THE FOUNTAINS OF ROME
381
plants himself square in front of it and begins shouting again. The
scene is mandatory, if you were in the wrong it
is
even more neces–
sary to make out that you were not; and inside the bus everyone is
pleased, more than they were already at being transported like a
shipment of eels; they would have been cheated if one of the drivers
had not played his part. The most relaxed-looking people in Rome
are the bus conductors, patrons all day of a kind of party that puts
the public at its best and wittiest, because the lack
is
not of sensi–
bility, only of nerves. The Roman form of serenade is to race a
motorcycle motor under the girl's window, but mufflers are not
common in any situation; the only things as dearly loved as a good
noise are breakneck speed and eye-splitting lights, preferably neon–
all
expressions of well-being, like a huge belly-laugh.
The women are of the species. Foreign men who take up with
them or try to are nearly dashed to pieces, which in these days is a
common attraction. With their dumpy graceless bodies and an air of
the empire about their beautiful heads and shoulders, their faces not
marred but somehow made more personal and approachable by the
extraordinary frequency of wens on them, these Roman women move
in the blazing noon of a terrible cold sensuality, that can kill be–
cause it is so truly gay. They are said to be the coldest women in
Europe but they are probably also the most candid; they are no
more nebulous than the sky above them, and seem incapable of the
least affectation; and they lose not an atom of their tremendous
inner conviction because their calculations have brought them to a
prospect of doing the washing for the next fifty years under an
image of the Madonna. Their power even takes on another depth of
joyousness once that is settled. The drive of femininity, which is of
the whole being and so just the opposite of nymphomania, never
gives out; neither does the lung power; their voices carry like V2's
across the square and in all the streets around, in a frenzy of anger
you would suppose but it may be only to ask the time and in a
moment
will
be as loud with laughter. With their children
it
is a
torrent treatment that may go on for thirty years, or never stop, of
huggings and slappings and spoiling and tyrannical ordering about.
The American, reflecting on
his
own childhood, feels exposed as to a
break in Boulder Dam.
The guitar player at one of the two restaurants there on the
