Giovanni's Room

by James Baldwin

  'What is she doing, wandering around through Spain alone?' asked Giovanni.

  'She likes to travel,' I said.

  'Oh,' said Giovanni, 'nobody likes to travel, especially not women. There must be some other reason.' He raised his eyebrows suggestively. 'Perhaps she has a Spanish lover and is afraid to tell you—? Perhaps she is with a torero.'

  Perhaps she is, I thought. 'But she wouldn't be afraid to tell me.'

  Giovanni laughed. 'I do not understand Americans at all,' he said.

  'I don't see that there's anything very hard to understand. We aren't married, you know.'

  'But she is your mistress, no?' asked Giovanni.

  'Yes.'

  'And she is still your mistress?'

  I stared at him. 'Of course,' I said.

  'Well then,' said Giovanni, I do not understand what she is doing in Spain while you are in Paris.' Another thought struck him. 'How old is she?'

  'She's two years younger than I am.' I watched him. 'What's that got to do with it?'

  'Is she married? I mean to somebody else, naturally.'

  I laughed. He laughed too. 'Of course not.'

  Well, I thought she might be an older woman,' said Giovanni, 'with a husband somewhere and perhaps she had to go away with him from time to time in order to be able to continue her affair with you. That would be a nice arrangement. Those women are sometimes very interesting and they usually have a little money. If that woman was in Spain, she would bring back a wonderful gift for you. But a young girl, bouncing around in a foreign country by herself—I do not like that at all. You should find another mistress.'

  It all seemed very funny. I could not stop laughing. 'Do you have a mistress?' I asked him.

  'Not now,' he said, 'but perhaps I will again one day.' He half frowned, half smiled. 'I don't seem to be very interested in women right now—I don't know why. I used to be. Perhaps I will be again.' He shrugged. 'Perhaps it is because women are just a little more trouble than I can afford right now. Et puis'—He stopped.

  I wanted to say that it seemed to me that he had taken a most peculiar road out of his trouble; but I only said, after a moment, cautiously: 'You don't seem to have a very high opinion of women.'

  'Oh, women! There is no need, thank heaven, to have an opinion about women. Women are like water. They are tempting like that, and they can be that treacherous, and they can seem to be that bottomless, you know?—and they can be that shallow. And that dirty.' He stopped. I perhaps don't like women very much, that's true. That hasn't stopped me from making love to many and loving one or two. But most of the time—most of the time I made love only with the body.'

  'That can make one very lonely,' I said. I had not expected to say it.

  He had not expected to hear it. He looked at me and reached out and 'Youched me on the cheek. 'Yes,' he said. Then : 'I am not trying to be méchant when I talk about women. I respect women—very much—for their inside life, which is not like the life of a man.'

  'Women don't seem to like that idea,' I said.

  'Oh, well,' said Giovanni, 'these absurd women running around today, full of ideas and nonsense, and thinking themselves equal to men— quelle rigolade!—they need to be beaten half to death so that they can find out who rules the world.'

  I laughed. 'Did the women you knew like to get beaten?'

  He smiled. I don't know if they liked it. But a beating never made them go away.' We both laughed. 'They were not, anyway, like that silly little girl of yours, wandering all over Spain and sending postcards back to Paris. What does she think she is doing? Does she want you or does she not want you?'

  'She went to Spain,' I said, 'to find out.'

  Giovanni opened his eyes wide. He was indignant. To Spain? Why not to China? What is she doing, testing all the Spaniards and comparing them with you?'

  I was a little annoyed. 'You don't understand,' I said. 'She is a very intelligent, very complex girl; she wanted to go away and think.'

  'What is there to think about? She sounds rather silly, I must say. She just can't make up her mind what bed to sleep in. She wants to eat her cake and she wants to have it all.'

  'If she were in Paris now,' I said, abruptly, 'then I would not be in this room with you.'

  'You would possibly not be living here,' he conceded, Taut we would certainly be seeing each other, why not?'

  'Why not? Suppose she found out?'

