Yet an Olympian pose of Via Roma in August, 1944, would have exhausted Katherine Cornell, and Louella found herself wilting by the time she’d reached the Galleria Umberto. She turned in at the little concrete posts and trod the pavement of the arcade. She’d always like the Galleria. Even if all the glass had been bombed out of it, there was something sort of darling about the place, like a baroque subway station. She’d often done the shops, though of course she’d never bought any of the crude oils of Mount Vesuvius or the junky jewelry that GI’s bought at twenty times its value for their girls in Montana. Louella just doted on the horrible blotchy pillows and ottomans lettered with MOTHER (sometimes misspelled by the Neapolitan seamstress) or great vulgar samplers stitched with the red bull of the 34th Division or the mosque of the Fifth Army.
She sat down in an outdoor café and ordered a vermouth. Near her were some GI’s in combat boots, their shirts open, wearing, against their sweat, neckerchiefs studded with their divisional insignia. They all had their feet up on the cane chairs and were cursing and railing. They deliberately tried to look like Bill Mauldin cartoons. Louella’d tried to understand combat infantry men, but she found them unnecessarily bitter and unappreciative. They seemed to think that they were the only ones suffering in this world. Once she’d tried to talk to a second lieutenant of the 45th about the world and the times, but after groping all over her daintiness he’d subsided into his gin and passed out.
She saw the seamy side of life in the Galleria Umberto. It was the burning glass of Naples. Louella sat and drank her vermouth with an adventurous little thrill, thanking her stars she’d been put on earth in 1944, with cultural background to appraise all this. Life, Life was what she got in the Galleria Umberto.
Stimulated by the sun and the crowds around her, she ordered another vermouth and went into a sort of ecstasy. It was a delight known to oriental mystics, at which one arrives after all fear is conquered and one resigns oneself to the idea of being just a drop of human consciousness. One’s heightened perceptions give one a superior detachment, and one watches the other drops with a clinical scrutiny, knowing that all this has been before and will be time and again.
Louella snapped out of her raptus. By her table an Italian child was standing with the shy yet intense presence of one who asks alms. It was scarcely more than a baby. It was wearing what looked like a potato sack, had a wilted flower in its gummy hair, and its tiny dirty feet had already been spread from pressing the scorching pavements of Naples. In its smeared fingers it extended a placard:
THIS GIRL IS AN ORPHAN BECAUSE OF ALLIED
BOMBARDMENTS. WILL YOU HELP HER?
Now Louella had social consciousness. She wasn’t one of those Boston old ladies who refuse to go to movies or read books which show the world as it is. She hated people who shove their noses into the sand of illusion and say that the war is none of their affair. But one had to make distinctions in one’s charity. Nine out of ten beggars are panhandlers. Louella found it an excellent rule of thumb that the really needy are too proud ever to do what this little girl was doing. So she summoned up her sweetest smile for the little girl, returned her stare, and said:
—Poor, poor moppet. You see, dear, you’re not old enough to realize that the Allies had to bomb Naples. The Germans were here, and Naples is a very important port. Some day when you grow up, you’ll see how cruel and complicated the world is, dear . . .
The little girl approached her placard to Louella’s face and began to wrench at her uniform. Something like tears formed in the huge black eyes, but Louella wasn’t taken in by this act. Not a bit. But rationalization wasn’t much use. Louella always ended by being guided by her heart, no matter how intellectual she tried to be. She clicked her tongue sympathetically several times, dived into her shoulder bag, and took out one lira.
Still the little girl remained, holding out her hand and examining the one-lira note speculatively. It always embarrassed Louella when the recipients of her mercy hung around. She hoped the little girl wasn’t going to make a scene and start kissing her skirt or anything lurid like that. Louella liked to do good works and keep them a secret between God and herself.
—Gimme sigaretta, said the little girl suddenly.
—Now, dear, really! Don’t try to pull that on me. You’re already stunted and wizened enough as it is. . . . And isn’t that the Italians for you? They haven’t got enough food, but they’re scrounging chewing gum. They have no cigarettes, but every last one of them has an American lighter. . . . Now my dear, I advise you to go back to the good nuns at the orphanage. Tell them the nice American lady said to give you a good bath and put you to bed . . . buona sera . . . run along now, dear.
