War wasn’t going to come to us. War wasn’t going to roll through our village. We were going to be inserted into it— with what they call surgical precision. With slow care.
One was not sorry to bid farewell to Portugal and its rhythm of misery and fiesta, the docks, the Agent’s clueless stare. And one did what one could with the conditions on the sordid steamer. Actually Hamilton himself, so smart and handsome when he travels, soon looked as grimy and fatalistic as everybody else. There were about twenty passengers (this was no passenger ship) and we slept in the mess, on benches and deck chairs, much resented by the crew, each of us with his possessions, or his secret, crushed like a lover in his arms and whispered to in all the languages of Europe. . . . The other language, stoppered in Hamilton’s throat: it is climbing to the surface. It twitches inside him. … Of course, we converse with no man: just sighs and nods and frowns, speech-waivers. They play cards all day. They are low persons, flotsam. What does the war want of them? They look fully disgraced. We have our gold, stored in a second belt beneath our shirt, and tugging heavily on our nethers.
I had always thought of Italy as my spiritual home. Hence the initial disappointment of Salerno. We stayed in a cheap boardinghouse from which the landlord saw fit to evict us for all the hours of daylight; strolling abroad, we devoted our time to churchgoing and to incoherent altercations wit
the Italian police. Hamilton, it turns out, despite his observances of the Wellport era, has no great liking for churches. He sits in the first pew he comes to and leers at the door every twenty seconds with the frowsiest of sighs. Once he approached the altar and extinguished a candle on the chest there, and pocketed a few imperceptible coins. A single glance at the crucified Christ, the worshiped corpse: a figure bent like a branch whose shape has changed in the stretching agony of fire. Above our head, an unregarded observatory of light. Then out again to the open air and the waiting carbinieri and the dumb show of pappaciere and papierì.
A vaudevillian menace charged our journey to Rome, the locomotive black and chimerical, and the Stazione Termini like an anti-cathedral with its soot-stained glass and vaultlike coldness and smell of earth’s crust or heirs rafters. Boldly we made our way through the incredible promiscuity of the streets: men with shoes made out of silver-birch bark, women wearing sacks and carpets, children in their dusty birthday suits. Their faces: they look like people on their way into hospital, as if life is worryingly but fascinatingly strange. Such unanimity of stun and daze. It’s okay, I want to tell them. We’re all going to make it. None will vanish. Many will appear. A cordial welcome—and a light lunch— awaited us at the monastery (Franciscan) on the Via Sicilia. After that we were off out again. Where to? Where else. The Vatican.
We become quite a regular there, as a matter of fact, nine consecutive mornings, including two Sundays, past the battlements, through gardens, then down the long loot-crammed passages, with glass cases full of baubles and beauties, and oblongs of oils and tapestries and embroidered maps reeling past our sight—to the waiting room. Actually Father Duryea, our contact, our man, always saw us right away
but that didn’t stop Hamilton from hanging around for hours afterward, in the waiting room. Tense, silent, on the chair by the table with its flower bowl and its dish of cracked apples. Father Duryea was an Irishman. His rampant facial heat had set up its headquarters in his nose; from there, stray tendrils of blood seemed to leak into his remorseful gray eyes. His mouth, too, was a scene of pain. His poor mouth. Hamilton greeted him with emotional thanks and immediately surrendered our papers: our little Nansen passport, our Portuguese visa, even the ticket coupon with which we had been issued at the harbor of Salerno. Father Duryea appeared to be hopeful and indulgent. But these things take time. Time in the waiting room, staring at the wounded apples and their open flesh.