We fished and we swam. Swimming with Cass was a passion; he was like a porpoise, and gulping bubbles arose where he vanished for interminable moments. Often we rowed in Cass’ skiff with the blond and bright-eyed children. But most of all we talked. Luck, as it turned out, was with us. The painting class he taught ("It’s not like having shares in General Electric,” he said, “but you’d be surprised at how well you can do, if you work at it.") had closed for the summer, his part-time job at the cigar factory had folded, and there was this interim space in which to take it easy. “I only took that job to get free cigars,” he told me, “which I’ve got to have now that I’m off the booze. But it’s absolutely disgusting, you know. These cigars, they’re homogenized. Actually, that’s what they do: they take good smoking tobacco and squeeze it up like they were making candy and feed it into a big machine and it all comes out about as tasty as a piece of stale chewing gum. Great big blooping hunks of dog hockey. Don’t tell me these machines help mankind, boy. I ran one. I got so dreary-assed bored it near about soured me on cigars forever. Which would have been a tragedy. Most artists are oral, this head doctor told me once, and they’ve got to have something to chomp on.”
We shared a love for music, which helped. He had put together a hi-fi set out of parts. He was on what he described as a Buxtehude “jag” and while I was there we must have heard “Alles was ihr tut” fifty times.
And there were outings almost daily to the leaky and half-collapsed fishing shack on the river—sometimes just the two of us alone, sometimes with Poppy, on Saturdays and Sundays en jamille, conveyed there in a third-hand army-surplus jeep which Cass had bought for a hundred dollars, and in which the seven of us (eight including the colored girl, Dora) bounced together in a writhing nest of mashed toes, wails, and sticky laps. The cabin was in a grove of live oaks bluish and creepy with Spanish moss. And here on the bank or afloat on the river, half-hypnotized by the heat and stillness and the glimmering noons, we tried to make sense out of the recent past.
“What about Rosemarie?” I asked him one day. “That great blond bundle of Mason’s. What about her?” Hazarding a foray into what I had come to feel was forbidden territory, I thought I might con him into talking about Mason by using that most oily of gambits—sex. “I don’t mean to be naive,” I went on. “I know that something like her around the premises wasn’t any guarantee that he wouldn’t have his hands on every female in sight. But you’d think that she would have been enough for him. Even him. At least enough so that if the girl—Francesca, you know—if she had turned him down as she obviously had, he wouldn’t have gone off his rocker like that.” I paused. “It just doesn’t add up,” I went on. “I mean, I knew Mason. But what he did was—well, it was incredible. To be a—you know, a cocksman is one thing, but a rapist is another. I mean a real out-and-out sex fiend is not what Mason—”
“She was quite a bimbo, that Rosemarie,” he said drowsily. “A real foursquare, fluid-drive humping machine. Godalmighty. What a man couldn’t have done with—” His voice tapered off and for a while he was silent. “I don’t know anything at all about Rosemarie,” he said evasively. “Nothing.” He propped his elbow on his knee and gazed at me with bright intensity. “That was the trouble, see? When I was in Europe I didn’t know anything at all. I was half a person, trapped by terror, trapped by booze, trapped by self. I was a regular ambulating biological disaster, a bag full of corruption held together by one single poisonous thought—and that was to destroy myself in the most agonizing way there was.” He got up from where he had been leaning against a tree, tense now, the humor and warmth dissipated, and began to pace the ground. I prepared myself. Occasionally he would do this: that gentle and easygoing thread would seem to snap within him, and he was abruptly all tension, recriminations, gloom. Even his diction changed. In the oddest way I was reminded of some red-necked Baptist preacher, garrulous and thick on the sidewalk with informal folksy good humor, who, ascending into the pulpit, turns into a tower of glitter-eyed fire and passion. And the strange thing was that, with Cass, it didn’t seem incongruous at all. Now in a pair of discolored swimming trunks, skeins of fallen moss clinging to his wet burly legs, he paused, made a painful expression, and pounded the side of his head to get the water out of his ears. “A man cannot live without a focus,” he said. “Without some kind of faith, if you want to call it that. I didn’t have any more faith than a tomcat. Nothing. Nothing! How can I tell you about Mason or Rose-marie or anyone else? I was blind from booze two thirds of the time. Stone-blind in this condition I created for myself, in this sweaty hot and hopeless attempt to get out of life, be shut of it, find some kind of woolly and comforting darkness I could lie in without thought for myself or my children or anyone else. Look at these hands, these fingers! Look at ’em, boy! See how steady they are when I hold them out here? Not a twitch, not a tremble, see? With practice I could be like that doctor who could tie surgical knots in catgut with two fingers stuck inside a matchbox. I’m bragging, these hands are one of my most precious attributes. Yet there was a time when a glass of wine in my hands could be no more than half full, else it would all slosh out. There was a time when I would look down at these hands and they’d be shaking and twitching so much that I swear to God they seemed to belong to somebody else, some old man with the palsy, and I’d pray for them to stop shaking until I wept.” He paused and nodded his head. “I don’t want to tell you my old troubles,” he said. “This isn’t no groaners’ bench.”
