by Elsa Morante
“Well,” he said, “as far as I’m concerned, do what you like. I AM A FUGITIVE is a film title. Did you believe me? I am a free citizen, starting tonight, in order with the authorities. I was legally turned out of my house, up there at the villa, at exactly seven o’clock p.m. today, December third, if you want to know!”
So saying, and without getting up from his slouch, he gave me a look that was lazy and impassive but full of malicious understanding. “You’re disappointed, are you?” he said after a pause. “Tell the truth: you swallowed the story of the escape right away, and already you were enjoying the thought . . . of going to report me . . .”
From the moment I planted myself there, facing him as I waited, I had promised myself not to address a word to him, and absolutely not to deal with him, any more than if he had been an animal. But on hearing him utter such a crazy slander I couldn’t restrain a loud, haughty cry of derision.
His response, however, was merely a condescending half smile, as if his opinion hadn’t changed. “You can spare yourself the inconvenience,” he continued, undeterred, settling himself more comfortably on the couch, “and as for the lights, as far as I’m concerned, I assure you, lights on or lights off is all the same to me here, at night. It’s your father who, for motives of prudence, thought up that trick, to turn off the lights . . . The police have nothing to do with it. A question of private family matters.”
Here he yawned and lighted a cigarette. “Well, just so you know,” he explained more clearly, “your father wouldn’t be eager to let you others in the house know I’m here. That’s why, as you see, he didn’t give me a room upstairs. I think, especially, he isn’t eager to introduce me to the signora . . .”
His speech had some inflections different from the usual, Neapolitan notes I was used to hearing: less singing and more robust. Yet he didn’t speak a dialect but a quite precise Italian. In fact, out of a taste for insults, he seemed to enjoy uttering refined phrases; and his manners, innately plebeian, were offensive with a more provocative pride while he pretended to be respectable. He spoke in a drawl, between drags of the cigarette. And every time he said your father he put into it a note of ironic servility and revulsion: as if he were avoiding a pathetic, annoying object and, at the same time, mocking that paternity, which I boasted of!
“And of course,” he continued, letting the words fall from his mouth with the expression of an undisputed sultan, as if he considered himself the chief gangster of the century, “I am not a family type, I’m a dangerous criminal . . . At the trial,” he declared, boasting, “they gave me two years! Yes, then they had to reduce it, because in the meantime these big international events intervened, and as a result the pardon of H.M. the King . . . Won’t you congratulate me on the lucky coincidence? If not for the march of history, I wouldn’t be here now, in your house, enjoying this lovely evening!”
Hearing that speech, I gave him a bewildered and almost questioning look, in spite of myself. Not because of the big international events he had hinted at: of which I knew nothing, and which at that moment didn’t interest me; but for another reason. “Two years only!” I thought, disconcerted. So this man whom I had considered a genuine life prisoner was, as it seemed, a petty criminal of no account! But still, I now realized angrily, even the knowledge that he could be a mere pickpocket or local troublemaker—rather than a fatal killer or outlaw—wouldn’t serve to diminish his dark, odious magnificence in my eyes.
To indicate that he was of no importance, I twisted my lips into a sneer of disgust. He, meanwhile, had started yawning exaggeratedly, as if this lovely evening, just by being named, had provoked in him an atrocious tedium. But he added no other word.
Some seconds of silence passed. I stood there, straight against the doorpost, hand in my pocket, in the attitude of a gang leader who is confronting a hostile gang leader in the middle of the deserted pampas. Finally I broke the silence, grimly, to find out:
“So? You’re sleeping here tonight?”
“Where do you want me to sleep, the Grand Hotel?
“Why?” he opined, sarcastically, after a moment. “Maybe the idea is disturbing to you? Maybe—”
I shrugged, with the disdain of a great lord:
“Pff . . . I don’t give a damn about you,” I answered.
