by John Updike
Allenson really couldn’t understand why, after these many kilometers in which he had not crashed into anything, she seemed still not to like his driving. The car’s five gears (six, with reverse) did sometimes still jumble under his hand, so that he tried to start in third or to move straight from first to fourth, but within a day he had satisfied himself that, in Italy as elsewhere, a subtle camaraderie of the road mitigates the chances of collision. Amid an incessant buzzing of motorcycles, and between onrolling walls of double-van trucks, understandings were being reached, tolerances arrived at. Even at the most frantic mergers, he felt a Latin grace and logic; the drivers of Italy, though possessed of a gallant desire to maximize the capacity of their engines, were more civilized than the Calvinistic commuters of Westchester and Long Island. “Relax,” he told Vivian, on the road to Lake Garda. “Enjoy the scenery.”
“I can’t. You’ll take some crazy wrong turn like you did outside Vicenza.”
“What if I do? It’s all new to us. It’s all Italy.”
“That’s the problem.”
“I thought you loved it here.”
“I do, when we stop moving.”
“You know, Vivian, I could start to resent all this criticism. Elderly men have feelings, too.”
“It’s not you, you’re doing great, considering.”
“Considering what?”
“Considering,” she said, “you’re driving on an empty gas tank.”
Sirmione, even in early May, was full of other tourists. “The kids are here,” the couple said, continuing a joke that had developed in Venice and continued into Ravenna, where every basilica and baptistry seemed crammed, beneath the palely shimmering Byzantine mosaics, with packs of sight-sated, noisily interacting schoolchildren. Even the vast Piazza San Marco wasn’t big enough to hold the boisterous offspring of an ever more mobile and prosperous Europe.
The small fortress at Sirmione offered views of the lake and, most fascinatingly, of the process of laying roof tiles. Three men labored gingerly on a roofed pitch beneath the fort’s parapets. The oldest stood on a dizzying scaffold and guided onto his platform each wheelbarrow-load of tiles and cement hoisted by a crane in the courtyard; the youngest slapped mortar along the edge where roof met parapet; the middle-aged man crouched lovingly to the main task, of seating each row of tiles on gobs of mortar and tapping them, by eye, into regularity. “Doesn’t that seem,” Allenson asked his wife, “a tedious way to make a roof? What’s wrong with good old American asphalt shingles?”
“They’re ugly,” Vivian said, “and these roofs are beautiful.”
“Yeah, but acres of them, everywhere you look. How much beauty do you need? The cement must dry up and then everything slips and slides and cracks. I wonder when this roof last had to be done like this. Probably last summer.”
Catullus had summered here, a monument down by the dock informed them. A hydrofoil from Riva hove splashily into view, and they ate two toasted panini con salami at an outdoor café. When Allenson closed his eyes and lifted his face to the sun he had a dizzying sensation of being on the old workman’s scaffold, suspended at a killing height, thousands of miles from home, on a small blue planet, and soon to be dead, as dead as Catullus, his consciousness ceasing, his awareness of sun and of shade, of the voices of the excited kids around them. His brief life was quite pointless and his companion no comfort. She was a kid herself. He opened his eyes and the tidily trashy, overused scenic charm of the lakeside washed in, displacing his dread.
“What are you thinking?” Vivian asked him, her voice on edge, as if they were already back in the car.
“How nice it is here,” he answered. He added, “And what a dreamboat you are.”
“Why do you lie?” she asked.
He felt no need to answer. People lie to be merciful.
They drove west to Decenzano, then north to Salo and along a road that twisted high above the lake. “Do you have to accelerate around the corners?” she asked.
“There’s a guy pushing me behind.”
“Let him pass.”
“There’s no place to pass.”
“Then let him go a little slower. He can see you’re not Italian.”
“How?”
“From the haircut. Why do you feel you have to pretend you’re an Italian driver?”
“No comprendo,” he said. “Sono italiano. Sono un ragazzo.” In a lavatory in Venice he had studied a graffito that read HO FATTO L’AMORE CON UN RAGAZZO VENEZIANO E STATO BELLISSIMA.
