The Gallery

by John Horne Burns

  There’s something in these memorials of the human spirit that cheers and terrifies at the same time. Death is coming, but it can’t be so awful because everyone goes through with it. And out of death this art speaks to the living. It smiles. With the smile of a mother who knows what her child has to look forward to. But she never speaks of it. This is the crystallized wisdom of art. Nobody heeds it, yet everyone admires it on one plane of taste or another. I remember that in Naples of August, 1944, I found that art achieves what man hopes for and what religions promise.

  And I remember that something in the air of Naples or in the Neapolitans brought me and other Americans back to the strength of human love. In the middle of a war it’s easy to forget how to love, either another’s body, or just humanity. War throws out of kilter that part of us which delights in a kiss, the feel of skin, a smile. Our emphasis falls on sheer physical release taken hurriedly and brutally.

  I wondered why Americans must be taught how to love. Perhaps it’s because in our country there is felt to be something shameful in two human beings taking their pleasure together. In America I remember a tension between the sexes. Human love is a disease for the isolation ward, not at all nice. Thus love in America is often divided into the classifications of Having Sex and Getting Married. Neither has much to do with love. It was the Having Sex which began to strike us in Naples as being so cold-blooded. What caused this? The Italian scenery? The Neapolitan women? But after a while I and many other Americans ceased to be satisfied with passion without affection. I’d known Americans who’d lost their virginity without ever kissing or making love in the old sense of the word. So we came to look upon this Having Sex, this ejaculation without tenderness as the orgasm of a frigidaire. There was no place for it in the scheme of human love. It wasn’t so much bestial as meaningless. For Having Sex meant that the two bodies involved never really knew one another. They just rolled and arose strangers, each loathing the other.

  For I remember that many of us Americans couldn’t fit love into our lives. Before marriage we knew the double date, that negation of intimacy and privacy. Two men and two girls go out for an evening. The men talk between themselves, the girls between themselves. After four hours everyone is so bored that the only escape is a physical one, as a book is torn to bits by a reader who can’t understand it. There were no overtures, no epilogues. I watched Americans when I was on double dates with them. They hadn’t much sense of how to lead up to the act by conversation, of how to stir the woman’s mind before their fingers touched her body. Their kisses, if they kissed at all, were rough and fumbling. They did outrage to the gentleness of women. I wondered why many Americans kept their love of women in a tight compartment. And the women in their turn thought the men graceless bulls.

  — I was standin in the park, the mess sergeant said. An she starts to cry an scratch my face when I wouldn’t kiss her.

  — Rosetta tole me I necked like a butcher, the corporal said. But I caught on fast, with the lessons she gimme. These babes know somethin. . . . She taught me to kiss slow, to take my time. I useta close my eyes an just jab, hoping for the best. . . . Rosetta kisses sleepylike. Sometimes she puts her tongue in my ear. Or just brushes her lips along my throat. Gee . . .

  — Neapolitan women know how to hold their men, the pfc said, wiping his spectacles. They’ve had centuries of training. You don’t need divorce when you can cook and make love. Love’s a lot simpler than some people make it out to be. Quite natural, you know . . .

  — Damned if I do know, the tech sergeant said. Wouldn’t it sorta embarrass ya to be married to a gal that responded too well? Wouldn’t ya feel she knew a little bit too much to be ya wife? . . . If ya had a mouse in ya house that really knew how to love ya up, ya might feel like handin her five bucks before ya went to sleep.

  — You’d get used to it, the pfc said. And you wouldn’t be nervous or dissatisfied half the time.

  For though we Americans were a conquering army, when history is written it will show that the Neapolitans conquered many of us. They beat us down with love. They loved love. There were Italian boys and girls who slashed their wrists for us, whether we deserved it or not.

  The Italians regarded romantic love as what it really is: a virulent disease. And we only jested about it. They taught us the anatomy of this extraordinary madness. They showed us that it should be enjoyed and feared, that the rules and science of love are at least as worthy of consideration as the laws of hygiene, football, and business ethics.

  The Neapolitans taught us that love’s as necessary as eating and excreting. It’s a game in which music and cruelty and peace are all at stake. People are only admirable in ratio to their susceptibility to love. Laughter and good manners and wit are all trappings of love. Even when they aren’t in love, the Italians ape the mannerisms of the lover. Thus they can be joyous at eighty. Italian love is both articulate and silent. The lovers quickly knock down any barrier between them. It’s the only time in a man’s life when he can forget that people are really alone in life, that actually there’s no way to bridge the chasm between hearts. Those physical manifestations of love, the touches and glances and kisses and confessions, are all deceits that we invent to hide our own loneliness.

  — When ya walk down Via Roma, the corporal said, ya can tell by their eyes whether they will or won’t. They make no bones about it over here. . . . Christ, what eyes they giveya.

  — Back home, the pfc said, they’d call it unbridled sensuality.

  — I can have any Ginso I want, the mess sergeant said. Any age, any sex. They all love it. It’s the one good thing I’ll say for em.

