Alone
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Norman Douglas >> Alone
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"You never told me why you come to Italy."
"In order," I reply, "to enjoy places like this."
"But listen. Surely you have fountains in your own country?"
"None quite so golden-green."
"Ah, it wants cleaning, doesn't it?"
"Lord, no!" I say; but only to myself. One should never pass for an
imbecile, if one can help it.
Aloud I remark:--
"Let me try to set forth, however droll it may sound, the point of view
of a certain class of people, supposing they exist, who might think that
this particular fountain ought never to be cleaned"--and there ensued a
discussion, lasting about half an hour, in the course of which I
elaborated, artfully and progressively, my own thesis, and forged, in
the teeth of some lively opposition, what struck me as a convincing
argument in favour of leaving the fountain alone.
"Then that is why you come to Italy. On account of a certain fountain,
which ought never to be cleaned."
"I said on account of places like this. And I ought to have added, on
account of moments such as these."
"Are those your two reasons?"
"Those are my two reasons."
"Then you have thought about it before?"
"Often."
One should never pass for an imbecile, if one can help it.
"But listen. Surely it is sometimes two o'clock in the afternoon, in
your country?"
"I used that word moment in a pregnant sense," I reply. "Pregnant: when
something is concealed or enclosed within. What is enclosed within this
moment? Our friendly conversation."
"But listen. Surely folks can converse in your country?"
"They can talk."
"I begin to understand why you come here. It is that difference, which
is new to me, between conversing and talking. Is the difference worth
the long journey?"
"Not to everybody, I daresay."
"Why to you?"
"Why to me? I must think about it."
One should never pass for an imbecile, if one can help it.
"What is there to think about? You said you had thought about it
already.... Perhaps there are other reasons?"
"There may be."
"There may be?"
"There must be. Are you satisfied?"
"Ought I to be satisfied before I have learnt them?"
"I find you rather fatiguing this afternoon. Did you hear about that
murder in Trastevere last night and how the police----"
"But listen. Surely you can answer a simple question. Why do you come to
Italy...?"
Why does one come here?
A periodical visit to this country seems an ordinary and almost
automatic proceeding--a part of one's regular routine, as natural as
going to the barber or to church. Why seek for reasons? They are so hard
to find. One tracks them to their lair and lo! there is another one
lurking in the background, a reason for a reason.
The craving to be in contact with beauty and antiquity, the desire for
self-expression, for physical well-being under that drenching sunshine,
which while it lasts, one curses lustily; above all, the pleasure of
memory and reconstruction at a distance. Yes; herein lies, methinks, the
secret; the reason for the reason. Reconstruction at a distance.... For
a haze of oblivion is formed by lapse of time and space; a kindly haze
which obliterates the thousand fretting annoyances wherewith the
traveller's path in every country is bestrewn. He forgets them; forgets
that weltering ocean of unpleasantness and remembers only its sporadic
islets--those moments of calm delight or fiercer joy which he would fain
hold fast for ever. He does not come here on account of a certain
fountain which ought never to be cleaned. [21] He comes for the sake of
its mirage, that sunny phantom which will rise up later, out of some
November fog in another land. Italy is a delightful place to remember,
to think and talk about. And is it not the same with England? Let us go
there as a tourist--only as a tourist. How attractive one finds its
conveniences, and even its conventionalities, provided one knows, for an
absolute certainty, that one will never be constrained to dwell among
them.
What lovely things one could say about England, in Timbuktu!
Rome is not only the most engaging capital in Europe, it is unusually
heterogeneous in regard to population. The average Parisian will assure
you that his family has lived in that town from time immemorial. It is
different here. There are few Romans discoverable in Rome, save across
the Tiber. Talk to whom you please, you will soon find that either he or
his parents are immigrants. The place is filled with hordes of
employees--many thousands of them, high and low, from every corner of
the provinces; the commoner sort, too, the waiters, carpenters,
plasterers, masons, painters, coachmen, all the railway folk--they are
hardly ever natives. Your Roman of the lower classes does not relish
labour. He can do a little amateurish shop-keeping, he is fairly good as
a cook, but his true strength, as he frankly admits, consists in eating
and drinking. That is as it should be. It befits the tone of a
metropolis that outsiders shall do its work. That undercurrent of
asperity is less noticeable here than in many towns of the peninsula.
There is something of the grande dame in Rome, a flavour of old-world
courtesy. The inhabitants are better-mannered than the Parisians; a
workday crowd in Rome is as well-dressed as a Sunday crowd in Paris. And
over all hovers a gentle weariness.
