Giovanni's Room

by James Baldwin

  'How do you feel?' he asked me. This is a very important day for you.'

  'I feel fine,' I said. How do you feel?'

  'Like a man,' he said, 'who has seen a vision.'

  'Yes?' I said. Tell me about this vision.'

  'I am not joking,' he said. I am talking about you. You were the vision. You should have seen yourself tonight. You should see yourself now.'

  I looked at him and said nothing.

  'You are—how old? Twenty-six or seven? I am nearly twice that and, let me tell you, you are lucky. You are lucky that what is happening to you now is happening now and not when you are forty, or something like that, when there would be no hope for you and you would simply be destroyed.'

  What is happening to me?' I asked. I had meant to sound sardonic, but I did not sound sardonic at all.

  He did not answer this, but sighed, looking briefly in the direction of the redhead. Then he turned to me. 'Are you going to write to Hella?'

  'I very often do,' I said. 'I suppose I will again.'

  'That does not answer my question.'

  'Oh. I was under the impression that you had asked me if I was going to write to HeÜa.'

  'Well. Let's put it another way. Are you going to write to Hella about this night and this morning?'

  'I really don't see what there is to write about. But what's it to you if I do or I don't?'

  He gave me a look full of a certain despair which I had not, till that moment, known was in him. It frightened me. 'It's not,' he said, 'what it is to me. It's what it is to you. And to her. And to that poor boy, yonder, who doesn't know that when he looks at you the way he does, he is simply putting his head in the lion's mouth. Are you going to treat them as you've treated me?'

  'You? What have you to do with all this? How have I treated you?'

  'You have been very unfair to me,' he said. 'You have been very dishonest.'

  This time I did sound sardonic. 'I suppose you mean that I would have been fair, I would have been honest if I had—if—'

  'I mean you could have been fair to me by despising me a little less.'

  'I'm sorry. But I think, since you bring it up, that a lot of your life is despicable.'

  'I could say the same about yours,' said Jacques. 'There are so many ways of being despicable it quite makes one's head spin. But the way to be really despicable is to be contemptuous of other people's pain. You ought to have some apprehension that the man you see before you was once even younger than you are now and arrived at his present wretchedness by imperceptible degrees.'

  There was silence for a moment, threatened, from a distance, by that laugh of Giovanni's.

  'Tell me,' I said at last, 'is there really no other way for you but this? To kneel down forever before an army of boys for just five dirty minutes in the dark?'

  'Think,' said Jacques, 'of the men who have kneeled before you while you thought of something else and pretended that nothing was happening down there in the dark between your legs.'

  I stared at the amber cognac and at the wet rings on the metal. Deep below, trapped in the metal, the outline of my own face looked upward hopelessly at me.

  'You think,' he persisted, 'that my life is shameful because my encounters are. And they are. But you should ask yourself why they are.'

  'Why are they—shameful?' I asked him.

  'Because there is no affection in them, and no joy. It's like putting an electric plug in a dead socket. Touch, but no contact. All touch, but no contact and no light.'

  I asked him: 'Why?'

  That you must ask yourself,' he told me, 'and perhaps one day, this morning will not be ashes in your mouth.'

  I looked over at Giovanni, who now had one arm around the ruined-looking girl, who could have once been very beautiful but who never would be now.

  Jacques followed my look. 'He is very fond of you,' he said, 'already. But this doesn't make you happy or proud, as it should. It makes you frightened and ashamed. Why?'

  'I don't understand him,' I said at last. I don't know what his friendship means; I don't know what he means by friendship.'

  Jacques laughed. 'You don't know what he means by friendship but you have the feeling it may not be safe. You are afraid it may change you. What kind of friendship have you had?'

  I said nothing.

  'Or for that matter,' he continued, 'what kind of love affairs?'

  I was silent for so long that he teased me, saying, 'Come out, come out, wherever you are F

  And I grinned, feeling chilled.

