Giovanni's Room

by James Baldwin

  My father had money in his account which belonged to me but he was very reluctant to send it because he wanted me to come home— to come home, as he said, and settle down, and whenever he said that I thought of the sediment at the bottom of a stagnant pond. I did not, then, know many people in Paris and Hella was in Spain. Most of the people I knew in Paris were, as Parisians sometimes put it, of le milieu and, while this milieu was certainly anxious enough to claim me, I was intent on proving, to them and to myself, that I was not of their company. I did this by being in their company a great deal and manifesting toward all of them a tolerance which placed me, I believed, above suspicion. I had written to friends for money, of course, but the Atlantic Ocean is deep and wide and money doesn't hurry from the other side.

  So I went through my address book, sitting over a tepid coffee in a boulevard cafe, and decided to call up an old acquaintance who was always asking me to call, an aging, Belgian-born, American businessman named Jacques. He had a big, comfortable apartment and lots of things to drink and lots of money. He was, as I knew he would be, surprised to hear from me and before the surprise and the charm wore off, giving him time to become wary, he had invited me for supper. He may have been cursing as he hung up, and reaching for his wallet, but it was too late. Jacques is not too bad. Perhaps he is a fool and a coward but almost everybody is one or the other and most people are both. In some ways I liked him. He was silly but he was so lonely; anyway, I understand now that the contempt I felt for him involved my self-contempt. He could be unbelievably generous, he could be unspeakably stingy. Though he wanted to trust everybody, he was incapable of trusting a living soul; to make up for this, he threw his money away on people; inevitably, then, he was abused. Then he buttoned his wallet, locked his door, and retired into that strong self-pity which was, perhaps, the only thing he had which really belonged to him. I thought for a long while that he, with his big apartment, his well-meant promises, his whiskey, his marijuana, his orgies, had helped to kill Giovanni. As, indeed, perhaps he had. But Jacques' hands are certainly no bloodier than mine.

  I saw Jacques, as a matter of fact, just after Giovanni was sentenced. He was sitting bundled up in his greatcoat on the terrace of a cafe, drinking a vin chaud. He was alone on the terrace. He called me as I passed.

  He did not look well, his face was mottled, his eyes, behind his glasses, were like the eyes of a dying man who looks everywhere for healing.

  'You've heard,' he whispered, as I joined him, 'about Giovanni?'

  I nodded yes. I remember the winter sun was shining and I felt as cold and distant as the sun.

  'It's terrible, terrible, terrible,' Jacques moaned. 'Terrible.'

  'Yes,' I said. I could not say anything more.

  'I wonder why he did it,' Jacques pursued, 'why he didn't ask his friends to help him.' He looked at me. We both knew that the last time Giovanni had asked Jacques for money, Jacques had refused. I said nothing. They say he had started taking opium,' Jacques said, 'that he needed the money for opium. Did you hear that?'

  I had heard it. It was a newspaper speculation which, however, I had reasons of my own for believing, remembering the extent of Giovanni's desperation, knowing how far this terror, which was so vast that it had simply become a void, had driven him. 'Me, I want to escape,' he had told me, 'je veux m'evader—this dirty world, this dirty body. I never wish to make love again with anything more than the body.'

  Jacques waited for me to answer. I stared out into the street. I was beginning to think of Giovanni dying—where Giovanni had been there would be nothing, nothing forever.

  'I hope it's not my fault,' Jacques said at last. 1 didn't give him the money. If I'd known—I would have given him everything I had.'

  But we both knew this was not true.

  'You two together,' Jacques suggested, 'you weren't happy together?'

  'No,' I said. I stood up. It might have been better,' I said, If he'd stayed down there in that village of his in Italy and planted his olive trees and had a lot of children and beaten his wife. He used to love to sing,' I remembered suddenly, 'maybe he could have stayed down there and sung his life away and died in bed.'

  Then Jacques said something that surprised me. People are full of surprises, even for themselves, if they have been stirred enough. 'Nobody can stay in the garden of Eden,' Jacques said. And then: 'I wonder why.'

