# Writing > Short Story Sharing >  See Rome and Die.

## MANICHAEAN

See Rome And Die.

Chapter 1:

Thanked be Fortune, it hath been otherwise
Twenty times better; but once in special,
In thin array after a pleasant guise.

Sir Thomas Wyatt 1503-1542.

When you have travelled as extensively as I have, you now choose the cities that you visit according to your moods. That might appear presumptuous to many readers, but
then, I have over the years acquired both that pedigree and the means to indulge. Many less fortunate have been denied and for that I offer no apology; the exercise being now, in many respects an ordeal rather than an absorption of pleasure.

So why Rome? If it had been danger and the stirring of mortal juices I had been seeking, then no doubt Kingston Jamaica would have been high up there on my list. If a pampered backwater and being a vegetative tourist, then perhaps Florida. But no. On this occasion, to be perfectly candid, I did not know what I wanted. Having traversed, at one time or another great chunks of the globe on long haul destinations to Africa, the Far East and North America, I was as it were, returning to my roots; to the Europe of my days as a student, though now so changed as to be at times unrecognisable from those early years.

A dying solar benediction on the upper cloud strata could be observed as the plane proceeded westward and, as if to keep one in countenance, the pilot announced that we were beginning our descent eastwards along the Italian coast into Rome's Fumanchino Airport. The well worn litany, (akin the instructiveness of Milton's "affable archangel") of "Please return to your seats, place them in an upright position, fold your trays" etc was chanted via a prerecorded message over the intercom.The Air Italia stewardess glided down the central isle as if it was her catwalk, the execution of which manoeuvre belied years of catering to any unwarranted attentions by male passengers. There darted now and then across her features a keen discernment which was not without a scorching quality, and I judged that she was the type of woman, that if she ever attained perfect
meekness, it would not be for lack of inward fire. These "Bella" apparitions can, on initial observance convey an attitude of haughtiness and give the impression that for anything to happen in spite of them was an offensive irregularity. "You may look and admire, but no more," they seemed to indicate, but then, just by mistake; spill your drink or stumble, and she is the mother figure wiping you down and gently touching your arm, her instincts those of caring for a small bambino that has scraped his knee.

I had made no plans regarding accommodation; as to whether to reside in Rome proper itself, or limit myself to the periphery and commute in as the mood took me. In fact the decision was not made until I had cleared immigration and partook of that band of Formula 1 drivers that assume the role of taxi drivers in this metropolis. Upon entering 
that aforesaid conveyance, I had but a split second between uttering the words "Holiday Inn," and fastening the seat belt, before the Fiat, (doubling as a Ferrari), had assumed a competitive weaving among early evening traffic towards my destination.

I was grateful to the Commissioners in Brussels that the old style currency of which I had previously been acquainted, had been replaced by the euro, remembering how as a student £1 had had it's equivalent in 1,657 lira, each note seemingly commending in design the equivalent beauty of a Botochelli and expanding in size vis a vis higher denominations. One really did wonder if such a thing as a trillion lira note would equate with a full page of the old Times newspaper and require folding in order to transport in an adequate manner! As it was, I paid my 30 euro taxi fare and entered the hotel.

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## MANICHAEAN

Chapter 2:

Brooding kisses I will pour
Shall thy youthful heat restore
Such kind showers in autumn fall,
And a second spring recall.

John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester 1647-1680.

If anyone will here contend that there must have been traits of superficial disquiet in the new arrivals behaviour they would have been correct. Two hours later he had taken one of the coaches provided by the hotel, that dropped it's guests off in Rome proper. It was
a cafe located just opposite the foot of the Spanish Steps, at the junction of three main thoroughfares in which he sat, an invariably busy, well known venue both with locals and tourists alike.

