The Journals of John Cheever (Vintage International) (12 page)

•

I go to town; I go to the Italian Consulate and wait and wait. It is my first brush with this classical red tape. The vestibule is full of people
waiting for some scrap or particle of their identity to be certified or returned to them. We are all loaded down with photographs of ourselves and we wait and wait. The bureaucrat has patent-leather hair, patent-leather shoes, and a suit as black as death’s advocate’s. It is his pleasure to keep us waiting. We—this cheerful generation—notice the variety and the patience in the faces.

   I walk and walk. I say a prayer on Fifty-third Street. I have lunch and see the ballgame. I come home on the train, drink some gin, and study Italian. I wake at three in the morning, paralyzed at the thought of what I have left undone, such as my teeth. And then I think I see clearly that passage in human relationships where the line between creativity and light, and darkness and disaster, is a hair. And I think this is an inherited burden, one that Mother carried much, and that, as in everything else, light will triumph. But I think I see the seductive face of wisdom, articulateness, and poetry; that it can be cultivated and made to bloom like a perverse lure, a chain of false and gentle promises, an artificial land of milk and honey. So I say there is a worm in the rose, but it is not fatal. But I would like to be spared this vision of disaster and pray for this, or for a fuller and more relaxed understanding of the fact that the force of life is contested.

•

Observe then this man, woken by his bladder at 3
A.M.
, and who, returning to bed, finds himself wakeful; more so, much more so than he will be at seven, when the alarm rings. There seems to be some excitement in the darkness. There is a little sweat in his armpits. Something is happening, he thinks, and he thinks he hears a footstep in the gravel outside. It is the footstep of a dope addict, armed with an icepick, who has come to murder his children, but listening for the opening of the front door and the footstep on the stairs and hearing nothing his mind wanders to a voyage he is about to take. The ship sinks and he is in a lifeboat with his wife and children—one of a convoy led by a navigator—but the wind and the tides separate them from the convoy and he realizes that he knows so little about navigation that even if he were only five miles from the Azores he would not be able to sail his beloved family to safety. He rolls onto his back and at this point his male member, bristling with usefulness and self-importance, takes th
center of the stage, but since the night offers no promise of requition this seems a foolish performance. Then thoughts of such lewdness cross his mind that he rolls onto his side and sends up toward Heaven an earnest prayer for some better understanding of cleanliness. He is back in the lifeboat once more. Now he lies on his stomach and prays once more, this time for the simple gift of sleep, and he seems to be enfolded, but enfolded in the wings of some rented angel’s costume with an unclean smell. He rolls onto his back and suddenly it is Christmas. It is Christmas Eve and he is a boy again, beloved, naked and cuddly in the clean sheets. Up goes his cod again, followed by his prayers, and so forth and so forth, ad nauseam.

•

On my first night in Rome I walk to the Spanish steps. I am a little disappointed. But I find the people very handsome and not covert as is the case at home. The girls lovely and the men good-looking, gallant. When I see an American he does not seem as well integrated or as well dressed. We are not a nation of voyeurs but we seem introspective. I have not been happy here, and waking at three in the morning I worry about everything. But there is no point in writing a story about poor Bierstubbe, the TV writer who came to Rome to write a great play about sex; who was shortchanged everywhere, whose money flowed like water, who was depressed by the dash of the Roman men and reminded of his own contested sexual identity, who wondered why he had ever left his cozy home, who drank gin before lunch, etc. So I will not write any such story.

•

Poor Bierstubbe, very homesick, watching people on the Via Veneto boarding the airplane bus for the U.S.A. Never in his life, not even as an infantry private under a sergeant who was court-martialled for cruelty and drunkenness, had Bierstubbe been so homesick. And, having dreamed half his life of sailing away, he dreamed away his days and nights of sailing home.

The hassle with the real-estate agents which seems to come to nothing, although there was no legal or emotional difficulty that I did not imagine. Leaving the Palazzo Doria at five or six—the tumul
of a great city at nightfall—much worried and sorely wanting a drink.

