Excerpt
The music surged up the Via Condotti just as Helge Gram turned onto the street in the twilight. It was The Merry Widow, played at a preposterously fast tempo, making it resound like a wild fanfare. And small, dark-haired soldiers stormed past him in the cold afternoon, as if they were no less than part of a Roman cohort which, at a furious double time, was about to fall upon the barbarian hosts rather than peacefully return home to the barracks for supper. Or perhaps that was exactly the reason they were in such a hurry, thought Helge with a smile; for as he stood there with his coat collar turned up against the cold, an oddly his-toric feeling came over him. But then he began humming along — “No, a man will never understand women” — and continued down the street in the direction where he knew the Corso must be.
He stopped at the corner and looked up the street. So that’s how the Corso looked. A ceaselessly flowing stream of traffic in the cramped thoroughfare and a churning throng of people on the narrow sidewalk. He stood still and watched the stream flow past. And he smiled, because he was thinking that now, every single evening, he could head up this street in the dark through the swarms of people until it became as familiar to him as Karl Johans Gaten back home.
Oh, he had the urge right now to walk and walk, through all the streets of Rome, gladly all night long. He was thinking of the city as it lay below him a short time ago, when he stood on Monte Pincio and watched the sun go down.
Clouds had covered the entire sky to the west, crowded together like small pale gray lambs. And the sun gave them glowing golden-amber edges as it sank behind. Beneath the pale sky lay the city, and Helge suddenly knew that this was precisely how Rome should look — not the way he had dreamed of it, but precisely like this, as it was.
Yet everything else he had seen on this trip had disappointed him because it wasn’t the way he had imagined beforehand, as he went about at home, longing to go out and see things. At last, now at last there was one sight that was richer than all his dreams. And it was Rome.
A wide plain of rooftops lay beneath him in the hollow of the valley, a jumble of roofs on buildings that were old and new, tall buildings and low buildings. They looked as if they had been put up quite hap-hazardly and as big as was needed at the time; only in a few places did the streets cut regular clefts through the mass of rooftops. And this whole world of disorderly lines that intersected each other at thou-sands of sharp angles lay rigid and motionless beneath the pale sky, in which an invisible sinking sun sporadically ignited a tiny rim of light on the edges of the clouds. The sun hung dreaming under a delicate, whitish mist, into which not a single spurting column of smoke blended, because there were no factory smokestacks in sight, and no smoke came from any of the comical little tin chimneys sticking up from the buildings.
Grayish yellow lichen lay on the old, rounded, rust-brown roof tiles, and greenery and small shrubs with yellow flowers grew along the eaves. Around the edges of the terraces stood silent, dead agaves in urns, and from the cornices twining plants spilled in silent, dead cascades.
Wherever the upper story of a taller building loomed above its neighbors, dark, dead windows stared out from a red-yellow or gray-white wall — or else they slumbered with closed shutters. But out of the mist rose loggias, looking like the stumps of old watchtowers, and arbors made of wood and tin had been erected on the rooftops.
And above everything hovered the church domes, a countless number of them. The magnificent gray dome far off in the distance, on the other side of the place where Helge caught a glimpse of the flowing river, that was the Basilica of St. Peter.
But on this side of the valley floor, where the dead roofs covered the city — which, on this evening, Helge certainly felt could be called eternal — a low hillside arched its long back toward the sky, and its ridge carried into the distance a lane of Italian stone pines whose crowns spread out into one above the slender pillars of their trunks. And far-thest away, beyond the dome of St. Peter’s, where the eye stopped, another slope rose up with light-colored villas among the pines and cypresses. Surely that must be Monte Mario.
Above his head hung the thick, dark foliage of the holly oaks, and behind him splashed the jet of the fountain with a peculiarly vivid sound. The water crashed against the stone bowl and trickled innocuously into the basin underneath.
Helge whispered aloud to the city of his dreams, whose streets his feet had never trod and whose buildings concealed not one familiar soul: “Rome, Rome, eternal Rome.” And he grew shy before his own lonely being, and afraid, because he was deeply moved, although he knew that no one was there watching him. All the same, he turned around and hurried down toward the Spanish Steps.
