Hill Towns (14 page)

“And the rest is history.”

“The rest, as they say, is history.”

From behind us, far up the hill, a voice wailed out of the darkness, a high, long tremolo. The lament of a lost soul. It died away in a kind of sobbing.

“What was that?” I said, my flesh creeping with chill. I turned and looked up but could only see the dark bulk of the huge building high above us, and above that the sky, full of stars.

“That was one of the good denizens of Regina Coeli,” he said, getting up and going to the parapet and leaning his forearms on it. I followed, staggering slightly.

“Every now and then one of them gives voice. It’s the Roman version of urban coyotes. The gentleman says he wants a lawyer. It’s usually that or a woman. If it weren’t dark you could see the guards prowling on the walls with Uzis. Gives a lot of tone to the neighborhood.”

110 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

I shivered. “That was…demonic. Poor people. I hardly even noticed the prison, way up there.”

“Well, in a way it’s not so much worse than its neighbor,”

he said. “See that roof over there, just below it? The two-level roof?”

I looked, searching the jumble of tiles and vines and TV

antennas that lay below the parapet. I saw the roof he meant.

The top level was dark, but the lower one was still lit.

Through small, deep old windows I could see figures working at a table in what must be a kitchen.

“It’s a retirement home for priests and nuns,” Sam said.

“The priests get the top level. They sit around all day drinking vino and eating the meals that the poor little retired nuns down on the lower level lug up stairs six or seven times a day. Rear back in their chairs in their long-awaited retirement, while wizened little old women in long black habits wash their holy clothes and cook and clean for them. That’s
their
retirement. They’ll be up half the night; they are every night.

Spiritus sanctus
.”

“What a…strange place this is,” I said, feeling the strangeness profoundly but knowing the words were massively inadequate.

“It is,” he said. “It is indeed a strange goddamn place. I don’t know why I stay. It’s impossible for a sane person to live here, and it costs more than anywhere else in Europe, and the inflation rate is out the kazoo, and the unemployment figures are through the ceiling, and they’ll steal the fillings out of your back molars if they get a chance, and it’s dirty, and it’s loud, and the traffic is lethal, and the country is flat broke, and there is an extremely high possibility of getting bombed or kneecapped whenever you go to the corner market.”

“But.”

HILL TOWNS / 111

“Yeah. But. It’s so goddamned beautiful it stops my heart just to stick my head out on the street every morning. Any patch of wall on any street looks like a painting; the layers go back to…God, the Renaissance. Medieval times. Every time they dig a hole in the street to build a new hotel or a McDonald’s, they hit columns or a ruin out of classical times.

The worst hovel in Rome has flowers and filigree and all those wonderful browns and golds. ‘Pear-brown Rome,’

Keats called it. It’s Valhalla for an artist. Even artists who aren’t working.”

“You’ll be working again soon,” I said, certain it was so.

I felt as if I had known this man for half my life.

“Maybe I will,” he said. “Maybe I will.”

“I like it that you’re a Southerner,” I said. “It takes some of the curse off your being so famous. It makes you easy to talk to. Of course, being drunk makes it easy too. I’d be tongue-tied with terror if I weren’t drunk and you weren’t a Southerner.”

He laughed and patted my shoulder.

“Nothing but Southerners here tonight,” he said.

“Why is that?” I said. “Why are all your friends Southerners? Where are all the Italian counts and race drivers and French couturiers and international artists? Where are the rich coke dealers?”

“You disappointed? Well, for one thing, Southerners make great expatriates. The very best. Attractive, mannerly, interesting, at home wherever they end up. You know why that is, Cat?”

I thought he must be pretty drunk too. His voice was thick, and his eyes were owlish.

“Because Southerners instinctively sink deep roots wherever they go?” I said.

“Not bad. But the real reason is that Southerners instinctively understand the delicate politics of deca 112 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

dence, and most places you’d really want to go and live are decadent.”

“Define decadent,” I said ponderously.

“It’s that,” he said, gesturing up at the dark shape of Regina Coeli.

“Those poor souls?” I felt the southern liberal’s mandatory indignance.

“No. That you didn’t even hear them. That you didn’t even know it was up there.”

“I think that’s specious,” I said, slurring it.

