ATDTDA (21): Need a cigarette's what it is, 582-584

[Paul Nightingale]

Hunter "fixe[s] her up with a room" and Dally meets "the seminotorious
Princess Spongiatosta, one of many acquaintances [she] hadn't known about
till now": another stage of her journey that recalls the initial
"labyrinthine principle" (575). That the Princess' husband/partner is
"seldom around" (582) echoes Dally's own relationship with Hunter, or even
Merle and Erlys; and the Princess herself, "whom Time seemed not, or maybe,
in Time's case, never, to have touched" recalls the description of Hunter,
his "young, almost adolescent face" in juxtaposition to "gray, nearly white"
hair (576).

Dally is "intrigued" by the palazzo (582), "the rapid changes of scale" that
challenge perspective, as much a new departure as "switch[ing] her own day
around ..." etc (580). Here, the mystery that surrounds the Princess recalls
Luca and Erlys for the first time (583); and Bria turns up for a visit,
standing in so to speak for her parents, the use of her full name perhaps
reminding Dally and the reader both that Dally isn't a Zombini. References
to Merle have taken Dally back; here she is kept at a distance. The "very
self-possessed young lady" that Dally goes to meet might recall "the
American girls, breezing along the Riva without a care" (575), from whom
Dally feels alienated. And then, as Dally "link[s] arms" with Bria (583),
perhaps she no longer feels so alienated. Cf. her earlier view, "wonder[ing]
if she had ever stood a chance of becoming one of them" (575).

Bria's description of family life hardly makes it sound a party: Erlys is "a
lot easier to miss when there's some distance in between" (583). Yet Dally's
relationship with her half-sister is reconfirmed, their shared experience as
young women, it seems, the decisive factor. At the end of the section, the
dialogue signifies some kind of double act, a familiar routine. Cf. the
similar passage, ie one concluding the section, on the Stupendica (514). If
the current section began with Dally trying to make sense of the Princess,
her host was quickly superseded by Bria, one who represents less of a
mystery, perhaps Dally looking at herself in a mirror: upon Bria's
appearance, Dally notes that she "just balance[es] the inch or so Dally had
grown over the past year" (583; and cf. the earlier reference to
chaperoning, 514). In the writing, then, Bria stands in for her parents, the
Princess, other American girls, as well as Dally herself.