Novelists

by C. P. Boyko

  His mother, his brothers, and all his friends were charmed by Signorina Catarina. They were tickled by her accent and her childish diction. They marveled at her appetite and used it to shame their fussy toddlers. And they were positively mesmerized by her stupidity, which seemed boundless; and, like visitors to the Grand Canyon, they kept walking up to its edge and shouting down into it to see if any echo would emerge.

  “What is your favorite color!”

  “Do you like tomatoes!”

  “What is two plus two!”

  She didn’t know! Again and again, she smiled and shook her head and said, “I’m not understand.” She was better than a movie. They sincerely hoped that Giuseppe Carlo would marry this girl.

  For Katherine, however, the novelty of seeing how the locals lived soon wore off. She was tired of being given strange new things to eat—including small creatures and the organs of large ones—and being watched for her reaction. She was tired of being stared at and talked about. The impression that she was the sole topic of conversation was strengthened by the fact that, whenever anyone did lapse into English, the comment was invariably about or directed at her. During the rest of their talk—and there were cataracts of it—she could only sit there and try to appear genial and satisfied. At first, out of politeness, she concealed her boredom by operating her utensils with panache or scratching unitchy parts of her body with absorbed assiduity; but eventually she abandoned the pretense, and fell into a wheezing trance, slumped upon her stool like a jellyfish washed up on a rock. Giuseppe Carlo, the only person in the room who might have acted as translator, did not seem to understand the need for one, or the responsibilities of one. Occasionally, seeing her not laughing, he would translate for her the punchline of an elaborate joke (“But the duck, he have no leg”) or the conclusion of a long, involved story (“He need his car to be fix”) and consider his duty discharged. When she herself said something clever—even if she advertised its cleverness by broadcasting it in a loud clear voice through a smirk—Giuseppe Carlo just smiled doubtfully and kept the comment to himself. She decided that he was immune to English witticism. Indeed, before seeing him in his natural habitat, she had assumed that he was dour and humorless. But when speaking Italian he became unbuttoned: he gasped and whistled and goggled, he waved his arms around like a drowning man signaling for help, he howled with laughter at nearly everything that was said. He was like a boy—a boy on summer holidays, drunk on sugar. She could not have imagined a man, could not have invented a character more different from Jeremy if she had set out expressly to do so. His happiness was contagious at first, but soon became grating. She reminded him about the waterfalls. Perhaps they should be catching their train?

  Giuseppe Carlo looked pained, and, for a moment, almost frightened. He promised that yes, tomorrow they would surely go.

  That it is not true what they say about trains, planes, and automobiles; they make the world larger, not smaller.

  Already, after only twenty minutes on the train, Katherine and Giuseppe Carlo had travelled beyond the parts of Rome that had become familiar to her; and within an hour they had escaped the city altogether. She was almost too excited by the sight of the voluptuously rolling hills, fading to a purple haze in the distance, to enter her new epigram in her notebook—but duty prevailed.

  The novelty of the train and the countryside revived her curiosity. Her enthusiasm could not be dimmed even by Giuseppe Carlo’s sullen, unsatisfying answers to her questions. She pointed at two men across the aisle drinking a strange brown beverage; Giuseppe Carlo said that it “eased the sleeping envy,” which she took to mean that it was tea. She pointed at a crowd enacting some ancient mystical ceremony; Giuseppe Carlo said that it was a “paradise of shopping,” which she supposed meant that it was a street market. She pointed at a colorful shrine on the dashboard of a taxi; Giuseppe Carlo said that it “made the air delicious”—in other words, it was an air freshener. She pointed at a group of boys kicking their shoes at a wall; Giuseppe Carlo said, “They kick they shoe.” When she saw a man sitting by a pond with a rifle at his side, she did not point. She supposed that Giuseppe Carlo would tell her that the man was fishing.

