The Warm South

SPQR

SPQR

In the winter Dr. Clark had recommended, on unspecified authority, that Keats take up riding; so an expensive horse had been hired to jog at a snail’s pace down the streets and public walks, grimly bouncing him over its chestnut withers, until his condition had put a stop to the excursions. Now that he was able to go out again, he was glad to do it on his own feet. Past the Piazza di Spagna, with its steps and sunny fountain, the cobbled ground sloped into a narrow lane between three-story buildings that were strange as a first sight of Rome, since their walls were freshly whitewashed as in England, their doors and shutters bright with verdigris as in England, and the people leaning out the windows all pale foreigners who seemed perplexed to find the street full of copies of themselves. One came to Rome expecting to meet gallant and noble Italians, and perhaps wicked and cruel Italians as well; but among the hotels one saw only serving boys, carrying up baskets of chicken and macaroni from the trattorie on the ground floors. England floated on top of Italy; turned brilliant under the Roman sky, it stared itself in the face; and Keats walked through it as if through a mirror until England came to a sudden end. He stood alone before the dim windows of a small piazza, where dark-faced people in dingy clothes watched from doorways. Here was the mystery. It was strange to think that this was an ordinary scene, that Rome was a city like any other, of whose natural life he knew nothing.

He and Severn had seen washing hung from windows and smelled laundry soap masking the cabbage in the gutters, come across charcoaled graffiti they couldn’t read, met soldiers in Papal uniform leaning on their bayonets and been followed by stray dogs with full paps. On the wider avenues were open-air stalls with men carving stone miniatures of monuments that, when you actually came across them, seemed to be miniature themselves, hemmed among higher, newer walls. The Pantheon, worn and soot-blackened on its outside, was inside transformed to a palace of gilt and rose-colored marble, full of kneeling pilgrims and plaster saints with heaped offerings: candles, dried flowers, paper scraps and—was it to symbolize afflictions?—a tin nose, a wooden leg. The height of St. Peter’s made Keats dizzy. Its outer square was gray and empty and gave no hint of the work within, only flagstones and palm trees, blue sky and the Pope’s prisoners in particolored garments, hoeing up weeds and rattling their ankle chains as they went.

They had gone outside the modern city too, out to the stretches of open campagna where the ruins were. Keats had expected the Forum to look like an enormous Bank of England, but in fact it was a park grown wild, with grass smothering its crumbled walls and brilliant red poppies shaking their early blooms in the breeze. The field was governed by a scattering of marble facades and arches whose carved boasts, where they hadn’t been broken up, were just within reach of Keats’s grammar-school Latin. Severn knew which emperors had left which memorials, and which had stolen and defaced the works of their predecessors; he also wondered aloud, as every traveler did, whether the banks of the Thames were one day to look like this. Keats couldn’t keep track of the history and spent a long time watching a gray cat slink among the stones and grass. It twisted now and then to lick the fur on its back. At the Colosseum they spent most of a day sitting on an overgrown upper ridge, Severn laying boards on his lap to sketch pastels of the changing light and Keats looking on with an empty head. Myrtles and olives had taken root below. There were dirt paths that seemed worn by human feet, but very few others were in the ruins, only some pilgrims clambering at bottom between the stations of the Cross.

Today they were not going so far, only up the Pincio from the English hotels. Severn was afraid of arriving late and kept darting up the street past the foreigners and their porters, then looking back and frowning as he waited for Keats to catch up. They were supposed to meet a genuine Roman, a young sculptor that Severn had gotten to know in one of the academies. Since their arrival they had seen no Italians socially, nor indeed anyone else, and Keats was suddenly shy. Suppose he was taken for the obnoxious sort of touring Englishman who took his guidebook everywhere; suppose he looked like a pauper? He kept pushing his hair back from his brow, and took a careful pace behind Severn lest he lose his breath. The high gate of the Villa Medici cast a terrible judgment on him. But Severn was already calling and waving, and a figure in nankeen jacket and trousers strode up with arms spread wide. He was tall and quite dark; he greeted Severn in loud, fast, strongly accented English; then he turned and clasped Keats’s hand in both his own. His hair was thick and slightly curled, flattened with a great deal of bear’s grease. Over his beaked nose were set deep, wide, feminine eyes with long lashes. Keats felt an immediate warmth for him, as he’d felt in the past for very tall people who seemed benign in their height. It seemed he could take them as protectors.

