Hill Towns (19 page)

“If you were particularly rich, you could have yourself or your children’s skeletons put here for all eternity,” Sam said.

“There are a couple of children from the great old families, the devout ones. I bring everybody here. Kids inevitably adore it. But I’ve known more than one adult to just hit the floor. The monks are used to it. They have a modern first aid station across the piazza there. Look at the plaque.”

It was small and easily missed. I did not know what the Italian meant.

“‘As we are now, so shall ye be,’” Sam translated.

I stood in that place of bones and laughed. It was too much, it was too awful. Maybe it was wonderful. I could not tell. Part of me was appalled, but a greater part was oddly comforted. This place did not ignore death but put it right in your face. From there you could shudder and go out to lunch.

I turned to Joe and then turned away. I could see that he was profoundly disturbed.

“You going to be OK?” Sam said.

“Yes,” I said. “The bones are really very lovely, aren’t they?

That rich, shining brown. Pear-brown Rome. Boy, it gets into everything, doesn’t it?”

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Back out in the sunlight again, I unfolded the pamphlet the monk had given me and looked at it. It was a poem, execrably written, from the point of view of an aborted baby to its mother. Death and forgiveness seemed to be the main thrusts of it. I crumpled it up in repugnance.

“It’s antiabortion propaganda,” I said. “Ugh. How can they, in that place? It’s a little Golgotha. They’re death engineers themselves, but they still try to lay that trip on women.”

“God and physics,” Sam said mildly, and we went on out into the heat of noon.

We trudged, sweating, through streets that seemed to me to be devoted largely to couture shopping. I could not imagine who would want to brave this fearsome, living heat to buy clothing, but a great many chic women whose national-ities I could not fathom seemed to be doing so, most with huge Vuitton bags, clicking in and out of small, austere shops with the hip-swaying gait that predominated here, exaggerated by heels so high I could not even imagine walking in them. My own feet, cradled as they were in crepe rubber, were still sore and burning. I seemed to feel the impress of every cobblestone we had trod on their bottoms. Sam, well ahead of us in his steady dogtrot, was running sweat on every bare surface, but his colossal legs ground along as if powered by pistons, and the straw hat still rode at a jaunty angle. At my side I could hear Joe breathing heavily, and I looked at him worriedly. He was not speaking much now—had not, since we left the grisly hospitality of the Capuchins—but I did not know if the malaise was one of flesh or spirit. His silence bothered me. Usually, if Joe was slightly unsettled about something, he made a joke of it. If it was more than a slight discomfort, he simply asked that it be stopped.

154 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

We crossed a dingy modern street whose traffic, for sheer artistry of mayhem, matched that of the Piazza Venezia, and all at once I heard water. Not the plinking splash of the many little fountains we had passed but a deep cool cascade, proper water, running wild. Nothing had ever sounded quite so wonderful to me at that moment. We came into a small, nondescript little piazza and I saw it precisely as I had in innumerable magazine pages, in many technicolor movies: the Fontana di Trevi, the Trevi Fountain, its streamlets bounding joyously over its artfully artless boulders and spuming great Neptune with its exuberance. An extraordinary, playful, baroque, excessive fancy in the middle of one of the most cramped, even banal, little piazzas I had ever seen. I wanted more than anything in my life, just then, to simply step into it and lie down among the glittering coins.

“Oh, Joe, do you remember the song ‘Three Coins in the Fountain’? It was popular when I was a little kid. I thought it was the most romantic song in the world. Wasn’t it in a movie?”

“The only movie I remember about it was Fellini,” Sam said, fishing in his pockets. “When Mastroianni and Ekberg are about to have at it in the fountain and the water goes off and his pecker goes down, not to put too fine a point on it.

At least, I’ve always been sure that’s what the symbolism insinuated. Here, turn around, both of you, and throw a coin in over your shoulder. Make sure you come back to Rome.”

“Maybe I’ll pass,” Joe muttered under his breath, as we shouldered our way through the crowds from the tour buses.

I smiled at him.

“Just say to yourself, ‘Make it October,’” I said, and he smiled back, a stretched ghost of his old full smile, and we tossed our coins.

