After lunch there was nothing to do so I bought an excursion ticket to Vesuvius. There were some Germans and Swiss on the bus and these two American girls, the one who had dyed her hair in some hotel washbasin a funny shade of red and was wearing a mink stole in spite of the heat and the other who had not dyed her hair at all and at the sight of whom my heart, like a big owl, some night bird anyhow, spread its wings and flew away. She was beautiful. Just looking at her different parts, her nose and her neck and so forth, made her seem more beautiful. She kept poking her fingers into her black hair?patting and poking it?and just watching her do this made me very happy. I was jumping, I was positively jumping just watching her fix her hair. I could see I was making a fool of myself so I looked out of the window at all the smoking chimneys south of Naples and the Autostrada there and thought that when I next saw her she would look less beautiful and so I waited until we got to the end of the Autostrada and looked again and she was as fair as ever.
They were together and there wasn’t any way of getting between them when we lined up for the chair lift but then after we were swung up the mountain to the summit it turned out that the redhead couldn’t walk around because she had on sandals and the hot cinders of the volcano burned her feet so I offered to show her friend the sights, what there were to be seen, Sorrento and Capri in the distance and the crater and so forth. Her name was Eva and she was an American making a tour and when I asked her about her friend she said the redhead wasn’t her friend at all but that they had just met in the bus and sat down together because they could both speak English but that was all. She told me she was an actress, she was twenty-two years old and did television commercials, mostly advertising ladies’ razors, but that she only did the speaking part, some other girl did the shaving, and that she had made enough money doing this to come to Europe.
I sat with Eva on the bus back into Naples and we talked all the time. She said she liked Italian cooking and that her father had not wanted her to come alone to Europe. She had quarreled with her father. I told her everything I could think of, even about my father being buried in the Protestant Cemetery. I thought I would ask her to have supper with me at Santa Lucia and so forth but then somewhere near the Garibaldi Station the bus ran into one of those little Fiats and there was the usual thing that happens in Italy when you have a collision. The driver got out to make a speech and everybody got out to hear him and then when we got back into the bus again, Eva wasn’t there. It was late in the day and near the station and very crowded, but I’ve seen enough movies of men looking for their loved ones in railroad-station crowds to feel sure that this was all going to end happily and I looked for her for an hour on the street, but I never saw her again. I went back to the place where we were staying, but there was no one at home, thank God, and I went up to my room, a furnished room?I forgot to say that the marquesa rented rooms?and lay down on my bed and put my face in my arms and thought again that I was never going to get all the loving I needed, no, never.
Later my mother came in and said that I would get my clothes all rumpled, lying around like that. Then she sat down in a chair by my window and asked wasn’t the view divine although I knew that all she could see was a lagoon and some hills and some fishermen on a wharf. I was cross at my mother and with some reason too because she has always taught me to respect invisible things and I have been an apt pupil but I could see that night that nothing invisible was going to improve the way I felt. She has always taught me that the most powerful moral forces in life are invisible and I have always gone along with her thinking that starlight and rain are what keep the world from flying to pieces. I went along with her up until that moment when it was revealed to me that all her teaching was wrong?it was faint-hearted and revolting like the smell of Chinese Temple Incense that comes off that man in church. What did the starlight have to do with my needs? I have often admired my mother, especially in repose, and she is supposed to be beautiful but that night she seemed to me very misled. I sat on the edge of the bed staring at her and thinking how ignorant she was. Then I had a terrible impulse. What I wanted to do was to give her a boot, a swift kick, and I imagined?I let myself imagine the whole awful scene?the look on her face and the way she would straighten her skirt and say that I was an ungrateful son; that I had never appreciated the advantages of my life: Christmas in Kitzbuhel, etc. She said something else about the divine view and the charming fishermen and I went to the window to see what she was talking about.
What was so charming about the fishermen? They were dirty, you could be sure, and dishonest and dumb and one of them was probably drunk because he kept taking swigs out of a wine bottle. While they wasted their time at the wharf their wives and their children were probably waiting for them to bring home some money and what was so charming about that? The sky was golden but this was nothing but an illusion of gas and fire, and the water was blue but the harbor there is full of sewage and the many lights on the hill came from the windows of cold and ugly houses where the rooms would smell of parmigiano rinds and washing. The light was golden, but then the golden light changed to another color, deeper and rosier, and I wondered where I had seen the color before and I thought I had seen it on the outer petals of those roses that bloom late on the mountains after the hoarfrost. Then it paled off, it got so pale that you could see the smoke from the city rising into the air and then through the smoke the evening star turned on, burning like a street light, and I began to count the other stars as they appeared, but very soon they were countless. Then suddenly my mother began to cry and I knew she was crying because she was so lonely in the world and I was very sorry that I had ever wanted to kick her. Then she said why didn’t we not go to San Carlo and take the night train to Rome which is what we did and she was happy to see Tibi lying on the sofa when we got back.
WHILE LYING in bed that night, thinking about Eva and everything, in that city where you can’t hear the rain, I thought I would go home. Nobody in Italy really understood me. If I said good morning to the porter, he wouldn’t know what I was saying. If I went out on the balcony and shouted help or fire or something like that, nobody would understand. I thought I would like to go back to Nantucket where I would be understood and where there would be many girls like Eva walking on the beach. Also it seemed to me that a person should live in his own country; that there is always something a little funny or queer about people who choose to live in another country. Now my mother has many American friends who speak fluent Italian and wear Italian clothes?everything they have is Italian including their husbands sometimes?but to me there always seems to be something a little funny about them as if their stockings were crooked or their underwear showed and I think that is always true about people who choose to live in another country. I wanted to go home. I talked with my mother about it the next day and she said it was out of the question, I couldn’t go alone and she didn’t know anyone any more. Then I asked if I could go back for the summer and she said she couldn’t afford this, she was going to rent a villa at Santa Marinella and then I asked if I could get the money myself could I go and she said of course.
I began to look around then for a part-time job and these are hard to find, but I asked Tibi and he was helpful. He isn’t much, but he is always kind. He said he would keep me in mind and then one day when I came home he asked me if I would like to work for Roncari, the sightseeing company, as a guide on Saturdays and Sundays. This was perfect for me and they tried me out the next Saturday on the bus that goes to Hadrian’s Villa and Tivoli and the Americans liked me I guess because I reminded them of home and I went to work on Sunday. The money was fair and the hours fitted in with my schoolwork and I also thought that the job might offer me an opportunity to meet some wealthy American industrialist who would want to take me back to the United States and teach me all about the steel business, but I never did. I saw lots of American wanderers though and I saw, in my course of duty, how great is the hunger in many Americans who have comfortable and lovely homes to wander
