“But why are you doing this for me?” Cass wondered aloud. “I mean—” But the corporal—enigmatic, exuding conviction, creep-ily benign—had vanished into the other room. What a monstrous swindle, he thought, ten thousand lire. A week’s pay for the fat bastard. It nearly cleaned him out, and this fact in truth sickened him far more than the hubris of the matter, overshadowing even his loathing of the huge wet bladder of a sergeant who had committed the extortion. Head throbbing, gut aching, feeling nearly as low as any low day he had had in Paris, he extracted the bill—his last of that size—from his wallet, and breathed it farewell as he tucked it into the sergeant’s ledger so that it coyly divulged itself, like a pink inner patch of thigh.
The sergeant returned with heavy footfall. “Now then,” he began sternly as he sat down behind the desk, “now then, I wish to say again that you are in a very serious predicament.” He reached for the ledger; as he did so, Cass saw his eyes light upon the banknote. “A serious predicament,” he went on without changing expression, and with such an artful modulation of tone that it was almost breath-taking, “which however you might be able to find your way out of.” He looked up at Cass, at the same time clapping the ledger shut. “You have made a serious mistake here in Sam-buco. We will not tolerate your kind of misbehavior. At the same time,” he said in a tempered, expressive larghetto, “at the same time, you do look like a decent sort, Scarlatti. I’d even be willing to say that this is your first encounter with the police. Am I right?”
“Right as rain, Chief,” Cass said, lapsing briefly into English, now again wildly outraged.
“Then I tell you what I am going to do. With the exception that you must pay for the broken vase at the Bella Vista, I am going to liberate you from these charges. I suggest that you watch your step in the future. You are free to go. You owe this office one hundred and fifty lire for the carta bollata.”
“For the carta bollata?”
“For the revenue stamp on the charge, for the official—”
“I know what it is, for the love of Christ,” Cass said, voice rising, “but do you mean to stand there, you despicable lump, and tell me—”
Later Cass recollected that at that instant he might easily have undone everything, but the sergeant had not heard his words or, if he had, chose to ignore them, for right then the noise and the shouting outside recommenced. “Bugiardo!” a girl screamed. “Liar!” “Bitch!” a man howled. And almost at the same moment Luigi the corporal, sweating, cap lopsided, propelled before him into the room a sunken-cheeked unshaven man in a tradesman’s smock and, directly behind him, a peasant girl. The girl, who was eighteen or so, wore a shabby moth-eaten coat several sizes too large and darkened with rain at the shoulders. She was barefoot, and a faded scarf concealed her hair. Still shrieking her fury she came in, and for a desperate, sinking moment all Cass could think of was how extraordinarily beautiful she was. Like the draught of wind that makes a fire blaze up, her anger seemed only to excite and inflame the loveliness of her face; Cass noticed that it was only Luigi’s big hand, grasped firmly at the belt of the girl’s coat, that kept her from climbing like a wildcat straight up the tradesman’s back. “Liar!” she screeched. “Liar! Liar!” And the tradesman, who had some dusty inflammation of the skin which patched his cheeks like frostbite, came back with that antiphonal low-throated groan, like a sob of hurt and disbelief, which punctuates Italian Donnybrooks: “Ah-uu! Tu sei bugiarda! Puttana! Liar yourself, you bitch!”
“Silence!” the sergeant commanded. “Maybe you’d better stand over here,” he suggested to the man. “And you” he said with a jerk of his head to the girl, “you stand on this side of the desk and keep your mouth shut.” Cass could almost hear an audible clink as the scales of justice, balancing sex upon one side, sank in the interest of commerce. The girl’s eyes flashed as she moved to where she was told to move, but she was close to tears. She bit the inside of her cheek, and her lips began to tremble, and as Cass stared at the soft-eyed oval of her face, smeared with rain and dirt, he wanted to clean her up, make her happy, and press upon her lips a full and passionate kiss. She was exquisite, and he gazed at her helplessly as he rubbed the knot on his head, aching to make sure that the rest of her body measured up to her legs, which were perfectly formed though like her face smeared with reddish dirt.
