Mary McCarthy

by Mary McCarthy

  “You should see them in Killarney,” eagerly put in the poet, and everyone began to recount some personal experience of German effrontery.

  The lawyer raised his voice. “And if the fishing people want their trade? Will you forbid Pierino or Romeo to take them to Rocca Bianca? Perhaps you’d like to institute some racial laws here to prevent that?” “Hear, hear!” said Irene.

  Hélène raised her small tanned face anxiously to her tall husband. “Aide-moi, Arturo.”

  “Il a raison, Hélène,” Arturo said mildly. “Sur le plan légal.”

  “Hell,” said Mike suddenly. “Can’t Hélène say what she thinks about German tourists without being attacked as a racist? I’m on her side. Lafayette, we are here!” He laughed at his own weak joke to break the tension.

  Spots of color appeared in the Englishman’s cheeks; he and Mike were not congenial, having already had disputes about prizefights and the execution of Caryl Chessman. “And what about the Americans?” he said to Hélène in a trembling voice. “Personally, if we must speak in these terms, I prefer the Germans to the Americans.”

  “No!” said Hélène, with violence. “The Americans do not come where they are not wanted. They are more sensitive, even the worst. They go where there are other Americans. To Harry’s Bar.”

  “What they do as tourists doesn’t interest me,” retorted the lawyer. “Unlike you, Mme. Buonsanti, I try to think politically. On that level, I can assure you, the Americans are not wanted in Europe. I can’t speak for the keepers of public houses, but I can promise you that the English people don’t want the sensitive Americans with their nuclear toys. Nor the Scots, nor the French, nor the Italians, nor even the Germans—if their governments consulted them. ‘Go home, Yankee,’ is what the Europeans really feel. Try talking to the fishing people here. If your American friends”—he glanced around him—“were sensitive, they’d clear out. No wonder the Germans are welcomed by the plain folk. At least there are no German military bases outside Germany!”

  Irene was the first to speak. “You can thank the Americans for that!” “I prefer to thank the Russians,” said the lawyer.

  “You are so rude,” said Hélène, wheeling on him, “that I would think you were probably a German. You look like a German.” Her blazing eyes surveyed his mountain-climbing costume. “I do not believe you are an Englishman.”

  “Ma fille,” said her father warningly. “Calme-toi.” And he rose, small and peaceable in his open-throated tan sports shirt, to put his arm around her and lead her to a chair. As he did so, they all saw the blue tattoo, like a laundry mark, on his plump sunburned forearm: his number at Auschwitz. Everyone drew a sharp breath. Nearly all of them had at least glimpsed it before—on the White Rock, while the doctor lay sunning, at table, during a chess session. But generally they tried not to look at it, even the smaller children, out of courtesy to the doctor, as if it were a deformity, and the doctor himself made this easier by his habitual meditative posture, chin sunk, arms folded on his lap. Now they stared at the number, at the lawyer, at Hélène.

  “Here,” said the Irish poet suddenly to the children, reaching into the pocket of his bathing trunks. “Go get yourselves ice creams.” He treated children to ice creams with the same absent abandon that he treated or tried to treat grownups to drinks. “Have a whiskey” or “Have an ice cream” was his customary greeting, according to age. But the children this time refused to budge; instead, the lawyer turned, picked up his stick, and marched down the walk without speaking.

  At once Hélène was remorseful. “J’ai trop bu à déjeuner,” she confessed.

  O’Hare and Arturo began to play chess at one end of the table, while the doctor watched; he had learned the game in Auschwitz. The children lingered round the table, as if feeling cheated at the way the discussion had been terminated by the unexpected appearance of Dr. Bernheim’s “number,” like a card produced from his sleeve. Everyone was silent, pursuing his own train of thought.

  “Tu l’as fait exprès, Maurice,” Arturo declared suddenly to his father-in-law, looking up from the board with a chuckle. “He did it on purpose, O’Hare.”

  “What?” said the poet.

  “Showing his number. To help his daughter.”

  The old man indicated a chess move with a silent finger. “Peut-être,” he said imperturbably.

