Afterwards Hal often thought of the parachute captain. His life in Oran became a round in which he did his work, enclosed in himself. He made no further attempt to enter into the lives of others. Nor did he visit any army psychiatrists. He knew he’d arrived already at a point where no one schooled in Freud or Jung could help him, any more than a bespectacled young psychiatrist from CCNY could have helped Jesus Christ in the Garden by psychoanalyzing the bloody sweat.
Nevertheless Hal went at the problem with a simplicity finer than any with which he’d ever attacked the enigma of his life heretofore. He went on the wagon from January to July of 1944. Stopping his drinking had no particular effect on him for better or for worse. He smoked a little less, and the evenings dragged more That heightened awareness of his was still with him. After a deep night’s sleep, sweltering under his mosquito netting, he could never be sure whether he’d really slept at all. He seemed merely to blank out for eight hours. Awaking, he was neither better rested nor less fatigued than when he went to bed.
He knew no French, for some block arose in his mind whenever he tried to learn a Romance language. Yet he made the acquaintance of an Oranaise who worked in the officers’ PX. This girl never forced an issue. She was as cool as a mannequin. From some secret source of supply she had a jeep—she’d been loved by a brigadier general in the ATC, by an American ensign, and by a French colonel from Sidi-Bel-Abbes. When Hal’s work was finished, she’d meet him with her jeep and relinquish the wheel to him. On these outings she wore polaroid glasses, wedgies, and a blue silk bandanna about her hair. Unlike most French girls she seldom spoke; and when she used her French on him, she pantomimed everything without a trace of nervousness. Evenings, he’d stay at her apartment and sit drinking fruit juice while she played “Tristesse” on her piano.
—C’est ton destin, she said once, d’aller au bout de toi-même.
Hal understood what she meant.
He often slept on the couch in her apartment. Sometimes at sunrise she’d come to his side in her blue kimono. She’d sit on his couch and watch while he passed without a jar from the depths of his sleep into full wakefulness. Then she’d take his hand. Sometimes she kissed his wrists or the lobes of his ears.
—Je t’aime pour ton angoisse indéfinie.
He understood what she meant by that too.
In a sense he was happier with Jeanne than he’d ever been. She had all his sensibilities plus a fortitude he didn’t own. She was the first with whom he had the certainty that anything he needed would be found in her, and with an abundance that would stop flowing only with her death. Jeanne was like a tube reaching into eternity that sucked up a grace of oxygen to one asphyxiating. She never seemed much moved by anything except when he took her hand or when she read aloud to him from the Jour de Colère of Pierre Emanuel. Hal caught very little of this poem. But often he thought that his only salvation would be to marry Jeanne. For she had that awareness and resignation of spirit that has sipped everything lovely in life, letting such values be her guide through some mortal experience that has purged her. The focus of her compassion was in her breasts, geometric as cones. Her nipples seemed to see.
In June, 1944, when Jeanne had brought him to a tranquillity like a magnetic field pointing all one way, she left him to visit her mother in Casablanca for a month. When he drove her to the station in Oran, he knew and she knew that they’d never see each other again. It was terminating in the silvery casualness with which it had begun. As she mounted the battered wagon-lit, she turned back and kissed him on the forehead, saying:
—Et je dis, en quittant tes charmes,
Sans larmes:
Adieu! . . .
The cadence of her voice told him what they were both thinking, for three days her spirit remained with him intact. He continued to sleep at her empty apartment, to which she’d left him the key. But on the fourth day his old sickness seized him with redoubled violence, as though Jeanne’s nursing had only caused its virus to become dormant. Hal now couldn’t bear the company of other Americans at all, particularly of his brother officers. It was difficult for him to sit still in one place without chain-smoking to distract himself from a compulsion to keep in constant motion. He couldn’t look anybody in the face. While giving orders to his GI’s, he’d walk up and down his office wringing his hands and feigning to concentrate. Sometimes it took every gram of control to keep from telling his first sergeant to please go away and let him alone. And he decided he’d have to fall off the wagon because at least having a glass of something numbing in his hand gave him an excuse for remaining stationary in one spot. When these fits were at their height, Hal had a feeling as though he’d like to dash the whole twenty-five thousand miles encircling the world. Then he’d come back to his point of departure and find himself standing there leering and saying, Welcome home, old goon. . . .
