XIV. NEW ATTEMPTS, NEW RAMBLES
CARDINAL SPADA
“I have arranged two interesting conferences for you,” said Kennedy, a few days later.
“My dear man!”
“Yes; one with Cardinal Spada, the other with the Abbé Tardieu. I have spoken to them both about you.”
“Splendid! What kind of people are they?”
“Cardinal Spada is a very intelligent man and a very amiable one. At heart he is a Liberal and fond of the French. As to the Abbé Tardieu, he is a very influential priest at the church of San Luigi.”
After lunch they went direct to a solitary street in the old part of Rome. At the door of the big, sad palace where Cardinal Spada lived, a porter with a cocked hat, a grey greatcoat, and a staff with a silver knob, was watching the few passers-by.
They went in by the broad entry-way, as far as a dark colonnaded court, paved with big flags which had grass between them.
In the middle of the court a fountain shot up a little way and fell into a stone basin covered with moss.
Kennedy and Cæsar mounted the wide monumental stairway; on the first floor a handsome glassed-in gallery ran around the court. The whole house had an air of solemnity and sadness. They entered the Cardinal’s office, which was a large, sad, severe room.
Monsignor Spada was a vigorous man, despite his age. He looked frank and intelligent, but one guessed that there was a hidden bitterness and desolation in him. He wore a black cassock with red edges and buttons.
Kennedy went close and was about to kneel to the Cardinal, but he prevented him.
Cæsar explained his ideas to the Cardinal with modesty. He felt that this man was worthy of all his respect.
Monsignor Spada listened attentively, and then said that he understood nothing about financial matters, but that on principle he was in favour of having the administration of all the Church’s property kept entirely at home, as in the time of Pius IX. Leo XIII had preferred to replace this paternal method by a trained bureaucracy, but the Church had not gained anything by it, and they had lost credit through unfortunate negotiations, buying land and taking mortgages.
Cæsar realized that it was useless to attempt to convince a man of the intelligence and austerity of the Cardinal, and he listened to him respectfully.
Monsignor Spada conversed amiably, he escorted them as far as the door, and shook hands when they said good-bye.
THE ABBÉ TARDIEU
Then they went to see the Abbé Tardieu. The abbé lived in the Piazza. Navona. His office, furnished in modern style, produced the effect of a violent contrast with Cardinal Spada’s sumptuous study, and yet brought it to mind. The Abbé Tardieu’s work-room was small, worldly, full of books and photographs.
The abbé, a tall young man, thin, with a rosy face, a long nose, and a mouth almost from ear to ear, had the air of an astute but jolly person, and laughed at everything said to him. He was liveliness personified. When they entered his office he was writing and smoking.
Cæsar explained about his financial knowledge, and how he had gone on acquiring it, until he got to the point where he could discern a law, a system, in things where others saw nothing more than chance. The Abbé Tardieu promised that if he knew a way to utilize Cæsar’s knowledge, he would send him word. In respect to giving him letters of introduction to influential persons in Spain, he had no objection.
They took leave of the abbé.
“All this has to go slowly,” said Kennedy.
“Of course. One cannot insist that it should happen all at once.”
BERNINI
“If you have nothing to do, let’s take a walk,” said the Englishman.
“If you like.”
“Have you noticed the fountains in this square?”
“No.”
“They are worth looking at.”
Cæsar contemplated the central obelisk. It is set on top of a rock hollowed out like a cavern, in the mouth of which a lion is seen. Afterwards they looked at the fountains at the ends of the square.
“The sculptures are by Bernini,” explained Kennedy. “Bernini belonged to an epoch that has been very much abused by the critics, but nowadays he is much praised. He enchants me.”
“It is rather a mixed style, don’t you think?”
“Yes.”
“The artist is not living?”
“For heaven’s sake, man! No.”
“Well, if he were alive today they would employ him to make those gewgaws some people present to leading ladies and to the deputies of their district. He would be the king of the manufacturers of ornate barometers.”
“It is undeniable that Bernini had a baroque taste.”
“He gives the impression of a rather pretentious and affected person.”
“Yes, he does. He was an exuberant, luxuriant Neapolitan; but when he chose he could produce marvels. Haven’t you seen his Saint Teresa?”
“No.”
“Then you must see it. Let’s take a carriage.”
They drove to the Piazza San Bernardo, a little square containing three churches and a fountain, and went into Santa Maria della Vittoria.
Kennedy went straight toward the high altar, and stopped to the left of it.
In an altar of the transept is to be seen a group carved in marble, representing the ecstasy of Saint Teresa. Cæsar gazed at it absorbed. The saint is an attractive young girl, falling backward in a sensual spasm; her eyes are closed, her mouth open, and her jaw a bit dislocated. In front of the swooning saint is a little angel who smilingly threatens her with an arrow.
“Well, what do you think of it?” said Kennedy.
“It is wonderful,” exclaimed Cæsar. “But it is a bedroom scene, only the lover has slipped away.”
“Yes, that is true.”
“It really is pretty; you seem to see the pallor of the saint’s face, the circles under her eyes, the relaxation of all her muscles. Then the angel is a little joker who stands there smiling at the ecstasy of the saint.”
“Yes, that’s true,” said Kennedy; “it is all the more admirable for the very reason that it is tender, sensual, and charming, all at once.”
