and wouldn’t the imposture make a better story than Tibi and the Pinturicchio? But my father taught me, while we hoed the beans, that I should complete for better or worse whatever I had begun and so we go back to the scene where he leaves the train in Naples.
In Naples I got off the train at the Mergellina hoping to duck the porter. Only a handful of people got off there and I don’t think the porter was one of them although I couldn’t be sure. There was a little hotel on a side street near the station and I went there and took a room and left my suitcase with the painting in it under the bed and locked the door. Then I went out to look for the office of the airline where I could buy my ticket and this was way on the other side of Naples. It was a small airline and a very small office and I think the man who sold me my ticket was probably the pilot too. The plane left at eleven that night so then I walked back to the hotel and as soon as I stepped into the lobby the lady at the desk said that my friend was waiting for me and there he was, the porter, with two carabinieri. He began to holler and yell?all the same things. I had bombed Frascati and Tivoli and invented the hydrogen bomb and now I was stealing one of the paintings that formed the invaluable heritage of the Italian people. The carabinieri were really very nice although I don’t like to talk with people who wear swords but when I asked if I could call the Consulate they said yes and I did. It was about four o’clock then and they said they would send an officer over and pretty soon this big nice American came over who kept saying “Yurp.” I told him I was carrying a package for a friend and that I didn’t know what it contained and he said, “Yurp, yurp.” He had on a big double-breasted suit and he seemed to be having some trouble with his belt or his underwear because every so often he would take hold of his waist and give it a big yank. Then everyone agreed that in order to open my package they would have to get a justice and I got my bag and we all got into the car the consular officer had and drove off to some questura or courthouse where we had to wait a half hour for the justice to put on his sash of office with the golden fringe. Then I opened my suitcase and he passed the package to an attendant who undid the knots in the twine. Then the justice unwrapped the package and there was nothing in it but a piece of cardboard. The porter let out such a roar of anger and disappointment when he saw this that I don’t think he could have been an accomplice and I think the old lady must have thought the whole thing up herself. They would never get back the money they had paid her, any of them, and I could see her, licking her chops like Reddy the Fox. I even felt sorry for Tibi.
In the morning I tried to get a refund on my plane ticket but the office was shut and so then I walked to the Mergellina to get the morning train to Rome. A ship was in. There were twenty-five or thirty tourists waiting on the platform. They were tired and excited, you could see, and were pointing at the espresso machine and asking if they couldn’t have a large cup with cream but they didn’t seem funny to me that morning?they seemed to be nice and admirable and it seemed to me that there was a lot of seriousness at the bottom of their wandering. I was not as disappointed myself as I have been about less important things and I even felt a little cheerful because I knew that I would go back to Nantucket sometime or if not to Nantucket to someplace where I would be understood. And then I remembered that old lady in Naples, so long ago, shouting across the water, “Blessed are you, blessed are you, you will see America, you will see the New World,” and I knew that large cars and frozen food and hot water were not what she meant. “Blessed are you, blessed are you,” she kept shouting across the water and I knew that she thought of a place where there are no police with swords and no greedy nobility and no dishonesty and no briberies and no delays and no fear of cold and hunger and war and if all that she imagined was not true, it was a noble idea and that was the main thing.
A MISCELLANY OF CHARACTERS THAT WILL NOT APPEAR
The pretty girl at the Princeton-Dartmouth Rugby game. She wandered up and down behind the crowd that was ranged along the foul line. She seemed to have no date, no particular companion but to be known to everyone. Everyone called her name (Florrie), everyone was happy to see her, and, as she stopped to speak with friends, one man put his hand fiat on the small of her back, and at this touch (in spite of the fine weather and the green of the playing field) a dark and thoughtful look came over his face, as if he felt immortal longings. Her hair was a fine dark gold, and she pulled a curl down over her eyes and peered through it. Her nose was a little too quick, but the effect was sensual and aristocratic, her arms and legs were round and fine but not at all womanly, and she squinted her violet eyes. It was the first half, there was no score, and Dartmouth kicked the ball offside. It was a muffed kick, and it went directly into her arms. The catch was graceful; she seemed to have been chosen to receive the ball and stood there for a second, smiling, bowing, observed by everyone, before she tossed it charmingly and clumsily back into play. There was some applause. Then everyone turned their attention from Florrie back to the field, and a second later she dropped to her knees, covering her face with her hands, recoiling violently from the excitement. She seemed very shy. Someone opened a can of beer and passed it to her, and she stood and wandered again along the foul line and out of the pages of my novel because I never saw her again.
. All parts for Marlon Brando.
. All scornful descriptions of American landscapes with ruined tenements, automobile dumps, polluted rivers, jerry-built ranch houses, abandoned miniature golf links, cinder deserts, ugly hoardings, unsightly oil derricks, diseased elm trees, eroded farmlands, gaudy and fanciful gas stations, unclean motels, candlelit tearooms, and streams paved with beer cans, for these are not, as they might seem to be, the ruins of our civilization but are the temporary encampments and outposts of the civilization that we?you and I?shall build.
. All such scenes as the following: “Clarissa stepped into the room and then out with this and all other explicit descriptions of sexual commerce, for how can we describe the most exalted experience of our physical lives, as if?jack, wrench, hubcap, and nuts?we were describing the changing of a flat tire?
. All lushes. For example: The curtain rises on the copy office of a Madison Avenue advertising agency, where X, our principal character, is working out the exploitation plans for a new brand of rye whiskey. On a drafting table to the right of his fruitwood desk is a pile of suggestions from the art department. Monarchal and baronial crests and escutcheons have been suggested for the label. For advertising there is a suggested scene of plantation life where the long-gone cotton aristocracy drink whiskey on a magnificent porch. X is not satisfied with this and examines next a watercolor of pioneer America. How fresh, cold, and musical is the stream that pours through the forest. The tongues of the brook speak into the melancholy silence of a lost wilderness, and what is that in the corner of the blue sky but a flight of carrier pigeons. On a rock in the foreground a wiry young man, in rude leather clothing and a coonskin hat, is drinking rye from a stone jug. This prospect seems to sadden X, and he goes on to the next suggestion, which is that one entertain with rye; that one invite to one’s house one exploded literary celebrity, one unemployed actress, the grand-niece of a President of the United States, one broken-down
