Mary McCarthy

by Mary McCarthy

  The little bohemian heiress, in fact, was the center of his inattention, an inattention principled and profound. From the very first night, apparently, she had associated herself in his mind with culture, and hence, merely by talking about them, she had fallen into the class of objects—cathedrals, works of art, museums, palaces maintained by the state—which, by being free to all, were valuable, in his opinion, to none. And by the same trick by which he substituted an empty space for the cathedral in the Piazza San Marco, he “vanished” Miss Grabbe from the table at dinner. The possibility of her buying a palazzo, which she spoke of continually, he simply declined to credit. His business interest, it would seem, was far too deep to be aroused by it, and no commission could be large enough to make him expand his idea of money to accommodate within it the living heresy of Miss Grabbe. All over Venice, volunteer real-estate agents were at work for her, the concierge at the Grand Hotel, the lift-boy, a gondolier, two Communist painters in a studio across the Canal. Mr. Sciarappa only smiled impatiently whenever this project was mentioned, and once he nudged the young lady and significantly tapped his head.

  Miss Grabbe, for her part, was unaware of his feelings. The first evening on the balcony, she had expressed herself strongly against him. Pointing dramatically to the blue lagoon, the towers, the domes, the clouds, the Palladian front of San Giorgio, all as pink and white, as airy, watery, clear, and neat as the bottles and puffs on her own dressing-table, she had taken the young man’s arm and invited him to choose. “My dear, why do you see him? He is not our sort,” she had said. “Life is too short. He will spoil Venice for you if you let him.” The young man had simply stared. Mr. Sciarappa was a nuisance, but he felt no inclination to trade him for the Venetian “experience.” The bargain was too sharp for his nature. If Mr. Sciarappa obstructed the European view, he also replaced it. The mystery of Europe lay in him as solidly as in the stones of Venice, and it was somewhat less worn by previous inquisitive travelers. Night after night, he and the young lady would sit up examining Mr. Sciarappa with the refined passion of connoisseurs. It was true that sometimes at the dinner-hour they would try to give him the slip, yet they felt a certain relief whenever he rose from behind a potted plant in the hotel lobby to claim, once again, their company. He had become a problem for them in both senses of the word: the impossibility of talking with him was compensated for by the possibilities of talking about him, and the detachment of their attitude was, they felt, atoned for by their neighborliness in the physical sphere. How much, in fact, they had come to feel that they owed Mr. Sciarappa their company, they did not recognize until the afternoon, extraordinary to them, when he was not on hand to collect the debt.

  The day of the fiesta he silently disappeared. Like everyone else in Venice he had been planning on the occasion. Colored lanterns had been attached to the gondolas, floats were being decked, and rumors, gay as paper flowers, promised a night of license, masking, and folly. A party of English tourists was expected; Miss Grabbe was trying on eighteenth-century court costumes with the Communists across the Canal. Apparently, Mr. Sciarappa had set this as the date of his own liberation, for at the apéritif hour he was not to be seen, either at the hotel or, as he had stipulated, in the Piazza. The two friends connected his appearance with the arrival of the English tourists, for at the first mention of their existence, his mind had ducked underground, into the tunnel where his real life was conducted. They had known him long enough to see him as a city of Catacombs, and to interpret his lapses of attention as signs of the keenest interest; his silences were the camouflaged entrances to the Plutonian realm of his thoughts. Nevertheless, they felt slightly shocked and abandoned. Like many intellectual people, they were alarmed by the confirmation of theories—was the world as small as the mind? They telephoned their hotel twice, but their friend had left no messages for them, and, disturbed, they allowed Miss Grabbe to go off with her maskers while they watched on the cold jetty the little gondolas chasing up and down the Canal in pursuit of the great floating orchestra which everybody had seen in the afternoon but which now, like Mr. Sciarappa, had unaccountably disappeared.

  Some time later, they perceived Mr. Sciarappa alone in a gondola that was rapidly making for the pier. They would not have recognized him had he not called out effusively, “Ah, my friends, I am looking for you all over Venice tonight.”

  The full force of this lie was lost on them, for they were less astonished to find Scampi in a falsehood than to find him in a new suit. In dark blue and white stripes, he stepped out of the gondola; gold links gleamed at his wrists; his face was soft from the barbershop, and a strong fragrance of Chanel caused passers-by to turn to stare at them. The bluish-white glare from the dome of San Giorgio, lit up for the occasion, fell on him, accentuating the moment. The heavier material had added a certain substantiality to him; like the men in Harry’s Bar, he looked sybaritic, prosperous, and vain. But this transfiguration was, it became clear, merely the afterglow of some hope that had already set for him. Wherever he had been, he had failed to accomplish his object, if indeed he had had an object beyond the vague adventure of a carnival night. He was more nervous than ever, and he invited them to join him on the Canal in the manner of a man who is weighing the security of companionship against the advantages of the lone hand. The two friends declined, and he put off once more in the gondola, saying, “Well, my dears, you are right; it is just a tourist fiesta.” The two retired to their window to wonder whether the English tourists, and not themselves or Miss Grabbe, had not been, after all, the real Venetian attraction. The Inglesi’s arrival might well have been anticipated in a newspaper, particularly since they had the reputation of being rich collectors of furniture. Mr. Sciarappa’s restless behavior, irrational in a pursuer who has already come up with his prey, was appropriate enough to the boredom and anxiety of waiting. Indeed, sometimes, watching him drum on the table, they had said to themselves that he behaved toward them like a passenger who is detained between trains in a provincial railroad station and vainly tries to interest himself in the billboard and the ticket collector.

