—Poor pickins tonight, said the major to the lieutenant.
—I don’t waste any time any more, the lieutenant grunted, paying for his chits. I just say do you and pushem into a dark corner. . . . Piss on all introductions and flourishes. . . . Who started this way anyhow? Not me, buddy. . . .
Momma looked at the half-bald head of the lieutenant under the crazy angle of his cap. She knew that he’d been most heroic in battle—that was how he’d got his commission. There was strife in his low grating voice. Once he’d told her of last winter in battle, of an Italian boy sewing by moonlight in the arch of a bombed house near Formia:
—I was drinking vino with my GI’s. . . . And he just sits there looking at me. Fifteen, he said he was . . . white skin. I remember his eyes over his needle. . . . I wonder where he is now.
As the lieutenant fumbled to pay her for their chits, a woman’s picture fell on Momma’s counter out of his pocket:
—Ees your wife in Stati Uniti? Momma said, trying to turn the glossy print over.
He covered it from her gaze with a hand pocked with sandfly bites and umber with cigarette stains. His eyes were close to hers, yellow and protruding.
—Never mind that, Momma, he said, restoring the picture to his pocket.
Momma knew that the bravest and coolest entered her bar alone. They entered with a curt functionalism that informed everyone that hadn’t come just to drink or to watch or to brood. Still others came in specious twosomes, talked together a little, and spent most of the time ignoring one another and looking into the mirrors in a sort of reconnoitering restlessness. And a few came in groups of twos and threes for protection. When Momma’s bar was full, it was like a peacock’s tail because she could see nothing but eyes through the cigarette smoke. Restless and unsocketed eyes that wheeled all around, wholly taken up in the business of looking and calculating. Eyes of every color. Momma’s bar when crowded was a goldfish bowl swimming with retinas and irises in motion.
Next there came two French lieutenants and two French sailors. The sailors were ubriachi and the lieutenants were icily sober. In the two French officers Momma’d always noted an excellence in the little braided pips through their shoulder loops, their American khaki shirts, and their tailored shorts. Their conversation played over the heads of their sailors with a silvery irony. Momma understood their tongue decently enough, that perfect language which gave all their remarks a literary quality beyond even the intelligence of the speakers.
—Ainsi je noie toute mon angoisse, said the first French officer.
—C’est ma femme qui m’incite à de telles folies, said the other.
—Tilimbom, the drunken sailors said, clapping the pompons on their caps.
The French officers had a jeep which they parked at the steps of the Galleria. When Momma closed her bar, she knew that they whisked into this jeep an assorted and sparkling company and drove to the top of Naples to admire the August moonlight. Momma wondered if the ripple of their epigrams and refinements ceased even when they were making love.
—C’est une manie, Pierre.
—Bon appétit, André.
Momma had less than half an hour till closing time. Her bar, into which people now must wedge themselves, was swimming in smoke and a terrific tempo of talk and innuendo. Under its surface there was a force of madness and a laughter of gods about to burst. Momma put her hand to her throat and swallowed hard in the strangling ecstasy of one dropping down an elevator shaft. For this was the time she loved best of her three hours: a presentiment of infinite possibilities, of hectic enchantments, of the fleeting moment that never could be again because it was too preposterous and frantic and keyed up.
The Desert Rat was finishing his fifth white wine in his prison of detachment and musing. Ella the Aussie was being removed by Gaetano and Vincenzo from the top of the bar, where he was executing a cancan. Rhoda was booming out a quotation from Spengler. The Negro second lieutenant was examining his nail polish. Eddie had put his arms around one of the French officers, talking about parlayvoo-fransay. And the two British sergeants reared up like Savonarolas.
—I’m asking you, Esther, to take a good look at all these mad people. For they are mad. And consider the subtle thread that brings them all together here. Not so subtle as that either, Esther, since their personalities are so deeply rooted in it. What an odd force to unite so many varied personalities! Something they all want . . . and when they’ve had it, their reactions will be different. Some will feel themselves defiled. Others will want another try at it. Others will feel that they haven’t found what they were looking for and will be back here tomorrow night.
