by Nick Dybek
“What did you suggest?”
“That fear is only a reflection of the less noble part of his soul, a weakness and an obscenity. These men, my god. Sometimes they absolutely refused to open their eyes no matter what was threatened. For me, it was twenty minutes only to cure them. Twenty minutes. But I had a record of twelve. Are you not impressed?”
Fortunately, before we could answer, the man behind the bar began to sing in a grumbling baritone. I didn’t know enough about opera to have an opinion of his performance, but I suspected it was very bad. The voice had a strangled, sardonic quality, the runs sounding almost intentionally tuneless. He was short and practically hairless, with shattered-glass wrinkles around his eyes. As he sang he never stopped working—polishing the stemmed glasses with their gold rims, stacking white saucers on a high shelf.
“It’s from Falstaff, I think,” Paul said. “Though difficult to tell.”
Bianchi shrugged. “Naturally. The great local nationalist. They say without Verdi there is no Mussolini. Perhaps you understand why the barman sings Verdi as he does.”
“I might understand, but it’s still criminal,” Paul said.
“A fan of Italian opera?”
“Certainly. The Viennese invented Italian Opera.”
“Yes. If only you’d been as generous with Trieste and Trentino, there would have been no war. Were you on the Isonzo, Paul?”
Paul nodded, but he must have sensed Bianchi was trying to bait him and wisely said no more. We listened to the singing, which seemed to grow only more sarcastically maudlin, more sour and grating. Something about a horse. Something about a river.
* * *
“Is there any use in feeling guilty now?” I asked Bianchi, a question I had asked myself often in the preceding months.
Bianchi smiled. “I’d like to say no, but, sadly, Tom, there is much use in guilt. If you want, I can say as both a psychiatrist and a Catholic: there is no civilization without it.”
The barman finished the aria. We clapped and bravoed, but he never looked our way. Only three or four tables were occupied now; the young men sipped their drinks and stared off, just as they had all night.
“Do you think that boy will return?” Bianchi asked. “You remember, the one who left when we arrived? It’s been too long.”
The boy never did return, but later an older man with yellow skin appeared in the doorway of the café, and Bianchi got up to speak to him. They argued for what seemed a long time, leaving Paul and me to exchange glances, to raise eyebrows at one another, a bit too shy to speak without our chaperone.
Meanwhile, Bianchi and the man raised their voices, speaking in dialect. And though the other man’s face was old and sickly, his shoulders were square and his knuckles were bloody. The longer I looked, the more the yellow of his skin—and the apparent wrinkles upon it—began to appear strangely uneven. The left side of his face seemed to have aged a decade slower than the right.
“I apologize,” Bianchi said, when he finally returned to the table, “but we have been asked to leave.”
“By whom?” Paul asked. “If you’re in any trouble, certainly we can . . .”
“No trouble,” Bianchi said. “No trouble. Just a matter between brothers.”
* * *
As it happened, Paul’s room was just above mine; we had the same view of a dark drugstore behind an iron grate, the same striped wallpaper, the same smoky blankets.
The wineglasses still bore the ten-lire tags from the shop where he’d bought them. It was warm enough to leave the windows open as we drank cheap Soave and talked the way strangers can when they’re young and far from home. Paul lay on the bed, smoking; or paced, smoking. And I sat in the room’s single chair, my wineglass on the windowsill, liquid shadows dripping down the walls.
His newspaper was a cultural weekly, not just edited but owned by his father. He had studied French painting—Bonnard in particular—prior to the war, a secret he’d protected with his life for four years.
“Now,” he said, “may I ask about your roots?”
“You can certainly ask, but they’ve mostly been pulled up, so to speak.”
“Perhaps that is a stroke of luck.”
“Someone else told me that once,” I said.
“Was he smart or stupid? I ask because I’m never sure where I fall.”
“Very smart.”
“That warms my heart. That’s right, isn’t it? The phrase?”
“That’s perfect. He was a priest, actually.”
“That chills my blood.”
