He went back into the blaring arcade, the grilling sun, the crowds. An American parachutist lounged against one of the columns, his knee arched so that a boot was off the pavement. He was chewing gum and wiping away the sweat from under his cap. This parachutist was arriving at a price agreement with a small girl in a tight blue dress. Her body was skinny, on her bolero she wore officers’ insignia, wings, and divisional patches. She also chewed gum. Beside her stood a scabrous urchin presiding as auctioneer, screaming out a sales talk, the specifications of her charms. The parachutist had his eyes half-closed and worked lazily on his gum while he reached out for the girl’s waist. He muttered slowly:
—I said vieni qua. Ya know it’s all a crocka shit.
Michael Patrick in passing attempted by some secret glance to show the girl that he understood and apologized. But she spat her gum on his shoes. He blushed and entered a little shop where rows of bottles stood like soldiers at attention. He knew very well what he could buy here—Benevento alcohol at five hundred lire a bottle. It carried labels of Scotch, cognac, and gin, but it was all the same stuff with different flavoring. You weren’t supposed to buy it because it went to your liver or to your eyes. But it did hit you with a hard bright drunkenness, and that was what he was seeking. He came out of the shop with the bottle propped like a ramrod inside his trousers. It couldn’t fall to the ground because his pants were tucked into the tops of his boots.
He went back to the courtyard with the fountain and sat down on the rim. Perhaps the woman who had called out the friendly lambasting might appear again. But most of all he wanted to get the sun out of his eyes. Sprawled along the lip of the fountain, he wondered whether he should pull out his bottle and taste it. He put his head between his thighs. Almost at once a dark heaviness passed over him like a wing, and he fell asleep.
No dreams visited him: he blacked out for an hour or so. Often when he tried to sleep sober, he’d hear the shriek and thud of artillery or screaming and lamenting that seemed to seep up from a rocking earth. But this was a sleep of negation in which he ceased to be for a while. On the line sleep had been the one pleasure he’d had to look forward to.
He twitched up suddenly with the beginnings of a sick headache. The Tedeschi watch told him it was time. His chin had been scraping the blue infantry badge above his heart. He got up and dragged along with a new sort of limp, for the bottle stiffened his right knee. He barged across the arcade with his head down, in that same feeling of apprehension when he’d crossed the New York streets with a hangover, the feeling of a frightful doom suspended over his head.
There was a portico running along the outside of the San Carlo Theater. There was also a traffic island and a green-lighted pro station. The opera crowd reached in a queue out of sight, except for a few who waited for their opera guests outside the arches. Or those who were more than usually lonely waited here to invite or to be invited inside.
Michael Patrick managed to get across from the arcade in blind lunges that carried him to the doors of the San Carlo. At first he thought he’d give away his extra ticket to somebody in the waiting line, but instead he ran up the stairway and shoved his ticket at one of the Neapolitans. They wore dirty powdered wigs, brocade crimson coats, knee breeches and stained white stockings. As his ticket was torn in half, he laughed and looked down at the splayed pumps of the ticket taker.
—Trade ya my boots, he said a little thickly, and watched the bowing flunky bounce back from the impact of his own vermouthy breath.
Michael Patrick climbed to his box in the sixth tier at the right-hand corner of the proscenium arch. There was no one else in this palco. The box door was unlocked by yet another character in eighteenth-century costume. Michael Patrick dug out a tip of one hundred lire and settled himself in a high-backed poltrona by the railing of his box. He could look straight down into the orchestra pit, where sweating gossiping men and women were tuning up or chaffing their friends who had dropped in casually on them in the pit. The San Carlo orchestra pit was as friendly and communal as a bomb shelter. Over the burr of the oboe and the running scales of the strings, the players and their guests chattered and fanned themselves with the evening newspaper.