  The train tracks cut through the country like a scalpel, laying open its tender viscera to her gaze. They passed through fields, orchards, and farms, within arm’s length of the farmers working on them; they tunneled through hills; they bisected roads at oblique angles; they plunged through the central piazzas of small towns, and sometimes through the very walls of buildings. There were no stations; the train stopped and started seemingly at random. At one point, it came to a halt in what appeared to be a large family’s living room. Katherine was in the bathroom car at the time (she had spent half the morning there). The window was wide open, and the toilet itself was nothing more than a hole in the floor; she looked down between her legs and could see carpeting between the railroad ties. The family stared at her mutely, with blunted expectation, like people who had been at the zoo too long. Her bowels shriveled. She nodded and waved. Some of the children waved back. Then with a lurch the train pulled out again. The countryside restored her privacy, but half an hour passed before she could relax enough to do what she had come to do—and then the result was dramatic, odious, and alarming. She returned to her seat on shaky legs. She tried to think of herself as the heroine of her novel—Kelly Newcombe returned to her seat on shaky legs—but the situation was too ignoble, and too personal, for fiction, or even a letter home to Jeremy. Jeremy did not admit to having bowel movements.

  She stumbled and nearly fell in the aisle. A moment passed before she realized that other passengers had been thrown from their seats, that suitcases had fallen from the overhead bins and broken open on the floor, and that the landscape outside had suddenly ceased to glide by. Everyone stuck their heads out the window or climbed down out of the cars to see what the train had hit. After a few seconds of surprised silence, a great chatter of opinion and speculation arose.

  “Is truck,” Giuseppe Carlo informed her. He spoke with excitement, which she mistook for satisfaction, and scolded him.

  “What if someone’s hurt!”

  “Is empty.” His hands flew apart in a gesture of vacuity.

  “Then how on earth did the conductor manage to smash into a parked truck?”

  Giuseppe Carlo’s torso undulated in a massive shrug. “Someone push him,” he said, meaning the truck. “And run fast away.”

  Katherine’s face contorted into a mask of incredulity and disapproval.

  “Bad people,” Giuseppe Carlo theorized. “We ride motor-bus now.”

  “This would never happen in North Carolina,” Katherine muttered—but the thought did not cheer her.

  They trudged along a dusty road under a blazing sun for an hour before coming to a town. From the tone and appearance of a conversation that Giuseppe Carlo held with a fat man seated drowsing outside a trattoria, Katherine inferred that no bus passed this way. She went inside to get a glass of water, but the place was deserted. She used the toilet anyway, and drank tepid tap water out of her cupped hands. Her stomach made noises like a dying animal, and a great belch worked its way slowly out of her throat like a snake shedding its skin. Her mouth tasted like burnt rubber. She did not feel good.

  She went back outside, where the men were now smoking cigars and obviously discussing her. Katherine tried simultaneously to look indifferent and impatient. The local man, sweating apparently without discomfort, looked at her appraisingly, held up an empty glass for her inspection, and asked her a question in Italian.

  “Huh?”

  “In America,” he said slowly, “how much money to wash this glass?”

  “To wash one glass? I don’t know.” She started, or considered starting, to divide the minimum wage in North Carolina by the number of glasses a dish washer could wash in an hour, but it was too hot for math. “I don’t know. A dollar,” she said carelessly.


  The local man whistled through his teeth and shook his head sadly. “So much!”

  Katherine did not like the way he was looking at her—as if she were a fat wallet lying on the sidewalk. She began pacing to evade his gaze, while he and Giuseppe Carlo discussed the wonderful, lamentable excesses of America. At one point, a woman appeared in the doorway of the trattoria with a baby slung carelessly over one hip, like a bag of newspapers that she was in no hurry to deliver. She took the three of them in with one long, wide-angle glance, then went back inside. Neither of the men paid any attention to her.

  Katherine planted herself, arms akimbo, in Giuseppe Carlo’s gaze and said, “Okay.”

  But it was the fat man who clapped his hands together, put on his hat, and said, “Andiamo.” He distributed coins across the table and stood up. They followed him across the street to a battered truck, Giuseppe Carlo bowing and flinging his arms around in praise of the man’s generosity.