“However, this sort of thing is not healthy,” murmured Cæsar, “this kind of vision depletes your life-force. One wants to find the same things represented in works of art that one ought to look for in life, even if they are not to be found in life.”
“Good! Here enters the moralist. You talk like an Englishman,” exclaimed Kennedy. “Let us go along.”
“Where?”
“I have to stop in at the French Embassy a moment; then we can go where you like.”
CORNERS OF ROME
They went back to the carriage, and having crossed through the centre of Rome, got out in front of the Farnese Palace.
“I will be out inside of ten minutes,” said Kennedy.
The Farnese Palace aroused great admiration in Cæsar; he had never passed it before. By one of the fountains in the piazza, he stood gazing at the huge square edifice, which seemed to him like a die cut from an immense block of stone.
“This really gives me an impression of grandeur and force,” he said to himself. “What a splendid palace! It looks like an ancient knight in full armour, looking indifferently at everything, sure of his own worth.”
Cæsar walked from one end of the piazza to the other, absorbed in the majestic pile of stone.
Kennedy surprised him in his contemplation.
“Now will you say that you are a good philistine?”
“Ah, well, this palace is magnificent. Here are grandeur, strength, overwhelming force.”
“Yes, it is magnificent; but very uncomfortable, my French colleagues tell me.”
Kennedy related the history of the Farnese Palace to Cæsar. They went through the Via del Mascherone and came out into the Via Giulia.
“This Via Giulia is a street in a provincial capital,” said Kennedy; “always sad and deserted; a Cardinal or two who like isolation are still living here.”
At the entrance to the Via dei Farnesi, Cæsar stopped to look at two marble tablets set into the wall at the two sides of a chapel door.
Cut on the tablets were skeletons painted black; on one, the words: “Alms for the poor dead bodies found in the fields,” and on the other: “Alms for the perpetual lamp in the cemetery.”
“What does this mean?” said Cæsar.
“That is the Church of the Orison of the Confraternity of Death. The tablets are modern.”
They passed by the “Mascherone” again, and went rambling on until they reached the Synagogue and the Theatre of Marcellus.
They went through narrow streets without sidewalks; they passed across tiny squares; and it seemed like a dead city, or like the outskirts of a village. In certain streets towered high dark palaces of blackish stone. These mysterious palaces looked uninhabited; the gratings were eaten with rust, all sorts of weeds grew on the roofs, and the balconies were covered with climbing plants. At corners, set into the wall, one saw niches with glass fronts. A painted madonna, black now, with silver jewels and a crown, could be guessed at inside, and in front a little lantern swung on a cord.
Suddenly a cart would come down one of these narrow streets without sidewalks, driving very quickly and scattering the women and children seated by the gutter.
In all these poor quarters there were lanes crossed by ropes loaded with torn washing; there were wretched black shops from which an odour of grease exhaled; there were narrow streets with mounds of garbage in the middle. In the very palaces, now shorn of their grandeur, appeared the same decoration of rags waving in the breeze. In the Theatre of Marcellus one’s gaze got lost in the depths of black caves, where smiths stood out against flames.
This mixture of sumptuousness and squalor, of beauty and ugliness, was reflected in the people; young and most beautiful women were side by side with fat, filthy old ones covered with rags, their eyes gloomy, and of a type that recalled old African Jewesses.
WHAT CAN BE READ ON WALLS
Cæsar and Kennedy went on toward the Temple of Vesta and followed the river bank until the Tiber Embankment ended.
Here the banks were green and the river clearer and more poetic. To the left rose the Aventine with its villas; in the harbour two or three tugs were tied up; and here and there along the pier stood a crane. Evening was falling and the sky was filling with pink clouds.
They sat down awhile on the side of the road, and Cæsar entertained himself deciphering the inscriptions written in charcoal on a mud-wall.
“Do you go in for modern epigraphy?” asked Kennedy.
“Yes. It is one of the things I take pleasure in reading, in the towns I go to; the advertisements in the newspapers and the writings on the wall.”
“It’s a good kind of curiosity.”
“Yes, I believe one learns more about the real life in a town from such inscriptions than from the guide- and text-books.”
“That’s possible. And what conclusions have you drawn from your observations?”
“They are not of much value. I haven’t constructed a science of wall-inscriptions, as that fake Lambroso would have done.”
“But you will construct it surely, when you have lighted on the underlying system.”
“You think my epigraphical science is on the same level as my financial science. What a mistake!”
“All right. But tell me what you have discovered about different towns.”
“London, for instance, I have found, is childish in its inscriptions and somewhat clownish. When some sentimental foolishness doesn’t occur to a Londoner of the people, some brutality or rough joke occurs to him.”
“You are very kind,” said Kennedy, laughing.
“Paris has a vulgar, cruel taste; in the Frenchman of the people you find the tiger alternating with the monkey. There the dominant note on the walls is the patriotic note, insults to politicians, calling them assassins and thieves, and also sentiments of revenge expressed by an ‘A mort Dupin!’’ or ‘A mort Duval!’’ Moreover, there is a great enthusiasm for the guillotine.”
“And Madrid?”
“Madrid is at heart a rude, moral town with little imagination, and the epigraphs on the walls and benches are primitive.”