“Con mia cara,” he added. “Con,” with its coarse meanings in other languages, turned out to be an indispensable Italian word. Cappuccino con latte. Acqua minerale con gas. Panini con salami. The little Fiat emitted a satisfying squeal of tires as Allenson surged around a hairpin curve. The grille of the tailgating Ferrari switched back and forth in the rearview mirror like an exasperated beast in a cage.
“I’m getting sick to my stomach,” Vivian said.
“Stop looking at the map. Look out the window. Enjoy the beauty you’re so crazy about.”
The most beautiful moment, for him, had occurred in Venice, as they were walking back to the hotel, up over a little bridge, past a place where the long black coffinlike gondolas waited in the canal while their drivers gloomily played cards. The dollar had become so weak that Americans were timid of gondola rides, and the Allensons had contented themselves with hearing, as they walked around after dinner, the astounding male voice of a gondolier, as open and plaintive as that of a woman, but enormous: it would swell from a distance into an operatic climax only a few yards away as a line of gondolas slid and tapped past and then slowly would subside, still audible long after the gondolas, with their burden of swaddled passengers, had vanished between the high, angled house walls. The water in the canal would tremble into stillness. The passengers were usually Japanese. This evening, as the Allensons crossed a little piazza and approached the passageway to their hotel, a tall Japanese girl cried out, “No! Wait!” The two syllables of English, somehow like a cry in a language Allenson only half understood, brimmed with a sweet anguish that electrified the air and arrested all motion but hers. Tall for her race, glimmering in a white dress, the young woman, her straight sleek hair utterly black in the half-light—that stagy indoors-outdoors atmosphere of Venice—raced across the flat stones at the canal’s edge while the gondoliers called to one another like awakened birds. She had lost something, Vivian speculated at Allenson’s side, and indeed the contralto cry had been as of someone violated, fatally penetrated. But, no, she wanted to give something, to a mustachioed young gondolier who, to receive it, gallantly made his way back across the narrow canal by stepping on other gondolas. The two of them reached out each an arm to touch hands, while imaginary music swelled, and in her strangely electrifying, passion-filled voice the Japanese girl said, in this language that belonged to neither her nor him, “Your mon-ey.” A tip. Some yen disguised as lire. The Japanese were flooding the world with money, as once Americans did. The Japanese had become rich and, with it, sexy. So beautiful, so far from home, her voice rising like a Madame Butterfly’s in this echoing stage set of a city. Her cry vibrated in Allenson’s bones until he at last fell asleep in the hotel bed.
“Darling, you must stop the car,” Vivian said, in a voice drained of all flirtation and wifely tact. “I’m about to throw up.”
He looked over. She did look greenish, under the tan she had acquired drinking cappuccini in sunny piazzas. Within a few hundred yards he found a space by the side of the road, beside a steeply descending woods, and pulled over. Other cars whizzed by. A few wrappers and empty plastic bottles testified to previous visitors. The lake showed its sparkling green-blue through the quivering tops of poplars. On the other side of the road a high ochre wall restrained the hillside. Vivian sat still, eyes shut, like a child trying to hold down a tantrum. Feeling unappreciated, Allenson got out of the car, slammed the door, and inspected this unscenic piece of Italy—the litter, the linked fence, th
e flowering weeds. Such unpampered roadside nature reminded him of America; his stiff old heart cracked open and peace entered, and with it, for the ten-thousandth time, a desire to reconcile with his wife, whoever she was. Vivian had opened the car window a crack, to permit communications. “Want to come out for some air?” he asked.
She shook her head curtly. “I want to go back. I want to get off this fucking twisty road.”
“What about Riva?” They had intended to drive to Riva at the head of the lake.
“Fuck Riva.”
“Honey, your language,” he said, slightly stirred, along the lines of the Japanese girl’s thrillingly pitched exclamation in Venice. He loved it when women let it out. “Would you like to drive?”
“You know I’m scared of the gears.”
“Then just relax and let me drive.”
“O.K., but don’t be so macho.” Her voice softened on “macho.” “I beg you,” she added. “Prego.”
