We cross the river and pass into the Trastevere, with its air of genteel squalor and monitored bohemianism. At a bar we stop and order glasses of pale wine. We sit for a while and watch other people. There is a big group at a nearby table, two or three families, the adults around our own age. They are Italians. They look prosperous, intelligent, carelessly attractive: they have a number of children and dogs. They are laughing, talking; more people come and they embrace them and laugh and talk even louder. One of them has her shopping in a basket at her feet. I can see tomatoes, a sheaf of basil, a stick of bread. They are so settled, so established. We watch them and drink our drinks. Have we tired of our root-lessness? Do we want friends, pets, establishment?
Two things have happened. The first is more of a dawning, a realization, than a happening: we have nearly run out of money. The second is a realization too, in its way, but it feels like an event. It is that we have changed. The change is hard to quantify, to accommodate, for it makes itself apparent only in the fact that we are neither tourists nor citizens, and however spiritually relieving that fact might be, it is difficult to know how to live in the world in the light of it. The longer we stay in Italy, the less we are able to conduct ourselves like visitors. Yet to live here, really live, would involve the same things as living anywhere. There would be school and routine, anxiety and conformity, judgment and separation, success and failure. There would be all the ripples of effect that are sent out when people establish themselves among other people. Is it these ripples, these imperceptible chains, that we shrink from sending forth? To live in another country requires a fundamental acceptance of things that are true in all countries. I have known people who have moved abroad, by choice rather than compulsion: the majority of them, before they leave, assert at every opportunity the ways in which their prospective homeland is better, and once they are there insist with equal vehemence on the ways in which it is worse. As a child, my parents were constantly moving. They, too, seemed to believe that when they moved, the bad things would remain behind. And perhaps they did: but the good things stayed there also.
I do not want to relocate, to stay, to settle down. I want to roam, like the writers and artists of an earlier age with their fashionable selfishness. D. H. Lawrence, for instance, lived everywhere, at least for the time it took him to come to hate the place. In Sea and Sardinia he describes an ocean voyage and two-week visit to Sardinia that he and his wife Frieda made one winter from Sicily, where they lived at the time. Sardinia is cold, austere, beautiful but a little cheerless, and their stay there is relatively brief. Nevertheless, Lawrence is constantly exhorting himself and his disconsolate companion to decide one way or the other: Could they live there? It seems he could go nowhere without ascertaining its fitness to sustain life, like a scientist scanning distant planets for signs of water and oxygen. Frieda, who had left her three young children in order to live with Lawrence, and caused such a scandal thereby that she was forbidden from ever seeing or contacting them, must truly have felt herself to be far inside the labyrinth of separation, every new move cutting her ties with England, though Sardinia was no further away than Sicily. Lawrence, perhaps, wanted to sever Frieda from her past, with its rival mother-love, but in every new place they went, her longing for her children was there. How many places would you have to move before you forgot who you were?
Lawrence himself tired of Italy, its little gardenlike landscapes, its art that he began to see as a substitute for life, its soppiness, what he called its “macaroni love.” He claimed to appreciate Sardinia for its lack of culture: how pleasant, he wrote, to come to a place where there were no Peruginos you had to go and look at. There was a time when he had needed to look at Peruginos, and also to enter the Roman past, the Hellenic. He had needed to furnish his soul with classicism, but he had outlived that need. Now what he required was life itself, living humanity. In The Rainbow Lawrence writes of the operation of culture as a form of grace in human evolution. People discover books, art, music; they inch forward in consciousness, pass on their discoveries to their children, who inch forward a little more. In The Rainbow, Will Brangwen is a frustrated aesthete who believes he will create art, but who ends up a bitter, violent man, teaching carpentry at adult-education classes in the new socially inclusive England of the early twentieth century. It is his daughter, Gudrun, who becomes the artist and thereby escapes her regional, working-class roots. Will, as the father of young children, would sit in the Nottinghamshire evenings leafing through his precious art books with their reproductions of Fra Angelico, but it was his daughter who would consummate his desire for these images. Will is able to comprehend beauty but not to bear its caste. As a man he is cruel, and fettered by upbringing. In the end the Fra Angelicos fail to refine his nature.
I am half shocked by Lawrence’s remarks about art, but I sympathize with them too. He did not, after all, know how physically ugly the world would become. For me, it is necessary to look at Perugino, in order to digest the supermarkets and shopping malls, the litter and landfill sites, the pylons and traffic jams and motorway service stations that otherwise fill the eye. Without beauty, the human sensibility becomes discouraged. One could look at a flower, of course, or a child; but to look at a painting is to feel looked at, comprehended, yourself. It is to experience empathy, for what is art but the struggle to acknowledge the fact that we ourselves were created? Over time the morality of art has become clear and distinct: we don’t ask it to be correct, or selfless, or didactic, or judgmental. We don’t blame it for the uses to which it is put. We don’t expect it to intervene, to determine, to make peace or war, to end poverty or greed, to abate suffering. We ask only that it be beautiful and true. We turn to it to dignify our experience of the world; to find a reply to the question of consciousness.
But I, too, have a qualm about the Fra Angelicos, the Peruginos. It is that they belong to the past. Their reality is so remote from our own: I fear that to look at them is a form of nostalgia. I fear the feeling of sadness they cause me, sadness that our own world is not more beautiful. I wonder whether the others feel that too, queuing down the streets in their thousands, thronging at the ropes of museums.
It is our last day in Rome: we are going to Vatican City. We have left it a little late to scale this peak, the Vatican museums with their seven kilometers of exhibits, the Sistine Chapel and the Raphael Stanze, the Borgia apartments, the Etruscan galleries. We have let time slip away from us, as sleep slips away from those who dwell too much on what the day will bring. We have begun to worry about the future, and the present has strayed from our clutches.
It is very hot, and I have hurt my foot. The pain is in the arch, a strange, screwlike agony that radiates a secondary numbness, so that my leg feels like a block of wood. It has been there for several days, though I have tried to deny it. My pace of walking has merely got slower and slower: the others stop and look round, finding that I am not there. For a while there was a mute adaptation to these new circumstances, as though we had been unexpectedly joined on holiday by an invalid great-aunt, who limped stoically in the rear. The children have started wincing and apologizing when they step by accident on my foot, causing me to shriek. When we sit down at a café, they automatically drag over an extra chair, for me to put my leg on. But on our last day in Rome, the veil of denial is torn down. It is ridiculous. I can barely walk. We must do something: we must act.