“Yes, I accepted your father’s invitation,” he resumed, in a tone of tranquil admission, with a kind of insolent generosity, “because, all things considered, this seemed to me the most comfortable inn here on the island, since I had to spend a last night in the place. There weren’t any more steamers for the mainland until tomorrow morning . . .” At that point a nostalgic and long-harbored impatience crossed his face, which made him extremely simple, even childish: “But if it hadn’t been for your father, who got mixed up in my fate,” he burst out all of a sudden, throwing his legs down from the couch, in a tone of outraged counterattack, “I could already be sleeping in Rome tonight, next to my girl. You can get from the prison of Viterbo (where I was) to my house, in Flaminio, in less than an hour by car! He’s the one (and he would even deny it!) who, on some pretext or other, brought about my transfer to this fine oasis of Procida: he did it, with his high-up acquaintances . . .”
Oh, like that . . . At that speech I saw again, like a court of veiled and evasive followers, the authoritative, mysterious, and nameless society that already, as a child, I had imagined in the service of my father. And, proudly, I was pleased with my father’s prestige, as I’d been as a child. Now it was explained why the famous Terra Murata had housed this petty criminal, condemned to a paltry sentence . . . It had been the will of my father, who had had him dragged into the land of the Geraces, reluctant, arrogant, like a slave . . .
But at that vision, suddenly and only now (and I was surprised at myself for not having thought it before), I remembered, with a real shudder, the famous old promise, sworn by my father to the dead Amalfi, never to bring any other friend to this island and this house, dear forever to a single memory! I had still in my ears the words of Wilhelm Gerace: If I failed, I would be a traitor and a perjurer.
So, then, he was!
My face must have revealed my sudden inner bewilderment. And perhaps it was this defenseless expression that momentarily disposed my adversary to a certain courtesy. With a distracted movement of his petulant, dark gaze he nodded in the direction of the set table and, in a tone of almost patrician urbanity, came out with:
“By the way, I haven’t yet apologized for eating your dinner . . .” That apology made me tremble with rage; but I didn’t want to give him the pleasure; and, displaying a pirate-like scowl, of one accustomed to the sleaziest carousing in the taverns, I said with fierce nonchalance:
“What dinner are you talking about? I always eat out.”
“Oh, yes, I didn’t think of that . . .” he answered in that same ceremonious way; but, meanwhile, he began to look at me curiously, eyes laughing. “In fact, say, boy,” he added, in a different, impertinent tone, full of meaning, “why do you go to bed so late at night? You have a girl?”
“No!” I declared, harshly.
“You don’t have a girl,” he replied, with a sudden expression of complicity in his cheerful eyes, “because you have at least two or three girls. You know what I found out from your father a little while ago? That you eat out, and go to bed late, because every night you go looking for girls, like a cat. That you go mad for the ladies! And already have lovers!”
I felt myself turning red: so W.G., unknown to me, knew something of my business! In any case, luckily, the man, perhaps, didn’t see my boyish blush. He had turned his gaze away from me and suddenly his smiles had disappeared into a black mood. He gave a big, yearning sigh, like a wolf’s. And, rising, he proclaimed, in a tone of triumph and threat, as if he were challenging to the death anyone who dared to dispute his word:
“I, too, like women!”
And he repeated, more threatening than before:
“I like women, AND THAT’S ALL!”
Then he began pacing back and forth in the room, with his proud, elastic jockey’s gait. He turned angry eyes to the walls painted with fake pergolas, vines, and grapes, to the scribbles of the boys, to the table set for a banquet, to everything, as if he were still in a jail. He complained to me:
“Well, if you know some pretty woman around here, why haven’t you brought her up here, so at least we can have some fun tonight?”
And he flung himself down again on the sofa, whose broken skeleton took offense, creaking painfully. The overhead lights, still on in spite of my father, gave no more illumination than as many wax tapers; and every so often, because of the unsteady current, the bulbs flickered, like insects in their death agony.
My father delayed. From moment to moment, I decided to go upstairs; but I don’t know what barbaric requirement of my instinct—perhaps a predestination to new bitterness—kept me there instead, in that cursed room, in front of him. This time it was he who interrupted the silence. In an unhappy, sullen voice, and barely turning an eye toward me, he said:
“Hey! Arturo Gerace!”
