“You dunno?” he said incredulously. “You dunno, Mr. Leverett? About this devvistation in our town? We are ruined! The town is veritably in ashes! After this eventuality there will be no more turismo in Thambuco for ten—no, my God, for twenty years. Overpowering twagedy, my God. It’s like the Gweeks, I tell you, but far worse!”
“Well, tell me!”
“A young girl, a peasant girl,” he said in low wretched tones. “A peasant girl from the valley. She was found ravished and dying on the valley road this morning. She is not expected to live out the day.” A great racking sob wrenched itself from his chest. “I tell you, it’s the first mortal act of violence in this town since the last thentury. Before my own father—”
“Go on!” I commanded.
“I demur, my God, because—” He was weeping now, blubbering, a soft fluid mess of a little man, turned to water. “Because—Because, it is so twagic, I tell you! Mr. Flagg—”
“What the hell has he got to do with it?”
“Oh, Mr. Leverett,” he sobbed, not entirely heedless of some innate dramatic flair. In his voice were all the echoed intonations of that strange dead hotel library of flamboyant gestures and fevered diction—Mrs. Humphry Ward and Bulwer-Lytton and Lorna Doone and other swooning, improbable chronicles left behind by drowsy English gentlewomen—which, I suppose, were the only books he had ever known. “Oh, Mr. Leverett, Mr. Flagg is dead. He lies even now beneath the precipice at the Villa Cardassi, where they say he threw himself, in remorse over the—the deed he committed.”
For a long moment I had no notion at all of what Windgasser was trying to convey to me: who was this soft, foolish, soggy little man, combing his wind-blown hair? Make him repeat it, my mind said, you misunderstood. I grabbed him by the arm.
“Yes, I mean it,” he said, sobbing. “Mr. Flagg lies below the Villa Cardassi. Dead, dead, dead.” He blew into his handkerchief. “He was such a kind, decent, generous man, too. It is difficult to believe. So big-hearted, so courteous, so affluent—”
I waited to hear no more, tearing myself from him and out of the garden and into the street again. I had no idea which way to go but I headed down the slope toward the square. Presently I increased my pace and soon I was running, my feet stumbling and sliding on the cobblestones. On the run I passed clots of people who stood in open doorways, some silent, some wildly gesticulating, all looking wide-eyed and stunned. I galloped on in the warm windy sunlight, half-overturning a boy on a bicycle, dodging a stray goat, in dreamlike flight through empty space vaulting down over half a dozen precipitously pitched stone steps; at last, gasping, I debouched in flapping seersucker from the cobbled street and found myself in the buzzing, people-crowded square. Everyone had gathered here, it seemed: townsfolk, tourists, peasants, policemen, movie stars. In groups of four and five and six they were solemnly talking—the townspeople in the center of the square, the tourists in seamy, be-Kodaked clusters near their buses beside the fountain, the movie folk at cafe tables, gloomily drinking. A squad of carabinieri entered in a riot truck, stage right, with groaning, descending siren, scattering a flock of geese in obese waddle. Save for one or two anachronistic details, the cluttered piazza might have been a set out of Il Trovatore. Above this jam-packed mob a hum and murmur of conversation floated like a black cloud—speculative, lugubrious, flecked with nervous laughter that bordered on hysteria. And as I stood there trying to gather my wits about me, I heard a church bell begin a jangling, discordant requiem, high in the air where pigeons wheeled about in the gusty sunlight—no more melodic than falling dishpans yet heavy and plaintive with woe. CLANGBONG! DING? BANG!
“Che rovina!” spoke a voice at my elbow. It was old Giorgio, the butler: huddled up in an American Navy pea jacket, though the day was sultry, he gazed with blue watery eyes into space, tugging at the folds of his neck and looking miserable.
“Is it true, Giorgio?” I said. “Is Signor Flagg really—”
“Si, signore,” he said listlessly, still gazing into space. “He is truly dead. By his own hand.”
LACRIME! the bells clang-clattered.
“What happened, what did he do, where can I see him?” I said all at once.
