For a long while he crouched in the weeds on his knees. His retching stopped. Sight came slowly back. Far off on the still sea a dark cruise ship plowed through the dawn, past a smaller, lighter craft moving south toward Sicily. From the black-hulled ship a plume of smoke went up in salute against the blue; Cass watched, blinked his eyes, heard the roar of the whistle, deep-throated, drowsy, sonorous, floating up faint but clear through light like a pearl. Presently he saw Mason lie down in the weeds, one leg up, one arm thrown over his eyes; Cass lay down too, on his side, drinking the air. The dark ship surged westward, high-prowed, majestic, silent, its slumbering voyagers oblivious of all, its running lights still aglow, but now, even as he watched, winking out one by one. At last he saw Mason draw himself half-erect. With guarded movements he too raised himself partly up, and now Mason seemed to be trying to say something to him, calling out across the field—but what was he saying, what were the words he was forming with his lips? I didn’t? I don’t? I’d die? He seemed to be weeping. Again Mason tried to speak. It wasn’t? It was? Why didn’t he come out with it? Why did he mouth those words, as if imploring him to understand? Foolish Mason flopped back in the weeds once more, Cass flopped back, too, for one brief and final rest, and though he has no recollection of how long they lay there—perhaps five minutes, perhaps less, perhaps more—he does recall that a thirst such as he had never known before swelled in his throat, and that as he lay in his doze, half-conscious, with the noise of cool, delectable waters rushing through his brain, he was carried swift as memory back to the very light of his own beginning, and there in some slumberous southern noon heard his first baby-squall in the cradle, and knew it to be the sound of history itself, all error, dream, and madness.
But he rose, with a stone in his hand, and Mason rose with a knobby club, pale, to confront him, and at that instant, as if from nowhere, one single pigeon shot toward them, then veered aslant in fright with the faintest snapping of its wings. But even as Cass saw the pigeon skim away seaward he had charged, roaring, and he fell upon Mason, who fought savagely, furiously, for the few seconds allotted him. Cass would remember that moment’s bravery—the club and the ruthless solid blows it landed on his ribs: it gave to that brief meeting a thrill of unexpected triumph and honor. But as Mason’s arms boldly struck out, Cass brought the stone across between them in one roundhouse sweep of his shoulder, and Mason dropped like a bag of sand, murmuring, “Dollbaby.” “Dollbaby,” he whispered again, in a child’s voice, but it was the last word he said, for Cass was atop the prostrate form and he drove the stone again, and again, and still once more into the skull which made a curious popping noise and split open on one side like a coconut, extruding a grayish-white membrane slimy with blood.
Perhaps it was then that he drew back, understanding where he was, and what he had done. He does not recall. Perhaps it was only the “Dollbaby,” echoing belatedly in his mind, that caused him to halt and look down and sec that the pale dead face, which was so soft and boyish, and in death as in life so tormented, might be the face of almost anything, but was not the face of a killer.
Children! he thought, standing erect over the twitching body. Children! My Christ! All of us!
Then in his last grief and rage he wrestled Mason’s body to the parapet, and wearily heaved it up in his arms and kept it for a moment close to his breast. And then he hurled it into the void.
Except for the doctor and the priest (Luigi later told Cass this), Luigi himself was the first person that morning to hurry to Fran-cesca’s side. Sergeant Parrinello, who went off pompously to the valley path, “the scene of the crime,” sent him there… . She lay on a bed in the house of Ivella the pharmacist, just outside the town walls; the farmers who found her on the valley path had dared not take her any further. She had lost an enormous amount of blood—so much blood, in fact, that the doctor ventured no hope that even the transfusion he might give her would suffice for more than half a day of life. She was unconscious, her breathing slow and shallow. Yes, she might be questioned, Caltroni said, if and when she became aroused; no disturbance or exertion seemed likely to alter the course of her mortal injuries. The doctor and the priest departed (the rite of Estrema Unzione had already been administered); they set off in search of more blood, and said they would return. In crisis, Caltroni was performing nobly. The corporal sat by Francesca’s side. An hour passed. A terrific clamor arose outside, and Luigi bade the pharmacist to go out on the street and shut the people up. For a long while there was silence, and Luigi sat there as light flooded the clean white room, watching the dying girl. Once she moaned and her eyelids flickered, and a flush came to rouge the pallor of her cheeks. Then again she went pale, and sank back into her coma, barely breathing. A half-hour passed, and another hour. But, still later, at about nine o’clock, her eyes opened and she breathed a great sigh as she looked around her; then, trying to move one of her shattered arms, she cried out in pain, and the tears started from her eyes. Luigi bent forward and placed another cool damp rag against her brow, as the doctor had instructed. He moved his lips close to her ear then, and very softly said: “Chi e stato?” For a long while she was unable to reply. She bit her lip in pain, and for a moment he thought she was going to sink back into oblivion. “Who, Francesca?” he repeated softly. And the girl whispered, “Cass.”
