The Surrendered

by Chang-Rae Lee

  FOURTEEN

  IN SIENA THEY HAD to share quarters again, as there were only six guest rooms in the residenza, a converted townhouse looking out over a tiny cobble stone piazza. Like everything else Hector had seen in this country it was old, beautiful, more than slightly decrepit, its façade saturated in the exact color (at least in his memory) of his mother’s light-brown eyes, this burnished, timeless wood. But the constant, nearly inescapable sighting of exquisite landscapes and antique architecture was wearing on him. Maybe he was imprinted too deeply by modest Ilion, or war-ravaged Seoul, or forgettable, low-slung towns like Tacoma and Fort Lee and then the many other crumbling, forlorn places he’d drifted through in between, and after these few days he felt that he was being overwhelmed, that his eyes hurt. The feeling that he should be comforted and uplifted by the beauty only made him feel more misplaced than ever, misguided, lost in a museum of someone else’s life.

  Their room was very large, a half-floor suite with high coffered ceilings and marble-tile floors and rich draperies and decorated with old rugs and paintings. The furniture, June had commented, was top quality. Hector had never seen such a place, much less stayed in one. The bath had a tub carved from a single block of marble and the fixtures were burnished brass and the bath and bed linens had been freshly starched and ironed, the crisp hand of their fabric pressed to a high sheen. Vases of sunflowers were set on either side of the single king-sized bed (he would sleep on the red velvet sofa), its baronial walnut headboard carved with a scene from the Palio di Siena, the famous horse race held in the main plaza, a tight phalanx of charging horses and riders thundering to the finish, the town’s huge clock tower serving as the background. The Palio was held in July and August, but in some years (like this one) there was also a special race in September; this was to be run tomorrow. He had parked their car in a lot on the northern end of the old city walls and taken a taxi toward the center. The only reason they were able to get a room at all was an unexpected departure due to illness by a Swiss couple at one of the most expensive lodgings in town, which the driver knew of because he’d driven the couple less than an hour earlier out to their parked car. The cabdriver, named Bruno, was a brightly garrulous young man who spoke a distinctive English and told them all about the “garish” and “anomalous” Palio tomorrow, about the history of the race and the contrade, groups from different wards of the city, each of which backed a horse. After he delivered them to the hotel and spoke to the owner (they would pay only twice the printed rate, normally tripled because of the race), Hector gave him fifty dollars and explained he was looking for someone and asked him to come back in an hour, to be their translator and guide.

  June had planned to accompany them after a quick bath. But when she was done she called weakly for him and he had to help her once again from the tub, this time blotting her wet skin and hair with the towel. She wavered there before him like a terribly sick child, barely able to stand upright. She was partly revived by the warm water but perhaps altered, too, and she spoke with a breathy delirium about how deeply grateful she was to him, saying again that her lawyer would ensure he was well compensated. She wrapped her arms around his neck and fell into him in her full nakedness and murmured that he could do whatever he wished to her, kissing his ear, his neck. He could feel the cling of her damp legs about his thigh and although he could not in a lifetime accede to so wrong an invitation, the barest instinctual shiver crept up from his groin to his chest, momentarily rousing him before a flood of shame clogged his throat. She collapsed into him and he wrapped her in a robe and helped her to the bed. She said she would just rest for a moment, but after lying down she asked him for a shot of morphine. He opened her kit and prepared the shot, unable to quell the thought of doing the same for Sylvie Tanner, to numb and pleasure, too.

  “Where are we, now?”

  “In Siena.”

  “Oh yes, yes. Will you go find Nicholas?”

  “I’ll try.”

  “Bring him back here soon,” she said, a waxy veneer dulling her eyes. “Very soon.”

  He rolled her onto her side and injected her in her rump and she drifted off to sleep. It was easier for him to do it for her, of course, rather than watch her struggle with the vial and syringe, to twist and try to find a good spot. When he did it her breathing would quicken and she might even reach out and hold tightly to his shirt and then softly exhale with a certain ripe agony when he finally injected her. In her overly grateful euphoria she once said she loved him. He didn’t know how to answer.

  Sometimes he may have jabbed harder than necessary, or in a spot that wasn’t fleshy enough, and she’d cry out sharply, gritting her teeth. He did so because a part of him was afraid of her, because he wanted to get away from her but couldn’t force himself to do so. But in guilty compensation he now gave her more of the drug, drawing down a few more lines on the syringe. She was no longer insisting she needed to keep her mind clear. What was left of her body was in charge of her and as such she somehow seemed a bit stronger, fuller, her cheeks not so drawn and wan; she was suddenly eating more, having a butter cookie along with the gelato she had him buy her every other hour or so, which was the only regular thing she consumed, save water; maybe it was all the sugar that was plumping her up, propping her. Earlier they had stopped at the big highway cafeteria and she’d had an anise cookie and lemonade, and she surprised him by rising from her chair like any healthy, sprightly woman and walking out to the car for the Italian phrasebook in order to ask the girl at the register what the best route would be to Lombardy, after leaving Siena. But her exertions had now left her like this, and when it was clear she would sleep for a while he drew closed the heavy draperies, the place as shrouded and hushed as a mausoleum.

