Aperto E Chiuso

In the several years of their secret affair, Vivian, George Allenson's third wife, had had ample opportunity to observe how little, in relation to his second wife, he was to be trusted; but he had not expected her, once they were married, to perceive him as untrustworthy. He was 20 years older, also, and he had not imagined that this superiority in experience, and in the relaxed poise that proximity to death brings, might be regarded as a deficit—in eyesight, in reaction time, in quality of attention. Throughout their vacation trip to Italy, Vivian was vocally nervous in the car, sitting beside him clutching the map while he, with growing confidence and verve, steered their rented subcompact through the Italian traffic, from one lovely old congested city to another. He was even mastering the Italian trick of turning a two-lane highway into a three-lane by simply passing right into the teeth of the oncoming traffic. Whenever he did this, she shrieked, and now she was worried about their running out of gas, and kept urging him into gasoline stations. Far as they had come, from Venice to Ravenna to Verona, they had not yet replenished the tankful that came with the car.

"There's one—it says aperto!

"Where?" Allenson asked, knowing perfectly well. There was a tense gullible nerve in his wife that it amused him to touch.

"Right there! We went right by! Mobil, just like at home! I can't believe you did that, darling!"

"I didn't like the look of it. Too many ugly trucks."

Vivian told him, with the complacency of a knowing child, "You're just nervous because you don't know how to say 'Fill 'er up.' But if we don't get gas soon, we'll be stuck by the side of the road, and then what'll you say?"

"I'll say, 'Scusi'" he said. "I'll turn to you," he elaborated, in the mellow baritone that even a smidgeon of Italian brings out in the male voice, "and say, 'Mi scusi, mia cara.' Actually, we've got plenty of gas. These little Fiats go forever on just a liter."

He was near 60, and she near 40, and as these irrevocable turning points approached, both of them, perhaps, were showing their nerves. They were headed toward Lake Garda on a day's trip out of Verona. Their Verona hotel room was not merely expensive but exquisite, provided with real antiques and a balcony view of roof tiles and campanili whose various bells rang the hours with a ragged succession of tollings. The Allensons' daily routine—two continental breakfasts in the room, delivered with much waiterly fussing and musical clatter, followed by a walking excursion to a church or two, a Roman amphitheater, a castle turned art museum, and then their return to the room and a lunch of fresh fruit bought en route and some thriftily saved breakfast rolls, the elemental economy of this lunch suggesting an even less expensive entertainment, in the languor of the sunny hour, on one or the other of their little Empire-style beds—this routine was intimate and strict, so it was with trepidation and potential irritability that they had set out, this morning, in the neglected car to brave the narrow unmarked streets and the helter-skelter of buzzing, thrusting Italian vehicles.

On their last excursion, which had brought them from Vicenza to Verona by way of the S11—an inescapable green line on Vivian's map—Allenson had managed almost immediately to take a wrong turn that headed them up into the hills, through pastel flocks of villagers attending Mass, between flowering hedgerows and fields dotted with sheep, on a winding upward road that offered, it seemed to him, no place to turn around. Her resentment of his failure to follow the route so clear and plain on her lap became shrill, and he risked their lives by angrily ducking into a dirt lane and backing out into the road. On their descent back through the village, which she retrospectively identified, on the map, as Montecchio Maggiore, Vivian confessed, by way of making up, how pretty it all was. And it was true, his blunder had in a flash uncovered a crystalline cisalpine charm bared by none of their map-bound excursions, even one in the very next hour, to Soave, at the end of a little spur that crossed the A4.

Soave, hitherto to them merely a name on a bottle of cheap white wine, was an old walled town; they parked outside the gates and walked along the main street. Outside the town's main bar, a crowd of men had gathered after Mass, and one of them abruptly presented Vivian, as she passed, with a red carnation. Allenson, a step behind her, was startled to see his wife accept the gift with an instant broad smile and the appropriate gracious gesture of bringing the flower to within a few inches of her chest. "Grazie" she said, managing nicely the little flirted tail of an E that Allenson always had trouble pronouncing.