“Well, Cat from Tennessee,” Sam Forrest said, “we are all of us nothing if not that. It’s the only way to live here.”

I said nothing, only looked out over the rooftops of Trastevere and felt the alcohol singing in my blood. It seemed totally unbelievable that I was here, on this rooftop in old Rome, having this conversation with one of the most celebrated artists of my time.

“I don’t know which is better,” I said. “Being here now or remembering it later.”

He laughed, and then he said, “What are you afraid of, Cat?”

I turned to him, the word
nothing
on my lips, and then I said, “I’m afraid of everything. I’m afraid of almost everything in the world that isn’t on the Mountain at home, and I’ve been afraid since I was five years old.”

“Tell me,” he said. And we sat back down on the bench and drank more bourbon, and I did. I told him all of it. It took quite a long time.

When I stopped talking, he was silent for a space, and then he said, “I would have liked to meet your parents. They had a certain personal style that speaks to me.”

HILL TOWNS / 113

“I know it’s funny,” I said, smiling but feeling obscurely diminished by his words. “You’d have to be a rock or a tree not to find it funny.”

“I don’t think it’s funny,” Sam said. “I meant that. Listen, Cat, you mustn’t be afraid of Rome. It’s just too rich; there’s too much you need to
get
here. All that out there…all that architecture, that…geometry, the sheer physics of it. God…it could blow your mind away, if you could really take it in.

You must do that. You must take it all in. I’ll bet it could heal you.”

“All that geometry and physics scares the hell out of me,”

I said. “Where’s the soul and spirit in geometry and physics?

Where’s the people?”

“Well, there’s an awful lot of God sprinkled around out there. All those saints and angels and churches. Saint Peter’s.

I think God was invented to cut physics down to size, but if you ask me, he hasn’t succeeded in Rome.”

“No,” I said. “God was invented to make physics bearable.”

He looked at me for a time in the darkness, a small smile curving the thin bronze lips up. In the vine shadow he looked Etruscan, ancient, mythic. Even the scrofulous ponytail was a part of it.

“I’d like to do two things while you’re in Rome, Cat Gaillard,” he said. “I’d like to show you
my
Rome. And I’d like to draw you. Your face is all over the city, you know.

It’s on practically every pagan artifact here and a few select Christian ones. It’s amazing, really. Will you let me do that?”

“I don’t know about the drawing,” I said. “After tonight I’m going to have such a hangover I won’t be drawable for ten years. But I’d like to see your Rome. Can Joe come too?”

114 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

“Sure,” he said. “We’ll do it before you leave for…where?

Where do you go next? Am I right in thinking that you and Joe are going with these randy children on their honeymoon?”

“Yep. Isn’t that shameless? From here to Venice, and then to Florence, and then to the hill towns….”

“Ah, yes,” he said. “The hill towns. Get Cat back up into her hills, whence cometh her help. Well, we’ll do it the day before you go, maybe. I’ll let you know. Meanwhile…have another drink.”

We did. We had several more. At some point in the evening we began to sing again. “Stars fell on Alabama,” we wailed into the soft night over Rome, and far above us floated down, as if in reply, “
Vorrei una dama! Vorrei una dama
!”

“Me too, my man,” Sam yelled back.

It must have been very late when Joe, still attached to Ada Forrest’s arm, came to claim me and take me home. All of a sudden I realized that we were among the last people left on the Forrests’ roof. It should have bothered me, but by then nothing did.

“We lived our little drama,” I warbled, lurching into Joe and holding on.

“A coach for you, Cinderella,” he said, grinning at me with very little humor. We creaked and bumped back down in the little elevator with Sam and Maria and Colin, to hail a taxi. But there were none about, and when we finally phoned, from the Forrests’ beautiful white painting-starred living room, it was to be told that there was, alas, a
sciopero
among the taxi drivers of Rome, and so Sam Forrest ended up driving us, badly, all the way up Monte Mario in a disreputable, belching old car of Finnish origin, and I slept all the way.