“And in Rome what do you find?”
“Here one finds a mixture of pornography, romanticism, and politics. A heart pierced by an arrow and poetic phrases, alternate with some enormous piece of filthiness and with hurrahs for Anarchy or for the ‘Papa-re.‘”
“Well done!” said Kennedy; “I can see that the branch of epigraphy you practise amounts to something. It should be systematized and given a name.”
“What do you think we should name it? Wallography?”
“Very good.”
“And one of these fine days we can systematize it. Now we might go and get dinner.”
They took a tram which was coming back from St. Paul’s beyond the Walls, and returned to the heart of the city.
THE MONK WITH THE RED NOSE
The next day Cæsar was finishing dressing when the servant told him that a gentleman was waiting for him.
“Who is it?” asked Cæsar.
“It’s a monk.”
Cæsar went to the salon and there found a tall monk with an evil face, a red nose, and a worn habit.
Cæsar recalled having seen him, but didn’t know where.
“What can I do for you?” asked Cæsar.
“I come from His Eminence, Cardinal Fort. I must speak with you.”
“Let’s go into the dining-room. We shall be alone there.”
“It would be better to talk in your room.”
“No, there is no one here. Besides, I have to eat breakfast. Will you join me?”
“No, thanks,” said the monk.
Cæsar remembered having seen that face in the Altemps palace. He was doubtless one of the domestic monks who had been with the Abbé Preciozi.
The waiter came bringing Cæsar’s breakfast. “Will you tell me what it is?” said Cæsar to the ecclesiastic, while he filled his cup.
The monk waited until the waiter was gone, and then said in a hard voice:
“His Eminence the Cardinal sent me to bid you not to present yourself anywhere again, giving his name.”
“What? What does this mean?” asked Cæsar, calmly.
“It means that His Eminence has found out about your intrigues and machinations.”
“Intrigues? What intrigues were those?”
“You know perfectly well. And His Eminence forbids you to continue in that direction.”
“His Eminence forbids me to pay calls? And for what reason?”
“Because you have used his name to introduce yourself into certain places.”
“It is not true.”
“You have told people you went to that you are Cardinal Fort’s nephew.”
“And I am not?” asked Cæsar, after taking a swallow of coffee.
“You are trying to make use of the relationship, we don’t know with what end in view.”
“I am trying to make use of my relationship to Cardinal Fort? Why shouldn’t I?”
“You admit it?”
“Yes, I admit it. People are such imbeciles that they think it is an honour to have a Cardinal in the family; I take advantage of this stupid idea, although I do not share it, because for me a Cardinal is merely an object of curiosity, an object for an archeological museum....”
Cæsar paused, because the monk’s countenance was growing dark. In the twilight of his pallid face, his nose looked like a comet portending some public calamity.
“Poor wretch!” murmured the monk. “You do not know what you are saying. You are blaspheming. You are offending God.” “Do you really believe that God has any relation to my uncle?” asked Cæsar, paying more attention to his toast than to his visitor.
And then he added:
“The truth is that it would be extravagant behaviour on the part of God.”
The monk looked at Cæsar with terrible eyes. Those grey eyes of his, under their long, black, thick brows, shot lightning.
“Poor wretch!” repeated the monk. “You ought to have more respect for things above you.”
Cæsar arose.
“You are bothering me and preventing me from drinking my coffee,” he said, with exquisite politeness, and touched the bell.
“Be careful!” exclaimed the monk, seizing Cæsar’s arm with violence.
“Don’t you touch me again,” said Cæsar, pulling away violently, his face pale and his eyes flashing. “If you do, I have a revolver here with five chambers, and I shall take pleasure in emptying them one by one, taking that lighthouse you carry about for a nose, as my target.”
“Fire it if you dare.”
Fortunately the waiter had come in on hearing the bell.
“Do you wish anything, sir?” he asked.
“Yes, please escort this clerical gentleman to the door, and tell him on the way not to come back here.”
Days later Cæsar found out that there had been a great disturbance at the Altemps palace in consequence of the calls he had made. Preciozi had been punished and sent away from Rome, and the various Spanish monasteries and colleges warned not to receive Cæsar.
XV. GIOVANNI BATTISTA, PAGAN
“My dear Cæsar,” said Kennedy, “I believe it will be very difficult for you to find what you want by looking for it. You ought to leave it a little to chance.”
“Abandon myself to events as they arrive? All right, it seems a good idea.”
“Then if you find something practicable, utilize it.”
Kennedy took his friend to a statue-shop where he used to pass some of his hours. The shop was in a lane near the Forum, and its stock was in antiques, majolicas, and plaster casts of pagan gods.
The shop was dark and rather gloomy, with a small court at the back covered with vines. The proprietor was an old man, with a moustache, an imperial, and a shock of white hair. His name was Giovanni Battista Lanza. He professed revolutionary ideas and had great enthusiasm about Mazzini. He expressed himself in an ironical and malicious manner.
Signora Vittoria, his wife, was a grumbling old woman, rather devoted to wine. She spoke like a Roman of the lowest class, was olive-coloured and wrinkled, and of her former beauty there remained only her very black eyes and hair that was still black.
The daughter, Simonetta, a girl who resembled her father, blond, with the build of a goddess, was the one that waited on customers and kept the accounts.
