The Light in the Piazza and Other Italian Tales:

The Pincian Gate

The Pincian Gate It seemed to her impossible that you could, here in mid-twentieth century, enter a medieval wall through a tiny gate, having pulled an iron chain to jangle a bell high above you, be shouted at hoarsely to "Vieni, vieni!" and, having climbed a twisting narrow flight that smelled of Roman masonry—chilly the year round, exactly as it must have been in Byron's day—confront across the threshold the face of a boy you went to school with back in Arkansas. Only it was a little more complex than that. Sara thought that it was useless coincidence to have remembered Gowan Palmer from school; to all present purposes, he was just a nice man she and her husband had met a year ago at a party here in Rome. As for those bygone days, he seemed to like Sara and Paul in spite of having known them forever, and none of them had the bad taste of people who reminisce. She learned by way of somebody else that he had been married to a New York girl she would probably never see, just as she discovered that it was no romantic notion that had lured him to take a damp three rooms in the Roman wall near the Pincio, but a leftover lease from a fellow-artist, now in Greece, who wanted the place occupied even at a loss. 92 ELIZABETH SPENCER As for the problems he was now drifting into—financial, emotional , artistic, and otherwise—she would bet she was far more aware of them than he. She was always hearing things against him now, and this, in view of her and Paul's conviction that his work was about to break over into the big-name cluster, seemed particularly a shame. He had had for some months the air and countenance of an artist considered the best by the best. Sara had got the impression that people-who-knew, the experts, had so far spoken of his work only among themselves but would let the outside world in on it whenever they happened to think of it. As this, so far as she could see, was the only way in which a lay person could know about excellence in modern art, she had no complaints about it and rejoiced in Gowan's right to it. In his studio now, out of the sun, she shivered and put on her jacket, while Gowan shook iron filings off a cushion and offered to heat up the espresso. He had been on a sculpture kick, as he called it, during the winter months, and she found herself angling to talk to him through a forest of elongated shapes in heavily beaten iron. "Let's go up in the sun," she urged. "Don't you know it's warm? You just sit in here and work so much I bet you don't even know it's spring!" "Not true. Somebody told me yesterday that it was spring. I'm not so helpless as you think." "I always think you're going to get pneumonia in this place. I see myself carrying hot minestrone up through the wall in February." "Oh, it can get warm enough. It's just that the traffic is so bad. That's the real reason I never entertain. At first, I felt I was on an island, with everything in Rome streaming past all day, and that at night I went under with it. The streetcars poured across my face, all iron wheels and clanging. Lambrettas snorted into my dreams. Now I sleep and work mainly on the park side, where there's less noise, but anyway I hardly hear it any more. Some part of your brain blocks out, I think. Here." He poured out coffee in tiny cups. "Let's go upstairs." THE PINCIAN GATE 93 Above, they sat between the blunt teeth of masonry on a pair of rickety chairs and warmed their faces in the sun, sipping coffee. "Who told you yesterday that it was spring?" She smiled, gently inquisitive. "Francesca, of course. She drove by in the afternoon." "Oh dear, maybe she's coming up today, too." "Today she's in Viterbo, guiding an art photographer around." "Our Italian career girl." "She's doing well. Of course, she doesn't have to, with three villas and a palazzo." It sounds like the perfect setup for...