One’s first impression of Rome is disappointing. All those who have studied some history and know that the city was the capital of the world are surprised by its layout, its ruins and the disorder and poverty that abounds. I was particularly distressed at the chatter and lack of devotion in the houses of worship. Most of the parishioners do not even kneel down during the Elevation.
‘And you have a lot more to see,’ the Senyor told me, ‘that will make you doubt about the place and its history. Nonetheless, Joan, and in spite of everything, this is Rome.’
Not until a few weeks later did I understand those words.
The Senyor wished to stay at the Grand Hotel, but due to the state of our finances, quite meagre after our Paris adventures, we went to a pensione on the Corso. The lady of the pensione received us with an effusiveness that did not please Dona Maria Antònia in the least and that certainly was not appropriate. She assured us that she had the best and most pleasant rooms in the city, but what we saw bore no relation to what she said. The Corso, the main avenue, like the Ramblas in Barcelona, for instance, is really not much more than a narrow, crooked street. That was the street our rooms overlooked. The weather was humid, and grass was growing in the cracks between the pavement cobblestones.
The Senyor wanted to show me ancient Rome first of all. Dona Maria Antònia stayed in the pensione. It was raining and we could not find a carriage. Armed with an umbrella, we went to the Capitoline square, one of Michelangelo’s more beautiful works. From there we walked down to the ruins. What dereliction, what an absence of grandeur, compared to what I had expected! Even the Coliseum struck me as small.
‘Rome,’ the Senyor told me, ‘is too ancient. It’s like a wine: to be good it has to be old, it has to be a vintage wine. But it oughtn’t to be too old, or it might turn sour. Rome did so quite some time ago.’
He was referring to the Rome of the Caesars. The Rome of the Popes, praise the Lord, is not dead, as we were able to witness later on.
The audience with Leo XIII was set, barring unforeseen circumstances, for the last day of the year, and we devoted the two previous weeks to visiting churches and museums. The Senyor was right: that was Rome. We were escorted by a sturdy fair-haired Franciscan from Lombardy. His expression did not seem particularly friendly (according to the Senyor, ‘he had never been taught how to laugh’) but he was always eager to please, one of the most kind-hearted men that I have ever known. He had been introduced to Roman high society and took us to visit some old palaces that left me in awe. I never would have thought that such a dead city, full of poverty and ugliness, still harboured such great wealth. Endless rooms covered in damask, with paintings up to the ceilings, full of engraved silver, chandeliers and swords with diamond-incrusted hilts. Neither in the house of the Counts of Montenegro nor in the Solleric Palace, veritable museums admired by the sadly famous George Sand, can such valuable objects be found. The paintings, however, are not edifying in the least. Naked bodies abound and some exceed all measure. I will not dwell upon this matter because there would be too much to say. I will only record one unbelievable instance, without mentioning the name of the person concerned. Had I not seen it with my own eyes, I never would have believed it: in a most elegant residence on the outskirts of the city (what they now call a casino in Italy), the property of a Prince, there is a marble by the sculptor Canova representing a naked goddess reclining on some cushions with an apple in her hand. That goddess is a portrait…of the lady of the house.
‘In general,’ Don Toni stated, ‘Italian women are as virtuous as Mallorcan women, if not more. They like to talk about their honour, as do Castilian women, but sometimes their virtue and their honour collapse all at once. Then they can go to extremes.’
After lunch we usually went to the Pincio. From the Piazza del Popolo one can go up by carriage on two monumental ramps. We rode in open carriages and the Senyor amused himself by chatting with the coachmen. Sometimes they spent the entire time arguing over a ral and when the Senyor finally got the discount he gave the man half a pesseta.
‘We all have our ways of losing our tempers,’ he observed. ‘The old ones complain and say horrible things to us, but out of respect they do so quietly. Besides, with those alcoholic voices they have, we can barely make out what they’re saying. The young ones tend to be bolder, but some of them react like little girls. The other day when you didn’t come along you missed one who burst into tears; he dropped the reins and almost let the carriage topple over. Only because I’d said: L’avaro conta sempre i suoi tesori.’ Afterwards he refused to charge us.’