•

It is four o’clock and I am in Rome and want a drink. Out of my window I see an orange house which is being turned into apartments and a man walking out of an alleyway in little steps as he buttons up his fly. Mary and Susie have gone out to meet Ben, home from his first day in school. I went to the American Express this morning and found my money waiting. I had been sure that this would not happen. Then I went to the Società Romana di Elettricità with La Signora Muni, where I saw some people of considerable beauty. Through my head run such scraps as this: my life is in the nature of a bargain and a very fair one; I believe in the miraculousness of life but my belief has never been so strained; this painful sense of not having a well-integrated body or mind is all the fault of my poor dead mother, whose life was so ridden with anxiety; look at the pretty girl; pray; of the two—the duchess in a mink coat and the wide-eyed child with a little hump to her shoulders—I prefer the child; perhaps this journey from one country to another puts too searching a light on the jerry-built structure of my life; a searching light is being brought to bear; people speak of Rome as we used to speak of Scout camp—you will hate it for two weeks and then you will not want to leave. So the intelligent thing is to ride out these storms of strangeness and see where you are in two weeks or a month. And so we leave the Società Romana di Elettricità.

•

After lunch I walk in the streets and observe how the facial traits of the people differ from the massive and weary countenances of the emperors and their wives. It may be no accident that much of the Roman portrait statuary we see in America reminds us of Americans. I don’t know. And the ease and grace with which they embrace one another, call after the pretty girls, kiss in doorways or sit on the wall up by the Gianicolo with a girl held cozily between their legs is very different from our idea of things. This is not a difference of language, race, climate, or custom; it is a vastly different approach to the wellsprings of humanity.

•

This is the kitchen of the Palazzo Doria, where I hope we will pass an affectionate and a useful year. The gas stove leaks. The drains are clogged. It is a dark day in Rome with a heavy rain. This is not classical weather. Ben and Mary are both coughing. Susie went off to school in tears. This is the first time in nearly a month that I have sat down and tried to make sense, and now my thoughts, gathered at rainy street crossings and high windows, in damp churches and strange beds at 3
A.M.
, and gathered often about the full limbs of comely strangers, seem about to leave me.

•

First there was the voyage, and this was ruled by my fear that the ship would sink. I don’t think a day passed without my being made uncomfortable by this foolishness. And when I woke, at 3
A.M.
, to the noise of smashing flower vases and medicine bottles, my parts would shrink and my heart would flutter like a lark. This is a deck, I would tell myself, walking back and forth; these are stanchions, these are lifeboats and that is an empty swimming pool, and these momentary things are the usable truths, but then seeing darkness off the bow, and in the west a prophetic and baneful light, and noticing that the speed of the ship had slacked off until she hardly seemed to move, I would feel sure that we were done for. Off the starboard bow I saw the snow-covered mountains of Corsica and thought that this would be a dangerous coast to land our boats on.

•

As for ruins, the American printing salesman who has flown in for an eight-hour conference says, in the bar of his run-down hotel, “Jesus, you can see where we all come from: I mean the sense of the past is so
terrific.”
But it is not always easy to come by. The guidebooks, the guides, our friends and acquaintances, and even strangers urge us to succumb to the sense of the past, but what about the present? Standing in the Pantheon I am impressed with the dome, but the children are pulling at my coat and asking me to buy them pastry or take home one of the splendid cats loafing under the portico. Going to meet E. at the Baths of Caracalla in a rainy dusk, I look in briefly at the colossal heaps of brick and then watch some kids practicing soccer shots on a little field. I am much more interested in them. Ben and I walk by the Foru,
which, with the green grass still growing among the stones, seems to be a double ruin: a ruin of antiquity and a monument to the tender sentiments of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century travellers, for we see not only the ghosts of Romans here but the shades of ladies with parasols and men with beards and little children rolling hoops. In the Colosseum I tell Ben that Christians were devoured by lions, although I think this is untrue. I am impressed with the massive outer archways—and yet I am not taken as directly by a sense of the past as I was in a Portsmouth countinghouse. We strive to feel the presence of Romans and then we pet a stray cat.

Homesickness here is not a string of specific images, evoking the pathos and sweetness of American life; it is mostly purse sickness, war sickness, the unease of not understanding the simplest remarks that are made and the chagrin of being swindled. I don’t long for the rivers or for the place-names or the mill-town parks. Not honestly.

