384
PARTISAN REVIEW
words, and other customers will treat them to wine to hear it again.
Italians from any other city speak of them as the scum of the earth.
Then they go off across the piazza, eight or ten of them, with
their arms around each other and one perhaps with a guitar, and
may pair off in the dark or be going to meet their fiancees or both,
or there may be more interesting possibilities, princes or diplomats
hunting in the quarter. On one excursion of the kind a Trastevere
boy went along gladly enough, until he looked around his com–
panion's fashionable bedroom.
uMacche!JJ
he' said. "Are you a Turk?
You have no picture of the Madonna here!"
The unmarried girls are on the whole still rather careful; the
ones who are not write their telephone numbers on five and ten
thousand lire bills; and here enters Dr. Strom, although there is more
than one way of looking at
him.
There are in fact two Dr. Stroms, Dr. Alfredo and Dr. David,
specialists in venereal diseases, "sexual anomalies" and most con–
spicuou.sly impotence, and in point of public notice they are by far
the most outstanding men in the city. They advertise every day in
the best newspapers, also on big signs set in the sidewalk beside all
the important bus-stops; the space must be rented by the city.
There are many other such ads in the papers and scribbled in chalk
on the insides of urinals; a recent one of those read "Better Hell
than Impotence" and had along with the doctor's address a picture
of a devil with a pitchfork; and there is one "sexologist" who ad–
vertises only in the Communist paper; but none can compete with
the great two-headed Dr. Strom. The only question is whether he
really exists, and if he does, how he can make a living. However you
take him, it
is
more of that blurting out; romance is impossible.
The very old are shocking. They are not left out, any more
than criminals, there is no conception of an outside for them to be out
in;
the great living-room with its flower and chestnut stands and shade
or sun for summer or winter is theirs too, the fountains flow for
them.
It
makes no difference how poor or sick or useless or disagree–
able they are. The Eskimos on the other hand are said to take their
old out and abandon them on the ice, with their own consent, and
in America many of our best sociologists are working on this problem.
The beggars are worse. There are thousands of them as there
always were, some with rented children smeared up for the job,
