Venus or the Virgin?

Somebody once said that a good prime minister is a man who knows something about everything and nothing about anything. I wince--an American foreign correspondent, stationed in Rome, covering Italy, Greece, Turkey, Corsica, Sardinia, Malta, Libya, Egypt and the entire Middle East. For example: Last year I was sent off to report on pollution around Capri, steel in Taranto, which (as journalists say) "nestles" under the heel of the peninsula, the Italo-American project for uncovering the buried city of the Sybarites, which is a third of the way down the coast from Taranto, the political unrest then beginning to simmer in Reggio di Calabria, around the toe of the continent, and, of course, if something else should turn up--some "extra dimension," as my foreign editor in Chicago likes to call such unforeseens.... Summer was dying in Rome, noisily and malodorously. Down south, sun, silence and sea. It was such a welcome commission that it sounded like a pat on the head for past services. I was pleased.

I polished off Capri in two hours and Taranto in three days--a well-documented subject. After lunching at Metaponto, now one of Taranto's more scruffy seaside resorts, I was salubriously driving along the highway beside the Ionian when, after about an hour, "something else" did crop up. It happened in a place too minute to be called a village, or even a hamlet, an Italian would call it a luoguccio (a rough little place), named Bussano. I doubt if many travelers not natives of these parts of Calabria have ever voluntarily halted in Bussano--barring Karl Baedeker some 100 years or so ago, or the modern Italian Touring Club guide, or a weary Arab peddler. The Touring Club guide is eloquent about it. He says, and it is all he says: "At this point the road begins to traverse a series of monotonous sand dunes." Any guide as reticent as that knows what he is not talking about.

Bussano consists of two lots of hovels facing each other across the highway, one backing on that wild stretch of the Calabrian Apennines called Sila, the other on an always empty ocean; "always" because there is no harbor south of Taranto for about 150 miles, nothing but sand, reeds, a few rocks edging the vast Ionian. I presume that during the winter months the Ionian Sea is often shaken by southwesterly gales. In the summer, nothing happens behind those monotonous sand dunes except the wavelets moving a foot inward and a foot outward so softly that you don't even hear their seesaw and you have to watch carefully to see the marks they leave on the sand, which is so hot that it dries as soon as it is touched. The luoguccio looked empty.

The only reason I halted there was that I happened to notice among the few hovels on the seaside of the road a two-storied house with a line of brown-and-yellow sunflowers lining its faded gray-pink walls. On these, high up, I could barely decipher the words Albergo Dei Sibariti. The Sybarites' Hotel. It must have been built originally for travelers by stagecoach, first horse, then motor, or by hired coach and horses, or by private carriage, or in later years by the little railroad along the coast that presently starts to worm its slow way up through those mountains that climb 7000 feet to the Serra Dolcedorme, where, I have been told, snow may still be seen in May. It was the same informant who told me about a diminutive railroad in this deep south--could it be this one?--grandiosely calling itself La Società Italiana per le Strade Ferrate del Mediterraneo--Roma, 500 miles from the smell of Rome and barred by the Apennines from the Mediterranean. The Albergo dei Sibariti could have flourished in the youth of Garibaldi.

I was about to move on when I glanced between the hotel and its nearest hovel at a square segment of sea and horizon, teasingly evoking the wealth of centuries below its level line--Greece, Crete, Byzantium, Alexandria. Once again I was about to drive off, thinking how cruel and how clever of Mussolini, and also how economical, to have silenced his intellectual critics (men like, for instance, Carlo Levi) simply by exiling them to remote spots like this, when an odd-looking young man came through the wide passageway, halted and looked up and down the highway with the air of a man with nowhere to go and nothing to do.

He was dark, bearded and long-haired, handsome if you like mushy Italian eyes, dark as prunes, eyelashes soft and long, cheeks tenderly browned. Under his hung chin he wore a great scarlet blob of tie like a 19th Century romantic poet; shirt gleaming (washed and ironed by whom?); shoes brilliantly polished (by whom?); pants knife-pressed (by whom?); on his head a cracked and tawny straw hat that just might have come many years ago from Panama, and he carried a smooth cane with a brass knob. His unshaven jaws were blackberry blue. His jacket was black velvet. His trousers were purple. All in all, overdressed for a region where the men may (or may not) wear a cotton singlet but never a shirt, except on Sundays, apart from the doctor, if there is one, or the teacher, if there is one, or the local landowner, and there is always one of them. What on earth could he be? Not a visitor, at this time of the year and in this nonplace. An adolescent poet? More likely an absconding bank clerk in disguise. (Joke. In places like this, the sand hoppers for 50 miles around are known by their first names.) The local screwball? I alighted. He saw me. We met in the middle of the road--the roads down here are wide and fine. I asked him if he might be so kind as to tell me where I might, if it were not too much to ask, find the lost city of the Sybarites. At once he straightened his sagging back, replied eagerly, rapidly and excitedly, "Three kilometers ahead fork left after the gas station then first right along a dirt track can I have a cigarette where are you from may I show you my pictures?"