—Does either of us know what these people are looking for, Magda? the second sergeant asked with thickened tongue.
—Don’t be dull, Esther. They’re all looking for perfection . . . and perfection is a love of death, if you face the issue squarely. That’s the reason why these people live so hysterically. Since the desire to live, in its truest sense of reproducing, isn’t in them, they live for the moment more passionately than most. That makes them brazen and shortsighted. . . . In this life, Esther, when you find perfection, you either die on the spot in orgasm, or else you don’t know what to do with it. . . . These people are the embodiment of the tragic principle of life. They contain tragedy as surely as a taut string contains a musical note. They’re the race’s own question mark on its value to survive.
—Is there any hope for them, Magda? the second sergeant whimpered, wiping a mist from his glasses.
—In the exact measure that they believe in themselves, Esther. Depending on how they control their centripetal desires. Some hold back in their minds and distrust what they’re doing. In them are the seeds of schizophrenia and destruction. Others give themselves wholly up to their impulses with a dizziness and a comic sense that are revolting to the more serious ones. . . . Lastly there’s a group which sees that they can profit by everything in this world. These are the sane. The Orientals are wiser in these matters than we or Queen Victoria. No phase of human life is evil in itself, provided the whole doesn’t grow static or subservient to the part. . . . But beware, Esther, of the bright psychiatrists who try to demarcate clearly the normal from the abnormal. In the Middle Ages people suffered themselves to be burnt as witches because it gave them such satisfaction to keep up their act. It was just a harmless expression of their ego. And children allow themselves to be pinked by hot stoves just to get a little sympathy out of their parents.
—What does God think of all this, Magda? mourned the second sergeant.
—Thank Him, if He exists, that we don’t know. . . . A new morality may come into existence in our time, Esther. That’s one of the few facts that thrills me, old bitch that I am. Some distinction may be made between public and private sins, between economic and ethical issues. In 1944 you find the most incredible intermingling, a porridge of the old and the new, of superstition and enlightenment. How can we speak of sin when thousands are cremated in German furnaces, when it isn’t wrong to make a million pounds, but a crime to steal a loaf of bread? Perhaps some new code may come out of all this . . . I hope so.
—And if not?
—Why then, the first British sergeant said in drunken triumph, we shall have a chaos far worse than in Momma’s bar this evening. This is merely a polite kind of anarchy, Esther. These people are expressing a desire disapproved of by society. But in relation to the world of 1944, this is just a bunch of gay people letting down their back hair . . . We mustn’t go mad over details, Esther. Big issues are much more important. It is they which should drive us insane if we must be driven at all. . . . All I say is, some compromise must and will be reached. . . . Esther, I’m stinko.
Momma watched the two British sergeants embrace each other with an acid tenderness. Then they slid to the floor unconscious, in a welter of battle dress and chevrons and spectacles. They lay with their eyes closed in the quiet bliss of two spinsters who have fought out their differences at whist, falli
ng asleep over the rubber. And it was typical of Momma’s at this time of the evening that no one paid any attention to the collapse, just pushed and wedged in closer to give the corpses room.
The talk was now at its full tide of animation, like a river ravenous to reach the sea, yet a little apprehensive to lose its identity in that amorphous mass which ends everything. Momma knew the secret of an evening’s drinking, that life grows sweeter as the sun sets and one gets tighter. If only drinkers knew how to hold their sights on that yellow target bobbing on their horizons! For Momma understood the drunkenness of the Nordic better than most Italians did. They drank out of impatience with details, with personalities that were centrifugal, with a certain feminine desire to have a crutch for the spirit, with a certain sluggishness of their metabolism. Momma thought it weak of them to drink, but it was a weakness as amiable as modesty, courtesy, or the desire to live at all when the odds were against them.
