THE FOUNTAINS OF ROME
383
strings has turned to a sly slithering and biting more skillfully dirty
than any of the verses; and after this song the singer will have to get
out his handkerchief though his forehead was dry enough after the
sad ones, at which he seemed to be working so. But this is an act
too and will not make you friends with them, though sporadically,
depending on business and the sirocco, they may pretend so; friend–
ship is an alien idea; sooner or later your feelings are going to get
hurt, and then suddenly it appears that all this time you had not
been where you thought at ,all, among the roots of your own memory,
but in China. It is an oriental city.
The spaghetti and the beads hanging in the doors to keep the
flies out, the guttural singing notes and sudden rests of Roman speech
are Chinese; the reverence for parents, the bright-colored swarming
streets, the easy talk of death; there is nothing here that you will ever
understand.
In the cheaper cafes and wine-shops off the piazza there is a
commotion of domestic gatherings all mixed with undercover opera–
tions of every kind, sexual, commercial; counterfeiters, pickpockets,
and the lower depths of the sports and lottery worlds. There are
plenty of ways of getting into that typically named place Regina
Coeli, but the murders of Rome, now that official fascist murder is
over, are nearly always of passion, and usually in the family. Con–
sidering the habits of the rulers for so long it is peculiar. Perhaps
it is only that serious gangsterism would be too much like working
for an idea and Romans care too much for their skins, but perhaps
it is also because of the purity of the water they drink and see every–
where around them, water being the element of miracle and ultimate
innocence, so that the wickeder they are the more they are only found–
ering in a state of grace. There is not even a concept of crime and
so there has never been any detective fiction, it would not make
sense; if a criminal is any good he is a
bravo,
a hero, but the really
good ones never do come from Rome.
This is terrible; it makes for a terrible familiarity with holiness;
you can treat it like a dog.
You can hear young men"in these
trattone
saying obscene black
masses, sitting under the crowded little bunch of flowers and tiny
electric bulb of the shop shrine or the shrine in the street, droning
and chanting in excellent mimicry a liturgy of Roman four-letter
