The American Read Free Page B

and a jutting chin points to the dubious grandeur of France. The truth is they have now a poverty of spirit and an aristocracy of politicians. Italy is different. Italy is romance.
    I like it here. The wine is good, the sun hot, the people accept their past and do not crow about it. The women are soft, slow lovers – at least, Clara is; Dindina is more anxious – and the men enjoy a good life. There is no poverty of the soul. Everyone is rich of spirit. The civil servants keep the streets clean, keep the traffic moving, keep the trains running and the water flowing in the taps. The carabinieri and the polizia fight the criminals, after a fashion, and the polizia stradale keeps the speed on the autostrada down. Taxes are collected with only a modicum of thoroughness. In the meantime, the people live, drink wine, earn money, spend money and let the world turn.
    Italy is the Land of Laissez-faire, a bucolic anarchy governed by wine and the connivances of various loves – of good food, of sex, of liberty, of devil-may-care, of take-it-or-leave-it – above all, of a love of life. The national motto of Italy should be senza formalità or non interferenza .
    Let me tell you a tale. The authorities in Rome wanted to catch tax dodgers – not as in England where they seek out the meanest evader of pennies, hounding him until his dues are settled. No, they wanted only the Caesars of the State Swindlers, the Emperors of Elusion. To catch them they set no paltry traps in banks, no covert studies of stocks and shares transactions. They sent a team of men around the marinas and harbours of Italy checking on the registration of every yacht over twenty metres. There was a wonderful Mediterranean logic at work: under twenty metres, and the yacht was a rich man’s plaything; over, and it was a super-indulgence of the truly rich. They found one hundred and sixty-seven yachts the owners of which were utterly unknown to the authorities – no tax records, no state benefit records, in some cases no birth certificates. Not even in Sicily. Not even in Sardinia.
    Did they find these men? Did they pay up the owed billions of illicit lire? Who can tell? It is just a fairy story.
    For me, no better place could exist. I could stay here for ever, quite possibly, undiscovered like an Etruscan tomb disguised as a culvert on the side of the Via Appia. So long as I don’t buy a yacht over twenty metres long and keep it at Capri. No chance of that now. Besides, had I wanted such a toy, I should have bought it long ago.
    Today, the courtyard is as ever cool. It is like a vault the roof of which has caved in, so the sky might peer down and bear witness to what little dramas are unfolding therein.
    Some say a nobleman was murdered by the fountain in the centre, that every year on the anniversary of his assassination, the water flows pink. Others tell me the courtyard was the scene of the murder of a Socialist in the Mussolini years. Whether the water is pink from blood, from the nobleman’s reputation (so they say) of always dressing in the pink of fashion or because the Socialist was only moderately leftist, I cannot tell. Perhaps a saint lived here and they have all got it wrong. So much for history.
    The flagstones are buff-coloured, as if worn from centuries of scrubbing and stoning. The fountain, which dribbles coolly through a necklace of pendant moss and algæ, the drips resonant in the cavern of the yard, is of marble shot through with black veins. It is as if the ageing building has contracted varicose veins in its heart. For the fountain is the heart of the building. Within it stands the figure of a girl bedecked in a toga and holding a clam shell from which the water falls, delivered by a two-and-a-quarter-millimetre-diameter pipe made of bronze. This girl is not fashioned of marble but of alabaster. Looking at her, I wonder if it is the water or her skin which cools our building.
    Doorways face the fountain, slatted shutters look down upon it,