The Gallery

by John Horne Burns

  — Good-by, Adalgisa, he said. Remember me when you grow up. . . . Because I know you will grow up . . . somehow. . . . You’ll live to be eighty. . . . Don’t sit by the fireplace with your hands folded and tell your grandchildren about the americani, how horrible they were. . . . Try to remember that there were many of us who looked at you and loved you in your helplessness and despair. And we said: My God, how cruel. . . . If I live, I’ll do something about all this . . . something. . . .

  Then he walked quickly away from the little girl toward the Municipio. He was trembling. His loins vibrated with something fiercer and more durable than the excitement of love. For Moe saw that he hadn’t so much time left, that the sweetness was dribbling away from him as from a broken jelly jar.

  Moe went to the Red Cross motor pool off Piazza Carità. There were jeeps and command cars behind the barbed wire. Through the area walked Italian soldiers in American issue uniforms dyed green and green helmet liners with MIG on their visors. Even their leggins were a washed-out emerald in the moonlight. They were sweating softly but they saluted him. He went in at the gate and was saluted also by the American GI in charge.

  — Listen, Joe, I’ve got to have a jeep for an hour or two.

  — No can do, lieutenant. These are Red Cross ve-hicles . . .

  — Listen, Moe said, my brother’s grave is near Caserta and tonight’s my last chance to visit it. . . . That’s a lie, of course . . . but don’t get chicken on me, Joe . . . you hate chicken as much as I do. . . .

  Then the MP saw Moe’s ruined hand, extended in supplication. He thought a little more and then he scribbled out a trip ticket and waved at a jeep at the end of one of the parked rows.

  — Okay. Willya promise me to have it back by 2300 hours, lieutenant? That jeep belongs to Genevieve, who I happen ta know is at Capri tonight with a colonel. . . . But 2300 hours for sure, lieutenant.

  — Thanks, Moe said, sticking the trip ticket in a pants pocket.

  He unlocked the steering wheel of the jeep, started it, and drove into Piazza Carità after another wave at the MP. He saw his own hands guiding the wheel of the jeep, one with the thumb delicately dangling as it used to in his taxi, the other yellow and macerated in the moonlight.

  He cut sharp left into Via Roma. It was now dark, but on either sidewalk of that straight street crowds were pushing along in the blackout and the heat. Over his turned-down windshield Moe saw those thousands of faces, stuck on bodies being pushed along by the momentum of more people behind them. In the moonlight they looked like flowers and stalks being carried down to some sea, flowers dumped down from the balconies above them. There was much talking, shouting, whistling, and jerky singing. There were still in the gutters old women vendors and kids selling peanuts or love. Thus the whole August night murmured on Via Roma as the faces pushed aimlessly yet steadily in the current.

  Moe drove slowly till he came to the Galleria Umberto. There in the moonlight, a little detached from the crowds on the left-hand sidewalk, Maria Rocco stood. Her head turned this way and that, and she glanced at her American wrist watch, sometimes shaking it or laying it to her ear. He called out softly to her and waved that she should cross Via Roma. She got in beside him without his bringing the jeep to a full halt. She was wearing a black silk dress that buttoned from her throat to the hem of her skirt. She wore no stockings. From under her rich hair escaped the pendants of silver earrings that tinkled to her shoulders.

  — If you did not come, she said, I had resolved never to go with the Allies again . . . except at an enormous profit. . . . Già mi dicono venale.

  — I wasn’t sure whether you were beautiful or not this afternoon, he said. Now I know. . . . Why do they make you put on that other smile in the PX?

  — Why? Maria Rocco asked. Because the world is now so terrible that people have to be ordered to smile. They pretend to kindness. It is something that brings in more lire.

  — You don’t have to say those things to me, Moe said. And you’re natural with me . . . I think. . . .

  — I shall not be natural much longer. . . . Have you got a stick of gum for me?

  — I did have, but I gave the last to Adalgisa.

  — Adalgisa? Maria Rocco’s eyes began to glitter. Vergogna. . . . Adalgisa! . . . And I spent an hour making myself pretty for you. Although my sister Bruna said that no American was worth it . . .

