The Gallery

by John Horne Burns

  There was a dispute over the order of debarkation. Finally the British infantry were marched off first. They were going straight to the front, so there was no need of their idling on deck. They clunked down the gangplank with their rifles.

  —Ees doon bloody well ere. Blimey, whot eel do to oos or oos to im!

  Some of the Americans got bored watching the stream of Limeys debarking, so without authority they scaled the rope ladders, grabbing their barracks bags and bedding rolls and tearing across the hinged bridge to land. They pre-empted little Neapolitans to tote their luggage. These were dirtier and more vociferous than anything Hal had seen in Africa. He’d expected a Neapolitan would look like a chef in a Second Avenue restaurant, standing on the pier in an apron and mixing a dish of spaghetti and garlic.

  —Eyeties, said the voice of the Eternal Tourist. Ginsoes. There they are. The Ayrabs of Europe.

  The barracks bags and the bedding rolls were put into piles with armed guards. Nobody trusted the little Neapolitans. Hal heard explanations that one would be three miles away by the time he’d hoisted your baggage to his shoulder. He heard that if a jeep were left unattended in the streets of Naples, the Neapolitans would pick it clean to the chassis.

  He obeyed all the landing instructions and found himself in a two-and-a-half-ton truck with all his baggage inviolate. The small Neapolitans swarmed all over the truck, not at all fazed by having empty or loaded carbines pointed at their heads. Over all the confusion at the port their dialect twittered and buzzed like a hive of hornets. Hal sensed that for all their dirt and thievery they also stole a zest and a passion for life.

  He was driven through the port area, past tetrahedron air-raid shelters, past files of crumbled buildings, to his billet on Via Diaz. He lumped all his junk in the center of the floor and went out to see Naples. It was 1600 hours; the sun was like a white-hot thumb pressing on Castel Sant’Elmo.

  In the first words he’d spoken in four days he inquired the way to the main drag. On Via Roma he found moving in both directions on both sidewalks of the narrow street a crowd thicker than anything in Times Square. The Allied soldiery all had a sour look. The Italians were selling cameos. They catered also to every bodily need in shrill idiomatic English. Pimping was the province of very tiny boys. Hal walked for five minutes and came at last to a spacious arcade opening off Via Roma. The crowd just pushed him there. It was like walking into a city within a city. There was no glass in the domed skylight. He asked an idling GI for information.

  —This is the Galleria Umberto, lootenant, sir. Everybody in Naples comes here.

  Hal looked around the Galleria as he walked through it. It was like all outdoors going on inside. He liked the feeling of being roofed over without any coffin sensation of claustrophobia. The Galleria was jammed with Allied soldiers and sailors, women sweeping, bars, art shops, small booths selling jewelry, columns, tattered flags and standards, lights suspended from the vaulted roof as though this were some vast basketball court.

  —These people, he said to himself, are all in search of love. The love of God, of death, or of another human being. They’re all lost. That’s why they walk so aimlessly. They all feel here that the world isn’t big enough to hold them. And look at the design of this place. Like a huge cross laid on the ground, after the corpus is taken off the nails.

  Hal walked around the Galleria. He stuck his hands into his pockets, swaggered a little, and tried to smile at everyone. Often his smiles were returned. But he didn’t follow them up. His was the disinterested smile of God the Father surveying the world after the sixth day. And Hal had never seen so many soldiers whose free time hung like a weight on their backs, as their packs had hung in combat. They sat at the outside tables of the bars and drank vermouth. They wore shoulder patches of three divisions. Their faces were seamy or gentle or questioning or settled or blank. No other people in the Galleria Umberto had so many nuances on their lips as the Americans Hal saw there.

  After looking in all the shop windows and all the posters and traversing both sides of the X-shaped pavement that bisected the Galleria, Hal sat down at one of the tables. He knew that he was in the tiniest yet the greatest city of the world. But it hadn’t the fixed pattern of a small town. It was a commune of August, 1944, and its population changed every day. These people who came to the Galleria to stand and drink and shop and look and question were set apart from the rest of the modern world. They were outside the formula of mothers and wives and creeds. The Galleria Umberto was like that city in the middle of the sea that rises every hundred years to dry itself in the sun.

