The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow [318]
out of my pocket and gave her a hundred lire. "What is this?" she said. "What do you mean? It's money." "What are you giving me? Do you know I have to stay in a convent in the mountains with the nuns and that they put me in a room with fourteen other women? All sorts of women? I have to sleep with fourteen other people. And I have to walk into the city because the Sisters won't give us the bus fare." "Do they want you to stay up there?" "The nuns are not very intelligent," she said. She wasn't able to stay up there and do dull tasks and escaped into town. She was full of rebellion. But her bones were showing through, her teeth were mixed up, her veil didn't quite hide the quavery hairs of her chin and mouth, this unfunny joke on former lady smoothness.; i I wanted to look at the doors and thought, Why can't they let you alone in this country? "This is Isaac going to his own sacrifice," she said. I looked, and doubted if that could be right. I said to her, "I don't want a guide. I understand how it is, but what do you want me to do? People are coming up to me all the time. So why don't you please take this money and--" I was beginning to be in pain over it. "People! But I am not other people. You should realize that. I am--" and she was voice-stopped, she was so angry. "This is happening to me!" she said. She seemed to crowd her heart with her elbow and came up close and started it again, that queer begging and demanding. 0 destroying laws! What was the matter, hadn't this thing taken long enough, wasn't it OF AUGt E MARCH gradual enough? I mean, the wrinkles coming, the gray choking out the black, the skin slackening and sinews getting stringy? Did she still have fresh in her mind the villa she had lost, the husband or lovers, the children, the carpets and piano, the servants and money? What was the matter that she still was as if in the first pain of a deep fall? I gave her another hundred lire. "Give me five hundred and I'll show you the cathedral and I'll take you to Santa Maria Novella. It's not far, and you won't know anything if someone doesn't tell you." "As a matter of fact, I have to meet a man right away on business. Thanks just the same." I took off. I might as well have, since Ghiberti didn't have much of a spell over me anyhow just then. This ancient lady was right too, and there always is a me it happens to. Death is going to take the boundaries away from us, that we should no more be persons. That's what death is about. When that is what life also wants to be about, how can you feel except rebellious? Yes, Europe is where Stella and I went after I made three other voyages in the war. I have written out these memoirs of mine since, as a traveling man, traveling by myself, I have lots of time on my hands. For a couple of months last year I had to be in Rome. It was summer, and the place broke out in red flowers, hot and sleepy. All the southern cities are sleep cities in summer, and daytime sleep makes me heavy and tasteless to myself. To wake up in the afternoon I would drink coffee and smoke cigars, and by the time I came to myself after the siesta it was wellnigh evening. You have dinner, and it's soft nerveless green night with quiet gas mantles in the street going on incandescent and making a long throbbing scratch in the utter night. Time to sleep again, so you go and subside thickly on the bed. Therefore I got into the habit of going every afternoon to the Cafe Valadier in the Borghese Gardens on top of the Pincio, with the whole cumulous Rome underneath, where I sat at a table and declared that I was an American, Chicago born, and all these other events and notions. Said not in order to be so highly significant but probably because human beings have the power to say and ought to employ it at the proper time. When finally you're done speaking you're dumb forever after, and when you're through stirring you go still, but this is no reason to decline to speak and stir or to be what you are. I try most of the time to be in Paris because that's where Stella works. She's with a film company that does international