by John Cheever
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As for ruins, the American printing salesman who has flown in for an eight-hour conference says, in the bar of his run-down hotel, “Jesus, you can see where we all come from: I mean the sense of the past is so terrific.” But it is not always easy to come by. The guidebooks, the guides, our friends and acquaintances, and even strangers urge us to succumb to the sense of the past, but what about the present? Standing in the Pantheon I am impressed with the dome, but the children are pulling at my coat and asking me to buy them pastry or take home one of the splendid cats loafing under the portico. Going to meet E. at the Baths of Caracalla in a rainy dusk, I look in briefly at the colossal heaps of brick and then watch some kids practicing soccer shots on a little field. I am much more interested in them. Ben and I walk by the Foru, which, with the green grass still growing among the stones, seems to be a double ruin: a ruin of antiquity and a monument to the tender sentiments of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century travellers, for we see not only the ghosts of Romans here but the shades of ladies with parasols and men with beards and little children rolling hoops. In the Colosseum I tell Ben that Christians were devoured by lions, although I think this is untrue. I am impressed with the massive outer archways—and yet I am not taken as directly by a sense of the past as I was in a Portsmouth countinghouse. We strive to feel the presence of Romans and then we pet a stray cat.
Homesickness here is not a string of specific images, evoking the pathos and sweetness of American life; it is mostly purse sickness, war sickness, the unease of not understanding the simplest remarks that are made and the chagrin of being swindled. I don’t long for the rivers or for the place-names or the mill-town parks. Not honestly.
“This is your past,” we say to the Romans and the Americans from small towns. I have a past—houses and people and traits and an old name. The Mediterranean is not a part of it. And yet I have dreamed of the Mediterranean for ten years; it is in some way a part of our dreams.
The rain lets up at noon and either the moods of this city or my own are mercurial. The sun bursts into the streets. Life is exciting and beautiful, and the sound of so many fountains is relaxing. I look with scorn at the Americans in the Piazza di Spagna, ripping open their letters from home and stopping in the middle of the sidewalk to read the news from Pelham, but receiving a letter myself I do the same. Smiling and chuckling, I walk down the street bumping into Romans, with a scrap of paper that seems to refresh my identity.
Mary and I lunch at a trattoria near the Pantheon. The fountain sparkles in the sun. We walk under the great porch and through the giant doors. It is impossible to mark the proprietorship of pagan and Christian, but the dome with its circle of blue seems triumphantly clear and free. As Americans we observe the ruined paint and the filth. The candlesticks and tombs of the Lombards are black with dirt. Even the wax of the candles is dark and the flowers on Raphael’s tomb are straw.
Some other Americans come in. They are followed by a guide. “I just want to look at the place; I don’t want to hear about it,” one lad says to the guide. “And anyhow I can’t understand what you’re saying.” Back here I snooze on the sofa, then go to meet Susie, climbing up the Campidoglio. Flooded with light it seems very rich, but the heads of the Dioscuri seem large and only intensify my affection for Marcus Aurelius and his shadow of gold. I walk up through the gardens, thinking that I will push a baby carriage here in the spring. The wind is northerly and the sky is full of that moving darkness and brilliance that we see through the fine dark leaves of many painted trees in many landscapes in many museums. Susie buys a doughnut in a pasticceria and we meet Ben. There is a gas strike. Dinner is delayed and I fill up with gin. Susie tells me that a boarder at school has stolen a pot of jam and the mother superior has put the school into Coventry. Prayers are said each morning for the thief. If this were at home we would rebel. We have a fine dinner, but after dinner I find Susie in bed, crying bitterly and asking to be taken home. This for Bierstubbe when I get around to him: the crying of his children.
•
We go to the Museo del Palazzo di Venezia. So cold it would chill your marrow. Shabby and unclean and the paintings so ill lit that half of them can’t be seen. The glare of light on the varnish is so harsh that we can’t make out what is going on. A painted ceiling where much is going on. Sea monsters abducting naked women. A roomful of bronzes, copies of which I think I’ve seen. Some lewd, some satyrs, a firm figure of a man. An armory and much early painting but not easy to see or admire. The gold gleams, but the faces seem dim and strange. It is, I think, this jumble of arsehole jokes and golden piety that I admire; it adds up to an honest measure of our nature. In one of the rooms we find all the guards smoking cigarettes and shooting five-lire coins down a long table.
