Hill Towns, page 12
“I really don’t know how I am going to do this,” I said aloud, but very softly. “Morning, everybody,” I said in a stronger voice. “Is it always this hot in Rome?”
A babble of voices answered me:
Joe saying, “Ta-da! She is risen! But where’s your new bathing suit?”
Sam Forrest saying, “Morning, muffin. You look altogether better than you have a right to.”
Maria saying, “Come sit and talk to us, we didn’t get a chance to last night, I’m so glad you’re here, this is divine.” Maria Condon saying “divine”? Maria in a bikini?
Colin saying, “Cat! Go back and put your bikini on! It’s cruel to get everybody’s fleshly hopes up and then back out!” Colin Gerard, talking to me of bikinis and fleshly hopes?
Ada Forrest saying, in her spilled-honey voice, “Pay no attention to this herd of goats. You’re smart to stay out of the water. This sun would cook that lovely white skin like pork in half an hour.”
Ada Forrest, gleaming like a pearl in her own whiteness as she lay full under the fist of the sun, her mouth and bikini strokes of scarlet, not a drop of sweat on her translucent skin, the white globes of her breasts and her carved waist and stomach untinged by the pink of the cooking pork she predicted for me. Her glorious white mane of hair was wrapped in a scarlet towel, and her ice-blue eyes hidden by huge black sunglasses. She looked unreal, phantasmagoric, almost uncanny, among the fleshy brown bodies around the pool.
I dropped into a chair beside Maria and hugged her as she leaned over to kiss me. A thick smell came off her, of sweat and sun oil and something I thought could only be semen. Joe had been right, Maria in her red-flowered bikini was overpowering: brown, glistening flesh spilling everywhere, the great bobbling breasts barely contained, all of her the firm, healthy consistency of sun-hot rubber. Her smile was wide and joyous, and she almost laughed aloud in her happiness. I squeezed her hard in a surge of pure love. Maria on this day reduced everything to its simplest and most elemental form; her glowing flesh and barely sated sensuality made nuance and cynicism almost obscene.
“I hope you are always as happy as you are right this minute,” I whispered to her, and she hugged me back.
“See Rome and die.” She laughed.
“God, I hope not,” Colin said from one of the lounge chairs. He wore American swim trunks, faded tartan that hung low on his slim hips. They were what all young Trinitarians wore on the Mountain, but here they looked callow, provincial, wrong. He seemed to know it. He had rolled them as high as they would go on his beautiful brown athlete’s legs and sat so that the muscles in the carved torso played whenever he moved. He was thickly oiled and wore black glasses like Ada’s. He could not seem to keep his eyes off Maria.
Sam Forrest should have looked obscene in the small blue bikini that was almost hidden under the bulge of his belly, but somehow he did not. He was massive, copper-gold all over with freckles and furred with bronze hair, hard and shining as amber or marble. I thought of some great pagan colossus or, for some reason, of Ozymandias. He wore a towel draped over his head, and sunglasses, and he was drinking a glass of red wine and picking grapes from a plate and popping them into his mouth. All that was missing was the satyr’s ears and hooves and the pipes.
Beside him, Joe in his new Italian leisure clothes looked pale and almost fussy, the classic comic Englishman on holiday in the Mediterranean, complaining because they had wine but no tea. I felt shamed and mean-spirited for even thinking such a thing and wished he would move away from Sam and sit somewhere else. But the only other empty place was beside Ada, and I realized I did not want him to sit there, either. Where, I wondered, was the fabled Yolanda Whitney?
As if in answer to the thought a woman heaved herself out of the pool and came over to us and slumped down into the chair next to Ada, snorting and shaking bright drops of water everywhere.
“Damn, Yolie, you’re worse than a wet dog,” Sam said mildly, and Ada tossed her a towel without comment, and the woman dried herself energetically with it and dropped it on the cement beside the lounge.
“Meet our friend Yolanda Whitney,” Ada said, and the woman squinted up at me. “Yolie, this is Catherine Gaillard, Maria and Colin’s friend from America. You’ve already met Joe.”
