Read Collected Novels and Plays for Free Online

dozen people, letting Xenia and Jane believe, if they so wished, that no other passage was available for the next four weeks; finally to catch the afternoon train for Naples and glide, exhausted, out into the gleaming wastes. Francis made his arrangements with the ease of a sleepwalker.
    In twenty-four hours he had nothing left to do. With luggage already at the station, his landlady pacified, flowers sent to Xenia, a final
grappa
with a silent Jane—all this behind him—he strolled through the shuttered city, fingering his passport and ticket and rather too much Italian money. Had he done the wrong thing? Mightn’t he turn round, go back to the Piazza del Popólo, find Jane still at the table where he had left her, chin
     in hand? The sky was so blue, the buildings so astonishingly solid, all shades of orange and brown, stones beautifully streaked from their long embrace of weather—what possible meaning could his departure hold? He wasn’t leaving, he had never arrived. He had nothing to show for it, nothing of Rome had rubbed off on him.
    It made him nervous. He decided to buy something, some small token to take home, a testimonial, a scar. At such moments Francis had the knack of vanishing into the spending of money as into his own room, where none might follow. Across the square a metal shutter went up. He hastened toward the shop, only an hour left before his train.
    It was a shop filled with antiquities, which he and Jane had often visited together. They would squint at intaglios, coins, terra-cotta oil-lamps, fragments of pots and statuary, and at length, no purchase made, smile wistfully into the dim corner where the fat old proprietor sat, conveying to him that his things were very fine but, alas, very costly. They were rarely either, to Francis’s mind. But the game amused him.
    He played it, however, in a different spirit this afternoon. After greeting the old man and reassuring him that no harm had come to the Signorina, Francis bent over glass cases, peered up at shelves, in an almost fearful excitement. The objects seemed to have come alive, to be trembling with the possibility of his possessing them. By the end of a half-hour in which he had smoked three cigarettes, he asked if there was anything he hadn’t seen.
    The old man made a show of thought, then rose with a wheeze to open a cupboard behind him. Francis watched, elated. He felt in his bones that a treasure would appear.
    A big box was placed on the counter. “Since today you are alone,” said the old man craftily, and opened it.
“Ecco, signore!”
    Inside, carelessly thrown together, were perhaps a hundred phalluses, of clay, of marble, some primitive—the old man chose one of these and held it high, croaking, “Etruscan! Votive!”—others (“Roman! Artistic!”) monumental and detailed, evidently chipped from sculpture under whichever Pope had been responsible for fig-leaves. Was it Urban? Or Innocent? Francis stared into the box, his mind blank. Then, coming to himself,
     “Ah no,” he said.
“Questo non é interessante.”
    The shopkeeper courteously ignored this remark. What he had in mind, Francis explained in his clumsy Italian, was something small, precious, something that he might offer as a gift, yes, to the Signorina.
    Had the old man understood? What gift more precious? He might have been musing, as with a quizzical smile he made a third selection, this one winged and erect.
“Porta fortuna!”
he nodded, and Francis lost his temper.
    How exasperating, how Italian, the old man was!
Porta fortuna
,indeed!—the phrase served up in connection with any miserable accident. You had only to stumble and fall upon slimy cobblestones, or break a glass and have to pay for it, and up would come a crone or a smiling waiter to observe that the misfortune was sure to bring you good luck. Why, your own grandmother might die, or yourself, a little black bug of a priest shutting your
     eyes—from nowhere the dry voice would be