The Girl on the Via Flaminia Page 14

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “Three thousand lire!” she said. “Think how much bread that is! How much oil! And for what? A night. One night out of so many. Pay me that, Roberto.”

  “Will you stop?” he said.

  “Why?” she said. “I have the card now. All the technicalities are taken care of. Pay me three thousand lire. It’s so much simpler when one pays, and then goes away the next morning.”

  “You’re just talking,” he said. “You couldn’t do it—”

  “Couldn’t I?” she said.

  “No.”

  “Then I’ll learn,” she said. “Antonio says I’ll learn.”

  “Lisa,” he said.

  “Yes?”

  “Tell me what you want.” He said it quietly. He stood there, beside her, near the table, controlling himself now, saying to himself he would only say now what was necessary, and no more than was necessary.

  “I?” she said.

  “Tell me what you want.”

  “Go home!” she said.

  “Christ,” he said, “I’d like to!”

  “Go home!” she said. “Take your tanks, take your money, take the coffee and the sugar and all your generous gifts and go home!”

  “It’s seven thousand miles away,” he said.

  “We don’t want you anymore,” she said. “The dancing in the streets is over. The celebration’s finished. Go home!”

  She was trembling. She was standing now, trembling, and he thought: her too. Antonio, her. Underneath, there’s this, the actual thing, how they really feel. And we don’t, or don’t want to, see it.

  He waited.

  Then he said, quietly: “Do you remember, Lisa, what you said about the Americans the first time I met you? When I came to the house the first night, and the lights blew out?”

  “What did I say?” she said, dully.

  “You said they were stupid.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “They were too rich.”

  “Yes.”

  “They were liars.”

  “Yes.”

  “What did I say?” he asked. “Do you remember what I said? I said we were a little bit of everything. Do you remember?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “You hate us now,” Robert said, standing there. “And maybe you’re right. You, Antonio, the kids who throw rocks at our jeeps. Maybe we ought to be hated. I don’t know. I’m not much of an American anyway.”

  He paused. She looked so exhausted.

  “It doesn’t matter anymore,” she said, in that dull and exhausted voice.

  “Except it might have been different,” he said. “Who knows? Perhaps if I had met you where there was no war . . .”

  “We wouldn’t have met,” she said.

  “We might have,” he said.

  “It wouldn’t have been different,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “Oh, Roberto,” she said, “it wouldn’t . . .”

  “Why not?” he said. “All I ever saw of Italy was war.” He came closer to her, almost touching her. “But it was different once.”

  “You wouldn’t have come to Italy if not for the war.”

  She had turned her head away.

  “But say I did,” he said, urgently, “I always wanted to see Europe.”

  “You wouldn’t have noticed me.”

  He touched her now. “I always notice blondes,” he said. “And I’d have asked the American ambassador to introduce us.”

  “He would not.”

  “He would. He’d be that kind of an ambassador. What did you do before the war?”

  He never had asked. The bombing in the train at La Spezia he knew, and that she had been hungry, and about the French captain in the hotel on the Corso. Her hair again fell softly across her face, shadowing it. “Did you go to the opera?”

  “Please . . .”

  “We’d go to the opera,” he said. “Which opera do you like best?”

  “Oh, Roberto . . .”

  “Which opera do you like best?”

  “La Traviata,” she said.

  “We’d have gone to La Traviata,” he said. “Then we’d travel.”

  “Roberto, please!”

  “We’d have seen all of Italy,” he said. He urged her into that imagined journey. He drew her closer to him. “Both of us. What town do you like best?”

  “Roberto,” she said, “stop!”

  “Come on: what town do you like best? I’m a stranger here.”

  “Portofino,” she said.

  “Portofino? Where is it?”

  “In the north. By the sea.”

  “All right,” he said. “We’d go to Portofino. In the north by the sea. Why do you like Portofino?”

  Despairingly, she said: “I was happy there once.”

