Please don’t take away my principles: I paid a high price for them

Per una vita non basta Roma

In the second scene, which takes place in 1978 Los Angeles, of the 2019 flop The Poison Rose, directed by George Gallo and Francesco Cinquemani and starring John Travolta and Morgan Freeman, Travolta, who plays the private dick Carson Phillips, is asked by a ravishing young lady whose name we never learn to take on a case that involves him travelling to Galveston. Galveston is in Texas. Travolta declines, saying that he doesn’t take on cases outside LA, whereupon the mysterious ravishing young client hauls out her cheque book, and asks to know Travolta’s price. That we also never learn. How much would you have asked for?

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I was once a tour director on an American tour in Rome. The first day was spent in collecting everyone from Fiumicino airport and settling them into our hotel, on the north side of the city and inconveniently situated for the metro. At dinner that evening, I sat away from the group, so as to establish my sphere of privacy and not favour any one party within the group, and ate the most wonderful pasta al sugo I have ever tasted in my life—three platefuls, and that was just the meal’s starter. Afterwards, exhausted from the early start and constant briefings all day long, I volunteered to take those who were interested on a walking tour introduction to the city. The group gathered outside the hotel before we would walk down to Conca d’Oro metro station.

While the group was made up mostly of teenagers, including a group from Stuart, Florida, whose teacher I knew from a previous tour, there was one small collection of four elderly-but-fit ladies, whose capo led me outside for a private conflab as the rest were coming down. I was about 24 years of age, she would be in her late 60s. She made it clear that she and her party wanted very special treatment, a personal guiding experience, full customised attention and the best of the best in all respects. Her list of desiderata was rounded off with the statement, “We shall make it very much worth your while.”

Looking back, perhaps I should have asked her how much she was offering. But I didn’t. I wasn’t interested in how much she was offering. I don’t want to brag, but the manner in which I was brought up had taught me to despise those who tried to buy favours, rather than to pounce at their temptation. I told her that they were four individuals in a bus of 40 to 50 tourists, and that there was no way I could devote myself entirely to their wishes. I regretted that they would just have to muck in with the communal group experience that all the members of the group had signed up for. And not the five-star, red-carpet treatment that, in any case, could only be offered on a limited basis. I seem to recall that, throughout the ensuing tour, they were constantly late in being where they were asked to be at a given time, engaged very little in the way of small talk, and stiffed me on the tip.

That, by their way of it, will have been my punishment. I regarded it rather as a reward. When I dropped the group at Frankfurt airport a few weeks later, I was so happy that I would never see these people ever again. And so dreading that I would probably see their likes very often again.

My life has been plagued by people who wanted to buy from me what I wasn’t selling—which was my principles; and who didn’t want to pay me for what I was selling—which was what they’d agreed to.