Two Weeks in Another Town

by Irwin Shaw

  Guido drove into the graveled driveway of a spreading, two-story flat-roofed house, set in a sloping garden. He had obviously been there many times before. All the curtains were drawn, but there was a light on by the side of the door.

  “I won’t be long,” Jack said hopefully. He had a twinge of guilt about keeping Guido from his bed and his family. What’s Delaney’s heart to Guido, Jack thought, that Guido’s Sunday with his wife and three children should be spoiled because of it?

  He rang the bell. From within, faintly, there came the sound of jazz being played. A butler in a starched white jacket opened the door.

  “Miss Barzelli, please,” Jack said.

  The butler nodded and took Jack’s coat and laid it on a huge gilt and brocade chair, one of a pair that flanked the doorway in the wide marble hallway. Now the music was louder. A phonograph was playing Cole Porter, a woman’s voice was singing, “It’s too damned hot…”

  The butler led the way toward a pair of high closed doors, carved and painted white, touched, too, with gilt. Barzelli likes the look of gold, Jack thought, she wants everyone to know how far she’s come from the village in Catania where she was born. The butler didn’t ask Jack’s name. He threw the door open without ceremony and waved Jack in. He seemed used to having men he had never seen before appear late at night and ask, in any language, to see the lady of the house.

  Barzelli was dancing in the middle of the room with a tall curly-haired young man in shirtsleeves. She was wearing tight green slacks and a black blouse with a low oval neckline and she was dancing in her bare feet on the veined marble floor. Lounging in the room were two other young men, in dark suits. One of them was lying stretched out on a long woolly white couch, his feet, in their narrow pointed black shoes, comfortably crossed on the fluffy cushions. A glass of whisky rested on his breastbone. The men hardly looked at Jack when he entered—one incurious, heavy-lidded glance of dark, long-lashed eyes, opaque with drink, and then they languidly turned their heads again to watch Barzelli and her partner as they danced. They were not the same young men whom Jack had noticed at the bar of his hotel and later at the night club, but they were of the same type. Ordinary riflemen of the Roman legion, Jack thought, easily obtainable to fill in for casualties at the nearest replacement depot. There were no other women in the room. Even before a word was said, Jack had the feeling that everybody there, with the exception of Barzelli, had been drinking all Sunday.

  Barzelli saw Jack over her partner’s shoulder. She smiled at him, and made a little slow gesture with her long fingers to welcome him, but she didn’t stop dancing. “The drinks are in the corner, mister,” she said.

  Jack stood at the doorway, watching her. He felt uncomfortable, like a trespasser lured by mistake to watch a spectacle he had no wish to see. If there had been another woman besides Barzelli in the room he’d have been more at ease. This way, it was almost as if he’d blundered into a place where some obscure and unpleasant rite was being conducted, a rite that had been performed many times in the past, a rainy Sunday, Roman, Appian rite, perverse and disturbing, celebrating boredom, satiety, sensuality, parasitism, luxury.

  The priestess danced, barefooted, in her ceremonial green and black, moving her tightly encased lovely hips in slow, obscene movements to the chant from the phonograph. Her hair loosened and swung in a dark mass over her bare full shoulders, from which the collar of her blouse had slipped. A distant, dreamlike smile was fixed on the soft, wide lips as she swayed, half leading, half led, close to her partner, whose silk shirt was stained with sweat. Jack had the feeling that they had been dancing like this, tranced, connected, mechanical, bored, titillated, for hours. The dark young men in their dark suits, acolytes, priests, worshippers, past and future participants, watched, bemused, making ritual slow trips to the bar to pour the accustomed libations. The light was garish and hard. A neon strip ran all around the room two feet below the high ceiling, behind a carved molding. There were roses everywhere, in tall glass vases, many of them faded and losing their petals. Three huge portraits of the lady of the house, by three different artists, were the only paintings on the dark blue walls. One of the paintings was a nude, Barzelli stretched out, with her arms above her head, on a red rug.