He drew slowly back in his chair, with a sudden mingling of emotions. He was, as he recalled later, shocked but not surprised, if such a combination of feelings can really exist. Because already he was almost certain who had done it. He had not thought of Cass. And yet when she murmured his name he realized she could be speaking the truth.
Bending down over the dying girl, he recalled the walks which even Cass had not been able to hide. Walks hand in hand in the valley, an American and a poor peasant girl—they were not disguisable, any more than the trips in the Cadillac to Naples. Luigi spoke gently to Francesca. “Chi?” he said once more. “Tell me again. Who did this to you?” The girl tried to speak. It was not Cass, it must not be Cass, and yet again, it could be Cass. Take a borderline mental case (an American at that) and combine this with some unbearable oppression—and finally love—and anything might happen. “Who, Francesca?” Now she seemed unable to answer.
There was a rap on the door and the pharmacist’s distraught wife appeared at the threshold, to tell him that Parrinello was outside and wished to talk to him. He got up from Francesca’s side and went into the rose-fragrant garden, where the sergeant was waiting. It was after nine o’clock. Parrinello was beside himself, slapping a glove against his fat thigh, his face shiny with sweat.
“Has she spoken?” the sergeant asked. “Has she said anything?” His expression was solemn, but he seemed visibly to thrill with excitement.
“She has said nothing, Sergeant.”
“She must speak. She must speak.”
Luigi sensed something. “What now, Sergeant?”
“Flagg. The American from the Palazzo d’Affitto. The man the girl worked for. He has been found dead at the bottom of the cliff below the Villa Cardassi. His head a bloody mess.”
Luigi felt the tips of his fingers go numb. “So it was—” For a moment he found it impossible to move his lips. “That is—”
“I’ve called Salerno. It is a clear case of doppio delitto. Captain Di Bartolo is on his way with a squad. Now you must—”
“Double murder? But the girl is not dead.”
“Yes, I said double murder!” He paused with a shrewd glint in his eye, a look of discovery. A full page spread in Il Mattino. And Luigi, as if in a dream, saw the fat sergeant waddling forward at some regional police parade, chest bloated and extended for the distinguished rosette. “The little wench had a lover. One of those cafe bums had been taking her into the weeds. A nice piece, too, and he didn’t want to let it go. Then this American she worked for began to fuck her, too. She got confused. She told her first boy friend, or he found out. He went really crazy. Flagg had to get her away from the palace to do it
, away from his blond girl. So he took her up onto the valley path sometime last night. And he began to fuck her. But he hadn’t planned on a crazy lover. The boy friend tracked them there, and found them in the act. He took care of the girl and then went off after Flagg, and chased him up to the Villa. Then he threw him over the wall. You should see his head, it’s a bloody mess.”
For such, Luigi thought, for such I let myself become a policeman, to listen to a man who two meters from death can talk with a mouth like this. Bees hummed around them, amid the heavy sweet scent of roses. The impulse to punish, to obliterate the gross face was, for an instant, almost unbearable.
“You say she said nothing?” Parrinello said.
“Nothing, Sergeant.”
