TITLE IMPAIRED
By
Arthur A. Baer

Read Before
The Chicago Literary Club
May 14th, 1951

"Signore Bah!"

Someone was calling on the station platform. The Rome-Florence Rapido slowed to a weary stop. The Italian businessmen had finished struggling backwards into their gabardines. They crowded the corridor, carrying worn, but distinguished, briefcases stuffed with oozing bottles of fresh Chianti and Pravaloni wrapped in newspaper.

Could it be I?

Why not, I thought, recollecting swiftly how many times my name had been abused on station platforms.

"Try to remember," I said to Alice, as I tussled with our own collection of briefcases, "another occasion, in the railway station at Keijo, with Ralph Cory in frock coat and striped trousers greeting us. His dispatch from Salisbury said simply, ' Meet the Baers,' and he had registered us at the hotel as what?"

"Dear Ralph," sighed Alice. "As Mr. and Mrs. George Washington Baer. Ah, Florence, sweet city of my dreams!"

I threw open the window and shouted "Cheat! Cheat!"

This was my continuing and satisfying revenge upon Compagnia Italiana Turismo, abbreviated modernly as C.I.T., its pronunciation as "cheat" having no punish significance to an Italian, but warming the cockles of my American-tourist heart.

An amazing stoutish man in a richly decorated uniform of robin's egg blue rushed up and enquired through his Franz Joseph whiskers, "Signore Bah?"

He was quickly calmed with a "Si, si, si!" I added, "Hotel Excelsior. Piazza Ognissanti. Four bags. Four. Quattro."

"Signore! You know Firenze? Have been before?"

"No!" Alice interposed firmly. "He has never been here. He's just practicing his guide book on us. He has a lot to learn about Florence, and I hope that you have a good guide for us."

"The guide! The guide!" His eyes brightened with pride. His Latin fingers quickly formed the circled message of perfection and he dispatched a bearded kiss toward the smoke-covered ceiling.

"Eccelente!"

Then we saw behind him a shabby man, somehow elegant in his shabbiness. The leather elbow-patches of his English jacket were well scuffed. The ribbon on his hat was noticeably stained, but the hat was a French velour of character. The shoes were awkward with thick soles that might be expected to wear a long time.

He stood there, diffident, withdrawn, evaluating, and still, somehow, at ease.

"Signora Bah, Signore, here is your guide to Firenze, Meestair Obolensky."

The guide bowed and barely smiled.

We all drove to the hotel, in an ancient Lancia. The guide turned in the front seat to make courteous inquiries about our long journey on the train, what our plans might be and other small talk. Over the back of the seat as he turned, hung his left hand. Obviously, it had never held a plow handle. The skin was delicate, slightly bluish and somewhat chapped. The fingers were slender and aimless. The nails needed attention.

From the relaxed fingers hung an empty cigarette holder, one of those inexpensive carved ivory pieces from the Bund in Shanghai, a common thing, but in this man's use, an instrument of grace and the insignia of a tradition.

That cigarette holder was to become almost as much Florence in our memories as the River Arno. Practically, it kept his hands fastidiously clear of tobacco stains. But to him it was more; it was the teacher's pointer, the conductor's baton, Merlin's wand. As we accompanied it through the streets, the museum, the churches and the chapels of Florence during the following days, we learned to look for the emphasis as marked by the cigarette holder. It illustrated, it punctuated, and it dramatized all of the guide's speech. It waved in great graceful circles; it stopped and paused immobile if we brashly interrupted; it extended the delicate hand into the gracious Tuscan landscape; and sometimes it stopped us with a wise warning as we paused on one of the thresholds of the fifteenth century.

At museum entrances, it disappeared without protest, but surely to him it must have seemed always alive in the darkness of his pocket, ready to leap out at the earliest opportunity, at the proximity of the exit door. The darkness of the pocket could not have been too dense, for the fabric of the coat was worn thin, as was the holder itself, and stained, too, with the years.

We parted at the hotel entrance.

"Tomorrow at nine," I said. "The Duomo, the Baptistery and Lorenzo's Tomb."

His punctilious courtesy evaporated in a wan smile and he walked off down the Lungarno.

I watched him go, wondering about his mood, which seemed one of either great weariness or of disappointment.

"What's wrong?" I asked Alice. "Surely we don't have to start out with a tip?"

"You've lost face," she said. "You committed the American sin of setting the hour too early."

She was right. We soon learned that to the guide nine in the morning was too early an hour for genuinely sensitive people to greet the day, and certainly extremely inconvenient to his established habits. Whenever we set an early hour for our tireless sight-seeing he was always punctual, but never cordial. It took him an hour and a half to warm up.