We sit in the sun and climb to the Campidoglio. It is autumn, but it is best for me not to say, “It Is Autumn In Rome” but just “it is autumn.” The grass on the slope is that crabgrass which takes hold at the end of summer. A few marigolds bloom in the plots. Tourists are as scarce as flowers and a guide trails us around the statue of Marcus Aurelius, complaining about the autumn and the bad business. A crowd of Americans comes up from the Forum but they do not say a word. The only sound is the whirr of moving-picture cameras and the clic of shutters. Going down the Campidoglio we pass a party of Germans. The yellow snapdragons that grow out of the cornice of the Church of Jesus, the tufts of grass and mullein that grow, like hair from a man’s nostril, from every orifice in Aurelian’s wall, the bluets that grow in the chinks of the Porta Pinciana, and the thick stand of grass around the bell tower of Santa Maria have all begun to fade.
•
What I am determined to get away from are set pieces, closed things, shut paragraphs.
The doorways of Europe, varnished and polished and waxed, even if the houses they secure are crumbling, in this vast city that is painted the color of spoiled lemons. The high doorways of Portugal with their stained-glass transoms built to accommodate a thin and a melancholy man on stilts. And the portoni here, built to withstand armed men on horseback and battering rams. You turn the key in the lock and the cumbersome door swings open. This is your place. You, among the many people on the street, have the key. When you close the door behind you it is dark and cold and the noise of the fountain sounds very loud. You unlock the elevator gate, part the frosted-glass doors …
•
I take the children riding in the Borghese Gardens. The old baron trots along beside the moth-eaten pony that Ben rides. Susie rides with an instructor. A man rides a white horse strenuously, bringing it again and again to a jump where it balks. “Che brutto,” say the grooms. When he is finished the horse is in a lather and the rider, when he dismounts, is breathing heavily and seems drawn and tired. He is a small man. I wait and watch the children and for a moment—not much longer—the place, the gardens seem to enter my head and I think, I hope, of possessing an earlier and happier view of Rome. I wonder what it is that I lack. I wonder if I have ever seen any place without the excitement of falling in love; at least of making friends. I make no friends here, and Mary’s fine condition cuts down on my sport. And I wonder if what I long for—shoot at—is not the pleasures of a young man in love. I see the details. San Pietro in Vincoli, Vittorio Emanuele, and the two charioteers on the monument, all moving off toward the same compass point—St. Peter’s. And I travel, admittedly, with a good deal of useles emotional baggage: hunger, thirst, anxiety, and cold feet—all things that plainly cloud my vision. My ambition is to familiarize myself with the city—to include it—and not at a literary level. Mary drinks tea with a divorcée on the Via Veneto. “Oh, the light was so beautiful,” she says, “and we didn’t see an American.” She seems to see the thing more clearly than I.
A reception in a palazzo; the quintessence of Roman dreariness. Rooms that were meant to be lit by candles or maybe torches do not seem to lend themselves happily to the kind of indirect lighting that latter-day Romans go in for. The upshot is a dimnes
s or dinginess that has an appreciable effect on my spirits. My feet ache from standing, but if I sit down I may get trapped. Butlers pass trays of bad brandy and bonbons. Ciardi complains about Rome. “If I’d known it was going to be like this,” he says, “I wouldn’t have come.” It is dreary; it is dreary; it is like the bus to the Termine Flaminio at rush hour on a rainy night; it is like pouring bad wine for dull guests.
It seems to me that in the United States the contest between youth and age or between youth and un-youth, between those men whose hash has been settled and those who are still in the throes of a gruelling search, is exacerbated to the point of sexuality and sometimes brutality. The hood under the streetlight, with his tight pants and his snap knife, and the well-dressed businessman, walking his wife’s poodle in the park, exchange a look of naked detestation—murder. The natural fact of a difference in age has made them enemies. I do not seem to find this in Europe. These may be difficulties of my own, but we will see.
•
I am uneasy, beset by emotional chills and drafts. Back here I see the fine sky from the windows and at five o’clock I read The New Yorker and drink a Martini.
