The Music School by John Updike

way birds and weeds lived in the crevices of this exploded civic dream. A delicate rain began to fall. At the end of one path, they peeked in glass doors, and a small uniformed man with a broom limped forward and admitted them, as if to a speakeasy, to the abandoned church of Santa Maria Antiqua. The pale vaulted air felt innocent of worship; the seventh-century frescoes seemed recently, nervously executed. As they left, Richard read the question in the broom man’s smile and pressed a tactful coin into his hand. The soft rain continued. Joan took Richard’s arm, as if for shelter. His stomach began to hurt—a light, chafing ache at first, scarcely enough to distract him from the pain in his feet. They walked along the Via Sacra, through roofless pagan temples carpeted in grass. The ache in his stomach intensified. Uniformed guards, old men standing this way and that in the rain like hungry gulls, beckoned them toward further ruins, further churches, but the pain now had blinded Richard to everything but the extremity of his distance from anything that might give him support. He refused admittance to the Basilica of Constantine, and asked instead for the
uscita
, mispronouncing it. He did not feel capable of retracing his steps. The guard, seeing a source of tips escaping, dourly pointed toward a small gate in a nearby wire fence. The Maples lifted the latch, stepped through, and stood on the paved rise overlooking the Colosseum. Richard walked a little distance and leaned on a low wall.
    “Is it so bad?” Joan asked.
    “Oddly bad,” he said. “I’m sorry. It’s funny.”
    “Do you want to throw up?”
    “No. It’s not like that.” His sentences came jerkily. “It’s just a … sort of gripe.”
    “High or low?”
    “In the middle.”
    “What could have caused it? The chestnuts?”
    “No. It’s just, I think, being here, so far from anywhere, with you, and not knowing … why.”
    “Shall we go back to the hotel?”
    “Yes. I think if I could lie down.”
    “Shall we get a taxi?”
    “They’ll cheat me.”
    “That doesn’t matter.”
    “I don’t know … our address.”
    “We know sort of. It’s near that big fountain. I’ll look up the Italian for ‘fountain.’ ”
    “Rome is … full of … fountains.”
    “Richard. You aren’t doing this just for my benefit?”
    He had to laugh, she was so intelligent. “Not consciously. It has something to do … with having to hand out tips … all the time. It’s really an ache. It’s incredible.”
    “Can you walk?”
    “Sure. Hold my arm.”
    “Shall I carry your shoebox?”
    “No. Don’t worry, sweetie. It’s just a nervous ache. I used to get them … when I was little. But I was … braver then.”
    They descended steps to a thoroughfare thick with speeding traffic. The taxis they hailed carried heads in the rear and did not stop. They crossed the Via dei Fori Imperiali and tried to work their way back, against the sideways tug of interweavingstreets, to the familiar territory containing the fountain, the American Bar, the shoe store, and the hotel. They passed through a market of bright food. Garlands of sausages hung from striped canopies. Heaps of lettuce lay in the street. He walked stiffly, as if the pain he carried were precious and fragile; holding one arm across his abdomen seemed to ease it slightly. The rain and Joan, having been in some way the pressures that had caused it, now became the pressures that enabled him to bear it. Joan kept him walking. The rain masked him, made his figure less distinct to passersby, and thus less distinct to himself, and so dimmed his pain. The blocks seemed cruelly uphill and downhill. They climbed a long slope of narrow pavement beside the Banca d’Italia. The rain lifted. The pain, having expanded into every corner of the chamber beneath his ribs, had armed itself with a knife and now began to slash the walls in hope of escape. They reached the Via Nazionale, blocks below