“What’d you say?” said McCabe.
“Deal! And bury and burn those goddam cards, this time.”
“Don’t get touchy, pal. We all have bad nights every—”
“Deal, I said. Up the limit.”
“What?” said McCabe incredulously.
“Up the limit! One thousand lire.”
“Well, it suits me if it suits you.”
Cass watched him narrowly, or as narrowly as he could with his inflamed, wayward, by now nearly antipodean eyes. McCabe was not a frail man by any means: he had chunky, solid shoulders and beefy hands and there was a sort of flinty Celtic meanness in his face that indicated he might be capable of a decent scrap. Yet Cass, unworried, even eager, knew he could be handled. Boiling now, and itching, Cass watched him as he dealt the cards—to him first, then to Grace, then to himself. There was no revelatory flicker of knuckle-skin beneath the deck; Cass made a clucking sound, aloud, beneath his tongue: the bastard was playing it cool, he thought, perhaps he even knew that someone had pegged him for the crook he was. Cass had three thousand lire riding on a five and a six, showing, and a seven in the hole—a restful eighteen. “Good,” he said. Grace stuck. McCabe turned up his cards, said, “Pay twenty,” and took the pot.
“Baby, you’re hot as a firecracker,” said Grace, in a marveling voice. To be both crooked and lucky was just too much. As McCabe dealt again, Cass took the bottle in both hands, somewhat like a baby, and downed in raw flaming gulps what was left of the whiskey to its palest dregs: perhaps to forestall what happened then and what seemed “forever after,” he should have made a libation to the gods of Rome; perhaps not even the gods can hinder a greased slide down toward disaster; either way, as he felt his brain reel and rock with instant concussion and, still gasping like a fish, caught what was—or what seemed to be—a cheating finger flashing white across the moist ruin of his vision, he knew with despair that he was gone again for good. “McCabe!” he roared. “You bottom-dealing swine!” And it took him no more than two brief seconds to fling off his glasses, heave the bottle over his shoulder, and, like a man swimming frantic strokes underwater, to flounder across the collapsing and wildly splintering card table, amid cards and chips and clouds of floating paper money, where he fell with outstretched, encircling hands upon the horrified McCabe.
Little else—try as he might—could he ever remember. He had begun to black out only seconds before he attacked McCabe, so that all that happened afterwards receded by degrees ever more dimly yet certainly into oblivion. He remembered Grace’s screams, unbelievable sounds—ear-splitting, cataclysmic: the voice of a woman in quadruple childbirth or in the throes of rape —high-pitched, relentless, and everlasting. He remembered Mc-Cabe’s front tooth splitting his own knuckle, painlessly, as he landed a lucky blow in a fight where all else seemed to be roundhouse swings, aimless staggerings, sightless and punch-drunk wrath. He remembered McCabe’s hairy fist as it connected with his eye, blinding him. He remembered more of Grace’s screams. At some point he remembered Poppy and the children, screaming too, and the tenants above and below all screaming—Zitti! Silen zio!Basta!—and the taste of blood in his mouth. He remembered getting a strong fingernail-splitting grip on McCabe’s pants, finally, and hurling him out into the night. He remembered retrieving his glasses and stuffing his pockets with lire—his own and McCabe’s —and staggering away from the place. And that was all.