  “You know, maman,” exclaimed Laure, raising her head, “I think you were right. I think he is a German.”

  “Mais oui, mais oui!” shouted François, his eyes sparkling. “Maman a parfaitement raison!” And the little boy assured them that the Englishman had paled when the word “spy” was mentioned. “C’est lui, j’en suis sûr, qui a dénoncé Porto Quaglia aux Allemands. Il a pâli, comme ça.” He gave a wild start, shuddered, and tried to make his small brown face blanch. The other children watched this performance agog. The adults, impressed for a minute by the boy’s conviction, quickly regained their balance. “Mais non, mais non!” they cried soothingly.

  “It’s just that he doesn’t like Americans, François,” Mike explained. “You can understand that, can’t you?” And he made a funny face. “He thinks they eat with their atom bombs on the table.”

  “What are you trying to cover up?” demanded Irene. “François is old enough to know that that man’s a Communist!”

  The “French” protruded their lower lips and doubtfully shrugged their brows; Arturo glanced up from the chessboard. “Je ne crois pas,” he said soberly.

  “La Voix de la Raison a parlé,” announced the editor, clapping his friend on the shoulder.

  “Mais en tout cas ce n’est pas une injure,” mildly pursued Arturo. And the others began to argue as to whether it was an insult to call a person a Communist.

  “Anyway, he’s not a Communist, honey,” said Mike, intervening. “It’s not that simple. He’s an overexcited unilateral disarmer.” “But why should that make him pro-German?” someone demanded. “Mais il n’était pas pro-Allemand,” objected someone else.

  The Irishman had been concentrating on the chessboard, ignoring the conversation. He captured a rook with his knight. “I’ll tell ye what it is,” he said abruptly, tilting back in his chair. “This fellow is a German who passed for English during the war years in England to keep on the good side of his neighbors. Get him to show ye his passport. I’ll wager he was born in Hamburg.”

  “C’est plutôt un juif Allemand qui s’est fait Anglais,” murmured the doctor. “Mais tu es fou, papa!” cried Hélène.

  “Favole!” said the editor. “You are telling each other fairy stories. The truth is simple. This Englishman would like to be unprejudiced, but he is not, unfortunately. Hélène would like to be prejudiced, but she is not, fortunately.” He rose to leave. “Meanwhile,” he added, with a grimace, “the real Germans are advancing.” Mike and Irene rose too.

  Irene approached Hélène. “I’m sorry I attacked you about the Germans coming here. I forgot about your father.”

  Hélène started to reply hotly, “Ce n’est pas à cause de mon père,” but then she gave it up, realizing that she could not explain in English to Irene what she felt toward these new Germans, and that if she were able to explain it in French, Irene would not understand, “Merci,” she said simply, instead.

  The summer, after this, was not the same. The only immediate consequence was that for a few days Hélène and the English lawyer stopped speaking when they met. But Hélène would not allow this to continue, for it would have ended in the creation of factions. There had never been factions in Porto Quaglia, and Hélène, therefore, when the time came, invited the lawyer and his family as usual to François’ birthday party—the great social event of the season, for which cakes were baked in Parma and sent over the mountains by bus. The English accepted, and the quarrel was patched up.

  The party was just like the parties of other years, except that it was too much like them—too defiant of change. The littlest girls dressed up in costumes representing, this year, the gr
eat sirens—the Queen of Sheba, Cleopatra, the Lorelei, Brigitte Bardot—and were made up by one of the painters; François shinned up a palm tree; everyone came, old and young, maids and nurses. As usual, the first goodbyes of the season were said, for François’ party was in the middle of August—after that, traditionally, the first departures took place. Yet the fact was these gay promises—“See you next year,” “All’ anno prossimo,” “À bientôt”—were tinged this year with uncertainty, wan like the flickering light of the Chinese lanterns hung from the trumpet vines and fir trees. Everyone looked at everyone else, wondering which would be the defector, which family would send postcards next year with “auguri” for François and love to everyone from Provence or Elba.

