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The Eternal City
Or how Princess Di helped me become a storyteller
Although I associated it with writers, once among the world’s most brilliant, who drank themselves into self-parody and premature death, Via Margutta was my favorite street in Rome. Not that I’d been there more than twice before. But both times I made a point of walking down that beautiful ancient street and looking very carefully at Number 30, the balcony where — if what Truman Capote wrote is true — his pet raven, Lola, perched on the edge of the stone balustrade and took her daily bath in a silver soup dish.
After a moment of sprightly immersion in the shallow water she would spring up and out and, as though casting off a crystal cloak, shake herself, swell her feathers; later, for long, bliss-saturated hours, she drowsed in the sun, her head tilted back, her beak ajar, her eyes shut. To watch her was a soothing experience.
I’ve read the Lola story half a dozen times. The words “casting off a crystal cloak” always cast a soothing spell on me. I love reading about how Truman got Lola as a present from the maid Gabriella, who’d cruelly clipped her wings, how ugly and hateful he’d found the bird at first, how he fell in love with her and spoiled her, and finally how she jumped off that balcony, unable to fly, and fell into the back of a moving truck, never to be seen, at least by him, again.