  Moe reached over, lifted her left earring, and let it fall to her shoulder.

  — Adalgisa is the name of a hungry child . . .

  — I’m sorry, Maria Rocco said. I’m sorry.

  And she tilted back in the stiff seat of the jeep and raised her chin to the moon.

  He drove dreamily along Via Carocciolo. The August moon was one-quarter way up now; the Bay of Naples was slit with streaks of light that broke where the islands reached up from the water. Moe and Maria in their jeep passed the Aquarium. Then he turned by Soldiers’ Park and steered up towards the Vomero. The jeep twisted and turned. Moe chose streets that were steepest because he liked the way her head jerked back when they began to climb.

  — I think I know most Americans, Maria Rocco said. They are for the moment. . . . What moment? . . . I worked for them at the QM. They ordered me to be cheerful, so I smiled as I counted out smelly drawers of officers’ laundry. And I smiled as I handed out dry cleaning to your GI’s. . . . Then I went to work at the Red Cross. With an ice-cream scoop in my hand. Here too I was ordered to smile. . . . I shall go on smiling for the Americans till my teeth drop out. . . . The Americans like smiling people. Why? A smile is hideous unless it means something. . . . For five years now none of my smiles has had any meaning. . . .

  When they’d got to the top of the city of Naples, Moe found a little park backboarded with mimosa and scrub pine and a few olive trees. It was really a small balcony between two palazzi, and it looked down over the moonlit city, which stretched beneath them like a dihedral angle filled with towers and terraces. After he’d run the jeep up to the railing of the balcony, he parked and they sat for a while in their stiff metal seats looking at the town below them and the black or silvery bay. Then he put his hand into his pocket, took out a little hinged box, and gave it to Maria Rocco. She opened it to find a cameo pendant on a gold chain. He fastened it around her neck. As he clasped it, her hair fell on his hands, both the whole one and the scorched one. Maria Rocco’s eyes became moist; she ran her fingers down the chain of the pendant and held the medallion of the cameo up to the moonlight and looked at it.

  — It was my mother’s, Moe said. She said I should give it to some nice Jewish girl I was going to marry. Don’t waste it on just anyone, she said.

  — And now you’re wasting it on me, Maria Rocco said. I wonder what your mother would think of me.

  — Oh, he said, finally snapping the clasp of the locket, you serve your purpose just as well as that nice Jewish girl my mother had in mind.

  — What purpose? she asked, drying her eyes.

  — Being something . . . very . . . necessary to her son. . . .

  Maria Rocco took up Moe’s right hand, the mangled one, and laid her mouth against it. Then he, by maneuvering his boots and his position on the seat of the jeep, laid his head down in her lap. Looking up at her, he saw the flange of her chin, her nostrils, her eyelashes, and the dangling ornaments of her earrings. It seemed to him that lying in her lap he lay at the roots of a living tree. He sighed and rolled his head about so that the buttons on her dress dented his hot cheeks. He smelled the dark warmth of her lap, of earth and silk and flesh.

  — Did you ever look up into somebody’s face from below? he asked. Then all the things you like about people’s faces are upside down.

  She laughed and chafed his hair.

  — You are stronger than I, even though now you lie in the position of a little boy who runs to his mother’s lap when he is afraid . . . for comfort from the world that has frightened him. . . . What comfort can I give you? . . . Tell you that everything in this world seems me
an and ugly to me, except you? . . . For there is a shadow over all the earth, with no promise that it will ever lift by the cloud’s passing away from the sun. . . . Only from you have I ever sensed what hope could mean. And soon you too must leave me. . . . It has always been so. . . . When I was a little girl, I used to watch the others being merry. And I would run off and cry. . . . Now I know why. . . . The light on the Bay of Naples . . . the laughter that I heard in the streets at night . . . the mandoline and serenate . . . all seemed to me such a mockery, as though people were deluding themselves that they were happy, that anything could last.

  — You were just waiting for something, holding yourself in readiness, Moe said, smiling up at her.

  — Waiting, Maria Rocco said. What is a woman waiting for? Listening and hoping. . . . Why must a man like you die? Why can’t they just take the rotten Italians and the rotten Americans and the rotten of the world and take them out and shoot them? . . . Then the decent ones could make another start and try to make a go of it. . . . Aren’t you afraid?