“What do you have against priests?”
He tried to explain the contradictory and destructive lessons of Viennese parochial education, but gave up because we were laughing so hard. He pointed to a scar on his cheek he’d received in a duel. At university, before the war. Over what? Over nothing. Dueling was illegal, but, due to a medieval privilege, the police had no jurisdiction over students in Vienna. Paul had leaned into the foil with his cheek, as was the custom. As was the custom in those days, he had worn a pair of gold-rimmed glasses without a prescription and ordered a beard tonic from an advertisement in the Neue Freie Presse. As was the custom, he was obsessed with looking older. “That’s the mark of the end times, isn’t it? When the young aspire to look old, instead of the other way around.”
I smoked Paul’s Gitanes, drinking the wine that much faster to wash away the taste. He produced a second bottle, and we talked politics with a moonlit intensity that often proves hilarious by daylight.
“Did you think it really was the end times?” I asked. “I mean, before 1914.”
“Some did, certainly. When I was in gymnasium, I had a friend who was already at university, a friend of my older brother, actually. He could speak most of the languages in the empire, had read all the great Slovenian poets, could name every Turkish pasha going back five hundred years. He was so intelligent that—though I loved him—I was almost afraid at times. Do you know that feeling?”
No, I didn’t know that feeling, just as I didn’t know many of the feelings Paul described. We refilled the glasses with the yellow wine, swirled, and toasted with a cold click. No clock in the room, no light yet on the street. But his friend—he shot himself in the head one evening, leaving no note.
“I assume that’s not something you ever considered?” Paul asked. “Suicide.”
“I’ve been too busy trying to stay alive to think about it much. Have you?”
“My god, it’s absurd to say yes, after everything I did to survive later. But at the time I trusted my friend’s judgment completely. And he was far from alone. We had an epidemic, you know, quite egalitarian too: bankers, chimney sweeps, acrobats, even our crown prince. And I was sure, intellectually, that my friend had good reasons for what he did—he must have. But there were times when I simply loved being alive. At home with my parents and during the war too.”
He looked down, embarrassed, but I wished I could have explained the affection I felt for him in that moment. I’ve since seen young actors return to the set with eyes red from highballs and Benzedrine, having spent the night talking themselves into an adamantine friendship. And the fact that I now see those mornings for what they are—the fact that I see the naïveté in those faces—only slightly diminishes the jealousy I feel at being too old for such things.
Santa Monica, 1950
The day after the composer’s birthday party, I got off the phone with Max Steiner and listened to the entire Sunday broadcast of the New York Philharmonic. I couldn’t have said what was played. I needed someone to talk to, but there was no one in particular I wanted to talk to. That’s the best definition of loneliness I know. Work helps. The radio helps. Driving helps, but, when I looked outside, my car was not in the drive.
By midafternoon I’d stopped caring who I spoke to; all that mattered was finding someone who wanted to speak to me. But the phone stayed quiet, an austere black on the stand in the hall. Living alone, one encounters such flashes of non-existe
nce, though they are mercifully rare. For me, they come on days like that one, when I feel regret. Days when I feel like being quiet and alone, but not alone. When effortlessness seems to matter a great deal. When the sight of a neighbor amid his dahlias would be a comfort.
And then Paul arrived near the golden hour, removing his tortoiseshell sunglasses when I answered the door.
“I meant to come earlier, so I could bring you something from the bakery, but I was ensconced in my book.”
“Reading or writing?” I asked, trying to conceal my relief.
“I wouldn’t keep you waiting just to read. This morning, I found I had a great many insights about Bierstadt’s landscapes to put down.” He smiled in that way of his—seemingly aware of the absurdity of his sincerity, completely sincere nonetheless. “It must be that seeing you again is good for my work. Or maybe it was the wine. Might I come in?”
“I’m sorry,” I said, stepping out of the doorway. “It’s only that you haven’t kept me waiting. I wasn’t even aware you knew my address.”
“I assumed you’d want your car back.”