Simonetta, being the manager, divided up the profits; the elder son was head of the workshop and he made the most money; then came two workmen from outside; and then the father who still got his day’s wages, out of consideration for his age; and finally the younger son, twelve or fourteen years old, who was an apprentice.
Simonetta gave her mother what was indispensable for household expenses and managed the rest herself.
Kennedy retailed this information the first day they went to Giovanni Battista Lanza’s house. Cæsar could see Simonetta keeping the books, while the small brother, in a white blouse that came to his heels, was chasing a dog, holding a pipe in his hand by the thick part, as if it were a pistol, the dog barking and hanging on to the blouse, the small boy shrieking and laughing, when Signora Vittoria came bawling out.
Kennedy presented Simonetta to his friend Cæsar, and she smiled and gave her hand.
“Is Signore Giovanni Battista here?” Kennedy asked Signora Vittoria.
“Yes, he is in the court.” she answered in her gloomy way.
“Is something wrong with your mamma?” said Kennedy to Simonetta.
“Nothing.”
They went into the court and Giovanni Battista arose, very dignified, and bowed to Cæsar. The elder son and the two workmen in white blouses and paper caps were busy with water and wires, cleaning a plaster mould they had just emptied.
The mould was a big has-relief of the Way of the Cross. Giovanni Battista permitted himself various jocose remarks about the Way of the Cross, which his son and the other two workmen heard with great indifference; but while he was still emptying his store of anti-Christian irony, the voice of Signora Vittoria was heard, crying domineeringly:
“Giovanni Battista!”
“What is it?”
“That’s enough, that’s enough! I can hear you from here.”
“That’s my wife,” said Giovanni Battista, “she doesn’t like me to be lacking in respect for plaster saints.” “You are a pagan!” screamed the old woman. “You shall see, you shall see what will happen to you.”
“What do you expect to have happen to me, darling?”
“Leave her alone,” exclaimed the elder son, ill at ease; “you always have to be making mother fly into a rage.”
“No, my boy, no; she is the one who makes me fly into a rage.”
“Giovanni Battista is used to living among gods,” said Kennedy, “and he despises saints.”
“No, no,” replied the cast-maker; “some saints are all right. If all the churches had figures by Donatello or Robbia, I would go to church oftener; but to go and look at those statues in the Jesuit churches, those figures with their arms spread and their eyes rolling.... Oh, no! I cannot look at such things.”
Cæsar could see that Giovanni Battista expressed himself very well; but that he was not precisely a star when it came to working. After the mould for the bas-relief was cleaned and fixed, the cast-maker invited Cæsar and Kennedy to have a glass of wine in a wine-shop near by.
“How’s this, are you leaving already, father?” said Simonetta, as he went through the shop to get to the street.
“I’m coming back, I’m coming back right away.”
SUPERSTITIONS
The three of them went to a rather dirty tavern in the same lane, and settled themselves by the window. This post was a good point of observation for that narrow street, so crowded and so picturesque.
Workmen went by, and itinerant vendors, women with kerchiefs, half head-dress and half muffler, and with black eyes and expressive faces. Opposite was a booth of coloured candies, dried figs strung on a reed, and various kinds of sweets.
A wine-cart passed, and Kennedy made Cæsar observe how decorative it was with its big arm-seat in the middle and its hood above, like a prompter’s box.
Giovanni Battista ordered a flask of wine for the three of them. While he chatted and drank, friends of his came to greet them. They were men with beards, long hair, and soft hats, of the Garbaldi and Verdi type so abundant in Italy.
Among them were two serious old men; one was a model, a native of Frascati, with the face of a venerable apostle; the other, for contrast, looked like a buffoon and was the possessor of a grotesque nose, long, thin at the end and adorned with a red wart.
“My wife has a deadly hatred for all of them,” said Giovanni Battista, laughing.
“And why so?” asked Cæsar.
“Because we talk politics and sometimes they ask me for a few pennies....”
“Your wife must have a lively temper,...” said Cæsar.
“Yes, an unhappy disposition; good, awfully good; but very superstitious. Christianity has produced nothing but superstitions.”
“Giovanni Battista is a pagan, as his wife well says,” asserted Kennedy.
“What superstitions has your wife?” asked Cæsar.
“All of them. Romans are very superstitious and my wife is a Roman. If you see a hunchback, it is good luck; if you see three, then your luck is magnificent and you have to swallow your saliva three times; on the other hand, if you see a humpbacked woman it is a bad omen and you must spit on the ground to keep away the jettatura. Three priests together is a very good sign. We ought all to get along very well in Rome, because we see three and up to thirty priests together.”
“A spider is also very significant,” said Kennedy; “in the morning it is of bad augury, and in the evening good.”
“And at noon?” asked Cæsar.
“At noon,” answered Lanza, laughing, “it means nothing to speak of. But if you wish to make sure whether it is a good auspice or a bad, you kill the spider and count its legs. If they are an even number, it is a good omen; if uneven, bad.”
“But I believe spiders always have an even number of legs,” said Cæsar.
“Certainly,” responded the old man; “but my wife swears they do not; that she has seen many with seven and nine legs. It is religious unreasonableness.”
