De las alegorías a las novelas

An essay ("From allegories to novels") by this Argentine.  You can read the original in this collection.

For all of us, an allegory is an aesthetic error. (I  had initially planned to write, "is nothing if not an aesthetic error," until I realized that my thought comprised an allegory.) As far as I know, the genre of allegory has been analyzed by Schopenhauer (Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, I, 50), by De Quincey (Writings, XI, 198), by Francesco De Sanctís (Storia della letteratura italiana, VII), by Croce (Estetica, 39) and by Chesterton (G. F. Watts, 83); in this essay I will limit myself to the latter two. Croce denies allegory's art; Chesterton vindicates it. I suspect Croce is correct; yet I would like to know how a form which seems to us so unjustifiable could have found so much favor. 

Croce's words are transparent enough that it suffices merely to repeat them: "If a symbol is imagined to be inseparable from artistic intuition, it must be a synonym of that same intuition, which is always of an ideal character. If, however, a symbol is imagined to be separable – if it can represent both the symbol and what is symbolized – it devolves into an intellectual error. The supposed symbol is the exposition of an abstract concept: it is an allegory, it is knowledge, or it is art which replicates knowledge. Yet we must be fair with the allegorical and admit that in certain cases it is quite innocuous. Some morality may be derived from Jerusalem Delivered; from Adonis by Marino, a decadent poet, we may come to understand that immeasurable pleasure may end in pain; and before a statue a sculptor may place a plaque stating that this work embodies Clemency or Goodness. These are allegories appended to a finished work, and they do it no harm. They are expressions intrinsically added to other expressions. To Tasso's Jerusalem, an appended page of prose proffers some of the poet's other thoughts; a verse or a stanza added to Adonis contains what the poet wishes us to understand; and by the statue we find inscribed the word clemency or goodness." On page 222 of his book Poetry (Barí, 1946), Croce's tone is far more hostile: "An allegory is not a direct means of intellectual expression, but rather a coincidence of writing and cryptography."  

Croce does not admit of any difference between content and form. The former is the latter, and the latter the former. To him, an allegory seems monstrous because it aspires to two contents in a single form: the immediate or literal (Dante, guided by Vergil, finds Beatrice), and the figurative (guided by reason, a man finally finds faith). Croce deems this manner of writing rife with laborious enigmas.  

To champion the allegorical, Chesterton begins by refuting that language exhausts the expression of reality:

[Man] knows that there are in the soul tints more bewildering, more numberless, and more nameless than the colours of an autumn forest; he knows that there are abroad in the world, and doing strange and terrible service in it, crimes that have never been condemned and virtues that have never been christened. Yet he seriously believes that these things can, every one of them, in all their tones and semi-tones, in all their blends and unions, be accurately represented by an arbitrary system of grunts and squeals. He believes that an ordinary civilized stockbroker can really produce out of his own inside noises which denote all the mysteries of memory and all the agonies of desire.

With language now declared insufficient, there is room for other means of expression; allegory may be one of these means, like architecture or music. Formed out of words, it is not a language of language, a sign of other signs of brave virtue and secret illuminations which indicate this word. A sign more precise than a monosyllable, richer and more apt.    

I do not know for sure which of the eminent debaters is right; what I do know is that allegorical art once seemed charming (the labyrinthine Roman de la Rose, extant in two hundred manuscripts, comprising twenty-four thousand verses) and now seems intolerable. In addition to being intolerable, we find it stupid and frivolous. Neither Dante, who recreated the history of his passion in La Vita nuova, nor Boethius the Roman, composing in a tower in Pavia, in the shadow of his executioner's sword, his Consolation of Philosophy, would have understood this sentiment. How then is one to explain this discord without resorting to a begging of the question about fluctuating tastes? 