Well, I thought, this is odd, I am on 42nd Street, Division, Pigalle, the Cascine, the Veneto, Soho, Pompeii, show me his dirty pictures, what next? His sister? A pretty boy? Cannabis? American cigarettes? I told him I was an insurance salesman from Chicago and bade him lead on. He led me rapidly through the passage to a wooden shack in the untidy yard behind the house, where, as he fumbled with the lock, he explained himself.

"I am a Roman I am a great painter I came down here two years ago to devote my life to my art I have been saving up for years for this a professor of fine arts from New York bought four of my paintings last week for 50,000 lire apiece."

I knew this last to be not so immediately he flung open the door on three deep lines of paintings stacked around the earthen floor--there were no canvases, he had mostly used chip board or plywood. His daubs all indicated the same subject, mustard-yellow sunflowers against a blue sea, each of them a very long way after Van Gogh, each the same greasy blob of brown and yellow, each executed (appropriate word!) in the same three colors straight from the tube--chrome yellow, burnt umber, cerulean blue--with, here and there as the fancy had taken him, a mix of the three in a hoarse green like a consumptive's spittle. They were the most supremely splendid, perfect, god-awful examples of bad art I had ever seen. As I gazed at them in a Cortez silence, I knew that I simply must possess one of them immediately.

Snobbery? A kinky metropolitan taste? I know the feeling too well not to know its source in compassion and terror. To me bad art is one of the most touching and frightening examples of self-delusion in the world. Bad actors, bad musicians, bad writers, bad painters, bad anything, and not just the in-betweeners or the borderliners but the total, desperate, irredeemable failures. Wherever I have come on an utterly bad picture, I have wanted to run away from it or possess it as a work of horror. Those "original" gilt-framed pictures in paper elbow guards displayed for sale in the foyers of big commercial hotels, or in big railroad terminals. A quarter of a mile of even worse "originals" hanging from the railings of public parks in the summer. Those reproductions that form part of the regular stock of novelty stores that sell china cuckoo clocks, nutcrackers shaped like a woman's thighs, pepper pots shaped like ducks' bottoms. The poor, sad, pathetic little boy with the one perfect teardrop glistening on his cheek. Six camels forever stalking across the desert into a red-ink sunset. Three stretched-neck geese flying over a reedy lake into the dawn. That jolly medieval friar holding up his glass of supermarket port to an Elizabethan diamond-paned window as bright as a 500-watt electric bulb.

We know the venal type who markets these kitsch objects and we know that they are bought by uneducated people of no taste. But if one accepts that these things are sometimes not utterly devoid of skill and are on the edge of taste, who paints them? Looking into the earnest, globular eyes of this young man in Bussano (who, insofar as he had no least skill and no least taste, was the extreme example of the type), I felt once again the surge of compassion and of fear that is always the prelude to the only plausible answer I know: that he was yet (continued on page 74)Venus or the Virgin?(continued from page 68) another dreaming innocent who believed that he had heard the call to higher things. His type must be legion: young boys and girls who at some unlucky moment of their lives have heard, and alas have heeded that far-off whir of wings and that solitary midnight gurgling song once heard, so they have been told, in ancient days by emperor and clown, the same that flung magic casements open on the foam of perilous seas and faerylands forlorn. The frightening part of it is that there can be very few human beings who have not heard that voice in some form or another. If we are wise, we either do nothing about it or do the least possible. We join something, send a subscription, vote, are modest.

I offered him a cigarette; I felt like an officer in charge of a firing squad; not that I, or anybody else, ever can kill such lethal innocence. As he virtually ate the cigarette, I saw that his eye sockets were hollowed not by imagination but by starvation. He was a living cartoon of the would-be artist as a young man who has begun to fear that he may not be the one and will certainly never again be the other. To comfort him, I irresponsibly said, "You might one day become the Van Gogh of Calabria," to which he said quickly, "I sell you any one you like cheap." Should I have said they were all awful? I said I liked the one that, in characteristic burlesque of the real by the fake, he had labeled Occhio d'Oro, Mar' Azzuro. "Golden Eye, Azure Sea." Whereupon he said, "Fifty dollars," and I beat him down to two. As he pouched the two bills, I asked him what he was proposing to do with all that lovely money. He laughed gaily--the Italian poor really are the most gutsy people in the world, as well as the most dream deluded--"Tonight I will bring my wife to the hotel for two brandies to celebrate my first sale in two years. It is an omen from heaven for our future."

All this and a wife, too? I invited him into the hotel for a beer, served by a drowsy slut whom he had imperiously waked from her siesta. I asked him about his wife.