  He bathed and shaved and put on the last of the shirts she’d bought him, which was still in its clear plastic package. Everything else of his stunk. They had been traveling without a thought of doing wash and so he gathered their dirty clothes up into a canvas drawstring sack he found in the closet, rooting through her luggage and pulling out what was unfolded or dirty. Her things smelled only marginally better than his, the odor more of dampness and spoilage than body smells. Someone could easily argue that all of him had spoiled, even as his physique remained remarkably sound, that a special scan of his abstract being would show an unsettling result, revealing a soul neither bountiful nor spare but used up, right down to nothing. Of course Dora would not have said so about him, but he couldn’t help wondering during the long, silent hours in the car whether he had been fooling her and himself, whether she would have eventually seen him for what he was, agreed with June that he was a man who wanted to hide himself away forever. He wasn’t useless (as a gravedigger, a janitor, a driver, a nurse, now a laundry maid), but by any weighing of the present evidence-what one might have banked via family or friendship or love or self-purpose, not even counting the mistakes or transgressions or outright crimes-he was not a worthy man. It was as plain as his thirst. His heart felt smashed every time he pictured Dora, but if he was honest it soon revived with what he had to believe was a rush of liberty, if liberty degraded, this feeling that he was released once again from the onus of having to hope or dream.

  And yet here he was, dressing for an errand that he could hardly pretend had not partly become his own. He was increasingly curious about Nicholas, too, wondering about the bloodlines that he and June had given him; about its expression in his physical appearance, and then in his undeniably slippery character; what his voice sounded like; and then simply wanting to lay eyes on the young man, take in the shape of him astride the world. He wished he could bump into him and know him and trail him unannounced, peer at him as he sat at a café or on a bus. Maybe this was what comprised fatherhood, at least for somebody like him: a sorry kind of surveillance. He knew he was a thousand light-years from being a respectable adult, his only contact that was even remotely paternal being his sometime counsel at Smitty’s of the slumming suburban kids, muttering they ought to
switch to beer before they drove back home on the Palisades Parkway. He certainly couldn’t bear any connection now, any relationship, the prospect of learning too much about Nicholas only trumped by the frightening idea that he’d have to explain himself, too, go over his background and his history and his bond to June, which would, if Nicholas pushed it, open up every other damn thing. But as he shuffled quietly across the expansive space of the suite to leave, he stopped by the bedroom and the sight of her stilled body, looking desiccated and abandoned in the gauzy raft of the canopied bed, made him think he couldn’t deny her this one last thing, however it might disturb him.

  At the residenza office on the ground floor he held up the bag of their dirty clothes and tried to communicate to the woman at the desk that he wanted to wash them someplace. She kept talking and motioning and then began pulling the bag away from him and it was only when Bruno appeared that it was sorted out; it had been so long since Hector had stayed in anything but a fleabag hotel that he’d forgotten that such a thing as laundry service was possible. He gave over the bag and had Bruno make sure she knew to leave it outside their door, as the signora was sleeping. Outside they made their plan. Hector had briefly mentioned to Bruno earlier that they were looking for someone and now he showed him the old school photograph and said he was likely working in an antiques shop.

  “There are many numerous establishments of antiquities here in Siena, signore,” he replied. “But I have cognizance of the very best ones, and we shall be advised to start at these.”

  He explained that it would be better to go by foot today. They were heading to Il Campo, the large main square, where the most prominent shops were, several of them in the piazza itself and on the street immediately ringing it. This was where they would run the horse race tomorrow.

  “Excuse me if this is offensive to you, but may I inquire who is this fellow you are looking for?”

  “He’s her son.”

  “I see,” he said, openly searching Hector’s face. “This is dolorous. Is the situation due to an estrangement?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “You are a good friend, then,” Bruno said.

  “No, not a good friend.”

  Bruno nodded curiously. He had a funny way of speaking and was forthright, but he still had a sense of when to keep quiet. He was just about the age Nicholas was now, and Hector decided he was lucky to have him along, so he could get at least some practice dealing with a younger fellow. All along he had assumed that June would be the one dealing with Nicholas, and that if he did anything at all, he’d do as she had asked him, perhaps physically compel him in some way. But now he wasn’t sure what he’d do, and he was glad for Bruno’s presence, to run interference, maybe even to talk for him if necessary.

