The Girl on the Via Flaminia (14 page)

She went out.

He put his face against the softness of her hair.

“See, baby?” he said. “Everybody loves you.”

“Let me go now,” Lisa said.

“All right,” Robert said. “First let me look at you.”

She closed her eyes and he lifted her face toward him. Tears, exhaustion: and yet the skin still held that fine color, that goldenness. “You're beautiful,” he said.

“I'm not beautiful,” she said. She tried to free herself.

“Where are you going?” he said.

“To wash . . .”

“Okay: but one kiss first.”

“Please,” she said.

“One kiss first,” Robert said.

He drew her to him again, and kissed her, and then she broke away and ran quickly out of the room.

Alone, he put the radio on. They were playing excerpts from the opera. It was in another language and the room filled with music. He thought: now it'll be all right. Now it'll work. It did not matter so much now that it was cold and dark. He remembered suddenly one of the towns in the south. It was a summer afternoon. Bricklayers were rebuilding a wall of a shelled or bombed house. The war had been in the town only two months before. Now the trowels of the bricklayers made sharp distinct clinks as they knocked the bricks into place and set them in the mortar. They were the old bricks of the house. They were putting up the wall with the same bricks and a fresh mortar. He heard the trowels clinking all the way down the street. Yes, he thought: now it'll work. Now—and then Ugo came in, looking at him questioningly.

“Where is Lisa?”

“Making herself beautiful,” he said to Ugo. “And?”

“She's all right,” he said. “She's fine now.”

They were all fine now. You went on so long and then there was a break, a change, a difference. Things got fine again. He was sure of it. It was cold and dark and all the lights were out but now it would go fine.

“And you, conquistatori?” Ugo said, looking at him. “How do you feel?”

“Me? Great.”

“Ah? . . .”

“I'll make them yell Viva la Chicago again,” Robert said. “I'll make them hang out flags and throw roses.”

Ugo sat down, smiling. The radio was loud. It was one of the big arias from an opera he did not know.

“So,” the old man said, “in the end, after the tempest and the tears, everything turns out well. A little love and the world runs smooth . . .”

“How's the macaroni?” Robert said.

“The macaroni's fine. We'll have a real festa. In Italy we say: macaroni and matrimony, if they're not served hot they're no good.”

“Italy,” Robert said. “Italy!”

“A country blessed by God and cursed by man,” Ugo said.

The radio poured out its tremendous music. Robert leaned toward the old man. “Were you ever in Portofino, Ugo?”

“Portofino? Sì. Several times.”

“Is it beautiful?”

“Very beautiful. The sea is all blue there, and the town is white. But why, suddenly, Portofino?”

He said it confidentially, leaning toward the old man. “Because I'm going to be seventeen years old in Portofino one of these days.”

“You're crazy,” Ugo said.

“Sure.”

He grinned. But at least now there wasn't that sensation of an enormous and abandoned space in which the small despairing gestures were made and the small despairing cries were heard. Perhaps it was love that peopled that emptiness and contracted all those horrible distances. “Who knows?” the old man said. “Perhaps the war will be over soon. Then you and Lisa can go away to America . . .” He pushed his spectacles higher. “When an Italian girl is in love, Roberto, she can be all fire and cloud . . .”

“Any girl in love is,” Robert said.

“But especially ours. You'll see! But take her away . . . Europe's done . . . there will be nothing left soon but the monuments.”

“Why don't you get Italy annexed to the United States?” Robert said. “The forty-ninth.”

“Suggest it,” Ugo said. “I'm willing.”

“I'll write my Congressman,” Robert said.

“America,” Ugo said. “An incredible country. No ruins! It hardly belongs in the twentieth century.”

In the hallway the doorbell rang.

Shaking his shapeless raincoat, the pipe in his mouth, the English sergeant came into the dining room.

“Buona sera,” the Englishman said.

