The Gallery

by John Horne Burns

  The last Italian to arrive at Momma’s was the only one she respected. He was a count, but he permitted himself to be known only as Gianni. Besides his title he had a spacious apartment in the Vomero. Momma respected his rank, and she hoped some day to be presented to his mother the countess. Momma liked Gianni as a person too. He was always dressed in black, with a white stiff collar and a black knitted tie. His black eyes smoldered with a remote nostalgia. For some months now he’d come to Momma’s drunk a little, and gone away. But tonight he seemed purposeful. He greeted Momma with a tender wretchedness. Momma knew his disease. He was a Neapolitan conte, dying of love. Gianni avoided the other Italians, who had perched themselves on a counter at the rear of the bar, and went straight up to the Desert Rat. Momma leaned over her cash desk and watched with popping eyes.

  —May I speak to you, sir? Gianni said to the Desert Rat.

  His English was as slow and exquisite as that melancholy that lay over him like a cloud.

  —Speak up, chum, the Desert Rat said in his almost inaudible voice.

  —Do you like me a little, sir?

  The Desert Rat didn’t answer, but his tall body stiffened.

  —I had a friend once, Gianni said, almost crying. He was a German officer. He taught me German, you see. He was kind to me. And I think I was kind to him. I think I am a good person, sir. I am a rich count, but of course to you that does not import. . . . I seek nothing from you, sir . . . like the others. . . . You look so much like the German officer. I was happy with him. He said he was happy with me. . . . Would you like sometimes to come to my house in the Vomero, sir?

  The two British sergeants set up a screaming like parrots. Gianni fled. Momma put her hand to her heart, which had given one vast jump. The Desert Rat quietly put down his wineglass. He took the two British sergeants and knocked their heads together. Then he ran out through the bar. Momma watched him stand outside, peering up and down the Galleria and shielding his eyes against the sun. After a while he returned to his place and fell into his old reverie. He seemed as stirred and angry as a true and passionate boy.

  The two British sergeants were shrieking and sobbing and looking at their reddened faces in the mirror. Then they repaired to the gabinetto. Momma could hear them inside splashing water on their faces and gibbering like chickens being bathed by a hen.

  Rhoda looked over her book at the silent Desert Rat. The second incident rolled through the bar like the aftertones of a bell. Momma just held onto her cash register and prayed, for she knew that this was going to be an evening. The Negro second lieutenant began to sing something about “Strange Fruit.” The Italians footnoted the incident to one another. Momma’s bar wasn’t nearly full yet, but it was buzzing like a bomb.

  Presently the two British sergeants swept out of the gabinetto, their faces swollen and their eyes flushed from weeping. They looked like hawks for someone to prey on. Enzo stepped easily up to them, placed a hand on his hip, and extended his powerful jeweled hand:

  —Buona sera, ragazze.

  —You go straight to hell! the first British sergeant screeched. Why do you come here at all, you sordid little tramps in your dirty old finery? Do you think we feel sorry for you? Go on Via Roma and peddle your stuff and stop trying to act like trade. . . . We see through you, two-shilling belles. All of you get out, do you hear? Nobody here wants anything you’ve got. The Allies are quite self-sufficient, thank you. We did all right before Naples fell. . . . Why the nerve of you wop queans! Glamour!? Why you’ve all got as much allure as Gracie Fields in drag. . . . Go find some drunken Yank along the port. . . . But get the hell out of here!

  The Italians replied to the sally of the British sergeants in their own indirect but effective way. Momma decided that the Italians were more deeply rooted in life, that they accepted themselves. For the Italian contingent merely sent up a merry carol of laughter. If they’d had fans, they’d have retreated behind them. This laughter hadn’t a hollow ring. It was based on the assumption that anything in life can be laughed out of existence. Momma had never admired the Italian element in her bar. Now she did. They shook with the silveriest laughter, lolling over one another like cats at play. Their limbs gleamed in their shorts. Even the tiny sergente maggiore joined in the badinage. And the two British sergeants stepped back by Momma’s cash desk and resumed their jeremiad.