Yolanda Whitney’s eyes did not sparkle now. They were flat and dark, like pebbles or marbles. Her hair was not wound around her head in glistening braids but leaped about her face in wet spirals, like Medusa’s. She seemed much larger than she did on television, fat, even; her flesh was tanned deep mahogany, but there was an unhealthy bluish tinge under it, and it was slack and peppered with yellowing bruises. The color in her face was hectic: sunburn, not natural rosiness. She did not look at all healthy. She looked wrecked, downright dissipated, years older than I had thought from her television show. The sweet smell of alcohol came off her in waves, and my stomach contracted at it. I could scarcely believe this was the same woman who taught the world to make cornshuck dolls.
“Ah, yes,” she said. Her voice was deep and thick, as if she had a cold. “Cat. I’ve been hearing about you.”
“It’s a pleasure to meet you,” I said. “I’ve enjoyed your show.”
“How nice,” she said. “Are you crafty, Cat? I’ll just bet you are.”
She said it in such an unmistakably spiteful tone that I could think of nothing to reply. What was the matter with this woman? Everyone looked at her, and Ada murmured, “Charming,” and Sam said, from behind the sketchbook he had picked up, “Put a lid on it, Yolie. It’s way too early.”
Her face went white under the sunburn and then dull red, and she turned her back on us elaborately and walked off toward the bar.
“On the contrary, I’d say it was way too late,” I heard her say as she went away.
“Has my deodorant failed me?” I said, heat crawling up my neck into my face. I said it as lightly as I could. I sat back down in my chair beside Maria, grateful for the shade of the umbrella and the shelter of my sunglasses, poised for flight. I was not going to sit beside this awful pool and let this awful woman take potshots at me.
“I apologize for her,” Sam said. “She’s had some very bad news from her agent. The network isn’t picking up her show next year, and they’re going to have to start scrambling around to find her a new one. They will; she’s too good not to. But uncertainty makes her crazy, and she’s had too much to drink. She’s taking it out on the new gal on the block. If she does it again I’ll swat her.”
Ada said, “We’ve known her since she was the new girl on the block herself. Sam met her at a party at the embassy the first time she was in Rome and brought her home; she’d lost her passport and most of her money, and her hotel had kicked her out. She was a pretty thing then; Sam did her portrait. It’s still in our collection. She stayed with us for a while, before she went back and started the column for that silly magazine. I’m sure she’s already sorry she snapped at you, Cat. She’ll tell you herself when she gets back.”
And she did. Yolanda Whitney came back carrying something tall and garnished with fruit in a frosted glass, sipping on it, and put her hand on my shoulder and said, “I’m sorry. I’ve got a foul temper and a worse mouth. I’ve been hearing all morning how you look like a Raphael, or was it a Leonardo, Joe? And that kind of makes you mean when you look like a Bosch.”
She smiled, but she was looking at Sam Forrest, and I remembered what Joe had said. It was true. Something hungry and hopeless looked out of her opaque eyes when they fell on Sam. I wondered if he knew.
“Not like Bosch. More like Vermeer. Big difference,” he said, grinning up at her. I saw, incredulously, that he was beginning a series of pencil studies of me and felt my face flame even hotter. He did not attempt to hide them, but I could not see them upside down and did not want to crane my neck. Yolanda Whitney, herself one of his subjects long ago. What else had she been to him? I wondered. Could she possibly think I was anything to him save a subject for his pencil, or would be? Dear God, I was already so sick of the thick, clotting nuance everywhere I turned in this old city.
“Sam, darling,” Ada said. “Why don’t you put the sketchbook away? Poor Cat doesn’t want to sit there all afternoon with you doing that; you can’t have any idea how it makes one feel. Like a bug under a magnifying glass.”
“You feel like a bug, Cat?” Sam said, not raising his eyes from the pad. His pencil flew.
“Yes,” I said shortly. “Or rather, like Mickey Mouse on one of those ‘Draw Me’ matchbook covers.”
He laughed and threw the sketchbook aside.
“That’s enough for now, anyway,” he said. “Got a good start. Does anybody want another drink? I’ll go.”
