by John Cheever
It was very hot and Ladros was crowded but the sea had a color he had never seen before and there was something in the air, a suspension of conscience, that made the white beaches and the dark seas of his own country seem censorious and remote. He seemed, in crossing the bay of Naples, to have lost his scruples. The contest was on Saturday and on Friday Simon came down with a bad attack of food poisoning. Emile bought him some medicine in a pharmacy but he was up most of the night and was too weak to get out of bed in the morning. Emile felt for him deeply and wished it were in his power to help. He had wasted his savings and if his sole ambition was ridiculous could he be blamed? Simon asked Emile to take his place and in the end he agreed. It was the brute power of boredom that forced his decision. He had nothing else to do. He got into his bathing trunks, put on Simon’s numeral and went up to the piazza at a little after four. The hot, bright sunlight could still be seen at the foot of the street but the square was in shade. There was a long wait. Presently a boatload of English tourists came in and filled up the tables at the edge of the square and then, in numerical order, the procession started.
He didn’t want to seem sullen, that after all would have been unfair to Simon, but he did want to seem disengaged, to make clear that this was not his idea, not what he wanted. He didn’t look at the faces below him but stared at an advertisement for San Pellegrini mineral water on a wall beyond the café. What would his mother have thought, his uncle, the ghost of his father? Where was the dark house in Parthenia where he had lived? When he had crossed the piazza he waited around with the others and then was led into the café by the proprietor and didn’t realize until then that there were only ten and that he was one of the winners.
It was getting dark by then, deepening into the grape-colored sky that more than anything else made him feel not unpleasantly far from home. Now the piazza was crowded. The ten men stood at the bar drinking coffee and wine, held together by the bond of a common experience and a questionable victory and alienated by the barriers of language. Emile stood between a Frenchman and an Egyptian and the best he could do was to speak a little crude Italian and smile hopefully but fatuously to prove that he was friendly and self-possessed. As it grew darker and darker in the piazza, as the light of day faded and as they stood under the bare lights of the café that had been arranged sensibly and economically to light the work of the bartenders and to flatter no one, they might, but for their lack of clothing, have been a group of workmen, clerks or jurors, stopping for a drink on their way back to wherever their lives were centered, to whereever they were awaited and wanted. Emile did not understand what would happen next and he asked the proprietor in dumb show to explain. The explanation was long and it was a long time before Emile understood that they, the ten winners, would now be auctioned off to the crowd in the piazza. “But I’m an American,” Emile said. “We don’t believe in that!”
“Niente, niente,” the judge said gently and explained to Emile that if he didn’t want to be sold he was free to go. In his own country Emile would have gone home indignantly but he was not in his own country and inquisitiveness or something deeper held him there. He was shocked to think that unfamiliar surroundings, lights and circumstances might influence his morals. To reinforce his character he tried to recall the streets of Parthenia but they were worlds away. Could it be true that his character was partly formed from rooms, streets, chairs and tables? Was his morality influenced by landscapes and kinds of food? Had he been unable to take his personality, his sense of good and evil, across the Bay of Naples?
In the piazza a band began to play and from behind the café a few mortars were fired off. Then the padrone opened the door and called to a man named Ivan, who smiled at his companions and went out onto the terrace where there was a block on which he stood. He seemed to acquiesce gracefully at this turn of events. Emile went out onto the terrace and stood in the shelter of an acacia tree. The bidding began lightheartedly, it seemed a joke, but as the bidding increased he realized that the young man’s skin was up for sale. The bidding rose quickly to a hundred and fifty thousand lire; but then it came in slowly and the stir in the crowd was erotic. Ivan seemed impassive but the beating of his heart could be seen. Was this sin, Emile wondered, and if it was, why should it seem so deeply expressive of everyone there? Here was the sale of the utmost delights of the flesh, its racking forgetfulness. Here were the caves and the fine skies of venery, the palaces and stairways, the thunder and the lightning, the great king and the drowned sailor, and from the voices of the bidders it seemed that they had never wanted anything else. The bidding stopped at two hundred and fifty thousand lire and Ivan stepped off the block and walked into the dark where someone, Emile couldn’t see who, had been waiting with a car. He heard the motor start and saw the headlights shine on the ruined walls as they drove off.
