Bedouin of the London Evening

by Rosemary Tonks

  THE BURNISHED MAN begins to talk. This time he speaks only to the lilac girl, to whom he has not previously said one word. His voice is pitched deeper. He is less of a philosopher, much less fond of the open air than he was. Sunglasses listens with interest, and waits patiently for her turn in the conversation, but it does not come. She wants to smoke; then let her smoke! No one is going to stop her. She sits where she has always sat, and although a minute or two ago she had a companion at her table and someone to talk to at the next, she now has two complete strangers, unknown persons, who ignore her and speak only to one another so rapidly that it becomes a dialect no one else can understand.

  How frightful to be brushed off like that as if one was lower than the dirt. The most hardened would be sapped and dispirited. She’s so low that if they were to give her one word, she could make a meal out of it, and pull herself up and move her limbs a little. It’s so exhausting putting up a fight alone, the joints become rigid and fasten the body together in one position and there’s no juice to unfasten it.

  They will not rescue her, because they have forgotten she is there. If she was to draw attention to herself, they would then see her, and might possibly speak to her: who knows?

  Presently she makes a fierce effort: she rises to her feet and pushes back her chair. To her, it’s like a bomb exploding. But no one has heard the sound. She sways, nearly off balance, and with her beach-bag walks away carefully. As though she has a scar on her face, she cannot quite manage her features, the shock seems to have given them a wrenching. But the further she removes herself from the two brutal young bodies at the table, the greater is her well-being.

  She gets herself down to the beach. On the burning white sands she spreads an orange towel, and prepares herself for a sunbath and a siesta. Quite worn out by life, she drops off into unrefreshing middle-aged slumbers. As the ugliness leaves her face, it turns into one of those curious death masks which are taken from a musician or a poet who has been defeated by life and resurrected by death; smooth, peaceful faces, they become perfect examples of otherworldliness, and thus the noble face of Death itself.

  And they? Signora Danielli watches them.

  They talk with hunger and thirst; with a radiant thoughtlessness. Their bodies, already prepared by water and fire for such a meeting, sense the approaching moment of supreme carnal gratification. Beside this, nothing else matters.

  They talk until they’ve talked themselves out. And then, each golden barbarian rests, with eyes passively turned away from the other, the feast to come. You don’t look directly when you want something as much as that. They appear expressionless… almost idiotic…but above all, monstrous.

  WHO IS GOING to pay the bill for this interesting lunch? On the island the young males who stand at street corners and stare with onyx eyes, hissing like snakes at foreign women who attract them, expect to be paid for and to receive presents.

  The lilac girl rummages and finds one of those flat leather purses which are made in North Africa and sold around the Mediterranean to tourists by itinerant Genoese. It’s closed by a fringed flap which tucks into a slot, and is decorated on the back by two brightly coloured strips of leather threaded through the glaciated manilla surface. Ridiculous object! You couldn’t get anything into it – not even a wad of Italian money, the coloured paper rags they use. She opens it, looks inside, gives a pretty trill like a handbell being rung, closes it and stows it away again. Out comes a buckle made of imitation stones – some dress-making project: she holds it in dimpled hands with little fingers which fasten and unfasten themselves as children’s do.

  So the meal is over. Up they get, smiling pleasantly at one another like strangers again, and casually, without a backward glance, they separate. The lilac girl with her spaniel, her untidy bag, her looped robe, passes the table of Signora Danielli.… Oh, that voluptuous cold puppy fat on her little face, how rich. And the cork sandals that slip off her heels, they’re so sluttish, so high and silly, she can hardly walk in them. She turns towards the beach and joins the figure which is drowning in sleep on the orange towel.

