William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice (85 page)

“How do you mean?” I said. There seemed to be a lot of mysterious goings-on around this weird palace, and I wanted to be let in on them.

“Oh nothing,” he said. He cast a glance at his watch. Then for no reason at all, or as if the watch had allowed him a sudden private insight, he said: “It’s the age of the slob. If we don’t watch out they’re going to drag us under, you know.” Delivered of this, he fell gloomily silent. Back in the village the clock struck the hour. As Cripps turned again, brooding silently on the far hovering lights, I felt I had never seen a man in whom resided such bitterness, such gloom. The chime’s single vibrating note died and became still: it was one, it was morning. Out of some window now on the level directly below us
Don Giovanni
came again, impassioned, alluring, boisterous, also very loud, as if someone had turned it loose full-blast in outrage.
Rinfrescatevi!
I heard Leporello boom above the flutes and strings.
Bei giovinotti!
And out across the starless night it went, rebounding from the moon-patched slopes across the valley, so far and still so close, and down across the coast above the boats and the twinkling lights—
Ehi caffé! Cioccolatte!
—and on and on, for all I knew, to Calabria and to Sicily. And at this upsurge of sound the golden people near the pool started, turned with puzzled questing faces like a herd of beasts around a water hole, frozen in stiff alarm.

“Look at them,” Cripps said slowly. “You know, that boy isn’t too far off, after all. Look at them, will you? The greatest art form ever devised by man, and what do you get? A void …
cosa da nulla
… nothing … We are not even barbarians. We are mountebanks.” He yawned. “Well, I guess I’ll try to go to bed. Did you ever have insomnia?”

“Not often,” I said.

“Let me give you some advice. Form regular habits, don’t try too hard for anything, forget about—well, honesty, or effort, or it’ll all get you like it’s got me. You know, I lie there and doze off into something that’s not quite sleep and I have a dream. In this dream I am always a victim. A golf pro and a crooner and a drum majorette are all contesting for my soul. Night after night. Sometimes it’s the crooner who wins out, sometimes the golf pro. But more often it’s the drum majorette. She just stands there and wiggles her behind, and then she stomps me to death.” He paused.
“Listen—”

Don Giovanni
had ceased. Now wild and woeful and with scandalous spine-chilling beauty, a hillbilly song had erupted on the night, athrob with shrill messianic voices, male and female, and the strumming of steel guitars. Perhaps it was pure volume alone, or some left-over nostalgia for this music from my native shires, but I thought I had never heard anything at once so lovely and so horrible, and my mind began to swarm with southern weather, southern voices, southern scenes:

This question we daily hear, no one seems to know …

Wha-a-at’s the matter with this world …

Country beer joints, pinewoods, dusty back roads and red earth and swamp water and sweet-fragrant summer dusks: my mind was smothered, overwhelmed by memory. “My Lord,” I said to Cripps, “what’s that—”

“Shh-h,” he said. “Listen—”

Now this rumor we hear: another war we fear,

Revelations
is being fulfilled …

“Wonderful,” Cripps whispered.

Your soul’s on sinking sand, the end is drawing near:

That’s what’s the matter with this world …

Pale faces turned toward the source of this anathema, the people below attended to the horrendous noise: a sport-shirted Italian mouthed a voiceless imprecation, another joined him, red-faced; La Mangiamele clapped her hands over her ears.

The precious ol’ Bahble says: Sin will have to go—

Wha-a-at’s the matter with this world …

Across all Italy the music seemed to stream, filled with dolor and distress, jangling guitars and wild apocalyptic voices joined in one long throbbing lament—bathos brought full circle and back into a kind of crippled majesty. I listened until shameful tears swam in my eyes. And then abruptly, and with the jagged uproar of a phonograph needle scraping like a raw blade across the evening, the music was strangled off, perished, and we heard drunken muffled shouts in the room below.

“Scum!” It was Cass’ voice. “Swine! Scum of the earth!”

Then after a pause, more quietly now,
Don Giovanni
filled the night, and the people around the pool relaxed, resumed their murmurous chatter amid the shadowy swoopings of the giant moths.

“That boy is killing himself,” said Cripps. “What can you do? He could stop Mason in his tracks, and all his breed. But look at him. He’s killing himself.” Then he said good night to me, and then he was gone.