When finally he came to, he knew neither where he was nor how he had gotten there nor the hour of the day or night. He was in a shuttered, silent room, dark as Hades; his head ached and throbbed like a monstrous boil, as did his hand and his halfclosed eye, and he was lying naked on a bed. For long perplexing minutes he grappled with the question of how came he there, and when, and why; there was a terrifying instant when he could not recall his own name. The terror passed. The hell with it. All identity had fled him and he lay there quietly breathing—pulsing, rather, like some low amoebic form of marine life—without fear or anxiety or sensation of any kind, save for pain, which he tried to exorcise through a vain attempt at going back to sleep. After a time, by the slowest of stages, he regained his bearings; memory and reality came slipping back, as did his name, which he spelled out slowly to himself—K-i-n-s—with a sense of charm and discovery, like a young lover. Then a cold crazy panic seized him and he shot out of bed, padding clumsily about on icy tiles until he found a light switch, turned it on, and in a fulllength mirror stood revealed as naked as Adam, one-eyed, bruised, hair upended like a Hottentot’s, standing half-frozen in a hotel room so foul and sleazy that it would have shamed a Panama brothel. An antiseptic smell floated on the air. Dirt in great sausage-shaped cylinders festooned the moldings of the walls, the rungs of two rickety chairs, the edges of a tattered rug. Of furniture, beyond the bed and chairs, there was none; for plumbing there was a plugged-up bidet, gorged with some unspeakable liquid that gulped softly and stagnantly. As for decoration there was only the omnipresent Virgin, gazing down on the grizzly sagging bed where, amnesically and with the collaboration of God knew whom, he had added his chapter to its dateless chronicle of fornication. Whoever she was (and try as he might with his bursting head to recall her, he could not; he might as well have gone to bed with a wraith) she had been thorough: not only had she taken all his money, down to the most frayed and crumbling five-lire note, but she had managed to make off with all of his clothes. Even his underwear was gone. No—charitable whore!—she had left him his glasses; these he found on the floor near the bed, along with his beret, which, being dilapidated, he supposed she couldn’t pawn, like the glasses. He put the glasses on, and the beret, and gazed at himself in the mirror: noble animal. His pelvic bones ached from the sinister, Lethean romp; looking down, catching sight of something that moved, he saw that she had left him, too, what appeared to be all the vermin in Rome —if that in truth was where he was. Murder! he thought. Murder! Triple bloody murder!
So he had no money, no clothes; recalling the night before (if it really was only the night before), he had no doubt that he was being hunted by the police, by the Pope, by the right honorable lady ambassador Mrs. Luce herself. He had a case of crabs. He was certain his finger was broken. He was on the verge of catching pneumonia in an unheated hotel room in a remote part of Italy (at least he was sure it was Italy) whose location he did not know. He had had, indeed, the debauch he had so long pined for —and one must pay—but did he really deserve this disheveled ending? His plight, in its quality of helplessness and exposure, seemed the closest possible approach in reality to that universal nightmare where one passes in nude parade down the crowded main street of some city—vulnerable, all divulged, without a fig leaf, without anything. There was only one thing to do, at least at that moment, and he did it: he crawled back into the lascivious bed and lay there, bereted, bespectacled, fiercely scratching, pondering a way out of his low condition.
Then who was it that called him? And from whence did it come, that rapturous voice? Was it only some place in his mind’s imagining—some island or magic coast never seen on earth—or was it in all truth a land, previsioned, real, where he knew that some fine day he’d set down his lover’s triumphant feet? He put up a hand to his aching brow, feeling sweat there now, and fever. Water! he thought. Water! Somewhere in the depths of the building a door slammed hugely, an explosion that brought forth from the woodwork a tribe of affrighted bugs; drowsily watching them shuttle about in the blinding light, he fell once more, terrifyingly, into sleep, dropping not into the oblivion he had so gluttonously yearned for but dreaming of that old abominable seascape upon which, floating helpless as a twig, he found himself eternally undone and foundering. Here, so familiar, was the black gulf, the solitary unpeopled coast rimmed round by palm trees, by the weathered slopes of volcanoes which from horizon to horizon sent plumes of smoke into a sickly overcast sky, devoid of sunlight, troubled by premonitions of thunder. Here on this gulf, in a tiny boat so frail that each black foamy wave threatened to swam
p it, he was rowing with confused, exhausting strokes toward an island far out to sea where amid whirling carrousels and orange blossoms and the black eyes of girls there existed a slumberous southern repose so sweet, so voluptuous, so soothing to his flayed and bedeviled senses that not to reach it would mean his ruin and his end. And from somewhere in the depths of this green vision one single girl’s voice called to him in a strange language filled with soft liquid syllables, remote, importunate, and ripe with the promise of love. Love me! she cried, in those words he could not fathom. Love me, and I shall be all salvation. Yet now as he stroked on the heavy oars he seemed to be carried far and away from the voice, borne even more perilously toward the land; huge currents and riptides washed him toward the barren inhospitable shore: a storm blew up, the gulf became as black as night, and upon the horizon there sprang to life a forest of whirling waterspouts, bearing down upon him as darkly as vengeful tornadoes from the western plains. The waves beat against him, black and cold, and with the waves came an explosion of torrential rain. In cataclysm, the great range of volcanoes erupted fire; the marvelous green coast or island, the enchanted land unseen at his back, perishing with its freight of unborn and untasted love, toppled into the sea with a hissing noise— “Dio non esiste!” he heard himself shriek—as at last one black and mountainous wave, washed to this gulf as if from the uttermost boundaries of the earth, bore him up and up through a sky snowy with the falling bodies of gulls, and descending now, onto the wretched and irremediable shore… .
