Two Weeks in Another Town

by Irwin Shaw

“Well, the man making the documentary picture went broke. Finally, I was doing everything, carrying cameras, hustling credit from the film-developing company, working in the cutting room. Twenty hours a day. Without pay. For a while I was eating on twenty cents a day. Then on nothing. I came down with pneumonia. My mother claimed my body from the authorities and took me home to nurse me. My father never came into my room. He was waiting for me to come to him and get on my knees and beg him to forgive me and tell him that I had seen the light, I would devote my life to paper cartons from then on. But while I was getting over the pneumonia I decided I had to come to Italy. The Italians were making the only pictures that wouldn’t make an honest man vomit in the projection room. If you were serious about movies this was the only place you could come to learn. You know why the Italians have made the good pictures? Because they openly and unashamedly take pleasure in each other. They take pleasure in the whole Italian—in his vices and absurdities as well as in his virtues. They see the joke at the funeral, the corruption in the virgin, the holiness and the impiety at the same altar. When an American artist looks at a fellow-American his first reaction is a shudder of disgust. That’s all right as far as it goes, but it’s no basis for a whole art.”

  “What made you so sure you wanted to make pictures?” Jack asked curiously.

  “The great art of the twentieth century,” Bresach said portentously, “is going to come out of the movies. It’s just made a beginning, the first stumbling steps.” Bresach was waving his hands excitedly, obsessed with his vision. “All the beauty, all the tragedy and nerve of this century are finally going to be put on film, and every other-art form is going to decay around it. The Shakespeare of this century is going to be a movie director. And he won’t be working for just a few thousand people, locked into one language. He’ll work for the whole world. He’ll speak directly, without words, to the millions, and they’ll understand him. Indians, Chinese, the Russian brute in Siberia, the fellagha, the peon, the coolie, the factory slave…” Bresach was talking almost incoherently now. “The lights’ll dim in the smelliest little converted barn at the furthest end of the earth, and he’ll go directly to every heart, he’ll show them what it’s like, what it is to be a man alive, black, brown, yellow, or white, what there is to hope for. He’ll be their darling brother, their teacher, their creator, their entertainer, their love. Look at Chaplin. Who in our time has ever had a kingdom like the kingdom of Charlie Chaplin? I’m ambitious. I covet that kingdom.” Bresach laughed hoarsely. “And naturally, we kicked him out, naturally we exiled him. For the whole world he represented the best thing that had come out of America in the twentieth century, so we couldn’t bear it. We couldn’t stand his light, malicious, brotherly, godlike laughter, so we cleansed ourselves of him. Do you know a man by the name of McGranery?”

  Jack hesitated, trying to remember. “Yes,” he said. “He was the Attorney General who signed the order that barred Chaplin from the United States.”

  “There!” Bresach crowed triumphantly, waving his arms, spilling more wine. “McGranery is immortal. If he hadn’t done in Chaplin, his name would vanish like dogpiss on a hot rock. Now his fame rests secure. He showed the world what Americans are made of. McGranery, McGranery,” he chanted crazily, “all hail McGranery, the immortal and evergreen memory of McGranery, in whose image we are made.”

  “Calm down,” Jack said. “Everybody’s watching you.”

  Bresach stared imperiously at the other diners in the room. There was a fat bald man with his fat wife, looking up over their lasagne, smiling tentatively, and a table with four middle-aged men who had stopped eating to regard Bresach with annoyed expressions on their faces. Bresach raised his hand in the Fascist salute. “Il Duce!” he said. “Trieste, Fiume. Bella Nizza.”

  Embarrassed, the other diners dropped their eyes and went back to their eating.

  “Veronica used to complain, too, when I talked in restaurants,” Bresach said. “She said I made so much noise, I must have Italian blood in me.”

  “Well, what’s happened to you since you came here?” Jack asked. He wanted to keep Bresach off the subject of Veronica. But it wasn’t only that—he was curious, too. Somehow, with the brandies and the wine and their joined quest for a missing girl, he felt involved more than ever with the boy, and interested in the events of his life, almost as if Bresach were a much younger brother who had been away for a long time, or a grown son.