  The burnished man pays his bill matter-of-factly, as though he always spends exactly that amount. The boy doesn’t ask him about the bottles or total up a long list, so it’s clear he pays for no one but himself. While he does it, that thick back is toward the beach. He won’t look at her, won’t look at the lilac wrap coming off. He’s devoted to his pockets, his wallet, and carefully buttons away some money into his shorts, and makes it neat. Having got together his personality in this way, he’s ready for his car and strolls out. There’s something so grim and fixed about his eyes…in his head, among all those thoughts, is he holding intact some essential datum which were chattered out piecemeal across the tablecloth? ‘No. I hate Bar Elio, it’s full of old, old men ugh! Our road’s so nice, and the house, who wants to go out and be goggled at by old men? The rose-coloured house in the Via Baiola. I’m always there in the evenings, lazing about.’ What a vapid, futile little mind; he would have pounced on the words, and from that moment was dead to the world.

  Signora Danielli notes that his is the yellow Alfa Romeo with the hood down. The tyres jerk and throw back sandy dust. From zero the machine vanishes down the road, whining, and that’s the last of him.

  The Signora catches herself stretching after the entertainment. The boys are rolling up tablecloths filled with breadcrumbs; there’s a pile of plates, greasy forks stick out of them. Oh it’s quite finished.

  She knows what she’s seen; a piece of her own youth. That reckless piece, it trapped her, and made her live a certain kind of life, not the kind she wanted at all. To think that she’d forgotten what it felt like, the elemental sex happiness which belongs to the animal kingdom, and which makes you behave so badly. Five tables away she’s seen it all again, hideous idiot joy, in which the actors are lost and mad, and their poor accomplices become the same.

  She’s so sorry for them. And grateful to think that she doesn’t have to wash and get ready for a lover.

  Yes, she’s old, but wide awake. When she escaped from that sort of youth, she got away only by ageing, only that way did she obtain real life. And now she walks in the marble of her library; her etched features look inward and outward; she has arrived at herself. That is the classical Italian happiness; the great joy and gaiety of understanding yourself.

  THE SUN REACHES the waters of the horizon at seven o’clock and at once goes out. Sometimes a cloud left over from the day maintains a red flame on board for half an hour into the night. Sweet water dews fall silently down the mountain slopes.

  Primitive peoples go to bed early, for everyone fears the dark.

  A wind gets up on one side of the island…under cliffs of unpolished marble, there’s a piling up of waves, a moaning that begins in the telegraph wires.

  Here’s Signora Danielli. She’s parked her car and now steps back in the dirt road to look up into infinity at the Milky Way, the Via Lattea, of which she is a part.

  By the light of it, she can also see that her two cats are watching her attentively from the driveway of her house. They run off as she approaches, and leave a dark object on the ground.

  She has her husband’s stick in her hand; the object may be an animal. Close to, she can see it’s a large rat, a dark piece of instinctive life force, which they’ve killed and brought for her. She’s turning it over gently with the stick, and it rolls softly in two sections like chamois bags of trinkets, when there’s a blast, enough to split her eardrums, and a blinding light flashes on and off high up the mountain. Every stone shakes in its socket, and the vibration runs through her body. A storm has begun.

  At that moment the rat comes to life. Ignited by the shock, it leaps gracefully into the air like a dancer, with the tips of its delicate feet hanging beneath it. Signora Danielli says compassionately: ‘Poor thing, poor thing. I must kill it.’ She strikes it feebly with her stick, so that it jumps up again and again, in a reflex action, each time higher than the las
t. And frisks about on the tips of prehensile bones in a spirited way, while the clouds grumble like a barracks full of soldiers and shoot out crackling shots.

  She has to hit, hit, hit. When it’s over, she’s panting and trembling. She leans on the stick, still watching it with fierce eyes, for a long time.

  WHEN SHE GOES inside she feels so uneasy that she stops to breathe in the familiar smell of the hall, but she seems to have brought in with her the wet darkness from outside, and the sickly wind that was blowing in the garden. Overhead, two gigantic air-shapes with sheer sides of rock, collide, trying to split one another open. You can hear the blistering and cracking of the seams.

  She mounts the staircase to her bedroom.

