by Louis Begley
It dawned on me that this must be the great Italian tenor—the best, some claimed, since Caruso—who had recently moved into nearby South Egremont. I knew the music: it was from Verdi’s Requiem, the great solo wherein the trembling soul pleads for salvation.
Later that day, I looked up the text. For once, it was in the right place, inside the compact disc cover. As I read it,
Ingemisco tanquam reus,
Culpa rubet vultus meus,
Supplicanti parce Deus.
Qui Mariam absolvisti
Et latronum exaudisti
Mihi quoque spem dedisti.
Preces meae non sunt dignae,
Sed tu bonus fac benigne,
Ne perenni cremer igne.
Inter oves locum praesta
Et ab haedis me sequestra
Statuens in parte dextra.
I groan like a criminal:
Guilt turns my face red,
God, spare Thy supplicant.
Thou hast absolved Mary
And granted the thief’s prayer,
Give me also hope.
My prayers are not worthy,
But Thou art good, so prove kind
Lest I burn in eternal fire.
Give me a place among the sheep,
Keep me away from the goats,
Adjudge me a place on the right.
my astonishment at the audacity—or was it cruelty—of Charlie’s farewell to Toby grew, until it turned into something like awe.
It was, of course, possible that the choice had not been his, that the distinguished performer, ordinarily far too grand for this kind of engagement yet apparently willing to be of service to Charlie, had told him that here was something suitable, and of the right length, that he could sing in the open air without accompaniment, and that Charlie, in his disarray and grief, agreed without question. But I rejected that explanation. Charlie was too deliberate in all matters of ceremony, too pedantic even about casual gestures, not to have examined each word that was to be sung and its implications. Was it not more likely that he had decided, perhaps long ago, to have this lament performed at his own funeral, if not Toby’s, that he knew its text as though it had been etched on his flesh with acid? Indeed, if the great tenor happened to suggest its use, didn’t Charlie take the coincidence to be a hideous sign, an obscene wink signaling complicity and agreement on a matter he surely preferred to keep to himself? For what was the meaning of these words—so humble, submissive, and, yes, saccharine—when applied to Toby but mockery, a knife pointed at the heart? If Verdi was on Charlie’s mind, he might as well have arranged for a baritone to sing Iago’s Credo in un Dio crudel. The message would have been more obvious, but to my mind less perverse and harsh.
“I groan like a criminal.” Yes, in a short life Toby had done his share of groaning—upon the discovery of his taste for men; when that taste first became apparent to others so that, at times, he was thankful for the dementia that had cut his mother off from knowledge; as the act was consummated, whether on Charlie’s exquisite bed or in men’s toilets in certain subway or railroad stations, while he leaned against a urinal; and with the revelation of each new facet of the disease. “Guilt turns my face red.” What was the flush of pleasure, when it suffused Toby’s face, but the guilty blush of shame, each of the gestures that brought the pleasure having been of old condemned as an abomination? “Adjudge me a place on the right.” Would that Judge set Toby among the righteous? No. Since the first coupling, He had turned the male seed into an instrument of contamination, so that sin and death conjoined are fatally borne by the seed, however it is spilled, and are the true birthright of all who grow from the seed. And forgiveness? Perhaps for the thief, strung up beside the Cross on which the Son was nailed and stabbed. But that Son—or was it the Father?—who found it needful to absolve Mary, for the sole reason that she too had been born of the seed, would He take pity on a dead little faggot? On Toby the receptacle, Toby the penetrator, Toby the rag soaked with semen, Toby the goat? Yes, beg Him. Fac benigne! Be kind! Grant cherubic Toby, Toby the easy lay, a place among the cherubim! Not bloody likely. Isn’t that what my proud, sardonic, sentimental, and self-hating friend Charlie would have said had he his wits about him?
And I, thinking of Laura’s child and mine, and of what might lie ahead, agreed, and wished that the great voice had been a shriek, crying: Mourn, wretched mothers of sons not yet conceived! Mourn, wail and beat your breasts. Mourn, and beware! A lord of evil sends plagues to torment the living and infect even the unborn!
