Early December sky over Catania was filled with a calmness in casual contrast to the chaotic life below. (The day before, Mason'd driven his Fiat up onto one of the giant white ships of the Tirrenia line at Genova; he'd paced the upper deck while gangs of Italian kids, lovebirds, old folks and crew, also restlessly wandered about: a long tiresome voyage; older passengers sprawled before the TV set in the lounge absorbed in artificial light. This thing—il dio, il re, l'eroe! The food was horrible. Fearing he might throw up he stood at the rear watching a crazy flock of gray gulls flapping in the ship's wake which, in its splitting of the sea skin, turned up fish they fed on . . . When he woke in the morning he was sick, truly. Claustrophobia in his narrow private space got to him. He was sure the room was bugged. Why hadn't they simply arrested him? How much more rope would they give? They docked at Palermo and in line he drove the Fiat off into the honking, busy city. Famished. He went to a restaurant a truck driver he'd met in the lounge recommended. This guy was from Napoli and knew his way around. Here he pigged out on lasagne verdi al forno and two big bottles of vino. Stuffed, warm and a little tight, he drove that long green stretch through plush countryside to Catania.) The sky, as I said, was serene. Below: one way streets that didn't make sense: insane intersections crammed with cars and people crossing in every direction with no direction. Madness! Whistle-blowing traffic cops who made no sense either. It was dusk. Lighted shops. Packs of teenage boys intent on their desperate enterprises (one tried to open Mason's door at a stop)! It took an hour to find the damned hotel—instructions had been so poor. Hotel Pericolo: the perfect secret of the sunny southern tip of Italy! A warning—? In the hotel room he took a shower and while doing so the phone rang. Wet, he answered. Professor Carlina Momachino wanted to know if he'd arrived and if all was well. Well how? . . . That night Mason had dinner with the Momachinos: polla alla cacciatora. A childless happy couple: she, a specialist in American fiction, he a specialist in marble. He looked like a palm tree with arms and she was this little dainty thing all motion and flutter with painted nails and pointed toes. Signor Vito Momachino drove him back. Exhausted, he went to sleep and while there found himself in this strange market place called Albano (wait, hay, this wasn't Italy, whhha . . . ) off some place called Gran Via to the, uh, right and another way, Casa Christino; and passing showcase glass seeing himself (just like some prison mugshot of himself) and here an old man was pushing his way through the crowd carrying a poster with some squabble about some government official whose identity was in question but there was a caption about the Union of the Democratic Center or the Centrists or was it the Left. Boy oh boy. Then this young dark guy—he could have been Italian or Spanish or even French—came knocking his way through—pushing aside two chubby senoras with yellow straw baskets, knocking over stalls crammed with cheap leather colorful cotton radiant metal glazed plastic painted glass and the guy, a hisser, tugged at Mason's sleeve, speaking in what sounded like Spanish or maybe Italian all the while flashing a wrist of Bulovas and all Mason could think was, Take me to your padrino. You from Morocco? And the watch-pusher said he was Pocoraba or Ernesto or Piazza but it didn't matter; in a nearby cafe they ordered government approved vino blanco. Now you don't want coca leaves, right. You got cash. When can you get it. Senor Aristides Rayo Barojas you see. Very formal. And suddenly they were at the entrance of a cluster of dilapidated chartreuse apartment buildings. Across the street for no reason: a fancy hacienda surrounded by kidney-brown debris and a vacant lot of broken bottles and gun shells. Before Pocoroba knocked on wood he kindly requested five hundred—not lire—but pesetas! Mason vaguely suspected he was somewhere in Spain: again, after . . . Mason unhanded the bread and waited. His moneybelt itched worse than a mudhound. A servant came and led them to Barojas: through tall dark hallways with pictures of thieves generals ancestors fingering the handles of swords, guys with chins stuck out, dudes with waxed mustaches curled up to a fine finish. It all felt like black lace. The languid summer outside hadn't ever reached this depth. The watch-pusher and Mason waited in a canary-yellow room lined with gold-painted Nineteenth Century volumes nobody'd touched in fifty years. A rotund gentleman in a smoking jacket entered. “I am Senor Barojas.” He didn't offer his hand. “May I help you?” Mason realized he didn't know why he was here. Barojas obviously sensing the confusion spoke again: “Don't be shy. I have the documents ready. Do you have the money?” But the dream he woke on was of Edith in New York and he had an erection straining up through it—her?—then one thing led to another and he knew he had to lecture at nine at, what was this place, Universita di Catania, section: Facolta di Lettere e Filosofia, Cattedra di Letteratura. He sat on the side of his bed waiting for the right moment to stand. Why had a player in such a casual ancient moment come back tugging at him with her big-girl erotic self. A light changed in him: brilliant green.
