The Light in the Piazza and Other Italian Tales (11 page)

“Papà!” Here Fabrizio all but left the earth itself. “I am twenty-three! The sun has cooked your brain. I should be the one to act like this.”

“All right, all right. I was mistaken. But my instinct was right.” He tapped his brow. “It is always better to discuss everything in great detail. I felt that we were going too quickly. You cannot be too careful in these things. But my son—” He caught the boy’s shoulder. “Remember to say nothing to the Americans. Do you want them to think we are crazy?”

“You are
innamorato
of the signora. I understand it all.”

14

At the wedding Margaret Johnson sat quietly while a dream unfolded before her. She watched closely and missed nothing.

She saw Clara emerge like a fresh flower out of the antique smell of candle smoke, incense and damp stone, and advance in white Venetian lace with so deep a look shadowing out the hollow of her cheek, she might have stood double for a Botticelli. As for Fabrizio, he who had such a gift for appearing did not fail them. His beauty was outshone only by his outrageous pride in himself; he saw to it that everybody saw him well. Like an angel appearing in a painting, he seemed to face outward to say, This is what I look like, see? But his innocence protected him like magic.

Clara lifted her veil like a good girl exactly when she had been told to. Fabrizio looked at her and love sprang up in his face. The priest went on intoning, and since it was twelve o’clock all the bells from over the river and nearby began to ring at slightly different intervals—the deep-throated ones and the sweet ones, muffled and clear—one could hear them all.

The Signora Naccarelli had come into her own that day. She obviously believed that she had had difficulties to overcome in bringing about this union, but having gotten the proper heavenly parties well informed, she had brought everything into line. Her bosom had sometimes been known to heave and her eye to dim, but that day she was serene. She wore flowers and an enormous medallion of her dead mother outlined in pearls. That unlikely specimen, a middle-class Neapolitan, she now seemed both peasant and goddess. Her hair had never been more smoothly bound, and natural color touched her large cheeks. Before the wedding, the wicked Giuseppe had seen her and run into her arms. Smiling perpetually at no one, it was as though she had created them all.

Signor Naccarelli had escorted Margaret Johnson to her place and sat beside her. He kept his arms tightly folded across his chest, and his face wore an odd, unreadable expression, mouth somewhat pursed, his high, cold Florentine nose drawn toughly across the bridge. Perhaps his collar was too tight.

Yes, Margaret Johnson saw everything, even the only person to cry, Giuseppe’s wife, who had chosen to put her sophisticated self
into a girlish, English-type summer frock of pale blue with a broad white collar.

I will not be needed anymore, thought Margaret Johnson with something like a sigh, for before her eyes the strongest maternal forces in the world were taking her daughter to themselves. I have stepped out of the picture forever, she thought, and as if to bear her out, as the ceremony ended and everyone started moving toward the church door, no one noticed Margaret Johnson at all. They were waiting to form the wedding cortege, which would wind over the river and up the hill to the restaurant and the long luncheon.

She did not mind not being noticed. She had done her job, and she knew it. She had played, single-handed and unadvised, a tricky game in a foreign country, and she had managed to realize from it the dearest wish of her heart. Signora Naccarelli was passing—one had to pause until the suction of that lady in motion had faded. Then Mrs. Johnson moved through the atrium and out to the colonnaded porch, where, standing aside from the others, she could observe Clara stepping into a car, her white skirts dazzling in the sun. Clara saw her mother: they waved to each other. Fabrizio was made to wave, as well. Over everybody’s head a bronze fountain in the piazza jetted water into the sunlight, and nearby a group of tourists had stopped to look.

Clara and Fabrizio were driving off. So it had really happened! It was done. Mrs. Johnson found her vision blotted out. The reason was simply that Signor Naccarelli, that old devil, had come between her and whatever she was looking at; now he was smiling at her. The money again. There it was, forever returning, the dull moment of exchange.