“Are there many people like that, so credulous?” asked Cæsar.
“Oh, lots,” replied Lanza; “in the shops you will find amulets, horns, hands made of coral or horseshoes, all to keep away bad luck. My wife and the neighbour women play the lottery, by combining the numbers of their birthdays, and the ages of their fathers, their mothers, and their children. When some relative dies, they make a magic combination of the dates of birth and death, the day and the month, and buy a lottery ticket. They never win; and instead of realizing that their systems are of no avail, they say that they omitted to count in the number of letters in the name or something of that sort. It is comical, so much religion and so much superstition.”
“But you confuse religion and superstition, my friend,” said Kennedy.
“It’s all the same,” answered the old man, smiling his suavely ironical smile. “There is nothing except Nature.”
“You do not believe in miracles, Giovanni Battista?” asked the Englishman.
“Yes, I believe in the earth’s miracles, making trees and flowers grow, and the miracle of children’s being born from their mothers. The other miracles I do not believe in. What for? They are so insignificant beside the works of Nature!”
“He is a pagan,” Kennedy again stated.
YOUNG PAINTERS
They were chatting, when three young lads came into the tavern, all three having the air of artists, black clothes, soft hats, flowing cravats, long hair, and pipes. “Two of them are fellow-countrymen of yours,” Kennedy told Cæsar.
“They are Spanish painters,” the old man added. “The other is a sculptor who has been in the Argentine, and he talks Spanish too.”
The three entered and sat down at the same table and were introduced to Cæsar. Everybody chattered. Buonacossi, the Italian, was a real type. Of very low stature, he had a giant’s torso and strong little legs. His head was like a woe-begone eagle, his nose hooked, thin, and reddish, eyes round, and hair black.
Buonacossi proved to be gay, exuberant, changeable, and full of vehemence.
He explained his artistic ideas with picturesque warmth, mingling them with blasphemies and curses. Things struck him as the best or the worst in the world. For him there doubtless were no middle terms.
One of the two Spaniards was serious, grave, jaundiced, sour-visaged, and named Cortés; the other, large, ordinary, fleshy, and coarse, seemed rather a bully.
Giovanni Battista was not able to be long outside the workshop, no doubt because his conscience troubled him, and though with difficulty, he got up and left. Kennedy, Cæsar, and the two Spaniards went toward the Piazza, del Campidoglio, and Buonacossi marched off in the opposite direction.
On reaching the Via Nazionale, Kennedy took his leave and Cæsar remained with the two Spaniards. The red, fleshy one, who had the air of a bully, started in to make fun of the Italians, and to mimic their bows and salutes; then he said that he had an engagement with a woman and made haste to take his leave.
When he had gone, the grave Spaniard with the sour face, said to Cæsar:
“That chap is like the dandies here; that’s why he imitates them so well.”
Afterwards Cortés talked about his studies in painting; he didn’t get on well, he had no money, and anyway Rome didn’t please him at all. Everything seemed wrong to him, absurd, ridiculous.
Cæsar, after he had said good-bye to him, murmured: “The truth is that we Spaniards are impossible people.”
XVI. THE PORTRAIT OF A POPE
Two or three days later Cæsar met the Spaniard Cortés in the Piazza Colonna. They bowed. The thin, sour-looking painter was walking with a beardless young German, red and snub-nosed. This young man was a painter too, Cortés said; he wore a green hat with a cock’s feather, a blue cape, thick eyeglasses, big boots, and had a certain air of being a blond Chinaman.
“Would you like to come to the Doria gallery with us?” asked Cortés.
“What is there to see there?”
“A stupendous portrait by Velázquez.”
“I warn you that I know nothing about pictures.”
“Nobody does,” Cortés declared roundly. “Everybody says what he thinks.”
“Is the gallery near here?”
“Yes, just a step.”
In company with Cortés and the German with the green hat with the cock’s feather, Cæsar went to the Piazza del Collegio Romano, where the Doria palace is. They saw a lot of pictures which didn’t seem any better to Cæsar than those in the antique shops and the pawnbrokers’, but which drew learned commentaries from the German. Then Cortés took them to a cabinet hung in green and lighted by a skylight. There was nothing to be seen in the cabinet except the portrait of the Pope. In order that people might look at it comfortably, a sofa had been installed facing it.
“Is this the Velázquez portrait?” asked Cæsar.
“This is it.”
Cæsar looked at it carefully. “That man had eaten and drunk well before his portrait was painted,” said Cæsar; “his face is congested.”
“It is extraordinary!” exclaimed Cortés. “It is something to see, the way this is done. What boldness! Everything is red, the cape, the cap, the curtains in the background.... What a man!”
The German aired his opinions in his own language, and took out a notebook and pencil and wrote some notes.
“What sort of man was this?” asked Cæsar, whom the technical side of painting did not preoccupy, as it did Cortés.
“They say he was a dull man, who lived under a woman’s domination.”
“The great thing is,” murmured Cæsar, “how the painter has left him here alive. It seems as if we had come in here to salute him, and he was waiting for us to speak. Those clear eyes are questioning us. It is curious.”
“Not curious,” exclaimed Cortés, “but admirable.”
