Leading Men

by Christopher Castellani

  They stood for a moment to admire it. It cast an elongated shadow on the far wall, which made it less menacing in its thinness but more imposing in its size. The shadow took up the entire length of the wall. A couple holding hands—a white-haired man with an impossibly young woman in a large floppy hat that concealed her face—hurried past without a greeting. The heat had broken, but the humidity gave the air vibrations. Frank leaned over and kissed the salty dried sweat on Tenn’s neck. He rested his head on his shoulder, gazing at the strange fountain. How you stand here all your days and nights yelling pointlessly at the sun I don’t know.

  “What do you say, Bitte?” Frank asked. “Is our she-wolf here happy or sad?”

  “Do not bait her,” Anja whispered.

  The fountain and the view were the only reasons to journey here, according to Bitte; the rest of the sprawling garden was common ruins. They passed under a low archway onto the path, which was surrounded on all sides by sparse woods and bursts of pink and yellow wildflowers in the brush. Couples lay on their backs on large flat boulders, their legs entwined at the ankles; they stared at the sky, kissed, slept, passed bottles of wine back and forth, climbed on top of each other. What Frank had been told about the old country had turned out to be true: everywhere you looked, even in the middle of nowhere, you found people in love.

  They walked in pairs though the path was wide enough for six across. Bitte and Jack led the way. Tenn and Anja in the middle. Sandro dragged his feet, his hands deep in his pockets, his head low. Frank slowed his pace to keep him company.

  “May I speak a few words to you in private?” Sandro asked, when the others were out of earshot.

  “Me? Sure.”

  “I have been trying to get you alone, but you have not noticed me.”

  “I—”

  “The first thing: It is not my fault about Jack’s book,” he said. “What he told you about it, the Stranger book, is not the truth. The editor, he writes from New York last week to say they cannot publish it. They will not publish it. It is no good, the editor says, even if Jack spends six months more on it, two years more on it. He can’t make what’s not good into something good.”

  “Does Jack know this?”

  “Of course he knows this! He reads the letter. I don’t hide his letters from him; he hides his letters from me. All night he drinks in the bar in Firenze and when he comes home on the last bus he is angry and flies to me with angry fists. And so the next night when he is gone at the bar I read the letters from his desk and that is how I know what they say to him about his book. Still I pretend because if he learns what I know, he will be humiliation.”

  Frank put his arm around Sandro’s neck and pressed close to his side. “The less you know what’s in their letters, the better,” he said. “Trust me. I’ve learned a few things living with a writer these few years.”

  Sandro shook his head. “I want to know everything or nothing.”

  “We’d have had it easier with actresses,” Frank said. The actress can learn her lines, go back onstage the next night, fix her makeup, rethink the character’s psychology, and boom! The audience loves her. The writer has to spend months, years, in the tunnel between one book and the next, with only his lovers and friends to shout at him in the dark, Keep going! It’s good, you’re good! Remember what so-and-so said about that last thing you wrote! “Except they don’t believe a word we say,” Frank said. “I don’t think they even hear us. They need desperately to hear it from us, but we’re never the ones they believe.”

  “Jack gets very angry when I do this, when I try to build him up.”

  “Tenn, too. Except when he doesn’t. Except when he begs me to remind him, over and over again, what he is, who he is. Then he makes me stop. I have quotations memorized from newspapers all over the world. ‘Go have a drink, Frankie,’ he’ll say, when I get revved up with my quotations, pushing me out the door. ‘I’m entitled to my misery.’” Frank threw up his hands in mock defeat, smiling, as if to say, what can we do? Might as well drink, dance, throw a party, find the nearest opera house and buy a front-row ticket.

  That wasn’t the whole truth, though. It had taken Frank years to learn the steps in this song and dance of need and resistance with Tenn, and to sing along to the lyrics of the chorus: “I need you, now go away; chain me up, now hand me the key.” By now, he was used to it all. And to be used to someone, to settle into his moods and demands and affections, wasn’t that something? Wasn’t that the best you could hope for, even when sometimes what you wanted most of all was to make love on a boulder for an audience of strangers, and to come back to the boulder every night at sunset to find that same man waiting there? Wasn’t that, possibly, everything?

