When I was discovered to have hepatitis even the Colonel came to see me. It was the only time he ever came to my flat, and Serafina was proud of my having him there and completely taken in by his moustache and by the campaign ribbons pinned to his summer uniform. I remember nothing of what I said to him, being by that time very ill and forgetful of his existence, let alone his presence; but I do recall that he urged me not to worry about the report, which he felt must be on my mind.
Serafina impressed him, too, and because of that I was not made to go to hospital as everybody wished, but remained at home throughout the confused weeks that followed.
When, after Ferragosto, I had got no better, Germani had driven me again to the hospital, and brought me home re-diagnosed as a serious case. There was no one now for me to pass on this news to, other than the Colonel — for that morning Justin had flown to Spain in a plane belonging to the United States Navy. I did write a calm note to Norah telling her I had jaundice, and she wrote hysterically back saying I must be very careful and that this was prevalent in Italy. She and Edmund had tried to ring me up, but the telephone system of Naples was one too many for them.
In fact the telephone seldom rang during those weeks, except for inquiries that came from the office. Even in the worst of the illness I would think of Bagnoli and the PX and the report and the Colonel, and be glad to be free of them and at home, nauseated, feverish, and turning deep yellow. When you are ill you can only be yourself – whereas in an office one is required always to be somewhat false, at least when one is subordinate. The preference for a serious disease over office life struck me, even at the time. Mostly my thoughts were not so coherent, and once or twice visited by passages of delirium.
In the jumble of those indistinguishable nights and days, two things grotesquely predominated. One was the festival of Piedigrotta, whose songs surged into my rooms from Mergellina and from every radio on the Posillipo. All night the celebrations flared red and green around my walls in fireworks and floodlighting, recreating an active volcano at the other – the wrong – end of the harbour; in the day, causing foreign contestants (for no Neapolitan would have contemplated so useless an expenditure of energy, and the race was always won by a Dane or a New Zealander) to swim out to Capri, and skiffs to tack back and forth around a series of buoys. The festival was of the same official duration as the active period of my illness: it reached its own climax, and entered its own decline.
The other thing was an ineradicable scent, exotic, sickening, which had somehow got into my rooms, I do not know from where. Until I was quite recovered I was always conscious of that sweet smell, and never found out where it came from, how it had infiltrated the mind, perhaps, or the imagination, rather than the nostrils. Perhaps it lingered from some tuberoses Justin once brought me; or from the perfume, with one of those names – Sin, or Scandal, or Woman – that Gioconda always wore.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Gioconda gone, Justin in Spain, I had no visitors. The few casual acquaintances who might have come were off to islands or mountains. Each morning Serafina let herself in, and that was the only interruption in identical days that I passed in bed or, when the disease began to ebb, out on the terrace. The mere fact of growing less ill, the privacy and silence of those high rooms, the emancipation from bureaucracy brought pleasure of a kind I had never known; pleasure that was far from negative, though it owed so much to lack; that, in looking inward rather than ahead, signified, I suppose, the end not even of youth but of childhood.
Below the windows there was always something going on. In the earliest morning there were boats below, on a sea at that hour indistinguishable from inflamed sky; one lone boat, or a pair, or a group of them drawing up nets or lobster pots. No sound ever came landward from these boats except sounds of the sea – soft plashings of their work, or the mild collisions of hull and tide. If the fishermen spoke to one another, it was in voices too low to reach the shore. The men, like the boats, were weathered, single-purposed, uncolourful. In each of their practised movements there was the intentness, the restraint, that suggest not an industry but an existence.
They were always there. Throughout the day, when the water near the rocks was logged with swimmers and with rafts and sailing boats, there on the periphery would be one of these boats, a wedge of grey or brown in that kaleidoscope, a fly in all that ointment. In the evening they were to be seen rocking on the wash of a pleasure-launch or in the wake of the fast white ferry bound for Ischia. In the night, no matter what hour one looked for them, they were out with acetylene lamps and you could see the single figure standing in the stern with the oars, and the other kneeling at the prow and bending into a circle of clear green light.
