“Tell me,” I said, “how in the world did you get the terrible business over with? What did you say to them? What did you do?”
“Well, it was tough, you know. I’ve always been twisted completely out of shape by such situations, even ones less serious than that. I don’t know what it is, because I don’t think I’m a real coward when you get right down to it. I guess I’d just rather see people have their illusions, rather than break them up and in the process make them seem even slightly stupid or silly. It’s a failing, I guess, but I’ve never really been able to conquer it. When I first went to art school in New York, I remember, the instructor thought my name was Mr. Applebaum, don’t ask me why, and for the longest kind of time I let him believe it—afraid to make him look like an ass—until it went on so long that it really became too late to tell him—then we both would have looked like idiots, you see—so I guess to this day if he ever remembers me he thinks of that nice Mr. Applebaum, from North Carolina.
“Anyway—Jesus Christ, lead us not into temptation… . Well, just like McCabe up in Rome, you see, Mason had him a bottle of whiskey. Twelve-year-old Scotch it was, too. He poured me out a stiff belt and had a weak one for himself, and pretty soon the glow was on. I remember along about here he went over to the balcony again and stood there looking out. And he was silent for a while, sort of musing; with his nose sticking out over the rim of his glass, and then he came out with this whispered line in German. Kennst du das Land wo die Zitronen blüh’n? Then he turned and looked at me with this little wistful half-smile on his face and said: ‘At last I know. Honest to God, it’s crazy beyond belief. At last I know, Waldo, what Goethe meant when he had his vision of Eden.’ And I reckon I was getting a little dreamy, on four ounces of Chivas Regal too, but I was damned if I was going to let this guy outdo me in the poetry line, so not to be topped, I said that yes, I understood what he meant, it was an earthly paradise, all right, and that it oft reminded me of those lines in praise of Attica to my old friend Oedipus at Colonus—to wit, and I quoted: ‘Nor fail the sleepless founts whence the waters of Cephisus wander, but each day with stainless tide he moveth over the plains of the land’s swelling bosom, et cetera.’ What a real collusion of frauds! Except, as I say, I was still worried deep down how I was going to straighten out this confusion of identities. You have no idea how embarrassing it is to be called Waldo in all earnestness when your name is something else.
“As usual, the booze took care of everything and worked the situation out in its own sweet way. Which of course is to say that it wasn’t more’n about fifteen minutes before I was plastered to the eyeballs. And now that I look back on it, I don’t suppose that Mason could ever forgive me for what I said and what I had done. He was being so phony and he was trying so hard, you see, only he had the wrong man. He was barking up the wrong tree, and when I finally got going there—spilling out all my bile and poison—I must have really hit him where he lived. Anyway, along about then Poppy took Rosemarie and the kids out for a stroll down into the piazza and Mason and I were alone. We started chatting again and I remember I had gotten up to pour me out another shot when at this point the damndest thing happened …”
Cass fell silent, and closed his eyes briefly, as if trying to recapture the moment in its reality. “As soon as I caught sight of her I was struck that I could have seen her these two times and each time forgotten her, and then see her again and be touched all over by the same sort of million-fingered joy and delight at her beauty. What she had done, you see, was to give a timid little knock at the door while Mason and I were talking. We hadn’t heard the knock and she was just standing there, God knows how long, in this sort of frowzy, shabby croker-sack of a dress and her naked feet were planted firmly on the floor and as I came toward her she reached up and slapped at a fly and then she folded her hands together in front of her. It would be easy to romanticize that moment, you know, and tell you how her hair had the fragrance of camellias and her skin the hue and sheen of fairest marble, but you saw her—you know how she looked—and the fact of the matter is that she smelled like a cowshed and she had streaks of reddish dirt running up her bare legs. But no matter. She had brushed her brown hair till it shone with a silver luster and she didn’t crack a smile when I came over and looked into her grave and lovely face.
