Tag: Piazza San Domenico Maggiore

He had his last euro, and he spent it on a book he was lucky enough to find among stacks of Italian books. He could have had a Peroni instead, but he needed something to chow on intellectually over the weekend. Ironically, it turned out to be George Gissing’s New Grub Street. The moment he read the words ‘Sensitive novelist…’, ‘Poverty’, ‘Fortunes dwindle’, ‘Bleak vision’ on the back flap a shiver ran down his spine, and he hurried to the white- moustachioed Signore with the coin in his hand.

He had enough to eat that weekend, but he had nothing else. In the evenings, after stuffing himself with pasta and beans and potatoes, he often craved a beer, or orange juice or just a bottle of aerated water. This lust was what bothered him principally. He had known hunger, and he knew what an implacable demon it was. He had heard it breathing in his belly on many dismal evenings. Today was not one of it, luckily, and he had in fact washed down his supper with an agréable bottle of sweet fizzy wine.

At 22, he still had his resolve. And he believed he still had his Muse, even though he could not claim to possess a body of work to speak for him. He was clean, for he did not believe unkemptness added anything to one’s craft as a writer. In fact given a choice he would have spent his money on soap and toilet paper and a new toothbrush instead of buying a kilo of peaches and perhaps a costoletta of meat, as indeed he had done that morning.

He scrubbed himself with soap, and he liked to smell nice. He took his seat on a stone bench by Piazza San Domenico Maggiore and he felt the tidings from the sea as a light breeze on his forearms. A reasonably attractive older woman with coiffed straight hair and cherry-red lips always passed him by around this time of the day, and she gave him a look which obviously desired more than mere eye-contact. She always had the top button of her blouse undone, like the men here, but fortunately she had no hair.

She had not come down today, and he plunged himself into the novel. Jasper Milvain’s doomsday forecast as far as the future of his writer friend Edwin Reardon was concerned gave him goose bumps which did not subside with the subsequent laps of the breeze. He saw what a hopeless snare the poor London artist was trapped in. No, he was more practical than Reardon. It would not happen to him.

He would never marry.