by Robert Lowry
“It was a lot of rain.”
“It was the rain or something else important. Anyhow I’d have waited there all night if you hadn’t come along. I was in love with her.”
“What about that little blonde in the red dress?” Burt asked sarcastically. “Were you deeply in love with her too?”
Maria Consorti, Joe thought, opening and closing the blind. Maria, the always-laughing little imp who’d dyed her hair blond and found herself the brightest red dress in Rome to be the belle of the town in. Why didn’t I go back that last day? he wondered. Why did I go to Nina Bonte instead? He’d made a crazy whirlwind of girls out of it . . . without ever knowing exactly what he was up to.
“Yeah,” he answered, “I was in love with her too. I still am.”
Burt laughed. “You sure showed a whole new side of your personality on this trip, Casanova.”
They opened the door and went out. Signora Valsetti was in the kitchen and beamed at them as they went by. Maddalena wasn’t around.
They ate three eggs apiece and drank red wine that had a good metallic taste in a restaurant two blocks away. There were no other customers and the restaurant was dark. They didn’t talk till they got to their cigarettes.
“Now it’s all over,” Joe said.
“Well, you’ve got till tomorrow. That ought to be time for something.”
“It doesn’t seem like six days, it seems like a month or a year.” He thought about it, blowing out smoke. “Or maybe that isn’t it either. Actually it doesn’t seem like any length of time at jail. It seems like no time. Like a dream. Like something whole and complete out of my life that I’ll never come back to continue.” He looked at Burt. “You thought I was kidding before with all that stuff about being in love.”
“We-ell,” Burt said, “as an old married man, y’know, I’d say that if you weren’t joking, you oughta be committed.”
Joe didn’t answer and they paid the check and went out.
But on the street Joe said, “That’s the way it is, I am nuts. When I got here I went slightly crazy. I wanted everthing again—all of it at once. I wanted a girl again . . . or maybe every girl. I wanted to be in one small room with her, to be decent to her. I was looking for several lifetimes squeezed into a few days—there wasn’t time for anything less.” He’d forgotten about Burt; he was really only talking to himself. “I guess I wanted to be in love again.”
“Yeah,” Burt said.
“And the city itself was like a big reflection of the way I felt. The girls I met weren’t whores, they were just girls. They were as crazy for life as I was. The war’s messed them up and the bottom’s fallen out of the world—so they’re rescuing themselves and maybe Rome too the only way they know how. They’re saving something out of this lousy junk-heap, maybe the last thing left to save. Anyhow the best.”
“Christ,” Burt laughed, “that’s the most sentimental bunch of rot I ever heard. What the hell’s gotten into you, anyhow? These girls are walking the streets because they’re hungry, friend. They’re not trying to bring any big moment into your life or their own—all they want to do is keep on eating.”
They went over and sat on a bench in Piazza Cavour Park.
Joe looked at the toes of his shoes.
“It isn’t like that either,” he said. “That’s only the surface reason, the one that maybe they themselves would give you. All I know is that there was something great in being with Gianna and Maria Consorti. They were real people, the best in the world. They didn’t ask for anything except to be kept alive and, if luck was with them, to be loved. I feel right now as if I’d known them all my life.”
Burt didn’t say anything. They sat there for a long time.
Then Joe said, “Let’s go now. Let’s start back today.”
“A whole day early?” Burt asked. “How are you going to explain that to those guys back at camp?”
“It’s all over,” Joe said. “I don’t want anything more to happen. It’s all too goddamn sad.”
They went up and packed fast and paid old Giorgio Valsetti and told him to say goodbye to his wife for them and half an hour later were out on the street again.
“Should we hitchhike or try to get a plane hop?” Burt asked.
“Let’s hitch,” Joe said. “We’ve got plenty of time—we can see the countryside, maybe stop off somewhere. Italy’s beginning to look human to me. I almost feel at home.”
They got a carriage and clop-clopped along toward the streetcar line that would take them out to the Appian Way.
