He had often thought of his loneliness, for example, as a condition which testified to his superiority. But people who were not superior were, nevertheless, extremely lonely— and unable to break out of their solitude precisely because they had no equipment with which to enter it. His own loneliness, magnified so many million times, made the night air colder. He remembered to what excesses, into what traps and nightmares, his loneliness had driven him; and he wondered where such a violent emptiness might drive an entire city.
At the same time, as he came closer to Rufus’ building, he was trying very hard not to think about Rufus.
He was in a section of warehouses. Very few people lived down here. By day, trucks choked the streets, laborers stood on these ghostly platforms, moving great weights, and cursing. As he had once; for a long time, he had been one of them. He had been proud of his skill and his muscles and happy to be accepted as a man among men. Only— it was they who saw something in him which they could not accept, which made them uneasy. Every once in a while, a man, lighting his cigarette, would look at him quizzically, with a little smile. The smile masked an unwilling, defensive hostility. They said he was a “bright kid,” that he would “go places”; and they made it clear that they expected him to go, to which places did not matter— he did not belong to them.
But at the bottom of his mind the question of Rufus nagged and stung. There had been a few colored boys in his high school but they had mainly stayed together, as far as he remembered. He had known boys who got a bang out of going out and beating up niggers. It scarcely seemed possible— it scarcely, even, seemed fair— that colored boys who were beaten up in high school could grow up into colored men who wanted to beat up everyone in sight, including, or perhaps especially, people who had never, one way or another, given them a thought.
He watched the light in Rufus’ window, the only light on down here.
Then he remembered something that had happened to him a long time ago, two years or three. It was when he had been spending a lot of time in Harlem, running after the whores up there. One night, as a light rain fell, he was walking uptown on Seventh Avenue. He walked very briskly, for it was very late and this section of the Avenue was almost entirely deserted and he was afraid of being stopped by a prowl car. At 116th Street he stopped in a bar, deliberately choosing a bar he did not know. Since he did not know the bar he felt an unaccustomed uneasiness and wondered what the faces around him hid. Whatever it was, they hid it very well. They went on drinking and talking to each other and putting coins in the juke box. It certainly didn’t seem that his presence caused anyone to become wary, or to curb their tongues. Nevertheless, no one made any effort to talk to him and an almost imperceptible glaze came over their eyes whenever they looked in his direction. This glaze remained, even when they smiled. The barman, for example, smiled at something Vivaldo said and yet made it clear, as he pushed his drink across the bar, that the width of the bar was but a weak representation of the great gulf fixed between them.
This was the night that he saw the eyes unglaze. Later, a girl came over to him. They went around the corner to her room. There they were; he had his tie loosened and his trousers off and they had been just about to begin when the door opened and in walked her “husband.” He was one of the smooth-faced, laughing men who had been in the bar. The girl squealed, rather prettily, and then calmly began to get dressed again. Vivaldo had first been so disappointed that he wanted to cry, then so angry that he wanted to kill. Not until he looked into the man’s eyes did he begin to be afraid.
The man looked down at him and smiled.
“Where was you thinking of putting that, white boy?”
Vivaldo said nothing. He slowly began pulling on his trousers. The man was very dark and very big, nearly as big as Vivaldo, and, of course, at that moment, in much better fighting condition.
The girl sat on the edge of the bed, putting on her shoes. There was silence in the room except for her low, disjointed, intermittent humming. He couldn’t quite make out the tune she was humming and this, for some insane reason, drove him wild.
“You might at least have waited a couple of minutes,” Vivaldo said. “I never even got it in.”
He said this as he was buckling his belt, idly, out of some dim notion that he might thus, in effect, reduce the fine. The words were hardly out of his mouth before the man had struck him, twice, palm open, across the face. Vivaldo staggered backward from the bed into the corner which held the sink and a water glass went crashing to the floor.