VII
HOO HOO, was it ever cold in the glen! Lambent stalactites of ice, rivulets seized in the face of the rock, crevices steel gray, blind mirrors framed by briar and snow, reflecting nothing. Fleet of foot, I raced, leaping from boulder to boulder, vaulting over tree trunks. Limbs of huge oaks gave way; from the frozen earth, I tore saplings with their roots, like tufts of grass, and cast them into the turbid lower void. And always my war cry: Hoo hoo! Abruptly, the day died. Hecate appeared out of the night, denser in blackness than night herself, majestic. On her left shoulder, she bore a moon. It was white like death. I hailed her, fell on my knees, and groveled. I felt around me for the place where the stones were sharpest, to beat my forehead against them. I clawed at my face and lips. At last, I bled. I licked and swallowed the blood, as I had swallowed him. Yellow crust, scabs, the taste of pus. Her moon leered at me. I leapt in pursuit. Arrived above the tallest pines, where the meadow like a shroud stretched toward the first star, I saw I was alone. Boreal wind. Hoo it was cold! Stripped to the waist, I cleansed the palms of my hands on gleaming snow, which I dug from inside a deep mound, rubbed my eyes, face, and breast with it. Only then, at last, I cupped my hands, carried fresh snow to my lips, and quenched my horrid thirst.
I descended through snowdrifts—strong as a bull, patient as an ox. From their balconies, leaning perilously, great constellations stared in wonder. Again, the tree line. There, brief slumber, like the touch of a god, purged me of all fever. Kyrie eleison! I raised my voice in a hymn of thanksgiving.
Charlie fell silent. He was still in black; evidently, he had not changed his clothes after the funeral. The black shoes he extended toward the embers in my fireplace were caked with mud. His eyes looked like raw meat. I had put a bottle of bourbon and the ice bucket on the low table next to his armchair. He refilled his glass and slept very quietly, with his mouth open. A few minutes later, he was awake. I supposed that he had been drinking all evening, long before he appeared, unexpected, at the door of my living room.
Oblige me, and do something about that miser’s fire.
The handyman had sawed dead tree branches broken by the last storm into fireplace-sized pieces. Beside them he had stacked overgrown vines he had cleared. Overcoming my habitual fear of starting a chimney fire, I filled the fireplace to the brim. The flame surged like a wave. I went to the kitchen, found some hard biscuits and cheese, and set the food next to the bottle.
He ate attentively, licking his index and median fingers to pick up crumbs more easily from the plate. Some time passed in silence. He drained the remains of the bourbon into his glass and handed me the empty bottle.
You do have more? If not, scotch will be just fine.
I made another trip to the kitchen.
Good. Now throw in some real logs and sit down. There, these should be enough. Have a drink. Celebrate with me. I have done it, I have stepped off the ledge, it’s over.
He poured some whiskey for me, put ice in it, refilled his own glass, and stared until I felt I must speak. It all seemed horribly clear, and I did not want to fall short of his candor. Therefore, I said to him, You mean you helped him commit suicide? It’s awful that you had to do it, but surely it was the right thing.
Charlie laughed.
Suicide? Certainly not! Toby had no intention of killing himself. He wanted to hang in there. His own words! That’s what he wanted. He was furious I had brought him here, and didn’t stop complaining until I had pr
omised to drive him back to the city the next day for another transfusion. Of course, we didn’t make it. He died in the evening. He even made me telephone the nurses and tell them not to bother to come out. That’s why he was alone.
