_THE CARDINAL UNCLE_
As the Cardinal gave no indication of curiosity to see Cæsar, Cæsar
several times said to Laura:
“We ought to call on uncle, eh?”
“Do as you choose. He isn’t very anxious to see you. Apparently he takes
you for an unbeliever.”
“All right, that has nothing to do with calling on him.”
“If you like I will go with you.”
The Cardinal lived in the Palazzo Altemps. That palace is situated in
the Via di S. Apellinare, opposite a seminary. The brother and sister
proceeded to the palace one morning, went up the grand staircase, and
in a reception-room they found Preciozi with two other priests, talking
together in low tones.
One was a worn, pallid old man, with his nose and the borders of his
nasal appendage extremely red. Cæsar considered that so red a nose in
that livid, ghastly face resembled a lantern in a melancholy landscape
lighted by the evening twilight. This livid person was the house
librarian.
“His Eminence is very busy,” said Preciozi, after bowing to the callers.
He spoke with a different voice from the one he used outside. “I will go
in, in a moment, and see if you can see him.”
Cæsar stepped to the window of the reception-room: one could see the
court of the old palace and the colonnade surrounding it.
“This house must be very large,” he said.
“You shall see it later, if you like,” replied the abbé. A little after
this Preciozi disappeared, and reappeared again in the opening of a
glass door, saying, in the discreetly lowered voice which was no doubt
that of his domestic functions:
“This way, this way.”
They went into a large, cold, shabby room. Through an open door they
could see another bare salon, equally dark and sombre.
The Cardinal was seated at a table; he was dressed as a monk and had the
air of being in a bad humour. Laura went promptly to him and kissed his
hand. Cæsar bowed, and as the Cardinal did not deign to look at him,
remained standing, at some distance from the table.
Laura, after having saluted her uncle as a pillar of the Church, talked
to him as a relative. The Cardinal cast a rapid glance at Cæsar, and
then, scowling somewhat less, asked him if his mother was well and if he
expected to be long in Rome.
Cæsar, vexed by this frigid reception, answered shortly in a few cold
words, that all of them were well.
The Cardinal’s secretary, who was by the window assisting at the
interview, shot angry looks at Cæsar.
After a brief audience, which could not have lasted over five minutes,
the Cardinal said, addressing Laura:
“Pardon me, my daughter, but I must go on with my work”; and
immediately, without a look at his nephew or his niece, he called the
secretary, who brought him a portfolio of papers.
Cæsar opened the glass door for Laura to pass.
“Would you like to see the palace?” Preciozi asked them. “There are some
antique statues, magnificent marbles, and a chapel where Saint Aniceto’s
body is preserved.”
“Let’s leave Saint Aniceto’s body for another day,” Cæsar replied
sardonically.
Laura and Cæsar went down the stairway.
“There was no need to come, to behave like that,” she said, upset.
“How so?”
“How so! You behaved like a savage, no more nor less.” “No, he was the
one that behaved like a savage. I bowed to him, and he wasn’t willing
even to look at me.”
“You made up for it by staring at him as if he had been some curious
insect in a cage.”
“It was his fault for not being even barely polite to me.”
“Do you think that a Cardinal is an ordinary person to whom you say:
‘Hello! How are you? How’s business?’”
“I met an English Cabinet Minister in a club once and he was like
anybody else.”
“It’s not the same thing.”
“Do you believe that perhaps our uncle considers that he fulfils a
providential mission, a divine mission?”
“What a question! Of course he does.”
“Then he is a poor idiot. However, it’s nothing to me. Our uncle is a
stupid fool.”
“You discovered that in such a little while?”
“Yes. Fanatical, vain, fatuous, pleased with himself.... He is of no use
to me.”
“Ah, so you thought he would be of some use to you?”
“Why not?”
Her brother’s arbitrary manner of taking things irritated and at the
same time amused Laura.
She believed that he made it a rule to persist in always doing the
contrary to other people.
