The Complete Stories (32 page)

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Authors: Bernard Malamud

BOOK: The Complete Stories
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“Caretakers?” Freeman was astonished.
“Yes.”
“Ernesto is your father?” His voice rose.
She nodded.
“Was it his idea for you to say you were somebody else?”
“No, mine. He did what I asked him to. He has wanted me to go to America, but under the right circumstances.”
“So you had to pretend,” he said bitterly. He was more greatly disturbed than he could account for, as if he had been expecting just this to happen.
She blushed and turned away. “I was not sure of the circumstances. I wanted you to stay until I knew you better.”
“Why didn’t you say so?”
“Perhaps I wasn’t serious in the beginning. I said what I thought you wanted to hear. At the same time I wished you to stay. I thought you would be clearer to me after a while.”
“Clearer how?”
“I don’t really know.” Her eyes searched his, then she dropped her glance.
“I’m not hiding anything,” he said. He wanted to say more but warned himself not to.
“That’s what I was afraid of.”
Giacobbe had come with the boat and steadied it for his sister. They were alike as the proverbial peas—two dark Italian faces, the Middle Ages looking out of their eyes. Isabella got into the boat and Giacobbe pushed off with one oar. She waved from afar.
Freeman went back to his pensione in a turmoil, hurt where it hurts—in his dreams, thinking he should have noticed before how worn her blouse and skirt were, should have seen more than he had. It was this that irked. He called himself a damn fool for making up fairy tales—Freeman in love with the Italian aristocracy. He thought of taking off for Venice or Florence, but his heart ached for love of her, and he could not forget that he had originally come in the simple hope of finding a girl worth marrying. If the desire had developed complications,
the fault was mostly his own. After an hour in his room, burdened by an overpowering loneliness, Freeman felt he must have her. She mustn’t get away from him. So what if the countess had become a caretaker? She was a natural-born queen, whether by del Dongo or any other name. So she had lied to him, but so had he to her; they were quits on that score and his conscience was calm. He felt things would be easier all around now that the air had been cleared.
Freeman ran down to the dock; the sun had set and the boatmen were home, swallowing spaghetti. He was considering untying one of the rowboats and paying tomorrow, when he caught sight of someone sitting on a bench—Ernesto, in his hot winter hat, smoking a cheroot. He was resting his wrists on the handle of his cane, his chin on them.
“You weesh a boat?” the guide asked in a not unkindly tone.
“With all my heart. Did Isabella send you?”
“No.”
He came because she was unhappy, Freeman guessed—maybe crying. There’s a father for you, a real magician despite his appearance. He waves his stick and up pops Freeman for his little girl.
“Get een,” said Ernesto.
“I’ll row,” said Freeman. He had almost added “Father,” but had caught himself. As if guessing the jest, Ernesto smiled, a little sadly. But he sat at the stern of the boat, enjoying the ride.
In the middle of the lake, seeing the mountains surrounding it lit in the last glow of daylight, Freeman thought of the “menorah” in the Alps. Where had she got the word, he wondered, and decided anywhere, a book or picture. But wherever she had, he must settle this subject once and for all tonight.
When the boat touched the dock, the pale moon rose. Ernesto tied up, and handed Freeman a flashlight.
“Een the jarden,” he said tiredly, pointing with his cane.
“Don’t wait up.” Freeman hastened to the garden at the lake’s edge, where the roots of trees hung like hoary beards above the water; the flashlight didn’t work, but the moon and his memory were enough. Isabella, God bless her, was standing at the low wall among the moonlit statuary: stags, tigers, and unicorns, poets and painters, shepherds with pipes, and playful shepherdesses, gazing at the light shimmering on the water.
She was wearing white, the figure of a future bride; perhaps it was an altered wedding dress—he would not be surprised if a hand-medown, the way they saved clothes in this poor country. He had pleasant thoughts of buying her some nifty outfits.
She was motionless, her back toward him—though he could picture her bosom breathing. When he said good evening, lifting his light straw, she turned to him with a sweet smile. He tenderly kissed her lips; this she let him do, softly returning the same.
“Goodbye,” Isabella whispered.
“To whom goodbye?” Freeman affectionately mocked. “I have come to marry you.”