The old man was like one drugged. Blindly he plucked at his neck, snuffling, quietly mourning. “He who lives by violence shall die by violence,” he mumbled sententiously. Then he paused, all aflounder in his unhappiness. “That one so fair and kind should meet such a bitter end,” he said finally, “is the greatest tragedy in the world.” And it took me a moment to realize then that it was not Mason, around whom all my thoughts had been revolving, he had been talking about, but the ravished and dying girl. Beneath the canopy of clashing bells I tore myself away from Giorgio’s side, plunging and sidestepping my way through the crowd toward the edge of the square. Here between two buildings was the entrance to a shadowy alleyway and down upon it were galloping the recently arrived carabinieri, who were armed to the teeth and blackly scowling and began to muscle their way through a crowd of gawking peasants, sending up bright flares of profanity and working their elbows like pistons. I stood there for a moment feeling shaky and rattled; then, undaunted, I pushed through the crowd of peasants, cursing too, and hustled after the cops up the alleyway. Very shortly the alley became a cobbled little street, the street a labyrinth winding narrowly between rows of dank, deserted houses, and the labyrinth finally a walled path which straggled away from the center of the town and mounted gradually the side of a dizzying precipice so vertical and so smooth that it was as bare of vegetation—even of moss or lichen—as a crag in the remotest north. Along this path I made my way, following the track of the cops whom I could hear clumping and toiling up ahead. People were coming down—spectators, I presumed, of the aftermath of tragedy: natives of the town, ragged peasants from the valley, several crestfallen dogs, and even two German tourists, a dough-faced fat couple sporting alpenstocks and green Bavarian hats, who edged past me with a strange glow of satisfaction and left the air echoing with soft chortles of eerie succulent laughter. I trudged along. The waning day was gold and green and summery, viewed as if through the clearest pane of glass. Lizards preceded me up the protecting wall, unloosing in their iridescent scramble bits and pieces of crumbling stone. Unnerving heights rose up and fell away on either side of me: I was at the level of a cloud which was plump and fleecy, its underside a dissolving pink, floating over the valley like cotton candy. Back in the town the bell ceaselessly tolled its jangling lament. Of the rest of that half-hour’s climb I remember nothing save that somewhere along the way I encountered Dawn O’Donnell coming down the path. She was making a weak-kneed descent, and her carrot-colored head was bent tragically low upon a wad of shredded Kleenex, and she was escorted by the crew-cut young man of the night before, who as he passed, I swear, was saying, ’Can that, baby, will you?” He looked at me but whether he saw me I couldn’t tell.
Halfway up the steep hill which led to the base of the cliff the path widened out, joining here a spacious, grassy ledge perhaps a hundred yards across which several scores of people had collected—townspeople, more tourists, more dogs, and at least two dozen policemen. Above the ledge the precipice rose heroic and dizzying to the Villa Cardassi: by craning my neck I could see the Moorish roof floating on high in the slanting sunset, and the stunted, wind-bent cedars which clung to the villa’s fortressed walls. It was a sickening drop. A few yards away near the base of the precipice a rope had been strung, one end secured with a metal hook in a crevice of a rock, the other end tied to a pole in the ground fifty feet away. It was against this rope that most of the onlookers were pressing, filling the air with soft morbid whispers of rumor, of conjecture and speculation; behind the rope stood half a dozen carabinieri, most of them looking solemn and self-important, and sweeping the crowd with beady-eyed glances of contempt. One of them was Cass’ friend, Luigi. I pushed toward him through the humid mob, signaling to him with my fingers. His sleepy eyes parted wide in a look of recognition; as he did this,
a gap of space appeared between two craning, brilliantined heads and I saw Mason at last—my heart giving a huge lurch of misery as I saw his long familiar outline beneath a blanket, covered up all but for the lower part of his white pathetic legs which stuck out shoeless and fly-covered and slew-footed. And at the sight, incongruously, I thought that the legs were still no doubt wearing a pair of Bermuda shorts, bottle-green and sharply pressed.
“Buongiorno,” I said to Luigi.
“Buongiorno”
“Come sta?”
“Bene, grazie, e lei?”
In my confusion, our greeting had such a quality of ludicrousness that I found myself forcing back in my throat a bubble of bereft and crazy laughter. I calmed myself. “I don’t know,” I said. “I think I’m going mad.”