  'Found out? Found out what?'

  'Oh, stop it,' I said. 'You know what there is to find out.'

  He looked at me very soberly. 'She sounds more and more impossible, this little girl of yours. What does she do, follow you everywhere? Or will she hire detectives to sleep under our bed? And what business is it of hers, anyway?'

  'You can't possibly be serious,' I said.

  'I certainly can be,' he retorted, 'and I am. You are the incomprehensible one.' He groaned and poured more coffee and picked up our cognac from the floor. 'Chez toi everything sounds extremely feverish and complicated, like one of those English murder mysteries. To find out, to find out, you keep saying, as though we were accomplices in a crime. We have not committed any crime.' He poured the cognac.

  'It's just that she'll be terribly hurt if she does find out, that's all. People have very dirty words for—for this situation.' I stopped. His face suggested that my reasoning was flimsy. I added, defensively, 'Besides, it is a crime—in my country and, after all, I didn't grow up here, I grew up there.'

  If dirty words frighten you,' said Giovanni, I really do not know how you have managed to live so long. People are full of dirty words. The only time they do not use them, most people I mean, is when they are describing something dirty.' He paused and we watched each other. In spite of what he was saying, he looked rather frightened himself. 'If your countrymen think that privacy is a crime, so much the worse for your country. And as for this girl of yours— are you always at her side when she is here? I mean, all day, every day? You go out sometimes to have a drink alone, no? Maybe you sometimes take a walk without her—to think, as you say. The Americans seem to do a great deal of thinking. And perhaps while you are thinking and having that drink, you look at another girl who passes, no? Maybe you even look up at that sky and feel your own blood in you? Or does everything stop when Hella comes? No drinks alone, no looks at other girls, no sky? Eh? Answer me.'

  'I've told you already that we're not married. But I don't seem to be able to make you understand anything at all this morning.'

  'But anyway—when Hella is here you do sometimes see other people—without Hella?'

  'Of course.'

  'And does she make you tell her everything you have done while you were not with her?'

  I sighed. I had lost control of the conversation somewhere along the line and I simply wanted it to end. I drank my cognac too fast and it burned my throat. 'Of course not.'

  'Well. You are a very charming and good-looking and civilized boy and, unless you are impotent, I do not see what she has to complain about, or what you have to worry about. To arrange, mon cher, la vie pratique, is very simple—it only has to be done.' He reflected. 'Sometimes things go wrong, I agree; then you have to arrange it another way. But it is certainly not the English melodrama you make it. Why, that way, life would simply be unbearable.' He poured more cognac and grinned at me, as though he had solved all my problems. And there was something so artless in this smile that I had to smile back. Giovanni liked to believe that he was hard-headed and that I was not and that he was teaching me the stony facts of life. It was very important for him to feel this: it was because he knew, unwillingly, at the very bottom of his heart, that I, helplessly, at the very bottom of mine, resisted him with all my strength.

  Eventually we grew still, we fell silent, and we slept. We awoke around three or four in the afternoon, when the dull sun was prying at odd corners of the cluttered room. We arose and washed and shaved, bumping into each other and making jokes and furious with the unstated desire to escape the room. Then
we danced out into the streets, into Paris, and ate quickly somewhere, and I left Giovanni at the door to Guillaume's bar.

  Then I, alone, and relieved to be alone, perhaps went to a movie, or walked, or returned home and read, or sat in a park and read, or sat on a cafe terrace, or talked to people, or wrote letters. I wrote to Hella, telling her nothing, or I wrote to my father asking for money. And no matter what I was doing, another me sat in my belly, absolutely cold with terror over the question of my life.

