388
PARTISAN REVIEW
There could never, of course, be fairy stories in such a place, any
more than ghost stories; there never have been in the country but they
would be particularly
de trap
in Rome. The Nordic soul misses its
yearnings and regrets. Here in the dazzle of physical facts it detects a
ghastly blank, in which there resounds endlessly that terrible word
pazienza,
applying to all calamities and inconveniences of whatever
degree and meaning not patience at all but an attitude as toward
the facts of astronomy. That is the strange gaiety and relaxation of
the piazza; only you, the alien, ever conceived of happiness; the as–
sumptions in every one of those heads would make any of your
compatriots commit suicide. The absence of friendship can appall
you there too, more than when you suffer from it; it is all bump
and flow, meet and good-by, unless there is some motive for main–
tenance or ritual continuity, but the heart is all in the moment;
the lasting, loyal heart is the one compounded from all their little
ones, as Dr. Strom is from their fears.
The priests and monks and nuns are shocking: what is this
vast population feeding at the expense of the other? So are all their
expensive new houses going up on the Janiculum where they already
have dozens, while the poor are still in caves and huts in the dumps,
having to throw their droppings together with their garbage out the
door. All those men and boys in their long skirts always seem to be
walking on revolving paddles like little steamboats; and how pleased
they are; it is only in the faces of the nuns that you see signs some–
times of great suffering.
There they all go, between the spa and the Bar Gianicolo, down
over the hill into the fat arms of Mother Church, above which .the
Dome, the
cupolone
Romans call it, sits like a Paris hat. This road is
the main artery between it and many of their houses, which are all
the same-tasteless elaborate villas of which the only beauty is the
flowers; the architecture is on a par with modern church music
and the neon crosses that are going up everywhere now-and so there
are processions of them all the time, of all ages and costumes and
prattling in all the world's languages: the Germans most vain in their
scarlet, others with purple sashes, Negro Jesuits from Africa, Chinese,
intense young Dutchmen, Boston Irish not yet used to the soutane,
cold-toed Capucins in brown, Passionists with the heart of Jesus usu–
ally a little crooked over their own.
It
is like a satire of the waterfront
