by John Cheever
I hope to go without strong drink before lunch, but if Mary has our baby today I think I will ask an indulgence. And sitting at the breakfast table today I think about the anarchic possibilities of human conduct, which seem, without light, to be inestimable.
•
On the day after my son is born, I wake up filled with good wishes for him: courage, love, virility, a healthy sense of self, and workable arrangements with God. I will climb Mount Chocorua with him. I tell the maid and then the children how fine he is. I am very excited and, still having a cold, find my eyes sore and watery. I do not go to church, feeling that this observance is not necessary. I take the bus with Ben and Susie to the hospital. Walking from the bus stop to the gates, we pass through a dark turn in the streets—I mean emotional darkness. K. has told me that a murder was committed here and I think I detect an atmosphere of sexual roughhouse, the smell of piss, a cat sleeping in an ashcan, and some very dirty drawings on the walls, which I examine. In the hospital there is Mary and my fine son and all the things I plan to do for him. I don’t ever remember loving a child so much. So then we go home in a bus that is crowded and smelly. I have a drink and feel very odd—the cold, I guess—and looking down from my balcony into the street I covet the freedom of young bucks in open cars going down to Ostia to raise hell, and observe how a man can be given nearly everything the world has to offer and go on yearning. We go to the Palatine after lunch and now I think the world seems very strange, perhaps through the caul of my cold. The sky is lovely, the light brilliant and spotty, but a chilly wind is blowing from some quarter and the leaves turn and move in this, and the uneasy sound reminds me of autumn. I sit here and there in the sun but I cannot get warm and chemical storms or distempers seem to be raging in my veins. Back here and coming down the stairs, for some reason I think what a struggle it is to admit the existence of evil in the world and in ourselves, how difficult it is to strike that balance between our self-expression—our extension—and that which we know to be right.
Back to the hospital again—I am very tired—and then to bed. I wish I could lose this cold.
•
The reviews come, but this is a nothing.
•
Walking Ben to school, I see a man struck by a car. The noise rings up and down the street—that surprising loudness of our bones when they are given a mortal blow. The driver of the car slips out of his seat and runs through the courtyard of the Palazzo Venezia, knowing that if he is caught he will be jailed without bail until his case comes to court sometime next year. The victim lies in a heap on the paving—a shabbily dressed man but with a lot of oil in his black, wavy hair, which must have been his pride. A crowd gathers—not solemn at all, although a few women cross themselves—and everyone begins to talk excitedly, but nobody lifts a finger to help the victim, whose lifeblood is spreading over the cobblestones. Here is the dangerous Rome. It is not a question of precautions—traffic lights and police at intersections—but of an entirely different point of view about continuity and the valuableness of life. It seems, to an American, to be an inability to concentrate, an inability to grasp the weight of consequences. The dying man is put on a stretcher and carted off while the crowd goes on regaling one another with opinions and reminiscences. The murderous stream of traffic is resumed, and Romans dart in and out among the cars like crazy hens. Yesterday I saw two limousines, full of diplomats coming back from a Vatican audience, going about one hundred miles an hour up the wrong end of a one-way street.
Federico is registered at the Embassy, and the next thing I must do along these lines is to buy a car. Federico is up much of the night. I feel sleepy.
•
To tell the truth, I bemuse myself at three in the morning with the day I win the Pulitzer Prize. I see the story in the Ossining paper, the Rome-American, Il Messaggero, etc. I also imagine the cable that tells me it has been bought for a hundred and fifty thousand dollars, I see an editorial in Life with a photograph of me here in the Galleria or coming down the Spanish steps.
Communion breakfast with Susie; frozen orange juice, Nescafé, all things from the PX. A heavy nap after lunch, from which I wake for once refreshed and not depressed—but it is a gray day, the worst kind of day in Rome. Mary takes the children to the zoo and I memorize “avere” and take care of Federico, who is fretful and has a cold.
•
Mary says that if the book is a success I will get swellheaded, and I think about the nature of success. One does not want to be a failure, a kind of wood violet, and yet perhaps the responsibilities of success are what I dread. I seem to yearn to live behind the scenes. But it is true that when I cannot sleep—when I am unhappy or lonely—I bemuse myself with imagining fourth and fifth printings and the ascent of my name on the best-seller list in the same way that whenever I am unhappy I console myself with imagining pieces of good news.
•
To church for Palm Sunday and my eyes fill with tears. My tears are lewd, I think. I cry at horse races and dirty jokes as readily as I do at the Passion. And I am afraid of sentimentality here—of what someone has called the deliquescent aspects of religion. And at the altar rai, feeling a very deep emotion and challenging it, I say, How else can we express our deepest feelings of aspiration, our determination, in spite of considerable odds, to lead a useful and an inspired life? One can express these things, a rationalist would say, by developing those gifts we have for continence, industry, fairness, love, etc., and yet as I see it there is something else.
