My father was kind to me and when I was little he took me to the zoo, and let me ride horseback, and always bought me some pastry and an orangeade at a café, and while I drank my orangeade he always had a vermouth with a double shot of gin or later when there were so many Americans in Rome a Martini but I am not writing a story about a boy who sees his father sneaking drinks. The only time I spoke Italian then was when my father and I would visit the raven in the Borghese Gardens and feed him peanuts. When the raven saw us he would say buon giorno and I would say buon giorno and then when I gave him the peanuts he would say grazie and then when we walked away he would say ciao. My father died three years ago and he was buried in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome. There were a lot of people there and at the end of it my mother put an arm around me and she said, “We won’t ever leave him alone here, will we, Pietro? We won’t ever, ever, leave him alone here, will we, dear?” So some Americans live in Rome because of the income tax and some Americans live in Rome because they’re divorced or oversexed or poetic or have some other reason for feeling that they might be persecuted at home and some Americans live in Rome because they work there, but we live in Rome because my father’s bones lie in the Protestant Cemetery.
My grandfather was a tycoon and I think that is why my father liked to live in Rome. My grandfather started life with nothing at all, but he made plenty and he expected everybody else to do what he did, although this was not possible. The only time I ever saw much of my grandfather was when we used to visit him at his summer house in Colorado. The thing I remember mostly is the Sunday-night suppers which my grandfather used to cook when the maids and the cook were off. He always cooked a steak and even before he got the fire started everybody would be so nervous that you lost your appetite. He always had a terrible time getting the fire started and everyone sat around watching him, but you didn’t dare say a word. There was no drinking because he didn’t approve of drinking, but my parents used to drink plenty in the bathroom. Well, after it took him half an hour to get the fire started, he would put the steak on the grill and we would all go on sitting there. What made everyone nervous was that they knew they were going to be judged. If we had done anything wrong during the week that Grampa disliked, well now we would know about it. He used to practically have a fit just cooking a steak. When the fat caught on fire his face would turn purple and he would jump up and down and run around. When the steak was done we would each get a dinner plate and stand in line and this was the judgment. If Grampa liked you he would give you a nice piece of meat, but if he felt or suspected that you had done something wrong he would give you only a tiny piece of gristle. Well, you’d be surprised how embarrassing it is to find yourself holding this big plate with just a bit of gristle on it. You feel awful.
One week I tried to do everything right so I would not get a piece of gristle. I washed the station wagon and helped Grandma in the garden and brought in wood for the house fires, but all I got on Sunday was a little bit of gristle. So then I said, Grampa, I said, I don’t understand why you cook steak for us every Sunday if it makes you so unhappy. Mother knows how to cook and she could at least scramble some eggs and I know how to make sandwiches. I could make sandwiches. I mean if you want to cook for us that would be nice but it looks to me like you don’t and I think it would be nicer if instead of going through this torture chamber we just had some scrambled eggs in the kitchen. I mean I don’t see why if you ask people to have supper with you it should make you so irritable. Well, he put down his knife and his fork and I’ve seen his face get purple when the fat was burning, but I’ve never seen it get so purple as it did that night. You God-damned weak-minded, parasitic ape, he shouted at me, and then he went into the house and upstairs to his bedroom, slamming about every door he passed, and my mother took me down into the garden and told me I had made an awful mistake, but I couldn’t see that I had done anything wrong. But in a little while I could hear my father and my grandfather yelling and swearing at one another and in the morning we went away and we never came back and when he died he left me one dollar.
It was the next year that my father died and I missed him. It is against everything I believe in and not even the kind of thing I am interested in, but I used to think that he would come back from the kingdom of the dead and give me help. I have the head and shoulders to do a man’s work, but sometimes I am disappointed in my maturity and my disappointment in myself is deepest when I get off a train at the end of the day in a city that isn’t my home like Florence with the tramontana blowing and no one in the square in front of the station who doesn’t have to be there because of that merciless wind. Then it seems that I am not like myself or the sum of what I have learned but that I am stripped of my emotional savings by the tramontana and the hour and the strangeness of the place and I do not know which way to turn except of course to turn away from the wind. It was like that when I went alone on the train to Florence and the tramontana was blowing and there was no one in the piazza. I was feeling lonely and then someone touched me on the shoulder and I thought it was my father come back from the kingdom of the dead and that we would all be happy together again and help one another. Who touched me was a ragged old man who was trying to sell me some souvenir key rings and when I saw the sores on his face I felt worse than ever and it seemed to me that there was a big hole torn in my life and that I was never going to get all the loving I needed and that autumn once in Rome I stayed late in school and was coming home on the trolley car and it was after seven and all the stores and offices were closing and everybody was going home and rushed and someone touched me on the shoulder and I thought it was my father come again from the kingdom of the dead. I didn’t even look around this time because it could have been anybody—a priest or a tart or an old man who had lost his balance—but I had the same feeling that we would all be happy together again and then I knew that I was never going to get all the loving I needed, no, never.
After my father passed away we gave up the trips to Nantucket and lived all the time in the Palazzo Orvieta. This is a beautiful and a somber building with a famous staircase, although the staircase is only lighted with ten-watt bulbs and is full of shadows in the evening. There is not always enough hot water and it is often drafty, for Rome is sometimes cold and rainy in the winter in spite of all the naked statues. It might make you angry to hear the men in the dark streets singing melodiously about the roses of eternal spring and the sunny Mediterranean skies. You could sing a song, I guess, about the cold trattorie and the cold churches, the cold wine shops and the cold bars, about the burst pipes and the backfired toilets and about how the city lies under the snow like an old man with a stroke and everybody coughing in the streets—even the archdukes and cardinals coughing—but it wouldn’t make much of a song. I go to the Sant’ Angelo di Padova International School for Catholics although I am not a Catholic and take Communion at St. Paul within the Gates every Sunday morning. In the wintertime there are usually only two of us in church, not counting the priest or canon, and the other is a man I don’t like to sit beside because he smells of Chinese Temple Incense although it has occurred to me that when I have not had a bath for three or four days because of the shortage of hot water in the palace he may not want to sit beside me. When the tourists come in March there are more people in church.