  From the day of O’Hare’s discovery, the “French” had been living in a state of apprehension, which they tried not to show to each other. The blue buses that came nearly every hour from Sarzana and La Spezia were covertly watched, and no one went into Sarzana without casting a supervisory glance over the main square, to note what strangers were about. At the sound of an unfamiliar horn along the road, walkers would stop to listen anxiously, expecting a big German tourist bus to appear around the next curve. The yearly expedition to Portovenere, which included a swim from the boat in a blue grotto and lunch outdoors on an island under a tree with a swing, was repeatedly postponed on various excuses, as though the “French” were afraid to leave Porto Quaglia unguarded, lest they come back and find it violated. None of these actions was planned; no one watched on purpose stationed in the café. It was just that now automatically even the chess players glanced up at the sound of a car or a bus braking, whereas before nobody had paid any attention unless waiting for a friend or a package. The effect of the alert was most noticeable on the children, who roamed about the village in bands, were reluctant to go blackberrying on Monte Morello, and swam in expeditionary forces beyond Raven Point to reconnoitre the coves and grottoes. As if enlisted by this esprit de corps, Mike and his wife had stayed on.

  The only person not privately on the watch for Germans was their herald, O’Hare, who again was invisible in the daytime and was said to be writing a verse play on Marlowe and the School of Night. And at night peace returned to Porto Quaglia. Just before dusk the old ladies, mothers of the Italians among the “French,” appeared on the road, walking with sticks, in pairs or leaning on the arm of a servant or a daughter-in-law. The emergence of le mamme, white-haired, talcum-dusted, woolly-shawled, like soft, powdery moths heading for the café, was the sign that traffic had stilled and Porto Quaglia was safe for the night; the buses had stopped running, and few cars passed. Across the river, the last rays of the sun, already hidden from the village behind Monte Morello, touched the windows of the golden hill towns, which sparkled and beaconed like fireflies or as though they had been turned into quartz or mica embedded in the green hills. After this, O’Hare, the owl, cruised into the café.

  At night Mamma Nature took possession of Porto Quaglia. After supper the children thronged up and down the waterfront picking out the stars, which seemed very near and bright. Sometimes the poet would join them in front of the café and teach them the English names—a game that caused much laughter, incredulity, and wonder. To think that what little Anne’s star book called the Great She Bear was known as the Big Dipper to the English, and La Chaise was Cassiopeia’s Chair.

  “There’s Orion’s Belt, Frankie,” O’Hare would say to François.

  “Ah oui, c’est Le Bâton de Jacob.”

  “Jacob’s Rod, is it?”

  “Mais non, c’est Les Trois Rois!”

  “Mais si,” Catherine would speak up. “Le Bâton de Jacob et Les Trois Rois sont la même constellation, n’est-ce pas, Monsieur O’Hare?”

  “Here’s a good one,” the poet would interject. “Do ye know what the English call Sirius? Orion’s Hound.” This pleased the children in the same way as penetrating the foreign disguises of the pieces on their fathers’ chessboard: was it true, they would ask the poet, that the English called the fou the “bishop”? And the Italians called him “l’alfiere.” The chessboard had its own constellations, said the Irishman, and the fixed moves of the pieces were like the fixed courses of the stars; it was a very old game—as old as the hills.

  When the children had gone to bed, the moonlit village was still, except for the faint sound of dance music coming from across the river, from the restaurant Il Pilota, near the house of Romeo, the boatman. The honky-tonk sound floating across the river seemed bathed in frontier innocence, and the menace of Punta Sabbia, just beyond, was reduced to the melody of an old jazz tune. In former years the “French” would have themselves rowed across on a Friday or a Saturday to dance, but now no one went, not even the young people, but the music still continued, as old as the hills itself, as if nothing had changed.