  The temple was disorderly, as though its servants were underpaid or carelessly regulated, but all appointments were there for every occasion. The place of sacrifice was no doubt the long white couch, but the young man lying there with the highball glass on his breastbone was certainly not the chosen victim. An habitué of the sanctum, he made familiar use of the holy objects. The true victim, Jack felt, was lying behind a blank white door in a shadowed room, breathing oxygen through a tube taped onto his cheek.

  The music came to a stop. The mechanical arm of the phonograph lifted slowly and fell into place on its rest as the turntable hushed into stillness. The dancers stood for a moment, arms on each other’s shoulders, hanging loose. They swayed gently, too weary or too inert to break away. Then Barzelli said something in Italian and her partner laughed, briefly, and went over to the glass table, piled with bottles, in the corner of the room, that served as a bar. Barzelli brushed her hair back with one hand, with a quick movement, and approached Jack. She stopped close to him, smiling at him, without friendliness, her hand on her hip, in a pose that betrayed her early years in the village in Catania. “You do not drink?” she said.

  “Not for the moment,” Jack said.

  “I suppose you have come to tell me something about poor Maurice.” Her tone was challenging, hostile.

  “More or less,” Jack said.

  “Jumping horses!” She snorted derisively. “He has no actors to dominate on Sunday, so he uses animals.” She eyed Jack, smiling coldly, waiting for him to answer. “You do not think so?”

  “I hadn’t thought about it,” Jack said.

  “Well,” Barzelli said impatiently, “what is it? What secret terrible message are you bringing?”

  Jack looked around him. The dark, drunken eyes of the young men were on them, incurious but attentive. “Can we talk alone?” he said.

  Barzelli shrugged. “If you want,” she said. She turned and walked toward a closed door at the other end of the room. Jack followed. Barzelli opened the door and they went into the dining room, a long bare room with an iron-and-glass table and spindly gilt chairs. Another portrait of Barzelli, this time in a black dress and black hat, hung over the sideboard, and an elaborate glass chandelier shed a harsh white light over the table. Jack closed the door behind him. Barzelli sat down at the head of the table, her elbows on the table top, her hands supporting her chin. Jack saw that she wasn’t wearing anything under her blouse, and her full breasts, which had contributed, as much as anything else, to her success, were clearly visible against the thin stuff of her blouse.

  “Sit,” she said, indicating a chair on her right.

  Jack sat down carefully. The chair looked so frail that he was afraid it would break under him.

  “So,” Barzelli said, “what does the poor man want? He was supposed to have lunch with me today. I waited and waited. I was furious. Luckily, some friends dropped in…” With a twitch of her shoulder she indicated the room from which they had just come. “So the food was not wasted.”

  They’ve been drinking since one o’clock, this afternoon, Jack thought. No wonder their eyes look like that.

  “That Mr. Fogel finally called me at five o’clock,” Barzelli said angrily. “It hadn’t occurred to anyone before that that maybe the star of the picture should be told the director was dying. It is an unimportant little detail.”

  “I’m sorry,” Jack said. “I should have done it.”

  “It makes no difference.” Barzelli shrugged. “Mr. Fogel said he probably would not die, anyway.” She reached over in a long, stretching, fluent movement and picked a dried fig out of a glass basket of fruit in the middle of the table. She tore it in half with her strong, even teeth, and chewed loudly. “What am I supposed to do?” she asked ind
ifferently. “Do we shoot tomorrow?”

  “Report to the studio for your regular call,” Jack said. “Didn’t they tell you?”

  “My poor dear man,” Barzelli said, “you do not understand the Italian movie business. Chaos. Maybe in three weeks they will straighten things out. So—I am to be on the set tomorrow?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is that what you came to tell me?” she asked, chewing loudly. “All this long trip so late at night?”

  “No,” Jack said. “I…”

  “Who is going to finish the picture?” Barzelli said. “Tucino? I warn you, if he goes near the camera, I walk off and I stay off…”

  “It won’t be Tucino,” Jack said, surprised and grateful at this unexpectedly ally.

  “Who, then?” Barzelli asked suspiciously.

  “I’m not sure,” said Jack. He had decided this was not the time to have it out with Barzelli, alone with her, in her own home. He had the feeling he would need help with her when she found out he was taking over. “It will be settled sometime tonight.”