A gas bomb, they said, started the fire in Misterbianco. Just for the ride, Mason went out in the jeep with Vito, a shy man in a red plastic jacket. Vito was a new inspector for the Catania fire department. “Go see the flames,” Carlina had said, tossing her dark shoulder-length hair back from her left eye and giving Mason one of those serious-blank Modigliani looks. On the way to Misterbianco Vito said it had to be the work of either a crazy arsonist or a revolutionary. It'd started at the Guglielmo Vanvitelli, a food processing plant, and, according to the voice on the phone from Misterbianco (where there was no fire department), the nearby hillside, trees and grass were burning away rapidly. Vito'd called for help from coastal Contana Rossa and Paterno, slightly inland to the north. As they approached, Mason saw the smoke drawing the village of Livorno as it looked on July 12, 1884, against a red chalk and terra verde sky. “Holy Galileo!” Vito slapped his own cheek. The yellow-orange flames were leaping furiously up the hill, higher than the cypresses, leaving a blue-gray ash in their wake, Mason and Vito jumped down from the jeep before it stopped moving. An old rusty fire-truck with Paterno painted clumsily on its left door was parked about fifty feet from the food plant. Several men, working one hose, were fighting the flames and smoke there but nothing was being done about the spreading. Beyond the cypresses was an orange grove. It would be next—and soon. Mason looked into Vito's excited eyes. “What'd you do now?” Vito didn't answer: he ran back to the jeep and snatched his telephone and began shouting in Italian into it. Mason wished he was on the Titanic, going down slowly. Rowing a mean boat. Or how about being at the Battle of the Amazons. Or at the Resurrection or at the Descent from the Cross. Where one was counted, every moment. Maybe being the Snake in the Apple Tree was a good role. But here? Watching a fire. Well, there was always Mardi Gras. He watched a woman with a Medusa face running from the plant toward Vito. Then beyond her, he noticed for the first time about fifty workers, mostly women, on the northeast side of the building, watching it burn. One man in the crowd seemed to be playing blind man's bluff. Suddenly a horse appeared on the burning hillside, stopped, gave the fire a skeptical look, then ran off—toward Mason. Something wild in Mason turned him into a seventeenth-century general as he leaped upon the galloping thick-footed Calabrese. It was white with black spots. Mason held on by its mane and gave the right pressure (with his thighs) to slow its pace. Luckily, it wasn't a wild trotter breaking out of some sepia and wash landscape. Its lines were as graceful as Venetian quill strokes. Vito was shouting and gesturing to Mason as the horse reared. Medusa too was shouting at Mason. Several people from the crowd came running down to the jeep. The horse kept trying to dislodge its rider by rearing and dancing around in the plush blue grass. Two police cars and two more fire trucks arrived just as four thick-set Venetian horses, straight out of the Iron Age, appeared on the same hillside where Calabrese first paused to inspect the heat. Everybody now, except the fire fighters, had come down from the food plant. They were watching Mason's effort to hold his own: some cheered him on, others angrily shook their fists at him. One man, who looked like Pope Gregory III, tried to catch the horse by its neck. Another yanked
at Mason's right leg till his shoe came off. This one had a Caligula-look. As the cops approached with drawn pistols, Mason fell from his perch into a soggy spot in the grass. Did he think he was a figure in Beckmann's Carnival triptych: in solemn pursuit of a sexual posture? Vito helped him up. So did two policemen. In Italian, the one with the frog-head asked for his identity paper. Meanwhile, Calabrese ran off to join the Venetians. As Mason brushed at the wet seat of his jeans, he glanced over his shoulder in time to see Calabrese lead the Venetians down the other side of the hill, like paper figures dropping into a manila envelope. They side-stepped the fire with the heavy grace of Degas ballet dancers dislocated in Bartolomeo's Assumption of the Virgin. Mason handed frog his passport. “Come si chiama?” frog asked as he flipped the pages of the passport. His companion, meanwhile, was speaking to Vito: “Chi è quest'uomo?” Then Vito explained in Italian that Mason was a writer visiting the university in Catania. Yet, in minutes, despite Vito's protest, the officers had Mason in handcuffs. They gagged him and tied his legs together, too. He struggled like a Tintoretto figure. The crowd had become a mob. Fist fights broke out. The firemen continued to fight the flames. One, under orders from the police, turned the hose on the crowd. Mason was thrown in the back seat of a police car. The horse returned, running through the burned grass, up past the food plant. Something with huge