Joe leaned back, puzzled and dreamy. He looked at the girls on the street and they meant nothing to him now. The whole trip was already like some confusing event from a long time ago that he still puzzled over. Nina Bonte, Maria Consorti, Gianna, even Carla and Maddalena—they were all different people essentially, but it seemed to him that each was somehow trying to recapture the same things, to offer the same things, to reap something out of the hopeless sterility of Rome in this tragic year.
Truckloads of soldiers coming in from the south passed their carriage. The GIs were standing in the big army trucks and staring at the girls eagerly. Joe thought of the hundreds who flooded into Rome every day for their first look at the city, and the hundreds who left at the same time, having seen Rome, having had this experience that was Rome.
And then he spotted the monument. He’d seen it a thousand times before in pictures and reproductions, but glimpsing it now electrified him. It was the statue of Romulus and Remus being fed by the she-wolf. It was the statue of the great she-wolf, cast in bronze, offering herself to the two helpless man-creatures. They strained to suckle her great teats, and in their grasping they reached for life itself.
Joe stared back at the statue long after they’d passed it. He had seen it before, but it was different now. His head hot and pounding, he felt emotionally involved in something he couldn’t get into words.
But even after they’d turned a corner and lost it, he didn’t mention it to Burt.
They got out of the carriage and took a streetcar out to the Appian Way. Half an hour went by before two Limeys in a weapons-carrier picked them up.
Riding along, Joe felt Burt peering with interest into his face.
“You’re looking pensive, amico,” Burt said.
“Tired.” His emotion at seeing the statue was draining out of him now.
Burt stooped down on the floor to light a cigarette. “It was a great little trip, wasn’t it.” He gave Joe a light.
“Yeah.”
Burt continued the peering, smiling, as if he divined what Joe was thinking about. He dragged on his cigarette.
“I should have said, it will have been a great trip,” Burt said, the knowing smile still there. “I mean, if we don’t end up with a nice dose.”
•
VISITORS TO THE CASTLE
MOUNTAINS ARE TALLER than history; again Tocini’s mountain proved this true. For months the war had raged down there on the plain, but Tocini, glistening white in the Italian sun, sat aloof, inviolable. If mountains are cathedrals, then Tocini was a silver dome. Bright tufastone houses clutched desperately to its vertical streets which circled and ran out from the castle crowning the highest rise of ground.
Only the castle had magnificence in all that small town of sixteen hundred souls, yet for more than four centuries no one had lived in it. The people of the town went on with their lives and their work around it, but even the children did not try to climb its slanted moss-covered gray walls and find an entranceway into the tall molding rooms which now housed no duke, no duchess, but only bats, a fieldmouse, a blood-stained sword.
Protected and forgotten through all the wars of Italian history, Tocini still had not gained the bounty of riches supposed to be the reward of peace and unaggressive living. For Tocini was poor; it lived on the sale of wine made from the grapes that grew on the mountainside, and the wine had to be hauled so far, at such great expense, down the treacherous mountain roads to Naples and to
Rome, that no large profit came from this. Even the town’s mightiest man, Antonio Grossi, who owned three-fourths of the grape arbors, the wine factory, the largest café and the town’s only three-story house, could not have been judged rich or powerful on any terms but Tocini’s.
For work the town had grape picking, barrel making, the manufacture of wine (done in Tocini style by throwing the vintage into huge wooden vats and mashing it with the naked foot), coffin carpentry and farming. For interest the town celebrated weddings, funerals and two hundred and seventeen days of church ceremonies, parades and festas each year. For entertainment Tocini boasted an eight-tube, cabinet-model, superheterodyne Crosley radio.
