The Light in the Piazza and Other Italian Tales (17 page)

Martha hated to break this moment, for once they saw her, they would never be quite like this again. “Are you, by any chance, the Cogginses?” They were. How thrilled they were, how instantly relieved. They had been expecting her, but had not known where to look. It was all open and friendly beyond measure. Martha became exhilarated, and felt how really nice Americans were. So the group formed instantly and began to move forward together. “Taxi! Taxi!” It was a word everyone knew. …

Two weeks later George Hartwell rang them up. They had crossed Italy by then and had reached—he had guessed it—Venice. How was it going?

“Well, fine,” Martha said. “It’s mainly the Cogginses. Mrs. Wilbourne couldn’t afford to come and stayed behind. She’s flying out to Rome in a week or so. George, did you ever know an economist who didn’t have money problems?”

He chuckled.

“Mr. Wilbourne doesn’t stay with us much. He goes off to visit industries, though God knows what he can learn with sign language. It’s churches and museums for the Cogginses—they’re taking culture straight.”

“Should I come up and join you with the other car?” His conference was over in Florence; he was feeling responsible and wondering what to do.

“We managed okay with the baggage rack. They’ve shipped nearly everything ahead.” She felt obscurely annoyed at being found. “How did you know where we were?”

“I remembered that pensione, that little palace you like. …”

It was indeed, the pensione in Venice, a building like a private palace. It had once been some foreign embassy, and still kept its own walled campo, paved in smooth flagstones, ornamented with pots of flowers, boxed shrubs and bougainvillea. The tall formal windows opened on a small outdoor restaurant. “You mean we get all this and two meals a day?” Mr. Coggins was incredulous. “And all for six thousand lire each,” chanted Mrs. Coggins, who was by now a sort of chorus. That was the first day. Jim Wilbourne, angrily complaining about some overcharge on the launch from the station, joined them from Padova just in time for a drink before dinner, and they felt reunited, eating out in the open with the sound of water, by candlelight. They decided to stay on for a day or two.

One afternoon they went out to the Lido—all, that is, except Martha, who had decided she would spend the time by herself, revisiting one or two of the galleries. When she came out of Tintoretto’s Scuola into the quiet campo where the broad shadow of a church fell coolly (had everyone in Venice gone to the Lido?), there in a sunlit angle, a man, with a leather briefcase but no apparent business, stood watching. The campo, the entire area, all of Venice, indeed, seemed entirely deserted. There had been no one else in the gallery but the ticket seller—no guide or guard—and even he seemed to have disappeared. The man with the briefcase held a lighted cigarette in his free hand, a loosely packed
nazionale
, no doubt, for the smoke came gushing out into the still air. When he saw Martha pause and look at him, he suddenly flung both arms wide and shouted,
“Signora, signora! Che vuol fa’, che vuol fa’?”
“I don’t know,” Martha answered.
“Non so.”
“Something has gone wrong!” he shouted across the campo, waving the briefcase and the cigarette. “Somewhere in this world there has been a terrible mistake!
In questo mondo c’è stato un terribile errore!”

Martha walked away to the nearest canal and took a gondola. Mad people show up all over Italy in the summer; they walk the streets saying exactly what they think, but this was not like that: it was only
scirocco
. The air was heavy. She remembered Tintoretto’s contorted figures with some desire to relax and straighten them out, and the cry from the man with the briefcase, comic and rather awful at once, swept through and shook her.

Already the sky was beginning to haze over. On a clothesline hung behind an apartment building, a faded red cloth, like a curtain or a small sail, stirred languorously, as though breathing in the heat itself. The boat’s upcurving metal prow speared free, swinging into the Grand Canal. Even there the traffic was light; the swell from a passing
vaporetto
broke darkly, rocking the gondola in a leaden way.

At dinner everyone was silent. Jim Wilbourne ate very little, and that with his elbow propped beside his plate. Martha judged that the Cogginses bored him; they seemed another order of creature from him. Some days before he had wanted to know what Italian kitchen appliances were like. The kind of apartment he wanted in Rome absorbed him.

Jean Coggins, who had sunburned the arches of both feet at the Lido, looked about to cry when her mother said sharply, “If you insist on having wine, you could at least try not to spill it.” Mr. Coggins, whose brow was blistered, sent back his soup, which was cold, and got a second bowl, also cold.

