ROADS TO ROME

By George Brown

TWO PEOPLE. By Donald Windham Popular Library. 253 pages. $1.95

Two people meet on the Spanish Steps in Rome: Forrest, an Anglo-Saxon American businessman approaching his thirty-fourth birthday, and Marcello, a seventeen-year-old Italian student. They go to Forrest's apartment, and thus begins a relationship that will last for about five months, surpass the erotic, and reinforce both of their lives. This is the plot of Donald Windham's third novel, "Two People," reprinted in paperback this fall. It is as fresh and moving as when it was published in hardback by Coward-McCann in 1965.

adult.

It's an old story in literature and movies: Americans going, to a foreign land and finding a brief but deep love affair, do ng away from home what they would never dare to do at home, or in a foreign land finding the opportunity that is lacking at home. But all of life is an old story. As we read this particular story, we feel that it is happening for the first time.

The impressive thing is that two maies, both basically heterosexual, can come together erotically at critical points in their lives, take strength from each other, and return to the demands of their destined lives. They don't actually have a love affair, not in the traditional romantic sense, although affection is there; for each, particularly Marcello, holds back a great deal of himForrest is a married man with self. Much of their relationship children who comes to Rome resembles the classic Greek with his wife for an extended traditon, with the older man vacation after his recent illness. being lover-protector to the one But the marriage has reached half his age. Because of the lowsuch a low point that the wife key pitch the story has a returns alone to the United poignancy that reaches the bitStates. Up to the point of the tersweet. And regarding such a meeting on the seedy, grand, brief but significant encounter, notorious Spanish Steps, whether it takes place in a Forrest has had no homosexual foreign land or in a person's experience -except for one homeland, there are those who isolated episode when he was in would say that it is predestined, his mid-teens. Marcello, who designed by Fate for a definite lives at home with his purpose. dominating Sicilian father, his The American novelist, born mother, two sisters, and brother, and brought up in the South, has somewhat recently and a New Yorker for many discovered sex, but only male years, shows a great understansex. He seems to engage in it ding of the Italian culture. The primarily for money, although he scenes in Marcello's Sicilianis far from being a prostitute, so Roman household ring true. innocent that he would never Windham also has an affinity ask for money. Attending a with the Italian language. school to prepare him for a adroitly using Italian words and naval career, Marcello is striving phrases throughout the novel; to become independer, to leave and Italian, of course, is a adolescence and become an romantic, musical language, even in print.

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Rome itself, that ancient and weary but modern and vital city, looms with fascination. Windham captures the beauty, charm, and constancy that is the Eternal City, while showing its

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"dump-heap disorder," wiliness, and areas of corruption. Rome comes so vividly alive that those who have pleasantly visited the city will experience nostalgia -and want to return. Those who haven't visited it will want to go there if they want to travel at all."The interesting thing out Rome," Windham has Forrest say, "is that it is incomprehensible. You can know all of it. You, keep discovering new things, I but they are details of what you already know." Forrest, adrift in life, at one point fantasizes about becoming a Roman, but eventually he realizes that he is indelibly an American, would always be an American in Rome.

Donald Windham has a marvelous style for describing scenes in quiet dramatic tones and deep colors. He weaves a rich tapestry as he describes a surprise meeting of the two protagonists toward the last third of the novel: "It was the first dark of evening. Reflections of the streetlamps and neon signs glowed on the wet sidewalks and pavements. In Pazza di Spagna, as he was threading his way through the crowd and approaching the corner of Via Condotti, there, a yard before him, dressed in a dark blue, double-breasted gabardine suit, a blue and white striped shirt, a dark blue tie, stood Marcello." This is but one of the rich tapestries in the novel.

Windham also weaves into his tapestries words for thought. "It is ordinary to love the mar. velous; it is marvelous to love the ordinary," he has Forrest observe. And on gifts, when he wants to give Marcello a present, Forrest says, "A present that you do not want is all right from someone you love. The person lends value to the present. But with other people the present has to lend value to the person."

Will we reach the day, we may ask as we finish reading this novel about two people from two different cultures, when society will accept the fact that heterosexuality and homo. sexuality need not be two separate ways of life, although they well can be? Will society

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eventually accept that there can be an interweaving of both in some lives, a slipping from one into the other, if need be, and then slipping back; or remaining in one or the other, if need be, with the individual experiencing no fear and guilt, or being subject to condemnation?

It is clear that what Forrest and Marcello feel for each other is not what each feels for the female in his life (Marcello does have a' girl friend, and it is during his affair with Forrest that he secures a heterosexual relationship with her). For them the male-male relationship satisfies a different need than the male-female relationship

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does. This, of course is not necessarily so for all people involved in homosexualheterosexual relationships. But so be it. The thing for society to realize is that sexually affectionate relationships, romantic relationships, erotic relationships, between males are natural and ancient.

"My friend says that the boys in Rome began doing this after the war," Forrest says to Marcello during one of their episodes in bed. "Your friend is wrong." replies the wise teenager. "Roman boys have been doing the same thing since ancient times."

And it's an ancient saying that all roads lead to Rome.

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