"Roman," he said proudly. "And borghese. Her father works in a bank. She believes absolutely in my genius. When we married, she said, 'Sesto'--I was a sixth child, my name is Sesto Caro--'I will follow you to the end of the world.'" He crossed two fingers. "We are like that." He crossed three. "With our child, like that. The first, alas, was stillborn."

(The harm innocence can do!)

He said that he, also, was a Roman. And he was--he knew the city as well as I do, and I have spent 20 years living there as a nosy reporter. I found him in every way, his self-delusion apart, an honest young man. He agreed that he had done all sorts of things. Run away from home at 14, done a year in the galleys for stealing scrap, returned home, spent two years in a seminary trying to be a monk, a year and a half in a trattoria in the Borgo Pio, was arrested and held for two years without trial for allegedly selling Cannabis, released, spent three years in Germany and Switzerland to make money for his present project, returned home, was apprenticed as an electrician's assistant.... He was now 29. She was now 21. When she was turned off by her father, they had come down here to beg the help of her godfather-uncle Emilio, an engineer living in what I heard him lightly call "the Cosenza of Pliny and Varro." I looked out and upward toward the Sila.

"Cosenza? A godfather so far from Rome?"

"Emilio was exiled there by Mussolini and never went back."

Unfortunately, or by the whim of the pagan gods of Calabria--he contemptuously called it Il Far Ouest-- his wife, then 19, and big with child, got diarrhea so badly in Naples ("Pollution around Capri?") that they finally tumbled off the train at a mountainy place called Cassano in the hope of quickly finding a doctor there; only to be told as the toy train pulled away into the twilit valleys that the station of Cassano was hours away from the village of Cassano, whereas their informant, a carter from Bus-sano, offered to drive them in one hour to his beautiful village by the sea near which (equally untrue) there was a very good doctor. So, with their parcels, their cardboard suitcases, their paper bundles and bulging pillowcases, they had come to this casale and stayed. Uncle Emilio had visited them once. Her father occasionally disbursed small sums of money on condition that they stayed where they were.

• • •

We shook hands cordially, I gathered my bad painting and drove off fast. I had walked into the middle of a story and I had no idea what its end would be. Murder? Suicide? If I could wait for either, that could be a good something else for Chicago. Not now. No lift. No human story, and I looked eagerly ahead of me along the straight highway to my meeting with the skilled Italo-American technicians and archaeologists at Sybaris. About this, at least, Van Gogh was accurate. After exactly three kilometers, I saw the yellow-and-black sign of a gas station, whose attendant directed me, without interest, toward a dirt track leading into a marshland of reeds and scrub.

As I bumped along this dusty track, I could see no life whatever, nothing but the widespread swamp, until I came around a bend in the track and saw ahead of me a solitary figure leaning against a jeep, arms folded, pipe smoking, well built, idly watching me approach. High boots to his knees, riding breeches, open-necked khaki shirt, peaked cap, sunglasses, grizzled hair. In his 60s? I pulled up beside him, told him who and what I was and asked him where I could find the buried city of Sybaris. Immobile, he listened to me, smiled tolerantly, or it might be boredly, then without speaking beckoned me with his pipe to follow his jeep. I did so until he halted near a large pool of clear water surrounded by reeds and mud. Some ten feet under water there were a couple of broken pillars and a wide half-moon of networked brick.

"Behold Sybaris," he said and with amusement watched me stare at him, around the level swamp at the all-seeing mountains and back to him again.

"You mean that's all there is to see of it?"

"All since, if you believe the common legend, its enemies deflected its great river, the Crathis"--he in turn glanced westward and upward--"to drown it under water as Pompeii was smothered in volcanic ash. Crathis is now brown with yellow mud. 'Crathis the lovely stream that stains dark hair bright gold.' Euripides," he annotated, and he smiled apologetically.

"But the archaeologists? I was hoping to find them at work."

He smiled unapologetically. He relit his pipe at his ease.

"Where is the hurry? Sybaris has been asleep a long time. They have finished for this year. They have to work slowly. They have been experimenting with sonic soundings since 1964. They have had to map the entire extent of the city with their magnetometers. It is six miles in circumference. But I am only an engineer. Consultant engineer. Of Cosenza."

I stared unhappily at the solitary eye of the once largest and most elegant city of the whole empire of Magna Graecia. I recalled and mentioned an odd detail that had stuck in my mind's tooth, out of, I think, Lenormant, supposedly typical of the luxury of the city in its heyday--its by-law that forbade morning cocks to crow earlier than a stated number of hours after sunrise. He shrugged dubiously. I did know that it was Lenormant who 100 years ago looked from the foothills of the Sila down at this plain and saw nothing but strayed bulls, long since gone wild, splashing whitely in its marshes. The engineer said he had been much struck by this legendary picture.

"Legendary? You are a skeptical man."

