Portraits and Observations (41 page)

Early that summer Graziella announced her engagement to a young man named Luchino, a slim-waisted waiter with oily, curly hair and a film-star profile. He spoke a little English, a little German; he wore green suede shoes and drove his own Vespa. Graziella had reason to think him a formidable catch; still, I was not happy about it. I felt she was too plain and healthy, simply too nice, for a sharp fellow like Luchino (who had a reputation as a semiprofessional gigolo catering to solitary tourists: Swedish spinsters, German widows and widowers), though, to be fair, such activities were far from uncommon among the village youth.

But Graziella’s joy was difficult to resist. She pinned photographs of Luchino all over the kitchen, above the stove, above the sink, inside the icebox door and even on the trunk of a tree that grew outside the kitchen window. Romance, of course, interfered with her care of me: now, in the Sicilian fashion, she had her fiancé’s socks to mend, laundry to do (and such a lot of it!), not to mention the hours she spent preparing a trousseau, embroidering underwear, fitting a wedding veil. Often at lunch I was handed a plate of ice-hard spaghetti, then given cold fried eggs for supper. Or perhaps nothing at all; she was forever hurrying off to meet her lover in the piazza for a twilight promenade. Yet in retrospect I do not begrudge her that happiness: it was but the prelude to the bitterest bad luck.

One August night her father (much beloved despite his drunkenness) was offered (by an American tourist) a tall glass of straight gin, told to drink it at one go, did so and underwent a stroke that left him paralyzed. And the very next day even starker misfortune struck; Luchino, streaking along a country road aboard his Vespa, rounded a corner, ran into and instantly killed a three-year-old girl.
I drove Luchino and Graziella to the child’s funeral; afterward, on the way home, Luchino was dry-eyed but Graziella moaned and wept as though her heart had been halved: I assumed she was grieving for the dead baby. No, it was for herself, the dark prospect before her: Luchino faced possible imprisonment and certainly a huge indemnity payment—there would be no marriage now, not for years (if ever).

The poor girl was prostrated. A doctor confined her to bed. One day I went to see how she was getting on. I took Lola with me, meaning to cheer the invalid. Instead, the sight of the bird horrified her; she screamed. She said Lola was a witch, she said Lola had the
malocchio
, the evil eye, and that the double tragedy, her father’s stroke and Luchino’s accident, was Lola’s work, a punishment inflicted for having caught her and clipped her wings. She said, Yes, yes, it’s true: every child knows ravens are the embodiment of black and wicked spirits. And, “I will never come to your house again.”

Nor did she. Nor did any other servant girl. For out of Graziella’s accusations, a myth grew that mine was a house of the evil eye: that not merely Lola, but I myself, possessed a potent
malocchio
. Nothing worse can be said of one in Sicily. Moreover, it is a charge against which there is no defense. In the beginning I joked about it, though it was not in the least a humorous adventure. Persons meeting me in the street crossed themselves; or, as soon as I had passed, arranged one hand in the shape of a bull’s head with horns—a dark-magic gesture meant to dispel the power of my malevolent, spell-casting, tortoise-shell-rimmed eye.

I woke one night around midnight and decided (snap!) to clear out. Leave before dawn. Rather a decision, for I’d lived there two years, and did not altogether relish being suddenly homeless. Homeless with two large dogs and an uncaged, peculiar bird. Nevertheless, I stuffed the car: it looked like a rolling cornucopia: shoes
and books and fishing gear spilling out the windows; with a few rough shoves I contrived to fit the dogs inside. But there was no room left for Lola. She had to sit on my shoulder, which was not ideal, for she was a nervous passenger, and any abrupt twist or turn made her either squawk or relieve herself.

Across the Straits of Messina, across Calabria, on to Naples and Rome. It is a journey pleasant to look back upon: sometimes, when balanced on the edge of sleep, I see pictures of it slide past. A picnic in the Calabrian mountains: a hard blue sky, a herd of goats below, the thin sweet pipings of the goatherder on a bamboo whistle—and Lola gobbling bread crumbs soaked in red wine. Or Cape Palinuro, a remote, forest-fringed Calabrian beach where we all were sunning ourselves under a still-warm October sun when a wild pig charged out of the woods and raced toward us, as though to attack. I was the only one intimidated: I ran into the sea. The dogs stood their ground and Lola stood with them, flapped about, shouting encouragements in her rusty voice; together, in concert, they chased the pig back into the forest. The evening of the same day we traveled as far as the ruins at Paestum: a brilliant evening, the sky like another sea, the half-moon like an anchored ship rocking in a surf of stars, and all around us the moon-brightened marble, the broken temples of a distant time. We slept on the beach that borders the ruins; or they did—Lola and the dogs: I was tormented by mosquitoes and thoughts of mortality.

