The Gallery

by John Horne Burns

  On this August night the officers hadn’t bothered her. In eight months at PBS Club she’d polished up the brushoff tactics Wilma had taught her. But just now opposite her leaning on the bar was a most simpatico person. On one tab of his collar he had a silver cross. By a little questioning Giulia proved to herself what she’d guessed when she first saw him — that he was a priest. He was drinking gin and juice. He minded his own business, except that every so often he gave her a kind smile. He spoke to her in both English and Latin. When she got stuck on a word in her novel, he’d explain it to her, poising his brown finger on the pages of her book. This chaplain’s hair was cropped to the bone. His face had the glow of a child. To Giulia he was a contrast with all the other American officers at the bar, whose faces were angry or soiled or lined or predatory.

  — Have you many Simon Legrees in America? Giulia asked, looking up from her book. Her forehead was resting on her hand.

  — Oh lots, the priest said laughing. But we’ve taken their horsewhips away from them.

  — I take this book home with me every night, said Giulia. Last night I read where Little Eva dies, and I cried myself to sleep.

  The priest laughed again and rocked back and forth on his combat boots.

  — Giulia, you’re great. I wish some of the bobby-soxers in my Boston parish could see you. They wouldn’t believe you existed. . . . Crying yourself to sleep over a book! . . . American women used to do that fifty years ago . . . but not now.

  She laid her novel face down and searched his face. The bar was weighted with the stifling August air. She felt the tiny ringlets fan over her moist brow.

  — Am I so different, Father? she asked earnestly.

  — Well, frankly, Giulia, you’re out of this world. . . .

  Then his face rushed a wild crimson, and he set down his glass and turned away.

  — Good night, Giulia, and God bless you.

  — Good night, Father, and thank you.

  She watched him leave the bar through its lurid smoke. He was with the 3rd Division, which was crowding the streets of Naples. She d heard that soon there’d be an invasion of southern France. That was why in August, 1944, you couldn’t turn around in Naples for the americani. There were more of them here now than she remembered when the city fell in October of last year. Giulia sighed and resumed her novel. She found that her thoughts were still with the priest, not with Signora Harriet Beecher Stowe. So she shut her book and thrust it under her dictionary.

  Then there came to the only open space at the bar a florid major clasping the waist of an American nurse. Giulia’d never got used to seeing women in officers’ greens and wearing lieutenant’s bars. Most of the American nurses had been gracious to her, saying that she was a dream. But this major and this nurse exuded an ugly reckless giddiness of alcohol. The nurse snuggled into the major and chuckled. She was a stout blonde, her cap set madly on her dyed hair. She had also a double chin. She began to size up Giulia, going all over her dreary Mother Hubbard with eyes like a parrot’s.

  — Sell me some chits, baby, the major said. Don’t just sit there and look like a doll.

  — Please sign the paper, Giulia said, pushing it and a pen toward him.

  — Well, just who does she think she is? the nurse said, blowing cigarette smoke into Giulia’s face.

  Giulia’s eyes watered, but she said nothing.

  — A mighty pretty piece of quail, the major said to the nurse, indicating Giulia with a whistle.

  — Herbert, the nurse said, don’t give me any of that crap that she reminds you of your daughter. I’ve heard that crap out of you before.

  The nurse leaned her head on the major’s shoulder and closed her eyes. Her double chin bobbled while she swallowed her drink. Then she leaned close to Giulia.

  — Why don’t you use lipstick, girlie?

  — I have naturally good color, Giulia said. And lipstick is hard to get in Naples this year. And if I put too much on, my mother would have me wash it off . . .

  — Well, listen to that now, said the nurse. Don’t get on your high horse with me, girlie. I have to take enough crap on the ward in the daytime. I didn’t come here to have the likes of you insult me. . . . I’m a commissioned officer in the American Army in case you don’t realize it, girlie. I’ve a good mind to report you to the military manager. . . . I could have you thrown out on Via Roma with the rest of them . . .

  — Oh dry up, Mary, the major said. Why don’t you buy her some lipstick from your own PX?

