The Warm South

Piazza di Spagna 26

Piazza di Spagna 26

A Roman morning is a glass bead on the horizon, pearl-gray to start, then stained by lower lights. Blue rises from the roofs, flat white follows and in a flash of gold the sun mounts the sky and divides the world into light and shade. Knife-sharp shadows cut the piazzas, a lesson in perspective: things stand as they stand. There shall be no doubting of place, nor time, nor substance. All dreams are locked in their cabinets for the day. The light’s edge touched bricks and deep-carved porticos, the bright Bourbon flag over the Spanish embassy, church steps and apartments across the way and the upper-story window that dropped a bar of sun onto the lids of John Keats. He winced and moved his head. The shutters traced a golden diamond on the hearth.

A tread on the steps, a soft rap at the outer door would be the doctor. Severn would receive him in the outer chamber, which was Severn’s to sleep in but outfitted during the day as a sitting room, with a couple of French chairs and a hired pianoforte. Severn set up his easels to block the bed and shuttled around between wooden panels with bright oil sketches, watercolors of Roman scenes and the half-length canvas where he’d chalked out the start of his Royal Academy painting. The doctor, a sober Scotsman who knew his landscapes and classical themes, always stopped to admire the works in progress before continuing into the sickroom. Severn laughed nervously at his compliments.

“Doctor Clark, you very much flatter me. I am always afraid my daubing shall disturb you….”

“But, Mr. Severn, I should say you prefer to daub before a public. Did you not sketch these upon the Pincio?”

Severn gave another high laugh. “One works from life. I can’t very well get the Pincio to come to me.” But he really did take pleasure in being watched. Every so often he would set down his brush and strike poses, running his hand through his curls. He had twenty-seven years to Keats’s twenty-five but had always seemed the younger man.

“Good morning, Mr. Keats.”

The doctor was large, the doorway small, and his shoulders and elbows had a way of filling it. His frock coat blocked the light. As he stepped in, one saw his thin ginger hair and the hooked nose that gave him the look of an eagle, though a kindly eagle, perhaps from a storybook. He opened the shutters and threw southern sun over Keats in bed.

“How did we pass the night?”

Keats muttered in answer. So early in the morning, he felt the breath uneasy in him.

“I think no leech today. If you would oblige me by lifting the nightshirt.”

His large hands undid the clasp of the medical bag, took out the wooden auscultation tube and held it to the patient’s breast. Keats inspired and expired, and the doctor nestled his balding head below, just as Keats had nestled his head against Severn those nights that Severn had carried him choking from room to room.

“Good.” The doctor raised his head. “Clearer by the day. Sit upright, please, and turn your back.”

Keats pushed himself up, arms slightly quaking, and hung his head out the window three stories over the piazza. The steps of Trinità dei Monti had sprouted their carpet of hats and parasols over the young women for hire as artists’ models. At the bottom of the steps carriages stood in line and fountain water shipped over the bow of the elder Bernini’s sinking boat. At times Keats would start in his room, realizing that for hours he had been hearing phantom patterns in the splash, a triple-time dance measure or the iambs from Philaster:

As you are living, all your better deeds

Shall be in water writ—

“What do you feel if I press here?” asked the doctor.

“Pressure,” Keats gasped, “but no inflammation. I should say the liver and pancreas are very well.”

The doctor chuckled, glad to hear the patient making a sally. In Keats’s own ears his voice sounded high, almost childish, since the illness. No one else had remarked on any change. The doctor returned his instruments to their bag, exactly reversing the order in which he’d taken them out, and Severn showed his face at the door.

“The liver is sound,” said Doctor Clark. “The pancreas is sound. I suspect the lungs were well from the start. The greater part may have been an affliction of the mind.”

“The mind,” said Keats.

“A nervous complaint.”

Doctor Clark could talk at length of nervous complaints, their various forms, their connection to bodily ailments—inasmuch as the brain, we now understand, is a fibrous organ like any other. He was kind. More than a doctor he’d been their factotum. He’d secured their rooms across the piazza from his own, gone out to find books in English, arranged for the hire of carriages and the pianoforte, brought sheet music of Haydn for Severn to play. What he said about the nerves was surely correct, and it struck Keats as an attack. He spoke from inside his profession as if it were a coat he had pulled around him, knowing that Keats, who had never taken the surgeon’s examination, must face him naked.

Keats sank back into bed. In his new, weak voice he asked, “Then I may soon return to England?”

The doctor shut his bag. “I recommend against haste. You haven’t the look of a man who has much encountered the Roman sun. Have you been about the city?”

Keats was coming back to walking as a child. His feet had become hilarious foreign implements, to be trusted only while he kept them in sight.

“Mr. Severn? You haven’t taken Mr. Keats onto the Pincio?”

Severn smiled narrowly. “Mr. Keats yesterday said that he found the stairs, er, of a difficulty to rank with German philosophy.”

“My life is in England,” said Keats.

“It shall wait for you there,” said the doctor. “I fear to send you on a sea voyage if the onset of winter should precipitate another attack and require you to be shipped back here in six months. Let the Roman spring do its work. Given the Roman summer, in a month or two I might suggest a removal to the hill country.”