At first during that convalescence I could do nothing but watch. Walking from one room to the next was exhausting, a few pages of a magazine or a book brought tears of fatigue. Sometimes I slept right through the morning and woke to find a tray on the bedside table and Serafina gone. But nothing intruded on my new pleasure; all this time was mine.
One morning it rained. Waking late I found the room dim, and the bathers’ screams suspended. The gulf was grey with rain that fell steadily, discreetly, without thunder. There was no wind, but for the first time in months the passage of air could be felt about the room. I pulled up a chair and sat at the terrace doors in an immense relief: I’d had no idea how much I had missed the rain. The hills, the buildings, the boats looked refreshed and grateful. The sea itself seemed to be thirsty.
I greeted Serafina with ‘The rain!’ as if it were a development that vitally affected both of us. She at once reproved me, it was a sprinkling only: ‘Sghizzichea’. And over the breakfast dishes she loudly sang a tragic song, ‘How it rains. Gesù, how it rains.’
The next day was fair again, the bathers were back. But the break was there, you felt it. We had got to the end of summer and there had been a change. I began to sleep less and to be interested in food. Germani drove me up to the hospital two or three times for blood tests in which a dye was injected into my vein to illuminate the declining course of the disease. I had a letter from my brother; and a Get Well card signed by all the office – the local staff having inscribed their names dutifully at the bottom, surname first, one neatly under the other like a petition. With an eye to conditions at Naples, the PX must have stocked up heavily with Get Well cards, for any number of these, each one different, ultimately reached me.
The first Saturday after the rain everybody was out using up what now remained of the good weather. Some were there at sunrise, lining the rocks like early risers getting first place for a spectacle. It was September, a ripe, flawless day. I was lying on the bed in a dressing-gown, reading. Serafina had said good-bye to me and gone to the door. I heard her talking to someone as she let herself out, and a man’s voice said impatiently, ‘That’s all right. Go, go.’ ‘No’ was repeated two or three times, and the door closed loudly. And the same voice, the man’s voice, said, ‘Jenny.’
Strangely, I thought at first that it might be my brother standing there so unexpectedly, or even Justin, and I could not take in the fact of its being Gianni. I had not been thinking much about Gianni, and it took a second or two to get the idea of his being there. But it was Gianni — Gianni was standing in the doorway of my room with a sheaf of flowers, wrapped up, beneath his arm.
He himself looked bewildered, as if I had taken him by surprise. He had a light-coloured suit on and a blue shirt, and looked very well dressed, almost dandified. Then I saw it was all wrong, the way he looked and his turning up like that. And even before I absorbed that realization, I had said, ‘What is it, what’s happened?’ One talks of being speechless with shock, but there are times when the comprehending words are uttered before the brain has formed their meaning. I remember thinking, The flowers are normal, to reassure myself: if there had been a calamity, a death, he wouldn’t have stopped to get me flowers.
He was looking at me in that way, puzzled and alarmed. I raised myself against t
he pillows as he came across the room and stood beside the bed. He suddenly dropped his bunch of flowers – that is, he just moved his arm as if the flowers were not there, and they fell to the floor with a paper crash. At the same moment I put my book face-down on the sheets. This laying down of our weapons occurred as he seated himself on the edge of my bed – not greeting me or taking my hand, but trembling all over like a domestic animal that has seen something wild.
Awareness of a sick-room, of my condition, seemed to work on him vaguely and to introduce some echo of restraint over whatever it was he had to tell me. ‘You don’t know,’ he said.
‘Gianni, my God, what is it?’
‘She’s gone. Gioconda’s gone to Spain.’
‘To Spain?’
‘Gioconda’s left me.’ But he gave, in stating this, no impression of delivering himself of what he had to say. He had information for me, I could see it. He hesitated again, and then he said, ‘She’s with the Scotsman.’
