394
PARTISAN REVIEW
is
one of the best cafes--and
if
there
is
nothing better to do she will
advise young people to be happily married. Herself, so she says, she
has had four husbands and been in love other times too but she never
found, she says looking at you in her bold blank ingenuous way, the
word coming right along, the ideal; she would always discover some
horrible thing and it would be finished. The last one was the director
of "my paper." She believed in him, and he was taking care of her,
b1l1.t then she found out horrible things and it made her sick, that's
why she had to go away to the cure for four months. She was eating
her heart out; so Roberto Rossellini who knew all about it went and
spoke to the director, and he was really
sorry,
but still there were
those horrible things she had learned. True love was what she had
wanted; she has never found the ideal.
Out
in
the empty piazza two of Bernini's bold white river figures
catch the light, one with his hand up
in
comic horror, the other
hiding
his
head; the fountain's obelisk finishes in shadow, you can
hear the water trickling over the marble snake and marine centaur
beneath. Carolina is looking at you with wicked wide-eyed innocence:
you are supposed to be moved by these confidences; she would not
have been happy to end the day with a poor performance. At last
she finishes her coffee, gathers up her few unsold papers, faces the
sinister gleam of the piazza like someone setting out alone at night
across an ocean.
"Non ho mai trovato l'ideale.'J