The sculptor seemed happy with any conversation they might offer, and Severn began to talk about art. He had just made a visit to Canova’s studio, where the great man had received him with the warmest hospitality and promised to write the Pope so that Severn might get permission to study in the palazzi.

“I wouldn’t say it to a painter,” said Severn, “but I may say it to you—I think to go far beyond any of the modern Italian painters I have seen so far. Does it not seem to you that they have no original or native idea of painting left? That everyone is in thrall to his dead masters?”

“Ah,” said the sculptor, delicately moving his hands, “it may be so, I can’t judge. I have never seen England. To know the galleries of London!”

They took a path of smooth earth between wild hedges that had burst the bounds of English style and splayed in all directions, hungry for light. Women with parasols and wide hats walked in the other direction and glanced with half smiles at the passing men. They halted at a stone fountain under pines and Severn leaned confidentially close. “Now let me tell you of Keats,” he said. “I’ve said as much privately, but let me say it in his hearing—you see in him the greatest English poet of our time. He is a rival to Wordsworth already. Soon enough he’ll rival Milton.”

Keats shook his head. “For pity’s sake, Severn.”

“No,” said the sculptor, touching Keats’s shoulder, “I believe your friend. I am honored to meet you.” He lowered his gaze and said, “I love English books. But it is not easy, you know, to find them in Italy. To import foreign books is restricted here.” His eyes flickered regretfully up, and Keats realized the man was trying to apologize for not having read his work. His face grew hot. He had been put in a false position, and the last thing he wanted to talk of was his own poetry.

“You wouldn’t see my books anyhow,” he blurted. “It’s the women.”

“I beg pardon?” said the sculptor.

“I am not the poet Severn claims.” Keats shook his head quickly. “What I say about women is a matter of commerce. I don’t know how things stand in Italy, but in England it is women who buy all literature. The reviewers cater to their sensibilities. This is all to the detriment of my sales, for Severn would not have told you that my poems are prurient, and vulgar—”

“Why no,” said Severn.

“But they are, Severn, and you know it. You read Blackwood’s, the same as anyone.” To the sculptor he said, “I published a mythological poem in England, which represented the goddess Diana taking a mortal lover. I was young when I wrote it, and I am sensible of its defects. But the choice of subject was its particular ruin.”

The sculptor’s quick eyes darted between the Englishmen. “A goddess, you say? A goddess can never be vulgar.”

“Thank you,” said Keats. “As I say, it is the ladies who take offense.”

“The Italian woman would not find her vulgar,” declared the sculptor. “She understands the passions, she has not the fear of them. If the book is not moral to the Church, she must perhaps tell her confessor—but this is not what you said, offense.”

He spoke insistently, with wide gestures, and as they turned to walk on they found the hill’s obelisk raised on a pedestal before them. It thrust upward for several dozen stone yards, with glyphs along its shaft and the sun glinting on its tip. Severn giggled and glanced between the others with his hand at his mouth.

“I look forward to meeting the Italian woman,” said Keats. “Now, if Severn has pity on me, he’ll talk of something other than my poems.”

But they had run out of talk. The sculptor folded his hands into the sleeves of his jacket and seemed very foreign to Keats, full of secrets. They circled the obelisk and came to a low stone wall overlooking a gap in the pines. There was the piazza they had climbed from, the narrow streets tumbling toward the river and farther off the campagna’s yellow fields hazing into blue.

“Castel Sant’Angelo,” said the sculptor, and pointed. “See, they have filled the moat.”

The city’s bridges ran slight over the water, skewing with the river’s bend like the spokes of a wheel. At their hub was the castle; a silver thread lapped the fortress within its outer wall.

“Why?” asked Keats. “Is that usually done in the spring?”

The sculptor turned in shock. “It is war,” he said. “You know that, don’t you? The cannons are getting ready.” Black blots were stationed at the fortress’s rim and tiny figures went between them.

Keats looked to Severn, with the sense of failing an examination. “I was ill. I’ve been shut in.”

“Excuse me,” the sculptor said. “Then it is natural.” But he seemed uneasy at Keats’s ignorance. “You know, surely, that we have Austria to the north and Naples to the south, and that they will have their fight here, in the Pope’s territories? The Austrians have already crossed the Po. But the cardinals fear more a march from Naples. There will be smoke from the south,” he said, pointing into the campagna, “if an army is seen.”

“They fear the carbonari, you mean?” Severn asked.

“The carbonari, the revolution, the new constitution in Naples. You know a revolution does not stop at a border. Suppose they march on Rome; why should they not seize the Holy See—even the, ah, person of the Pope? That is the prize.”