Coleridge observes that all men are born either Aristotelians or Platonists. The latter suspect that ideas are realities; the former, that they are generalizations; for the former, language is nothing if not a system of arbitrary signs; for the latter, it is a map to the universe. The Platonist knows that the universe is in some way a cosmos, an order; this order, for the Aristotelian may be an error or a fiction of our imperfect knowledge. Through every latitude and era, these two immortal antagonists have changed dialects and number: the first may be Parmenides, Plato, Spinoza, Kant, or Francis Bailey; the other, Heraclitus, Aristotle, Locke, Hume, or William James. In the arduous schools of the Middle Ages, everyone hailed Aristotle as the master of human reason (Convivio, IV, 2), yet the nominalists were Aristotle, and the realists, Plato. George Henry Lewes believed that the only medieval debate of any philosophical value was that between nominalism and realism. A bold judgment, if one that enhances the importance of this vivid controversy more than some maxim by Porphyry, put forth and commented on by Boethius, provoked at the beginning of the ninth century, which Anselm and Roscellinus reaffirmed at the end of the eleventh, and which William of Occam revived in the fourteenth. 

As one might suspect, all these years multiplied towards infinity the number of intermediary positions and distinctions. Nevertheless, one should assert that for realism the primordial element was the universal (Plato would say it was ideas and forms; we would say abstract concepts), and for nominalism, individuals. The history of philosophy is not a vain museum of distractions and verbal games; it is far more likely that these two theses correspond to the two ways in which to sense reality. Maurice de Wulf writes: "Ultrarealism took into account the initial adhesions. The eleventh-century chronicler Hériman of Tournai referred to those who taught dialectics in re as antiqui doctores; Abelard spoke of this as ancient doctrine (antigua doctrina), and until the end of the twelfth century, labeled his adversaries as moderni." A thesis now inconceivable appeared evident in the ninth century and persisted in some form until the fourteenth. Nominalism, before the novelty of very few, now included everyone; its victory was so vast and fundamental that its number was useless. No one declared himself to be a nominalist because there was no one who was anything else. We must try to understand, nonetheless, that for the men of the Middle Ages the most important thing was not men but humanity; not individuals, but the species; not the species, but the genus; not the genera, but God.  

In my understanding, it was from such concepts (the clearest manifestation of which is perhaps Eriguena's four divisions of nature) that allegorical literature emerged. It is the tale of abstractions, like the novel is the story of individuals; the abstractions are simply personified. For that reason, in every allegory there is something novelistic. The individuals whom novelists put forth aspire to generic roles (Dupin is reason; Don Segundo Sombra is the gaucho); in novels there is an allegorical element. 

The passage from allegory to novel, from species to individuals, from realism to nominalism, took several centuries, but I venture to suggest an ideal date. That day in 1382 on which Geoffrey Chaucer, who perhaps did not believe himself to be a nominalist, wanted to translate into English that verse of Boccacio's, "E con gli occulti ferri i Tradimenti" ("and treacheries with hidden irons"), and repeated it in this way: "The smyler with the knyf under the cloke." The original was in the seventh book of the Teseida; Chaucer's version in The Knightes Tale.

Amadeus

I was to be bricked up in fame!  Embalmed in fame!  Buried in fame – but for work I knew to be absolutely worthless!  This was my sentence; I must endure thirty years of being called 'Distinguished' by people incapable of distinguishing! ... And finally – His masterstroke!  When my nose had been rubbed in fame to vomiting – it would all be taken away from me.  Every scrap.

There are two tides in the affairs of men to which we can hardly relate, death and genius.  Death will remain the eternal mystery likewise for fanatic, soulless Darwinists (there are, it should be said, other types), as well as the most pious among the faithful.  Neither one can fully imagine what happens when nothing more happens, even if that nothing should ring for all of time's length.  But genius is a species ever visible both to other geniuses, who will invariably experience pride and kinship, and a lesser grouping that recognizes one sad fact: they themselves are mediocre shades, pale imitations of stars afflicted with enough ability to see what they might have become if their skills had matched their pretensions.  In a lifetime filled with art you will regularly encounter works on uneven pairs bound in envy, but none as famous as this play.

