Father Donovan said nothing but bent down and tucked his trousers over his combat boots. Then he noticed a little girl sitting on the curb. She had blond hair, so rare in Neapolitan babies. She seemed so tiny and alone. She was peeling a stick of American chewing gum, her mouth already open in anticipation. And her eyes glowed like a kitten’s at dusk. Father Donovan walked over to talk to her. He had another stick of gum in his pocket to give her. But she, fearful of her treasure, darted out into the street. He laughed and ran after her.
Around the corner from the San Carlo an English lorry turned in. It slid like a huge coffin behind the blackout lenses on its headlights. These cast a sick pencil of glow on the little girl’s bobbing hair, on the pursuing legs of Father Donovan. Chaplain Bascom saw what was happening. He shouted and leaped into the street after them. The lorry bore down. His ears exploded with the scream of brakes and the crunch of bodies, as collies are mashed under heavy turning wheels.
On the opposite curb the tiny Neapolitan girl watched the truck back off. The two bodies lay there quietly, one with a bit of purple silk ribbon over his heart. She put her gum into her mouth. Americani. For it wasn’t the first time she’d seen the dead lying in the streets of Naples.
FOURTH PROMENADE
(Algiers)
I REMEMBER LEARNING ALL OVER AGAIN HOW TO WALK. MY gait was something between a sailor’s and a mountaineer’s. For Rue Michelet winds and grinds to the top of the city. Walking in Algiers means going either uphill or down. Consequently I was forever leaning forward or backward. I got to be uneasy on a level stretch, the way a drunk’s nerves twitch till the bars open.
I remember that Algiers was more European than Casa. In the summer of 1944 there was a quality of reaching out. It was the old Paris trying to find itself. Most of the people in Algiers were refugees from Paris and were waiting to get back there. They rejoiced over the Normandy invasion because it was the beginning of an attrition they’d thirsted for since June, 1940. Sometimes I thought it was we Americans who were getting Paris back for them, but I didn’t say so.
I remember that in Algiers many French soldiers wore our uniform. It was easy to tell that they weren’t Americans—something narrower about their eyes, something contracted and concentrated in everything they did. Nevertheless they wore our uniforms, and the Mediterranean Base Section decided that a discrimination must be made—possibly to keep us out of the Kasbah and out of certain bars and areas smelling of bed sheets and strange foods. So we had to affix to our caps the little brass circlet US. Then it was clear to us and to the MP’s who was a French GI and who an American.
It was the first time I saw British soldiers. Till July of 1944 Allied Force Headquarters was at Algiers. In the AFHQ offices there was an Englishman to counterbalance every American. Thus the streets of Algiers clomped with British hobnails. The British wore shorts till 1800 hours. Through the leafy heat their legs bobbed like brown pistons. They wore canvas gaiters and short sleeves and berets designed after the queen’s own tam. On Rue Michelet and Rue d’Isly I remember the signs in the windows: WO’S & SGT’S CLUBS. The OR’s had theirs too. But the British said that we Yanks were better off than they. They’d been a long time away from Blighty, as long ago as Tobruk, and they resented our rations and our cigarettes and our theaters. ENSA was never like this, they said. They scratched their bare legs, bitten by the anopheles mosquito.
I remember my first pass in Algiers. I knew just where I wanted to go. I walked out into the twilight where the barrage balloons shimmered over Algiers Harbor like silver kidneys. The port was teeming with hospital ships, the air buzzed with planes flying into Maison Blanche. I walked down Rue Michelet, leaning backward. Along my way were green public gardens, but their iron gates were locked at sundown.
—Why, myte? Because you bloody Yanks used to myke a shambles of them after nightfall.
Through the heat of Algiers I looked inside the scrolled gratings. I could see the fountains playing and the statues with inscriptions in French. What, no walks there after dark? At noon French girls walked there on their lunch hour from the office. They were crisper and cooler than the Casablancaises.
—Closer to French love all the time. The wimmin in Casablanca have seen too many Ayrabs.
