Set This House on Fire (4 page)

When Mason Flagg wrote me in Rome, inviting me down to Sambuco for a visit, I felt that nothing fitted in better with my plans. I had been in Europe for four years—and in Rome for three—and I had come to the point where I sensed that my roots, such as they were, must be replanted in native soil or shrivel away completely. So it was that Mason’s invitation nicely coincided with the “last look around” I planned to take before going back to America.

How I got to Europe, and what I was doing there, is a brief and easy matter to explain. I had not been in the war (the one before Korea), having gotten a really horrible education under Navy auspices at a college in Illinois, from which I emerged with an ensign’s commission just two days after the bomb fell on Hiroshima. I went on to get a law degree and for a short time I worked in New York. Then, feeling somewhat cheated of travel and excitement, I decided to go to Europe—a traditional move, after all, for shiftless youths with murky horizons. I got a job in the legal division of a large government relief agency and for a while I was located in Paris, where I thought I might extend a democratic hand to the war-racked and the downtrodden, and where I ended up hearing the complaints of alienated bureaucrats, fellow employees from Louisville and Des Moines. My office had a fabulous view of the Place de la Concorde, and I occupied myself with itineraries and bills of lading which were works of art.

After a year I was transferred to Rome, and an even finer office facing on the ruined green sweep of the Circo Massimo: here in almost all seasons there was a carnival which livened up my days with braying horns and the crazed music of calliopes. I liked Rome, even though my routine—attending to the woes of the Agency employees—seemed just about the same: there is something in the Italian climate that makes the average American clerk. so remote from the mechanisms of progress, even more peevish and discontented; and the commissary milkshakes—because of the quality of the milk—were not nearly so good as in Paris, although toward the end of my stay I learned that they began getting fresh shipments by air from Dutch dairies. But the job paid well enough (embarrassingly so, compared to my Italian office-mates, who appeared to work twice as hard for half the pay) and I bought a spruce little Austin sports convertible to carry me up and down the long slope to my home on the Gianicolo hill. I had an apartment there in a run-down building and an old rheumatic woman named Enrica who cooked suppers for me and filled my evenings with her tireless lament. I had a phonograph, too, a scratchy machine left me by a former American tenant, along with what seemed to be all the works of Wagner, Liszt, and Tchaikovsky ever recorded. The view from my terrace was luxurious, especially during summer twilights when I’d sit there playing a Liszt concerto, drinking commissary whiskey and watching the whole city spilled out beneath me in a luminous frieze of rust and gold. I had two or three girls during that time—a girl named Ginevra, and then one named Anna Maria, and toward the end, perhaps as some augury of the end of my expatriation, a junior from Smith College with wonderful black eyes—and usually there would be two of us there listening to the villainous music, perfectly content, while the setting sun touched the ramparts of the Forum with one last glint of perilous light, and the shadow of my hill, marching eastward, rolled up the city in darkness.

In all, it was a fine three years. I traveled all around and saw the sights and, possibly because I felt so happily enriched, regarded myself as somewhat superior to my friends at the Agency, whose limits of adventure in Italy were defined (outside of a flying trip to Capri each summer) by their apartments in the suburbs and by the bar downstairs in the Hotel Flora, where the martinis were dry and chill and made of the best English gin. I had, it is true, donated little enough to Italy but Italy had rewarded me in the simple fact of its warm and extravagant being, and since it is more blessed to give than to receive I felt that this, at least, might have made the Italians happy, where my grotesque attempts at “aid” and “relief” had not. At any rate, toward the end of my third year I decided to go back to America. Splendid as the city is, it is impossible to become Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court in Rome. I had by that time saved a little money, and a number of ornate letters I had written had produced several tentative offers of jobs in New York. I might have departed Italy as blithe as a sparrow and with no regrets—except for Sambuco and the invitation I received from Mason Flagg.