  “Once?”

  “When I was seventeen.”

  “Would I be happy in Portofino?” he said.

  “Roberto!” she said. “Oh, please . . .”

  But he held her now firmly, urging her to go with him, to go to Portofino, in the north by the sea, now when it was all dark here, and the city cold, and there was nothing but that great solitariness. “Would I be happy in Portofino?”

  “I don’t know!” she said, as though she could not bear that journey, or that possibility of happiness.

  “I’d be in love,” he said. “You’re supposed to be happy when you’re in love. Would I be happy?”

  “Yes!” she said, at last.

  “You’d be happy too, wouldn’t you? The way you were when you were seventeen?”

  “Yes, yes!” she said.

  “Then, after Portofino, and after being in love, we’d go to the States, wouldn’t we? To America. Just to show them how pretty an Italian girl can be . . .” Close, so that finally a warmth was between them, so that the cold went away, the solitariness, the lostness. “I always take my wives home. You’d go, wouldn’t you?”

  “Perhaps . . .”

  “You’d go, wouldn’t you?”

  “Oh, Roberto!”

  “You’d go.”

  “Yes, yes . . . I’d go!”

  “Besides,” he said, “I’d have to show my mother who ate her fruit cake. Tell me what kind of a wife you’d have made. A good one? Would you have made a good wife?”

  “Yes.”

  “How good?”

  “Very good.”

  “All the Italians make good ones, they tell me. But you’d have been one of the best, wouldn’t you?”

  “Yes . . .”

  “Guaranteed?”

  “Yes, yes!”

  And then it went away: the exultation, the journey of words, the imagined joy. He stroked her hair. “I’ve brought you nothing but bad luck, haven’t I, baby?”

  He could not see her face. Against him, he heard her say, brokenly: “Bad, bad luck . . .”

  “We turned out to be great liberatori, all right,” he said. He reached down now, and took the police card gently out of her hand.

  “No, Roberto—give it to me,” she said.

  “Give you what?”

  “The card!”

  “What card?” he said, tearing it up. “I don’t know of any card.”

  “Roberto!” she said. “You mustn’t do this to me, you mustn’t!”

  “Do what?”

  “This! . . .”

  “Why not?” Robert said. He had torn up the card. “Blondie loves Dagwood, doesn’t she? Everything happens to them, but she loves him.” She was struggling not to listen. “Doesn’t Biondie love him?”

  He caught her shoulders.

  “Doesn’t Blondie love him?”

  “Roberto!” she said, in a final despair.

  “Doesn’t she?”

  “Yes!”

  “Say it.”

  “She loves him.”

  “Then kiss him,” Robert said. “He just came home from a hard day in the office. Kiss him.”

  She kissed him at last, crying, sh
e was crying, her mouth against his mouth, hard and despairing, when the door from the garden opened again, admitting the night and the cold, and Adele, her head wrapped in a shawl, carrying a market bag, came into the room, and seeing them, in that fierce and despairing embrace, cried: “Ecco . . .” and Robert took his mouth away from the girl’s, and said: “Hello, Adele . . .”

  “Dio,” the woman said, unwrapping the shawl, “she’s still crying?”

  “No,” Robert said, “she’s not crying now. You’re not crying now, are you, baby?”

  “No,” the girl said, crying.

  “How did it go at the questura?” Adele asked. She put the market bag down.

  “All right,” Robert said.

  “No trouble? She’s free?”

  “Yes,” Robert said, “she’s free.”

  Adele looked pleased. “What did I say? I said it would go all right. You always imagine things are worse than they are. A little courage, that’s all one needs. Where is Ugo?”

  “In the kitchen,” he said. “Nina’s here.”

  “Nina? Dio, so quickly? But good—we’ll make a fine festa. I promised her a festa yesterday . . . wine and macaroni! The Americans like macaroni, no, Roberto?”

  “They love it.”