I remember how few Ayrabs there were in the city itself, as though the French had put guards at the entrances. I saw Ayrabs only when I was out in trucks, along the roads to Maison Carrée or Maison Blanche or spying on the Tamaris Hotel at Ain-Taya. That too made Algiers seem less an African city. It was also the French everywhere spoken. I stopped many times as I strolled along, trying not to seem a country cousin just in from Casa:
—Oo sir troove l’Hôtel Aletti?
—Il n’est pas trop loin, monsieur.
The Hôtel Aletti. Only colonels and generals and foreign correspondents lived in it. But everybody flocked to its gardens and terrace, and not to look at the colonels and the generals and the war correspondents.
Nearly every GI in the city of Algiers converged afternoons on the Hôtel Aletti, like the rays of the sun in heraldic designs. I’d go to the Place d’Isly and turn right toward the harbor. I’d pass the street of the peppermint columns of the Bar Pigalle, where people in white linen drank vermouth and talked of Paris. Then I’d turn left on a ramp and go downhill again, leaning backwards.
—That there’s the Aletti, kids. The Passion Pit of Algiers. . . .
I remember that in front of the hotel there was a terrace of different levels with metal tables and umbrellas. There was constant movement here of people with glasses in their hands, swarming on the different planes like drunks at a garden party. It was almost a terrace restaurant where people idle and look for and at other people. In the Aletti garden there was an excitement seemingly without reason. Occasionally a brigadier general would issue martially from inside the hotel, picking his way among the tables and the Ayrab shoeshine boys. GI’s would lower their eyes to their drinks. But the ladies would appraise the general’s mistress. Sometimes it was a Red Cross girl. But oftener it was an Algérienne whom he kept in lipstick and an apartment near the Saint Georges. The BG’s lady sometimes flew to Italy with him in his plane when he made inspections.
I remember that persons with a purpose never stayed long in the outdoor garden of the Aletti. They’d go into the lobby, which looked as though it should be cool. But it never was. It was like the lobby of a New York flop joint, with hundreds of rotting leather chairs. On these GI’s lolled. Past their relaxed bodies flitted the corps of mademoiselles, about fifty in number. They had union hours and union prices. The rules of courtship weren’t strictly observed. The GI’s just lay in their chairs drinking, while the girls moved from one cluster to the next, making their sales talk. They knew instinctively where to do their promoting, working from the bar to the farthest recesses of the lounge. They spoke to as many as two hundred GI’s in the two hours that the bar stayed open. I remember their French social sense. Even if I wasn’t interested, they’d make a social call on me lasting five minutes in return for a drink, a cigarette, and a stick of gum. For ten francs the bar offered white wine with a block of ice in it. It was a strong and melancholy drink.
I remember the Duchess, who always sat alone in a pink straw hat, drinking and smoking and thinking. She never made the advances, having high ideals of her profession. She knew French poetry, the opera, and the gossip of the haut monde. If I bought her a drink, she accepted it so that I understood the great favor she was doing me. Nor did she ever entertain a proposal till closing time, since goodly fellowship was more important to her than her career. She viewed her lovers with a mellow cynicism. I knew she was out of her century. But I didn’t tell her, for the Duchess knew it herself.
—Hélas, she said, picking up her gloves at closing time, qu’ai-je fait de ma jeunesse?
I remember the most sought-after, Emilie the tigress. She was an exhausting girl. She’d fling herself on me in a rage of delight, chewing her gum madly, her eyes spewing fort
h little sparks of coldest fire. She nudged me, prodded me, kicked me, pulled my hair, nipped at my ears. She’d get hold of my waist and squeeze and tickle and maul:
—Ah, chéri, que tu es timide! Crache-moi dans la bouche et dismoi que tu m’aimes!
Then she’d get bored with me and egg the other girls on to fights. I remember discovering that this was an epileptic fit that she sustained for two hours because she was, as it were, on the stage in the Aletti.
I remember that the prettiest of them all was Claudette, who’d come in with her suitcase from Tunis for the pickings. Because she was as fresh and straightforward as an American girl, she was the most popular. Claudette talked a rolling salty English. She made it quite clear that with her stipends from the Allied troops in Algiers she could retire a rich woman in another year.
—And I won’t be a beatup old bag, either! Claudette said.
She never allowed herself to be sampled in public, which was part of the selling propaganda of the other girls.