In his opinion, an early start damaged the entire day's program. Lunch came at the wrong time. The sacristan with the big ring of keys was always locking up for his colazione when we appeared. We had our afternoon coffee or aperitif before the amiable Florentines had theirs, and so missed the social flavor of this important daily function. As we sat at a sidewalk table at Gilli's, in the mid-afternoon, at my invitation and request, drinking nauseatingly delicious cacao con crema, he would adjust his bifocals and peer in anguish across the Piazza della Repubblica in the direction of his favorite café. The tables there were bare and empty now, but in two hours would be crowded with his cronies of the Chess Players Club, while he, poor guide, at that time would be dragging us from gallery to church to monument, trying desperately to give us some slight appreciation of the glory of the "quattrocento" in Firenze.

We disappointed him. We did not rest with proper dignity after lunch. We were impervious to the impropriety of roaming about in public before the coffee hour. We ate our dinners much too early for true epicurean enjoyment. We shocked him with our regular evening walks through the streets and alleys, after dinner, when civilized people sit around a Strega or two and devote themselves to conversation.

This last was really the key to his mistrust of us and his disapproval. For our guide was a Russian to whom conversation was almost a sacred rite. It was an exercise for its own sake. He never found it tiring nor tiresome; to him it was always stimulating, almost a spiritual necessity, at all hours, in every place, under all circumstances. It was endless.

It was not concerned with the mundane and petty details of practical living. These were obviously expected to extract themselves from their intricate messes without help from conversation or discussion. His talk, with no provocation at all, settled heavily upon the ultimate philosophies of everyone's existence, and neither started nor ended on any consideration of practical details.

We worried him. Alice inherited an English tradition of making philosophies clear in action rather than in words. And my training in American business life has taught me to act, rather than discuss. Certainly I omit philosophy entirely from ordinary daily discourse. We proved to be most disappointing to him, as he was disconcerting to us.

He struggled bravely with the situations we created. He endured stoically what he could not cure.

On our part, we doggedly endeavored to keep up with him, though we were certainly bewildered much of the time. If Alice floundered in the too-deep water, or found herself sinking from the exhaustion of ceaseless talk, and so stopped putting in the occasional word or nod which was the understood convention that she was still alive and listening, he would pull me aside and say, "I think your wife, she does not like what I am saying?"

He never openly revealed the sources of the philosophies with which he illumed our passage through museums and crypts, but we soon recognized the familiar Tolstoyan interpretations of the course of human life. The immediate application of the master's philosophy to the solution of man's current perplexities was, however, his own, and minor inconsistencies were inevitable. Certainly, ideological concepts in conflict were as uncomfortable to him as physical inconveniences, and he met both by avoiding them.

Whenever it became embarrassingly obvious that the philosophy he espoused at the moment was hopelessly irreconcilable with our materialism or even with actual facts, he would invariably sigh deeply, reach into his pocket for a package of cigarettes and the holder, break a cigarette carefully in two, place one half gently back in the package, the other in the holder, light up with a kitchen match from his vest pocket, and say sadly and conclusively, "Man is an insect. He cannot control his destiny. Es muss so immer sein!"

One evening we were leaving the Buca di Lapi in the Piazza Antinori. It had been a delicious dinner of bistecca alla Fiorentino, asparagus a burro that literally melted away in one's mouth, small wild strawberries and a bottle of Valpolicella. I felt at peace with the world and in love with the Medici family. I was toying with the idea of roaming the streets of Florence that night in the company of Poliziano and Pico della Mirandola and Lorenzo the Magnificent.

Alice spoiled it.

"Look!" she said.

The Communists had been distributing handbills and the passersby into whose hands they had been thrust had flung them in sheaves into the gutters. A sudden wind was driving a flurry of Marxist literature through the ancient square.

The scornful untidiness brought to mind Mussolini's vaunted conquests over old customs in the interests of civic cleanliness.

"The Florentines do not seem to care much for Communist propaganda," I said to the guide.

"No," he answered. "Some of them hate the Russians, I think."

There was no rancor in his manner, only a sort of retrospective languor. It was clear that something spoken or thought, perhaps only a word, had switched the train of his emotions.

He reminisced.

"I was a student in the university in St. Petersburg. It was 1917. The war was three years old, but I was not of it. Too young. Then the Revolution broke and my family came to the city for refuge. The Bolsheviki had driven them out of our country estate. My mother brought a few things with her, but we really lost everything. It was like some of the peasant uprisings after Napoleon. They ransacked the house. They stole or despoiled our furniture, our family portraits, our wonderful piano from Paris. Everything was gone. Everything."

"When we were all together again in St. Petersburg, we worried and fretted. Many of our friends were there, too. We visited; one family to the other family. All we talked about was the Revolution, how we hoped and prayed it would soon end. There had been other Revolutions and they had ended. When would this one end and let us return to our pleasant living?"

"But it was not to be. Before long we learned that the secret police were building a case against us and we fled to Germany, to Bonn, where we had friends."