  An old Neapolitan in a greasy apron was standing beside his table. Hal ordered a drink, giving the old man two cigarettes and the fee for a double vermouth, which tasted like fruity alum. And then, looking again through the Galleria, which had enraptured him as a circus does a child, Hal saw a figure bearing down on him. And he knew that he had been waiting, had been summoned to the Galleria for this. The figure came through the mob with the surety of a small boat picking its way through shoals.

  The parachute captain took one of the wicker chairs and sat down beside him without saying a word. Hal felt the bright bitter eyes going over his face. The Neapolitan brought another vermouth. Then Hal spoke with the studied casualness of one who seeks to show that his thoughts are elsewhere:

  —How’s your grave?

  —Blow all that, the parachute captain said. You’ve always stalled with me. That’s caused your ruin. You’re a dishonest man, chum. You think of yourself as the center of the universe. . . . And anything that doesn’t fit into your scheme of things gets rationalized away like a piece of rock found on the wrong geologic stratum.

  That vague sword was already beginning to pierce Hal’s heart, but he paid no attention and said:

  —Look at these people around us . . . the same as you and I.

  —The same? The captain threw back his head and laughed. Your pity goes too far, boy. Or not far enough. You’ve never learned the difference between seeing humanity and getting smothered by it. The more you feel you must love humanity, the more you indicate a certain deficiency in yourself. . . . Jesus Christ must have been a misanthrope deep down inside, who tried to offset his truer characteristics. Love is the most natural thing in this world, you see. A lover never feels he must love, because he does. Only the half-arsed poets invented love as a force that has nothing to do with anything, because they had to cook up something to write about, as propagandists cook up causes to die for. . . . I’m talking of the sorrow of those who think, rather than those who do. . . . In wartime the greatest heroes are the sensitive and shy and gentle. They’re great because they have to live in a world which is dedicated in wartime to an annihilation of everything they stand for. They’re the unsung. No one will ever sing to them. Except us, the dead. Their theme’s too secret, like masturbation. . . . If a man all his life has oxidized his every mood the moment it entered his glands, if he insulted and slugged his way along, it’s not a much greater effort for him to go into battle. The gentle die in battle. Your crude extrovert comes out of his ordeal more brutal and crass and cocky than when he went in. That’s the way civilizations die, gradually. A premium is put on physical courage in wartime which kills off the gentle, because they’re too noble to admit of cowardice. So they die. . . . Death to them is terrible. And it’s just another of those things to people who aren’t aware of life, except as a current of vitality that carries them along.

  —And yet, Hal said, leaning forward and hearing the thumping of his own heart, you fought and died in Sicily a few months ago. What are you so bitter about? Your ghost should mount a soapbox in Union Square. Perhaps you could finally teach the world something.

  The elegant and mocking figure looked at him and laid its shining high boots across an adjoining chair. This parachute captain had the scorn of a demon, who knows that he can very well afford to thumb his nose at God because he will burn through all eternity no matter what he does.

  —My d
eath in Sicily, the captain said, sending a graceful hairy claw through the air, was merely a compensation for my life. My life was a mess. I was a Broadway chorus boy. Do you think I liked swishing my way through the American theater? Do you think I enjoyed the fascism of great stars and booking agents and elegants who thought they were writers? Jesus, no! But in my jump training I was able to exorcise all this nonsense. In the crazy camaraderie of silk and geronimo I achieved reality to my life. . . . Oh, there was nothing solemn or dignified in the way I took my exit. It was a bullet in my face, just after I’d landed, and was looking around for my men, to urge them on in the way that cameramen like. My death was the expiation of that ridiculous society for which I danced, painted and epicene behind a proscenium arch. I was a very jerky marionette on the stage and a very still one as a corpse. . . . But let me tell you one thing, Joe: the ecstasy of death is a greater one than I found in love or the dance with a capital D. . . . I pity you for all your struggling and whining to yourself. For I’m free, free! . . . Out forever from under all this pitiful shit of human life!

  —How you hate, Hal said, covering his face with his vermouth glass.

