by James Salter
She left him at the entrance to his hotel, and her car, noisy, plain, sped off. Every detail of going up to his room—the face of the portiere, the heavy key, the coming together of polished doors, the rising, his slow walk down vaulted corridors—everything affirmed his feeling of triumph. He lay in bed content to be alone at so solemn a moment, to be able to savor it. In the streets of the sleeping city, along its bare, new avenues, across its empty squares her car still dashed, its headlights jumping nervously on the roughness of the road, his thoughts enclosing it, sheltering it as it went.
In the morning, the telephone rang. “Ciao, amore,” she said.
“Ciao.”
“I wanted to hear your voice.”
“I was sleeping,” he confessed.
“Yes, of course. The sleep of the blessed. I too …”
Her words stirred him. The maids were dropping brooms in the hall.
“I imagine you lying there …” At last she was free to speak. She had so many things to say, so much that had waited. “I picture you taking a bath. The water is pouring into the tub, filling the room with a luxurious sound.”
“Are you at home?” he asked.
“Sì. At home, in my bed. It’s only a small bed, it’s not like yours.”
“Like mine?”
“You have a big one, don’t you? At least, I imagine it so.”
She was calling from her room in a voice that was slightly guarded, even though, as she said, her mother spoke no English. He was in Italy. The girls on the street, the mechanics, the boys in the outskirts driving motorbikes home from work on winter evenings with newspaper wrapped around their hands—suddenly he felt he might share their lives.
They went again to the apartment with its wooden doors. In the daylight it seemed abandoned. The floor had a vague pattern of flowers, the walls were tan. The owner’s English clothes, pushed to one side, were hanging in a wardrobe. The sun, as if by chance, fell in one window. It was bare and chilly, but visit by visit it became theirs.
They went on Saturdays. He sat sketching the ruins opposite. There were stacks of torn magazines near his elbow: Oggi, Paris-Match. In the street the sound of occasional footsteps, the racketing cars. He seemed calm but he was terrified. I will never learn it, he thought, the language, the hours, the life. He concentrated on the drawing, searching for the right colors.
She appeared at his side. “Does music bother you?”
“Not at all.”
She put on a record. She watched him work. In the afternoon they went to a film. They parked three blocks away. Approaching the theater he felt like a boy who has not studied his lessons and is entering class. He mingled uneasily with the others. They sat in the audience and she whispered important lines to him in the dark.
The radio was playing softly. It was cold in the evening; they were chilled. The light, even in these southern latitudes, was fading. She had put the kettle on and was arranging the cups and spoons—faint, homely sounds that struck him like voices from afar. He felt the first touch of panic at her kindness. It was not kindness he needed. His life was being washed away, it was coming to pieces, floating like paper on the tide; he needed hours that were useful, work, responsibility. He smiled wanly as she brought the cups to his chair and knelt beside it. Silence. In the manner of a servant girl she began to remove his shoes and socks. His feet were bare. She drew them to her.
“You are cold,” she said. She held them in her hands. “I will warm you.” She spoke to them as if they were children. “There, that’s better, isn’t it? Sì. Yes, you are not used to winter, not these winters. These are something new. They can be cold, more cold than you imagine. In your nice English shoes everyone thinks you are warm and content. Look, how nice your shoes are, they say, such fine shoes. Yes, they think you are warm because you look nice; they think you are happy. But happiness is not so easy to find, is it? It’s very difficult to find. It’s like money. It comes only once. If you are lucky, it comes once, and the worst part is there’s nothing you can do. You can hope, you can search, anger, prayers. Nothing. How frightening to be without it, to wait for happiness, to be patient, to be ready, to have your face upturned and luminous like girls at communion. Yes, you are saying to yourself, me, me, I am ready.”
Her cheek was pressed to his naked feet. She seemed very small.