"In this country, legend is always posturing as history. We are a wilderness of myths growing out of myths. Along the coast there at Crotone, my wife, as a girl, walked to the temple of Juno, the mother of the gods, in a procession of (continued on page 192)Venus or the Virgin?(continued from page 74) barefooted girls singing hymns to Mary, the Mother of God. Here Venus can overnight become Saint Venus. Santa Venere. A hill once sacred to Cybele becomes sanctified all over again as Monte Vergine. I do not deride any of this. Some myths point to a truth. Some not. I cannot always distinguish. And I have lived in Calabria for thirty years."

"Not a born Calabrese, then?"

"I am a Roman. I was exiled here by the Fascist! in 1939. Not in this spot! Back up there in a small village called San Giovanni in Fiore. A pretty name, situated beautifully, poor and filthy when you got there. The night they arrested me in Rome, they allowed me five minutes and one suitcase. I grabbed the biggest book I could find. It was Don Quixote. After I had reread it by daylight and by candlelight three times that winter, I had nothing else to read, nobody to talk to, nothing to do. Every fine day I tramped over those mountains, sometimes twenty and more miles a day." He laughed cheerfully. "Wearing out the Fascist spies detailed to follow me. Today the same men, as old as I am now, joke with me over it. They were bastards, every one of them. And would be again if it suited them. They say, 'Ah, the good old days, Emilio! You were so good for our bellies. If only we could lead one another that dance all over again!' Everywhere I came on old stories written on old stones--myths, charms, omens, hopes, ambitions. The cerecloths of Greece. The marks of Rome. Those bits in that pool are probably Roman. You can tell it by the opus reticulatum of the bricks. That was only uncovered in '32. They call this place the Parco del Cavallo. What horse? Whose horse? I came on remnants of Byzantium, the Goths, the Saracens, the Normans. Our past. When my spies saw what I was after, they stopped following me--I had become a harmless fool--doors opened to me, a landowner's, then a doctor's, even a schoolmaster's, a learned priest's in Rossano. I met and fell in love with a doctor's daughter from Crotone. It was a charming little port in those days. Good wine of Ciro. Good cigars. Very appealing. One day in September 1943, after the British Eighth Army entered Crotone, we were married. Well before then," he laughed, "every Fascist of San Giovanni in Fiore had burned his black shirt and started shouting 'Viva il Re.' The old woman with whom I had lodged sold me for 10,000 lire to the doctor, who sold me for 20,000 to the police marshal, who sold me for 50,000 to a landowner, who drove me into Crotone to show the British commanding officer the victim of Fascism whom he had protected for the last four years. I did not give him away.

I had fallen in love with Calabria so much that I even liked its ruffians. I settled in Cosenza."

Why was he unburdening himself like this to a stranger? I said that in September 1943 I was with the American Army across those mountains.

"My God!" I wailed, throwing a bit of silver wrap from my chewing gum into the pool of the horse. "Do you realize that all that is over a quarter of a century ago?"

He smiled his tender, stoic's smile.

"I realize it very well. My youngest son is a lieutenant in the air force. His brother is studying medicine in Palermo. My eldest child is due to have her first baby at any hour."

"Why did you not return to Rome?"

He again glanced toward Cosenza. The sun, I observed, sinks early behind those Apennines. For no reason there flashed across my eyes the image of this plain covered by the floodwater made by their melting snows.

"I never went back to Rome because I had fallen in love with a woman who was a place. I saw my Claudia as a symbol of the ancientness, and the ancestry, and the dignity and the beauty of Calabria, of its pedigree, its pride, its arrogance, its closeness to the beginning of the beginnings of man and the end of the ends of life. I believed then and believe still that outside Calabria it would be impossible to find another Claudia."

I did not suggest that 50,000,000 Italians might not agree. If a young man in love and an old man remembering are not entitled to their dreams, who is? I merely suggested that there is also some "ancientness" in Rome.

"In museums? In Rome the bridge is down. It has no living past. It is just as venal, vulgar, cowardly, cynical and commercial a city as any other in the world." He jerked his body to a soldierly attention. "I must get back to Cosenza. We have been warned by the doctor that the birth may be difficult. There may have to be a Caesarean. My wife will be praying for an easy birth. When I get back, she may have more news."

His wife alone? No relatives? Aging, both. I did not say that my own daughter had married far away from me into another continent. All dreams have an ending somewhat different from their beginnings.

"Your daughter is in Cosenza?" I asked hopefully, but he waved his right hand toward the south.

"No. She married a splendid young man in Reggio. An avvocato. Young Vivarini. It is not far, but it is far too far for my wife and me at a time like this."

We shook hands warmly. We had in some way lit in those few minutes a small flame to friendship. He stepped into his dusty old jeep, waved, went his way deep into the mountains, as I did along the coast, deeper into his south and his beloved past.

