by John Metcalf
A board creaked; a shoe cap knocked hollow on a riser.
It was just as my hand was turning on the huge carved acorn of the newel post on the landing that a door opened below and a man came out. He was a black shape with the light of the room behind him, shelf after shelf of books. He called us down and demanded our names and addresses. He was cataloguing the library. He was sick of boys breaking in and was giving our names to the police. He fumbled the front door open and ordered us out.
Secure in our aliases, we walked away down the drive.
Now, in my dreams, I have returned.
Nightly I brave the weathered griffins, the rank laurels; nightly I climb those uncarpeted stairs; nightly my hand grasps the great carved acorn of the newel post. But my dream does not continue.
Perhaps one night I will not awaken in the blue dark to turn and stare at the blue night-light on the bedside table. Perhaps one night soon—I have that feeling—I will round the dark oak acorn and reach the rooms above.
The sun has long since passed over the house and I am sitting in the shade. Soon Robert will return from his office and change into his gardening clothes; he will gather the windfalls in his oblong wooden basket. Soon the garage will sound as my grandson, returning from his college, roars his motorbike into the narrow space; soon the kitchen will be full of noise. Then Mary will call me for dinner. I should go and shave. But I will sit a little longer in the sunshine. Here between the moored houseboats where I can watch the turn of the quicksilver dace. Here by the piles of the bridge where in the refracted sunlight swim the golden-barred and red-finned perch.
THE NIPPLES OF VENUS
Rome stank of exhaust fumes and below our hotel room on the Via Sistina motor bikes and scooters snarled and ripped past late into the night rattling the window and the plywood wardrobe. The bathroom, a boxed-in corner, was the size of two upright coffins. It was impossible to sit on the toilet without jamming your knees against the wash-basin. In the chest of drawers, Helen discovered crackers, crumbs, and Pan Am cheese.
I’d reserved the room by phone from Florence, choosing the hotel from a guidebook from a list headed: Moderate. We would only have to put up with it for Saturday and Sunday and would then fly home on Monday. After nearly three weeks spent mainly in Florence and Venice, I had no real interest in looking at things Roman. I felt . . . not tired, exactly. Couldn’t take in any more. I’d had enough. “Surfeited” was the word, perhaps. I was sick of cameras and photographs and tourists and tourism and disliking myself for being part of the problem. I felt burdened by history, ashamed of my ignorance, numbed by the succession of ponte, porta, piazza, and palazzo. I was beginning to feel like . . . who was it? Twain, I think, Mark Twain, who when asked what he’d thought of Rome said to his wife:
Was that the place we saw the yellow dog?
Helen was bulged and bloated and the elastic of her underpants and panty-hose had left red weals and ribbing on the flesh of her stomach. She’d been constipated for nearly two weeks. I’d told her to stop eating pasta, to relax, to stop worrying about whether the children would leave the iron switched on, about aviation disasters, devaluation of the lira, cancer of the colon, but at night I heard her sighing, grinding her teeth, restless under the sheets, gnawing on the bones of her worries.
That waiter in—where was it? Milan? No. Definitely not in Milan. Bologna?—a waiter who’d worked for some years in Soho in the family restaurant—he’d told us that the tortellini, the tiny stuffed shells of pasta in our soup, were commonly called “the nipples of Venus.”
Fettuccine, tuffolini, capelletti, manicotti, gnocchi . . .
Mia moglie è malata.
Dov’è una formacia?
Aspirina?
Bicarbonato di soda?
. . . polenta, rigatoni, tortellini . . .
Praaaaaaaaap . . .
Scooters on the Via Sistina.
Praaaaaaaaap . . .
Helen passing gas.
* * *
The Spanish Steps were just at the top of the street anyway and at the very least, Helen said, we had to see the Trevi Fountain and St. Peter’s and the Pantheon.
They all looked much as they looked in photographs. Not as attractive, really. The Spanish Steps were littered with American college students. The sweep of St. Peter’s Square was ruined even at that early hour by parked coaches from Luton, Belgrade, Brussels, and Brighton. Knowing that St. Peter’s itself would be hung with acres of martyrdom and suchlike, I refused to set foot in it. The Trevi Fountain was rimmed with people taking its photograph and was magnificent but disappointing.
