The host, fat, though with a greyish face scored by deep and dusty runnels, kept saying "Sí, sí, sí" to indulge Llanos, unconvincible as to the virtue of the Madrid way. But then he said something rapid and coarse, full of Roman noises. Llanos laughed. "What was that?" John asked. "What makes you laugh so?"

Belli was saying in a sort of horrified fascinated trance: "… Cuesti cqui sso rreliquioni – ma ar mi' paese…"

"Why, yes," Llanos said, surprised. "Those very words. It must be some old Roman saying about Spaniards. 'Here in Rome we have Adam's balls.' – 'Ah, but we in Spain have Adam's – ' "

"Cazzo," John said, too loudly. Eaters turned unamused, to hear a foreigner use a dirty word, a Roman's privilege.

Belli had heard John on Nature, through Gulielmi, as well as the coarse host. He was a listening man, so much was evident: he made use of his two ears. He spoke long and bitterly. Gulielmi said: "He says that you free-thinking Protestant English poets have forgotten how to think, freely or otherwise. Excuse me – this is his view, not, as you know, necessarily mine. Free thinking, he says, is anyway no thinking. You have substituted something called Nature for God, and with Nature there is nothing but Truth and Beauty and Goodness till you fall sick, and then Nature becomes lying and ugly and malevolent. You make Nature both God and devil, but it is the one or the other only according to your moods."

"I did not say that," John said lamely. "I do not think that. As for falling sick, what does he know about my falling sick?"

"He says, you are evidently and very clearly sick. I think, as you know, you are better today, but he will have it that you are sick."

Belli looked at John grimly during this, great dark eyes trained on a sick English poet who did not know how to think.

"He also says that man is born evil."

"Why?" John asked, sweating worse than ever.

Belli knew the word. "Perché, perché, perché?" he said in crescendo, and then much of which John could understand little.

"Why won't unwrite the book, he says. He says those of you who reject the traditional view of man, which is not only Christian but also Jewish and Musulman, those, he says, must write their own book. You will find plenty of material he says, forgive me, up the arsehole of Pasquino's statue."

"Pasquino?"

"A bust, not a statue," Llanos said. "On the Via di Pasquino near the Piazza Navona. It is where anonymous lampoons are placed. Satirical verses. You will have seen it."

"I've seen nothing," John said. "I know nothing." He felt sick and weary and began to taste, with a disquiet that made the sweat gush, a rusty gob that was sliding up to his mouth. Covertly he spat it into his handkerchief, covertly looked. Thank God or Nature, there was no red. The taste of rust was the taste of the wine from Piedmont. His relief was immense. Stowing the handkerchief in his breast, he found there the coda'd sonnet about the dumpendebat. "This," he said to Gulielmi, smiling, "is for you."

Gulielmi took it, saw what it was, hastily handed it back. "Not now. Perhaps tomorrow."

"No, no. Take it home, read at leisure."

Belli was quick to see it was a poem neatly engrossed in green ink. "Un altro sonetto," he said, his nostrils widening. "Su un altro gatto?"

John understood that. "Not cats," he said. "Cazzi." Belli jerked it out of Gulielmi's hand rudely, then scanned it. He would know no more than that it was a sonnet with a coda. About cazzi. He peered closely at it however and hit a word thrice with his index finger. "Dumpendebat," he said bitterly to Gulielmi. Then he raged at Gulielmi very finely, so that the room stopped eating to listen, using most expressive gestures of his fine ringed hands, and Gulielmi was apologetic and humble, flashing odd brief looks of hurt at John. Belli got up, tore the poem in two, four, eight, snowing the fragments over the dirty dishes. He swished up his grey cloak from the back of his chair, nearly sending flying a full wine jug on the neighbour table. The neighbour eater saved his jug with both hands, barking Romanly, eyes abulge, while the wine danced to its resettling. Belli grabbed his hat from the chairpost and slammed it on his black locks.

"That," John said, "is mine. That is discourteous." Belli, bowing only to Llanos, strode out in what seemed to be a rage-engendered gale that bore his cloak-folds aloft. "Well," John said. "He wrings at some distress."

"It was he," Gulielmi said, "who wrote the original. You translated what he wrote."

"I did not know. How could I know?"

"I told you the author had destroyed it in anger and shame. He did not know that I had a copy."

"Anger and shame – why? It is a mere bawdy joke. It is the sort of thing any poet will do in fun. It is somewhat childish to be angry and ashamed."

"You will never understand Belli," Gulielmi sighed. "Nor, I think, will I. He is like two men always fighting each other. Most men learn to come to terms with their higher and lower selves. After all, we are all equipped with an apparatus of generation, and we all have aspirations to the pure life of the soul. But Belli is not satisfied with how God made him, which seems to mean that he is not satisfied with God, and this feeds an ever-growing guilt."

"He is married?" Llanos asked.

"He married a widow of some wealth, and he is both joyful and guilty about that. His childhood was poor and unhappy, and the poverty and unhappiness should, so his strange scheme of justice would have it, both continue and not continue. He is unfaithful, I think, but not physically. He has a Beatrice or Laura somewhere in the Marche, and he writes her the most spiritual poems."

"I am sorry to say," Llanos said, "that he does not write well. Not that I have seen much of what he has written."

"I think he does write well," Gulielmi said, "though not supremely well. But as he is torn between his soul and his lower instincts, so is he also torn between the language of Petrarch or Dante and the rough speech he hears all about him in Rome. He has seen what Carlo Porta can do with the language of the Milan streets. He feels, I think, that he may have a duty to the low and dirty language of his native city. But that language, as you are perhaps a little learning, Mr Keats, is not the language of the soul."

"His," Llanos said, "was one of the names I was given. The name of an opener of doors, very friendly with cardinals." It was as though he thought it was time to be apologising for knowing Belli.

"Well," John said, "I cannot expect him to listen to me now, but I could have counselled him to a way out of his guilt and unhappiness. The way out is the way out of the conception of ourselves as unified beings. We are, in fact, unities in name and appearance and voice and a set of habits only. We are nothing more, and to flesh ourselves with character we must identify ourselves, swiftly, temporarily, with one or other of our brothers and sisters of the universe. We have to dress up in the borrowed raiment of a comet, the moon, a pecking sparrow, a snowflake, boiling water, a billiard ball rolling towards a pocket. The dumpendebat self of our friend and the stabat mater self are but two among the many selves available. I see, though, that this atomising of the self would never appeal. It is not very Christian. But then I do not believe in the existence of art that is Christian. Art is not anything but art."

"You have Michelangelo in your mind, I think," Llanos faintly smiled. "And the thought also that it is not Signor Belli's soul that must be saved but his art."

"How else can a man save his soul save through art of some kind or other? A saint's life, I suppose, is a kind of art, in which the material is not stone or words or paint but conduct. And it is in the saint's art like the poet's that we that we -" The slattern and the serving-lout had returned to the kitchen from somewhere dark at the back, no longer fumbling and fumbled, sleek, rather, if sleekness was at all possible to two such, sleek as street cats could sometimes be -