The time is both 1823 and 1783, and the place is Vienna.  Our narrator in bilocation is Antonio Salieri, an Italian composer once a trusted servant of the Habsburg Emperor and a man of one simple aim: to "blaze like a comet over the firmament of Europe."  Salieri is of humble beginnings and pitiable for that very reason; his accomplishments are much more impressive than those of a young man who has always had every opportunity.  When we first meet our grizzled master, he is already a forgotten name, beginning his eighth decade (when most people would have died years before), acerbic, and snacking on the "sweetmeats of Northern Italy" which may symbolize both his pathetic gluttony and the saccharine layers of his compositions.  Salieri is not only the epicenter because we see events filtered through his eyes; his eyes are also representative of our own.  His awkwardness in dealing with a talent so superior to his as to urge him towards suicide smacks of exaggeration until we consider, perhaps with a heavy heart, the many times and many situations in which we have lain beside the green-eyed monster and humored her anxieties.  Iago may be his ancestor, but Iago is prompted by sheer malice, which I am happy to say does not occur in the vast majority of our kind.  He gives his servants a strange order to return early the next morning, ostensibly to shave and feed him, and prepares to spend the entire night awake and alone.  Alone, that is, with his cascading memories of having met and ruined perhaps the greatest artist ever to walk the earth.

Salieri claims some talent, a life of hard work and incommensurate reward, a wrong that can be righted if he were to gain the position of First Royal Kapellmeister – at least, that is his story.  Yet shortly into his opening monologue, another horrific detail comes to light:

Music is God's art.  Already when I was ten a spray of sounded notes would make me dizzy almost to falling!  By twelve, I was stumbling about under the poplar trees humming my arias and anthems to the Lord.  My one desire was to join all the composers who had celebrated His glory through the long Italian past! ... Every Sunday I saw Him in church, painted on the flaking wall.  I don't mean Christ.  The Christs of Lombardy are simpering sillies, with lambkins on their sleeves.  No: I mean an old candle-smoked God in a mulberry robe, staring at the world with dealer's eyes.  Tradesmen had put him up there.  Those eyes made bargains, real and irreversible.

This magnificent passage ensures our sympathy cannot possibly rest with Salieri, because he cannot possibly have in mind a God who wishes beneficence for the world.  And like so many of those resolved to worship the God of Bargains, the clear hues of Salieri's categories begin to bleed.  Our self-designated monk of music will thus begin the second act with a diabolical scheme to "block God in one of His purest manifestations," after having concluded the first act with an indignant discourse to this same Deity on what exactly their bargain was.  And what it consisted of is much less important than the fact that there was one at all.

The beauty of the play's structure is that we know the legend; we know the outcome; we even know the ostensible method of Mozart's demise, and yet we long for the actual interaction between Salieri and the "purest manifestation" of musical talent ever known.  That musical talent is, however, plagued by the bromides that pad lesser minds because what Mozart knows for sure he simply inserts into his music.  He will join and then describe his Masonic lodge, his relationship with his somewhat slutty wife Constanze, his fears about his own mortality, and his distaste for the myths of yore.  Mozart is not portrayed as a modernizer as much as being very modern.  He cusses, he copulates, he lives riotously; at least he does not seem to drink heavily, perhaps because that would be the only vice that could interfere with his work.   His wit is either offensive or mundane ("It is impossible to bore the French – except with real life!"), depending on how motivated he might be to engage those who actually value conversation.  Mozart's disdain for the habits of the world leads him logically to make a few impetuous mistakes, although he does not suspect his downfall until the appearance of a mysterious messenger in a grey mask.