  “It had better be settled to my satisfaction,” Barzelli said. “Tell them that.”

  “I’ll tell them.”

  “Then what?” Barzelli said. “What are you here to say?”

  Jack took a long breath. What was he here to say? I bring a message from the depths of marriage; help rescue my friend where he drowns in fourteen years of love and hatred; understand the bitter, octopal twinings of a man and woman who have spent a good portion of their lives devouring each other, strangling each other, rising and diving in the treacherous element, surfacing into the air, plunging below, always terribly clasped, supporting, hurting, caressing each other. What was he there to say to this glittering, impervious woman with her shining white teeth, her glowing skin, her superb, victorious body, her perfect health, her cunning, self-adoring brain, her retinue of beautiful young drunkards on the other side of the door? What was he there to say? Learn pity in a moment, become human before midnight, weep one small tear for the suffering of a poor, foolish, desperate soul. He could say some of this, or all of this, to any other of the men and women he had met since he had come to Rome, to Bresach, to Max, to Veronica, to Holt and his wife, to Despière, to Tasseti, even, and hope to have some portion of it strike a sympathetic chord somewhere within them. But with Barzelli…He stared at her. She was leaning forward, displaying the smooth sweep of her breasts, chewing evenly on her dried fig, regarding him impassively, waiting, ready to reject any claims on her. Anybody but Barzelli, he thought. But he had to say something. Delaney, lying behind the blank white door, had the right to expect him to say something…The instructions, to the letter…

  “Clara Delaney,” he began flatly, “refuses to go visit Maurice in the hospital.”

  “Good,” Barzelli said. “He can die in peace if he has to.”

  “No,” Jack said. “It’s the one thing he wants, that he thinks he must have.”

  “Did he say that?” Barzelli asked, harshly.

  “Yes.”

  “Imagine that. That dry washrag of a woman.” She shook her head in wonder. Then she shrugged. “Well, even the worst atheists call for the priest when they think they’re going to die. So—Signora Delaney won’t go to the hospital. Tragedia. How does that concern me?”

  “Delaney asked me to ask you please not to visit him in the hospital,” Jack said, clumsily. “He says if his wife hears you’ve visited him, she’ll never come to his room…”

  For a moment, a look of puzzlement, incredulity, spread over Barzelli’s face. Then she put her head back and laughed aloud. Her laugh was merry and deep and innocent. At that moment, Jack hated her and had an overpowering impulse to lean over and kiss, the gentlest and hungriest of kisses, the smooth, powerful throat, where it swept up from her bare shoulders. Deliberately, he sat farther back in his chair, averting his eyes. Abruptly, Barzelli stopped laughing. “Mamma mia,” she said. “American women! They belong in museums! Imagine that! And what do you do after you leave me, Mr. Andrus?” she asked, biting the words off. “Do you go to every one of the fifty women that Maurice Delaney has slept with since he was married and request them, for the sake of Mrs. Delaney, not to visit the great man in the hospital?” She jumped up and strode back and forth, like a prowling animal in a cage, her bare feet padding on the marble floor with a surprisingly hard, calloused noise. “For your information, Mr. Andrus,” she said angrily, “and for Mr. Delaney’s information, too, let me tell you that I had no intention of visiting him in the hospital. I hate sick men. I avoid them. They disgust me. Tell that to Mr. and Mrs. Delaney. Tell that to the lovebirds.”

  Jack stood up, getting ready to leave. Every time he changed his position abruptly, he felt dizzy and a haze seemed to obscure his vision. Now the sight of Barzelli prowling back and forth, barefooted and furious against the background of neon-lighted portraits, all considerably out of focus, was intolerable to him. He longed to be alone in the car with Guido, driving quietly through the dark night back to his own room.

  “One more thing you can tell her,” Barzelli was saying, her lips curled back in a grimace of scorn. “Her husband has not made love to me. Not ever. He has slept in the same bed with me, but he has not made love to me. Is that sufficiently clear? Should I write it out in Italian? You can have it translated by the clerk in your hotel. He has not made love to me. It may be of interest to her. It is of no interest to me. American men, too,” she said. “Maybe they belong in museums, too!”

