“Peter has been sick?” he asked.
“What made you think so?”
“He hasn’t been in school for six weeks.”
“Yes,” she said, but you could tell that all of her heart wasn’t in the lie. It was very upsetting to hear my mother telling this lie; upsetting because I could see that she didn’t care about me or whether or not I got an education or anything, that all she wanted was that I should get Tibi’s old picture across the border so that he would have some money. “Yes. He’s been very sick.”
“Could I see him?”
“Oh, no. I’ve sent him home to the States.”
I left the balcony then and went down the salone to the hall and down the hall to my room and waited for her there. “You’d better go down and wait for Tibi,” she said. “Kiss me goodbye and go. Quickly. Quickly. I hate scenes.” If she hated scenes I wondered then why she always made such painful scenes but this was the way we had parted ever since I could remember and I got my suitcase and went out and waited for Tibi in the courtyard.
It was half past nine or later before he showed up and even before he spoke I could tell what he was going to say. He was too tired to drive me to Naples. He had the Pinturicchio wrapped in brown paper and twine and I opened my suitcase and put it in with my shirts. I didn’t say goodbye to him—I made up my mind then that I was never going to speak to him again—and I started for the station.
I have been to Naples many times but that day I felt very strange. The first thing when I went into the railroad station I thought I was being followed by the porter from the Palazzo Tavola-Calda. I looked around twice but this stranger bent his face over a newspaper and I couldn’t be sure but I felt so strange anyhow that it seemed I might have imagined him. Then when I was standing in line at the ticket window someone touched me on the shoulder and I had that awful feeling that my father had come back to give me help. It was an old man who wanted a match and I lighted his cigarette but I could still feel the warmth of the touch on my shoulder and that memory that we would all be happy together again and help one another and then the feeling that I would never get all the loving I needed, no, never.
I got into the train and watched the other passengers hurrying along the platform and this time I saw the porter. There was no mistake. I had only seen him once but I could remember his face and I guessed he was looking for me. He didn’t seem to see me and went on down to the third-class compartments and I wondered then if this was the Big World, if this was really what it was like—women throwing themselves away over halfwits like Tibi and purloined paintings and pursuers. I wasn’t worried about the porter but I was worried about the idea that life was this much of a contest.
(BUT I AM NOT A BOY in Rome but a grown man in the old prison and river town of Ossining, swatting hornets on this autumn afternoon with a rolled-up newspaper. I can see the Hudson River from my window. A dead rat floats downstream and two men in a sinking rowboat come up against the tide. One of them is rowing desperately with a boat seat and I wonder have they escaped from prison or have they just been fishing for perch and why should I exchange this scene for the dark streets around the Pantheon? Why, never having received from my parents anything but affection and understanding, should I invent a grotesque old man, a foreign grave, and a foolish mother? What is the incurable loneliness that makes me want to pose as a fatherless child in a cold wind and wouldn’t the imposture make a better story than Tibi and the Pinturicchio? But my father taught me, while we hoed the beans, that I should complete for better or worse whatever I had begun and so we go back to the scene where he leaves the train in Naples.)
IN NAPLES I got off the train at the Mergellina hoping to duck the porter. Only a handful of people got off there and I don’t think the porter was one of them although I couldn’t be sure. There was a little hotel on a side street near the station and I went there and took a room and left my suitcase with the painting in it under the bed and locked the door. Then I went out to look for the office of the airline where I could buy my ticket and this was way on the other side of Naples. It was a small airline and a very small office and I think the man who sold me my ticket was probably the pilot too. The plane left at eleven that night so then I walked back to the hotel and as soon as I stepped into the lobby the lady at the desk said that my friend was waiting for me and there he was, the porter, with two carabinieri. He began to holler and yell—all the same things. I had bombed Frascati and Tivoli and invented the hydrogen bomb and now I was stealing one of the paintings that formed the invaluable heritage of the Italian people. The carabinieri were really very nice although I don’t like to talk with people who wear swords but when I asked if I could call the Consulate they said yes and I did. It was about four o’clock then and they said they would send an officer over and pretty soon this big nice American came over who kept saying “Yurp.” I told him I was carrying a package for a friend and that I didn’t know what it contained and he said, “Yurp, yurp.” He had on a big double-breasted suit and he seemed to be having some trouble with his belt or his underwear because every so often he would take hold of his waist and give it a big yank. Then everyone agreed that in order to open my package they would have to get a justice and I got my bag and we all got into the car the consular officer had and drove off to some questura or courthouse where we had to wait a half hour for the justice to put on his sash of office with the golden fringe. Then I opened my suitcase and he passed the package to an attendant who undid the knots in the twine. Then the justice unwrapped the package and there was nothing in it but a piece of cardboard. The porter let out such a roar of anger and disappointment when he saw this that I don’t think he could have been an accomplice and I think the old lady must have thought the whole thing up herself. They would never get back the money they had paid her, any of them, and I could see her, licking her chops like Reddy the Fox. I even felt sorry for Tibi.
In the morning I tried to get a refund on my plane ticket but the office was shut and so then I walked to the Mergellina to get the morning train to Rome. A ship was in. There were twenty-five or thirty tourists waiting on the platform. They were tired and excited, you could see, and were pointing at the espresso machine and asking if they couldn’t have a large cup with cream but they didn’t seem funny to me that morning—they seemed to be nice and admirable and it seemed to me that there was a lot of seriousness at the bottom of their wandering. I was not as disappointed myself as I have been about less important things and I even felt a little cheerful because I knew that I would go back to Nantucket sometime or if not to Nantucket to someplace where I would be understood. And then I remembered that old lady in Naples, so long ago, shouting across the water, “Blessed are you, blessed are you, you will see America, you will see the New World,” and I knew that large cars and frozen food and hot water were not what she meant. “Blessed are you, blessed are you,” she kept shouting across the water and I knew that she thought of a place where there are no police with swords and no greedy nobility and no dishonesty and no briberies and no delays and no fear of cold and hunger and war and if all that she imagined was not true, it was a noble idea and that was the main thing.