PARTISAN REVIEW
who seemed to stand there before them, shivering and slightly chicken–
breasted in the nude, Scampi, she said, was very nice, but not in any
way remarkable, the usual Italian man. He had taken her back from
the fiesta, where the orchestra had never been found and she had
grown tired of the painters, who looked ridiculous in costume when
no one else was dressed. He had pinched her bottom on the Riva and
undressed her on the balcony; they had tussled and gone to bed.
Upon the cold stage of Miss Grabbe's bald narrative, he caperr.d' in
and out like a grotesque, now naked chasing her naked onto the
balcony, now gorgeous in a silk dressing-gown and slippers tiptoeing
down the corridor of the hotel, now correct in light tan pajamas duti–
fully, domestically, turning out the light. For a moment, they saw him
all shrunken and wizened. ("My dear, he is much older than you
think," said Miss Grabbe confidentially), and another glimpse re–
vealed him in an aspect still more intimate and terrible, tossing the
scapular he wore about his neck, and which hung down and inter–
fered with his love-making, back again and again, lightly, flippantly,
recklessly, over his thin shoulder.
"Stop," cried the young lady, seizing the young man's hands and
pressing them in an agony of repentance to her own bosom. "Does
it shock you?" inquired Miss Grabbe, lifting her black eyebrows.
"Darling, you
gave
me Sciarappa."
"No, no," begged the young lady, for it seemed to her that this
was not at all what they had wanted,
this
mortal expose, but that,
on the contrary, they had had in mind something more sociological,
more humane-biographical details, Mr. Sciarappa's relation with
his parents, his social position, his business, his connection with the
Fascist state. But of all this, of course, Miss Grabbe could tell them
nothing. The poor Italian, hunted down, defenseless, surprised in
bed by a party of intruders, had yielded nothing but his manhood.
His motives, his status, his true public and social self, everything that
the young lady now called "the really interesting part about him,"
he had carried off with
him
to Rome intact. He was gone and had
left them with his skin, withered, dry, unexpectedly old. Through
Miss Grabbe, they had come as close to him bodily as the laws of na–
ture permit, and there at the core there was nothing-they had known
him better in the Galleria in Milan.-
As
for the affective side of him,
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