  'Love him,' said Jacques, with vehemence, love him and let him love you. Do you think anything else under heaven really matters? And how long, at the best, can it last? since you are both men and still have everywhere to go? Only five minutes, I assure you, only five minutes, and most of that, hélas! in the dark. And if you think of them as dirty, then they will be dirty— they will be dirty because you will be giving nothing, you will be despising your flesh and his. But you can make your time together anything but dirty; you can give each other something which will make both of you better—forever—if you will not be ashamed, if you will only not play it safe.' He paused, watching me, and then looked down to his cognac. 'You play it safe long enough,' he said, in a different tone, 'and you'll end up trapped in your own dirty body, forever and forever and forever—like me.' And he finished his cognac, ringing his glass slightly on the bar to attract the attention of Madame Clothilde.

  She came at once, beaming; and in that moment Guillaume dared to smile at the redhead. Mme. Clothilde poured Jacques a fresh cognac and looked questioningly at me, the bottle poised over my half full glass. I hesitated.

  'Et pourquoi pas?' she asked, with a smile.

  So I finished my glass and she filled it. Then, for the briefest of seconds, she glanced at Guillaume; who cried, 'Et le rouquin là! What's the redhead drinking?'

  Mme. Clothilde turned with the air of an actress about to deliver the severely restrained last lines of an exhausting and mighty part. 'On t'offre, Pierre,' she said, majestically. 'What will you have?'—holding slightly aloft meanwhile the bottle containing the most expensive cognac in the house.

  'Je prendrai un petit cognac,' Pierre mumbled after a moment and, oddly enough, he blushed, which made him, in the light of the pale, just-rising sun, resemble a freshly fallen angel.

  Mme. Clothilde filled Pierre's glass and, amid a beautifully resolving tension, as of slowly dimming lights, replaced the bottle on the shelf and walked back to the cash register; offstage, in effect, into the wings, where she began to recover herself by finishing the last of the champagne. She sighed and sipped and looked outward contentedly into the slowly rising morning. Guillaume had murmured a 'Je m'excuse un instant, Madame,' and now passed behind us on his way to the redhead.

  I smiled. 'Things my father never told me.'

  'Somebody,' said Jacques, 'your father or mine, should have told us that not many people have ever died of love. But multitudes have perished, and are perishing every hour—and in the oddest places I—for the lack of it.' And then: 'Here comes your baby. Sois sage. Sois chic.'

  He moved slightly away and began talking to the boy next to him.

  And here my baby came indeed, through all that sunlight, his face flushed and his hair flying, his eyes, unbelievably, like morning stars. It was not very nice of me to go off for so long,' he said, 'I hope you have not been too bored.'

  'You certainly haven't been,' I told him. 'You look like a kid about five years old waking up on Christmas morning.'

  This delighted, even flattered him, as I could see from the way he now humorously pursed his lips. I am sure I cannot look like that,' he said. 'I was always disappointed on Christmas morning.'

  'Well, I mean very early on Christmas morning, before you saw what was under the tree.' But his eyes have somehow made of my last statement a double entendre, and we are both laughing.

  'Are you hungry?' he asked.

  'Perhaps I would be if I were alive and sober. I
don't know. Are you?'

  'I think we should eat,' he said with no conviction whatever, and we began to laugh again.

  'Well,' I said, 'what shall we eat?'

  'I scarcely dare suggest white wine and oysters,' said Giovanni, *but that is really the best thing after such a night.'

  'Well, let's do that,' I said, 'while we can still walk to the dining room.' I looked beyond him to Guillaume and the redhead. They had apparently found something to talk about; I could not imagine what it was. And Jacques was deep in conversation with the tall, very young, pockmarked boy, whose turtleneck black sweater made him seem even paler and thinner than he actually was. He had been playing the pinball machine when we came in; his name appeared to be Yves. 'Are they going to eat now?' I asked Giovanni.

  'Perhaps not now,' said Giovanni, Trot they are certainly going to eat. Everyone is very hungry.' I took this to refer more to the boys than to our friends, and we passed into the dining room, which was now empty, the waiter nowhere in sight.

  'Mme. Clothilde I' shouted Giovanni, 'On mange ici, non?'

