THE FOUNTAINS OF ROME
387
faucet!" his pretty mother says with hilarious gaiety, addressing
everyone at the three or four tables outside the bar. "He's been five
times this afternoon and I've only been once.... All right, but go be-–
hind the bush. Oh, look at him, he's doing it right here!
Five times!"
She goes off in peals of laughter, doubling over the table with it, and
everyone falls in with her pride and humor; Rodolfo beams, finish–
ing; naturally he
is
spoiled, being such a
wunderkind.
The urinal here is the handsome kind with two compartments
and the screens coming pretty well around, not one of the cheaper
little open niches of the less important streets, where in any case
just as much use is made of the comers provided by the irregularities
of the buildings. It
is
right in front of the cafe, beside the hydrant
and tub, where people stop to drink and bring their bottles to fill
all day, so that especially on holidays there are two waiting lines
or shifting social gatherings mingled there. It is the corner spa, one
part of it for men only-indicating a certain archaism in this society,
but that is deceptive; if there were any exclusion beyond mere con–
venience the men would button their flies inside the screen and not
as they stroll away across the piazza. It is the whole cycle, natural
and manifest as pregnancy or the flow of historical time; and this is
happening all over the city, in combination with hundreds of foun–
tains that are not just a public faucet like this one but designed in
a spirit as of the greatest cathedrals, if you could speak of such a
thing as a cathedral here. The waters themselves so beautiful, even
the less good ones being incredibly limpid, with no suggestion of
transit, none of that half dead look of most city water-all the mil–
lions of gallons of it seem to be springing just that instant from
virgin earth- are among other things continually working their way,
mixed with various quantities of wine, through every single intestinal
and urinal tract in the human conglomeration, and thence eventually
in their new chemical form out the great and equally visible end-hole
of the Cloaca Maxima, that anal opening on the Tiber which
is
pointed to with such intimate affection because it has been discharging
the same substances as now for some twenty-five hundred years, and
some excretion from every person's body in all that time had to go
through it.
It
seems that past generations would moan and a million
and a half living people would start having gastric pains
all
together
if it were blocked up.