  In the daytime this illusion could not be maintained. The sighting of the Germans in Sarzana had served to call attention to a fact that had been half escaping notice: the White Rock was filling up with bathers. Each day there were new ones. Arriving in their boats, the “French” would discern dark figures, tiny in the distance in the white glare of the cliff, which made them look like people in an overexposed photograph; disembarking, the “French” would often find their places preempted: Dr. Bernheim’s special shady corner under an overhanging cliff, François’ lookout post on the highest rock, Hélène’s hollow. Another umbrella would be standing in the crevice where the engineer’s wife had always planted hers; in the cave where they were in the habit of changing they would find a fat man asleep or a couple embracing. Romeo, Pierino, and Paolo were continually chugging back and forth with strangers aboard whom they deposited—strangers from no one knew where, since they were not staying at the inn or at either of the two boarding houses. And as if this were not enough, new motorboats and even small cruisers began appearing from the other direction and discharging passengers.

  All these people, materializing seemingly from thin air, behaved as if they belonged here, as if they had “always” been coming to the White Rock, which they treated in cursory fashion, like a row of cabine with showers. They did not exclaim over the beauty of the spot but at once put on diving masks and flippers and began to swim. Or launched their children in tubes and themselves on surf mattresses. Or slung cameras round their necks and started photographing—“action” shots of a group splashing each other in the water. This matter-of-fact behavior and the way they ignored the “French,” who outnumbered them, gave the August mornings the quality of a dream sequence. It was as if the “French” collectively had become invisible; the others crossed by them, climbed over them, talked past them, as if they were not there at all in reality but were only figments of their own imagination. If they spoke, they felt they would be inaudible, like someone trying to shout in a dream, and in fact they became remarkably silent. Only their eyes spoke. Some of the strangers, who for the most part were extremely ugly, brought food with them and ate lunch at midday, scattering grape skins and peach pits and salami rind and crusts of bread on the marble and throwing empty Chinotto bottles into the sea. Large horseflies appeared on the White Rock. On the green water there was an iridescent film of gasoline.

  These strangers varied from day to day, but they did not have a marked individuality; rather, they seemed a species whose children, summoned in raucous authoritarian voices, were all named “Umberto” or “Massimo.” “They will go away after Ferragosto,” the editor prophesied, but the fifteenth of August passed and the shriek “Umberto!” “Massimo!” was still heard on the White Rock like the perpetual crying of gulls.

  And one day, at last, Germans came; Romeo had brought them from the Camping at Punta Sabbia. First there were two, then four, then a whole boatload, many of them middle-aged—the men old enough to have been in the S.S. or, to judge them more charitably, to have manned those very pillboxes just around the point that had cowed the area with their artillery till the Americans took Viareggio. Yet now that they were her
e, in the too too solid flesh, the “French” banished these memories, just as they tried not to look at the number on Dr. Bernheim’s arm. In actuality, the Germans from the Camping, it was admitted, were no worse than the invaders who had preceded them; the invaders were all “Germans,” in the sense of a foreign species with the power of rapid multiplication, as the invaded were all “French.”

  But as if to illustrate the complexity of the subject, Irene was accosted one morning toward the end of the month by an Italian crone, the grandmother of some Umberto or Massimo and their little sister (never summoned) Marisa or Silvana. “Sprechen Sie Deutsch?” said the old woman, seizing Irene by the skirt of her beach gown as she tried to pass on the rocks. And when Irene refused angrily to answer her, she continued to gabble at her in German, eager, no doubt, said the editor, to renew conversations she had enjoyed in the old times with the Nazis. Soon afterward Hélène had a similar wounding experience in the post office when she went to buy stamps. “Francobolli, per favore,” she said, pushing her postcards through the window and starting to make a remark about the weather.

  “Per la Germania?” interrupted the employee. “Deutschland?”

  Hélène was outraged. The woman had not even troubled to look at the postcards. Or at her. They were for France, Hélène pointed out. She was not German; she was the Signora Buonsanti. But the employee, who was new, it seemed, did not recognize her. “Cento lire,” she said, counting out stamps for the postcards and handing them back for Hélène to lick.

  “Après dix ans c’est un peu fort,” declared Hélène, seating herself with a thump in the café.

  Arturo gave his genial laugh. “Comme c’est beau!” he said. “Per loro adesso siamo tutti quanti tedeschi.”

  Seriously, put in the professor’s pretty daughter, this must mean that there were Germans actually in the village.