Places of historical interest often make me feel as if I’m eight again and the sermon will never end. I enjoyed the doors of the Pantheon—I always seem drawn to bronze—but the hushed interior struck me as lugubrious. Helen, on the other hand, is an inveterate reader of every notice, explication, plaque, and advisement.
Straightening up and taking off her reading glasses, she says,
“This is the tomb of Raphael.”
“How about a coffee?”
“Born 1483.”
“Espresso. You like that. In the square.”
“Died in 1520.”
“Nice coffee.”
And then it was back to the Spanish Steps because she wanted to go jostling up and down the Via Condotti looking in the windows—Ferragamo, Gabrielli, Bulgari, Valentino, Gucci. And then in search of even more pairs of shoes, purses, scarves, gloves, and sweaters, it was down to the stores and boutiques on the Via del Tritone.
For lunch I ate funghi arrosto alla Romana. Helen ordered risotto alla parmigiana and had to go back to the hotel. She said she’d just lie there for a bit and if the pains went away she’d have a little nap. She asked me if I thought it was cancer, so I said that people with cancer lost weight and that it was risotto, manifestly risotto, risotto first and last.
“There’s no need to shout at me.”
“I am not shouting. I am speaking emphatically.”
“You don’t mind?” she said. “Really?”
“I’ll go for a stroll around,” I said.
“You won’t feel I’m deserting you?”
“Just rest . . .”
* * *
I strolled up the Via Sistina and stood looking down the sweep of the Spanish Steps. Then sauntered on. Some seventy-five yards to the right of the Steps, seventy-five yards or so past the Trinita dei Monti along the stretch of gravel road which leads into the grounds of the Villa Borghese, tucked away behind a thick hedge and shaded by trees, was an outdoor cafe hidden in a narrow garden. The garden was just a strip between the road and the edge of the steep hill which fell away down towards the Via Condotti or whatever was beneath. The Piazza di Spagna, perhaps. Houses must have been built almost flush with the face of the hill because through the screening pampas grass I could glimpse below the leaning rusty fence at the garden’s edge the warm ripple of terra cotta roof tiles.
The garden was paved with stone flagstones. Shrubs and flowers grew in low-walled beds and urns. In the centre of the garden was a small rectangular pond with reeds growing in it, the flash of fish red and gold. The tall hedge which hid the garden from the road was dark, evergreen, yew trees.
It was quiet there, the traffic noises muted to a murmur. Round white metal tables shaded by gay umbrellas, white folding chairs. Two old waiters were bringing food and drinks from the hut at the garden’s entrance. There were only three couples and a family at the tables. The yew hedge was straggly and needed cutting back. The shrubs and flowers in the stone-walled beds were gone a little to seed, unweeded.
I sat at the only table without an umbrella, a table set into a corner formed by the hedge and a low stone wall. The wall screened the inner garden a little from the openness of the entrance and from the shingled hut-like place the food came from. All along the top of the wa
ll stood pots of geraniums and jutting out from the wall near my corner table was the basin of a fountain. The basin was in the form of a scallop shell. The stone shell looked much older than the wall. It looked as if it had come down in the world, ending up here in this garden cafe after gracing for two hundred years or more some ducal garden or palazzo courtyard. The stone was softer than the stone of the wall, grainy, the sharpness of its cuts and flutes blurred and weathered.
I sat enjoying the warmth of the sun. The Becks beer bottle and my glass were beaded with condensation. Sparrows were hopping between tables pecking crumbs. Water was trickling down the wall and falling into the stone scallop shell from a narrow copper pipe which led away down behind the wall and towards the hut at the garden’s entrance. Where the pipe crossed the central path feet had squashed it almost flat. The small sound of the water was starting to take over my mind. The glint and sparkle of the sunlight on the water, the tinkling sound of it, the changes in the sound of it as it rose and deepened around the domed bronze grate before draining—it all held me in deepening relaxation.