“Goddamnit,” said the girl, sharply, “ain’t no need to wreck the joint.” And she bent down to pick up the bits of glass. But it also seemed to Vivaldo that she was a little frightened and a little ashamed. “Do what you going to do,” she said, from her knees, “and get him out of here.”
Vivaldo and the man stared at each other and terror began draining Vivaldo’s rage out of him. It was not merely the situation which frightened him: it was the man’s eyes. They stared at Vivaldo with a calm, steady hatred, as remote and unanswerable as madness.
“You goddamn lucky you didn’t get it in,” he said. “You’d be a mighty sorry white boy if you had. You wouldn’t be putting that white prick in no more black pussy, I can guarantee you that.”
Well, if that’s the way you feel, Vivaldo wanted to say, why the hell don’t you keep her off the streets? But it really seemed better— and it seemed, weirdly enough, that the girl was silently trying to convey this to him— to say as little as possible.
So he only said, after a moment, as mildly as he could. “Look. I fell for the oldest gag in the business. Here I am. Okay. What do you want?”
And what the man wanted was more than he knew how to say. He watched Vivaldo, waiting for Vivaldo to speak again. Vivaldo’s mind was filled suddenly with the image of a movie he had seen long ago. He saw a bird dog, tense, pointing, absolutely silent, waiting for a covey of quail to surrender to panic and fly upward, where they could be picked off by the guns of the hunters. So it was in the room while the man waited for Vivaldo to speak. Whatever Vivaldo might say would be turned into an opportunity for slaughter. Vivaldo held his breath, hoping that his panic did not show in his eyes, and felt his flesh begin to crawl. Then the man looked over at the girl, who stood near the bed, watching him, and then he slowly moved closer to Vivaldo. When he stood directly before Vivaldo, his eyes still driving, it seemed, into Vivaldo’s as though he would pierce the skull and the brain and possess it all, he abruptly held out his hand.
Vivaldo handed him the wallet.
The man lit a cigarette which he held in the corner of his mouth as he deliberately, insolently, began looking through the wallet. “What I don’t understand,” he said, with a fearful laziness, “is why you white boys always come uptown, sniffing around our black girls. You don’t see none of us spooks downtown, sniffing around your white girls.” He looked up. “Do you?”
Don’t be so sure, Vivaldo thought, but said nothing. But this had struck some nerve in him and he felt himself beginning to be angry again.
“Suppose I told you that that was my sister,” the man said, gesturing toward the girl. “What would you do if you found me with your sister?”
I wouldn’t give a damn if you split her in two, Vivaldo thought, promptly. At the same time this question made him tremble with rage and he realized, with another part of his mind, that this was exactly what the man wanted.
There remained at the bottom of his mind, nevertheless, a numb speculation as to why this question should make him angry.
“I mean, what would you do to me?” the man persisted, still holding Vivaldo’s wallet and looking at him with a smile. “I want you to name your own punishment.” He waited. Then: “Come on. You know what you guys do.” And then the man seemed, oddly, a little ashamed, and at the same time more dangerous than ever.
Vivaldo said at last, tightly, “I haven’t got a sister” and straightened his tie, willing his hands to be steady, and began looking around
for his jacket.
The man considered him a moment more, looked at the girl, then looked down to the wallet again. He took out all the money. “This all you got.”
In those days Vivaldo had been working steadily and his wallet had contained nearly sixty dollars. “Yes,” Vivaldo said.
“Nothing in your pockets?”
Vivaldo emptied his pockets of bills and change, perhaps five dollars in all. The man took it all.
“I need something to get home on, mister,” Vivaldo said.
The man gave him his wallet. “Walk,” he said. “You lucky that you can. If I catch your ass up here again, I’ll show you what happened to a nigger I know when Mr. Charlie caught him with Miss Anne.”
He put his wallet in his back pocket and picked up his jacket from the floor. The man watched him, the girl watched the man. He got to the door and opened it and realized that his legs were weak.