“I can understand. Via!” he snarled at two urchins who tried to edge past him. “I can well understand. You were well acquainted with this man, Mason. Is that not so?”
“I was,” I said. “Tell me, Luigi, what in God’s name happened?”
There is something about death, violence, and calamitous happenings that brings out in Italians the wiseacre, the frustrated savant; of the many details I recall from that hellish day not the least is how, in my search for particulars, I ended up with a collection of aphorisms. “Who knows,” he said, gazing at me gently through heavy-lidded eyes, “who knows what terrible things lurk in the mind of a man who kills? Who—”
“Can I see him, Luigi?” I broke in. Why at that moment I wanted to see Mason (I think I have an aversion to the dead more than ordinarily squeamish) will forever remain a mystery to me, unless it was only to prove to myself, in my stupefied disbelief, that it was really Mason’s mortal shell beneath that blanket, instead of some living, breathing Mason who, pink and supine, would gaze up at me with a wink and a lunatic cackle, full of claptrap to the very end.
“È vietato,” said Luigi. “No one is allowed on the scene until the investigation is completed and the body removed.”
“But I knew him, Luigi,” I pleaded. “He was… he was"—and out came the calumnious phrase—"he was my best friend.”
Luigi pondered for a moment. I could not help but feel that the fact that I was an American—despite, or perhaps even because of, his comments of the night before—gave me a certain status in his eyes. “Very well,” he said finally. He moved away across the grassy ledge to the place where Mason’s body lay. Two men stood there brooding over a ledger—a mountainous fat sergeant of the carabinieri, with spectacles, with a fuming cigarette pasted upon his lips, and with a triple chin folded away toward his neck like the buttocks of a baby; the other a thin, bony, intense-looking man in a trench coat and a fedora which came down over and all but hid his eyes: he was assiduously chewing gum, and a pistol divulged itself lucidly through a bulge in his coat, like a plain-clothes cop in a funny movie. Only, he was not funny. This man, I was told by a wide-eyed boy standing beside me, was I’investigatore, from Salerno, and while Luigi murmured in his ear and gestured toward me, I humbly awaited his decision, ungrieving, unmourning, but with a pain of desolation in my heart such as I had never felt before.
“O.K.” said Luigi, as he came back. “You can talk to the investigator.” He enunciated the title in oval meticulous syllables, investing it with glamour and ponderosity. “Be brief, though,” he added. “The investigator has much to do. Have you seen Cass, by the way?”
“Not since last night,” I replied.
“Strange,” he said, with a puzzled look. “I can’t find him anywhere. Or Poppy or the children, either.”
I ducked under the rope and walked toward the investigator; he scrutinized me narrowly as I approached, looking up from his notebook, suspicious, guarded, glacial, a regular monk of a policeman, with pious and austere eyes and a lean, monastic, lowering stance, his jaw working strenuously against its burden of gum. The sergeant, a behemoth beside him, intercepted the rays of the sun, casting an oblong of darkness over Mason’s prostrate form, like the shadow from a gigantic tent. Welling up inside with my ancient atavistic dread of cops, I walked toward them with a great deal of hesitance. ’Buongiorno” I said.
“Do you know this man?” said the investigator in a peremptory voice.
“Yes,” I said. “Yes, I do. I should like to see him, if I may.”
“He has already been identified,” he replied, somewhat illogically. There was no discourtesy, no harshness in his voice, yet there was no trace of gentleness either. He seemed rather to have trapped within him, like steam in a simmering kettle, a seething anger, and was taking pains to control himself. “He has already been identified,” he repeated, fixing me with his competent, gelid eyes. “What is this man to you?”
“Why I—I don’t know,” I replied. “That is—what do you mean?”
The voice of the mammoth sergeant behind him was like a wheezy little reed: emanating from that ton of mountainous flesh it had a fluty, canary-like quality, the voice of a boot-licker—querulous, eunuchoid, and sarcastic. ’Ascoltami! You heard I’in-vestigatore! What is this man to you? How do you know this Flog?”
“Quiet, Parrinello,” the investigator snapped. His voice grew more equable as he turned back to me. “I mean, signore, how do you stand in relation to this man. What is he to you—the deceased. Relative? Friend?”
“He was a friend of mine,” I replied.