An Egyptian named Ahab came next but something was wrong. He smiled too knowledgeably, seemed much to ready to be sold and to perform what was expected of him and was knocked down at fifty thousand lire in a few minutes. A man called Paolo re-established the atmosphere of sexuality and the bids, as they had been for Ivan, came in slowly and hoarsely. Then a man named Pierre climbed onto the block and there was some delay before the bidding began at all.
Something had gone wrong. The bloom was off him. He had drunk too much wine or was too tired and now he stood on the block like a stick. His slip was cut scant enough to show his pubic hair and his pose was vaguely classical—the hips canted and one hand curved against his thigh—classical and immemorial as if he had appeared repeatedly in the nightmares of men. Here was the face of love without a face, a voice, a scent, a memory, here was a rub and a tumble without the sandy grain of a personality, here was a reminder of all the foolishness, vengefulness and lewdness in love and he seemed to excite, in the depraved crowd, a stubborn love of decency. They would sooner look at the prices on the menu than at him. His look was sly and wicked, he was more openly lascivious than the others but no one seemed to care. There was some subtle change in the atmosphere of the place. Ten thousand. Twelve thousand. Then the bidding stopped. This was the worst of all for Emile to see. Ivan had sold himself to God knows whom, a face in the dark, but it seemed more shameful and more sinful that Pierre, who was willing to perform the sacred and mysterious rites for the least sacred rewards, was wanted by no one and that for all his readiness to sin he might, in the end, have to spend a quiet night in the dormitory counting sheep. Something was wrong, some promise, however obscene, was broken and Emile sweated in shame for his companion, for to lust and to be unwanted seemed to be the grossest indecency. In the end Pierre was knocked down for twenty thousand lire. The padrone turned to Emile to ask if he wanted to reconsider his decision and in an intoxication of pride, a determination to prove that what had happened to Pierre could not happen to him, he went forward and stood on the block looking out boldly at the lights in the piazza as if he had in this way managed to come face to face with the world.
The bidding was spirited enough and he was knocked down for a hundred thousand lire. He stepped off the platform and walked through the tables to where a woman was waiting. It was Melissa.
She drove him up into the hills and through the gates of a villa where he could hear the loud noise of a fountain and nightingales singing in the trees and where he discovered that he had not brought his sense of good and evil across the bay. This eruption of his senses, this severance from the burdens of his life, was so complete that he seemed to fly, to swim, to live and die independently of all the well-known facts, that he seemed violently to destroy and renew himself, demolish and rebuild his spirit on some high sensual plane that was unbound from the earth and its calendar.
There was a pool in the garden where they swam and they ate their meals on a terrace. With her this time he never seemed to achieve consciousness; or perhaps he had discovered a new level of consciousness. There were six black dogs around the place who watched them and the servants came and went with trays of food and l
iquor. He had no idea of the passage of time but he guessed he had been there a week or ten days when she said one morning that she had to drive down to Ladros on an errand but that she would be back before lunch.
She hadn’t returned by two and he ate his lunch alone on the terrace. When the maids had cleared the table they went upstairs to take their siesta. The whole valley was still. He lay on the grass by the pool, waiting for her to return. He felt drugged by an acuteness of sexual sensation and like the absence of a drug her delayed return left him in pain. The black dogs lay in the grass around him. Two of the dogs kept bringing sticks for him to throw. Their demands were insistent and tedious. Every few minutes they would drop a stick at his feet and if he didn’t throw it at once they would howl for his attention. He heard a car in the road and thought that in another five minutes she would be with him but the car continued on to a villa farther up the cliff. He dove into the pool and swam the length of it, but as he pulled himself out of the cold water into the hot sun this contact only made his need for her seem keener. The flowers in the garden seemed aphrodisiac and even the blue of the sky like some part of love. He swam the length of the pool again and lay on the grass in a shady part of the garden where the dogs joined him and the retrievers howled for him to throw sticks.