  “What’s happened to me?” Bresach laughed bitterly. “Nothing. Niente. I’ve written a script. And I’ve gotten a couple of days’ work as an extra in a picture about Nero, wearing a tin breastplate and helmet, and for two weeks I was permitted to run out for coffee and sandwiches for the second unit of a Hollywood company that was making a few exteriors in Venice.”

  “Did you learn anything?”

  “I learned you have to have luck,” Bresach said.

  “Has anybody read what you’ve done on the script yet?” Jack asked.

  “Yes. I have been highly praised.” He laughed bitterly. “It is too good, they say, to do commercially.”

  “Let me read it,” Jack said.

  “Why?” Bresach demanded.

  “Maybe I can help you.”

  “I do not accept money,” Bresach said. “I am pure about my enemies.”

  “Oh, balls,” Jack said. “First of all, I’m not your enemy. And second, I’m not going to give you any money.”

  “What, then?”

  “Maybe I can get Delaney to read it. If he likes it maybe hell take you on as an assistant,” Jack said. “He’s nearly finished with this picture, but there’s still most of the cutting and dubbing and music to do. He’s very good at all that. You could learn a lot from him. And he’s almost certain to do another picture here soon.” Even as he was talking, Jack was thinking that Delaney would profit more from the association than Bresach. Bresach’s violence and naive faith in the value of film might rekindle something in Delaney that had died down a long time ago.

  “Delaney.” Bresach made a face.

  “Don’t say another word,” Jack said warningly. “Do you want me to talk to him or not?”

  “Why’re you doing this, Jack?” Bresach asked. “Out of what guilt?”

  “Oh, hell,” Jack said. “How many times do I have to tell you I don’t feel the least bit guilty about you?”

  “If I accept,” Bresach said formally, “understand that the favor does not put me in your debt.”

  “I’m beginning to understand why your father was so exasperated,” Jack said, “and why your mother cried.”

  Surprisingly, Bresach grinned, boyish, teasing, satisfied. “I’m beginning to get on your nerves,” he said. “Good. Finally I’m going to get you to hate me. We are progressing.”

  Jack sighed. “Talk to him, Max,” he said.

  “Robert,” Max said, “there is no law that says you must be absolutely impossible at all times.”

  “I want everything to be clear and well understood between us,” Bresach said. “That’s all. I don’t want any murky passages.”

  “All right, I’ll talk to Delaney about you,” Jack said. “For what it’s worth. Do you think you have talent?”

  “I am a monster of talent,” Bresach said gravely.

  Jack laughed.

  “That godamn laugh again,” Bresach said.

  “I’m sorry,” Jack said. He had not meant to hurt the boy, but the laugh had escaped automatically. It was a gentle laugh, nostalgic even, as Jack recognized in Bresach the fierce certainty and immodesty of the untried, the young, the untested, the unwounded, the undiscovered.

  “Actually,” Jack said, “I’m laughing because I might have said the same thing, if anybody had asked me the same question, when I was your age.”

  “You crapped it away,” Bresach said. “Why?”

  “Be polite, Robert,” Max said. “The gentleman means you no harm.”

  “Why?” Bresach said, disregarding Max.

  “I’ll
write you a long letter,” Jack said.

  “What did you exchange it for?” Bresach said. “Your job in Paris?” He laughed harshly. “An organization of obsolete misfits pretending they can save the world with parades and belligerent statements to the newspapers, and falling into a profound, embarrassed hush whenever they hear the dirty laugh of reality outside the office door? What did you do, Jack, when the tanks came into Budapest? Where were you when the British fleet was at the mouth of the Suez Canal? What brilliant scheme did you come up with when the paratroopers tortured the fellagha in Algeria? What profound and illuminating criticisms do you make when Mr. Nasser incites everybody around him to murder everybody else around him? I know you. I know all of you…” Bresach said wildly. “All you soft-assed, soft-voiced, soft-brained maneuverers, sitting out the twentieth century, making soft, polite little noises, whispering together at cocktail parties, to drown out the noise of atomic experiments, the ticking of bombs, the screams on the radio, the appeals for help of men who should be your friends and who are murdered between the third and fourth martini…”

  “I do what I can,” Jack said, not quite believing it, shaken, despite himself, by the violence of the boy’s attack, and by the bitter echo, in his words, of the rebuke in Steve’s letter. “What the hell—whatever I do, it’s better than those idiotic pictures I was in.”

