The Light in the Piazza and Other Italian Tales (5 page)

Whether she sought advice or whether her need was for somebody to talk things over with, she had gone one day directly after lunch to the American consulate, where she found, on the second floor of a palazzo whose marble halls echoed the click and clack of typing, one of those perpetually young American faces topped by a crew cut. The owner of it was sitting in a seersucker coat behind a standard American office desk in a richly paneled room cut to the noble proportions of the Florentine Renaissance. Memos, documents
and correspondence were arranged in stacks before him, and he looked toward the window while twisting a rubber band repeatedly around his wrist. Mrs. Johnson had no sooner got her first statement out—she was concerned about a courtship between her daughter and a young Italian—than he had cut her off. The consulate could give no advice in personal matters. A priest, perhaps, or a minister or doctor. There was a list of such as spoke English. “Gabriella!” An untidy Italian girl wearing glasses and a green crepe blouse came in from her typewriter in the outer office. “There’s a services list in the top of that file cabinet. If you’ll just find us a copy.” All the while he continued looking out of the window and twisting and snapping the rubber band around his wrist. Mrs. Johnson got the distinct impression that but for this activity he would have dozed right off to sleep. By the time she had descended to the courtyard, her disappointment had turned into resentment. We pay for people like him to come and live in a palace, she thought. It would have helped me just to talk, if he had only listened.

The sun’s heat pierced the coarsely woven straw of her little hat and prickled sharply at her tears. The hot street was deserted. Feeling foreign, lonely and exposed, she walked past the barred shops.

The shadowy interior of an espresso bar attracted her. Long aluminum chains in bright colors hung in the door and made a pleasant muted jingling behind her. She sat down at a small table and asked for a coffee. Presently, she opened the mimeographed sheets that the secretary had produced for her. There she found, as she had been told, along with a list of tourist services catering to Americans, rates for exchanging money and advice on what to do if your passport was lost, the names and addresses of several doctors and members of the clergy. Perhaps it was worth a try. She found a representative of her ancestral faith and noted the obscure address. With her American instinct for getting on with it, no matter what it was, she found her tears and hurt evaporating, drank her coffee and began fumbling through books and maps for the location of the street. She had never dared to use a telephone in Italy.

She went out into the sun. She had left Clara asleep in the hotel during the siesta hour. A lady professor whose card boasted of a number of university degrees would come and give Clara an Italian lesson at three. Before this was over, Mrs. Johnson planned to have returned. She motioned to a
carrozza
and showed the address to the driver, who leaned far back from his seat, almost into her face, to read it. He needed a shave and reeked of garlic and wine. His whip was loud above the thin rump of the horse, and he plunged with a shout into the narrow, echoing streets so gathered-in at this hour as to make any noise seem rude.

After two minutes of this Mrs. Johnson was jerked into a headache. He was going too fast—she had not said she was in a hurry—and taking corners like a madman.
“Attenzione!”
she called out twice. How did she say “slow down”? He looked back and laughed at her, not paying the slightest attention to the road ahead. The whip cracked like a pistol shot. The horse slid and, to keep his footing, changed from a trot to a desperate two-part gallop that seemed to be wrenching the shafts from the carriage. Mrs. Johnson closed her eyes and held on. It was probably the driver’s idea of a good time. Thank God the streets were empty. Now the wheels rumbled; they were crossing the river. They entered the quarter of Oltr’arno, the opposite bank, through a small piazza from which a half-dozen little streets branched out. The paving here was of small, rough-edged stones. Speeding toward one tiny slit of a street, the driver, either through mistake or a desire to show off, suddenly wheeled the horse toward another, almost at right angles to them. The beast plunged against the bit that had flung its head and shoulders practically into reverse, and with a great gasp in which its whole lungs seemed involved as in a bellows, it managed to bring its forelegs in line with the new direction. Mrs. Johnson felt her head and neck jerked as cruelly as the horse’s had been.

“Stop! STOP!”

