The Farewell Symphony (17 page)

There was never a question of challenging the addition, which was impeccable, or the prices, clearly marked on the menu. No, Thomas argued that since we were regular clients and our father was ill at home and all our money went to support him, such robbery was inhuman and even bordered on the illegal. The proprietor descended from her throne and replied that she had a sister at home who was an invalid as well, that taxes were rising and that the rent had shot up so high that soon she'd have to close her doors. Thomas responded with more heart-rending details about our poverty and the tragedies besetting our relatives one after another He was so convincing that I studied him with genuine sympathy until I remembered his sad story was also supposed to be mine and I hung my head with aching sorrow. Finally the owner of the restaurant drew a vigorous line through our bill and gave us a twenty-percent sconto, which I paid as Thomas shook the hands of the waiter and his boss, a big doggy smile on his lips as he looked shyly around through his shaggy blond eyebrows.

The first few weeks I lived with him, I had one bad surprise after another—the electricity was turned off, then the phone, then we were served an eviction notice. I paid the slx months' overdue back rent, which was still cheaper than a single month's rent for my Trastevere tart's flat. And I paid the phone bill, especially since in those days the waiting list for a new phone was so backed up it could take a full year before a new line could be installed. Thomas had inherited this number from the former tenants.

who'd been Communists, which explained why our line was tapped. The tapping equipment was so crude that the moment an eavesdropper joined us the volume dropped and the line sizzled like a frying pan. Thomas wouldn't let me pay the electricity bill; he was convinced he could get it turned back on by invoking our invalid father, stumbling in the dark, housebound but deprived of his radio, no electric blanket in an unheated apartment to ward off a fatal chill. I went with him to the government office where he made his plea. He succeeded in having the service reinstalled, although never for a moment, I'm sure, did the office clerk who heard him out believe his story. No, Thomas was simply being rewarded for his fine performance. Now, of course, everyone's mani are pulite in Italy and those bravura arias are no longer heard in public places. In fact all this talk about corruption is just the noise generated by the switch from the old feudal baksheesh system to a rational and impersonal Northern European capitalist system.

I didn't mind paying the bills. As the weather became warmer we ate outside at the Piazza Navona or in a square looking across toward the Palazzo Farnese or, around the corner, in a restaurant called La Querela, which was also the name of the huge tree shading the small square. I'd pick up the check, even when our group grew to include six, eight or ten of Thomas's friends.

In June Italy's soccer team beat Brazil in the Coppa Mondiale. As soon as this victory was announced all Rome went wild. Thomas said that Italians became so excited after a major soccer victory that they could be easily seduced and we should head up to the Via Veneto right away.

On the street all the cars were honking and kids were poking their heads out of the open vents in car roofs and unfurling Italian flags, which streamed and fluttered behind their ecstatic faces. The swerving yellow and white headlights lit the flags from many angles. Usually the streets were so deserted after nightfall, the palazzi so hermeticaUy shuttered, that the city seemed abandoned to its cats and a few night watchmen, who left chalk marks behind on doors to show they'd passed by on their inspection route. But tonight the gloomy buildings—with their massive sooty stones on ground level gouged in "wormlike" patterns or left rough and rusticated—came alive with noise and light. Shutters flew open and revealed behind these majestic Renaissance facades the poverty of apartments lit by a single dangling bulb. Thomas said, "And they live on nothing but spaghettis and they eat them without sauce" (he was so Italianized that

The Farewell Symphony

even when he wanted to invent an English plural for pasta he habitually added an s, since he could never imagine that spaghetti could be a collective singular in English).

His prediction that we'd find a willing tifoso was spot-on. We were walking up the slow bend after the Piazza Barberini that marks the beginning of the Via Veneto when a kid all on his own, overflowing with joy, walked between us, put his hands on our shoulders and cantilevered his body up in the air. He swung like the clapper of a bell and made about as much noise.

Thomas, usually so discreet, even haughty, in public during his daily sorties with Anzio, suddenly asked, with stunning simplicity, if he'd like to come home with us to make love. The young man turned somber, which I thought meant he was going to say no, but in fact he was just coming to terms with our offer "I've never tried homosexuality but I accept your invitation," he said at last. Perhaps he was most astonished that we had a place to go to, since unmarried men in Italy at that time were forced to live at home. Only foreign bachelors possessed their own apartments.