  This shout produced an answering shout from Mme. Clothilde and also produced the waiter, whose jacket was less spotless, seen in closeup, than it had seemed from a distance. It also officially announced our presence in the dining room to Jacques and Guillaume and must have definitely increased, in the eyes of the boys they were talking to, a certain tigerish intensity of affection.

  'Well eat quickly and go,' said Giovanni. 'After all, I have to work tonight.'

  'Did you meet Guillaume here?' I asked him.

  He grimaced, looking down. 'No. That is a long story.' He grinned. 'No, I did not meet him here. I met him'—he laughed—'in a cinema!' We both laughed. 'C'était un film du far west, avec Gary Cooper.' This seemed terribly funny, too; we kept laughing until the waiter came with our bottle of white wine.

  Well,' said Giovanni, sipping the wine, his eyes damp, 'after the last gun shot had been fired and all the music came up to celebrate the triumph of goodness and I came up the aisle, I bumped into this man—Guillaume— and I excused myself and walked into the lobby. Then here he came, after me, with a long story about leaving his scarf in my seat because, it appeared, he had been sitting behind me, you understand, with his coat and his scarf on the seat before him and when I sat down I pulled his scarf down with me. Well, I told him I didn't work for the cinema and I told him what he could do with his scarf—but I did not really get angry because he made me want to laugh. He said that all the people who worked for the cinema were thieves and he was sure that they would keep it if they so much as laid eyes on it, and it was very expensive, and a gift from his mother and—oh, I assure you, not even Garbo ever gave such a performance. So I went back and of course there was no scarf there and when I told him this it seemed he would fall dead right there in the lobby. And by this time, you understand, everybody thought we were together and I didn't know whether to kick him or the people who were looking at us; but he was very well dressed, of course, and I was not and so I thought, well, we had better get out of this lobby. So we went to a cafe and sat on the terrace and when he had got over his grief about the scarf and what his mother would say and so on and so on, he asked me to have supper with him. Well, naturally, I said no; I had certainly had enough of him by that time, but the only way I could prevent another scene, right there on the terrace, was to promise to have supper with him a few days later—I did not intend to go,' he said, with a shy grin, Taut when the day came, I had not eaten for a long time and I was very hungry.' He looked at me and I saw in his face again something which I have fleetingly seen there during these hours : under his beauty and his bravado, terror, and a terrible desire to please; dreadfully, dreadfully moving, and it made me want, in anguish, to reach out and comfort him.

  Our oysters came and we began to eat. Giovanni sat in the sun, his black hair gathering to itself the yellow glow of the wine and the many dull colors of the oyster where the sun struck it.

  'Well'—with his mouth turned down—'dinner was awful, of course, since he can make scenes in his apartment, too. But by this time I knew he owned a bar and was a French citizen. I am not and I had no job and no carte de travail. So I saw that he could be useful if I could only find some way to make him keep his hands off me. I did not, I must say'—this with that look at me—'altogether succeed in remaining untouched by him; he has more hands than an octopus, and no dignity whatever, buf—grimly throwing down another oyster and refilling our glasses of wine—I do now have a carte de travail and I have a job. Which pays very well,' he grinned. It appears that I am good for business. For this reason, he leaves me mostly alone.' He looked out into the bar. 'He is really not a man at all,' he said, with a sorrow and bewilderment at once childlike and ancient, I do not know what he is, he is horrible. But I will keep my carte de travail. The job is another matter, but'—he knocked wood—'we have had no trouble now for nearly three weeks.'

  'But you think that trouble is coming,' I said.

  'Oh, yes,' said Giovanni, with a quick, startled look at me, as if he were wondering if I had understood a word of what he had said, 'we are certainly going to have a little trouble soon again. Not right away, of course; that is not his style. But he will invent something to be angry at me about.'