I suppose you and Toby never discussed this point, he continued, so you don’t know how strongly he felt that there should be a nice order of precedence in death. Like letting the older person go through the door first. Après vous, Maman, après vous, Charlie. I think the more elegant attitude in these circumstances might be: Surtout, avant vous, Gaston! There is only one argument to the contrary, which doesn’t apply in my case, because I wasn’t cut out to be a nurse, that Alphonse wants to stick around, Nurse Gaston, lave and bury him, and pay his bills. Subtleties of this sort were lost on Toby. All he knew was that he was dying and others weren’t. His mother’s having lost her marbles was a sort of mitigating circumstance, a partial excuse for her good physical health, but he really took it very hard that I had been, his word again, spared. Spared what? I would ask him. Your particular disease? You know nothing of how I will die, and why do you wish to be there to find out? Believe me, I would say, it’s all quite random, who goes first and why and how, and quite immaterial. Take the massacre of the Innocents. Does it matter that there is no evidence to prove that a large number of the mothers impaled themselves on the Romans’ swords or lost their minds from grief? Does it matter that mothers and fathers who saw their children butchered went right on doing their best to survive in Auschwitz, or Bergen-Belsen, or any other of those hell pits, and did in fact survive, and after the war raised new fucked-up families, just like everybody else? My foot! There is a famine in Ethiopia—pick any country in Africa. In one picture, a mother carries a withered child, in another it’s some balloon on legs like hairpins playing in the dust, while momma and poppa are picked at by a bunch of birds. Are the living better off than the dead? Only the dead are spared, Toby, I would tell him. You have heard about the music of the spheres? It’s the upgathered howl of pain, rising from every corner of the earth. Like a toilet bowl that has overflowed and yet some idiot keeps flushing. But I might as well have talked to a wall.
Without warning, he was asleep again. This time, he snored very loudly.
Aha, a good sign! I heard myself snore. Toby always claimed he could hear me from down the hall. Let no one say that Charlie Swan has murdered sleep!
He refused my offer of coffee.
Charlie, I said, have you been trying to say you killed Toby? If that’s so, tell it to me, get it out of your mind, and don’t talk about it again—I mean to anyone else. He was practically dead anyway. You only did what he should have asked of you.
Don’t jump to conclusions, old friend. I don’t need a lawyer, not this time. Toby died of what they call natural causes and, absent accident, so will I, to keep my part of the bargain. But if you like, I will a tale unfold. Just for you. Imagine my house. It’s afternoon. Winter sunlight, a decent fire in the fireplace, irises and tulips arranged by me. I have fed Toby lunch. Custard brought from New York, chocolate milk, and pills. More pills—a stunning multitude—in little dishes cunningly displayed on my mother’s night table, which I have moved into his room. But one night table is not enough. The rest of the pharmacy, a junkie’s dowry of sedatives and tonics, occupies the cocktail tray I have placed on a trestle. Together with his poor treasures: photographs taken on a beach in Beirut, and I suppose at Christmas, held in a traveling wallet of cracked, faded leather that was his father’s, the Easter egg with a clock inside it I gave him after our first night together, his loose-leaf address book, closed with a rubber band and bulging with business cards and scraps of paper crumpled like tissue. On them, the entire universe of a homeless waif. Heartbreak. What has he besides? The bed I let him use? His clothes? Pills and wads of sterile gauze?
I clear the dishes and come back. He is on the bed, propped up on the pillows, under that alpaca or mohair throw. I recall that I must have it cleaned. Face like the head of a dead sheep. I have brought very soft pajamas for him, to keep him warm—and to stop him from scratching his legs. Instead, he is wearing the antique woman’s kimono embroidered with cranes I brought from Hong Kong. An effort at coquetry? Or does the silk feel better against his skin? In any case, the effect is grotesque. Cranes are a symbol of longevity. I wonder how much longer I can bear it, and sit down on a chair beside him.
You know, I can go to New York for the transfusion alone, he tells me. Mr. Babinski will drive me down, and once I’m in the city it’s very easy. I’ll call you if there is a problem.
At once, I begin to cry, and turn away quickly, so he won’t see my face. It’s all there, in those few words: his desperate will to continue—for what? Dependence. Fear of displeasing. Displeasing me. As though that were still an issue. And I said to myself that all I know, or think I know, about the human condition, everything I have so carefully explained to him—for one reason only, so that he would swallow enough of those goddamned pills and leave me at last in peace—missed the point. He wants fraternity, not equality. For a leper, real fraternity exists only with other lepers, not with the nice doctor from the Bronx who comes to look after him during a summer vacation. There is no fraternity between the guy whose eyes have been seared by some Indian policeman and the ladies and gentlemen of Amnesty. His brothers are the guys in the same police station, the same prison, the same cell, having the same plant juice dripped under their eyelids.