  I remember that love in Naples was both wild and disciplined. When two people enter into this madness, they can’t stop short at any point, saying: There, I’ve loved you enough. Yet this madness of giving and pleasing and reciprocating is governed by strict rules that the lovers seem instinctively to understand. The only evil you can do to love is to thwart it by purely intellectual rules or by betraying what your own heart tells you to do.

  I remember how easy and fluid the beginning is. That first entrance into a room, that easy lounging on a street corner, that first sally of eyes, those first words that awakened a suspicion or an echo in my cellar. I couldn’t believe it was happening to me. Yet I’d always dreamed this was the way it would be when it came. At first I tried to hold off and watch my own mind. But I ended by tumbling into the stream I was charily testing with my toe.

  I remember the next stage of my disease. Something I’ve been looking for is here for the asking. Everything we say to each other means more than our words denote. For love is understanding. And the solace! For a night, for a week, for a month, for a year two people are able to forget the riddle of being alive in the greater delight and torment of being lifted out of themselves and married on some island where nothing else in the world may come.

  — Dimmi che cosa pensi, John.

  — Same thing you are, of course.

  I remember that then I found the difference between love and Having Sex. There’s none of the blind preoccupation with my own body and its satisfaction. The first aim is to please my love. And I end by being pleased too.

  — No, penso a te. Voglio sentirti contento fra le mie braccia.

  — Don’t you feel that I am? If I could keep my lips in your hair forever. . . .

  For the act of love is only the continuation and the resolution of a desire and a mystery already set up in two minds. The blueprint becomes the working model, the raw stone the statue. I remember lying there, lost and wondering. I put my hand out to encounter another hand, already reaching for mine. My mouth went out exploring, only to meet another mouth working toward mine in the darkness. In that kiss I felt as though my tongue had at last articulated a word I’d been striving to pronounce all my life long. In those long kisses there was nothing brutal, nothing rapacious, as mad love is said to be, so that the lovers lacerate one another’s lips. I think we were both a little sad when we kissed
. In those kisses we tried to heal each other’s souls.

  And I remember the sweet slowness of undressing one another, the longing and the languor. The clothes dropping whispering to the floor, the shadowy bodies gradually revealed, the secrets even more secret and removed that they lay under our hands. It seemed that in our lethargic and compassionate caresses we were trying to console each other for every hurt the world had ever inflicted: I am with you to comfort me, and I will comfort you. For I love you.

  And I remember how exquisite was our leisure with one another. If there was passion — and indeed there must have been much — it only carried us slowly and steadily up to that place where there is understanding. Higher and higher. We didn’t say much, only one another’s names in a rising intensity of pain and delight. And for one instant we were in a place where there was no difference between us. We melted into all those who’ve ever loved and lived at all. But then the hand that had buoyed us to these places slowly set us down again on earth. For no one can live very long up there.

  And after a while of nothing to say out of the huge peace, it’s time for sleep. Sleep’s a part of love. No man should rise from the bed after loving, button his pants, and run to catch a train. For that’s a denial of the peace that love brings. I remember how we turned to each another, to sleep all night long with our arms about each another:

  — Buona notte e sogni d’oro. . . . Dormi, John. . . .

  Thus in Naples I and other Americans loved. In a war one has to love, if only to reassert that he’s very much alive in the face of destruction. Whoever has loved in wartime takes part in a passionate reaffirmation of his life. Such love has all the aspects of terror and surprise. I am bitter when my love seems cold. Nothing can equal the malice with which I plot to pay back every slight, real or imagined. And nothing can match the tears and vows with which we are reconciled for the second or the hundredth time. All my conduct is analyzed scruple by scruple with an ethical nicety which I can never carry into my daily living. If men could live all their lives as virtuously and introspectively as when they’re in love, we’d all be gods, and there’d be no need of promises of heaven or of hell.

  — I deliberately insult Rosetta, the corporal said. An when I’ve said my piece to her an see the expression on her face, I’d give a month’s pay to take back my words. . . . Yet I won’t apologize to her. Why’s that?

  — Those minutes of waitin, the mess sergeant said, wonderin will she show up tonight.

  — In love, said the pfc with spectacles, laughing for the first time overseas, is the only time when the human race is amusing or good or anything else but scheming beetles . . . and it’s the only time when we get a true perspective on ourselves, for we can’t stand ourselves. . . .

  I remember that in Naples I learned that everything in life is a delusion, that all happiness is simply a desire for, and unhappiness a repining of, love. Nothing else matters. All of life is a preparation for, or a retrospection on, those brief hours when two people are together and perfect in each other. Then we’re the slaves of a power outside ourselves, that brings us together for its own ends and tricks us into a joy and an equality.