“And nothing happens,” she said. “It happens to all the others. Yes, you think, it will happen to me. And every year you have more to give, nothing is spent, nothing is taken away, you are richer, you are laden, and every year the same: nothing. Until finally there are almost no others, you are left alone like one flower in a great meadow, and it is autumn, yes, the days are growing shorter, the grass bends beneath the wind. And the sun comes and shines on you still, alone in that great field, the last flower, beautiful, yes, because of that, and there you are in the long, endless afternoons, waiting, waiting …”
She was a woman of great strength. She was slight, but she possessed will and also a terrifying loneliness. The city echoed it. The great, steel shutters closed at night, the streets became empty, the people disappeared. There were lights in occasional restaurants and empty cafés, the rest was darkness, void. The monuments were sleeping, the cats were crouched beneath parked cars. It was a city built on matrimony and law, even if ridiculed, even if despised; all else was fugitive, all in vain.
“You will find happiness,” he told her. They were at lunch. The winter held days of sunshine, noons of infinite calm. He broke a piece of bread to cover his confusion, dismayed at the tense of his verb.
“Do you think so?” she said coolly. Nothing escaped her.
“Yes.”
“That’s encouraging.” She examined his face. She was cautious, warned.
He regretted what he had said, it was as if he had tried to release himself from involvement in her life. His guilt and the healthy faces of those at tables nearby created turmoil and shame in him. The long, dark hair of the Italian women, their passionate faces—faces all the more poignant because they were soft and would not last a decade—the talk of couples, of families, their intense interest in one another, their laughter, all of it seemed to celebrate connubial life, the many facets of it richer than his own, and richer too than any possibilities of his. He was frightened to realize that he had already passed with Lia into the silence of dutiful meals, their attention straying to others, to people being seated, as they waited for dishes to be placed before them.
“You are silent,” she said.
“Am I?”
He did not know what else to reply. He could see across from him, as if it were already accomplished, the woman he had married, with whom he was destined to sit at table for all the remaining years of his life. He envied everyone about him who had married someone different and was engaged in easy conversation; in the long run, what is more important than that? It is the bread of sexual life.
At the same time, he saw that it was a kind of panic which was making him mute, that he was not himself, he was unsure. There were deep, almost invincible yearnings and hungers in this woman. They would not reveal themselves in a day, they had been too long steeping. She was like a convict, an outcast in whom one must believe or she would be lost, who needed someone to save her. And that man she would astonish, the man who committed his life. Thoughts of the underground river passed through his mind, the voyage few men dared take, in which one risked everything.
“You know what I’d like to do, Lia …”
“Tell me.”
“I’d like to take a trip. I’d like to go somewhere with you, away from Rome, the two of us. Would you like that?”
“Sì, amore.”
“For a week or so.”
“Sì. Can you wait just a little? My parents are planning to go away. That would be a good time.”
“Where are they going?”
“To Sicily.”
“We’ll go north.”
“Don’t worry, they won’t find us.”
&
nbsp; He could not hold his thoughts intact long enough to understand what was happening. He was in turmoil; was he being tested? Was anything more than this swooping from a semblance of happiness to boredom and fear still possible for him? Or perhaps, in the way of someone blind to his own weaknesses, he was about to enact again a hopeless domesticity, to repeat those things which had already brought him here, to a strange country far from home.
Sometimes he slept in the apartment, uneasy, alone. She came to him in the morning. She had oranges in her handbag, flowers, pictures of her childhood, of the father who adored her too frankly, photos taken on Mikonos, in London when she weighed fifty-five kilos—horrible, she turned them over quickly, she was ashamed of them but she wanted to show him everything—the homely English girl friend at whose country house she spent an icy Christmas. She wanted him to share her life. In her white underpants she sat kneeling on the bed and prepared an orange. She was solemn, she did not speak. The shutters were open, the sunlight poured in.
