William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice

by Styron, William

  “And it was then that this own rage of his came on him—the first time I ever saw him explode. He leaped toward the door, too, and he fetched me a solid blow across the chest with his fist. I couldn’t struggle, I was too weak and worn-out. And before I knew it I was flat down on my back again with one wrist manacled to the leg of the cot and he was standing over me, red-faced, just beside himself with outrage, shouting those words at me: ‘Tu pecchi nell’avere tanto senso di colpa! You sin in your guilt!’ And he raised general hell.

  “We calmed down, both of us. Neither of us said anything for a while. Then Luigi sat down beside the cot. He was silent for a long time, then he looked into my eyes and said: T would like to tell you a story.’ And I said, calm now: ’A story about what, Luigi?’ And he said: ’A story about how it is that I am a grown man and how I have only wept three times since I was a child. An Italian who has wept only three times since he was a child is neither much of an Italian nor much of a man. But I must tell you this story.’ And I told him to go ahead. And he said this to me. He said: The first time was in Salerno during the war. I was only a boy then, and I had two baby brothers and three sisters. We lived in the back of the city, up near the hills, and when the British and the Americans made their landings on the beach my father thought we would be safe. We did not leave. The battle went on for several days, and presently the Germans withdrew. They withdrew through our part of the city and the Allies pursued them. A building near our house was used by the Germans as a command post. Only then, with the battle very near us, did my father decide to leave. He left first with my mother and four of my brothers and sisters. We had a dog which my mother loved very much and this dog had become lost, and I stayed behind with one of my baby brothers to search for the dog. We could not find the dog and the battle was coming nearer and so I decided to leave quickly. As we ran through the streets my baby brother, who was six, thought he saw the dog in a vacant lot and he called out to it and then ran back to fetch it. This was several blocks away from the German command post. Just as my brother ran into the vacant lot a British plane came over and dropped a bomb which must have been intended for the command post. I ducked, I could see the British target mark on the side of the plane. The bomb fell far short, into a building next to the vacant lot. There was some sort of fuel, oil or gasoline, stored in that building, for when the bomb hit it I saw a tremendous sheet of flame. I was knocked to the pavement by the concussion, but I was not hurt, and when I got up I heard a screaming. I looked into the lot and I saw my little brother running toward me, clothed in flame. He was on fire! He ran toward me, all ablaze, screaming in a way that I never knew a child to scream. It seemed as if the whole city were filled with the sound of his screams. It was like angels screaming. And then he fell to the street in front of me, blazing like a torch. He died right away. He was no more than a blackened little cinder. I wept.

  “ ‘For a long time after that I never wept again. I grew older and I became what I am, a policeman, cold and impersonal, with few emotions. I never married, mistrusting and hating my own emotions, and their coldness. I never could escape the memory of my little brother, burning, nor did I believe in a God who could create a universe in which it would be possible for a single innocent child to suffer like that. Neither did I forget the British, who had dropped that bomb. Once you asked me why I became a Fascist, and I think I must have evaded your question, for it could not have been simple expediency that led to this choice. Rather I believe that part of it was my hatred of the British, if anything, though I possibly didn’t realize it. Deep down I think I knew it was not rational of me to hate the British so. It had been an accident, no worse than a thousand others in the war, but often I could not help but think of that pilot and what he looked like, and after the war when the tourists came again I would see some young Englishman with his gray eyes and his casual arrogant manner and I would say to myself that it was he who had flown over Salerno and cremated my brother. I hated them, their arrogance and their smugness and their affected good manners, and I often vowed that in some way I would avenge myself on some Englishman for what he and his country had done to my brother.

  “ ‘Then once not too long ago after I was stationed up here in Sambuco, there came a certain Englishwoman to the Bella Vista. She lived there for a whole spring and summer. She seemed to personify all that was mean and despicable in the Anglo-Saxon race. She was a hysteric little virgin in the menopause—stupid, ugly, rude, demanding, and parsimonious. She was the terror of the help at the hotel. She never tipped. There was something small and bitter about her that made people actually shy away from her in the streets. Her voice was harsh and strident. She was also very religious—an abstainer—and her tongue never once tasted Sambuco wine. She demanded much and gave nothing. I think she must have been slightly crazy. The people in the town despised her. What she was doing in this sunlight I shall never know. I always will remember her in the piazza, screeching in loud English, accusing some poor devil of a taxi driver of cheating her. Well, one morning when Parrinello was off duty, I was called to the hotel by Windgasser. He was terrified. He thought the Englishwoman was dead. After several days with the door locked one of the maids had gone in and had tried to rouse her from her bed, but she had not moved. Windgasser was afraid to look. I went upstairs and found her in her bed. She was dead, all right, cold as stone. I thought at first it was probably a heart attack. I sent one of the maids for the doctor, and while she was gone I looked around the room and after a bit I found a small empty bottle with its cap off. It was a bottle of sleeping pills, and so quite correctly I assumed she had committed suicide. It served her right, I thought. I remember looking down at her as she lay there, at the pinched, mean little face which even death had not softened, and I was filled with hatred and loathing. She had been a menace and a nuisance in life, and in death she was still, at least, a nuisance. She disgusted me. She had lain in that hot room for three days. She had begun to stink. And she was British. I hated her. Then I looked down and I saw a piece of paper crumpled up in her hand. I unclenched her fingers and removed the paper, and I saw that there were some words in English written on it that I could not understand. I called to Windgasser and he came, and I asked him to read the words to me. And he read them. And can you guess what they said? Can you guess what they said, Cass?’ he said again.

