Finding Again the World

by John Metcalf

  I explained to June that it was quite possible that I sounded very like the guy on a PBS series because the series had been made by the BBC and I had been born in the UK but was now Canadian. She told me my accent was cute. I told her I thought her accent cute too. We toasted each other’s accents. Helen began giving me looks.

  June had bought a purse in Rome. Joanne had bought a purse in Florence. Florence was noted for purses. June and Chuck were going to Florence after Rome. Helen had bought a purse in Florence—the best area of Florence for purses being on the far side of the Ponte Vecchio. In Venice there were far fewer stores selling purses. Shoes, on the other hand, shoe stores were everywhere. Norm said he’d observed more shoe stores in Italy than in any other country in the world.

  Nelson disliked olive oil.

  George could not abide eggplants. Doris, George’s wife who had died of cancer the year before, had never fancied tomatoes.

  Nelson was flushed and becoming loquacious.

  Chuck said he’d had better pizza in Grand Forks, North Dakota, where at least they put cheese on it and it wasn’t runny.

  George said the look of eggplants made him think of native women.

  Joanne said a little pasta went a long way.

  Milan?

  After Venice, Norm and Joanne were booked into Milan. What was Milan like? Had anyone been there?

  “Don’t speak to me about Milan!” said Helen.

  “Not a favourite subject with us,” I said.

  “We got mugged there,” said Helen, “and they stole a gold bracelet I’d had since I was twenty-one.”

  “‘They,’” I said, “being three girls.”

  “We were walking along on the sidewalk just outside that monstrous railway station . . .”

  “Three girls, for Christ’s sake!”

  “They came running up to us,” said Helen.

  “Two of them not more than thirteen years old,” I said, “and the other about eighteen or nineteen.”

  “One of them had a newspaper sort of folded to show columns of figures and another had a bundle of tickets of some sort and they were waving these in our faces . . .”

  “And talking at us very loudly and quickly . . .”

  “. . . and, well, brandishing these . . .”

  “. . . and sort of grabbing at you, pulling your sleeve . . .”

  “Touching you,” said Helen.

  “Right!” said Norm. “Okay.”

  “Exactly,” said Joanne. “That’s exactly . . .”

  “And then,” I said, “I felt the tallest girl’s hand going inside my jacket—you know—to your inside pocket . . .”

  “We were so distracted, you see,” said Helen, “what with all the talking and them pointing at the paper and waving things under your nose and being touched . . .”

  “So anyway,” I said, “when I felt that I realized what was happening and I hit this girl’s arm away and . . .”

  “Oh, it was awful!” said Helen. “Because I thought they were just beggars, you see, or kids trying to sell lottery tickets or something, and I was really horrible to Jack for hitting this girl . . . I mean, he hit her really hard and I thought they were just begging so I couldn’t believe he’d . . .”

  “But the best part,” I said, “was that I probably wasn’t the main target in the first place because we walked on into the station and we were buying tickets—we were in the line—and Helen . . .”

  “I’d suddenly felt the weight,” said Helen. “The difference, I mean, and I looked down at my wrist and the bracelet was gone. I hadn’t felt a thing when they’d grabbed it. Not with all that other touching. They must have pulled and broken the safety chain and . . .”

  “Of course,” I said, “I ran back to the entrance but . . .”

  I spread my hands.

  “Long gone.”

  “With us,” said Joanne, “it was postcards and guidebooks they were waving about.”

  “Where?”

  “Here. In Rome.”

  “Girls? The same?”

  “Gypsies,” said Norm.

  “Did they get anything?” said Helen.

  “A Leica,” said Joanne.

  “Misdirection of attention,” said Norm.

  “Were they girl-gypsies?” I said.

  “Misdirecting,” said Norm. “It’s the basic principle of illusionism.”

  “I was robbed right at the airport,” said Nelson.

  “It must be a national industry,” said George.

  “They had a baby in a shawl and I was just standing there with Mother and they pushed this baby against my chest and well, naturally, you . . .”

  “I don’t believe this!” said Norm. “This I do not believe!”

  “And while I was holding it, the other two women were shouting at me in Italian and they had a magazine they were showing me . . .”

  “What did they steal?”

  “Airplane ticket. Passport. Traveller’s cheques. But I had some American bills in the top pocket of my blazer so they didn’t get that.”

  “Did you feel it?” said Joanne.