He sighed.

"Our exile from our homeland seemed endless those days."

"Your exile," I interrupted cruelly, "will never end."

He turned on me sharply.

"It is exile no longer. For me it is no longer exile. The Russia of my boyhood, the home in the country, the old servants, the gay trips to the city -- these things have gone. Can you turn back the hands on the clock? Am I exiled from a land that is strange to me, that I distrust?"

He blew his nose vigorously, using a frayed, but clean kerchief.

"I am an Italian," he sputtered. "Or rather a Florentine. I am more a Florentine, than an Italian."

After a slight pause, he said, "I would like to visit America. I know many people in America."

"Did you stay long in Germany?" enquired Alice.

"Many years, Signora. Many sad, lonely years. We grew poorer and poorer, and we all learned to do the things poor people have always done. But of course, everyone was poor in Germany in those years. I went to the university just long enough to finish what was almost finished in St. Petersburg, and I was married in Bonn and my son was born there."

"My brother and his family lived with us. My brother talked too much. One day, the brown shirts came and arrested him, because, they said, he did not hate the Russians enough. Germany would not be safe, they said, unless everyone hated the Russians, the Communists. We had no money, but we still had powerful friends and he was released. In five weeks. Five long weeks. A police wagon stopped in front. They brought him in on a stretcher. But he could not speak."

"Why not?" I asked, somehow sharing the terror of that discovery.

"I do not know. I only know that he could not speak a word to us. And in four days he died."

The guide crossed himself.

"Then you hated the Germans," said Alice with conviction.

"We could not stay longer. Any gemutlichkeit was gone. Somehow we got here to Italy. And now I am a guide."

"Well, you have been safe here," said Alice, putting a question into the statement.

"Yes," he agreed. "Yes, I and my wife. We were safe. But my son. Now he's a fine young man. A good head and a musician too. The Fascists put him in prison in Rome. Because he was a Russian, they said he was a Communist. They said he did not hate enough, that he did not hate the English and the Americans enough."

He paused.

"Hate, hate. No one hates enough. The world has put a premium on hating. Would you have a cigarette for me, Signore?"

He lit it, inhaled with pleasure, then with the cigarette holder from Shanghai, drew a generous circle which included the great granite blocks of the Palazzo Strozzi.

He declaimed, "Men are powerless against fate. They are the irresponsible tools of history. Our little human fears, our vanities, should they make us take sides, should they make us hate? Are we all Neapolitans, that we should get angry and brawl and die and murder in the streets, and think something is achieved?"

"Mussolini's men said that my son was working in the underground, but this was false. I taught him from little on, that no one man can change the course of history. Every great event in history is the product of the combined willing of the great mass of men who take part in it. Whatever my son might do, or whatever I might do, would not change anything. I told him, the underground, the army, they are not for us. I told him, the more we might take part, the less free will we be."

"I am a guide," he said.

"Are you content?" asked Alice. "Don't the tourists annoy you, their early hours, their ignorance of history, their coming to Florence to shop for blouses and purses instead of soaking up some culture?"

"And their tipping!" she added with exasperation.

"Signora," he replied, brushing up his dignity. "I have told you before what is Italy. For the tourist, Italy is climbing a long flight of stairs or a long hill, and when you finally reach the top, you find there a man with his hand stretched out. Do not slight the man who asks for a tip. In a poor country like Italy, the tip may mean shoes for his feet or bread for his children."

"As for myself," and he smiled bravely, "I give alms, therefore I accept them."

He said goodnight and left us.

In the afternoon of the next day we went to Fiesole. It was the first warm Sunday of spring. All the little girls were out in freshly starched dresses. The streets were filled with bicycles. The Florentines had swarmed up the hill into the park and too many tried to crowd into the tiny tea-room. Like the others, we sat happy in the bright sunlight, enjoying the wisteria-covered brick wall below the open windows, the soft little hills called Fiesole, the sweet city of Firenze spread out in the plain.

"I should like," murmured Alice, "to find a villa here and live a while in Fiesole."

"Why not?" asked the guide. "I will find you a villa, complete with servants and garden and gardener."

"I must go back to work," I said.

He looked at me pityingly, smiled, rolled up his hat as a brush and swept the crumbs off the table.

"Let us order tea. Tea and cakes. The owners of this place are Milanese and you can have here panettone."

"You are too American," he said, returning from the waiter to me. "Work, work, work! Is that all there is to life? Withdraw a little. Relax a little. No one who thinks can really take an active part, a serous part, in trying to change anything. You Americans never seem to realize it. Your personal life can be free only as your interests are abstract."

"I take exception," said Alice, determined to stay in the discussion this time, although she seemed more interested in the throngs of cheerful Florentines struggling up the steep street and the frankly amorous couples in the tea-room.