  —Your imaginary troubles, the captain said, crooking a finger and smiling almost tenderly, are far more serious than mine ever were. At least I was able to lump all mine in one ball.

  Hal looked away into the sunny Galleria. The captain’s words clattered in on him. And there was that old sinking sensation of having a world on his shoulders without asking for it.

  —The wisdom of death, he said, trying to strike a tone of banter. But his teeth showed like a skull’s.

  —The French, the captain said, striking a tone of preciosity, speak of the expérience mortelle. We’ve both had it . . . but it seems to have paralyzed you, boy. You must either live or die. You’re trying to do both. . . . I died. . . . But my spirit is congealed into one knot of fury. I left this life angry, but not hurt; whole, even though mangled. . . . I see through you. You’re trying to conceal that your soul is a perfumed jellyfish. You’ve tried to wrestle with the larger issues when you’re not sure whether you can read and write. . . . Wise up to yourself, buddy. It’s not too late.

  Hal arose and knocked over the wicker table.

  —I don’t care to drink with you any more. And please, please don’t visit me again. Let me alone. You’re the essence of all that’s evil in the world. You’re the evilest person I’ve ever known. There’s something about your mouth, the way it works, as though this world were just your orange, to be sucked dry. . . .

  —Ah, mysticism and metaphor, the captain said softly, also rising. There’s no place for that crap any more, chuck. It’s outworn, like the Middle Ages trying to smoke out syphilis with incense. Certainly there are faith and spirituality, but this time there’s no applying the old creeds and schemes. You have no right to seek God directly. You must do it through other people. They’re all small pieces of Him. If you know and love all the people of your time, you know God.

  —Let’s go down on our knees together, Hal said—and pray because we’re both so proud and cold and heartless.

  —Less proud and cold and heartless than most. . . . I prayed as I was dying. And I died at twenty-two. . . . But my death was part of the scheme and the deception, that’s all. . . . You don’t want to learn anything, do you kid?

  —Pray to Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, Hal said.

  He was terrified at the rabid insistence in his voice.

  For the next five days he lay in his billet and looked at the ceiling. For five nights he couldn’t close his eyes. In his head he heard a continual crashing, as of buildings falling down irreparably. Often it seemed to him that he was capable of everything, but especially of the great and the good things of life. It seemed he had only to stretch out his hand and the sorrowing world would be remade and every tear dried in every eye. He wanted so to help, to help, to help. . . .

  Then they took him in an ambulance to the Forty-fifth General Hospital, where he was given a knockout drug for paranoia and delusions of persecution. A nurse there was a first lieutenant, a Russian Jewess named Luba. She said to the psychiatrist, a major:

  —Gee, sir, nuts are all so individual. They’re not ordinary people. . . . Now you take that tall good-looking one who thinks he’s Jesus Christ. . . . Why, damn it, if he grew a beard, I’d believe he was. . . .

  THIRD PROMENADE

  (Casablanca-Algiers)

  I REMEMBER THE SIXTH GENERAL HOSPITAL IN CASABLANCA. IT was stuck, as they seem to stick all hospitals, in a school with large windows and many floors. Its doctors and its nurses were mostly from New England, so that the place had an air of efficiency and cold kindness that struck me strange in Casa. The nurses lived in a high apartment like a silo. The GI’s had a tent area near Parc Lyautey. On one side was a clearing of French tanks drawn up in rows, the way military force is deceptive and orderly—on review. Between the tanks and the tents there was a cement road where the French used to walk arm in arm in the evenings. Ward boys and dental technicians leaned over their barbed-wire enclosure on nights when they weren’t on duty. They called out to all and sundry, as though they felt it necessary to reaffirm their being in a strange land. Their tents were pyramidal. In the daytime the flaps were tucked up, and I could see the mosquito netting looped up over the frames of the cots in a tight ball.