The letter came on a day in early July, only a week or so after I had quit my job. I knew Mason had been in Sambuco ever since the spring. In May I had received a gossipy letter from him—the first in years—saying that he had gotten my address from a mutual New York friend, that he was now established in Italy for “a long spell of writing,” and that he would like to have me come down. It was a letter, however, which for reasons I think will be made evident later, I chose at the time to ignore. This other invitation weakened me, though; I felt foot-loose and adventurous, with no ties at all, and I had my eye cocked for new vistas. The note was breezy but specific—“stay as long as you like”—and typical of Mason, who was never one to understate the scope of his operations: “We are living in the goddamdest palace you ever saw.” I had never been to Sambuco, but Mason—with his picture of sun and sea, plus what sounded like a battalion of servants (“$50 a month for the lot and they stand around and out-yassuh any coon the old man ever had in Virginia”)—made it all seem lazy enough and I decided, rather than wait around in Rome, to drive down there the next day. I sent Mason a wire that I was coming. Sambuco is six hours by car from Rome; an hour from Naples. I had already reserved passage back to America from Naples, and so it was a convenient and fairly easy matter to switch my sailing to a date a week or so later. Not so the matter of my auto registration (it had expired), nor that of the car itself, which I had already made arrangements to sell through the Automobil Club Italiano, and which, if I was ever to swim in that cool blue sea far down the slope from Sambuco, I knew I had to hold on to. So my last afternoon in Rome—one I had expected to while away in mild nostalgia at some flower-rimmed café—was spent with a functionary at the auto club: a demonic, moon-faced woman, with sweat describing great blue hoops beneath her arms, who swore that at this late hour to think that I could in any way change the course of events was a sort of criminal dream.
“Questa non è l’America, signore,”
she wheezed darkly,
“qui siamo in Italia.”
The registration had expired, and that was that. So much the same for the car—committed irrevocably. Documents were brought out to support this point, and a huge code book and a group of dossiers; but I had learned in Italy that the more emphatic an official “No,” the greater one’s chances for success. And so toward evening, sweltering, I came away with my renewal and with the wretched title to the car—in the only country in the world where such a victory can leave one feeling hopelessly beaten.

I drove home in twilight, happy to have my car back and to know that I could get rid of it in Naples before I sailed, after all. But I felt hot and exhausted; the woman had cowed me, and I fell into a sort of despondent reverie, driving at a cripple’s pace toward home, past heat-worn and silent Romans, through avenues of withering, downcast trees. In St. Peter’s Square there was not a soul in sight, save two humid, hurrying nuns, and over the great cupola the very air seemed to churn and billow with the dreadful incandescence of the day. “Oh it’s hot—
God!”
I heard someone cry as I dawdled up the hill, but the city for once seemed oddly still —even the motorscooters had ceased their racket—all as if awaiting breathless, in one strangled hush, some latter-day holocaust.

Later, when darkness fell, it cooled off a bit and I was able to finish my packing. The house was a shambles—which was all right—because now, pictures down, chairs upturned, trunks and boxes everywhere, the place seemed stripped of any sentimental associations, and I was not disposed to snoop around for any. My Smith girl had left days before, spirited aloft on the first westbound plane by her mother—an angular example of Detroit Gothic—who had sensible plans for her daughter at Grosse Pointe. This was all right, too, I suppose; the core of our romance—love in the Eternal City—seemed long since to have become worn down by time and familiarity, and she had begun to cadge jars of peanut butter from friends at the Embassy, and spent long homesick hours going to American movies. And they were practices to which, too late, I realized I had been giving dull approval. But that evening I was far from happy, or even contented, and I didn’t know what to blame. Possibly, though, it
was
only the apartment, unclad now in that almost mystically inspired ugliness which Mussolini brought to the works of his era: a room of plywood, chrome, leatherette, and water stains, one sixty-watt bulb pulsing spiritlessly over all, and from the phonograph, the
Pathétique
—a faint, blurred convulsion. I was depressed to learn that I could have lived for so long in such an eyesore, but still saddened that this one seemed to be giving me up with the identical unconcern with which it had received me, three years before.