Perhaps women are biologically conditioned to accept flowers, even from total strangers on the street. Vivian was dark-haired and somewhat stately of figure; but for a spatter of girlish freckles, and those dry crinkles that collect where American women's smiles stress their faces, she might have been Italian. Allenson reflexively reached toward his pocket to pay for the flower, but no charge was exacted. The man, in a suit but unshaven, matched Vivian's smile with an equally broad one of his own and responded, "Prego, signora," ignoring her husband.

Allenson quickened his step to place himself by her side. When they had put behind them the crowd of loitering, chattering men, Vivian asked him, "What did it mean?" For all her criticism of his driving and deportment, she expected him to know everything, to be wise.

"Damned if I know. Look—those little girls have carnations, too."

"Does it mean I'm a Communist or something?"

There were election posters all over Italy, and some of them did show a carnation. "Left of center, at the worst, I would think. Communism's had it, even here. Maybe it's just something they do for tourists."

"I think we're the only ones in town." It was true, entering the walled town at Sunday noon felt as if they were trespassing in a large living room, full of families. Allenson's eyes, moving on from the little carnation-carrying girls in the after-church stragglers, had received the equivalent of a flower: seen from behind, a father and daughter walking with their arms about each other's waists, the gray-haired father, in his possessive fond grip, apparently unaware that his long-haired daughter had grown to be as tall as he and voluptuous, her mandolin-shaped bottom just barely contained in a leather miniskirt. These skirts, taut swatches exposing the full length of thigh, had been all over Venice, moving up and down the stepped bridges that crossed the canals. As a child wants to reach out and pat balloons, to verify their substance, Allenson had mentally reached out. Perhaps Vivian was right, he was not trustworthy. He wanted to be forever young. He had left his antihypertension pills at home, and she—rather chemically, he thought—credited to that his rejuvenated sexual energy. But, broken loose from the routines of work and old friendships, one is, as a tourist, immersed in youth, unable to ignore how the world's population is renewing itself. Even Vivian was old, relatively.

Allenson really couldn't understand why, after these many kilometers in which he had not crashed into anything, she seemed still not to like his driving. The car's five gears (six, with reverse) did sometimes still jumble under his hand, so that he tried to start in third or to move straight from first to fourth, but within a day, he had satisfied himself that, in Italy as elsewhere, a subtle camaraderie of the road mitigates against collision. Amid an incessant buzzing of little motorcycles and onrolling walls of double-van trucks with the Mercedes emblem on their grilles, understandings were being reached, tolerances arrived at. Even at the most frantic mergers, he felt a Latin grace and logic; the drivers of Italy, though possessed of a gallant desire to maximize the capacity of their engines, were more civilized than the brutal commuters of Westchester and Long Island. "Relax," he told Vivian, on the road to Lake Garda. "Enjoy the scenery."

"I can't. You'll take a crazy wrong turn like you did outside Vicenza."

"What if I do? It's all new to us. It's all Italy."

"That's the problem."

"I thought you loved it here."

"I do, when we stop moving."

"You know, Vivian, I could start to resent all this criticism. Elderly men have feelings, too."

"It's not you, you're doing great, considering."

"Considering what?"

(continued on page 178)Aperto E Chiuso(continued from page 84)

"Considering," she said, "you're driving on an empty gas tank."

•

Sirmione, even in early May, was full of other tourists. "The kids are here," they said, continuing a joke that had developed in Venice and continued into Ravenna, where every basilica and baptistry seemed crammed, beneath the palely shimmering Byzantine mosaics, with packs of sight-sated, noisily interacting school children. Even the vast piazza of San Marco wasn't big enough to hold the boisterous offspring of an ever more mobile and prosperous Europe.

The small fortress at Sirmione offered views of the lake and, most fascinatingly, of the process of laying roof tiles. Three men labored gingerly on a roofed pitch beneath the fort's parapets. The oldest stood on a dizzying scaffold and guided onto his platform each wheelbarrowload of tiles and cement hoisted by a crane in the courtyard; the youngest slapped mortar along the edge where roof met parapet; the middle-aged man crouched lovingly to the main task of seating each row of tiles on gobs of mortar and tapping them, by eye, into regularity. "Doesn't that seem," Allenson asked his wife, "a tedious way to make a roof? What's wrong with good old American asphalt shingles?"

