Set This House on Fire (54 page)

“It was for my little brother,” the girl said in a muffled faint voice, helpless now, mortified, tears streaming out from beneath her dirty fingers.

“Listen,” Parrinello went on. “You’re from Tramonti, are you not? You need money, I’ll bet. Let me give you some advice,
carina.
What you should do is save enough money to go to Positano, maybe Naples—maybe even Rome. Rome is a fine place. There you rent a room in a hotel and you pick up a rich man on the big street—hey, what is the name of that street, Corporal, where all the rich princes go?”

“Via Veneto,” was the stiff remote answer, spoken so frostily that it could barely be heard. Heartbrokenly, miserably, the girl continued to weep.

“And you go to a room, see, and you take that lovely sweet behind of yours and you spread it out on a set of nice pink sheets—”

The wretched storekeeper had begun to make yucks of appreciative amusement. For an instant, shutting out from his mind the dreadful scene, Cass looked out the window, following Luigi’s gaze. His skull had begun to throb like some huge inflamed carbuncle, but now he saw that something strange had happened to the weather—a miracle. It was spring, and he could feel the warmth stealing into his bones. Dissolved like dew before the sun, the scud and rack of clouds had been washed clear of the valley. It was suddenly so bright, so vivid in the Mediterranean light, that he felt he could reach out and touch each detail; he saw a postcard in color of majestic peaks and a sky so shockingly blue that it looked like some madman’s overpainting and orange groves dropping in a ladder of terraced greenery toward the sea. Somewhere there was a dripping noise, last remnant of rain and winter. A flock of sheep was bleating, inebriate, on the far slope of the valley. And, Lord love me, he thought, there was even music: someone far off in the town had turned on a radio full blast, as if to celebrate this delinquent sunlight. It was not, to be sure, the carrousel which in his dreams had always foreshadowed this moment; it was Guy Lombardo, all glucose and giggles, but it struck some buried chord in him and as he glanced back at the girl, who had raised her begrimed, sorrowful, lovely face now, he felt like letting out some kind of a scream.

“Perciò,”
the sergeant was still needling the girl, “you will have a lot of money. It is a matter of using only that nice well-built part of yours. As it is”—and here the lilting soft lubricity faded from his voice—“as it is you cannot afford to steal. Do you know what the fine is for stealing?”

“No,” the girl said hopelessly.

“In your case, it will be one thousand lire. Do you have it?”

“No.”

“Of course not. Then do you know what we must do?”

“No.”

Cass saw the sergeant’s face go pink again, winding up. “We take that big sweet behind of yours—”

Rage, possible to give voice to only in his native tongue, burst inside Cass’ head like a ball of insanity. “Lay off her, you miserable sonofabitch!” he roared. “Lay off her, hear me? Lay off her or I’ll stomp your teeth out! Lay off her!”

Alarmed, pale, the sergeant let his hand go back to his holster, where it rested caressing with nervous sausage fingers the grip of a Mauser automatic. “What does he say, Corporal?
Che cosa significa
layofer?”

Luigi made a helpless expression. “I don’t know. I have no English, Sergeant.” And as Luigi spoke, Cass calmed himself, though still quivering and with some difficulty. Heedless of the commotion, the
flaneur
rat meandered in from the other room, halted sniffing, plunged back into his hole. Through the window Cass smelled flowers. He was sweating. The warmth in the air was not of spring but of eternal summer; outside through the doorway, around the blooms of immense white camellias, bumblebees droned, mnemonic with the sound of South and home. The sergeant stared at Cass, momentarily daunted, fidgeting.

“I’ll pay for the thing,” Cass said to the storekeeper. Then to Parrinello, in a crucifixion of restraint and decency: “Forgive me for my outburst,
Vossignoria.
But if it may please your lordship, I have a very personal difficulty. I am subject to fits often—harmless.”

The sergeant relaxed.

“I should also like to pay the fine, if I may.” The sergeant shrugged his acquiescence. Cass took out his wallet. “Here is two thousand lire for everything. I hope this amount will suffice.”

Then he turned and made his way from the room, into the spring air outside.