Laura and her friends of both sexes used to run across one another in
museums, out walking in the popular promenades, and at the races. Cæsar
didn’t go to museums, because he said he had no artistic feeling; races
didn’t interest him either; and when it came to walking, he preferred to
wander at random in the streets.
As his memory was not full of historical facts, he experienced no great
esthetic or archeological thrills, and no sympathy whatsoever with the
various herds of tourists that went about examining old stones.
At night, in the salon, he used to give burlesque descriptions, in
his laconic French, of street scenes: the Italian soldiers with
cock-feathers drooping from a sort of bowler hat, the porters of
the Embassies and great houses, with their cocked hats, their blue
great-coats, and the staff with a silver knob in their hands.
The precise, jocose, biting report of his observations offended Laura
and her lady friends.
“Why do you hate Italians so much?” the Countess Brenda asked him one
day.
“But I don’t hate them.”
“He speaks equally badly of everybody,” explained Laura. “He has a bad
character.”
“Is it because you have had an unhappy life?” the Countess asked,
interested.
“No, I don’t think so,” said Cæsar, feeling like smiling; instead of
which, and without knowing why and without any reason, he put on a sad
look.
_EXERCISES IN HYPOCRISY_
Laura, with her feminine perspicacity, noted that from that day on the
Countess looked at Cæsar a great deal and with melancholy smiles; and
not only the mother appeared interested, but the daughter too.
“I don’t know what it is in my brother,” thought Laura; “women are
attracted to him just because he pays no attention to them. And he knows
it; yes, indeed he does, even thought he acts as if he were unconscious
of it. Both mother and daughter taken with him! Carminatti has been
routed.”
The Countess quickly discovered a great liking for Laura, and as they
both had friends in good Roman society, they made calls together. Laura
was astonished enough to hear Cæsar say that if there was no objection,
he would go with them.
“But the majority of our friends are old ladies, devout old ladies.”
“All the better.”
“All right. But if you come, it is on condition that you say nothing
that would shock them.” “Surely.”
Cæsar accompanied the Countess Brenda and his sister to various
aristocratic houses, and at every one he heard the same conversation,
about the King, the Pope, the Cardinals, and how few or how many
people there were in the hotels. These topics, together with slanders,
constituted the favourite motive for conversation in the great world.
Cæsar conversed with the somewhat flaccid old ladies (“castanae
molles,” as Preciozi called them) with perfect hypocrisy; he regarded
the classic decorations of the salons, and while he listened to rather
strange French and to most elegant and pure Italian, he wondered if
there might be somebody among all this Papal society whom he could use
to forward his ambitions.
Sometimes among the guests he would meet a young “monsignor,” discreetly
smiling, whose emerald ring it was necessary to kiss. Cæsar would kiss
it and say to himself: “Let us practise tolerance with our lips.”
In many of these salons the mania for the English game called “bridge”
had caught with great violence.
Cæsar hated card-games. For a man who made a study of the
stock-exchange, the mechanism of a card-game was too stupid to arouse
any interest. But he had no objection to playing and losing.
The Countesses Brenda and San Martino had “bridge-mania” very hard, and
they used to go to Brenda’s room in the evening to play.
After playing bridge a week, Cæsar found that his money was insensibly
melting away.
“Look here,” he said to Laura.
“What is it?”
“You have got to teach me bridge.”
“I don’t know how to play, because I have no head for such things and I
forget what cards have been played; but they gave me a little book on
the game. I will lend it to you, if you like.”
“Yes, give me it.”
Cæsar read the book, learned the intricacies of the game, and the next
few evenings he acquitted himself so well that the Countess of San
Martino marched off to her room with burning cheeks and almost in tears.
“What a cad you are!” Laura said to him at lunch some days later,
laughing. “You are fleecing those women.”
“It’s their own fault. Why did they take advantage of my innocence?”
“They have decided to go and play in Carminatti’s room without telling
you.”
“I’m glad of it.”
“Do you know, _bambino_, I have to go away for a few days.”
“Where?”