  I said nothing. I said goodbye and left him. Hella had long since returned from Spain and we were already arranging to rent this house and I had a date to meet her.

  I have thought about Jacques' question since. The question is banal but one of the real troubles with living is that living is so banal. Everyone, after all, goes the same dark road—and the road has a trick of being most dark, most treacherous, when it seems most bright— and it's true that nobody stays in the garden of Eden. Jacques' garden was not the same as Giovanni's, of course. Jacques' garden was involved with football players and Giovanni's was involved with maidens—but that seems to have made so little difference. Perhaps everybody has a garden of Eden, I don't know; but they have scarcely seen their garden before they see the flaming sword. Then, perhaps, life only offers the choice of remembering the garden or forgetting it. Either, or: it takes strength to remember, it takes another kind of strength to forget, it takes a hero to do both. People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their innocence; people who forget court another kind of madness, the madness of the denial of pain and the hatred of innocence; and the world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget. Heroes are rare.

  Jacques had not wanted to have supper in his apartment because his cook had run away. His cooks were always running away. He was always getting young boys from the provinces, God knows how, to come up and be cooks; and they, of course, as soon as they were able to find their way around the capital, decided that cooking was the last thing they wanted to do. They usually ended up going back to the provinces, those, that is, who did not end up on the streets, or in jail, or in Indochina.

  I met him at a rather nice restaurant on the rue de Grenelle and arranged to borrow ten thousand francs from him before we had finished our aperitifs. He was in a good mood and I, of course, was in a good mood too, and this meant that we would end up drinking in Jacques' favorite bar, a noisy, crowded, ill-fit sort of tunnel, of dubious—or perhaps not dubious at all, of rather too emphatic—reputation. Every once in a while it was raided by the police, apparently with the connivance of Guillaume, the patron, who always managed, on the particular evening, to warn his favorite customers that if they were not armed with identification papers they might be better off elsewhere.

  I remember that the bar, that night, was more than ordinarily crowded and noisy. All of the habitués were there and many strangers, some looking, some just staring. There were three or four very chic Parisian ladies sitting at a table with their gigolos or their lovers or perhaps simply their country cousins, God knows; the ladies seemed extremely animated, their males seemed rather stiff; the ladies seemed to be doing most of the drinking. There were the usual paunchy, bespectacled gentlemen with avid, sometimes despairing eyes, the usual, knife-blade lean, tight-trousered boys. One could never be sure, as concerns these latter, whether they were after money or blood or love. They moved about the bar incessantly, cadging cigarettes and drinks, with something behind their eyes at once terribly vulnerable and terribly hard. There were, of course, les folles, always dressed in the most improbable combinations, screaming like parrots the details of their latest love affairs—their love affairs always seemed to be hilarious. Occasionally one would swoop in, quite late in the evening, to convey the news that he—but they always called each other 'she'—had just spent time with a celebrated movie star, or boxer. Then all of the others closed in on this newcomer and they looked like a peacock garden and sounded like a barnyard. I always found it difficult to believe that they ever went to bed with anybody, for a man who wanted a woman wo
uld certainly have rather had a real one and a man who wanted a man would certainly not want one of them. Perhaps, indeed, that was why they screamed so loud. There was the boy who worked all day, it was said, in the post office, who came out at night wearing makeup and earrings and with his heavy blond hair piled high. Sometimes he actually wore a skirt and high heels. He usually stood alone unless Guillaume walked over to tease him. People said that he was very nice, but I confess that his utter grotesqueness made me uneasy; perhaps in the same way that the sight of monkeys eating their own excrement turns some people's stomachs. They might not mind so much if monkeys did not—so grotesquely—resemble human beings.

  This bar was practically in my quartier and I had many times had breakfast in the nearby workingman's cafe to which all the nightbirds of the neighborhood retired when the bars closed. Sometimes I was with Hella; sometimes I was alone. And I had been in this bar, too, two or three times; once very drunk, I had been accused of causing a minor sensation by flirting with a soldier. My memory of that night was, happily, very dim, and I took the attitude that no matter how drunk I may have been, I could not possibly have done such a thing. But my face was known and I had the feeling that people were taking bets about me. Or, it was as though they were the elders of some strange and austere holy order and were watching me in order to discover, by means of signs I made but which only they could read, whether or not I had a true vocation.