  Giovanni had awakened an itch, had released a gnaw in me. I realized it one afternoon, when I was taking him to work via the Boulevard Montparnasse. We had bought a kilo of cherries and we were eating them as we walked along. We were both insufferably childish and high-spirited that afternoon and the spectacle we presented, two grown men jostling each other on the wide sidewalk and aiming the cherry pits, as though they were spitballs, into each other's faces, must have been outrageous. And I realized that such childishness was fantastic at my age and the happiness out of which it sprang yet more so; for that moment I really loved Giovanni, who had never seemed more beautiful than he was that afternoon. And, watching his face, I realized that it meant much to me that I could make his face so bright. I saw that I might be willing to give a great deal not to lose that power. And I felt myself flow toward him, as a river rushes when the ice breaks up. Yet, at that very moment, there passed between us on the pavement another boy, a stranger, and I invested him at once with Giovanni's beauty and what I felt for Giovanni I also felt for him. Giovanni saw this and saw my face and it made him laugh the more. I blushed and he kept laughing and then the boulevard, the light, the sound of his laughter turned into a scene from a nightmare. I kept looking at the trees, the light falling through the leaves. I felt sorrow and shame and panic and great bitterness. At the same time—it was part of my turmoil and also outside it—I felt the muscles in my neck tighten with the effort I was making not to turn my head and watch that boy diminish down the bright avenue. The beast which Giovanni had awakened in me would never go to sleep again; but one day I would not be with Giovanni anymore. And would I then, like all the others, find myself turning and following all kinds of boys down God knows what dark avenues, into what dark places?

  With this fearful intimation there opened in me a hatred for Giovanni which was as powerful as my love and which was nourished by the same roots.

  Chapter Two

  I scarcely know how to describe that room. It became, in a way, every room I had ever been in and every room I find myself in hereafter will remind me of Giovanni's room. I did not really stay there very long—we met before the spring began and I left there during the summer—but it still seems to me that I spent a lifetime there. Life in that room seemed to be occurring underwater, as I say, and it is certain that I underwent a sea change there.

  To begin with, the room was not large enough for two. It looked out on a small courtyard. Looked out means only that the room had two windows, against which the courtyard malevolently pressed, encroaching day by day, as though it had confused itself with a jungle. We, or rather Giovanni kept the windows closed most of the time. He had never bought any curtains; neither did we buy any while I was in the room. To insure privacy, Giovanni had obscured the window panes with a heavy, white cleaning polish. We sometimes heard children playing outside our window, sometimes strange shapes loomed against it. At such moments, Giovanni, working in the room, or lying in bed, would stiffen like a hunting dog and remain perfectly silent until whatever seemed to threaten our safety had moved away.

  He had always had great plans for remodelling this room, and before I arrived he had already begun. One of the walls was a dirty, streaked white where he had torn off the wallpaper. The wall facing it was destined never to be uncovered, and on this wall a lady in a hoop skirt and a man in knee breeches perpetually walked together, hemmed in by roses. The wallpaper lay on the floor, in great sheets and scrolls, in dust. On the floor also lay our dirty laundry, along with Giovanni's tools and the paint brushes and the bottles of oil and turpentine. Our suitcases teetered on top of something, so that we dreaded ever having to open them and sometimes went without some minor necessity, such as clean socks, for days.

  No one ever came to see us, except Jacques, and he did not come often. We were far from the center of the city and we had no phone.

  I remembered the first afternoon I woke up there, with Giovanni fast asleep beside me, heavy as a fallen rock. The sun filtered through the room so faintly that I was worried about the time. I stealthily lit a cigarette, for I did not want to wake Giovanni. I did not yet know how I would face his eyes. I looked about me. Giovanni had said something in the taxi about his room being very dirty. 'I'm sure it is,' I had said lightly, and turned away from him, looking out of the window. Then we had both been silent. When I woke up in his room, I remembered that there had been something strained and painful in the quality of that silence, which had been broken when Giovanni said, with a shy, bitter smile: 'I must find some poetic figure.'

  And he spread his heavy fingers in the air, as though a metaphor were tangible. I watched him.

  'Look at the garbage of this city,' he said, finally, and his fingers indicated the flying street, 'all of the garbage of this city? Where do they take it? I don't know where they take it— but it might very well be my room.'

  It's much more likely,' I said, 'that they dump it into the Seine.'