  “Where?” she asked.

  “La cascata.”

  “But surely it’s too far.” In fact she had no idea how far it was. She had not even bothered to find Malabria on a map; as a psychological novelist she had as little use for maps as she had for politics. She did not even know which direction they had come out of Rome, let alone what distance. “You can’t drive us all the way.”

  The fat man slapped Giuseppe Carlo on the shoulder, guiding him into the cab of the truck, and said that, on the contrary, the waterfalls were near enough to bite. Then he gallantly helped Katherine up onto the uncovered bed of the truck and pointed to a jagged sheet of aluminum siding, whose sun-shielding virtues he extolled.

  She grasped his meaning once they were moving and the sun was again beating down on her, but the metal cut her hands so she resorted to hiding her head inside her shirt. This had the added benefit of keeping enough of the dust and exhaust out of her mouth for her to breathe. The road, if it was a road, had been corrugated by past rains and baked and cracked by the sun; she had to grip the side of the truck with one hand at all times in order not to be bucked out. She prayed silently and angrily—but whether for the man to drive faster or to drive slower, she did not specify.

  The voice of the driver drifted back to her occasionally. She could not make out the words, but something about his tone made her think of Jeremy. He sounded like he was telling Giuseppe Carlo something for his own good.

  The idea of Jeremy speaking to Giuseppe Carlo gave her a shock of dissonance. What would those two ever find to talk about? This trip had made her realize that despite all his worldly airs, Jeremy was decidedly parochial. She, on the other hand, was cosmopolitan and multilingual, could move easily between cultures, and make friends anywhere. When she tried to imagine her husband and her tour guide in a room together, she could only hear arguing. You shut up, said Jeremy. You don’t talk now, said Giuseppe Carlo.

  “You don’t talk now,” said Giuseppe Carlo. He was looking at her through the rear window with an expression that she had never seen on his face, and which seemed as out of place there as a scar. The truck was stopping. She removed the shirt from her face and looked around, blinking and squinting in the dust.

  Two men in grey uniforms approached the truck. In the road beyond them was a cluster of grey covered vehicles, where other men in grey caps squatted, some of them smoking, all of them clutching rifles.

  “A checkpoint?”

  “Sta’ zitto!” said the fat man through his teeth.

  Was it a border? They were in the middle of nowhere. She saw nothing but endless rows of young pear trees supported by wooden stakes, which rolled away across the black fields in perfect formation like gravestones in a military cemetery. A great setting for a chapter in her novel, she decided. But the guns would have to be removed; they were too vulgarly ominous.

  The two men in uniform slowly circled the truck, muttering thoughtfully to each other. Then one of them, the shorter one, leaned against the passenger side door and made an observation—at least it did not sound like a question, and neither man inside the truck apparently felt obliged to answer. Then the tall man began making observations which the short one repeated, still without eliciting any reply from Giuseppe Carlo or the driver. The uniformed men’s lackadaisical manner struck Katherine as deplorably unprofessional, and she made this opinion public through the angle at which she held her head. She was as urgently conscious of the passport in her bag as of an ace of trumps in an otherwise mediocre hand, but the officials gave her no opportunity to play it. Finally, Giuseppe Carlo and the fat man spoke a few unemphatic sentences, also as if speaking only to each other, and after some more circling and philosophizing the two men in grey backed away from the truck and waved them on, as if dismissing a crackpot theory.

  When they were moving again, she asked why they had been stopped, but did not pursue the matter when neither man replied. She had learned that her own impressions were more interesting than Giuseppe Carlo’s explanations.

  Katherine, who had been to Niagara Falls, was not terribly impressed by the Malabria Waterfalls, which seemed to her more like a long winding water-staircase. She concealed her disappointment, however, from Giuseppe Carlo, whose every hair and muscle trembled with bated triumph, like an athlete or a magician awaiting his audience’s thunderous applause.