“For me it is more curious than admirable. There is something brutal in this Pope; through his grey beard, which is so thin, you can see his projecting chin. The good gentleman was of a marked prognathism, a type of degeneration, indifference, intellectual torpor, and nevertheless, he reached the top. Perhaps in the Church it’s the same as in water, only corks float.”
LEGEND AND HISTORY
Cæsar went out of the cabinet, leaving the German and Cortés seated on the sofa, absorbed in the picture; he looked at various paintings in the gallery, went back, and sat down, beside the artists.
“This portrait,” he said presently, “is like history by the side of legend. All the other paintings in the gallery are legend, ‘folk-lore,’ as I believe one calls it. This one is history.”
“That’s what it is. It is truth,” agreed Cortés.
“Yes, but there are people who do not like the truth, my friend. I tell you: this is a man of flesh, somewhat enigmatic, like nature herself, and with arteries in which blood flows; this is a man who breathes and digests, and not merely a pleasant abstraction; you, who understand such things, will tell me that the drawing is perfect, and the colour such as it was in reality; but how about the person who doesn’t ask for reality?”
“Stendhal, the writer, was affected that way by this picture,” said Cortés; “he was shocked at its being hung among masterpieces.”
“He found it bad, no doubt.”
“Very bad?”
“Was this Stendhal English?”
“No, French.”
“Ah, then, you needn’t be surprised. A Frenchman has no obligation to understand anything that’s not French.”
“Nevertheless he was an intelligent man.”
“Did he perhaps have a good deal of veneration?”
“No, he boasted of not having any.”
“Doubtless he did have without suspecting it. With a man who had no veneration, what difference would it make whether there was one bad thing among a lot of good ones?”
The German with the green hat, who understood something of the conversation, was indignant at Cæsar’s irreverent ideas. He asked him if he understood Latin, and Cæsar told him no, and then, in a strange gibberish, half Latin and half Italian, he let loose a series of facts, dates, and numbers. Then he asserted that all artistic things of great merit were German: Greece. Rome, Gothic architecture, the Italian Renaissance, Leonardo da Vinci, Velázquez, all German.
The snub-nosed young person, with his cape and his green hat with its cock-feather, did not let a mouse escape from his German mouse-trap.
The data of the befeathered German were too much for Cæsar, and he took his leave of the painters.
XVII. EVIL DAYS
Accompanied by Kennedy, Cæsar called repeatedly on the most auspicious members of the French clerical element living in Rome, and found persons more cultivated than among the rough Spanish monks; but, as was natural, nobody gave him any useful information offering the possibility of his putting his financial talents to the proof.
“Something must turn up,” he used to say to himself, “and at the least opening we will dive into the work.”
Cæsar kept gathering notes about people who had connections in Spain with the Black party in Rome; he called several times on Father Herreros, despite his uncle’s prohibition, and succeeded in getting the monk to write to the Marquesa de Montsagro, asking if there were no means of making Cæsar Moneada, Cardinal Fort’s nephew, Conservative Deputy for her district.
The Marquesa wrote back that it was impossible; the Conservative Deputy for the district was very popular and a man with large properties there.
When Holy Week was over, Laura and the Countess Brenda and her daughter decided to spend a while at Florence, and invited Cæsar to accompany them; but he was quite out of harmony with the Brenda lady, and said that he had to stay on in Rome.
A few days later Mme. Dawson and her daughters left, and the San Martinos and the Marchesa Sciacca; and an avalanche of English people and Germans, armed with their red Baedekers, took the hotel by storm. Susanna Marchmont had gone to spend some days at Corfu.
In less than a week Cæsar remained alone, knowing nobody in the hotel, and despite his believing that he was going to be perfectly indifferent about this, he felt deserted and sad. The influence of the springtime also affected him. The deep blue sky, cloudless, dense, dark, made him languish. Instead of entertaining himself with something or other, he did scarcely anything all day long but walk.
TWO ABSURD MEN
“I have continually near me in the hotel,” wrote Cæsar to Alzugaray, “two absurd fellows: one is one of those stout red Germans with a square head; the other a fine slim Norwegian. The German, who is a captain in some service or other, is a restless man, always busy about what the devil I don’t know. He is constantly carrying about trunks and boxes, with the aid of a sorrowful valet, dressed in black, who appears to detest his position. The captain must devote the morning to doing gymnastics, for I hear him from my room, which is next to his, jumping and dropping weights on the floor, each of which must weigh half a ton, to judge by the noise they make.
“He does all this to vocal commands, and when some feat doesn’t go right he reprimands himself.
“This German isn’t still a moment; he opens the salon door, crosses the room, stands at the window, takes up a paper, puts it down. He is a type that makes me nervous.
“The Norwegian at first appeared to be a reasonable man, somewhat sullen. He looked frowningly at me, and I watched him equally frowningly, and took him for a thinker, an Ibsenite whose imagination was lost among the ice of his own country. Now and then I would see him walking up and down the corridor, rubbing his hands together so continuously and so frantically that they made a noise like bones.
“Suddenly, this gentleman is transformed as if by magic; he begins to joke with the servants, he seizes a chair and dances with it, and the other day I saw him alone in the salon marching around with a paper hat on his head, like children playing soldiers, and blowing on a cornet, also made of paper.” I stared at him in amazement, he smiled like a child, and asked if he was disturbing me.
