Last Stories and Other Stories (9780698135482)

by Vollmann, William T.

  6

  The psychotherapist Wilhelm Stekel asserts that our fundamental emotion is hatred. Hence we may conceive of the masochism merely as a painting over the sadistic portrait beneath. Such an assertion would be monstrous, could it not be proved. Are we created in Mary’s image—or, if you like, is she one of us? If so, what sadism does her portrait conceal? If not, is she inhuman? Or is Stekel incorrect?

  7

  Next question: Considering the way that some families have of devouring their weakest or most foreign member in some dramma eroico, I wonder whether Nino’s father had been sacrificed? His sense that his wife no longer needed him had been, as such feelings almost invariably are, entirely correct; without Nino and his demands the couple would have been worse off; hence if anyone had to go the father was the one. And why not? He was already as worn as the Arco di Riccardo. Such parapathies, once initiated, may well continue. Families are hungry. Could this explain why Nino chose to vandalize the Madonna, and why his mother said nothing? Pretending to him that she must visit her sister, she hurried out with a rag and a bucket of soapy water, struggling to clean the marble, but it did no good.

  8

  By this time we had all divided into factions, each of us attracted by the flavor of a sympathetic idea, just as in the Canal Grande a school of long green fingerlings will gather round an ice cream cone whose melting whiteness makes especially foul light in that dark water right above another gift to Neptune, namely a pallid rubber glove whose protrusions swiggle and sway in the listless current—and if you want to sit at a café with your friends and speculate as to whether that ice cream cone was dropped in the water by a careless child, or thrown in by the parent of a child who was naughty (who, for instance, whined), or whether it fell from the hands of a sticky child who had eaten too much and suddenly began to vomit, why, then, I wonder why you don’t have better things to do; and it may be much the same with the variously attractive theories about why the Madonna bled when the brick struck her forehead. Nobody except for that despicable boy knew the whole story. He’d lied to his mother, who suspected him but found it more relaxing, God bless her, to believe him; she took a long hot bath, and afterwards he rubbed her feet, all the while sarcastically abusing her for her lack of faith in him. But which way did he judge the question? When his brick hurt that perfect woman, her eyes had moved; she had seen him; this was absolutely for certain; and the blood which spattered his wrist was an earnest of her suffering, which horrified and humiliated him but mostly (in that instant at least) caused him to be terrified of discovery and punishment; as soon as he had gotten away, the horror of what he had done began to prey on him, until he decided not to think about it ever again; and when this strategy failed, he commenced to nourish resentment against Our Lady, who had caused him such suffering. If only she had stayed dead! Who was she to magick the merest nasty thoughtlessness into an atrocity, by being present in her body so unexpectedly? If I drive round the corner at high speed and some old lady is stupid enough to be crossing the street just then and no one has ever been in my way before at that corner, which I have taken at high speed all my life, how can the outcome be my fault? And so he became a Madonna-hater. (The young man’s mother took him to the Gran Teatro di Trieste. He licked his lips at the flowers and lace on Carmen’s costume.)

  9

  His mother was now an elderly marble-skinned woman, her head tilted back, her hair almost like a gilded mushroom cap. She wore a thin smile, with her nostrils flaring and her eyes not quite closed. The muscles and bones were taut on her face.

  One of his father’s cousins was a pharmacist, and it was to him that Nino presently applied for employment. In the back room of the man’s shop, where he compounded his preparations, there hung an anatomical model of a woman, gloriously naked, and her belly opened so that one could see her internal organs. Opening her belly that night, with the half-formed intention of doing mischief, Nino found a little girl inside. He took her out, and instantly fell in love with her, for her anus was as pretty as the tawny ring in the white cup from which the espresso has been drunk; and so he finally grew up into a man and joined the army.

  After several of those July amours to which I have alluded, he fell for a certain Triestina named Francesca whose waist-length chestnut hair, carefully combed, shone red, yellow and all the other colors as she sat with a rose in her folded hands. Some of her suitors could play the viola d’amore of nice red wood, but Nino, having enlisted in the engineers’ battalion, knew how to detonate things; and thanks to his unswerving application to dishonesty he could glamorize his occupations into something resembling the candylike floral depictions on a certain psalterium in Dubrovnik. So Francesca married him.

  Nino’s mother congratulated them, with a tenderly submissive smile, as if she were relieved to fade out of this story. And Nino said to himself: Now I must become good.— He not only forgave the Madonna, but prepared even to love her.