Looking again with relief to see that there wasn’t anybody else besides himself in the box, Michael Patrick loosened his belt and extracted the bottle of cognac from his trouser leg. As he took his first swig, all the lights in the theater blinked out. Red glows appeared over the exits. The flutter and movement in the house abated, giving way to a noisy shushing by the audience. Only the orchestra in their cellar gave off a nimbus of phosphorescence; the footlights stained the velvet curtain as rich and dark as blood. Michael Patrick gasped with delight and leaned far out over the barrier of his box.
A tired old man, a turkey wearing a frock coat, came into the orchestra pit from under the stage. He groped his way among the crowded music desks until his grizzled skull jutted over the podium and the wall of the pit. A hand reached out of the prompter’s box and diddled with a mirror. For a while the old Neapolitan talked to the orchestra, dispensing wisdom and sadness to them like a Dutch uncle. He seemed intolerably weary, sternly kind. Then he lifted his stick and the trombones blatted out a hectic and cynical phrase. The strings muttered and swayed, and the curtain went up on a skylighted garret overlooking the frozen roofs of Paris.
Like a child Michael Patrick peered and listened to the persiflage of the painter with green smock and easel and the writer who burned his manuscripts to keep warm. He heard the tenor and the violins in unison lift and drop in long tender melodies that were both sad and gay. Sometimes Michael Patrick would raise his bottle to his lips, never taking his eyes or his ears from that sweet world on the stage.
There was a rap on the door of the garret.
—Chi è là?
—Scusi.
—Una donna!
He watched the violins plug on their mutes. The old maestro concertante leaned over them cajolingly. An aching perfumed strain rose in the darkness till Michael Patrick felt his heart begin to ache with a wild wistfulness. A shy little seamstress came onto the stage carrying a lighted candle. At this moment Michael Patrick ceased to be anywhere particular in this world, least of all in Naples of August, 1944. He was happy.
What was there here in the sweetness of this reality that he’d missed out on in America? He’d opened a door into a world that had nothing to do with merchandising and selling, with the trapped four-four beat of boogie-woogie, with naked girls shaking their navels through cigar smoke on a runway, with nervous old ladies totting up their insurance, with the fact that he wouldn’t live to be twenty-eight, with the gum-beatings of topkicks, with the smell of a world like a slaughterhouse, with groping and misunderstanding and cruelty. He felt himself inundated with the loveliness that men seek in a woman’s arms, that old nuns sense on their death-beds. He saw for the first time in his life that the things which keep the world going are not to be bought or sold, that every flower grows out of decay, that for all the mud and grief there are precious things which make it worth while for us to leave our mothers’ wombs—if someone shows us these priceless things. Before and after this truth, he saw, there’s nothing, nothing at all. . . .
—O soave fanciulla! . . .
His body was racked with a delight from outside himself. And when the lights came up again at the end of the first act, he fell from his paradise. The applause, the simpering curtain calls had nothing to do with what he’d felt—for the first time to be abstracted from his own sweating tired body, from a regimen that tormented him because it had no meaning he could decipher. So he retired sulkily to the rear of the box, sat on the floor out of range of the theater lights and the chatter of the audience, and drank slowly and methodically. There were no odds in walking down to the foyer and making a pretense at a social promenade. Besides he was pretty drunk.
Near the close of the third act of La Bohème Michael Patrick had emptied his cognac bottle. It lay by his boots like a spent rifle.
He leaned heavily on the barrier and stared out at the stage. He couldn’t see too distinctly now, but the music and the voices came up to him in a vortex that carried him along in its conical eye. His sight was blinking and bloodshot.
—Se vuoi . . .
Se vuoi serbarla per ricordo d’amore,
Addio, addio . . . senza rancor . . .
He laid his head on the plush railing by his arms. His tears fell on his knees. He wept very quietly but at length. It was okay to cry because he knew with clarity and brilliance exactly why he was crying. For his own ruined life, for the lives of millions of others like him, whom no one had heard of or thought about. For all the sick wretchedness of a world that no one could, or tried to, understand. For all who passed their stupid little lives in the middle of a huge myth and delusion.
