Two Weeks in Another Town

by Irwin Shaw

  Saving the morning in the garden, he realized, as he walked out of the lawyer’s office, was not going to be easy.

  Sum up the night. In a little while dawn will break over the ruins and monuments and television aerials of Rome and it is time to make up the tally of memory. Forgotten voices have spoken, old songs have been heard, ghosts have coupled and parted, ancient wounds have opened and bled once more, the now and here of the Roman night has revealed itself to be a frail and dangerous platform on the crumbled columns of the past, the dead have made their brief appearance, fingers lifted in gnomic warning…

  Out of all that gay, brave company…

  Death.

  The Presence was back in the room with him, breathing on the pillow beside him, patient, waiting. He felt under assault. The blows of the night had sapped him, the first church bells of morning were the final explosions under the walls. All his vitality, all the inner, thoughtless health that had pulled him through wounds and hospitals and failures and loss of love, seemed to be sliding away. With the fresh blood wet on his lip, he had the feeling that a voice had whispered in his ear, between sleeping and waking, “You will not leave Rome alive.”

  Veronica, he thought. Why isn’t she here? Godamnit, why isn’t she here? He closed his eyes tightly and remembered that full, enveloping body. He twisted miserably with desire. If she were here, he thought feverishly, it would all be different.

  It is dawn in Rome and here and there the sound of a Vespa, hammering against the sienna walls, is heard, and the bells of various churches, among them Sant’Andrea della Valle, Santa Maria Sopra Minerva, Santissima Trinita dei Monti, San Lugi de’ Francesi, Santa Maria della Pace, salute the new day, after the nightmare night.

  Mass is being celebrated in the church of Santa Maria in Trastevere, for five old women in black shawls, rheumatically bowed over on the cold and drafty stone floor, listening to the sleepy young priest saying, Kyrie eleison, Kyrie eleison, Christe eleison, Kyrie eleison, Kyrie eleison, before going off to the day’s work scrubbing floors in hospitals, office buildings, hotels. The market is being set up in the square near the Farnese Palace, flowers and artichokes from Sicily and the red oranges and the sogliole and the cefali and the triglie from the Mediterranean and the bricklike triangles of Parmesan cheese and the mortadella and salamis and the white, wet eggs of mozzarella piled on straw. The last, hilarious customers are coming up from the mulatto’s basement night club on the Via Veneto, laughing loudly, speaking half a dozen languages, and starting their cars with a roar of motors on the bluish street. Jack’s drunk, his knuckles a little swollen, sleeps uneasily now in his hotel room three streets away, fearing the onset of morning, even in his dreams preparing for the first two aspirin, the first Alka-Seltzers, the first Bloody Mary of the new day. The policemen on duty on the Via Botteghe Oscure, opposite the headquarters of the Communist party and the home of the Spanish Ambassador, lean against the wall out of the wind and wonder who is going to riot today and what heads will have to be clubbed, and the marine guard in front of the American Embassy waits for his relief, glad to be on the night watch, because the students don’t demonstrate in front of the Embassy at night to show their disapproval of events in Egypt or Hungary or Algeria. Sleepily, the marine guard speculates on why it is that Italian students feel that they have to show their disapproval of upheavals in Africa and Central Europe by marching, waving flags, in front of the American Embassy in Rome. The Tiber flows in its stone banks past the Castel Sant’Angelo and the Palace of Justice, flows under the stone bridges, a narrow, tamed stream to have flowed through all that history, on its way past Ostia toward the sea, past Ostia Antica, which has once been a thriving port of two hundred thousand souls, and is now only excavated ruins and a restored open theatre in the wintry green fields, spreading toward the black lava beaches.

  The trucks rumble through the Piazza Colonna with the morning’s newspapers, announcing scandal and crisis; the workmen begin putting up wooden stands for a parade on the avenue leading to the Colosseum, there is a smell of coffee from the all-night cafés, the last whores reluctantly leave the Piazza Barberini, where the fountain plays incessantly, the water cascading down the muscular shoulders and the upturned head and fishtail of the bronze figure of sea and earth.