  But she went on bleeding; the neighbors remarked it; no one could explain who had injured her, and why she did not heal.

  10

  His wife was now a gentle, melancholy, elegant woman in brownish-black, wearing a brooch below her withered throat, a lace collar of moderate width, and round earrings of some precious stone which coincidentally resembled his dead mother’s eyes. As for him, he had resigned from the army in order to become a greengrocer, an occupation so respectable that he fancied himself nearly as worthwhile as a gold-relief saint with an upraised spear. Outside their window, the high-masted ships rocked quietly in the mirror-harbor. Of course they had children, a daughter who reminds me of a cherry tree growing out of the ruin of the old Basilica, and two busy little boys like the blooming bush on one of the high ledges of the Arco di Riccardo. I remember passing by their window and seeing the sons in their formal jackets, sitting at the piano for their lesson, while the potted orchid behind them grew sluttishly wild. Just as some rich orders like to get their old wooden icons sheathed in hammered silver, so Nino sometimes embellished his life with extramarital adventures, in order to display his loyalty to what he called happiness; while Francesca perfumed her underwear with dried orange blossoms.

  One day Nino got a rash on his belly which declined to improve. He grew ill. At such times he had always been childishly peevish and dependent, so that the family could never do enough to please him. Finally Francesca gently said: Darling, I’ve heard that Our Lady’s blood works miracles.

  Terrified, he sat up and said: What must I do?

  I’ll go with you. We’ll pray. Then you must kiss her on the forehead, and swallow the blood.

  Needless to say he preferred not to go. On the other hand, he feared suspicion and exposure as a result of any refusal—although only a little, for he had thrown that brick so long ago that his crime seemed unreal to him—and his rash itched so badly that he could scarcely sleep.

  So his wife led him there. He crept up toward Our Lady of the Flowers, groaning with pain.

  It was that time in mid or late afternoon when the Triestine summer, not having entirely established its sticky grip, allows a cloud or two to dim the sun, and an innocuous remembrance of the bora to rise deliciously in the shaded parks where children go fishing for tiny prey with hands, hopes and sticks; and even the old couples who sit together doing nothing are refreshed into holding hands there in the mottled shade of the chestnut trees of the Giardino Pubblico “M. Tommasini,” the bare-breasted stone nymph pissing happily from the circular array of jets, the many-windowed apartment façades glowing slate-green or whitish-pink outside the shady zone; tonight will be humid again, so people will open their windows, and the mosquitoes will feast all night. They descended the semicircular seat-steps of the Teatro Romano, and Nino could not help but look at the column which in boyhood he had damaged, first dreading that the brick might have healed itself, which would render this world’s laws still less predictable, then sad and guilty when he saw that it had not, and fin
ally angry that he had been made to be sad.— He wished to pulverize Our Lady into gravel.

  We’re almost there, darling.

  Nino did not reply, because the Madonna’s smile came into view before the rest of her, and it unnerved him as much as ever. For years he had tactfully avoided reminding her of his existence, but now she herself had dragged him back! What was wrong with this world? He tried to say to himself: She’s nothing but a vampire!—never mind that he was the one who had come to drink blood.

  He had forgotten her sadly smiling slightly bewildered face, and that infuriating way that her eyes had of looking lost. The Christ child in her arms was a sexless little adult.

  Francesca was now praying steadily. He knelt beside her, moved his lips, and closed his eyes, so as not to be haunted by Our Lady’s face. Dove, lily and olive branch, those Marian attributes he promised henceforth to adore. When he could no longer put it off, he stood up and kissed that stone forehead, tasting dust, salt, soot, then blood.

  Instantly her bleeding ceased, leaving for a souvenir a reddish-ocher stain on her smooth cold forehead. Simultaneously Nino found himself healed, so that his life became as lovely as the long dead singer Bianca Kaschman, as useless as an artificial sand dollar, as meaninglessly triumphant as wreaths of silver and gold. Again, one must wonder about Our Lady’s motives.

  11

  Within the year he turned away from his wife, since he now lacked any further need of others. Self-entitled to the seductive stare of a certain Triestina in a pallid formal gown with half a dozen hems, her right knee crossed over the left to make a platform for her left elbow as she played with the pearls on her triple-stranded necklace, her hair pulled back, everything dim and silver-blue but for the whites of her eyes, he pursued and eventually won her on a blue-grey day of bora rain, streetlamp reflections shining on the empty street like cat-eyes, until he finally unlatched the coffers of his heart for her and she saw inside. Francesca, for whom he had so long pretended to be tamed, kept looking desperately between her tanned and slender knees, in case she she had lost some part of herself.— Fortunately, she was comforted, for the long-necked, golden-haloed, blue-grey bird called the Holy Ghost flew to her from out of an old Croatian-Glagolitic missal. Then she took the children, and ran off with a haberdasher.