“Don’t stop,” I said. “I’m listening.”
He sat down beside me. “No, that wasn’t it,” he went on. “The booze, I mean. It went deeper than that. I was sick as a dog inside my soul, and for the life of me I couldn’t figure out where that sickness came from. I told you the other day about—well, about how I was brought up, up there in Columbus County, dirtpoor and an orphan and all. For a long time I thought that was it. Orphanhood, pore shivering orphanhood! Or how I never got an education past second-year high school. Ignorance, pore downtrodden ignorance! I remember when I was in Paris there, trying to be a painter, and in Rome too, the chorus of this wonderful old hillbilly song used to come back to me.” He paused. “Maybe I’ll tell you about Paris sometime. I had the goddamdest thing happen to me there I ever had in my life. Anyway,” he went on, “this here song was called ‘The Dying Paper Boy,’ and the chorus went: I never had the chance that other boys had, I never had no mom nor no dad.’ Nor no dad,” he repeated, with a short chuckle. “Christ on a bleeding toboggan! I used to sing that all the time. I had enough self-pity wallowing around inside me to float a whole raft… .
“Or the war,” he continued, “that was a good thing to peg it on. The crushing horrors of combat in the grim Pacific. Ha! Or the fact that I’d married a Catholic and a Yankee to boot, who had tricked me and saddled me with a colicky brood of noisy tadpoles whose very presence would be a hindrance to a bank clerk or a shoe salesman or an art critic, much less someone who was a sensitive bunch of nerves like myself. Or, well—” He fell silent again but the shade of a grin lingered on his lips.
“O.K.,” I said. “So—”
“So I traveled blindly down across that continent, full of booze and blind as a bat, abusing my family and abusing myself—teetering on an edge between life and death that wasn’t much thicker than a hair, you might say, until I got to Sambuco. I thought I might pull out of it there for a while, but I was deluded. On that day you saw me I was blinder than I ever was before or since. That’s why I can’t tell you anything about anything. I was numb, out, stoned—and for the life of me I can’t tell you what happened. Only—”
Poppy called from the cabin. “Cass! Peter! Your beans are going to get co-wuld!”
“Only what?” I said.
“Hold your horses, honey!” he shouted. “Only you can tell me something, maybe. Maybe you can.”
“Tell you what?”
“Tell me about that day. Think hard. There are several things already that—”
&n
bsp; “Cass!”
“O.K! On our bleeding way!”
And so I had to tell him my story first… .
I barely made it up the hill to Sambuco after leaving Cass and Poppy on the road. It was a murderous climb for my ravaged Austin. After half an hour or so, and a dozen engine-cooling halts along the way, I came in sight of Sambuco’s archaic gate: here the car in final mutiny quivered and fulminated and drifted to a stop as the magnificent sea came into view a thousand feet below and as all the trappings of the barbaric valley I had climbed—crags and cliffs and lizard-skittering walls—slipped out of sight behind me. I could hardly believe that I had made it.
Through the archway I could see the piazza of the town, captured in a dazzling noose of sunlight, but the view of the sea from these heights was immediately so theatrical and romantic that it was a few moments before I realized that both town and square seemed oddly quiet and deserted. It was a stunning view. I stood there for a few seconds hypnotized, once again filled with momentary relief. On the high slope across the valley some wretched poor sheep were grazing, but so perilously and at such a slant that, like cutouts pasted there by children, they looked vulnerable to the slightest gust of wind. Then with a sound akin to music and almost beautiful, a bus horn’s two fat honking notes floated up from the valley; this and then a church bell far off behind me in the scrubby wilderness made me aware again of how unnaturally silent it was here at the entrance to the town. I trudged off through the dark mildewed archway in search of a telephone, troubled once more, and despairing, and conscious at my sleeve of the quick futile clutch of a hand, of the carabiniere in the shadows who whispered to me frantically, much too late: “Signore, aspen’! C’è il film!”
