Tibi knew all about my playing hooky and I guess his friends at Roncari had told him but he promised not to tell my mother. We had a long talk together one night when my mother was getting dressed to go out. He was saying first how strange it was that I wanted to go home and he didn’t want to go home. Tibi doesn’t want to go home because he has a difficult family situation. He doesn’t get along with his father who is a businessman and he has a stepmother named Verna and he hates Verna. He doesn’t ever want to go home. But then he asked me how much money I had saved and I told him I had enough to get home but not to live on or anything or get back and he said he thought he could do something to help me and I trusted him because after all he had got me the job with Roncari.
The next day was Saturday and my mother told me not to make any plans because we were going to pay a visit to the old Princess Tavola-Calda. I said I didn’t much want to go but she said I had to go and that was that. We went over there around four, after the siesta. Her palace is in an old part of Rome where the streets turn in on themselves and a run-down quarter too where like in any other run-down quarter they sell secondhand mattresses and old clothes and powders against fleas and bedbugs and cures for itchiness and other thorns in the flesh of the poor. We could tell which palace was hers because the old Princess had her head out of one of the windows and was having a fight with a fat woman who was sweeping the steps with a broom. We stopped at the corner because my mother thought the Princess would not want us to see her having a fight. The Princess wanted the broom and the fat woman said that if she wanted a broom she could buy a broom. She, the fat woman, had worked for the Princess forty-eight years and was paid so miserably that every night she and her husband sat down to a supper of water and air. The Princess came right back at her in spite of her age and frailty and said she had been robbed by the government and that there was nothing but air in her own stomach and that she needed the broom to sweep the salone. Then the fat woman said that if she gave her the broom she would give it to her in the squash. Then the Princess got sarcastic and called the fat woman cara, cara, and said she had cared for her like a baby for forty-eight years, bringing her lemons when she was sick, and that yet she did not have the gentleness to loan her a broom for a moment. Then the fat woman looked up at the Princess and took her right hand and bunched her lips together between her thumb and forefinger and made the loudest raspberry I ever heard. Then the Princess said, Cara, cara, thank you very much my dear, my old and gentle friend, and went away from the window and came back with a pot of water which she meant to dump on the fat woman, but she missed and only wet the steps. Then the fat woman said, Thank you, your royal highness, thank you, Princess, and went on sweeping and the Princess slammed the windows and went away.
During all of this some men were going in and out of the palace carrying old automobile tires and loading them onto a truck and I found out later that the whole palace, excepting where the Princess lived, was rented out as a warehouse. To the right of the big door there was a porter’s apartment and the porter stopped us and asked us what we wanted. My mother said we wanted to take tea with the Princess and he said we were wasting our time. The Princess was crazy—matta—and if we thought she was going to give us something we were mistaken because everything she had belonged to him and his wife who had worked for the Princess forty-eight years without a salary. Then he said he didn’t like Americans because we had bombed Frascati and Tivoli and all the rest of it. Finally I pushed him out of the way and we climbed up to the third floor where the Princess had some rooms. Zimba barked when we rang and she opened the door a crack and then she let us in.
I suppose everyone knows what old Rome is like by now but she needed that broom. First she apologized for her ragged clothes but she said that all her best clothes, the court dresses and so forth, were locked up in this trunk and she had lost the key. She has a fancy way of speaking so that you would be sure to know that she is a Princess or at least some kind of a noble in spite of her rags. She is supposed to be a famous miser and I think this is true because although she sometimes sounds crazy you never lose the feeling that she is cunning and greedy. She thanked us for coming, but she said that she could not offer us any tea or coffee or cake or wine because her life was such a misfortune. The land redistribution projects after the war had drawn all the good peasants away from her farms and she could not find anyone to work her lands. The government taxed her so unmercifully that she could not afford to buy a pinch of tea and all that was left to her was her paintings and while these were worth millions the government claimed that they belonged to the nation and would not let her sell them. Then she said she would like to give me a present, a seashell that had been given to her by the Emperor of Germany when he came to Rome in 1912 and called on her dear father, the Prince. She went out of the room and she was gone a long time and when she came back she said alas, she could not give me the shell because it was locked up with her court dresses in the trunk with the lost key. We said goodbye and went out, but the porter was waiting for us to make sure we hadn’t gotten anything and we walked back home through the terrible traffic and the dark streets.
Tibi was there when we got back and he had dinner with us and then late that night when I was reading someone knocked on my bedroom door and it was Tibi. He seemed to have gone out because he had his coat on over his shoulders like a cloak the way the Romans do. He also had on his plush hat and his tight pants and his plush shoes with gold buckles and he looked like a messenger. I think he felt like a messenger too because he was very excited and spoke to me in a whisper. He said it was all arranged. The old Princess had a painting that she wanted to sell in the United States and he had convinced her that I could smuggle it in. It was a small painting, a Pinturicchio, not much bigger than a shirt. All I had to do was to look like a schoolboy and no one would search my bags. He had given the old woman all of his money as security and he said some other people had bought in and I wondered if he meant my mother, but I didn’t think this was possible. When I delivered the painting in New York I would be paid five hundred dollars. He would drive me down to Naples on Saturday morning. There was a little airline that carried passengers and freight between Naples and Madrid and I could take this and catch a plane for New York in Madrid and pick up my five hundred dollars on Monday morning. Then he went away. It was after midnight, but I got out of bed and packed my suitcase. I wouldn’t be leaving for a week but I was on my way.
I remember the morning I left, Saturday, that is. I got up around seven and had some coffee and looked into my suitcase again. Later I heard the maid taking in my mother’s breakfast tray. There was nothing to do but wait for Tibi and I went out onto the balcony to watch for him in the street. I knew he would have to park the car in the piazzale and cross the street in front of the palace. Saturday in Rome is like any other day and the street was crowded with traffic and there were crowds on the sidewalk—Romans and pilgrims and members of religious orders and tourists with cameras. It was a nice day and while it is not my place to say that Rome is the most beautiful city in the world I have often thought that, with its flat-topped pines and the buildings all the colors of ripening, folded in among the hills like bone and paper, and those big round clouds that in Nantucket would mean a thunderstorm before supper but that mean nothing in Rome, only that the sky will turn purple and fill up with stars and all the lighthearted people make it a lively place to be; and at least a thousand travelers before me, at least a thousand must have said that the light and the air are like wine, those yellow wines from the castelli that you drink in the fall. Then in the crowd I noticed someone wearing the brown habit that they wear at the Sant’ Angelo School and then I saw it was my home-room teacher, Father Antonini. He was looking for our address. The bell rang and the maid answered it and I heard the priest ask for my mother. Then the maid went down to my mothers room and I heard my mother go out to the vestibule and say, “Oh, Father Antonini, how nice to see you.”