  And all over the city there is the stirring of women getting out of bed to buy bread, to make breakfast, to prepare children for school, there are the repressed, unheard groans of men stiffly pushing themselves into their clothes, sweaty from yesterday’s underpaid labor, preparing for the starvation labor of today.

  The clear, wintry Mediterranean dawn, pale green and cold rose, touches the white jerry-built walls of Parioli, built by Mussolini’s millionaires and added to by Marshall Plan millionaires, touches the dome of the Vatican, the tops of the willows in the Borghese gardens, touches Garibaldi’s bared head on the great statue in the janiculum with a peaceful, deceptive, hopeful light.

  The Mediterranean light filters into the hotel room where Jack lies, hot-eyed, wakeful, caught in the drift of the past, remembering voices from another age….

  He looked at the leather traveling clock. Time to get up. He got out of bed and shaved. His face was haggard in the bright bathroom light and he cut himself under the chin and the cut didn’t stop bleeding for a long time.

  He dressed, feeling hazy and thick-fingered. He took Despière’s envelope and put it into a dresser drawer under some shirts. He made sure to take his dark glasses, for disguise against Delaney’s sharp examination.

  When he started to go out, he saw an envelope under the salon door. He bent, feeling dizzy, to pick it up. There was no name on it, no address. It was of thin, flimsy paper, and he could feel that there was only a single sheet of paper in it. He opened it soddenly, knowing that it must be some new attack, some last foray by the night.

  “Andrus,” he read. It was written in red ink, a nervous, scrawled handwriting. “I came across a quotation that might interest you. It’s from Pliny, arranged by Leonardo da Vinci, in his notebooks. Are you interested in natural history? Here it is…

  “‘The great elephant has by nature qualities which are rarely found in man, namely honesty, prudence, a sense of justice, and of religious observance. Consequently, when the moon is new they go down to the rivers and there solemnly cleansing themselves bathe, and after having thus saluted the planet they return to the woods.

  “‘They fear shame and only pair at night and secretly, nor do they then rejoin the herd but first bathe in the river.’

  “Remember the elephant, Andrus, fear shame, cleanse yourself.

  Bresach”

  Jack stared dully at the thin sheet of red-scrawled paper. It had been Bresach prowling outside the door, he thought. He’s crazy, he’s capable of anything. Only a lunatic would come to a man’s room at three o’clock in the morning to deliver a message like this.

  He folded the letter neatly, and put it in his pocket. It took a great effort of will to open the door into the corridor.

  Still, the days were bearable. It was the nights that one had to survive.

  15

  HE WAITED IN THE restaurant until two thirty and ate his lunch and dawdled over his coffee, but Veronica didn’t appear. He left the restaurant and went back to his hotel, but there was no message for him there. He was irritated with her and for a moment thought of forgetting her and going upstairs and trying to take a nap. He was exhausted from the night before and the session with Delaney in the dubbing room had been unpleasant and tiring. Delaney had nagged at him and been sardonic about the way he looked. “Christ,” Delaney had said, “if you’re going to stay up screwing all night, how can you expect to do your job right?”

  He had cut Delaney short and had tried desperately to concentrate, but the effects of the night had been impossible to throw off. He knew that he needed sleep, but he knew he wouldn’t be able to sleep unless he had tried to find Veronica.

  He gave Guido the name of the hotel to which he had delivered V
eronica the night before. Guido must have had a good lunch, because he was expansive and talkative, although Jack would have liked to be left in peace to doze in the back seat.

