II: Big Sea
Italy
In July, with business very bad, the management of the Grand Duc decided to close up entirely until September; re-decorate, get a new band, and figure out how they were going to build up their former de luxe trade again. The night before the Grand Duc closed, Romeo asked me what I was going to do until the place re-opened in the fall.
I said: “Just stay in Paris, I guess.”
We’re going home on a vacation. You can stay at my house.”
I said: “How much is the fare?”
Third-class, it turned out to be very little. I had saved several hundred francs, so I decided to go with them. I wanted very much to see Italy, especially Venice, where I had read that all the streets were streets of water. Luigi lived in Turin, so we stayed there a day or so with his parents. Then we went on to Dezenzano, where Romeo lived.
Dezenzano is a very old village on the shore of the Lago di Gardo, not far from where d’Annunzio died. It is a postcard village, with a lake so blue that in any other land it would only be a picture lake—not real. The village itself begins with the fishing port and runs up a slight rise to end in flowery fields, crossed by an ancient aqueduct bringing water from the mountains. The fishing boats had red sails, and orange-colored sails, and brown sails billowing softly in the wind, as the landward breeze brought the boats to dock with their catch of silver fish.
The girls were black-haired and pretty. Romeo had a nice girl in the village near the port, by whom he had had a child. But Romeo’s patrician mother lived in a big, old, stone house on a cobblestone square at the top of the town, across from a church and near the town’s sole moving picture theater, which had pictures only on Sundays after the angelus.
The night we arrived was Sunday and the whole village had gone to the movies. There was no one home at Romeo’s house and he had no key, so we left our baggage piled in the doorway and went to the movies, too. It was one of those theaters where the screen is at the front of the house beside the front door, so you come in facing the audience. Just as we came in, the house lights went on between reels, as they were changing the film. The place was crowded, but as we entered and the people saw us, the whole crowd arose and began to make for the doorway. Soon they became a shouting, pushing mass. I didn’t know what they were saying, for they were speaking Italian, of course, and I didn’t understand Italian. But Romeo and I were swept into the street and surrounded by curious but amiable men, women, and children. Finally, Romeo’s mother got to him through the crowd and threw her arms about his neck. I gathered that almost all of the people of the village were Romeo’s friends, but I didn’t know why so many of them clung to me and shook my hands, while a crowd of young boys and men pulled and pushed until they had me in the midst of them in a wine shop, with a dozen big glasses of wine in front of me.
Later that night Romeo explained to