  “Some nights I feel like the loneliest man on earth,” Frank admitted to Sandro. “Especially when Tenn’s in the tunnel.” He could set a clock by these episodes, but what he should have told him was that a life of brief bouts of loneliness was far better than what he’d had before, which was one of love in a hundred desperate directions. If he’d been guilty of any crime before Tenn, it was of giving pieces of his heart to too many men who didn’t deserve it. Now Tenn had all of it. It was only the shell of his body, those restless limbs and lips, that they let other men borrow from time to time, and that was less of a crime than it was a dive into cool water.

  “Lonely is not the problem,” said Sandro. “I can’t worry about who is lonely and who is not lonely. The problem is that Jack is killing himself. Worse and worse he becomes with the drinking. The Stranger book was like blood flowing to his heart to keep him alive. But now there is no blood flowing. Before, he drinks and writes together. Anymore it is the drinking by itself all day in the bar in Firenze. After I read the letter is when I decide we must go to Portofino so he can talk to Truman Capote. To save his career. To get help for his mind, maybe, I don’t know, I am desperate. He calls the writings of Capote ‘nonsense,’ but I tell him what does it matter if you like the man’s books if he can make the right introductions? Instead we have a happy accident with the dogs and he meets the great Tennessee Williams, which is even better, and I meet you, you who are a gift to me because we are in, what is it called, the same boat. All day I try to convince Jack to stay even more days here with you and Tennessee Williams, to become friends more close, but he insists we must go tomorrow.” Sandro was near tears, his hands talking loud though his voice was soft and breaking. “He says he will go by himself if he must, take the car and the dog and Marika and leave me here abbandonato.”

  “I’m sorry,” Frank said. In a few minutes, they’d reach the cliff, where their group stood with their hands on the wooden posts for balance, their lips silently parted, looking up and out at the sky streaked with bands of pink and purple. The clouds were burnt red. The percussion sound grew louder from the woods or one of the villages below, Frank couldn’t tell.

  “I love this man,” said Sandro. “You can’t understand how, I know. I see the way you and the others look at him, like he is distasteful. He shows no kindness to me anymore, it is true. There are days when I wish him to disappear. And my heart is too big to disappear myself, to stay all the time with—” He shook his head. They walked in silence a few more steps. “You’ve had women before, yes?”

  “Until the war,” said Frank.

  “Jack is someone in pain,” Sandro said. “You do not have such pain. Not you, so full of life. Not me. Not Signorina Anja. But Jack has it all over his body, pain like his skin on fire. And he is my obligation.”

  They closed in on the others. “I will help you,” Frank assured him, quickly, under his breath, though he had no idea what form that help might take. From all he’d seen and heard, Sandro was better off without the brute. Let Jack drink himself to death if that’s what he wanted. He was entitled to his misery. Tenn had a life force that kept the words coming and the blood flowing, that got him out of the tunnel and the actors onto the stage and the
audience to their feet. If you didn’t have your own life force, no one could lend you his. No one could save you. But he didn’t say any of this to Sandro, not then, and not later. All he could do was offer his vague promise of help.

  “You two sure took your time,” Jack said.

  Other than the old man and his girlfriend with the floppy hat, who nuzzled close a few feet away, they were alone on the edge of the cliff. As the sky blazed and darkened, shadows swept across the towns and lights came on one by one in the houses and restaurants below, quietly welcoming the night.

  “Bellissimo, no?” said Sandro.

  “That breeze,” said Anja.

  “Che spettacolo!” said Tenn.

  “What is all that drumming?” Frank asked, which was when, from behind the hill of trees on the other side of the path, the pack of boys from the street outside the café reappeared. They’d multiplied into more than two dozen bodies, some who looked as old as eighteen, others as young as ten, banging sticks and rocks together and singing in their gibberish tongue. They organized themselves in blocks of three or four, arm in arm, singing different songs, lifting their knees above their waists like soldiers as they marched down the hill.

  “It’s some kind of dumb show,” said Tenn.

  “It’s hideous,” said Bitte.

