He could not now, a minute after opening the book, recall whether he had opened at random or not. Cazzica, an Interjection of admiration, what! gods me! god forbid, tush. Tush, not to be superstitious, it was as though there might have been a sly Elizabethan guiding of his finger to cazzo and the rest that approval might in a manner thus be expressed from the shades of his translating that prick-naming sonnet. An interjection of admiration. He turned now to the back of the book, where Florio gave instructions as to the pronunciation of Italian:
For so much as the Italians have two very different sounds for the two vowels E and O which for distinctions sake, they name the one close and the other open… The close E… is pronounced as the English E or Ea, as in these words, Bell, Beane, Den, Deane, Fell, Flea, Meade, Quell, Sell, Tell amp;c and the open E… is ever pronounced as Ai in English, as in these words Baile, Baine, Daine, Faile, Flaile, Maide, Quaile, Saile, Taile, amp;c…
It began to sunrise upon him slowly what this meant. It meant that he was being granted a vision (not the just word. Audition?) of how Shakespeare spoke. He spoke like an Irishman, cazzica. He said not flea but flay. He pronounced reason as raisin. And now it flashed in where the joke was in Falstaff's words: "reasons are as plentiful as blackberries." Of course, raisins. With awe and something of fear, John felt as if he were being instructed by the dead in person, souls of poets dead and gone. Doors were being opened. Welcome to long life and further revelations. The gods were accepting the blood sacrifice of Lieutenant Elton. He, John Keats, was being reserved for, preserved for -
He was on his feet, hands behind him, pacing from wall to wall when Dr Clark came in. Clark said: "Good morning," tossed a coin in his head it seemed and decided on Scotch. "Ye seem – restless, restive, unrested. Ye luik to me to hae a fever, mon."
"I am well, I never felt better. There are so many things I have to do. Let me tell you my -"
"Ye may tell Signor Gulielmi, wha's waiting for ye ootside. I hae nae time the noo for poetical blatherings. Weel, the starvation diet is haeing its effects. Ye are thinner though, aye."
"Being thin I conform the better to your view of how a consumptive should look. You never liked the appearance of unsick normality. I am hungry all the time, and I cannot think that to be good, I am damnably hungry."
"That's subjective, mon. But, to be objective, nae bleeding."
"No, no blood comes up. Or down."
"Weel then, that is because of the licht diet. Persevere, and ye may weel soon be like Lieutenant Elton, the blood-spitting gone and he on his way hame."
"I shall end up here, sick or well, dead or living. I think Rome and I have things to say to each ither, other."
Clark waved that away as of no moment. "Gulielmi has a mind to take ye to see Roman things, meet Roman folk forbye. We'll gang doon together." He suddenly grew weary of Scotch, it seemed, as of a language it required concentration to speak, a sort of Italian. "It is not all that warm outside. The sun is a deceiver. Take your topcoat." John listened with interest to the patrician accent. He caught a flash of Clark in high places, a physician to the nobility perhaps, saw him in a gilded bedroom with a scutcheon over the bed, but heard comforting Scotch treacling out like a placebo: Aye, aye, ye rest yon heid the noo, yer grace.
"Aye," John said.
Gulielmi, raw northern bones and droll Roman eyes, drably dressed for the bright day, smiled faintly at a mother seated on the Spanish Steps, giving her great breast to a boy who was surely more than ready for weaning. Both wore costumes of the Campagna, artist's models both. The Steps were a lolling minced rainbow of artist's models, and there were also the flowersellers. The church bell sang once, and in some strange way it embraced the scene. John saw why, and his heart jumped. The whirring fragments of sound that splintered off from the bell's main note were those colours, and the fundamental bongggg was white. Colours whirred or whirled into God's white and away and back again. What did God have to do with anything? No, here in Rome you could not say that. There was room for Apollo and Venus and still some for God. He tasted the faint aloes of resentment at the hunched coughing narrow-chested God of the English.
"Mr Keats," Gulielmi greeted, "I see the rose of health on thy cheek."
"Master Kates, Shakespeare would call me. I have had the revelation this morning of hearing Shakespeare's voice. Florio's Dictionary. I have learned that Shakespeare said têle for tail and mêde for maid. Their sounds were not ours, they were European sounds. I wonder if Shakespeare was ever in Rome."
"Well, he was closer to Rome, and to Veneto, and to the whole of Italy than any of your poets have been since, Mr Shelley and Lord Byron not excepted. England seems more and more to move away from Europe. Speaking of moving, do you feel yourself well enough to move by ferry and carrozza to the Cappella Sistina?"
"Not too much excitement," Dr Clark answered for John. "Let us no undo the salvatory work of the light diet. Fish. If there is to be dinner, let it be fish."
"Fish, yes. But Michelangelo before the fish," Gulielmi said.
"Michelangelo is unco' exciting." And Dr Clark fussed off to see other patients. Gulielmi hailed a carrozza on the Corso, telling the rogue of a driver to drive to the Porto de Ripetta ferry. John's supply of breath was not enough to sustain the skyboat of his enthusiasms. He tried to tell Gulielmi about the idea within himself that was trying to attain the first crude crudely workable shape, the – "Blobs of mercury – being brought together – by some helpful fingertip – to form the one – quicksilver disc -"
"Calm. You must be calm. It is good for you to be calm."
So John saved his breath and took in the Romans – workmen, carriers, barefoot child beggars skilled in adult obscenity: cazzo… coglioni… puttana… vafnculo. He would have to start reading hard. He would have to think of a stanza form. Blank verse, rhymed couplets, no. Terza rima? But that would seem like a mockery of Dante. The sonnet used as a stanza? That meant each phase of the story would thud or sweep or sidle in like a wave, then recoil. And why not? The octave for the public event, the sestet for the unchanging Marius or Mario. Unchanging, there was the rub. Could you really compose a lengthy poem about what never changed? His heart began to sink, and he recognised that, in a manner, his survival depended on the right burgeoning of this poetic idea. But to what category did the idea, would the poem, belong? Tragedy? Hardly, great men dying but a small man eternally remaining. Was he capable of it? It was some new thing, some category to be freshly invented. It was not the comic of Don Juan, not squibbish and irreverent. It was mightily reverent to this persistent Roman. Yet (heart dropping further, awareness of light flooding his eyes as his eyes further widened) what does Marius-Mario do but persist in living, begetting, working, owing rent, borrowing, drinking? He does not move, he does not generate a narrative.
They had been set down in the piazza of St Peter. "You look pale," Gulielmi said. "You need some grape spirit." And he led him, hand gently on his arm, to a wineshop off the square, cave-like, dusty, not warm.