He meditated putting in for a transfer to Casablanca to be near Jeanne. But he knew and she knew that she’d done everything in her power for him, that her therapy was only a breathing spell in the denouement. Even now at the Hôtel Anfa or at Villa Moss she’d be allowing someone else to possess her cool body, the while she covered her eyes and thought of Hal and shook her head sadly. There’d been nothing cloying in her pity for him. But what Jeanne had given him was a sip of life, for which he had no thirst. He’d read enough romances to know that he’d already entered, through no fault or desire of his own, into league with those who are on the other side of the looking glass.
He got a five days’ leave forced on him, for his CO had noticed his removed emotional state and had chalked it up to overseas blues. He booked passage on a plane to Cairo and stopped off in Algiers, both to see the city and to renew the acquaintance of some of his friends from OCS. He left the plane at Maison Blanche and hitchhiked into Algiers. It lay before him in the July afternoon, sprawled on its hillside like the segment of an amphitheater. Dozens of barrage balloons floated above the harbor like silver sausages on a blue plate.
In the offices of AFHQ Hal sat on his friends’ desks and cocked a critical eye to see whether possibly some new insight or mercy had been born in them as a result of being overseas and brooding on the war. They cursed the Ayrabs and said that the French were playing us for all they could get. All their meannesses, latent in the States, had only been crystallized by a year in Africa.
So Hal declined their offers to dinner at a dozen sumptuous messes and went out to walk along the Rue d’Isly. There were more British than Americans in evidence, clumping along in their boots and gaiters and shorts. And at 1800 these British all left the streets for a few minutes to put on their long trousers.
On a ramp near the Hôtel Aletti Hal found a transient officers’ mess. The meal was good. Discovering that he could buy a bottle of wine, he fell off the wagon. Along with the brown pork chops and the greenery on his plate the strong white wine began to work upon him. He knew what was coming—the old desolating anxiety and heartache stirred in his bowels. He knew he oughtn’t to finish the whole bottle, but he did and lit a cigarette.
The P/W lieutenant in charge of the mess had been leaning against a column and looking at Hal with a luminous interest. This Italian resembled a little the parachute captain, but there was also in his brown triangular face a print of the wildness of Reggio Calabria. He treated his waiters with a gentleness, unlike the domineering of the Italian officers over their soldati in the P/W enclosures around Oran. This Italian lieutenant knew some secret of relaxation, for he nestled his thick hair indolently against the column and crossed his bare legs. He was wearing his old Italian khaki shorts, but his shirt was American suntan P/W issue, with stars attached to the tabs of his open collar.
Finally Hal lit another cigarette and held one out to the P/W lieutenant. The Italian bounded toward him as though he’d been preparing this movement for the past five minutes. The flare from Hal’s cigarette lighter threw into relief the brown eyes and the sleek head. The Italian took a puff and came to attention.
&n
bsp; —Grazie tanto. . . . Lei mi sembra così gentile. . . . Se tutti fossero come Lei.
—But I don’t know a word of Italian, Hal said.
The Italian kept at rigid attention by Hal’s table. Now it was hard enough for Hal to keep up any intercourse with people whose language he could understand. Therefore a huge tension reared inside him when he knew he couldn’t get a word across to the P/W lieutenant. Hal wasn’t one of those extroverts who could shout in English at someone ignorant of the language, and use violent gestures, hoping thereby to force some semantic rapport. Nevertheless he motioned the Italian to sit down opposite him. The lieutenant in his turn motioned one of the waiters to bring another dish of ice cream. Hal had to eat it. The ice cream didn’t belong to the Italian, but there was a miraculous graciousness in his bounty as he smiled his melting smile and talked a soft stream of compliments of which Hal didn’t understand a word. Yet it wasn’t so difficult as he’d feared. He didn’t have to cope with the Italian. When an American started to talk, Hal always felt like asking him to please shut up. But there was nothing offensive about this elegant little man. Perhaps he was lonely after thirteen months of imprisonment. Perhaps Italians, being gregarious and rhetorical, became even more melancholy than British and Americans.