  He shook his head.

  “No. They just took the baby and walked away and I only realized when I was going to change a traveller’s cheque at the cambio office because we were going to get on the bus, weren’t we, Mother?”

  “A baby!” said June.

  “But a few minutes later,” said Nelson, “one of the women came up to me on her own with the ticket and my passport.”

  “Why would she give them back?” said Helen. “Don’t they sell them to spies or something?”

  “I paid her for them,” said Nelson.

  “Paid her?” said June.

  “Paid her!” said Norm.

  “PAID!” said Chuck.

  “Ten dollars,” said Nelson.

  “They must have seen you coming!” said George.

  “They must have seen all of you coming,” said Chuck.

  Nelson poured himself another murky tumbler of Frascati. “It wasn’t much,” he said. “Ten dollars. She got what she wanted. I got what I wanted.”

  He shrugged. Raising the glass, he said,

  “A short life but a merry one!”

  We stared at him.

  “I got what I wanted, didn’t I, Mother? And then we went on the green and red bus, didn’t we? Do you remember? On the green and red bus?”

  The old woman started making loud squeak noises in her throat.

  It was the first sound we’d heard her make.

  She sounded like a guinea pig.

  “It’s time for tinkles!” sang Nelson. “It’s tinkle time.”

  And raising her up and half carrying her to the door of the women’s malodorous toilet, he turned with her, almost as if waltzing, and backed his way in.

  * * *

  . . . not entirely without incident.

  Don’t mention Milan to us!

  . . . except for Helen’s getting mugged

  It all made quite a good story, a story with which we regaled our friends and neighbours. We became quite practised in the telling of it. We told it at parties and over dinners, feeding each other lines.

  But the story we told was a story different in one particular from what really happened—though Helen doesn’t know that.

  The scene often comes to mind. I see it when the pages blur. I see it in my desk-top in the wood’s repetitive grain. I see it when I gaze unseeing out of the window of the restaurant after lunch, the sun hot on my shoulder and sleeve. I see it when I’m lying in bed in the morning in those drowsy minutes after being awakened by the clink and chink of Helen’s bottles as she applies moisturizing cream, foundation, blush, and shadow.

  Chuck from Grand Forks, North Dakota, had been right. They had seen all of
us coming. Easy pickings. Meek and nearing middle age, ready to be fleeced, lambs to the slaughter.

  She’d been the first female I’d hit since childhood. I hadn’t intended to hit her hard. I’d moved instinctively. Her eyes had widened with the pain of it.

  I’d noticed her even before she’d run towards us. Good legs, high breasts pushing at the tight grey cotton dress, long light-brown hair. She was wearing bright yellow plastic sandals. She had no makeup on and looked a bit grubby, looked the young gamine she probably was.

  I’d been carrying a suitcase and felt sweaty even though it was early in the morning. Her hand as it touched the side of my chest, my breast, was cool against my heat.

  When I struck her arm, there was no panic in her eyes, just a widening. There was a hauteur in her expression. Our eyes held each other’s for what seemed long seconds.

  When Helen discovered her bracelet gone, I hurried out of the vast ticket hall but under the colonnade and out of sight I slowed to a walk. There is no rational, sensible explanation for what followed.

  I stood in the archway of the entrance. The two small girls had gone. She stood facing me across the width of the curving road. It was as if she’d been waiting for me.

  We stood staring at each other.

  Behind her was a sidewalk cafe. The white metal chairs and tables were screened by square white tubs containing small, bushy bay trees. The bays were dark and glossy. Dozens of sparrows hopped about on the edges of the tubs. Pigeons were pecking along the sidewalk near her feet. Among them was a reddish-brown pigeon and two white ones. In the strong morning light I could see the lines of her body under the grey cotton dress. She was gently rubbing at her arm.

  Sitting there in Reardon’s restaurant, drowsy in the sunshine after eating the Businessman’s Luncheon Special ($4.95), the cream of celery soup, the minced-beef pie with ginger-coloured gravy, the french fries, the sliced string beans, waiting for the waitress to bring coffee, sitting there with the winter sun warm through the window on my shoulder and sleeve, I walk out of the shadow of the arch and stand waiting on the edge of the sidewalk. She nods to me. It is a nod which is casually intimate, a nod of acknowledgement and greeting. I wait for a gap in the sweeping traffic.

  She watches me approaching.

  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 wall 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.