“Let’s get this clear,” said Parrinello to the man. “You are claiming this girl stole something from your store.”
“She attempted to,” the man said. “I caught her in the act.”
“I did not steal!” the girl burst out. “I was outside and I had it in my hand, but I was going to pay!”
“Another lie!” the man retorted. “What could you pay with?”
“Silence!” the sergeant ordered. He eased down into the seat, quiet for a moment, mysterious, and the swivel chair with a sound of singing springs swung him ponderously and heavily far, far back, so that he lay nearly horizontal, hammocked in the bloat of his paltry and terrible authority. Then after a bit he said to the storekeeper: “Tell me. You have not told me. Just what is it that the girl stole from you?”
“This,” the man said, “this.” He pulled out of his smock one of those gaily colored celluloid windmills, fastened to a fragile wand, which children run with or hang out of car windows. It was possibly worth the equivalent of a nickel or a dime. “I had it displayed outside upon the street,” the man began to explain rapidly, “when along came this peasant who snatched it up and ran away with it. Admit it!” he said with a snarl at the girl. “Why don’t you admit it!”
Suddenly broken, the girl put her face between her hands and began to sob.
Parrinello took the windmill. With an absurd and stagy air of nonchalance he blew upon it, puffed cheeks distended and with puckered pink lips, like some lewd Wind that blows from the corner of an antique map. “Tell me, slut,” he said to the girl at last, in his querulous eunuchal voice, “tell me something. I think I’ve seen you before, haven’t I? I can’t see now, but it seems that I remember that you have a nice big behind on you. A sweet behind. Now why does a grown girl like you with a sweet big behind want to steal a child’s toy like this? You should be down on the coast peddling that sweet nice behind to rich tourists.” It was, pure and unadorned, the voice of impotence, and Cass saw the sergeant’s face tinge pink as he crooned and sucked and smacked, getting his labial kicks. Luigi stirred nervously, now gazing with an air of stiff despondency out the window. “Why did you want to steal a thing like this?”
“It was for my little brother,” the girl said in a muffled faint voice, helpless now, mortified, tears streaming out from beneath her dirty fingers.
“Listen,” Parrinello went on. “You’re from Tramonti, are you not? You need money, I’ll bet. Let me give you some advice, carina. What you should do is save enough money to go to Positano, maybe Naples—maybe even Rome. Rome is a fine place. There you rent a room in a hotel and you pick up a rich man on the big street—hey, what is the name of that street, Corporal, where all the rich princes go?”
“Via Veneto,” was the stiff remote answer, spoken so frostily that it could barely be heard. Heartbrokenly, miserably, the girl continued to weep.
“And you go to a room, see, and you take that lovely sweet behind of yours and you spread it out on a set of nice pink sheets—”
The wretched storekeeper had begun to make yucks of appreciative amusement. For an instant, shutting out from his mind the dreadful scene, Cass looked out the window, following Luigi’s gaze. His skull had begun to throb like some huge inflamed carbuncle, but now he saw that something strange had happened to the weather—a miracle. It was spring, and he could feel the warmth stealing into his bones. Dissolved like dew before the sun, the scud and rack of clouds had been washed clear of the valley. It was suddenly so bright, so vivid in the Mediterranean light, that he felt he could reach out and touch each detail; he saw a postcard in color of majestic peaks and a sky so shockingly blue that it looked like some madman’s
overpainting and orange groves dropping in a ladder of terraced greenery toward the sea. Somewhere there was a dripping noise, last remnant of rain and winter. A flock of sheep was bleating, inebriate, on the far slope of the valley. And, Lord love me, he thought, there was even music: someone far off in the town had turned on a radio full blast, as if to celebrate this delinquent sunlight. It was not, to be sure, the carrousel which in his dreams had always foreshadowed this moment; it was Guy Lombardo, all glucose and giggles, but it struck some buried chord in him and as he glanced back at the girl, who had raised her begrimed, sorrowful, lovely face now, he felt like letting out some kind of a scream.