Who was fooling whom, she longed to say, but did not. Or rather, since we both had our little game to play, which of us came off better? Let’s tell the truth at last, you and I.

It was a great pity, Signor Naccarelli was saying, that Signor Johnson could not have been here to see so beautiful a wedding. Mrs. Johnson agreed.

Though no one knew it but her, Signor Johnson at that very moment was winging his way to Rome. She had cut things rather fine; it made her shudder to realize how close a schedule she had had to work with. Tomorrow she would rise early to catch the train to Rome, to wait at the airport for Noel to land, but wait alone this time, and, no matter what he might think or say, triumphant.

He was going to think and say a lot, Noel Johnson was, and she knew she had to brace herself. He was going to go on believing for the rest of his life, for instance, that she had bought this marriage, the way American heiresses used to engage obliging titled gentlemen as husbands. No use telling him that sort of thing was out of date. Was money ever out of date? he would want to know.

But Margaret Johnson was going to weather the storm with Noel, or so at any rate she had the audacity to believe. Hadn’t he in some mysterious way already, at what point she did not know, separated his own life from that of his daughter’s? A defective thing must go. She had seen him act upon this principle too many times not to feel that in some fundamental, unconscious way he would, long ago, have broken this link. Why had he done so? Why, indeed? Why are we all and what are we really doing? Who was to say when
he
, in turn, had irritated the selfish, greedy nature of things and been kicked on the head in all the joyousness of his playful ways? No, it would be pride alone that was going to make him angry: she had gone behind his back. At least so she believed.

Though weary of complexities and more than ready to take a long rest from them all, Mrs. Johnson was prepared on the strength of her belief to make one more gamble yet, namely, that however Noel might rage, no honeymoon was going to be interrupted, that Signor Naccarelli was not going to be searched out and told the truth, and that the officials of the great Roman church could sleep peacefully in rich apartments or poor damp cells, undisturbed by Noel Johnson. He would grow quiet at last, and in the quiet, even Margaret Johnson had not yet dared to imagine what sort of life, what degree of delight in it, they might not be able to discover (rediscover?) together.
This was uncertain. What was certain was that in that same quiet she would begin to miss her daughter. She would go on missing her forever.

She was swept by a strange weakness. Signor Naccarelli was offering her his arm, but she could not move to take it. Her head was spinning and she leaned, instead, against the cool stone column. She did not feel able to move. Beyond them, the group of tourists were trying to take a picture, but were unable to shield their cameras from the light’s terrible strength. A scarf was tried, a coat; would some person cast a shadow?

“Do you remember,” it came to Mrs. Johnson to ask Signor Naccarelli, “the man who fell down when the cannon fired that day? What happened to him?”

“He died,” said Signor Naccarelli.

She saw again, as if straight into her vision, painfully contracting it, the flash that the sun had all but blurred away to nothing. She heard again the momentary hush under heaven, followed by the usual noises careless resumption. In desperate motion through the flickering rhythms of the “event,” he went on and on in glimpses, trying to get up, while near him, silent in bronze, Cellini’s
Perseus
, in the calm repose of triumph, held aloft the Medusas head.

“I did the right thing,” she said. “I know I did.”

Signor Naccarelli made no reply. “The right thing”: what was it?

Whatever it was, it was a comfort to Mrs. Johnson, who presently felt strong enough to take his arm and go with him, out to the waiting car.

The White Azalea

Two letters had arrived for Miss Theresa Stubblefield: she put them in her bag. She would not stop to read them in American Express, as many were doing, sitting on benches or leaning against the walls, but pushed her way out into the street. This was her first day in Rome and it was June.