Enea, as he was named {Aeneas, I realized with a start, as I glanced at him again, hoping to discern something classical in his face) was a student of what I made out to be hydraulic engineering and he came from Lucca. The Romans he considered to be, one and all, "turds" (stronzi) because all they thought of was making money and showing off. "And they're all lazy, they never work; either they're making a new strike or picking their noses and taking a four-hour siesta." Enea was amused by my American accent and my plucky if hopeless attempts to communicate; he assured me that he liked Mickey Mouse and hamburgers. I might have said something cutting if I'd known how to or if he'd been less sexy.

He had red cheeks like taffy apples under a flawless permanent tan, very red lips, one clean white canine on the right side that overlapped another tooth and left a little gap, not at all hickish but rather disconcerting, so at odds was it with his quiet good manners and dignified if thrilling smiles. Perhaps because of the gap, the adjoining teeth were always sparkling with saliva as though a celebrity photographer had added highlights. He had a small, pale Adam's apple raised like a knobby dial to regulate the volume of his husky tenor voice. When his face was immobile it took on a stern condottiere's expression, cold and disabused beyond his years, as though a boy, after fighting in his first battle, were to lift his visor I forgot to mention he was tiny.

When we got home Thomas went into the bathroom for a second. In

that same instant Enea was naked and I, still half-dressed, reached down to toucli the hard little urgency he was presenting mc out of a bush of black, glossy hair strangely pornographic because it was such a neat little plantation in an otherwise creamy-white body: flat tummy, hard loins, an ass as hard and round as a soccer ball. He exploded in my hand after a single thrust. I wiped the copious semen on one of Thomas's dirty T-shirts I found under a chair. I worried about what Thomas would do or say. Enea, perfectly composed or if embarrassed determined not to show it, put on his underpants and said, "Insornma, era iin po' hanale" ("It wasn't all that exciting after all").

Thomas, red and peeled and naked as the devil, figured out right away what had happened. He put on his grey plaid robe and poured us all a glass of white wine.

''Adesso" Enea said primly, ''cominciamo il dialogo."

"What'd he say?" I asked Thomas.

"He said we must begin the dialogue now."

"What dialogue, the little wanker!" I wailed.

"A, you know, discussion about homosexuality and what it means. Now that we've had sex—"

"You mean he's had—"

"Anyway," Thomas interrupted, generously brushing aside my nasty precision, "he feels he's at least earned the right to a discussion—"

"—Marxist, no doubt," I grumbled. "Anyway, I'm bushed. I'm going to bed."

I shook Enea's hand rather stifHy; he looked shocked by my rudeness.

Once I was in bed I could hear their voices through the closed door rumbling on and on, punctuated by all those rhetorical markers that are always more noticeable in a language other than one's owii and that in any case are strikingly efficient in Italian. ''Anzi," Thomas kept crying, which means "On the contrary." ''Cioe" they'd both interject ("That is to say") by way of piling up new explanations. "DaiP' Thomas would shout murderously, a word that means no more than "Get off it!" "Dungue," Enea would say from time to time, a word that may signify "therefore," but which Italians use to suggest a verbal sponging down of the blackboard and a vain aspiration toward order. "Magari," each of them would mumble after any hopeful remark, to mean "Would that it might be so," much as an Arab might say ''Inshallah." Lucrezia would be proud of my knack at making sense of it all, just as sleep overcame me and nothing made sense any more.