The city has undergone orgies of bloodshed and terror. Think only,
without going further back, of that pillage by the Spanish and German
soldiery under Bourbon; half a year's pandemonium. And all those other
mediaeval scourges, epidemics and floods and famines. That sirocco, the
worst of many Italian varieties: who shall calculate its debilitating
effect upon the stamina of the race? Up to quite a short time ago,
moreover, the population was malarious; older records reek of malaria;
that, assuredly, will leave its mark upon the inhabitants for years to
come. And the scorching Campagna beyond the walls, that forbidden land
in whose embrace the city lies gasping, flame-encircled, like the
scorpion in the tale....
A well-known scholar, surveying Rome with the mind's eye, is so
impressed with its "eternal" character that he cannot imagine this site
having ever been occupied otherwise than by a city. To him it seems
inevitable that these walls must always have stood where now they
stand--must have risen, he suggests, out of the earth, unaided by human
hands. Yet somebody laid the foundation-stones, once upon a time;
somebody who lived under conditions quite different from those that
supervened. For who--not five thousand, but, say, five hundred years
ago--who would have thought of building a town on a spot like this? None
but a crazy despot, some moonstruck Oriental such as the world has
known, striving to impress his dreams upon a recalcitrant nature. No
facilities for trade or commerce, no scenic beauty of landscape, no
harbour, no defence against enemies, no drinking water, no mineral
wealth, no food-supplying hinterland, no navigable river--a dangerous
river, indeed, a perpetual menace to the place--every drawback, or
nearly so, which a town may conceivably possess, and all of them huddled
into a fatally unhealthy environment, compressed in a girdle of fire and
poison. Human ingenuity has obviated them so effectually, so
triumphantly that, were green pastures not needful to me as light and
air, I, for one, would nevermore stray beyond those ancient portals....
The country visits you here. It comes in the wake of that evening breeze
which creeps about with stealthy feet, winding its way into the most
secluded courtyards and sending a sudden shiver through the frail
bamboos that stand beside your dinner-table in some heated square. Then
the zephyr departs mysteriously as it came, and leaves behind a great
void--a torrid vacuum which is soon filled up by the honey-sweet
fragrance of hay and aromatic plants. Every night this balsamic breath
invades the town, filling its streets with ambrosial suggestions. It is
one of the charms of Rome at this particular season; quite a local
speciality, for the phenomenon could never occur if the surrounding
regions were covered with suburbs or tilth or woodland--were aught save
what they are: a desert whose vegetation of coarse herbage is in the act
of withering. The Campagna once definitely dried, this immaterial feast
is at an end.
I am glad never to have discovered anyone, native or foreign, who has
been aware of the existence of this nocturnal emanation; glad because it
corroborates a theory of mine, to wit, that mankind is forgetting the
use of its nose; and not only of nose, but of eyes and ears and all
other natural appliances which help to capture and intensify the simple
joys of life. We all know the civilised, the industrial eye--how
atrophied, how small and formless and expressionless it has become. The
civilised nose, it would seem, degenerates in the other direction. Like
the cultured potato or pumpkin, it swells in size. The French are
civilised and, if we may judge by old engravings (what else are we to
take as guide, seeing that the skull affords some criterion as to shape
but not size of nose?) they certainly seem to accentuate this organ in
proportion as they neglect its use. Parisians, it strikes me, are
running to nose; they wax more rat-like every day. Here is a little
problem for anthropologists. There may be something, after all, in the
condition of Paris life which fosters the development of this peeky,
rodential countenance. Perfumery, and what it implies? There are
scent-shops galore in the fashionable boulevards, whereas I defy you to
show me a single stationer. Maupassant knew them fairly well, and one
thinks of that story of his:--
"Le parfum de Monsieur?"
"La verveine...." [22]
Speaking of the French, I climbed those ninety odd stairs the other day
to announce my arrival in Italy to my friend Mrs. N., who, being vastly
busy at that moment and on no account to be disturbed, least of all by a
male, sent word to say that I might wait on the terrace or in that
microscopic but well-equipped library of hers. I chose the latter, and
there browsed upon "Emaux et Camees" and the "Fleurs du Mal" which
happened, as was meet and proper, to lie beside each other.
Strange reading, at this distance of time. These, I thought--these are
the things which used to give us something of a thrill.