•
At seven the sky is all pink and gold; but just as we plan to leave for the Rocca a dark sky moves in over the Campidoglio: thunder, lightning, and torrential rains. I have the wind up—am worried about the driving, everything—and take a pull at the Scotch bottle, which makes me feel considerably better. What I want, I think, walking back from the cigarette store, is the laughter in life, and I think of the old prayer—“Prepare us for adventure, but do not spare us the hazards,” etc. The air is dark with swallows, there is more thunder and lightning as we leave. I get the B.s at the Gianicolo and we start down the coast road in unsettled weather. The landscape, or what I see of it from the driver’s seat, is lovely, but I say this: that the role of a writer is not to seek out the most beautiful places in the world and describe them—at least not my role. The Campagna is so green that it will seem at dusk to shine. There are thunderclouds over the mountains, streams and spouts of rain, and a clearing over the sea that is the fine blue of clear, saline water—but a richer blue than the Pacific. The whole countryside is a carpet of flowers. I have never seen anything like it, but somehow we are still travellers. We are in a hurry. We look for nothing here that is precious to us. The great Campagna with its cover of flowers is, in a sense, a locked sight. We go through Civitavecchia and under the walls of Tarquinia. The darkness and noise of the storm is still on the mountains. The light over the sea is brilliant. The Rocca is beautiful today. Lupine and snapdragons hang in long garlands from the walls. The air smells of salt. There is a mountain—a dead volcano, I guess, from the looks of the rocks on the beach—and in the distance a hill with a tower or castle, like a few broken teeth. And I miss again the fact that I am not young and in love, for these are the landscapes and places for young lovers. The whole thing seems to unfold as that. So much of the world seems to me to be a place where a young man leads a young girl.
•
I dream about the White House. It is after supper in a bedroom that I have seen on postcards. Ike and Mamie are alone. Mamie is reading the Washington Star. Ike is reading “The Wapshot Chronicle.”
•
Driving over the Ponte Flaminio to see Susie graduate, we seem very middle-aged. The nuns have worked over the ceremony and it seems sympathetic and comprehensible to me. The last high-school affair I attended, I nearly got into a fight with two hoods who were feeling a little girl in the auditorium. But here there is no conflict between youth and age, chaos and substance. The boys are no less vigorous, but
they are polite. And oh, the girls. The chinless one, and N., whose beauty is like an ache and it will be gone, as sure as winter comes, within three years. The girl from Boston with a boy’s face, a child’s hair ribbon and yellow hair as fine as silk way down her back. The nervous girl, the girl with spit curls, the plain girl at the end who nearly fell down. A string trio plays “Pomp and Circumstance” at an excruciatingly slow pace and the girls come down the center aisle like brides, holding flowers, their eyes on the carpet, or peek to the left and right to find their parents or, more often, their friends, since this is an International School and many of their parents are away. Women cry. Men smile foolishly. Everyone is immensely moved at this spectacle of female youth and its wealth of opportunity. Next comes His Excellency all dressed in red, including his complexion. His face is as vast and meaty as a six-rib roast and pursy, too, if you can imagine a pursy roast. Then the Ambassador of Panama compares the girls to a flock of birds, flying hither and yon. He also quotes from Cardinal Newman. His Excellency quotes from Pius XII. Diplomas and prizes are given out. Then the string trio strikes up a capriccio and His Excellency leads the procession into the vestibule. It is so much like a wedding that now the girls beam and smile at everyone. We are presented to His Excellency, the Romans kneeling to kiss his ring and the Protestants manfully shaking his hand. There is punch and sandwiches in the garden. The girls say goodbye and promise to write. I do not fail to get an eyeful of the Princess Barbarini, who looks as she should, only very Madison Avenue. The Prince is nothing. The school stands on a little hill, just outside the boundaries of Rome. Vigna Clara, a new housing development, expensive and unsightl, stands on the next hill. But the valley between the two is still a piece of the Campagna—yellow wheat and red poppies—and the famous shadows are beginning to fall. So we drive back through the traffic jams, the dusty parks, the apartment-house neighborhoods, fashionable and unfashionable—the outskirts of any big city.
A poor day and I wonder how I spoil it. Swimming with a mask, I see my son, swimming with his. It is strange and touching to see him underwater, the little sand he touches rising slowly, like smoke. Sitting on a rock in the sun, I wonder about that emotional debility that strikes me. And it seems that we cannot reform our sexual natures. And there is a point where denial is sheer hypocrisy, with its train of gruelling and foolish anxieties. One must act with a free heart—there can be nothing covert—and seek the best ways of expressing ourselves within the conditions under which we live. And waking I think how narrow and anxious my life is. Where are the mountains and green fields, the broad landscapes?
