Umbertina by Helen Barolini

Author:Helen Barolini [Barolini, Helen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781558617278
Publisher: The Feminist Press at CUNY

Chapter Nineteen

The women and children left for the sea first. The writers, intellectuals, artists, and cultural bloc in general started departing after the awarding of the Strega literary prize. By August the shopkeepers, clerks, and civil servants departed, too. Rome was once more in the hands of the outlanders. Tourists bathed their swollen feet in the fountains and huge Rome-by-Night buses passed incessantly, spewing their exhaust fumes and exhibiting the dull stares of old ladies framed in the windows to those who spent the long nights sitting in the piazzas.

Some oases remained. Piazza Navona, with its orangish facades and green ivy, was barred to traffic and turned back to strollers . . . the hippies . . . the kids on bikes . . . the torch-swallowing men.

Massimo was still in Rome, going to his family at the sea only on occasional weekends. Piazza Navona became their scene. Marguerite met him there to go on to the Trattoria Al Antiquariato. Never had summer been so prolonged. Way into September there were days of sun and blue skies for going to the sea at Ostia, near Rome; there were long, mild nights. They walked up and down the stilled summer center of Rome, hand in hand, or his arm around her shoulder. Lovers.

“Are we lovers?” she’d ask.

“No, we’re more than lovers.”

“Then we’re less! That’s what that means. More is less, like Gropius.”

“No, we have more than lovemaking between us, even if that is the most important thing. We have our work, our friendship. . . .”

“Friends for life, amici della pelle!”

“That’s it.”

But later in the night, at her room, when she asked again “Are we lovers?” he answered, “Si, molto.”

At times, apart from him, she would play: Let us now reconstruct the past, and try to make history out of those bits of memory, conversation, images, meetings, and all the rest that made up their story. . . .

He had been circumspect at their first meeting at Angela’s when he stopped by her room to bring her a folder of his unpublished short stories. He sat uneasily on the edge of the studio couch drinking the whiskey she offered him. His reserve increased hers and they spoke only of the plans for her translations of some of the stories.

One evening they went out to dinner together, again for the reason of conferring about the translation in progress. She put on a crepe mini and a Persian necklace and Tina said “Mom’s going out with her boyfriend” as she went out the door. Alberto smiled. As if the thing were so impossible. As if the explanation of meeting Bontelli for the translations were so sufficient.

They had met at Rosati’s. Both of them fitted their picture of each other: Both were well dressed, handsome, likable, clean, and healthy—just like a televised commercial. Except that they were real, and he was more: He was her bridge to a new reality even though he made her passage a slow, perplexing progress.

“I saw Alberto at the Strega, Marguerite, but I didn’t see you.

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