He had always found the Eternal City, (if ever that solitary superlative existed), full of contradictions. It seemed still to function as if when days were longer; as if time like money was measured by our needs. A fear arose, that he had been mistaken in his choice. Till recently, he had crowded his laborious uncreative hours with the vaporous pressure of Tartarean shades, and in now choosing a southern landscape he knew that they invariably seem divided between natural grandeur and social slovenliness. Rome through its history could become the oppressive masquerade of ages, in which his own life
too would become a masque with enigmatical costumes. This feeling bruised his attachment and relaxed it's hold.

If truth were known, he had some half formed wish to place himself in an attitude of receptivity towards sublime chance, but was cognisant of the fact was that there were now few unknown regions preserved as hunting grounds for the poetic imagination he felt he had.

He looked around. Acolyte bar staff catered for the over indulgent. At a table outside, what appeared to be a middle-aged Italian bachelor had a complexion something like an Easter egg, a few hairs carefully arranged, and a carriage implying the consciousness of a 
distinguished appearance. His companion, by contrast looked like a death's head skinned over for this nocturnal socialising.

Something dropped by his leg and instantaneously he stooped to pick it up. It was then, as his head rose in unison that he saw her, the faces inches apart, the beauty more subdued than her film image, but the reality more beholden. She had dropped a gold chain and in the brief, impersonal conversation full of apologies that followed, they together created that peculiar intimacy which consists in shyness. They were obliged to look at each other in speaking, and somehow the looking could not be carried through as the matter of course which it really was. That intimacy of mutual embarrassment, in 
which each feels that the other is feeling something, having once existed, it's effect is not to be done away .

He looked again, but as he raised his eyes anew, he saw a certain helpless quivering which touched him quite newly.

To him at that moment she was as natural as she would ever have been when she was five years old. She on her part felt that her tears had risen and it was no use to try and do anything else than let them flow over her cheeks.

His words were quite abrupt and awkward, but the tone made them sound like an ardent,
appealing avowal.

"What is the matter? You are distressed. Tell me!"

She had not been spoken to in such tones for a long time, not in her marriages, not since her father had died all those years ago, and there could have been no more complete answer than silence.

Forgetting everything else and all those around him in that crowded cafe, he put his arms around her, folding her gently and protectingly, and kissed unashamedly each of the two large tears. This was a short way of arriving at an understanding, but it was a short way
as effective and instructive as of the man himself.

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## Steven Hunley

I dunno, Man, how I missed the first part of this, but let's take first impressions first. As usual the wordsmanship is superb. Funny thing, WORD wants to redunderline wordsmanship and replace it with swordsmanship, which it finds no fault with. Not sure about fencing, but I think you make points by 'touching' the other guy.

Seems like your wordsmanship is like a fencer's swordsmanship, it touches me. I've always been a sucker for an exotic location, but the man-woman thing, the nuances of relationships between men and women, well, they are if not my favorite locations, my favorite parts.

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## MANICHAEAN

Thanks Steve.
While on holiday I managed to finish "The Enemy Within," but am not sure yet where this one is going now I'm back at work. Perhaps nowhere!
Like your own excellent writing, it's best to concentrate on the basic appetites of man: food, drink, love, ambition, adventure, intrigue.

Have you ever tried writing from a woman's perspective? Now, that should turn out either hilarious or a best seller!! Come on, give it a try.
I for one, would look forward with relish to that.

Best regards
M.

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## MANICHAEAN

Chapter 3:

LEAVE me, O Love, which reaches but to dust, 
And thou, my mind, aspire to higher things! 
Grow rich in that which never taketh rust: 
Whatever fades, but fading pleasure brings. 
Draw in thy beams, and humble all thy might 
To that sweet yoke where lasting freedoms be; 
Which breaks the clouds and opens forth the light 
That doth both shine and give us sight to see. 
O take fast hold! let that light be thy guide 
In this small course which birth draws out to death, 
And think how evil becometh him to slide 
Who seeketh Heaven, and comes of heavenly breath. 
Then farewell, world! thy uttermost I see: 
Eternal Love, maintain thy life in me! 

Philip Sydney.


“I’m so sorry,” she said “I don’t know what came over me. You were so kind.”

