William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice

by Styron, William

  BENVENUTO A SAMBUCO

  BIENVENU A SAMBUCO

  WILLKOMMEN IN SAMBUCO

  WALCOME TO SAMBUCO

  The truck was gone. Merciful God, he thought, heaving slowly to his feet, I’m in a bleeding infantile neurotic cycle. He climbed dreamily back onto the motorscooter, tried to start it, remembered his lack of fuel, and was about to push it toward shelter, when at this moment Saverio came splashing across the square, stuttering, snaggled mouth ajar, nearly toppling him again as he took possession of the knapsack riding aft. “Bella Vista!” he roared. “Tutti i conforti … panorama scenico … prezzi moderati!” Through the downpour the creature gazed at him imploringly, with wild dislocated eyes. Cass shivered. I have gone to sleep, he thought, I’ve gone to sleep and am dreaming of hell. He sneezed, swaying groggily, aware that the day was verging on darkness and oblivion. “Dica,” he said to the idiot, “where can I get a drink?”

  “At the Bella Vista!”

  There was no one in the lobby of the Bella Vista. It was grim, cold, deserted, and silent save for a hideous rococo clock whose pendulum snapped back and forth slowly and dolefully in the stillness. There were potted rubber plants, an umbrella stand, and a massive walnut armchair whose mirrored back reflected the oval specter of himself, pale-faced and dripping. It was like the waiting room of a funeral parlor, and the adjoining salone revealed even grimmer secrets: plush chairs bedecked in graying antimacassars, a chandelier once meant to cast a glory of light, in which one bulb glimmered dimly, more rubber plants in pots, and a wide view of the sunless valley with its churning rack of clouds and mist. Then in the gloom his eyes picked out a fireplace and a grate filled with feebly glowing coals. Drawn up close beside it an aging couple in sweaters and lumpy tweeds were playing backgammon with broken, haunted expressions and with chilblained, visibly trembling hands. They seemed to be the hotel’s only guests. Somewhere out of sight a canary chirped submissively. The place smelled of wet wool, old books, fish, and Great Britain. Staggering through the hallways, he located the bar. Almost as an afterthought, it was cramped into a tiny, dim, airless anteroom, and there could not have been a gloomier place to drink in all of Europe. By hammering at a bell long enough, he finally summoned an oppressed-looking waiter, who sold him a bottle of caramel-tasting Italian brandy. He took this back into the salone and sat down, trying to dry out, but without hope, since the air of the hotel seemed damper even than his clothes. He picked up a copy of the London Daily Mail, put it down again—it was six months old. The brandy, foul as it was, warmed him, allaying some of his nervousness and depression. After some minutes he actually felt a kind of deceptive, dull-witted sense of well-being, and told himself that he was not drunk, after all. He looked at the backgammon players, and sneezed again.

  He must have sat there for half an hour, brooding, gazing out at the tragic landscape. It conjured up all scenes which in his imagination existed as places to be shunned: Blackpool; Winnipeg; Finland; Shamokin, P.A. The land was darkling and accursed. He tilted the bottle up and drank. In the shadows by the fire the Englishman and his wife massaged their fingers. All of a sudden, try as he might to repress it, a pressure which had been building up all day tore loose, and he broke wind loudly, a prolonged tattoo which he squirmed vainly to muffle, finally relaxed sheepishly and let go—a slow, erratic crepitation, like marbles falling into a hopper. There was a commotion at the backgammon table. He barely noticed it. His disturbance ceased. He brooded some more. Then, after a while, rising unsteadily from the chair, only halfaware that he had begun to fret out loud, and to mumble, he took an infirm step forward, wondering if now was not the time to go back to Rome, and in spite of the rain. “You can take Sambuco and bugger it!” he said aloud. “Bugger it!” He hardly knew he spoke: the Englishwoman, followed more slowly by her husband, snapped erect at the table like a startled doe. He lurched toward the mantelpiece, in the hope of eliciting some warmth for his pants from the meager coals. Suddenly he was trapped, cornered, utterly hemmed in by Sambuco: he felt like one of those gallant cowboys who, pinned to the edge of an abyss by Indians, must turn around to face a storm of arrows or plunge horse and all into the horrendous gully. There was nowhere, he thought with mounting terror, nowhere at all to go. His affliction returned. Windy, turbulent, he edged past the slowly rising, cherry-red, bristling old man and in complete despair fell heavily against the mantel, feeling, as he did, something give way ponderously at his shoulder and fall to earth with an ear-splitting crash.