At last she had communicated. Crying an order to the horse, hauling in great lengths of rein, the driver obeyed. The carriage
stood swaying in the wake of its lost momentum, and Mrs. Johnson alighted shakily in the narrow street. Heads had appeared at various windows above them. A woman came out of a doorway curtained in knotted cords and leaned in the entrance with folded arms. A group of young men, one of them rolling a motor scooter, emerged from a courtyard and stopped to watch.

Mrs. Johnson’s impulse was to walk away without a backward glance. She was mindful always, however, of a certain American responsibility. The driver was an idiot, but his family was probably as poor as his horse. She was drawing a five-hundred-lire note from her purse, when, having wrapped the reins to their post in the
carrozza
, the object of her charity bounded suddenly down before her face. She staggered back, clutching her purse to her. Her wallet had been half out; now his left hand was on it while his right held up two fingers.
“Due! Due mila!”
he demanded, forcing her back another step. The young men around the motor scooter were noticing everything. The woman in the doorway called a casual word to them and they answered.

“Due mila, signora!”
repeated the driver, and thrusting his devils face into hers, he all but danced.

The shocking thing—the thing that was paralyzing her, making her hand close on the wallet as though it contained something infinitely more precious than twenty or thirty dollars in lire—was the overturn of all her values. He was not ashamed to be seen extorting an unjust sum from a lone woman, a stranger, obviously a lady; he was priding himself rather on showing off how ugly about it he could get. And the others, the onlookers, those average people so depended on by an American to adhere to what is good? She did not deceive herself. Nobody was coming to her aid. Nobody was even going to think, It isn’t fair.

She thrust two thousand-lire notes into his hand, and folding her purse closely beneath her arm in ridiculous parody of everything Europeans said about Americans, she hastened away. The driver reared back before his audience. He shook in the air the two notes
she had given him.
“Mancia! Mancia!”
No tip! Turning aside to mount his carriage, he thrust the money into his inner breast pocket, slanting after her a word that makes Anglo-Saxon curses sound like nursery rhymes. She did not understand what it meant, but she felt the meaning; the foul, cold, rat’s foot of it ran after her down the street. As soon as she turned a corner, she stopped and stood shuddering against a wall.

Imagine her then, not ten minutes later, sitting on a sofa covered with comfortably faded chintz, steadying her nerves over a cup of tea and talking to a lively old gentleman with a trace of the Scottish highlands in his voice. It had not occurred to her that a Presbyterian minister would be anything but American, but now that she thought of it she supposed that the faith of her fathers was not only Scottish but also French. A memory returned to her, something she had not thought of in years. One Christmas or Thanksgiving as a little girl she had been taken to her grandfather’s house in Tennessee. She could reconstruct only a glimpse of something that had happened. She saw herself in the corner of a room with a fire burning and a bay window overlooking an uneven shoulder of side yard partially covered with a light fall of snow. She was meddling with a black book on a little table and an old man with wisps of white hair about his brow was leaning over her: “It’s a Bible in Gaelic. Look, I’ll show you.” And putting on a pair of gold-rimmed glasses he translated strange broken-looking print, moving his horny finger across a tattered page. In this unattractive roughness of things, it was impossible to escape the suggestion of character.

It came to her now in every detail about the man before her. Even the hairs of his gray brows, thick as wire, had each its own almost contrary notion about where to be, and underneath lived his sharp blue eyes, at once humorous and wry. Far from being disinterested in his unexpected visitor, who so obviously had something on her mind, he managed to make Mrs. Johnson feel even more uncomfortable than the specimen of American diplomacy had done. He was, in fact, too interested, alert as a new flame. She had a feeling
that compromise was unknown to him, and really, come right down to it, wasn’t compromise the thing she kept looking for?