I must have only half-heard the cop. At any rate, it pains me still to describe what happened as I strode unheeding past his groping hands, out of the moldering archway, and into the glare of Sambuco’s piazza. Submerged in my worries, I must have been so absorbed that I did not notice the fidget and buzz of industry around the cafe table I blundered into, where sat a man and a woman chattering busily. Here, suddenly and fuzzily bewildered, I tapped the shoulder of a scowling waiter hovering near, my lips parted on the first breath of a question: Cameriere, per favore, c’è un telefo …
From behind me, I heard someone roar: “Cut! Cut! Jesus Christ, cut!”
I turned to find myself exposed to a battery of cameras and arc lights and reflectors, and now to the pop-eyed rage of a roly-poly little man in Bermuda shorts bearing down upon me, his lips curled around the butt of a cigar.
“Hey, paesan!” he yelled. “Vamoose! Get the hell out of here! Umberto, tell this guy to get out of here! He just killed a hundred feet of film! Vamoose out of here, paesan’!”
I felt a multitude of eyes upon me—from the mob of townspeople I saw gathered behind ropes gazing on, from the movie folk clustered beneath the lights, especially from the two people at the table I had blundered into. One of them was Carleton Burns, who returned my gaze with his world-famous look of bored, functional disgust. No one laughed. It was like dwelling in an extremely bad dream. For a moment, in the same way that di Lieto’s old grandmother had scared me, I felt the queasy visceral terror of a small boy caught at some lurid trespass, and I went weak, cold, and limp and I sensed the blood of pure humiliation knocking at my temples, but then suddenly something in me—perhaps it was the heat, or simply this final embarrassment, or the fact that now, after suffering such conquest all day at the hands of Italy, it was my own countryman, a waddling small blob of one but nevertheless a countryman, who was abusing me—anyway, something within me popped like a valve, and I began to boil over.
“Umberto!” he shouted at me, though not to me. “Tell that carbinary to keep these people away! Tell this guy to get the hell out of here. Vam—”
“Vamoose yourself, you miserable jerk!” I howled. “Don’t talk to me like that! Do I look like an Italian? I’ve got as much right to this square as you do! Who do you think you are, ordering me around—” In the wilting heat minute orange globes of hysteria exploded before my eyes and I heard my voice bubble up and upward, precariously pitched and rabid but somehow, I knew, almighty, for as I kept shouting at the little man I saw him stop dead in his tracks, cigar butt wagging uncertainly like a semaphore, and with eyes bulging goiterously in indecision and I suspect disbelief. Of the two final things I remember saying, the first—“You can’t push Italians around!”—seemed as I spoke unscientific and hollow, but a mawkish sense of triumph, the first of the day, swept over me as I yelled, “I’m a tired, weary man!” and on that note turned on my heels and stalked shuddering like a beleaguered and temperamental actor off what, it suddenly occurred to me, was a set.
I might have walked out of the square, down the mountainside and back to Rome, so sore and consuming was my bitterness, had I not at that instant run into Mason Flagg. He was standing at the archway; he had seen it all, and appeared to be beside himself with joy. In a sport shirt baroque with silver flowers, a white ski cap raked sideways across his skull, he was hooting with laughter; as I approached him his laughter slackened to a silent, convulsed chuckle and one shoulder went up briefly in that high-strung twitch I had forgotten, but which I might have recognized him by, at any angle and from any distance, whether in Sambuco or Paris or Peru.
“Old Petesy,” he said, giggling, pumping my hand, “let’s flap off on a wild one to Goochville.”
It was a private reference to our days in prep school. I remembered that it had always been his custom—whenever we met after a long time—to greet me in some such fashion and I generally answered in kind, with schoolboy bravura, though never without feeling slightly asinine.
