"English, surely," the young American lady says, eying the "tall, straw-colored" stranger who stood smoking in the corridor of the wagon-lit. Unconvinced, her companion concedes, "If English, then a bounder." Their conversation continues "in an agreeable rattle-rattle" as they discuss the problems of detecting "a bounder in a foreign country." Thus Mary McCarthy begins her story about two young Americans (unnamed and unmarried) traveling together in Europe shortly after the end of World War II. For the most part, she writes from an inside point of view, using as her narrative focus the double consciousness of the American couple. Yet, in reality, this double consciousness is single. Different in their characteristic external responses, the young Americans are basically alike, having come "to think in unison" and needing "the spoken word only for a check."

Intrigued by Europe, they are also puzzled and challenged by its mystery. Although they are tourists and are ostensibly traveling in Italy for pleasure, the couple is determined to penetrate the "Continental standards" that they sense as "mysteriously different" and even, although they question their own seriousness, "to get into European society." Architecture, they believe, provides "the most solid answer to their social curiosity." Thus they seek to understand the Sforzas "through the agency of their Castello" and "to know the Pisani" by visiting Stra, on the Brenta. Putting great stock in appearances, they find their penchant for categorizing thwarted by upper-class Europeans who, trying "to dress like English gentlemen," strike "the inevitable false notes."

But "The Cicerone" is less about the adventures of two Americans in search of Europe than it is about American attitudes toward the Continent. To dramatize this wider purpose, Miss McCarthy uses Rino Sciarappa, the cicerone, and introduces a third American, Polly Grabbe. Basic to the symbolic structure of the story is the assumption that Sciarappa is the personification of post-war Europe. "The mystery of Europe lay in him as solidly as in the stones of Venice, and it was somewhat less worn by previous inquisitive travelers." To the American couple, the Italian is "a city of Catacombs" whose "real life" is conducted in the "tunnel" of his mind. The cicerone's appearance underscores his identification with Europe—in particular, post-war Italy. His slenderness is cadaverous and his quick and light movements, effete. He reminds the young lady and young man "of that horror so often met in Paris, city of beauty, the well-preserved woman in her fifties." Even "the terraced fields" are "like Mr. Sciarappa's wrinkles." Moreover, the land bears "the mark of wisdom—it too had seen life." The different ways in which the young American couple and Miss Grabbe relate to Sciarappa clarify different but similar American attitudes toward Europe. Conversely, the disbelieving and contemptuous Italian expresses a conventional attitude of Europe toward America: '"Ah, you Americans,'" he remarks, "'your streets are paved with dollars.'"

Like Rino Sciarappa, the young American couple behaves in a manner that, similar to "the young lady's large black hat, long gloves, high-heeled shoes, and nylon stockings," acts as "a declaration of nationality." The young man who walks "proudly on the dilapidated streets of Europe" is unabashedly curious. Little interested in people's opinions or in their emotions, he is "passionately, madly curious as to what people did and how they made their money." Uneasy in "his small role as war-profiteer," he nonetheless avoids the black market in favor of cashing "his checks at the regular rate at the bank" for only a single week. The young lady shares the inquisitiveness of her companion. An active verbalizer, she is adept at labeling sentiments, at dissecting shades of feeling, of making subtle distinctions. She is both aggressive and gullible. Being gregarious, she "took the kindest view of everyone" and believed that "she was the only person in the world who told lies."

The relationship that develops between Rino Sciarappa and the two Americans is as deserved as it is bizarre. Since the narrator does not enter the Italian's mind, the Italian is an enigma not only to the young man and young lady but to the reader as well. Stymied by the cicerone's uncertain grasp of English syntax, the Americans seek to ascertain his place in the social hierarchy and thereby to "understand" Europe not through what he says but through more tangible, external means. But neither his appearance nor his professed occupation allows them to turn him into a demonstrable abstraction. Equally unknowable are his reasons for staying with them in the role of cicerone.

