Warburg in Rome Read Online Free PDF Page A

known as Kevin Deane. Nice to meet you.”
    “Hello, Father. I’m David Warburg.”
    “Oh, really? Warburg. I’m from New York. We have to talk, when we’re down and can hear ourselves.” With that he turned back to the window.
    And so did Warburg, thinking, Here we go again.
     
    Before sunrise that same morning, the second dawn after Rome’s liberation, Marguerite d’Erasmo awakened from her first sound sleep in days. She untangled the bedclothes, flicked on the table lamp, rose, and went straight to the curtain that sheltered a corner of the room. She was in the garret of an old boarding house in Trastevere, the Tiber-side neighborhood where many of Rome’s workers, artisans, students, and pensioners lived. This was the mansard flat she’d lived in before fleeing Rome months before. It had been kept for her by Signora Paoli, the building’s aged portiere , who’d greeted her with an embrace upon her return the night before. Now, pulling the curtain aside, Marguerite found the oversized copper tub—still there. She hadn’t dreamt it.
    Originally a livestock drinking tank, the tub had been hoisted up to the building’s attic when pipes for running water were installed to that level—not so long before Marguerite had found the place two years ago. The narrow trough was the furthest thing from a claw-footed lounging tub, but she remembered how the wooden back rest, sloping just so, had made it comfortable enough. Unlike the fine ladies’ vascas in the rooms where she’d bathed as a child, Marguerite had learned to love this elongated animal waterer for its simplicity and for accommodating her tall, thin frame at full stretch. Brooding trances, warmth on her skin, lung-searing steam, peace—such were her prior associations with the tub, but this morning it looked all at once like a ready casket. She closed her eyes for a moment. Unaccountably, her nostrils were seized by the stench of urine, as if, in her absence, those farm animals had been here to reclaim the thing.
    She reached for the left wall faucet and turned it. The tap sputtered, ran cold at first, gradually offering tepid water, and then, to her amazement, hot. Scalding. Only then did she lean into the depth of the tub to plug the drain hole with a fist-sized lump of cork. This would be her first bath in weeks. Waiting for the enormous tub to fill, she fell back onto the bed, as if for a languid reverie. She let her arms and legs swing, as if trying to stay afloat, as Carlo’s face broke into her mind.
    The ache came screeching back. What were those first feelings of hers? The single-minded woman for whom he had been only the exotic Savoyard, with his mountain-man tangle of red hair and beard; how drawn she’d been by the political defiance that had made him a fugitive, the fire that she had taken to be all courage and virtue; her beau ideal of the responsible life in an age of wickedness—where was the unchastened woman of such perceptions now? Once, with her eyes closed like this, she could pretend that the fingers between her legs were his, as she had in the beginning imagined eventually giving herself to him. But the beginning was a lie. Who was she to have believed it?
    This was no dream. Days before, she had left Trieste without Carlo, hidden in the stinking hold of a fishing boat that took her to Ancona. Remember, O most blessed Virgin Mary . . .
    That she was changed forever by what had happened in these months since she’d fled Rome, after the Nazi occupation, was the base fact of her new condition—yet still an astonishment. She opened her eyes. At the window, the first glow of dawn had come. At this moment, in the rough hillside hut above the village of Vranjak, would come the soft rapping on her door as she lay in a shepherd’s bed of quilted furs. Carlo’s habit was to wake her at just this hour—since she was the sunshine, he always said. She knew that he had come this early at first hoping to make love to her. She had let him