Last Stories and Other Stories (9780698135482)

by Vollmann, William T.

  Although Marija failed to survive him by many years (she aged with an eerie rapidity), Tanya lived into the era of diamond clasps, weaving her nephews’ undershirts, still hoping for her father to return. By then her family’s garden had been eaten up by caterpillars, and the Spanish consulate had taken over her father’s warehouse. Just as a preying nautilus extrudes its tentacles, so this or that rich Triestino overhung her property, trolling at its deeds and taxes, making her shameful offers. A certain Alberto importuned her the most, but he was too old. Meanwhile her brothers and uncles hounded her, hypothesizing that since she had been her father’s favorite she must know something about his treasure. When nothing came of their investigations, they ostracized her, I fear, but in time they forgave her. She became quite the old maid. All protections having been not only superseded but countermanded, death slavered to get at her now, so that even the brick-scaled, flag-clutching pier-claws of the harbor occasionally sought to close upon her whenever she promenaded in search of her father (sometimes followed at a distance by Alberto), with her woman’s dagger at her side, inquiring among the cloaked, barelegged Ragusan merchants, quizzing the beggar-children huddled together like figures on a dirty old marble frieze; but again and again death spat her out, not relishing the taste of her indifference.

  How much did she comprehend? Although her father never told her in so many words that he had hoped to sail high enough to approach not only the stars and saints swarming through the sky like the ships in Venice on Ascension Day, scarlet bunting everywhere, oars swiveling like crustacean legs, lapis-cloaked ladies in the shaded galleries, peals of cathedral bells, but also the starry canals to grander spheres, until he came into the gold-haloed presence of his most adored saint, didn’t Tanya guess it all? Turning away from this, she rigged out yellow ledger-pages like the cutched sails of the Cirtoviches’ fleet, valiantly angling for the slightest breeze of profit. Even in this skill, in which she had no interest, she proved better than her father’s other children. But, as the Triestini remarked, the planets were against her.

  She married late; her husband was a merchant whose family came from Muggia. He was as handsome, sad and smoothfaced as the bearded golden reliquary bust of Saint Nicholas, whose moustaches, beard and hair flow together like so many parallel waves of yarn; but Tanya scarcely noticed him. Their children died early. From across the room the husband frequently stood for a moment to watch this woman (who never permitted him to call her Tanyotchka), with her long grey hair hanging down and her chin in her hand as she did his accounts. He felt proud of her; she knew nearly as much as he did. Sometimes he got her to sit beside him by pretending interest in her father’s doings. When he died, he left her a decent portion.

  Although she gave up on astronomy, she never ceased praying for her father’s safe return. She called upon Christ, and Saint Sava, and Saint Lazar, of course, not to mention the Holy Virgin, whom in Trieste we name Stella Maris. Every day she went to church. It would have pleased Jovo Cirtovich to see her go out for so many years into the Triestine twilight of many colors. But when people saw her on the street, she was just another old woman dressed in black.

  THE MADONNA’S FOREHEAD

  1

  Once upon a time, somebody threw a brick at Our Lady of the Flowers, and she began to bleed from her stone forehead. From this occurrence we all accepted the occasional sentience of statues, but thence our themes departed in cardinal directions. Upholding the Madonna’s compassionate forbearance, some argued that she had in effect murmurously moaned to us: Your disrespect gashes me, but how could I, your loving mother, bring myself to punish you in any way? That is why I smile upon you just as before even while the blood runs down my cheek.— Schismatics asserted that her smile was in fact a punishment, and indeed a terrible one, for they remembered from their childhoods the faithful, distant sadnesses of their mothers when they sinned—longhaired mothers who licked the sugared spoon and pouted, swinging their knitted turquoise purses, strings of pearly tears commencing from their big sad brown eyes—and as for the children, their evil remained inexpiable; that was why nobody beat them; their lives had become hopeless. They were the ones who upon seeing the glare of the solar disk behind late summer clouds were capable of simultaneously rejecting both their present sweltering infinities, thickened by cigarette smoke, and the clammy bora wind of embryonic autumn.— Still others said: No, what’s proved is that she could not stop the brick from striking her!— The boy who threw the brick was their adherent. Of course he had never supposed that anything supernatural would happen, for be assured that he had thrown stones, rusty iron and other such before, impelled by blasphemies as insignificant to us as the rotations of the little carousel beside the Canal Grande. In those days the boy, whose name was Nino, appeared as hard and slender as a breadstick. Sometimes his parents punished him; hence his cunning had increased with the cowardice of experience, and he generally threw stones and bricks in the hottest hours of the afternoons, when arugula wilted under the striped umbrellas of the produce stalls and even the Italian flag sweated on its pole. He especially liked to climb over the railing where the Via del Teatro Romano overlooks those eponymous semicircles of grass-grown brick benches and globs of masonry which the centuries treat as does the morning sun the fish vendor’s blocks of ice; they may last out the afternoon, but count on them to be absent tomorrow! We may therefore consider this boy an agent of the morning sun. Arriving at the Roman theater with his pockets full of gravel, he would pick a weary old column and assail it with dents and dimples; once indeed a certain missile of his smashed off the corner of an ancient brick, and he felt as happy as if he had dislodged an enemy’s tooth. The afternoon weighed shadily on a rusty grating in an arched doorway set in a steep grassy hillside; this spot had always been sinister to Nino, and now, glancing at it as if by mistake, he discovered his triumph decaying into guilt and fear, because what if a ghost came out? But nothing did come, because the amphitheater, where gladiators once clubbed and stabbed each other for our amusement right there on the ocean’s edge, had already lost almost everything, even the sea itself, which had receded like an old man’s gums and now hid behind the white municipal building of flags and garbage cans. Then the boy’s courage returned, and he decided to throw something at the Madonna della Borella, whom we also know as the Madonna dei Fiori, Our Lady of the Flowers. Right then the sky was as smooth as the naked black buttocks of faraway statues, and the Madonna’s face was smoother even than that. Maybe he could break her nose off.