"Men can be free," she said, "if they are educated properly. I mean educated not only in philosophy and metaphysics, but in the scientific understanding and knowledge and control of the tangible world about them."

"Ah," he breathed in an exhausted fury, "why are you so like the German? You say that you dislike him, because of what you call his arrogance, but this is only his self-confidence, and it springs from this same thing that you believe in. This science. This science which you have invented and magnified and magnified until it has become for you the absolute. The last word. The final truth."

A high Oxford accent penetrated the soft air and in the doorway appeared a tall thin Englishman and his wife, demanding service. A pair of Florentines, lightly poised on the edge of the frail seats; were practically swept out by the proprietor, to make places for the British lions.

The guide's nostrils lifted slightly.

"The English are self-confident too," he continued. "They are conscious of themselves as citizens of the most fortunately constituted kingdom in the world. Every Englishman believes that he knows what it is requisite for him to do, in all circumstances. And beyond that, he knows that whatever he does as an Englishman is correct, correct beyond cavil."

"You are generalizing," I said, to irritate him.

"What is your science," he quickly retorted, "but generalizations which you hurriedly call truth? Just like the doctors. The doctors think they know a nostrum for each disease no matter who has it. They are scientists. They are a part of the falsity and deception which make up modern life. They prescribe the most varied remedies for all the diseases which their so-called science knows. But it is clear, it is very clear, that every ailment which attacks mortal man is beyond any doctor's power of understanding."

"Come, come!" said Alice. "Your own cough, now. Don't you think you should see a doctor? It hasn't improved in the last fortnight."

His smile was thin, but courageous.

"I have a cough, but it is nothing. I have a cough, but also I have a bad lung. I have been very sick with it. Very sick. But I know myself. I know what to do. I rest. I eat lightly. I do not smoke too many cigarettes. I say to you, each man has his own distinguishing characteristics. Whatever disease he has must necessarily be peculiar and new. Unique. Unknown to medicine."

Alice sighed. She was about to give up.

"You feel there is no value even in medical science?" she asked.

He shook his head.

"None whatever. Oh, there is a value in a doctor. But not to the patient, only to the household. True, they make a sick one swallow drugs and drugs are mostly noxious, but not much harm is done because they are given in such small quantities. The drugs and the doctors satisfy that eternal human demand for hope and consolation, for sympathy and activity, which we all feel at a time of suffering."

"Of course, the doctors are not to blame because they cannot grasp this simple idea, that there is no nostrum which will cure all patients, no matter how like their symptoms. The doctors are too busy; they practice night and day; it is their way of earning money. You could not dare ask them to stop and think about it all. Once in a while, one of them questions himself, in his maturity, but by this time he has already spent the best years of his life in the business and it is too late."

He drained his tea-cup. He carefully wrapped the small remaining portion of cake in his paper napkin and put it in his pocket.

"I do not mean to say," he continued, "that only the Germans and the English and the Americans are self-confident. This is a characteristic of Spengler's western world. The Russians were self-confident too, when I left Russia. But we were so because we knew that we knew nothing, wished to know nothing, believed it impossible to know anything."

Before we had time to question whether this might be, on his part, downright defiance or possibly a regretful confession, he rose, saying, "It is early. Let us get in the car and go to Certosa, where the Carthusian monks plow the fields and pray and brew wonderful liqueur.

"The panettone was good," he added. "Surely you should give the girl a tip. But fifty lire is ample."

The following morning, we drove up the Elsa Valley to San Gimignano and passing through the massive city gate found ourselves in the fourteenth century.

"The Capulets and the Montagues brawled in these streets," said Alice.

"In San Gimignano," replied the guide, "the feuding was between the Salvucci and the Ardinghelli."

He chided like a pedagogue correcting a grave error.

"Please," he insisted sharply. "This is San Gimignano, not Shakespeare. This is medieval, not renaissance. This was the town of the towers. Seventy-two stone towers. They were built not to fortify the town against its enemies, but in the senseless course of civil wars."

"That's my point," said Alice.

"Please, Signora," complained the guide. "Please bear with me. From here we will go to Siena and there I will try to show you, in the Sienese school of painting, the contrasts of Siena versus Florence, Guelph versus Ghibelline, conservative versus liberal. But San Gimignano is different. It is a sport. With the Renaissance, the great Tuscan cities bloomed, but San Gimignano petrified. Is it not petrified? Petrified and crumbling. Thirteen towers left of seventy-two!"

"Please be patient, Signora. When yesterday you said that today we would visit Siena, I was sick. I was dejected. For many years, I have not seen Siena and I have lost touch. I am no longer familiar with its monuments and history. During the war, with the Germans here, I could not go. Since then, I must say, I have been too poor. So last night I read and studied my books, until late after midnight. So I will try my best to explain things to you."

He coughed disturbingly.