I slept in Crotone, badly, woke wondering if I had been as unwise about my food as one so easily can be anywhere south of Rome, or dreamed oppressively, or failed to do something along the road that I ought to have done. It was not until I had dived into the sparkles of the sea and been driving fast for a good hour that the reason for my dejection struck me. I had caught the mal du pays. Four days out of Rome and I was already homesick for it. And why not? I am not married to Old Calabria. I am a political animal, a man of reason. A man interested in the world as it is. My job is to do with today, occasionally with tomorrow, never with yesterday. I had been seeing far too many memorials to that incorporeal, extramundane, immaterial, miasmic element that is food and drink to men like my engineer and that Carl Sandburg called a bucket of ashes. One ancient temple had been exciting, like those 15 Doric columns at Metaponto deep in weeds and wildflowers. The next, a few miles away, had been too much. A cartload of stones. Decline, decay, even death are beauty's due. Never defeat. And this deep south is littered with defeat. A bare megalith to record a defeated city. A duck pond to call up great Sybaris. Not even a stone had marked several names gloriously resounding in my guidebook. On the edge of a bleak moor and a bare cliff outside Crotone, Juno's church had been worn by time, weather and robbery to a solitary column. All as empty now as the sea, except for an aging woman remembering the garlanded girls with whom she had walked in a line singing hymns in May. Was it at Locri that I had paused for gas and looked into the tiny local museum, ill-kept, pathetically dusty, unfrequented? Aranciata Pitagora. One of Greece's greatest philosophers advertising orange juice over a wayside stall. Back, for God's sake, to living Rome. By tonight's plane out of Reggio.

I covered my final 40 miles in half an hour. I swept delightedly into a Reggio bristling with carabinièri, local police, armed troops, riot-squad trucks crackling out constant radio reports. The hotel was like a field H.Q. with pressmen and photographers, cinema crews and TV crews. All because it was widely and furiously feared that Rome intended to pass Reggio over in favor of Cosenza as the new provincial capital. Posters all over the walls announced that at four o'clock there would be a Monster Meeting in the Piazza del Popolo. This would leave me just enough time to interview the chief citizens of Reggio: the mayor, the archbishop, city councilors, parliamentary deputies, labor bosses, leading industrialists, if any. For some five hours, lunchless, I patiently gathered from them thousands of flat-footed words, to which at the afternoon meeting a sequence of bellowing orators added many more. Weary, hungry and bored, I remembered with a click of my fingers the name Vivarini.

• • •

Twenty minutes later, in a quarter of the city far removed from the noisy piazza, I was admitted by an elderly woman in black--wife? housekeeper? secretary?--to the presence of a very old man in a dusky room crammed and cluttered with antiquated furniture, bibelots, statuettes in marble, alabaster and bronze, old paintings, vases, boxes of papers, books, bowls, crystal paperweights, signed photographs in silver frames. It was the kind of room that made one wonder how its owner ever found anything he might require there. A Balzac would have been delighted to list all these telltale signs, markers or milestones of the fortunes of a business and a family, especially those signed photographs--King Vittorio Emanuele III, Dr. Axel Munthe, one Peter Rothschild, Prime Minister Giolitti (the one who held out against Mussolini until 1921), Facta (who fell to Fascism in 1922), Mussolini's son-in-law Galeazzo Ciano, Marshal Badoglio. As for me, one look, one sentence and I knew what I was in for.

"Ah, signore, this was once a city of the rarest elegance. My son, whom you must meet--he is at the hospital--does not realize this, he is too young. But I myself heard D'Annunzio say that our lungomare is one of the most gracious seaside promenades in Europe. What do you think of that?" (I refused to say; but if the so-called Prince of Montevenoso ever said so, he must have said it before 1908, when this city was flattened by its terrible earthquake, and at that date Signor Vivarini would have been a very small boy, indeed.) "But, now? Alas, signore, we have been taken over by the vulgar herd, the popolazzo. Corruption. Vendettas. Squabbles for gain. Maladministration. And all because our natural leaders, our aristocracy, the landed gentry of Calabria started to abandon Reggio immediately after the earthquake of 1908...."

In the distance, an irritable rattle of rifle fire. He did not seem to hear it. He went on and on. I should be back there watching the rioting.

"Nothing can save us now but a miracle.... When I was a youth...."

