Caesar or Nothing Part 45

Don Calixto and the Canon continued chatting.

XXII. SENTIMENTALITY AND ARCHEOLOGY

Don Calixto and the Canon went away to Spain. Caesar thought he was wasting time in Rome and that he ought to get out, but he remained. He kept wondering why Susanna Marchmont had left and never written him.

Twice he asked about her at the Hotel Excelsior, and was told that she had not returned.

One evening at the beginning of May, when he had managed to decide to pack up and go, he received a card from Susanna, telling him of her arrival and inviting him to have tea at the _Ristorante del Castello dei Cesari._

Caesar immediately left the hotel and took a cab, which carried him to the top of the Aventine Hill.

He got out at the entrance to the garden of the _Ristorante_, went across it, and out on a large terrace.

There were a number of Americans having tea, and in one group of them was Susanna.

"How late you come!" she said.

"I have just received your card. And what did you do in Corfu? How did things go down there?"

"Very well indeed. It is all wonderful. And I have been in Epirus and Albania, too."

Susanna related her impressions of those countries, with many details, which, surely, she had read in Baedeker.

She was very smart, and prettier than ever. She said her husband must be in London; she had had no news from him for more than a month. "And how did you know I was still here?" Caesar asked her.

"Through Kennedy. He wrote to me. He is a good friend. He talked a lot about you in his letters."

Caesar thought he noticed that Susanna talked with more enthusiasm than ordinarily. Perhaps distance had produced a similar effect on her to what wondering about her had on him. Caesar looked at her almost pa.s.sionately.

From the terrace one could see the tragic ruins of the Palace of the Caesars; broken arcades covered with gra.s.s, remains of walls still standing, the openings of arches and windows, and here and there a pointed cypress or a stone pine among the great devastated walls.

Far away one could see the country, Frascati, and the blue mountains of the distance.

As it was already late, the group of Susanna's American friends decided to return by carriage.

"I am going to walk," said Susanna in a low tone. "Would you like to come with me?"

"With great pleasure."

They took leave of the others, went down the garden road, which was decorated on both sides with ancient statues and tablets, and issued on the Via di Santa Prisca, a street between two dark walls, with a lamp every once in a while.

"What a sky!" she exclaimed.

"It is splendid."

It was of a blue with the l.u.s.tre of mother-of-pearl; in the zenith a stray star was imperceptibly shining; to the west floated golden and red clouds.

They went down the steep street, alongside a garden wall. In some places, bunches of century plants showed their hard spikes, sharp as daggers, over the low walls.

There was a great silence in this coming of night. Among the foliage of the trees they heard the piping of sparrows. From far away there came, from time to time, the puffing of a train.

_DESOLATION_

They walked without speaking, mastered by the melancholy of their surroundings. Now and again, a peasant, tanned by the sun, with his little sack full of gra.s.s, came home from the fields, singing.

Caesar and Susanna pa.s.sed alongside of the Jewish cemetery, and stopped to look in through a grill. The wall hid the burning zone of twilight; a greenish blue reigned in the zenith.

They went on again. A bell began to ring.

Caesar was depressed. Susanna was silent.

They crossed a street of new, dark houses; they pa.s.sed by a little square with a melancholy church. The street they took was named for Saint Theodore. To the left, down the Via del Velabro, they saw an arch with many niches on the sides of the single opening.

A band of black seminarians pa.s.sed.

"Poor creatures!" murmured Caesar.

"Are you very sympathetic?" said Susanna, mockingly.

"Yes, those chaps rouse my pity."

Now, on the right, the furious ruins of the Palatine were piled up: brick walls, ruined arches, decrepit part.i.tions, and above, the terrace of a garden with a bal.u.s.trade. Over the terrace, against the sky, were the silhouettes of high cypresses almost black, of ilexes with their dense foliage, and a large palm with arching leaves.

From these so tragic ruins there seemed to exhale a great desolation, beneath the deep, green sky.

Susanna and Caesar drew near the Forum.

In the opaque light of dusk the Forum had the air of a cemetery. Two lighted windows were shining in the high dark wall of the Tabularium, and sharp-toned bells were beginning to ring.

They went up the stairway that leads to the Capitol, and on a little terrace they stopped to look at the Forum.

"What terrible desolation!" exclaimed Susanna.

"All the stones look like tombs," said Caesar. "Yes, that is true."

"What are those three high open vaults that give so strange an impression of immense size?" asked Caesar.

"That is what remains of Constantine's basilica."

For a long while they gazed at that abandoned s.p.a.ce, with its melancholy columns and white stones.

In a street running into the Forum, there began to shine two rows of gaslights of a greenish colour.