Anyway, it was getting late when I finished packing—almost nine o’clock—and old Enrica had my last meal on the table. She was a study in bereavement as she served me my meal, snuffling over the platter, wailing phrases in unfathomable Sicilian, and gazing at me from the kitchen with furtive, stricken eyes. No employer, she boohooed, fingering her sparse mustache, had been so kind, so
gentile,
and alas, she’d have to go back to Messina, because to work now for anyone else in Rome would be intolerable. She kept mumbling over the stove, gloomily rattling pots and pans. It helped make the meal a dismal one; the ravioli, on the table since eight, was like plaster, the wine bilious, syrupy, body-warm. But below the terrace the city spread itself out in a million flickering eyes of light. I could see the Colosseum, aglow in the phosphorescence of floodlamps, and a ruined assembly of stark white shafts where the Forum lay. Far past these, two oscillating points of red and green, an airplane, mounted the looming dark above the Alban Hills. Over the south and east, where I was going, hung a flashy crowd of Roman constellations, and a fire-trail of neon where the outskirts of the city rambled up the hills into sightless gloom and made Rome look suddenly more immense than any city in the world. And for a moment—though perhaps it was just the wine—I felt that Rome, too late, was finally intelligible to me, offering me at my departure no reproach at all, but only a tolerant, valedictory, and many-eyed wink, in its vast immortal patience with the barbarians of the earth, of which I was only the most recent. But the moment passed, I drank too much wine in a reckless effort to feel happier, and in an hour or so Enrica bade good-by to me.
“Addio,”
she cried,
“buon viaggio.
Enrica will miss you, signore.” And she hobbled out into the night, weeping bogus tears that came not wholly from grief, for later I discovered that she had taken with her, among other things (a fountain pen, gold tie clasp, etc.), my Remington razor, which at least she could use.

After this and by eleven o’clock, stumbling about the cluttered depot my apartment had become, I felt so intimidated that I could hardly wait to get to Sambuco. Feverishly I decided to leave that night. I loaded up the Austin, stuck a pint of bourbon in the glove compartment, and took off down the hill, dogged by the gray suspicion, all the way, that I had left something behind. But my tennis balls were with me, my guitar, and passport, and the pornographic studies, carefully disguised as a Maioli-bound Petrarch, which Mason had asked me, in a postscript to his letter, to get him on the Via Sistina. All was in place, I racked my head futilely, and only when the Tiber hove into sight did I realize that what I was really leaving behind—with both affection and a very special sort of malice—was simply Rome. But after so long a stay I felt such a leave-taking was peremptory, rude. I drove then, for the last time, into the Piazza Santa Maria in Trastevere, and there I had a beer.

It was shadowy and quiet around my cafe. From the restaurants the American sojourners had departed, leaving the square to a gang of children, a beggar scratching at a violin, and young priests with programs homeward-bound from some concert across the river and out this late, I guessed, by special dispensation. There was also Ava Gardner, who from her tattered billboard cast a peeled glance of vacancy toward the fountain, where eons of ooze had wrought, in place of beauty, an admirably weathered composure. It was a fine fountain and I gazed at it for a long time. In the wings of the church behind, blue in shadows, slumberous pigeons clucked and rustled and all was quiet. For a while, sitting there, I tried to feel that the evening was momentous, but I was uninspired, my thoughts tepid and shallow. Vaguely I had the sense that I was at some decisive instant in my life, with the most exciting part of my youth behind me, but this thought left me unstirred. My mood was dangerously close to self-pity; I felt like someone sitting amid the bunting and splendor of his own farewell party, at which nobody at all turned up.

The beer was good; warm air blew over me with the smell of coffee, then of flowers, and I had a fleeting unhappy paroxysm of goatish lust. Then like stiffened silver one chime broke from the campanile high above, the half-hour. A gang of boys came racing by, the square for an instant alive in a scamper of footsteps, a flurry of naked heels. A restaurant closed for the night with a roar of descending shutters, and from afar someone called out
“Tommasino!”
—a summery voice, dying in the alleyways, touched with heat and fatigue and sleep.

For a while after this the square was deserted. Once a cat loped across my gaze with a squint-eyed, piratical look and a suave grin. Bent on who knows what unholy mission, he cruised up over the fountain steps, a yellow blur, and plunged dauntlessly into the shadows. Then all was serene and decorous once more, the heavens clear, starry, the air aromatic with blossoms, the fountain leaking slow trickling notes of water, like memorandums. I sat until the bell struck again, when the waiter came near, insinuating with a yawn the lateness of the hour. I paid him and sat there for one final moment, inhaling the odor of flowers. Then I got up and took my last look at Rome: at fountains, pigeons, cats, and priests, a crowd of whom came by just as I arose, two licking at ice cream cones, two gossiping in Irish—
Me old mother gave me this
—two clutching at missals and breathing soft flutters of prayer—the cloaks of all trembling like banners of mourning, and disappearing, black against a blacker black, up the moonless slope of Gianicolo, toward some good cloister. …