“Smooth as silk,” he promised. The exchange had conferred youthful status on him; he got back into the car bouncily. “Stop looking at the map,” he told her. “That’s what gets you sick.”
On the way back toward Salo, Vivian cried out, “What a lovely little church! Darling, could you please stop?”
There was a space of cobblestones beside an array of white metal tables, and he pulled in. “See,” she said, in a placating tone meant to match his new docility. “If you go slow enough, we can see things.”
The ancient little church had a patchily Romanesque façade. The rounded front portal was open, and to enter they parted a thick red curtain. Within, they were embraced by the watery cool of village Catholicism—a stony deep scent like that of a well, a few guttering candles, some unfathomably murky frescoes. The hard-pressed tourist couple welcomed the emptiness, the vaulted silence between the entrance and the pale Virgin who was making a gentle disclaiming gesture beside the altar. Vivian was so moved she fed a thousand-lira bill into one of the offering boxes. From the church they went next door to sit at one of the white tables. A girl just barely in her teens came to them shyly, nervously, as if they were the first customers of her career. Allenson ordered cappuccino for Vivian, limonata for himself. Both were good, as Hemingway might have said. Dear old Hemingway, Allenson thought—looking for the good life in hotels and cafés, roaming Europe like a bison on a tenderly grassy plain, nibbling, defecating, showering love on headwaiters and contessas.
From the white tables one looked level across the road at the masts of some fishing boats and through them at the glittering turquoise water receding to the misty blue mountains of the far shore. Once again, the best had proved to be the unforeseen. On her map Vivian discovered that they were in Maderno. She found the church in her guidebook, in the smallest of types. “ ‘Sant’ Andrea,’ ” she read. “ ‘Shows remains of Roman and Byzantine architecture, especially in the pillar capitals, doors, and windows. A yet older church,’ it says, ‘seems to be incorporated in the building.’ ”
“ ‘Yet older.’ ” Reading over her shoulder, Allenson said, “We should go see D’Annunzio’s house. It’s just down the road.”
She looked at him distrustfully. “Who was D’Annunzio?”
“You dear child,” said Allenson. “He was just about the most famous writer since Byron. I mean famous-famous, not literary-excellence-famous. I’m a little vague about exactly why. Kind of a pre-Hemingway, fond of big gestures. A great womanizer. Didn’t you see the article on his house a while back in Art & Antiques? It looked like a Turkish harem.”
“That would appeal to you,” Vivian said.
“And there are gardens,” he dimly remembered. “We passed the sign to it just here”—he stabbed the map—“in Gardone Riviera. We’ll nip in to look at it, and then drive straight back, and be back in the hotel in time to have tea in the bar. Maybe he’ll give us those little English biscuits again.”
“Gas,” Vivian said. “We must get gas, George.”
Con gas. “There’ll be a station on the way to D’Annunzio,” he promised.
But there wasn’t. The distance was so short he shot past the turnoff, and had to back around, awkwardly and dangerously, while Vivian shrieked and clamped her eyes shut. Once safely parked, they walked uphill, following signs to Il Vittoriale degli Italiani. It was two o’clock, and the sun had become hot. “What’s a ‘vittoriale’?” she asked him.
“I don’t know. Some kind of victory?”
“I thought the Italians never had that sort of victory. That was part of their charm.”
“We’ll see,” he promised.
But at the entrance, with its ticket booth and desultory souvenir stands, the guard was explaining something to a bulky, displeased Italian family. “È chiusa,” Allenson heard him say. The ending was feminine. “La casa?” he asked, at a venture.
“La casa, il museo,” the guard said, and a torrent more, of which Allenson took the drift to be that the grounds and gardens were, however, open. The day was Monday, which presumably explained the split. Aperto, chiuso: Italy was a checkerboard.
“You’re in luck,” Allenson told his wife. “The house full of pillows is closed. Only the outdoors is open.”
“Is it worth seeing?”
“It must be, or they would shut everything up at once. Do you want to go in or not, dear?”
Vivian gave her first sign of D’Annunzio-induced panic. Her dark eyes, aswarm with resentments, made an effort to read her husband’s face. “You want to,” she said. “You think it’ll be sexy.”