  In moments, the boys had gathered in front of them, facing them, at the cliff. They inched closer and closer, pushing them in toward the railing with their bony little bodies, making that racket with the sticks and the rocks and their trilling voices and their eyes wide and wildly blinking. The old man pulled his girlfriend away and ran up the path on the other side unnoticed. The boys pointed their sticks at Frank and Tenn and Sandro and Jack, but their eyes and their broad toothy smiles were fixed on Anja and Bitte, still in their sheer sundresses over their white swimsuits.

  Bitte covered her breasts with her arms and stood behind Tenn. “Give them some money or something!” she shouted.

  “Stay calm,” Tenn said, clapping along nervously to the beat of their weird drumming. “They just want our attention. It’ll be over soon.” Still, Frank reached into his pocket to fold the few lire notes he had left.

  “But what are they?”

  “They’re just gypsies,” said Jack. He reached out to one of the younger ones and pressed a coin in his palm. When the boy’s friends surrounded him, Jack turned his pockets inside out and said, “Vuoto! No more!”

  Their teeth were chipped and sharp, with gaps between them as if they’d been knocked out or had never grown there at all. Their ghastly concert went on and on, unbearably, even as, one by one, they handed over their money, darkness falling fast around them. The couples up on the hill climbed down from their boulders, approached the group curiously, then stopped and retreated to the garden. The boys were chanting by then, the chants blending into each other, unceasing, a nightmarish cacophony of nonsense. The voice of the one who appeared to be the leader rose sharp and loud over the others. His eyes were the wildest of the bunch. He had fleshy, pointed ears that jutted from his head like an elf’s. They might have been singing in some obscure Italian or Slavic dialect, but no one, not even Sandro, could place it. They sang and chanted louder and louder, interrupting each other, competing with each other, stretching their mouths wide, baring their broken teeth.

  Bitte tried to make a run for it, but after just a few steps the leader stopped her and held her in place. One of the other tall ones, his skin the color of walnut, then grabbed her from behind, his arm across her chest, her back pulled against him, and sang a slow sweet serenade in her ear. In his other hand, he held a long stick sharpened into a spear. She closed her eyes hard. Her face was terrified. When she stomped her foot on his, he didn’t flinch. Tenn looked to Frank desperately— “Do something,” he said between clenched teeth—but behind them was the cliff and in front of them was the army of boys, whose faces showed a possessed exuberance. Was this some kind of horrible joke, or were they really dangerous? Frank had stared down the Japs without fear, line after line, but he could not imagine how to combat an army of children.

  It was Sandro’s turn to try. “Vai via!” he shouted, stepping toward them and waving his arms like a blind man finding his way.

  The boys jeered at him. The ones with spears pressed them against Sandro’s chest. Ten of them, maybe, had spears. Their faces were streaked with mud.

  Sandro raised his arms above his head. “Andate all’inferno!” he shouted, ticking his chin up.

  “Andate all’inferno!” They shouted back. They chanted his words, girlishly, mincingly, over and over, a queer chorus, as they marched in place. “Andate all’inferno! Andate all’inferno!”

  Frank put his arm around Tenn’s waist. He stood tall and stiffened his chest, muttering under his breath so that Tenn could hear, and then Tenn did the same. “Now!” Frank shouted, and they charged forward together to break through the wall of bodies. The boys swarmed them and brought them to the rocky ground three steps from where they started. They held their legs and pulled at their trunks, slicing into their thighs and backs with their sharp raccoon nails, digging under the skin as if trying to scoop out chunks of flesh. Frank tried to fight them off, punching at their chests and faces, but they kept coming at him. Jack and Sandro landed beside him, tackled easily, their arms flailing. The boys pinned Frank flat on his stomach onto a rock that bruised his ribs, a bare and putrid foot on the back of his neck and another on his shoulder blades to keep him down. Tenn’s body lay on top of his. “What in holy hell is this?” Jack was yelling between gasps, covering his face with his fists, like a boxer, so that the boy kneeling on his chest couldn’t scrape out his eyes.