  — Not very much, Moe said, taking her hand, that lay upon his chest. But I have been afraid. . . . I was afraid when I was a kid and Ma said to go down to the delicatessen and see if there were any leftover sausages. . . . And I was afraid when I first started to drive a taxi. . . . And I was afraid that first day on the line. . . . You never really get over being afraid, until you’re not alive, and then you’ve found out there isn’t much to be afraid over. . . . Now I know that a lot of all this doesn’t matter. What does matter is my Ma in Brooklyn and my friend Irving and a girl like you. . . . It all seems so sweet, even if it has to end like an ice-cream soda at the end of a straw.

  — No, it all seems so ghastly, Maria Rocco said; and she shook her head with such vehemence that his head bounced in her lap. There’s nothing fair or decent from the beginning to the end. . . . If you have too little, you pass your life in envy and aspiration. All your energies go up in smoke, simply trying to convince your neighbors that you exist. . . . Or if you have too much, you become like a crazy squirrel laying away nuts for a future that will never materialize. . . . O Dio mio, we have all lost the way. One loves too much and breaks his heart. One loves too little and lives in his own petty world, respected for what he has and dying unwept. And each is a fool. . . . We have all lost the way.

  — I don’t think I’ve lost the way, Moe said. Just being alive now is good to me. . . . And you’re not lost either. And most of the people in the world are like us. We just have to find what not to put our faith in. Most of the people who try to tell us what to do are wrong. . . . Look, you and I are together tonight. We’re happier than most of the others. Because we know one another. We’ve confessed to one another that we’re frightened and puzzled. But the point is, we have confessed. We don’t pretend to know the answers.

  Maria Rocco began to cry again. Her tears fell on his up-turned face. He put out his spoiled fingers to catch a few of the drops.

  — I am a whore, she said. You are not the first man I have been with. . . . Your mother would hate me. . . . Thank God she is five thousand miles away and cannot see you with me.

  — Why, you don’t know yourself, Moe said, taking both her hands in his and imprisoning them, for they were fluttering above him. You’re kind . . . and sweet. . . . I don’t know what else there is to be. . . . To me you’re like a light in a dark noisy passageway. . . . I’ve seen plenty of faces of dead Americans and dead Krauts. . . . Their eyes were wanting something. In death they looked surprised and hurt. . . . But when I watch your eyes, I see the difference.

  She ran one of her fingers across his lips as he lay looking up at her. When she bent over him in their cramped quarters on the seats of the jeep, the cameo swung out into the air above his face. He threaded the path of buttons, hummocking out over her breasts.

  — Don’t you go north tomorrow, Maria Rocco said quietly but eagerly. I know a place where I can hide you. I’ll bring food to you. . . . Don’t worry. I will save you. This war must soon be over. . . . Let them kill off the others. But men like you must not die in it. Stay with me. Rather than give you up, I would shoot all the MP’s in Naples who came looking for you. I would fight for you. . . . And humanity, if it still exists, will end by being grateful to me. . . . Women have preserved great and good men before.

  Moe laughed softly in her lap. The moon was laced through her hair.

  — Thank you, my darling. . . . But the funny thing is, I wouldn’t be happy in our hideaway. Can you understand why? . . . My place is up north of here. Fighting. . . . It doesn’t matter what the war means or who wins it. But I’m tied up in a set of circumstances I’ve got to follow through. . . . I’m going back to the line tomorrow. I don’t have any ideas that the world will be any better for me living or dying. . . . It’s just the way things have panned out for me. There’s been a logic in my life. A crazy logic. And this is part of the logic. . . . People spent most of their lives saying: This can’t be happening to me. Even on their deathbeds they say it. They’re surprised to find themselves dying on account of they could never quite accept the fact that they were alive. . . . I accept everything. . . . This is me lying here and above me is you. . . . This is Naples. . . . This is August 14, 1944. . . . My name is Moe . . . your is Maria. . . . And I love you.

  — Maria does not understand Moe at all, she said.

