Caesar or Nothing Part 37

A few days later Mme. Dawson and her daughters left, and the San Martinos and the Marchesa Sciacca; and an avalanche of English people and Germans, armed with their red Baedekers, took the hotel by storm.

Susanna Marchmont had gone to spend some days at Corfu.

In less than a week Caesar remained alone, knowing n.o.body in the hotel, and despite his believing that he was going to be perfectly indifferent about this, he felt deserted and sad. The influence of the springtime also affected him. The deep blue sky, cloudless, dense, dark, made him languish. Instead of entertaining himself with something or other, he did scarcely anything all day long but walk.

_TWO ABSURD MEN_

"I have continually near me in the hotel," wrote Caesar to Alzugaray, "two absurd fellows: one is one of those stout red Germans with a square head; the other a fine slim Norwegian. The German, who is a captain in some service or other, is a restless man, always busy about what the devil I don't know. He is constantly carrying about trunks and boxes, with the aid of a sorrowful valet, dressed in black, who appears to detest his position. The captain must devote the morning to doing gymnastics, for I hear him from my room, which is next to his, jumping and dropping weights on the floor, each of which must weigh half a ton, to judge by the noise they make.

"He does all this to vocal commands, and when some feat doesn't go right he reprimands himself.

"This German isn't still a moment; he opens the salon door, crosses the room, stands at the window, takes up a paper, puts it down. He is a type that makes me nervous.

"The Norwegian at first appeared to be a reasonable man, somewhat sullen. He looked frowningly at me, and I watched him equally frowningly, and took him for a thinker, an Ibsenite whose imagination was lost among the ice of his own country. Now and then I would see him walking up and down the corridor, rubbing his hands together so continuously and so frantically that they made a noise like bones.

"Suddenly, this gentleman is transformed as if by magic; he begins to joke with the servants, he seizes a chair and dances with it, and the other day I saw him alone in the salon marching around with a paper hat on his head, like children playing soldiers, and blowing on a cornet, also made of paper." I stared at him in amazement, he smiled like a child, and asked if he was disturbing me.

"'No, no, not in the least,' I told him.

"I have asked in the hotel if this man is crazy, and they have told me that he is not, but is a professor, a man of science, who is known to have these strange fits of gaiety.

"Another of the Norwegian's doings has been to compose a serenade, with a vulgar melody that would disgust you, and which he has dedicated '_A la bella Italia_.' He wrote the Italian words himself, but as he knows no music, he had a pianist come here and write out his serenade. What he especially wants is that it should be full of sentiment; and so the pianist arranged it with directions and many pauses, which satisfied the Norwegian. Almost every night the serenade '_A la bella Italia_'

is sung. Somebody who wants to amuse himself goes to the piano, the Norwegian strikes a languid att.i.tude and chants his serenade. Sometimes he goes in front of the piano, sometimes behind, but invariably he hears the storm of applause when it ends, and he bows with great gusto.

"I don't know whether it's the other people who are laughing at him, or he who is laughing at the others.

"The other day he said to me in his macaronic Italian:

"'Mr. Spaniard, I have good eyesight, good hearing, a good sense of smell, and... lots of sentiment.'

"I didn't exactly understand what he meant me to think, and I didn't pay any attention to him.

"It seems that the Norwegian is going away soon, and as the day of his departure approaches, he grows funereal."

_THE SADNESS OF LIFE_

"I don't know why I don't go away," Caesar wrote to his friend another time. "When I go out in the evening and see the ochre-coloured houses on both sides and the blue sky above, a horrible sadness takes me. These spring days oppress me, make me want to weep; it seems to me it would be better to be dead, leaving no tomb or name or other ridiculous and disagreeable thing, but disappearing into the air or the sea. It doesn't seem natural; but I have never been so happy as one time when I was in Paris sick, alone and with a fever. I was in an hotel room and my window looked into the garden of a fine house, where I could see the tops of the trees; and I transformed them into a virgin forest, wherein marvellous adventures happened to me.

"Since then I have often thought that things are probably neither good nor bad, neither sad nor happy, in themselves; he who has sound, normal nerves, and a brain equally sound, reflects the things around him like a good mirror, and feels with comfort the impression of his conformity to nature; nowadays we who have nerves all upset and brains probably upset too, form deceptive reflections. And so, that time in Paris, sick and shut in, I was happy; and here, sound and strong, when toward nightfall, I look at the splendid skies, the palaces, the yellow walls that take an extraordinary tone, I feel that I am one of the most miserable men on the planet...."

_ONE SUNDAY AFTERNOON_

His lack of tranquillity led Caesar to make absurd resolutions which he didn't carry out.

One Sunday in the beginning of April, he went out into the street, disposed to take a walk outside of Rome, following the road anywhere it led. A hard, fine rain was falling, the sky was grey, the air mild, the streets were full of puddles, the shops closed; a few flower merchants were offering branches of almond in blossom.

Caesar was very depressed. He went into a church to get out of the rain.

The church was full; there were many people in the centre of it; he didn't know what they were doing. Doubtless they were gathered there for some reason, although Caesar didn't understand what. Caesar sat down on a bench, worn out; he would have liked to listen to organ music, to a boy choir. No ideas occurred to him but sentimental ones. Some time pa.s.sed, and a priest began to preach. Caesar got up and went into the street.

"I must get rid of these miserable impressions, get back to n.o.ble ideas.

I must fight this sentimental leprosy."

He started to walk with long strides through the sad, empty streets.

He went toward the river and met Kennedy, who was coming back, he told him, from the studio of a sculptor friend of his.

"You look like desolation. What has happened to you?"

"Nothing, but I am in a perfectly h.e.l.lish humour."

"I am melancholy too. It must be the weather. Let's take a walk."

They went along the bank of the Tiber. Full of clay, more turbid than ever, and very high between the white embankments hemming it in, the river looked like a big sewer.

"This is not the 'coeruleus Tibris' that Virgil speaks of in the Aeneld, which presented itself to Aeneas in the form of an ancient man with his head crowned with roses," said Kennedy.

"No. This is a horrible river," Caesar opined.

They followed the sh.o.r.e, pa.s.sed the Castel Sant' Angelo and the bridge with the statues.

From the embankment, to the right, they could now see narrow lanes, sunk almost below the level of the river. On the other bank a new, white edifice towered in the rain.

They went as far as the Piazza d'Armi, and then came back at nightfall to Rome. The rain was gradually ceasing and the sky looked less threatening. A file of greenish gaslights followed the river-wall and then crossed over the bridge.

They walked to the Piazza del Popolo and through the Via Babuino to the Piazza di Spagna.

"Would you like to go to a Benedictine abbey tomorrow?" asked Kennedy.

"All right."

"And if you are still melancholy, we will leave you there."

_THE ABBEY_

The next day, after lunch, Kennedy and Caesar went to visit the abbey of Sant' Anselmo on the Aventine. The abbot, Hildebrand, was a friend of Kennedy's, and like him an Englishman.

They took a carriage and Kennedy told it to stop at the church of Santa Sabina.

"It is still too early to go to the abbey. Let us look at this church, which is the best preserved of all the old Roman ones."

They entered the church; but it was so cold there that Caesar went out again directly and waited in the porch. There was a man there selling rosaries and photographs who spoke scarcely any Italian or French, but did speak Spanish. Probably he was a Jew.