It was bizarre, his saying it like that, ‘Lo Scozzese’ — the comic name he had used for Justin, uttered in this context bereft of comedy. The knowledge was both physical and mental, like an electric shock. I could feel it entering my ears and breast and fingers, circulating in me.
‘Do you understand me, Jenny?’ Gianni’s impulse to break the news gently was transfigured, as I stayed silent, into the need to urge the situation on me and obtain a response comparable to his own. ‘With your friend.’
It came to me how Justin had said, ‘Your friend. Your friend Gioconda.’ To remind himself, possibly; to accuse himself — or Gioconda. I felt the same new, frightening surprise I had experienced on learning that I had a recognized, serious disease, not just a passing ailment that the system would absorb and forget within hours or days. I felt knowledge, as I say, coursing in my body, making everything different.
Gianni leant forward for a moment, his elbows on his knees, his hands over his eyes. I thought he must be weeping, but he looked up dry-eyed, as if he had merely been trying to concentrate on a complicated matter. He looked terrible, his face whitely disarrayed; one could not say that he suddenly looked like an old man, but you could see how he would be in age, the fullness turned to folds, the eyes more fixed. At the same time he looked better too, more like a real person.
I still had not spoken to him. I could hear his breathing, heavy and regular, like a patient in anaesthesia.
‘Tosca told me. But there was a letter lying there too. It’s been lying there ten days.’
‘What do you mean? Lying where?’
‘San Biagio. She telephoned me, Gioconda, almost three weeks ago, and said she wasn’t going to Nice. She asked me to come to Naples.’
‘You didn’t come.’
He shouted, ‘No.’ He controlled himself, laid his hands, now, on his knees to steady them, to steady himself. ‘I came only this morning. I’ve come this moment from San Biagio. I thought she would still be there.’
So there had been a calamity after all. The flowers were for Gioconda.
‘You hadn’t been in touch with her?’ He shook his head. ‘You were punishing her,’ I said, punishing him.
‘We had a quarrel.’ Gianni made a pronouncement of this, as if their relations had been otherwise unclouded. ‘Over my life in Rome. Over a woman.’ We were quiet again until he repeated, ‘Her letter has been there all this time, right there on the table in the hall.’ This fact of the letter lying there like an undetonated explosive was the last straw for him. I knew what he felt: to me too the tranquillity of my convalescence now appeared to have taken place in grotesque ignorance of this. ‘You can read it. It says nothing – I mean, nothing more. She mentions you. She says she hasn’t been able to write it to you – but I thought at first you might have known. From him.’
I took Gioconda’s note from him and read it. They may be married by now, I thought, handing it back.
Gianni folded it and put it into his wallet, carefully, as though conserving a piece of evidence. He put the wallet back into his trouser pocket, stretching out his leg to do so, his foot grazing the paper cone that contained the flowers. He said to me, ‘I am in agony’ – the statement as blatant, as naïve as the caption of a silent film. He got up distractedly and walked round the bed. Coming back and standing beside me he put his palm against his breast. ‘A blow. Just what people say — I’ve had a blow. That’s how it feels. As if I’d been struck by force.’
He turned away once more and walked over to the terrace doors and stood there, a violet shape against the light. I heard the shuddering sounds of his tears.
It was appalling, this humbling of Gianni – as once before, when I had seen him plead with Gioconda and be refused; and compounded by the contrast with his accustomed facility for tears. I lay listening to him, so exquisitely aware of his grief that every detail on which my eye fell — the crease of a sheet, the fissure in a tile, the slight stain around the doorknob – commanded attention and became significant, as if my perceptions were trying to divert me out of self-preservation, in the way that one might offer trinkets to a frantic child.
I swung my legs down from the bed to go to him, but as I got to my feet he turned abruptly and was at my side again.
Gianni’s sudden presence, the effort of rising, affected my balance. Standing barefoot on the little rug by the bed, I swayed slightly and took a step aside. He put out his hand to steady me, grasping my arm above the elbow, his fingers completely circling the flesh through the cotton gown.
