Caesar or Nothing Part 46

As they pa.s.sed down the slope leading to the Capitol, in a little street to the left, the Via Monte Tarpea, they saw a funeral procession ready to start. At that moment the corpse was being brought into the street.

Several women in black were waiting by the house door with lighted candles.

The priest, in his white surplice and holding up his cross, gave the order to start, and pushed to the front of the crowd; four men raised the bier and took it on their shoulders, and the procession of women in black, men, and children, followed behind. Bells with sharp voices began again to sound in the air.

"Oh, isn't it sad!" said Susanna, lifting her hand to her breast.

They watched how the procession moved away, and then Caesar murmured, ill-humouredly:

"It is stupid."

"What?" asked Susanna.

"I say that it's stupid to take pleasure in feeling miserable. What we are doing is absurd and unhealthy."

Susanna burst into laughter, and when she said good-night to Caesar she squeezed his hand energetically.

XXIII. THE 'SCUTCHEON OF A CHURCH

"Susanna Marchmont," Caesar wrote to his friend Alzugaray, "is a beautiful woman, rich, and apparently intelligent. She has given me to understand that she feels a certain inclination for me, and if I please her well enough, she will get a divorce and marry me.

"I have discovered the reasons for her inclination, first in a desire to revenge herself on her husband by marrying the brother of the woman he has fallen in love with; secondly, in my not having made love to her, like the majority of the men she has known.

"Really, Susanna is a beautiful woman; but whereas other women gain by being looked at and listened to, with her it is not so. In this beautiful woman there is something cold, utilitarian, which she does not succeed in hiding by her artistic effusions. Besides she has a great deal of vanity, but stupid vanity. She has asked me if I couldn't manage to acquire a high-sounding, decorative t.i.tle in Spain.

"If Susanna knew that in my heart I keep up her friendship only through inertia, because I have no plans, and that her millions and her beauty leave me cold, she would be dumfounded; I believe that perhaps she would admire me.

"At present we devote ourselves to walking, talking, and telling each other our impressions. Any one would say that we intentionally play a game of being contrary; whatsoever she finds wonderful seems worthy of contempt to me, and vice-versa. It is strange that such absolute disagreement can exist. This Sunday afternoon we have been taking a long walk, half sentimental, half archeological.

"I went to get her at her hotel; she came down, looking very smart, with an unmarried friend, also an American and also very chic.

"The three of us walked toward the Forum. We pa.s.sed under the arch of Constantine. A small beggar-boy preceded us, getting ahead and turning hand-springs. I gave him some pennies. Susanna laughed. This woman, who pays bills of thousands of pesetas to her milliner, doesn't like to give a copper to a ragam.u.f.fin.

"We turned off a bit from the avenue and went up on the right, toward the Palatine. Among the ruins some women were pulling up plants and putting them into sacks. At the end of the road, on the slope, there were Stations of the Cross, and some boys from a school were playing, guarded by priests with white rabbits.

"It was impossible to go further, and we went down the hill toward the Piazza di San Gregorio. On the open place in front of the church that is in this square, some vagabonds were stretched out on the ground; an old man with a long h.o.a.ry beard and a pipe with a chain, two dark youths with shocks of black hair, and a red-headed woman with silver hoops in her ears and a baby in her arms.

"The two young boys threw me a glance of hatred, and stared at Susanna and her friend with extraordinary avidity.

"What very false ideas must have been going through their minds! I might have approached them and said politely:

"'Do not imagine that these ladies are of different stuff from this red woman who has the baby in her arms. They are all the same. There is no more difference than what is caused by a little soap and some money.'

"'Let us go in and see the church,' said Susanna.

"'Good. Come along.'

"The church has a flight of stone steps and two cypresses to one side.

"We went into a court with graves in it, and stayed there a while, reading the names of the people buried in them. Susanna's friend is a sort of little devil with the instincts of a small boy, and she went springing about in all the corners.

"When we came out of the church we found the square, deserted before, now full of people. During the time we had stayed inside, a numerous group of tourists had formed a circle, and a gentleman was explaining in English what the Via Appia used to be.

