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Summer Night
in a Florentine Slum
I leaned out of the window-looking at the summer-strewn street; late
in heat-lit with lamps, and mixed my breath with the tired dust.
The dust was hot,
the dust was dry-it lay low, it travelled about; and among it, Latin
families lay on the lousy stones, in what they could manage of an earthy
abandon.
They sprawled
among each other, lightly ragged, heavy breathing men, with their offspring
flung into sleep across their pelvises-blowing the life out of their
Toscani cigars-among their messy curls-and the lubricous eyes of their
women waited on them from the darkness.
The dwarf news-vendor
from the Ponte Vecchio offered his surplus papers to the inopulent neighborhood-ladies
from windows arraigning him-he furnishing no fit decoration for amorous
couches-he juggling solid in his distorted pockets:
I have a woman
at home with four children-and she is big again. A hair-strewn fury-swished
down past them-accusing with a back-flung gesture-purest operatic-a
hungry tram conductor-expecting supper-of being unfaithful-"by God the
executioner!-I'll eat your heart."
Higher up the
hill-an argument was in travail, involving the rhetoric of a woman far
gone in heart diseases-and her daughter, a handsome half of a lady,
who lived on a board, having been born without legs; groups of grey
soldiers watched-their eyes intrigued.
The crowd pressed
on the gasping witch-Ashy-her pulled muscles pushing on the rail of
a wooden chair-while the alarmed semi-effigy slippelled about on hands
and board-gelatinously shaking her tears out of herself-amazingly quick
about it; round door lintels and out again screaming at variegated Madonnas
scooping the air for a last gasp of a mother's love and hairpins.
Nothing but the
flamboyant passage of Carabinieri could put a stopper on this.
Sophia came up
to the window, with her husband, and a large wicker perambulator some
goddess had showered philanthropically upon her, in which descent it
had lost all upholstery, so babies fell about in it, on the wooden bottom.
Sophia was lovely
and ran like a spider, curls and skirts behind her-and her husband for
all his opthalmia-very beautiful indeed.
"Why doesn't he
get them medicated?," I asked. "Medicated?" the wife gaped offended.
"I can't see anything wrong with his eyes."
The babies' pinafores
wouldn't do up a the back: "Look," said the Italian beggar as he ran
his filthy palm along dorsal muscles-"Have you ever seen such a torso
in your life-Donatello-Hey?"
These were friends
of mine; they lived in a room-with a cobweb and a bed-sofa-under which
they stored the family valuables; and a cardboard box full of a rich
little boy's pajamas, and the photo of a gruesome wisp, their first
baby-dead of starvation.
Sophia was gentle
with it-but her eyes glistened to the treasure, a newspaper cutting
from which she read, how her husband had hanged himself in a doorway-cut
down at the critical moment by the police.
"He often does
that," she said proudly-"He's so neurasthenic."
At their hungriest
their passion had not waned, yet she had never loved him so much as
when she saw his name in print.
They passed-in
the shadow of a wall, that all day long a maddened woman had leaned
against-holding a knife behind her back-She was waiting for revenge
to the hooting of neighbors-who refrained from other interference, being
of a race with consummate social tact.
Under the incessant
sun-she clung to her purpose-in a fanatical cramp,
"Is the game fair?"
I wondered. "Nature umpires!"
Not till the long
heat attenuated to dusk, at the hour the man she was looking for, really
must come home from work-had she slunk away to the imminent maternity
hospital.
In the house opposite,
the carpenter stretched a lean arm across the table, and pawed his young
wife's breast-the table he had beaten her with the same morning-and
she smiled at the alcove-and the Sun-god painted on the ceiling-darkened
to the removal of the light.
While I drew in
my head and pulled the English chintz curtains scattered with prevaricating
rosebuds; and Beardsley's Mademoiselle De Maupin drew on her gloves
at me from the wall.
[LLB 1982]
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