  I remember that the nurses at the Sixth General Hospital were plumper and saltier than most ANC’s. They talked wistfully of Boston and Taunton and Waltham and Cambridge and Worcester. Army general hospitals are incestuous. They’re like a little town in which everyone spies on everyone else, and everyone dates everyone else. The surgical captain has his favorite nurse, while the anesthetist looks on and gnashes his teeth. The patients are well cared for, but they’re outside the charmed circle; they’re like guests at a summer hotel in the Adirondacks. They never get to see the inside. They lie in their beds and watch the life of the general hospital. They’re not a part of it at all, unless some nurse takes a fancy to them on her ward, or some doctor bucking for his majority takes a special interest in their rare disease.

  The main ward at the Sixth General was the biggest in the whole world. They’d taken over a lumber shed and a printing plant, and the beds just went on and on. In those acres of beds they could have laid all the sick and wounded of the war. I remember lying in my bed in this ward. I had the GI’s because I’d neglected to scald my mess gear with one soapy and two clear. My illness gave me a time schedule all my own. I’d feel the dry spasms of peristalsis in my belly and I’d go tearing to the latrine. Everything came out of me in an agony over which I had no control. Then I’d go back to bed, cured of everything, including my energy and the will to live. Two hours later it would happen all over again. I turned from side to side under my mosquito netting and watched the goings and comings on the big ward, the visits, the flirtations. I envied the Georgia ward boys for the easy way they had with the doctors and nurses, the kidding, the rushes with the bedpan, and the goose-necked jars of amber. And because I was an ambulatory patient, I had to make my own bed every morning.

  I remember best one of the nurses. She told us to call her Butch. She was from Dorchester and she was the biggest gal I’d ever seen. When she bent over to take my temperature, I thought from her wide breasts and bulging belly that a witty and motherly cow was ministering to me. We loved the lieutenant for her laugh that was cynical and rich. She specialized in making the appendix patients laugh until they all but burst their stitches. There was a smell of cologne and soap about her. One night she had a baby on the stairs of the nurses’ quarters. The colonel had to deliver her himself; it was the first time he’d practiced obstetrics in thirty years. He was so mad at her for waking him out of a sound sleep that he shipped her and her baby back from Casa to the States. We smiled in our beds, for after she’d cared for us all, she now had something all her own to love. A parachutist in a near-by bed bet that an Ayrab was the father, but none of us laughed. We were
ashamed of the parachutist and devoted to the lieutenant. She’d been the nurse of the Sixth General who’d mitigated for us the somber impersonal excellence of army medical care. She’d had a good word for each of us. Often when we couldn’t sleep in the Casablanca nights, she’d given us that pink pill. A truck driver three beds over said that if he ever got back to Boston alive, he’d take out our lieutenant and her baby and set them up to supper and drinks. He added that women like the lieutenant are the salt of the earth.

  I remember also the nut ward of the Sixth General in Casa. Not that I was ever in there, except for a visit. It was called the Parker House after the nice old psychiatrist in charge of it. Lieutenant Colonel Parker never knew why so many people smiled at him on the streets of Casablanca. He kept the nuts in a separate building, locked and grated and barred and remote from the other buildings of the Sixth General. Beaucoup GI’s and officers ended up in the Parker House. From there they usually went home on a boat, under guard. The officers and GI’s were together on one ward. I guessed that when you went off your trolley, you didn’t care much whether your insignia was a bar or a stripe.

  I remember going to the Parker House to visit a buddy who blew up after a week’s sitting and staring at the wall of his tent. He took his tommy gun and fired it at the canvas. Then he lay, after he’d fired his bursts, in a slit trench of his own making until our major came:

  —What you tryin to do, Perkins, k-k-k-kill us all?

  And Perkins was taken to the Parker House. It was his theory that his heart was going to stop in the very next minute. Old Colonel Parker told him there was nothing the matter with his heart. Still he moaned and stared at the wall for hours on end. He wasn’t the same, I remember, when I went to see him the last night before they shipped him back to the States. He sat on a bench with his head in his hands. He was wearing GI pajamas and a red bathrobe with 6TH GEN HOSP stenciled on the back. They’d taken away the belt of his bathrobe so he couldn’t strangle himself. But when he saw me outside the grating, all his apathy dropped, and he came over and hung on the bars, smiling and cavorting, like a monkey praying to be fed.