The contact recalled me to him – recalled me, that is, as my self rather than as, simply, the recipient of his news – for he stared into my face with a shifting of sights, and again with the look of puzzlement and recognition.
‘You’re so thin, Jenny.’ Without changing its pressure, his hand on my arm acknowledged this, and his voice altered. ‘Almighty God, you’re thin.’
It is hard to convey, now, why it was touching, how touching it was, this involuntary solicitude of Gianni’s. It was like the rain — I had not realized, until it fell, how deprived of it I had been, how greatly life had been lacking in this perfectly ordinary element. Tears – of weakness, loneliness, self-pity — rose to my own eyes. But most of all it was moving, this digression of Gianni’s, by its show of a spontaneous human concern. The simple physical fact of Gianni taking hold of my arm and noticing how thin it had become gave us back for a moment our sense of existing outside of Gioconda’s departure, and of being subject to human sensations other than suffering. Far from giving a sense of proportion, as it is said to do, disaster throws everything out of perspective: and this exchange of ours was hopelessly bound up with the disruption, the detail of my thinness merely thrown into relief by it – enhanced by it, in fact, like the cracked tile or the stain on the door.
Gianni still held my arm, and still I stood there with the backs of my legs touching the cool metal frame of the bed. We said nothing. The cries from the sea, which throughout this time had gone unheard, were all at once raucous and urgent, as if someone had unthinkingly turned up their volume. ‘So thin, Jenny,’ Gianni repeated, to pass the time, it might have been, while we entered into another stage of experience.
Without slackening his encircling fingers – as though my arm represented some source of meaning – Gianni embraced me, and I leant against him. His face, wet with tears shed for Gioconda, was lowered to mine. And when at last we lay down together, his hand, then releasing me, reached up from habit to the back of my head, to grope for the tortoiseshell comb he was accustomed to unclasping there.
Gianni and I sat by my windows in the dark, I in a deep chair with my legs beneath me, he on a stool alongside. My hand, over the chair-arm, rested, light, in his; comforted, serene, without suspense.
‘She won’t stay with him.’
‘That’s it,’ said Gianni. ‘Tell me she’ll come back. For it’s all I can stand at the moment.’
‘She will,’ I obediently answered. As Gianni pointed out, it was necessary to get
him through this day. ‘For him, it must be …’
‘A grand passion.’
‘Yes. For her, it can only be -’ I was going to say ‘despair’; but left it, again, unfinished. This time Gianni did not supply the word.
‘Perhaps she has already left him.’
‘Perhaps.’
Gianni said, ‘The poor bastard.’ Then, simply, ‘The bastard.’ He lit a cigarette and threw the match out over the terrace into the sea. When the cigarette was finished, he did the same with the end of it.
‘Gianni,’ I said at length. ‘If Gioconda comes back, there’ll be no use blaming her.’ It was my turn, now, to tell him things.
Gianni touched his head against my shoulder. ‘Sweet.’
‘It might even be that you would be different with her.’
‘What you mean, is, it might be a lesson to me,’ said Gianni, but not smiling.
‘It might make you kinder.’
‘Perhaps.’ Gianni looked doubtful. ‘The thing is, I don’t think I could keep it up. It would be all right for a while, and then it would all be the same again. I don’t know that I could change.’
‘On the contrary. I’m talking about your becoming more like yourself.’
‘That might be worse, in the end.’
We were talking about him as we might have done behind his back.
‘Besides, I have no desire to turn into one of those men you see about – reformed characters, you know; who have come to heel.’
For a time we watched the lights lifting and sinking in the water, the lights strung up the side of Vesuvius, the lighted curve of the town tapering away to darkness. Gianni moaned, thinking I suppose that Gioconda might not come back, and that if she did he might never see her. ‘Let me stay tonight.’ And he added ingenuously, ‘I ought not to be by myself.’
The Bay of Noon Page 14