He wondered what she was doing in Ladros. The cook bought the wine and the food and there was, he thought, nothing she needed. Her inability to resist his touch and his looks made him wonder if she could resist the touch or the look of any other man and if she was not now climbing some staircase with a stranger with hairy forearms. The degree of his pleasure in her immersion in sensuality was the exact degree of his jealousy. He couldn’t credit her with any vision of constancy; and he went on throwing sticks for the dogs.
He went on throwing sticks as if some clear duty were involved, as if their welfare and amusement were on his conscience. But why? He had not liked them or disliked them. His feeling was substantial enough to be traced. He did, it appeared, feel some obligation to the dogs. There was some mutuality here as if in the past he had been a dog, dependent upon the caprices of a stranger in a garden, or as if in the future he might be transformed into a dog asking to be let in out of the rain. There were obligations and rewards, it seemed, for the patience with which he threw sticks. But where was she? Why was she not now with him? He tried to imagine her on some innocent errand but he couldn’t. Then he sat up suddenly in anger and pain and the dogs sat up to watch. Their golden eyes and the whining of the retrievers made him angrier and he climbed the stairs to the salone and poured himself a drink but he left the door open and the dogs followed him in and sat around him on their haunches as he stood at the bar as if they expected him to speak with them. The house was still; the maids would be sleeping. Then his rage at her propinquity, her uselessness, her corruption shook him and the gaze of the animals only seemed more questing, as if this hour were speeding toward a climax they well knew; as if he were traveling toward some critical instant that involved them all; as if their dumbness and his lust, jealousy and anger were converging. He ran up the stairs and dressed. It was an hour’s walk to the village but he didn’t expect her car to pass him because he was convinced by then that when she did return it would be with another lover and he would have been transformed into a dog. But when she did pass him and stopped and when he saw that there were groceries in the back of the car, his moral indignation collapsed. He went back with her to the villa and returned to Rome with her at the end of the week.
CHAPTER XXX
Returning to her pensione one morning Honora found Norman Johnson waiting for her in the lobby. “Oh, Miss Wapshot,” he said, “oh, it’s so good to see you. It’s so good to see anybody who can talk English. I was told that all these people studied English in school but most of the ones I’ve seen don’t speak anything but Italian. Can we sit down here.” He opened his briefcase and showed her the order for her extradition, a copy of the criminal indictment passed down by the circuit court in Travertine and an order for the confiscation of all her property; but with so much documented power in his hands he seemed shamefaced and it was she who felt sorry for him. “Don’t you worry,” she said, touching him lightly on the knee. “Don’t you worry about me. It’s all my fault. It was just that I was so afraid of the poor farm. I’ve been afraid of the poor farm all my life. Even when I was a little girl. When Mrs. Bretaigne used to take me motoring to see the autumn foliage I used to close my eyes when we passed the poor farm, I was so afraid of it. But now I’m homesick and I want to go back. I’ll go down to the bank and get my money and we’ll go home in one of those flying machines.”
They walked together to the American Express Office, not as a jailer and a culprit but as dear friends. He waited downstairs while she closed her account and she joined him, carrying a large bundle of twenty-thousand lire notes. “I’ll get a taxi,” he said. “You can’t walk through the streets like that. You’ll be robbed.” They stepped out into the Piazza di Spagna.
It was a bright winter’s day. At Fregene the catamarans would be up on rollers, the bathhouses shut, the light on the olives a sad light, the zuppa di pesce signs fallen or hanging from a single nail. The swallows were gone. In Rome it was hot in the sun, cold in the shade, the soft, bright light heightening the curious tidewater look of that old and crowded city as if, sometime in the past, the Tiber had risen over its banks—a flood of dark water—and stained the buildings and churches up to their pediments, leaving the limestone above still pale and still, this late in the year, overgrown at every cranny with thick tufts of grass and capers that looked so like pubic hair that they gave to the celebrated square an antic look. Americans wandered away from the office reading the news from home-sweet-home. Most of the news appeared to be humorous since most of them, from time to time, would smile. They walked, unlike the Italians, as if they accommodated their step to some remembered and explicit terrain—a tennis court, a beach, a plowed field—and seemed set apart by an air of total unpreparedness for change, for death, for the passage of time itself. There were perhaps a hundred and fifty people in the square when Honora entered it and glanced up at the sky. A Danish tourist was photographing his wife on the Spanish Steps. An American sailor was dousing his head in the fountain. There were fresh flowers on the monument to the Virgin. The air smelled of coffee and marigolds. Sixteen German tourists were drinking coffee in a café across the street. 11:18 A.M.