And so I shift again in my chair, smile, and assure Toby that it is in fact very convenient for me to be in New York for a few days. I ask him to excuse me for a moment, I will be right back.
I have always been proud of my teeth. If you haven’t noticed before, look: they are white and perfect, as though I had had them capped, but they are, in fact, entirely my own. The only time my gums have bled is when I have been hit on the mouth in the boxing ring. I take a metal fingernail file in the bathroom and cut my gums savagely. Crisscross. Also the insides of my cheeks. Then I go in to him. He has begun to doze. I kneel down at the side of the bed, slide my hand under that blanket. The kimono is already half-open. I caress him, first at the ankles, moving up slowly, feeling for crusts to avoid hurting the sores. For a while, he pretends I have not waked him. Then his face lights up, eyes wide open. I hear his breath. He thinks I want him, turns toward me, his thigh lifts to meet my hand. He has been so very weak, I don’t know what to expect, but yes, it’s ready. So I rise from my knees, grab his waist, stoop, and take him. His stomach, his buttocks, heave against my hands. A moment later, it has been done, sealed! I linger like a bridegroom and let go gently, reluctantly. His fingers are in my hair, playing with my ears. When he is quiet again, I show him the inside of my mouth. From the taste, I can tell it is still bleeding. I look into his eyes. For whatever it’s worth, he knows that it will have to be the same for me.
Then I lie down beside him. He has turned on his side, with his back to me. The old spoon position, well known to bring comfort and peace. Except that, suddenly, it is not comfort I want. I pierce him. Like a battering ram. Without letting down my trousers. And all the while, the kid howls from pain.
The exigencies of my toilette. He too has composed himself and goes back to being grateful. I administer a sedative and show him where there are lots more should he want them. Then I say, I will leave the lights on in your room. I need a long walk now. Nothing more can happen to you until I return.
And I rush to that frozen glen. Hours later, I approach the house like a burglar. Leave the car on the road, creep quietly, quietly on the side of the driveway, so the gravel won’t crunch. His light is still on.
He rinsed his mouth with the bourbon and winked at me. I managed to smile back. Some minutes passed. I heard what could be a muffled cry and ran upstairs. The bedroom door was open. In the wedge of light that came from the corridor I saw Laura’s face. She was sleeping peacefully. I leaned my head against the door frame and remained there until my heart stopped pounding. She had lost a quantit
y of blood two days earlier, when she returned from Milan, but the doctor still hoped she would be able to keep the child.
When I came back downstairs, the room was empty. Dying coals glowed in the fireplace. The only glass on the coffee table was my own. Charlie had vanished.
I never have asked Charlie why he had that woman pray over the grave at Toby’s funeral, or what was his reason for the Verdi lament. I suppose I was held back by a sort of shy respect. Much later, though, under different skies, as I turned the matter over in my mind, it occurred to me that Charlie might have laughed at my indignation had I told him about it. He had indeed come to look like an aged Mars. I could imagine him throwing back that gorgeous head and saying to me something like, My boy, I don’t look at the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel to learn about paleontology. I haven’t stopped praying because prayers aren’t granted, any more than heterosexuals have stopped screwing because children are born to suffer and to die. I told the Wop to sing the Requiem because it’s so beautiful.
Also by Louis Begley
WARTIME LIES
THE MAN WHO WAS LATE
About the Author
LOUIS BEGLEY is a lawyer as well as a novelist and lives in New York City. His first novel, Wartime Lies, was the winner of the 1991 PEN Hemingway Award, the Irish Times-Aer Lingus Book Prize, and the Prix Médicis Etranger, France’s most coveted prize for fiction in translation. It was also nominated for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Mr. Begley’s second novel, The Man Who Was Late, received wide critical acclaim. In 1993, he was elected president of the PEN American Center.