Somewhere just below me were famous guidebook attractions—the Barcaccia Fountain, the Antico Caffe Greco, the rooms where John Keats died now preserved as a museum and containing memorabilia of Byron and Shelley—but all I wanted of Rome was to sit on in the sunshine drinking cold beer and listening to the loveliness of water running, the trill and spirtle, the rill and trickle of it.
Watching the sparrow, the small cockings of its head, watching the little boy in the white shirt and red bow-tie balancing face-down over his father’s thigh, I was aware suddenly at the corner of my eye of flickering movement. I turned my head and there, reared up on its front legs on the rim of the stone scallop shell, was a lizard. It stood motionless. I turned more towards it. Its back was a matte black but its throat and neck and sides were touched with a green so brilliant it looked almost metallic, as if it had been dusted with metallic powder.
Set on the stone surround of the scallop shell were two pots of geraniums and from the shadow of these now appeared another lizard, smaller than the first, not as dark in colouring, dun rather than black and with not a trace of the shimmering peacock green—compared with the male a scrawny creature drab and dowdy.
This lizard waddled down into the curve of the stone basin where she stopped and raised her head as if watching or listening. Or was she perhaps scenting what was on the air? I’d read somewhere that snakes “smelled” with their tongues. Were lizards, I wondered, like snakes in that? Would they go into water? Was she going to drink?
I was startled by loud rustlings in the hedge near my chair. A bird? A bird rootling about in dead leaves. But it wasn’t that kind of noise quite. Not as loud. And, I realized, it was more continuous than the noise a bird would have made—rustling, twig-snipping, pushing, scuffling. The noise was travelling along inside the hedge. Slowly, cautiously, not wanting to frighten away the lizards on the stone scallop shell, I bent and parted branches, peering.
And then the noise stopped.
As I sat up, I saw that the stone bowl was empty, the brown lizard disappeared behind the geranium pots again. The green lizard was still motionless where he’d been before. Every few seconds his neck pulsed. Suddenly I saw on the wall level with my knee a lizard climbing. Every two or three inches it stopped, clinging, seeming to listen. It too was green but it had no tail. Where its tail should have been was a glossy rounded stump.
Lacking the tail’s long grace, the lizard looked unbalanced, clumsy. About half the tail was gone. It was broken off just below that place where the body tapered. The stump was a scaleless wound, shiny, slightly bulbous, in colour a very dark red mixed with black. The end of the stump bulged out like a blob of smoke-swirled sealing-wax.
Just as its head was sticking up over the edge of the stone shell, the other lizard ran at it. The mutilated lizard turned and flashed halfway down the wall but then stopped, head-down, clinging. The pursuing lizard stopped too and cocked its head at an angle as if hearing something commanding to its right.
Seconds later, the stubby lizard skittered down the rest of the wall, but then stopped again on the flagstones. The pursuing lizard pursued but himself stopped poised above the wall’s last course of stones. It was like watching the flurry of a silent movie with the action frozen every few seconds. And then the damaged lizard was negotiating in dreamy slow motion dead twigs and blown leaves on his way back into the hedge. He clambered over them as if they were thick boughs, back legs cocked up at funny angles like a cartoon animal, crawling, ludicrous. His pursuer faced in the opposite direction intently, fiercely.
Peculiar little creatures.
I signalled to the waiter for another beer.
I sat on in the sunshine, drifting, smelling the smell on my fingers of crushed geranium leaves, listening to the sounds the water made.
And then the noises in the hedge started again.
And again the lizard with the stump was climbing the wall.
And again the lizard on the top was rushing at it, driving it down.
By the time I was finishing my third beer, the attacks and retreats were almost continuous. The stubby lizard always climbed the wall at exactly the same place. The defending lizard always returned to the exact spot on the stone surround of the scallop shell where the attacking lizard would appear. The stop-frame chases flowed and halted down the wall, across the flagstones, halted, round an urn, into the hedge.