She showed him her city, the keyhole in the Piazza dei Cavalieri di Malta through which one saw a hidden garden, and beyond it, floating in air, vast as the sun, the dome of St. Peter’s. She showed him museums and the ruins at Ostia, San Giovanni at Porta Latina with the tree struck by lightning, St. Agnese where the barbers of Rome shaved the beggars, small restaurants, graves. In the faded red stucco of a wall where a madman lived beneath the sidewalk when she was a child—they used to listen to him and run when he howled—an inscription was scratched. Viri stood reading it. YOUNG MAN, GOOD-LOOKING, INDUSTRIOUS. OBJECT: MATRIMONY. SEEKS SERIOUS AND CARINA GIRL. Beneath was a telephone number and certain irreverent comments.
“Yes,” Lia said dryly. “Matrimony.”
“But doesn’t he mean it?”
“Who knows?”
It was a mild day. The winter was almost past.
6
THEY WENT TO THE ARGENTARIO in April. The roads were empty. They drove for hours and in the warmth of the sun through the windshield, the gentle swaying of the car, he felt at peace. The country they were passing through was not what he had expected; it was bare, industrial seacoast. There were no quiet towns, no farms.
Lia was driving. As he looked at her, talked, watched her small hands, he realized that he was somehow holding something back despite it all: it was his opinion of her. Instead, he was wondering vaguely what Nedra would think; he was almost nervous, he imagined everything, even a curt dismissal, he was preparing to argue with her—those arguments that were always infuriating, that he never won.
“What are you thinking of, amore?”
“What am I thinking of? Somehow I’m never able to answer that question.”
“Are they secret thoughts?”
“No, not exactly.”
“Tell me.”
“Nothing is secret. It’s just that certain things can’t be said very well.”
“You make me curious.”
“I’ll tell you at dinner tonight,” he said.
She smiled.
“You don’t believe me?”
“I don’t want to pry.”
The hotel she had chosen was on the side of a hill. It was isolated and expensive. They signed their names in a small reception building before a young man dressed in striped trousers and a morning coat. Their luggage was carried down to one of the wings below, the door to their room was opened. Like a prisoner who is taken from an administrative office, along corridors, and finally hears the steel bolts close his cell, Viri, the moment they were alone, felt depressed beyond words. The floor he stood upon was tile. The room was chilly, dark, the window lay in the shadow of other walls. There was a wide bed, composed in a practical manner: two smaller beds put together. Given the bed, not much additional space existed.
“I’m sorry,” he said to her. “Do you like this room?”
She looked about briefly and shrugged.
He climbed the steps to the office, where, after much consultation of ledger pages though the hotel was almost empty, and several discussions between someone invisible in the back room and the clerk, it was arranged that they should have another room—a suite, in fact.
Viri could not bring himself to speak in Italian. “Will it be the same price?”
“Yes, the same price,” the clerk said, not bothering to look up.
“Thank you.”
“Certainly, sir.”
They walked down to the cala after lunch. The sun was warm. The descent wound past villa after villa, all new, all with freshly sodded lawns. Lia was talking about where one could live in Rome, in what kind of apartment. His mind was wandering. The roofs of the villas, the little driveways, were all identical. From time to time, he offered a sound of agreement. He tried to seem at ease.
They lay on the pebbled beach. The bar of bamboo and palm fronds was closed, it was still too early in the season.
“Talk to me,” she said. “You talk so little about yourself. I am fascinated by your name. How did you come to be named Vladimir?”
“It’s a Russian name. My family came from Russia.”
“From which part?”
“I don’t know. From the south.”
He lay there silent. A lone attendant was raking up seaweed. The water was too cold for them to swim. Looking down, he suddenly saw beneath him the thin, white legs of his father. He wrapped the towel around himself. Lia’s flesh, always a faint brown, exotic, strange, was faintly goose-pimpled from the wind.
“Do you want a towel?”
“I prefer the sun,” she said.
“What is it like in Sicily?”
“I’ve never been to Sicily.”
They walked up slowly. It was very long, he had tried not to think of it on the way down. Twice she stopped to rest and he stood waiting, once above a trash heap. “They throw it anywhere,” she said. “You know, there’s a strike, amore. They don’t collect it any more.”