"They're ugly," Vivian said, "and these roofs are beautiful."

"Yeah, but acres of them, everywhere you look. How much beauty do you need? The cement must dry up and then everything slip and slide and have to be done all over."

Catullus had summered here, a monument down by the dock informed them, and a hydrofoil from Riva hove splashily into view, and they ate two toasted panini con salami at an outdoor café. When Allenson closed his eyes and lifted his face to the sun, he had a dizzying sensation of being on the old workman's scaffold, suspended at a killing height, thousands of miles from home, on a small blue planet, and soon to be dead, as dead as Catullus, his consciousness ceasing, his awareness of sun and of shade, of the voices of the kids around them. His brief life was quite pointless and his companion no comfort. She was a kid herself. He opened his eyes and the tidily trashy, overused beauty of the lakeside washed in, displacing his dread.

"What are you thinking?" Vivian asked him, her voice on edge, as if they were already back in the car.

"How nice it is here," he answered. "And what a dreamboat you are."

"Why do you lie?" she asked.

He felt no need to answer. People lie to spare each other.

They drove west to Desenzano, then north to Salò and along a road that twisted high above the lake. "Why do you have to accelerate around the corners?" she asked.

"There's a guy pushing me behind."

"Let him pass."

"There's no place to pass."

"Then let him go a little slower. He can see you're not Italian."

"How?"

"From the haircut. Why do you feel you have to pretend you're an Italian driver?"

"No comprendo," he said. "Sono Italiano. Sono uno ragazzo." In a lavatory in Venice, he had studied a graffito that read, Ho Fatto L'amore Con Un Ragazzo Veneziano Ed Stato Bellisimo. "Con mia cara," he added. Con, with its coarse meanings in other languages, turned out to be an indispensable Italian word. Cappuccino con latte. Acqua minerale con gas. Panini con salami. The Fiat emitted a tiny satisfying squeal of tires as Allenson surged around a hairpin curve. His eyes held in his rearview mirror the grilled face of a tail-gating vehicle, switching back and forth in the mirror like an exasperated beast in a cage.

"I'm getting sick to my stomach," Vivian said.

"Stop looking at the map. Look out the window. Enjoy the beauty you're so crazy about."

The most beautiful moment, for him, had occurred in Venice, while they were walking back to the hotel, up over a little bridge, past a place where the long black coffinlike gondolas waited in the canal while their drivers gloomily played cards. The dollar had become so weak Americans were timid of gondola rides, and the Allensons had contented themselves with hearing, as they walked around after dinner, the astounding male singing of a gondolier, as open and plaintive as that of a woman but enormous: It would swell from a distance into an operatic moment only a few yards away as the gondolas slid and tapped past and then slowly would subside, still audible after the gondolas, with their burden of swaddled passengers, had vanished between the tall angled house facades and the water in the canal had gone still. The passengers were usually Japanese. This evening, as the Allensons crossed a little piazza and approached the passageway to their hotel, a tall Japanese girl cried out, "No! Wait!" The two syllables of English, somehow like a cry in a language Allenson did not understand, brimmed with a sweet anguish that electrified the air and arrested all motion but hers. Tall for her race, glimmering in a white dress, the young woman, her straight sleek hair utterly black in the half-light—the stagy indoors-outdoors atmosphere of Venice—raced across the flat stones at the canal's edge while the gondoliers called to one another like awakened birds. She had lost something, Vivian speculated at Allenson's side, and, indeed, the contralto cry had been as of someone violated, fatally penetrated. But no, she wanted to give something to a mustachioed young gondolier who, to receive it, gallantly made his way back across the narrow canal by stepping on other gondolas. The two of them each reached out an arm to touch hands, while imaginary music swelled, and in her strangely electrifying, passion-filled voice, the Japanese girl said, in this language that belonged to neither her nor him, "Your mon-ey." A tip. Some yen turned into lire. "The Japanese flooding the world with money, as once Americans did. The Japanese had become rich and, with it, sexy. So beautiful, so far from home, her voice rising like a Madame Butterfly's in this echoing stage-set of a city. Her cry vibrated in Allenson's bonés until he at last fell asleep in the hotel bed.