“To Naples. Come with me.”
“No; I have things to do here. I will take you to the station.”
“Ah, you rascal! You are a Don Juan.”
“No, dear sister. I am a financier.”
“I can see your victims from here. But I shall put them on their guard.
You are a blood-thirsty hyena. You like to collect hearts the way the
Red-skins did scalps.”
“You mean coupons.”
“No, hearts. You like to pretend to be simple, because you are wicked. I
will tell the Countess Brenda and her daughter.”
“What are you going to tell them?”
“That you are wicked, that you have a hyena’s heart, that you want to
ruin them.”
“Don’t tell them that, because it will make them fall in love with me. A
hyena-hearted man is always run after by the ladies.”
“You are right. Come along, go to Naples with me.”
“Is your husband such a terrible bore, little sister?”
“A little more cream and a little less impertinence, _bambino_,” said
Laura, holding out her plate with a comic gesture.
Cæsar burst out laughing, and after lunch he took Laura to the station
and remained in Rome alone. His two chief occupations consisted in
making love respectfully to the Countess Brenda and going to walk with
Preciozi.
The Countess Brenda was manifestly coming around; in the evening Cæsar
would take a seat beside her and start a serious conversation about
religious and philosophical matters. The Countess was a well-educated
and religious woman; but beneath all her culture one could see the
ardent dark woman, still young, and with intense eyes.
Cæsar made it a spiritual training to talk to the Countess. She often
turned the conversation to questions of love, and discussed them with
apparent keenness and insight, but it was evident that all her ideas
about love came out of novels. Beyond a doubt, her calm, vulgar husband
did not fill up the emptiness of her soul, because the Countess was
discontented and had a vague hope that somewhere, above or beneath
the commonplaces of the day, there was a mysterious region where the
ineffable reigned.
Cæsar, who hadn’t much faith in the ineffable, used to listen to her
with a certain amazement, as if the plump, strong woman had been a
visionary incapable of understanding reality.
In the daytime Cæsar went walking with Preciozi and they talked of
their respective plans.
_SOLITARY WALKS_
Often Cæsar went out alone, chewing the end of his thoughts as he
strolled in the streets, working out possible schemes of investments or
of politics.
When he got away from the main streets, he kept finding some corner at
every step that left him astonished at its fantastic, theatrical air.
Suddenly he would discover himself before a high wall, on top of
which were statues covered with moss, or huge terra-cotta jars. Those
decorations would stand out against the dark foliage of the Roman ilex
and the tall, black cypresses. At the end of a street would rise a tall
palm, drooping its branches over a little square, or a stone pine, like
the one in the Aldobrandini garden.
“These people were real artists,” Cæsar would murmur, and mean it as a
fact, not taking it for either praise or blame.
His curiosity got excited, despite his determination not to resemble a
tourist in any way. The low windows of a palace would let him see lofty
ceilings with great stretches of painting, or decorated with medallions
and legends; a balcony would display a thick curtain of ivy that hid the
railings; here he would read a Latin inscription cut in a marble tablet,
there he would come upon a black lane between two old houses, with a
battered lantern at its entrance. In the part of town between the Corso
and the Tiber, which is full of narrow, crooked old streets, he loved to
wander until he was lost.
Some details already familiar, he was delighted to see again; he always
halted to look down the Via della Pillotta, with its arches over the
street; and the little flower-market in the Piazza di Spagna always gave
him a sensation of joy.
At dusk Cæsar would walk in the centre of town; the bars filled up with
people who loved to take cakes and sweet wine; on the sidewalks the
itinerant merchants cried their trifling wares; along the Corso a
procession of carriages full of tourists passed rapidly, and a few
well-appointed victorias came driving back from the Pincio and the Villa
Borghese.
Once in a while Cæsar went out in the evening after dinner. There was
scant animation in the streets, theatres didn’t interest him, and he
would soon return to the hotel salon to chat with the Countess Brenda.
Later, in his room, he would write to Alzugaray, giving him his
impressions.