I rose at the sound of a distant, dull explosion, ready to run without ceremony, when from the doorway I found myself transfixed by the stare of a man whom I took to be his son--a tall, thin, challenging, cadaverous man of about 35, eyes Atlantic gray, peering through eyelashes that hid nothing of his patent awareness of his own merits, his inquisitorial mistrust, his cold arrogance of a pasha. I would have been utterly repelled by him if his clothes were not so much at odds with his manner. His lean body was gloved in a light metallic, bluish material suggestive of shimmering night and stars, his skintight shirt was salmon pink, his lemon tie disappeared into the V of a flowered waistcoat, the silk handkerchief in his breast pocket lolled as softly as a kitten's tail, or as its eyes, his shoes were sea suede, and his smoke of hair was blued like a woman's. He looked so promisingly ambiguous after all those obvious, political big mouths in the piazza that I introduced myself at once--name, profession, nationality. In a courteous and attractively purring voice, and in the unmistakable English of Cambridge (Massachusetts)--i.e., of Harvard--he replied that he had also spent some time in America. In return, I told him that I had begun my career as a journalist on the Crimson. His laugh was loud, frank, open and delighted. We shook hands amiably. I was on the point of deciding that he was really a most engaging fellow when I recalled his ice-cold air, his arrogance and his suspicion. I glanced at his clothes and I looked at his face, and it was his mouth that now impressed me: a blend of the soft, the mobile, the vulpine, the voracious that made me suddenly think that the essence of his first effect on me had been the predatory and the self-protective nature of a born sensualist. Obviously a man capable of being very attractive to women, but also, I feared, capable in his egoism of being very cruel.

"You enjoyed America," I stated cheerfully.

For a second or two, his peering mask returned. He smiled, not unhappily, yet not warmly, either, the way I fancied an inquisitor might smile when watching a heretic slowly gyrating over the flames that would soon deliver his soul to paradise. He said that he had endured the arid rigidities of Harvard University for three years. He laughed gaily at another rattle of gunfire, saying, "That nonsense will be over in an hour." He did not so much invite me to dine with him as order me to give him the pleasure.

"And the consolation! I am going through a difficult time."

The next second he was blazing with fury at his father, whose tremulous question, "How is Angiolina?" he had already timidly iterated four times.

"She has been in labor now for eight hours!" he ground out savagely. "If she has not given birth within three more hours, I insist upon a Caesarean." The old man waved protesting hands. "My dear father," he raged now in a near whisper, "I have told you twenty times that there is nothing scientifically wrong with a Caesarean." He turned suavely to me. "I do wish my dear father would realize that even after three Caesareans my wife could still bear him a long line of grandchildren." He laughed lightly. "Of course there is no truth in the legend that Julius Caesar was so delivered. I will call for you at your hotel--the Excelsior, I presume?--at half past seven. We will dine at the Conti. It is not very much, but it is our best."

I would have preferred to catch the plane for Rome. But I remembered and shared my engineer's quiet troublement over his daughter. My own daughter had not had an easy time with her first. There bounced off my mind the thought that a nameless young woman in Bussano had lost her first. Actually, it was none of these things that decided me, but the sound of more shots at which I ran from the pair of them. The rioting was well worth it, water cannon, baton charges, rubber bullets, the lot, women screaming Jesu Marias, hair streaming, children bawling, fat men behaving like heroes, the finest, fullest crop of De Sica clichés, vintage 1950, and not a cat killed. And all for what? For, at least, more than Hecuba, if for less than Hector. According to old Vivarini, for pride, honor, family, home, ancient tradition. for Rhegium antiquum so often raped already--by Messinese, Syracusans, Romans, Goths, Normans, Saracens, Pisans, Turks, Aragonese, Fascisti, Nazis and the liberating armies of Great Britain and the U.S.A.; also, I had been variously told, for real estate, tourism, air travel, emigration, IRI, Bernie Cornfeld's fonditalia, Swiss hooks in Chiasso, the Mafia, the Cassa per il Mezzogiorno, the Demo-Christians' majority in parliament.... But the journalist's classical symptom is cynicism, the boil of his inward frustration, the knowledge that he will never get at the total truth, a commodity reserved for historians, novelists and poets who will reduce his tormented futilities to a few drops of calm wisdom.

By the time Vivarini called for me, I was calmed, and if, since Crotone's morning moonshine coffee, still unfed, yet not unslaked, braced by two martinis, which I insisted that he and I, at the bar, make four; as, in Conti's, he at once ordered not one but two liters of vino di Ciro, which reminded me of the drunken night, it was in Peking (Oh! Jesus!), years and years ago that I first became a father.

"No!" he groaned aloud to the totally empty restaurant. (Its usual clients afraid to emerge at night?) "No baby yet!"

His father ("Don't touch the scampi! Even here possible pollution!") was a Polonius, a foolish, fond old man whom nobody would mistake for his better, three generations out of date, a sweet, kind man with fine sensibilities, a shrewd business head, a tea-rose soul, a brain that could have worked like a computer if he were not also a besotted sentimentalist; in short, a mess like all Italians.

"By comparison I, Bartolomeo--"

"Hi, Bart! Call me Tom!"