I had to laugh. “You drove me home last night?”
“My god, man, were you that bad?”
“Well, it was quite an occasion, wasn’t it?”
“Indeed. I was pleased to see you get on so well with Steiner. It isn’t always easy with him.”
“You didn’t happen to hear us at the piano?”
“Of course. It’s an event when he plays, you know. Even for that crowd. And you held up quite well. Singing, I mean.”
Once he said it, the memory materialized, however dimly—the faces in the doorway of the tiny practice room; Steiner urging me to keep singing; I, stinking enough to oblige. Eventually, someone, thank god, had relieved me and begun a song in German with Steiner still at the piano. Had that been Paul?
“Was it anything you recognized? The song, that is?”
“Should I have?”
I wasn’t sure whether I was relieved or disappointed. “Is my car still in your driveway then? Why don’t we go?”
“Good. And if you’d like to have dinner, you’ll be at my house anyway.”
I couldn’t help but smile. “I don’t know I could survive another dinner like last night’s.”
“Don’t worry. Tonight’s birthday party is for a zookeeper. The crowd is much tamer.”
“Tamer?”
“Yes, what do you think? Funny? I’ve been working on that one in my head all day.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
* * *
Women in black shawls waited outside Ospedale San Lorenzo, holding bouquets. Around them, men in pale blue pajamas and straw slippers took the sun in lawn chairs, looking on shyly. Bianchi came out into the courtyard, clean-shaven in a white doctor’s coat.
“Members of the international press,” he said, smiling, “I welcome you.”
He led us past a deserted nurses’ station, and into the central hall with its rows of white beds, crisp as soldiers on parade. Meanwhile, patients wandered the ward in lazy shuffles. A typewriter was clicking somewhere. A man stood by a basin, slicking back his hair. We passed another man making the sign of the cross over his breakfast. We passed many men smoking and playing cards. There were white ceiling fans; and porticoes, dug into the walls, occupied by plaster busts; and fireplaces on either end of the room; and radiators under eruptions of sunlight from the big windows.
“Is that a bust of Bellini?” Paul asked.
“Yes, the hospital was a music school before the war. Someday it might be again. Or the country might abolish music entirely. No matter, it only makes sense to leave the busts and the pianos.”
“Tuned?” Paul asked.
“The pianos? They are locked shut. Only some patients found the music therapeutic. As you see, I’ve chosen an open ward. More socialization, less faradization.” Bianchi frowned when neither of us reacted to the flourish of language. “If you want, it is no secret that much of what is here is just for show.”
“Showing what?” I asked.
“The progress of Italian medicine, naturally. Only it has been difficult to convince anyone to come to the show.”
“Who are all the women in black?” I asked.
“Grieving mothers.”
“But don’t they know that this Fairbanks can’t be their boy, that he isn’t even Italian?”
“Naturally, I remind them of that fact each morning,” Bianchi said.
* * *
Douglas Fairbanks did not resemble the actor. There was a trace of copper in his widow’s peak, cut unflatteringly close. A dip in his right cheek tremored in code. One could still see the echo of a face that might have been striking if it were open in the typically American fashion. But everything about the man was closed. His shoulders pointed in, his cheeks caved in, his eyes were deeply set. He’d been given his own room—a former practice room, judging from the musical staff on the wall. There was no piano now, only a steel-framed bed and a night table covered in flowers. There were flowers on the sill of the single window, tinting the sun a sickening pink. Douglas Fairbanks watched the light on the wall.
“He is not always comfortable with visitors,” Bianchi said. “Only the international press is allowed at the moment.” He nodded at Paul and me.
“No one has claimed an identification?” I asked.
“No. As I say, many of the women you have seen already know that Mr. Fairbanks is not their son. They truly do know it, and still they come. They will have the chance to see for themselves, naturally, but I can only allow a few a week, so they must wait. That may sound cruel, but my responsibility is to Mr. Fairbanks, and the visits exhaust him. But I believe he feels well today. If you want, you may say something to him.”