When the waif had gone, Louella treated herself to another vermouth. Her family used to talk about how the Other Half lived. In Naples everybody was the Other Half. Her sympathies had been stretched like an elastic band, and she’d return to the States with a depth of understanding and a compassion that might startle a few of her friends, who were still fighting for nylon hosiery and getting up concerts for shipwrecked merchant seamen.
She observed a feverish activity in the bar, behind the metal coffee machines. A cluster of Neapolitans were bartering and gibbering and making with their hands and exchanging lire with someone at the center of their circle. Louella stood up with her glass in her hand and saw that it was an American GI. Out of his haversack he took bars of Palmolive, cigarettes, chewing gum, flints and wicks, lighter fluid, a fountain pen, a watch, and two boxes of K-ration. All these he sold covertly and swiftly to the Italians, who scattered when his small store was exhausted. Then he had a drink at the bar, counted his receipts, and left. He was a typical joe in bright combat boots, with that smooth easy way she liked in American men.
—How much’d you make? Louella hailed him.
—Quiet for Chrissakes! Twelve thousand lire.
She sat down with the gay laugh of a conspirator, applied herself to her vermouth, and fanned herself. Yes, here in Naples the economic unbalance of the world was being evened out, and by the business acumen of the GI. This private was getting sixty dollars a month, a pitiful pittance for facing gunfire and for buying anything at the frightful Italian prices. And yet he had a typically American kindness: he’d seen the stark need of the Italians for things he could buy at his PX for next to nothing. It was this speculative free enterprise that had made America great. She made a mental note to write her Wall Street friends how finally she’d come to understand economics better than it’s taught in the colleges. Now she could be reasonably sure that there were two great laws at work in this world—the moral law, and the law of supply and demand.
A plump Neapolitan woman came sweeping around the tables with a broom such as witches ride. She wore a dress of frayed black cotton, which by the afternoon sunlight silhouetted her pregnancy. In her pierced ears she wore rings, and a chain with a cross hung around her doughy neck. Occasionally she would spit on the pavement of the Galleria to lay the dust. Her shoes were clogs of roped cord which kept slipping off her ankles. She worked slowly and haphazardly; otherwise Louella would have been upset at a woman so far gone exerting herself in the brutal August sunlight. Louella didn’t think it very hygienic the way the woman, for all her condition, would sink grunting to her knees and pluck up the cigarette butts under the tables. These she would consign to her pockets and continue sweeping. Louella wondered if she smoked them or sold them. She knew of the fantastic Neapolitan practice of breaking down thousands of cigarette butts into a can and selling the result as pipe tobacco. But this sweeper with the brown face and the knotted hair had one touching compensation in her drudgery. As she worked she sang unembarrassedly one of those tender Neapolitan songs that are weighted with poverty and love. Louella knew that great art comes out of sorrow. On this score she worried for America. We must guard ourselves in America, Louella knew: when we banish poverty and disease, we must take pains not to banish genius too. This idea struck her as so original that she orde
red another vermouth.
It was getting toward sunset. And in Louella’s drinking there was something almost Persian. The poet Hafiz tels us that whoever can’t drink can’t love. If perhaps overseas Louella drank a little too much, alcohol brought to her an outlet and an expression that were perhaps the only things her nature lacked. In conversation she was eloquent, and her fruition had been reached in the very human act of being surrounded by a small coterie, exchanging stimulating ideas with them over full glasses in which the ice chimed a punctuation to her conversation pieces. That was Louella’s world, and she knew that out of such worlds of people getting together and drinking and talking every worth-while thing had been born. She hadn’t much patience with the lonely and recondite spirits who pretend to rare gifts in order to camouflage their essential inability to get along with the rest of the human race.