  “I looked up at Luigi and I said, ‘No, I could not ever guess, Luigi.’ And he said, in a sort of transliterated Italian which I didn’t recognize at first: ‘Certamente la bontà e la misericordia mi seguiranno per il resto delta mia vita, …’ And I suddenly understood and said to Luigi, breaking in in English: ’Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the rest of the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.’

  “And Luigi said: ‘Yes, those were the words that were written on the paper. And I asked Windgasser to go away and when he had left I turned around and gazed down at the Englishwoman again. She still looked the same, ugly and ill-natured. But for some reason that I will never be able to explain I found myself weeping. I found myself weeping helplessly, and this was the first time since that day long ago when I saw my brother burning. I do not know why I wept. Perhaps it was because of the terrible loneliness that seemed to hover over that little room. Perhaps it was because I knew that goodness and mercy had never followed this woman, ever, and there was something in this awful faith of hers that moved me, shabby as she was. Anyway, I suddenly thought of my baby brother and all the Englishmen I had hated for so many years and, still hating them, I sat down beside the body of this miserable little woman and I wept until I could weep no longer.’

  “Luigi stopped talking for a moment. Then he said: ‘I am not a sentimental man, you must know that. I accuse myself constantly of being stiff and cold, of failing to engage myself in the same kind of life that engages others. It is not natural, really. Sometimes I think I must have the blood of a Dutchman or a Scotchman in me. I do not know. But you ask me why it is that I lied for y
ou in the way I did, and I can only tell you this. I can just tell you that the only other time I wept since I was a child was sometime during that day when Francesca died, and when I realized what you had done, and what would be the consequences for you if you were caught and tried. And would you believe something, Cass? It was not for you that I wept, nor for Francesca, but without self-pity for myself—because I understood something. When I wept in this extraordinary way, which is so rare for me, I could not help but think again of my brother and the Englishwoman and then all that had happened here in Sambuco, and I wept out of my own understanding. And that understanding was that this existence itself is an imprisonment. Like that Englishwoman we are serving our sentences in solitary confinement, unable to speak. All of us. Once we were at least able to talk with our Jailer, but now even He has gone away, leaving us alone with the knowledge of insufferable loss. Like that woman, we can only leave notes to Him—unread notes, notes that mean nothing. I do not know why this has happened, but it has happened, that is our condition. In the meantime we do what we can. Some day perhaps the jails will be empty. Until then to confine any but the mad dogs among us is to compound that knowledge of insufferable loss with a blackness like the blackness of eternal night. I have seen prisons, they are the closest thing to hell on earth. And you are not a mad dog. I suppose I lied to try to save you from this kind of banishment. But I suspect that that is not all. I know you and your hideous sense of guilt too well. You are a damnable romantic from the north, the very worst kind. In jail you would wallow in your guilt. As I say, I did not wish to allow you that luxury. Do you see now why I lied for you, my friend?’

  “I lay there with that handcuff chewing at my wrist. He was wrenching at my very guts. I felt like I was being suffocated. I looked at him and finally I said: ’Luigi, you are a very singular Fascist policeman.’ He got up and went to the window again and stood there, gazing out into the night. ’Suppose I don’t go along with you?’ I said. ’Suppose I go to Salerno anyway and hang us both? What would happen to you? And what would I get?’ He didn’t say anything for a while, then he said: ’I would get the limit —many years. I would get more than you. I don’t know what you would get. Three years. Five. Maybe more, maybe nothing. After all, it might be said you had some provocation for what you did. But the jails are crowded. The bureaucracy. It would be months, years, before you even came to trial. Then who knows what you would get? You might get off with only the time you spent in detention—crime of passion. You might get twenty years. Justice in this country is insane as it is everywhere else. I read of a railway mail clerk in Verona, I think it was, who for defrauding the government of ten thousand lire received a sentence of fifteen years. On the other hand, in the south there was a man who killed his father-in-law with an ax and got twenty-one months. Possibly the father-in-law deserved it, and the railway clerk was a scoundrel, but it shows you how far we are from an idea of justice.’