An enormous sky of the most delicate blue arched overhead. In her mind’s eye—her imagination responding fully, almost exhaustingly, to these shores’ peculiar powers of stimulation—she saw the city as from above, telescoped on its great bare plains that the ruins marked, aqueducts and tombs, here a cypress, there a pine, and all round the low blue hills. Pictures in old Latin books returned to her: the Appian Way Today, the Colosseum, the Arch of Constantine. She would see them, looking just as they had in the books, and this would make up a part of her delight. Moreover, nursing various Stubblefields—her aunt, then her mother, then her father—through their lengthy illnesses (everybody could tell you the Stubblefields were always sick), Theresa had had a chance to read quite a lot. England, France, Germany, Switzerland, and Italy had all been rendered for her time and again, and between the prescribed hours of pills and tonics, she had conceived a dreamy passion by lamplight, to see all
these places with her own eyes. The very night after her father’s funeral she had thought, though never admitted to a soul:
Now I can go. There’s nothing to stop me now
. So here it was, here was Italy, anyway, and terribly noisy.

In the street the traffic was really frightening. Cars, taxis, buses, and motor scooters all went plunging at once down the narrow length of it or swerving perilously around a fountain. Shoals of tourists went by her in national groups—English schoolgirls in blue uniforms, German boys with cameras attached, smartly dressed Americans looking in shop windows. Glad to be alone, Theresa climbed the splendid outdoor staircase that opened to her left. The Spanish Steps.

Something special was going on here just now—the annual display of azalea plants. She had heard about it the night before at her hotel. It was not yet complete: workmen were unloading the potted plants from a truck and placing them in banked rows on the steps above. The azaleas were as large as shrubs, and their myriad blooms, many still tight in the bud, ranged in color from purple through fuchsia and rose to the palest pink, along with many white ones too. Marvellous, thought Theresa, climbing in her portly, well-bred way, for she was someone who had learned that if you only move slowly enough you have time to notice everything. In Rome, all over Europe, she intended to move very slowly indeed.

Halfway up the staircase she stopped and sat down. Other people were doing it, too, sitting all along the wide banisters and leaning over the parapets above, watching the azaleas mass, or just enjoying the sun. Theresa sat with her letters in her lap, breathing Mediterranean air. The sun warmed her, as it seemed to be warming everything, perhaps even the underside of stones or the chill insides of churches. She loosened her tweed jacket and smoked a cigarette. Content … excited; how could you be both at once? Strange, but she was. Presently, she picked up the first of the letters.

A few moments later her hands were trembling and her brow had contracted with anxiety and dismay.
Of course, one of them would
have to go and do this! Poor Cousin Elec
, she thought, tears rising to sting in the sun,
but why couldn’t he have arranged to live through the summer? And how on earth did I ever get this letter anyway?

She had reason indeed to wonder how the letter had managed to find her. Her Cousin Emma Carraway had written it, in her loose high old lady’s script—
t’s
carefully crossed, but
l’s
inclined to wobble like an old car on the downward slope. Cousin Emma had simply put Miss Theresa Stubblefield, Rome, Italy, on the envelope, had walked up to the post office in Tuxapoka, Alabama, and mailed it with as much confidence as if it had been a birthday card to her next-door neighbor. No return address whatsoever. Somebody had scrawled American Express, Piazza di Spagna? across the envelope, and now Theresa had it, all as easily as if she had been the President of the Republic or the Pope. Inside were all the things they thought she ought to know concerning the last illness, death, and burial of Cousin Alexander Carraway.

Cousin Emma and Cousin Elec, brother and sister—unmarried, devoted, aging—had lived next door to the Stubblefields in Tuxapoka from time immemorial until the Stubblefields had moved to Montgomery fifteen years ago. Two days before he was taken sick, Cousin Elec was out worrying about what too much rain might do to his sweetpeas, and Cousin Elec had always preserved in the top drawer of his secretary a mother-of-pearl paper knife which Theresa had coveted as a child and which he had promised she could have when he died.
I’m supposed to care as much now as then, as much here as there
, she realized, with a sigh.
This letter would have got to me if she hadn’t even put Rome, Italy, on it
.

She refolded the letter, replaced it in its envelope, and turned with relief to one from her brother George.