“Consumption killed my younger brother,” Keats said.

The doctor lifted his brows and, getting no further information, turned his look to Severn.

“They prescribed him bloodletting,” he continued, “and a vegetable diet. Tom would not quarrel with physicians. Only when he was near his end did he whisper that more than anything in the world he wanted a beefsteak. We didn’t give him it. At times my heart is pierced to think we kept it from him.”

The piazza’s sounds receded, becoming remembered sounds. From far above the doctor replied, “It is a truly sad necessity.”

“Nor to dispute your diagnosis,” said Keats, “but you are aware, are you not, that my hemorrhages in England were of arterial blood, not from the stomach. They came up in a froth—”

“Bless me!” cried Severn, shuddering, “must you say ‘froth?’”

“It is a fact.”

“I understand,” said the doctor. “You are not quarreling with me, Mr. Keats, but with the gods.”

Keats crossed his arms and made a wry face.

“I cannot encourage you to travel. The risk that we would gladly run ourselves, we shrink from imposing on another. If it does not sound too parsonical from a man in middle life, I would counsel patience, to think of the years you have left, and to recall that as recently as Christmas, it was doubtful you should get to live any of them.”

Under his folded arms Keats felt his own slightness. “Believe me to be grateful for all you have done, Doctor Clark.”

“Believe me to be sorry I can do no more.” The doctor bowed. “Until tomorrow. I always look forward to the effects of another day upon Alcibiades”—he gestured to Severn’s canvas—“and I have your volume, Mr. Keats, on order from Taylor and Hessey.”

“My volume?” The frontispiece came faintly to mind. “They will have a happy surprise that anyone wants it.”

The doctor made a strange face and reached as if to touch Keats’s shoulder, but withdrew. “Mr. Severn,” he said, “if I might trouble you apart for a moment.”

They stepped out. Keats heard the door unlatch and swing open, and murmurs from the entryway, in the embarrassed tones of people with nowhere private to talk. They lived very close here. A muslin drape screened the landlady and her daughter from sight, but their footsteps were as clear as one’s own. One heard their food on the gridiron, their water jars and chamberpots being emptied. They were always boiling egg noodles and filling the place with steam. The mother never stopped exclaiming in her Roman dialect; the daughter was silent. During his fever Keats had forgotten she was there. Now that he sat in the front room, he would see her step past the drape in bright, coarse calico, hair pulled up from her long neck and a basket in her hand. Her shy glance as she walked to the door struck him dumb. He felt himself viewed: slight, ill, poor, from a foreign land. A quarter hour later she came back with bread or a wrap from the butcher and was hurried by her mother behind the drape.

Footsteps went down the stairs and Severn stepped in with a dejected look.

“What was that?” asked Keats.

“Nothing,” said Severn. “The bill. As courteous as a duke, of course.”

“The purse is a fibrous organ like any other.”

Severn blinked and forced a smile, but his eyes darted about the room. He muttered, not quite to himself, “The lodging—full-crown dinners—seven for the pianoforte.”

“Are we very poor now, Severn?”

“Poor!” Severn raised both hands and brushed back his curls. “On my honor, Keats, I spared you every trouble so long as I could. I cooked for economy’s sake; I washed up; I made you coffee,” he cried, waving at the hearth, “and you threw it away, and I made it again, and you threw it out the window again, and I made it a third time—and then you would have me read to you. And I was supposed to begin a painting! With my son yet in London, nearly two years old and not baptized—”

“It was good of you.”

Severn colored and looked down. “It is a fortnight since I drew the last on your publishers’ letter of credit. Doctor Clark was not inquiring after professional fees. He has been providing for us out of his own pocket.”

A pot clanged in the outer room and the landlady shouted. Past these walls were other walls in morning light, and others again, then farther roads, country hills and mountains, all the lands of Europe that Keats knew only from guidebooks and poetry, each stood up as a barrier between him and the life he had loved.

“I had made peace with this country being my grave,” he said. “It can’t be my home.”

“You are advised to stay,” said Severn.

“I am desired to stay. And how? With the good doctor dispensing scudi from the one hand and asking them back with the other—only around the corner, so as to spare my condition? It is not tolerable.”

“He has been kind,” Severn said haltingly. “There was that certain fish.”

“Fish?”

“Last month. He went all over Rome to find it, and had in his wife to cook, though you couldn’t eat—”

“Then mightn’t I as well have choked?”

Severn winced. The blood began to ebb from Keats’s face and very slowly, as if guided by an older hand, he sat up in his blankets. The stream of the world had found its way back to him. The moment he set foot out of bed, it would take him up again.

“Forgive me, Joe,” he said. “It is the melancholy. It came first of my illnesses, and it will be the last to take leave.”

“So says Doctor Clark. The nervous fibers.”

“I do not speak of fibers,” said Keats. “It is the trouble I have put you to. I’ve so depended on you, and on everyone, I don’t know how I am to make good.”

“It is nothing,” said Severn.

“I shall settle my debts to the penny.”

He had said it to give confidence. But Severn turned aside with a twist to his mouth, and Keats realized he was embarrassed to have such a promise made him by a sickly man in a nightshirt, sitting up in the cot that ought to have been his deathbed.