We settled for the winter in Rome, first at a hotel (the management of which expelled us after five days, and it was not even a first-class establishment), then in an apartment at 33 Via Margutta, a narrow street often painted by bad painters and renowned for the number of cats who dwell there, unowned cats sheltering in the overgrown patios
and existing on the charity of half-mad elderly women, crones who every day tour the cat jungles with sacks of scrap food.

Our apartment was a penthouse: to reach it one climbed six flights of steep dark stairs. We had three rooms and a balcony. It was because of the balcony that I rented it; after the vastness of the view from the Sicilian terrace, the balcony offered, in contrast, a miniature scene tranquil and perfect as firelight: several Roman rooftops, faded orange, faded ocher, and a few across-the-way windows (behind which episodes of family life could be observed). Lola loved the balcony. She was scarcely ever off it. She liked to sit perched on the edge of the stone balustrade and study the traffic on the cobbled street below: the old ladies feeding the Margutta cats; a street musician who came each afternoon and played bagpipes, until, feeling thoroughly blackmailed, one tossed him a coin; a handsome knife-grinder advertising his services with a song sung in the most bull-like of baritones (housewives hurried!).

When the sun was out Lola always took her bath on the balcony balustrade. Her tub was a silver soup dish; after a moment of sprightly immersion in the shallow water, she would spring up and out, and as though casting off a crystal cloak, shake herself, swell her feathers; later, for long, bliss-saturated hours, she drowsed in the sun, her head tilted back, her beak ajar, her eyes shut. To watch her was a soothing experience.

Signor Fioli seemed to think so. He sat at his window, which was exactly opposite the balcony, and played attentive audience to Lola as long as she was visible. Signor Fioli interested me. I had taken the trouble to learn his name and something of his story. He was ninety-three years old, and in his ninetieth year he had lost the ability to speak: whenever he wished to attract the attention of his family (a widowed granddaughter and five grown great-grandsons), he rang a small supper bell. Otherwise, and even though he never left his
bedroom, he appeared to be in complete command of himself. His eyesight was excellent: he saw everything Lola did, and if she did anything especially foolish or lovely, a smile sweetened his sour, very virile old face. He had been a cabinetmaker, and the business he had founded still operated on the ground floor of the building in which he lived; three of his great-grandchildren worked there.

One morning—it was the week before Christmas, almost a year to the day that Lola had entered my life—I filled Lola’s soup bowl with mineral water (she preferred to bathe in mineral water, the bubblier the better), carried it out to her on the balcony, waved at Signor Fioli (who, as usual, was settled at his window waiting to attend Lola’s toilette), then went inside, sat down at my desk and started to write letters.

Presently I heard the summoning tinkle of Signor Fioli’s supper bell: a well-known noise, one heard it twenty times a day; but it had never sounded just like this: a ringing rapid as the beat of an excited heart. I wondered why, and went to see, and saw: Lola, a stupefied sun worshiper squatting on the balustrade—and behind her an immense ginger cat, a cat that had crept across the rooftops and was now crawling on its belly along the balustrade, green eyes aglitter.

Signor Fioli shook his bell. I shouted. The cat leaped, claws unfurled. But it was as if at the last moment Lola sensed her peril. She jumped off the balustrade, fell outward into space. The disgruntled cat, Signor Fioli and I watched her extraordinary descent.

“Lola! Fly, Lola, fly!”

Her wings, though spread, remained motionless. Slowly, gravely, as though attached to a parachute, she drifted downward; down and down.

A small pickup truck was passing in the street below. At first I thought Lola would fall in front of it: that seemed dangerous enough. But what happened was worse, was eerie and awful: she
landed on top of some sacks stacked on the back of the truck. And stayed there. And the truck kept going: turned the corner and drove out of the Via Margutta.

“Come back, Lola! Lola!”