  —What will become of us, Esther? When we were young, we could laugh off the whole business. You and I both know that’s what camping is. It’s a Greek mask to hide the fact that our souls are being castrated and drawn and quartered with each fresh affair. What started as a seduction at twelve goes on till we’re senile old aunties, doing it just as a reflex action. . . .

  —And we’re at the menopause now, Magda. . . . O God, if some hormone would just shrivel up in me and leave me in peace! I hate the thought of making a fool of myself when I turn forty. I’ll see something gorgeous walking down Piccadilly and I’ll make a pass and all England will read of my trial at the Old Bailey. . . . Do you think we would have been happier in Athens, Magda?

  —Esther, let’s face facts. You can’t argue yourself out of your own time and dimension. You and I don’t look like the Greeks and we don’t think like them. We were born in England under a late Victorian morality, and so we’ll die. . . . The end is the same anyhow, Greek or English. Don’t you see, Esther? We’ve spent our youth looking for something that doesn’t really exist. Therefore none of us is ever at peace with herself. All bitchery adds up to an attempt to get away from yourself by playing a variety of poses, each one more gruesome and leering than the last. . . . I’m sick to death of it, Esther. I can think of more reasons for not having been born than I can for living. . . . Is there perhaps some nobility stirring in my bones?

  —Then is there no solution, Magda? the second British sergeant asked wistfully.

  He cast his eyes about the bar like a novice about to take the veil.

  —Millions, Esther. But rarely in the thing itself. That’s what tantalizes us all. We play with the thing till it makes of us what we swear we’ll never become, cold-blooded sex machines, dead to love. There are so many ways of sublimating, Esther. . . . But are they truly satisfying either? For some hours I’ve known, though they’ll never come again, I’d cheerfully pass all eternity in hell.

  —And I too, Magda. That’s the hell of it. We all have known moments, days, weeks that were perfect.

  —All part of the baggage of deceit, Esther. God lets us have those moments the way you’d give poisoned candy to a child. And we look back on those wonderful nights with far fiercer resentment than an old lady counting the medals of her dead son.

  —But we’ve had them, Magda; we’ve had them. No one can take them away from us.

  The two British sergeants lapsed into silence, for which Momma was grateful. Their conversation was a long swish of hissing s’s and flying eyebrows. They began to scratch their chevrons in a troubled and preoccupied way, and their faces fell into the same sort of introspective emptiness that Momma’d observed on old actresses sitting alone in a café. There was a lost air about them that made her prefer not to look at them, as though the devil had put her a riddle admitting of no solution, and a forfeit any way she answered it.

  It was 1830 hours in Momma’s bar, the time of the breathing spell. She was quite aware that, gathered under her roof and drinking her white wine and vermouth, there was a great deal of energy that didn’t quite know how to spend itself. And since there’s some rhythm in life, in bars, and in war, everybody at once stopped talking and ordered fresh drinks. She could see them all looking at their wrist watches and telling themselves: I have another hour to go—what will it bring me?

  Momma’s sixth sense told her there was trouble brewing. A group of soldiers and sailors entered her bar. From the way they shot around their half-closed eyes she knew that this wasn’t the place for them. They had an easiness and a superiority about them as though they were looking for trouble with infinite condescension. Cigar
s lolled from their mouths.

  —Gracious, the Negro second lieutenant said, men!

  —Look, Esther, said the first of the British sergeants, look at the essence of our sorrow. . . . What we seek and can never have. . . . And each side hates the other. The twain never meet except in case of necessity. And they part with tension on both sides.

  For there were two American parachutists who lounged insolently, taking up more cubic space than they should have. And with them were two drunken American sailors, singing and holding one another up. Momma now wished that Poppa were here to order this foursome out summarily, under threat of the MP’s. Vincenzo and Gaetano were no help at all in such circumstances. Then what she feared happened. Someone of her regular clientele let up a soft scream like a pigeon being strangled. At once a parachutist stiffened, flipped a wrist, and bawled:

  —Oh saaaay, Nellie!