Regrettably, I have never seen Shaffer's play performed, but its premises and covenants lend themselves almost as well to the screen (as realized in spectacular fashion in this masterpiece).  Amadeus will be admired for generations to come as one of the finest dramatic works of the twentieth century and one may imagine its gestures so clearly as if they had always been so.  One courtier compliments Salieri "as if tipping him"; as Salieri is trundled, already an old man, to another awards ceremony, a passer-by comments, "Isn't that one of the generals from Waterloo?"; and we are left to wonder about the real appearance of the visitor in the grey mask who asks Mozart for a hideous favor.  While the hypocorisms and scatology the Mozarts exchange were probably included to exemplify Amadeus's repugnance towards conformist views on music and everything else, they shine with a certain childish authenticity, as if pure genius could only come from a being unaware of his own sins.  Ah, but Salieri knows about sin.  And he knows that the human heart may be inherently good if constantly provoked by the ways of the world.  Only music in its purest form reveals the lining behind the ineluctable modality of the visible, a visible that seems so much more profound and mysterious when accompanied by the melodies of heaven.  And as Salieri himself once wrote, First the music then the words. 

Petrarch, "S'io credesse per morte essere scarco"

A work ("If I believed through death myself released") by this Italian poet.  You can read the original here. 

If I believed through death myself released, 
Of loving thoughts which bind me to this earth, 
Already placed would be my hands inert,
Each dull limb burdenless beneath the peat;   

But since I fear a passageway would bend
'Twixt crying eyes, from war to bloody war,  
So I remain, alas, behind a door,  
Amidst a serried path of doubtful end.   

Enough time's laps'd for final bowstrings drawn  
In arrows merciless, tint'd in their aim
With others' blood, nay bathed, my whole to breach;  

Yet deafest Love I still cannot beseech,
Who left me color'd in his painted frame,  
Forgetful now to call me to his pawn.  

St. Thomas Aquinas

Look at the world and you will see two currents, like tides peeling off in opposite directions.  On one side, science and selfishness have decided that we are nothing but mammals and have informed us that we should plan accordingly.  On the other, those who believe in their religion to the point of hating all others have assembled themselves by the millions, often in dedicated resistance to the smug atheist nonsense that masquerades as enlightenment but is simply everlasting darkness.  But both of these streams are sad and mistaken.  They are mistaken because life is neither a link on a billion-year chain of death nor death's eager anticipation; they are sad because something inside of them, a squeak or voice however faint, occasionally speaks to them about the positive acceptance of life.  Not the acceptance of life of the Superman who, in his puerile fantasies, hates God for his fate like a teenager hates acne and awkwardness and champions a life of defiance.  But acceptance of life in its unending beauty and the knowledge that it is but a precursor.  And there was no one who valued life and its aftermath more than the subject of this book.

How much is really known of Aquinas's life we will not be able to gauge from Chesterton's work.  That is to say, while the book is nominally a biography, it is more properly termed an essay.  What we can say with assuredness that it isn't is a hagiography.  The subject may involve, at times, one brilliant man's earthly existence that was relatively short, even by the tempered expectations of the thirteenth century.  But it certainly does not involve the theology of that man.  Catholic saints, as Chesterton points out in his habitually careful apologetics, tend to have exactly the same type of theology:

Because St. Thomas was a unique and striking philosopher, it is almost unavoidable that this book should be merely, or mainly, a sketch of his philosophy.  It cannot be, and does not pretend to be, a sketch of his theology.  But this is because the theology of a saint is simply the theism of a saint; or rather the theism of all saints.  It is less individual, but it is much more intense.

Without contradicting Chesterton – something I am obliged to do on the very rarest of occasions – I wonder whether this is really true.   I wonder whether a saint who is taught the ways of the Cross probably in his earliest youth, who augments his faith like armor in clashes with jackal-like sceptics and blasphemers, who is confronted with the sins of his Church – which are legion because the Church is made of men – truly sees the most important facet of his life in precisely or almost precisely the way all saints are said to have seen it at all times.  As questionable as this assertion may be, it is the method by which we may sunder theology, which requires a great deal of background explanation that would devour such a slim tome, from philosophy, which, as we know, can even reveal itself on a parchment inside a baked cookie.  Thus if we examine Saint Thomas's philosophy we may get a sense of why people devote years to this work (I have read much of it, but am no completist); and yet we note the title of the Summa, one of man's greatest triumphs of thought and faith, and replace it on the shelf with Tillich, Augustine, and Duns Scotus.  There is also the small matter of the life of Aquinas, the life he would so love, the daily existence brimming with privileges that he forsook (he was a not-distant cousin of none other than this Emperor), and the taciturn pensiveness that would earn him the nickname, "The Dumb Ox."  It seems impossible to cleave this life from either his theology or philosophy; they form, in their neat little way, a trinity of their own, although Aquinas would not agree with such an asseveration as much as not bother to consider it for too long.  In fact, he did bother to consider many things for too long.  But one thing which was under constant consideration was the splendor of God's green earth, blue sky and upright, rational mammals who, for better or worse, thought themselves created in His own image.  And so we have, according to Chesterton, Aquinas's most relevant accomplishment as far as the average person is concerned: that reason, unadulterated and ecstatic reason, can be trusted.

