A Freewheelin' Time (16 page)

With Janet Kerr in Perugia

Perugia is landlocked and built like a medieval fortress about 1,600 feet above sea level. It is all steep hills, with many streets that are literally flights of stone stairs that lead up to the only level part of the city, its center.

When the Etruscans, a people about whom very little is known, originally settled the area, they left traces of their civilization all over Umbria and Tuscany. Their alphabet is decipherable, yet the vocabulary is not. There seems to be no final agreement among historians as to why a seafaring people would settle so far from the sea.

They were exquisite artisans, making fine gold jewelry and beautiful miniature figures that looked like mini Giacometti statues. The walls they built withstood wars and earthquakes over long centuries to the present time. The Etruscans carved stone to a precision fit and did not use mortar. The Romans, who conquered them, did not destroy anything; instead they built their arches and walls above and around what the Etruscans had constructed.

Janet sat in the garden of the
pensione
and played her autoharp and sang folk songs in her sultry voice. The tourists and students staying there were enthralled and marveled at the strange instrument. Within a short time she met a young Frenchman named Bernard and ended up traveling to France with him.

At the one theater in town, the Morlacchi, where concerts, opera, and plays were presented, I was an extra in a production of an opera. An announcement had been posted at the University for Foreigners that nonsinging extras were needed for the production. Many foreign students showed up for the audition at the theater, including Rosemarie and me. The director, who seemed very important because he had everyone heeding his every demand, instructed us to line up on the newly constructed set. He explained that we were to look desperate and pleading.

Stretch out your hands and beg with every fiber of your being, he said, as the King and his court strode by. He looked at each of us intently, pointed, and said, You, yes. You, no.

No, he told Rosemarie.

When he turned to me, I returned his gaze with intensity. I soulfully implored. I stretched out my hands and beseeched.

You, he said, pointing at me. Yes, you.

Our costumes were gray rags and we were made up to look dirty and red-eyed. I believe the opera ran for only a few performances, but I had a great time.

T
he grass-covered cloister inside the art school had an ancient well in the center of it. We sat with our drawing pads under the arched walkway surrounding the grounds and drew each other, the cloister, and the building we were in. We worked with our various art supplies in a room that was cluttered with gesso molds of limbs, hands, and heads on shelves and hanging on the walls. We learned anatomy by drawing from full-scale replicas of statues by Michelangelo and Donatello.

Summer was endless and the coolness of the approaching fall inviting. I kept postponing the time to go home.

In September I moved to the Pensione Arco Etrusco. This one didn’t include meals and there fore cost less. My allowance from my mother and the money I had saved from various jobs would last longer. By now I knew my way around. There were many places to eat well for very little; it was a university town, after all. Several local
trattorie
(informal home-style restaurants) served three-course meals for a few dollars, with a small supplement for a quarter liter of wine. They offered pasta, followed by meat and vegetables and then a serving of fruit and cheese—not at all like the sort of eating places that cluster around university campuses in the United States.

I had a room right on top of the Etruscan Arch, one of the main tourist attractions in Perugia. Built by the Etruscans and modified by Caesar Augustus, it is pictured on every postcard. My room was big, dank, and dark, with only one window, but that window was over the arch and had a tiny balcony. I sent a postcard to Bob and he wrote back:

Lithograph, Italy 1962

Got your postcard showing that arch you live at—God it’s like that balcony in Romeo and Juliet—Nobody calls to you and sings to you like in that tho, do they??

The room had a big cement sink with only a cold-water faucet. There was a trap door in the middle of the floor, which I was disappointed to discover was nailed securely shut when I tried to pull it open in search of the history that might be stored there.

I sent Bob a shirt I bought for him at the local market. He is wearing it in some of those publicity stills taken some time later:

You sent me a great shirt—I wear it in the house…but not outside cause I don’t want no one to see me in it before you see me in it—please come back and see me in the shirt—then I’ll be able to wear it outside.

Despite the good time I was having and the new people I was meeting, I agonized continually over what I wanted to do and over my feelings for Bob. It was not easy. I pleaded for time and he pleaded for that time to end:

There is a Peter Sellers movie on at 5 o’clock—I promised myself that I would see Taylor Mead’s movie “The Flower Thief”…don’t think I’m really loving movies—It’s just that I’m hating time—I’m trying to push it by—I’m trying to stab it—stomp on it—throw it on the ground and kick it—bend it and twist it with griting teeth and burning eyes—I hate it I love you—

W
ithout the summer sun to warm the walls of the Etrus can Arch, my room got colder and danker. There was no heat of any kind. I moved one more time, in early October, to a
pensione
that offered a room with a gas heater and an improvised kitchen with a hot plate and a small sink. It was on Via della Gabbia, Street of the Cage. It wasn’t much of a
pensione
since the owner, a signora, rented out the two extra rooms in her home. The improvised kitchen was behind a heavy red brocade curtain tied back with thick gold cords, very much like in a theater.

