North from Rome Read Online Free PDF

sun play on his spine, and watched the parade of handsome Romans mixing with the eternal tourists.

4
    As he waited for Rosana, Lammiter again noted the preponderance of young America: the college girls; and the high-school boys; and the young men just out of service, their hair still close-cut, their shoulders still squared away, and the G.I. savings in their pockets. There were older Americans, too, mostly family men shepherding their flocks back to their hotels: the grey-haired and bald-headed fathers, in button-down collars and the new drip-dry jackets posing as seersucker, patiently accepting a summer vacation spent in museums and churches while dissembling their worry about the low evaporation point of money; the wives, who had read the guide books and provided the enthusiasm, now harried and hurried but still determined on culture in spite of the problems of food and drink for the children, of nylon laundry all over the bathroom, of the chore of keeping a family neat while it lived from suitcases; the children themselves,remarkably good-natured, who must have had better ideas on spending a hot summer day than by breathing the petrol fumes of a modern city. The English tourists were mostly middle-aged. The men wore high-waisted trousers held up by taut suspenders over transparent nylon shirts open and neatly folded back at the neck. And their choice in holiday shoes was odd: criss-crossed, leather sandals displaying lots of heavy wool sock. Their women weren’t what Lammiter expected, either: they didn’t look like the Englishwomen he met in New York or Washington: these Roman tourists were more solidly constructed, sensible in shoes and ankles, more like Brussels sprouts than the well-advertised roses, nice and wholesome and all so very much alike. With some pepper and salt and butter, they’d probably taste alike, too. Once outside of the buses which had brought them across Europe, the English couples kept together, in tight phalanxes of four or six, as if they distrusted the friendliness of the natives. Perhaps they were new to travel, and were still worried about white-slave traffic, unmentionable diseases, and pickpockets. The thin middle-aged Englishman sitting at the table opposite Lammiter seemed both horrified and fascinated by his own countrymen: he kept looking up at them in pained disbelief. Not one tie, far less an old school tie, among them.
    If the English stiffened into set moulds when they travelled, the French became as shapeless as a melted candle. Not for them was the clean shirt, and the trousers at least pressed under the mattress, or the dainty afternoon frock; they dressed for a comfortable journey (which usually meant five packed into a small beetle-like car with bits and pieces of luggage strapped all around): crumpled shorts and hairy legs, wrinkled skirts andsoiled blouses, bare feet in equally dusty sandals. They sauntered slowly, carelessly, dropping into a ragged single file as often as not, like a column of Bedouins cautiously straggling into rival territory. If they were impressed, it was well disguised. And the worse a French tourist dressed, the more contemptuously he looked at others. The carefully washed, brushed, and dressed Italians—even those who could afford only one meal a day— refused to be scorned. They ignored the tourists (after all, Rome had been invaded by barbarians for centuries) and watched the pretty Roman girls with national pride. From sixteen until twenty-two or so, they were beautiful, as beautiful as any Lammiter had ever seen anywhere. But what happened after twenty-two, he wondered? Then he saw Rosana Di Feo coming towards him at last. She was an exception to the general rule, he considered. She must be twenty-three or -four, and she was still a beauty.
    “I’m sorry,” she said, “to have been so long.” But she didn’t sit down.
    So he rose. “I was watching the tourists,” he explained.
    Her voice was very low. “I’ve watched them for three