"Darling, you must stop the car," Vivian said, in a voice drained of all flirtation, of wifely importuning. "I'm about to throw up."

He looked over. She did look pale, under the little tan she had acquired drinking cappuccini in sunny piazzas. Within a few hundred yards, he found a space by the side of the road, beside a steeply descending woods, and pulled over. Other cars whizzed by. A few wrappers and empty plastic bottles testified to previous visitors. The lake showed its sparkling green-blue through the quivering tops of poplars. On the other side of the road, a high ocher wall restrained the hillside. Vivian sat still, eyes shut, like a child trying to hold down a tantrum. Feeling unappreciated, Allenson got out of the car, slammed the door and inspected this unscenic piece of Italy—the litter, the link fence, the flowering weeds. Such unpampered roadside nature reminded him of America; his used old heart popped open and peace entered, and with it, for the ten thousandth time, a desire to reconcile with his wife, whoever she was. She had opened the car window a crack, to permit communications. "Want to come out for some air?" he asked.

Vivian shook her head curtly. "I want to go back. I want to get off this fucking twisty road."

"What about Riva?" They'd intended to drive to Riva at the head of the lake.

"Fuck Riva."

"Honey, your language," he said, slightly stirred, along the lines of the Japanese girl's exclamation in Venice. He loved it when women let it out. "Would you like to drive?"

"You know I'm scared of the gears."

"Then just relax and let me drive."

"OK, but don't be so macho." Her voice softened on "macho." "I beg you," she added. "Prego."

"Smooth as silk," he promised. The exchange had conferred youthful status on him; he got back into the car bouncily. "Stop looking at the map," he told her. "That's what gets you sick."

•

On the way back toward Salò, Vivian cried out, "What a lovely little church! Darling, could you please stop?"

There was a space of cobblestones beside an array of white metal tables, and he pulled in. "See," she said, in a placating tone meant to match his new docility. "If you go slow, we can see things."

The ancient little church had a patchily Romanesque façade. The rounded front portal was open, and to enter, they parted a thick red curtain. Within, they were embraced by the watery cool of village Catholicism—the stony deep scent of a well, a few guttering candles, some unfathomably murky frescoes. The hard-pressed tourist couple welcomed the emptiness, the vaulted silence between them and the pale Virgin making a gentle disclaiming gesture beside the altar. Vivian was so moved she fed a 1000-lira bill into one of the offering boxes. From the church, they went next door to sit at one of the white tables. A girl just barely in her teens came to them shyly, nervously, as if they were the first customers of her career; Allenson ordered cappuccino for Vivian, limonata for himself. Both were good, as Hemingway might have said. Dear old Hemingway, Allenson thought, hoping to find the good life in hotels and cafés, roaming Europe like a bison on a tenderly grassy plain, nibbling, defecating, praising headwaiters and contessas. From the white tables, one looked level across the road at the masts of some fishing boats and at the glittering turquoise water backed by the misty blue mountains of the far shore. Once again, the best had proved to be the unforeseen. On her map, Vivian discovered that they were in Maderno. She found the church in her guidebook, in the smallest of types. "'Sant' Andrea,'" she read. "'Shows remains of Roman and Byzantine architecture, especially in the pillar capitals, doors and windows. A yet older church,' it says, 'seems to be incorporated in the building.'"

"Yet older." Reading over her shoulder, Allenson said, "We should go to see D'Annunzio's house. It's just down the road."

She looked at him distrustfully. "Who was D'Annunzio?"

"You dear child," said Allenson. "He was just about the most famous writer since Byron. I mean famous-famous, not literary-excellence-famous. I'm a little vague about exactly why. Fond of big gestures, and a great womanizer. Didn't you see the article on his house a little while back in Art and Antiques? It looked like a Turkish harem."