"Hi, Tom ... am a cold Cartesian. My wife," he informed me secretively, evidently making some point, "is a mortal angel. I have selected her with the greatest care. For I have also had my sorrows. My betrayals. Yet she is an angel with a Gallic mind. She also loathes all this nonsense of her father's and of my father, all this ridiculous adoration of the past. Down with tradition! It ends up in confusion, mythology, obfuscation!" He hammered the table, a waiter came running and was dismissed. "I insist on a Caesarean! Those two old men with their folksy minds think it bad, wrong, a threat to the long line of children they dream of as their--their!--descendants. Excuse me," he said quietly. "May I telephone?"

He returned, swaying only a very little, shook his head, looked at his watch, while I thought of the engineer and his wife waiting by the telephone in Cosenza, and that agonized girl hauling on a towel tied to the end of a bedpost, and that old lawyer somewhere up the street moaning to himself among his portraits and his trophies of the dead, and I said. "Lookit, Bart, for Chrissake, forget me. I know you want to be back in that hospital, or nursing home, or whatever it is, do please go there!" To which, intent on behaving as calmly as a Harvard man--that is to say, as a Yank, that is to say, as any English gentleman (period 1850) would have behaved--he replied that if his poppa was irrational, his father-in-law, Emilio, was far more so.

"I can guess how my father explained those riots to you. The decay of the aristocracy? All that stuff? But did he once mention the Mafia? With whom, of course, he worked hand in glove all his life. Whereas, on the other hand, my father-in-law, Emilio, would know all about the Mafia, but he would tell you that the rioting would have been far worse if it had not been for"--here one could almost hear his liver gurgling bile--"the 'wisely restraining hand of the Mother Church.' Two complementary types of total unreason."

At this he bowed his face into his palms and moaned into them, "If only my love and I could get out of this priest-ridden, Mafia-ridden, time-ridden, phony, superannuated provincial hole!"

He quickly recovered control of himself sufficiently to beg me, concernedly, to give him the latest news from the States. I did so, keeping it up as long and as lightly as I could, since the narration seemed to soothe him. But it was only a seeming, because he suddenly cried out, having obviously not heeded one word I had been saying, "The Church here, of course, is a master plotter and conspirator. Have you seen its latest miracle?"--as if he were asking me whether I had seen the latest film. "You must. It is a masterpiece. Five hundred meters away. A weeping Madonna. Weeping, of course, for Reggio. Like Niobe, from whom the idea most certainly derives. What a gullible people we are! Madonnas who weep, bleed, speak, go pale, blush, sway, for all I know dance. Did you know that before the war, Naples possessed two bottles of milk supposed to have been drawn off the breasts of the Virgin that curdled twice a year? Excuse me. May I telephone?"

He disappeared. This made the restaurant twice as empty. The padrone asked me solicitously if all was well. Signor Vivarini seemed upset? I said his wife was expecting a baby.

"A baby!"

Within a minute the restaurant came alive. Two waiters and a fat female cook bustled from the kitchen. After her came a serving-woman. The padrone's wife appeared. Two small children peeped. An old man shuffled out in slippers. In a group, they babbled about babies. It was nine o'clock. I had lost my plane. I had not yet written my report on Reggio. But Vivarini did not come back and he did not come back, and I was cross, bothered, bored and bewildered. The restaurant was empty again--the whole company of family and servitors had drifted off in a gabble to regather outside the telephone booth. I had decided to pay the bill and leave when a miniriot burst into the place, all of the rioters returning cheering and laughing to me, as if I were the fertile father, and in their midst Bartolomeo Vivarini, swollen as the sun at noon, beaming, triumphant, bestowing benedictions all round, proclaiming victory as smugly as if he were the fertile mother.

"Un miracolo gradito!" he both laughed and wept. "A son! I am the father of a son! I have telephoned my father and my mother, my father-in-law and my mother-in-law. They are all such good people, are they not?"

The company laughed, clapped and declared that it was, indeed, a miracle, a splendid miracle, a miracolo gradito.

"There will be more children!" the cook assured him.

"And more sons," the padrone's father assured him.

He sat, sobbed, hiccuped, called for champagne, but this firmly forbade.

"You haven't yet seen your wife!" I pointed out. "She must have suffered terrible pain," at which his tears spouted like champagne.

"I had forgotten all about her!" he wailed and punished his bony breast. "I must light a candle for my wife to the Madonna. To the weeping Madonna! Let us go, my dear friend. To the Madonna! She, perhaps, may make them give me one peep at my son. You will drive me? I dare not! It is not far away."

So we left, led noisily by all to the door. And nobody asked us to pay the bill.

His car was a Lancia. I drove it furiously to somewhere up the hill, this way, that way, until, above the nightness and lightness of the city, of the straits, of all Calabria and all Sicily, we halted on the edge of a tiny brilliant piazza crowded with worshipers or sight-seers, where there stood an altar, and on the altar a pink-and-blue commercial statue of the allegedly lachrymose Virgin Mary. A hundred breathless candles adored her, and four steady electric spotlights. Bartolomeo crushed me through the crowds to the altar, bought two candles, one for himself, one for me, refusing to take any change for his 1000-lire bill, lit his candle, fixed it in position and knelt on the ground to pray, his arms wide in total wonder and belief.