I muttered a response. Then, without leaving his sleepy supine position, he brought his hands to his mouth in the shape of a megaphone, and began declaiming, with the artificial, exaggerated emphasis of a police show:
“ATTENTION! ATTENTION! Dangerous criminal sought, escaped from Sing Sing! Attention to the description: regular nose, regular mouth, Greek profile . . .”
Then he began laughing softly to himself, with a definite and malicious (although almost affable) allusion to my credulity of before. I was tempted to respond to him with some terrible insult; but he had already fallen back into his languid, bored silence, as if he were dozing on his own account . . . And it was here that suddenly, in the silence, almost without expecting it myself, I let out, with peremptory abruptness, a question that for too long I had held inside:
“Why were you inside? What did you do?”
Although with some delay, he turned to consider me from between his lashes, raising half his lip in a smile of boastful pride, which didn’t seem, however, to deny me a response . . . “So you’re curious to know!” he observed, as a preamble. And in fact forgetting my antipathy, I looked at him, intent and in suspense, in the adventurous eagerness to hear him. As if I were expecting that his imminent confidence, there, in the big room, were to reveal to me an absolutely unique and extraordinary crime, which I had never in my life heard of, never read in any book: decked out with who knows what marvelous, hateful attractions . . . And that awakened in me a fantastic sensation: as of a funerary initiation or of manly promotion! Full of importance and fascinated repulsion.
Meanwhile, lying there, his eyelids half closed, he slowly stretched, making me wait still longer for his response. Finally he began, staring into the air, in a sly voice:
“So . . . Well: armed robbery. I attacked a stagecoach . . . that was traveling at nine hundred (meters) an hour . . . on the streets of Buffalo . . . in Texas . . .”
But he was quick to retract, resuming, in the same accent:
“Actually, no. I kidnapped and raped . . . a fifty-seven-year-old lady . . . of royal blood!”
Then, after another pause:
“No, in fact, I was wrong . . . I stole . . . the priest’s cassock!”
And he concluded:
“Now you can choose.”
“Who cares about knowing!” I exclaimed, with a contemptuous sneer. And from that moment on, I decided to remain absolutely mute, as if on the couch, in place of him, there were a corpse, or an Egyptian mummy. However, a little later, as if he were seeking an excuse for making up with me, he offered me a cigarette. I refused. At which he got to his feet, and finally, in a tone of religious seriousness, addressed me:
“You know who I am?”
Without speaking, I raised my chin, in a scornful sign of denial. He then dipped a finger in the wine in the glass, and with his wet finger traced on the wall, among the old drawings and signatures of the boys, the figure of a star:
“I’m Stella—Star. Tonino Stella!” he declared.
And, offended by my obvious indifference, he proclaimed gloriously:
“My name appeared in all the papers!”
He came over to me and, as if to document his identity, pulled up his sleeve slightly and showed me that he had a tiny star tattooed on his wrist.
But even before the tattoo of the star, I happened to see on his wrist something else that, as soon as I noticed it, truly startled me: a watch, too well known and familiar for me not to be able to distinguish it among all the watches of Europe! Besides the mark Amicus, I even recognized small abrasions on the face and some salt stains on the steel band. It was, with no possibility of doubt, the famous watch that my father had received as a gift from Algerian Dagger, as a sacred pledge of their friendship, and from which for years he had never been parted! I recalled that I had seen it on his wrist until that very morning; and for a moment I suspected that Stella had stolen it. But immediately I understood that the truth was different: it was not a theft but a gift, which my father had given to Stella on this, their evening of celebration, without any regard for his faithful old friend.
So in the space of a day W.G. had denied without scruples first Romeo and then Marco, the two most faithful companions of his fate. Doubly a traitor—and perjurer. In honor of this ingrate.
Parody
I’m almost certain that Stella must have realized instantly that I recognized the watch; but nevertheless he showed neither embarrassment nor remorse. In fact, though without stopping to discuss it boldly, he glanced at that magnificent timepiece, as if in open pleasure at possessing it. And meanwhile he proceeded haughtily:
“But don’t you get the newspapers from Rome down here? My photograph was even in some of them, around a year ago, in the days when they were looking for me . . . Ask your father if you want other information! . . . Yes, it was just at that time, it seems to me, while I was hiding here and there, that I had the honor of making his acquaintance!