  Just as the late afternoon sun extends itself down Trieste’s drainpipes, elongating their goldenness while devouring their shaded dullnesses, so that lines of gold expand like a summer thermometer’s mercury, penetrating each roof’s shaded zone even as the solar angle alters so that the lines of gold commence to narrow—already now they resemble the slenderest rays of light which a master’s one-haired brush could paint onto a Book of Hours, for the shade has risen all around it; now they are all gone—thus the past (if indeed there can be any such thing as a “past,” a present which has become nonexistent) of this iconoclast thins out the more radiantly it pretends to go backwards, so that if you were to ask me, why did he become that way?, I might start to answer confidently, then lose my thread, distracted and annoyed precisely as you would be when a black lapdog goes barking past the merry-go-round, dragged by its weary master, slavering from both sides of its drooping little tongue, which is even more crimson than the velvet seats in the opera house. Meanwhile the horses gently rise and fall, while the pumpkin-coaches, sanctuaries for timid little ones, remain as solidly anchored to the revolving disk of reality they inhabit as would a fat woman’s bottom; and as the lapdog’s angry yelps succumb to the law of decrescendo, a little boy’s whine fills the impending acoustic vacuum; but the young mother of the bobbed hair and mohair scarf and spectacles waves to her four-year-old blonde in the sunglasses who clings (somehow regally) to her white plastic pony’s neck as it ascends and descends
without consideration for the whining of the boy, who sits behind her all alone; other children accustom themselves to their pole-skewered horses with cautious amazement; then here comes the boy, Nino, all by himself; his father is reading the newspaper because it is Sunday and he is tired, his absence being in the small boy’s mind merely a grief, although when the boy has grown perhaps it will number among the father’s many sins which whirl in the shadows of the trembling olive-green hedges. A man walks by smiling, with his arms folded. He stops. He turns back. He cannot get enough music, it seems. The boy’s whines never reach him. And down the street they are knocking an old horse over the head, because Nino’s father and I both like to eat horsemeat steaks with green peppercorns. The man stands for a long time, smiling and faintly nodding his head. When the Sunday light strikes the yellow-painted zinc of the ticket kiosk, the pigeons suddenly look very dull indeed, and Nino’s whining becomes still more of an insult to the music, the waving parents, the happiness of this world.

  As for the boy’s father, poor man, he’d gotten trapped by a pair of mammaries—or, to be more precise, by the peach-colored throat of the woman who now no longer loved him, or at least that was his belief although they had never talked about it because, as H. P. Lovecraft proved, it may well be better not to know the answers to questions of fatality and decay; for instance, what answer, what honest answer at least, could the whining boy have learned which would not have made him feel worse? For when we whine, dear brothers and sisters, we become unlovable; that is why the jackbooted heel which has just crushed the bones of the prisoner’s hand against the flagstones cannot be blamed for entering a partnership with the jackbooted toes in order to penetrate the prisoner’s screaming mouth at high speed, simply in order to shut him up, because most of us who claim to love a crying child are lying; the remainder must be themselves unlovable, because they tolerate, encourage, actually foment annoying demands upon our so-called obligations—not that I would ever suppose that the father wished to hurt his dear bambino whose face was always sticky with snot and the slobber of green and red candies. From one of the conical-roofed white vending tents on the edge of the Canal Grande there now came, temporarily expelling the smells of burned rubber and of cigarettes, a fragrance of frying calamari, and since Nino’s crying couldn’t get worse and he surely wouldn’t toddle off the moving carousel and if he did then naturally the attendant at the kiosk would take care of him, the father went to buy them both this treat—yes, both of them, for even now he still dreamed of being surrounded by children just as the plinth of Verdi’s statue has been lovingly besieged by red begonias—but I regret to say that as he approached the line of backs and buttocks between him and the calamari, he suddenly experienced, as perhaps he might have planned for and even welcomed had he slept or philandered less in order to read more frequently an Evangeliario, or better yet an Evangeliario covered in red leather and saints in silverworked relief, a thrombosis, and that was the end of him, right there on the Piazza del Ponterosso, surrounded on all sides by the candy-cake Habsburg buildings of Trieste. And he had been correct, because that dirty naughty boy kept whining so hard that he had made everything as horrible for himself as he could, which meant that he was safe; and when the carousel stopped, he clung to the shining pole of his horse, whining with his eyes closed; the attendant frowned, but since the father was out pissing or something he allowed the child, who frankly repulsed him, to stay where he was until all the parents had bent over their darlings to carry them off their horses, or smiled with outstretched arms while their children returned radiantly or regretfully to their care; so the next cloud of children swarmed onto the carousel, the whistle blew, and the smell of fresh-fried calamari blew from the white tents, in front of which a crowd was thickening like leukocytes around an enemy bacillus; so that the attendant supposed that the sidewalk painter had begun the day there, inconsiderately close to the businesses of others; or perhaps one of the North Africans had finally gotten hold of a good book to sell, preferably one pertaining to carnal adventures; but the crowd seemed too attentive even for that, and now here came a policeman in a very clean uniform; the crowd contracted to make him a passageway, and the attendant leaped onto the dais of his carousel in hopes of some excitement, so that just as the accordionist started to squeeze out the national anthem, the attendant gaped, proving to all of us that his teeth were as brown as the wooden keys of an old spinet; for he had just perceived the dead man.