We sat beside the pool until nearly two o’clock, talking desultorily, sipping drinks, sweating, nibbling at sandwiches. Ada put wet cotton balls over her eyes and slept in the sun, or appeared to. Sam stretched out on his stomach and did sleep; I heard soft snores rising from his hidden face. Yolanda Whitney drank quietly and stared off over the pool down onto Rome, poaching in its heat miasma. Colin and Maria stayed in the pool, bobbling at the edge, holding on to the side with their hands, their bodies pressed closely together. They kissed and nibbled on each other and murmured into one another’s ears, and once, when I looked over at them, I could have sworn they were making love underwater. There was little else it could have been. Their faces were blind and emptied out, and their mouths were slightly opened as if they could not get air. No one else seemed to notice.
“Is there some law about that?” I murmured to Joe, who was slumped beside me in a chair reading USA Today. He looked over at them and grinned.
“Not in Rome,” he said, and went on reading.
Finally, at a little after two, we left the pool to go and dress for Colin and Maria’s wedding. Just before we passed under the arch that led back into the hotel lobby, I stopped and looked back. For some reason the heat haze that had lain over the city beyond the pool apron had lifted for a moment, and Rome looked once more like something out of an enchantment, a sorcerer’s spell, clear and rich and shining in its own light.
I turned to Sam Forrest, who stood beside me, looking at it too.
“It’s all in the light, isn’t it?” I said.
“Yep,” he said. “Light is everything. It always has been.”
They were married at six o’clock in the evening in the Palazzo dei Conservatori on the Campidoglio, on Capitoline Hill, the smallest and to me most resonant of Rome’s celebrated Seven. On this ancient outcropping overlooking both the Forum and the great sweep of the Vatican, the religious and political life of the city has been conducted since its birth. The long night of the Middle Ages did not entirely quench that life, and it had its own renascence when Michelangelo designed the exquisite small square that crowns it still. Today, when Romans shrug and say they can’t fight city hall (“Che posso fare?”), this is where they mean. Sam told me the complex was designed to turn its back on pagan Rome, lying beneath the bulk of the Capitoline to the southeast, and face Saint Peter’s, to the northwest. But it did not seem to me, when Joe and I had climbed the Cordonata, and walked to the back of the square, and looked down on the broken columns and arches and temples of the Forum shimmering enigmatically in their stillness, that the ecclesiastical shunning had done much good. The little bowl of antiquity shimmered and burned with life, no less than the square above it.
“Yow,” I said softly. “Eternal is right. It does major things to your stomach and heart, doesn’t it?”
Joe was silent, his arm loosely around my waist. I leaned my head onto his shoulder.
“What are you thinking?”
“That it was worth everything to come here and see this with you. Oh, Cat, please don’t be afraid to go off the Mountain anymore. Think what might be ahead of us if you can. I didn’t miss it while you couldn’t, but now…would you have wanted never to see this?”
I wouldn’t have if I couldn’t have, I thought, but to him I said, “I wouldn’t have missed a minute of it. It’s like an explosion in your brain. It could change your life. But Joe…it’s still hard. It’s still hard. Don’t leave me alone again. Keep me on the hills and stay with me.”
I said it lightly, but my voice trembled.
“I’m not going to leave you,” he said, but his voice was abstracted, and he was looking around him with a hunger that seemed almost furious, ravenous. Unease put soft fingers in my throat. He was only now tasting the world he had abjured for me, and I did not think he would be content to stay above it again. He was Joe and he would be content to stay above it again. He was Joe and he would try, if I asked him, but he would not be content. Tears stung in my nose and I turned away from ancient Rome—unlike me, wholly unvanquished still.
“Let’s go get some coffee,” I said. “I saw a little outdoor place at the bottom of the steps. We’ve got some time yet.”
We went back across the piazza. It hummed with noise and life despite the oppressive heat. Families strolled in the fading light, tourists pointed and posed and snapped their cameras, dark-suited men and white-bloused women scurried back and forth carrying sheaves of important-looking documenti, children shrieked and laughed and clambered over the fountain and the two granite lions guarding the base of the great staircase. The light, that had been white and flat all afternoon, had by some alchemy turned rich and clear and golden, full of complex depths and planes and slants. I thought of what Sam had said earlier: “Light is everything. It always has been.” This light was not like any I had seen on the Mountain, lovely as that often was. You would not mistake this for anything but the light of Rome. I imagined, smiling at the fancy, that it was the light itself that had turned the city to umber, amber, and gold.