•
This in the bedroom in Scarborough, and I must find a place to work. After much foolish—senseless—anxiety I pried the nameplate off the door in Rome, loaded the car, and left Rome for Naples, followed by the best wishes of the porter and his wife. We stopped in some place like Terracina for coffee and reached Naples in time for lunch. The hotel was comfortable and seemed elegant, although I think there were bugs in the bed. The next afternoon I took the children up Vesuvius, suffering from vertigo. Coming back on the bus I sat with a pretty Danish actress. I meant to ask her for this and that, to at least send her a copy of the novel, but everything was put off and she left the bus suddenly at the railroad station without my finding out her name. Back at the hotel I had a hooker of whiskey, and standing on the balcony with my glass, looking at a vacant lot, an unfinished building, and the cranes and machines of the port, I yearned, I longed, I seemed to be in love, and so much for this capriciousness. In the morning we hired a car and driver to take us to Pompeii. Our driver was overwrought and spoke English with difficulty. We were joined by two young Americans who seemed so much to be their mother’s best, so weary and effeminate, that life seemed completely withheld from them. In the morning, afte much sweat and nervousness, we board the ship, and go on deck, after lunch, to make our farewells. After having wondered for so many months about the depth and reality of my love of Italy, after having imagined this scene so many times, I stand at the stern deck, staring at the cliffs along the coast; it all slips and falls away as insignificantly and swiftly as a card house.
“You got some rope?” an American asks me. “I want to tie on a hat. Ha-ha-ha.”
“I’m never going back,” an old lady says in the dining room. She sounds petulant; her feelings have been hurt. “I’m accustomed to conveniences,” she says, “and now I want them. I lived in a little shack until I was married.”
“My daughter keeps buying old houses and doing them over,” says another, reminding me of American decorative arts and their curious place in our lives. By dusk there is no land to be seen.
•
Lunch at the Century with M. “The book,” he said, “made quite a ripple.” Really very condescending. It is, after all, my first novel. The atmosphere in the streets of a financial and sexual contest is very vivid: I am richer than you, poorer than you, more virile than you, less virile than you, the graduate of a better, more exclusive college than you, and you can tell by the cut of my coat and my hair that my social orientation is better than yours; I work for a smaller but more potent advertising agency than you, my clubs are better than yours, my tailor, my shoemaker, yea, even my lights and my vitals are better than yours. Or lesser. In the public urinal I am solicited by the man on my right but I do not dare turn my head. But I wonder what he looks like. No better or no worse, I guess, than the rest of us in such throes. Whichever way we can most swiftly dismiss these matters seems best. It would matter less (I think) in Rome.
•
What the travel books don’t mention is the sense of danger experienced by the visitor to Rome. Driving back into the city after a long weekend you see at the gates of the Campo Verano a long line of hearses. Nearly every hearse and mourner’s coach in Rome is there, and while you watch, two more roll up and join the end of the line. There mus be twenty-five. You ask one of the drivers what the occasion is and he says it is the epidemic. He has been carrying the dead out of Rome for three days now without time to eat or drink or sleep. He makes the sign of the cross and moves slowly forward to the gates. In the city, in the Piazza Venezia, it is a winter’s night with the especial, cheerless dampness of that part of the world. The floodlights aimed at the monument, the yellow clouds of a big-city fog. You park your car and lock the ignition switch, the steering wheel, and all the doors, since car thefts go on every night in this quarter. You go into a bar to buy a package of cigarettes and the place is so damp and cold that the poor girl who waits on you—she wears three sweaters and fur-lined boots—is shivering. You buy an evening paper. In the bar and in the streets everyone is coughing. You ask the porter at our house what he knows of the epidemic and he says that there is one, a peste, but through the infinite grace of God his family and his house have been spared. His sister has taken her children out of the city to Capranica to escape the poisonous air but he has no place to send his children. He can only pray. Upstairs in your flat you pour a drink of whiskey for medicinal reasons and step out onto your balcony to examine this dangerous and mysterious city. You telephone a friend and someone answers the phone to say that your friend has left suddenly for Switzerland. You call another friend who has gone to Majorca. Then you call your doctor. He is short-tempered because he has been called from the dinner table to answer the phone. You ask him if the city is dangerous. He shouts his reply. “Yes, the city is dangerous. Rome has always been dangerous. Life is dangerous. Do you expect to live forever?” He ends the conversation with a bang. You look in the newspaper for some account of the plague. There are the usual government crises, new oil fields have been discovered in Sicily, and there was a murder on the Via Cassia, but the only news of the epidemic is that Masses will be sung in six churches for the health of the city of Rome. You might fly, like your friends, to Switzerland or Majorca, but how can you flee until you know what it is you are fleeing?