Reason remains a wicked word, because for the man of learning it is a shibboleth and for the man of experience it is a barrier.  Philosophy, we have heard so many times and not incorrectly, is a luxury of the rich.  Reason is not what propels the everyday man on his everyday routine; in many ways, what propels him is faith, but that observation has produced its own library of apologists.  What Aquinas did was move away from the abstraction of religion and move towards the concretization of religion, specifically, of a Catholic God.  If the senses are from God, then there is no reason to doubt them, for the world which they relay is as real as Heaven and the Crucifixion and Hell.  But what sensing something means has befuddled philosophers from the very beginning.  Aquinas makes things radically simple:

Our first sense of fact is a fact; [one] cannot go back on it without falsehood.  But when we come to look at the fact or facts, as we know them, we observe that they have a rather queer character; which has made many moderns grow strangely and restlessly sceptical about them.  For instance they are largely in a state of change, from being one thing to being another; or their qualities are relative to other things; or they appear to move incessantly; or they appear to vanish entirely .... There is no doubt about the being of being, even if it does sometimes look like becoming; that is because what we see is not the fullness of being .... Most thinkers, on realizing the apparent mutability of being, have really forgotten their own realization of the being, and believed only in the mutability .... While they describe a change which is really a change in nothing, [Aquinas] describes a changelessness which includes the changes of everything.  Things change because they are not complete; but their reality can only be explained as part of something that is complete.  It is God.

At first glance, the last seventeen words may seem like gigantic leaps from the steady logic of the sentences preceding; upon rereading the entire passage, greater sense emerges; but as is often the case with the tenets of genius, the truth of these statements becomes upon reflection well-nigh undeniable.  I cannot say whether atheists and other sceptics who study science for a dozen years and conclude that protons and neutrons and black holes and red dwarfs must be the handiwork of chance because everything is chance – including, therefore, their own conclusions – really think of a Christian god as an "old king" (to use Chesterton's phrasing).  An old king that sits, in his falsehood, in the corner of a shallow sky that now we all know stretches towards infinity, and deludes us in his non-existence.  Aquinas's lifelong insistence upon arguing on his opponent's terms is fine if the opponent is knowledgeable but wrong.  But we are facing a situation in which the opponent is both ignorant and wrong.  God, if He exists, is everything ("the alpha and omega" seems inappropriate and miniscule) and we play by the rules He has installed.  He is not the same as a planet or a lost continent or a loch-dwelling creature – such are the terms, inter alia, of the scientist.  He is or He isn't; and reason continually whispers to billions of people that He most certainly is.

Aquinas died suddenly and young.  Like Chesterton he was a big and tall man, and a cursory inspection of him – never mind that he was a monk and thus wholly uninterested in his personal appearance – would have judged him an oaf.  The moniker the Dumb Ox, along with the Schoolman, Doctor Angelicus, Doctor Communis, and Doctor Universalis, suggests that the impression of Thomas the man has been refracted necessarily through sympathetic and unsympathetic historians, but also through the vivacity of his ideas.  I understand Aquinas in a very different way from how I understand Kant and Bergson – in my opinion, the three greatest philosophical geniuses of the last two millennia – but since all three of them are, with the odd dark passage, perfectly lucid, they sit enshrined in the pantheon of my mind.  Kant gave us morality (our future); Bergson gave us memory (our past); and Aquinas, in his unusual path, gave us sensation, perception, life itself, our present.  And our past, present and future, along with Something much more profound and terrifying, are the beginning.  But they and that Something are not the end. 

