They stood then at the bed's foot. One of the men, smelling death, made a sign of the cross with great speed. Signora Angeletti spoke on and on, apologetic, bold, sympathetic, asserting her rights.
"What is it?" Severn said. "What in God's name -"
"Wait." And John heard her out and heard what she said confirmed more briefly in the Roman basso of the elder of the two men. "It's the law, Severn. Everything is to be burnt at the stake – furniture, books, the very wallpaper. I am a source of infection to the city. I am to be allowed to die first, but then comes the burning."
"It's that man Clark brought, it's that damnable priest at the top of the Steps -"
"It's the law, Severn. La legge, capisco," he said to Signora Angeletti and the two men. They all nodded, thankful to be understood. Nothing personal, they would that the signore could live and flourish, but as he was dying and they had it on medical authority confirmed by the Church that he was then there was nothing for it but the burning and they were sincerely sorry about the expense. "We have to find the money, Severn. To replace what is to be burnt. La legge, you understand. I'm truly sorry, truly. I take back what I said about wishing to die quickly. I must die slowly and grant you time to raise the money." Severn raised pathetic fists towards his temples and was ready to scream. "Calm, calm. There will be time, I promise you. I will expire slowly, like a good boy."
NINE
John Keats's nightly music was from a tiny fountain in the shape of a boat; Belli's was the torrent of Trevi, which he lived above. He and his wife had an apartment in the Poli palazzo, whose windows, like the eyes of the sculpted figures that preside over the waters, looked straight on to the pool and the jets that thrashed into it. Belli was in his study with Gulielmi a week after Epiphany, both standing, both looking down absently into the foam rainbowed by the bright noon. Gulielmi was just back from the north. He had announced that Carlo Porta was dead. He had died of gout the day before Epiphany.
"I should have gone to Milan to see him," Belli said. "He was a great poet."
"A great dialect poet."
"Dialect, dialect, dialect. What in God's name is the difference between a language and a dialect? I'll tell you. A language waves flags and is blown up by politicians. A dialect keeps to things, things, things, street smells and street noises, life."
"Well, now your way is clear. You must replace Porta. No, don't burst out again. As the great poet of dialect. Yes, I know, comparing Milanese and Roman is like comparing French and Spanish, but I mean what you mean – things, appetites, feelings, odours, people, not the big bannered abstractions."
"I've thought of this," Belli said. "Thought of it especially since the great man offered me the great position. Belli on the side of the State, gelder of thought and speech in the service of stability. Belli at nightfall, saving his reason through scurrility. All literature is subversive, somebody said. Voltaire? A repressive office will force me into a metier of subversion. I acknowledge myself to be a split man."
"We're all split. Meat is disgusting, some Englishman said, but it's also delicious. The act of love is bestial but also ecstatic."
"Stability saved through scurrility. Subversion the prop of social order."
"It's the literature that counts. You embrace a kind of martyrdom to write what you have to write. Have you considered what you have to write?"
"Stuff for tavern recitation with the doors closed. Totally unpublishable."
"But what?"
"Time, time, I must be given time. I'm not ready."
The furnishings of the study expressed the contradictions in the man – a plain deal kitchen table, a tavern chair and a chair of French provenance, very fine, an old prie-dieu with stuffed satin well knee-worn, a lectern with an open Jerome, a Jacobin etching showing a generic pope as a feeder of children to a greybeard cannibal God, Lotto's Annunciation (a bad copy) with its cat running scared from Gabriel. On the table was John Keats's cat sonnet, with a literal translation by Gulielmi.
"That boy there," Gulielmi said, "spoke to me of a great long poem about Rome – changing Rome and the unchanging Roman. My heart ached with pity when he told me. I knew it was not for him."
"Changing Rome, indeed. Rome doesn't change, Rome must not be viewed temporally. No work for an outsider. But he's on the right lines in another way. I'm sorry I sneered at this cat sonnet of his."
"Whatever you do, Belli, for God's sake don't take that poem as typical. He's not that kind of poet at all. He's a poet of nature, romance, fairyland, heartache, the classical world as seen in a rainy English garden. That cat sonnet's a mere joke."
"Joke or not, he's on the right lines there. The sonnet form can be dragged low, must be dragged low. The time has come to reject its Petrarchal coronation. You see, God is in cabbage patches and beer-stains on a tavern table. Do you follow me?"
"No."
"I was so bitterly ashamed of that cazzo sonnet – you remember it?"
"Can I ever forget?"
"One must trust one's instinct more. I was really proclaiming the glory of God. Do you follow me?"
"No."
"Never mind. I have some Madeira here. A present from – Never mind. Do you like Madeira?"
"With a biscuit. Do you have a biscuit?"
Belli opened his battered escritoire and disclosed bits of old food – cheese, stale bread, a hunk of salami tough as pemmican. "I sometimes," he said apologetically, "need a little something when working late. Here are English biscuits. That Spanish fellow gave them to me. Pianos?"
"Llanos. Hm, still eatable." Belli poured sweet golden wine. "Hm, not bad really."
"Perhaps," Belli said, having sipped, "I should not say the glory of God. Perhaps, as ever, I go too far." Gulielmi waited, having expected this. "You see, I will end with some – You see, only the other day I heard a Roman workman saying how much he hated work. He said it was hypocritical of priests, who do nothing anyway, extolling the virtues of toil, when the final virtue is to do nothing. In heaven, this man said, the male saints do nothing all day except play with their balls while the female saints merely scratch their cunts." Gulielmi laughed until he choked on biscuit crumbs. Belli remained grave. "I see that," he said, "as a perfect sonnet. I even heard the rhymes lining themselves up. It has to be set down, aromatic Roman speech haloed by a sonnet. How can I talk about doing it to the glory of God?" He seemed genuinely distressed.
"The glory of man," Gulielmi said, after coughing. "But never mind. And now let me tell you what your task is. This boy Keats – whom I must go to visit, and soon, before it is too late – Keats, I say, dreamed that his big Roman poem could be all in sonnets. He was, even if he were to live, the wrong man for it. The work is reserved to you. You depict unchanging Rome through its many voices. You write two thousand, three thousand sonnets. All about dirty cynical suffering rejoicing Rome, and all in Roman voices. Not your voice, not that. Their voices. Why should that make you feel guilty?"
"I'm tempted," Belli said. "Sorely tempted, God help me." He raised his fist to his breast as though to beat it, then opened his fist to grasp his Madeira glass. He sketched, before drinking, a shy gesture of toasting the project.
TEN
"I have conversed with some men who rejoiced in the death or calamity of others, and accounted it as a judgment upon them for being on the other side, and against them in the contention: but within the revolution of a few months, the same man met with a more uneasy and unhandsome death: which, when I saw, I wept, and was afraid; for I knew that it must be so with all men; for we also shall die, and end our quarrels and contentions by passing to a final sentence."