  She bent down and laid her mouth against his temple, passing down to his lips. There was no pressure in her kiss, but it sealed a wild peace he’d been feeling with her all evening. Her kiss made him hers more than any passionate one ever could have. Her hair fell into his closed eyes. He raised his arms and twined them about her shoulders, where the black silk soothed his fingers — the good ones and the bad ones.

  — You understand me very well, Moe said against her cheek.

  — Something keeps looking over our shoulders at us. . . . We have so little time and we need so much of it.

  — Okay, he said.

  He raised himself out of her lap, keeping one arm round her neck. He looked out over the Bay of Naples. By Ischia he saw a motorboat turning on the water. He looked at her body rising and falling on the seat beside him. Then he began to unbutton her dress, beginning at her neck. She wore nothing underneath the tight black silk; so as it was released by the parting fabric, her skin gushed to his hand like a living sponge. At last her dress was open from neck to skirt. She lay with her eyes closed. Her breathing was inaudible. In the open shell of black silk, her naked beauty seemed to have burst from a ruptured pea pod. She seized his hands and brought them down on her breasts, beehives in the moonlight.

  — Baciami . . . abbracciami, amore! Maria Rocco cried.

  At her cry he trembled with recognition. It was something he’d been listening for all his life.

  There’d been no firing since dawn. Moe and his platoon were crawling along a country road in Tuscany. They were looking for some protected trees where they could sit down and eat their K-ration. This countryside was hilly and brown. Ahead of them on a cliff a castle with spires looked down into the valley. Nobody knew where they were. The cultivated terraces all looked alike, alternating bands of green and umber.

  With it the platoon had three Krauts, captured at dawn. One had chest and arm wounds and never stopped groaning. The platoon wanted to do away with this Kurt. He, staggered along in bandages and doped with sulfa, saying over and over again that Roosevelt was a Jude. The other two Krauts walked with him, but didn’t help Kurt or pay him any attention. Moe never took his eyes off his platoon this morning. They were more than lean and mean riflemen. They were ugly. He watched especially his medical aid pfc, Dimplepuss, who occasionally prodded the moaning Kraut named Kurt.

  — Dimplepuss, listen to me, Moe said. All you’re here for is to get that Kraut to battalion aid . . . if we ever find it.

  — I ain’t supposed to do anything for the bastard, Dimplepuss said.

  — Oh shut up! Moe yelled. You’re goddam triggerhappy for a medic
. Tonight I’m turning you in for an NP.

  Thus they drooped and stumbled along in the dust till noon. Throughout the uneven and smoking landscape there wasn’t a sign of regiment or battalion or company or any other platoon. They passed an overturned Kraut tank under a laurel tree. And in some bushes a mortar and three Krauts, kaput beside it. Moe’s section sergeant edged up from his place in the demoralized march.

  — Listen, lieutenant. You can see they’re pretty pissed off. Not at you. They better eat chow. But fast.

  — Wait till the next turn of this road, Moe said. We’re really lost.

  So they plowed on farther in the heat and the yellow smoke that arose from the vegetation and from their own boots. Around a bend in the road they came upon a tiny village. Every house but one had at least a wall and roof off. A cat poked around in the one street, the main one.

  — That’s what the artillery done las night, one of the men said. All that poppin too. . . . Git off the pot, Mister Dupont.

  The jagged glass windows of a store still sustained a swinging hinged sign: Vino. Onto the pavement in front of the shop was a settled pool of red around a blasted wine cask.

  — Vino with our chow, Moe said. That cat has been licking it up all morning.

  The platoon carried out of the shop bottles of red and white vino, some flasks of cognac. Then most sat down under the bowl of a stone fountain in the piazza. It gave a shade for their heads. Others possessed themselves of the church at the other end of the tiny square. The bell tower and three walls were standing. They threw off their packs and disposed themselves round the splintered baptismal font or at the feet of a fresco of Christ feeding the multitude with loaves and fishes. This fresco too was cracked and missing sections, like a ruined billboard advertising tires. As the platoon opened their K-rations, two of the Krauts began to whimper. The one named Kurt started yelling Roosevelt and Jude in a splitting howl.