His eyes were fierce, but there was a faint smile around his mouth, and Keats said cautiously, “But you yourself don’t fear that chance?”

The sculptor glanced at the women strolling some distance away. “You will find many in Italy,” he said quietly, “to tell you that Austria is our jailor and that Count von Metternich has locked us up under a guard of kings, and dukes, and popes. They would tell you the people of Naples are the first to break free.”

“We saw King Ferdinand in Naples,” said Severn, “parading with his troops. I thought he looked like a goat. Keats said—what did you say, Keats?”

“I said—and understand, please,” he told the sculptor, in the same low tone, “I know nothing of affairs here. But I thought history had started to run backward. Bonaparte was a plague, but why, after his defeat, should we restore the old princes to their plots? Imagine the fallen Titans seizing back their thrones, and Saturn swallowing his children a second time! I am ashamed of the part the English had in it.”

The sculptor threw back his head laughing—he seemed to have forgotten about secrecy—and clapped Keats’s shoulder. “Bravo! Bravo, signor poeta! Only,” he said, now serious, “I cannot agree with you on Napoleon. Read even the grafitti here, and always you will see his name with the cause of liberty. Costituzione on the one side, Evviva Napoleone on the other.”

“But the two can’t agree. Where is the liberty in changing a king for an emperor?”

The sculptor looked into the treetops. “I think the English can never understand Napoleon. You have an old constitution, and ancient ideas of your rights. We in the South had no such things, not until Napoleon brought the beginnings of civilization. And if that is not the end, if he returns—”

“Returns!” cried Severn. “How, from his island?”

The fierce smile showed again on the sculptor’s lips. “The ocean is wide,” he said, “but not empty. Some would tell you to watch for American ships in our harbors.” He opened his arms to his companions. “It is lucky, signori, to come to Italy in this time. Great spirits are at work.”

They reflected on this. Keats looked again into the countryside, and the sculptor coughed and doubled over. His hand went to his lips; Keats caught him in both hands and pressed his heaving breast and back.

“There, lift your head,” said Keats. “Try not to bend—sit if you must—” But already the sculptor was shaking his head and gasping that it had passed, thank you, he was well. His face was a dark ash color and his forehead glistened. Severn stood aside in hesitation, hands half raised.

“Your lip!” said Keats.

Along the sculptor’s mouth and fingers were red droplets, spread thin and flecked with foam. He made a quick nod, unfolded a white handkerchief from his jacket and wiped his lips slowly, with conscious dignity, as if recovering from an embarrassment. Keats wanted to press his ear to the man’s chest, to test the lungs, but he would hear nothing through the jacket. A proper examination was needed. “How long have you had the symptoms?”

The sculptor’s thin fingers tucked away the handkerchief and he made an effort to smile. “Long enough that I don’t worry. It is never severe.”

“But are you under a doctor’s care?”

“A doctor costs money.”

“We must find you someone. Severn, do you think Doctor Clark—?”

“Thank you,” said the sculptor. “What can a doctor do? In England he would tell me to go to Rome. In Rome he will tell me to pray.”

His eyes were wide, but there was no appeal in them. Something else was in his face, a quietude and refusal of sympathy that stopped Keats cold. He was not to feel the sculptor’s sufferings as his own, and he was not to offer aid. The sculptor watched him as if from behind a window, with a touch of pity that Keats did not understand their separation.

Pine boughs cooled the yellow light above them, and the passing gowns and umbrellas had vanished into the farther gardens. Distant laughter struck the air, like pebbles dropped in water, and faint bells began to sound from St. Peter’s. The miles of intervening air washed out their harshness, as if they were not being struck at all but coaxed into song by fine brushes.

“I think it a richer sound than St. Paul’s,” Keats murmured.

Severn had been looking on and biting his lip. Now he tentatively said, “But for richness of sound, you know, nothing bests the Roman chamber pot.”

“Chamber pot!” said the sculptor, with a weak smile.

“Why yes,” said Severn, with more energy, “owing to how thick you Romans make them. Do you not know what a fine tone is produced by kicking one? Thus—” His boot mimed a blow and he called, “Barummm!”

His face was earnest, and Keats felt very glad to know him. “Not at all,” he said. “It is rather, prawwng!”

“What! Shall you instruct me in the chamber-organ?” His foot skated through the dappled light, striking again and again until the sculptor started to laugh.

“Baroooom!”

“Praaayng!”