Set This House on Fire (67 page)

“Crackerjack,” Mason was saying. The sunny meadow with its sweet conjuring mood of another field, another moment, had slipped behind them, yielding to a sloping ascent through the last stretch of woods before the summit, precipitous and awash with water from the roadside springs; beneath them, the tires whispered and splashed. With a shudder Cass raised the bottle to his lips and drank. “An absolutely crackerjack director, completely first-rate. Do you remember
Mask of Love,
back in the late thirties? And
Harborside,
with John Garfield? It was one of the first films ever done completely on location. That was Alonzo’s. But the trouble with Alonzo is that he’s neurotic. He’s got a persecution complex. And so when that Hollywood Communist investigation came up, even though he wasn’t remotely connected with anything to do with the Party—he was too bright for that—he got disgusted and came to Italy and hasn’t been back to the States since, making a lot of wretched two-bit pictures in Rome. I think it’s only because Kirschorn has a guilt complex—a sort of fairweather liberal, you might say—that he signed Alonzo up for this monstrosity. Poor bastard, Alonzo hasn’t—” Cass tapped Mason’s shoulder. “Bear right here, Buster Brown, the right fork.” The car swerved to starboard, with a soft lurch and a squealing of tires. “Christ, Cass, stay on the
ball,
will you?” He barely heard the words, maddening, insistent as they were.
I cannot say it is not sex yet if it were sex pure and simple I would have took her long ago. No there is this other thing. Maybe you could call it love, I do not know …

Abruptly, the summit gained, all Italy rolled eastward, in haze, in blue, in a miracle of flux and change. Steaming with noon far below, the Vesuvian plain swept away toward the Apennines, a ghostly promenade of clouds dappling all with scudding immensities of shadow. A rain squall miles away was a black smudge against the horizon, the enormous plain itself a checkerboard of dark and light. Westward Vesuvius loomed, terrible, prodigious, drowsing, capped with haze. Beyond these heights—invisible—the gulf. Blinking, with odd and sudden panic, Cass turned his eyes away.
Frattanto in America,
said the meticulous radio voice,
a Chicago, il celebre fisico italiano Enrico Fermi ha scoperto qualcosa…
. Cass blinked again, shut his eyes, drank. The gulf, he thought, the gulf, the perishing deep. The volcano. Merciful bleeding God, why is it always that I—“So they can say what they will about Alonzo. You should see what Louella wrote about him, by the way. He might have been foolish, he might have had a bit too much of what is commonly known as integrity, and all that nonsense, but give him some film and a great actor like Burnsey to work with and he’ll turn out something first-rate. It might not be Eisenstein, or the early Ford, or Capra, or even Huston, yet there’s something individual—” Yatatayatata. His eyes still closed against mad Vesuvius, Cass thought: That voice. That bleeding outrageous voice. Cripps. Yatatayatata. Cripps. Why was that name now so sharply meaningful? Then suddenly, even as he addressed himself the question, with dark revulsion and even darker shame, he knew: recollecting dimly some sodden recent night, an assemblage of faces—the movie yahoos—leering and howling, Mason standing above him flushed and grinning and with his ringmaster’s look, and then himself, finally, impossibly murky with drink, rubbery-limbed, mesmerized, performing some nameless art even now unrecollectable save that it was clownish, horrible, and obscene. The limericks, the dreadful exhibition bit, the filthy lines—and what else? Merciful Christ, he thought, I think I must have took out my cock. But yes, Cripps. Had it not been Cripps, alone among that mob sympathetic, who with face at once enraged and compassionate had approached him sometime after, steadied him, guided him downstairs, splashed his brow with water, then gone off on a tirade about Mason the words of which meant only this: Courage, boy, I don’t know what he’s doing to you, or why, but I’m on your side? Let him try that again and he’ll answer to me… Good old Cripps, he thought, nice of the guy, I’ll have to thank him sometime. He opened his eyes. But for Christ’s sweet sake it’s not Mason who done it after all, it was me!