At the end of the opera Michael Patrick felt and reeled his way down the five flights of stairs. He leaned bemused and lost in the portico of the San Carlo till the shrill crowds had gone away. The moon was out above Vesuvius. The bay shimmered out toward Torre Annunziata and Salerno. The night still had the hot heaviness of the daylight hours. Naples was a murmur of sound, the river-rushing of people fleeing and seeking and pretending and betraying.
Then he noticed a girl with a birthmark standing close beside him. Her hands were folded under her breasts. She seemed intensely aware of him. There was a red flower in her hair, and she smiled at him as though she beckoned across some unbridgeable distance. He was too drunk to string ideas together, but it was perfectly clear what they must do, and each understood it in a kind of mute joy. He took her arm, warm and almost weightless in its cotton sleeve. He led her into the arcade and to that quiet fountain place where he’d slept this afternoon. He placed her against a wall out of the moonlight. He kissed her hands and her throat and the mauve birthmark on her cheek, pressing himself gently against her. His fingers went through her hair the way children wander in a dark forest, numb and crying and lost.
—Oh I think I love you he said.
Their tears mingled; he felt she was nodding her head.
FIRST PROMENADE
(Casablanca)
I REMEMBER THE SMELL OF THE AIR IN CASA, A POTION OF RED clay and the dung of camels. That was the way the Ayrabs stank too.
A Liberty ship in convoy brought me to Casa from Camp Patrick Henry, Virginia. In the nineteen days of crossing the Atlantic, I remember that something happened to me inside. I didn’t know what adjustment to make for where I was going, but I think I died as an American. I’d climbed the gangplank with some of that feeling of adventure with which all soldiers go overseas. All the pacifist propaganda of the twenties and thirties couldn’t quite smother that dramatic mood of well-here-we-go-again-off-to-the-wars.
I remember the endless foul nights below deck, with the hatches battened, and the clunk of the depth charges, and the merchant marine eating like kings and sneering at us and our Spam-twice-a-day. We GI’s were like pigs in the hold, bunks five-high to the block, latrines swilling and overflowing, and vomit or crap games on the tarpaulin-sheathed floor where we huddled. The sergeant was on the bottom tier, one inch off the floor, with his nose jutting into the rear end of the joe sleeping above him. The pfc was on the top, trying to sleep with his face against a ventilator. And everywhere a litter of barracks bags and M-1’s, with every man making up deficiencies in his equipment at the expense of his neighbors. It was the first time I’d seen American soldiers stealing from one another. There were three hundred of us in that hold, looking down one another’s windpipes. We lived off one another like lice. I’d believed that Americans liked to give one another elbow room, except in subways.
I remember the enforced calisthenics on the deck of the Liberty ship, the drill with the Mae Wests, the walking guard on deck lest Neptune should arise from the waves and goose the ship with his trident, the crap game that ran night and day throughout the voyage, the listening to the ship’s guns spit out practice tracers. There were nurses and Red Cross girls and State Department secretaries on the boat deck, which was off limits to us. They took sun baths and dallied with the officers and screeched when the depth charges detonated. If a starboard wind blew it my way, I heard their laughter, stylized like a sound track for bobby-soxers.
I remember the harbor of Casa at 0700 hours. At first when I saw the cranes and the berths, I thought it was all a joke, and that we were really still at Hampton Roads. It took all day to disembark us replacements because the cargo security officer couldn’t find a case of Coca-Cola and was worried about his date with a Casablancaise that evening. He had the one-up-on-you wisdom of one who’s already been overseas, and he peddled his wisdom to us gratis:
—I tell ya, French gals can teach the American ones a trick or two.
We got two days’ supply of C-rations, and we carried our M-1’s and A-bags onto the soil of North Africa. The smell I’d sniffed out in the channel was now strong, like the tart sweatiness under the wing of a dying chicken. And the Ayrabs stood around our two-and-a-half-ton truck. They were wearing GI mattress covers. They held out their hands, smiling as cagily as poor relations. They had white teeth and red fezzes. We tried to buy some of those Ayrab chapeaux.
