PARTISAN REVIEW
friends found themselves once more going to his favorite restaurant,
drinking
his
favorite wine, and being snubbed first by the waiter and
then by their impatient guide.
If
he was a spy, however, his superiors
must at last have given him a new assignment, for the next day he
left Florence, not without giving the young lady
his
restaurant key
to Rome.
In Rome, curiosity led them, at long last, and with some reluc–
tance, to investigate
his
address, which he had written out in the
young lady's address book long ago, on the train, outside Domodossola,
when their acquaintance had promised to be of somewhat shorter
duration.
As
their steps turned into the dusty Via San Ignazio, they
felt their hearts quicken. The European enigma and its architectural
solution lay just before them, around a bend in the street, and they
still, in spite of everything, should not have been surprised to find a
renaissance palace, a coat of arms, and a liveried manservant just
inside the door. But the house was plain and shabby; it was impossible
to conceive of Mr. Sciarappa's gabardines proceeding deftly through
the entrance. Looking at this yellow house, at the unshaven tenant
regarding them from the third-story window, and the mattress and
the geranium in the fourth, the two friends felt a return of that morti–
fication and unseemly embarrassment they had experienced in Miss
Grabbe's bedroom. This house too was an obscenity, like the shrunken
skin and the scapular, but it also was a shell which Rino Sciarappa
did not truly inhabit. By common consent, they turned silently away
from it, with a certain distaste which, oddly enough, was not directed
at Mr. Sdarappa or his residence, but, momentarily, at each other.
The relation between pursuer and pursued had been confounded, by
a dialectic too subtle for their eyes.
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