  Slotkin, he thought, old father, old rabbi. Patience, discipline—that’s what I need, and he was still thinking this in dim self-congratulation at his insight, when hell broke loose around him. For the huge vase, in falling—it could not have weighed less than fifty pounds—had narrowly missed the old man; even now as Cass looked dully down at it lying splintered in green shards on the floor he saw two wool-lined slippers shuffle forward, heard a voice quaking and elderly and half-hysteric with rage. “Drunken foul-mouth! Blightah!” the old man quavered, brandishing an invisible riding crop, and Cass, looking up in pity and wonder at the inflamed, mustachioed face, was for the first time aware of what he had done.

  “Scuse me—” he began, but it was too late, for the salone, awakened by the sound of the crash, came alive like a mausoleum overrun by vandals. Three waiters appeared, and several maids; what looked like a cook came on the run, chef’s hat flopping, and a horde of lesser minions—busboys, gardeners, porters. As they surrounded him, and as the old man, still fuming, shook a chapped fist in his face, he could only think that with all this help around, the place surely must be losing money.

  “Look here! Ruddy side of the man!” the Englishman was bawling to the assemblage. “Look at him! Who is he, filthy drunken beggar! Nearly brained us, he did, with that vahs!” Dumbly he watched the old man, watched his wife now plucking at his sleeve, watched the parlor as it filled up with spectators, and said to himself over and over, metronomically: This is not happening, this is not happening to me. Then just as his longing to melt through the floor became so intense that he did, for an instant, seem to feel his feet sink beneath him, a wild-eyed little man came on the scene, gesticulating with a menu he held in one plump hand. This, he made out, was someone named Signor Windgasser, a small human, wholly terrifying. Sputtering apologies to the old Englishman, he turned to face Cass and began to flourish the menu beneath his eyes. “You!” he cried. “That vase was worth two hundred thousand lire!” Cass was too dazed, too confused, too inextricably lost to stir; in a blur of muffled sight and sound like the wildest hallucination he watched Windgasser’s lips moving in convulsive outrage, yet could make no sense of what was being said; hand cocked upon his spectral swagger stick, the old man still fumed and fussed; from somewhere in the crowd there was a hoarse croak of uneasy laughter. A frieze of dingy damask curtains swam like water upon his vision; uptilted, the distant valley seemed to slope like a ski chute wrapped in mist toward the unbelievable sea. Nauseated now, weakly heaving, he tried to reply, tried to discover some meaning in this preposterous inquisitorial dream; just then, just as he made his benumbed lips function and, trying out a mouthful of thick strange-sounding words of apology, staggered toward Windgasser with placating hands uplifted, he felt an unyielding rod or bar or fireplace fender clutch his ankle, tripping him, and the parqueted flooring of the Bella Vista rose up to meet him full and shocking in the face, like a slammed door. He lay there, aching, watching ten thousand minute blossoms of fire. Then he felt himself being hoisted by strong hands, by brawny white-sleeved arms that propelled him forward across the room and into the lobby, where someone muttering Italian oaths rammed his knapsack down around his neck and by the seat of his pants hurled him forward again, half-suspended in air, feet paddling like a comic bicyclist’s, out of doors and into the rain. “Cacciatelo via!” he heard someone shout, and the jeering word “Ubriacone!” A door slammed, and the muffled words came back—“And stay out!” And he was alone once more in the rain.

