380
PARTISAN REVIEW
The church
is
essential in the same way. It was the first one
dedicated to Mary and has kept the modest, authentic dignity of its
great age beneath its tatters and strange accretions-or not so strange:
there has been no serious change since the twelfth century square
tower and mosaic across the
fa~ade.
It gives the square its deep
subtlety of color and line, and
is
part of its other spaciousness too,
along with the moving water, and as a view of the mountains would
be.
The place itself
is
voyage; that is why there
is
no restlessness.
Neither
is
there anything for the tender heart, neither pity nor self–
pity; for the delicate sensibility it is all scandal and continual death.
The most startling people are the children; no other Italians have
quite that look. These are the boys painted by Caravaggio, with all
the tough seductive wisdom of the city, the toying challenge miles
beyond any illusion, in their eyes; painted sometimes, in their care–
less open shirts, as child saints, when all their sublimity
is
of the rock
bottom. They have been spared nothing, nobody ever changed the
subject when they came into the room; by·the age of seven
it
seems
there is no human temptation or degradation they have not walked
through the boiling center of, no vice they have not made up their
own minds about, and they can have the manners of mule-drivers
or cardinals as they happen to choose; only they cannot dissemble;
they have the appalling candor of all Rome, and when you see it in
a child's face you do not know
if
you are looking at fish or at angels.
You see something else in their eyes; it
is
themselves as very old men,
then their children and great-grandchildren standing before you at
the age of seven and of seventy or a hundred, all with the same two
huge eyeballs looking at you in what might be a smile.
The wonder, you might think, is that their fathers can be so
childish. The rages of these men are marvelous. A vespa brushes with
a filobus and immediately the two drivers are at each other as if
there had been a feud between their families for years. "HOO! LA!
HO!"
((Ignorante!" ((Fesso!" ((Coglione!"
They gesticulate, point
to their steering-wheels and fenders, bring the city to witness; the
buses run from overhead wires so soon twenty are held up. The
owner of the vespa in
his
fury gets his front wheel stuck sideways
and the motor going full speed makes the machine buck like a wild
horse; so the bus moves on but he catches up with it a block later,