“‘No, no, not in the least,’ I told him.
“I have asked in the hotel if this man is crazy, and they have told me that he is not, but is a professor, a man of science, who is known to have these strange fits of gaiety.
“Another of the Norwegian’s doings has been to compose a serenade, with a vulgar melody that would disgust you, and which he has dedicated ‘A la bella Italia.’ He wrote the Italian words himself, but as he knows no music, he had a pianist come here and write out his serenade. What he especially wants is that it should be full of sentiment; and so the pianist arranged it with directions and many pauses, which satisfied the Norwegian. Almost every night the serenade ‘A la bella Italia’ is sung. Somebody who wants to amuse himself goes to the piano, the Norwegian strikes a languid attitude and chants his serenade. Sometimes he goes in front of the piano, sometimes behind, but invariably he hears the storm of applause when it ends, and he bows with great gusto.
“I don’t know whether it’s the other people who are laughing at him, or he who is laughing at the others.
“The other day he said to me in his macaronic Italian:
“‘Mr. Spaniard, I have good eyesight, good hearing, a good sense of smell, and... lots of sentiment.’
“I didn’t exactly understand what he meant me to think, and I didn’t pay any attention to him.
“It seems that the Norwegian is going away soon, and as the day of his departure approaches, he grows funereal.”
THE SADNESS OF LIFE
“I don’t know why I don’t go away,” Cæsar wrote to his friend another time. “When I go out in the evening and see the ochre-coloured houses on both sides and the blue sky above, a horrible sadness takes me. These spring days oppress me, make me want to weep; it seems to me it would be better to be dead, leaving no tomb or name or other ridiculous and disagreeable thing, but disappearing into the air or the sea. It doesn’t seem natural; but I have never been so happy as one time when I was in Paris sick, alone and with a fever. I was in an hotel room and my window looked into the garden of a fine house, where I could see the tops of the trees; and I transformed them into a virgin forest, wherein marvellous adventures happened to me.
“Since then I have often thought that things are probably neither good nor bad, neither sad nor happy, in themselves; he who has sound, normal nerves, and a brain equally sound, reflects the things around him like a good mirror, and feels with comfort the impression of his conformity to nature; nowadays we who have nerves all upset and brains probably upset too, form deceptive reflections. And so, that time in Paris, sick and shut in, I was happy; and here, sound and strong, when toward nightfall, I look at the splendid skies, the palaces, the yellow walls that take an extraordinary tone, I feel that I am one of the most miserable men on the planet....”
ONE SUNDAY AFTERNOON
His lack of tranquillity led Cæsar to make absurd resolutions which he didn’t carry out.
One Sunday in the beginning of April, he went out into the street, disposed to take a walk outside of Rome, following the road anywhere it led. A hard, fine rain was falling, the sky was grey, the air mild, the streets were full of puddles, the shops closed; a few flower merchants were offering branches of almond in blossom.
Cæsar was very depressed. He went into a church to get out of the rain. The church was full; there were many people in the centre of it; he didn’t know what they were doing. Doubtless they were gathered there for some reason, although Cæsar didn’t understand what. Cæsar sat down on a bench, worn out; he would have liked to listen to organ music, to a boy choir. No ideas occurred to him but sentimental ones. Some time passed, and a priest began to preach. Cæsar got up and went into the street.
“I must get rid of these miserable impressions, get back to noble ideas. I must fight this sentimental leprosy.”
He started to walk with long strides through the sad, empty streets.
He went toward the river and met Kennedy, who was coming back, he told him, from the studio of a sculptor friend of his.
“You look like desolation. What has happened to you?”
“Nothing, but I am in a perfectly hellish humour.”
“I am melancholy too. It must be the weather. Let’s take a walk.”
They went along the bank of the Tiber. Full of clay, more turbid than ever, and very high between the white embankments hemming it in, the river looked like a big sewer.
“This is not the ‘coeruleus Tibris’ that Virgil speaks of in the Aeneld, which presented itself to Aeneas in the form of an ancient man with his head crowned with roses,” said Kennedy.
“No. This is a horrible river,” Cæsar opined.
They followed the shore, passed the Castel Sant’ Angelo and the bridge with the statues.
From the embankment, to the right, they could now see narrow lanes, sunk almost below the level of the river. On the other bank a new, white edifice towered in the rain.
They went as far as the Piazza d’Armi, and then came back at nightfall to Rome. The rain was gradually ceasing and the sky looked less threatening. A file of greenish gaslights followed the river-wall and then crossed over the bridge.
They walked to the Piazza del Popólo and through the Via Babuino to the Piazza di Spagna.
“Would you like to go to a Benedictine abbey tomorrow?” asked Kennedy.
“All right.”
“And if you are still melancholy, we will leave you there.”
THE ABBEY
The next day, after lunch, Kennedy and Cæsar went to visit the abbey of Sant’ Anselmo on the Aventine. The abbot, Hildebrand, was a friend of Kennedy’s, and like him an Englishman.
They took a carriage and Kennedy told it to stop at the church of Santa Sabina.
“It is still too early to go to the abbey. Let us look at this church, which is the best preserved of all the old Roman ones.”
They entered the church; but it was so cold there that Cæsar went out again directly and waited in the porch. There was a man there selling rosaries and photographs who spoke scarcely any Italian or French, but did speak Spanish. Probably he was a Jew.
