looked at Lauro di Bosis for a moment with some of the feelings usually attributed to young girls standing at the grave of Keats.
And that was the end of it.
Except for one thing, a curious thing. That same night I had a dream, a very simple, nonsymbolic dream. In the dream I had a modest bouquet of flowers and I set out to try to find the bust of Lauro di Bosis and leave the flowers there. I couldn’t find it. I had a sense of desperation, the cold-sweat urgency of a real nightmare. And then I knew where it was and why I hadn’t noticed it. There it was, covered, bank on bank, with a heaped jungle of flowers. It was buried under a mountain of flowers. In my dream I wept for shame. But I woke then and I laughed out loud and slept soundly after that.
PRETTY BIRDIE
THE WOMEN OF THE TOWN never liked Ilse Monk. Not from the first day of her when the through train for Atlanta inexplicably slowed down, hissed and groaned and sighed with the effort of braking, came to a full stop for the first time ever at Tucker’s Landing, while all over the town, clustered as it was close by the railroad tracks, faces like full moons pressed against window scre
ens. Graceful, the white-coated porter from the Pullman car swung down one-handed and flourished a little stand at the bottom of the steps. Then, dainty, step by step on the highest unsteady peaks of heels you can imagine, Ilse descended. She was entirely in white from the wide-brimmed hat that glistened in the sunlight like a rakish, tilted halo around the spun-gold cascade of her hair, a dress that the light breeze danced in and which seemed to be made out of something as rare and frivolous as the summer clouds, to the white impractical shoes without, as yet, even the least speck of dirt on them.
She stood beside the porter, relaxed and waiting for something, and unsmiling, yet clearly untroubled, she gave the patch of haphazard houses the courtesy of a slow, veiled look.
Next her husband tumbled down after her as if pushed from behind, clod-footed, stumbling, rummaging in chaotic pockets for a tip to give the porter. As soon as he found it, he struggled toward the depot and freight shed carrying all of her luggage at once—so much of it!—burdened comically beyond believing, and nearly beyond telling, like some kind of a circus clown. The train pulled away silently. Except for the two of them standing there in the sun with the suitcases, it was hard to believe that the train had stopped at all. After a while P. J. Florey, who sometimes doubles as a taxi driver, came over from his filling station to pick them up. There were wonderful complications in getting all that baggage into the trunk and the backseat. Then he whisked them away and out of sight.
Evening Performance Page 32