"That would appeal to you," Vivian said.

"And there are gardens," he dimly remembered. "We passed the sign to it just here"—he stabbed the map—"in Gardone Riviera. We'll nip in to look at it, and then drive straight back, and be back in the hotel in time to have tea in the bar. Maybe he'll give us those little English biscuits again."

"Gas," Vivian said. "We must get gas, George."

"There'll be a station on the way to D'Annunzio," he promised.

But there wasn't. The distance was so short he shot past the turnoff and had to back around, awkwardly and dangerously, while Vivian shrieked and clamped her eyes shut. Once safely parked, they walked uphill, following signs to Il Vittoriale degli Italiani. It was two o'clock, and the sun had become hot. "What's a vittoriale?" she asked him.

"I don't know. Some kind of victory?"

"I thought the Italians never had that sort of victory. That was part of their charm."

"We'll see," he promised.

But at the entrance, with its ticket booth and desultory souvenir stands, the guard was explaining something to a bulky, displeased Italian family. "E chiusa," Allenson heard him say. The ending was feminine.

"La casa?" he asked, at a venture.

"La casa, il museo," the guard said, and a torrent more, of which Allenson took the drift to be that the grounds and gardens were, however, open. The day was Monday, which presumably explained the split. Aperto, chiuso: Italy was a checkerboard.

"You're in luck," Allenson told his wife. "The house full of pillows is closed. Only the outdoors is open."

"Is it worth seeing?"

"It must be, or they would shut everything up at once. Do you want to go in, or not?"

Even this early, she showed signs of a curious D'Annunzio-induced panic. Her brown eyes, with their dry smile crinkles at the corners, tried to read his face. "You want to," she said. "You think it'll be sexy."

"I want to do what mia cara wants," Allenson said. He pointed out, "We won't be here soon again. Maybe never." Wednesday, they were flying home.

"How much is it?"

Allenson glanced at the biglirtleria and said, "Five thousand a head. A cappuccino in Venice cost nine. It's only money; we're making memories." Your mon-ey: passed through the reaching hands, the coffinlike gondolas bumping.

"Let's see what the other people do."

The Italian family, with abundant disgruntled exchange between the husband and the wife, while their two fat children reddened in the sun, decided to enter; but inside the gates, on the long paved walks and surreal stark stairways, where the Allensons kept encountering them, the man was heard more than once exclaiming, as he surveyed the sun-struck vittoriale, "Cinque mila!"

To Allenson, it was worth it. The views of the lake, of the forest plunging down into the lake, were worth it. The early-modern grandiosity was worth it. The place had the feeling of an American sacred place—the home of Daniel Chester French, for instance, or Roosevelt's Hyde Park—in which history had scarcely had time to cool. One's parents, in boaters and white linen, might have been guests here, filling the terraces with the sound of their youthful frivolity. An old red roadster was displayed behind glass—l'automobile dell'impresa di Fiume. "The empress of Fiume?" Vivian asked.

"I don't think so. Something that happened at Fiume?" Stairways led upward, past closed house and museum doors, into the surrounding woodland, where a mountain stream had been tricked into forming a goldfish pond. The atmosphere was pampered, enchanted, sinister. They came to a structure, open, wherein a large old-fashioned motorboat was suspended in memorial dry dock; around the walls of the boathouse, maps and photographs tried to explain the great impresa of Fiume, but only in Italian. It was a secret the Italians had among themselves; it involved a number of men, centered on short, bald, goateed, baggy-eyed D'Annunzio, wearing the clothes of an aviator. Maps showed dotted lines heading across the Adriatic and back. "What happened?" Vivian demanded in her sharp, car-riding voice.

"I don't know. It was a heroic exploit, in the car and then the boat."

"It feels evil."

"Don't be silly. In the First World War, the Italians were on the Allied side, remember? Read Hemingway. They were fighting the Austrians."

"Then what were they doing in Yugoslavia?"

"It was Austrian at the time, maybe." History, his fragile knowledge of it, was crumbling under him.