Antonio Grossi had bought the radio eight years before on a great business trip he’d made to Naples. He had used his solid-tire truck—the only truck in all the town—to bring it back, and he’d installed it before the amazed unbelieving eyes of three hundred townspeople in the middle of the dirty stone floor of his café. The radio ran by battery and, no one could deny, it was beautiful. The carpenters of the town were interested in the intricate scrollwork on its front, and they admired the way its round ugly fat legs had been turned out. None of them even tried to maintain that handwork could ever equal the precision of this American marvel. Every man in the town had peered at one time or another into the back of the radio—at the shiny silver tubes, the strange lights, the wires running everywhere. Most amazing part of all, though, was the big yellow halfmoon dial and the knobs that when twisted produced loud music or soft music, or voices from Rome and Bari, or strange howls that were like none other in the world.
The café which housed the radio was dark, low-ceilinged and dirty. No one in the town, not even Signora di Benedetto, who was a hundred and three, knew how long it had been there, or cared. But through all the hundreds of years of drinking accomplished in it, the cool dungeon of a room seemed to have missed no chance of absorbing any intruding raucous odor, and of preserving such odor in the terrible mixture of all its other smells. Tocini’s greatest café, in short, stank. But its stink was familiar—sour with vino, rancid with urine, musty with the accumulation of filth in the cracks of its stone floor—and nobody minded or even noticed. The men who sat on its wooden benches with their big earthenware mugs of vino argued and talked above the screaming of the radio, and quieted only when some extraordinary news of the outside world beat itself into their brains. Most of all they preferred loud music, as background for what came out of their own mouths.
No woman had ever sat drinking in Antonio Grossi’s café, or in any café of Tocini. The pump and the home were proper places for the gossip and nonsense of the female set. Even the town’s three whores, Maria, Filippa and Costantina, who earned their living in the last house of the outermost street, had to respect this rule. Before the arrival of the radio no woman had dared hang round even outside the café. But now this was changed. From the first day of the radio’s installation the women had begun to gather before the café in the evening to listen. And gradually the ritual of listening had been worked into Tocini’s complex moral code. Only at one special time, that is, was it proper for women to stand in front of the café: the period just before the evening meal, around seven or seven-thirty. One old woman, Signora Francesca Santonastasi, who somewhere along in her seventy years had lost her moral sense, was taunted day and night by the children because she couldn’t resist hobbling over, even at ten in the morning, to steal a little of the entertainment. The kids shouted “Old Radio Leg” at her, though it was never clear just what the connection was between her disgrace and her short leg.
So the coming of the radio changed the town. Without the radio the war itself might not have loomed too large in the public consciousness. But now national and international developments became as important in café conversation as deaths, the weather and accidents. Antonio Grossi, who came in of an evening to sit the enormous bulk of his body at a table in the rear, flanked by his brother-in-law and his father-in-law—Antonio too had his opinions on the right and wrong of the way the world was going. This was a pompous one. Usually he sat back there in heavy majesty between his two relatives, silent as a jug between two bottles. But as the news became more urgent, as the Germans invaded Poland and the radio bristled with war, he couldn’t help interrupting an argument now and then at another table between some of his own tenant farmers and setting them straight on a point or two. The night Italy entered the war the entire café, including Antonio Grossi, was in furious uproar, as if the town were concerned in such worldly matters.
Tocini would have been conscious of the war otherwise only because its young men were taken away by the army, so that girls of the town during those years grew pale and fearful of not being married, and only ate more and got fatter through nervousness brought on by thinking of this terrible state. It wasn’t until the Allies had battled up both coasts, overrun the Foggia Plain and forced the Italian surrender that forty-fourth year of the twentieth century, that talk of the war calmed in Antonio Grossi’s café, and talk of the boys coming back, up the mountainside, home again, became more important. They brought tales of brutal treatment by the Germans in the months before the surrender, tales of cruel Russians, of monstrous Americans and greedy English. Their report to the old men and cripples in the café made the world outside Tocini seem a terrible place. And there was a secret feeling in all that their town had been saved by God. No one suggested that it had remained untouched only because it sat atop a mountain and was of no importance to anyone else in the world.
