The Spectator Bird (9 page)

It had already eased through the lake down there. Now, shifted down, it started fast up the road on which water was still sheeting, not yet cleared by my clearing of the culvert. It threw a bow wave like a power boat—a BMW, I saw, two people in it, blonde hair on the right, black behind the wheel, two faces staring out through the sweeping wiper blades. Césare and company, a half hour early. Ruth would be so pleased.

Leaning on my shovel, I stood aside, my face fixed for humorous comment, intending to wave them on when they slowed, with shouted assurances that I would be with them in a few minutes. But at the last moment something in the set of Césare's head and neck told me that he was not pausing in any downpour on any flooded hill for any workman in a muddy slicker leaning on a muddy shovel. I just had time to swing around as they passed. The splash drenched the back of my slicker and the unprotected back of my neck.

Almost contemplatively, assuring myself that I still had a half hour before my guests were due, I went on down to the bottom and cleared the culvert there to ease and drain the lake. Leaving the shovel in case further emergencies developed, I came back up the road littered with leaves, broken branches, and rocks loosened from above. To maintain feelings appropriate to a host, I did not allow myself to dwell on the State Department's exchange-of-persons program, nor yet on the volatile and romantic Italian temperament. Instead, I counted the steps it took me from the bottom culvert to the middle one—one hundred twelve—and from the middle one to the top—one hundred seventy-one. Two hundred eighty-three altogether.

Unseen, I got past the entrance and around to the bedroom door. But when I had peeled off my soaked and muddied clothes and stepped into the bathroom, my finger on the switch produced no light, and in the shower my turning of the knob gave rise to no more than a weak little old man's jet followed by a dribble. While I tried to get clean under that, I elaborated a fantasy in which I called Dr. Ben Alexander and had him come to examine the prostate of my plumbing system.

Finally I got half clean, though my hands continued numb, and at twelve-forty, only ten minutes after they had been invited for, but forty after their arrival, I went in to my guests. Things had obviously been a little strained in there. Ruth, who has a lot of doomed-queen, avenger-queen expressions, sometimes Medea, sometimes Clytemnestra, sometimes Lady Macbeth, gave me one that was more like Cassandra or Mary Queen of Scots. She was just handing a drink, probably the second or third, to Césare, who was peering out at the drowned hills and being reminded, not for the first time if my intuition was right, of Umbria.

Césare rushed to embrace me, crying to his gods that he had not recognized me on the hill. “How could I know? I saw you there, I thought, ‘Poor devil, what some people must do to live.' But I could not stop, you understand, the road was a
torrente.
Or should I pretend that Ms. McElvenny was driving?”

I shook Ms. McElvenny's hand: she was a pussycat with half-inch eyelashes. “I knew who was driving,” I said. “Remember the last time I saw you? You drove me down that corkscrew road from the American Academy to Trastevere. I didn't draw a breath all the way down. Once I looked back, just as we passed that little temple, the one with the fountains, and the gravel was still hanging in the air above the Villa Aurelia's gate. Then I looked down, and here came a Volkswagen bus that was going to meet us just at a curve where a fellow was washing his car in the road. And from farther down the roofs of the Regina Coeli were floating up toward us the way Fifth Avenue would float up at you if you did a half gainer off the Empire State. Nobody's going to be in any doubt who's driving, if you're at the wheel.”

Césare was delighted. Said Ms. McElvenny the pussycat, “Can you picture what it's like to have him drive you down Jones Street?”

“Yes,” I said. “Yes, I can. Exactly.”

Ruth's eyes were asking accusingly, Where
were
you? Césare was simultaneously exclaiming about the
brutto tempo
and asking how I was and demanding to know how I found myself out here on the West Coast. I got myself a drink and offered to refill Ms. McElvenny. “I'm gonna drive,” she said with a grin. The lights came on. Ruth breathed an excuse and darted for the kitchen. In the door she hung a moment. “Give me fifteen minutes?” she said, and vanished. There we were.