In a delirium Momma leaned over her cash desk and strained her ear at the hurtling shafts of talk:
—How can you possibly like actors? Every goddam one of them is constantly playing a part. Off the stage too . . .
—I am essentially an aristocrat. People must come to me. But I’m by no means passive . . .
—My aunt, a refined colored woman, brought me up most circumspectly. I come from a long line of missionaries. So don’t think I don’t spread the good word among the Gentiles . . .
—I don’t know why our sort is always in the best jobs and the smartest . . .
—First time for me, ya see. I’m not the lowered-eyelash kind . . .
—So I told this Nellie to go peddle her fish somewhere else. And she did . . .
—Do you remember loathing your father and doting on your teachers? . . . You didn’t? . . .
—. . . not responsible for anything I do tonight . . .
—Il n’y a rien au monde comme deux personnes qui s’aiment . . .
—Every time I think this is the real thing, the bottom falls right out from under me. Here I go again . . .
—. . . un vero appassionato di quelle cose misteriose . . .
—I could be faithful all night long . . .
—Ciao, cara . . .
—In the Pincio Gardens all I saw was flesh flesh flesh . . .
—Sometime we’ll read the Phaedo together. Then you’ll see what I mean . . .
—There’s somethin in ya eyes. I dunno, I just know when I’m happy . . .
—Let’s you and me stop beating around the bush . . .
—Don’t feel you have to be elegant with me, Bella, cause your tiara’s slippin over one ear . . .
—For Chrissakes, what in hell do ya take me for? . . .
—They’re all suckin for a bruise . . . or somethin else . . .
—. . . am frankly revolted with the spectacle of human beings with their bobbie pins flying all over the place . . .
—And when they expect you to pay them for it . . .
—Pussunally I tink da Eyetalians is a hunnert years behind da times . . .
—Why do I wear a tie? Just to be different, that’s why . . .
—. . . simply no idea of the effect of Mozart coming over a loudspeaker at the edge of the desert. The Krauts simply lovedddd ittt! . . .
—In a society predominantly militaristic . . .
—Ciao, cara . . .
—I looked at you earlier . . . but I didn’t dare think . . .
A sudden silence descended on Momma’s bar. There was a movement of many bodies giving way to make space. She now knew exactly what time it was and who had come. It was Captain Joe and the young Florentine. This was the climax of every evening. Captain Joe stalked cool and somber in his tank boots, a green bandanna tucked round his neck in the negligence of magnificence. He had gold hair which caught the light like bees shuttling at high noon. He had a hard intense sunburned face that smoldered like a monk in a Spanish painting. Momma knew that he was a perfect law unto himself, though gentle and courteous with all. He came only in the company of the young Florentine, whose eyes never Left his face. The captain smiled with amusement and understanding at all, but he spoke only to his friend. Their faces complemented one another as a spoon shapes what it holds. The Florentine had dark thoughtful eyes and olive skin. He seemed wholly selfless. He and Captain Joe shared a delight and a comprehension that couldn’t be heard. But they gave out a peace, a wild tranquillity.
—Buona sera a Lei, said Captain Joe to Momma. You keep a great circus at Naples, signora. And the miraculous thing about you is that you don’t need the whip of a ringmaster. . . . You and I and Orlando are the last of a vanishing tribe. We live in the sunshine of our own nobility. A perilous charge in these days. I wonder if our time will ever come again. We give because we have to. And others try to draw us into their own common mold, reading their own defects into our virtues.
Momma signaled to Vincenzo and Gaetano to shut down the rolling steel shutter. It was closing time. Captain Joe lit her cigarette.
—Happiness, Captain Joe said, is a compromise, signora, between being what you are and not hurting others. . . . We smile, Orlando and I. . . . Genius knows its own weaknesses and hammers them into jewels. All our triumphs come from within. We’ve never learned to weep . . .
A shout, a thud, and screams tore the air.