  — I’d croak first, the nurse said, her double chin jiggling. Let’s get the hell out of this flea joint. . . . Get the jeep and drive me back to Aversa. . . . I’m all sweaty. I can’t beat this damn heat.

  — And just mind your p’s and q’s with me, girlie, she added to Giulia. I’d hate to tell you what I think of you Ginso women.

  The nurse and her major went out of the bar nudging one another, the major protesting that he hadn’t made eyes at Giulia. Giulia watched their exit. Then she laid her head in her hands. Only for an instant, for the major insisted that his girls look sharp on duty.

  Through the open windows of the Bank of Naples looking out on Via Rome the sultry music of the Neapolitan night came up to Giulia, an undertone discernible even through the rumble of the officer’s bar. She could all but distinguish the press of the women’s heels on the pavements beneath her, could almost see the Neapolitans lounging in doorways and the scugnizz’ peddling things till they must leave the streets at curfew hour. This murmur of her own town had a certain meaning for Giulia. The simulated gaiety of the Americans in their bar had none. She was weary. The very repose of sitting and selling chits or sandwiches for eight months was beginning to fatigue her. Wilma and the other girls could break the monotonly by ducking down behind the cassa for a quick cigarette. Lately she noticed that she’d a headache when she walked away from the club around midnight. Perhaps it was the war. Perhaps it was Naples in August, 1944. Perhaps she was what the americani called fed up. But it did seem to her that her life was assuming the quality of a grinning automaton who worked on the four-o’clock shift. She knew that she was giving nothing of herself, that she was turning into a slightly stale vase of flowers. . . .

  — Buck up, Giulia, said an officer, buying some chits. Life is real, life is earnest.

  — Yes, Giulia said, lowering her eyes.

  — So ye won’t talk to me tonight? the officer said, waggling a finger. Okay, don’t. I’ll go and shoot the breeze with Wilma. She’s naughty. . . . I like em naughty. Why don’tcha wise up and get naughty too?

  He left her in an irritation. Giulia sold more books of chits, but all the time her mind was running in its own groove. She thought of her fidanzato Pasquale. Every week his letters came from the P/W enclosure in Oran. They were flatulent and lamenting, living over the years 1940 and 1941. They were full of noble whining and quotations from Leopardi. He kept telling her that Italy and the Italians were done for.

  And Giulia thought of the Neopolitan girls she’d grown up with. Either they’d gone giggling over to the Allies for what they could get, or else their mothers had locked them up for the duration. She knew that the lives of all Neapolitans had been cut in two. They might all be said to have died; yet she doubted if they’d had a rebirth, though their bodies went right on living. Only herself seemed unchanged, moving in some orbit of her own that had no relation to any reality.

  On this night in August, 1944, Giulia was lonely. She was the only Neapolitan girl who was hewing to her own destiny, as though the war had never been. Thus now in her breast she felt a pulse of fierceness and resentment when she looked at the Naples of August, 1944. There was nothing here now that offered her any consolation or the old quiet delight she once took from life: the sip of a glass of new wine, the walks with her girl friends (she’d none now, though she visited many), and that old pleasure she used to get from combing out her hair before going to bed. All these simple processes and habits had become routine and zestless to her.
She felt like a starving person who has lost the taste for food. She wondered if she were dying of staleness.

  — O Dio mio, she said fiercely to herself, su, su! coraggio! . . .

  She wondered to what a pretty pass she’d come that often now she carried on dialogues with herself. And it was all very simple, for she saw clean through the rhetoric of Italian. She wished to be loved. This craving had crystallized in Giulia during her eight months at PBS Club.

  But she wished to be loved according to the old standards of honor passed down through generations of Italian mothers. She wasn’t interested in something mad and fragrant for a few nights, such as she saw all about her in Naples of August, 1944. Before the fall of Naples she’d been on the right path to be loved according to her lights. She saw the purpose of her training, to be an Italian girl of softness and dignity. Nearly all Italian women had these traits. But many had abandoned them in the catastrophe that was rending Italy. Giulia had abandoned nothing. Now as a result of still living as she’d been taught to live, she found herself like an island, off by herself. She wondered if she were mad. She feared she’d schooled her soul for something that could never again materialize in Italy. She was objective enough to know that in a normal time she’d have had a quietly happy life. She’d have been a good wife and a good mother. That was what women did best. But how were these things to be now? Sometimes she got such a perspective on herself that she seemed a quiet feast set on a table to which no man would ever come. Now the food was growing cold, and all the loving pains of the cook were wasted. . . .

