Full resolution (JPEG) - On this page / på denna sida - Part one - I
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intensely to leave. And he walked still more slowly, furtively,
like one who has escaped from prison.
At the corner of the street there was a restaurant. He made
for it, and on his way found a tobacco shop, where he bought
some cigarettes, picture cards and stamps. Waiting for his
steak, he drank big gulps of claret, while he wrote to his
parents; to his father: “I have been thinking of you very often
today” — it was true enough — and to his mother: “I have
already got a small present for you, the first thing I bought
here in Rome.” Poor mother — how was she? He had often
been impatient with her these last years. He unpacked the
thing and had a look at it — it was probably meant for a
scent-bottle. He added a few words to his mother’s card that he
managed the language all right, and that to bargain in the
shops was an easy matter.
The food was good, but dear. Never mind, once he was more
at home here he would soon learn how to live cheaply.
Satisfied and exhilarated by the wine, he started to walk in a new
direction, past long, low, dilapidated houses, through an
archway on to a bridge. A man in a barrier hut stopped him and
made him understand that he had to pay a soldo. On the other
side of the bridge was a large, dark church with a dome.
He got into a labyrinth of dark, narrow bits of streets —
in the mysterious gloom he surmised the existence of old palaces
with projecting cornices and lattice windows side by side with
miserable hovels, and small church-fronts in between the rows
of houses. There were no pavements and he stepped into
refuse that lay rotting in the gutter. Outside the narrow doors
of the lighted taverns and under the few street lamps he had a
vague glimpse of human forms.
He was half delighted, half afraid — boyishly excited, and
wondering at the same time how he was to get out of this maze
and find the way to his hotel at the ends of the earth — take a
cab, he supposed.
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