  And finally I remember that the Neapolitans, because they were human beings and concerned with being nothing else but, carried their loves into their relations with others. I suppose that Christianity is only a code to expand your personal love to all the world. Your desire and your potency are supposed to touch all people. On the lowest scale this means simply good manners. On the highest, Jesus Christ. I wondered sometimes why the Italians struck me as kinder and gentler than many Americans. Perhaps it was because their lives were more fixed economically, because they knew they could never make a million dollars or be president of the United States. Therefore their energies turned inward: to the enjoyment of life as it could be lived within their own possibilities, to the acquirement of those graces and kindnesses which make life different from the whirring of a machine.

  — She brought me to her house, the mess sergeant said. I didn’t wanna go, but I went because I thought there was a chance of her ending the night shackin with me an Jacobowski. Christ, what a welcome I got! Ya’d think I was a visitin fireman. . . . Well, those Ginsoes treated me so white that me an Jacobowski decided not to shack with her after all. . . . Say, maybe that was in the back a their heads all the time.

  — Maybe, the pfc said. Or maybe they just liked you as a human being. That’s not impossible, you know.

  — Nah, the mess sergeant said. They wanted somethin outa me. Just what they wanted I ain’t yet figured out. But I will.

  — Maybe they didn’t want anything at all from you, the pfc said.

  But no one ever listened to him.

  And sometimes I wondered why the Neapolitans, with some exceptions, seemed so good to me. Their motives were so unmixed; their gladness so bright, their grief so terrible. I decided that it was because they were living for their bare existence. They’d never had much, and in August, 1944, they’d given up every nonessential and quite a few of the essentials. We Americans were still thinking in terms of nylons and chromium and that raise from fifty to sixty dollars a week. The Neapolitans weren’t always sure they’d be eating that evening. But instead of inducing a squalor and envy in them, in most cases this bleak reality brought forth in them a helpless gaiety, a simplicity, and a resignation that touched me and many other Americans. This even though they’d lost their war. The fact remained that these people must and would live, the only important fact after the nonsense and cruelty of the moment have been wiped away. There’ll be Neapolitans alive in 1960. I say, More power to them. They deserve to live out the end of their days because they caught on sooner than we to how simple human life can be, uncomplicated by advertising and Puritanism and those loathsome values of a civilization in which everything is measured in terms of commercial success. What difference does it make if a man has BO from honest work if he can’t buy soap? And does a wife care for the hair on her legs if her children aren’t eating regularly?

  I remember that this generalized love of the Italians for life and other human beings brought them to a functionalism that we Americans have so far realized only in our machinery. I don’t speak as a romanticist. What complicates human life unbearably is the unequal distribution of goods and favoritism. But the last is far more human and understandable than the first. People aren’t born equal intellectually. But that’s a truism. All have a right to work, to eat, to sleep, to make love, and to dress, if they choose. Everything else in life has been introduced into it by the so-called ruling and intellectual classes, who in 1944 were too aware of themselves and too little cognizant of their responsibilities. By August, 1944, they’d failed completely. It was time for a new order and straight thinking. The alternative was obvious.

  I remember that I knew and I saw that the Italians were a more cohesive social group than the Americans. Then that is all to their credit. Have we Americans, for all our preaching, done much to assimilate our minorities, to control vested interests, to distinguish between talent and ballyhoo, to understand the world in which we live? In the future there’ll be no satisfaction in saying: I am an American, as the Italians used to tell me, with the pride of an inferiority complex: I am an Italian. So what? Perhaps we must soon all come to the point where we’re proud only to say: I am a human being, a citizen of the world. For in Naples I and other Americans learned by a simple application of synecdoche that no one, in himself and by himself, is much better or much worse than anybody else. And we Americans were only fortunate. Our good fortune should be shared, or we’d lose it and ourselves and our humanity. In Naples I and other Americans were reduced by watching the effects of the war to that cipher which is the beginning of wisdom and love. Who am I? Why, only a more or less sensitive piece of chemicals and reactions. I shall live for part of a century. And it’s to my own interest and to the interest of my children that others in the world shall know that life can be as good as I have found it to be. This is u
tter idealism. It is also utter practicality, such as Americans like to talk about.

  And I remember that in Naples I relearned that man is more than a physical being. The religions of the world have been saying this for several thousand years. But the world has never settled on a dogma to define the spiritual nature of man. No one ever will, except for himself. That belongs to liberty of choice. It’s at any rate a question that can be settled without murder. All that matters in the twentieth century is that millions of people must never again be thrust out of life through no fault of their own.

  It seemed, against American rules of A Good Fight and Fair Play, that the Italians should hate us and that we should hate them. Then in twenty years we can all have a Return Engagement on the Home Field. In Naples I saw that this need not necessarily be so.

  — Dovete aiutarci, the Neapolitans said.

  This meant that we ought to help them.

  Why not? I don’t remember noticing that most Europeans were content to sit back for the rest of their lives and receive American food and medical supplies. This is the newest form of vicious propaganda. Some, of course, were. But then there are also Americans who’d be only too happy with a dole.

  In August, 1944, I remember that there were many Americans in Naples. They learned from Italian life. They learned the things that were good and bad in both American and Italian life.