“Man, let’s really flap one,” I responded briskly. “Who was that guy running off at me out there, Mason? He burnt me up—”
“Some assistant director. Rappaport, I think his name is. Don’t let him worry you. He gives everybody a pain. I think Alonzo should give you a job, Petesy boy. You were terrific out there.”
“Well, I’m sorry,” I began, “if I messed up their scene. I’ve had a terrible day. I was coming down the highway outside Pompei and I ran smack into—”
“Petesy, you look great!” he broke in. “I’m certainly glad you could come. How long has it been? Three years? Four? I don’t think you’ve changed a bit. A little fatter in the cheeks, maybe, less haunted in aspect—and I should say more self-gratified around the glands. How’s all this Italian twat you’ve been getting, Petesy? I’ve heard that a man hasn’t even begun to savor life, until he’s had one of these native girls moaning mamma mia to him in the sack. Petesy, you look absolutely in top condition!”
“Thanks, Mason,” I said, without enthusiasm.
I must have queered the movie-making for the day, for around the cameras there was a tired air of dismantling, and the towns-people, flocking past the ropes, had once again taken possession of their lovely square.
“Don’t let it bother you,” Mason reassured me, as we walked toward a cafe across the piazza. “They’re running this outfit like a carnival. For Christ sake, that scene you just got yourself into wasn’t even written until three hours ago. It’s the damndest production you ever saw. Writers dropping like flies.”
“How long are they going to be here?” I asked, with a twinge of expectation. Through his family Mason had always been in contact with the movie world, but although I had known him off and on since boyhood my acquaintance with the celebrities of that world had been more distant than I might have wished. I had an awe of those people almost teen-age in its dazzlement, and the hope now of some actual fellowship—no matter how fugitive—colored my imagination with a sudden iridescent allure. “Are they going to be here very long?”
“There’s that little jerk Rappaport,” he said, as if he hadn’t heard me. “Don’t worry about him. You know what his first name is? Guess.”
“I couldn’t guess, Mason.”
“Van Rensselaer. They call him Rense. Jesus
sake.” He twitched his shoulder up jerkily, as if he were trying to throw it out of joint. In the center of the square we made our way through a jabbering crowd of movie extras, from which two handsome Italian girls in skimpy black sunsuits detached themselves, slithering across our path with a great deal of pelvic animation. Mason took my arm. “Now just look at that,” he said. “Petesy, there’s more twat up on this mountaintop than a wise man could possibly handle. Just look at that stuff. I’d get a double-indemnity clause in my insurance policy before I’d play humpty-dump with something like that all night. Godalmighty,” he sighed, moving in lean long strides beside me, “it sure is good to see you again, Petesy. How is this Italian stuff? You must be a veteran.”
“Well—” I began, but “So long, Seymour!” he was shouting, flapping his arm at a young man who, perched in the cockpit of a Jaguar at the piazza’s sheer edge, seemed prepared for flight into space. “See you in the moom pitchers!” Then, “There goes the last writer,” he said to me. “Nice guy. Used to write novels.
“Oh, God only knows how long they’re going to be here,” he went on, “a couple of days, a week—you never can tell, the way they’re making this picture. They only got here just a few days ago, right after I wrote you, as a matter of fact. I don’t know what the exact pitch is, financially, except there’s something about blocked-up lire, around a million dollars’ worth, that the company had to play with, and so they dug up this horrible old costume novel about Beatrice Cenci and then assembled this half-American, half-Italian cast, and then found that the wardrobe and properties strained the budget all out of whack and so they decided to do it as a farce, in modern dress. I don’t know. Anyway, they’ve been all over Italy messing around with the story and hiring writers and firing them, or they quit, because the whole story has gotten so grotesque, and the whole thing finally became such a colossal mess that Kirschorn, the producer—he’s sitting on his fat ass up in Rome, at the Hassler—told Alonzo to get the outfit out of his sight and just finish the goddam thing. So Alonzo—say, you might have seen him at Merryoaks when we were kids; he was a great pal of the old man’s—anyway, Alonzo had been to Sambuco before and decided it would be a fine place to booze it up and look at the view while they were getting the abortion over with. Alonzo and I ran into each other the morning they got here. Say, there’s Rosemarie now! Hey, baby!” he cried, grabbing my arm and pointing at me. “Look, Peter’s here!”
William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice Page 54