  Then we sat in silence for awhile, smoking cigarettes, surrounded by oyster shells, and finishing the wine. I was all at once very tired. I looked out into the narrow street, this strange, crooked corner where we sat, which was brazen now with the sunlight and heavy with people— people I would never understand. I ached abruptly, intolerably, with a longing to go home; not to that hotel, in one of the alleys of Paris, where the concierge barred the way with my unpaid bill; but home, home across the ocean, to things and people I knew and understood; to those things, those places, those people which I would always, helplessly, and in whatever bitterness of spirit, love above all else. I had never realized such a sentiment in myself before, and it frightened me. I saw myself, sharply, as a wanderer, an adventurer, rocking through the world, unanchored. I looked at Giovanni's face, which did not help me. He belonged to this strange city, which did not belong to me. I began to see that, while what was happening to me was not so strange as it would have comforted me to believe, yet it was strange beyond belief. It was not really so strange, so unprecedented, though voices deep within me boomed, For shame! For shame I that I should be so abruptly, so hideously entangled with a boy; what was strange was that this was but one tiny aspect of the dreadful human tangle occurring everywhere, without end, forever.

  'Viens,' said Giovanni.

  We rose and walked back into the bar and Giovanni paid our bill. Another bottle of champagne had been opened and Jacques and Guillaume were now really beginning to be drunk. It was going to be ghastly and I wondered if those poor, patient boys were ever going to get anything to eat. Giovanni talked to Guillaume for a moment, agreeing to open up the bar; Jacques was too busy with the pale tall boy to have much time for me; we said good-morning and left them.

  'I must go home,' I said to Giovanni when we were in the street. I must pay my hotel bill.'

  Giovanni stared. 'Mais tu es fou,' he said mildly. There is certainly no point in going home now, to face an ugly concierge and then go to sleep in that room all by yourself and then wake up later, with a terrible stomach and a sour mouth, wanting to commit suicide. Come with me; we will rise at a civilized hour and have a gentle aperitif somewhere and then a little dinner. It will be much more cheerful like that,' he said with a smile, 'you will see.'

  'But I must get my clothes,' I said.

  He took my arm. 'Bien sûr. But you do not have to get them now.' I held back. He stopped. 'Come. I am sure that I am much prettier than your wallpaper—or your concierge. I will smile at you when you wake up. They will not.'

  'Ah,' I could only say, 'tu es vache.'

  It is you who are vache,' he said, 'to want to leave me alone in this lonely place when you know that I am far too drunk to reach my h
ome unaided.'

  We laughed together, both caught up in a stinging, teasing sort of game. We reached the Boulevard de Sébastopol. 'But we will not any longer discuss the painful subject of how you desired to desert Giovanni, at so dangerous an hour, in the middle of a hostile city.' I began to realize that he, too, was nervous. Far down the boulevard a cab meandered toward us, and he put up his hand. I will show you my room,' he said. It is perfectly clear that you would have to see it one of these days, anyway.' The taxi stopped beside us, and Giovanni, as though he were suddenly afraid that I would really turn and run, pushed me in before him. He got in beside me and told the driver: 'Nation.'

  The street he lived on was wide, respectable rather than elegant, and massive with fairly recent apartment buildings; the street ended in a small park. His room was in the back, on the ground floor of the last building on this street. We passed the vestibule and the elevator into a short, dark corridor which led to his room. The room was small, I only made out the outlines of clutter and disorder, there was the smell of the alcohol he burned in his stove. He locked the door behind us, and then for a moment, in the gloom, we simply stared at each other— with dismay, with relief, and breathing hard. I was trembling. I thought, if I do not open the door at once and get out of here, I am lost. But I knew I could not open the door, I knew it was too late; soon it was too late to do anything but moan. He pulled me against him, putting himself into my arms as though he were giving me himself to carry, and slowly pulled me down with him to that bed. With everything in me screaming No! yet the sum of me sighed Yes.

  Here in the south of France it does not often snow; but snowflakes, in the beginning rather gently and now with more force, have been falling for the last half hour. It falls as though it might quite possibly decide to turn into a blizzard. It has been cold down here this winter, though the people of the region seem to take it as a mark of ill-breeding in a foreigner if he makes any reference to this fact. They themselves, even when their faces are burning in that wind which seems to blow from everywhere at once, and which penetrates everything, are as radiantly cheerful as children at the seashore. 'Il fait beau bien?—throwing their faces toward the lowering sky in which the celebrated southern sun has not made an appearance in days.