“Funny thing, I had noticed Mason had gotten up and was giving her the once-over. It was really a hungry look he was giving her. It annoyed me somehow, boozy as I was. I motioned her out into the courtyard where we could talk. I said, ‘Are you the girl that Luigi and Signora Carotenuto sent?’ And she said yes, then I said, ‘What’s your name?’ and she said ‘Francesca, Francesca Ricci.’ My heart was pounding like a bleeding schoolboy’s, and I must have had an oafish look on my face, because I was suddenly aware that she was looking up at me with a puzzled expression and then I heard her say anxiously. ’I knocked, signore, but you didn’t hear me, you didn’t hear.’ As if I suspected her of robbing the joint. Then, as much as I hated to, I came to the point instead of beating around the bush and prolonging the contact, so to speak. I said: ‘I’m sorry. Mi displace. But you will have to go away. There was a mistake made. I just can’t afford to hire anyone.’ And then this terrible look of sorrow came over her face, and she looked out into the street with her eyes full of the purest grief, and I thought she was going to blubber at any minute. I’ve often wondered whether a quality of pity wasn’t rooted in the heart of love just as much as beauty is, or desire; whether a part of love wasn’t just the perfectly human, uncondescending, magnanimous yearning to shelter in your arms someone else who is hurt or lost or needs comfort. Anyway, there she stood looking so raggedy and shabby and wretched—so poor, there doesn’t have to be any other word—that I could have bit off my tongue for causing her such misery and disappointment. But I couldn’t very well back down; what I’d said was true, and that was the simple fact of the situation. I said: ‘I am very sorry, but I’ve had a recent disgrazia. You’ll just have to go away. It is something beyond my control. I know you need the money very much and I’m terribly sorry but you’ll just have to go away.’ Pretty soon she looked up at me again with her lips quivering and said: ‘I can cook and sew, signore. I can scrub clothes and clean the house.’ And then she said in a sort of quick anxious gasp in this horrible English she had picked up: ‘I can wash over the kildren!’ Then I said: ‘Che?’ And then I understood what she meant and I found myself laughing. But not much, because as I laughed her eyes got more and more lost and mournful and despairing, and finally she broke down and stuck her head into her hands and began to sob. And at this point I began to tramp up and down the courtyard muttering to myself and coughing behind my hand, all in an absolute sweat, you see—wanting her to stay if only for a few more minutes just so I could feast my eyes on her, but at the same time trying to figure out a way to get her out of there before I busted out bawling myself. Finally I went up to her and took her by the shoulders as gently as I could and said firmly: ’You cannot stay. I have no money to pay you. Don’t you understand?’ She kept on sobbing, and it was all I could do to keep from taking her in my arms and soothing her and telling her that everything in the end would be all right, but I knew that everything in the end would not be all right so I just stood there and patted her on the shoulders and snuffled and groaned to myself. Then finally she looked up at me and here is what she said. It’s hard to describe her manner, because in the midst of her grief she was proposing something that a girl might find hard to do even in the midst of composure or good spirits or joy, but she looked up at me with these woeful red-rimmed eyes and said with the merest pathetic suggestion of some wan dispirited coquetry: ‘I know you are an artist, signore. I could pose for you well, and do anything—’ But I shushed her up and said, ‘Yes,’ because if she had to go as far as this anything then her distress was deeper even than the distress she had been weeping over, and I figured we’d be able to work out an answer somehow. So I said: ‘Yes.’ And then I said: ‘You won’t
have to pose for me or anything. You just come and cook for us and wash over the kildren. I‘ll find a way to pay you.’ And in a moment she had vanished, and I felt an undertone of trouble myself, but with you might say a kind of warm gentle joy along with it, like a man who knows a tremendous secret… .”
Again he fell silent, and when he resumed talking, after a long pause, it was with a laugh that had very little humor in it at all. “Now that I recall it, I don’t think Mason had been eavesdropping. Bald as he could be and all, he was careful about most of the more obvious amenities. But when I turned around he was standing there in the doorway, gazing at the outer door of the courtyard where Francesca had gone. But even if I thought he had been listening in—in which case he couldn’t have understood a word, since the Italian language remained as dark to him as Icelandic right up to the very end—it wasn’t this that griped me and tore at me so as what he said then. ‘Now that looks like real tail, Waldo,’ he said, rubbing his finger up against the side of his ear. “There’s nothing like a round little behind to make me bloom like a rose.’ Then he said: ‘Where did you dig her up?’
“Maybe this was meant as a really virile observation, to offset all the art appreciation and the poetry. But the look on his face was pink and greasy and what he said was like a slap in the face in this hot and disrupted condition I was in. Now that I look back on it I can understand that maybe he didn’t mean anything insulting by it, and actually he was even trying to impress me. Hell, it was a remark I might have made myself, about somebody I didn’t care anything for. For one thing, she was obviously just a poor little peasant and he couldn’t have suspected how she had set me rocking and churning. But the other thing, of course, is that Mason was just like that. The universal man he thought of himself as, the bleeding equilateral triangle of the perfect human male, an aesthete who could quote you half a line from Rilke and Rimbaud and you name it, and dream of himself potting tigers in Burma and getting gored in Seville, and balance himself off as the most glorious stud that ever crept between two sheets. And since he was none of these things to no degree he had to talk a lot, to make you believe he was all of them.” He hesitated for a moment. “Christ, I’m trying to be fair to this guy!” he said with sudden passion and bitterness. “He was bright, too, bright as hell—a marvel even, in his amateur way. What made him such a swine? Such a—” He stopped, lips trembling.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I just don’t know.” For the briefest space of time I had the notion that Mason, sprung forth in spirit from the grave, was sitting in judgment on our judgment upon him. We turned away from each other—I with a counterfeit yawn, Cass fidgeting.