It was late in the afternoon. Bells were chiming through the bright translucent air. A flight of pigeons thundered up as if from nowhere, bedecking the air above the fountain with tumultuous slate-colored wings. As he walked up the cobbled street to the hotel he turned, and he thought he saw the girl, head hunched down in her baggy coat, hurrying from the police station, and he started to call out to her but already she had vanished down an alleyway. He turned again and was walking on when he heard a voice.

“How does the head feel?” It was the corporal, Luigi. Reserved, cool, remote, very unlike an Italian, he seemed at the same time longing, even desperate, to communicate, and he fell in beside Cass as he climbed the hill. “I was sent by Parrinello to make sure that you pay for the vase.”

“The head is better,” Cass said. “You Italians run a strange police force.”

The corporal was silent for a moment. “I suspect that it is no better or no worse than anywhere else.”

“It is a wonder that someone has not eliminated that chief of yours. He is the grandfather of all reptiles.”

“Yes,” Luigi said, “he is—troublesome. Tell me, you are an educated man, are you not?”

“No,” said Cass, “I have no education. I have read books but I have no education. Why do you ask?”

The corporal had stopped walking, and now Cass paused too, looking into the grave, earnest, somewhat humorless face. “I do not know why I ask,” he said. “I do not know. Perhaps you will pardon me. But I so rarely see an American like you. That is, your little joke with Parrinello, your command of this language. Then—what you did for that girl, who was simply a poor peasant, of no account whatever. That appealed to me. That was a humanist gesture, I thought. What an educated man would do. That appealed to me.”

“I liked her looks,” Cass replied, faintly annoyed. “She was of some account. She was a very good-looking female. Why? Aren’t you an educated man?”

“No, I am not,” he went on in his formal, meticulous way. “Like you I have read many books but I had no opportunity to continue my education. I wished to become a lawyer, but circumstances forced me to—” He paused. “I became what I am. Most people do not get much education in this country. They must work too hard, so they do not read anything.”

“Also in America they do not get much education,” Cass said. “They do not work hard, and they do not read anything either.” Cass resumed walking.

“It is sad that they do not read, missing so much. One of the great revelations of my life was reading
The World as Will and Idea
by the great German philosopher Schopenhauer. More than anyone I have read he points the way toward what I have come to regard as a creative pessimism. Have you read Schopenhauer?”

“Never,” Cass said shortly, with rather more rudeness than he meant or intended. His head had begun to throb mercilessly. “No, I haven’t.”

“I’m sorry,” said the corporal sensitively. “If I have intruded, forgive me. I find it so rare a thing these days to be able to talk to a kindred spirit. Your little joke with Parrinello. That was delightful! How I wish—” But his voice trailed off, and now, coming to a rise in the street, Cass caught a glimpse again of the sea, far below, and the orange and lemon groves and vineyards terraced against the gigantic plunging hills. From distant gutters and drains there was a steady trickling and gushing; earth and sky seemed burnished, brushed, cleansed, and there was a sound of water everywhere as the debris of winter was swept gurgling seaward. The sun was going down, crescents of fading light glowed on distant barren hills.
“Madonna! Che bello!”
some woman’s voice shouted, celebrant, as at the light of the Second Coming. For no reason at all, Cass felt himself shivering.

“That girl,” he said, turning to the corporal, “that girl in the station. What is her name?”

“I do not know,” Luigi said with a shrug. “A peasant from the valley. I cannot say that I have seen her before.”

“She was beautiful. Do they all come that way?”

“It is rare that peasants are born with beauty. When they are, it is almost never that they keep it past childhood. I did not notice this peasant’s beauty.”

“Corporal, you must be blind.”

“I did not look at her carefully. Peasants do not interest me. They are a scummy lot for the most part, hopelessly inbred like animals. Most of them are mentally defective.” He shook his head solemnly. “It comes from eating nothing but bread. Sometimes I think that they should all be exterminated.”

“Why, Corporal,” Cass said with good humor, “you talk like some sort of Fascist.”

“I
am
a Fascist,” Luigi said in a bleak matter-of-fact voice, though adding as if in extenuation: “Please do not misunderstand me. Insofar as extermination is concerned, I do not mean that cruelly. Fascism is not Naziism. I only mean it—” And he paused for an instant, and clenched his fists together as if struggling for articulation, for reason. Then in a voice which would have sounded foolishly pompous had it not at the same time been resonant with conviction, he said: “We are
all
damned, you see! All of us! But somehow we get along. They”—jerking his hand sideways, toward some invisible peasant host—
“they
are damned forever. They do
not
get along. They are less than animals. They should be exterminated. They should be put out of their suffering.”

