It was Sunday and the plaza was more crowded than ever.
The tables under the arcade were packed.
As usual the red-haired beggar came along, a terrifying figure in his silence, his threadbare rags and his pitiful distress.
He was standing in front of a table only two from mine, mutely beseeching, but without a gesture.
Then I saw the policeman who at intervals tried to protect the public from the importunities of all these beggars sneak round a column and give him a resounding whack with his thong.
His thin body winced, but he made no protest and showed no resentment; he seemed to accept the stinging blow as in the ordinary course of things and with his slow movements slunk away into the gathering night of the plaza.
But the cruel stripe had whipped my memory and suddenly I remembered.
Not his name, that escaped me still, but everything else.
He must have recognized me, for I have not changed very much in twenty years, and that was why after that first morning he had never paused in front of my table.
Yes, it was twenty years since I had known him.
I was spending a winter in Rome and every evening I used to dine in a restaurant in the Via Sistina where you got excellent macaroni and a good bottle of wine.
It was frequented by a little band of English and American art students and one or two writers; and we used to stay late into the night engaged in interminable arguments upon art and literature.
He used to come in with a young painter who was a friend of his.
He was only a boy then, he could not have been more than twenty-two; and with his blue eyes, straight nose and red hair he was pleasing to look at.
I remembered that he spoke a great deal of Central America, he had had a job with the American Fruit Company, but had thrown it over because he wanted to be a writer.
He was not popular among us because he was arrogant and we were none of us old enough to take the arrogance of youth with tolerance.
He thought us poor fish and did not hesitate to tell us so.
He would not show us his work, because our praise meant nothing to him and he despised our censure.
His vanity was enormous.
It irritated us; but some of us were uneasily aware that it might perhaps be justified.
Was it possible that the intense consciousness of genius that he had rested on no grounds?
He had sacrificed everything to be a writer.
He was so certain of himself that he infected some of his friends with his own assurance.
I recalled his high spirits, his vitality, his confidence in the future and his disinterestedness.
It was impossible that it was the same man, and yet I was sure of it.
I stood up, paid for my drink and went out into the plaza to find him.
My thoughts were in a turmoil. I was aghast.
I had thought of him now and then and idly wondered what had become of him.
I could never have imagined that he was reduced to this frightful misery.
There are hundreds, thousands of youths who enter upon the hard calling of the arts with extravagant hopes; but for the most part they come to terms with their mediocrity and find somewhere in life a niche where they can escape starvation.
This was awful.
I asked myself what had happened.
What hopes deferred had broken his spirit, what disappointments shattered him and what lost illusions ground him to the dust?
I asked myself if nothing could be done.
I walked round the plaza.
He was not in the arcades.
There was no hope of finding him in the crowd that circled round the bandstand.
The light was waning and I was afraid I had lost him.
Then I passed the church and saw him sitting on the steps.
I cannot describe what a lamentable object he looked.
Life had taken him, rent him on its racks, torn him limb from limb, and then flung him, a bleeding wreck, on the stone steps of that church.
I went up to him.
“Do you remember Rome?” I said.
He did not move.
He did not answer.
He took no more notice of me than if I were not standing before him.
He did not look at me.
His vacant blue eyes rested on the buzzards that were screaming and tearing at some object at the bottom of the steps.
I did not know what to do.
I took a yellow-backed note out of my pocket and pressed it in his hand.