“Perciò,” the sergeant was still needling the girl, “you will have a lot of money. It is a matter of using only that nice well-built part of yours. As it is”—and here the lilting soft lubricity faded from his voice—“as it is you cannot afford to steal. Do you know what the fine is for stealing?”
“No,” the girl said hopelessly.
“In your case, it will be one thousand lire. Do you have it?”
“No.”
“Of course not. Then do you know what we must do?”
“No.”
Cass saw the sergeant’s face go pink again, winding up. “We take that big sweet behind of yours—”
Rage, possible to give voice to only in his native tongue, burst inside Cass’ head like a ball of insanity. “Lay off her, you miserable sonofabitch!” he roared. “Lay off her, hear me? Lay off her or I’ll stomp your teeth out! Lay off her!”
Alarmed, pale, the sergeant let his hand go back to his holster, where it rested caressing with nervous sausage fingers the grip of a Mauser automatic. “What does he say, Corporal? Che cosa significa layofer?”
Luigi made a helpless expression. “I don’t know. I have no English, Sergeant.” And as Luigi spoke, Cass calmed himself, though still quivering and with some difficulty. Heedless of the commotion, the flaneur rat meandered in from the other room, halted sniffing, plunged back into his hole. Through the window Cass smelled flowers. He was sweating. The warmth in the air was not of spring but of eternal summer; outside through the doorway, around the blooms of immense white camellias, bumblebees droned, mnemonic with the sound of South and home. The sergeant stared at Cass, momentarily daunted, fidgeting.
“I’ll pay for the thing,” Cass said to the storekeeper. Then to Parrinello, in a crucifixion of restraint and decency: “Forgive me for my outburst, Vossignoria. But if it may please your lordship, I have a very personal difficulty. I am subject to fits often—harmless.”
The sergeant relaxed.
“I should also like to pay the fine, if I may.” The sergeant shrugged his acquiescence. Cass took out his wallet. “Here is two thousand lire for everything. I hope this amount will suffice.”
Then he turned and made his way from the room, into the spring air outside.
It was late in the afternoon. Bells were chiming through the bright translucent air. A flight of pigeons thundered up as if from nowhere, bedecking the air above the fountain with tumultuous slate-colored wings. As he walked up the cobbled street to the hotel he turned, and he thought he saw the girl, head hunched down in her baggy coat, hurrying from the police station, and he started to call out to her but already she had vanished down an alleyway. He turned again and was walking on when he heard a voice.
“How does the head feel?” It was the corporal, Luigi. Reserved, cool, remote, very unlike an Italian, he seemed at the same time longing, even desperate, to communicate, and he fell in beside Cass as he climbed the hill. “I was sent by Parrinello to make sure that you pay for the vase.”
“The head is better,” Cass said. “You Italians run a strange police force.”
The corporal was silent for a moment. “I suspect that it is no better or no worse than anywhere else.”
“It is a wonder that someone has not eliminated that chief of yours. He is the grandfather of all reptiles.”
“Yes,” Luigi said, “he is—troublesome. Tell me, you are an educated man, are you not?”
“No,” said Cass, “I have no education. I have read books but I have no education. Why do you ask?”
The corporal had stopped walking, and now Cass paused too, looking into the grave, earnest, somewhat humorless face. “I do not know why I ask,” he said. “I do not know. Perhaps you will pardon me. But I so rarely see an American like you. That is, your little joke with Parrinello, your command of this language. Then—what you did for that girl, who was simply a poor peasant, of no account whatever. That appealed to me. That was a humanist gesture, I thought. What an educated man would do. That appealed to me.”
“I liked her looks,” Cass replied, faintly annoyed. “She was of some account. She was a very good-looking female. Why? Aren’t you an educated man?”
“No, I am not,” he went on in his formal, meticulous way. “Like you I have read many books but I had no opportunity to continue my education. I wished to become a lawyer, but circumstances forced me to—” He paused. “I became what I am. Most people do not get much education in this country. They must work too hard, so they do not read anything.”