To Martha the silence was welcome, for always before when gathered together, they had done nothing but ask her about the country—politics, religion, economics, no end of things. She was glad they had at last run down, like clocks, and that they could find themselves after dinner and coffee out in the back courtyard because some fiddlers had happened to pass. The guests began to dance, first with one another, then with strangers, then back to known faces again. When the music turned to a frantic little waltz, Jim Wilbourne stumbled twice, laughed and apologized, and led Martha
to a bench near the wall, where they were flanked on either side by stone jars of verbena.

“I’m so in love with that girl,” he said.

Martha was startled. What girl? The waitress, one of the guests, who? There wasn’t any girl but the Coggins girl, and this she couldn’t believe. Yet she felt as the guide on a tour must feel on first noticing that no one is any longer paying attention to cathedrals, chateaux, battlefields, stained glass, or the monuments in the square.

Jim Wilbourne offered her a cigarette, which she took. He lighted it, and one for himself.

“Out at the Lido this afternoon,” he went pleasantly on, “she got up to go in the surf. Her mother said, ‘You’re getting too fat, dear. Your suit is getting too small.’ For once I could agree wholeheartedly with Mrs. Coggins.”

So then it was Jean Coggins. “But she’s only a kid,” Martha protested.

“That’s what I thought. I was ten days on that damn boat and that’s what I thought, too. Then I caught on that she only looks like a kid because her parents are along. She’s nineteen, actually. And rather advanced,” he dryly added.

“But when—” Martha exclaimed. “I’ve never seen you near each other.”

“That’s strange,” said Jim Wilbourne.

She almost laughed aloud to think how they had so quickly learned to walk through walls; she felt herself to be reasonably observant, quite alert, in fact. But she was also put out—she and George Hartwell were not really delighted to have Americans who leaped into
la dolce vita
the moment the boat docked—if not, in fact, the moment they embarked. She got up and walked to the wall, where she stood looking over the edge into the narrow canal beneath. From under the white bridge a boat went slowly past, a couple curled inside; its motor was cut down to the last notch, and it barely purred through the water. Before Jim Wilbourne came to stand beside her, the boat had slipped into the shadows.

“Italy always has this romantic impact,” Martha began. “You have to take into account that the scene, the atmosphere—”

“‘Generalizations,’” Jim Wilbourne teased her, quoting something she was fond of saying, “‘are to be avoided.’”

“No, it’s true,” she protested. “After a year or so here, one starts dreaming of hamburgers and milk shakes.”

“Indeed?” He flicked his cigarette into the water and turned, his vision drawn back to where Jean Coggins was dancing with the proprietor’s son, Alfredo, the boy who kept the desk. Her skirts were shorter, her heels higher; her hair, a shambles on her return from the beach, had been brushed and drawn back. She had put on weight, as her mother said, and she did, to Martha’s surprise, look lovely.

Martha, who disliked feeling responsible for people, toyed with the idea of seeking the elder Cogginses and hinting at what she knew, but there in the faraway shadows, around and around a big oleander pot, the Cogginses were dancing cheek to cheek. Richard Coggins accomplished a daring twirl; Mrs. Coggins smiled. The two grubby musicians, with accordion and fiddle, who had brought an empty
fiasco
and offered to play for wine and tips, had not even paused for breath for an hour. They could go on like this all evening.

Scirocco
, Martha thought, deciding to blame everything on the weather.

She slipped away, walking inside the broad, dimly lighted hall of the pensione. It looked shadowy and lovely there, its wide doors at either end thrown open to the heavy night. On the beamed ceiling reflections from water were always flickering, breathing, changing. Behind the desk a low light burned, and the proprietor, a tubby, shrewd-faced man, was bending over one of his folio-sized account books. He had told Martha that the pensione was owned by a Viennese lady who came there unannounced twice a year. She might descend on him, like the angel Gabriel, he had said, at any moment. So he kept his nose to his figures, but now, as Martha went by on her thoughtful way upstairs, he looked up.

“Ah, signora,” he said, “there’s nothing to do about it.
Non c’è niente da fare
.” But what he meant, if anything, was not clear.