If they no longer provide that sensation, it may well be that we have
absorbed their spirit so thoroughly into our system that we forget
whence we drew it. They have become part of ourselves. Even now, one
cannot help admiring Gautier's precision of imagery, his gift of being
quaint and yet lucid as a diamond; one pictures those crocodiles
fainting in the heat, and notes, too, whence the author of the "Sphinx"
drew his hard, glittering, mineralogical flavour. The verse is not so
much easy as facile. And not all the grace of internals can atone for
external monotony. That trick--that full stop at the end of nearly every
fourth line--it impairs the charm of the music and renders its flow
jerky; coming, as it does, like an ever-repeated blow, it grows
wearisome to the ear, and finally abhorrent.
Baudelaire, in form, is more cunning and variegated. He can also delve
down to deeps which the other never essayed to fathom. "Fuyez l'infini
que vous portez en vous"--a line which, in my friend's copy of the book,
had been marked on the margin with a derisive exclamation-point. (It
gave me food for thought, that exclamation-point.) But, as to substance,
he contains too many nebulosities and abstractions for my taste; a
veritable mist of them, out of which emerges--what? The figure of one
woman. Reading these "Fleurs du Mal" we realise, not for the first time,
that there is something to be said in favour of libertinage for a poet.
We do not need Petrarca, much less the Love-Letters of a Violinist--no,
we do not need those Love-Letters at all--to prove that a master can
draw sweet strains from communion with one mistress, from a lute with
one string; a formidable array of songsters, on the other hand, will
demonstrate how much fuller and richer the melody grows when the
instrument is provided with the requisite five, the desirable fifty.
Monogamous habits have been many a bard's undoing.
Twenty years' devotion to that stupid and spiteful old cat of a
semi-negress! They make one conscious of the gulf between the logic of
the emotions and that other one--that logic of the intellect which ought
to shape our actions. Here was Baudelaire, a man of ruthless
self-analysis. Did he never see himself as others saw him? Did he never
say: "You are making a fool of yourself"?
Be sure he did.
You are making a fool of yourself: are not those the words I ought to
have uttered when, standing in the centre of the Piazza del Popolo--the
sunny centre: so it had been inexorably arranged--I used to wait and
wait, with eyes glued to the clock hard by, in the slender shadow of
that obelisque which crawled reluctantly, like the finger of fate, over
the burning stones?
And I crawled with it, more than content.
Days of infatuation!
I never pass that way now without thanking God for a misspent youth. Why
not make a fool of yourself? It is good fun while it lasts; it yields
mellow mirth for later years, and are not our fellow-creatures, those
solemn buffoons, ten times more ridiculous? Where is the use of
experience, if it does not make you laugh? The Logic of the
Intellect--what next! If any one had treated me to such tomfoolery while
standing there, petrified into a pillar of fidelity in that creeping
shadow, I should have replied gravely:
"The Logic of the Intellect, my dear Sir, is incompatible with
situations like mine. It was not invented for so stupendous a crisis. I
am waiting for my negress--can't you understand?--and she is already
seven minutes late...."
A flaming morning, forestaste of things to come.
I find myself, after an early visit to the hospital where things are
doing well, glancing down, towards midday, into Trajan's Forum, as one
looks into some torrid bear-pit.
Broken columns glitter in the sunshine; the grass is already withered to
hay. Drenched in light and heat, this Sahara-like enclosure is
altogether devoid of life save for the cats. The majority are dozing in
a kind of torpor, or moribund, or dead. My experiences in the hospital
half an hour ago dispose me, perhaps, to regard this menagerie in a more
morbid fashion than usual. To-day, in particular, it seems as if all the
mangy and decrepit cats of Rome had given themselves a rendezvous on
this classic soil; cats of every colour and every age--quite young ones
among them; all, one would say, at the last gasp of life. This pit, this
crater of flame, is their "Home for the Dying." Once down here, nothing
matters any more. They are safe at last from their old enemies, from
dogs and carriages and boys. Waiting for death, they move about in a
stupid and dazed manner. Sunlight streams down upon their bodies. One
would think they preferred to expire in the shade of some pillar or
slab. Apparently not. Apparently it is all the same. It matters nothing
where one dies.
There is one immediately below me, a moth-eaten desiccated
tortoiseshell; its eyes are closed and a red tongue hangs out of the
mouth. I drop a small pebble. It wakes up and regards me stoically for a
moment. Nothing more.