“Well, keep after her. If she says anything, let me know. I’ll be down at the station. One of those cafe bums. The fellow must be a big man—big and husky. If I could just get the name of the man who did it before Di Bartolo comes I’d be—” He paused, made a sullen grimace, as if understanding he’d revealed himself. “You’d better—”
But before he could deliver the order, Luigi had wheeled about, stalking away without a word as he entered the house again, crept quietly into the bedroom, and resumed his vigil at Francesca’s side. The girl, white as a bone, had sunk back into her profound repose, so still now that he thought for a moment she must be dead. But she clung if not to consciousness then at least to life, and he watched her, barely breathing himself. At around ten o’clock, the doctor returned, accompzinied by the woebegone gray-eyed priest whom Luigi had never seen before. Together they rigged a new jar of blood plasma on the metal hanger above the bed. The doctor—or maybe it was the priest—said that he was sending a nurse. The priest spoke another absolution, and again they were gone—to Amalfi this time, the doctor said—in quest of more blood. It was hot now, and Luigi took his jacket off, his bandolier and belt. Francesca seemed to sleep more peaceably, and faint color had returned to her cheeks, but still she breathed in her soft shallow breaths, and her eyes were closed as if in death, lids chalky white, and she uttered no sound. He kept looking down at the girl. He had never in his life given peasants much thought or consideration, neither despising them nor feeling for them pity, sympathy or anything, but accepting them only as one might accept the nagging presence of bad weather or an eternal headache or a pet dog so old and ugly that one no longer wished to give it food and water yet could not bear to destroy it or turn it away. His parents had been far from rich but not bitterly poor, and out of all that ordinary life from which he had grown in Salerno he had taken with him as little understanding or caring about pure, wicked, despairing poverty as he had the desire to become excessively rich. His schoolteacher father had wanted him to be a lawyer, but the war had come, shattering all; he had become instead a policeman, and life had reduced itself to a space of excruciating gray disappointment through which he drifted halfeducated, purposeless, feeling nothing, ready for any easy bribe, and paying lip-service to a political label of which he was, at heart, deeply ashamed. He tried to do his job well, but what was his job? What? He knew that in this country there was little chance of “becoming”; you were what you were, and that was that. Yet now as he looked down at Francesca he saw not the brutalized, defeated, life-corroded face which had existed like a wish in his mind since childhood but a face which was, even in dying, extraordinarily beautiful, and he felt anguish wrench at his heart. Though he had seen this girl before, he had never really looked at her. He realized with something of a shock that it was the first time he had ever looked directly into a peasant face. Felice. Happy. This is the word he had always heard about peasants. So poor. But really so happy. They have music. And love. Now, looking down at Francesca, he knew differently. No music at all, and very little love. She seemed to wake, and now to try to speak, and he bent forward, listening. She was beautiful. But only the shadow of a word passed across her lips. She sank back into sleep. He looked down at her, feeling sorrow to his depths. The knowledge of human distress, for the first time in years, washed in upon him like light. He thought of Cass and, in deep misery, wondered what demon had possessed him to attack this girl.
Because at this moment he was certain that Cass had done it. It was no cafe lounger who was the culprit; Cass was the betrayed lover, the double killer whom Parrinello sought. It was a fierce and terrible thing, but it seemed perfectly true. Why question the girl any longer? Go out and find a bespectacled American in dirty khaki with a look in his eyes of the fixity of doom. It should not be too hard, unless he had already added himself to the gruesome list… .
Yet now the nursing sister, a horse-faced nun in white from the convent, glided silently and sternly into the room, without even a nod, planted herself between him and Francesca, starched and pleated rump aslant before his face, and as she did so, and as he moved his chair, something suddenly opened in his mind, like a gust of wind and sunlight blowing open a blind. It could not be Cass. And if it was not Cass it could only be the one he had thought of at first. … He brooded for a long time while the nun fussed silently over the girl, and shortly after this he saw that Francesca had opened her eyes, wide, and was staring up into space. He asked the nun to leave the room. She refused, scowling. He asked her again, irritably, moving his chair toward the bed and feeling queasy with excitement. Again she refused. Again he asked her. And she refused. “Vada via! Via!” he snarled. “Out of here, damn you!” And she vanished, scared, in a swirl of pleats.
He bent down to the girl. “Francesca,” he said, “tell me now. Carefully. Who was it that hurt you? It was not Cass, was it?”
“No,” she said in a faint weak voice. “Not Cass.”
“Who was it then?”
“Signor Flagg.”
Puzzlement and confusion. This, he knew, simply could not be. The American with the vacant face like a pretty little boy?
“What did Signor Flagg do to you?”
“He took me—” She began to weep, which caused her breath to heave violently, hurting her, and she cried out in pain. Then she ceased crying and her eyes fell shut and he thought that once again she was slipping back into darkness. But she stirred awake and she looked at Luigi with great staring, frightened eyes. “He took me in his room.”