I remember the Place de France and the Boulevard de la Gare and the billboards of Publi-Maroc. There was a secret yellow bell tower I’d seen as photomontage for Humphrey Bogart. And the long cool Hôtel de Ville in the Place Lyautey, near palm trees, fountains, and an MP motor pool. However they might deal with the Ayrabs, the French had hit on a colonial architecture that seemed to grow naturally out of the pink soil of Morocco. There were stained stucco walls around the two Medinas, all of which were off limits to us.
Why is it called Casablanca? Because for all the smell there’s a ghostly linen brilliance about the buildings clustered on their terraced levels. This White City is best seen at noon or sunset. I knew that I couldn’t be anyplace else but in Africa. There’s something festering here, something hermetically sealed. With the exception of the indigenous Ayrabs, all Caucasians here seem to be corpse intruders, animated by a squeaking desire to be somewhere else. The restlessness of Casablanca is of the damned. It’s a place where all the tortures of the twentieth century meet and snicker at one another, like Ayrab women under their veils marketing in the Suk.
—What I mean to say is, I’m going to start chasing some of this French stuff tonight.
—And I’m plenty pissed off at Miss Lucy Stout, who taught third-year French at Coolidge High. Ya need more than a bongswahr in this town.
—J’aime le jambon quand il est bon.
I think it was at Casablanca that the bottom dropped out of my personality. Americans profess to a neatness of soul because their country is Protestant, spacious, and leery of abstracts. Now I’m an American uprooted. I’m in a foreign land where I must use a ration card, where there’s no relation between the money in circulation and the goods to buy with it. This was the only way I could explain to myself the looks I got from the French and the Ayrabs. That housewife who protested she was born in Lyon was thinking about the difference between my lunch and hers. That foxy old Ayrab selling leather wallets knew I was almost as rich as the Caïd. That splayfooted garçon who brought me Bière la Cigogne, tasting like straw soup, wondered whether he might have sniped at me in Fedhala on November 8, 1942. For the first time I saw the cancer of the world outside of the United States, where we put nice sterile bandages over any open sores, and signs of Men Working by sewers.
I remember that a truck carried us to a staging area outside Casa. Around this camp was barbed wire to keep us and the Ayrabs on our respective sides. But such arrangements never work, because of the x factor of human curiosity.
—Yas, ya’re repple-depple boys now. Ya’ll get to know these sandy tents so well. Beds made of planks and chicken wire. Ten percent pass quota. Rushes to the pro station. Details we dream up just to keepya out of mischief. . . . And don’t ya dare try to write ya mom about ya sorrows. That’s what the army has
censorship for. . . . The slip of a lip may sink a ship, but the slip of ya pen may upset the Congress of the United States.
I remember the Old Man of our repple-depple. He was a major. Once he’d been a lieutenant colonel. We heard that at Salerno he got the idea of marching his battalion in parade formation up the beach. The battalion didn’t exist any more, and neither did his lieutenant-colonelcy. So now he toughened up infantry replacements. He used to walk all over camp waving his stock and wearing his campaign ribbons. He loved to make inspections. He always wore leggins. Sometimes he carried a bull’s pizzle to beat the Ayrabs with. And at all hours his voice came over his personal public-address system, through the whirling sand and the flapping lonely tents:
—Men, I know what war is . . . you don’t . . . yet. . . .
Evenings he might be seen at the Automobile Club in Casa with a French WAC officer built like Danielle Darieux. But he had trouble with the parachutists in our repple-depple. They’d shoot holes in their tents when they couldn’t get out on pass. Then our major would drive through the areas in a jeep, with a tommy gun pointed out of his sound truck.
At midnight the parachutists would take off under the barbed wire for Casa, for at reveille everybody answered to everybody else’s name. In repple-depples the noncoms were only acting, with brassards pinned sheepishly to their arms. Even our first sergeants were only casuals themselves—privates. So they couldn’t chew us out too much because we’d get them later at the Bar Montmartre or at the Select or at Pepita’s, and we’d fix them up with Marie the Pig, who was malade.
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