  Jacques was aware, I was aware, as we pushed our way to the bar—it was like moving into the field of a magnet or like approaching a small circle of heat—of the presence of a new barman. He stood, insolent and dark and leonine, his elbow leaning on the cash register, his fingers playing with his chin, looking out at the crowd. It was as though his station were a promontory and we were the sea.

  Jacques was immediately attracted. I felt him, so to speak, preparing himself for conquest. I felt the necessity for tolerance.

  'Im sure,' I said, 'that you'll want to get to know the barman. So I'll vanish anytime you like.'

  There was, in this tolerance of mind, a fund, by no means meagre, of malicious knowledge— I had drawn on it when I called him up to borrow money. I knew that Jacques could only hope to conquer the boy before us if the boy was, in effect, for sale; and if he stood with such arrogance on an auction block he could certainly find bidders richer and more attractive than Jacques. I knew that Jacques knew this. I knew something else: that Jacques' vaunted affection for me was involved with desire, the desire, in fact, to be rid of me, to be able, soon, to despise me as he now despised that army of boys who had come, without love, to his bed. I held my own against this desire by pretending that Jacques and I were friends, by forcing Jacques, on pain of humiliation, to pretend this. I pretended not to see, although I exploited it, the lust not quite sleeping in his bright, bitter eyes and, by means of the rough, male candor with which I conveyed to him his case was hopeless, I compelled him, endlessly, to hope. And I knew, finally, that in bars such as these I was Jacques' protection. As long as I was there the world could see and he could believe that he was out with me, his friend, he was not there out of desperation, he was not at the mercy of whatever adventurer chance, cruelty, or the laws of actual and emotional poverty might throw his way.

  'You stay right here' said Jacques. I'll look at him from time to time and talk to you and that way I'll save money—and stay happy, too.'

  'I wonder where Guillaume found him,' I said.

  For he was so exactly the kind of boy that Guillaume always dreamed of that it scarcely seemed possible that Guillaume could have found him.

  'What will you have?' he now asked us. His tone conveyed that, though he spoke no English, he knew that we had been speaking about him and hoped we were through.

  'Une fine à l'eau,' I said; and 'un cognac sec' said Jacques, both speaking too quickly, so that I blushed and realized by a faint merriment on Giovanni's face as he served us that he had seen it.

  Jacques, wilfully misinterpreting Giovanni's nuance of a smile, made of it an opportunity. 'You're new here?' he asked in English.

  Giovanni almost certainly understood the question, but it suited him better to look blankly from Jacques to me and then back again at Jacques. Jacques translated his question.

  Giovanni shrugged. I have been here a month,' he said.

  I knew where the conversation was going and I kept my eyes down and sipped my drink.

  'It must,' Jacques suggested, with a sort of bludgeoning insistence on the light touch, 'seem very strange to you.'

  'Strange?' asked Giovanni. 'Why?'

  And Jacques giggled. I was suddenly ashamed that I was with him. 'AH these men'—and I knew that voice, breathless, insinuating, high as no girl's had ever been, and hot, suggesting, somehow, the absolutely motionless, deadly heat which hangs over swamp ground in July— 'all these men,' he gasped, 'and so few women. Doesn't that seem strange to you?'

  'Ah,' said Giovanni, and turned away to serve another customer, 'ho doubt the women are waiting at home.'

  'Im sure one's waiting for you,' insisted Jacques, to which Giovanni did not respond.

  'Well. That didn't take long,' said Jacques, half to me, half to the space which had just held Giovanni. 'Aren't you glad you stayed? You've got me all to yourself.'

  'Oh, you're handling it all wrong,' I said. He's mad for you. He just doesn't want to seem too anxious. Order him a drink. Find out where he likes to buy his clothes. Tell him about that cunning little Alfa Romeo you're just dying to give away to some deserving bartender.'