Two figures bore down on Louella, slicing across the orange motes that make sunset in the Galleria a flood of orange dust. One was an old violinist with only sockets where his eyes should have been. His body was sheathed in unclean pitted flesh, suggesting that his youth hadn’t been circumspect, or that he belonged on Molokai. He was guided by a boy in shorts and sandals. The son had a mysterious dark beauty that made Louella uneasy, since she felt that no man had the right to look that way. Beauty in men is only embarrassing. The music of the blind violinist was frightful to Louella’s ear. Children who stretch a catgut string across a cigar box get better results. Louella found gross fraud in anyone’s attempting to fob such dreadful sounds off on the public, preying on its sympathies because he couldn’t see. She tried to keep from shuddering as the scrawny scarecrow leered at her from out of its empty caverns, and as a special tribute scratched out Stardust. She felt herself in the presence of something obscene, at the revels of a kobold and a pixie. Her stomach turned, and she was about to rise from the wicker table and leave her vermouth when two newcomers slumped at her table. They waved away the blind fiddler and his son, who started to pass a plate. They threw fifty lire into it.
—Via!
The musician padded off led by his boy, and Louella turned to thank her new companions. They were both airplane drivers, and they smiled at her a little drunkenly because the setting sun hit them square in the eyes. They wore their caps on the backs of their skulls, sloppy squashed caps that looked as though they’d been jumped up and down on. Both were captains. Little silver Capri bells jingled on their leather field jackets. On their backs was stenciled a nude girl in color who flew through the air dropping bombs. On their feet, which they’d trussed up on neighboring chairs, were boots of softest leather, such as cowboys wear. Ginny used to say that airplane drivers never looked like human beings, but like goggled men from Mars. Louella knew better. Uninhibited children on the ground, at their controls they became serious technicians controlling colossal steel birds that dragoned through the air and dropped death on Jerry factories. She loved the faces of airplane drivers, so fresh and smiling, unsoured by their grim task. They were never bitter like the infantrymen, and they were never over twenty-four, even if they were full colonels. They were the sort of kids you saw in drugstores who drank cokes, listened to jukeboxes, and whistled at the girls. They were good. They’d been thrust out of high school fraternities into a war. They were the sort of towheaded fellows who are the backbone of American manhood. Thinking was a pussy disease of modern life, but the fliers of the United States Army Air Force hadn’t caught the contagion.
Louella felt so old and mellow and wise and she leaned forward over her vermouth and smiled at them.
—Roger, the first captain said, and called for three vermouths.
—Flak, flak, flak, his buddy said, and reached over and patted Louella on her wrist.
She didn’t flinch or go prissy because she knew she was in the presence of that sacred and awful thing, American Loneliness, akin to the face of Abraham Lincoln. She knew that Americans were the saddest people in the world in time of war because they were Magnificent Provincials. That was why every American soldier who wasn’t queer had to have his buddy, with whom he shared a stream of consciousness in itself meaningless, but which added up to all the nobility and isolation of a young and idealistic people thrown into death and destruction.
—Wilco, Roger.
Airplane drivers had a language all their own, a patois compounded of machine vocabulary, of the tension and relaxation alternating in those spells in which each tried to work off his nervousness between missions. Louella understood it with the reverence of a scholar. But this was a living language with a syntax of agony. She beamed at them both as though to say she wanted them to feel right at home with her, consider her their big sister.
The first captain was pretty high. He slumped into his chair and inhaled one vermouth after another, mumbling flak and Roger like an incantation. He was obviously the more poetic and sensitive of the two, and the more passive, since equals rarely mate in friendship or in love. But he was also at a plane of self-communion and negation into which Louella was too perceptive and reverent of human isolation to thrust herself. There was nothing she could do for him tonight. So she applied herself to the second captain, who was looking at her appreciatively. Noticing the gold band on his finger, she asked him about his wife.
—Oh that bitch, that lovely little bitch, he said. She hasn’t written for three months. And I’m over here in this arsehole of the earth eating myself out and wondering what she’s doing. Is she turning into a Victory Girl? I’ll kill the slut if I ever find out anything. . . . Three months she hasn’t written, and she used to write twice a day. . . . One V-mail and one air mail. . . . I’m going crazy. . . . I’ll turn myself in for pilot fatigue and get myself sent home. . . . If you could see her, baby.