Paul said nothing. I introduced myself, and Fairbanks took a swing at me with his eyes.
“Try harder,” Bianchi encouraged.
“I’ve come from Paris,” I said to Fairbanks. “Have you been to Paris?”
Fairbanks said nothing. Paul said nothing. “Where have you been?” I asked. Fairbanks’s eyes—the failing green of early autumn—stayed away.
Bianchi put a hand on my shoulder.
“I do not think to interrogate is the best way,” he said. “May I?”
He scraped the chair toward the bed and sat down, smoothing the pleats of his pants. “I used to speak to him in Italian,” he said. “He understands Italian, but he speaks English better.”
“He does speak?” Paul asked. He had taken the seat next to mine, behind Bianchi. He squinted at Fairbanks.
“Naturally, he does,” Bianchi said. “Mr. Combs is not from Paris. He’s an American. Where in America, Tom?”
“Chicago.”
“Do you know Chicago, Mr. Fairbanks? Can you picture this place?”
Fairbanks looked to the flowers in the window. He blinked at the wash of sunlight, as if he might find a shrunken city there. Perhaps in his riddled mind he could.
“You do not have to answer,” Bianchi said to Fairbanks. Then he addressed us, “Naturally, he does not trust anything. He does not trust his own mind. He does not trust treatment. He knows not to trust because he knows he is beyond help. But perhaps he is not beyond help, and perhaps he trusts me a little now.”
“What sort of treatment?” Paul asked.
“In Sienna, he was given, if I can use the term, the full arsenal. Faradization to every part of his body. Hot baths. Ice baths. Hot baths followed by ice baths in order to shock him back into consciousness. Exercise, both mild and vigorous. Extremely vigorous. Interrogation and intimidation. Purgatives, diuretics, and stomach pumping.”
“Leeches?” I asked.
“You understand perfectly. I do not wish to insult my colleagues, but when he came here he looked very bad. You wouldn’t think it to see him now.” He must have seen the question in my face. “He looks much better, truly. If you want, you may write that my method is in part responsible.”
And what was Bianc
hi’s method exactly? He explained that there was, as yet, no term for it. Perhaps Paul and I could help him to invent one? What was the desired outcome? Naturally, for this man we referred to as Fairbanks to regain his personality, to return to the man he once was. And, in order for this to occur, Bianchi contended, he must be treated like that man. Here, Bianchi admitted, he made assumptions, but it was his belief that in his old life, Fairbanks was treated with dignity and respect.
“It sounds obvious, does it not?” he asked. Yet, he pointed out, even the famous Dr. Fenayrou of Rodez stripped his patient for examination before legions of strangers. He induced fever to occlude Mangin’s resistance to treatment. “I refuse to use any of these methods. So perhaps this man’s personality will be slow to return, but it will return. And he himself will be able to tell us who he is.”
“You don’t use therapy?” Paul asked.
“Naturally. But voluntary. Always voluntary.”
“The diagnosis?”
“Like Mr. Mangin, Mr. Fairbanks is diagnosed with dementia praecox. He suffers from amnesia, severe disassociation, listlessness, what you might call paralytic melancholy.”
“A fugue state?”
“Very nearly. He would starve to death if we let him, but, if asked, he will eat. If led, he will walk the grounds, and he will even seem to take some pleasure in the flowers and especially in the fountain. In certain conditions, he will speak.”
“So you’ve said, doctor, but excuse me,” Paul said. “I still haven’t heard him say a word.”
“No,” Bianchi said. “Would you like to?”
He turned back to Fairbanks. “I will begin a process that will make you feel very relaxed, Mr. Fairbanks? Would that interest you, Mr. Fairbanks?”
Fairbanks’s eyes stayed on the flowers. “If you want,” he said quietly.
Bianchi unfolded a sheet of paper from the breast pocket of his coat and tacked it to the wall opposite the bed. The paper was blank except for a single blue dot, the size of an American penny.