Then pulling herself together and lightly touching away the remnants of any tears with her finger tips, she said with an attempted smile,
“But do you make a habit of embracing women you don’t know in crowded cafes?”

“If required, yes” he replied softly looking into her face.

From her closeness she smelled the way the Taj Mahal looks by moonlight.

“But then I’ve seen your films, not that it means you’re public property.”

She was uncharistically subdued and embarrassed.

“Did you enjoy them?” she enquired tentatively.

The accent was Southern, Louisiana or thereabouts.

“I think that I’ve fantasized about you as much, if not more than other men.”

The verbal directness was tender and she found it appealing. Throwing back her head, she laughed. The mane of dark hair shook like a thing alive, her teeth shone and her neck was exposed. It was the natural and the blatant side of her nature.

“Well, you seem to know me quite well. What about yourself? What are you doing in Rome?”

She viewed him more closely.

He was evidently not a man to whom fatigue was familiar; long, lean, and muscular, he suggested the sort of vigor that is commonly known as “toughness.”

She put him in his late forties, but that was not a problem. She had had her fill of bright young men who could invariably be tedious. As she had fought her way up in the acting world she had tended more to literary males with a more delicate balance of sensitivity and strength that was becoming increasingly rare.

He was a powerful specimen she admitted to herself, but more than that. He was in the first place, physically, a fine man. He appeared to possess that kind of health and strength which, when found in perfection, are the most impressive, and though his usual attitude and carriage were of a rather relaxed and lounging kind; when animated he straightened himself. There was also something rather Elizabethan about him — his casual versatility, his good looks, that effervescent combination of mental with physical activities. Something a bit Philip–Sidney-ish.

He had eyes, that at Balliol his contemporizes used to say were so much more of a Cambridge blue than an Oxford, and his look was one of being committed to nothing in particular, of standing in an attitude of general hospitality to the chances of life, of being very much at one’s own disposal. But there was something vaguely defiant in its concessions, and something profoundly reassuring in its reserve.

“I’m Gary Rossow,” he said and extended his hand.

This amused her, this formal show of manners after the spontaneity of the earlier physical contact.

She said, “My name is ------“

“I already know,” he interrupted. “Shelly Ann Crawford with two Oscars to her credit.”

Celebrated people commonly have many ill things said of them, whether well-founded or not and no exception was made in the case of Miss Crawford as she was known now, having reverted back to her maiden name after two marriages and an equal number of divorces.

“So what do you do Gary, and are you rich?” she asked teasingly.

“Oh, I’m a painter, though at the moment six months of uninterrupted monotony would be more valuable to me than a brilliant succession of novelties. I’m not sure if you understand, but I don't want to repeat my artistic innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.”

There was an expression of overwhelming sadness — a sort of universal sadness, something remote or impersonal about the way he expressed this; like a man to whom the world lacks substance because it has not sufficiently cultivated his emotional nature.

“And in answer to your second question regards money,” he continued.
Rossow was silent for a moment, and then with a tranquil smile he answered, “Yes.”

“So you are your own master?” she enquired.

“Oh, I have been my own master all my life, and I’m tired of it. I have money enough, or if I haven’t I ought to have. The problem is that I am a good worker, but I rather think I’m poor at relaxing. I have come here to amuse myself, but I doubt whether I know how.”

She looked into his face, knowing that in her experience, the education of all beautiful women is the knowledge of men.

“But why Rome?” she asked.

‘There is nothing like the charm of Rome,” he responded slowly. “In England, France and Germany, we feel the weight of the present, but in Rome the present is like a glass window through which we view the grand procession of past events. What is becomes of less importance than what was, and for the first time we feel the true sense of our indebtedness to the ages that have gone before. We bathe deep in the spirit of classical antiquity, and we come out refreshed, enlarged and purified. We return to the actualities of today with a clearer understanding, and better prepared to act our part in them.”

She then paid him what he would always regard in years after as the greatest compliment.
“Thank God, Mr Gary Rossow,” she said, “you are capable of imagining things.”