  “France,” Guido said, roaring down on a traffic light and slamming on the brakes two feet before he hit an old man with a brief case who was crossing the street. “France—that is the country.” He spoke in French, their common bond. “They are blessed, the French. They have everything. All the riches in the soil, all the minerals, all the most beautiful women. And they are not crowded. That is their big blessing. They control the birth. It is not like here, like this senseless Italian incubator, where every day our women give birth to another twenty thousand unemployed. Why, in France, they even have to import, workers.” He shook his head at the unbelievable glory of this condition. “Imagine a country like that. The human being is king.” He sighed loudly. “I should have stayed there. When my battalion moved out, I should have had the sense to desert and stay. Later on, I could have constituted myself prisoner and then become a citizen. The happiest months of my life I spent outside Toulon. My captain was a crook and he hired us out to a lady he was in love with who owned a vineyard and we worked on the vines for one whole spring and summer. The lady who owned the vineyard and whom our captain loved was an aristocrat. She told us, ‘My poor children, you are going to lose the war and soon many of you will be dead, drink as much wine as you can now.’ The wine of that coast is heavy and powerful and she understood when we had to sleep under the olive trees in the hot afternoons and she never told the captain. If it is absolutely necessary to work,” Guido said authoritatively, “it is always best to work for an aristocrat.”

  Guido had told Jack that he was paid sixteen hundred lire a day, being paid only on the days he actually worked. That amounted to about two dollars and fifty cents a day, and he had three children to feed, but his shirt was always clean and ironed in the morning, he wore a neat tie, his shoes were shined, his hair brilliantly bartered.

  He drove on the Italian theory. As soon as he got behind the wheel, he assumed that all other drivers were cowards and all pedestrians as agile as gazelles, so that he hurled the green Fiat with all the speed he could command at intersections and other cars, trusting that the other drivers would jam on their brakes in panic or veer off. He plunged down on all pedestrians, even one-legged men on crutches and old women leading babies, as though confident that they would somehow, miraculously, leap out of the way at the last moment. He had told Jack, proudly, that in all his years of driving, he had never as much as scratched the fender of a car. Like other absurd principles in Italy, Guido’s seemed to work most of the time.

  “When I read the newspapers,” Guido went on, “and I read about the troubles that France is having, I am terribly sad. Especially in Algeria. I am sad for them and I am sad because in the Italian papers it is easy to see that the journalists are thinking, ‘We have been kicked out of Africa, we have had our Mussolini, now it is your turn, your Mussolini is on his way. Now we will lecture you.’”

  At the moment, Jack was sorry that Guido had ever learned to speak French.

  “They cannot win in Algeria,” Guido went on. With the job he had, with the long hours of waiting for his clients, he had ample opportunity to read all the newspapers and reflect upon the state of the world. “It is a guerrilla war, and to win a guerrilla war you must be prepared to use terror, to stamp out everything. The French use terror, of course, but they are too civilized to go all the way, so of course they will lose. Only the Germans and the Russians would be capable of not losing. But who would want to be a German or a Russian?”

  “Do you belong to a political party?” Jack asked, interested, despite himself.

  Guido laughed musically. “I work day and night,” Guido said. “When could I have time to belong to a political party?”

  “But you vote, don’t you?”

  “Of course,” said Guido.

  “What party do you vote for?”

  “The Communist party,” Guido said promptly. “Naturally. If you earn sixteen hundred lire a day, what party can you vote for?” The car was stopped at a traffic light and he turned to Jack. “No offense meant,” he said politely. “Actually, it is a sign of my respect for you, Monsieur Andrus, my telling you. When other Americans ask me for whom I vote, I always say the Monarchists. The Americans seem to like that better. But you have lived in France, you understand Europe, even though you are a rich American. There is no reason I cannot tell you the truth.”

  He turned back to his driving. At the next light, he swung around again. “Of course, I am not a Communist,” he said. “I only vote to show my contempt.”

  When they got to Veronica’s hotel, Jack went into the lobby, half expecting to see the night porter still sitting facing the mirror, adoring himself. But there was a severe-looking old man with concierge’s keys on the collar of his uniform who was behind the desk now. He spoke no English or French and all he kept saying when Jack gave him Veronica’s name was, “La signorina è partita.”

  Jack’s Italian was not up to finding out any more than that, but a German priest who came down the steps took pity on him and said he spoke some English and offered to act as translator.

  “I understand,” Jack said to the priest, “that Signorina Rienzi has left. Will you be good enough to ask if she has left a forwarding address?”