Touching her tea-moistened lip with a small Florentine embroidered handkerchief, she told him her dilemma in quite other terms than the ones that troubled her. She put it to him that her daughter was being wooed by a young Italian of the nicest sort, but naturally a Roman Catholic. This led them along the well-worn paths of theology. The venerable minister, surprisingly, showed little zeal for the workout. An old war-horse, he wearied to hurl himself into so trifling a skirmish. He wished to be tolerant… his appointment here after retirement had been a joy to him … he had come to love Italy,
but
—one could not help observing. … For a moment the sparks flew. Well.

Mrs. Johnson took her leave at the door that opened into a narrow dark stair dropping down to the street.

“Ye’ll have written to her faither?”

“Why, no,” she admitted. His eyelids drooped ever so slightly. Americans … divorce; she could see the suspected pattern. “It’s a wonderful idea! I’ll do it tonight.”

Her enthusiasm did not flatter him. “If your daughter’s religion means anything to her,” he said, “I urge ye both to make very careful use of your brains.”

Well, thought Mrs. Johnson, walking away down the street, what did Clara’s religion mean to her? She had liked to cut out and color things in Sunday school, but she had got too big for that department, and no pretense about churchgoing was kept up any longer. She wanted every year, however, to be an angel in the Christmas pageant. She had been, over the course of the years, every imaginable size of angel. Once, long ago, in a breathless burst of adoration, she had reached into the Winston-Salem First Presbyterian Church Ladies’ Auxiliary’s idea of a manger, a flimsy trough-shaped affair, knocked together out of a Sunkist orange crate, painted gray and stuffed with excelsior. She was looking for the little Lord Jesus, but all she found was a flashlight. Her teacher explained to her, as she
stood cheated and tearful, holding this unromantic object in her hands, that it would be sacrilegious to represent the Son of God with a doll. Mrs. Johnson rather sided with Clara; a doll seemed more appropriate than a flashlight.

Now what am I doing? Mrs. Johnson asked herself. Wasn’t she employing the old gentleman’s warning to reason herself into thinking that Clara’s romance was quite all right? More than all right—the very thing? As for writing to Clara’s father, why Noel Johnson would be on the transatlantic phone within five minutes after any such suggestion reached him. No, she was alone, really alone.

She sank down on a stone bench in a poor plain piazza with a rough stone paving, a single fountain, a single tree, a bare church façade, a glare of sun, the sound of some dirty little black-headed waifs playing with a ball. Careful use of your brains. She pressed her hand to her head. Outside the interest of conversation, her headache was returning and the shock of that terrible carriage ride. She did not any longer seem to possess her brains, but to stand apart from them as from everything else in Italy. She had got past the guide-books and still she was standing and looking. And her own mind was only one more thing among the things she was looking at, and what was going on in it was like the ringing of so many different bells. Five to four. Oh, my God! She began to hasten away through the labyrinth, the chill stench of the narrow streets.

She must have taken the wrong turning somewhere, because she emerged too far up the river—in fact, just short of the Ponte Vecchio, which she hastened to cross to reach at any rate the more familiar bank. A swirl of tourists hampered her; they were inching along from one show window to the next of the tiny shops that lined the bridge on both sides, staring at the myriads of baubles, bracelets, watches and gems displayed there. As she emerged into the street, a handsome policeman who, dressed in a snow-white uniform, was directing traffic as though it were a symphony orchestra, smiled into the crowd that was approaching along the Lungarno and brought everything to a dramatic halt.

There, with a nod to him, came Clara! He bowed; she smiled. Why, she looked like an Italian!

Item at a time, mother and daughter had seen things in the shops they could not resist. Mrs. Johnson with her positive, clipped American figure found it difficult to wear the clothes, and had purchased mainly bags, scarves and other accessories. But Clara could wear almost everything she admired. Stepping along now in her hand-woven Italian skirt and sleeveless cotton blouse, with leather sandals, smart straw bag, dark glasses and the glint of earrings against her cheek, she would fool any tourist into thinking her a native; and Mrs. Johnson, who felt she was being fooled by Clara in a far graver way, found in her daughters very attractiveness an added sense of displeasure, almost of disgust.