O
N MY FIRST MORNING IN ROME I SLEPT LATE. IT

WAS not good sleep; I tossed and licked dry lips and buried my head deep under the covers to escape the stale chill of the air-conditioning and the spearlike shards of white light from the window wall facing the hydroelectric plant. When I first woke, at dawn, I had a savage headache, one I knew would border on the unendurable if I moved. My stomach roiled. I had never felt anything like this before, but I knew it was a formidable hangover, and my only hope was to lapse again into the heavy unconsciousness that had taken me down the instant I hit the bed the night before. Before I did, I remembered the night on the roof above Trastevere, and the bourbon and Sam Forrest and the tipsy singing, and winced. Even that hurt. I willed myself back into sleep. When I woke again it was 11 A.M., and Joe was shaking me by the shoulder and holding coffee to my nose. I thought for a moment that the dark, thick smell would make me throw up.

115

116 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

“Good morning, Signora Fellini,” Joe said, setting the coffee on the bedside table and sitting down on the edge of the bed. He ruffled my hair. I grimaced with the pain of his touch and sat up. My eyelids seemed glued together and my mouth full of flannel. I was profoundly, powerfully thirsty, but not for the caustic Roman coffee.

“Is there any water?” I croaked.

“There’s some
acqua minerale
but no ice,” he said. I heard sloshing and fizzing, and reached out blindly for the glass, and downed the mineral water in a gulp. It careened around my stomach and threatened for a moment to bounce right back up. I remembered I had eaten none of Ada Forrest’s beautiful buffet the evening before.

“Can you die of this?” I said.

“Not in Rome,” Joe said. “If last night was any example, half the Eternal City feels this way when they wake up. I’ve got a tad of hangover myself.”

“No wonder they can’t balance their budget,” I said, and sat up and squinted blearily at him while I waited for the room to stop spinning.

He laughed and took away the glass and brought the coffee back, and with it a small plate with a hard roll and a wedge of soft cheese. He did not look as if he had a hangover. He looked…astonishing. He wore white shorts that he might play tennis in except that they were too tight and too short, and a sleeveless T-shirt striped in wide bands of red, green, and white that fit him like an undershirt, and rubber shower clogs. I stared. I had never seen Joe Gaillard in anything remotely resembling this costume, not even his underwear. He never wore undershirts, and his boxer underpants were cut much fuller and longer than those shorts. He looked so utterly alien to the man I had lived with for twenty-three years HILL TOWNS / 117

that I had no idea whether the costume suited him. It probably did. He was still long-muscled and slender, and tanned from tennis, and the hair on his arms and legs was dark gold, untouched by the silver that threaded his hair and mustache.

Yes, his new clothes were undoubtedly becoming. But it was still like waking up to a stranger in my bedroom.

He looked down at himself and shrugged.

“Well, it was all they had in the famous Ortini’s that fit me; everything over here is cut for tiny little snake-hipped guys. I sent the other stuff to be washed and bought some pants for tonight. The clothes I had on yesterday could stand by themselves. Come on, Cat, stop staring at me as if I had on a dress. Everybody out by the pool is wearing stuff like this, or worse. Had you rather I bought myself a bikini?”

“I’d rather you got your bag back,” I said, getting up and walking on wavering legs to the bathroom. “I feel like I’ve waked up in a strange bedroom with Casanova. I’m glad you’re speaking to me, though. I hope everybody else is.

Lord, my head. How do drunks stand the next morning?

Have you already been down to the pool?”

“Yep. It’s nice; it’s probably the only relatively cool spot in Italy. Don’t worry about last night. You were cute,” he said indulgently, and I looked back at him over my shoulder.

Joe had never in his entire life called me cute. I would not have thought the word was in his vocabulary. Was he teasing me? Had I behaved so disgracefully he was resorting to sarcasm? He had never done that with me, either. But I saw nothing in his face save amusement and affection. I went into the astounding bathroom, an octagonal cave of tawny marble except for the wall of mirrors over the vanity counter, and

118 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

crawled under the shower and turned it on as hot and hard as I could bear it. When I came out I felt better.

He was holding out a small handful of cloth, when I came back into the bedroom, and grinning.

“Before you say no, just try it,” he said. “You’ll look terrific.

Everybody at the pool is wearing one. Ada has one on. So does Maria, before God. Sam too, if you can believe it. If Maria and Sam Forrest can wear bikinis, you can too. The signorina who sold it to me swears she sold one just like it to Julia Roberts not long ago.”