  As for him, ambition bemused him, like a lady’s legs reflected in a curving wall of brass—but without Francesca his belly-rash returned. The next time Nino kissed the Madonna’s stained forehead, his affliction, as indeed he had expected, refused to divorce him. This was positively insulting, since Our Lady could easily have made another cure; everyone knows she vanquished a cholera epidemic in 1849. Lonely and perhaps not far away from death (so it certainly appeared when he looked into the mirror), Nino would have wooed her had he known how, but found it easier to become a politician—for his life, unlike yours or mine, was comically accidental and meaningless. Incited by slogans about smashing the idols, chipping away at restraint, tearing down the old order, he believed that life should have promised him something, and he was not the only one.

  In his schooldays the bad boy had loved Emperor Massimiliano, touched his statue and even refrained from daubing, scratching or chipping it. So it might be “no accident” that he betook himself to the deep and ancient chairs of the Caffè San Marco, worn by generations of nationalists’ buttocks.

  An eagle on a shroud for Lohengrin, said the Duke, and we’ll need turquoise-beaded bands on its wings and sad ruby eyes, because . . .

  Silence! The leader arrives—

  The leader liked Nino, because he was so good at telling lies, so before the Madonna had wept or bled again he got to take the train all the way to Venice, bearing in his briefcase the money and confidence of the party. Already he was hoping that someday he could for all purposes become a white statue whose arms would be pompously folded across his toga’d breast, overwatching the red flag which bore the historical weight of Trieste’s white fleur-de-lys well enough to slowly, slowly stir, unfurling like a pill dissolving in liquid, then wrapping itself up again, just as Caesar covered his face when he saw Brutus among his assassins . . . and below the flag’s balcony, all of us, his followers, even Our Lady (whose statue was naturally much smaller) would be carried into the shadow where arched windows shone silver and cigarette smoke diffused like sea-fog. Thus his hopes, and the train had barely passed Miramar.— Here came the trolley of coffees, candies and cigarettes. The woman who wheeled it wore a frothy white chemise, and there were dark circles under her armpits. As she drew close to his seat, he inhaled the smell of her sweat and was enchanted. Those intimate circles, they reminded him of the light seen through grape leaves. Because he knew what to say, she soon agreed to meet him in a hotel room where the shadow of the lace curtain on the Naples yellow wall resembled a harp, but when he undressed, it turned out that his sickness had spread. Revolted, the woman departed.

  What will become of me? he anguished, which is not the same as what will I become?— If only Our Lady had left me as I was that first time—if Francesca hadn’t dragged me there . . . !—for what he detested above all was confusion. He wished to be what he was, coldly and secretly. But what was that?

  Resigning from politics without even returning the money, and therefore knowing that unless her new husband, who had friends in three of Trieste’s marine insurance companies, saved him, his best hope was death, he returned on his knees to Francesca, who unfortunately had grown happy where she was. Out of pity (and with her new husband’s permission) she gave him a lily and an olive branch, instructing him to sleep with them under his pillow until he dreamed of the Madonna. But he never did. One cool whitish-pale morning when a single pale pigeon flew high across the Via Dante Alighieri, showing itself for the merest instant between the two embellished streetwalls, Nino returned to kiss Our Lady’s forehead once more in secret, desperate to believe that it would bleed again, although he knew quite well not only that all hope of that had fled, but also that whatever solution the mystery of the bleeding stone image might contain, he was better off never learning. Our Lady bowed her marble face, silently suffering the touch of his lips; and the bloodstain on her forehead matched in hue the crimson-brown garment of one of those faded figures on certain Istrian graveyard frescoes. He licked and licked at her forehead like a dog, but this time he could not obtain the slightest blood-taste. By the time death came, from complications of his rash, exacerbated by three bullets in the back, Nino had become bitter—although, come to think of it, he might always have been that way.

