Returning to her pensione one morning Honora found Norman Johnson waiting for her in the lobby. “Oh, Miss Wapshot,” he said, “oh, it’s so good to see you. It’s so good to see anybody who can talk English. I was told that all these people studied English in school but most of the ones I’ve seen don’t speak anything but Italian. Can we sit down here.” He opened his briefcase and showed her the order for her extradition, a copy of the criminal indictment passed down by the circuit court in Travertine and an order for the confiscation of all her property; but with so much documented power in his hands he seemed shamefaced and it was she who felt sorry for him. “Don’t you worry,” she said, touching him lightly on the knee. “Don’t you worry about me. It’s all my fault. It was just that I was so afraid of the poor farm. I’ve been afraid of the poor farm all my life. Even when I was a little girl. When Mrs. Bretaigne used to take me motoring to see the autumn foliage I used to close my eyes when we passed the poor farm, I was so afraid of it. But now I’m homesick and I want to go back. I’ll go down to the bank and get my money and we’ll go home in one of those flying machines.”
They walked together to the American Express Office, not as a jailer and a culprit but as dear friends. He waited downstairs while she closed her account and she joined him, carrying a large bundle of twenty-thousand lire notes. “I’ll get a taxi,” he said. “You can’t walk through the streets like that. You’ll be robbed.” They stepped out into the Piazza di Spagna.
It was a bright winter’s day. At Fregene the catamarans would be up on rollers, the bathhouses shut, the light on the olives a sad light, the zuppa di pesce signs fallen or hanging from a single nail. The swallows were gone. In Rome it was hot in the sun, cold in the shade, the soft, bright light heightening the curious tidewater look of that old and crowded city as if, sometime in the past, the Tiber had risen over its banks—a flood of dark water—and stained the buildings and churches up to their pediments, leaving the limestone above still pale and still, this late in the year, overgrown at every cranny with thick tufts of grass and capers that looked so like pubic hair that they gave to the celebrated square an antic look. Americans wandered away from the office reading the news from home-sweet-home. Most of the news appeared to be humorous since most of them, from time to time, would smile. They walked, unlike the Italians, as if they accommodated their step to some remembered and explicit terrain—a tennis court, a beach, a plowed field—and seemed set apart by an air of total unpreparedness for change, for death, for the passage of time itself. There were perhaps a hundred and fifty people in the square when Honora entered it and glanced up at the sky. A Danish tourist was photographing his wife on the Spanish Steps. An American sailor was dousing his head in the fountain. There were fresh flowers on the monument to the Virgin. The air smelled of coffee and marigolds. Sixteen German tourists were drinking coffee in a café across the street. 11:18 A.M.
Honora was approached by a barefoot beggar in a torn green dress who held a baby. She gave her a lira note. She gave one to a man in a striped apron, to a little boy in a white coat carrying a tray of coffee, to a good-looking tart holding her coat closed at the throat, to a stooped woman wearing a hat shaped like a wastebasket, to three German priests in crimson, to three Jesuits in black with lavender piping, to five barefoot Franciscans, to six nuns, to three young women in the black, sleazy uniforms worn by the maids of Rome, to a clerk from one of the souvenir shops, to a hairdresser, a barber, a pimp, three clerks, their fingers stained with lavender government office ink; to one dispossessed marquesa, her ragged handbag stuffed with photographs of lost villas, lost houses, lost horses, lost dogs; to a violinist, a tuba player and a cellist on their way to the rehearsal hall on the Via Athenee; to a pickpocket, a seminarian, an antique dealer, a thief, a fool, an idler, a Sicilian looking for work, a carabiniere off duty, a cook, a nursemaid, an American novelist, a waiter from the Inglese, a Negro drummer, a medical-supply salesman and three florists. There was not a hint of charity in her giving. The good her money might do would never cross her mind. The impulse to scatter her money was as deep as her love of fire and she sought, selfishly, an intoxicating sensation of cleanliness, lightness and usefulness. Money was filth and this was her ablution.