  “He turned around and faced me and after a second he said: ‘For the sake of my own skin I do not think I would ever be so foolish as to do again what I have done. But now that I have done it, I believe that what I did was right. Is not my notion of justice as good as that of some judge who might not like your face and sentence you to five years? Ten years? I think true justice must always somehow live in the heart, locked away from politics and governments and even the law. Maybe it is a good thing I did not succeed in becoming a lawyer. I would have made a poor one. But now I have done what I think was right. And this is what I’m going to do. I’m going to unlock that manacle. Then you will be free to go. You may go to Salerno and implicate yourself—both of us. Or you may go free; you may leave here and go back to America, where you really belong. So I am going to strike off that manacle. Go to Salerno if you wish. Short of killing you, there is no way that I can stop you. But before you do, consider this. Consider a number of years in jail. It is more than a possibility. Think whether these years in jail, away from your family, will satisfy your guilt and your remorse in a way that is not satisfied by the remorse you will have to live with for the rest of your life. Then consider this, too, my friend. Simply consider your guilt itself—your other guilt, the abominable guilt you have carried with you so long, this sinful guilt which has made you a drunkard, and caused you to wallow in your self-pity, and made you fail in your art. Consider this guilt which has poisoned you to your roots. Ask what it was. Ask yourself whether it is not better to go free now, if only so that you may be able to strike down this other guilt of yours and learn to enjoy whatever there is left in life to enjoy. Because if by now, through what you have endured, you have not learned something, then five years, ten years, fifty years in jail will teach you nothing.‘ He came close to me. His face was shining with sweat. For the love of God, Cass,’ he said. ‘Consider the good in yourself! Consider hope! Consider joy!’ Then he stopped. ‘That is all I have to say. Now I am going to strike off that manacle.’ And he struck it off… .”

  “So as I told you, I came home in the dark with Luigi and I left him at the door of the palace and I went downstairs and sat there in the bedroom, looking out at the sea. Poppy was still asleep. It was close to dawn. On the gulf the fishing boats were coming in, these lights moving across the water like a crowd of stars adrift, and a pale glow the color of smoke came into the sky above Salerno and the coast sloping down toward Sicily. I could hear a dog barking, far off, and a cowbell clanking faintly somewhere against the hills. I thought of Francesca and Michele, and all that I had lost, and the grief came back in a wave, then it went away.

  “I thought of Mason, too, but nothing happened. I was past all rage now, and grief. If I had been branded by fire I wouldn’t have stirred, wouldn’t have moved.

  “Then you know, something as I sat there—something about the dawn made me think of America and how the light would come up slowly over the eastern coast, miles and miles of it, the Atlantic, and the inlets and bays and slow tideland rivers with houses on the shore, all shuttered and sleeping, and this stealthy light coming up over it all, the fish stakes at low tide and the ducks winging through the dawn and a kind of apple-green glow over the swamplands and the white beaches and the bays. I don’t believe it was just because of this at all, but all of a sudden I realized that the anxiety and the anguish—most of it, anyway—had passed. And I kept thinking of the new sun coming up over the Coast of Virginia and the Carolinas, and how it must have looked from those galleons, centuries ago, when after black night, dawn broke like a trumpet blast, and there it was, immense and green and glistening against the crashing seas. And suddenly I wanted more than anything in my life to go back there. And I knew I would go… .

  “After a while I heard the two older kids whispering in the other room. Presently I heard them creep down the stairs and outdoors into the garden, and I heard Poppy stir in the bed behind me, and now in this rising morning light I heard the children call out to each other, and I could see them playing some game which was more like a dance. I didn’t know what it was but there they were sort of strutting face to face and soundlessly clapping their hands together, like some vision of Papageno and Papagena, or something even more sweet, paradisaic, as if they were children not really of this earth but of some other, delectable morning before time and history. I watched them as if I were watching them for the first time in my life, or as in a dream.

  “Then I heard Poppy stir again and she rose up in bed and I heard her say, ‘Oh, Cass, you’ve come back!’ And I went over to her and sat down beside her and took her in my arms. I tried to say something apologetic, but I just couldn’t—then, at least. ‘I thought you would never come back!’ she said. ‘I was worried frantic! Where have you been?’ Well, I told her some sort of lie, figuring that there’d be time enough to tell her later where I had been. I calmed her down. And we talked for a while and she asked me a lot of questions, then after a bit she got to yawning and she asked me what time it was, and she lay back against the pillow. ’Well, as usual I don’t understand abou
t you,’ she murmured as she drifted off, ‘but I’m very glad you’ve come back.’ So again I went over to the window and sat down.

  “Now I suppose I should tell you that through some sort of suffering I had reached grace, and how at that moment I knew it, but this would not be true, because at that moment I didn’t really know what I had reached or found. I wish I could tell you that I had found some belief, some rock, and that here on this rock anything might prevail—that here madness might become reason, and grief joy, and no yes. And even death itself death no longer, but a resurrection.

  “But to be truthful, you see, I can only tell you this: that as for being and nothingness, the one thing I did know was that to choose between them was simply to choose being, not for the sake of being, or even the love of being, much less the desire to be for- ever—but in the hope of being what I could be for a time. This would be an ecstasy. God knows, it would.