PARTISAN REVIEW
buying a palazzo, which she spoke of continually, he simply declined
to credit. His business interest, it would seem, was far too deep to be
aroused by it, and no commission could be large enough to make him
expand his idea of money to accommodate within it the living heresy
of Miss Grabbe. All over Venice, volunteer real-estate agents were at
work for her, the concierge at the Grand Hotel, the lift-boy, a gondo–
lier, two Communist painters in a studio across the Canal. Mr. Scia–
rappa only smiled impatiently whenever this project was mentioned,
and once he nudged the young lady and significantly tapped his head.
Miss Grabbe, for her part, was unaware of his feelings. The first
evening on the balcony, she had expressed herself strongly against
him. Pointing dramatically to the blue lagoon, the towers, the domes,
the clouds, the Palladian front of San Giorgio, all as pink and white,
as airy, watery, clear, and neat as the bottles and puffs on her own
dressing-table, she had taken the young man's arm and invited him
to choose. "My dear, why do you see him? He is not our sort," she
had said. "Life is too short. He will spoil Venice for you if you let
him." The young man had simply stared. Mr. Sciarappa was a nuis–
ance, but he felt no inclination to trade him for the Venetian "ex–
perience." The bargain was too sharp for his nature.
If
Mr. Sciarappa
obstructed the European view, he also replaced it. The mystery of
Europe lay in him as solidly as in the stones of Venice, and it was
somewhat less worn by previous inquisitive travelers. Night after night,
he and the young lady would sit up examining Mr. Sciarappa with
the refined passion of connoisseurs. It was true that sometimes at the
dinner-hour they would try to give him the slip, yet they felt a certain
relief whenever he rose from behind a potted plant in the hotel
lobby
to claim, once again, their company. He had become a problem for
them in both senses of the word: the impossibility of talking
with
him
was compensated for by the possibilities of talking about him, and the
detachment of their attitude was, they felt, atoned for by their neigh–
borliness in the physical sphere. How much, in fact, they had come
to feel that they owed Mr. Sciarappa their company, they did not rec–
ognize until the afternoon, extraordinary to them, when he was not
on hand to collect the debt.
The day of the fiesta he silently disappeared. Like everyone
else in Venice he had been planning on the occasion. Colored lan-
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