He looked down, saw that his legs were trembling out of control. “I’m gonna cut out, Mason,” he said, turning to stare at the lovely profile, cool, swank, sweatless, scrupulous, a silk scarf beneath, chaste polka dots. “I finally decided I’ve just about had Sambuco. So soon’s I clean up this little job back in Tramonti I’m gonna cut out.” The booze had made him bold; it was out before he had time to think: “Now if you could just see your way clear to advancing me say about hundred and fifty thousand lire I could get me and the family back to Paris. See, in France I could get some kind of a job, and pay you back, and besides—” “How much do you owe me already?” (The voice peremptory but, withal, not unkind.) “Oh I don’t know, Mason. I got it all down some place. Somewhere around two hundred thousand. Except that I—” Mason spoke again, affable still, yet in tones inhibitory if not adamant: “Don’t be silly, Cassius. A hundred and fifty thousand couldn’t get you as far as Amalfi. Quit worrying about the money, will you? Stick around, we’ll have us a circus.” He turned, with a sort of wink, faintly apologetic, adding: “I mean a ball, dollbaby, not what you think I mean. A
ball.
Picnics in Positano. Capri. Just a good time, that’s all.” (In spite of nausea, weariness, fidgeting legs, Cass began to giggle again, without a sound:
Merciful Christ, a circus.
Thinking of that delicious
crise,
somewhere in the depths of June, when Mason, propositioning Cass at a fuzzy vulnerable moment with the idea of a circus, coyly divulged the information that this would engage the four of them—Mason, titanic broad-assed Rosemarie, himself and, implausibly, insanely,
Poppy
—in some co-operative bedroom rumpus; more tickled and bemused than horrified by the vision of his saintly little Irish consort sporting with Rosemarie, all naked as herring, he had laughed so uproariously that Mason gave up the venture straightaway, though sulking.) His giggling ceased, died out as suddenly as it had come. So the guy really is going to hold out on me. Which is all the more reason I guess for shaking him down on the sly. He glanced at Mason again, sideways, wordlessly addressing him: If you’d just come on out and admit you was basically a plain old sodomist and wanted to get into my fly you’d be a lot more attractive person, Buster Brown.

“So cut the crap, Cassius. Quit this silly talk about leaving. Look, I know it’s a rather banal observation, but the grass always looks greener on—” At horrifying speed now they moved northwest along the spine of the ridge, tires humming, above the enormous plain. Focusing his eyes upon Mason’s knee, Cass again opened his mouth to speak, thought better of it, belched. And for a long moment, almost as if in delicate, easily shatterable opposition to the volcano which he could not bear to allow himself to see, he thought of the crazy mess of incidents and misadventures which had brought him to this day, this ride, this horror and this hope: the vision of Michele on that doomed, suffocating afternoon when first he’d seen him (the day itself had been touched with premonitions of ruin, somehow, for far off down the coast a highway crew was blasting and gusty tremulant explosions all too reminiscent of warfare and death accompanied them, Cass and Francesca, as they walked back into the valley and as she told him of her father’s consumption—
tisi, la morte bianca
—which was,
Dio sa,
bad enough in itself to have, yet surely He must have had special vengeance in mind to compound this disease with such a wicked accident: the time between the moment she heard his helpless frantic cry and the instant he struck the ground could scarcely have been ten seconds, less than that, yet seemed a long eternity—for the cowshed roof, wet and slanting, offered no grip at all to his clutching hands, so that when he stumbled and fell he lay there for a moment spread-eagled against the peak and for that instant she thought he was safe until very slowly he began to slide feet first and belly down along the glassy incline, uttering not a sound and making futile grasping motions with his hands, slipping still, skidding faster and faster to the eaves, where, a limp figure catapulted into empty space, he soared outward, and down, his leg snapping like a piece of kindling beneath him as he struck the earth), that stifling afternoon when, with Francesca at his side, gazing down for the first time at Michele, at the great blade of his nose and his sunken cheeks so pale and cruelly lined, the mouth like a gash parting in a whisper of a smile, revealing jagged teeth and a mottled diseased patch of bright red gums—at that smile, was it not then that he had come to his own awakening? Or was it later, sometime after those sick fevered eyes, gazing up from the hammock in the shade, had rested upon Cass gently and questioningly and not without wonder, and the voice in a croak had said: “An American. You must be very rich”? There had been no reproach in this wan and worn-out remark, no indignation, no envy; it had been merely the utterance of one to whom an American and wealth were quite naturally and synonymously one, as green is to grass, or light is to sun, and Cass, who had heard these words spoken before though never by one so unimaginably far gone in misery and desolation, had felt clamminess and sickness creep over him like moist hands. The man, he saw, was not too much older than himself. Perhaps his awakening had begun then. For,
“Babbo!”
said Francesca then, sensing his embarrassment. “What a thing to say!” And runnels of sweat had coursed down Michele’s cheeks, while Francesca moved to his side, mopping his face with a rag, crooning and clucking soft words of reproof. “For
shame”
she had said, “what a thing to say,
Babbo!”
Then carefully she had ministered to her father, stroking his brow and rearranging the folds of his threadbare denim shirt, smoothing back the locks of his black sweat-drenched hair. So that with pain and distress in his heart and a hungry indwelling tenderness he had never known quite so achingly, he had watched her as she attended to the stricken man, and all her beauty seemed enhanced and brightened by this desperate, gentle devotion. An angel, by God, he had thought, an angel—And then, embarrassed, he had turned away, and stepped into the doorway of the hut. Here in the hushed light his eyes had barely made out the dirt floor and a single poor table and, beyond, empty, the cow stall with its meager bed of straw, and his nostrils were suddenly filled with a warmly sour and corrupt odor that bore him swiftly into some mysterious, nameless, and for the moment irretrievable portion of his own past, thinking: Lord God, I know it as well as my own name. And then he had inhaled deeply, almost relishing the sour and repellent smell, then almost choking on it as he filled his lungs with the thick putrescent air, in a hungry effort to dislodge from memory that moment in years forgotten when he had smelled this evil smell before, when suddenly he knew, and thought: It is niggers. The same thing, by God. It is the smell of a black sharecropper’s cabin in Sussex County, Virginia. It is the bleeding stink of wretchedness. And then, exhaling, he had stepped back puzzled and distressed into the sunlight, and Francesca raggedy and lovely bending down over Michele, then standing up. A great collapsed grin had spread over Michele’s face, and with an aimless gesture in the air of one limp and bony hand he scattered a cluster of green hovering flies. For a moment they were all silent. A thunderous detonation sounded once more from the sea, borne on a hot blast of air which shuddered in the pine trees around them, welling up thudding through the valley distances and died finally with a rumble like that of colliding kegs and barrels diminishing in murmurous echo against the hills. “It is a
festa?”
Michele said. The sunken grin creased his face again, and for no reason at all an awful chuckle gurgled up in his mouth, terminating not in the sound of laughter but in one long agonized spasm of coughing which set his arms, shoulders, and spindly neck to jerking like those of a puppet on wires, so loud and prolonged, this fit, that it seemed not simply the effort of one frail body to free itself of stifling congestion but a kind of explosive, rowdy anthem to disease itself—a racking celebration of infirmity—and it was at that instant that Cass, belatedly and desperately, at last awakened, understood that the man was dying. And had thought, turning, his eyes closed tight against the sun: I’ve got to do something. I’ve got to do something and do it quick. And remembered the women carrying fagots. And thought again: And I have been poor, too. But never anything like this. Never.