“He took you in his room?”
“Yes.” She halted. “Oh, am I going to die?”
“What did he do to you?”
“I—” Weakly, she turned her head. “I cannot say.” And by not saying, said it.
“He did not take you on the path?”
She was silent, except for the steady, labored breathing.
“He did not take you on the path?” he asked again, gently.
“I don’t know,” she whispered, after a long wait. “Nothing. All. I don’t forget.” She was out of touch, speaking stunned opposites.
“Do you remember what happened on the path?”
“I don’t forget.”
“Francesca, do you remember? Tell me, do you remember someone hurting you on the path?”
“I don’t forget.”
“Francesca. Tell me this. Was it Saverio?”
The brief space of time before her reply was like a roaring noise in his ears. Then, “Yes! My God, it was Saverio!” she cried in a hoarse tormented voice. “My God, yes! My God! My God! M,” God!”
He called for the nurse, but it was not necessary, for the sister had barely reached her side when the girl gave a sudden convulsive twist with her neck, sighed, and plunged back into unconsciousness, trailing behind her sobs of heartbreak and horror as if into the darkness of a cave. Luigi rose from the chair.
“You’re going to kill her!” the nun hissed.
“Non importa. She’s going to die anyway.”
“You monstrous policemen! Have you no feeling when—”
“Shut your face, Sister.” He paused. “Forgive me.”
He went out into the garden, into the high clear light of late morning. He found himself cursing Parrinello more bitte
rly than ever before. For if the sergeant had acted, would all of this have happened? No. Only Luigi himself had thought it right to put Saverio away. This was Italy for you. A countryside roaming with lunatics. A madhouse with the inmates in charge. He had long ago passed on his feelings to Parrinello, asking him if he too didn’t feel it wise to bring Saverio to the attention of the authorities of the comune, who in turn might bring pressure on the defective’s nearest relative—an aging half-sister—to have him committed. But Parrinello had scoffed, dismissing the idea as quickly as he had any other sign of initiative on the part of his subordinate. He was a wretched jealous man, with no imagination. He was also fat and lazy, and he wanted no part of any scheme or maneuver outside his province, which was to enforce the law, not to complicate it. Besides, he asked Luigi, what proof had he that Saverio was anything other than the harmless simpleton that he seemed to be? Which was to some extent true, and Luigi had conceded to himself the difficulty of the situation. The evidence, the proof, was meager and vague indeed: several middle-aged Nordic ladies, debarking from the tourist buses, had upon various occasions complained of being “rubbed” or “brushed”; three or four times a washed-out and formless visage—which may or may not have been Saverio’s —had appeared night-peeping at the Bella Vista’s windows, to vanish at the sound of the invariable scream. Once, two or three summers before, a lady visitor from Strasbourg claimed that the demented clod, while carrying her luggage to the hotel, had exposed his private parts to her, in an alleyway behind the church. This, the most serious indication of all, might have developed into a substantial charge against Saverio, had the investigation not been handled by Parrinello, who had fought against the French in the late war and hated them, and who, observing that the woman seemed a parched, hysteric type anyway, was inclined to accept Saverio’s blabbered protestations that he had merely been attending to a call of nature. So that was all there was, on the surface at least. Fifteen years before—during the war and long before Luigi had come to Sambuco—a shepherd girl had been found dead, horribly mutilated, among the rocks on the mountain slope in an area even more remote from the town than Tramonti. This was a lax and confused period. The war was on and nobody really seemed to care. Word of the slaying seeped down to the town days after the girl had been buried. Disinterment and an autopsy were ordered, but for some reason neither was carried out. The mountain people, a benighted lot and more superstitious than Africans, murmured darkly of evil spirits. Others talked of wolves. Still others spoke of a deserter from the German army who had been seen lurking in the woods. And the whole incident was fairly well forgotten by everybody. Luigi, who of course learned of all this long after the event, had always been struck by the fact—which he discovered quite accidentally—that not only had Saverio, who was a huge mad boy of seventeen, been living in the same place at the time, but under the same roof. Obviously there was no proof after all these years. But often it is the most bizarre, familial sort of crime which goes for a long time (perhaps forever) unsolved, even in the midst of city sophisticates. It would perhaps have been unusual for those simple peasants to cast an eye of suspicion on the girl’s own brother… .
William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice Page 107