The fact is that either because of these scenes or because of the tip that ensued, as soon as we arrived at the Piazza the coachmen started fighting over who would take us in his carriage. The Senyor sat on a stone bench and smiled as he watched them. Dona Maria Antònia contemplated the scene from a distance, sheltered under her umbrella.
‘They’ll tell us when they’ve finished, won’t they, Joan? The Senyor is turning into a little boy. Now you tell me why he has to make these men angry. Someday they’ll end up calling us something we won’t like to hear.’
After having argued for a while, we got into one of the carriages and rode up to the Pincio, crossing other carrozze full of high society ladies who went out to sun themselves. The Pincio gardens have been famous since ancient times and overlook a splendid view. Roses, cypress trees and statues compose a most beautiful image of the Renaissance. There is no path, balustrade, temple or belvedere that is not guarded by some nymph or Caesar. There is marble everywhere. The stone characters form entire legions, and as we walked down a dense avenue where the pedestals were almost touching each other, the Senyor pointed out the possible consequences.
‘In Rome,’ he said, ‘there will end up being more statues than people, because people die, but statues live on. Each generation adds new sculptures, not even counting the ones they dig up in the excavations. What will happen the day marble rules over man, and the guides say, “Rome, with a population of one million four hundred thousand, four fifths made of stone”?’
When travelling one encounters strange characters, and the Romans were quite unusual. Every afternoon we came across a rather beautiful elderly lady; after the second day she smiled at us as if we were acquainted. The third day, seeing we had stepped out of the carriage to contemplate the view from a belvedere, she said graciously: ‘Fa molto dolce. Domani avremmo una bella giornata.’ Before leaving she handed us her card. She was a marchioness. The following afternoon we learned that she lived alone and that her distractions were art and carriage-drives on sunny days. We had started to suspect that she might be a charlatan when we received an invitation to meet her for lunch. When we arrived at her address close to the Piazza di Spagna, she introduced us to an old lady and two slightly tattered commendatori. In the course of the visit we discovered she was a cousin of the Barberinis, although they apparently were not on speaking terms; we therefore did not ask her to show us the palazzo. The residence of the marchesa was not exceedingly luxurious, but it had a certain charm, as did its owner. It seemed as though it had gradually been stripped of paintings and tapestries; there were still some valuable damasks and furniture. We never discovered what sort of art it was that she was interested in. She was cultured and had a melancholy, rather mysterious air about her. She claimed to know a lady who made copies of paintings for a reasonable price, but she did not press the matter nor make us feel any obligation. Suddenly we stopped seeing her. We reached the conclusion that she was indeed a lady, albeit an odd one.
One afternoon, the young coachman who had wept because the Senyor told him only misers count their riches, saw that we were taking another carriage and took out a knife; had I not stopped him, he would have thrust it into his horse’s chest.
‘See, Tonet?’ Dona Maria Antònia said, ‘That’ll teach you not to fool around with these people.’
‘They’re a sensitive race,’ the Senyor thought out loud.
‘It would indeed be sensitive,’ she replied, ‘if we ended up in trouble. Do you really find it so amusing to listen to them?’
I think he really did. The Senyor denied the substance of Italian literature (emptier, as far as he was concerned, than a snailshell and more rhetorical than a nun’s bouquet) and yet was a lover of the language for its musicality and the reactions of its people, for their primitive and histrionic nature. ‘They shouldn’t write,’ he said. ‘They’ll never know how to carry out a subtle analysis. The world of thought is beyond them. They shouldn’t write, but they should let us write about them.’ Consequently he would make them talk, and since his Italian was not very good, he would throw in any old sentence from the Méthode de Ahn just to test their reaction. ‘Non si conosce meglio I’uomo che nell’ubriachezza,’ he would suddenly exclaim. Thinking they were being considered drunkards, they would gesticulate and spew forth all sorts of unpleasant comments, as Dona Maria Antònia had foreseen. Yet the Senyor was more interested in the euphony of the words than in their meaning.
‘Have you ever heard anything more delightful than an aria from Andrea Doria?’ he asked us.
‘Who was Andrea Doria?’ his wife inquired. ‘Didn’t Raphael paint her?’
