378
PARTISAN REVIEW
but really owning it. It is where they live. The fountains, those two
high waving flags of world Catholicism, are as local as a barnyard
pump. There is no distance; there is no awe of anything.
It is like a party all the time; nobody has to worry about
giving one or being invited; it is going on every day in the street
and you can go down or be part of it from your window; nobody
eats alone in the cafeteria, reading a book. A sick-bed is another
public gathering; there is a ritual of moaning, question and response;
everybody must crowd in.
Then there are the periodic Big Parties, a great deal older than
their present ostensible occasions, dogmas and the names of saints,
so old that the tumescence of life they cause seems of an order with
the habits of bees and the motions of tides. Everybody knows what
to do, none of it is to be decided any more, there is no question of
having a good time or not; if that is what you are supposed to
be
having that day then you are having it. The strolling places are all
big with motion; the main sounds are of laughter, easy as waterfalls,
and motors, but the machines are not going out of the city unless
to the beaches in summer; they are just expressing themselves. The
little iron tables or big wooden ones with their scars and rubbings of
so many other such days, or in some arbor restaurants the hideous
cement ones like cut-rate tombstones, are each a domestic fragment
of the one sprawling family affair- the material of the public table
is of intimate importance in this form of life, more than a person's
own last name; the children are in and out of everything, no distance
there; other families, of four, five, six, rumble by packaged into one
bulbous organism astride the family vespa; and at the proper hour
it is all one mass exodus, to bed.
The honored personage, in any gathering, is the pregnant
woman. She is exhibited, she exhibits herself, everyone feels happier
and more important if there is someone in that condition at the table;
and nothing can be refused her.
If
you refuse a pregnant woman
something she wants you will get a sty in your eye, and her frustrated
wishes will appear as blemishes in the child.
It is a deluge. You are in life way over your head, there is no
getting out of it, except in the
beaux quartiers
which are not
beaux
at all but only pretentious; taste never functioned here on anything
between the hovel and the grand palazzo. There are distances there