  “Anja, are you OK?” Frank called out. She and Bitte had been dragged to the edge of the cliff. In flashes, he could see them through the swarm of boy bodies. “Tell me you’re OK!”

  “Frank!” she called back, kicking her legs. She screamed as they pulled at her dress, choking her. “Help!” she shouted.

  “Help us!” Bitte shouted.

  Frank heard the sound of fabric being torn, and there, when he looked up, were the scraps of their white sundresses, bright as flames, being tossed into the blurry darkness. Anja’s arms—probably they were Anja’s arms—reached out for one of the wooden posts and grabbed onto it. He fought his hardest to get out from under the boys, but they kept coming at him to keep him down. Another bare foot settled on his right cheek, smashing the side of his head into the dirt. They’d rolled Tenn off him and, though he couldn’t see him, he knew it was his whiskey-sweet breath on the back of his neck. He knew the rhythm of his lungs in his moments of terror and excitement. He knew the exact thickness of the chest he’d feel if he could only reach back and hold him.

  Bitte had managed to get her arms around Anja’s waist, but Frank had no clear view of what the boys were doing to them. There were too many boys surrounding the women. They piled on top of them, jumped back up, hung back for a moment, and dove forward again. Then Frank saw something he would never, for the rest of his life, be able to shake: one of the boys, his face indistinguishable from the others, opened his mouth wide, his teeth bared like a dog, lunged at Anja’s bare leg and bit into it. She screamed. The boys started chanting even louder, and laughed, and shrieked like falling birds, a horrible noise that drowned out the women’s cries. They took out their little cocks and stretched them, squeezing and pulling them toward the ground, a herd of bony cows milking themselves. Frank imagined the women’s bodies stripped and mud-streaked, the boys, violent with lust, pressing limply into them, suffocating them. Devouring them. He tried again to hoist himself up, but he was immobilized and he was crying, and the crying made him weak. Never before had he felt so powerless, so trapped by the limits of his body.

  Then Luca and his brother appeared, flanked by an army of men, from the boulders, and the boys stopped their chants and dropped their spears and flew into the dark woods. On
ly the leader, the one with the elf ears, stayed on. He was holding Jack by the throat when he saw Luca. The way Jack told it, the boy looked him straight in the eyes in a way that was tender and searching, as if he might gently press his lips to his, but instead he bent down, his left hand still clutching Jack’s throat, picked up a rock the size of a fist, and bashed the rock into Jack’s right temple. It swelled almost immediately into a bump the size and shade of a ripe peach.

  Luca and his brother pinned the boy. They stomped on his groin and, when he curled up in pain, like a sow bug, they kicked at his face until it bled. They dragged his unconscious body, his eyes already bruised, the back of his head a seeping mess of gashes, to the edge of the cliff. Luca rolled him over it onto a ridge ten feet down, where he landed with his neck twisted the wrong way. The men stood there watching him, breathing hard. The boy didn’t move. Then Luca slid down to the ridge and turned his head toward the towns and the boats in full glitter below.

  * * *

  • • •

  A TOURIST FOUND THE BODY the next afternoon. The story was gossiped over for a few days, and then the police hushed it up quickly to protect Luca and his brother, Roberto, who would never have been charged anyway for ridding the world of a barbaric gypsy with no name and no papers. Who could prove he existed at all? No family came forward to claim him, no group cried out for justice. His tribe of boys disappeared into the woods, and then, Frank imagined, they dispersed among the low streets of the resort towns up and down the peninsula, where they targeted old women susceptible to pity. For years afterward, Frank searched the faces of gypsies whenever he passed them in various cities up and down Italy and North Africa, but he would have recognized only the leader by his eyes and ears, and maybe the tall boy with the walnut skin, who Bitte said smelled of cloves.

  No detective followed Jack and Sandro from Portofino to the bungalow in Marina di Cecina, where they’d planned to swim and sail until the end of August. By then, Frank and Tenn and Anja were hundreds of miles away, and Bitte’s rich old man, Signor Ricciardi, had set his sights on her again, because—and hadn’t Frank known this all along?—the appearance of youth was as seductive as the real thing, especially when time was short and you were desperate for someone to lavish love on.