After a moment Cass went on. “Well, I reckon I simmered down pretty quickly. That Scotch he was putting out was on the de-luxe side, and it was too much to forgo just because of a single crude remark. Yet I remember, as we went back into the room there, I remember thinking about him, brooding, trying to size him up. In those days, especially when I was drunk, my judgments on America and Americans tended to get a bit somber and harsh, to say the least. And Mason now—well, I can’t say that I actually out and out disliked him, even with that remark of his—seeing Francesca again had left me feeling very warm—but you might say that there was a whole lot about him that I didn’t exactly cotton to. And all this quite aside from the Waldo business, which had begun to set my teeth on edge. No, there were these other things—all his slickness, and his suavity, and that bland arch pretty-boy face of his, and yes, even those goddam sun glasses he was wearing indoors, too, where there wasn’t no sun. In this haze I was getting into, all these things added up to something, and that something didn’t seem to be much more than the man I had come to Europe to escape, the man in all those car advertisements—you know, the young guy waving there—he looks so beautiful and educated and everything, and he’s got it made, Penn State and a blonde there, and a smile as big as a billboard. And he’s going places. I mean electronics. Politics. What they call communications. Advertising. Saleshood. Outer space. God only knows. And he’s as ignorant as an Albanian peasant.”
He paused. “Maybe it was partly envy in those days. Mason had a lot more than this, I guess. After all he wasn’t a type, he was his own self. But then, as I told you, I always had it in for these young American dreamboats, who’ve had it handed to them on a silver platter—education, especially, books, the opportunity to learn something—and then never used it, but took a couple of courses in water-skiing, and then dragged-ass out of school barely able to write their name and believing that the supremest good on earth was to be able to con a fellow citizen into buying a television set that would reduce his mind to the level of a toadfish or lower even. Millions of them! Because I never had that chance—though if wasn’t nobody’s fault directly, except maybe the depression and my uncle’s having to pull me out of school to go to work—and I resented it, and having to learn the little I know on my own hook, so to speak. Anyway, put part of this feeling down to envy. Nonetheless, with Mason here, you see, he had begun to look and smell a little like that certain man, in spite of Kennst du das Land crap and the playwrighting, and my enthusiasm for him had pretty much wore off, you might say. As a matter of fact, he had begun to look phony as a boarhog with tits. What the hell are you laughing at?”
“At Mason,” I said. “I want to cry, but I’m laughing at Mason. Go on.”
“Well, we got to chatting there by the balcony, and we got on various subjects, abstract expressionism—he had all the proper things to say about that—and I remember somewhere along the line there he started in on jazz. I think he must have seen my phonograph, or maybe my Leadbelly album, and figured that naturally I was pretty well gone on jazz. Though of course what they call modern jazz and Leadbelly are two different things. Well now—jazz. You know, some of it’s pretty good, and I’d probably like it a lot more than I do if it weren’t for some goddamed avant-garde creep always jamming it down my throat. And Mason was basically about as much avant-garde as J. P. Morgan. Anyway, I guess you’ve got to be something of a heretic—a bleeding infidel—to say that you don’t like jazz. In New York, say you don’t like jazz and it’s like saying you’re an F.B.I. man. It’s a shame, you know. Because good jazz should be taken for what it is. Music. It isn’t great art but it’s music, and a lot of it’s fine, only about half the people who listen to it think that it’s some sort of propaganda. They’re worse than the bleeding Russians. Like that time in New York, I was in a bar near the Art Students’ League and I told this young girl that I thought Negro spirituals were very beautiful, and she said: ’Oh, they went out in the thirties. You southerners just want to see Negroes remain in a state of primitive religiosity.’ She was one of these jazz nuts, of course. But it’s true, really. Most of the people who say they like jazz couldn’t whistle “Yankee Doodle.” They’re tone deaf. They like it because they think it stands for something. Or because it’s chic. Well, believe me, it’s not that I have anything against jazz, but until my ears improve there will be very little in it that will ever turn me to fire and ice inside—like the day in Paris when I was listening to the radio, and heard that aria from Gluck for the first time in my life, where Orfeo calls out to Euridice in his grief, and I sat there shivering and burning, with my hair straight on end, and near about keeled over like a log.
“Anyway, Mason moved in on me pretty quickly there, and he began talking about Mezz and Bird and Bix and Bunk and Bunny and God knows who else, and I just pretty much gave him the helm, sitting there brooding and listening and sipping away at his ten-dollar luxury bottle. I guess almost a half-hour must have passed, and I was getting woozier and dreamier and—I don’t know—sad, I guess, half-listening to him yack away about this horn player named Bird, who had a terrible death-wish and finally croaked, and gazing down into the sea and the valley, which were all blazing gold at that time of the day, and so beautiful, and forever out of my reach. And I kept thinking about Francesca, too—. things that excited me but scared me, too, if yo
u want to know the truth—and his voice came back into focus all of a sudden, and I realized he was talking about parachuting and Yugoslavia, and this jump he’d made into the black, black night. Well, I listened more intently now, and I believed it—there wasn’t any reason not to, especially since his manner of telling it was really so modest, and even funny in a way. As you know, it was quite a tale.
William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice Page 97