The term "cicerone" derives from the name of the Roman orator Cicero and refers to his learning or eloquence. It was first applied to learned Italian antiquarians whose function was to provide visitors with information about the antiquities of a place. Subsequently, the meaning was widened to include ordinary professional guides. But in neither the original nor the later sense is Sciarappa a cicerone, and herein lies the central irony of the story at its literal and satirical levels. Not valuing the art treasures of Italy and, in fact, not valuing post-war Italy, he cannot credit tourism as a legitimate motive for the Americans' being in Italy any more than he can credit as honest their enthusiastic response to Italy's art objects and buildings: "it was as if the devaluation of the currency had, for Mr. Sciarappa's consistent thought, implicated everything Italian; cathedrals, pictures, women had dropped with the lira." Further, since cathedrals, works of art, museums, and palaces maintained by the state were free to all, Sciarappa considers them as valuable to none. Equally peculiar—for a guide—is the "one solid trait" that the two Americans discover in his character, his "rooted abhorrence of the advertised first-rate, of best hotels, top restaurants, principal shopping streets, famous vineyards." In an interplay of internal emotions and external forces, Miss McCarthy balances Sciarappa against the Americans. Neither the Italian nor the Americans can assign each other to a social class. The young man and young lady sense that Sciarappa believes himself to be the victim of an imposture. "But did he believe that they were rich pretending to be poor, or poor pretending to be rich? They could not tell." Their partial understanding of the Italian's hostility does not preclude their lessening sympathy toward him and their increasing impatience at devoting evenings to a "stranger who was continually out of sorts because he could not make up his mind whether they were worth swindling." Later, in Venice, they find themselves in the same kind of situation: "He had become a problem for them in both senses of the word: the impossibility of talking with him was compensated for by the possibilities of talking about him, and the detachment of their attitude was, they felt, atoned for by their neighborliness in the physical sphere."

This kind of balancing, this interplay between abhorrence and attraction, supply and demand, is apparent in other short stories by Miss McCarthy. In "The Genial Host," for example, Margaret Sargent realizes that she exists in a strange symbiotic relationship with Pflaumen the host. His price for providing dinner parties where she meets eligible young men is that she inform him of resulting emotional liaisons. In "The Friend of the Family," the husband and wife discover the usefulness of the unobtrusive and dull Francis Cleary. His company is not sprightly but neither is it demanding or upsetting, and thus they find themselves cultivating this mutually satisfactory friend, even to the point of wooing him in order to maintain the delicate balance of their own social relationship. Further evidence can be found in "The Weeds," where the wife, after trying to break away from her husband and start a new life in New York City, returns to her husband, defeated by the inevitable changes that five years have wrought in herself, her friends, and the social patterns she had known as a single woman. Modifying her demands, she goes back to her insensitive and dogmatic husband because she needs the structured situation he offers her.

In a similar way, the Americans find themselves drawn to the distrustful and uncommunicative cicerone, despite the absence of a common meeting ground. In fact, they need him precisely because he is different from them, for they sense the mystery of Europe in his enigmatic disaffection. If they can understand Sciarappa, they reason, they can understand Europe. Consequently they try to coax the Italian "out into the open." Their bait is Polly Grabbe, a "middling but authentically rich" American whom they are to meet in Venice. Well known for her semi-annual pilgrimages to Europe in search of love and for her collection of garden statuary, the flower-bulb heiress provides a means for them to trap Sciarappa into revealing himself. If he wishes money, Polly Grabbe has enough to precipitate him into some decisive action. If he seeks a mistress, Miss Grabbe is accessible.

But the relationship that develops between Sciarappa and the American heiress fails to reveal the inner nature of the Italian. Shrewd and flighty, relentless in her search for experience and lenient in her judgments of men, Miss Grabbe fails to provoke the cicerone into disclosing his motivation. Throughout, Polly Grabbe refuses to see anything transcendent about the man and interprets his behavior on the basis of her own limitations. Instead of seeing "the problem of Sciarappa," she warns the Americans that he will spoil Venice for them. Commenting on Sciarappa's disappearance on the day of the fiesta, she says, "'I thought you wanted to get rid of him—he has probably found bigger fish.'" At another time, she tells the young man, "'My dear, he simply wants to sell us something."'