I inspected Ms. McElvenny. She was just the kind of pussycat that Césare collects. In fact, she too put me in mind of the last time we were in Rome, when an American girl came to me wanting me to get her an advance on her manuscript and be a reference in her application for a Guggenheim. She said she worked so well in Rome that she simply must stay another year. She intimated two or three times that she would do
anything
for the chance. I found myself unable to assist her as much as she wanted me to. Three days later I saw her at a table on the Via Veneto, smiling as any pussycat smiles who has just swallowed a bumblebee, while Italy's Greatest Novelist poured out to her, leaning head to head across the cloth, his best D'Annunzio monologue.

A version of which he was now giving me. Beside Césare Rulli, Ben Alexander would seem taciturn. He has an interest in everything that moves; only quiet things elude him. He cannot sit still. Sitting, he hitches a chair around like a milking stool. Standing, he hops and strides around with his impetuous limp, gained, he says, from a German bullet when he was with the partisans during the war. I make no judgment on where he spent the war or how he got his limp. Maybe he borrowed it from Lord Byron and liked it so well he forgot to return it. He is a fly in a bottle, a June bug against a screen. Where anyone else would simmer, he boils; where others boil, he erupts.

He didn't dwell long on the
brutto tempo
or the view that is like Umbria. He was instantly off on San Francisco, which he has of course fallen in love with: a world city, a city more of Europe than America, a place full of life, excitement, color, motion, a city that knows how to play. Apparently he and his pussycat had seen it all, including two or three topless-bottomless joints in North Beach that they took in after the consul's party.

“This that you live in is beautiful,” he says with a sweeping gesture that makes Ms. McElvenny protect her sherry glass with both hands.
“Bella, bella.
Really, it is like Umbria. With cypresses it might be Tuscany. But I am curious, Giuseppe. Why do you live in the country? Why not in San Francisco?”

I said we were close enough. When we needed the City, which was no oftener than once a month, we could be there in less than an hour. Mostly we went for nothing more spectacular than to see an exhibition at one of the galleries or museums, or to walk in Golden Gate Park.

“Golden Gate Park?” says Césare to Ms. McElvenny. “Did we see that?”

“I didn't think it would be very high on your must list,” says Ms. McElvenny.

The glance he gave her was of such melting warmth and promise and adoration that I expected I might out of pure discretion have to leave the room for a few minutes.
“Avevi ragione,”
Césare said. “You were right.”

He tipped his glass to drink, and I saw his eyes fix on something across the room. There were the breadpans I had set out on top of the bookcase wall. Below, overlooked in the rush, were the collected works of Oates, O‘Connor, O'Neill, and Katherine Anne. He limped across to inspect them, and after a moment of contemptuous scrutiny limped back.

“I didn't set them out to impress you with the competition,” I said. “I set them out because the rain had leaked in and got them wet. Your own are farther along the shelf, nice and dry.”

He grunted, regarding me across his raised glass. “So you like it better in the country. What do you do besides put pans under leaks and dig in the mud?”

“Lavoriamo
in
giardino,”
I said.
“Leggiamo. Meditiamo. Di quando in quando facciamo una passeggiata.”

“Sei filosofo,”
Césare said. He studied me, tasting his drink with pursed lips, with the wincing, pleased, thoughtful expression of a horse drinking ice water. I half expected him to bob his nose in it. “Who are the literary people here? Who is there to talk to?”

I said there were writers up and down the Peninsula, but no literary life as he knew it, no taverns or pubs or sidewalk cafes where they gathered to talk shop and subvert each other's wives and girl friends. Publishers and agents were all in New York. The local writers operated by mail, a fine economical system.

Squinting in amusement, he called the pussycat's attention to me with a jerk of shoulder and eyebrow. “Look at him. He was once a man of the world, he had juice in him, he liked conversation, excitement, people, crowds, pretty women, literary discussion. Now he sits on a cow pad and consults the grass. He pretends to be on the shelf. Look, right over there is proof that on the shelf you can get all wet You are not fair to your wife. She is an angel, I adore her, she should be out where things go on. She will look at you and grow dull, dull, dull! Listen. I wish you had been with us in San Francisco. Come back with us tonight, I'll stay over, we'll see something besides Golden Gate Park. You don't want to sit in this imitation Umbria and dig in the mud and struggle against uncivilized nature. That is the way to grow old.”

