"We will see."
"Alas, yes. You will see."
When the visitors had left, Severn and John looked at each other. Severn brought the pianoforte lid gently down and looked again. John's eyes were now dulled, stilled, the lids brought gently down. He was sitting with left foot on right knee, shoe off, fondling his instep. He said:
"You were shocked. You will be shocked more before we are done."
"It is not to my taste, no more than that. It will seem namby pamby to you that I spoke so, but it is the way I was brought up. You are unused to Christians, I know. I think sometimes now of Providence. My being here, I mean."
"Cant and humbug, by your leave. Anyway, I talk of bigger shocks. The obscenity not of desperation but of dying. It will not be pretty, like some marble spaniel of Mr Ewing. Are you sure you wish to stay?"
"If I did not love you I would still speak of my Christian duty. Besides, I do not believe it. You are already better."
"In terms of my posthumous life, yes. I am not spewing blood. I fear our friend Clark may be right. I have pains in my stomach. I may add I have pain in my dumpendebat. Oh no, don't look newly shocked, nothing to do with the clap, big or little. Shall I say that I have loved like a gentleman, meaning to end unfulfilled, not to have cupped those breasts naked or even kissed deeply, and as for the other, the right true end – And I am wrong too to say gentleman, because we have been confined by our class which is neither gentlemanly nor ruffianly but plain pure middle, and poets of the middle zone are not permitted, by reason of their small sales, to be married. So I end unsatisfied, Severn my dear boy, and I would curse loudly now if I were not so, ah, spent. Spent without spending."
"But you have – You told me. I mean, the experience, though not with."
"I've drabbed, briefly and cheaply. That I try to forget."
"You really mean," Severn said, with the eye of fascination all against his better instincts, "you think she should have – given herself to you?"
"Like you, like Lieutenant Isaac Marmaduke Elton, she accepts the cant of the feathers and the iron meeting holily when the holy words have been burbled. Poets do not marry, though. Not on a sale of fifty copies."
Severn, still standing by the pianoforte, lifted the limp wings of his arms to waist height then let them limply fall. "Lord Byron can live on his verse. But who would wish to be Lord Byron?" A candle flickered at that question, and a wind brought the chuckle of the fountain a fraction nearer. "It is love that is the thing, remember, the warmth of two hearts conjoined. She returns your love."
"Dum pendebat on the crux she returned his amore. And yet her name, now I say it to myself in this room, Rome I would say where names are tunes -" He was weary. "The name of any leering fishwife. A seller of headcheese. Give me some of my laudanum, Severn. I need sleep."
"I gave it to Dr Clark, you know that. I want no repetition of what of what."
"Happened on the ship to Naples. Good. The suicidal poet must be protected from himself. Good good. Meanwhile I may not sleep."
"The fountain will send you off. You say it does."
"By the waters of babble on there we shat down and flung our arses on the pillows."
"That is not funny."
"No, merely blasphemous. I blaspheme against love and against both testicles I would say testaments. But a testimony is to do with swearing on one's balls. An old Roman custom. And there are two testaments. Interesting."
"If blaspheming makes you more cheerful, then I suppose you must blaspheme," Severn said stoically. "But I wish there were some other way of making you cheerful."
Soon John lay in the Roman dark listening to the fountain he thought of as his. It was not a question of being cheerful, rather of shedding the shameful rotting stuff that was himself by making that inner nub which cried I, I, I into the centre of something free of the agony of thought. He tried to turn himself into the music of Haydn that Severn had played, but the image of Severn's all too human fingers intruded like a meddling elf. As for the water of the fountain, it remained obdurately other, singing mindlessly and unoppressed by time.
TWO
Giovanni Gulielmi, doctor of letters of the University of Bologna, had a small private income, derived from the rents of the land in Lazio left him by his father, who was untimely dead of Naples cholera, some British gold invested with the banker Torlonia, and what he got from the tenants of the first and second floors of the large house facing the Basilica of Santa Cecilia in the piazza named for her in the Trastevere district of Rome. The third, top, floor was enough for his mother and himself. Their cook and maid lived out. They had no coach. Gulielmi had a study of his own, very bare, with rugs on the marble, a massive English mahogany table that had been his maternal grandfather's, and three pictures on the walls. These were respectively by Labella, Macellari and Zappone, minor painters of respectively the Umbrian, Florentine and Venetian schools, and were respectively of the Annunciation, the Jordan Baptism and the Scourging at the Pillar. Here he worked at translations from English into Tuscan – unprofitable work, except for his version of Byron's Beppo, which had gone into three Turin printings. He sat with Endymion and the 1820 poems of John Keats and the fine-eyed, wavy-maned Guiseppe Gioacchino Belli one forenoon of November sunlight and intense blue Roman sky, song and the noise of fish and vegetable vendors coming from below. Belli looked without favour at the beginning of Gulielmi's draft translation of the Ode to a Nightingale.
" 'My heart is sad and my senses are oppressed by a stupor as of sleep, as if I had been drinking hemlock.' Yes yes yes. What does he know about drinking hemlock? We have all heard this kind of thing before."
"The content, yes. The shape, the melody, no."
"Which you cannot translate."
"That argues its superiority as poetry. Byron is all too translatable."
"Poetry should be about things. What things is poetry about since 1815? The poet's mistress is cruel to him. The poet fears he is going to die or fears he is not going to die. Rather like seasickness. The world is a fearful emptiness, but birds and flowers grant some little consolation. Perhaps next year there will be a new subject, but I think most poets have their elegies on Napoleon waiting."
"Here is something different," Gulielmi said, picking up a single sheet from his table. "The young man gave me this as an example of a sonnet in the Petrarchan form, difficult in a language like English, which has so few rhymes."
"Why does it have few rhymes? It is not natural for a language to have few rhymes. Italian is full of rhymes."
"Something to do with the endings dropping off," Gulielmi vaguely said.
"I cannot understand English and you say this little man is untranslatable."
"This poem is about a cat. A cat belonging to some lady called Signora Reynolds."
"Facetious then, light, nothing."
"Catullus wrote on a sparrow."