She heard the lapping of tiny waves from everywhere, and through a window saw the flowers against the wall, hanging half-closed and dark as wine.

3

In Piazza San Marco, where she went the morning after with some idea of keeping her skirts clear of any complications, Jim Wilbourne nevertheless appeared and spotted her. Through hundreds of tables and chairs, he wove as straight a line toward her as possible, sat down and ordered, of all things,
gelato
. He was wearing dark glasses as large as a pair of windshields, and he dropped off at once into a well of conversation—he must have enjoyed college, Martha thought. The scarcely concealed fascism of Italy troubled him; how were they ever to bring themselves out into democracy?

“Quite a number have jumped completely over democracy,” Martha said.

“I simply cannot believe,” he pursued, trying to light a cigarette with any number of little wax matches, until Martha gave him her lighter, “that these people are abstract enough to be good communists. Or democrats, either, for that matter. I think when the Marshall Plan came along they just wanted to eat, and here they are on our side.”

“Oh, I really doubt they’re so unaware as you think,” Martha said. “The idea of the simple-hearted Italian—not even English tourists think that any more.”

“I don’t so much mean simple, as practical, shrewd, mainly a surface life. What would happen, say, if this city turned communist right now? Would one Venetian think of hauling the bones of St. Mark out of the cathedral and dumping them in the lagoon? I just can’t see it.”

“The Cogginses seem to like everything just the way it is,” Martha laughed.

“Do you see that character as I do? As long as Richard Coggins can hear some
ragazzo
go by whistling
‘O soave fanciulla,’
he’s gone to paradise for the afternoon. The more ragged the
ragazzo
is, the better he likes it. I have two blind spots; want to know them? Opera and religious art. A million churches in this country and quite likely I’m not going to like a single one of them.”

“So no wonder you keep escaping us.”

“Oh, it’s been pleasant enough. You’ve done your best to keep us happy. And then there’s daughter Jean—” He paused, adding, “Don’t get me wrong,” though she had no idea what that meant. By now he was eating through a mountain of ice cream, striped with caramel and chocolate, piled with whipped cream and speared with wafers.

“The Cogginses are going down to Rome tomorrow,” he went on. “As you know they’ve got this meeting with Coggins’s opposite number, somebody who’s going to the States to tell us all about jazz.”

“I ought to know about it,” Martha said. “I went to enough trouble to set it up. Anyway, it’s chamber music, not jazz.”

“Okay, Mrs. Ingram. So you’ll get me straightened out some day. Keep at it. Anyway, I wondered if maybe you wouldn’t stay on a day or so, with Jean and me. She thought it would be a good idea. We could all go to the Lido.”

“That might be fun,” said Martha.

“If you’re worried about the Cogginses—well, don’t. Him and his bloody opera plots. Catsup all over the stage, women’s heads bellowing out of sacks. Is he serious? Those people were born to be deceived.”

“The real hitch for me is that I have a schedule back in Rome. I only made this trip to please my boss.”

“It can’t be all that important,” he pursued, though it was obvious to her that by actually mentioning deception he had spoiled it all.

“Anyway,” she pointed out gently, “in this weather the water will be no good at all for swimming. There’s sure to be a lot of rain.”

“How nice to know so much.”

She maneuvered easily, but the fact was, he puzzled her. Are they all turning out like this, she wondered, all of them back there? Yet he consistently gained her attention, if that was what he wanted; she had found him attractive from the start, though she had assumed he was accustomed to creating this sort of reaction and would not have thought it remarkable, if he noticed at all. As for herself, she wanted only to place a face value on him. Tanned, solid, tall, dressed even to his watchband with a sort of classical American sense of selection, he was like something handpicked for export; if you looked behind his ear you might find something to that effect stamped there. He was very much the sort who returned in ten years leading a group of congressmen by the nose and telling them what to look for and where, though when on home leave she might encounter him even before that, being interviewed on some TV show. It would be like him to leap out at me, right in a friend’s living room, she thought. And when he had appeared in Venice a few evenings back, she had been looking toward the bridge he crossed to reach them and had seen him mount up angrily, suddenly, against the horizonless air. He gave her then, and fleetingly at other times, as well, the impression of being seen in double, as people always do who carry their own image in their heads.