by James Salter
They were married on a Sunday. Lia’s mother gave Viri an enameled French ring that had been in her family. She believed in him. She was gay at the bridal supper, the greatest of her dreads had vanished. Even the brother was cordial.
They began a second life. They lived on Via Giulia in an apartment on the third floor. One ascended an oval stairway at the end of the hall. It was not large, but it had a study. There was morning sun, a small kitchen, a bath. Lia was very happy. An intellectual apartment, she said.
They were calm, they were at peace in Vecchia Roma, the part of the city he liked. He began to walk among its shops and streets, routes to the Piazza Navona, to Sant’Eustachio. He slept well. He was slim. He worked with Cagli and Rova. He seemed younger, there were fewer lines in his face or, having been deep from uncertainty, they were fading now. Perhaps it was only the light.
The door had two locks. “Rome is filled with thieves,” Lia said.
He stood beside her as she turned the key two, three, four times, driving the bolt ever deeper. There was also a key for downstairs, and two for the car. He remembered how once they had never locked anything except when they went to the city. He remembered the river, the dry lawns of autumn warmed by the sun. He longed for home.
He recognized the state he was in. Was I only free for that brief time, he thought? Looking back it seemed deceptively sweet. His life was closed in by ancient walls, families he was unrelated to, customs that would never change. In the small rooms of the flat, in the narrow streets, all Lia’s faults seemed to leap forth, to present themselves for recognition: her nervousness, lack of independence, her insistence on being loved. He learned that she could not amuse herself, that she was desperate without him.
“I love you,” she explained. “I want to be near you, amore. Don’t deprive me, don’t keep me hungry.”
He could not discourage it. He saw in her eyes how much she meant it. Her devotion was too strong, it had a pathetic quality.
They drove to the country for lunch, to a simple place called Montarozzo. It was a mild day, like the first day of a convalescence. She was wearing a navy skirt and a sleeveless blouse. In the fields little girls were playing in communion dresses, white in the sunshine, while their families dined. There were train tracks beyond. Occasionally, drawing glances, there passed a great express.
As usual she ate little, he was used to it. He had finally come to a deep vein of understanding. He was not on a journey, he was to spend his life here, to have this life and this only. Patience, he thought to himself; it will open. The bread was delicious. He dipped morsels of it into his wine like a peasant. This was her sea, this sunlight which fell upon them through the vine leaves. She shined in it. Her hair was short and gleaming, her shyness fell away. The faint circles under her eyes, blue, enduring, made her seem sensual. She was like a refugee, a woman who had seen armies pass, destruction, absurdity. She had survived all this, she had come through alive.
“You are a very good architect. You know, they respect you greatly.”
“Really?”
“They like you very much.”
He smiled vaguely, but he was pleased. “It would be strange, wouldn’t it, having failed in America, if I achieved something here?”
“No. You were meant to come here.”
“I suppose.”
“To discover me,” she said. “Discover you …”
“Yes, like a mushroom. You pushed aside the leaves and there I was.” She seemed calm, submissive. “You have the nose of a truffling pig, amore.”
“Do you think so?”
“You have intuition,” she said. “It’s very strong, well developed. I’m interested in these things, you know, I study them. I will become a mystic in the end,” she confessed. “When the time comes. When the last hungers of the flesh have left me,” she added with a slight smile.
There was a clairvoyant, a woman who lived among animals, she often went to see. Viri accompanied her. It was in a residential neighborhood, a building like any other, modern, cold. The apartment was filled with plants, birds, bizarre paintings, tanks of fish. There were other visitors: couples desiring children, women with sickly sons. Signora Clara touched them. She spoke to them with the voice of someone struggling, distant. The soft bubbling of the air pumps rose behind her. To Viri she said, “Come, look at this. Do you speak Italian?”
They stood before the dim water through which a pearly stream of bubbles rose. She was wearing carpet slippers and an unbuttoned sweater.
“These are my children,” she said.
The fish hung in luminous shadow, their movements curiously abrupt. She tapped the glass lightly.
“Come, children, come,” she said, and reaching into the tank slowly, affectionately, she took one in her palm and withdrew it. It lay quietly in a bit of water in her hand. “All life is one,” she said.
She lived with her maid. She had a husband and family, Lia said, but she had left them to devote herself to her work.
Within you are two seeds, the woman told Viri: one live and one dead. You love the dead one best. He did not know what she meant.
“She can heal,” Lia said. “She knows everything.”
“She seems cold to me,” Viri said. “Very distant.”
“Yes, she is cold. To understand everything is to love nothing,” Lia quoted.
She made tea for him, she kept his clothing in order, she drew the water for his bath. The shelves of the medicine cabinet were dense with her creams and lotions. In the courtyard the bathroom windows gave on, there was never any change. It was evening. When he came out she was lying there, olive skin naked, slim as a line. He brushed his teeth with Italian toothpaste, he ate Italian meat, he was vanishing day by day into the aged streets, the dark-faced crowds. He boarded the great green buses with their silver numbers and passed, noticing them less and less, the worn columns, the statues weeping black. He was lost among them, the passengers, audiences, crowds, condemned just as they to the humblest of daily acts. He turned corners in sunlight, disappeared in the shade of awnings announcing TRATTORIA, lingered before bookshops.