  He watched the concierge shake his head when the priest translated the question.

  “Ask him,” Jack said, “what time she left?”

  “Alle dieci,” the concierge said.

  “Ten o’clock,” Jack said to the priest “I understand.” His throat was beginning to feel very dry. “Ask him if she left alone, or if there was a gentleman with her.”

  In heavy, Teutonic Italian, the priest translated. The concierge now seemed annoyed with the interrogation, and began to make notations on a series of cards on the desk. “Si,” he said.

  “Ask him if he knows what the gentleman looked like. Was it a young American with glasses, wearing a kind of khaki-colored overcoat?”

  When the priest translated the question, the concierge glanced coldly at Jack. There was no doubt about what the concierge felt concerning aging foreigners who pursued young Italian virgins with such persistence. He spoke to the priest with a rising, cutting inflection in his voice.

  “The concierge sayss he hass a multitude of osser ssinks to do, besides taking desscriptions of vissitors to the albergo,” the priest said. The phone rang then and the concierge began to talk fretfully and at length to whoever was on the other end of the wire. Jack waited for a moment, then knew there was no satisfaction to be gained there. He thanked the priest, who beamed at him, to show that he was glad to be of service and that he held no ill-will against Jack for having won the war, and Jack went out to the little square in front of the hotel, where Guido was polishing the Fiat’s headlights with a rag.

  Jack stayed in his room all afternoon, cursing himself for not having extorted from Veronica the address of the friend with whom she was supposed to be staying. There was no call from anybody all afternoon, and by six o’clock, he was sure that something dreadful had happened to her. He reread the insane note that Bresach had slipped under the door during the night, and a shiver of apprehension chilled him. He found it ominous that Bresach was now avoiding him. If I don’t hear from her by tomorrow afternoon, he decided, I’m going to go to the police.

  That night he was awakened again and again by the ringing of telephone bells. But when he opened his eyes, the room was silent, no bells were ringing.

  In the morning he knew that he would have to find Bresach. But the only people he could think of who knew where Bresach lived were Veronica and Jean-Baptiste Despière. And Veronica was gone and Despière was in Algeria, atrocity-hunting, address unknown. Before leaving for the studio, Jack went downstairs to the lobby and looked, without much hope, in the Rome telephone book. There was no Bresach. He hadn’t expected there would be.

&nbs
p; The morning held a surprise for him. Without warning, he suddenly felt confident and easy, and he did very well with the scenes he was dubbing.

  “You have been touched by the spirit, boy,” Delaney said, beaming. “You’re fine. I told you all you needed was a good night’s sleep, didn’t I?”

  “Yes,” Jack said, “you told me.”

  That afternoon he went to the Embassy to see if anyone there knew where Bresach lived or whether he had left his address there, as Americans’ living in Rome for more than three months were supposed to do. But he didn’t have much hope of that, either. Bresach was not the sort of boy who would bother with the American Embassy.

  When he was coming out of the Embassy he ran into Kern. Kern was dressed in dark gray, and as usual, he had the air of a man who has just spoken on an equal basis with the head of a powerful state. He stopped and smiled his slightly unpleasant smile at Jack. “I have been working on the case of your friend,” he said.

  “What’s that?” Jack asked, confused. He had been thinking so concentratedly about Veronica that it was only with a wrench that he could make himself try to understand what Kern was talking about

  “Your friend Holt,” Kern said. “He was in to see me and I told him I would take what steps I could.”

  “Oh, good,” Jack said. “Thanks.” He had forgotten all about Holt and his attempts to adopt a child. So much had happened since his conversation with Kern that it all seemed remote, blurred by time.

  “I had been waiting for you to call me,” Kern said, slowly and portentously nodding his yellowed head. “I thought we might get together for a drink.”

  “I’ve been meaning to,” Jack said, wanting to get away. “But I’ve been terribly busy.”

  “I’m having some people in after dinner tonight, at my place,” Kern said. “It might be interesting for you. All Italians. I don’t imagine you know many Italians, do you?”