In front of the curtain were a bed, a desk, a bookcase, and a window that looked out onto the street. I loved the room and I liked the signora. She was full of energy, walleyed, and squat. When she walked the lower half of her body appeared to be on time delay, showing up a few seconds later. She rented out
bombole,
gas canisters used for kitchen stoves and heaters because Perugia didn’t have piped-in city gas lines at that time. The signora also collected and restored clothing for antique dolls,
bambole.
I named her home
La Casa delle Bombole e Bambole.

The signora was always in a flurry of activity. The phone rang constantly. She assumed I would answer it and take messages for her. She would place her fingers on her lips to say I’m not here, no matter who called. She never seemed to be able to deliver the
bombole
on time or to finish sewing the clothes for the
bambole.
She also had two young children to take care of and a husband who was there sometimes but not often, preferring the outside world to the constant chaos at home. He did show up for meals and to change into a newly pressed shirt, however.

The signora spent an inordinate amount of time ironing everything in sight. The towels in the bathroom were stiff and as flat as boards as a result. I used my colorful striped towel that I had bought when I first arrived in Perugia in July. When she offered to iron it for me, I politely told her it wasn’t necessary, but
grazie
all the same.

T
he spell broke around the time cold weather blew in from the surrounding mountains. It was October 1962, and on the nineteenth the Cuban missile crisis exploded. I was in a café in Perugia watching Kennedy on TV. It was very tense. People were crowded around the television in stunned silence. Everyone thought the world was on the brink of nuclear annihilation. Life as we knew it was about to end. A letter from Bob arrived on October 29, after the worst of the crisis was over and the worst conceivable horror had been avoided. He wrote that in the time leading up to the face-off between the United States and the Soviet Union, he felt that: “the maniacs were really going to do it this time,” and he recounted his passive acceptance of the inevitability of dying. He only hoped that he would “die quick and not have to put up with radiation.”

Bob wearing the Italian shirt

Sitting in the Figaro all nite waiting for the world to end (the first nite Kennedy talked and the Russian ships were getting nearer Cuba—). I honest to God thought it was all over—Not that I gave a shit any more then the next guy (that’s a lie I guess) but it was interesting waiting for the bombs to fall and kill you—and it really seemed that way—

If the world did end that nite, all I wanted was to be with you—And it was impossible cause you’re so far away—And that was why it seemed so hopeless.

I felt the same way. What was I doing so far away? Suddenly I was desperately homesick. All the indecision and the conflicted feelings had disappeared. I knew where I wanted to be.

The political crisis may have passed, but that didn’t bring the return of a feeling of security. Quite the contrary—the smell of devastation charged the future. A line had been crossed, and there was no going back. I made a decision to finish out the time at the Accademia and be home by Christmas, less than two months away.

In December I sailed for home from Naples on the
Cristoforo Colombo.
I had a cabin somewhere in the vicinity of the ship’s engines and about the size of a closet. Big pipes ran along the walls and they, as well as the entire cabin, were thick with layers of crusty white paint. I thought that if I scraped the paint down to the first layer the cabin would be twice as big and the pipes as thin as wire. It felt like steer-age, which seemed an appropriate way to travel to the United States, my home. Even the name of the ship seemed right—the Christopher Columbus. Remember where you come from, and you will know who you are.

Re-
Entry

Grapevines have a tendency
to grow every which way but straight. They dip, curve, and curl tightly in a tangled web. For sound to travel along such a vine and be reproduced without distortion is impossible: that is how rumors and gossip travel.

Bob was in England to do a television show, with a side trip to Italy, as I was returning by ship to New York City at the end of 1962. Our letters had crossed in the mail. The dates and plans made with an element of surprise for each other backfired and by the time my ship docked in New York he had already left. We wouldn’t reconnect until mid-January.

I spent a short time in New Jersey with my mother and Fred and then headed to the apartment in the Village. I was excited to see everyone after such a long absence.

Just being in the little Fourth Street apartment again brought me to tears. I couldn’t wait to see Bobby. I didn’t regret the long separation, but I had suffered it. I had no idea, though, of the extent to which he’d suffered it in public.

When I went around to some of the clubs, I did not get a friendly reception. Instead I was greeted with accusations that I was cold and indifferent to someone who loved me. I was not there for Dylan when he needed me most. Some deliberately sang songs he had written about his heartache as well as any ballad that pointed a finger at a cruel lover.

The gossipy insinuations by the folkies around the Village hit hard. Bob had suffered publicly and as a result I was the villain, the Barbara Allen to his Sweet William. I did not handle public involvement in my private life well. I had been looking forward to reconnecting with people and had not expected this unwelcome home. It was as if every letter Bob had written to me and every phone call he had made had been performed in a theater in front of an audience. Now I was the second act, standing alone on the stage after intermission; it was open season on my performance. I was booed and panned, while the guy from the first act had received a standing ovation.

Intimate friends like Lillian and Mell Bailey didn’t treat me this way. Truly close friends who knew Bob and me understood not to judge. They paid no attention to the twists along the grapevine. With these friends I spent real quality time until Bob got back a week or so later in January, when we made up for lost time.