•

From the boathouse, a concrete path led upward still, to a bizarre and solemn structure, a two-story mausoleum. The lower portion, entered through open arches, had the same watery smell as the little Romanesque church, but the only holy objects were graven names, names of i Tredici—the Thirteen—and more inscrutable printed information concerning Fiume. Upstairs, a circle of blazing white sarcophagi thrust pointed corners, like little marble ears, against the blank blue Mediterranean sky. In the center of the circle, on square columns twice as tall as the others, the largest sarcophagus flamboyantly loomed. Vivian seemed quite bewildered, dazed and lost in the white brilliance, in the angles of unrelieved marble. "He's in there," Allenson explained to her, pointing to the central tower.

"Your hero?" she said. "And who's in all these others?"

"His companions in the thing of Fiume. The Thirteen."

"You mean men are in all these boxes? Where are their wives? Why aren't they buried with their families?"

Allenson shrugged. Her insatiable questions, like a child's, were wearing him down, numbing his brain.

She announced, "This is the most hateful place I've ever been. I can't stand it. It's Fascist. It's Hitler. I keep thinking of all the dead Jews."

"Honey, it wasn't that war. Italy was on our side. D'Annunzio died in 1938, it says right here. The grandeur of all this, I don't know—maybe it was Mussolini who financed it. He wasn't thought to be all that bad at first—he made the trains run on time. Not that even I was alive then."

"I can't stand it," Vivian said. "If I have to stand a minute longer here in the blinding sun listening to you defend this Nazi, I'll scream. I'd like to blow it up. I wish I'd brought a can of spray paint so I could write graffiti all over it. I'm surprised nobody has."

"Vivian, dear, you're being quite stupid. He wasn't a Nazi, he was a poet, a fin-de-siècle dandy. You don't know the details of it, and I don't either. When we get home, I'll do some research."

"You ever mention this hideous man to me again, I'll ask for a divorce."

He winced a smile, here in the sun. "You think the judge will find it insufficient grounds?"

She would not smile back. "Think of it—real men in those boxes, their bones. Hideous male bonding, right through to the afterlife."

"I don't know, isn't there a kind of innocent pomp to it? I find it rather touching."

"As touching as what you did to Claire."

Claire had been his second wife. Allenson blinked and said, "What we did to Claire, you could say."

"Men, I mean," Vivian pleaded, desperately gesturing upward, out of the depths of a millennial oppression. "Putting themselves in pompous marble boxes, ruining all this woodland, the lovely view. Oh, I hate it. I can't stand you standing there smirking and loving it."

"I don't exactly love—" But his wife, with an angrily shut face, from which tears were trying to escape, dodged past him and through the shadows of the motionless memorials, the Thirteen basking in their glory, as if through a maze, and ran down the stairs, where the portly family was with difficulty ascending to get their cinque mila's worth.

Maybe a baby, Allenson thought, would calm her down. She was approaching the age of now or never, as far as pregnancy was concerned. But the thought of one more dependent, its little life sticking out past his into the future like a diving board, made him dizzy. Vivian was waiting for him at a landing lower down, leaning against a stone balustrade. "Sorry," she said. "I lost it." In the cooling sunlight, he saw that she, like a real Italian beauty, had a few fine dark hairs on her upper lip.

This vulnerable touch softened him. "You're right, of course. There is something creepy about this place."

"There's still more. There's a whole navy down there, the sign says."

"Nave," Allenson read. "A ship. How can there be a ship?"

But there was, with a mast and cabin and funnels, breasting the treetops, below them. A kind of gigantic centaur, its back half a deck imitated in stone, the foredeck apparently real, and all the tons of it heroically dragged up the hillside to rest incongruously among the poplars and the ink-dark cypresses. It would have helped his marriage, he knew, to forgo this wonder, but the boy in him couldn't resist heading down the steps, and setting foot on the marble deck, then the wooden deck, and looking over the rail at the ocean of trees, the poplar leaves flickering like tiny white-caps. It was very Italian—like, on a grander scale, those pieces of Venetian glass that ingeniously imitate candy. Returning up the stairs, he was short of breath, and his legs felt heavy. "It's a toy," he told Vivian. "It's all toys."