“Also in America they do not get much education,” Cass said. “They do not work hard, and they do not read anything either.” Cass resumed walking.
“It is sad that they do not read, missing so much. One of the great revelations of my life was reading The World as Will and Idea by the great German philosopher Schopenhauer. More than anyone I have read he points the way toward what I have come to regard as a creative pessimism. Have you read Schopenhauer?”
“Never,” Cass said shortly, with rather more rudeness than he meant or intended. His head had begun to throb mercilessly. “No, I haven’t.”
“I’m sorry,” said the corporal sensitively. “If I have intruded, forgive me. I find it so rare a thing these days to be able to talk to a kindred spirit. Your little joke with Parrinello. That was delightful! How I wish—” But his voice trailed off, and now, coming to a rise in the street, Cass caught a glimpse again of the sea, far below, and the orange and lemon groves and vineyards terraced against the gigantic plunging hills. From distant gutters and drains there was a steady trickling and gushing; earth and sky seemed burnished, brushed, cleansed, and there was a sound of water everywhere as the debris of winter was swept gurgling seaward. The sun was going down, crescents of fading light glowed on distant barren hills. “Madonna! Che bello!” some woman’s voice shouted, celebrant, as at the light of the Second Coming. For no reason at all, Cass felt himself shivering.
“That girl,” he said, turning to the corporal, “that girl in the station. What is her name?”
“I do not know,” Luigi said with a shrug. “A peasant from the valley. I cannot say that I have seen her before.”
“She was beautiful. Do they all come that way?”
“It is rare that peasants are born with beauty. When they are, it is almost never that they keep it past childhood. I did not notice this peasant’s beauty.”
“Corporal, you must be blind.”
“I did not look at her carefully. Peasants do not interest me. They are a scummy lot for the most part, hopelessly inbred like animals. Most of them are mentally defective.” He shook his head solemnly. “It comes from eating nothing but bread. Sometimes I think that they should all be exterminated.”
“Why, Corporal,” Cass said with good humor, “you talk like some sort of Fascist.”
“I am a Fascist,” Luigi said in a bleak matter-of-fact voice, though adding as if in extenuation: “Please do not misunderstand me. Insofar as extermination is concerned, I do not mean that cruelly. Fascism is not Naziism. I only mean it—” And he paused for an instant, and clenched his fists together as if struggling for articulation, for reason. Then in a voice which would have sounded foolishly pompous had it not at the same time been resonant with conviction, he said: “We are all damned, you see! All of us! But somehow we get along. They”—jerking his hand sideways, to
ward some invisible peasant host— “they are damned forever. They do not get along. They are less than animals. They should be exterminated. They should be put out of their suffering.”
“Creative pessimism,” said Cass, blinking.
The corporal for the first time made the suggestion of a smile and then he looked at his watch. “It has been a pleasure talking to you,” he said. “I hope I have not offended you. Life is strange, is it not?”
“How do you mean?” said Cass, in honest wonder.
“Existence, I mean. Do you not sometimes wake up from a long sleep and for those few moments before you are completely awake feel the terror and the mystery of existence? It lasts but for a few seconds but it is the only time when one moves close to eternity. And do you know something? I do not believe in God. Yet for me the awful part is that in a twinkling I am fully awake, and I do not know whether it was that in that movement toward eternity I have come closer to God—or nothingness.”
Cass blinked again, and for a moment he wondered whether the corporal was not slightly loony. Fascist-humanist, intellectual, scourge of the peasantry, creative pessimist, metaphysician, with long sideburns poking down from beneath his visored cap, mustached and honey-eyed like some borghese matron’s movie dreamboat, he had nonetheless communed lonesomely with his soul; suddenly the words—and were they as true as they seemed, and as terrible?—came through to Cass like vibrations from a titanic gong. He looked straight into Luigi’s eyes, realizing that the corporal, whatever else odd he might be, was as sane as they come.
William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice Page 89