The investigator leveled upon me his frosty gaze; again there seemed to be no hostility in his look—toward me, at least: if anything, there was now even a touch of cordiality in his manner. But he was still all business: I was no doubt a source of information to him, so perhaps he did not want to fluster me by giving vent to the anger raging within him. He shifted his gum and cleared his throat, saying: “So he was a friend? Let me ask you this, signore. Was he a psychopath?”
Nourished all my schooldays as I have been on the thin porridge of psychology, I am as given as anyone to tagging people with labels; with Mason then, however, in his ultimate, pitiful state of defenselessness, I didn’t know what to say. “Well, I’m sorry—” I began. “If he was, it was because—No!”
“How long have you known him?” he put in. “Understand, signore, you’re under no obligation to answer these questions. However, you would be doing us a kindness by whatever information you can offer about this—” And he looked down at Mason, his lips parted as if upon some distasteful word. “This man here. You have known him how long?”
My glance stole down to the blanketed form. I might say that there was a smell of death about this scene, except that there wasn’t; all I could smell was my own sweaty, unstrung self, while death resided only in the eye—in the blanket-shrouded body, shockingly immobile, in those shanks and feet with their hue and texture of milk glass, and in that plague of demonic scavengers, whose mindless winged presence, at least at that moment, seemed once and for all to dispose of any idea of a caring and beneficent deity: the thousand sucking flies, rankly festering in a metaphysics of their own, which swarmed on the blanket and upon Mason’s ankles, and sought out private mysteries between his toes. And for an instant I pondered just how long I had known Mason, realizing that by any definition whereby one might feel me competent to judge him I had not known him long—two swift boyhood years, plus a week, plus these last feverish hours—but that with all of this I had the notion I had known him all my life. That is what I said, finally: “I’ve known him all my life.”
“And he never exhibited any tendencies which one might call psychopathic?” said the investigator.
“Not to my knowledge,” I said. I don’t know whether I lied to him, and still don’t know to this day. One thing I did know: that Mason, upon whom short hours ago I would have turned my back in his direst need, now was so defenseless that it was the least I could do, in my own way, to stick up for him, if only as a last, nostalgic gesture. I said: “He was not psychopathic, signore, not to my knowledge.” And one sudden remembrance—that I had not bade him even a decent good-by—touched me with
withering sorrow.
The investigator still held himself in check, but it was an effort, and on his thin dry lips there was an expression of restrained exasperation. He handed the ledger to the sergeant and drew his trench coat around him with an angry, silent flourish. ( “Thank you, my Captain, thank you, thank you,” the sergeant said insistently.) Far down in the village I heard again an old woman’s shriek of lament, distant, echoing, drowned in a renewed clamor of bells which swept up the valley on a gust of wind. A small cloud darkened the day with a moment’s somber light; the grass rustled about Mason’s body, I heard a chirruping of crickets. The cloudlet passed: flooding sunlight swept over the valley like a yellow noise, like a thunderclap. The investigator wiped sweat from his brow with two slender bony fingers. “I cannot let you see him,” he said. “For your own benefit. He is terribly mutilated. Look up there.” He jerked his neck toward the villa and the promontory high above. “One cannot fall that distance without suffering a change of—of features. Inoltre—” He paused, gazing at me with a look part bitterness, part reproach.
“Furthermore, what—” I said.
“Furthermore, I do not believe you when you say this man was not psychopathic. Per prima cosa, it is apparent to me that he was a suicide. That does not in itself necessarily mean that he was a psychopath, but such an act is always at the very least the product of a deranged mind. Secondo”—and here I began to detect a tremor in his voice as the anger, the outrage gained dominance within—’secondo, signore, I cannot believe that anyone but a psychopath could commit such an insane act of violence. Therefore, it is no doubt a charity to call this man one. Never in my life have I seen a person violated so horribly as that girl. Never! Signore, you were his friend and I will spare you—”
The sergeant’s piping, female voice broke in; his face was tomato-red and his lumbering body shook like jelly, scarily, as if his whole bladdery, epicene form were about to tumble down upon me. “Never in your life! Her scalp ripped back from her head as if seized by a bear! Never in your life! Gangster of an American—”
William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice Page 76