Everywhere, young couples were waiting to be married or just had been. Some, in long chaste white and sober black, were toiling up and down the staircase of severe, medieval Santa Maria d’Aracoeli, flanking the Cordonata. They would, I knew, be bound by the iron bonds that only the Roman Catholic Church can forge. The others were destined, like Maria and Colin, for civil services in the Conservatori. Some were as properly gowned and tuxedoed as their counterparts heading for sacraments and sanctity, but others wore costumes of great variety and exuberance. I saw gowns from the chokingly expensive shops around the Piazza di Spagna, silk jackets from Armani and Versace, miniskirts of satin and leather, long dresses obviously made by loving hands and some by indifferent ones, cottons and silks and even one that seemed largely cobbled together of feathers. Each couple moved in a phalanx of laughing, shouting, jostling friends and relatives. The coffee shops and caffès around the base of the Campidoglio were clogged with noisy wedding parties drinking everything from acqua minerale to raw red wine. Wine predominated. Two couples stand out in my mind still; Joe took photos of both. They are, somehow, simply Rome to me.
One was a pair of a heartbreaking youngness, she dressed in unfashionably cut white with a meager veil and he in a too-large greenish tuxedo that must have seen many such family occasions, standing below the brow of the hill in the Forum, arms around each other, dwarfed by the columns that shone in the evening sunlight, smiling up at their party, who were standing behind Joe and me. It was, I suppose, the juxtaposition of all that hopefulness and sheer youngness, that all-suffusing living love, with the implacable bones of the dead empire, that sent the tears coursing hotly down my cheeks. I wanted terribly, in that moment, to know that nothing would corrode them, change them, diminish them. Poor Roman children, there seemed little in their lives that would not.
The other couple held court in the flyspecked, dusty little caffè where we finally found a seat. They were older, but their entourage was no less jubilant, no less loving. The groom wore truly splendid white tie and tails, and his bride, dusky and handsome with her flashing white eyes and teeth and black hair cut modishly short on her neck, wore a skintight, strapless, short gown of scarlet satin with long gloves, high heels, and pillbox to match. She looked to be at least seven months pregnant.
She felt us looking at her and turned, flashed me a smile and lifted her glass of wine to me, and called, “Voianche! Congratulizioni!”
I smiled perplexedly at her and lifted my glass in return, and Joe pulled out his phrase book and thumbed it and began to laugh.
“She either thinks you’re pregnant too, or about to be married, or maybe both,” he said, and I looked down at myself and grinned.
“She thinks we’re a cute little old bride and groom,” I said, looking at the great bouquet of lilies and baby’s breath I held. I had wanted to give Maria something to wear at her wedding, something borrowed or blue, perhaps, but Ada had outfitted her with a wonderful ecrusilk suit from Armani, and she was to wear Colin’s martyred mother’s pearls. Mrs. Gerard had taken to her bed from prostration and could not attend her son’s pagan civil wedding, but sent in her stead the triple strand of matched pearls that had graced the throats of Gerard brides since before the “late unpleasantness.” Maria had her own mother’s blue garter and her sister’s borrowed linen handkerchief.
“Then let me give you your flowers,” I said, remembering the elaborate florist shop in the hotel, and she had said she would love that, and I sat cradling them in the caffè, masses of luminous small lilies in the colors of the light and earth of Rome.
“Grazie!” I called to the scarlet bride, and Joe grinned and nodded and made a gesture I could not see over my head that set the male guests in the party roaring with laughter.
“Whatever that was, you better watch it or you won’t be doing it again in your lifetime.” I smiled at him. Somehow I felt, just then, like a bride myself, tremulous and breath-held with excitement.
“I plan to be doing it in about seven hours, or sooner if we can slip away from the famous wedding dinner,” he said.
I saw them then, Maria in her chic ecru and Colin correct in a dark summer-weight suit, running hand in hand toward the Cordonata, with Sam behind them, still in chinos and a vast, flapping blue blazer and Ada looking like a lit candle in peach silk. Behind everyone, cinched into a smart yellow suit, hair once again shining in its braids, Yolanda Whitney clattered along on very high heels. Even from this distance she looked altogether restored to her twenty-four-inch-screen self, pretty and winsome and celebratory, everyone’s favorite young aunt, the good witch come to bless the union.