It was not long after Cripps left that a really rather distressing thing occurred. What happened was this: after watching Cripps walk away, I lingered on the balcony for a while, brooding over the people around the pool. I listened—I should say I was belabored by the music: once again it became raucous and loud, and the voices of Elvira and Masetto and Ottavio, screeching like alleycats while the detestable grandee went about his seduction, boomed up and around me, and washed away the sounds from the pool below. I watched the lights floating out upon the sea, ravished by their beauty, but at the same time sunk in the profoundest gloom—primarily because of Cripps, who in an odd and oblique way had so mutilated my happy expectation of America that, if memory serves me right, I concocted all sorts of alternatives: another job in Rome, marriage to a princess somewhere, headlong flight to Greece. I was mired in despondency, my throat was itchy and sore. But after a short time my sadness diminished: to hell with Cripps, I thought, and I turned to make my lonesome way back down among the movie stars. It was several moments later, after I had passed through the long room, that a door burst open a few feet away from me, exposing a glimpse of an ascending stairway, and a girl of eighteen or twenty, who came skidding out into the room as if upon glass, slipped to the floor in a heap, and then leaped up and rubbed her elbow, sobbing as if her heart would break. She was almost faultlessly lovely; even the brief glimpse I had of her, as she stood there indecisively with her brown eyes round with hurt and terror, wrung my heart with yearning. I put out my hand to steady her, for she seemed to be on the verge of toppling once more, but she drew back instantly and threw a hunted, despairing look toward the staircase. Her dress was black and of poor quality, such as that which servants wear; through a rip in the bodice practically all of one of her full, heavy, and handsome breasts was laid bare, and for the entire ten seconds that she stood there, paralyzed, it seemed, by panic and indecision, I too felt rooted there and speechless, torn both by a futile, gallant desire to help and by the beast inside which drew my eyes down to that delectable, troubled bosom. Then, suddenly covering herself, still furiously sobbing, she struck herself in the face.
“Dio mio!”
she cried in a frenzy.
“Questa è la fine! Non c’è rimedio!”

“Can I help—” I began.

“Ah my God, please,” she exclaimed in English. “No, please, don’t—”

And then, recovering control, breathless, she pushed past me with a little groan of anguish, her brown hair in a scattered, lovely tangle about her face as she took to her heels again, bare feet pattering in diminishing terrified flight down the hallway. She had spun me around like a top, and I came to rest on a marble bench, still vibrating. Before I could rise, I heard a thunderous noise once more on the stairs, as of trunks and boxes tumbling down. It was a hell of a racket; the whole palace seemed to be in eruption. Then Mason burst forth, skidding too on the glassy floor, throwing out his arms wildly and righting himself as he slid to a stop before me. Three Band-Aids plastered his face. His hair flew out in all directions. He was clad in a silk dressing gown both too short for him and put on in obvious haste, for his chest was bare, exposing a thicket of reddish sweating hair, and I could see, below, his knobby knees. Rather incongruously, his feet were shod in wooden shower clogs, which is what accounted for all the noise.

“Where is she!” he snarled at me, his face red and ugly.

“Who?” I said. I had drawn back nervously on the bench. I had never seen him quite like this before: he wore a brutish, wild expression, and with his red-rimmed eyes and arm cocked threateningly I thought he was going to paste me one where I sat.

“Where did she go!” he yelled. “Tell me, you bastard! I’ll kill her!”

“I’ll swear to God, Mason,” I said, “I just do not
know.”

“You’re lying!” And then with a strange, painful, bowlegged gait, infinitely stiff and slow, he moved toward the hallway down which the girl had disappeared. “You wait right there, Petesy boy, because when I come back I expect to stomp out of you a fat amount of your yellow and treacherous shit.” There was a kind of a smile on my host’s face but pure malice and venom were in his voice, and hatred… .

Maybe you recollect that dream of betrayal which I described early in this story—of the murderous friend who came tapping at my window. Somehow when again I recall that dream and then remember Mason at this moment, I am made conscious of another vision—half-dream, half-fantasy—which has haunted me ever since I left Sambuco.

It goes like this: I have taken a picture of a friend with one of those Polaroid cameras. While waiting for the required minute to elapse I have wandered into another room, and there I pull out the print all fresh and glossy. “Ha!” or “Well!” or “Look!” I call out expectantly to the other room. Yet as I bend down to examine the picture, I find there, not my friend at all but the face of some baleful and unearthly monster. And there is only silence from the other room.

3

“Holy
God,”
said Cass one day, as I recalled that evening for him, “was I as bad as all that?”

“I wouldn’t say bad,” I replied. “Not
bad.
As I recall it you were even quite eloquent, in a soggy way. But—well yes, you were blind, all right.”

He reflected silently for a long time on what I had told him. “That piano,” he said finally. “Falling all over that piano. I don’t remember a thing about it. I swear.”

