“The other table,” he said. The five young men had all turned; their heads were together, now and then a hand, an arm, secret, gesticulant, their faces all one way. They leaned back, without turning their faces, and the waiter stood, tray on hip — a squat, sardonic figure older than Grandfather Lust himself — looking also. At last they turned and went on up the street together in the direction from which he had come, he leading the bicycle. Just before they passed from sight they stopped and faced one another again among the people, the heads, without touching at all. Then they went on. “Let’s have some wine,” Don said.
The waiter set the brandies on the table, his apron like a momentary board on the wind. “You have military in town,” Don said.
“That’s right,” the waiter said. “One.”
“Well, one is enough,” Don said. The waiter looked up the street. But they were gone now, with her white dress shaping her stride, her girl-white, not for us.
“Too many, some say.” He looked much more like a monk than the priest did, with his long thin nose and his bald head. He looked like a devastated hawk. “You’re stopping at the priest’s, eh?”
“You have no hotel,” Don said.
The waiter made change from his waistcoat, ringing the coins deliberately upon the table. “What for? Who would stop here, without he walked? Nobody walks except you English.”
“We’re Americans.”
“Well.” He raised his shoulders faintly. “That’s your affair.” He was not looking at us exactly; not at Don, that is. “Did you try Cavalcanti’s?”
“A wineshop at the edge of town? The soldier’s aunt, isn’t it? Yes. But she said—”
The waiter was watching him now. “She didn’t send you to the priest?”
“No.”
“Ah,” the waiter said. His apron streamed suddenly. He fought it down and scoured the top of the table with it. “Americans, eh?”
“Yes,” Don said. “Why wouldn’t she tell us where to go?”
The waiter scoured the table. “That Cavalcanti. She’s not of this parish.”
“Not?”
“Not since three years. The padrone belongs to that one beyond the mountain.” He named a village which we had passed in the forenoon.
“I see,” Don said. “They aren’t natives.”
“Oh, they were born here. Until three years ago they belonged to this parish.”
“But three years ago they changed.”
“They changed.” He found another spot on the table. He removed it with the apron. Then he examined the apron. “There are changes and changes; some further than others.”
“The padrona changed further than across the mountain, did she?”
“The padrona belongs to no parish at all.” He looked at us. “Like me.”
“Like you?”
“Did you try to talk to her about the church?” He watched Don. “Stop there tomorrow and mention the church to her.”
“And that happened three years ago,” Don said. “That was a year of changes for them.”
“You said it. The nephew to the army, the padrone across the mountain, the padrona . . . All in one week, too. Stop there tomorrow and ask her.”
“What do they think here about all these changes?”
“What changes?”
“These recent changes.”
“How recent?” He looked at Don. “There’s no law against changes.”
“No. Not when they’re done like the law says. Sometimes the law has a look, just to see if they were changed right. Isn’t that so?”
The waiter had assumed an attitude of sloven negligence, save his eyes, his long face. It was too big for him, his face was. “How did you know he was a policeman?”
“Policeman?”
“You said soldier; I knew you meant policeman and just didn’t speak the language good. But you’ll pick it up with practice.” He looked at Don. “So you made him too, did you? Came in here this afternoon; said he was a shoe-drummer. But I made him.”
“Here already,” Don said. “I wonder why he didn’t stop the . . . before they . . .”
“How do you know he’s a policeman?” I said.
The waiter looked at me. “I don’t care whether he is or not, buddy. Which had you rather do? think a man is a cop and find he’s not, or think he’s not a cop, and find he is?”
“You’re right,” Don said. “So that’s what they say here.”
“They say plenty. Always have and always will. Like any other town.”
“What do you say?” Don said.
“I don’t say. You don’t either.”
“No.”
“It’s no skin off of my back. If they want to drink, I serve them; if they want to talk, I listen. That keeps me as busy as I want to be all day.”
“You’re right,” Don said. “It didn’t happen to you.”
The waiter looked up the street; it was almost full dark. He appeared not to have heard. “Who sent for the cop, I wonder?” Don said.
“When a man’s got jack, he’ll find plenty of folks to help him make trouble for folks even after he’s dead,” the waiter said. Then he looked at us. “I?” he said. He leaned; he slapped his chest lightly. He looked quickly at the other table, then he leaned down and hissed: “I am atheist, like in America,” and stood back and looked at us. “In America, all are atheists. We know.” He stood there in his dirty apron, with his long, weary, dissolute face while we rose in turn and shook hands with him gravely, the five young men turning to look. He flipped his other hand at us, low against his flank. “Rest, rest,” he hissed. He looked over his shoulder at the young men. “Sit down,” he whispered. He jerked his head toward the doorway behind us, where the padrona sat behind the bar. “I’ve got to eat, see?” He scuttled away and returned with two more brandies, carrying them with his former sloven, precarious skill, as if he had passed no word with us save to take the order. “It’s on me,” he said. “Put it down.”