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We made our way along the Corso and back up the Via Condotti to the Spanish Steps, so clogged with people photographing other people and vendors of every imaginable object and teenagers jostling and crowing and lunging that we could hardly see the monumental staircase itself. Sam pointed out the house where Keats lived and died and asked if we’d like to go in.

“Another time,” I said, frankly worried about Joe now. He was as pale as a wraith and nearly hobbling. Sam seemed to notice for the first time.

“Christ, I’ve nearly killed you,” he said. “If you don’t come down with Roman Foot on top of heat prostration it’ll be a miracle. Can you make it to the top? The Hassler has a good bar; we’ll get a drink and then we can get you some decent walking shoes and take a cab back to the studio. We’ll save the Ghetto and old Aldo Mori for another trip. You should have spoken up. Don’t let assholes run you into the ground before you have your second wind.”

“I’m fine,” Joe said thinly. I wanted to shake him; he was obviously very far from fine. “I think I will get a drink, though, and see if there are any decent men’s shops around here. I can’t spend the rest of my time in Italy in this getup; I look like a male stripper. I want you all to go on, though.

I know there was more you wanted Cat to see, and I know she wants to see it. I’ll meet you back at your studio for lunch in…what? An hour and a half?”

“No, I’ll go shopping with you,” I began. “You don’t look so good; I’m afraid—”

“Cat, I really want to be by myself for a little while,” he said, in a low, fast voice, and I stopped. I could think of nothing to say. Joe had never before told me he did not want my company. My eyes stung.

156 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

“But you don’t know where the studio is,” I said, hating myself for going on.

“I’ll bet, if I ask him nicely, Sam will tell me, and I’ll tell a taxi driver, and he’ll take me there,” Joe said, with such soft sarcasm that I turned away and studied the bulk of Trinità dei Monti at the top of the hill, almost black against the furious blue-white of the sky.

“Sounds like a good plan,” Sam said, taking my arm.

“Come on, Cat. Cut the guy some slack. He can get a cab in a second at the Hassler. There’s only one other thing I really wanted you to see, and then we’ll all go have lunch. Ada’s bringing it from home, and Colin and Maria are coming.

Well, as a matter of fact, Joe, so is Yolanda; I forgot. Why don’t you buzz her room and see if she’s ready when you’ve finished shopping, and you can ride down together? She knows where it is. That is, if you can stand her, after last night.”

“Be glad to,” Joe said. “See you guys later.”

And he turned away from us and climbed the Spanish Steps without looking back, striding purposefully, as if not to show that his feet were in agony and his legs rubbery with heat. I looked after him.

“He’s okay,” Sam said, tugging gently on my arm. “Don’t hover. He’s a big boy. He’ll do better by himself for a while: get his bearings and set his own pace. Maybe have an adventure all by himself, one somebody else didn’t plan. Let him find his own Rome.”

I turned away from the steps and followed Sam back into the piazza. I felt desolate, diminished. How had I offended Joe? It had happened so seldom, this shortness of his, that I literally had no idea. And Yolanda Whitney; I was not sure I liked the idea of that at all.

“I didn’t know Colin and Maria and Yolanda were joining us,” I said neutrally, climbing into the cab he hailed.

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“Yolie called early this morning and asked if we were going to see you; said she wanted me to relay her apologies for being a harlot last night. I told her to come to lunch and tell you herself. Ada said since it was shaping up into a party she’d call Colin and Maria, and we could eat up the rest of the buffet from the other night. Don’t worry about Yolanda, Cat. You have no cause to.”

“I wasn’t,” I said, my face hot.

“Yeah, you were.”

He gave the driver an address on Via XX Settembre.

“Where are we going?” I asked, profoundly grateful to be off my feet and in a dim, soft interior, even hurtling suicidally through Rome.

“Church,” Sam said. “Santa Maria della Vittoria. It’s as baroque as a baboon’s butt, and what I’m going to show you is a Bernini, not my favorite sculptor. His feet’s too big, as the old song says, among other things. But this one is something else. I have a special reason to show it to you.

You’ll see.”