  'Very funny,' said Jacques.

  'Well,' I said, 'faint heart never won fair athlete, that's for sure.'

  'Anyway, I'm sure he sleeps with girls. They always do, you know.'

  'I've heard about boys who do that. Nasty little beasts.'

  We stood in silence for awhile.

  'Why don't you invite him to have a drink with us?' Jacques suggested.

  I looked at him.

  Why don't I? Well, you may find this hard to believe, but, actually, I'm sort of queer for girls myself. If that was his sister looking so good, I'd invite her to have a drink with us. I don't spend money on men.'

  I could see Jacques struggling not to say that I didn't have any objection to allowing men to spend money on me; I watched his brief struggle with a slight smile, for I knew he couldn't say it; then he said, with that cheery, brave smile of his:

  'I was not suggesting that you jeopardize, even for a moment, that'—he paused—'that immaculate manhood which is your pride and joy. I only suggested that you invite him because he will almost certainly refuse if I invite him.'

  'But man,' I said, grinning, 'think of the confusion. He'll think that I'm the one who's lusting for his body. How do we get out of that?'

  'If there should be any confusion,' said Jacques, with dignity, 'I will be happy to clear it up.'

  We measured each other for a moment. Then I laughed. 'Wait till he comes back this way. I hope he orders a magnum of the most expensive champagne in France.'

  I turned, leaning on the bar. I felt, somehow, elated. Jacques, beside me, was very quiet, suddenly very frail and old, and I felt a quick, sharp, rather frightened pity for him. Giovanni had been out on the floor, serving the people at tables, and he now returned with a rather grim smile on his face, carrying a loaded tray.

  'Maybe,' I said, 'it would look better if our glasses were empty.'

  We finished our drinks. I set down my glass.

  'Barman?' I called.

  'The same?'

  'Yes.' He started to turn away. 'Barman,' I said, quickly, 'we would like to offer you a drink, if we may.'

  'Eh, bien!' said a voice behind us, 'c'est fort ça! Not only have you finally—thank heaven!— corrupted this great American football player, you use him now to corrupt my barman. Vraiment, Jacques! At your age!'

  It was Guillaume standing behind us, grinning like a movie star, and waving that long white handkerchief which he was never, in the bar at any rat
e, to be seen without. Jacques turned, hugely delighted to be accused of such rare seductiveness, and he and Guillaume fell into each other arms like old theatrical sisters.

  'Eh bien, ma chérie, comment vas-tu? I have not seen you for a long time.'

  'But I have been awfully busy,' said Jacques.

  'I don't doubt it I Aren't you ashamed, vieille folle?'

  'Et toi? You certainly don't seem to have been wasting your time.'

  And Jacques threw a delighted look in the direction of Giovanni, rather as though Giovanni were a valuable racehorse or a rare bit of china. Guillaume followed the look and his voice dropped.

  'Ah, ça, mon cher, c'est strictement du business, comprends-tu?'

  They moved a little away. This left me surrounded, abruptly, with an awful silence. At last I raised my eyes and looked at Giovanni, who was watching me.

  'I think you offered me a drink,' he said.

  'Yes,' I said. 'I offered you a drink.'

  'I drink no alcohol while I work, but I will take a Coca-Cola.' He picked up my glass. 'And for you—it is the same?'

  'The same.' I realized that I was quite happy to be talking with him and this realization made me shy. And I felt menaced since Jacques was no longer at my side. Then I realized that I would have to pay, for this round anyway; it was impossible to tug Jacques' sleeve for the money as though I were his ward. I coughed and put my ten thousand franc note on the bar.

  'You are rich,' said Giovanni, and set my drink before me.

  'But no. No. I simply have no change.'

  He grinned. I could not tell whether he grinned because he thought I was lying or because he knew I was telling the truth. In silence he took the bill and rang it up and carefully counted out my change on the bar before me. Then he filled his glass and went back to his original position at the cash register. I felt a tightening in my chest.