“Now, what?” Don said. The music had ceased; from across the street we watched the fiddler, fiddle under arm, standing before the table where the young men sat, his other hand and the clutched hat gesticulant. The young woman was already going up the street, the child riding her hip again, its head nodding to a somnolent rhythm, like a man on an elephant. “Now, what?”
“I don’t care.”
“Oh, come on.”
“No.”
“There’s no detective here. He never saw one. He wouldn’t know a detective. There aren’t any detectives in Italy: can you imagine an official Italian in plain clothes for a uniform?”
“No.”
“She’ll show us where the bed is, and in the morning early—”
“No. You can, if you want to. But I’m not.”
He looked at me. Then he swung his pack onto his shoulder. “Good night. See you in the morning. At the café yonder.”
“All right.” He did not look back. Then he turned the corner. I stood in the wind. Anyway, I had the coat. It was a shooting coat of Harris tweed; we had paid eleven guineas for it, wearing it day about while the other wore the sweater. In the Tyrol last summer Don held us up three days while he was trying to make the girl who sold beer at the inn. He wore the coat for three successive days, swapping me a week, to be paid on demand. On the third day the girl’s sweetheart came back. He was as big as a silo, with a green feather in his hat. We watched him pick her over the bar with one hand. I believe she could have done Don the same way: all yellow and pink and white she was, like a big orchard. Or like looking out across a snowfield in the early sunlight. She could have done it at almost any hour for three days too, by just reaching out her hand. Don gained four pounds while we were there.
V
Then I came into the full sweep of the wind. The houses were all dark, yet there was still a little light low on the ground, as though the wind held it there flattened to the earth and it had been unable to rise and escape. The walls ceased at the beginning of the bridg
e; the river looked like steel. I thought I had already come into the full sweep of the wind, but I hadn’t. The bridge was of stone, balustrades and roadway and all, and I squatted beneath the lee of the weather rail. I could hear the wind above and beneath, coming down the river in a long sweeping hum, like through wires. I squatted there, waiting. It wasn’t very long.
He didn’t see me at first, until I rose. “Did you think to have the flask filled?” he said.
“I forgot. I intended to. Damn the luck. Let’s go back—”
“I got a bottle. Which way now?”
“I don’t care. Out of the wind. I don’t care.” We crossed the bridge. Our feet made no sound on the stones, because the wind blew it away. It flattened the water, scoured it; it looked just like steel. It had a sheen, holding light like the land between it and the wind, reflecting enough to see by. But it swept all sound away before it was made almost, so that when we reached the other side and entered the cut where the road began to mount, it was several moments before we could hear anything except our ears; then we heard. It was a smothered whimpering sound that seemed to come out of the air overhead. We stopped. “It’s a child,” Don said. “A baby.”
“No: an animal. An animal of some sort.” We looked at one another in the pale darkness, listening.
“It’s up there, anyway,” Don said. We climbed up out of the cut. There was a low stone wall enclosing a field, the field a little luminous yet, dissolving into the darkness. Just this side of the darkness, about a hundred yards away, a copse stood black, blobbed shapeless on the gloom. The wind rushed up across the field and we leaned on the wall, listening into it, looking at the copse. But the sound was nearer than that, and after a moment we saw the priest. He was lying on his face just inside the wall, his robes over his head, the black blur of his gown moving faintly and steadily, either because of the wind or because he was moving under them. And whatever the sound meant that he was making, it was not meant to be listened to, for his voice ceased when we made a noise. But he didn’t look up, and the faint shuddering of his gown didn’t stop. Shuddering, writhing, twisting from side to side — something. Then Don touched me. We went on beside the wall. “Get down easier here,” he said quietly. The pale road rose gradually beneath us as the hill flattened. The copse was a black blob. “Only I didn’t see the bicycle.”
“Then go back to Cavalcanti’s,” I said. “Where in hell do you expect to see it?”
“They would have hidden it. I forgot. Of course they would have hidden it.”
“Go on,” I said. “Don’t talk so goddamn much.”
“Unless they thought he would be busy with us and wouldn’t—” he ceased and stopped. I jolted into him and then I saw it too, the handlebars rising from beyond the wall like the horns of a hidden antelope. Against the gloom the blob of the copse seemed to pulse and fade, as though it breathed, lived. For we were young, and night, darkness, is terrible to young people, even icy driving blackness like this. Young people should be so constituted that with sunset they would enter a coma state, by slumber shut safe from the darkness, the secret nostalgic sense of frustration and of objectless and unappeasable desire.
“Get down, damn you,” I said. With his high hunched pack, his tight sweater, he was ludicrous; he looked like a clown; he was terrible and ugly and sad all at once, since he was ludicrous and, without the coat, he would be so cold. And so was I: ugly and terrible and sad. “This damn wind. This damn wind.” We regained the road. We were sheltered for the moment, and he took out the bottle and we drank. It was fiery stuff. “Talk about my Milan brandy,” I said. “That damn wind. That damn wind. That damn wind.”