“Non c’è Dio! he found himself sobbing, lying outstretched on the floor. “He is dead! He is dead!” And even as he awoke on the wet tiles the contracting, seashore rhythm of the dream still lingered, and he was again wafted in one long last dwindling shiver of memory, screaming, to his mean and worthless extermination. Light had filtered through the shutters; still he could not tell whether it was dawn or dusk… .
Poppy came and got him, bearing a cardboard box full of clothes. He had mustered enough strength to bang on the door and yell, summoning a limping, evil-looking porter, whom he bribed with the promises of fortune to make the telephone call. The man also brought him a bottle full of water, which he downed at a gulp. Distraught and red-eyed as she was, Poppy was relieved to see him and—as always—was forgiving. In wrenching guilt over what he knew he had really done, he told her how—in a bar on the Piazza Mazzini—he had fallen in with bad company: two fuzzy-headed Somaliland Negroes who could scarcely speak Italian and who, dropping some tribal potion into his Strega, had rolled him for his money and his clothes. This Poppy believed implicitly, which aggravated his guilt. Bouncing homeward in a taxi through the morning light, he lay with his head in Poppy’s lap, suffering and suffering, and muttering recriminations. From her he discovered that the hotel had been on a miserable slum street far out off the Via Appia Nuova—barely in Rome at all—and that he had spent a full day and a full night in the place. It was Good Friday, with a salmon-streaked and radiant sky, touched with sorrow and hope, and the bells were silent all over Rome.
7
With raw meat on his eye and a bandage over his cut finger, and with blue ointment smeared upon his nether parts, he convalesced, for three days grazing like a sick cow upon the ragged edges of sleep. The nightmare did not return, although he brooded about it a lot. What did it mean? Passionately he tried to make the dream give up its meaning; each detail was as clear in his mind as something which happened only yesterday, yet when he tried to put them all together he ended up with black ambiguous chaos. Perhaps, he thought, it was a species of madness.
Be that as it was, he was hooked, he knew, hooked by the treacherous grape, and he felt that this time he’d be forced to ride the merry-go-round for a long, long spell. Above all, now, escape—the desire for flight, anywhere, so long as it was swift—loomed in his mind as the foremost necessity, thus bearing out the prophecy of Slotkin, the kindly old Navy brain doctor, who once had told Cass just that: “You will be running all your life.” His voice had been fatherly, and there had been in his eye the rueful look of one who had tried, but failed, to help runaways and escapists before; yet the words had stuck, and as Cass struggled to his feet on the day after Easter he remembered them, hating that dim old father symbol whose presence seemed fated to dog him until the day he died.
One thing he knew was that he must head south again, and so he did—alone—and that is how he finally came to Sambuco.
He was later able to recall some of his suicidal journey; in pouring rain, wobbling southward on his motorscooter, it was only a miracle (or perhaps Poppy’s tearful blessing, together with the steel Testament carried safely by her dumb brother Alfie all through the Normandy campaign, which she stuck into his breast pocket) that prevented his grappa-blurred trip from coming to an end beneath the wheels of some truck or bus. Rain poured down his neck, rivulets of water flowed into his shoes. He sang hymns to keep up his spirits, Methodist hymns, throbbing with passion, meekness, and love for a pansy savior. And He walks with me, he roared to the highway, Andy talks with me, Andy tells me that I am His own. Smitten with a sudden religious tic, giggling yet close to tears, he gulped grappa as he weaved steering with one hand down precipitous concrete slopes. At the Cross, at the Cross where I first saw the Light! Huge trucks passed him with their backwash drenching him to the skin; in the rear of one he thought he saw perched his old uncle, who waved a receding, remonstrating finger. And the burdens of my heart rolled away … A low, black, ancient Maserati veered close, skidding, brakes squealing in a mist of rain, and nearly clipped him off the road. Memory, in the form of an iridescent penumbra of tears, fogged his eyes. Blessed assurance—Jesus is mine! All Italy lay shrouded in wet and cold. Oh, what a foretaste of glory Divine! Presently he ceased singing, and lapped back moistly into dark inner recesses of his self. He brought the scooter into a semblance of control. What he was searching for, what impossible prize Or vision he was seeking, as he bumped along in the monstrous damp, he did not know; yet he felt some premonition not too far removed from delight when, toward noon, he saw the sun flame out over the slopes of Vesuvius and Naples below it, cluttered and blue, sea-girt, smoky, and as prodigious as Jerusalem. Yet he did not stop here, to eat, or even rest. Something impelled him on. Stiff and saddlesore, veering wildly as he sidestepped in and out of a web of trolley tracks, he put-putted down the drizzly Via Monteoliveto, assailed by a grim ecstasy of southern smells—of salt sea and pimientos and sewers —and a jazzy amorous hubbub, and snapping, black and insolent eyes and, quick as a wink, by a raucous pimp no more than ten and hardly higher than his knees, hideous and imperishable in his memory for the fluted blue cavity that replaced an ear, who trotted alongside and badgered him for five blocks about screwing his sister. “Hey, Joe, maybe you like my brother!” Maybe I would, Cass thought, with a sad strong inner stirring, thinking of a boy’s slim hips, maybe I would, I don’t seem to be making it with the ladies any more, but then banished the thought, banished the child with a few lire and a soft boot in the pants, throttling up as he found the road to Sorrento.
