Timebends (32 page)

His welcome at the restaurant was princely, and we were given a ringside table. Vinny could hardly wait to tell the senator about our adventure. He had spent half a decade in one of Mussolini's jails as a political prisoner and listened with what I took to be diminishing amusement to Vinny's excited reenactment of the terrors of actually meeting Lucky Luciano and later the mysterious young man.

A small party of guests was now being seated at another ringside table some twenty feet away. A vaguely familiar round-busted woman with pearls in her hair, and—was it possible?—Luciano and his strongarm guy. The great killer saw Vinny and just barely nodded as he sat down. I turned as calmly as I could to interrupt. “He's here,” I muttered.

Vinny took one glance and then lowered his head. “Jesus! He's going to think we're following him!”

“Following who?” the senator asked.

“Luciano. That's him over there!”

The little senator looked across at Luciano's table, reached into his breast pocket, drew out a pearl-handled snub-nosed revolver as smoothly as if it were a fountain pen, and laid it on the white tablecloth next to his wineglass. Grinning contemptuously under his luxuriant mustache, in a voice loud enough to hail a taxi, he called out, “Luciano? Luciano is my
prick!”

I have always lacked a flight reflex; in its place I have a denial reaction that refrigerates me and slows down all my movements. I looked down at my plate, memorizing its border pattern, while through the corner of my eye I saw that Luciano, his bravo, and the pearl-haired woman were also not reacting and that the waiters were continuing to move about and the maître d' smoothly guiding another party to a table.

Not yet returning his pistol to his pocket, the senator explained that the Mafia had recently killed a number of Socialist organizers and Communists and that he would be perfectly happy, as he thought Luciano was aware, to fight it out with him right here and now. Longhi and I, needless to say, were not as happy as he was at the prospect, but some wonderful spaghetti and a broiled fish with spicy sauce cheered us, and presumably Luciano and his party as well. We all finished our meals as though nothing had happened.

“We are in Luciano's power,” I said as we lay down to sleep. “What's going to happen in the morning? Do we accept the car?”

“Maybe he called it off now,” Vinny surmised, half hopefully. Worried but full of good food and fine red wine, we slept soundly despite what I now concluded was the waste of three cartons of cigarettes.

Next morning as promised, a little Fiat with driver was waiting at the front door of the hotel. The driver, a middle-aged depressive in a rumpled business suit, with no hat and a green tie that seemed to have been nibbled by mice, understood immediately that we wished to travel the whole island, and off we went.

A mountainous if often water-hungry Eden, Sicily was possessed by secretive people. As we went through villages and hamlet streets, they glanced at us from fields and houses as though we were to be executed shortly and were best left alone. But Vinny went on happily searching out his families, made his little speeches, collected the names of the living and the dead. It was all perfectly cynical and finally quite moving. The truth was that he was fulfilling a desperate need in these people to communicate over an
ocean not only of water but of indifference to their awful loneliness. The women, many of them young and strong and initially greeting us suspiciously like frightening visions out of the sky in this place where few strangers meant them well, were soon won over and sat in prayerful adoration of Vinny's cheering reports of husbands and brothers and sons far off in Brooklyn, and of course he loved his noble role.

The way we got our fuel troubled me. We would pull up to an isolated grocery store out in the country with a lone dust-covered gas pump beside the road, and our driver would cut his engine and in the silence simply wait. No sign of life for a few moments, but presently a man would appear and wordlessly walk to the hose, stick it into the tank, crank out the gas, replace the cap, and walk back into his store without a lira being paid or a syllable exchanged. It was beginning to look like the swamp called Something for Nothing, from which there is no return. Meanwhile the driver, despite Vinny's being able to understand him, would utter not a word mile after mile, hour after hour. But suddenly in Siracusa, a town still in partial ruin as a result of the war, he stopped the car, shut off the engine, got out and opened the door, and with a gesture behind him said,
“Teatro.”