  They dipped their feet in the cool, dirty water, and Katherine washed the sweat and the dust, which the sweat had turned to mud and the sun had cooked to a brittle crust, from her arms and face and neck. Then, for five seconds, they sat, side by side, listening to the trickle of the stream through little corridors of stone, and watching the overlapping coins of sunlight dance across the shivering membrane of shadow cast by the trees; then Giuseppe Carlo turned, and, as if tuning a radio, put his hands on her breasts.

  The blood in Katherine’s body redistributed itself in strange and uncomfortable concentrations; her head seemed to have too much of it and her heart too little. She staggered to her feet and stood there for a moment, alternately gaping and squeezing her fists, before remembering to slap him. She did this twice, once with each hand, but without any manifest result: Giuseppe Carlo continued to leer at her hopefully, his eyes wide and moist and not quite calibrated. The scene acquired a muffled, drunken quality when she stooped to collect her shoes, a prosaic action which clashed ludicrously with Giuseppe Carlo’s assault.

  She hurried away, trying to escape her embarrassment and confusion. She had reached the road by the time her emotions cooled enough for thoughts to be precipitated out. What had he been thinking? Had he forgotten she was married? Didn’t he care? Had this been his plan all along? Was this the way all Italian tour guides behaved? Did he suppose that she was attracted to him? Was she?

  In any event, she had not come halfway around the world to kiss a man other than her husband. If all she had wanted was an affair, she could have stayed in North Carolina.

  But that was not the sort of novel she was interested in writing. She was not that sort of novelist.

  A sinking despair, almost like lightheadedness, came over her at the realization that none of this could be salvaged, none of it could ever be converted to fiction. For the second time that day, and the second time in her life, she had undergone an experience that her art could not translate. But if there were things of which art could make no use, of what use was art?

  A phantasmagoria of bad, unusable material, a nightmarish procession of illness and obscenity, paraded through her mind. These images percolated into her body as nausea—or perhaps the nausea percolated into her mind in the form of these images. She stumbled off the road into the ditch and was sick in several different ways, all of them spectacular, and all of which will be left to the reader’s imagination—for some things, alas, remain unprintable.

  Sickness and the sun scoured her mind clean of thought for a long time. When next she looked up, she found that she was no longer alone. Two men in grey cap
s were standing next to a grey covered truck, asking her questions which they punctuated with thrusts of their rifles.

  Kelly Newcombe wiped her mouth and smiled queasily, but with a feeling of relief, almost of deliverance.

  She had left her bag behind with Giuseppe Carlo, and so was without money or identification; but, whoever these men were and whatever it was they wanted, she felt confident that their mutual misunderstandings would be instructive, their setbacks fortifying, their struggles ennobling. She felt that she had reentered the territory of the writable.

  “I’m sorry, I don’t speak Italian,” she said in quite passable Italian—which was how the two men knew that she was a liar, and therefore most likely a spy.

  THE UNDERGOING

  SHE WAS TWENTY-TWO and still a student, was earnest, optimistic, and ambitious, loved good talk but only participated when it stalled, believed in considering issues from every angle, privately respected her parents, laughed like a duck, and had lips that did not cover her teeth, so that she always looked credulous and surprised. He was twenty-three and worked unwillingly at a press-cutting agency, was restless, deprecating, and lazy, believed anything well written, despised his parents (who had money but would give none of it to him), and had a prominent Adam’s apple and a gaze that never fell below the horizon. Neither of them had been in love before.

  We do not fall in love so much as ski into it. The beginner finds it difficult to proceed slowly, let alone stop, once they are launched—and indeed, in their inexperience, often do not recognize the need for caution. They move so swiftly that hazards which might have deterred them if seen from above soon pass by in a beautiful blur. Battered veterans call this headlong dash “puppy love.” It’s fun while it lasts.

  Within five minutes of meeting, Terence and Madison were exchanging philosophies. It was amazing how alike they were. She wanted to change the world, so saw in his grievances a kindred revolutionary zeal. He was a rebel and a loner, so saw her zeal as the vitriol of a fellow misfit.