He began to notice the green plastic bags stuffed in the underbrush along the road.
“We should have driven down,” he said.
“Sì.”
In the late afternoon the room had a smell of dampness. He noticed a mosquito gliding along the upper wall. He lay on a small daybed near the terrace doors, Lia beside him. Her robe was open—he had untied it—her eyes concealed in shadow. The black print of her navel, the even blacker cuneal hair shone up at him like dark stones at the bottom of a pond. She was thin, her flesh was soft, easily bruised. There he was, between her legs, she was uncovered, sprawled among her clothing. The mosquito had slipped from sight, vanished. They were clasped in each other’s arms, disinterested, naked, soiling the rumpled bedspread that covered a mattress.
The act was somehow shameful, an act of boredom and desperation, entered into because everything else had failed. It ended quickly. He lay by her side and put his arm beneath her head, drawing the robe over her at the same time as if she were a shop and he were closing her for the night—a shop one had to talk to. She said nothing. She lay unmoving in the dark.
In Porto Santo Stefano they found a restaurant and sat down for dinner. Only one other table was occupied. “I suppose it’s a little early,” he commented.
“Sì.”
He was counting on the meal to replenish some of the joy that had fled from him, as one counts on medicines or amusements. He read the menu, he read it again like a man looking for something which is inexplicably missing. The waiter stood near his elbow.
She was not hungry, Lia confessed. The announcement disheartened him. He began to suggest things she might like. “Bollito misto.”
“No.”
“They have some fish.”
“Nothing, amore.”
The restaurant was empty; even the street outside was quiet. He sprinkled salt from the small glass dish by dipping into it with the tip of his knife and then tapping. He tried to drink the wine. He had ordered too much.
She watched him eat and said little. She was like a stranger he had encountered on
a journey, suddenly he did not know if he could trust her. He was certain she could sense his nervousness. The waiter was sitting near the door to the kitchen; the owner seemed half asleep.
“It feels as if we were in exile,” Viri said. “The tagliatelle is good. Have a taste.”
She accepted. His hand held forth the fork in the deserted room, like a room where an assassination is to take place.
“Do you want to go back to Rome?” she asked.
He felt guilty. He felt he was spoiling everything. “I don’t know. Let’s decide tomorrow,” he said. “I’m a little nervous, I don’t know why. I’m sure I’ll get over it. And the hotel … Perhaps it’s the barometer or something. Give me a day or two, it will be all right.”
And later, in bed, he saw her approach, raise her arms and take off her nightgown. Even this act frightened him. She slipped in beside him, naked, unhurried. “Amore, of course I’ll wait,” she said. “You know that. I am yours,” she said in a voice without hope. “Do what you like to me.”
7
THE TERRORS OF BANISHMENT, OF a new world. What in the beginning was novel, curious, slowly hardens to intractable life, the laughter fades, it is like a difficult school, one which will never end. He did not recognize the holidays. Even Sundays were meaningless, feared, with everything closed like a book.
Adorato, she whispered, amore dolce. Forgive this relentless courtship. She had little restraint left, she said. She had hungers only an orphan could know. She had begun to lose hope. Somehow it strengthened her. The terror of desperate longing which she had unfurled before him she now withdrew. In its place was a kind of aristocratic submission. She went to Milan with her parents. They saw the opera. She had her hair cut. The proprietor of the hotel wants his daughter to cut hers like mine, she wrote. They went to exhibitions, shopped. Even that does not quite kill the loneliness. I am wistful for you. I smoke a cigar in the evenings. They call me Cigarello, brown and thin. She came back witty and beautiful. Her eyes were cool. She wanted him, she said. She was living a d’Annunzian passion, one of acceptance, despair. I would like to fit your hand like a favorite soap. They were sitting on a bench in the Villa Borghese, eating milk chocolate from a bed of foil. The color of her nipples, she said later. She had to go home for dinner. Ciao, my swan, she smiled.