Yet again it rained, and still he did not know why he pressed on. Between the snow-capped peak of Vesuvius and the calm dark bay, a jetty, seaweed-slimy in the low tide, lay poised like a cliff in the green of summer. At its edge three bare-legged urchins, shivering, and a solemn fat priest stood fishing in the downpour, and Cass paused thoughtfully, wondering if he had the talent to sketch the sweet and crazy scene—decided he didn’t, passed on. The grappa bottle was nearly empty. In Sorrento, in midafternoon, he found himself in a grimy bar somewhere at the edge of the sea, drinking Strega, learning songs in tongue-twisting dialect from a sweaty barkeep in B.V.D.’s, playing mechanical football with a cross-eyed boy in American Army clothes, and washing his hands at a scummy sink whose drain emptied onto the water fifty feet below; there, inanely winding his watch, he fumbled it into the sea with a splash, and was immediately dissolved in loony grief. “Sono pazzo!” he exclaimed tearfully to the barkeep. “I’m
mad! Mad!” And before he knew it he was on his motorscooter again, blundering around the hairpin turns toward Positano and Amalfi. Above Positano he blew a tire, squatted by the roadside and repaired it with numb fingers. Farther on he ran out of gas, which in terms of Sambuco was either a curse or a blessing, depending upon how one views all that came after. For as he stood drenched at the roadside, a truck carrying barrels of wine drew to a halt, and from one window a most peculiar face peered out. Hooked like a scimitar, a majestic nose rode adventurously forth, dominating, indeed almost overshadowing, the face; upon its stately arch small wens were sprinkled like pumpkin seeds and from the two caverns beneath, great thickets of hair sprouted black and luxuriant. Of the chin there was almost nothing: above the point where it should have been, and shadowed almost to obscurity by the huge bowsprit of a nose, a mouth with thin red lips described a V-shaped smile, wet and lubricious. Something about the man’s face, the nose especially, gave it a look at once humorous and benign, like a cross between Punch and Torquemada; his hair, like Franz Liszt’s, hung seedily to his shoulders. “Che t’è successo?” he said. To which Cass replied: “No gas, my friend.” The face smiled. “Hang onto the back,” he said. “You look cold. Open the tappo and have some wine, but be careful not to spill it. Hang onto the back and I’ll take you where you’re going.”
Which was the most curious part of all. For the face in the truck could not have known where Cass was going, any more than Cass did himself. And a long time afterward, thinking that without that offer he doubtless would never have landed where he did, he wondered if that face had really been as queer and sinister as he remembered it. Yet as Cass hung himself with one hand to the rear of the truck and allowed himself to be pulled behind, he felt the road rise beneath him, and now through pouring rain he felt himself being towed higher and higher along the margin of some wild and yawning gorge, where foaming torrents rushed a thousand feet below, and the sea fell away in the distance like gray water in a dishpan, steaming and indistinct. Directly in front of his muzzle the bung of one barrel was riven through by a wooden cock, and with his free hand he gave it a twist, so that the wine spurted red and bubbly into his out-thrust lower jaw. Higher and higher the truck climbed, towing its drinker. When they reached the peak level ground, Cass had gulped a pint without wasting a drop, and now as the truck halted in a strange rainy piazza, before he could thank the weird face in the cab, he had fallen from the motorscooter in a soggy, deplorable heap, a red and white banner floating insanely across his vision:
William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice Page 87