And I think of the rooms you go into—that one, quite small, the home of an unmarried and practically unknown English novelist; the large abstract painting, done by a friend; the few Roman art objects, the black window curtains that may have been left over from the war, and the gas heater that gives off a dry heat and consumes the oxygen in the room at an alarming rate. And the people. First we have the two American homosexuals who have every reason to be pleased at finding themselves in Rome. Here they are not the talk of their landlady; rough boys do not whistle at them as they go down the street, nor do respectable householders look on them with loathing and scorn. Then there is the Negro and his girlfriend. The trouble in the South is not on his conscience here. Nine-tenths of the city is not shut to him and he will never be embarrassed in restaurants and trolley cars. No one here thinks twice about the fact that the girl on his arm is white. And he seems to hate his own country; speaks of it always critically. Next we have the American novelist and his newspaperwoman wife. He is the son of an interfering and troublesome woman—such a thing is possible—and she is the daughter of an alcoholic, and they both speak frankly of getting away from this pair. He wrote one novel twelve years ago, and has not yet settled his plans for a second, but whereas in New York this would be spoken behind his back—where his delayed career would be the subject of anxiety or even ridicule—no one in Rome cares. She must have spent her youth in a very small and squalid place, for just the bare fact of being in Rome pleases her as if this city still had for her all the connotations of flight and breath that it must have had for her as a child. Next is the American divorcée. She had a love affair with a neighbor, and her husband divorced her, not on these grounds but for these reasons. Her parents, her brother, and the community where she lived censured her cruelly for her unfaithfulness, and knowing—or suspecting—that what she did was not so uncommon, she feels that she has been exposed to a shocking amount of hypocrisy and is happy to be in the Mediterranean, where the life of the flesh is not a source of so much anxiety. Her favorite subject of conversation is morality in the United States, and they all—the homosexuals, the Negro, the couple with difficult parents—like to talk about what they have escaped. Next we have the maverick of an American family—one of those families so famous for its wealth and power that the name is known to everyone. But she does not want to be the daughter of this household, to make the kind of marriage expected of her, to appear in public and have her picture in the paper. She has done what she wants, and what she wants seems to have been calculated to offend her family deeply. She is married to a hysterical ballet dancer and has written a novel in which her father, undisguised, appears to be a moral ogre. And there are many more—the Grub Street artists, the forgotten playwright, the sad rich man, etc. When we go around the room, what we criticize is that in these people the force of escape seems to overpower the force of a search. We say goodbye—the drinks are terrible, and I don’t like cakes at six-thirty in the evening—and it seems that we are as deeply implicated as anyone else in the room.
•
What I escape is the alcoholic life of a minor literary celebrity in Westchester; also the trying company of people I dislike; also perhaps a degree of sexual anxiety, based on some unhappiness in my youth and refreshed by the same scenes and types—scenery and people I don’t see here. And I escape the languor of wanting to escape.
•
And walking back from the river I remember the galling loneliness of my adolescence, from which I do not seem to have completely escaped. It is the sense of the voyeur, the lonely, lonely boy with no role in life but to peer in at the lighted windows of other people’s contentment and vitality. It seems comical—farcical—that, having been treated so generously, I should be stuck with this image of a kid in the rain walking along the road shoulders of East Milton.
•
To Naples for a day. I felt so heavyhearted and sad here at parting, as if I might never return. Also premonitions of illness sweep my frame and of being found murdered and naked in a back street. Leaving Rome, the sense of leaving an immense physical and intellectual explosion; the ruins of. South, all the fruit trees are in bloom and all the gardens green; but he looks out of the window, appalled at this reflection of his life, a creation of physical comfort and the ability to attract affection. I walk in Naples, up past the Rotunda and the Palace to the Galleria and drink a vermouth. I have my shoes shined by a man who says he will pray for my wife and my family, and I say we will need these prayers. Dinner with the Warrens, much loud music, and I take another walk and go to bed. In the dining room, an American ham with scrambled eggs and make it snappy. I start for the museum, in two minds about the Pompeian frescoes. It is morning in a strange city, even as in Glens Falls. The sun bright, people hurrying through the smell of coffee t work. In the museum much to see and many relics of a licentious civilization and I wonder where the frescoes are. Then I am taken in hand by a guard who does not want to show me shady frescoes but fine paintings, and I think then, Ah, this, this is life. But then I enter another room where the poor guard tries to do no more than is done on the walls and I escape, my teeth chattering with the cold. I wool-gather about this, walking back in the sunlight—smell of burned coffee, church bells, and then at a turn in the street I step into the smell of the sea, strong and fresh, and my woolgathering is ended. The smell is persuasive, and this persuasion is: to have faith in men. There in that dark gallery for a minute or two we stumble on midnight, on the borders of the conscience, where we doubt the promise in the faces of strangers, we doubt that life has any spiritual value. Then I lunch with the Warrens and board a first-class local, a little compartment lined with red plush like a box at the opera, and so we speed north again toward Rome, me in the company of an old man, a young student, and a soldier. I see the fruit trees again and the trees hung with vines and the famous sea, and rising from the shacks of a disreputable summer resort a round tower and, with it, memories of heroes, purple cloth, its splendor and its disappearance. And then I can only exclaim, watching the country in the dusk, how incomprehensible life is: there is the son my wife carries, the guard caressing the marble limbs of Achilles, the smell of the sea, the love I bear my children, the fruit trees that seem to make their own light in the dusk, the conversation among the three passengers, which I cannot understand, the sparse farmhouse lights, the carts and bicycles on the roads leading into every village.
