Alfred Kazin
FROM AN ITALIAN JOURNAL
"He ought to have a hundred hands to write, for what can
a single pen do here. . .. " Goethe: Rome, 1786.
Florence, June 11, 1947-The night man at the hotel desk is a
wizened, fatherly hunchback, with a face that belongs with the insignia
of little keys fastened to the lapels of his official frock coat. In the hot
and windless summer night, while millions of little green insects buzz
around the flickering street lamps along the Arno, he bustles behind
the bar, amused at our thirst, gently lifting stoppers from decanters
and bringing up green and purple bottles from some mysterious cellar
bin under his feet. An old magician doing his act for spellbound chil–
dren, he first pours out a little of this and then a little of that, pre–
tending to look amazed at their instant transfusion, and as he squeezes
the soda over the highly colored surface, cries out
Eccola!-but
with a
patient solicitousness that says plainly that while nothing will relieve
our thirst if we insist on it so impatiently, he will go on inquiring into
bottle after bottle,
if
we wish.
The lounge is an old family parlor, with the rubber plant on a
lace doily over the upright piano, heavy brass-framed pictures of hunt–
ing dogs and "The Stag At Eve," and old copies of
The Illustrated
London News.
A withered English blonde sits in one corner, reading
The Times,
and from time to time calls across the lounge in a piercing
"Oxford" accent, recounting to another
inglese
her difficulties with
the Italian law, "so unnecessarily complicated." She has come back to
reclaim a house bought before the war. In another corner a man with
the burned-out face of Oswald Spengler: completely bald, shaven head,
rocklike Prussian military skull, burning little eyes, a fierce wide scar
running across his left cheek and deep into his neck like a singed enve–
lope. Junker face, haughty with suffering: he never looks at anyone, and
prowls around the lounge smoking cigarettes out of a long jeweled
holder.
All signs and instructions are first in English, then in French, and
550