  Giulia couldn’t resist laying her face in her hands. She felt her tears squeezing through her tightly locked fingers.

  — Why you’re crying, a voice spoke to her. Ma Lei non deve piangere cosi amaramente. . . . Perchè?

  She looked up and made a grab for the handkerchief that an American captain whom she’d never seen was holding out to her. She peered swiftly up and down the bar. Everyone was drunk and talking wildly. No one had noticed her disgraceful giving-way. The tears in her eyes stopped quite suddenly. She turned away her head from the American captain and blew her nose. Reality returned to her in wave upon wave of mortification.

  — Metterei volentieri mille fazzoletti Sua disposizione, the captain said.

  Her joy at being addressed in formal Italian by an American made Giulia weak. She gripped both sides of her cash desk, smiled stupidly, and returned his handkerchief to him. She reached blindly for her green bag to take out her own.

  — You mustn’t speak Italian to me, she said. Among my American friends I speak American.

  — Now who taught you that pretty speech? the captain said. I know you’re too sharp a girl to think that the people who come to this club are your friends. So don’t begin with a hypocrisy . . . let’s be honest with one another from the start, shall we?

  — Yes, said Giulia, I do so want someone to be honest with.

  The brazen sound of this speech in English (she still thought in Italian) stunned her. She felt her color coming up over the shapeless collar of her Mother Hubbard.

  — Yes, the captain said, setting down his glass, let us be completely honest with one another. . . . I’ll be honest with you. You’re the loveliest girl I’ve ever laid eyes on. And your loveliness comes . . . from being . . . just there. . . . I walked into this smelly strained room, expecting to find nothing. And I find you . . . just . . . there . . . how wonderful. . . . And I’m not drunk either.

  This American captain was the ugliest man Giulia had ever looked upon. His face was square. In his combat boots he looked like a wooden robot. His hair was gray at the temples. Yet when he smiled or gestured with his long gentle hands, or when he spoke, it seemed to her that granite dissolved into music. He was so hideous that he made her want to laugh, as at a gnome in a fairy tale. Yet her laughter at him turned back on herself. In his first contact with her this captain had beckoned her into a peace in which he himself moved. This peace wasn’t specious. Giulia sensed it was a solid block which only his death could shatter. Within five minutes she thought that this captain had always been resident some place inside her, had chosen this moment to step out and introduce himself. For he had a way of allaying her doubts before she uttered them. He knew her, and she knew him, as though all their lives they’d instinctively been preparing for one another.

  — You’re smiling now, the captain said. That’s better. Tell me that you never smiled at anyone that way before.

  — No, said Giulia, hardly daring to look at him, I never have.

  For the rest of the evening till the bar closed Giulia and the American captain talked together. Quietly, when the spirit moved them to say something; casually, without effort. He leaned opposite her on the bar. Never too near or too familiar, because the externals weren’t necessary. Something else in them was touching. And there was respect for each other’s privacy, like two civilized people bowing in a maelstrom. The bar ceased to exist for them. Giulia continued to sell chits. Even when she took her eyes from him to count chits or change or to speak to the officer purchasing, she knew that this captain was with her. From this moment on he wouldn’t leave her. Some force had come up under her and was buoying her up as she’d never swum before. And she’d look into that face with no redeeming trait of beauty to make a man desirable. Then a laugh of the wildest joy would seem to smother her. He responded to everything she thought or said as though, well, that was exactly what he’d expected her to think or say.

  — We’re not mad, the captain said. Sanity is so marvelous.

  Yet Giulia in her bed that night was sure she was mad. She laughed and cried till the sun came up over Naples. Looking at her sorry face in the morning, she laughed again and fell back on her bed.

  — Sì, sono pazza, she said. Non potrei essere così felice. . . .