  “We’ll make a festa,” Adele said. “But remember: no more tears!”

  “No,” Robert said. “No more tears.”

  The old woman picked up the bag. She’s good too, Robert thought, in spite of that hatchet face.

  “Music,” Adele said, going to the hallway, “a little wine, macaroni . . . and no more tears . . .”

  She went out.

  He put his face against the softness of her hair.

  “See, baby?” he said. “Everybody loves you.”

  “Let me go now,” Lisa said.

  “All right,” Robert said. “First let me look at you.”

  She closed her eyes and he lifted her face toward him. Tears, exhaustion: and yet the skin still held that fine color, that goldenness. “You’re beautiful,” he said.

  “I’m not beautiful,” she said. She tried to free herself.

  “Where are you going?” he said.

  “To wash . . .”

  “Okay: but one kiss first.”

  “Please,” she said.

  “One kiss first,” Robert said.

  He drew her to him again, and kissed her, and then she broke away and ran quickly out of the room.

  Alone, he put the radio on. They were playing excerpts from the opera. It was in another language and the room filled with music. He thought: now it’ll be all right. Now it’ll work. It did not matter so much now that it was cold and dark. He remembered suddenly one of the towns in the south. It was a summer afternoon. Bricklayers were rebuilding a wall of a shelled or bombed house. The war had been in the town only two months before. Now the trowels of the bricklayers made sharp distinct clinks as they knocked the bricks into place and set them in the mortar. They were the old bricks of the house. They were putting up the wall with the same bricks and a fresh mortar. He heard the trowels clinking all the way down the street. Yes, he thought: now it’ll work. Now—and then Ugo came in, looking at him questioningly.

  “Where is Lisa?”

  “Making herself beautiful,” he said to Ugo. “And?”

  “She’s all right,” he said. “She’s fine now.”

  They were all fine now. You went on so long and then there was a break, a change, a difference. Things got fine again. He was sure of it. It was cold and dark and all the lights were out but now it would go fine.

  “And you, conquistatori?” Ugo said, looking at him. “How do you feel?”

  “Me? Great.”

  “Ah? . . .”

  “I’ll make them yell Viva la Chicago again,” Robert said. “I’ll make them hang out flags and throw roses.”

  Ugo sat down, smiling. The radio was loud. It was one of the big arias from an opera he did not know.

  “So,” the old man said, “in the end, after the tempest and the tears, everything turns out well. A little love and the world runs smooth . . .”

  “How’s the macaroni?” Robert said.

  “The macaroni’s fine. We’ll have a real festa. In Italy we say: macaroni and matrimony, if they’re not served hot they’re no good.”

  “Italy,” Robert said. “Italy!”

  “A country blessed by God and cursed by man,” Ugo said.

  The radio poured out its tremendous music. Robert leaned toward the old man. “Were you ever in Portofino, Ugo?”

  “Portofino? Sì. Several times.”

  “Is it beautiful?”

  “Very beautiful. The sea is all blue there, and the town is white. But why, suddenly, Portofino?”

  He said it confidentially, leaning toward the old man. “Because I’m going to be seventeen years old in Portofino one of these days.”

  “You’re crazy,” Ugo said.

  “Sure.”

  He grinned. But at least now there wasn’t that sensation of an enormous and abandoned space in which the small despairing gestures were made and the small despairing cries were heard. Perhaps it was love that peopled that emptiness and contracted all those horrible distances. “Who knows?” the old man said. “Perhaps the war will be over soon. Then you and Lisa can go away to America . . .” He pushed his spectacles higher. “When an Italian girl is in love, Roberto, she can be all fire and cloud . . .”

  “Any girl in love is,” Robert said.

  “But especially ours. You’ll see! But take her away . . . Europe’s done . . . there will be nothing left soon but the monuments.”

  “Why don’t you get Italy annexed to the United States?” Robert said. “The forty-ninth.”

