In the beginning most of my mother’s friends were Americans and she used to give a big American party at Christmas each year. There was champagne and cake and my mother’s friend Tibi would play the piano and they would all stand around the piano and sing “Silent Night” and “We Three Kings of Orient Are” and “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing” and other carols from home. I never liked these parties because all the divorcées used to cry. There are hundreds of American divorcées in Rome and they are all friends of my mother’s and after the second verse of “Silent Night” they would all begin to bawl, but once I was on the street on Christmas Eve, walking down the street in front of our palace, when the windows were open because it was warm or perhaps to let the smoke out from those high windows, and I heard all these people singing “Silent Night” in this foreign city with its ruins and its fountains and it gave me gooseflesh. My mother stopped giving this party when she got to know so many titled Italians. My mother likes the nobility and she doesn’t care what they look like. Sometimes the old Princess Tavola-Calda comes to our house for tea. She is either a dwarf or shrunk with age. Her clothes are thin and held together with darns and she always explains that her best clothes, the court dresses and so forth, are in a big trunk but that she has lost the key. She has chin whiskers and a mongrel dog named Zimba on a piece of clothesline. She comes to our house to fill up on tea cakes, but my mother doesn’t care because she is a real princess and has the blood of Caesars in her veins.
My mother’s best friend is an American writer named Tibi who lives in Rome. There are plenty of these but I don’t think they do much writing. Tibi is usually very tired. He wants to go to the opera in Naples but he is too tired to make the trip. Tibi wants to go to the country for a month and finish his novel but all you can get to eat in the country is roast lamb and roast lamb makes Tibi tired. Tibi has never seen the Castel Sant’ Angelo because just the thought of walking across the river makes Tibi tired. Tibi is always going here or going there but he never gets anywhere because he is so tired. At first you might think someone should put him into a cold shower or light a firecracker under his chair and then you realize that Tibi really is tired or that this tiredness gets him what he wants out of life such as my mother’s affections and that he lies around our palace with a purpose just as I expect to get what I want out of life by walking around the streets as if I had won a prize fight or a tennis match.
That autumn we were planning to drive down to Naples with Tibi and say goodbye to some friends who were sailing for home, but Tibi came around to the palace that morning and said he was too tired to make the trip. My mother doesn’t like to go anywhere without Tibi and first she was gentle with him and said we would all go down together on the train but Tibi was too tired even for this. Then they went into another room and I could hear my mother’s voice and when she came out I could see she had been crying and she and I went down to Naples alone on the train. We were going to stay two nights there with an old marquesa and see the ship off and go to the opera at San Carlo. We went down that day and the sailing was the next morning, and we said goodbye and watched the lines fall into the water as the ship began to move.
By now the harbor of Naples must be full of tears, so many are wept there whenever a boat pulls out with its load of emigrants, and I wondered what it would feel like to go away once more because you hear so much talk about loving Italy among my mother’s friends that you might think the peninsula was shaped more like a naked woman than a boot. Would I miss it, I wondered, or would it all slip away like a house of cards, would it all slip away and be forgotten? Beside me on the wharf was an old Italian lady in black clothes who kept calling across the water, “Blessed are you, blessed are you, you will see the New World,” but the man she was shouting to, he was an old, old man, was crying like a baby.
After lunch there was nothing to do so I bought an excursion ticket to Vesuvius. There were some Germans and Swiss on the bus and these two American girls, the one who had dyed her hair in some hotel washbasin a funny shade of red and was wearing a mink stole in spite of the heat and the other who had not dyed her hair at all and at the sight of whom my heart, like a big owl, some night bird anyhow, spread its wings and flew away. She was beautiful. Just looking at her different parts, her nose and her neck and so forth, made her seem more beautiful. She kept poking her fingers into her black hair—patting and poking it—and just watching her do this made me very happy. I was jumping, I was positively jumping just watching her fix her hair. I could see I was making a fool of myself so I looked out of the window at all the smoking chimneys south of Naples and the Autostrada there and thought that when I next saw her she would look less beautiful and so I waited until we got to the end of the Autostrada and looked again and she was as fair as ever.
They were together and there wasn’t any way of getting between them when we lined up for the chair lift but then after we were swung up the mountain to the summit it turned out that the redhead couldn’t walk around because she had on sandals and the hot cinders of the volcano burned her feet so I offered to show her friend the sights, what there were to be seen, Sorrento and Capri in the distance and the crater and so forth. Her name was Eva and she was an American making a tour and when I asked her about her friend she said the redhead wasn’t her friend at all but that they had just met in the bus and sat down together because they could both speak English but that was all. She told me she was an actress, she was twenty-two years old and did television commercials, mostly advertising ladies’ razors, but that she only did the speaking part, some other girl did the shaving, and that she had made enough money doing this to come to Europe.
I sat with Eva on the bus back into Naples and we talked all the time. She said she liked Italian cooking and that her father had not wanted her to come alone to Europe. She had quarreled with her father. I told her everything I could think of, even about my father being buried in the Protestant Cemetery. I thought I would ask her to have supper with me at Santa Lucia and so forth but then somewhere near the Garibaldi Station the bus ran into one of those little Fiats and there was the usual thing that happens in Italy when you have a collision. The driver got out to make a speech and everybody got out to hear him and then when we got back into the bus again, Eva wasn’t there. It was late in the day and near the station and very crowded, but I’ve seen enough movies of men looking for their loved ones in railroad-station crowds to feel sure that this was all going to end happily and I looked for her for an hour on the street, but I never saw her again. I went back to the place where we were staying, but there was no one at home, thank God, and I went up to my room, a furnished room—I forgot to say that the marquesa rented rooms—and lay down on my bed and put my face in my arms and thought again that I was never going to get all the loving I needed, no, never.
Later my mother came in and said that I would get my clothes all rumpled, lying around like that. Then she sat down in a chair by my window and asked wasn’t the view divine although I knew that all she could see was a lagoon and some hills and some fishermen on a wharf. I was cross at my mother and with some reason too because she has always taught me to respect invisible things and I have been an apt pupil but I could see that night that nothing invisible was going to improve the way I felt. She has always taught me that the most powerful moral forces in life are invisible and I have always gone along with her thinking that starlight and rain are what keep the world from flying to pieces. I went along with her up until that moment when it was revealed to me that all her teaching was wrong—it was fainthearted and revolting like the smell of Chinese Temple Incense that comes off that man in church. What did the starlight have to do with my needs? I have often admired my mother, especially in repose, and she is supposed to be beautiful but that night she seemed to me very misled. I sat on the edge of the bed staring at her and thinking how ignorant she was. Then I had a terrible impulse. What I wanted to do was to give her a boot, a swift kick, and I imagined—I let myself imagine the whole awful scene—the look on her face and the way she would straighten her skirt and say that I was an ungrateful son; that I had never appreciated the advantages of my life: Christmas in Kitzbühel, etc. She said something else about the divine view and the charming fishermen and I went to the window to see what she was talking about.