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By Root 4007 0

courtyard was inhabited by a balding goat, a few elderly chickens, and a multitude of starving cats. And that wasn't all: “When we arrived here we found that the signorina had rented the place out as a movie set,” Cheever wrote the Blumes. “There were two light generators in our yard and a small company of about forty-five people wandering around, acting, eating sandwiches and relieving themselves.” Mary caught a bad case of impetigo and they almost gave up, but soon enough both the itchy pustules and the movie people vanished, and the Cheevers began to have fun. The village was populated by friendly peasant folk, mostly sardine fishermen and their families, who took a shine to the Americans: “When Ben walks down the street everyone shouts: Bengy, Bengy, c'iou Bengy and there was a dance on Saturday night. Susie went with an Italian family and danced with the beach-boys. The music was an accordion and a set of trapdrums.”

The majestic cliffs and the purple Mediterranean stirred immortal longings in Cheever, and he spent many wistful hours sitting on a wall, sipping cocktails, and gazing at all the strapping fishermen gamboling about in the nude. One day a couple of youths carved a woman in the sand, then mounted her “with considerable agility and ardor” while Cheever's heart turned over. It was all so hopeless—and yet sometimes, with a sense of “gaiety and terror,” he considered “follow[ing] his mischievous nose” and the world be damned—but he only sat there drinking and feeling old. “And it seems that we cannot reform our sexual natures,” he wrote in his journal. “And there is a point where denial is sheer hypocrisy, with its train of gruelling and foolish anxieties. … I think how narrow and anxious my life is. Where are the mountains and green fields, the broad landscapes?”

AS A CONDITION for renting La Rocca, Cheever had agreed to hire the caretaker—an energetic middle-aged woman named Ernesta—as a cook. Eleanor Clark had warned him that Ernesta (“an absolute jewel”) and Iole would despise each other, and she was right: Ernesta banned Iole from the kitchen, and Iole began blackguarding the woman at every opportunity. She told Cheever that Ernesta was taking kickbacks from merchants, and that her shiftless husband, Fosco, was siphoning gas from the Fiat. One day, too, Cheever returned from an afternoon swim to find a group of tourists milling around the courtyard taking pictures—they even took a picture of the startled, naked Cheever as he stumbled into his trunks. Outraged, he ran them off with a bucket of water and threats to call the police, whereupon Ernesta indignantly explained that at least one of the visitors was “the local Marquesa, paying a courtesy call.” According to Iole, however, they were all Germans: Fosco had accosted a tour bus and sold them tickets at fifty lire a head.

The final blowup occurred in early August. Susan and Ben had begun filling their hats with figs from a tree near the lighthouse when Ernesta snatched the hats away and dumped the (unripe) figs on the ground. Iole scampered down from the terrace and the fight was on: she called Ernesta a big, filthy witch (strega), while Ernesta replied in effect that Iole was a whore (mignotta) and a piece of shit (caeca). An hour later Cheever put his family on a train to Rome, then returned to La Rocca and coldly paid Ernesta her wages. “What troubles me most are unkind feelings about Eleanor,” he wrote afterward, “some timidity towards her that is best overcome with anger, some fear of losing her friendship or perhaps her advocacy.”

They left Italy three weeks later, after a stop in Pompeii to examine the crater of Vesuvius, where Cheever was smitten by a Danish actress. He sat with her on the bus going back and was about to get her name when she suddenly disembarked, and Cheever was left feeling “sick with love.” (He would moon over the encounter for years.) Two days later, in Naples, they boarded the Constitution with Iole in tow as well as four Japanese dancing mice (recompense for Barbara Frietchie). “After having wondered for so many months