  This was the moment the Italians had been waiting for. They picked themselves off the flat-topped counter where they’d been idling and padded toward the four newcomers. They were cajoling and tender and satiric and gay. They lit cigarettes for the parachutists and the sailors, and took some themselves. It became a swirling ballet of hands and light and rippling voices and the thickened accents of the sailors and the parachutists.

  —Jesus, baby, those bedroom eyes! someone said to Vittorio.

  —I hateya and I loveya, ya beast, one of the sailors said.

  —Coo, it teases me right out of my mind, one of the British sergeants said. So simple and complex. Masculine and feminine. All gradations and all degrees and all nuances.

  —The basis of life and love and cruelty and death, said the other British sergeant, looking as though he would faint. And in the long run, Magda, who is master and who mistress?

  From a tension that was surely building up, Momma was distracted by the appearance of an assorted horde. In the final hour of the evening her bar filled until there were forty wedged in, six to eight deep from the mirrors to the bar. Her eyes had a mad skipping time to follow all that went on. It was like trying to watch a circus with a thousand shows simultaneous in as many rings.

  First came an Aussie in a fedora hat, to which his invention had added flowers and feathers. Tonight he was more than usually drunk. He slunk in with the slow detachment of a mannequin modeling clothes. He waved a lace handkerchief at all:

  —Oh my pets, my pets! Your mother’s awfully late tonight, but she’ll try and make it up to you!

  —Ella’s out of this world, some one said. She’s brilliant, brilliant.

  A glazed look came over the sailors’ eyes like snakes asleep. Ella the Aussie kissed their hands and bustled off while they were still collecting themselves.

  —Don’t call me your sister! Ella shrieked, waving at his public while buying chits from Momma. He kissed Momma on both her cheeks, leaving a stench of alcohol and perfume.

  There was a rich hollow thud. Momma at first feared that someone had planted a fist on someone else’s chin. But it was only Rhoda, the WAC corporal, closing her book. That evening she read no further. It was getting too crowded in there even to turn pages.

  Next to appear at Momma’s was a British marine, sullen in his red and black, with a hulking beret. Momma knew he was a boxer, but not the sort who made trouble. He’d a red slim face, pockmarked and dour; the muscles in his calves stood out like knots. While drinking he teetered up and down on his toes and was a master at engineering newcomers into conversation. He observed everyone with a cool devotion. Often he’d invited Momma to his bouts at the Teatro delle Palme, but she hadn’t gone because she couldn’t bear to see him beating and being beaten in the ring. This British marine was on the most basic and genial terms with himself and the world.

  Next came a plump South African lance corporal with red pips, and a Grenadier Guardsman, tall and reserved and mustached. The South African lance corporal was a favorite of Momma’s because he made so much of her. She knew he didn’t mean a word of it, but the whole ceremony was so much fun to her.

  —Old girl, I’ve finally got married, said the plump lance corporal, presenting her to the Grenadier Guardsman, who looked terrified and bulwarky at the same time. This is Bert. You’ll love Bert. He save my life in Tunisia. And he understands me. So he’s not as stupid as he looks. And his devotion, darling! Coo! Just like a Saint Bernard Bert is. He knows how to cook, you know. . . . Bert’s essence is in his mustaches. The traditionalism, the stolidity, and the stupidity of the British people produced those mustaches of Bert’s.

  Momma was in such a whirl of happiness that she gave the guardsman a chit for a drink on the house. Meanwhile the South African lance corporal whirled about the bar, burbling to everyone and formally announcing his marriage to Bert.

  Momma was beginning to believe that she wasn’t going to have any trouble from the parachutists and the sailors. They and the Italians were lazily drinking and mooing at one another. Momma tried to spell out for herself some theory of good and evil, but the older she got and the more she saw, the less clear cut the boundaries became to her. She could only conclude that these boys who drank at her bar were exceptional human beings. The masculine and the feminine weren’t nicely divided in Momma’s mind as they are to a biologist. They overlapped and blurred in life. This trait was what kept life and Momma’s bar from being black and white. If everything were so clear cut, there’d be nothing to learn after the age of six and arithmetic.

