What was so charming about the fishermen? They were dirty, you could be sure, and dishonest and dumb and one of them was probably drunk because he kept taking swigs out of a wine bottle. While they wasted their time at the wharf their wives and their children were probably waiting for them to bring home some money and what was so charming about that? The sky was golden but this was nothing but an illusion of gas and fire, and the water was blue but the harbor there is full of sewage and the many lights on the hill came from the windows of cold and ugly houses where the rooms would smell of parmigiano rinds and washing. The light was golden, but then the golden light changed to another color, deeper and rosier, and I wondered where I had seen the color before and I thought I had seen it on the outer petals of those roses that bloom late on the mountains after the hoarfrost. Then it paled off, it got so pale that you could see the smoke from the city rising into the air and then through the smoke the evening star turned on, burning like a street light, and I began to count the other stars as they appeared, but very soon they were countless. Then suddenly my mother began to cry and I knew she was crying because she was so lonely in the world and I was very sorry that I had ever wanted to kick her. Then she said why didn’t we not go to San Carlo and take the night train to Rome which is what we did and she was happy to see Tibi lying on the sofa when we got back.
WHILE LYING in bed that night, thinking about Eva and everything, in that city where you can’t hear the rain, I thought I would go home. Nobody in Italy really understood me. If I said good morning to the porter, he wouldn’t know what I was saying. If I went out on the balcony and shouted help or fire or something like that, nobody would understand. I thought I would like to go back to Nantucket where I would be understood and where there would be many girls like Eva walking on the beach. Also it seemed to me that a person should live in his own country; that there is always something a little funny or queer about people who choose to live in another country. Now my mother has many American friends who speak fluent Italian and wear Italian clothes—everything they have is Italian including their husbands sometimes—but to me there always seems to be something a little funny about them as if their stockings were crooked or their underwear showed and I think that is always true about people who choose to live in another country. I wanted to go home. I talked with my mother about it the next day and she said it was out of the question, I couldn’t go alone and she didn’t know anyone any more. Then I asked if I could go back for the summer and she said she couldn’t afford this, she was going to rent a villa at Santa Marinella and then I asked if I could get the money myself could I go and she said of course.
I began to look around then for a part-time job and these are hard to find, but I asked Tibi and he was helpful. He isn’t much, but he is always kind. He said he would keep me in mind and then one day when I came home he asked me if I would like to work for Roncari, the sightseeing company, as a guide on Saturdays and Sundays. This was perfect for me and they tried me out the next Saturday on the bus that goes to Hadrian’s Villa and Tivoli and the Americans liked me I guess because I reminded them of home and I went to work on Sunday. The money was fair and the hours fitted in with my schoolwork and I also thought that the job might offer me an opportunity to meet some wealthy American industrialist who would want to take me back to the United States and teach me all about the steel business, but I never did. I saw lots of American wanderers though and I saw, in my course of duty, how great is the hunger in many Americans who have comfortable and lovely homes to wander around the world and see its sights. Sometimes on Saturdays and Sundays when I watched them piling into the bus it seemed to me that we are a wandering breed like the nomads. On the trip we first went out to the villa where they had a half hour to see the place and take pictures, and then I counted them off and we drove up the big hill to Tivoli and the Villa d’Este. They took more pictures and I showed them where to buy the cheapest postcards and then we would drive down the Tiburtina past all the new factories here and into Rome. In the wintertime it was dark when we got back to the city and the bus would go around to all the hotels where they were staying or someplace near anyhow. The tourists were always very quiet on the trip back and I think this was because, in their sightseeing bus, they felt the strangeness of Rome swirling around them with its lights and haste and cooking smells, where they had no friends and relations, no business of any kind really but to visit ruins. The last stop was up by the Pincian Gate and it was often windy there in the winter and I would wonder if there was really any substance to life and if it wasn’t all like this, really, hungry travelers, some of them with sore feet, looking for dim hotel lights in a city that is not supposed to suffer winter but that suffers plenty, and everybody speaking another language.
I opened a bank account in the Santo Spirito and on Easter vacation I worked full-time on the Rome–Florence run.
In this business there are shirt, bladder, and hair stops. A shirt stop is two days where you can get a shirt washed and a hair stop is three days where the ladies can get their hair fixed. I would pick up the passengers on Monday morning and sitting up in front with the driver would tell them the names of the castles and roads and rivers and villages we went by. We stopped at Avezano and Assisi. Perugia was a bladder stop and we got to Florence about seven in the evening. In the morning I would pick up another group who were coming down from Venice. Venice is a hair stop.
When vacation was over I went back to school but about a week after this they called me from Roncari and said that a guide was sick and could I take the Tivoli bus. Then I did something terrible, I made the worst decision I ever made so far. No one was listening and I said I would. I was thinking about Nantucket and going home to a place where I would be understood. I played hooky the next day and when I came home nobody noticed the difference. I thought I would feel guilty, but I didn’t feel guilty at all. What I felt was lonely. Then Roncari called again and I skipped another day and then they offered me a steady job and I never went back to school at all. I was making money, but I felt lonely all the time. I had lost all my friends and my place in the world and it seemed to me that my life was nothing but a lie. Then one of the Italian guides complained because I didn’t have a license. They were very strict about this and they had to fire me and then I didn’t have any place to go. I couldn’t go back to school and I couldn’t hang around the palace. I’d get up in the morning and take my books—I always carried my books—and would just bum around the streets or the Forum and eat my sandwiches and sometimes go to the movies in the afternoon. Then when it was time for school and soccer practice to be over I would go home where Tibi was usually sitting around with my mother.