  “Suggest it,” Ugo said. “I’m willing.”

  “I’ll write my Congressman,” Robert said.

  “America,” Ugo said. “An incredible country. No ruins! It hardly belongs in the twentieth century.”

  In the hallway the doorbell rang.

  Shaking his shapeless raincoat, the pipe in his mouth, the English sergeant came into the dining room.

  “Buona sera,” the Englishman said.

  She’d been happy in Portofino, Robert thought: it was a white town, and the sea was blue. He wanted to see all of Italy: the quiet and undestroyed places, where the sea was blue. There must be many places like that, undestroyed. It was impossible to destroy everything. They never could destroy everything.

  “Ah,” Ugo said to the sergeant, “you’re in time . . .”

  It must have been bad in the questura for her. But now it would be different: the difference would be in how he felt. He could borrow the jeep again. They could ride out into the country, or when the summer came swim on the Lido, or visit the old castles. They would clear the mines out of the sea and the swimming would be good. It would be different in the sunlight on the sand and the mines cleared away.

  “In time?” the Englishman said. “What for?”

  “It’s a festa tonight at the Pulcinis,” Ugo said.

  Yes: music, the opera, the possible swimming when the weather changed, and tonight a festa.

  “Do you think we ought to invite England to the festa?” Robert said to the old man.

  “Do those islanders like macaroni?” Ugo said.

  “Do you like macaroni?” Robert asked the sergeant.

  “Hot?” the sergeant said.

  “Hot?” Robert said to Ugo.

  “Always hot,” Ugo said.

  “I like,” the Englishman said.

  “Then we invite him,” Ugo said.

  “That’s right,” Robert said. “He is a kind of ally.” He liked them all now. They were fine, they were allies, they were finally allies. The macaroni would finally unite them, and there would be a change of heart, a change of feeling. Even Antonio would change too, once he got over Libya. They were good people, they were all friends and all allies, and not everything had been destroyed.

  “I say, Yank: was
n’t that your gel I saw outside?” Robert turned.

  The sergeant’s pipe was there, where it had been before, and there was no malice, no threat; it was simply information.

  “Outside?” he said.

  “In the street,” the Englishman said. “She was in an awful hurry. Didn’t even have her coat on. Where’s the fire? I said. But she didn’t seem to hear me.”

  He could feel the cold and the dark rush back. The opening again of the enormous distances. The wind blowing through the emptiness.

  “Where did she go?” Robert said.

  “Down the Via Flaminia last time I saw her.”

  He turned and he began to run. In the hallway Ugo and the Englishman could hear Adele’s voice calling, “Roberto! Where are you running? The macaroni is almost ready!” They could hear, too, the violent opening of the door.

  Puzzled, the Englishman turned to Ugo. “What’s wrong with him?” he said. “What’d he lose?”

  Ugo stood up, slowly. The weariness was back. “What we’ve all lost, my friend.” He looked at the sergeant. “Viva la Chicago!” he said, sadly.

  14.

  Now he was running. He must not stop running. He had to find her. There was a fog in the streets and there were no lights and the Via Flaminia lay wet and cold and dark. There were two possible directions she could have gone: toward the river, or toward the Piazza del Popolo and the city. He hesitated. He could not decide. The bridges and the river were closer than the city. Then he began to run again.

  “Lisa!” he shouted.

  He ran toward the city. She must be somewhere there, where the tracks of the trolley ran under the archways of the old gate.

  The people who were awake or out could see him running. The men playing cards in the wineshops. The drivers waiting beside their horse-drawn carriages for a fare. The women who kept their appointments in the dark side streets.

  But it was only a soldier running.

  He wore no coat. He was bareheaded.

  He was probably drunk. Or he had been robbed. Or he had committed a crime.

  They disregarded him.

  When he shouted “Lisa!” into the fog and the darkness, they shrugged their shoulders and said, “Eh, the soldati . . . the trouble is always with women.”