These cats have lost their all--their self-respect. Grace and ardour,
sleekness of coat and buoyancy of limbs are gone out of them. Tails are
knotted with hunger and neglect; bones protrude through the skin. So
they strew the ground in discomposed, un-catlike attitudes, while the
sun burns through their parched anatomy. Do they remember their
kittenish pranks, those moonlight ecstasies on housetops, that morsel
snatched from a fishmonger's barrow and borne through the crowded
traffic in a series of delirious leaps? Who can tell! They are not even
bored with themselves. Their fur is in patches. They are alive when they
ought to be dead. Nobody knows it better than they do. They are too ill,
too far gone, to feel any sense of shame at their present degradation.
Nothing matters! What would Baudelaire, that friend of cats, have said
to this macabre exhibition?
Yonder is an old one, giving milk to the phantom of a kitten. The parent
takes no interest in the proceedings; she lies prone, her head on the
ground. Her eyes have a stony look. Is she dead? Possibly. Her own
kitten? Who cares! Her neighbour, once white but now earth-coloured,
rises stiffly as though dubious whether the joints are still in working
order. What does she think of doing? It would seem she has formed no
plan. She walks up to the mother, peers intently into her face, then
sits apart on her haunches and begins gazing at the sun. Presently she
rises anew and proceeds five or six paces for no imaginable
reason--collapses; falls, quite abruptly, on her side. There she lies,
flat, like a playing-card.
A sinister aimlessness pervades the actions of those that move at all.
The shadow of death is upon these creatures in the scorching sunshine.
They stare at columns of polished granite, at a piece of weed, at one
another, as though they had never seen such things before. They totter
about on tip-toe; they yawn and forget to shut their mouths. Here is
one, stretching out a hind leg in a sustained cramp; another is
convulsed with nervous twitchings; another scratches the earth in a kind
of mechanical trance. One would say she was preparing a grave for
herself. The saddest of all is an old warrior with mighty jowl and a
face that bears the scars of a hundred fights. One eye has been lost in
some long-forgotten encounter. Now they walk over him, kittens and all,
and tread about his head, as if he were a hillock of earth, while his
claws twitch resentfully with rage or pain. Too ill to rise!
Most of them are thus stretched out blankly, in a faint. Are they
suffering? Hungry or thirsty? [23] I believe they are past troubling
about such things. It is time to die. They know it....
"L'albergo dei gatti," says a cheery voice at my side--some countryman,
who has also discovered Trajan's Forum to be one of the sights of Rome.
"The cats' hotel. But," he adds, "I see no restaurant attached to it."
That reminds me: luncheon-time.
Via Flaminia--what a place for luncheon! True; but this is one of the
few restaurants in Rome where, nowadays, a man is not in danger of being
simultaneously robbed, starved, and poisoned. Things have come to a
pretty pass. This starvation-fare may suit a saint and turn his thoughts
heavenwards. Mine it turns in the other direction. Here, at all events,
the food is straightforward. Our hostess, a slow elderly woman, is
omnipresent; one realises that every dish has been submitted to her
personal inspection. A primeval creature; heaviness personified. She
moves in fateful fashion, like the hand of a clock. The crack of doom
will not avail to accelerate that relentless deliberation. She reminds
me of a cousin of mine famous for his imperturbable calm who, when his
long curls once caught fire from being too near a candle, sleepily
remarked to a terrified wife: "I think you might try to blow it out."
But where shall a man still find those edible maccheroni--those that
were made in the Golden Age out of pre-war-time flour?
Such things are called trifles.... Give me the trifles of life, and keep
the rest. A man's health depends on trifles; and happiness on health.
Moreover, I have been yearning for them for the last five months. Hope
deferred maketh the heart sick.... There are none in Rome. Can they be
found anywhere else?
Mrs. Nichol: she might know. She has the gift of knowing about things
one would never expect her to know. If only one could meet her by
accident in the street! For at such times she is gay and altogether at
your disposal. She is up to any sport, out of doors. To break upon her
seclusion at home is an undertaking reserved for great occasions. The
fact is, we are rather afraid of Mrs. Nichol. The incidents of what she
describes as a tiresome life have taught her the value of masculine
frankness--ultra-masculine, I call it. She is too frank for subterfuge
of any kind. When at home, for instance, she is never "not at home." She
will always see you. She will not detain you long, if you happen to be
de trop.