‘He was a man, not a woman,’ the Senyor replied. And since Italy made him dream, he added: ‘He must have been a young, energetic man; a captain. His skin was tanned from the sun; the wind tossed his hair and his forehead was always full of curls.’
Don Toni was undoubtedly caught in the same predicament as the eighteenth century: he was too lucid to seem lyrical, but lyricism was in him the way it is in the music of Rameau. What he hated was dark lyricism, shouts and exclamation marks.
‘Have you ever seen the classical Latins,’ he brought to my attention, ‘use exclamation marks in their literature? They didn’t even know what they were. It’s well and good to shout at Pastora,’—a mule at Bearn—‘because otherwise she doesn’t get the point. Needless to say, romantic readers are also a little deaf. Voltaire said to Rousseau: “Reading your works, one feels like walking on all fours”.’
In general, he found Italy a country of outrageous gestures.
‘When the gestures are the Sistine Chapel,’ he said, ‘we must accept and be grateful for them: genius has its privileges. But there are few artists like Michelangelo, even though he isn’t always a genius. His statue of Moses, gigantic in size, is not really all that great. It’s more of a caricature than anything else. In general, the Italian society of the Renaissance was histrionic. Do you know of anything in poorer taste than the banquet offered by Chigi to Giovanni di Medici? The plates were made of gold, and when they’d been used, Chigi threw them into the Tiber. But he had a net set in the river and the following day he got the entire set of gold dishes back again. How do you explain Giovanni di Medici wanting to be acquainted with a man the likes of that? Yet despite the Medicis being called princes, they were nothing but merchants. In that sense they could keep company with the Chigis. How very different, Joan, from the noblemen of Spain!’
It seemed to me that Don Toni had started slapping too many bellboys and threatening too many cheeky coachmen. In doing so he was unconsciously restating our power over a country we had dominated so many times. He was strict and made himself respected above all for his élan, as the French would say. I was worried that one day someone might give us an insolent reply and I would feel obliged to intervene.
‘Have no fear,’ he replied. ‘You look so fierce that you scare them away. The other afternoon, when the waiter came in with the bill, you even showed your teeth. I wanted to say: “Don Joan will throw you off the balcony as if you were a ball,” but I didn’t know how to translate it.’
‘Senyor, please remember that is not my duty.’
‘I know,’ he replied, ‘and sometimes I’m sorry that you’re such a good boy, because I’m sure you’d like…’
He stopped himself and I blushed. It was true that the Devil tempted me, awakening my thirst for combat. It had begun in Paris the day the police officer grabbed my arm; it continued at the hotel, when the man at the reception desk said goodbye with vicious irony, and now, that very morning, my blood had risen when I heard a couple of students who were staying in the room next door repeat the notes of the scale during an entire quarter of an hour, tapping on the balcony windows: ‘Sono tre spagnuoli, caramaba!’ The two rooms were connected by a locked door. I could have knocked it down with one blow. God gave me the strength to say my rosary. When I finished I heard my neighbours, who according to the chambermaid were two Neapolitans, leaving their room and I ran to the door, unaware of my actions. Never in my life had I set eyes on anything more beautiful. Imagine two Greek statues, two adolescents in their prime endowed with a flexibility that made them seem to change every instant. Those expressive differences, that constant flight resulted in an appearance that I have never been able to remember as twofold, but rather as a whole. They stopped to let me by as soon as they saw me, ennobled by the serious expression that darkened their features; they suddenly looked like men. At that very moment a cat meowed and they fell on each other in an outburst of wild laughter, half-shut eyes and curls carved in stone long before the birth of Our Lord Jesus Christ. For a moment, their well-proportioned, masculine bodies twisted like those of two children holding on to each other so as not to fall down and slapping each other with their hands. They immediately resumed the form of Greek statues and pressed themselves against the wall, exclaiming in a baritone: ‘Prego, signore!’ I told them I was in the neighbouring room and then they smiled like proper young gentlemen. They politely put themselves at my disposal and walked off keeping their composure. However, halfway down the hall they put their arms around each other again, and as soon as they reached the staircase, their melodious voices took up the senseless song that minutes earlier had infuriated me and now filled me with tenderness: ‘Sono tre spagnuoli, caramba!’