She gazed at him with eyes moistly bright, then came the soft, inevitable thunder: “Are you a Jew?”
Why should I lie? he thought; she’s mine for the asking. But then he trembled with the fear of at the last moment losing her, so Freeman answered, though his scalp prickled, “How many no’s make never? Why do you persist with such foolish questions?”
“Because I hoped you were.” Slowly she unbuttoned her bodice, arousing Freeman, though he was thoroughly confused as to her intent. When she revealed her breasts—he could have wept at their beauty (now recalling a former invitation to gaze at them, but he had arrived too late on the raft)—to his horror he discerned tattooed on the soft and tender flesh a bluish line of distorted numbers.
“Buchenwald,” Isabella said, “when I was a little girl. The Fascists sent us there. The Nazis did it.”
Freeman groaned, incensed at the cruelty, stunned by the desecration.
“I can’t marry you. We are Jews. My past is meaningful to me. I treasure what I suffered for.”
“Jews,” he muttered, “—you? Oh, God, why did you keep this from me too?”
“I did not wish to tell you something you would not welcome. I thought at one time it was possible you were—I hoped but was wrong.”
“Isabella—” he cried brokenly. “Listen, I—I am—”
He groped for her breasts, to clutch, kiss, or suckle them; but she had stepped among the statues, and when he vainly sought her in the veiled mist that had risen from the lake, still calling her name, Freeman embraced only moonlit stone.
1958
O
ne beautiful late-autumn day in Rome, Carl Schneider, a graduate student in Italian studies at Columbia University, left a real estate agent’s office after a depressing morning of apartment hunting and walked up Via Veneto, disappointed in finding himself so dissatisfied in this city of his dreams. Rome, a city of perpetual surprise, had surprised unhappily. He felt unpleasantly lonely for the first time since he had been married, and found himself desiring the lovely Italian women he passed in the street, especially the few who looked as if they had money. He had been a damn fool, he thought, to come here with so little of it in his pocket.
He had, last spring, been turned down for a Fulbright fellowship and had had no peace with himself until he decided to go to Rome anyway to do his Ph.D. on the Risorgimento from firsthand sources, at the same time enjoying Italy. This plan had for years aroused his happiest expectations. Norma thought he was crazy to want to take off with two kids under six and all their savings—$3,600, most of it earned by her, but Carl argued that people had to do something different with their lives occasionally or they went to pot. He was twenty-eight—his years weighed on him—and she was thirty, and when else could they go if not now? He was confident, since he knew the language, that they could get settled satisfactorily in a short time. Norma had her doubts. It all came to nothing until her mother, a widow, offered to pay their passage across; then Norma said yes, though still with misgiving.
“We’ve read prices are terrible in Rome. How do we know we’ll get along on what we have?”
“You got to take a chance once in a while,” Carl said.
“Up to a point, with two kids,” Norma replied; but she took the chance and they sailed out of season—the sixteenth of October, arriving in Naples on the twenty-sixth and going on at once to Rome, in the hope they would save money if they found an apartment quickly, though Norma wanted to see Capri and Carl would have liked to spend a little time in Pompeii.
In Rome, though Carl had no trouble getting around or making himself understood, they had immediate rough going trying to locate an inexpensive furnished flat. They had figured on a two-bedroom apartment, Carl to work in theirs; or one bedroom and a large maid’s room where the kids would sleep. Although they searched across the city they could locate nothing decent within their means, fifty to fifty-five thousand lire a month, a top of about ninety dollars. Carl turned up some inexpensive places but in hopeless Trastevere sections; elsewhere there was always some other fatal flaw: no heat, missing furniture, sometimes no running water or sanitation.
To make bad worse, during their second week at the dark little pensione where they were staying, the children developed nasty intestinal disorders, little Mike having to be carried to the bathroom ten times one memorable night, and Christine running a temperature of 105; so Norma, who didn’t trust the milk or cleanliness of the pensione, suggested they would be better off in a hotel. When Christine’s fever abated they moved into the Sora Cecilia, a second-class albergo recommended by a Fulbright fellow they had met. It was a four-story building full of high-ceilinged, boxlike rooms. The toilets were in the hall, but the rent was comparatively low. About the only other virtue of the place was that it was near the Piazza Navone, a lovely seventeenth-century square, walled by many magnificently picturesque, wine-colored houses. Within the piazza three fountains played, whose water and sculpture Carl and Norma enjoyed, but which they soon became insensible to during their sad little walks with the kids, as the days passed and they still found themselves homeless.