I ran after her; skidded down the six flights of slippery stone stairs; fell; skinned my knees; lost my glasses (they flew off and smashed against a wall). Outside, I ran to the corner where the truck had turned. Far off, through a haze compounded of myopia plus tears of pain, I saw the little truck stopped at a traffic light. But before I could reach it, long before, the light changed and the truck, bearing Lola away, taking her forever from me, blurred into the traffic swirling about the Piazza di Spagna.

Not many minutes had elapsed since the cat had lunged, only four or five. Yet it took an hour to retrace my route, climb the stairs, pick up and pocket the broken glasses. And all the while Signor Fioli had been sitting at his window, waiting there with an expression of grieved astonishment. When he saw that I had returned he rang his bell, calling me to the balcony.

I told him, “She thought she was something else.”

He frowned.

“A dog.”

The frown thickened. “She’s gone.”

That he understood. He bowed his head. We both did.

It must be seven or eight years since I last saw the modern legend named Jane Bowles; nor have I heard from her, at least not directly. Yet I am sure she is unchanged; indeed, I am told by recent travelers to North Africa, who have been or sat with her in some dim Casbah café, that this is true, and that Jane, with her dahlia-head of cropped, curly hair, her tilted nose and mischief-shiny, just a trifle mad eyes, her very original voice (a husky soprano), her boyish clothes and schoolgirl’s figure and slightly limping walk, is more or less the same as when I first knew her more than twenty years ago: even then she had seemed the eternal urchin, appealing as the most appealing of nonadults, yet with some substance cooler than blood invading her veins and with a wit, an eccentric wisdom no child, not the strangest
Wunderkind
, ever possessed.

When I first met Mrs. Bowles (1944? 1945?), she was already, within certain worlds, a celebrated figure: though only in her twenties, she had published a most individual and much remarked novel,
Two Serious Ladies;
she had married the gifted composer and writer Paul Bowles, and was, together with her husband, a tenant in a glamorous boardinghouse established on Brooklyn Heights by the late George Davis. Among the Bowleses’ fellow boarders were Richard and Ellen Wright, W. H. Auden, Benjamin Britten, Oliver Smith, Carson McCullers, Gypsy Rose Lee and (I seem to remember) a trainer of chimpanzees who lived there with one of his star performers. Anyway, it was one hell of a household. But even amid such a forceful assembly, Mrs. Bowles, by virtue of her talent and the strange visions it enclosed, and because of her personality’s startling blend of playful-puppy candor and feline sophistication, remained an imposing, stage-front presence.

Jane Bowles is an authoritative linguist; she speaks, with the greatest precision, French and Spanish and Arabic—perhaps this is why the dialogue of her stories sounds, or sounds to me, as though it has been translated into English from some delightful combination of other tongues. Moreover, these languages are self-learned, the product of Mrs. Bowles’s nomadic nature: from New York she wandered on to and all over Europe, traveled away from there and the impending war to Central America and Mexico, then alighted awhile in the historic ménage on Brooklyn Heights. Since 1947 she has been almost continuously resident abroad: in Paris or Ceylon, but largely in Tangier—in fact, both Jane and Paul Bowles may now safely be described as permanent Tangerinos, so total has their adherence become to that steep, shadowy-white seaport. Tangier is composed of two mismatching parts, one of them a dull, modern area stuffed with office buildings and tall, gloomy dwellings, and the other a Casbah descending through a medieval puzzlement of alleys and alcoves and kif-odored, mint-scented piazzas down to the crawling-with-sailors, ship-horn-hollering port. The Bowleses have established themselves in both sectors—have a sterilized,
tout
confort
apartment in the new quarter and also a refuge hidden away in the darker Arab neighborhood: a native house that must be one of the city’s tiniest habitations—ceilings so low that one had almost literally to move on hands and knees from room to room; but the rooms themselves are like a charming series of postcard-sized Vuillards—Moorish cushions spilling over Moorish-patterned carpets, all cozy as a raspberry tart and illuminated by intricate lanterns and windows that allow the light of sea-skies and views that encompass minarets and ships and the blue-washed rooftops of native tenements, receding like a ghostly staircase to the clamorous shoreline. Or that is how
I
remember it on the occasion of a single visit made at sunset on an evening, oh, fifteen years ago.