“I want to do what mia cara wants,” Allenson said. He pointed out, “We won’t be here soon again. Maybe never.” Wednesday, they were flying home.
“How much is it?”
Allenson glanced at the biglietteria and said, “Five thousand a head. A cappuccino in Venice cost nine. It’s only money; we’re making memories.” Your mon-ey: yen passed through the reaching hands, the coffinlike gondolas bumping.
“Let’s see what the other people do.”
The Italian family, with abundant disgruntled dialogue between the husband and wife, while their two fat children reddened in the sun, decided to enter; but inside the gates, on the long paved walks and surreal stark stairways, where the Allensons kept encountering them, the man was heard more than once to be exclaiming in disbelief, as he surveyed the sunstruck vittoriale, “Cinque mila!”
To Allenson, it was worth it. The views of the lake, of the forest plunging down into the lake, were worth it. The only slightly aged grandiosity was worth it. The place had the feeling of an American sacred place—the home of Daniel Chester French, for instance, or Roosevelt’s Hyde Park—in which history has scarcely had time to cool. One’s parents, in boaters and white linen, might have been guests here, filling the terraces with the clamor of their youthful frivolity. An old scarlet roadster was displayed behind glass—L’automobile dell’impresa di Fiume. “The empress of Fiume?” Vivian asked.
“I don’t quite think so. Something that happened at Fiume?” Stairways led upward, past closed house and museum doors, into the surrounding woodland, where a mountain stream had been tricked into forming a goldfish pond. The atmosphere was pampered, enchanted, sinister. The couple came to a shelter wherein a large old-fashioned motorboat was suspended in memorial drydock; around the walls of the boathouse maps and photographs tried to explain the great impresa of Fiume, but only in Italian. It was a secret the Italians had among themselves; it involved a number of men, centered about short, bald, goateed, baggy-eyed D’Annunzio, wearing the clothes of an aviator. Maps showed dotted lines heading across the Adriatic and back. “What happened?” Vivian demanded in her impatient, car-riding voice.
“I don’t know, darling. It was a heroic exploit, in the car and then the boat.”
“It feels evil.”
“Don’t be silly. In the First World War, the Italians were on the Allied side, remember? Read Hemingway. They were fighting the Austrians.”
“Then what were th
ey doing in Yugoslavia?”
“It was Austrian at the time, maybe.” History, his fragile knowledge of it, was crumbling under him.
From the boathouse a concrete path led further upward, to a bizarre and solemn structure, a two-story mausoleum. The lower portion, entered through open arches, had the same watery smell as the little Romanesque church, but the only holy objects were graven names, names of i Tredici—the Thirteen—and more inscrutable printed information concerning Fiume. Upstairs, in a circle, elevated sarcophagi, blazing white, thrust their pointed corners, like little marble ears, into the blank blue Mediterranean sky. In the center of the circle, on square columns twice as tall as the others, the largest sarcophagus loomed. Vivian seemed bewildered—dazed and lost in the white brilliance, in the angles of unrelieved marble. “He must be in there,” Allenson said to her, pointing to the center.
“Your hero?” she said.
“He isn’t my hero. Please. Relax.”
“And who’s in all these others?”
“His companions in the thing of Fiume. The Thirteen.”
“You mean men are in all these boxes? Where are their wives? Why aren’t they buried with their families?”
Allenson shrugged. Her insatiable questions, like a child’s, were wearing him down, numbing his brain.
She announced, “This is the most hateful place I’ve ever been. I can’t stand it. It’s Fascist. It’s Hitler. I keep thinking of all the dead Jews.”
“Honey, it wasn’t that war. Italy was on our side. D’Annunzio died in 1938, it says right here. The grandeur of all this, I don’t know—maybe it was Mussolini who financed it. He wasn’t thought to be all that bad at first—he made the trains run on time. Don’t blame me, I was just a child in Pound Ridge.”
“I can’t stand it,” Vivian said. “If I have to stand a minute longer here in the blinding sun listening to you defend this Nazi I’ll scream. I’d like to blow it up. I wish I’d brought a can of spray paint so I could write graffiti all over it. I’m surprised nobody has.”