•
A copy of the book arrives, and also a generous letter from S.B., and I am intoxicated or at least upset—mostly because I may commit the sin of pride; find humility difficult to arrive at. But if the book is any good it is plain luck and there is no point in my assuming that it is a product of industry, passionate application, etc. But dizzy with excitement I went out to buy cigarettes, and the pretty girl at the café, quite a flirt, gave me a loo
k of pure uninterestedness and so I am crushed and feel like myself again. But perhaps by seeing the book in print I may be able to put it behind me. It has been a kind of keyhole, a very restricted point of view, and I would like to see it turn into cold puddin so that I can go to something better. I felt that way with the “Goodbye, My Brother” story. For nearly a year it seemed to me an adequate piece of self-expression and then when I reread it one day it was cold pudding and so we proceed.
•
Still with a cold, I walk in Rome after lunch. A nice day, the sun very hot, the last of Carnival. My nose is running and I feel a little strange, all of which, in some way, seems to endear the city to me. I see blue sky through the windows of a ruin. By accident, I approach the tomb of Augustus, with its trimmed greenery, and turn back. I approach the Pantheon and go right down the Navona. The fountains are turned off and the man with the brutto muso and the fish between his legs seems to be compensating. The sunny tables of the café I like are full of Americans. They are not pretty, and a skinful of wine and the glare of the sun make them less so. The clock at Sant’ Agnese strikes three, and every single one of them—six in all—shoots his cuffs and checks his wristwatch. I turn left and go up a dark street that I do not know. The street rises, a hillock of brick, and out of a narrow alley comes a hunchback or dwarf holding by the hand a child dressed as a fairy princess—a blue gown sparkling with brilliants and pointed silk hat with a long veil. Then I hear drums and see through the dark alley into a little piazza made by the junction of several alleys. There are more stairs and little hillocks of paving, and the squash-colored buildings are more random than usual. I see a woman with a mop of dyed-yellow hair leaning from a window into the sun beside a younger woman with black hair. But it is the drumming that fills the air, it is the drumming that is compelling. Compelling, harsh, as unmusical as the grating beat of a strained heart and so bare that it seems to state the facts of life: lust, hunger, or, if you will, the demands of a full bladder—something inescapable. The company is quite large as these things go. There are two drummers dressed as sailors, two men with tambourines, dressed as sailors, and two dancers, all the costumes shabby and stitched together out of Christmas leftovers in some cold hill kitchen and the whole thing dictated by a tradition that is probably no better known to the Romans than it is to me. So the dancers move around one another to the music of the gallows drum. They are both men, one dressed like a prince or grandee and the other like I don’t know what. He has a shawl over his head, a mask over his eyes, his back is humped way up above his head, and tied to his groin is an ugly doll with the face of a witch. He wears over his trousers a skirt and an apron. The dance is stamped out on the paving: primitive, simple, full of sexual movement performed with perfect weariness and indifference, and when it is done the whole company marches on—the drumming has never stopped and I can still hear it as I head for the Corso. Here I see, in a traffic jam, a boy in a canozza, dressed as an Indian prince, his face all powder and rouge, scattering confetti. I go into Gesù to say my prayers. All the front pews are taken by men from the German college in their red robes. To my left is a man who is either drunk or asleep and who changes his position with a thump, while I pray, but who goes on sleeping. Back here the children throw confetti from the balcony and I take my temperature, which is normal. Then we go to hear four Beethoven sonatas—violoncello and piano. Very good. Such music seems to me, more than anything else, proof of peaceable intent.