—Mi permetta, signor tenente. Mi chiamo Scipione. E Lei non può immaginare quanto mi piacerebbe avere un amico sincero. Beh . . .
—If I were going to be in Algiers long, Hal said, I could distract myself by teaching you English. I’d like to do something for someone.
—Quindi, the P/W lieutenant said. He spread his hands in a deprecating shrug as though to say that their friendship was already a sealed testament. Ho una bellissima stanza qui in un albergo d’Algeri. . . . Sono tanto, tanto bravi con me gli americani.
—All you need is a girl now, Hal said.
—Sono quattordici mesi che non tocco una donna, Scipione said. Ho quasi perso il ricordo. Ma . . . cosa vuole? È il nostro destino.
Hal was aware of the official stand on fraternization with prisoners of war. But he waved for another bottle of wine.
—Caro tenente, mi dispiace. Ma la lunga prigionia mi ha rovinato lo stomaco. Il vino non lo posso più bere.
—In short, Hal said, you won’t drink with me. Lucky people. No rough edges in your relations with others to be lubricated with the grape. I envy you.
Rising abruptly from the table, he shook hands with the gleaming little officer. A look of sodden dismay and regret flooded the brown graceful face.
—O Dio mio, L’ho offeso? . . . Mi dica, La prego, che fastidio Le ho dato?
—It’s nothing, nothing, said Hal.
Though something told him not to act this way, he turned away with a surgical smile and went out into the city of Algiers. It was beginning to grow dark. He went and drank at the Center District Club, where Italian P/W dispensed a potent rum. At midnight he went walking along the Mediterranean and picked up a girl. But he discovered that the rum or his own mind had finally made him impotent. He lay beside her weeping and thinking through the old tale of Narcissus.
On July 26, 1944, Hal left Africa. He carried with him its silt, since no one can be on that continent long without forever being marked with something shadowy, brooding, and evanescent as the Ayrabs. He sailed on a British steamer onto which had been sardined the last remnants of Allied Force Headquarters. Everyone said that as soon as the ship sailed the French would clip the hair of all Algerian grisettes and machine-gun the Ayrabs to boost their own sagging prestige. They sailed on an old cruise steamer converted into a troopship. There were sumptuous meals, and the British were most obsequious, as though from some policy of gratitude for lend-lease. The passengers were a garish lot. They’d been swept out by the last broom to clean AFHQ: French captains involved in some misty liaison, American signal corps officers still carrying telephone wire and switchboards, and unidentified Desert Rats who’d been waiting transportation to the Italian front since the fall of Tunisia. Every night the ship blacked out, for who knew but what Jerry might fly down from southern France and bomb the daylights out of them? Reconnaissance planes had been over Algiers every night in July, 1944. If he bombed this troopship, some of the stoutest old lumber of the Allied armies would go to the bottom.
After Hal had swung his bedding roll into the hold, where he bunked in the five-high arrangement, he stood on deck and watched the lights of Algiers shimmer away from him. The barrage balloons still swung aloft in the moonlight. He was leaving Africa forever. There he’d spent almost a year of his life. Some of the aridity of the desert had been blown into him. There his personality had learned of limitless horizons and the sickening mirage of eternity. There he’d been sliced by the French perfection of detail, but soundlessly, as glass under water can be sheared by a scissors.
He tried to sleep a lot on the trip to Italy, but the hold was an inferno in the daytime. And at night the ventilators sounded as though his head were being held under water. So he spent the hours of light hiding under funnels on the deck. To read there were only improving books put in the ship’s library by British pietistic societies seeking to turn the traveler’s mind to his salvation. Most often Hal read the Gospel of Saint John.
He knew he was going to Italy, though security forbade his knowing where. The dopesters were all certain they’d land in Naples. And Hal, just after a rich English breakfast, when with coffee and a cigarette his spirits would rise to what would be normal in most men—numbness and resignation—used to wonder what he’d find in Italy. Perhaps his African sojourn had been a time of testing, a dark night of the soul. Perhaps in Italy he’d finally blossom out. But in his midnights he knew that Italy would be just one more new place to adjust himself to. And his powers of elasticity were now about as good as a rubber band’s that has lain in a sunny attic.