  Among the later comers to Momma’s were certain persons from the port battalion that sweated loading and unloading ships in the Bay of Naples. They turned up in her bar in the Galleria Umberto as soon as the afternoon shift got off, just as the truck drivers make a beeline for coffee and doughnuts. They usually came with fatigues damp with their sweat, with green-visored caps askew on their knotted hair. Because they were out of uniform Momma feared trouble with the MP’s. But some of these port battalion GI’s were Momma’s favorites since they brought her many odds and ends they’d taken from the holds of Liberty ships: tidbits destined for generals’ villas and the like. They knew Momma’s nature as a curio collector of things and people.

  There was Eddie, an American corporal. Momma loved Eddie the way she’d love a child of her own who was born not quite all there. Eddie’d been a garage mechanic in Vermont. He squirmed with that twisted tenderness often acquired by people who spend their lives lying under motors and having axle grease drip on them. Eddie had misty lonely eyes; his mouth was that of one who has never made the transition out of babyhood. His red hair yielded to no comb, and there was always a thick mechanical residue under his fingernails, which Momma sometimes cleaned herself. Eddie was drunk on duty and off. As he bought his chits, he leaned over Momma and patted her clumsily on her hair.

  —Come stai, figlio mio? Momma asked.

  —Bene, bene, Momma, he replied.

  Eddie would caress people in a soft frightened way and then run his tongue over his lips. After he’d got good and tight, he’d go through the crowded bar playing games, pulling neckties, snapping belt buckles, and thrusting his knee between people’s legs. He was like a little dog that has got mixed up in society and desires to find a master.

  Then there was a supply sergeant of the port battalion, with his vulture face. His every movement seemed to Momma a raucous suppression of some deeper inferiority sense. He talked constantly like a supply catalogue, reeling off lists of things in his warehouse for the potent music of their names. Then he would shoot out his jaw and the blood would capillate into his eyes. Momma got him rooms around Naples with spinster acquaintances of hers. He stayed in these rooms on his one night off a week. This sergeant loved to sally into off-limits areas and wet-smelling vichi.

  —Color and glamour, the sergeant said, all there is to life, baby. . . .

  Eddie meanwhile had drunk three glasses of vermouth and came and stood by Momma, slipping cakes of soap into her hand behind the cash desk.

  —Jees, I tink I got da scabies, Momma . . .

&nb
sp; The last delegate from the port battalion was one of its tech sergeants named Wilbur. He treated Momma like a serving girl and spent his time going over everyone with his eyes. Wilbur should have been born a lynx, for he draped his length over any available area with a slow rehearsed lewdness. Tonight he was growing a mustache, but it didn’t camouflage his violet eyes that glowed like amethysts in his face. Momma could never get him to look her in the eyes. He simply drawled at everyone, and all the things he said lay around in gluey pools like melted lavender sherbet.

  —Bonsoir, ducks, Wilbur said to the two British sergeants. When is all this blah going to end? Because it is blah, and nobody knows it better than you. . . . Done any one nice lately? What a town to cruise this is. All the belles in the States would give their eyeteeth to be in Naples tonight. And when they saw all there is here, they’d be so confused they wouldn’t know what to do with it. . . . Can you imagine the smell of their breaths? . . . Blah, that’s all it is.

  Two of Momma’s more distinguished patrons now entered from the Galleria. They did it every evening, but every evening a little hush fell over the drinkers. They came in a little flushed, as though they’d been surprised in a closet. Perhaps the momentary pall proceeded from a certain awe at their rank, or at their temerity in coming at all. For by now the party was well under way, susceptible to that hiatus in levels of euphoria when people come late to a group that is already from alcohol in a state of dubious social cohesion. One was a pasty-faced major of the American medical corps who gave Momma a free physical examination every month and got his dentist friends to clean her teeth gratis. The major’s breath always boiled in an asthmatic fashion, as though he were in the last stages of love-making. With him was his crony, a not so young second lieutenant who’d been commissioned for valor in combat at Cassino. The major and the lieutenant both wore gold wedding bands on their fingers. Momma gathered that they preferred not to discuss their wives, since these little women were four thousand miles away.