176
PARTISAN REVIEW
If
only that rich flagon of hope would stay too, undiminished
with them! Or
if
one could only go on looking at it as
if
it were some
symbolic vessel of an unevictable happiness!
Roderick McGregor Fairhaven sat listening to his wife describe
the scenes from the train yesterday (not this train, which was the
Circumvesuviana, but the Rapido, the Rome-Naples Express), how
fast it went, past the magnificent Claudian aqueducts, a station,
Torricola--och aye, it was a rapido indeed, he thought, as once
more in memory, bang: and they flashed through Divino Amore.
(No stop for Divine Love.) And the white oxen and high tension lines,
the lupin and hayricks, the bellflowers and yellow mullein, the
haystacks like leaning towers of Pisa, a lone hawk fluttering along
the telegraph wires, the rich black soil- Tansy had seen and re–
corded everything, down to the wildflowers whose name she didn't
know: "Lilac and gold, like a Persi.an carpet." The precipitous, hilly
country, and now on the narrow coastal plain, the feeling of the
shape of Italy: "like a razor-backed hog." Suddenly rain, and the
castellated cities on the hilltops, a few dark tunnels, and beyond in
the fields, in brilliant sunshine again, the men winnowing, the black
chaff blowing from the wheat. And there had been nothing so beau–
tiful, Tansy was saying, as the vermillion poppies blowing among
the delicate tufted ivory-colored wheat. And then Forrnia, a dull
station stop, but with a Naples-like town way off in the distance.
They'd looked out of the window at more castellated towns built
on gray rock, a blaze of poppies by a ruined wall,
3i
flock of white
geese waddling towards a pond where dark grey cows lay sub–
merged like hippopotami. And, "You should have seen them, I
thought they
were
hippopotami," Tansy said, though now there
were a flock of goats, rust-red, black and cream-colored, being her–
ded up a steep hill by a skinny little boy with bare feet and bare
chest and bright blue trousers. And the signs:
Vini Preciati-Ristoro
-Celezioni Calde.
...
What did one want to look at ruins for? Why
shouldn't one prefer the Restaurant Vesuvius to Pompeii, to Vesuvius
itself for that matter? Roderick was now, in so far as he was listen–
ing, but delighted to hear her talk, vicariously enjoying the train
trip in a way he hadn't at all in the howling electric train itself.
Another brief stop: Villa Literno. And the sign:
E Prohibito
Attravesare I Binari.
These were the kind of things he'd planned