"Let us," I said sympathetically, "go on then to Siena. I want to see that great whipped-cream-cake cathedral. We can lunch in Siena."

We stepped into a doorway to let the town water-supply go by, a huge cask mounted on wheels and drawn by a team of white bullocks.

When we reached the ancient square where our car was waiting, we found the car surrounded. The driver was extolling the virtues of the dilapidated Lancia to several aproned waiters, a number of idle citizens and a pair of hungry and hopeful Italian dogs.

As we approached, the driver, in some surprise, reluctantly opened the rear door for Alice.

A round little man ran up from an open doorway.

"But surely you are going to have lunch in my albergo?" he asked with a worried smile. "You are not going?"

"We are on our way to Siena," I replied.

"But it is a long drive. You should have luncheon here. We expect you."

"You are very gracious," I said, "but we must go."

"It is up but a few short steps," insisted the proprietor, "and my kitchen is spotlessly clean."

"No, thank you," I said.

"Your luncheon will be the best," pursued mine host. "Superb. You will enjoy it. And especially Signora. We have a fine cook."

"We have phoned to Siena for a reservation," I said.

"Not only a delicious luncheon, but una bella vista," persisted the proud proprietor. "Beautiful. The towers of the town. The vineyards. The green Tuscan hills."

The waiters looked desolated, the citizens incredulous; the little boys whispered to one another.

The guide spoke up hopefully.

"Our driver says this is all true. A wonderful inn. In fact, he says that he knew you would enjoy it so very much, he has already cancelled our reservation in Siena."

Mine host smiled knowingly and bowed to the pavement.

What could we do but climb the stairs? We looked in at the spotless kitchen, where the cook and his two woman helpers welcomed us with smiles and swift words of hospitality. We were ushered onto a dining terrace. The waiters, by now our bosom friends, rushed a table and chairs to the widest window and we sat down to our bella vista, the Tuscan hills, described by someone as the most civilized landscape in the world.

"Signore Obolensky," I said to the guide, "I will be very grateful to you if you will order our dinner."

He puffed up with pleasure, the proprietor look relieved and the pair ceremoniously opened up negotiations as to the nature of our meal.

The sparring finally subsided. A decision was achieved. We were to begin with gnocchi, delicious potato dumplings. I felt relieved and so did the waiters. The sauce was a serious problem, but we settled on pomodoro, with the garlic omitted and basil, bay leaf and oregano to be added.

The guide was in his glory. This had not happened to him in years. Every detail was discussed meticulously, argued at great length and finally compromised. He relished the flavor of each rare herb he suggested or accepted. His cigarette holder had never been more active, nor more imperious. His eyes shone. He actually beamed.

What would the meat course be? This seamed a most momentous question.

As for myself, I felt scornfully incredulous, since after all, we were in San Gimignano and could not possibly have a choice of, say, venison or guinea hen under glass or Morro crab.

However, at long last, the matter was resolved. We would have veal. I had known it all the time.

During the ensuing argument, as to whether it should be prepared in the local manner with prosciutto, or to the Russian's taste, with Marsala wine, Alice interrupted to state very firmly that she could not endure veal.

Both advocates were aghast.

What would Signora suggest? It was obvious that both were at a loss as to what else she could possibly suggest.

And she said simply, "Lamb chops."

The proprietor did not understand the English and waited eagerly for developments.

The guide was embarrassed and upset.

However, he seized the goat, so to speak, by the horns and explained to Alice as tactfully and as patiently as possible that in the countryside, in Italy, only the peasants eat lamb and that we might easily lose caste with mine host and his waiters and cooks and kitchen help if we ordered lamb.

But Alice was obdurate. She said very pleasantly that she hated veal, that she wanted lamb and nothing else.

"Agnello," she said firmly.

"Agnello," repeated mine host with understanding and deep approval, leaving the guide behind.

"And what cut?" he asked.

As English, Italian and Russian, together with a little awkward Spanish which I tossed in for spice, quickly reached a distressing impasse; the little round man left us suddenly and dashed into the kitchen. In a moment he was back, bearing proudly on a huge tray the bloody carcass of a freshly slaughtered small young lamb. With Alice's distressed help we very quickly decided which cut was to be ours for lunch.

Now the conclave assembled again. How about the vino?

I held out for an Orvieto from Umbria, but the majority decided upon a local wine and the host proposed a San Gimignano Chianti from his own vineyard. Bellisimo!

He rushed off and was back in three shakes of the lamb's tail with a great dusty bottle of red wine, which each of us handled and admired in turn. A waiter brought an opener and the cork popped properly. Vine host smelled the cork carefully. It was not sour. He sniffed the open bottle and said, "Ah!" He wiped the mouth of the bottle very lovingly with a napkin, poured a little into my wineglass, twirled the glass dexterously so that the wine swirled beautifully in the glass, sniffed the glass with complete approval, held it up to the light to admire the rich ruby color of the wine and finally set the glass down in front of me with a flourish.