  Suddenly she regained control of herself. She stood absolutely still, leaning over the back of a chair, staring coldly at Jack. “It is of no consequence,” she said. “Why not be calm? Tell Maurice I would like him to get well. Why not?” She shrugged. “It does me no harm. Now, it is really very late and we are all going to have an unpleasant day tomorrow, we must sleep.” She indicated a door that led into the hallway. “You do not have to go through the young men again. I see that they disturb you.”

  21

  KEEP OUT OF THE bedrooms of your friends, Jack thought, as he sat beside Guido, on the road back to Rome past the tombs; or even out of the living rooms of the friends of your friends—there are unpleasant mysteries hidden in such places.

  He closed his eyes and dozed and awoke in the swiftly moving car only as it swept up the hill toward the Quirinal. The figures of the two horse tamers at the heads of their enormous stone steeds loomed in the dark square. The sentries stood with their machine pistols in front of the president’s palace.

  “Nothing more tonight, Guido,” Jack said as they drove up under the portico of his hotel, a few minutes later. “But I’m afraid I’ll need you in the morning at about eight fifteen. I’m sorry for today…”

  “No need to be sorry, monsieur,” Guido said. “When disaster strikes, one expects to lose a little sleep.”

  Jack looked across at the grave, handsome face, and thought how patient and capable and resilient the man was, how gentle and understanding. He has lessons to teach all of us whose errands he has run this Sunday, Jack thought. Hard-working, graceful, sweet-tempered and enduring, Guido seemed, at that moment, to represent the deepest values, the permanent, marvelous, ever-replenished gifts of his race. It was one of the blackest marks against Guido’s country, Jack felt, that it could find nothing better for him to do than to drive the spoiled, invading children of the twentieth century around the city of Rome. I must do something for him, Jack thought, I must do something enormous.

  “Tell me, Guido,” Jack said, “if you had some money, what would you do?”

  “Some money?” Guido asked, politely puzzled. “How much money?”

  “A great deal,” Jack said.

  Guido thought for a moment. “I would take my wife and my three children to Toulon for a week,” he said, “and visit the vineyard and the lady for whom I worked during the war.”

  Two hundred, two hundred and fifty dollars, Jack calculated. Hardly more. In Guido’s calculation, a great deal of money. Well,
Jack decided, I’m going to give it to him. When they pay me. My tribute to Italy.

  He sighed. He was tired and it took an effort to get out of the car. “Good night, Guido,” he said. “See you in the morning.” Let the gift come as a surprise.

  “Good night, monsieur,” Guido said. “Sleep well.”

  He drove off.

  The concierge had three messages for him. They all said the same thing. Call Operator 382 in Paris, Parigi, the hotel operator had written. The first one had come in at noon, the last one only a half-hour ago. Jack looked at his watch. It was only ten minutes past one. So much had happened that day that it seemed impossible that it was only ten minutes past one. He suddenly realized that he was very hungry and he ordered a bottle of beer and some cheese and bread to be sent up to his room. As he waited for the elevator, crushing the three bits of paper in his hand, he remembered the morning, with Bresach waiting for him in the lobby, and Veronica’s telegram, “Don’t worry, dearest…” Fifteen hours ago. Another era, when people could write, Don’t worry, dearest. Zurich, he remembered. How were the heart cases in Zurich tonight, how did the Swiss stand on the subject of the fidelity of Delaney to his wife, what was the opinion, in that neutral country, of Barzelli and her three drunkards?

  The telephone was ringing as he unlocked the door to his apartment. Jack switched on the light and went over to the desk and said, “Hello, hello…”

  “You don’t have to snap my head off,” a woman’s voice said, with a little laugh.

  “Who’s this?” Jack asked, although he knew.

  “You know who it is, Jack.”

  “Carlotta,” Jack said flatly. He hadn’t spoken to her since the morning in California, and had only communicated with her through lawyers, and it had been nearly ten years, but he knew. “I thought I saw you when I was leaving the hospital.”