“I’m getting out of here,” I heard someone say. “This is just the way he teaches, too.”
“—in the Piazza del Popolo and suddenly I became conscious of this woman. A big woman carrying some sort of a bundle. At first I thought she was carrying laundry. She had the thick forearms of a laundress, broad powerful shoulders, colossal legs, but when she came close I could see she was carrying a baby all wrapped up in a kind of sheet. She was young — it’s hard to tell a gypsy’s age, but she looked about twenty-five and was probably closer to nineteen. In the same hand that she held the baby she had a beer bottle. She had this wide rent in her dress, no underwear on at all — I could see her strong ass. I couldn’t figure out the beer bottle — for a beggar, that’s lousy publicity — until I saw there was a little milk in it. Now why a strapping thing like that wouldn’t breast feed I don’t know, unless it was the poor woman’s concession to the rest of us, not to make a brutta figura by showing a tit in public. I remember it was a nice day; it had rained earlier, but now the sun was very bright and all the streets were dry. Rome and Lago Torvu in the Pacific are the only two places I know where absolutely brilliant afternoons follow cold, dreary mornings. Well, as I say, she was a beggar. The kid was a prop, of course, and could just as well have stayed home with the beer bottle and the mama’s pregnant little sister, but probably the woman felt she needed it for her begging. She came up to all of us. She didn’t miss a table. She’d go up to each of these fine diners sitting in the sun in the café and she’d hold out her hand. Well, they didn’t even look at her. I mean, it was as if this woman and her baby were invisible. They looked everywhere else — out of the corner of your eye you could see them sizing up all the other people in the café—but they ignored her. I’ll tell you the truth. I don’t think they saw her. It was as if I, the only person watching her, were having some sort of a private vision. She stood there with the baby and the cruddy milk and asked for money. I mean she begged— she really begged, if you understand me. ‘For the sake of the baby, signore and signori, five lire. Five lire.’ A penny is six lire, you know. Well, it was amazing. They didn’t even refuse. It was as if not only hadn’t they seen her but they couldn’t hear her, either. Finally she’d get tired and go to the next table. She didn’t seem mad. No expression. It was as if she couldn’t see them, either. It took her ten minutes before she got to me. I gave her all my money. About fifteen dollars, I think. That’s shit about how they’ll take it and just buy drink for the lazy gypsy fucker that lives with them. What the hell. Milk, booze — need is need. After the way those others treated her I couldn’t do enough for this woman. I asked her to sit down with me and share my lunch. I couldn’t eat after that anyway. She misunderstood. She thought I was trying to buy her when I gave her the money.
“‘Prego, signor,’ she tells me, ’there is the child Here, under the table, touch my organs.’
“Look, it’s no secret. I’m oversexed. And I particularly like big women. My third wife was an African princess six feet two inches tall, two hundred pounds and strong as an ox. But I didn’t want a thing from this woman, you understand — for me it was just another futile gesture against an endless regime of human misery. But she couldn’t understand this. She sat beside me and ate my lunch with one hand and squeezed my prick with the other. I wanted to get away, but I couldn’t move. I had a hard-on that big. ‘Please, signora, that isn’t necessary.’ She wouldn’t stop. That hard gypsy hand was all over me. Well, it happened. I’m a man — jerk me and I come. She finished me and my lunch at the same time.
“What are you laughing at? Do you think this is a funny story? What are you laughing at?
“So she took the kid which she had put down on an empty chair beside her — she never once fed that baby a thing — and she got up to go. ‘Signora,’ I said, ‘please. I’ve given you all my money. You’ve eaten my lunch. You’ll have to pay the check.’ Well, she didn’t listen to me any more than the others had listened to her. She just got up and got the hell out of there. In the end I had to run off without paying. What are you laughing at? All right, I can see the joke, too, but please try to understand the point. Be adults, for God’s sake.
“That night, without being invited by anyone, I made my first speech. In the open air, in the Piazza di Spagna. Then, the next day, I made the same speech in St. Peters’—in four languages, Italian, French, German and English. I was a guest of the government, you understand. I was there as an exchange professor at the University of Rome, and it wasn’t for me, but everywhere I went until they threw me out of the country I made that speech. Later I dropped the French and German and English because I realized I wasn’t there to put on a show, but to get things done. The trench coats! Everywhere you looked. I tell you, whenever I see trench coats I know that Fascism is the next step!
“My speech was as follows:
“‘My Italian friends. There is poverty in your country. That is not my concern. In all countries there is poverty. What troubles me rather is your indifference to it. I have seen beggars ignored. Ignored. As well to cause poverty, to bring about another’s misfortune oneself, as to ignore it when it happens. You are a morally culpable people. So advanced is the brutalization in your society that the poor themselves have become brutalized. I have seen beggars ignored, but what is perhaps worse, I have seen the giver ignored by the beggar. I do not blame him — it is you who have caused this.
“‘I demand a change.
“‘You think there is safety in indifference; there is none. You think there is forgetfulness in the turned back; there is none. Or, if you are one of the few who give, you think there is remission in alms; there is none. There is none. In the altered condition only, in the revolutionized circumstance only, in the new beginning only is there the chance for grace. I address the remnant of your Catholicism — I mean to stir that.
“‘Revolt! Revolt!
“‘In Africa, among the Rafissi people, there is a tradition. When there is a crime, it is the chief who is punished. He is dragged from his king’s hut to be humiliated and dismembered. Modern intelligences balk at this practice. How barbarous, they think! And yet I hasten to assure you that there is no lack of candidates for chieftain. There, among the Rafissi people, evil is a risk they run. Though I do not advocate indiscriminate violence, I see in this practice a wise deal. Who is to blame for a crime if not the father? All kings are fathers. Why, the very texture of their reign is determined by primogeniture, by the ability to make heirs. If there is crime those heirs are not well made.
“‘Italians. Throw off your chains. Begin again. Reform! Reject! Revolt!’
“I told them that — in St. Peter’s, in my classes, everywhere. Until I was stopped.
“Well, in Nebraska, in 1933, I was worse. I was a firebrand, not a cautious person. And it didn’t help that my chairman was a jealous man. We split a section. Mine had a larger enrollment than his and he found out through his network of classroom spies that I wasn’t sticking to the syllabus—his syllabus, I might add. Well, why should I? What was anthropology in 1933? The tolerance level of an Ur-culture toward its missionaries? Artifacts? Snapshots of people with bones in their noses? How many serious people were there in the business in 1933? So, to my eternal credit, in 1933 I taught my classes what I had experienced myself about mankind and about life. That was the syllabus.