  On the way to the main square they passed smaller squares and side streets completely taken over by the contrade. It was as if circus gangs and their families had overrun the town. They were making preparations for tomorrow’s race, making banners and decorating large chariots for the prerace procession. The banners, patterned with medieval-looking crests and designs, festooned the doorways, the motifs rhymed in the smocks and costumes of the mostly young people milling around the long tables on which older women were setting out bread baskets and plates of salami and pitchers of water and wine. Small dogs and children, also dressed in contrada colors, scampered after one another across the cobblestones. Tourists stood to the side, pointing and taking pictures. Some assemblages spontaneously broke into song, rehearsing traditional anthems that sounded like stadium chants crossed with folk ballads, the reports of which would prompt a competing chorus across the way, drawing out yet another chorus, echoes of the bellowed music rounding through the stone-walled city.

  Hector thought back to certain summer days in Ilion, though those would too often end not in shared song but shouts and strife: a scene of mostly company families picnicking at the river park, the men playing baseball with a keg of beer stationed by first base, the mothers cheering hotly between gulps of their shandies and lemonades, all of it peppy and happily competitive until some red-faced lout (sometimes Jackie Brennan) would shriek about a rough slide or inside pitch; there’d be taunts and shoves, and unsettled scores would rear up and ignite a scuffle or two, until at some point everybody quit going altogether, staying at home and drinking on their own porches and giving familial grief to one another. If he had grown up here instead of in Ilion, would he look forward to sitting cheek by jowl each year with his lifelong neighbors? Would he be drinking in celebration, crooning with them until his chest ached? Serve as an estimable brother, or husband? Maybe even a father? Or would he be just as unsociable as now, maybe more so with the standing expectation that he join in? Surely there were malcontents and miscreants here like anywhere else, and yet to look upon the gatherings he could believe what Bruno was telling him, that near every last able-bodied person took part, at least marginally, that a “communal tide,” as the young man put it, swept up all, even the flotsam like Hector, who would never hold high any colors.

  “How long will you be visiting?” Bruno asked.

  “Just today.”

  “You will not witness the race?”

  “No.”

  “The Palio is a spectacle, something not to be missed. This time it is a special one, as I indicated, a commemoration of the Comune. But I understand. The lady you are traveling with, she is not in good health.”

  “That’s right.”

  “My family is close-acquainted to the best general physician of our city. He practiced in Milano.”

  “Don’t sweat it.”

  “It is no issue. I will telephone him, whenever she needs.”

  “She doesn’t need anything,” Hector said. “Not anymore. That’s it, okay?”

  Bruno nodded. They had reached the large main square, which suddenly opened up from the shadowed narrow street in a brilliant wash of light. Roving hawkers peddled guidebooks and souvenirs, drinks and snacks. The antiques shops in the square that Bruno suggested were open and crowded with customers, but the proprietors, both of whom seemed to know Bruno, or at least recognized him as a local, had no reaction to the photograph he showed them. As they departed the second shop the owner eyed Hector at length, with a kind of pitying disdain, as if he were some sad sack of a parent futilely searching for someone who was no doubt wayward from very early on.

  Next they went to a shop just outside Il Campo, on the way toward the duomo on the Via di Città; here the proprietor told Bruno that a young foreigner had recently inquired about working there. But hers was a smaller shop than those in the main square and she only needed help on Saturdays, and the young man, whom she remembered as confident and vaguely Oriental-looking, had asked her if there was another antiques dealer who could use an English-speaking helper. She had pointed him to a specialty dealer on the western end of town, a new high-end gallery that catered to wealthy tourists and whose owner was not a Sienese, and thus perhaps in need of a manager. It was near another famous church of the city, the Basilica di San Domenico, and though Bruno didn’t know of it he decided they should go there; if it was unfruitful they could easily loop up and stop back at the residenza, to check on the lady, before trying the last few neighborhoods on the eastern side of town. Barring all that, tonight they could visit the nightclubs and coffeehouses that were popular with students and younger people; if Nicholas were indeed in Siena he would likely be out on the eve of the race.

  The shop was a new glass-façade gallery across the street from the small plaza in front of the basilica. Three large oil paintings hung in the front display, tame, Impressionist-style landscapes of the Tuscan countryside. They had to push a buzzer to be admitted, and after a moment Bruno pressed again and a pretty, bespectacled young woman dressed in a tailored gray suit and white blouse appeared at the desk and let them in. The gallery was large and double-winged, as it took up the ground-floor retail space on either side, the central room a sculpture and jewelry gallery, with the wings
devoted to modern and antique furniture on one side and paintings on the other. The young woman immediately took Hector for a tourist (his new shirt and trousers, no doubt) and introduced herself in perfect English as Laura, and Bruno briefly explained (also in English) why they were there. They showed her the old middle-school photograph. She examined the picture, the scantest ripple crossing her face, and when Bruno asked her again if she knew such a person she said that there was a young Englishman who was recently hired.