I took a sip and smacked my lips. He then filled the glasses and we all drank to two toasts, to the towers of San Gimignano and to many more good vintage years.

It was a wonderful meal.

Alice and I enjoyed it thoroughly.

The guide wallowed in it.

The host enjoyed our enjoyment.

The waiters were happy.

The cook came to the doorway and smiled broadly.

We talked of many things, but principally of Benozzo Gozzoli, whom some call a minor artist, who painted here in San Gimignano, in frescoes, the life of St. Augustine, revealing in them a very rich understanding of the simple human qualities, of love and pride and jealousy.

Alice voted first place as a portrait painter to Ghirlandajo, citing the two episodes in the life of Santa Fina, the patron saint of the town of the towers. She was a beautiful child, who died, as someone has said, "of divine love," at the age of thirteen. In the purity and sweetness of her soul, she was in great contrast to this turgid quarrelsome town, this place destroyed by hatred, revenge, jealousy, blood, torture and murder. Alice said that Ghirlandajo made all this clear in her face.

I voted for Gazzoli in preference to Ghirlandajo.

I said, "Whatever else he may be in the history of painting, he has great importance as a painter of portraits. Take, for example, his Procession of the Magi, in the Medici Palace."

The guide agreed vigorously.

"It is a very rich piece of work," he said. "I love the composition, the procession of horsemen and retainers moving in great dignity through the Etruscan mountains. I love the spirit of the painter, who permits a huntsman to break from the ranks and pursue a deer up the ravine. I have a feeling that there will be food in the encampment tonight, for John Paleologus, emperor of Byzantium, and for his traveling companion, the Patriarch of Constantinople. Do you remember that the third of the Magi is Lorenzo himself, soon to become Il Magnifico?"

"The picture," he continued, "is full of pomp and regalia. It is crowded with allegorical references. It is rich in symbolism. And what an intricate interweaving of Magi and Emperor, Tuscany and Bethlehem, learning and religion! I believe it is Young who says that in this picture it is Learning, rather than Wealth and Power, that is exalted.

"Yet, with all the history and allegory which it contains, I like it best for its portraits. For instance, that of Emperor John. I am told that this is the only portrait known of John, or of any one of that long line of Emperors of the East, the line that began with Constantine and held the throne in Constantinople for eleven hundred and thirty years."

"Do you remember," he asked, "that the painter put himself into the fresco" There he stands, between two of the learned Greeks, with his name written on his cap, Gazzoli."

He stopped and held the wine bottle up to the light.

"Lady and gentleman," he said, in his best professional manner, "the wine is finished. And it is now too late to go on to Siena. We have talked away the afternoon."

The following day, when we entered the Piazza del Campo in Siena, we seemed to emerge on an alien world. Yet, in the casualness of the daily business going on in the square, there was apparent nothing of the deliberately quaint, nothing of the arrogance of self-conscious preservation of the past. Probably the massive genuineness of the medieval Gothic buildings dwarfed the activities of the moment into negligible minutiae, and so it seemed another century.

Inside the heavy museum doors, however, we were definitely enveloped in a past which, it seemed to us, must have been as inflexible in its beginnings as now.

"This is what I told you about yesterday," the guide said. "Europe's great struggle, the fight between Guelph and Ghibbeline, between Florence and Siena, a fight to the finish. Siena was all that was aristocratic and conservative. Florence was all that was, in those days, liberal and progressive. Of course they fought."

Here followed one of the pauses so rare in his monologues. It could not have had to do with the facts of the 15th century wars nor with 13th century painting, because such talk always flowed easily, without pause.

Perhaps here was a dichotomy which he could not escape by ignoring it, as was his habit; which would somehow force him to take a position and become vulnerable.

We knew by this time that he regarded the entire world as a fait accompli, future as well as past and was convinced that any energy devoted to either protests or approval, to either resistance or assistance, would be futile waste. To regret or to rejoice would be to identify himself with some cause and so invite discomfort or injury to himself. Nothing was worth that.

The abrupt and painful pause continued. Had his talk about the quarrels of Florence and Siena trailed off into a void because he could not endure the exertion of rejoicing in a past triumph of freedom and democracy, or of mourning the current defeat of the traditional and the conservative?

Was he worried about how to preserve a professionally objective attitude before the customers?

Or did this distressing refusal to discuss the blessings that followed the triumph of liberalism in art and in politics, have a deeper cause and conviction than we might suspect?

We strolled leisurely along the walls hung with the great primitives, with Cimabue and Giotto, survivals from the days before Florence nurtured the first of the moderns in the fine arts. And here also the guide seemed as stonily unemotional as when he had faced, with us, the rich living masterpieces in the Uffizi.