“. . . By the way,” he observed at this point, “the Count is making us wait, tonight . . . It must be more than half an hour since he went up!”
And with a shake of his forearm he made the sleeve go back above his wrist, consulting the watch:
“Exactly,” he declared, “twenty-six and a half minutes.”
It seemed that he was eager to annoy me with that watch: he rewound it ostentatiously, then put it to his ear. Finally, following the direction of my looks, he noted, with insidious arrogance:
“What? Maybe you think you recognize this watch? Well, then let me inform you that it’s become my property: by right!”
I shrugged, and, to show how much I didn’t care, I gave a kick to a nearby chair. He reconfirmed:
“BY RIGHT, yes, precisely! Owed to me by your father. And besides the watch HE OWES ME some naval binoculars, a speargun, and an underwater mask, which he says he already has in the house, stored upstairs. Also, tomorrow HE OWES ME a complete new set of clothes, to be bought at a leading tailor in Naples, and a pair of new shoes, with rubber soles. Then, according to the pledge, he’ll owe me some capital: as much as I need to open a garage, in Rome, so that I can get married to my girl!”
He had sat down in a composed way, his back straight against the sofa back, with solemnity and regal assurance. But, at his last words, a frown of perplexity appeared on his forehead:
“By the way,” he asked me, “is it true, that your father is so rich?”
A disparaging suspicion was clear in his tone: and, at that, anger, too long masked by nonchalance, began to storm fatally in my chest. But more than ever now I felt that unmasking my indifference would be, for him, a satisfaction too much desired! And I contented myself with letting him hear, in response, only a dull mumbling.
“Because to listen to him,” he insisted, curling his lips with barely concealed skepticism, “he can spend what he likes, he’s got millions . . . But then to loo
k at him one wouldn’t say he’s any type of millionaire. He doesn’t have the appearance of a gentleman, really . . .”
“Oh, you say so . . .”
“Yes, I say so! But any other self-respecting person even if he doesn’t say it thinks it! What sort of gentleman is he? Who goes around dressed in rags, which aren’t even patched, and he doesn’t shave, and never washes, so he stinks . . .”
“Hey, watch how you speak!”
“Well, sorry.”
“Watch how you speak, I’m telling you!”
“I repeat, sorry . . . On the other hand,” Stella explained, “if I interest myself in his finances, it’s for a matter of business! It’s a business matter that your father is proposing to me: he gives me what I told you, in objects and money, and, in exchange, I agree to go on a two-week journey with him . . . But he intends to give me the cash (the money he promised, I mean) only at the end of the two weeks, not before, because if he gives it to me ahead, he says, he loses the only good guarantee that I won’t clear out . . . Well, all right! I’ll take his word for it! But I would advise him not to cheat: for his health!” Here Stella looked at me, threatening and harsh, as if he took me as witness and guarantor. “Obviously,” he concluded, with an expression of disdain, “if instead of going right back to my girl in Rome I go and look at some sunsets with him, I won’t be going for his pretty face!”
At that, he seemed to sink into a vexed and demanding meditation, as if the mere idea of that promised journey he was preparing for were a torture to his nerves. As for me, from the moment I heard the word journey I remained without color or breath, silenced.
And in the question that, from the deepest childhood regions, came to my lips I barely recognized my voice, so weak and lost did it suddenly sound:
“. . . You’re going . . . far . . . ?”
Stella raised an eyebrow: “Far . . . what?” he said, with an obtuse expression. “Me, you mean? With your father? Oh, for our journey, you mean! Re-e-eally far! . . . Of course! More or less, we’ll be around here, through the usual area . . .” His lips formed a bored, skeptical, and mocking half smile. “Your father,” he added, like someone stating a well-known fact, “isn’t the type to move around too much. He’d be upset, heartbroken. He’s one who always travels in the same neighborhoods. You know those old tethered hot-air balloons? Well, he’s like that . . .”