—Ya will, willya! a drunken voice roared, hoarse with murder. Fists began to fly and people retreated against the walls. There was kicking and petitioning and cursing. The Desert Rat roused from his torpor and leaped in to defend the fallen. In the narrow bar persons swirled back and forth in a millrace. There were bloody noses and snapping joints. And when Momma saw the MP’s break in from the Galleria, flailing their night sticks, she knew that the time had come for her to faint. So almost effortlessly she fell out and across her cash desk. She’d been practicing mentally all evening long.
FIFTH PROMENADE
(Algiers)
I REMEMBER THAT ALONG THE HARBOR OF ALGIERS THERE’S A SEA wall. It dams the city up on the side of the hill lest it slide into the sea. In daylight I used to walk along this wall back of the Hôtel Aletti. There were Ayrab cameramen who took pictures that came out in reverse on gray sensitized paper. These photos made me look as though I’d happened before 1865, in a sad light such as surrounded Mr. Lincoln. And alongside the box camera on clothespins there were suspended pictures the Ayrab was especially proud of: a French family on Sunday afternoon, sailors with their arms around girls, and GI’s peering out of an evil mist, with their shirts open and flowers in their buttonholes. Then I knew that they were drunk, with that same sharp exhibitionism of convict photos or those taken in penny arcades under cruel lighting, so that all subjects look depraved and pimply.
I remember how men overseas in Alger in 1944 tended to gather round the water front, as though by going near water they were challenging the barrier that kept them from home. They’d hang over the concrete balustrade and glare at the water and at the hospital ships and at the barrage balloons. They were people who stood on the edge of the moon, looking longingly at the earth. And all along this sea wall were sentry posts of antiaircraft installations. Back of these, thousands of soldiers peered out to sea or into the heavens. The British in their shorts rubbed themselves against the cement and murmured to one another:
—Choom, I’m browned off. Are you?
I remember how they talked of Africa and Africa and Africa, of how they’d been in the bloody place for four years, and would they ever get back to Blighty. Nor were the Americans any the less on the griping, except that it was more focused—against officers and against food and against what the folks in America were doing. The Americans and the British rarely liked one another. The Limeys thought we had too many PX’s and cinemas where they couldn’t go, and too good rations and all the wimmin. And we thought that their battle dress smelled musty, and that what with the radio there was no excuse for so many accents and dialects as they spoke. Neither understood the other, or tried to.
But we shared places with them along the Mediterranean at Alger. Their shorts hitched high as they leaned over the wall, pointing out things in the harbor. And our pants tightened over our buttocks as we pressed ourselves against the concrete, observing the shipping riding at anchor. There’s a torture in ports when one is landbound. Along this gauntlet of men reaching out to sea and wishing they weren’t there the French families of Alger used to take their Sunday walks. I thought it wasn’t fair for them to be so natural and at home in a foreign land. Also there used to be ladies who got whistled at, and French officers on leave, and little Ayrabs trying to turn a franc. For the money in North Africa was like tinted toilet paper with murals on it. It was so dirty I couldn’t be convinced of its value. It was printed in Philadelphia, however.
I remember that in the evening the press around the harbor got thicker. Then the wall was lined with uniformed men standing elbow to elbow, as though they were in a firing squad. The moon showed their faces or their backs. There was a ripple of talk like the afterswish of a wave. But most just stared. Their eyes were points like a battalion of waiting cats in single file. There was a mute panic in them. At one cry they’d have pushed down the wall and tumbled into the Mediterranean.
—I should thrill to be in Algiers, I suppose. But in wartime nothing gives you any satisfaction, does it? You do all sorts of things and find that it’s like sucking dried fruit. You thought you wanted it from the outside, but inside there’s nothing but ashes.
—The MP’s let me into the Kasbah this afternoon. I went to a house and persuaded the Fatima to let me take pictures of her, bollocky. Such exposures too. I’m squeezing this and I’m squeezing that of her anatomy. She just loved to be photographed . . . for a price. So now I have my own French pictures. But much clearer than those they peddle on the streets back home. I’m having copies struck off for all my boys.
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