The Farewell Symphony

One day as I was waiting on a street corner a block from tiie Fountain of Trevi, three soldiers started chatting me up. They were bersaglieri, Garibaldi's crack troops, and they wore feathers in their caps. Thomas had told me that a soldier received only three feathers with his kit and if he had more that meant he'd paid for the extra plumage and might be worth pursuing. These bersaglieri, I noticed sadly had only the regulation three feathers, but one of them talked to me with masterful assurance. "We're in a crack company," he said in Italian, "and we have to run several kilometers every morning. We have beautiful bodies, our bodies are wonderfully fit, unfortunately we earn only a few pennies every day, not even enough for cigarettes, so we're always on the lookout for a bit of extra change, besides we have lots of free time and nowhere to go, you'd be surprised what good shape we're in, our bodies are really beautiful." At last Thomas came up and I ducked away with him; I was afraid to invite three tough heterosexuals home (they might rob me) although to this day I wish I'd done so. By the time I'd explained the situation to Thomas the soldiers had vanished into the crowds. He was angry we'd missed what he said was a rare opportunity—"Nice Calabrese boys," he said, "with no hang-ups."

Thomas had an American friend named Bill (so often pronounced "Beal" by the Italians that to this day I can hear it in no other way). "Beal" had a lanky, boyish figure, a wonderful full head of hair that was glossy and straight, long on top and short on the sides, which made me think of Prince Hal's tonsure, a winningly lopsided smile, fine hands boned like Indian wickerwork and an intellectual seriousness that seemed unusually becoming in one so beautiful. He was very tall but always standing, as though embarrassed, in contrapposto, like a tall woman in flats, a beautiful hand on his hip—or in the air as he grasped after a point he'd just sighted. The Italians couldn't get enough of him. He was the slender American boy, rangy and just a bit gawky or rather coltish, and his serious, distracted way of smiling up through his glossy hair, then flicking it aside as his smile faded, conformed to their ideal of how an American should look and manage his looks. He was healthy, naive, available and yet a bit mysterious.

Just about when I'd decided no one in Rome was really gay I met "Beal" and watched him bring them out of the woodwork. Around him eveiy Italian man seemed to be at least bisexual. I wasn't ugly (in fact I

was never cuter) but the Italians didn't like me, possibly because I was "double-bodied" or at once too serious about art and too frivolous about politics. No, that wasn't it. Their reasoned disappointment came only after knowing me a bit and merely confirmed their bad first impression, based as it was on an allergy to my earnestness—my efforts to learn Italian, catch the drift, win a place.

Nor did "Beal" like me. He made a careless litde effort at first to ingratiate himself by having me listen to a record of "Switched-On Bach" he'd just received from the States, a precious harbinger of a new American trend. It was a speeded-up rendition for chipmunks of the great Ibccata and Fugue played on twittering electronic instruments, excited gibberish that struck him and Thomas as terribly contemporary, yet another of the horrors that people back then were always announcing as about to replace traditional art forms.

When I said I liked my Bach switched off, he and Thomas looked at me with a mixture of pity and contempt, even dislike, and after that I felt I'd lost Thomas's friendship forever. He and "Beal" were always cooking up schemes in whispers behind my back. They'd go silent when I came into the room. "Beal" himself was a composer who lived in a maid's room and worked up new sonatas on an electric keyboard he'd plug in, play and listen to with earphones, the only sound that was audible to visitors being the click of his fingernails on the plastic keys. Thomas admired "Beal's" self-discipline and up-to-date "American" tendencies; he was half proud parent, half sponsor, though in fact he was penniless and incapable of sponsoring even Anzio vwth a daily cornetto.

If mentally I put American in inverted commas I did so to mark a shift in my feelings. Until that time I'd never thought of my counti"y as having a national character. When I'd lived in it I'd experienced it as vaguely coterminous wdth all cultural possibilities; only now, here in Italy, could America be praised for its energy or efficiency or youthful audacity or damned for its capitalist greed or colonialism. When Thomas was with his Italian friends he'd routinely characterize America as a country that had passed direcdy from puritanism to decadence and that was in die thrall of the "military-industrial complex." But now with "Beal" he let on that he might admire American culture for its teenage vitality and saucy irreverence.

One night Thomas took me out cruising with him. Just as I'd given up on him he squandered a sudden if short-lived interest on me. We went to the Janiculum Hill, a very long trek by foot for us, though just a five-

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minute ride for all the others, the car owners. Lights advanced, bobbed and swerved, then went dead as the drixers parked in their extinct but still creaking automobiles. No one got out. All these men were eyeing each other from their parked cars—another Italian stalemate.