I got out, and there indeed was the steel-fenced ruin of the tremendous ancient Greek theatre. Why had he stopped here?—unless Luciano or the young bandit had instructed him to, for me, a writer of plays. I made my way down the stone tiers of that vast, vine-grown, sun-blasted amphitheatre chiseled out of the mountain, and at last stood on the rock stage that ended with a sheer drop to the blue sea just behind it and the arch of sky overhead. I felt something close to shame at how suffocatingly private our theatre had become, how impoverished by a psychology that was no longer involved with the universalities of fate. Was it possible that fourteen thousand people had sat facing the spot on which I stood? Hard to grasp how the tragedies could have been written for such massive crowds when in our time the mass audience all but demanded vulgarization. If the plays were not actually part of religious observances, it is hard to imagine what it was that fenced them off from the ordinary vulgarity of most human diversions. Still, religion alone does not entirely explain the foreverness of the architecture, the sculpture, and the plays themselves—the inexhaustible tension of their unadorned straight line from intention to the exploding flare of consequences realized at last. Amazing that the past's domination of the present should have inspired in me a
reassurance of order in this colony of Greece, a city that had never known more than a few periods of peace, a land never tranquil, fought over since the end of the Stone Age by nearly every tribe in Europe, from North Africa to Denmark. Yet amid such chaos such symmetry—how was it possible? What had kept them from despair, why are those plays so filled with sun? Surely they knew no less than we the betrayal of human hopes, the deaths of children? In Ezra Pound's translation of
Ajax,
the hero's final, agonized cry, “IT ALL COHERES!,” victoriously declares life justified, and even his betrayal and death. Was coherency the triumph, the system's manifestation and therefore God's okay, while our flux of choices merely soothes the entrepreneurial loneliness of the un-tribed, self-warring soul? Surely one sound was never in this place—applause; they must have left in amazement, renewed as brothers and sisters of the moon and sun.

Almost ten years later I found myself sitting on a plane next to the young director Peter Brook, who was showing me newspaper clippings on a subject he wanted to make into a movie: the hunting down of Salvatore Giuliano, the fearsome Sicilian bandit, by a virtual Italian army. He had finally been gunned down in the courtyard of a country house. Giuliano by this time was a legend all over Europe. The journalists could not quite decide whether he had stolen from the rich to give to the poor or, a mere bum, from everybody without discrimination. Was he a Mafia stooge? Not quite, apparently. A hero, then? Certainly not, he was far too bloodthirsty. But women, it was said, so adored him that he must have had real charm. I turned a page to a large close-up of the dead face. In the grainy blowup I was sure I saw our friend in the mackinaw.

Longhi lost the election, this time by a landslide—only one among many signs that the political climate was changing. I was off on another tack by now: the salesman was crowding the piers out of my head.

But Italian images would always hang behind my eyes like painted scenes. In a town whose name I have forgotten, somewhere in central Sicily on a beautiful sunny day in winter, I saw a dozen men standing around a well in the middle of a dusty piazza. They were in their twenties and early thirties, strong-bodied, with hard, hoe-curved hands and the burnt skin of peasants, masons, woodcutters. We had paused at a rotting country café for a glass of
juice and learned that it was customary for men to come to the well around noon, just in case one of the surrounding latifundia might need an extra worker in the middle of the day, and for lack of anything else to do they just hung around until it got dark, when they went home. Always hungry, they were offering themselves, but all they were eating was time. Suddenly this image locked into place, connecting itself to the story Vinny had told me months before about the Red Hook longshoreman who had betrayed some illegal immigrant relatives and had disappeared. This glimpse in Sicily of desperate, workless men standing in their hunger around that well made monstrous the idea of their betrayal after they had succeeded in escaping this slow dying in the sun. And somehow their story attached itself in my mind to the theatre on which I had climbed around in Siracusa. But I was not ready to write such a play, not yet.

Back in New York it was a hard cold winter. One afternoon, after attending to some business in midtown, I was about to head for the subway and a bit of warmth when my eye caught
The Testament of Dr. Mabuse
on one of the Forty-second Street marquees. I decided to look in on it again. It was one of the films that over the years since I had first seen it had become part of my own dream tissue and had the same intimacy as something I had invented myself.

