CHAPTER 10
ROME
Mara’s home near the Piazza Sallustio was a lovely place with a garden surrounded by high walls and well- kept grounds. In the 1950s and 1960s, when the nearby Via Veneto was the center of European la dolce vita, the home was owned by a titled family from Monaco who put it to good use entertaining the glitterati of those heady days. Today the area had slipped into genteel quietude. The real estate was still choice and expensive.
Mara seemed most comfortable here; she had scattered throughout the house the myriad small personal items that one kept around simply because one liked something’s shape or color or had fond remembrances associated with its acquisition.
Here, too, Harry Strand saw for the first time some of Mara’s fully developed drawings, which she had framed and hung throughout the house. She had not told him that they were hers. They had been there nearly a week before he had enough leisure time to wander unhurriedly through the large rooms and examine all the paintings and drawings she had accumulated.
She was a far better artist than she had allowed him to see from the sketching she had been doing in Houston, having implied that her work was little more than academic. She had a very fine hand, a sound grounding in draftsmanship, and a genuinely original eye. She had a few figure studies, but most were studies of Roman architecture and city scenes.
When Strand looked at these pictures, Mara came into a clearer focus. It is inherent in an artist’s work to be revelatory, and Mara’s drawings were no exception. In the way she expressed the attitude of a seated nude, in the way she brought the light to a church or palazzo, or chose a perspective of one of Rome’s countless small, winding streets, she revealed, incrementally, ever more of her mind and personality and gave him access to other dimensions of understanding her. He saw nothing in these works to lessen his growing affection for her. He saw everything to enhance it.
After he had finished the week-long process of acquiring the Fuseli drawings, he and Mara began showing each other “their” Rome. They were surprised to learn that in the past they had spent many months in Rome at the same time, and Mara found it intriguing to speculate that with their common interests they might very well have been in some of the same galleries or museums or restaurants at the same time. In reality, however, Strand knew that his Rome and Mara’s Rome, despite all their common interests, had never had the remotest chance of overlapping. They had been, in fact, worlds apart.
None of that mattered, for in the Rome of the present they stopped pretending that the very thing each of them had desired, and each had believed was inevitable from their first meeting, was not going to happen.
They had been dining late at Toula, which had become their favorite restaurant, an understated place at the throat of the tiny Via della Lupa in the center of the city. They lingered long over desserts and more wine, then walked awhile in the narrow streets near the Pantheon in the cool of an evening so rare that it seemed to have been conjured for them from antiquity. She leaned against him in the taxi, and he could smell her, not her perfume, but the fragrance of her skin, and the ride to Sallustiano took them through a Rome that had never seemed to Strand more beautiful or ancient.
There was no decision, no word spoken, as they climbed the stairs together. With Mara still holding to his arm, he simply walked past his own bedroom and followed her into hers.
He undressed her by the opened balcony doors above the palms, the late Roman breeze moving all about them like a vague memory he could never quite remember. She waited for his hands, head bowed, leaning into him slightly with a grace of controlled desire that he had never before experienced with a woman. When her dress fell away to the floor, she was naked. As he touched her waist, traced his fingers over the rise of her hips, and gently moved his hands up to cup her breasts, she leaned her head forward and put her lips lightly upon his neck. The feel of her was as new and erotic to him as the first moment he had ever felt a woman’s naked breasts, that long lifetime ago as an astonished boy.
“I just got a call from an old friend,” Mara said, approaching the door to the room where Strand had been spending the afternoon poring over half a dozen art books he had bought that afternoon in the Largo Chigi. “A woman I’ve known for years. We’re going to have drinks at a little cafe near the bottom of Veneto. Want to go along?”
Strand looked at his watch and then outside to the courtyard, where the light was already softening in the late afternoon.
“You still want to have dinner at Toula’s at nine?” he asked.
“Sure.”
“Then I think I’ll pass.”
“She’s going to be disappointed.”
Strand shrugged. “I’ll open a bottle of something here and think about you at dusk.”
She came across the room to the sofa, where he sat among books and papers scattered about him, and leaned over the back of the sofa, put her arms around his neck, and kissed him.
“She’s pretty,” she whispered. “You’ll be missing something.”
“Well, that’s enticing”-Strand scratched his temple with his pencil-“but I really don’t want to stop in the middle of this. Tell her… it pained me to forgo the pleasure of her company.”
“Yeah,” Mara said, straightening up, “she’ll swoon.” She turned and headed for the door, grabbing her shoulder bag from a chair on the way out. “See you later.”
Strand worked for nearly an hour more before he stopped, laid aside a folio volume of early Renaissance architectural drawings, and rubbed his eyes. He hadn’t even gotten up from the sofa since Mara left, and he needed to stretch his legs and go to the bathroom. First he turned on a few lamps, giving the room a soft amber glow.
This generous room had become Strand’s favorite place in the house because of its antique furniture and broad doorways opening to the loggia and courtyard. Pictures hung everywhere here, covering the high walls, hanging over the fireplace and over the doors. There were tall narrow paintings and horizontal drawings, some with elaborate frames, some with simple ones, square pictures, small oval ones; oils, pastels, pencil, charcoal, and metal point. One of Mara’s rare large nudes hung on the north wall, a dominant piece that Strand liked very much. In one corner of the room was an easel and a small table cluttered with pencil and charcoal boxes with colorful French and Italian labels.
He went down the corridor to the bathroom, and when he returned he opened the French doors to the evening air, standing and looking out with his hands in his pockets. Somewhere in another concealed garden a peacock cried. The city was all around him, yet the only evidence of it was a faraway and almost imperceptible hum of traffic.
Leaving the French doors open, he stepped outside and stood for a moment in the loggia. The east wall in the courtyard was rosy and deepening quickly as the sun fell behind the Janiculum across the Tiber. He stepped out onto the cinder path that followed the wall and began walking, his shoes making a crunching sound on the cinder. At the far end of the garden he stopped and listened to the peacock again and took a deep breath of the air. The air of Rome changed at dusk and acquired a special quality in the same way that the city’s famous light took on a unique character of its own at certain times of the year. At night the air was nearer to antiquity than in the day, and one could imagine with greater clarity the men and women of former ages.
He moved on, rounding the garden on his way back to the loggia. When he was nearly there he looked toward the French doors, anticipating that the amber glow from the few lamps in the room would be even richer in color now with the greater darkness. Instead he saw a jarring, pale light, flickering against the panes of the French doors.
He stopped. The television? Was Mara home? She hadn’t touched the television since they had arrived.
His heart began to lope, and all of his old reflexes roused themselves as he studied the pale light from the darkness where he stood. Then he walked on. He stepped up on the loggia and entered the villa through the French doors.
No one was there. He called out. Nothing. The house, his sixth sense told him, was empty.
Between the fireplace and the French doors was a small black statue, an admirable study of a Maillol nude. It sat on what must have been a narrow pedestal covered with a faded scarlet Renaissance damask with fleur-de-lis
