The Light in the Piazza and Other Italian Tales by Elizabeth Spencer Page B

might not be able to discover (rediscover?) together.This was uncertain. What was certain was that in that same quiet she would begin to miss her daughter. She would go on missing her forever.
She was swept by a strange weakness. Signor Naccarelli was offering her his arm, but she could not move to take it. Her head was spinning and she leaned, instead, against the cool stone column. She did not feel able to move. Beyond them, the group of tourists were trying to take a picture, but were unable to shield their cameras from the light’s terrible strength. A scarf was tried, a coat; would some person cast a shadow?
“Do you remember,” it came to Mrs. Johnson to ask Signor Naccarelli, “the man who fell down when the cannon fired that day? What happened to him?”
“He died,” said Signor Naccarelli.
She saw again, as if straight into her vision, painfully contracting it, the flash that the sun had all but blurred away to nothing. She heard again the momentary hush under heaven, followed by the usual noises careless resumption. In desperate motion through the flickering rhythms of the “event,” he went on and on in glimpses, trying to get up, while near him, silent in bronze, Cellini’s Perseus , in the calm repose of triumph, held aloft the Medusas head.
“I did the right thing,” she said. “I know I did.”
Signor Naccarelli made no reply. “The right thing”: what was it?
Whatever it was, it was a comfort to Mrs. Johnson, who presently felt strong enough to take his arm and go with him, out to the waiting car.

The White Azalea
    Two letters had arrived for Miss Theresa Stubblefield: she put them in her bag. She would not stop to read them in American Express, as many were doing, sitting on benches or leaning against the walls, but pushed her way out into the street. This was her first day in Rome and it was June.
An enormous sky of the most delicate blue arched overhead. In her mind’s eye—her imagination responding fully, almost exhaustingly, to these shores’ peculiar powers of stimulation—she saw the city as from above, telescoped on its great bare plains that the ruins marked, aqueducts and tombs, here a cypress, there a pine, and all round the low blue hills. Pictures in old Latin books returned to her: the Appian Way Today, the Colosseum, the Arch of Constantine. She would see them, looking just as they had in the books, and this would make up a part of her delight. Moreover, nursing various Stubblefields—her aunt, then her mother, then her father—through their lengthy illnesses (everybody could tell you the Stubblefields were always sick), Theresa had had a chance to read quite a lot. England, France, Germany, Switzerland, and Italy had all been rendered for her time and again, and between the prescribed hours of pills and tonics, she had conceived a dreamy passion by lamplight, to see allthese places with her own eyes. The very night after her father’s funeral she had thought, though never admitted to a soul: Now I can go. There’s nothing to stop me now . So here it was, here was Italy, anyway, and terribly noisy.
In the street the traffic was really frightening. Cars, taxis, buses, and motor scooters all went plunging at once down the narrow length of it or swerving perilously around a fountain. Shoals of tourists went by her in national groups—English schoolgirls in blue uniforms, German boys with cameras attached, smartly dressed Americans looking in shop windows. Glad to be alone, Theresa climbed the splendid outdoor staircase that opened to her left. The Spanish Steps.
Something special was going on here just now—the annual display of azalea plants. She had heard about it the night before at her hotel. It was not yet complete: workmen were unloading the potted plants from a truck and placing them in banked rows on the steps above. The azaleas were as large as shrubs, and their myriad blooms, many still tight in the bud, ranged in color from purple through fuchsia and rose to the