  Miss Grabbe had taken very little part in all this mental excitement. So far as the two friends could see, he had no erotic interest for her. She was as adamant to his virility as he to the evidence of her money—it would have disturbed all her preconceptions to discover sex in a business suit. She received his disappearance calmly, saying, “I thought you wanted to get rid of him—he has probably found bigger fish.” In general, after her first protest, she had grown accustomed to Mr. Sciarappa, in the manner of the rich. For her he did not assume prominence through the frequency of his attendance, but on the contrary he receded into the surroundings in the fashion of a piece of furniture that is “lived with.” She opened and closed him like a guidebook whenever she needed the name of a hotel or a hairdresser or had forgotten the Italian for what she wanted to say to the waiter. Having money, she had little real curiosity; she was not a dependent of the world. It did not occur to her to inquire why he had come, nor did she ask when he would leave. She too spoke of him as “Scampi,” but tolerantly, without resentment, as nice women call a dog a rascal. She was not, despite appearances, a woman of strong convictions; she accepted any current situation as normative and was not anxious for change. Her money had made her insular; she was used to a mercenary circle and had no idea that outside it lovers showed affection, friends repaid kindness, and husbands did not ask an allowance or bring their mistresses home to bed. So now she accepted Mr. Sciarappa’s dubious presence without particular question; it struck her as far less unnatural than the daily affection she witnessed between the young man and the young lady. She domesticated all the queerness of his being with them in Venice. “My dear,” she remonstrated with the young man, “he simply wants to sell us something,” dissipating Sciarappa as succinctly as if he had been a Fuller Brush man at the door. It irritated them slightly that she would not see the problem of Sciarappa, and they did not guess that now, when they had given up
expecting it, she would grapple with their problem more matter-of-factly than they. While the two friends slept, through the night of the fiesta she and Mr. Sciarappa made love; when he departed, in dressing-gown and slippers, she thanked him “for a very pleasant evening.”

  Mr. Sciarappa, however, did not stay to cement the relationship. He left Venice precipitately, as though retreating ahead of Miss Grabbe’s revelations. He was gone the next afternoon, without spoken adieus, leaving behind him a list of the second-best restaurants in Florence for the young lady, with an asterisk marking the ones where he was personally known to the headwaiter. “Unhappily,” his note ran, “one cannot be on a holiday forever.” On a final zigzag of policy he had careened away from them into the inexplicable. Now that he had declared himself in action, his motives seemed the more obscure. What, in fact, had he been up to? It was impossible to find out from Miss Grabbe, for to her mind sex went without explanations; it seemed to her perfectly ordinary that two strangers who were indifferent to each other should spend the night locked in the privacies of love.

  Sitting up in bed, surrounded by hot-water bottles (for she had caught cold in her stomach), she received the two friends at tea-time and related her experiences of the night, using confession matter-of-factly, as a species of feminine hygiene, to disinfect her spirit of any lingering touch of the man. Scampi, she said, accepting the nickname from the young man as a kind of garment for the Italian gentleman, who seemed to stand there before them, shivering and slightly chicken-breasted in the nude, Scampi, she said, was very nice, but not in any way remarkable, the usual Italian man. He had taken her back from the fiesta, where the orchestra had never been found and she had grown tired of the painters, who looked ridiculous in costume when no one else was dressed. He had pinched her bottom on the Riva and undressed her on the balcony; they had tussled and gone to bed. Upon the cold stage of Miss Grabbe’s bald narrative, he capered in and out like a grotesque, now naked, chasing her naked onto the balcony, now gorgeous in a silk dressing-gown and slippers tiptoeing down the corridor of the hotel, now correct in light tan pajamas dutifully, domestically, turning out the light. For a moment, they saw him all shrunken and wizened. (“My dear, he is much older than you think,” said Miss Grabbe confidentially), and another glimpse revealed him in an aspect still more intimate and terrible, tossing the scapular he wore about his neck, and which hung down and interfered with his love-making, back again and again, lightly, flippantly, recklessly, over his thin shoulder.

  “Stop,” cried the young lady, seizing the young man’s hands and pressing them in an agony of repentance to her own bosom. “Does it shock you?” inquired Miss Grabbe, lifting her black eyebrows. “Darling, you gave me Sciarappa.”