  CAT GODDESS

  1

  Dark bronze Rossetti, haughty on his plinth, held a book and clutched his heart, while among the many abject figures below, a seminude crowned lady who held a tablet of the laws essayed eternally to offer him a palm branch. As soon as the evening darkened sufficiently to be safe, he stepped down, snubbing the poor crowned lady, who grew as disappointed as if she were made of flesh, an emotion she could not sweat out or weep out, because the foundry had cast her to love only him above her, whom he unfortunately considered a mere decoration; Rossetti-adoration was in her every bronze atom. Rossetti, differently comprised, wanted women. The clashing of bronze against bronze could not seduce him. Some of our miseries may be called tragedies of place, as was the syndrome of that poor crowned lady (whose name was Giovanna); had fate simply established her farther down the coast, she might have attracted the attentions of some marble Herakles. Cloaking his face, Rossetti set off to drink a grappa in the brown and creamy-yellow silence of the Caffè San Marco, where they kept a table for him by the far wall, in a niche whose sweet dimness offered however treacherously to preserve the semiliving from recognition. He paid in bronze, of course: heavy, dark, ovoid coins from a hoard within the plinth, which was much hollower than it appeared. Our Lady of the Flowers, who performs miracles every day, replenished his treasury, out of loving pity, which indeed shored up his equanimity. Why he could not be satisfied w
ith standing forever overlooking the Giardino Pubblico “M. Tommasini,” graciously accepting the deposits of pigeons, cannot be explained; but several other plinths in Trieste had been vacated by now, their heroes and heroines having chosen ecstatic oblivion over unbending fame. There was, for instance, a certain shy little marble girl whose sculptor, Barcalgalia, had condemned her always to be half-trying to cover her pubis; meanwhile she had conveniently pulled up her marble shift, so over time she gave and took much joy. A century and more it had been since she first leaped off her marble block. Our Lady, whose hobbies include the arranging of marriages, once proposed her to Rossetti’s consideration, but he said: You know, cara, the thing is, I have a bitter disposition. That’s why I need someone soft and yielding. I’m not saying a stone woman can’t be forgiving; for instance, look at you, still smiling, with that bloodstained forehead! But you’re not, how should I say, available . . .—nor would he have wished her to be; although he had several times been tempted by the exaggerated frozen gazes of the thespians at the Circulo Artistico, he longed, if such a verb is not preposterous when applied to him, for a dear woman of flesh who could warm him up as even Triestine sunlight never could, not quite; indeed, it was considerably worse for poor bronze Giovanna, who had to stand always in his shadow—not that she ever complained. And so the shy marble girl found herself another taker; one day James Joyce stepped off his plinth by the Canal Grande, and the newspapers wrote that he had been stolen by a nymphomaniacal American heiress who engaged in untrammelled sexual congress with statues. After Joyce deserted his post, even Umberto Sava, it was said, began to be tempted by a certain someone cast in pure silver. As for Rossetti, all he needed were his nightly amours. For her part, Giovanna (whose longings resembled brass railings shining in the morning sun) never imagined lowering herself to engage in such practices. Where her idol went when he departed her she suspected all too well, but since he never failed to return, she had at least someone to look up to. So on the evening under consideration, she watched his departure no less calmly than mournfully. Rossetti turned his steps to the San Marco, which, while it was not as quiet as early on a Sunday afternoon just before closing, remained a good venue for a bronze fellow who prefers to be left in peace. Whenever he had the place to himself, Rossetti liked to inspect each of the round brass-bordered portraits, whose crudeness surpassed that of worn Etruscan frescoes. To the vertically grooved column-reliefs upon the Naples yellow walls clung plaques whose import might be stylized honeybees or petals of quartered flowers; these decorative concretions soothed Rossetti by reminding him of his plinth. So he sat down in his private corner, prepared to re-explore the way that some grappas burn and others glow. And on this night the slender, elderly waiter, whose spectacles never ceased shining even when he straightened his necktie, revealed, without even any expectation of a tip, that a sweet girl all alone in a tasselled scarf and a long pale dress dress of many embroideries had just decided to paint her lips, cock her plumed hat, and set off for the radiant sea. Can you believe it? She meant to abandon this world! Moreover, she derived not from some Serbo-Croatian-speaking karstic village high in the interior, which origin might have excused her, but from Trieste herself, empress of cities. The waiter, who took pride in knowing Rossetti’s tastes, remarked that this young lady, whose name was Silvia, was worth looking over, at which Rossetti pondered and ordered another grappa. Next morning, when Silvia arrived at the port, whose ships’ smokestacks resembled banded cigars, Rossetti, having without making her a single promise instructed Giovanna to take his place on the plinth, either with or without her palm branch, whatever she considered most discreetly effective, stood waiting to rescue the girl from the sea.