&n
bsp; Then—perhaps it was the intolerable rain again, or the swelling beneath his eye, or the insulting “Ubriacone,” with its false imputation that he had drunk too much—something popped like a valve inside him; he took a deep breath, shot his soggy cuffs, and charged back into the hotel like a tormented bear. A grave error. The marble steps, slick from the downpour, were like glass beneath his feet. He was only halfway up to the entrance when like a doormat the earth was whisked away from beneath him. Still roaring, he saw the hotel’s façade spin madly sideways, and at the door one solitary waiter, pop-eyed in dismay, reaching out vainly to arrest his fall. Then he felt his skull crash down upon the edge of a step, and he was sped into oblivion upon great baroque chords of organ music, obliterating shock and pain… .

  When he awoke, with an ache in his head but curiously in command of his senses, he smelled an institutional smell of wine and grime, and knew almost at once that he was in a police station. He was lying on a cot, and he heard his own groan as he struggled back to consciousness; though it was a little death to do so, he rose to a sitting position on the cot, gingerly touched his cranium, and felt a lump the size of a small doorknob, fiercely painful to touch. And as he raised his eyes he saw two policemen. One, an immensely obese, bespectacled sergeant, scowled at him from behind a desk. The other, standing, was a young corporal with a mustache, who seemed to regard Cass less with suspicion or hostility than with a kind of bemused speculation, though even this was hard to be sure about, for much of his face was obscured as he spread his jaws wide and with a large hand began industriously to pick his teeth. No one spoke. Cass watched dully as a be-whiskered rat peered out from a hole in the wall behind the sergeant’s desk, sniffed the atmosphere and, like some cafe trifler idly emerging at midafternoon, serenely waddled away out the door and into another room. Rain drummed steadily on the roof overhead. Still drunk, his pain numbed, Cass heard a thin brainless giggle at work in his throat.

  “Molto comico?” said the fat sergeant, with ponderous irony, “molto divertente? Well, we’ll see just how funny it is.” He spread out a sheaf of papers on the desk before him. “Get to your feet and come over here.”

  Cass rose and moved unsteadily to the desk, where by stretching his neck he was able to look down and make out the list of charges, all the while attending to the sergeant’s high-pitched epicene voice: “You are first charged with willful and malicious destruction of property. Secondariamente, with the use of obscene language in a public place. In terzo luogo, with disorderly conduct in a public place. In quarto luogo, with attempted assault upon a person, by name Signor the Vice-Admiral Sir Edgar A. Hatcher, Southsea, Hampshire, Gran Bretagna. In quinto luogo, with drunkenness in a public place. How do you call yourself? Passport, please.”

  “Come?” Cass said.

  “Your passport!” the sergeant commanded.

  “It’s with my motorscooter, in the piazza,” Cass mumbled, forcing back demented hilarity.

  The sergeant made an exasperated motion with his pudgy hands, turned to the corporal: “Go get the motorscooter. Get the motorscooter and the passport.”

  The corporal, disheartened, rolled his eyes toward the roof and the rain, torrential now, a cloudburst.

  “All right, wait until the rain stops,” the sergeant said, and then to Cass: “Nazionalità? Inglese?”

  “Americana”

  “How do you call yourself?” the policeman went on, brusque, provincial, pen poised above a ledger.

  “Domenico Scarlatti.” The name, like a flute-sound, like an incantation, had appeared at the forefront of his mind for no reason at all; now it had simply escaped his lips, spoken with gravity, dignity, self-possession. The sergeant looked up at Cass, scrutinizing him with ignorant small eyes.

  “Then you are an Italo-American,” he piped, with bitter censure in his voice. He drew back in the chair for an instant, folding his hands over his elephantine paunch. “It is the case with such people as you. It is your stock of people which has gone to America and made a fortune, only to come back to the land of your ancestry and flaunt your money and your uncouth ways. It is a great pity that we do not have Mussolini now. The Duce would enforce laws against the likes of you. Well, let me tell you something, Scarlatti. Here in Sambuco we will not tolerate your type of behavior, do you understand?” Again he leaned over the ledger. “Where were you born, and when?”

  Oh, my heart, Cass thought, improvising: “June 6, 1925. But tell me, Sergeant, how is it that I am accused of assault? That vase. I meant no harm—”

  “Answer the questions,” the sergeant snapped. “Birthplace?”

  “Put down Tuxedo Park. Then, comma, New York,” he persevered. With fingers delicately outstretched, he steadied himself against the desk.