“Well,” he said, “thanks for the buggy ride,” and stumbled down the stairs. He had reached the first landing when he heard a door above him open and quick, stealthy footsteps descending. Then the girl stood above him, stretching her hand over the banister.
“Here,” she whispered, “take this,” and leaned dangerously far over the banister and stuffed a dollar into his breast pocket. “Go along home now,” she said, “hurry!” and rushed back up the stairs.
The man’s eyes remained with him for a long time after the rage and the shame and terror of that evening. And were with him now, as he climbed the stairs to Rufus’ apartment. He walked in without knocking. Rufus was standing near the door, holding a knife.
“Is that for me or for you? Or were you planning to cut yourself a hunk of salami?”
He forced himself to stand where he was and to look directly at Rufus.
“I was thinking about putting it into you, motherfucker.”
But he had not moved. Vivaldo slowly let out his breath.
“Well, put it down. If I ever saw a poor bastard who needed his friends, you’re it.”
They watched each other for what seemed like a very long time and neither of them moved. They stared into each other’s eyes, each, perhaps, searching for the friend each remembered. Vivaldo knew the face before him so well that he had ceased, in a way, to look at it and now his heart turned over to see what time had done to Rufus. He had not seen before the fine lines in the forehead, the deep, crooked line between the brows, the tension which soured the lips. He wondered what the eyes were seeing— they had not been seeing it years before. He had never associated Rufus with violence, for his walk was always deliberate and slow, his tone mocking and gentle: but now he remembered how Rufus played the drums.
He moved one short step closer, watching Rufus, watching the knife.
“Don’t kill me, Rufus,” he heard himself say. “I’m not trying to hurt you. I’m only trying to help.”
The bathroom door was still open and the light still burned. The bald kitchen light burned mercilessly down on the two orange crates and the board which formed the kitchen table, and on the uncovered wash and bathtub. Dirty clothes lay flung in a corner. Beyond them, in the dim bedroom, two suitcases, Rufus’ and Leona’s, lay open in the middle of the floor. On the bed was a twisted gray sheet and a thin blanket.
Rufus stared at him. He seemed not to believe Vivaldo; he seemed to long to believe him. His face twisted, he dropped the knife, and fell against Vivaldo, throwing his arms around him, trembling.
Vivaldo led him into the bedroom and they sat down on the bed.
“Somebody’s got to help me,” said Rufus at last, “somebody’s got to help me. This shit has got to stop.”
“Can’t you tell me about it? You’re screwing up your life. And I don’t know why.”
Rufus sighed and fell back, his arms beneath his head, staring at the ceiling. “I don’t know, either. I don’t know up from down. I don’t know what I’m doing no more.”
The entire building was silent. The room in which they sat seemed very far from the life breathing all around them, all over the island.
Vivaldo said, gently, “You know, what you’re doing to Leona— that’s not right. Even if she were doing what you say she’s doing— it’s not right. If all you can do is beat her, well, then, you ought to leave her.”
Rufus seemed to smile. “I guess there is something the matter with my head.”
Then he was silent again; he twisted his body on the bed; he looked over at Vivaldo.
“You put her in a cab?”
“Yes,” Vivaldo said.
“She’s gone to your place?”
“Yes.”
“You going back there?”
“I thought, maybe, I’d stay here with you for awhile— if you don’t mind.”
“What’re you trying to do— be a warden or something?”
He said it with a smile, but there was no smile in his voice.
“I just thought maybe you wanted company,” said Vivaldo.
Rufus rose from the bed and walked restlessly up and down the two rooms.