It seemed as though, underneath the hard surface, he was annoyed by our, to him, crude American habit and need to of taking sides, of being ardent partisans on every issue regardless of its significance. He perceived the familiar resisting under our carefully uncritical aloofness, which was the best we could do in our endeavor to match his genuine remoteness. Being completely ignorant of the criteria which evaluate the technique of a painting, we could respond only to the subject matter and so both of us remained cold to the beauty we were quick enough to acknowledge.

"I think you do not like the primitives," he said finally, breaking the long silence. The comment seemed somehow irrelevant to the differences between Florence and Siena, where he had left off.

He is a masochist, I thought. He does not like what we think; it irks and pains him; but he insists on hearing it over and over again.

"After what we have seen in the Uffizi," said Alice, "these stylized Madonnas seem more than ever like wooden dolls."

He sucked in his breath.

"And look at these Byzantine holy infants," she added, "lifeless little symbols! How could an erring human find hope of salvation from them?"

"I resent the gold-leaf backgrounds," I commented, to annoy him. "The gold hurts my eyes."

He chose his words cautiously.

"Please try to remember that these were didactic paintings. These were propaganda paintings. The Church told its story in pictures to people who could not read words. The illiterate and the unsophisticated were impressed by the gold-leaf background. They soon learned to believe that whatever it surrounded must be holy indeed."

He regarded us sharply.

"These paintings," he continued, "were intended to teach the common people the stories of the saints and the martyrs, and to instruct them how to pray for help and salvation."

"These things," said Alice, "have a modern parallel in the anti-capitalistic frescoes of Rivera and Oruzco."

"You can hardly assume," I argued, "that the audience at Dartmouth is illiterate and unsophisticated."

"Of course not," she agreed. "We take it for granted that these great modern Mexican artists painted originally for the ignorant Indian peon and in the beginning with the same kind of faith that Cimabue had six centuries earlier."

We lingered along the galleries, finding here and there a few pieces which we understood and enjoyed.

"I think perhaps you are beginning to like the primitives," he suggested after a bit, with satisfaction.

"Yes," he added, as if gently reminiscent, "the world was a better place in those days, when the people were simple believers and their guardians were the aristocracy."

Now it was clear why his history lesson had faded into silence. The defeat and the failure and the bankruptcy of his group, his inheritance, these hardly belonged in a gallery lecture. Or perhaps he had hesitated to argue this thesis with public-school Americans.

At any rate, Alice took up cudgels.

"The saints had an easy time of it," she said. "Their suffering was soon past and then they became eternally happy and blessed. They were not required to maintain their right to sainthood by further struggles with evil."

"I think, Mr. Obolensky," she added thoughtfully, "the aristocracy was like that, too. Originally they established their right to power by preeminent success in the techniques of their day, but their descendants calmly accepted the power. They failed to establish or maintain their right to it by showing prowess in the ways of their own time."

She warmed to her subject.

"It was nice for an aristocracy to have a constituency whose trust was never disturbed by doubts or questionings. It was very nice and very comfortable. But that kind of thing is deader than the 13th century and we all know it."

"I am afraid that you are right," replied the guide, forlornly, and the sadness in his voice bespoke a consciousness of the irreparable loss of high estates.

"It is getting late," he said. "We must return to Florence."

A few days later, in the Uffizi, we stopped before the Botticelli Venus.

The guide continued his discourse after the briefest wave of his long hand toward the great canvas. Perhaps he thought no identification necessary, but more likely he was so entranced by his thesis that he slipped, as seldom, from his guise as guide.

"No man," he went on, as if there had been no lapse of time since the first day we met, "no single man alone ever determined a great event of history. The great man is always just the figurehead of the mass of men behind him. Napoleon at Borodino did not of his own will decide the campaign tactics that determined the fate of Europe at that moment. The great army of French soldiers would have torn him to bits if he had attempted to forbid them to attack the Russians who faced them. They had only one thought, to kill the Russians.

"Napoleon thought, to be sure, that he alone chose his course of action, but really he had no more to do with it than we have now. No man changes the course of history. It is all inevitable in the will of the great mass of people. It will inevitably proceed in its own way and at its own pace. No one can even change the course of his own life, for the same reason, for the reason that it is all inevitable in a will outside his own."

While he talked I looked at the portrait of the exquisite Simonetta and thought of that other series of frescoes in the Sistine Chapel, painted for the Pope with great religious feeling, and then of the final period in the painter's life, when Savonarola wielded the power in Florence and molded all men's thoughts to his own pattern. The pagan Venus poised timeless charm before us, but my mind flew out with the guide's last words to that bronze disc imbedded in the pavement before the Palazzo Vecchio, to show where Savonarola was hanged and burned on the 23rd of May, 1498.

For a moment I let myself submerge in a sea of negation. Perhaps we were wrong. Perhaps the guide was right. Perhaps intimations of greatness within the individual are not worth the heeding. Perhaps there can be nothing for us except what the great mass of men decides.