“Creative pessimism,” said Cass, blinking.

The corporal for the first time made the suggestion of a smile and then he looked at his watch. “It has been a pleasure talking to you,” he said. “I hope I have not offended you. Life is strange, is it not?”

“How do you mean?” said Cass, in honest wonder.

“Existence, I mean. Do you not sometimes wake up from a long sleep and for those few moments before you are completely awake feel the terror and the mystery of existence? It lasts but for a few seconds but it is the only time when one moves close to eternity. And do you know something? I do not believe in God. Yet for me the awful part is that in a twinkling I am fully awake, and I do not know whether it was that in that movement toward eternity I have come closer to God—or nothingness.”

Cass blinked again, and for a moment he wondered whether the corporal was not slightly loony. Fascist-humanist, intellectual, scourge of the peasantry, creative pessimist, metaphysician, with long sideburns poking down from beneath his visored cap, mustached and honey-eyed like some
borghese
matron’s movie dreamboat, he had nonetheless communed lonesomely with his soul; suddenly the words—and were they as true as they seemed, and as terrible?—came through to Cass like vibrations from a titanic gong. He looked straight into Luigi’s eyes, realizing that the corporal, whatever else odd he might be, was as sane as they come.

“I often feel very lonely too,” Cass said. “Very lonely. Very terrified.”

“Then you understand what I mean?”

“Yes.”

“I’m sorry that I have talked to you in this way,” Luigi said after a pause, and then put out his hand. “I hope you will come back here sometime. You
are
going to pay for that vase?”

“I’ll pay for it, Luigi,” Cass said, “many thanks. Many thanks.” And then the corporal was gone.

It was easier than he thought it would be to get into Windgasser’s good graces. Cleaning himself up in the bathroom of a cafe, quite sober now, he put on his courtliest manner and presented himself at the hotel, apologizing elaborately for breaking the vase. At first cool and forbidding, Windgasser broke down and became surprisingly sympathetic, even warm, and listened with anxiety on his face, and understanding, as Cass described the diabetic condition he had been forced to live with since adolescence, and the insulin shock he was sometimes precipitated into, accidentally, and without warning, causing him to acquire the thick speech and the inhibited powers of locomotion and, yes—most abominably!—even the loose-lipped coarseness of a drunkard. “My stars, I had no idea!” said Windgasser, offering his own apologies while perhaps sensing a client, and he mentioned his own affliction, a fistula
in ano,
inoperable these many years despite consultations with doctors in Geneva, Zurich, and Basel. Getting back to the issue at hand, Cass said that as for money he was somewhat reduced, and he was on the point of offering to pay in installments when Windgasser, a brick of a man, allayed all Cass’ distress: the vase, he said, like all his furniture, was insured by a solid Swiss firm which (unlike the Italians) always paid off, and there was a satisfied tone in his voice which indicated that the vase was possibly even better off in splinters. Cass went to the window. It was almost dark. On the gulf, against the softest aquamarine of an evening sky, fishing boats with lights aglow moved seaward; the lights glittered and twinkled, a tiny galaxy of drifting vivacious stars. The air was warm and a scent of orange blossoms was heavy all around him. “It is beautiful here,” he said aloud. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like it.” Windgasser behind him, eagerly breathing, allowed that it was beautiful, indeed just the place for an American to live, especially a painter, especially an American, so unlike the Italian tenants of years past, so raucous, so uncouth, whose children wrote obscenities all over the walls. The palace annex, the famous Palazzo d’Affitto, owned by the Windgasser family for three generations … There was an apartment,
commodious, most engaging
… Perhaps Mr. Kinsolving would like to take a look?

A wild cry came up from the valley, a cry passionate and young and wild, and darkness came quickly and heavily, odorous with spring and the scent of oranges. Cass stood for a long time at the window, like Richard Wagner before him
( “Parthifal
was written here,” Windgasser lisped), filled with lust and longing and tawdry romantic urges.