  “Tuxedo Park, New York. Spelling?”

  “T-u-s-s-e-d-o. Like the capital of Japan.”

  “Curious. Father?”

  “Alessandro Scarlatti. Deceased now.”

  “Mother?” The sergeant scribbled laboriously.

  “Gypsy Rose Scarlatti. Defunta,” he added. “Also deceased.” All of a sudden—orphan that he was and had been—he felt close to tears.

  The sergeant leaned back again and, with an air of sagacity, of magnitude, began to lecture him again: “You are in very serious trouble, my friend. We do not like to arrest Americans. Not because we have any qualms about it, see? But only because you now are strong and we are weak, and your country brings—how would you say it?—pressure to bear. When the principles of the Duce are restored”—and here the dimmest facsimile of a smile appeared on his porcine face—“all that might change. But at the present we do not relish arresting Americans.” He paused and looked down, drumming with his fingers on the desk. “But we cannot tolerate your kind of behavior. And we will arrest you! It is emigrants like you, bearing an Italian name, who give Italy a bad smell all over the world. The Duce himself pointed out,” he went on with an erudite gleam, “the Duce himself pointed out in a speech at Ancona in July, 1931, that democracies must fall out of the weight of the corruption and license they allow their citizens, citizens I suspect like you—” He doubtless would have gone on, except for the uproar which rose at that moment from the single adjoining room. There was a man’s large, rough, argumentative voice, then another voice, then another voice—a girl’s—vituperative, high-pitched, and filled with angry scorn. Something seemed to strike heavily against a wall. The girl shrieked, the man began to shout. And the sergeant got up heavily, wheezing, and lumbered back into the other room. “Zitti!” Cass heard the sergeant squeal, and the hubbub subsided, save for the sound of distant heavy breathing, and the sergeant’s castrato voice, now in command of all. Cass turned then and saw that the corporal was still gazing at him, speculative, not unfriendly, attentive.

  “What will I get?” Cass said with a groan, apprehensive now.

  The corporal removed a fingernail from between his teeth. “Straordinario,” he mused, ignoring the question, “assolutamente straordinario.”

  “What?”

  “The vacuum of the man. Born and brought up in Naples, home of the Scarlatti. And he has heard of neither one of them. What is your real name?”

  Cass told him, feeling somewhat more sober now, but the ache in his head burgeoning and blossoming and, along with it, pangs of anxiety creeping up secretly, darkly inside his breast. For an instant he had the crazy impulse to make a break out the door. Then he forced himself to remain calm and asked the corporal for a glass of water.

  “What will I get?” he said again, as the corporal ran water into a glass.

  “Here, drink it down. It will be good for you,” said the corporal. “You speak excellent Italian. I suppose it is the fact that you are an American that makes you so naïve in such matters.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Sergeant Parrinello, that is what I mean. When a police officer is intent on making an arrest he simply locks the culprit up. And that’s the end of it. When on the other hand he is persuad
ed that he might in some small way profit by the desperation of the accused to be released, he gives long dissertations on this and that. The Duce. Ancona. 1931. Democracies. Corruption and license. Do you not see the method in this procedure? It is merely to allow time. To allow time for the accused to make an appropriate mental calculation—that is to say, whether he should perhaps give up the price of an enormous meal in a de-luxe hotel or whether, under the circumstances of his own malfeasance, an even more handsome sacrifice might not be in order—that new gown for one’s wife, perhaps, or—”

  “I’m not going to bribe that pile of blubber!” Cass protested, too loudly, in the spirit—suddenly resurgent when it came to money—of Calvin, Wesley, and Knox.

  “Sssh-h,” the corporal warned him. His face was quite solemn. “Take it from me, Luigi, this Parrinello can make it hard. He does have a charge against you; you might squat in jail in Salerno for a whole month, awaiting trial. Our procedure for obtaining bond is different from that in America. And Parrinello is basically a cheap fellow.” He moved toward the door, fingering his mustache, and, lowering his voice, said: “In your situation I should think ten thousand lire might be right, so long as you also pay for that broken vase. But don’t be obvious, stick it in his ledger there. I have seen nothing.”