“If you’d done that sober, you’d have been in the hospital for a week.”

“And that string music. Jesus, I’ve still got it somewhere, down underneath the Buxtehude. ‘What’s the Matter with This World?’ Wilma Lee and Stoney Cooper. I got that record up in Petersburg, Virginia, right after the war when I was visiting my cousin up there. Carted it all around Europe with me, too. But I’ll swear I can’t remember ever playing it over there. And that night—”

“You played it all right. Boy, you played it.”

“Holy God.” He fell silent for a while, then he said: “What time do you suppose that was? What time of the evening?”

“Morning, I’d say. Somewhere around one o’clock.”

He wrinkled his brow and then looked at me intently. “All right then, that was the last time you saw Mason before—before he was dead. When you saw him chasing off after Francesca. Is that right?”

“That was Francesca, then?” I countered. “The girl he killed?”

His face for a moment seemed unutterably weary and somber. It was his first reaction of this kind since I had come to Charleston; partly through me, I suppose, he had begun to live it all again, and at this moment I could only vaguely sense how much he had cared for the girl. “It was her,” he said rather despondently, “it couldn’t have been anyone else. Did you see her again?”

“I don’t think it was too long afterwards. With you.”

“Where,
for God sake?”

“Down in that courtyard. You—” I paused. It was an awkward thing to say, and I didn’t know if he wanted to hear it. “You kissed her. Or she kissed you. Believe me, I wasn’t spying,” I added, “I happened to be—”

“No, of course not. But—” With puzzlement all over his face, he ran his fingers through his hair. Then after a moment he said:
’Wow,
you know it is all coming back now. In bits and pieces and little flickers, you see.” He fell silent again, then his eyes slowly lit up, and he arose from his chair and began to pace around the cluttered fishing shack. It was raining, and the roof leaked, and water dripped down the back of my neck. “Like what you just said, for instance. I’d forgotten that, too. A total and complete blank. Of course! I did see her. I
did
see her. And—” His voice trailed off.

“And what?”

He scratched his chin. “And she—Look,” he said, “this is important. Try to be as accurate as you can. How long do you think you were at that party? That is, before you saw Mason and he hollered at you.”

I brooded, straining to be exact. “It must have been eleven-thirty or so when I came in with Rosemarie.” I paused. “And about—oh, sometime after one when Mason came downstairs after Francesca. A little less than two hours, I’d say. But why—”

“Wait a minute, wait a minute,” he said, gesturing for silence. Then after a bit he turned to me with a wan sad grin, and said: “Now tell me this, will you. When
was
the last time you saw Mason?”

I started to tell him, again with some embarrassment. “Well, at least that’s an easy one. It was when he made you go into your trained-seal act. When he made you—” I faltered, horribly.

“Oh Jesus, yes,” he blurted, “Poppy once told me a little about that. It got so awful I didn’t ever let her finish.” He paused, somewhat agitated now, stroking his bare arms. “That was when—when you rescued me, I guess. I don’t remember that, but I do remember it afterwards, when you were sobering me up. And after this exhibition I put on you never saw Mason again?”

“Only when he was stiff and cold.”

Somber, absorbed, he gazed for a long while through the streaming windows. “Somewhere,” he said slowly, “at one point along in there somewhere she told me something.” He struck his head shortly with his hand, as if to dislodge the memory. “She told me something …”

I was utterly baffled about all this, and my silence must have betrayed my bafflement, for in a moment he turned and said in an even voice: “You’ve got to excuse this, you know. I’m not pulling your leg, really.” He ran some water in a pan and, sitting down beside me, began to eviscerate a large croaker. “I’m going to level with you about something,” he went on. “It’s not something I’ve ever wanted to think about, much less talk about. Maybe it’s better this way—get it out of the system. But—well, it’s like this, you see. That trained-seal act, as you call it. Mason had me coming and going down there that summer. It started out O.K., we were even sort of buddies at first. But then—something went wrong. What with the booze and the weird condition I was in he began to stomp me —I mean really stomped me, and I let him—and it got so bad I was paying him for the time of day. A regular peon I was, if you want to know the truth.” He paused. “I’ve never known anyone in my life I ever hated so much.” He became silent, sweating over the fish.

“So—” I said.

