A Time In Rome by Elizabeth Bowen

Author:Elizabeth Bowen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Vintage Classics

IV

THE SMILE

TO THE SUN Rome owes its underlying glow, and its air called golden—to me, more the yellow of white wine; like wine it raises agreeability to poetry. One remembers the glow as a constant, the city as a succession of bright distances—there can be blindness to what is harsh or hideous, sprawlingness, rag-gedness at the edges. There can be days when the eye appeases the ear, diverting it somehow from noisiness—Rome, less excruciating than Paris or Madrid, has inevitably its hell’s cauldrons, such as the Piazza Barberini, but I have known those to be endurable, if only for the pleasure of getting out of them: round any corner may be a sudden hush. The February, March, and April I was there, winter was like spring, spring like summer. A mild year, everybody remarked. February, almond and judas trees fluffed the Borghese and other gardens with pink and purple; pavements gave off what (to me, coming from the Atlantic) was almost a Mediterranean glare; soil was hard underfoot, and flags out or washing drying flicked at the sunshine like tinted fires. This, a wintry version of what was still in store, acted on me like an extra season grafted into the calendar, a bonus. By April, I found myself thinking twice, round noon, about any ascent of steps—roses began; round me buildings deepened from blonde to honey. While it lasts, such weather seems everlasting.

But there is no constant, rather a range of changes which are extreme, theatrical. (The only neutral I know of is a drained-away day, such as that of my February arrival, when the sky fades over a Rome fatigued and unreal.) There are onslaughts which have the character of reprisals—such as when, under an iron cloud-ceiling, grit begins by blowing in weird puffs, then gales mount up into ferocity, spattering bent fountains, clawing at awnings, ruffling the dull Tiber, dementing the shutters on their hooks. My first Sunday, wind wrenched a glass transom out of a public building and dashed it on to the street across the way, all but decapitating a pair of lovers. Rome has also an anti-weather which makes for lassitude, through heaviness, or tension—nothing is more ominous than when clouds pile up, fulvous and inky, behind livid buildings on the hills. Thunder grumbles more angrily here than elsewhere. Rain crashes down so hard that it rebounds, making everything dark, clammy, and stuffy indoors or out—there may be Venice-like reflections in the watery tarmac; and rain is to be admired inside the Pantheon, where, falling through the round aperture in the top of the dome, it forms a diaphanous central pillar, running away at the base through the slots cut for it. Otherwise, nothing is so demoralizing, unedifying, and indeed dangerous as a Roman wet day—everything goes slippery underfoot, traffic makes lunges at you half-blindedly, for on streaming windscreens wipers cannot work fast enough. Write such a day off, if you can afford to: settle for a cinema, or, in a corner of a café, puzzle over the blank back pages of a neglected diary.

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