At the bar of the Aletti stood a circle of misanthropes, officers, and people who wanted to look at the circus without standing in the ring. They drank their white wine and listened and gazed at the ground. What conversation they made to one another or to me heightened my sense of the mania and irrelevance of the war. Nothing they said registered with me at all. It was as though a comedian were to describe death to an audience in a burlesque theater. They all simply lectured when they talked. In the things they said there wasn’t an attempt to establish contact with another human being. They raved like people coming out of anesthetic. They’d built their walls around them for the duration.
I remember that the only person who dared intrude on these solitary drinkers was some girl who wasn’t doing too well for herself in the Aletti lobby. But she too soon saw how these anonymities had been frightened, how they came to the Aletti bar merely in order not to lose their hold on humanity. It was that vague escape from misanthropy in which one frequents crowds in order to assure oneself one hasn’t lost the way.
I remember that sometimes I’d grow weary of drinking and of being pushed around by the Aletti Victory Girls. So I too would stand at the bar with the zombies. I’d take a token white wine and wedge myself in with the rest of the dying pack. When the wine nibbled at me, I sometimes caught psychic currents I couldn’t explain. I’d look up with a sudden uneasiness and see someone at the other end of the bar communicating with me by signals that seemed to have been already agreed on between us. And then I sensed that I could talk out of this world, as one sometimes does with total strangers on railway trains and in confessionals. Sometimes I was close to believing that old crud about the wigwags human beings send out to others when they’re lonely, as insects are said to talk with the scraping of their wings. And I too began to slide around in the dihedrals of time and space, slipping in and out of being like a ball bearing in a maze.
I remember that sometimes my life in that sweating bar of the Hôtel Aletti looked like a separate and removed bubble inching along a thread. Then my mind would start gyrating like a corn popper and I’d have to quiet myself by reasoning that I’d been away from the States a long time, that I was drunk, and my mind was playing me dirty tricks. It was trying to be God and come face to face with itself. But why? why? why? At these moments I’d see myself rocketing out into space, seeing this world from the viewpoint of eternity. How tiny we all were, how like fleas dolled up for a pageant.
I remember that a second lieutenant of the engineers used to drink every afternoon at the bar of the Hôtel Aletti. For a week I watched him. He fled the girls and leaned in the farthest corner of the bar, holding onto his drink as gods clutch at their membra in orgies. I wondered why he never had a buddy. He had hair as white as the snow that Algiers never sees, and a thin sunburned face. He looked like the social young men in Life magazine’s dances, but he didn’t act like them. If anyone spoke to him, he’d reply in just as many words as they’d used on him, smile as though to tell them they didn’t see the farce of it all, and return to his wine. If after this an attempt was still made to continue the conversation, he’d smile again and softly change his place at the bar. His encounters with Emilie and Lucie and Bettine used to make me wonder. I think they were afraid of him. He’d disengage himself from their arms and their nipping teeth with the slippery coolness of an invisible fish.
One evening, I remember, when the white wine had taken a communicative turn in me, I slipped into the place next him and waited shyly, tingling a little. I ordered another white wine with the Aletti ice cube bobbing in it and looked at my boots. It was odd to feel him close by me. It seemed as though all air had been sucked into the place where he stood so aloof and silent. He smelled of Lifebuoy soap and shaving lotion, as though he strove to be impersonal.
I know my army officers pretty well, having observed them for years from the perspective of a pebble looking up and squinting at the white bellies of the fish nosing above it. Americans usually go mad when by direction of the president of the United States they put a piece of metal on their collars. They don’t know whether they’re the Lone Ranger, Jesus Christ, or Ivanhoe. Few Americans I ever knew could sustain the masquerade of an officer. Their grease paint kept peeling in unexpected places. I heard that in combat the good officers simply knew their men well and did them one better in daring. But to be a good officer out of combat demands a sort of shadowboxing between truth and posing. Europeans know the secret. But few Americans can play the nobleman without condescension or chicken.