“I’ll tell you about that sometime. But now—Anyway, the point is this: a while back you said something about how it shocked you, Mason doing what he did and all. How though you could credit him with an ordinary red-white-and-blue Americanstyle rape you couldn’t see him doing it in the all-out monstrous way he did it. Well, when you said that, it rang a bell. Because there in Sambuco, when it was all over, that was the way I felt too. I hated his guts, he was the biggest son of a bitch I had ever run across; but later I couldn’t see him doing that. What he did took something Mason didn’t have. His cruelty and his meanness was a different kind. Only—” He fell silent again, the cords of his arms standing out as he strained away with the knife. “Bleeding croaker,” he said at last, as if wishing to banish the subject for good. “Hardly worth the trouble. Skin on a croaker’s like—”

I may have been mistaken, but I thought for a moment he was going to weep.

“Only
what?”
I persisted. “Look, Cass, like you say, you can level with me. I’m not trying to worm something out of you that you don’t want—”

“Only this,” he said, turning calmly to face me. “Only I think now that, by God, I was wrong about all that. Maybe he had it in him, after all. Everything you say—all of this stuff I was blind to —makes it plain that rape was on his mind from the word go. She wouldn’t give in to him, so he would take it. That afternoon, for instance; what he said there to Rosemarie that time, just before he belted her. And then this thing you told me about—chasing after her down the stairs. He said, I’ll kill her.’ Isn’t that what you said? And then—”

“Then what?”

“Nothing much,” he said in a bemused voice. He turned to me again. “Put it this way,” he said. “Maybe I’m just being a scoundrel. Maybe I’m just being un-Christian. Maybe I just want to make sure that he really was a monster.”

“Monster?” I said. Cass appeared to have lost his reticence about Mason, and I was eager to press this slight advantage. “Tell me,” I said, “he really gave you a rough time down there, didn’t he?”

He seemed to ponder the question for a long moment, turning over all the angles, absorbed. “Yes, I reckon he did. But how much of all that was due to my own corruption, this old corruption of mine—how much of the whole ruination was my blame I’d like to know. Maybe I’ll tell you about that too sometime, when I’m able to be sensible about it and recollect it.” He halted to wipe the wet scales off his knife, and dried his hands. “It’s really curious, you know,” he went on, now in a somber monotone, “this business about evil—what it is, where it is, whether it’s a reality, or just a figment of the mind. Whether it’s a sickness like cancer, something that can be cut out and destroyed, with maybe some head doctor acting as the surgeon, or whether it’s something you can’t cure at all, but have to stomp on like you would a flea carrying bubonic plague, getting rid of the disease and the carrier all at once. Not too long ago, as time goes—you’re a lawyer, you know all this—they’d hang a ten-year-old for stealing a nickel’s worth of candy. Right there in Merrie England, France too. This was the plague theory, I guess. Stomp on the evil, crush it out. Now a kid goes out on the streets—he’s not even ten, most likely he’s twenty and he goddam well knows better—and he commits some senseless and vicious crime, murder maybe, and they call him sick and send for the head doctor, on the theory that the evil is—well, nothing much more than a temporary resident in the brain. And both of these theories are as evil as the evil they are intended to destroy and cure. At least that’s what I’ve come to believe. Yet for the life of me I don’t know of any nice golden mean between the two.”

“How does all of this apply to Mason?”

“Well first—Let me explain a little something. I don’t mean to be blowing my own horn, or singing the blues, either, but—well, I’ve come up where I am—I’ll admit it isn’t very far—pretty much the hard way, as I guess you know. I didn’t get past the second year up there in this miserable little high school in North Carolina, even now I have the toughest time writing and punctuating and so on. But I did learn to read and I’ve read a lot on my own hook, and I guess I’ve read ten times what the average American has, although God knows that could mean only one book. Anyway, I guess one of the big turning points in my life was right after the war, when I got discharged from the psycho ward of that naval hospital I was telling you about, in California. There was this chief noodle specialist there—one hell of a guy. He was a Navy captain, name of Slotkin. I’d told him about my schoolboy interest in painting, and he got me in one of these therapy painting classes, and I reckon I was a painter from then on out. That’s how I ended up after the war in New York instead of back in Carolina, I guess. Anyway, we couldn’t come to any agreement whatsoever about my melancholia or whatever it was, with its manic-depressive overtones, but I had a lot of long talks with him, and there was some patient gentle quality the guy had that almost swung me out of my blues, and just before I left the place—uncured—he gave me a two-volume edition of Greek drama. It was quite irregular and all, I guess, this gift from a full Navy captain to a buck private in the Marines, but I guess he saw something in me, even if I wasn’t about to buy any of his Freud. I remember he told me this: ’Read this when you’re down and out.’ Something like: ’The fact of the matter is this, you know, we haven’t advanced any farther than the Greeks, after all.’ Which you’ve got to admit is pretty cool talk, coming from a reverend brain doctor. He was quite a sweet guy, old Slotkin.