This, I persuade myself, is a great occasion--my health and
happiness.... Besides, I am her oldest friend in this part of the world;
was I not on the spot when she elected, for reasons which nobody has yet
fathomed, to make Rome her domicile? Have I not more than once been
useful to her, nay, indispensable? I therefore climb, not without
trepidation, those ninety-three stairs to the very summit of the old
palace, and presently find myself ushered into the familiar twilight.
Nothing has changed since I was here some little time ago to announce my
arrival in Italy (solemn occasion), when I had to amuse myself for an
hour or so with Baudelaire in the library, Mrs. Nichol being engaged
upon "house-accounts." This time, as I enter the studio, she is playing
cards with a pretty handmaiden, amid peals of laughter. She often plays
cards. She is puffing at a cigarette in a long mouthpiece which keeps
the smoke out of her olive-complexioned face and which she holds
firm-fixed between her teeth, in a corner of the mouth, after the perky
fashion of a schoolboy. I have interrupted a game, and at once begin to
feel de trop under a glance from those smouldering grey eyes.
"It is not a trifle. It is a matter of life and death. Will you please
listen for half a minute? Then I will evaporate, and you can go on with
your ridiculous cards. The fact is, I am being assassinated by inches.
Do you know of a place where a man can get eatable macaroni nowadays?
The old kind, I mean, made out of pre-war-time flour...."
She lays her hand on the cards as though to suspend the game, and asks
the girl in Italian:
"What was the name of that place?"
"That place----"
"Oh, stupid! Where I stayed with Miranda last September. Where I tore my
skirt on the rock. Where I said something nice about the white
macaroni?"
"Soriano in Cimino."
"Soriano," echoes the mistress in a cloud of smoke. "There is a tram
from here every morning. They can put you up."
A pause follows. I would like to linger and talk to this sultry and
self-centred being; I would like to wander with her through these rooms,
imbibing their strange Oriental spirit--not your vulgar Orient, but
something classic and remote; something that savours, for aught I know,
of Indo-China, where Mrs. Nichol, in one of her immature efforts at
self-realisation, spent a few years as the wife of a high French
official, ere marrying, that is, the late lamented Nichol--another
unsuccessful venture.
Now why did she marry all these people (for I fancy there was yet an
earlier alliance of some kind)? A whim, a freak? Or did they plague her
into it? If so, I suspect they lived and died to repent their manly
persistence. She could grind any ordinary male to powder. And why has
she now flitted here, building herself this aerial bower above the old
roofs of Rome? Is she in search of happiness? I doubt whether she will
find it. She possesses that fatal craving--the craving for disinterested
affection, a source of heartache to the perfect egoist for whom
affection of this particular kind is not a necessity but a luxury, and
therefore desirable above all else--desirable, and how seldom attained!
The pause continues. I make a little movement, to attract notice. She
looks up, but only her eyes reply.
"Now, my good fellow," they seem to say, "are you blind?"
That is the drawback of Mrs. Nichol. Phenomenally absent-minded, she
always knows at a given moment exactly what she wants to do. And she
never wants to do more than one thing at a time. It is most unwomanly of
her. Any other person of her sex would have left a game of cards for the
sake of an attractive visitor like myself. Or, for that matter, an
ordinary lady would have played cards, given complicated orders to
dressmakers and servants, and entertained half a dozen men at the same
time. Mrs. Nichol cannot do these things. That hand, that rather
sunburnt little hand without a single ring on it, has not moved from the
table. No, I am not blind. It is quite evident that she wants to play
cards; only that, and nothing more.
I withdraw, stealthily.
Not downstairs. I go to linger awhile on the broad terrace where
jessamine grows in Gargantuan tubs; there I pace up and down, admiring
the cupolas and towers of Rome that gleam orange-tawny against the blue
background of distant hills. How much of its peculiar flavour a town
will draw--not from artistic monuments but from the mere character of
building materials! How many variations on one theme! This mellow Roman
travertine, for instance.... I call to mind those disconsolate places in
Cornwall with their chill slate and primary rock, the robust and
dignified bunter-sandstone of the Vosges, the satanic cheerfulness of
lava, those marble-towns that blind you with their glare, Eastern cities
of brightly tinted stucco or mere clay, the brick-towns, granite-towns,
wood-towns--how they differ in mood from one another!... Here I pace up
and down, rejoicing in the spacious sunlit prospect, and endeavouring to
disentangle from one another the multitudinous street-cries that climb
to this hanging garden in confused waves of sound. Harsh at close
quarters, they weave themselves into a mirthful symphony up here.
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