American officers fall into three easy slots of the doughnut machine. The feminine ones, I mean those who register life and are acted upon by it, become motherly, fussy, and on the receiving end from the GI’s under them. If they rule at all, it’s by power of their gentleness, which can fasten a GI in tight bonds once his will consents and admires. Second, there are the violent and the aggressive, who as commissioned officers assume a male and fatherly part ranging from drunken pas who whale their sons on Saturday nights to the male and nursing tenderness of an athletic coach. Yet these most masculine men aren’t always the best officers in a crisis or showdown. Third, there are those commissioned nonentities who as civilians were male stenographers, file clerks, and X-ray technicians. They are neither masculine nor feminine. They move through the army in polyp groups of their own sort. They’re never alone. I can be in the same room with such officers without feeling the presence of anything or anyone. Touching their personalities is like poking at a dish of lemon jello. They smile and assume another shape.
I remember standing beside the white-haired second lieutenant of the engineers. I thought that if he didn’t speak soon, I’d scream, as the saying goes. I didn’t know into which of my three slots he fell. He seemed a coin with the milling rubbed off.
—Don’t be so goddam condescending, corporal.
—Pardon, sir? I said.
I jumped at the sound of his voice. I realized that his mind had been tracking mine for the past five minutes. This lieutenant had a voice that began at his navel and got muted in his sinuses. As he leaned toward me, his breath was mixed with wine and peppermint.
—You’ve been watching me for the past week, corporal, he said.
—A GI looks up to his officers, sir. Or wants to. . . .
—Ah . . . you hoped to prove to yourself that I’m a sad sack. Well, I am. Completely lost. . . . How do you know you’re in Algiers? Or for that matter what proof can you give me that you’re alive?
—One at a time, sir, I said, gulping my wine so that I could buy him one and establish some ground between him and myself.
—Your curiosity will be the death of you, corporal. Play safe and retreat into some sort of role. . . . It’s wonderful how in a war you can purge yourself and become nothing or everything. . . . I for example have lost my touch with life. I’m like those basket cases in combat. A man still alive but limbless and deaf, dumb, and blind. I just lie in a great white bed, my brain still functioning, but able to make n
o impression on the world outside me. . . . Do you understand me? You have the face of a ferret or a weasel. . . . But knowing too much will sicken you. Just go back to being convenient and optimistic and slick and conventional.
—The lieutenant speaks a fine English, I said, gulping.
—Don’t address me in the third person. You’re like the Ayrabs saluting me when they want a bonbon. You’re an American corporal, and you have confused ideas of democracy and independence and the four freedoms. You loathe saluting me on the street. You think, that sonofabitch shavetail. . . . So don’t think you’re kidding me when you address me in the third person. It’s not respectful. It’s fawning. . . . So for God’s sake just cut out that crap. . . . You came here to talk, and I’m giving you what you asked for. You’ll never want to talk to me again, which will be healthier for both of us.
—Shall I go away now, sir? I said, bridling and trembling at the same time.
—If you like. But you won’t. . . . I’m your experience for today. Well, I’ll give you a dose of me.
—Well, I try to give everybody an even break, I stuttered.
—Except me, corporal, except me. For one solid week now you’ve been staring at me when you weren’t allowing yourself a free grope from these putains. . . . Did it ever occur to you that I have a right to privacy? Is your own life so small that you must enlarge it by listening in on my party lines?
—You’ve got me all wrong, sir . . .
—Mother of shit, the lieutenant said, his voice as cool and removed as ever, how I envy you mediocre people! Since I came overseas I’ve been in a position where nothing has squared with the education I got. I have a good mind. And it’s disciplined. I know Shakespeare and Mozart and calculus and how to hold my moxie. But nothing I learned at Yale has given me any preparation for the mad world in which I find myself. . . . Do you all think you’re playing a game with high stakes? Are you happy to be a Joiner? Are you happy moving in herds and thinking as the newspapers and the radio commercials tell you to? What sweet consolation to be able to say to yourself: I’m an American, therefore better than anyone else in the world! . . . You see, corporal, the human race is getting worse all the time. Each year we know less than we did in the preceding. We’re more no-account now than we were five hundred years ago. Five hundred years from now I doubt that there’ll be any of us left on earth. Just thousands of wrecked planes and burned-out tanks from the South Pole to the steppes of Russia. . . . We get smugger all the time. We call forces of destruction and speed, the March of Progress. . . .
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