But with each sortie the damaged lizard was being driven further and further away. Finally, the pursuing lizard hauled his length into the hedge and I listened to their blundering progress over the litter of twigs and rusty needles in the hedge-bottom, the rustlings and cracklings, the scrabblings travelling further and further away from my chair until there was silence.
The sun had moved around the crown of the tree and was now full on me. I could feel the sweat starting on my chest, in the hollow of my throat, the damp prickle of sweat in my groin. I glanced at my watch to see how long she’d been sleeping. I thought of strolling back to the hotel and having a shower, but the thought of showering in the boxed-in bathroom inside the glass device with its folding glass doors like a compressed telephone booth—the thought of touching with every movement cold, soap-slimy glass . . .
I lifted the empty Becks bottle and nodded at the waiter as he passed.
A dragon-fly hovered over the pond, its wings at certain angles a blue iridescence.
I wondered about my chances of finding a Roman restaurant or trattoria serving Abbracchio alla Romana, a dish I’d read about with interest. And while I was thinking about restaurants and roast lamb flavoured with rosemary and anchovies and about poor Helen’s risotto and about how long I’d been sitting in the garden and Helen worrying there in that plywood room heavy with exhaust fumes . . .
you might have been killed . . . you know I only nap for an hour . . . I got so scared . . .
. . . while I was thinking about this and these and listening to the water’s trickle and looking at the white, heavy plumes of the pampas grass, there on top of the wall, my eye caught by the movement, was the lizard with the stump.
I studied the face of the wall, scanned the bottom of the hedge, looked as far around the base of the urn as I could see without moving, but there was no sign of the other lizard, no sound of pursuit.
He stood motionless on top of the wall just above the scallop shell where the scrawny brown female still basked. The stump looked as if blood and flesh had oozed from the wound and then hardened into this glossy, bulging scab.
The coast’s clear, Charlie!
Come on!
Come on!
He was clinging head-down to the wall inches above the stone shell.
The female had raised her head.
Now he seemed to be studying a pale wedge of crumbling mortar.
Come on!
And then
he waddled down onto the stone surround and seized the female lizard firmly about the middle in his jaws. They lay at right angles to each other as if catatonic. The female’s front right leg dangled in the air.
Come on, you gimpy retard! Let go! You’re biting the wrong one. It’s the GREEN ones we bite. The brown ones are the ones we . . .
The waiter’s voice startled me.
I smiled, shook my head, picked up the four cash-register slips, leaned over to one side to get at my wallet in my back pocket. When he’d gone and I turned back to the stone scallop shell, the female had already vanished and the end of the stump, somewhere between the colour of a ripening blackberry and a blood blister, was just disappearing into the shadows behind one of the pots of geraniums.
I got up slowly and quietly. I was careful not to scrape my chair on the flagstones. I set it down silently. I looked down to make sure my shoe wasn’t going to knock against one of the table’s tubular legs. One by one, I placed the coins on the saucer.
* * *
No, I told Helen on Sunday morning, not the Forum, not the Colosseum, not the Capitoline, the Palatine, or the Quirinal. I wanted to be lazy. I wanted to be taken somewhere. But not to monuments. Trees and fields. But not walking. I didn’t want to do anything. I wanted to see farmhouses and outbuildings. What I wanted—yes, that was it exactly—a coach tour! I wanted to gaze out of the window at red and orange roof tiles, at ochre walls, poppies growing wild on the roadsides, vines.
At 10 AM we were waiting in a small office in a side street for the arrival of the coach. The brochure in the hotel lobby had described the outing as Extended Alban Hills Tours-Castelli Romani. Our coach was apparently now touring some of the larger hotels picking up other passengers. The whole operation seemed a bit makeshift and fly-by-night. The two young men running it seemed to do nothing but shout denials on the phone and hustle out into the street screaming at drivers as coach after coach checked in at the office before setting out to tour whatever they were advertised as touring. Commands and queries were hysterical. Tickets were counted and recounted. And then recounted. Coaches were finally dispatched with operatic gesture as if they were full of troops going up to some heroic Front.