James Salter - Burning the Days

As it happened, I didn’t go to Verona or Piacenza. I met other people and then others. I took the apartment of an Englishwoman — her pretty, botanical name, Lyndall Birch, was on a small white card beneath the doorbell — on Via dei Coronari, a narrow, homely street in the old part of the city. The apartment was an attico, three rooms and a terrace, reached by climbing six flights of worn marble stairs. Across the rooftops, hot and becalmed, the Crespis’ terrace could be seen, bounded by furled blue, palatial drapes. It was late June; the city was a furnace, the sun beating down on the ceiling. In the months that were to come I wrote lying prone on the apartment’s cool stone floor, the burning air above my head too thick to breathe.

At dinner one night in a country restaurant I tried to follow the conversation and bursts of laughter. It was all wicked and in Italian. I could make out occasional coarse words. We were in the the garden, grouped around an animated woman named Laura Betti. She was a singer and actress. Pasolini and Moravia had written lyrics for her songs and she performed all the Kurt Weill — Bertolt Brecht repertory in Italian. She talked constantly that night, a cigarette between her fingers. Her laugh was irresistible. Smoke poured from her mouth. She was blonde, a bit heavy, perhaps thirty years old, the sort of woman who proudly wore a latent sadness.

We were in the ancient world, it seemed, in the cool air, the darkness beneath the vines. The empty carafes of wine were replaced by others, the green bottles of minerale. There were six or seven of us. They were talking about everyone and eating from one another’s plates: about the famous actress who liked to make love in two ways at the same time, you could always recognize such women, Laura Betti said, by the way they looked over their shoulder with a knowing smile; about the madwoman who walked the streets singing in a ruined voice, a confused song about her great love who had taken her in his arms, the beauty of Jesus, and the little boy’s dove she touched with her tongue. It was all about love, or, more properly, desire. Rome to them was a village that had no secrets. They knew everything, the names of the four countesses who had picked up an eleven-year-old gypsy girl one night and brought her to the house of a noted journalist to see him have his pleasure with her.

The script I was writing, they asked, what was its nature? Though feeling it sounded naïve, I described it. Perhaps it should not take place in Rome, I suggested — someone had mentioned Piacenza.

“Bologna,” Laura Betti said. “That’s where it could take place.”

“Bologna?”

“It’s marvelous,” her husky voice declared. It was the city she was from.

“Bologna is famous for three things,” she said. “It’s famous for its learning — it has the oldest university in Italy, founded in the twelfth century. It’s famous for its food. The cuisine is the finest in the country. You can eat in Bologna as nowhere else, that’s well known. And lastly, it’s famous for fellatio.” She used another word.

“It’s a specialty,” she said. “All the various forms are called by the names of pasta. Rigate, for instance,” she explained, “which is a pasta with thin, fluted marks. For that the girls gently use their teeth. When there used to be brothels there was always a Signorina Bolognese —that was her specialty.”

The girl who worked in a publishing house and the one from Milan gave no sign of having heard. At nearby tables couples were talking in the darkness. I was impressed by Laura Betti’s cool frankness, her poise — it was my novitiate.

I went to Bologna. Beside the wooden doors of the main station as the train pulled in, a woman was waiting. She nodded and smiled. I knew her name, Camilla Cagli. She was Bolognese; her husband was a lawyer. Laura Betti had called her and asked if she would be able to show me the city, and of that long day it is her smile I remember, the ease of her company, the natural grace. We walked beneath the arcades, talked of life in Bologna, and visited the huge house, the palazzo now become apartments, in which she had been born. For a few hours one is wrapped, even enraptured, in intimacy.

She had been married before, to a man of good family, but it was an empty marriage of bridge games and idleness before the war. She had been lucky and gotten a divorce — almost unheard of in Italy — during a brief period when the Communists were in power.

In the end, however, it was not in Bologna but in Rome itself that it all unfolded.

—

In Rome, the heat bore down. Dark Sicilians rose at two in the afternoon. The Tiber was green and stagnant. On Sunday mornings the highway to the sea was jammed with cars, the music from hundreds of radios beating the blue, exhausted air.

Three or four times a week I traveled up via Flaminia and across the bridge to the apartment of an American woman who was giving me Italian lessons. Her children closed the door to the living room and left us alone. Dorothy Brown was my tutor’s name. We sat on the couch and studied. The vocabulary was not that of school. “The Italians are more interested in the culo than the fica,” she told me, writing down the words. “There is even a verb for it, inculare. The girls all prefer it to preserve their virginity.” Her boyfriend, she said, had done it this way with his cousin since they were both fourteen. Molten images: the dark, shadowed room, the youthful limbs, the faint smooth rustle of sheets.

At noon the boyfriend comes, an aristocrat from the south, small and self-assured, friendly with the children. We have lunch en famille. A maid serves. On her bare upper arm is a vaccination mark the size of a plum. “Marco, mangia,” the boyfriend coaxes the youngest child — eat. “Come fa crescere?” —How are you going to grow big? The sun has emptied the midday streets. Around the Pantheon the cats are dozing beneath parked cars.

Like so many in Rome, Dorothy Brown seemed in a kind of exile. I somehow connect her with California. She had a chance in Rome — there is always a chance, even during revolutions and hard times — though good looks are hardly a guarantee.

Women seemed drawn to Rome, perhaps because of its decadence and the famous avidity of the men. There were women in expensive clothes at the Hassler or Hôtel de Ville; women traveling with their husbands and without; young women who claimed to be actresses — who knows what became of them; pairs of women in restaurants reading the menu very carefully; women stripped of illusion but unable to say farewell; women who owned shops and went to Circeo in the summer; divorced women who had once had a life in Trastevere; English girls who said, Oh, not this week because they weren’t quite right — the doctor was sure it was nothing; girls who looked unbathed, filthy even, sitting in skimpy dresses in the restaurants, with young white teeth; principessas born in Vienna, living in the solitude of vast apartments; and aging fashion editors who seldom strayed far from the Hilton.

Against them, the legions of men: the handsome scum; men whose marriages had never been annulled; men who would never marry; men of dubious occupation; men from the streets and bars, of nullo, nothing; men with good names and dark mouths; swarthy men from the south, polished and unalterable, the nail of their little finger an inch long.

Amid this cast there were somber sights: the English prime minister’s daughter, who was an actress, walking unsteadily through the restaurant, bumping into tables. She had narrow lips and an actress’s always available smile. She was living with a black man on the Via del Corso in an apartment with high ceilings, no furniture, and the smell of incense. The front doors were lined with steel and had well-machined locks.