Honora was approached by a barefoot beggar in a torn green dress who held a baby. She gave her a lira note. She gave one to a man in a striped apron, to a little boy in a white coat carrying a tray of coffee, to a good-looking tart holding her coat closed at the throat, to a stooped woman wearing a hat shaped like a wastebasket, to three German priests in crimson, to three Jesuits in black with lavender piping, to five barefoot Franciscans, to six nuns, to three young women in the black, sleazy uniforms worn by the maids of Rome, to a clerk from one of the souvenir shops, to a hairdresser, a barber, a pimp, three clerks, their fingers stained with lavender government office ink; to one dispossessed marquesa, her ragged handbag stuffed with photographs of lost villas, lost houses, lost horses, lost dogs; to a violinist, a tuba player and a cellist on their way to the rehearsal hall on the Via Athenee; to a pickpocket, a seminarian, an antique dealer, a thief, a fool, an idler, a Sicilian looking for work, a carabiniere off duty, a cook, a nursemaid, an American novelist, a waiter from the Inglese, a Negro drummer, a medical-supply salesman and three florists. There was not a hint of charity in her giving. The good her money might do would never cross her mind. The impulse to scatter her money was as deep as her love of fire and she sought, selfishly, an intoxicating sensation of cleanliness, lightness and usefulness. Money was filth and this was her ablution.
By this time the roofs of the square were black with people. A clerk from the express office climbed out the window, slid down the awning and dropped to the sidewalk at Honora’s feet. Bystanders stood knee deep in the water of the fountain. Then some
mounted carabinieri came up the Via Condotti and Honora turned and climbed the stairs while the voices of thousands blessed her in the name of The Father, The Son and The Holy Ghost, world without end.
CHAPTER XXXI
Coverly’s security clearance was renewed pending Cameron’s return from New Delhi but Brunner had gone to England and Coverly had no way of knowing when the old man would come back. Then, through some irreversible and confused bureaucratic process Coverly was served a ten-day eviction notice by the government housing office. His feelings were mixed. Their life in Talifer seemed over, if it could ever have been said to have begun. He could easily find work as a pre-programmer somewhere else and the thought of leaving Talifer seemed to Betsey like the promise of a new life. At about this time he received a wire from St. Botolphs. COME AT ONCE. This unprecedented directness from his old cousin alarmed him and he packed and left. He arrived there late the next afternoon. The day was rainy but as they approached the sea the rain turned to snow. The fall of snow whitened the bare trees and the slums beside the tracks and gave them, so Coverly thought, a pathos and beauty that they would have at no other time in their history. All this whiteness made him lighthearted. When he got off the train Mr. Jowett was nowhere around and the station had been abandoned. He saw no one to wave to in the windows of the Viaduct House; no one in the feed store. Crossing the green he was stopped by a procession of men and women leaving the parish house of Christ Church. They were eight and they walked two by two. All the men but one, who was bareheaded, wore stocking caps. He guessed that there had been a tea, a lecture, some charitable gesture, and that these were the inmates of the poor farm. One of them, an angular man, seemed mad or foolish and was muttering: “Repent, repent, your day is at hand. Angel voices have told me how to make myself pleasing to the Lord. . . .” “Hushup, hushup, Henry Saunders,” said a large Negress who walked at his side. “You just hushup until we get into the bus.” A bus was parked at the curb with HUTCHINS INSTITUTE FOR THE BLIND painted on its side. Coverly watched a driver help them in and then walked on up Boat Street.