“This is your past,” we say to the Romans and the Americans from small towns. I have a past—houses and people and traits and an old name. The Mediterranean is not a part of it. And yet I have dreamed of the Mediterranean for ten years; it is in some way a part of our dreams.

The rain lets up at noon and either the moods of this city or my own are mercurial. The sun bursts into the streets. Life is exciting and beautiful, and the sound of so many fountains is relaxing. I look with scorn at the Americans in the Piazza di Spagna, ripping open their letters from home and stopping in the middle of the sidewalk to read the news from Pelham, but receiving a letter myself I do the same. Smiling and chuckling, I walk down the street bumping into Romans, with a scrap of paper that seems to refresh my identity.

   Mary and I lunch at a trattoria near the Pantheon. The fountain sparkles in the sun. We walk under the great porch and through the giant doors. It is impossible to mark the proprietorship of pagan and Christian, but the dome with its circle of blue seems triumphantly clear and free. As Americans we observe the ruined paint and the filth. The candlesticks and tombs of the Lombards are black with dirt. Even the wax of the candles is dark and the flowers on Raphael’s tomb are straw.

Some other Americans come in. They are followed by a guide. “I just want to look at the place; I don’t want to hear about it,” one lad
says to the guide. “And anyhow I can’t understand what you’re saying.” Back here I snooze on the sofa, then go to meet Susie, climbing up the Campidoglio. Flooded with light it seems very rich, but the heads of the Dioscuri seem large and only intensify my affection for Marcus Aurelius and his shadow of gold. I walk up through the gardens, thinking that I will push a baby carriage here in the spring. The wind is northerly and the sky is full of that moving darkness and brilliance that we see through the fine dark leaves of many painted trees in many landscapes in many museums. Susie buys a doughnut in a
pasticceria
and we meet Ben. There is a gas strike. Dinner is delayed and I fill up with gin. Susie tells me that a boarder at school has stolen a pot of jam and the mother superior has put the school into Coventry. Prayers are said each morning for the thief. If this were at home we would rebel. We have a fine dinner, but after dinner I find Susie in bed, crying bitterly and asking to be taken home. This for Bierstubbe when I get around to him: the crying of his children.

•

We go to the Museo del Palazzo di Venezia. So cold it would chill your marrow. Shabby and unclean and the paintings so ill lit that half of them can’t be seen. The glare of light on the varnish is so harsh that we can’t make out what is going on. A painted ceiling where much is going on. Sea monsters abducting naked women. A roomful of bronzes, copies of which I think I’ve seen. Some lewd, some satyrs, a firm figure of a man. An armory and much early painting but not easy to see or admire. The gold gleams, but the faces seem dim and strange. It is, I think, this jumble of arsehole jokes and golden piety that I admire; it adds up to an honest measure of our nature. In one of the rooms we find all the guards smoking cigarettes and shooting five-lire coins down a long table.

We sit in the sun and climb to the Campidoglio. It is autumn, but it is best for me not to say, “It Is Autumn In Rome” but just “it is autumn.” The grass on the slope is that crabgrass which takes hold at the end of summer. A few marigolds bloom in the plots. Tourists are as scarce as flowers and a guide trails us around the statue of Marcus Aurelius, complaining about the autumn and the bad business. A crowd of Americans comes up from the Forum but they do not say a word. The only sound is the whirr of moving-picture cameras and the clic
of shutters. Going down the Campidoglio we pass a party of Germans. The yellow snapdragons that grow out of the cornice of the Church of Jesus, the tufts of grass and mullein that grow, like hair from a man’s nostril, from every orifice in Aurelian’s wall, the bluets that grow in the chinks of the Porta Pinciana, and the thick stand of grass around the bell tower of Santa Maria have all begun to fade.

•

What I am determined to get away from are set pieces, closed things, shut paragraphs.

The doorways of Europe, varnished and polished and waxed, even if the houses they secure are crumbling, in this vast city that is painted the color of spoiled lemons. The high doorways of Portugal with their stained-glass transoms built to accommodate a thin and a melancholy man on stilts. And the
portoni
here, built to withstand armed men on horseback and battering rams. You turn the key in the lock and the cumbersome door swings open. This is your place. You, among the many people on the street, have the key. When you close the door behind you it is dark and cold and the noise of the fountain sounds very loud. You unlock the elevator gate, part the frosted-glass doors …