  “No,” Bresach said loudly. “You were a good actor. You were honest. You weren’t part of the brainless, optimistic conspiracy. If you weren’t saving anybody else, at least you were saving yourself. You added to the population of the world one rescued soul. That’s not to be sneered at. You shed that much light. Now what do you do? You spend your life spreading military darkness and political confusion. Tell me honestly, Jack, when you were twenty-two, when you made that first picture, would you have behaved the way you have here in Rome?”

  “I slept with girls when I was twenty-two,” Jack said, “if that’s what you mean.”

  “You know damn well that isn’t what I mean,” Bresach said. “You’re married now, aren’t you?”

  “You know I am.”

  “What do you tell your wife?” Bresach demanded. “Do you tell her you love her?”

  “Knock off,” Jack said. “Continue the lecture on politics.”

  “All right,” Bresach went on, his tone reasonable and friendly. “You tell her you love her. But you make a mental reservation. Put it into figures. A reservation of ten percent? Twenty percent? What would you say? Two weeks in Rome in the year, maybe a couple of other weeks in London or Washington on affairs of state, with Veronicas always abundant—and that’s going on the assumption that you’re chaste in Paris, and I don’t know why I should assume that…”

  “You are being insulting, Robert,” Max said.

  “We are past insults, Jack and me,” said Bresach. “We are at the point of murder. We are at the point where the truth is glaring in our eyes.” He swung around again to face Jack. “What I’m saying is that your whole life is based on a system of hedging. So much commitment to love, but no total commitment, so much of a commitment in your work, but of course only an absolute idiot could commit himself there totally. The man of parts, in parts, the modern, disgraceful, useless, undependable, fragmented, vandalizing man. Is my language too strong?”

  “Yes,” said Jack. “But do keep going.”

  “On the subject of religion,” Bresach said, “and what a subject that is to broach in the city of Rome. Are you a religious man?”

  “No.”

  “Do you go to church?”

  “Occasionally,” Jack said.

  “Ah,” said Bresach, “of course. The civil servant. Ever since the Republicans got in, there has been a pious flood on Sunday mornings toward the higher brackets. Do you believe in God?”

  “I have to skip that,” Jack said. “Remember, I’m pressed for time. I have to leave for Paris in a few days.”

  “Nominally, what are you?” Bresach asked. “Protestant?”

  “Lutheran,” Jack said, “if anything.”

  Bresach nodded. “If anything. And your wife?”

  Jack hesitated. “Catholic.”

  “And your children?”

  “For the time being, they go to Mass.”

  “Aha,” Bresach said with cold triumph. “For the time being they are the prey of superstition, of oppression, of bloody myths, of intolerance, ignorance, the worship of idols, all of which their father abhors. For the time being. You see, Max,” Bresach glared at the Hungarian. “This man who has been picked from the whole teeming population of this earth to salvage my life has not even the courage of his atheism, refuses even the small act of honor which would let him keep faith with his no-God. He is a slider and adjuster. Catch him by surprise and you will find him with his finger in the air, testing the wind. On some days he almost crosses himself. Worse, he permits his innocent and helpless children to cross themselves. He trims, he hesitates, he smiles at his own failings, he jokes about the gifts he has let slip through his fingers, he moves like an eel through the interstices of our society, he gets his salary by trading on everybody’s fear that we’re all going to be blown up tomorrow morning, he betrays his wife when he travels, he betrays himself when he breathes. Naturally women love him and fall at his feet, because he only gives himself partially, and what female can resist the partial man? He slides into bed as he sometimes slides into church, not quite believing in it, but liking the sound of the choir, the movements of the congregation, come, amen, the open thighs, amen, the douche bag, blessed be thy name, amen, married, unmarried, amen, amen!”

  “Does he talk like this when he’s sober?” Jack asked.

  “Quite often,” Max said.