“Why is he not in a hospital?” he had asked furiously. “Why is he lying here like this?” Ghita, the mother and wife, had come then—wild-haired, consumptive herself, feverish, wobbling ever near hysteria—trailed by an evil old crone from the hills, carrying amulets, potions, charms. “Ask Caltroni!” Ghita had screeched. “Ask the doctor! He says there is no use! What hospital! Why put a man in a hospital when it is no use! And when there is no money to pay!” (All this in front of the squalling children, in front of Michele, sunk in his hammock dreaming his gentle smile, while cackling Maddalena, the rustic thaumaturge, hovered over, gat-toothed and with swelling blue varicose veins, waving the amulet like a censer.) “He is going to die anyway!” she had yelled. “Ask the doctor! You’ll see!” And, some days later, he had indeed gone to see the doctor, climbing the dark fish-smelling stairs to an office aerie where, munching on a piece of stringy goat cheese, pompous and vain, evasive, a wop Sydney Greenstreet paradoxically radiating a quality of ignorance and ineptitude so overpowering that it was like a kind of brownish aureole around him, Caltroni held forth, amid a magpie’s nest of rusty probes and forceps and speculums superannuated at the time of Lord Lister.
“Perchè?”
he had said, and spread pudgy nicotine-brown fingers.
“Non c’è speranza. È assolutamente inutile”
And had paused, savoring the pronouncement. “It is what is known as generalized consumption. There is not a hope in the world.” And Cass, feeling the blood knocking outrageously at his temples (by then his need
to do
something had become like a panic, a fierce drive up ward and outward from his self that had begun to cut like flame through the boozy dreamland, the nit-picking, the inertia, the navel-gazing), said loudly and impatiently: “What do you mean there is not a hope in the world? I’m no doctor but I know better than that! I read the papers! There are
drugs
for this now!” Whereupon Caltroni, stupidity like ooze around his pink lips, had closed his eyes behind his pince-nez, pressed his fingers together, a rich wise gesture, absurdly vain, sacerdotal:
“Vero.
I do believe there is a drug. It is somewhat like penicillin. The name escapes me.” And opened his eyes. “It is an American product, I believe. But it is in exceedingly short supply in Italy. I myself have never had the opportunity to use it, although in Rome—” He paused. “In any case it could do no good with the
peasant”
—speaking the patronizing word,
campagnuolo,
delicately, as if it were a germ—“he is far gone, and besides he could never be in any position to pay—” But Cass had risen, stalked to the door, shouting over his shoulder:
“Che schifo! Merda!
I wouldn’t let you perform an abortion on my cat!” And felt instant shame, aware even as he slammed the flimsy door shut that the ignorant doctor’s sin was only the venial one of being born in the south of Italy, where, soggy and defeated, even his vanity a sham, he would be reconciled in despair until the end of his days to pricking boils and salving the teats of mangy cows and prescribing quack pills and ointments to people who repaid him—because that is all they had—in goat cheese.