“Will you show me your Rome, as this is my first time here, and thus I suppose technically, I am still in a state of innocence.”

The exchange between their two set of eyes was implicit and mutually understood.

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## MANICHAEAN

Chapt 4:
When thy beauty appears
In its graces and airs
All bright as an angel new dropped from the sky,
At distance I gaze and am awed by my fears;
So strangely you dazzle my eye.

Thomas Parnell 1679 - 1718.

The subsequent intense seven days that they spent together were so extremely enjoyable that although their feet ached and their senses at times seemed overwhelmed by the sheer volume and essence of what they were viewing, they concluded each expedition with a sense of fulfillment.

Does not romance come originally from Roma, as well as Romulus? Gary knew by instinct that his companion was receptive and therefore wished her to stand where Cæsar had stood, to behold the snowy Soracte of Horace, and to read Virgil’s description of an Italian night on Italian ground. Of the men who have celebrated Italy; Byron, Shelley, Rogers, Ruskin and the two Browning’s, perhaps it was also significant that in the case of Rossow, here was an individual who likewise was admirably equipped for it. There was a decidedly Italian element in his composition,— not the light-hearted, subtle, elastic, fiery Italian, such as we are accustomed to think them, but the tenderly feeling, terribly earnest Tuscan, like Dante and Savonarola. The myrtle and the cypress are both emblematic of Italian character, and in Rossow there was more of the latter than the former.

They had in the course of the week, looked out from the Pincian hill, and saw Nivea Soracte as Horace had beheld it, then proceeded to investigate everything from the Mamartine prison, in which Jugurtha was starved, to the catacombs of St. Calixtus. All the time overhead, the Italian sky with its softer blue than that of England and America, and that peculiar luminous quality in the atmosphere, as well as a more decided difference between sunshine and shadow, than in countries north of the Alps.

On another day they went to see the Pope convey the Sacrament from the Sistine chapel, to deposit it in the Capella Paolina, another chapel in the Vatican;— a ceremony emblematical of the entombment of the Saviour before His Resurrection. Gathered round the altar, was a perfect army of cardinals and priests, in red, gold, purple, violet, white, and fine linen, whilst little knots of friars in their coarse brown robes and peaked hoods made a strange contrast to the gaudy ecclesiastics of higher degree.

The Coliseum was visited and both tried to envisage it as it used to be; with thousands of eager faces staring down into the arena, and the whirl of strife, and blood, and dust going on there. Its solitude, its awful beauty, and its utter desolation seemed like a softened sorrow. They climbed its upper halls, and looked down on ruins, all about it; the triumphal arches of Constantine, Septimus Severus, and Titus; the Roman Forum; the Palace of the Caesars; the temples of the old religion, fallen down and gone; as if to see the ghost of old Rome, a wicked, old city, haunting the very ground on which its people had trod. And yet now, one could not help but discern instances where an ancient pillar, with its honoured statue overthrown, supported a Christian saint: Marcus Aurelius giving place to Paul, and Trajan to St. Peter.

Under today’s itineary Gary had chosen a focus on art and they had in the morning viewed the beauty of Canova’s statues; along with the wonderful gravity and repose of many of the ancient works in sculpture, both in the Capitol and the Vatican. But now they stood together, fingertips almost touching before the portrait of Beatrice di Cenci, in the Palazzo Berberini, a picture almost impossible not to be moved by. The soft beauty of the face and figure with its subtle innocent glow emerging forth distinctively from the darker shades of the portrayed surrounding captors. The head is loosely draped in white; the light hair falling down below the linen folds. In the eyes, so peaceful and resigned, there is yet the wildness of a momentary terror, or distraction, that had been struggled with and overcome, that instant; and nothing but a hope, and a beautiful sorrow, and a desolate earthly helplessness remained. Some stories say that Guido painted it, the night before her execution; some other stories, that he painted it from memory, after having seen her, on her way to the scaffold.

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