In those midnights when he couldn’t smoke on deck because of the blackout, Hal used to lean over the rail and glare at the phosphorescence of the Mediterranean. He’d seen it from Oran and Algiers. Now he was on it. The Romans rode on it, Shelley was drowned in it, Mussolini thought it was his sea. By sunlight it was an aching blue. At midnight it was just another body of water on which a ship could float. Sometimes, in the dark, anonymous figures in shorts came and stood beside him and shared his glances over the black water glowing in the wake of the ship. But even though they stood at his elbow, Hal made no attempt to enter their worlds, as he might once have tried to. Once, accosted by a word of greeting, he left the rail and descended swiftly into the sweltering hold. Anything was better than to be talked to. It was his achievement that in crossing the Mediterranean he never said a word to anyone except the gentle Cockney table waiters.
He saw the Cape of Bizerte shrouded in its ghostly triangle of sunset. He saw the island of Sicily jutting like a palace. Over those escarpments the spirit of the parachute captain flew. Perhaps at night his spry hairy figure sucked the blood of Sicilian children abroad late in the streets of Palermo.
With the dawn of the third morning he arose heavy and sweaty to find birds flapping alongside the ship and a hammerlike mass of ocher rock lifting out of the sea. He saw the eyeless sockets of caves in its sides and many pretty villas perched over crevasses.
—That’s Capri, someone said to someone else, accenting the last syllable. We’ll go and see the grottoes. The airplane drivers do a lot of their shacking there.
By noon they were sliding into the harbor of a city.
—That’s Naples, said the voice that accompanies all travelers. I’d know it from the postcards and the pitchers in the barbershops. Look, that’s Vesuvius. . . . Yessir, the old anthill’s smokin. Ain’t got over the shock of Anzio yet. . . . And see that big thing that looks like a country club at the top of the city? That’s Castel Sant’Elmo. . . . I been readin my guidebooks.
Hal thought, See Naples and die, wondering if he really might. It had the same open-fan formation, spread on the hills and sliding into the harbor, as Algiers. But it was vaster, Naples. Hal
thought of the million lives squirming in that crowded dihedral; of the spray of dialect, of the typhus and DDT, of the flash of colors in the streets where boys slept on their bellies. An odor such as he’d never whiffed before was in the air, a stink and a perfume of dead flowers and human matter and the voice of Saint Thomas Aquinas at the University of Naples and Enrico Caruso dying at Somma Vesuviana and all the spaghetti in the universe. Already the tugs were slithering them into their berth like patient worried little daughters leading a blind old mother. And tiny fishing skiffs water-bugged it over the bay and careened alongside the British troopship. The fishermen showed their teeth and called out in an indescribable dialect.
Nearly all the berths in Naples harbor were twisted like the machinery in a petroleum yard after an explosion. Blasted and bombed cranes clawed wildly at the sky. A few ships still lay on their rusty sides. They looked like fat women who’d committed suicide in water too shallow to drown them. The acres of devastation along the water front were something Hal had never imagined, except in the rubbled castles of his own brain. For a mile along the port area the houses lay in their gray dust. Here and there a room stuck out of a second story where a bomb had split a house in half. Some were like dollhouses, in which a side can be hinged away for a cross section of all the rooms. Here was half a staircase leading nowhere, a flapping shred of blue wallpaper. In one blasted room the pictures still hung askew on the wall, waiting for some housewife to come and straighten them. The dock area and beyond it were mostly blocks of rubble and segments of balcony and girders thrusting out in pointless punctuation marks. In these ex-houses people had been born and loved and begotten and died. Eggs dropped from the sky had blown them apart.
Hal leaned his head against the railing. Now he understood the difference between being and not-being, there in the silence and the heat and the mess of Naples at high noon. The lovely, the cruel, and the opportunist were all entombed here in this shambles around the Bay of Naples. Himself, trembling and weary and reduced to a zero before the horror of it, saw the aftermath. He saw clearly what he’d been feeling dimly for twenty-nine years— that to human life and striving there’s no point whatever. That we are all of us bugs writhing under the eye of God, begging to be squashed. That as evidence of our mortality all we leave behind us is the green whey of a fly that is swatted to death.
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