“I don’t need no company. I done had enough company to last me the rest of my life.” He walked to the window and stood there, his back to Vivaldo. “How I hate them— all those white sons of bitches out there. They’re trying to kill me, you think I don’t know? They got the world on a string, man, the miserable white cock suckers, and they tying that string around my neck, they killing me.” He turned into the room again; he did not look at Vivaldo. “Sometimes I lie here and I listen— just listen. They out there, scuffling, making that change, they think it’s going to last forever. Sometimes I lie here and listen, listen for a bomb, man, to fall on this city and make all that noise stop. I listen to hear them moan, I want them to bleed and choke, I want to hear them crying, man, for somebody to come help them. They’ll cry a long time before I come down there.” He paused, his eyes glittering with tears and with hate. “It’s going to happen one of these days, it’s got to happen. I sure would like to see it.” He walked back to the window. “Sometimes I listen to those boats on the river— I listen to those whistles— and I think wouldn’t it be nice to get on a boat again and go someplace away from all these nowhere people, where a man could be treated like a man.” He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand and then suddenly brought his fist down on the window sill. “You got to fight with the landlord because the landlord’s white! You got to fight with the elevator boy because the motherfucker’s white. Any bum on the Bowery can shit all over you because maybe he can’t hear, can’t see, can’t walk, can’t fuck— but he’s white!”
“Rufus. Rufus. What about—” He wanted to say, What about me, Rufus? I’m white. He said, “Rufus, not everybody’s like that.”
“No? That’s news to me.”
“Leona loves you—”
“She loves the colored folks so much,” said Rufus, “sometimes I just can’t stand it. You know all that chick knows about me? The only thing she knows?” He put his hand on his sex, brutally, as though he would tear it out, and seemed pleased to see Vivaldo wince. He sat down on the bed again. “That’s all.”
“I think you’re out of your mind,” said Vivaldo. But fear drained his voice of conviction.
“But she’s the only chick in the world for me,” Rufus added, after a moment, “ain’t that a bitch?”
“You’re destroying that girl. Is that what you want?”
“She’s destroying me, too,” said Rufus.
“Well. Is that what you want?”
“What do two people want from each other,” asked Rufus, “when they get together? Do you know?”
“Well, they don’t want to drive each other crazy, man. I know that.”
“You know more than I do,” Rufus said, sardonically. “What do you want— when you get together with a girl?”
“What do I want?”
“Yeah, what do you want?”
“Well,” said Vivaldo, fighting panic, trying to smile, “I just want to get laid, man.” B
ut he stared at Rufus, feeling terrible things stir inside him.
“Yeah?” And Rufus looked at him curiously, as though he were thinking, So that’s the way white boys make it. “Is that all?”
“Well”— he looked down— “I want the chick to love me. I want to make her love me. I want to be loved.”
There was silence. Then Rufus asked, “Has it ever happened?”
“No,” said Vivaldo, thinking of Catholic girls, and whores, “I guess not.”
“How do you make it happen?” Rufus whispered. “What do you do?” He looked over at Vivaldo. He half-smiled. “What do you do?”
“What do you mean, what do I do?” He tried to smile; but he knew what Rufus meant.
“You just do it like you was told?” He tugged at Vivaldo’s sleeve; his voice dropped. “That white chick— Jane— of yours— she ever give you a blow job?”
Oh, Rufus, he wanted to cry, stop this crap! and he felt tears well up behind his eyes. At the same time his heart lunged in terror and he felt the blood leave his face. “I haven’t had a chick that great,” he said, briefly, thinking again of the dreadful Catholic girls with whom he had grown up, of his sister and his mother and father. He tried to force his mind back through the beds he had been in— his mind grew as blank as a wall. “Except,” he said, suddenly, “with whores,” and felt in the silence that then fell that murder was sitting on the bed beside them. He stared at Rufus.
Rufus laughed. He lay back on the bed and laughed until tears began running from the corners of his eyes. It was the worst laugh Vivaldo had ever heard and he wanted to shake Rufus or slap him, anything to make him stop. But he did nothing; he lit a cigarette; the palms of his hands were wet. Rufus choked, sputtered, and sat up. He turned his agonized face to Vivaldo for an instant. Then: “Whores!” he shouted and began to laugh again.
Another Country Page 7