brutta figura…” They stepped from the hall into the cavernous picture gallery. The room was dimly lighted, its hundreds of chairs covered with chamois. The Prince wondered if he should mention the paintings, and tried to take his cue from the Duchess. She seemed to be waiting, but was she waiting for him to join her or waiting for a display of his sensibilities? He took a chance and stopped in front of a Bronzino and praised it. “He looks rather better now that he’s been cleaned,” she said. The Prince moved from the Bronzino to a Tintoretto. “I say,” she said, “shall we go on to someplace more comfortable?”
The next gallery was tapestries, and her one concession to these was to murmur, “Spanish. A frightful care. Moths and all that sort of thing.” When the Prince stopped to admire the contents of a cabinet, she joined him and explained the objects, and he caught for the first time a note of ambivalence in her apparent wish to be taken for a simple woman who lived in a flat. “Carved lapis lazuli,” she said. “The vase in the center is supposed to be the largest piece of lapis lazuli in the world.” Then, as if she sensed and regretted this weakening of her position, she asked, as they stepped into the next room, “Did you ever see so much rubbish?”
Here were the cradles of popes, the crimson sedan chairs of cardinals, the bread-and-butter presents of emperors, kings, and grand dukes piled up to the ceiling, and the Prince was confused by her embarrassment. What tack should he take? Her behavior was not what one would expect of an heiress, but was it, after all, so queer, so unreasonable? What strange attitudes might one not be forced into, saddled with a mile or more of paintings, burdened with the bulky evidence of four consecutive centuries of wealth and power? She might, playing in these icy rooms as a girl, have discovered in herself a considerable disinclination to live in a monument. In any event, she would have had to make a choice, for if she took this treasure seriously, it would mean living moment by moment with the past, as the rest of us live with our appetites and thirsts, and who would want to do that?
Their destination was a dark parlor. The Prince watched her stoop down to the baseboard and plug in a feeble lamp.
“I keep all the lamps unplugged, because the servants sometimes forget, and electricity is frightfully expensive in Rome. There we are!” she exclaimed, straightening up and gesturing hospitably to a sofa from which the worn velvet hung in rags. Above this was a portrait by Titian of the first Malvolio-Pommodori pope. “I make my tea on a spirit lamp, because in the time it takes the man to bring tea from the kitchen the water gets quite cold.”
They sat waiting for the kettle to boil. She handed him his tea and smiled, and he was touched, although he didn’t know why. But there seemed about this charming woman, as there was about so much that he admired in Rome, the threat of obsolescence. Her pallor was a little faded. Her nose was a little sharp. Her grace, her accent were close to excessive. She was not yet the kind of woman who carries her left hand adrift in midair, the little finger extended, as vulgar people are supposed to hold a teacup; her airs and graces were not yet mistaken, and through them the Prince thought he felt the beating of a healthy and decent heart. But he felt, at the same time, that her days ended inexorably in the damps of a lonely bed, and that much more of this life would transform her into that kind of wasted virgin whose musical voice has upon men the force of complete sexual discouragement.
“My mother regrets that she was unable to come to Rome,” the Prince said, “but she asked me to express to you her hope that you will someday visit us in our country.”
“How nice,” Donna Carla said. “And please thank your mother. I don’t believe we’ve ever met, but I do recall your cousins Otto and Friedrich, when they were in school here, and please remember me to them when you return.
“You should visit my country, Donna Carla.”
“Oh, I would adore to, but I can’t leave Rome, as things stand now. There is so much to do. There are the twenty shops downstairs and the flats overhead. Drains are forever bursting, and the pigeons nest in the tiles; I have to go to Tuscany for the harvests. There’s never a minute.”
“We have much in common, Donna Carla.”
“Yes?”
“Painting. I love painting. It is the love of my life.”
“Is that so?”
“I would love to live as you do, in a great house where one finds?how can I say it??the true luminousness of art.”
“Would you really? I can’t say that I like it much myself. Oh, I can see the virtues in a pretty picture of a vase of flowers, but there’s nothing like that here. Everywhere I look I see bloody crucifixions, nakedness, and cruelty.” She drew her shawl closer. “I really don’t like it.”
“You know why I am here, Donna Carla?”
“Quite.”
“I come from a good family. I am not young, but I am strong. I…”
“Quite,” she said. “Will you have some more tea.”
