2. Servi
had sharpened his impressions on the whetstone of urban Rome: The Americans in the Eternal City
were loud, heavy, cumbersome, pushy and did not mix well with the natives. Italians were an anarchic people, suspicious
of those who wielded power and adverse to its manifestations, such as forming
lines. When thrown together in a crowded
piazza, these two peoples were mutually antagonistic, like two armies
bristling with unused weaponry, aching to be smeared with the other’s
gore.
So when he saw
Americans, Servi ran the other way. He
avoided the Coliseum, the Vatican,
the Forum, the Pantheon -- all the places his countrymen flocked liked schools
of invasive fish.
Servi’s
trip has begun auspiciously enough with a small scholarship from an Italian-American
foundation, The Amerigo Vespucci Fund,
to study philosophy at La Sapienza. Servi, like an actor reading from a script of
the most banal platitudes, rode a dinged motor scooter to class each day with
Aristotle’s Metaphysics. But he had little aptitude for philosophy,
and when his instructor hinted at this, Servi quit, leaving the scholarship
dangling in the air like a noose without a body.
His
formal reason for being in Rome
gone, Servi adopted another. He began to
draw and paint from a variety of saggy nudes, under the tutelage of a cranky
dowager who critiqued her student’s drawings with a slashing motion from a slim
bamboo reed. After a few weeks of study,
she told Servi he had no eye for form, shape, line, perspective, shading, or an
overall sense of composition. She did
not tell him to quit, but once again Servi took the cue. What else could he do? He viewed people as mirrors of his own inner
workings. What he saw reflected in these
professore, dottore, and dowager
instructors was a sense of dread about this wayward, but ardent, shaggy
American. They had a hard task: they
were purveyors of bad news to a fervent young man. Even his fluent Italian failed to help him,
merely providing a fluid medium through which to communicate both his teachers’
displeasure with his performance and Servi’s all too ready acceptances of their
diagnoses.
In
a final sputter of effort to fulfill his evaporating quest, Servi started a
short story. He sat at the small desk at
his pensione and wrote well and
without effort for about five pages and then his hand halted and twitched, as
if afflicted with palsy. He read what he
wrote. It wasn’t all that bad, but after
five pages, he could not imagine what would happen next. It was like a spigot in his mind had drained
the sap from the pipes that controlled his hand. In five pages Aaron Servi had written himself
out. He did not need some overexcited
writing instructor at the American
Academy to hint that he
should put down his pen. On the stone
slab in the morgue of words strung together and failing to meet a meaningful
end, Servi threw the shroud over the corpse of writing with his own capable
hands.
Then
Servi packed up his small bag and left the pensione
to find cheaper lodging. As frugally as
he lived, he was running out of money.
But there was more: Servi wanted
to hide. He had committed an
unpardonable sin in the eyes of his countrymen:
he had failed. His native
optimism dead, Servi had begun to develop a petite pain in his side. It was nothing at all really, a slight pull
in his right flank. But sometimes it
caused a twinge of prickly discomfort, as if a needle had pierced his side only
to be quickly withdrawn. So like a
wounded animal that ignores offers of help to die under the porch, Servi set
out to vanish.
Dear Aaron, his
mother wrote, there is nothing wrong with
failing. Everyone fails. But to stay in Italy proves nothing. All it proves is that you have a lot of
growing up to do. You are not being a
hero remaining where you are…you are not owning up to your failure.
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