  “You must have some jolly evenings up at your place,” Jack said.

  “Don’t joke,” Bresach said harshly. “I’m attacking you. There will come a time when you will feel the blows, when you will weep with pain and remorse…” He ground some black pepper out of a big wooden mill onto the mozzarella cheese on the plate in front of him. “It’s made out of buffalo milk,” he said conversationally. “Did you know that?”

  “No,” Jack said.

  “I always knew I wanted to live in a place where they milked buffaloes,” Bresach said, taking a huge piece of cheese on his fork and stuffing it in his mouth. “In our country, we have got rid of the buffaloes and Charlie Chaplin. Up, McGranery.”

  “Don’t start that again, Robert,” Max said.

  “So when I got better,” Bresach said calmly, as though there had been no interruption in his story about himself and his family, “I blackmailed my mother into hocking a ring and giving me the money to come to Italy. I told her that if I hadn’t gotten started in the movies in one year, I’d come back and make paper cartons for the rest of my life and honor my mother and father like a good boy. By the way, Andrus, what did your father do?”

  “He had a small fruit-drying plant in California.”

  “God, the way people spend their lives,” Bresach said. “Did he have a holy feeling about dried fruit?”

  “No,” Jack said. “It was just a way of earning a living. He didn’t take business very seriously. As long as he made enough to support his family and buy the books he liked that was all he wanted.”

  “Was he American?”

  “Yes.”

  “It was a lucky thing he died before McGranery got around to him.”

  “Robert,” Max said warningly.

  “I am learning everything I can about the man who is the most important man in the world to me,” Bresach said, “John Andrus. Or James Royal. The double man. He is the two most important men in the world to me because he’s robbed me of the thing that I wanted and needed more than anything else in my life. He is the Opponent, he is the Demon of Loss, he is the Destroying Element.” Bresach was chanting crazily now, his eyes almost closed, the sweat streaming down his cheeks. “When I face him, I face my father, I face the paper-carton factory, I see a door closing in
my face, I see my love vanishing down a thousand dark, unknown streets, I see my bed with a hunted man in it, not the warm girl who belongs there and who is gone. I look at him and I remember the day I tried to kill myself…It is vitally important to me that his father dried fruit in California. I must search out his last secret.”

  “You’re dead drunk,” Jack said.

  “Even that is possible,” Bresach said calmly. “But drunk or sober, you must learn about me, too. You are involved with me. We are the main elements in each other’s lives. We are wound around each other like snakes in battle. You are a civilized man. What you do to me, you must do in full knowledge. At the end, no matter what happens, you must not be able to say to yourself, ‘I didn’t know. It was an accident.’” He drained his glass and poured himself another, full to the brim, the wine purplish and raw. His hands shook and the flaring throat of the carafe with the seal of the city of Rome on it, clinked nervously against the glass. “I am in despair,” he said, “and you must know it.”

  “Robert,” Max said softly, “it is late. It is time to go home.”

  “If Veronica isn’t there,” Bresach said, “I have no home. Without her I am zero, I am minus 273.1 degrees Centigrade, where the protons stop their movement within the atom. Christ, who would have thought anything like this could happen in Rome? Veronica…” He took a deep breath. “Where is she?” he asked petulantly. “I need her. Maybe she’s sitting at a table in a restaurant in the next block. It drives you crazy. We ought to be out roaming the streets sniffing for her perfume like bloodhounds. I lied to you the other night, Jack. I said there were ten thousand girls more beautiful than Veronica. It was a cheap, despicable, cowardly lie, and I said it because I wanted her so badly. I was begging for her. There is no girl more beautiful than Veronica.” He put his hand into the pocket of his duffel coat and took out the knife and put it on the stained tablecloth between himself and Jack. “There it is, between us, you sonofabitch,” he said, his voice choked.

  “Robert,” Max said softly. “That is no good. Put the knife away.”

  Bresach touched the knife, smiling crookedly at Jack. Then, surprisingly, he put the knife away. “It is the symbol of the unsheathed and upright penis,” he said quietly, “in the dreams I dream. You see, I haven’t wasted all my time with Dr. Gildermeister.”