"Just like war," she said.

"Oh, come on," he begged. "I didn't build it. I'm just a tourist like you." Imitating a dutiful husband, he escorted her down, past the closed mansion with its art-deco doors, past the red roadster used in the mysterious impresa, out of this maze with its dead Minotaur. Yet at the entrance, he couldn't resist asking, "Want to buy any souvenirs?"

"Drop dead," she suggested, and walked away from him toward the car. He bought five postcards, including one showing D'Annunzio nel sui studio (dans son bureau, in his study, in sein er Bibliothek) gazing intently at what appeared to be comic-strip-shaped proofs, wearing a three-piece fuzzy gray suit, a handkerchief in his pocket, a stickpin in his cravat, the veins in his very bald head bulging with concentration, his little lips pursed. He looked sickly, a rich life catching up to him. Now his body was back there, pressed against the sky, dry as a flattened lizard.

Vivian was far down the narrow sidewalk toward the parking lot. No, wait. That thrilling contralto. Ignominious in her sulk, she had to wait beside the little Fiat, since he had the keys. "That was fun," he told her. "Just as well the house and museum were closed, they might have been too much."

"I'd rather have fun at Auschwitz," she said.

"Cut it out. OK, the guy had a good self-image. That's no crime. That doesn't mean Auschwitz. The trouble with your generation, all you know about history is Auschwitz and the A-bomb, and all you know about politics is you don't want them to happen again. I keep telling you, he was on our side. You've got the wrong guy."

"Maybe you've got the wrong girl. You had a wife just like you, why didn't you stick with her? Claire would have loved going to Nazi shrines."

"She might have," he admitted.

Vivian persisted, her dark eyes flashing. "You want a new woman. Claire and I were a set, we went together. I bet you've already got her picked out. It was somebody you saw in Venice. You began to act funny in Venice." Female intuition, Allenson thought, what a nuisance it is. Her basic thrust secretly thrilled him, but the practicalities of it were overwhelming.

"Vivian, please. I'm nearly sixty. I'm ready for my sarcophagus. As my prospective widow, I hope you paid close attention up there. It's just what I want. Only, you can leave out those thirteen other guys."

She grudgingly laughed, beginning to let him back in. He knew what would please her. Back on the main road, she said, "Look, George, there's an aperto."

He slowed and pulled into the gas station. "How did you say we say, 'Fill 'er up'?"

"Il pieno, per favore. That's what the guidebook says."

But no one came out of the little office, and no other cars were at the pumps. Allenson got out into the sun and shrugged at Vivian through her window. "Chiuso," he said.

Another car pulled in, and a small Italian woman in black got out and looked around. Allenson caught her eye. "Chiuso?" he said again, with a more tentative intonation. She favored him with a stream of Italian and did not seem disappointed when his face showed total incomprehension.

Allenson had noticed, beyond the empty office, a boy in gray jeans and a Shell T-shirt washing a car, with an air of independence of this establishment. But now he came over and spoke to the woman and showed her something about the pump. She smiled in sudden eager understanding, performed some action Allenson could not see, seized the handle of the gasoline pump, pumped and drove away.

The boy approached Allenson. "Is automatique," he said. "Ten-thousand-lira note, then pump."

"Ah, comprendo, comprendo. Molte grazie." He explained to Vivian, "You deal with the pump directly. You feed it lire." He found the right denomination of bill in his wallet, and with a curt mechanical purr, the slot sucked it in. Gasoline then flowed from the nozzle into his tank, rather briefly. Ten thousand lire—nine dollars—bought just a few liters.

"More!" Vivian shouted from within the car. "Here's some more money." She pushed ten-thousand-lira notes out through her half-open window, and the pump sucked them up, turning money into movement, into married romance.

When he got back behind the wheel, Vivian, momentarily satisfied, said, "It's strange he had to explain it to the woman, too. She was Italian."

"It's a tough country," Allenson pronounced, from his height of experience. "Even the natives can't figure it out."

"'How nice it is here,' he said. 'And what a dreamboat you are.' 'Why do you lie?' she asked."