—Louella, she corrected gently.
She was working herself into a sweat of empathy. All day long she’d longed for an airplane driver for whom she could do something unselfish.
—Louella, she worked in the PX at Luke Field. . . . If you could have seen her, the way she used to stand behind the cash register. . . . Just like a cute mouse. And when the jukebox came on, the way her eyes’d sparkle. . . . All she wanted was to dance and eat ice cream sodas. . . . But what a bitch not to write to me in three months.
—She’s true to you. I know it, Louella said, laying her hand on his leather sleeve; he put his own over it and moved a little closer to her. I swear she’s true by all that’s fine in American womanhood.
—Three months, the captain said. I married her quick. I was graduating from flight training, and I didn’t want somebody else to snap her up. . . . Three months she hasn’t written. . . . But if I find she’s using my allotment checks for something else than that little house . . .
—She couldn’t, she wouldn’t, Louella cried in a passion of righteousness.
The captain buried his face in one hand and tightened his clutch on her with the other. His sleeves were half-rolled to the elbows; the Capri bells on his jacket jingled mockingly. Louella knew that he was sobbing inside. He was a handsome lithe man. And the situation came clear in her mind, and her pity for him moistened the edges of the whole sorry portrait. And Louella decided that the greatest of war crimes is the bitchery of a wife when her husband is far from her. Louella imagined stunning scenes in which she gave the cheap painted little wife a piece of her mind, a piece of the mind of all the decent American women in the world. Right now the minx was probably out in an Arizona roadhouse, spending the captain’s money on some new OC out for an evening’s kicks. She saw them laughing through the din of the band, drinking champagne and kissing. . . .
It was dark now, and all three of them walked unsteadily along Via Roma with their arms about one another’s necks. They were all crying and wondering who started this war anyhow. Louella was the steadiest of the three. She steered them through the crowds. Both kissed her good night at the door of her apartment in Piazza Carità. They wanted to come up and have a party, but Louella didn’t want Ginny to start th
inking things.
In her bedroom, after draping her mosquito netting with an insouciant hiccough, she poured herself a nightcap of vermouth and shook a phenobarbital capsule into it. She lay quite motionless in her bed and felt two tears scamper down her cheeks. There was a roaring in the merciless Neapolitan night, and she saw the red and green lights of a transport plane track through the sullen air out Vesuvius way.
—Roger, she said, and hiccoughed again.
SECOND PROMENADE
(Fedhala)
I REMEMBER THAT THERE’S AN AMERICAN CEMETERY AT SAINT Jean de Fedhala, twenty-seven kilometers up the coast north of Casa. The graves are plotted in neat rows. I saw how close and still bodies can be laid together in the earth. Over each rectangle a white cross spreads its rafter arms. Most of the crosses have dogtags affixed to them, giving each its relief from anonymity. But walking lightly among the crosses and looking for the names of my friends, I found some unmarked. Underneath must be the bodies of those who were blown apart by artillery or drowned while still wading ashore, or who didn’t wear their dogtags. I remember that the body of a priest lies next to a pfc.
The sky at Fedhala is the color of slate, and the air of Fedhala is of that musky heaviness I knew only in North Africa. The atmosphere lies like a shroud over the continent. Perhaps from this comes the thick lost mystery of Africa, which teased my mind, particularly after sunset. It’s a strange air to lie in for all the time when your nose was used to the damp of New England or to the winds that congeal the Loop. With X-ray eyes I pierced the layer of loam blanketing the bodies and saw them lying there, each in his mattress cover, staring up at me. They didn’t have the finished peace of ordinary dead, embalmed in funeral homes. There was a rigidity and bitterness about them as though a cop had surprised them in the orgasm of life. There was something of unfinished business about all of these Fedhala American dead. To their spirits, smothered underground, the air there, as in all military cemeteries, was charged with question marks. I knew that the air could never be static above Saint Jean de Fedhala. A military cemetery never knows peace.
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