As far as I was concerned, the miracle was, of course, like every popular Italian miracle, preposterous--a word, as I learned at high school, that means in Ciceronian Latin arse to front. The object was to me simply an object, bought from some statue vendor in Reggio, with, if even that ever happened, a drop or two of glycerin deposited on its painted cheek by some pious or impious hand. But why would any man do that? Gradually, as I looked about me and felt the intensity of the human feeling circling the altar like a whirlpool of air, or bees in a swarm, or butterflies over a wave, or fallen leaves whispering in a dry wind, I began to feel awed and even a little frightened. As I moved through the murmuring or silent crowds, conscious of the eloquent adoration of the old, the unexpected fervor of the young, the sudden hysteria of a woman carried away screaming, the quiet insistent stare of two Franciscans fixed on the painted face, I became so affected that at one point I thought that I, too, could, might, perhaps--or did I?--see one single, perfect teardrop gleaming in the spotlights on the face of the Mother of their God. I blinked. It vanished.

But had it ever been there? Where was the proof that it had not been an illusion even for its author? The night was inflammable, the country explosive, I had too much respect for my skin to ask why even one teardrop had not been looked at through a microscope capable of distinguishing between glycerin-- that is to say, C3H5(OH)3--and the secretions of the lachrymal gland. I might as well have committed instant suicide as suggest that a similar test could be applied to the wine said to change during their Mass into the blood of their God. I found myself beside the two motionless friars. I cautiously asked one of them if he had seen, or knew anybody who had seen, a tear form in the statue's eye. He answered skillfully that this was not wholly relevant, since if one saw the tear it was so, and if one did not see a tear it was not so, which, he took pleasure in explaining to me courteously, but at some length, marks the difference in Kantian philosophy between the phenomenon and the noumenon. My mind swam.

Bartolomeo had vanished. I stayed on in that haunted piazzetta until well after one in the morning. I collected some opinions, two asserted experiences, several stories of miraculous cures. The crowd thinned, but at no time was the statue unattended by at least one worshiping believer. Only when a palsied, dumb, gummy-mouthed woman asked me the time by tapping my watch with her finger did I remember that by now the huntsmen might be asleep in Calabria but the foreign editors of America would be wide awake, for who could be drowsy at that hour whose first edition frees us all from everlasting sleep? A few steps away I found a lighted café whose owner must have nourished the same views as Sir Thomas Browne. There, over a couple of Stregas, I disposed in 20 minutes of Reggio's political troubles. Inside another half hour I evoked the miracle of the Madonna in one of the most brilliant pieces I have written during my whole life. The best part of it was the coda, which I doubted I would ever send--they would only kill it at once. In it I asked Chicago, still daylit, still dining or well dined, rumbling like old thunder, smelling as rank as a blown-out candle, how it is that the Mediterranean mind never ceases to offer us new lamps for old; and I opined that it is because it is in the nature of that restless mind to be divinely discontent with this jail of a world into which we are all born. That Latin mind is always trying to break out of its mind, to blow down the walls of its eyes, to extend time to eternity, so as to see this world as only their gods have ever seen it before.

No! Not for Chicago. Not that I cared. What is every journalist anyway but an artist manqué spanceled to another, who is tethered to a third and a fourth and a fifth, up to the 50th and final manqué at the top.

I passed slowly back through the little piazza. The candles were guttering, the spotlights still shone, it was empty except for one man kneeling in the center of it before the sleepless statue. I bade her a silent farewell, whether Juno, Hera, Niobe, Venus or the Virgin, and went on walking through the sleeping streets downhill to the shore. It was a still night. The sky gleamed with stars like Vivarini's blue coat. I thought of my dauber of Bussano, my Van Gogh manqué, and I decided that the distinction between emperor and clown is irrelevant. Every virtue is woven into its opposite, failure built into ambition, despair into desire, cold reason into hot dreams, delusion into the imagination, death into life, and if a youth has not the guts to take the risks of every one of them, he will not live long enough to deserve peace.

I paused. In the straits, was that a purring motorboat? Not a sound. Here, about 5:20 one equally silent morning 61 years ago--it was, in fact, December 28--people like the father and mother of old Mr. Vivarini the lawyer felt their house sway and shiver for 32 seconds, and for 12 miles north and south every house swayed and shook intermittently in the same way for two months. At widening intervals, the earthquake went on for a year and a half. The entire city vanished. Like Sybaris. Like Pompeii.

I looked at my watch. In a few hours, another green sheen would creep over the Narrows. Another pallid premorning lightsomeness would expand in the sky behind Aspromonte. I walked on smiling at the fun the Vivarinis would have disputing over the name of their newborn child.