  There’s a light on in her husband’s large dressing-room next door. This is the irritating, beloved husband who made her change her life so many years ago. He’s moving about on some business of his own, according to a set of thoughts which are entirely unknown to her.

  Oh but the thunder! Now it bears down solely on the house in an effort to smash the roof in; the electric light bulbs flicker. At any moment there may be total darkness: the island’s supply is always confused by an electric storm.

  Her husband is pulling drawers open impatiently in the old armadio… the thunder shifts its position, and a watery cough goes off far into the distance, echoing as it strikes against unseen obstacles and passes through great empty rooms, through the august Sala di Giove, and on and on…then she can hear the domestic sounds of the bouse again, and the double rap of the drawer handles as they fall back on the wood, rat-tat. He’s looking for something: possibly he’s going out for the evening? She cheers up at once. She won’t be expected to cook dinner; she can go to her books. She can spend the evening quietly finding out the attribution of ‘Ayin’ among certain old volumes with end-papers of marbled plum. The pleasure of it floods over her in a rush of blood as sweet as honey.

  He is going out. She remembers now; she told him he was driving too fast, and he opened the lid of his eye at the corner and showed her some light green crocodile water. How furious he was! He let her see what was going on inside, but he had no idea of how much he’d shown her. He lowered the lid, after he’d given her a sight of the green water, and they walked along together, side by side, thinking it over. She was very interested by what she had seen. He would have to be teased; or, if he wouldn’t respond to that, then he would have to be fought with. She could never afford to relax, since he shifted his ground psychologically every minute. If she became intimidated, she would go under forever. ‘It took me twenty years to learn how to be rude to you,’ she would think, looking at him, ‘and you like it. But I do not.’ ‘When he goes out,’ she thinks later, ‘I must remember to be sharp to him, as though I have a grievance. That kiss on his neck, behind the ear, the one that keeps him sealed in and made safe by my love while he’s out in the world, that must go…or I shall lose value in his eyes.’

  AN OLD MAN of sixty-eight opens the door of the dressing room, and stands there, fastening a despatch case. He has a handsome toast-dry face, peevishness gives it life. He wants to be prevented from doing what he is doing, and from leaving the house in the middle of a storm in his well-pressed grey suit with the brown silk handkerchief tucked in the pocket.

  Out of habit, she opens her mouth spontaneously to tell him about the rat; then stops herself. She hasn’t worked over the story to see whether it does her credit; if there’s a weak spot he’ll use it against her. She becomes her husband for an instant and passes the thing through his mind.

  Although she hasn’t said a word, the old man has seen her lips move. He at once hastens off downstairs, convinced that she’s going to intercept him, which is exactly what he wants. In the hall, he struggles into his coat with the thought that he’s being nagged to death, and flies out into the darkness as the first drops of rain fall. He’s punishing her by leaving her alone in the middle of a storm. For his part, he’s from a very old Neapolitan family, and the storms of the Mediterranean are in his blood. They invigorate him with what he is already; he’s more decisive, flashing, aristocratic, at these times when the ordinary people bury themselves in the ground, or in their houses, with their wet dogs clinging to them and belly-crawling on the floor beside them. For the same reason he drives his car fast, and be will not be shackled and reduced to an impotent booby, when such boldness is his by right of birth.

  She listens calmly to the steps of this man so stuffed with insolent bad behaviour. He will have reached the eucalyptus trees by now, and will be opening the door of the car. Because he is alone, he will drive very carefully and quite slowly after all. He will go straight to Tonino’s; no, to Marcello’s, in the port. And they will all turn towards him and light up as he comes in, since he’s known to be a born story-teller. He’ll sit down, make the ‘thump’ on the cloth with his closed fingers which is the prelude, and begin to be amusing. It only takes a minute or two, and people go red and their eyes shine with stupid glee. Women, underwear, lavatories, husbands, these subjects are well known to be funny in the first place, but if you cram them into an Italian meat mincer all over again, out come brand new sausage jokes, naked, obscene, childish. It’s appalling to have a quick and filthy mind like that, to wink, and raise your little old man’s finger in the air and wag it about.