  But I sensed, when I woke up and looked around the room, the bravado and the cowardice of his figure of speech. This was not the garbage of Paris, which would have been anonymous: this was Giovanni's regurgitated life.

  Before and beside me and all over the, room, towering like a wall, were boxes of cardboard and leather, some tied with string, some locked, some bursting, and out of the topmost box before me spilled down sheets of violin music. There was a violin in the room, lying on the table in its warped, cracked case—it was impossible to guess from looking at it whether it had been laid to rest there yesterday or a hundred years before. The table was loaded with yellowing newspapers and empty bottles and it held a single brown and wrinkled potato in which even the sprouting eyes were rotten. Red wine had been spilled on the floor; it had been allowed to dry and it made the air in the room sweet and heavy. But it was not the room's disorder which was frightening; it was the fact that when one began searching for the key to this disorder, one realized that it was not to be found in any of the usual places. For this was not a matter of habit or circumstance or temperament; it was a matter of punishment and grief. I do not know how I knew this, but I knew it at once; perhaps I knew it because I wanted to live. And I stared at the room with the same, nervous, calculating extension of the intelligence and of all one's forces which occurs when gauging a mortal and unavoidable danger: at the silent walls of the room with its distant, archaic lovers trapped in an interminable rose garden, and the staring windows, staring like two great eyes of ice and fire, and the ceiling which lowered like those clouds out of which fiends have sometimes spoken and which obscured but failed to soften its malevolence behind the yellow light which hung like a diseased and undefinable sex m its center. Under this blunted arrow, this smashed flower of fight lay the terrors which encompassed Giovanni's soul. I understood why Giovanni had wanted me and had brought me to his last retreat. I was to destroy this room and give to Giovanni a new and better life. This life could only be my own, which, in order to transform Giovanni's, must first become a part of Giovanni's room.

  In the beginning, because the motives which led me to Giovanni's room were so mixed, had so little to do with his hopes and desires, and were so deeply a part of my own desperation, I invented in myself a kind of pleasure in playing the housewife after Giovanni had gone to work. I threw out the paper, the bottles, the fantastic accumulation of trash; I examined the contents of the innumerable boxes and suitcases and disposed of them. But I am not a housewife—men never can be housewives. And the pleasure was never real or deep, though Giovanni smiled his hu
mble, grateful smile and told me in as many ways as he could find how wonderful it was to have me there, how I stood, with my love and my ingenuity, between him and the dark. Each day he invited me to witness how he had changed, how love had changed him, how he worked and sang and cherished me. I was in a terrible confusion. Sometimes I thought, but this is your life. Stop fighting it. Stop fighting. Or I thought, but I am happy. And he loves me. I am safe. Sometimes, when he was not near me, I thought, I will never let him 'Youch me again. Then, when he 'Youched me, I thought, it doesn't matter, it is only the body, it will soon be over. When it was over, I lay in the dark and listened to his breathing and dreamed of the 'Youch of hands, of Giovanni's hands, or anybody's hands, hands which would have the power to crush me and make me whole again.

  Sometimes I left Giovanni over our afternoon breakfast, blue smoke from a cigarette circling around his head, and went off to the American Express office at Opéra, where my mail would be, if I had any. Sometimes, but rarely, Giovanni came with me; he said that he could not endure being surrounded by so many Americans. He said they all looked alike—as I am sure they did, to hI'm. But they didn't look alike to me. I was aware that they all had in common something that made them Americans, but I could never put my finger on what it was. I knew that whatever this common quality was, I shared it. And I knew that Giovanni had been attracted to me partly because of it. When Giovanni wanted me to know that he was displeased with me, he said I was a 'vrai américain'; conversely, when delighted, he said that I was not an American at all; and on both occasions he was striking, deep in me, a nerve which did not throb in him. And I resented this : resented being called an American (and resented resenting it) because it seemed to make me nothing more than that, whatever that was; and I resented being called not an American because it seemed to make me nothing.