It is inevitable, therefore, that she should relate to Sciarappa in her own way—as a convenient directory of people and places and, finally, as a lover. Her graphic confession after a night of lovemaking ("'he is much older than you think'") dramatizes the polarities between her and the young Americans. The young lady begs her to stop because she knows that "this mortal exposé" is not what they had wanted; "on the contrary, they had had in mind something more sociological, more humane—biographical details, Mr. Sciarappa's relation with his parents, his social position, his business, his connection with the Fascist state." The revelation of Miss Grabbe yields only an image of Sciarappa "hunted down, defenseless, surprised in bed by a party of intruders." The motives, status, and true public self of the Italian—"'the really interesting part about him'"—continue to elude them.

As they travel to Florence, they note that the "landscape itself seemed to wear a face baked and disabused as Mr. Sciarappa's own." Geography and man merge when they unexpectedly encounter the cicerone in Florence. Baffled, the young man admits, '"He is following us, but he is ahead.'" In Rome, where their persistent curiosity causes them to "investigate" the address of the Italian, they do so with quickened expectation. "The European enigma and its architectural solution lay just before them, around a bend in the street." Their discovery that his house is "plain and shabby" makes them feel as mortified and embarrassed as when they had listened to Polly Grabbe's confession. "This house too was an obscenity, like the shrunken skin and the scapular, but it was also a shell which Rino Sciarappa did not truly inhabit." Their shame causes them to turn away, aware that "the relation between pursuer and pursued had been confounded, by a dialectic too subtle for their eyes."

What has happened is that their net—architecture—is, like Miss Grabbe's, "too coarse to catch" the mystery of the Italian. The distaste the American couple feels for each other is really an objectifying of what each finds repugnant in himself. In their alikeness, each is subdued by the grossness he sees reflected in the other person. Thus the story folds back on itself, and the two Americans are again standing at a distance from the secrets of Europe, reduced, at least momentarily, from their hopeful curiosity on the wagons-lits or their naive, optimistic belief that someone would "discover them in this dark continent."

The dialectic that confounds the relation between pursuer and pursued has to do with the interchangeability of the two entities. Ostensibly Sciarappa is the pursuer. The American couple and Miss Grabbe see him as wanting something from them. What the young lady and young man discover is that they are also pursuers in a pursuit externalized by their image of the cicerone "hunted down" in Miss Grabbe's bed, by their finding him waiting for them in Florence, and by their "investigation" of his residence in Rome. The dialectic resulting from this exchange of roles is indeed too subtle for their eyes to detect. Externals such as houses and clothes are forever incapable of explaining an entity as elusive as Rino Sciarappa, who had, quite literally, "careened away from them into the inexplicable."

The conclusion of "The Cicerone" makes the formal design of the story apparent. It began with the two young Americans, opened to include Rino Sciarappa (as the first sentence suggested), and then widened to encompass the flower-bulb heiress. After this relative fullness, the story closed in on itself again, finally returning to the isolated consciousness of the American couple. Such formal balancing of plot and characters parallels and enhances the delicate balance of the social relationships that form the story's content.

In commenting on her technique as a writer, Mary McCarthy has said, "With characters, I do try at least to be as exact as possible about the essence of a person, to find the key that works the person both in real life and in the fiction." Yet, despite scrupulous delineation of dress (Miss Grabbe's and the young lady's "costumes"), history (Miss Grabbe's past), mannerisms (the young man's unleashed hilarity), subtleties of feeling (the young lady is a "specialist in sentiments"), the reader remains at considerable psychic distance from the characters. This "gulf is inevitable in the case of Polly Grabbe and the cicerone—characters whose consciousnesses are closed to us. But we are removed even from those characters whose perceptions serve as narrative focus—the young couple. This separation is widened by Miss McCarthy's failure to name her central characters: They are anonymous Americans of cultivated sensibility.