  “No, no,” begged the young lady, for it seemed to her that this was not at all what they had wanted, this mortal exposé, but that, on the contrary, they had had in mind something more sociological, more humane—biographical details, Mr. Sciarappa’s relation with his parents, his social position, his business, his connection with the Fascist state. But of all this, of course, Miss Grabbe could tell them nothing. The poor Italian, hunted down, defenseless, surprised in bed by a party of intruders, had yielded nothing but his manhood. His motives, his status, his true public and social self, everything that the young lady now called “the really interesting part about him,” he had carried off with him to Rome intact. He was gone and had left them with his skin, withered, dry, unexpectedly old. Through Miss Grabbe, they had come as close to him bodily as the laws of nature permit, and there at the core there was nothing—they had known him better in the Galleria in Milan. As for the affective side of him, the emotions and sentiments, here too he had eluded them. Miss Grabbe’s net had been too coarse to catch whatever small feelings had escaped him during the encounter.

  A sense of desolation descended on the room, the usual price of confidences. It was a relief when one of the Communist painters came in with some lira, which Miss Grabbe put in her douche-bag. The two friends exchanged a glance of illumination. Had this repository for his country’s debased currency proved too casual for Mr. Sciarappa’s sense of honor? Was this the cause of his flight? If so, was it the lira or his manhood that was insulted? Or were the two, in the end, indistinguishable?

  The two friends could never be sure, and when they left Venice shortly afterwards they were still debating whether some tactlessness of Miss Grabbe’s had set Scampi at last in motion or whether his own action, by committing him for an hour or so, had terrified him into instant removal. He was a theoretician of practice so pure, they said to each other on the bus, that any action must appear to him as folly because of the risks to his shrewdness that it involved, a man so worldly that he saw the world as a lie too transparent to fool Rino Sciarappa, who was clever and knew the ropes. As they passed through the bony Apennines, the landscape itself seemed to wear a face baked and disabused as Mr. Sciarappa’s own, and thus to give their theories a geological and national cast. The terraced fields lay scorched, like Mr. Sciarappa’s wrinkles, on the gaunt umber-colored hillsides; like his vernal hopes, plants sprang up only to die here, and the land had the mark of wisdom—it too had seen life. After these reflections, it was a little anticlimactic to meet, half an hour after their arrival in Florence, the face of Italian history, whose destination had been announced as Rome. “He is following us, but he is ahead,” said the young man, abandoning historical explanations forever. Only one conclusion seemed possible—he must be a spy.

  In Florence, at any rate, he appeared to be acquainted; he introduced them to a number of American girls who worked in United States offices and to one or two young men who wore American uniforms. All of these people, as he had once promised them in Venice, called him by his first name; yet when the dinner-hour drew near the whole party vanished as agilely as Mr. Sciarappa, and the two friends found themselves once more going to his favorite restaurant, drinking his favorite wine, and being snubbed first by the waiter and then by their impatient guide. If he was a spy, however, his superiors must at last have given him a new assignment, for the next day he left Florence, not without giving the young lady his restaurant key to Rome.

  In Rome, curiosity led them, at long last, and with some reluctance, to investigate his address, which he had written out in the young lady’s address book long ago, on the train, outside Domodossola, when their acquaintance had promised to be of somewhat shorter duration. As their steps turned into the dusty Via San Ignazio, they felt their hearts quicken. The European enigma and its architectural solution lay just before them, around a bend in the street, and they still, in spite of everything, should not have been surprised to find a renaissance palace, a coat of arms, and a liveried manservant just inside the door. But the house was plain and shabby; it was impossible to conceive of Mr. Sciarappa’s gabardines proceeding deftly through the entrance. Looking at this yellow house, at the unshaven tenant in his undershirt regarding them from the third-story window, and the mattress and the geranium in the fourth, the two friends felt a return of that mortification and unseemly embarrassment they had experienced in Miss Grabbe’s bedroom. This house too was an obscenity, like the shrunken skin and the scapular, but it also was a shell which Rino Sciarappa did not truly inhabit. By common consent, they turned silently away from it, with a certain distaste which, oddly enough, was not directed at Mr. Sciarappa or his residence, but, momentarily, at each other. The relation between pursuer and pursued had been confounded, by a dialectic too subtle for their eyes.

  The Old Men

  TO THE young man in the hospital nightshirt, the continuous moaning of the old voice across the hall was at first a simple irritant, like the clanking of radiator pipes. Could not somebody put a stop to it? was his involuntary, impatient query. He was furious with the hospital, with the doctor, and above all with his own irrelevance in having fallen off a ladder in his friend’s New England studio and landed here, at the county seat, with a broken elbow, in the private wing of an institution that, in eve
rything but the charge per diem, resembled penury itself. The windy old voice perpetually crying “Nurse, nurse!” from just across the corridor, groaning, quavering, soughing, seemed to typify everything that was antiquated and unnecessary in the whole situation. Despite the young man’s efforts to take a more humane view, the notion that his old neighbor could be turned off with one severe twist of the wrist, like a leaking faucet, persisted in the young man’s head, together with the conviction that he himself, in the old man’s position, would have shown more self-control. Once he had allowed himself to voice this comparative judgment, however, he was immediately filled with chagrin, for he was a just young man, of a cool but chivalrous disposition, and he recognized that there had been nothing, as yet, in his young life to test his powers of self-restraint; all he could say with positiveness was that in order to utter such vivid groans as proceeded from the opposite room he would have to be a different person—i.e., to be ailing and old.