Cæsar asked him where they manufactured those religious toys, and the pedlar told him in Westphalia.
Kennedy went to look at a picture by Sassoferrato, which is in one of the chapels, and meanwhile the rosary-seller showed the church door to Cæsar and explained the different bas-reliefs, cut in cypress wood by Greek artists of the V Century, and representing scenes from the Old and New Testaments.
Kennedy came back, they got into the carriage again, and they drove to the Benedictine abbey.
“Is the abbot Hildebrandus here?” asked Kennedy.
Out came the abbot, a man of about fifty, with a gold cross on his breast. They exchanged a few friendly words, and the superior showed them the convent.
The refectory was clean and very spacious; the long table of shining wood; the floor made of mosaic. The crypt held a statue, which Cæsar assumed must be of Sant’ Anselmo. The church was severe, without ornaments, without pictures; it had a primitive air, with its columns of fine granite that looked like marble. A monk was playing the harmonium, and in the opaque veiled light, the thin music gave a strange impression of something quite outside this life.
Afterwards they crossed a large court with palm-trees. They went up to the second story, and down a corridor with cells, each of which had on the lintel the name of the patron saint of the respective monk. Each door had a card with the name of the occupant of the room.
It looked more like a bath-house than a monastery. The cells were comfortable inside, without any air of sadness; each held a bed, a divan, and a small bookcase.
By a window at the end of the passage, one could see, far away, the Alban Hills, looking like a blue mountain-range, half hidden in white haze, and nearby one could see the trees in the Protestant cemetery and the pyramid of Caïus Cestius close to them.
Cæsar felt a sort of deep repugnance for the people shut up here, remote from life and protected from it by a lot of things.
“The man who is playing the harmonium in this church with its opaque light, is a coward,” he said to himself. “One must live and struggle in the open air, among men, in the midst of their passions and hatreds, even though one’s miserable nerves quiver and tremble.”
After showing them the monastery, the abbot Hildebrand took them to his study, where he worked at revising ancient translations of the Bible. He had photographic copies of all the Latin texts and he was collating them with the original.
They talked of the progress of the Church, and the abbot commented with some contempt on the worldly success of the Jesuit churches, with their saints who serve as well to get husbands and rich wives as to bring winning numbers in the lottery.
Before going out, they went to a window, at the other end of the corridor from where they had looked out before. Below them they could see the Tiber as far as the Ripa harbour; opposite, the heights of the Janiculum, and further, Saint Peter’s.
When they went out, Kennedy said to Cæsar:
“What devilish effect has the abbey produced in you, that you are so much gayer than when we went in?”
“It has confirmed me in my idea, which I had lost for a few days.”
“What idea is that?”
“That we must not defend ourselves in this life, but attack, always attack.”
“And now you are contented at having found it again?”
“Yes.”
PIRANESI’S GARDEN
“I am glad, because you have such a pitiable air when you are sad. Would you like to go to the Priory of Malta, which is only a step from here?”
“Good.”
They went down in the carriage to the Priory of Malta. They knocked at the gate and a woman came out who knew Kennedy, and who told them to wait a moment and she would open the church.
“Here,” said Kennedy, “you have all that remains of the famous Order of Saint John of Jerusalem. That anti-historic man Bonaparte rooted it out of Malta. The Order attempted to establish itself in Catania, and afterwards at Ferrara, and finally took refuge here. Now it has no property left, and all that remains are its memories and its archives.”
“That is how our descendants will see our Holy Mother the Church. In Chicago or Boston some traveller will find an abandoned chapel, and will ask: ‘What is this? ‘And they will tell him: ‘This is what remains of the Catholic Church.’”
“Don’t talk like an Homais,” said Kennedy.
“I don’t know who Homais is,” retorted Cæsar.
“An atheistical druggist in Flaubert’s novel, Madame Bovary. Haven’t you read it?”
“Yes; I have a vague idea that I have read it. A very heavy thing; yes, ... I think I have read it.”
The woman opened the door and they went into the church. It was small, overcharged with ornaments. They saw the tomb of Bishop Spinelli and Giotto’s Virgin, and then went into a hall gay with red flags with a white cross, on whose walls they could read the names of the Grand Masters of the Order of Malta. The majority of the names were French and Polish. Two or three were Spanish, and among them that of Cæsar Borgia.
“Your countryman and namesake was also a Grand Master of Malta,” said Kennedy.
“So it seems,” replied Cæsar with indifference. “I see that you speak with contempt of that extraordinary man. Is he not congenial to you?”
“The fact is I don’t know his history.”
“Really?”
“Yes, really.”
“How strange! We must go tomorrow to the Borgia Apartment in the Vatican.”
“Good.”
They saw the model of an ancient galley which was in the same hall, and went out through the church into the garden planned by Piranesi. The woman showed them a very old palm, with a hole in it made by a hand-grenade in the year ‘49. It had remained that way more than half a century, and it was only a few days since the trunk of the palm had broken.
From the garden they went, by a path between trees, to the bastion of Paul III, a little terrace, from which they could see the Tiber at their feet, and opposite the panorama of Rome and its environs, in the light of a beautiful spring sunshine....