"'These are the things that please you,' Susanna said to me, laughing.

"I answered with a joke. The truth is that no matter how many explanations I am given, an ancient Roman always seems a cardboard figure to me, or at most a marble figure. It is not possible to imagine how bored I used to be reading _Les Martyres_ of Chateaubriand and that famous _Quo Vadis_.

"From the Piazza di San Gregorio we took a steep street, the 'Via di Santi Giovanni e Paolo,' which pa.s.ses under an arch with several brick b.u.t.tresses.

"We came out in a little square, in an angle of which there is an ancient arcaded tower, which has tiles set into the walls, some round and others the shape of a Greek cross.

"The modern portico of the church has columns and a grated door, which we found open. Over the door is a picture of Saint John and Saint Paul; on the sides of it two shields with the mitre and the keys. On one, set round about, are the Latin words: _Omnium rerum est vicisitudo;_ on the other is written in Spanish: _Mi corazon arde en mucha llama._

"'Is it Spanish?' Susanna asked me.

"'Yes.'

"'What does it mean?'

"I translated the phrase into English: 'My heart burns with a great flame'; and Susanna repeated it several times, and begged me to write it in her card-case.

"Her friend skimmed some pages in Baedeker and said:

"'It seems that the house of two saints martyred by Julian the Apostate is preserved here.'

"I a.s.sured them that that was an error. I happen to have been reading just a few days ago a book about Julian the Apostate, and it turns out that that Emperor was an admirable man, good, generous, brave, full of virtues; but the Christians had reason for calumniating him and they calumniated him. All Julian's persecutions of Christians are logical repressions of people that were disturbing public order, and the phrase, Vencisti, Galileo, is a pious fraud. Julian was a philosopher, he loved science, hygiene, cleanliness, peace, in a world of hysterical worshipers of corpses, who wanted to live in ignorance, filth, and prayer.

"But Christianity, always a religion of hallucinated persons, of mystifiers, has never vacillated in singing the praises of parricides like Constantine, and in calumniating the memory of great men like Julian.

"Susanna and her friend considered that the question of whether Julian has been calumniated by history, or not, was of no importance.

"The truth is that I feel the same way.

"From the Via di Santi Giovanni e Paolo we came out into a small square by a church, which has a little marble ship in front of its porch. We saw that his street is named after the _Navicella._"

A ROYAL IDYLL.

"By the side of the church of the Navicella, we pa.s.sed the Villa Mattei, and Susanna wished to go in. What a beautiful property! What splendid terraces those in that garden are! What laurels! What lemon-trees! What old statues! What heavy shade of pines and live-oaks!

"Kennedy, who has an admirable knowledge of every corner of Rome, has told me that at the beginning of the XIX Century the Villa Mattei was the property of G.o.doy. King Charles IV and his wife were in Rome, living in the Barberini Palace, and they spent their days in the seclusion of the Villa Mattei; and while the favourite and the Queen, who had now become a harpy, walked in those poetical avenues, bordered with box and laurel, the good Bourbon, now an old man, walked behind them, his forehead ornamented like a faun's, enchanted to watch them; I don't know whether he was playing the flute.

"Susanna's friend laughed at the thought of the good Charles IV, with his waistcoat and his long coat, and his satyr's excrescences, and his rural flute; but the allusion did not find favour with Susanna, whether because she thought of her husband's infidelities, or because she considered, that if her father gets to be the shoe-king, she will then have a certain spiritual relationship to the Bourbons. In the Villa Mattei we saw an _ediculo_, which rises at the edge of a terrace, amidst climbing plants. There, as an inscription says, Saint Philip Neri talked to his disciples of things divine. From the terrace one can see the Baths of Caracalla, and part of the Roman Campagna behind them.

"We came out of the Villa Mattei and left the Piazza, della Navicella and came down through a place where there is a wall with arches, under which some beggars have built huts out of gasoline cans. There is an eating-place thereabouts called the Osteria di Porta Metronia.