wings flew overhead, causing a momentary shadow to cover the chaos. Mason spat phlegm on the seat. His nose rested on a spot that smelled of semen and sweat. As he was driven away, he heard Vito shouting after the car. One cop sat in back with Mason. In the front, Mason was aware of a woman's voice and the voice of the cop driving. The woman was called Priscilla. The cop beside Mason said, “Da dove viene?” When they arrived at the police station in Catania, the cops went for an officer who spoke English. He was plump with pendulous breasts. He seemed happy as he spoke this distant tongue: “ . . . you will be charged with arson,” he told Mason. Priscilla'd come into the station with them. She got slapped on the ass several times by cops just passing the reception desk where Mason stood still in handcuffs. His legs now though were free. He wished he were back in 1920, in bed with Jeanne Hébuterne, soothing her, giving her a reason to live. Mason's rage was met with a slap across the face. He kept telling them they had the wrong man. Breasts laughed at him as the officer at the reception desk, with Mason's passport spread before him, booked the Afro-American for arson. How much injustice could one endure. Moments later, Mason was pushed into an interrogation room. Bats hung upside-down from the ceiling. A couple of men in armor hung out in one corner playing cards. A portrait of Mario Buggelli was tacked to the wall alongside a reprint of Beata Matrex. Mason almost wept on sight of it: what lovely African lust lingered beneath its intentions! He was forced down into a hard wooden chair. Four or five cops surrounded him. Breasts held Mason's bearded chin in the palm of his hand. Then he spat in his face. Mason blinked: while his eyes were closed he saw Abraham travelling toward the Promised Land. Then the door behind him opened and somebody said the name Vito Momachino. His wife, the professor, they said, was with him.
Professor Rosa Bartoli had reserved a room for him at the Argentina in Florence. Why'd he felt so safe lately? was it possible The Impostor was nowhere. Mason drove north, pushing his luck, enjoying winter warmth. The nefarious trickster arrived at suppertime. In the lobby the TV showed a cartoon of a woman belly-dancing and doing a strip. Tease? She wasn't fooling! She ended her act with only her reflexes X-rayed. Hanging from the construction site of her body was a placard with this message: “ . . . Egli la aspetta.” He felt yucky hungry horny and free—no lecture till Monday and it was only Friday. Determined not to fall for any rigmarole of false clues, a hateful vendetta of his own mind, he was a masoned wall of faith. Self-confidence was his middle name. No pun. Concreteness could be seen all over historic Florence, as he walked. He looked into the facade of the city: workers in stone had made it a towering monument to something he reluctantly understood. Well, even he was beginning to realize the real subject of his story wasn't this damned quest he'd thought he was on. He stuttered angrily realizing it: “I'll b-b-be d-d-damned!” He pulled out a Camel and struck a match to it. Wasn't he really playing the ultimate pinball machine of luck and trying (even with a false name) to be himself. Don't answer that. A true freemason? or just an ex-apple cart urchin adrift in a string-of-lucky breaks. He slept then got up and went out: daylight was a silicon blessing. Was Eye really watching him? or was it just his paranoia? Free as he felt he still felt trapped. Yet he went forth: into the chapels churches cloisters galleries fortresses gardens and like a good winter wanderer, scanned the squares—crossed and recrossed Ponte Vecchio finding the people more interesting than the whatnots the tourist-trap jewelry the sexy manikins. Lotta girls with slender brown legs. After doing the Uffizi he went to Dante's house: went down on his hopeless knees before it and burned a candle for five minutes. Passersby thought him a fool. He felt like he was fucking in public. Relentlessly he explored the Medici Chapel, seeing the way Michelangelo left the marble to speak of itself as marble, and moved on to Piazza della Signori. Museum floors were hard. Inside Museo Nazionale the dreamer of bird-seeds became aware of the hugeness of his new hunger (seemingly endless, right). He'd already focused one slanted eye on a ristorante boasting tripe in the Florentine manner. As he made a scientific investigation of the menu, a kid snatched a purse from an old woman and split on his bike. Mason whispered to himself, you are not a moralist. As he wandered he vaguely thought about Monday: his lecture wouldn't be just another narcissistic rug-cutting act. Then he got his tripe: in a tomato sauce: it was good. The seven-headed, fire-breathing dragon that now faced Mason did not promise to be just or moral. It was midnight and somehow he hadn't gotten very far: hadn't he been trying to cross Piazza Saint Giovanni since noon? Had time caved in on