Carl had in the beginning avoided the real estate agents to save the commission—5 percent of the full year’s rent; but when he gave in and visited their offices they said it was too late to get anything at the price he wanted to pay.
“You should have come in July,” one agent said.
“I’m here now.”
He threw up his hands. “I believe in miracles but who can make them?” Better to pay seventy-five-thousand and so live comfortable like other Americans.
“I can’t afford it, not with heat extra.”
“Then you will sit out the winter in the hotel.”
“I appreciate your concern.” Carl left, embittered.
However, they sometimes called him to witness an occasional “miracle.” One man showed him a pleasant apartment overlooking some prince or other’s formal garden. The rent was sixty thousand, and Carl would have taken it had he not later learned from the tenant next door—he had returned because he distrusted the agent—that the flat was heated electrically, which would cost twenty thousand a month over the sixty thousand rent. Another “miracle” was the offer by this agent’s cousin of a single studio room on the Via Margutta, for forty thousand. And from time to time a lady agent called Norma to tell her about this miraculous place in the Parioli: eight stunning rooms, three bedrooms, double service, American-style kitchen with refrigerator, garage—marvelous for an American family: price, two hundred thousand.
“Please, no more,” Norma said.
“I’ll go mad,” said Carl. He was nervous over the way time was flying, almost a month gone, he having given none of it to his work. And Norma, washing the kids’ things in the hotel sink, in an unheated, cluttered room, was obviously unhappy. Furthermore, the hotel bill last week had come to twenty thousand lire, and it was costing them two thousand more a day to eat badly, even though Norma was cooking the children’s food in their room on a hotplate they had bought.
“Carl, maybe I’d better go to work?”
“I’m tired of your working,” he answered. “You’ll have no fun.”
“What fun am I having? All I’ve seen is the Colosseum.” She then suggested they could rent an unfurnished flat and build their own furniture.
“Where would I get the tools?” he said. “And what about the cost of wood in a country where it’s cheaper to lay down marble floors? And who’ll do my reading for me while I’m building and finishing the stuff?”
“All right,” Norma said. “Forget I said anything.”
“What about taking a seventy-five-thousand place but staying only for five or six months?” Carl said.
“Can you get your research done in five or six months?”
“No.”
“I thought your research was the main reason we came here.” Norma then wished she had never heard of Italy.
“That’s enough of that,” said Carl.
He felt helpless, blamed himself for coming—bringing all this on Norma and the kids. He could not understand why things were going so badly. When he was not blaming himself he was blaming the Italians. They were aloof, evasive, indifferent to his plight. He couldn’t communicate with them in their own language, whatever it was. He couldn’t get them to say what was what, to awaken their hearts to his needs. He felt his plans, his hopes caving in, and feared disenchantment with Italy unless they soon found an apartment.
 
 
At the Porta Pinciana, near the tram, Carl felt himself tapped on the shoulder. A bushy-haired Italian, clutching a worn briefcase, was standing in the sun on the sidewalk. His hair rose in all directions. His eyes were gentle; not sad, but they had been. He wore a clean white shirt, rag of a tie, and a black jacket that had crawled a little up his back. His trousers were of denim, and his porous, sharp-pointed shoes, neatly shined, were summer shoes.
“Excuse me,” he said with an uneasy smile. “I am Vasco Bevilacqua. Weesh you an apotament?”
“How did you guess?” Carl said.
“I follow you,” the Italian answered, making a gesture in the air, “when you leave the agencia. I am myself agencia. I like to help Americans. They are wonderful people.”
“You’re a real estate agent?”
“Eet is just.”
“Parliamo italiano?”
“You spik?” He seemed disappointed. “Ma non è italiano?”
Carl told him he was an American student of Italian history and culture, had studied the language for years.