She'd been happy in Portofino, Robert thought: it was a white town, and the sea was blue. He wanted to see all of Italy: the quiet and undestroyed places, where the sea was blue. There must be many places like that, undestroyed. It was impossible to destroy everything. They never could destroy everything.

“Ah,” Ugo said to the sergeant, “you're in time . . .”

It must have been bad in the questura for her. But now it would be different: the difference would be in how he felt. He could borrow the jeep again. They could ride out into the country, or when the summer came swim on the Lido, or visit the old castles. They would clear the mines out of the sea and the swimming would be good. It would be different in the sunlight on the sand and the mines cleared away.

“In time?” the Englishman said. “What for?”

“It's a festa tonight at the Pulcinis,” Ugo said.

Yes: music, the opera, the possible swimming when the weather changed, and tonight a festa.

“Do you think we ought to invite England to the festa?” Robert said to the old man.

“Do those islanders like macaroni?” Ugo said.

“Do you like macaroni?” Robert asked the sergeant.

“Hot?” the sergeant said.

“Hot?” Robert said to Ugo.

“Always hot,” Ugo said.

“I like,” the Englishman said.

“Then we invite him,” Ugo said.

“That's right,” Robert said. “He is a kind of ally.” He liked them all now. They were fine, they were allies, they were finally allies. The macaroni would finally unite them, and there would be a change of heart, a change of feeling. Even Antonio would change too, once he got over Libya. They were good people, they were all friends and all allies, and not everything had been destroyed.

“I say, Yank: wasn't that your gel I saw outside?” Robert turned.

The sergeant's pipe was there, where it had been before, and there was no malice, no threat; it was simply information.

“Outside?” he said.

“In the street,” the Englishman said. “She was in an awful hurry. Didn't even have her coat on. Where's the fire? I said. But she didn't seem to hear me.”

He could feel the cold and the dark rush back. The opening again of the enormous distances. The wind blowing through the emptiness.

“Where did she go?” Robert said.

“Down the Via Flaminia last time I saw her.”

He turned and he began to run. In the hallway Ugo and the Englishman could hear Adele's voice calling, “Roberto! Where are you running? The macaroni is almost ready!” They could hear, too, the violent opening of the door.

Puzzled, the Englishman turned to Ugo. “What's wrong with him?” he said. “What'd he lose?”

Ugo stood up, slowly. The weariness was back. “What we've all lost, my friend.” He looked at the sergeant. “Viva la Chicago!” he said, sadly.

 

 

 

 

N
ow he was running. He must not stop running. He had to find her. There was a fog in the streets and there were no lights and the Via Flaminia lay wet and cold and dark. There were two possible directions she could have gone: toward the river, or toward the Piazza del Popolo and the city. He hesitated. He could not decide. The bridges and the river were closer than the city. Then he began to run again.

“Lisa!” he shouted.

He ran toward the city. She must be somewhere there, where the tracks of the trolley ran under the archways of the old gate.

The people who were awake or out could see him running. The men playing cards in the wineshops. The drivers waiting beside their horse-drawn carriages for a fare. The women who kept their appointments in the dark side streets.

But it was only a soldier running.

He wore no coat. He was bareheaded.

He was probably drunk. Or he had been robbed. Or he had committed a crime.

They disregarded him.

When he shouted “Lisa!” into the fog and the darkness, they shrugged their shoulders and said, “Eh, the soldati . . . the trouble is always with women.”

While he ran.

 

Poet, screenwriter, and novelist, Alfred Hayes, was one of the most important American writers of the 1950s and 1960s. Twice nominated for Academy Awards, he wrote films for Fellini, De Sica (
The Bicycle Thief
), Rossellini (
Paisan
), Zinnemann, and Fritz Lang (
Clash By Night
). His novels include
In Love and My Face for the World to See
, and his poem
Joe Hill
was set to music by Earl Robinson and made famous by Joan Baez. Hayes died in 1985.