  They say he could go on the stage, and get paid for it. But he prefers to be close to people, and laughs along with them and goes a good dark red himself. In no time they’re all roasting hot, it’s like a volcano in there, they bang on the tables and yell: ‘Basta!’ He dries his face – which is streaming – and grows younger every minute. You can just see the sort of young man he used to be… there, now, there’s the Ercole d’Oro, see the way he breathes in contemptuously in a long-drawn-out sneer? He was once a glowing, lustful fellow with a great black chin with an oily dent in it: the women must have gobbled him up. But then, why the story-telling? To keep the cold out, of course. Otherwise old age would get inside and creeping death would reach the viscera, especially the liver. He needs the heat of other healthy human beings constantly, in order to remain alive. But he must have a reason for waylaying them, and getting them to sit down and unbutton their coats….

  And so this handsome well-dressed man becomes a joke-jobber. When the fire goes out of him, as it does regularly, in fact nearly every day, he drives off, off, away from his house with its books and sofas and the polished chequerboard floors where his wife walks about.

  ‘Vitti, Vitti, have I done this?’ Signora Danielli asks the man in her head. She’s lighting an oil lamp and bends over it.

  Immediately the house is engrossed in the darkness of the mountain: the electricity has failed on this side of the island.

  She now has a circle of yellow light, and goes and comes within it, bringing kitchen candles to be lighted. This primitive task reassures her, and as each flame develops and burns steadily, her thoughts settle.

  The rattling noises of the branches against the walls, and the sea wind that stops the rain hissing into the ground and carries it off sideways with a dolorous moan…these things are necessary so that the grave Italian interior may double its peace. Nothing moves. The table where the lamp stands is the centre of the world. To sit still there is to be in touch with everyone and everything. How the books along the walls excite her; the titles are serious and contain real knowledge, they are always new because each time you read them the same words say something different. There are works by Maxwell on the Tarot, on Alchemy, on Persian seers, on Sai Baba. In this earthly paradise, she cuts with a little alabaster paper-knife into the cartridge paper of a new book; rough edges form. She has entirely forgotten her husband’s existence.

  PRESENTLY – it’s as though someone has called to her – she lifts her head and listens intently…some ineffable matter….

  They will be meeting about now, the burnished man and the lilac girl. He’ll go to her house after dinner; it’s all arranged, and they can’t wait any lon
ger. Sunglasses will have to go up to her room; it’ll be one of those small white-washed rooms with damp marks low down, with an icon painted as though by a child, and an unsteady wicker table. She’ll be sent up to her room after she’s played bath-attendant. For the lilac girl will soak herself slowly, and call out from her bath often; the spaniel will walk in and out of the open bathroom door while she splashes water at it. When she steps out, so slippery, to dry herself, Sunglasses will put the cigarette into her mouth as she hands her that expensive rough towel, which she’ll tuck under her armpits. And lifting up her arm to get it right, she will look into the hollow of her young armpit, as white as a groin.

  When the lights go out, the lilac girl will go on drying herself in the warm darkness; she’ll be able to see perfectly well. And she’ll scoff at her dog because it whimpers and is craven.

  Then Sunglasses will bring a lighted lamp through the night to this indoor bathing scene, and the girl will already be dressed in her lilac robe. Her body will already smell of Calèche, that heavy Parisian powder which is for much older women, because it dresses the skin with the milky dust of another skin as heavy as soil, and makes it plump. As for her hair, she’ll have pushed it up in tresses on top of her head; she can’t be bothered to do it. The atmosphere of the lamplight allows one to be slack. But for the shuddering behaviour of her dog, she would be ideally contented in these conditions. Accustomed to making a slow toilet, in any circumstances whatsoever, she’s at home on the earth. With Arab-style gestures that concentrate the whole mind, she brings the cosmetics she wants within her circle of movement. Her arms bend and stretch themselves forth; it’s impossible to look away from her.