ESTATE OF POMPEII
177
to jot down for his students-but it was Tansy who turned out to
be memorizing them. And as they approached Naples he thought,
there is an anonymity in movement. But when the train stops, voices
are louder, more searching it seems, it is time to take stock. To him
of whom stock is being taken these are bad moments.... And there
was an anonymity too in sitting still, in the dark restaurant at Pompeii
listening to one's wife talk so entrancingly. And he didn't want her to
stop. Naples had been ruin enough in this year of 1948, and sad
enough to have driven Boccaccio himself-Giovenne della Tran–
quillitate indeed-right back to Florence without even having paid
a visit to Virgil's tomb-
"Pompeii," Tansy was reading aloud from her guide book–
as now thank God it started to rain again-"an old Oscan town dat–
ing from the 6th century B.C., which had adopted the Greek cul–
ture, lay in the rich and fertile campania felix close to the sea,
possessing moreover a busy harbor. . . ."
"I know... it exported fish sauce and millstones....But I was
thinking," Roderick brought out
his
pipe, "that I've read little about
the malaise of travellers, even the sense of tragedy that must come
over them sometimes at their lack of relation to their environment."
"
what?"
"The traveller has worked long hours and exchanged good
money for this. And what is this? This, preeminently,
is
where you
don't belong. Is it some great ruin that brings upon you this migraine
of alienation-and almost inescapably these days there seems a ruin
of some kind involved-but it is also something that slips through the
hands of your mind, as it were, and that, seen without seeing, you can
make nothing of: and behind you, thousands of miles away, it is as
if you could hear your own real life plunging to its doom."
"Oh for God's sake Roddy-!"
Roderick leaned over and replenished their wine glasses, at the
same time catching sight of his reflection in a flawed mirror in which
also appeared the rainbarrel and the rain-dripping trellis in the gar–
den and the dove and the girl washing dishes, where behind the word
Cinzano
and to one side of a card stuck in the frame which stated
enigmatically 26-27
Lulio Pellegrinaggio a Taranto
(in Autopulman)
he saw himself: beaming, merry, spectacled, stocky, strong, re–
flective, and grave, forceful yet shy, brave and timid at once, and