Inside the church, the contrast between the burning day and the rich gray, brown, and mauve marble served to blind me for a moment. I let Sam guide me, sensing people all about me but somehow not feeling the neck-prickling, pre-liminary seeping of the fear. My eyes gradually accustomed themselves, and when they did we were standing before a little chapel at the back of the church. A small dome just above it let a clear golden light down through an opening; motes danced in it, and I was reminded, by its iridescent solidarity, of the column of light in the Pantheon and of my fancy that I could climb it. The light fell full on a sculpture, and I caught my breath when I looked at it. Then I shut my eyes involuntarily.

“A not uncommon impulse,” Sam said, watching me.

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“The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa. Bernini’s ideas of sacred ecstasy and rapture got him into not a little hot water. The head is one of the finest things ever to come from a chisel, I think, and who knows, it may be the most perfect expression of Divine Love ever wrought by man. Eleanor Clark said the smile of the angel who’s getting ready to run her through with his arrow is one of the best in all the world’s sculpture.

Of course, one President de Brosses of France said, that ‘If this is Divine Love, I know all about it.’”

I opened my eyes and stared at the saint in her intricately wrought, disheveled robes. There was no doubting the passion; there was so much passion in her blind, naked face, so much transport and abandon, such sheer physical hunger and completion, both at once, that I felt a wave of heat spread slowly through me from the pit of my stomach. The statue was powerfully beautiful and powerfully erotic.

“My God,” I whispered. “It’s the absolute essence of—”

“Isn’t it?” Sam said. “Makes you wonder what the precise difference between sacred and profane love is. A great conundrum, the one at the very heart of Christianity. I maintain there never has been any difference; that all ecstasy is sensual, and all sensuality ecstatic. It’s only our minds that divide it, with not a little help from Mother Church. It’s one reason I rank Catholicism right along with Nazism as a source of exquisitely murderous damage.”

I did not answer. I continued to stare at the saint, impaled on her passion. There was something, something….

On the other side of Saint Teresa, in the gloom, a little nun knelt. I had not noticed her because she HILL TOWNS / 159

crouched so low, and her robes were almost the precise dark of the chiaroscuro of shadow in the chapel. Now I stared at her. I could tell at once she was not of a Roman order but from one of the rural provinces, perhaps in the Mezzogiorno.

I don’t quite know how I knew, but I did. It was there in the roughness of the fabric of her habit, the plain shiny-scrubbed face, the raw red hands that were clasped before her, their knuckles swollen with hard work. I thought she was probably quite young, for there were no lines in her face, and her lips, parted, were still soft and formless, almost a child’s lips. Her eyes were closed, and tears made silver snails’ tracks down her cheeks, and on her face was a flame of such pure yearning and devotion that I averted my head.

I want that, I thought, simply and wholly. I want to feel that.

Sam took my elbow and walked me around the other side of the statue, a little space away from the kneeling nun.

“I damn the church that promises that little girl what she thinks she’s being promised,” he said. His tone was soft, but he almost spat the words.

“I was just thinking I wanted it for myself,” I said. “That certainty. That…payoff, which shakes your whole soul. How do you know she isn’t going to get it? How do you know she doesn’t already have it?”

He made a small sound of contempt.

“I’ll take the physics, the geometry,” he said. “I think you had it wrong, Cat. I think physics was invented to make God bearable.”

We stood in silence for a while, looking at Saint Teresa.

Then he said, “What else do you notice about it?”

“I don’t know what you want me to see,” I said 160 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

uncertainly. “Something about the technique itself? Something about the marble?”

“Look at the face. Look at the way the light falls on the planes of the cheeks and the forehead; look at the nose; look at the chin. Look at the wrinkles in the robe. Look at the mouth….”

I saw then. In a way more inherent than actual, perhaps, but undeniably: it was my face. My face, over the wrinkled white linen I wore now. My face, my face in ecstasy….

My face as only one person on earth had ever seen it. How had Sam Forrest known?

“I want to go now,” I said numbly.

“Don’t feel strange about it, Cat,” Sam said. “I told you your face was all over Rome. You have that sort of narrow Renaissance look to you; this is just one of several sculptures I could show you right now, this afternoon, that look like you. You’ll see a lot more of them in Florence….”

“But you picked this one to show me. Why did you do that, Sam?”