  That afternoon Giulia knew she’d gone mad, but in a precise and scheming way. She put on and took off nearly all her dresses. She experimented with her hair, ending by doing it the old way with the delta of ringlets around her brow. Mamma from her couch kept calling out Whatever on earth was the matter with Giulia? And Giulia only smiled from before her mirror, her mouth full of hairpins. Finally she put on her green frock, her green shoes, her green Meravigliosa hat with the green bow. Then she tucked under her arm the copy of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the English dictionary. Mamma, inspecting her, pointed out that today was neither Sunday nor a giorno di festa. To which Giulia replied that, given the right frame of mind, every day was a giorno di festa.

  She went down into the streets of Naples. In August, 1944, the city had a smell of baking stone shot through with the spicy tang of mandarini sold in the corner wagons. In that salita where Giulia lived the corrugated iron walls of the public urinal impregnated the air with an acrid fume poignant as history. She walked quickly along humming to herself that tune “Polvere di Stelle” by Hoagy Carmichael. She swung her green bag so gaily that shoeshine boys in the public garden of Piazza Municipio turned round at their stands and called out to her invitations that had an American tone of provocation. She had also to pass the palazzo where an American port battalion was quartered; the GI’s were hanging out of their balcony windows in their undershirts, chewing gum and swapping with one another observations on current events and Neapolitan girls with whom they were shacking. Giulia’s passage provoked a madrigal of whistles. The sentinel at the barbed wire, a GI of more feudal heritage, presented arms to her. Ordinarily she’d have cast down her eyes and felt her body go taut, but today she smiled and looked him straight in the face.

  — Come stare? Tu molto buono, the sentinel said, shifting his carbine back to its shoulder sling.

  — Grazie assai, Giulia said.

  Wilma and Gino were living together in two rooms on Via Diaz. They were quite comfortable by pooling their salaries from PBS Club and by drawing American rations that Gino’d promoted from the quartermaster. They were easily the happiest unwed couple in all Naples. Their prosperity and their love were supporte
d by the Americans, whom they both cherished with the cynical devotion of people below stairs.

  This afternoon Giulia found them where she’d hoped she would, taking the sun from their second-story balcony, leaning on the railing and holding hands. They talked incessantly to each other, Gino’s mouth against Wilma’s hidden ear, whispering ironies and passions. Gino was wearing his turtle-necked sweater and a pair of white flannels. His brilliantined curls wriggled like garter snakes in the Neapolitan sunlight. Wilma had on a blue silk kimono. The white globes of her breasts twinkled in the sun. Her blue hair was low over her forehead; her rouged and mascaraed face made her features sharp and clear to Giulia, who was standing thirty feet below the doting couple. Wilma sent up her scream of welcome.

  — Ho bisogno di te, Giulia called up to the balcony, beckoning urgently up to Wilma.

  — Giulietta, aspetta un po’! Wilma cried and vanished from the balcony, roguishly tucking her kimono about her creamy shoulders.

  — Ciao, Giulietta, Gino said, leaning out over Giulia.

  — Ciao, Gino, said Giulia.

  After a while Wilma appeared on the sidewalk and took Giulia’s arm. They waved good-by to Gino on his balcony and whisked off along Via Medina at a businesslike clip. Wilma’d put on a dramatic hat with a veil and had applied more paint so that her generous flamboyant face glistened like porcelain under the veil. With her breezy tact she didn’t even inquire what Giulia wanted of her. Obviously she remembered her ancient promise to be Giulia’s chaperone in any emergency.

  — Come mai sei cosi cambiata in una notte? Wilma said chuckling.

  By this one sentence Giulia knew that this wise girl was in on her secret. Wilma smoked a cigarette through the mesh of her veil, giving her the appearance of a network on fire. They turned up Via Diaz, arriving at the Intendenza di Finanza Building. In August, 1944, this was the headquarters of the Peninsular Base Section. Without any difficulty they got by the MP and into the cool foyer, for Wilma had a pass. As they seated themselves on the bench by the information booth, Giulia suddenly asked what would Wilma think if she married an American? Wilma gave out a jolly cackle, patted her hand, and said that Giulia for quite some time had been spoiling for an American.