Historia romana

A work ("Roman story")  by this Argentine man of letters.  You can read the original in this collection.

Every morning at half past ten I would leave the Hotel Gassion; my neighbors came from the Hotel de France.  In the Boulevard des Pyrénées, on separate benches in front of the same mountains, one reading Daisy Miller, others reviewing their homework, we would warm ourselves in the sun.  My neighbors were five girls and a governess.  Anyone who looked at the girls distractedly could have taken them for a series of specimens (of different sizes, of different ages that ranged from nine to nineteen) of the same person: submissive, blonde, tall and slim, with gray eyes and a blue uniform.  Of the governess – an elderly, ill-tempered woman – I have but a vague memory.

The regulars at the Sporting Bar informed me that the girls were my compatriots; that their father, "an American of Béarnese blood," had a ranch and a vast fortune in Buenos Aires; and that now the family was in Pau so as to receive an inheritance. 

One morning I came out of the hotel at ten o'clock.  A little while later the eldest of the sisters appeared and asked me whether she could share my bench.  We immediately struck up conversation.

"My name is Phyllis," she said.

"Do you like Pau?"  I asked.

"It bores me just as much as the ranch does.  So does the live I lead ... With Mademoiselle breathing down our necks, who could have any fun?  Don't think that it was always like this.  My parents are crazy: either they leave me completely to my own devices or they watch me night and day.  In July I was in Rome alone, at the house of some Italian girls whom I had met in Puente del Inca.  You're a writer, aren't you?"

"How did you know?"

"In Pau one knows everything.  Do you want me to tell you what happened to me in Rome?  You'll find it amusing.  Here comes Mademoiselle with the girls.  I'll see you tonight in the casino."

It was not a girl I met up with that evening, but a charming woman who took me by the arm and threw her head back laughing.  I exclaimed:

"How you've changed!"

"Do not think like that," she said.  "If they discover that I escaped, they'll kill me and lock me up.  Do you want me to tell you about my Roman love affairs?"

The golden Phyllis, virginal in look with the squawks of a bird, informed me that one of the Papal Gentlemen – I saw him in a signed photo, almost fat in his impeccable white coat – had asked for her hand in marriage.  The scene took place in a restaurant in Rome, and I do not remember the response the girl gave, but I do recall that she offended the maître d'hôtel by asking for a beefsteak.

"It's Friday," said the Gentleman.

"I know," Phyllis replied.

"So how dare you eat meat?!"

"I'm Argentine and in my country we don't observe the fast all year round."

"We're in Rome, I'm a Papal Gentleman and here we most certainly do observe the fast every Friday of the year."

"I will never again eat meat on a Friday.  But I've already ordered it and I don't want to annoy the waiter by telling him not to bother bringing it out."

"You'd prefer to make me sad."

("I didn't want to admit," Phyllis told me, "that I was hungry.")

They brought the beefsteak, a tempting beefsteak, and Phyllis with gestures of irritated resignation did not touch it, leaving it on its plate.

Her beau asked:

"And now why won't you eat it?"

"Because I don't want to make you sad," she replied.

"Now that you've ordered it, eat it," he conceded disdainfully.

Phyllis did not wait for him to insist.  Still angry, but with both haste and pleasure, she devoured the beefsteak.  Her beau exclaimed in a pained voice:

"I would never expected a blow like that."

"What blow?"

"You're still making fun of me.  That you would eat that meat and hurt my feelings."

"You told me to eat it."

"I wanted to test you and now I'm disappointed," the Gentleman observed.