There were hours between afternoon and evening when he desperately wept for his children. He wrote to them feverishly, letters he could barely finish, their faces appeared before him, days they had spent. His hand was like a sick man’s. Be generous, he wrote, know the meaning of joy, carry my love with you all through life.
He was gentle, composed. They went from meal to meal and from place to place, meals that fell silent over empty cups.
“Kari kiri?” she suggested solemnly, taking up the knife.
He managed to smile. “Have patience with me,” he told her. He could think of nothing else.
And late at night she talked to him. She woke him if necessary, and he lay listening.
“Yes,” she said, “you are frightened, I know you are frightened. I know your habits, I know your thoughts. You have married me for my sake, but not for your own—not yet. That will come. Oh, yes. It will come because I will wait. I am a cornucopia, I am overflowing. I am not sweet—no, not in the way one tastes at first. But sweet things are forgotten quickly, sweet things are weak. I have the patience to wait, yes, as long as necessary. I will wait a month, a year, five years, I will sit like a widow, playing a kind of napoleone, because slowly, slowly I will enslave you. I will do it when the moment comes, when I know it is time, that I can succeed. Until then I will sit at your table, I will lie beside you like a concubine—yes, I will give myself to you in whatever way you like, I will raid your fantasies, I will pillage them and keep the pieces to hypnotize you with. I will say, ‘Those things you are dreaming of, I will make them real.’ I will be your Arab girl, I will serve you naked, yes, I will hold food between my teeth for you, I will be your daughter, I will be your whore. You cannot believe what I know—no, never—what I have imagined. Amore, the secret is to have the courage to live. If you have that, everything will sooner or later change.”
He rose and wen
t into the bathroom to find refuge. Her intensity, the loneliness of her voice overpowered him. In the mirror he saw a man with the paleness of someone who has just been awakened. He seemed mortal, weak. He saw clearly that something unthinkable was already expressing itself: he was going to become an old man. He did not believe it, he must prevent it, he could not permit it to be—and yet at the same time it was the meaning of his entire life.
She was tapping at the door. “Are you all right, amore?”
“Yes.” He opened the door. She had put on her robe. “Yes, I’m all right.”
“Come,” she said. “I’ll make you some tea.”
His progress was slow, like the passage of days, but in time he no longer noticed the coldness of terrazzo floors, the shrill ring of the telephone, the taps from which water came without force, as if in the midst of a drought. After endless depression, nights without sleep, realization that the life he had entered was calamitous, without hope, he slowly became lucid, even calm. He was able to read and think. The days dawned quietly. I am through it, he thought. Like the survivor of a wreck, he took stock of himself. He touched his limbs, his face, he began the essential process of forgetting what had passed.
He was in a period of contentment with daily life, of peace. He looked about himself gratefully. It was still not completely real to him, it was a kind of scenery he watched like someone on a train, some of it vivid, going by, some of it bare.
8
IN THE LETTER BOX WAS AN ENvelope addressed in the clear hand he recognized instantly. He opened it in the hallway and began to read, his heart thudding. Dearest Viri … How instantly she spoke to him across the miles, across everything. His eye fled through the lines. He expected always to hear her say she had been mistaken, she had changed her mind. There was not a day, not an hour, that his immediate, undefended response would not have been to surrender. He was like those veterans, long retired, to whom one day there comes the call to arms; nothing can keep them, their hearts come alive, they lay down their tools, leave their houses, their land, and go forth.
She wanted to borrow ten thousand dollars; she needed it, she said—you know how life is. She promised to pay it back.
Ten thousand dollars. He did not dare tell Lia; he knew what she would say. The venality of Italian life, the rigidity of it informed everything. The woman who came to clean received twenty thousand lire a week, the price of a pair of shoes on the Via Veneto, not even the price. How could he tell her? Rome was a southern city, a capital laid out on the iron axes of money and wealth, the banks were like mortuaries. They bared their teeth over money, the Italians, they showed them like dogs.
Lia read the letter. She was silent, cold. “No,” she said, “you cannot. Why does she need money?”
“She’s never asked for anything.”
“She will milk you. She cares nothing for money, you told me that yourself, she throws it away. If you give her money now, six months later she will want more.”
“She’s not like that.”
He could not explain it, he knew that, not to this woman suddenly suspicious, alert. She was slight, she was certain, she knew the language, the machinery of this world.
At dinner that night she opened the subject again. The desolate sound of forks hung in the air.
“Amore, I want to ask you something.”
He knew what she was about to say.
“Yes, of course, you know,” she agreed.
She seemed despondent, subdued, as if she accepted the presence of this other woman.
“Don’t send it,” she pleaded.
“Lia, why?”
“Don’t send it.”
“All right,” he said.