him? Sunlight at one point—now a full moon. Some impious rite of . . . “The horror! The horror!” Had he been going around in circles since mid-day. Hadn't Bartoli been with him. The taste of sparkling silverware and the soave they'd drunk at lunch was still in his mouth. The Duomo sat there like a giant toad with semidivine intentions. Sentimental boys and girls giggled in the shadows of its facade. What'd set him off? Bartoli's question: “Are you for real?” American words crowded with fresco-saints in silver and gold! As the beast roared, the kids went on with their mockery of his disorientation. Or were they laughing at the past: at, say, daisies in chalcedony or precious stones around the neck of one of the Medici women. Mason stumbled about the piazza, unable to decide which way to go. Too many variables! Too many directions! And, jokingly, hadn't he admitted to Rosa Bartoli, “Yes, you're right, I'm not the person I claim to be,” but wasn't it clear in his face that he was putting her on. He was talking to himself now: “She gained my confidence then betrayed me: promised not to tell anybody: yet she went off, leaving me blind drunk—or stoned?—to reveal my secret to the world. Curse her! Aliosha! I was once a boy who believed in everybody! I trusted. I had confidence!” The kids snickered. Mason swung his fist at the moon. He howled and barked, then fell to his knees, slobbering. No dignity? Everything that rises will converge. The winds blew. One could always fly home! Or die, after an uneventful, passive, stupid life! Okay. So, he'd gone along with Rosa. He'd played the game. A lunch game: “Yes, you're right: I'm not who you think I am. I'm the Hunter Gracchus. I'm . . . I'm lost!”
But soon he really got lost. The streets didn't make sense. He'd followed his own “logic”—along a certain alley then suddenly the cobblestones spread in a concentric pattern. This was a circle, a circle of mysteriously gloomy buildings (museums? churches?) casting mid-morning shadows into the half where he had now stopped, puzzled, unwilling to retreat or go on. He fingered a folded lottery ticket in his pocket. Straight across the circle, on the stairway of one of the larger structures, was the figure of a person. Man or woman? At this distance, he couldn't tell. Nobody else in sight. Mason started out toward the person. Hesitantly. Halfway across the circ
le he was able to see that the person was male. Or seemed so . . . When Mason was within ten feet of the unusually still figure he felt a slight murmur of the heart. Then the man flung his cape back, whipped out a sword, and flung it toward Mason. The thing clanged on the stone before him, only inches from his toes. Mason strained through his sunglasses trying to focus the face. It was a face. Yet something was wrong. The face wore a mask. Rubber? Deer skin? Did it matter? “This is a private matter,” the stranger said. The voice was gentle, almost sweet. “Pick it up.” Mason hesitated. Why should he? Although he felt compelled to obey without understanding why, he continued to stare at the figure and didn't move. The sword-carrier then jerked another sword from beneath his cape and flashed it in steep sunlight coming down through marble arches. The order came again, this time more forcefully: “I said pick it up!” Who was this, what was this? One of his beloved friends coming back into his life with dramatic humor? A son, a disguised daughter? John Armegurn serving as a hit man? or perhaps Mister Berdseid? No. It was only when the strange swordsman started rushing down the stairway, leaping, skipping, with his sword-tip pointed directly at Mason, that Mason picked up the weapon at his feet, and stumbled back, trying to escape. But the caped-figure advanced too quickly and Mason was obliged to defend himself. He flung wildly and awkwardly—lashing out at his opponent. The dashing figure propped the fist of his left hand on his hip and with sword and body he made unmistakable gestures of invitation. Mason, still retreating, stumbled on the cobbles. The swordsman continued to rush him, to feint—expertly. Mason's foil was dangling. He kept swinging it back and forth before him to keep the saberman off. Then Mason fell on the wet stone and found the tip of the other's sword pushing against the skin of his neck. The victor spoke gently: “I have a contract for you to sign. Either you sign it or I kill you.” As he spoke he dug the paper from a pocket beneath his cape. He dropped it on Mason's chest. “You may read it first.” The first thing Mason noticed about the official-looking document was its letterhead: Magnan-Rockford Foundation. The swordsman meanwhile pitched a Bic down to the ground at Mason's left. Mason made an effort to read the damned thing. He couldn't concentrate. “Sign it!” The tip of the sword dug deeper into Mason's throat. “But—” “Sign!” He signed Mason Ellis. The moment he wrote the name he realized his mistake. But it was too late.
My Amputations (Fiction collective ;) Page 16