It was “Up at a Villa—Down in the City” all over again.
Bang-whang-whang
went his drum, and
tootle-de-tootle
his fife. After I came in, he didn't once look outside again, though what was going on out there was spectacular and even frightening. Until Ruth announced lunch—she had lighted candles on the table, anticipating further trouble from Pacific Gas and Electric—he proselytized me on life in the city square. As if I were a high school student, and not a bright one at that, he literally construed me the word “civilization,” and how it came from
civis,
and the word “urbanity,” and how it came from
urbs,
and he suggested that, being the man I was, I could not rusticate myself without doing harm to the civilized world.

Since we were on that subject, one on which I have pondered, I reminded him of some other words: “arcadian,” which had its own pleasant connotations, and “civility,” which might once have characterized the civis but which seemed now to be forgotten there. I said if I had my choice I preferred to be suburbane. I said there were enough people around without my going hunting them. I preferred books. And as for pretty girls and
amore,
I quoted him Aldous Huxley to the effect that sooner or later everybody arrived at the point where he could not take yes for an answer. Miss Pussycat, sipping her barely touched sherry and keeping track of things behind her camel eyelashes, just about broke up over that one.

But Césare could not be diverted from his basic subject, women. He brought them to the table with him and developed them role by role: civilizers, comforters, handmaidens, houris, goddesses, objects of worship, homemakers, matriarchs. He made a speech worthy of an oil sheikh. Miss Pussycat watched and was fascinated, and likewise Minnie, stumbling around the table in her wiped-off but still wet shoes, bulging her white nylon as she thrust platters and bowls before people, her eyes on Césare's animated face and her thumb comfortably in the sauce.

But after he had run through his set pieces, Césare rather tapered off. The plate that Minnie carried away from his place was only half cleaned. He drank his Green Hungarian without comment, almost impatiently. I had the distinct impression that he was more and more astonished that we had asked him down
en famille.
Why were there no other people, why had no one been invited in to meet him? Why, when we obviously were well enough off to choose, did we choose to eat like peasants in a kitchen, without the stimulation of guests? Why had we not understood that a famous novelist appreciated a larger audience? His eye once or twice wandered to Ms. McElvenny's. He yearned to be gone.

At two-thirty she took her cue, stood up from the coffee tray in the living room, and said they ought to leave. It was such a terrible day, bad for driving, and they had appointments. How lovely of us to let her come down and kibitz on our reunion. On departure, Césare embraced Ruth and then me, clapping my shoulders as if he were Anthony and I Enobarbas. When were we next coming to Rome? We must absolutely let him know. We must be pulled out of our retirement and restored to civilization. And for today, and the chance to see us even so briefly,
mille grazie
. And
rrivederci.
And
venga
,
venga a Roma
.

I held an umbrella over the two of them as we all ran for their car, and got myself wet all over again. As they grimaced and waved from behind their streaming windows and swashing wipers, I stood there like Little Boy Blue's tin soldier, waving them off. When I came in, I was depressed and irritable, and I have been that way ever since.

By working our heads off, we managed to give Césare the dullest two and a half hours he has had since arriving in America. Any lunch in the City, anything from fog cutters and Indonesian
saté
at Trader Vic's to a beer and a Polish sausage down at the Eagle, among the longshoremen by Pier 37, would have pleased him more. It did not occur to him, so busy was he talking up women and civilization, to comment on Ruth's food, which was better than anything he would have got in the City. He was not moved by the Green Hungarian, though it is so much better than the sulphurous Frascati he is used to that he should never know peace in Rome again. Nothing we provided him, including the company, was anything but a bore. His monologues were wasted on an empty house. He pities me, I saw it in his face.

One thing he did do—he impressed Minnie. “Ain't he a sky-rocket, though?” she said as we gathered to clean up. “What is he, Eyetalian?”