She drove Louis and Irene south for a week, amusing them with the old saying, “Anything below Rome is Africa.” At Pompeii Louis thumped his chest as in the days of old when the bell rang at mass to announce the elevation of the host. “What a great civilization!” he said reverently, communicating with his Italic roots. Marguerite took them as far as Paestum and from there sent a postcard to Massimo telling him the day she’d be back in Rome. “Arrivederci presto,” she wrote.

The day she got back he called, and they met that evening outside Otello’s in Via della Croce. He was dressed in light slacks and a blue shirt open at the neck. He was tanned, and again looked beautiful.

“Is it you?” she said.

“How was Pompeii?”

“I think some of it shocked my cousins.”

“Why?”

“Oh, you know—those murals. The guide showed us the sixty-nine one and asked if we had that in America, too. I don’t know if he meant the painting or the sex act, but I told him it was against the law in any case.”

“No wonder everything’s gone wrong over there.”

She laughed, and looked up as a couple passed their table. Marguerite nudged Massimo to call his attention to them. The short, stocky woman had grayish curls all over her head, wore high white glossy boots, and was quarreling with a tall man wearing a cowboy hat and chewing a long cigar.

“You see how badly some people get themselves up,” Massimo said.

“They’re Americans—just like me.”

“Not at all! A man can feel proud to be seen with you. What have you to do with those relics?”

“You’re right. Maybe they were Australians.”

Under the leafy bower vines, seated next to the bright display of fruits and vegetables, they leaned toward each other and studied the menu.

“Ciao, Massimo. Marguerite! I thought you were living in Florence!” A huge female form loomed over their little table. It was Clotilde Guarino—self-styled national monument of Italian letters. One of a troupe of thick-skinned, aggressive, overpowering Italian women-cultivators of their own gardens who manure with contacts their meager crops of literature. Of all of them Clotilde was the worst because she was physically so vast, so present. Marguerite remembered the time a Christian Democratic deputy to Parliament had tried to intimate to Alberto that he’d do well to consecrate an issue of the review to Clotilde’s poetry and Alberto told him to go screw himself—screwing Clotilde being too improbable, even for an insult. That was Clotilde: a site of pilgrimage for young provincials arrived in the capital, who, feeling her glory, fed their own hopes; pompous, dated as the last queen of Italy, omnipresent, and dangerous to rivals and the irreverent.