The dingy theatre at three o'clock in the afternoon was almost empty, and seeing a movie during working hours still felt vaguely sinful. Even worse, I had been making preliminary sketches of scenes and ideas for a salesman play and should have been home at my desk. I was still at the stage of trying to convince myself that I could find a structural arch for the story of the Lomans, as I called the family. The name had appeared suddenly under my hand one evening as I was making my vagrant notes, still unconvinced that I would take up this project for my next work. “Loman” had the sound of reality, of someone who had actually lived, even if I had never known anyone by that name.

Now, watching Fritz Lang's old film, I was drawn into the astounding tale, gradually recalling it from the past. From time to time, Paris is experiencing fires, derailments, explosions, but the chief of the Sûreté is baffled because he can find no motive for these catastrophes, which he has come to believe are not accidental but the work of criminals. But to what end and for whose profit he
cannot imagine. He visits a great psychiatrist, Dr. Mabuse, who heads a famous clinic outside Paris. After hearing the chief out, the doctor explains that indeed these are probably not accidents but that the perpetrators will be very difficult to find. They may be lawyers, clerks, housewives, mechanics, people of all classes who have one thing in common—a disgust with civilization and the wish simply to destroy it. Being psychological and moral, the profit is impossible to track.

The chief, played by Otto Wernicke, a massive actor the size of Lee J. Cobb (whom, incidentally, I had not yet met or heard much about), proceeds to send out men to keep watch on the crowds that collect at fires and other calamities. In time one young detective notices a man watching a particularly awful fire in an orphanage and recalls having observed him at a previous fire. He begins to track this fellow through the city and is led into a great printing plant closed for the night. The tension under Lang's direction is almost unbearably visceral as the detective moves around the massive printing machines in the darkness, keeping his eye on the suspect, who now opens a steel door and vanishes through it. The detective follows, opens the door, goes down a flight of steel stairs, and finds himself in a basement auditorium that is about a quarter filled with men and women representing every class of people in Paris, from pretentious business types to common laborers, students, and shopkeepers. They seem unrelated and sit quite apart from one another, all watching a curtain drawn across a stage. From behind it now is heard a voice that in quiet, rather businesslike tones instructs the audience on the next objective, a Paris hospital that is to be dynamited and set afire. The detective rushes the stage, parts the curtain—and discovers a phonograph playing a record. The chase is on.

He slips into a tiny office, quietly shuts the door, switches on the light, and sits down at a phone to call his boss, the chief played by Wernicke. The camera moves into a close-up on the young detective's desperate face as he clamps the receiver to his ear and whispers, “Hello? Hello! Lohmann? Lohmann!” The light snaps out and the screen goes black before he can give his location. The next shot finds him in an asylum in a white gown, seated on a bed with his hand up to his ear gripping a nonexistent phone receiver, a look of total terror in his face, repeating, “Lohmann? Lohmann? Lohmann?”

My spine iced as I realized where I had gotten the name that had lodged so deep in me. It was more than five years since I had last
seen the film, and if I had been asked I never could have dredged up the name of the chief of the Süreté in it. In later years I found it discouraging to observe the confidence with which some commentators on
Death of a Salesman
smirked at the heavy-handed symbolism of “Low-man.” What the name really meant to me was a terror-stricken man calling into the void for help that will never come.

Memory inevitably romanticizes, pressing reality to recede like pain. When the escaping Hebrews saw the waters rushing in to cover the God-dried seabed, drowning the pursuing Egyptian army, they sat down on the shore to catch their breaths and promptly forgot all their previous years of miserable argufying and internecine spitefulness.

Now, with only the serene blue sea before them, they were soon telling their children how wonderful life used to be, even under the Egyptians, when at least they were never allowed to forget they were all Jews and therefore had to help one another and be human. Not like now, when everybody's out for himself, etc. … The brain heals the past like an injury, things were always better than they are now.