Now the tone of the radio had changed, and it was true that the temper of the people around the café altered in proportion. No longer were the Americans described as invading beasts who had come, fat and rich as they were, to steal more from the Italian people. Their horns were gone: the same unctuous voices from Naples and Bari spoke of the Allies as only slightly less than angels come to drive out the were-wolves sucking Italy dry. The Italian people were liberated—rainbows and blazing sunrises everywhere, with food, clothing and good living on their way.
One day in August a bit of news in which the townspeople could see great possibilities came over their loudspeaker from Radio Bari. “Usually reliable sources in the United States reported today that Fiorello LaGuardia will soon resign as mayor of New York City to take an important post with the Allied Military Government in Italy. This comes as extremely welcome news to Italians, who see in LaGuardia the sympathy and fairness of a man of their own blood and tongue....”
News like this hadn’t been heard in the town since the declaration of war. Of course no one in the café had any doubt whatever that the great man was on his way. “He might even be in Italy at this moment,” Gino Spinelli, a wispy sadfaced little baker, suggested. And somehow this bit of dreaming immediately became the truth: he was in Italy already, preparing to take over the leadership of the country, and his first concern would be to see that Italians were given the best in the world.
“America has a million times as much as she needs,” Carlo Giambrone declared from under his black mustache. “Clothing. The best wool, plenty of cotton. Food. The whole country’s so full of animals they don’t know what to do with them.”
Antonio Grossi sat at his table in the rear, looking as heavy and intense and authoritative as ever. It was only toward the end of the evening that he opened his wet red lips and growled to the room in general: “They’d better hurry and send him over before the Russians get here.” His brother-in-law and his father-in-law sat as always on either side of him, nodding their heads and trying to look shrewd.
More speculation on LaGuardia’s appointment came over the radio for the next couple of days. And after that there was nothing. The café, however, only stopped talking about it after a week or more. Reluctantly then it turned its attention to other subjects: the marriage of the town’s fattest maiden, Angela Mangione, to Signor Abruzzi, coffinmaker, who had left his sixtieth birthday far in the past; the sudden death of Signora di Benedetto, about wh
ich everyone had a theory—heart, liver, chill—without giving any thought to the fact that old ladies of a hundred and three don’t have to have a special reason to die; the birth of a one-eyed calf to Albert Form’s cow.
Tocini could forget anything. It was not part of the world, it was removed, set high on a mountain, forgotten. The realities of life were not wars, invasions, new governments; but only grape growing, wine making, being born and dying. The big radio did not really bring a new sense of reality to Tocini. It remained through all eight years a manufacturer of dreams. And even the arguments that grew out of what the strange voice two hundred miles away was saying were not like arguments that concerned real life: with all the passion spent on them, they never led to blows as a dispute over a woman or a keg of wine could. They were carried on, rather, in a dreamy, faraway, wistful manner, and they were welcomed as one welcomes a recreation.
On the plain that stretched out eastward from the mountain, bombers and fighters swarmed. On clear mornings, heavy with armature and death, they roared down their fields and climbed the sky, up, up, higher than the mountain, heading for northern Italy, Austria or the Balkans.
Nearest the mountain was the town of Cormo, and on its outskirts to the east lay a great airfield that each morning launched waves of heavy bombers to cast giant shadows across the town. This town had known the war, it was a bombed town. Its tiny station was twisted agonies of rail, its opera house a heap of rubble. Yet its citizens had not run away; they moved anxiously about again, going on with their lives, marked only here and there by a missing leg, a twisted back, a face hideously insane. Each morning horses pulled two-wheel carts to the fields outside the town; in the evening they returned. Two or three cafés were open, but they were not patronized. The people were creatures in trance; they’d felt the war pass over them like a giant’s crushing boot; they were alive, but something that was their gaiety had gone from them. Sullenly they slouched past the Americans billeted in their houses. They had no time even for hope; and though they too had heard last week of the rumor that LaGuardia might come to govern them, still they showed little interest. They were lost people.