“Anyway, when you mentioned how I started quoting at length from Sophocles that night, it all came back to me. The sweat and the horror and this bleeding awful view into the abyss. Long before I ended up in Sambuco I’d memorized great hunks and sections. out of those two volumes. And when you saw me that night I was really in a bad way—as blind-drunk off of
Oedipus
as I was off of booze.” He paused and fingered ruminatively at the edge of the knife. “Yet here’s the thing, you see. Let me explain if I can.” He paused again and closed his eyes, almost prayerfully, as if coaxing reluctant memories from the confusion of the past. “I was so completely blind. Stoned. Something you said … which has to do with this evil I was talking about.” His eyelids parted, and he turned. “Yes, I think I’m getting some of it. More of it’s coming back now. I do remember just in the dimmest way going upstairs. The piano, no. But
Oedipus,
and Cripps, and you—yes, a little.” He shook his head. “No, there’s some connection I can’t make yet. Jesus Christ, you’d think we were having a bleeding seance. I was trying to search for something that night … But now it’s all gone again. Do you think it could be that I had come up there to chew Mason’s ass out with a little
Oedipus?
No, I doubt it.” He shook his head again, violently. “All I know now is that I had some sort of drunken truth that I’d dredged up out of that play, and that it sure as hell had to do with evil, and that Mason…”

He stopped and, very calmly, lit a cigar. “But I might be mistaken,” he added. “What did you really think of Mason?” he said then, turning.

“Oh I just don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know how to explain him, I never have known. He was a jerk. A big spoiled baby with too much money and a lot of pretensions. He was the world’s worst liar. He hated women. He was a lousy mess. And yet—”

“Yet what?”

“Yet he was great fun to be with sometimes. He was entertaining as hell. But he was more than an entertainer. Remove all the other stuff and he might have been quite a guy.”

“How long did you know him, really?”

“That’s an odd thing,” I said. “I knew him a couple of years at school. And then for a week or so in New York, right after the war. I can’t recall how long exactly. Ten days. Maybe a couple of weeks. We’ll call it a week. And then that day in Sambuco. And that was all. But—” I paused. “But still and all there was something about him. I mean you could see him for twenty-four hours and he would reveal more about himself than most people do in a lifetime. He was a—” I halted. I really didn’t know what he was.

“Tell me about him,” Cass said.

“Well, it’s not really a whole lot,” I said. “I don’t think I could exactly—”

’Tell
me anyway,” he said.

So I tried to tell him. I tried to tell him everything I could remember. I told him how at first I had lost track of Mason after that dismal week end down in Virginia and how, though we wrote each other for a while (he was in Palm Beach, Havana, Beverly Hills, New York, usually with Wendy; his letters were lewd and comical), our correspondence petered out and he dropped from sight altogether. I told him, too, how ten years—to the month—passed before I ran into him after the war, quite by accident, in a New York bar…

No doubt it is too easy to say that had I not met Mason again things would have turned out differently, that, having lost touch with one another, we would not have restored our old communion of spirit—a dignified phrase for “palship” or some other term equally American and specious, but which, once re-established, allowed him to invite me down to Sambuco. Most of our existence, though, is made up of such imponderables; the important thing is that we met again. It was in the late spring, a week or so before I got the Agency job and sailed for Europe. I had very little money at that time but a job with a veteran’s counseling service allowed me to eat after a fashion and to rent a tiny cardboard apartment on West Thirteenth Street. It was a humid season, with muggy twilights crowned high with thunderheads and a grumble of storms that never came, wilted faces along the avenues, and windows thrown open on the heat-blown air erupting blurred music and voices ballyhooing war, cold war, threats of war. Evenings I tried to read uplifting books in my apartment, but my soul was illequipped for the stress of loneliness. My room was a place of subterranean murk with a view of an airshaft and an adjoining hotel where old men constantly shambled by, scratching themselves, flushing remote toilets. But it was only in part because of my surroundings that this time of my life was not a very satisfactory one. There are certain periods in youth which are not touched by even a trace of nostalgia, one’s conduct at that time seems so regrettable. Never very fastidious anyway, I became wholly unkempt, and was sour and spiteful to the girls I tried to pick up in Village hangouts. And to top it all, Mason came into my life—in a jammed bar on Sheridan Square during an evening’s prowl that had left me more than usually lonesome and disheveled, and with my carcass burdened with mean-spirited lusts.