“Give me a cigarette.”
“You’ve got them.”
“I gave them to you.”
“You’re a goddamn liar. You didn’t.” He found them in his pocket. But I didn’t wait.
“Don’t you want one? Better light it here, while we are . . .” I didn’t wait. The road rose, became flush with the field. After a while I heard him just behind me, and we entered the wind. I could see past my shoulder his cigarette shredding away in fiery streamers upon the unimpeded rush of the mistral, that black chill wind full of dust like sparks of ice.
Divorce in Naples
I
WE WERE SITTING at a table inside: Monckton and the bosun and Carl and George and me and the women, the three women of that abject glittering kind that seamen know or that know seamen. We were talking English and they were not talking at all. By that means they could speak constantly to us above and below the sound of our voices in a tongue older than recorded speech and time too. Older than the thirty-four days of sea time which we had but completed, anyway. Now and then they spoke to one another in Italian. The women in Italian, the men in English, as if language might be the sex difference, the functioning of the vocal cords the inner biding until the dark pairing time. The men in English, the women in Italian: a decorum as of two parallel streams separated by a levee for a little while.
We were talking about Carl, to George.
“Why did you bring him here, then?” the bosun said.
“Yes,” Monckton said. “I sure wouldn’t bring my wife to a place like this.”
George cursed Monckton: not with a word or even a sentence; a paragraph. He was a Greek, big and black, a full head taller than Carl; his eyebrows looked like two crows in overlapping flight. He cursed us all with immediate thoroughness and in well-nigh faultless classic Anglo-Saxon, who at other times functioned in the vocabulary of an eight-year-old by-blow of a vaudeville comedian and a horse, say.
“Yes, sir,” the bosun said. He was smoking an Italian cigar and drinking ginger beer; the same tumbler of which, incidentally, he had been engaged with for about two hours and which now must have been about the temperature of a ship’s showerbath. “I sure wouldn’t bring my girl to a dive like this, even if he did wear pants.”
Carl meanwhile had not stirred. He sat serene among us, with his round yellow head and his round eyes, looking like a sophisticated baby against the noise and the glitter, with his glass of thin Italian beer and the women murmuring to one another and watching us and then Carl with that biding and inscrutable foreknowledge which they do not appear to know that they possess. “Èinnocente,” one said; again they murmured, contemplating Carl with musing, secret looks. “He may have fooled you already,” the bosun said. “He may have slipped through a porthole on you any time these three years.”
George glared at the bosun, his mouth open for cursing. But he didn’t curse. Instead he looked at Carl, his mouth still open. His mouth closed slowly. We all looked at Carl. Beneath our eyes he raised his glass and drank with contained deliberation.
“Are you still pure?” George said. “I mean, sho enough.”
Beneath our fourteen eyes Carl emptied the glass of thin, bitter, three per cent beer. “I been to sea three years,” he said. “All over Europe.”
George glared at him, his face baffled and outraged. He had just shaved; his close blue jowls lay flat and hard as a prizefighter’s or a pirate’s, up to the black explosion of his hair. He was our second cook. “You damn lying little bastard,” he said.
The bosun raised his glass of ginger beer with an exact replica of Carl’s drinking. Steadily and deliberately, his body thrown a little back and his head tilted, he poured the ginger beer over his right shoulder at the exact speed of swallowing, still with that air of Carl’s, that grave and cosmopolitan swagger. He set the glass down, and rose. “Come on,” he said to Monckton and me, “let’s go. Might as well be board ship if we’re going to spend the evening in one place.”
Monckton and I rose. He was smoking a short pipe. One of the women was his, another the bosun’s. The third one had a lot of gold teeth. She could have been thirty, but maybe she wasn’t. We left her with George and Carl. When I looked back from the door, the waiter was just fetching them some more beer.
II
They came into the ship together at Galveston, Geo
rge carrying a portable victrola and a small parcel wrapped in paper bearing the imprint of a well-known ten-cent store, and Carl carrying two bulging imitation leather bags that looked like they might weigh forty pounds apiece. George appropriated two berths, one above the other like a Pullman section, cursing Carl in a harsh, concatenant voice a little overburred with v’s and r’s and ordering him about like a nigger, while Carl stowed their effects away with the meticulousness of an old maid, producing from one of the bags a stack of freshly laundered drill serving jackets that must have numbered a dozen. For the next thirty-four days (he was the messboy) he wore a fresh one for each meal in the saloon, and there were always two or three recently washed ones drying under the poop awning. And for thirty-four evenings, after the galley was closed, we watched the two of them in pants and undershirts, dancing to the victrola on the after well deck above a hold full of Texas cotton and Georgia resin. They had only one record for the machine and it had a crack in it, and each time the needle clucked George would stamp on the deck. I don’t think that either one of them was aware that he did it.
Complete Works of William Faulkner Page 672