Bevilacqua then explained that, although he had no regular office, nor, for that matter, a car, he had managed to collect several exclusive listings. He had got these, he said, from friends who knew he was starting a business, and they made it a habit to inform him of apartments recently vacated in their buildings or those of friends, for which service he of course tipped them out of his commissions. The regular agents, he went on, demanded a heartless 5 percent. He requested only 3. He charged less because his expenses, frankly, were low, and also because
of his great affection for Americans. He asked Carl how many rooms he was looking for and what he was willing to pay.
Carl hesitated. The man, though pleasant, was no bona fide agent, probably had no license. He had heard about these two-bit operators and was about to say he wasn’t interested but Bevilacqua’s eyes pleaded with him not to say it.
Carl figured he had nothing to lose. Maybe he does have a place I might be interested in. He told the Italian what he was looking for and how much he expected to pay.
Bevilacqua’s face lit up. “In weech zone do you seek?” he asked with emotion.
“Anyplace fairly decent,” Carl said in Italian. “It doesn’t have to be perfect.”
“Not the Parioli?”
“Not the Parioli only. It would depend on the rent.”
Bevilacqua held his briefcase between his knees and fished in his shirt pocket. He drew out a sheet of very thin paper, unfolded it, and read the penciled writing, with wrinkled brows. After a while he thrust the paper back into his pocket and retrieved his briefcase.
“Let me have your telephone number,” he said in Italian. “I will examine my other listings and give you a ring.”
“Listen,” Carl said, “if you’ve got a good place to show me, all right. If not, please don’t waste my time.”
Bevilacqua looked hurt. “I give you my word,” he said, placing his big hand on his chest, “tomorrow you will have your apartment. May my mother give birth to a goat if I fail you.”
He put down in a little book where Carl was staying. “I’ll be over at thirteen sharp to show you some miraculous places,” he said.
“Can’t you make it in the morning?”
Bevilacqua was apologetic. “My hours are now from thirteen to sixteen.” He said he hoped to expand his time later, and Carl guessed he was working his real estate venture during his lunch and siesta time, probably from some underpaid clerk’s job.
He said he would expect him at thirteen sharp.
Bevilacqua, his expression now so serious he seemed to be listening to it, bowed, and walked away in his funny shoes.
 
 
He showed up at the hotel at ten to two, wearing a small black fedora, his hair beaten down with pomade whose odor sprang into the lobby. Carl was waiting restlessly near the desk, doubting he would
show up, when Bevilacqua came running through the door, clutching his briefcase.
“Ready?” he said breathlessly.
“Since one o’clock,” Carl answered.
“Ah, that’s what comes of not owning your own car,” Bevilacqua explained. “My bus had a flat tire.”
Carl looked at him but his face was deadpan. “Well, let’s get on,” the student said.
“I have three places to show you.” Bevilacqua told him the first address, a two-bedroom apartment at just fifty thousand.
On the bus they clung to straps in a tight crowd, the Italian raising himself on his toes and looking around at every stop to see where they were. Twice he asked Carl the time, and when Carl told him, his lips moved soundlessly. After a time Bevilacqua roused himself, smiled, and remarked, “What do you think of Marilyn Monroe?”
“I haven’t much thought of her,” Carl said.
Bevilacqua looked puzzled. “Don’t you go to the movies?”
“Once in a while.”
The Italian made a short speech on the wonder of American films. “In Italy they always make us look at what we have just lived through.” He fell into silence again. Carl noticed that he was holding in his hand a wooden figurine of a hunchback with a high hat, whose poor gobbo he was rubbing with his thumb, for luck.
“For us both,” Carl hoped. He was still restless, still worried.
But their luck was nil at the first place, an ocher-colored house behind an iron gate.
“Third floor?” Carl asked, after the unhappy realization that he had been here before.
“Exactly. How did you guess?”
“I’ve seen the apartment,” he answered gloomily. He remembered having seen an ad. If that was how Bevilacqua got his listings, they might as well quit now.
“But what’s wrong with it?” the Italian asked, visibly disappointed.
“Bad heating.”
“How is that possible?”
“They have a single gas heater in the living room but nothing in the bedrooms. They were supposed to have steam heat installed in the building in September, but the contract fell through when the price of steam pipe went up. With two kids, I wouldn’t want to spend the winter in a cold flat.”

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