Love in Rome

THE GIRL ON THE VIA FLAMINIA (215 pp.)--Alfred Hayes--Harper ($2.50).

Robert was not an especially adventurous man; back in Buffalo he had been a hardworking, uninspired advertising salesman. As a soldier in Italy, he had weathered battle and he was deadly tired of the male odors and loud talk of the army barracks. More than anything else, he wanted to find a complaisant girl. For Lisa, the girl he found in Rome, it was a case of surrender or hunger. But Robert and Lisa soon found that love could never be simple, not even when it was sold by a desperate Italian girl to a lonely G.I. in a tawdry room on Rome's Via Flaminia.

The room they took was part of the apartment of Mamma Adele, who believed them when they told her they were married. Perhaps if they had gone to a more impersonal place, the original plan would have worked out better. But Adele's apartment was a home, redolent of strong emotions. In it lived Adele, a tough-faced old woman, "all leather and insomnia"; her husband Ugo, a gentle soul who felt in his bones the sufferings of his countrymen ; their son Antonio, an embittered ex-soldier who had welcomed the American soldiers but now hated them for their attentions to Italian women. It was a house where one could love or hate, but where no one could engage in the sort of painless barter Robert had hoped for.

When Lisa was hauled in as a prostitute by the Rome police, Robert was stunned but inclined to self-justification. "I didn't make the war," he told Lisa. "I didn't make the police." Only after Lisa came back, carrying the yellow police card and screaming at him, "Go home! Take your tanks, take your money, take the coffee and the sugar . . . and go home!" did Robert begin to understand that he had debased a human being. He decided to make it up to her by promising to bring 'her to America.

To this point Alfred Hayes has written a terse and readable book, not the best of its kind but certainly a good evening's reading. If he had made his American as alive and interesting as his Italians, and bothered less about making all hands talk like characters out of Ernest Hemingway, he might have written a very good novel. His ending will strike some readers as tragic, some as sugary--depending on what the reader makes of it. Altogether, pliable ending and all, it seems made to order for Gary Cooper, who has just paid $40,000 for the screen rights.

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