As a fiction writer, however, Miss McCarthy most often bases her characters on persons whom she has known. The facts of her life frequently supply the "facts" of her fiction. Many knowledgeable readers have noted the similarities between Mary McCarthy and the young lady, Miss McCarthy's third husband and the young man, and a famous real-life American heiress and Polly Grabbe. It is as though by drawing them from real-life models Miss Mc-Carthy assumes their "life-likeness" in fiction. In truth, however, the characters in "The Cicerone" are little more than two-dimensional puppets maneuvered into place by the author. A consequence of their "flatness," of the manner in which they are made "real," is their distance from us. In turn, this distance compounds our lack of sympathy toward them.

Ironically, the "person" we are closest to in "The Cicerone" is the implied author—that is, the image of Mary McCarthy we construct from reading the story. In the first paragraph, it is Miss McCarthy (not the young man or young woman) who compares Sciarappa to "an English cigarette," finding that the Italian bears "the same relation to a man that a Gold Flake bears to a normal cigarette." In this same paragraph, it is Miss McCarthy, again speaking directly through her narrator, who likens the young man's eyes to "strange green headlights on an old-fashioned car." Throughout the story, various similes, metaphors, allusions, and turns of phrase come not from the characters but, unfiltered, from the narrator who, serving as the author's agent, displays her brilliant command of language.

Yet Miss McCarthy's unwillingness or inability to create round, sympathetic characters is basic to her method and purpose as a writer. Fundamental to her intention is the depiction of characters that are representative types as well as singular entities. Her ability to see and describe generically is partly responsible for her ability to write satirically. In "The Cicerone," the Americans and Sciarappa are satirical portraits of representative types. Concomitantly, satire allows Miss McCarthy to accomplish her larger social purpose in this story.

For through Sciarappa and the American she is embodying national attributes and attitudes. Parasitic, unyielding, and nervous, Rino Sciarappa is Europe. Remember Polly Grabbe's confession, "'My dear, he is much older than you think.'" He is also faded and secretive. To the Americans, he is "the face of Italian history." Even his purposelessness, his lack of occupation, identifies him with a Europe recovering from a devastating war. Polly Grabbe and her flower-bulb fortune represent more than American materialism, vulgarity, and artistic pretension. Quite literally, Polly Grabbe "grabs" at Europe through the agency of the cicerone. Accepting Sciarappa as a lover, she causes him to strip himself physically in a gesture that parallels her requisitioning of Europe's art treasures. The young American couple wants to strip Europe spiritually and intellectually, but, in their persistence, they are as gross as Miss Grabbe. The tone-deaf young man and the gullible young lady differ in kind but not degree from the heiress in their quest to understand the social hierarchy and heritage of Europe and to lay bare its spiritual essence. That they fail with Sciarappa is symptomatic of their larger failure.

The life depicted in "The Cicerone" is bleak and hopeless. In many ways, the war-torn, humbled, unyielding Europe Miss McCarthy describes has echoes of T. S.

Eliot's The Waste Land, which also imagizes a parched and barren land. Like Eliot's personages, the young Americans are dry and sterile people who intellectualize their experience as they attempt, unsuccessfully, to intellectualize Europe and its mystery. In the manner of the inhabitants of The Waste Land, they have lost touch with the past and cannot participate in its rituals, as their inability to share in the bacchanalian experience of the fiesta suggests. Paralleling Eliot's poem, the failure in sexual relationships in "The Cicerone" suggests the malaise of the wider society. Having recognized the disadvantages of traveling together—"('My dear,' said the young lady, 'a couple looks so complete')"—the young Americans accept their "handicap" like "the best jockey" in a horse race who "scorns to take a lighter weight." Although Rino Sciarappa gives himself to Polly Grabbe in a night of adequate though not extraordinary lovemaking, he rejuvenates neither himself nor his partner. Instead, he leaves Venice the next morning, offering as a reminder of himself a list of second-best restaurants and hotels. That Polly Grabbe stores the devalued currency of Italy in her douchebag is a fitting and final symbol for all that is incongruous and debased in the arid plain of "The Cicerone."