Why should we struggle so frantically to control events, even within the sphere of our own daily living? It will avail nothing, for actually there is no possibility of achieving even the least of one's ends, since one cannot really have ends of one's own. Why should one defy a catastrophe, even if one can see it clearly approaching from a distance? There is no point in resisting it. It is certain to be inevitable. Do not try to escape it or thwart it. The only course is to accept its consequences stoically. It will certainly overtake one sooner or later anyway and when one has that conviction there can be no exhilaration in the losing fight.

But if one bowed to its inevitability, one could at least survive to the extent of a threadbare overcoat in the galleries of Italy.

Savonarola had poured out the words of his personal faith hour after hour to the hypnotized Florentines and in response to his eloquence they had thrown their most cherished worldly possessions into great bonfires in the streets. The gaieties of Lorenzo's court and the pageantries of his luxurious tastes were forgotten. Florence swung the full arc of the pendulum and became the grim city of the Frate's solemn ascetic preachments.

But this was not enough for the puritanical Fra Giralamo; he must needs take the people with him in establishing his own version of the city of God on earth. And so, on a final bonfire, long after the false curls and the rouge and the priceless editions of Petrarch and Boccaccio and the ancient Latin classics had been consigned to the flames by his repentant followers, was flung the tortured helpless body of gaunt Savonarola himself, fed to the fires of political revenge by the very people who had sobbed out their hearts, when, long before, in a memorable sermon, he had offered himself as the first and most willing sacrifice, if one were needed to redeem the city and the church.

The great reformer became, too, but a tiny heap of shapeless grey ashes, a tragic fate for a man who had dedicated himself to the masses of men, to freeing them from exploitation and from hopeless misery of body and soul. Reformers and resisters often meet that fate, because men in masses always oppose changes and being changed. The fickle Florentines were really no more reprehensible than any other men, since it was quite beyond their capacity to have heart or mind for the reforms which their Fra Giralamo expounded so fiercely in the Duomo.

I struggled in the dark waters, fought my way to the surface, breathed again, and opened my eyes. There before me was the bewitching Venus, riding the seashell.

The theory of inevitability is not for me, I said to myself, and this Russian needs a good strong dose of wholesome raw American belief in the individual. He needs to be convinced that defiance, even if it terminates in extinction, is a higher destiny than a compromise with great forces, just because they may represent great numbers or wield great power.

Passivity, I thought, is an unacceptable means of survival; and the bronze disc in the worn pavement means much more, in the history of mankind, than the survival of any conformer, even a Botticelli.

"No man," the guide was saying, "can change the destiny of a nation. He cannot change alone a single event in its history. He cannot even determine a single event in his own life. He can control nothing. It is all inevitable."

"Botticelli," he continued, "could not help altering himself from a painter of the secular worldly life of Lorenzo's court into a man who painted only religious subjects. All such changes are predestined. They are arranged by circumstances."

We moved along to stand before the Madonna of the Pomegranate, sometimes called the loveliest of the Botticelli Madonnas. The guide stood for a moment enraptured before he spoke again.

"You see," he said, "how Botticelli understood so thoroughly the things I have been talking about. See how closely the mother holds her child. You can see in her face that she knows the unhappiness that is in store for both of them, but she knows that she can do nothing to avert it. She knows that no one can do anything. She accepts her destiny. It is inevitable. In this is the meaning and the loveliness of the painting."

"No," he concluded, "you must acknowledge it now. It is here proven for you. Everything is inevitable. One cannot resist. This is the key to our broken world."

Alice pulled me aside and hissed into my ear, "It is the cowards who bury the brave."

We left Florence the next day for Como and the lake country.

Our guide accompanied us to the railway station behind Santa Maria Novella, to put us in the right compartment on the right train.

We chatted small talk on the platform until the bells began to ring. Then I pressed handful of bills into his hand, saying quietly, "Do not be offended."

He smiled, coughed and replied, "I give alms, therefore I accept them."

Somehow, he looked shabbier than ever.

We all shook hands and as Alice and I turned to enter the coach, he pulled a small card from his pocket and handed it to me.

"Goodbye," he said, "goodbye! Arrividerci! Perhaps we may meet again. I hope so. Perhaps in America. I would love to visit America."

The train began to move.

The porters stepped back to watch the departure.

A drunken American in the vestibule ahead called out "Buon giorno! Buon giorno!" and threw a handful of cigarettes at the porters.

One of the cigarettes fell near our guide. He stooped over, picked it up, put it in his ivory cigarette holder and lit it with a kitchen match from his vest pocket.

I felt very sad.

I felt the card in my hand. I looked at it. It was soiled from handling and the printing was poor.

It read, "Prince Nicholas Obolensky, Firenze."