  A little girl, her hand held by her father’s, kept turning sideways to watch the pigeons and the sea, but her father supposed that it was the dead man who attracted her, hence his well-meaning yanking of her wrist; while the whining boy was sure that she kept looking at him in fascinated contempt; and it was this memory above all, whose basis you have just seen to be false, which hurt him most in later life—but did any of this justify his actions?

  2

  So the naughty boy grew up with his ever-merciful mother whom he hated, teased, tormented and drained. Those two were of so little interest to anyone else that they lived on the eighth floor of a seven-storey façade (chiseled dirty stone, which might have been pink or tan beneath its greyness). It could have been worse; they could have lived on the ninth floor, among the old widows who have gone to heaven; although it could have been better, in which case they might have been privileged to exist on the seventh floor, among the old widows who no longer watch but listen through the dark shades of their narrowly vertical windowpanes. Those years half throttled him with the stickiness of clothes at knees, elbows, shoulders, chest and back. He kept running to see where life was. Whenever life got away from him, he grew enraged and smeared his excrement on monuments. He was a disgusting boy, to be sure, and always had been. When he was small he used to fly from banister to shoulder or armchair to neck like a vampire bat, sinking his sharp little teeth into the flesh of anyone he chose. When people prayed he would roll his eyes and utter rude whistlings. Those behaviors grew more discreet upon the death of his father. Anyhow, what was he to do? Everything was grey with white glare behind it, like the noon sky in Trieste late in a summer which will not die. So he remained miserably exempt from the fear that so many feel in the face of death, from the vain desire to keep death from achieving total victory by commissioning monuments to ourselves. But finally his testicles descended, and at once autumn began, with a wind which whirled away the potato chips from their glass dishes on the tables of the outdoor cafés. The shadows were more distinct and we could all see farther. What we spied between the slats of our shutters used to be undifferentiated whiteness; but now it organized itself into distinctions of white light and blue light.

  His mother bought him a little briefcase. He began to be excited by the dull sheen of brass plaques.

  3

  I cannot tell you whether he wanted to be good or merely to be approved of. He was a boy who told lies. Once his mother told him to eat a certain apple before it got overripe, and he said that he had done it but she found it in the dustbin. These careless lies of his became more extravagant, hence almost endearingly unearthly. A beggar came to the door. His mother was upstairs scrubbing the floor. She heard the beggar arguing with her son; she was just about to rise up off her aching knees and go to the young man’s aid when the door slammed behind the beggar; then her son came rushing upstairs with his face alight with virtue; he announced that he had given the beggar five hundred lire of his own money. What could the mother say? Perhaps he had at least felt a momentary charitable inclination, which should not be discouraged. Smiling pityingly, she patted his elbow and went on scrubbing the floor.

  4

  When he threw the brick at the Madonna’s white, white forehead, at first he disbelieved the result. Then, determined not to change his life, he approached the divine image in a scientific spirit, seeking to see some reservoir of rusty water beneath the paint. But no; she was bleeding. And she gazed at Nino, lovingly smiling—the smile of a lover, or a mother, or simply of a woman who
loved—so giving, that smile, and so fearless, but not like the smile of the woman he would someday marry, who sometimes, at least at first, expressed such happiness that he seemed to smell the fragrance of oranges and lemons; and not like the heavy-lidded smiles of the prostitutes with whom he would in time lie on July afternoons, with the window open in hopes of a harbor breeze; no, she gazed at him with sad awareness—after all, not like his mother, who narrowed her awareness in order to avoid loving him less on account of his sins. Sad smile, brown eyes (one of them larger than the other), bleeding forehead—what did all this mean?

  5

  The boy knew well the tri-tiered stands of gum, candies and cough drops in little boxes, and then around the corner he knew a specific double-shelved pastry case, with cookies like full moons eclipsed at the center by smaller planets of jam. These cookies did not seem stealable, so he bought one with his mother’s money, then ran off with it to lurk amidst the sunken weedgrown columns of the Teatro Romano, seeking to deny what he had seen.