“Amore, believe me. I know.” She was the guardian of a bitter knowledge.
“But the fact is,” he said evenly, “you don’t.”
There was silence. She took the dishes to the kitchen. She returned. “Have you ever heard of Paul Malex?” she asked.
“No.”
“Paul Malex is a writer, he is the intelligence of Europe. You’ve never heard of him?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Then believe me, his knowledge is rich, his insight; there is no one to approach him. He reads fluently in Greek and Arabic. He passes freely in the most elevated groups in Europe.”
“What does this have to do with—”
“Malex has gone below the plankton. He has gone below a level in the mind, like the level in the sea where the whales feed. Beneath it is the blackness, the cold, creatures with huge teeth that devour each other, death. He has penetrated that. He does it at will. He perceives structures there, the basic structures of life.”
He had lost the thread. “What are you saying?” he asked.
“I am saying that in Europe one knows certain things. They have been proved again and again. This city is almost three thousand years old. You will see.”
The letter lay on the brown marble surface of a bureau in their bedroom, its words invisible in the dark. They had been written quickly, as Nedra always wrote, in long sentences, without pausing, words which, like an insult or exact judgment, had to be reread, one could never recall them exactly, they were like their author, instinctive, glinting, like a glimpse of fish in the sea.
… you know how I hate to go over things that are past, but how I wish we’d bought a little house somewhere near Amagansett. Either a house or ten acres of land. Marina told me what they wanted for land now and I couldn’t believe it. I suppose the reason we didn’t was the same as always: we had no money. I’m doing some interesting things now, things I always wanted to do. I’m working part-time for a florist, it’s ideal for me, it’s like going to a house I’m especially fond of. Very few flowers, actually. Mostly plants. It doesn’t sound too glorious as I write it—a florist—but I may not continue, I may do something else. Viri, there is one great favor you could do for me, and I want to ask it without a lot of explanation …
All night these words lay folded. They had arrived in Rome like so many other appeals, now they were waiting, they had joined that world of everything attendant, timeless, in despair. Still, they were dangerous. They lay amid crystal bottles, tattered lire notes, a comb, a gold pen. They were there at dawn.
Naked, Lia knelt near his waist. The morning light filled the room, he was still half-asleep. She was unbuttoning the worn, white buttons of his pajamas, her cool fingers did not hesitate, she was calm, assured, the Arab woman she had sworn. His head was rolled to one side, his eyes closed.
“Look at me,” she commanded.
She was dark, like a girl of the streets, struck along one side by the bright morning sun.
“Look at me,” she said. She was the blade of an angelic light; her arms were lean, her breasts like a sixteen-year-old’s.
She hesitated. Her movements were slow and dreamlike, her hands supporting her near her thighs. The letter was her audience, she was performing for it as if it had eyes, as if it were a poor, ineffectual child before whom she would demonstrate her shamelessness, her power. Her voice was uneven as she bent.
“Yes,” she whispered, “I will be your whore.”
His head lay back, as if severed, among the pillows.
His thoughts were tumbling.
“Everything,” she swore.
Afterwards she stepped from the bed. She was deliberate, unhurried, her act was not ended. The door to the bathroom closed. He lay with the room growing still, the walls fading, the ceiling, like silver water after the leap of a great fish. He was witness to this setting which remained, this world of memory as against the one of flesh, and his thoughts turned irresistibly to all he had been entreated to forget: to Nedra who was living on despite the letter, whose life still blazed strength, in whose wake—even before they had been husband and wife, before, during, after—he had always traveled. And then to her rival of whom he was afraid. These women with their needs and assurance, their dazzling selfishness, their smiles—he would never conquer them, he
was too timid, too consenting. He was helpless with them; he was close to them, yes, enormously close, even kindred, but at the same time completely different and alone, like a lame recruit in barracks.
Alone, he lay in the sheets of the still-warm bed. He had drawn the covers to his waist, he could feel a wetness, dense and chill beneath one leg; alone in this city, alone on this sea. The days were strewn about him, he was a drunkard of days. He had achieved nothing. He had his life—it was not worth much—not like a life that, though ended, had truly been something. If I had had courage, he thought, if I had had faith. We preserve ourselves as if that were important, and always at the expense of others. We hoard ourselves. We succeed if they fail, we are wise if they are foolish, and we go onward, clutching, until there is no one—we are left with no companion save God. In whom we do not believe. Who we know does not exist.
9
DEATH TAKES THE LAST STEPS quickly, in a rush.
Nedra was ill. She did not admit it except to feel uncomfortable suddenly in the city. She wanted the open air, she wanted the invisible. Like those anadromous creatures that start without knowing it to their final sites, that somehow, across incredible distances, find their way home, she went—it was the beginning of spring—to Amagansett and took a small house that had once been the shed on a farm. There were some apple trees, long past bearing. The boards of the floor were worn smooth. The village and fields, everything was empty and still. Here she made her ashram, beneath the open skies, by occasional fires, near the continent’s fingery edge.