Bruff Wipes His Mouth with His Napkin.

30-May-11

FLORENCE

(Scene: An open-air café in Florence in 1908. Harold Bruff and William Alexander Percy are seated facing each other at a table with some food and wine on it. In the background are other tables with men and women. Waiters are moving about. It is mid-day in summer.)

Bruff: This is the second time that I have been with you in Europe. You can have no idea how delighted I am to be here with you. What an escape from Boston!

Percy: Imagine the difference between this and Mississippi. This splendid city has more culture than in all of America. And to be here with you makes it all the more wonderful.

(Bruff wipes his mouth with his napkin.)

Bruff: You are not using your napkin.

Percy: I am leaving it folded, just in case.

Bruff: In case of what?

Percy: I have been very careful with my napkins for three years. I don’t want to create havoc again.

Bruff: How does one create havoc with a napkin? You are joking.

Percy: No, let me tell you. When I first came to Harvard, I was…

(Laughs)

Percy: I was invited to dine with my fellow law student Harley Stowell at the home of a middle-aged professor and his wife. Behind my host was an immense birdcage full of canaries. There was a folded napkin on my plate. Little did I suspect that a small brown roll lay hidden within it. I opened it with such a vigorous flourish that the roll soared through the air and crashed against the birdcage with a loud bang. All of the canaries went crazy. I was horrified. Other students have been expelled for less. Amazingly enough, the Brahmanand his wife acted as if nothing had happened. The soup was served. The birds calmed down. Of course I said nothing. Neither did Harley. Nobody flinched.

Bruff: I would have turned red.

Percy: I think I did. Never since that day have I opened a napkin.

Bruff: Allow me.

(He takes Percy’s napkin and opens it.)

Bruff: There, no harm done.

Percy: I should be more relaxed. I don’t have to worry here. I can drench my soul in a world of art.

Bruff: Yes, the number of the city’s great artists is uncanny. The Uffizi especially. The paintings and the statues.

Percy: Michelangelo’s and Donatello’s Davis. Do you prefer? I prefer Michelangelo’s, although Symonds dismissed it as a “Hobbledehoy of Sixteen.”

Bruff: I prefer Donatello’s, more graceful and sumptuous! I wonder if the boys who served as models for these artists really looked like the statues? I should like to snap my fingers and turn into such a sculptor with such models.

Percy: You forget Savonarola.

Bruff: He was none too soon dispensed with.

Percy: I sometimes get the impression that all of the Renaissance artists.

Bruff: Had male models?

Percy: Yes. The male form is more beautiful than the female, at least in adolescence. And there are so many excuses to make statues or paintings of David, John The Baptist, Ganymede, and all the other Grecian lads. Antinous above all. (Sighs)

Bruff: This city is a monument to such lads and the artists who loved them.

Percy: Even if the lads were pin cushions.

Bruff: Pin cushions?

Percy: Saint Sebastian full of arrows. I think especially of Il Sodoma. Robert Hobart Cust has written about him. Cust devotes a whole chapter to denying that Il Sodoma deserved his nickname. Guido Reni was another and I believe even Botticelli from his illustrations of The Divine Comedy.

(The Acton family enters from the left.)

Acton: Pardon me, but I overheard yourdiscussion. I am a collector. This is my wife and my son. He is four. Say Hello to the gentlemen, Harold.

Child: Hewwo.

Wife: I’ll find a table. Come.

(They go off to a table in the background.)

Acton: Florence for art devotes. It is too bad that nothing celestial has been produced here for ages. It is so good to meet fellow connoisseurs. Perhaps we could chat later. Percy: Thank you.

(Acton joins his family.)

Bruff: A wife and child. Ghastly.

Percy: Only bachelors should collect art. How can married men burn “with a Hard, gem-like flame”?

Bruff: Especially if they have bird-cages.

(Enter Bernard Berenson from the left.)

Berenson: I hear a Harvard accent.

Percy: Not from me, y’all.

Berenson: One Harvard man can always tell another. My name is Berenson.

Percy: A famous name in the world of art. My name is William Percy and this is Harold Bruff.

Bruff. Glad to meet you.

(They shake hands.)

Berenson: Perhaps we can chat later. Here is my card, gentlemen.

Bruff: Thank you. This is getting to be a habit. Florence is agrand center for connoisseurs.

(Berenson goes off to a table in the background near the Actons.)

Bruff: A Lithuanian Jew who made good at Harvard

Percy: The incomparable Bernard.

Bruff: Let us get back to our subject.

Percy: Yes. I readFrancesco Matarazzo’s‘The Chronicles of Perugia’. It would be interesting to visit its museums and to cruise it. It seems that of you’re the high-born youths of thatcity were especially given to romantic friendships with each other and often with elders!

Bruff: Sounds like Florence. When?

Percy: 1492 to 1503.

(Enter Edward Strachan Morgan from the left.)

Morgan: Do I hear someone speaking about me?

Percy: I beg your pardon?

Morgan: I am the translator of Matarazzo.

Percy: Edward Morgan? Amazing. Yes, I was just speaking of the chronicles.

Morgan: Glad to meet someone who has read it. Let me give you my card. You are Americans?

Percy: Yes. It seems that everybody wants to chat with us anglophiles today. The community of anglophiles dazzles me.

Morgan: It’s not always so pleasant!

(Morgan goes off to a table in the background.)

Bruff: We’d better leave before we overwhelmed.

Percy: We must chat with them all. This is the place to be. How lucky. One day I hope that even our house in Percy Place will be where all sorts of fascinating people will gather to chat.

Bruff:Waiter, the check! Il conto, per favore!

(The waiter comes, Bruff pays and they go off to the left. The other people have been in a sort of Pantomime of conversation in the background all this time so that Bruff and Percy can be heard.)