Nevertheless, a few days later he took her to the beaches of Ostia.  It was very hot,  and in the middle of the afternoon the Gentleman admitted:

"You make me uncomfortable.  Although it pains me to say it, I cannot be silent: I desire you."

Phyllis replied that if he did not possess her this very evening, they would never see each other again.  The nobleman fell to his knees, kissed her hand and, almost crying, said that she should not allow herself to have such evil thoughts; that very soon they would get married; and that very soon she would be a princess.  Phyllis then explained to him that she was Argentine and in her country nobility didn't mean a thing; that in Buenos Aires or in any part of the country she was a person from a very well-known and, what is more, a very rich family; that her parents had ranches and that, on the other hand, a European nobleman was a rather suspicious item.  Despite her loving him and her not doubting the purity of his sentiments, she could not hide her innermost conviction that he was planning a marriage of convenience ... All this occurred in the train that took them back to Rome amidst a crowd who filled both seat and aisle.  A crowd who was chewing on sandwiches and who seemed very close during this sultry twilight hour.

When they arrived, Phyllis asked her beau where he was planning on taking her and the courtier mumbled in vague phrases mixing together names of restaurants and cinemas.  Phyllis implacably repeated her threat: make her his or never see her again.  Her beau then began to explain that, in Rome, there was no such place to go.

"There are no hotels for couples," he said, somewhere between proudly and desperately.

"And you don't have an apartment?"

"An apartment to bring girls back home?  No one in Rome has such a place.  One would have to be very rich.  I've been told that before the war ..."

"Take me somewhere," Phyllis insisted, adding in the Argentine dialect: "that's why you're (sos) a man."

The two then wandered endlessly through the streets.  When Phyllis saw a prostitute on a corner, she had her solution.  She said:

"Let's go to this woman's place."

"Impossible to talk to her," her beau got defensive.  "We can't approach her together.  And I can't leave you alone and approach her myself."

"So then I'll talk to her."

Her beau tried to dissuade her, repeating: "How am I supposed to take you to the apartment of a lady of the night?"  He tried other arguments: "How are we going to spoil our first night of lovemaking with the sordid quarters of a woman of ill repute?"  Not looking at him and with a curt tone, Phyllis asked once more, again in the Argentine familiar:

"Are you (vos) going or am I?"

The Papal courtier finally made up his mind.  He spoke with the woman and the three of them walked over to her place.  They did not walk all together.  The woman walked, alone, a few meters ahead of them.  The idea that he could be seen with a prostitute terrified him; but Phyllis couldn't have cared less whether or not anyone saw her.

As street prostitution is forbidden in Rome, every time that a policeman approached, the Gentleman became extremely anxious.  Although they were not walking with the woman, he wanted to run away and tried to force Phyllis to follow him.  What would he have said had they arrested him – him, a Papal Gentleman – for cavorting with prostitutes?  Phyllis explained to him that they were not walking with the prostitute  and that, precisely because he was a Papal Gentleman, they would not dare arrest him.  Many times did they lose sight of the woman during this journey through the narrow alleyways of Ancient Rome; many times did the Gentleman declare with relief that they had lost her for good; and many times did Phyllis force him to go look for her.  They always found her again.  And after navigating a dark, narrow, and malodorous labyrinth, they arrived at the place.  The walls of the woman's room were covered in religious picture cards; atop a small night stand was a considerable pile of statues of saints; and the bars of the bed frame were stuck all over with faded wreathes from the most recent Palm Sunday.  The Gentleman stated that these witnesses made the task which lay before them much harder for him.  In the adjoining kitchen the woman was frying something and manifested her impatience with thumps of the saucepan.

"The poor thing needs the room for other clients," Phyllis explained, perhaps superfluously.

Yet her beau did nothing but tremble and sweat.  Phyllis repeated her ultimatum; at long last, the man fulfilled his debt as best he could and declared Phyllis a woman of adamantine.  By the time they bid farewell to the mistress of the house, the mistress had regained her manners.  She wished them much happiness and, indicating with a circular gesture all the pictures and statues around them, Heaven's blessing.