Now he was standing here on the corner of Via Condotti and the Corso, feeling an oddly sweet anxiety because he was about to cross through the teeming life of the street and then make his way into the strange city. He would go straight through, all the way to the Piazza San Pietro.
As he cut across the street two young girls walked past him. Those two are undoubtedly Norwegian, it occurred to him at once, and he found the idea amusing. One of them was very blond and wore a light-colored fur.
He suddenly felt happy just from reading the street names on the corners of the buildings, the white inlaid marble plaques with the clean, Roman letters chiseled into them.
The street he was following ended in an open square near a white bridge that had two rows of streetlamps burning a sickly greenish yellow against the vast pale light streaming down from the restless heavens. Along the water ran a low stone parapet, shining wanly, and a row of trees with withered leaves, the bark of their trunks scaling off in big white flakes. On the opposite side of the river, gas lamps burned beneath the trees, and the massive buildings stood black against the sky; but on this side the evening light still flared in the windowpanes. The sky was almost clear now, a transparent blue-green above the ridge with its lane of pines, but a few heaps of heavy cloud banks drifted past, glowing red and yellow, like a portent of storm.
He stopped on the bridge and looked down at the Tiber. How murky the water was! It gushed in torrents, flame-colored from the sky’s reflection; it swept branches and planks and debris along with it, there below in its bed of pale stone walls. On one side of the bridge a small stairway led down to the water. Helge thought about how easy it would be to sneak out here one night if things ever became too unbearable. He wondered if anyone ever did.
In German he asked a constable the way to St. Peter’s, and the con-stable replied in French and then Italian, but when Helge kept on shaking his head, he went back to speaking French and pointed up the street the way the traffic was flowing. Helge set off in that direction.
A massive dark wall rose against the sky, a low round tower with notched battlements and the coal-black silhouette of an angel on top. He recognized the contours of the Castel Sant’Angelo. He passed right below it. There was still enough light in the sky that the statues along the bridge looked yellowish in the dusk, and the Tiber’s water still flowed with the reflection of red clouds, but the gas lamps were gaining in power and cast arcs of light onto the currents. Behind the Ponte Sant’Angelo the electric trolley cars, with lights shining from their win-dows, raced across a new bridge made of iron. Blue-white sparks flew from the insulated wires.
Helge tipped his hat to a man. “San Pietro, favorisca?”
The man pointed and said a great deal that Helge could not under-stand.
The street he now entered was so narrow and dark that he actually felt a thrill of recognition — this was the way he had imagined an Italian street would look. And there was one antiques shop after another. Helge peered with interest into the poorly lit windows. Most of it was probably junk. The dirty remnants of coarse white lace hanging there on strings: Was that Italian lace? There were bits and pieces of pottery displayed in dusty box lids, small, venomous-green bronze figures, old and new metal candlesticks, and brooches with clus-ters of stones that didn’t look genuine. Still, he had an absurd urge to go in and buy something — inquire, bargain, make a purchase. He ended up inside a cramped little shop, almost before he knew what he was doing. But it was an amusing place, with all sorts of strange artifacts: old church lamps up near the ceiling, tattered silk with gold flowers on red and green and white backgrounds, rickety furniture.
Behind the counter sat a dark-haired young man, reading. His skin was golden, his chin blue with stubble. He chattered his replies as Helge pointed at various items and said, “Quanto?” The only thing Helge could understand was that everything was shamelessly expensive. Of course he ought to wait to buy anything until he spoke the language and could haggle properly.
Over on a shelf stood a number of porcelain pieces: rococo figurines and vases decorated with molded bouquets of roses. But they looked new. Helge picked up a little knickknack at random and set it on the counter. “Quanto?”
“Sette,” said the man and put out seven fingers.
“Quattro.” Helge held up four fingers, wearing his new brown glove. And he suddenly felt happy and confident at this leap into a foreign language. It was true that he didn’t understand a word of the clerk’s protests, but each time the man stopped talking, he would repeat his “quattro” and hold up four fingers.
“Non antica!” he added with a flourish.
But the shop clerk insisted: “Antica.”
“Quattro,” said Helge for the last time. Now the man was holding up only five fingers. When Helge turned toward the door, the man called after him — he gave in. Bursting with joy, Helge accepted the knick-knack, which had been wrapped in pink tissue paper.
