Two Weeks in Another Town (31 page)

They didn’t shake hands, and after a moment, Jack left Delaney standing there, senatorial and oracular in his towel-toga by the edge of the pounding sea. Jack went between two nearby houses to the road, where his car was parked, because he didn’t want to have to say good-bye to Clara.

When he got home, Carlotta was out, He packed two bags hastily, and left a note, and started driving East by two o’clock that afternoon.

“You were right to leave her. She’s an idiot.”

“How can you tell from one letter?”

“Not asking for money. She could have bled you white.”

“I have been talking to Miss Lee’s lawyers,” Mr. Garnett was saying, “and I’m afraid you’re in trouble, Mr. Andrus.” Mr. Garnett was a soft-spoken, balding man whose law firm didn’t specialize in divorce cases. Jack had an irrational distaste for divorce lawyers, as for doctors who advertised that they specialized in venereal diseases. “She’s asking for an enormous settlement. Her lawyers have been awarded an injunction tying up your bank account and all your assets, as of two days ago, on the grounds that you have no regular income against which alimony could be secured. Furthermore, they allege that you plan to leave the country, and your wife, as the plaintiff, must be protected.”

“But it’s ridiculous,” Jack said. “I’m the one who’s asking for the divorce.” He hadn’t claimed adultery because he hadn’t wanted to drag the whole thing through the mud. He had envisioned a quiet, polite, undamaging divorce. “How can she expect to get anything from me?” he demanded.

“She’s claiming misconduct, Mr. Andrus,” Mr. Garnett said softly, “and I’m afraid she can make it stick.”

“Good God,” Jack said, “everybody in California knows she’s been sleeping with everybody but the doorman at the studio.”

“Can you prove that, Mr. Andrus?”

“I can prove it, but everybody…”

“She can prove misconduct on your part, Mr. Andrus,” said Mr. Garnett, looking respectably down at the papers on the desk in front of him. “Her lawyers inform me that they have had you followed while you were in New York and they have evidence.”

“Oh, Christ,” Jack said. He had met a Red Cross girl whom he had known in England, and more out of loneliness than anything else, he had stayed a few nights in her apartment. Without pleasure.

“Of course, Mr. Andrus,” said Mr. Garnett, “you could hire detectives, too, to follow your wife, although I imagine that she will be very discreet until the case comes to trial. Still, it might pay to take the chance. I know a very good agency in California which has had excellent results in the past, and…”

“No,” Jack said. He thought of the breakfast in the garden so long ago. No matter what, he couldn’t set policemen on the trail of the woman who had sat across from him that morning. “No,” he said thickly. “Forget it.”

“There is one fortunate aspect to the situation,” Mr. Garnett said. “She can’t touch your pension. The government keeps that inviolate.”

“Good old inviolate Uncle Sugar,” Jack said, standing up.

“I’d like to have your instructions on this,” Mr. Garnett said. “How do you want me to contest the case?”

“Don’t contest it,” Jack said. “I won’t even be here. I’ll be in Europe.”

“I know the firm which is representing your wife,” Mr. Garnett said. “They’re quite—quite ruthless. It may be difficult to make any sort of compromise with them, unless you at least threaten to defend and file countercharges…And if your wife has been as…as indiscreet…in the past as you say, it may very well be possible, even now, to get testimony from hotel registers and maids and chauffeurs and similar witnesses.”

“No,” Jack said. “Nothing. Give her what she wants. Try to hold onto something for me, but if it doesn’t work without all that, give.”

“I’m terribly sorry, Mr. Andrus,” Mr. Garnett said. He stood up to say good-bye. “Oh, one more thing. Your wife also claims the car you drove to New York and I believe she is arranging to have it impounded. Of course, I’ll take the necessary countermeasures.”

Jack laughed wildly. “Give her the ear,” he said. “I won’t be able to afford the gas. Give the lady everything.”

Saving the morning in the garden, he realized, as he walked out of the lawyer’s office, was not going to be easy.

Sum up the night. In a little while dawn will break over the ruins and monuments and television aerials of Rome and it is time to make up the tally of memory. Forgotten voices have spoken, old songs have been heard, ghosts have coupled and parted, ancient wounds have opened and bled once more, the now and here of the Roman night has revealed itself to be a frail and dangerous platform on the crumbled columns of the past, the dead have made their brief appearance, fingers lifted in gnomic warning…

Out of all that gay, brave company
…

Death.

The Presence was back in the room with him, breathing on the pillow beside him, patient, waiting. He felt under assault. The blows of the night had sapped him, the first church bells of morning were the final explosions under the walls. All his vitality, all the inner, thoughtless health that had pulled him through wounds and hospitals and failures and loss of love, seemed to be sliding away. With the fresh blood wet on his lip, he had the feeling that a voice had whispered in his ear, between sleeping and waking, “You will not leave Rome alive.”

Veronica, he thought. Why isn’t she here? Godamnit, why isn’t she here? He closed his eyes tightly and remembered that full, enveloping body. He twisted miserably with desire. If she were here, he thought feverishly, it would all be different.

It is dawn in Rome and here and there the sound of a Vespa, hammering against the sienna walls, is heard, and the bells of various churches, among them Sant’Andrea della Valle, Santa Maria Sopra Minerva, Santissima Trinita dei Monti, San Lugi de’ Francesi, Santa Maria della Pace, salute the new day, after the nightmare night.

Mass is being celebrated in the church of Santa Maria in Trastevere, for five old women in black shawls, rheumatically bowed over on the cold and drafty stone floor, listening to the sleepy young priest saying, Kyrie eleison, Kyrie eleison, Christe eleison, Kyrie eleison, Kyrie eleison, before going off to the day’s work scrubbing floors in hospitals, office buildings, hotels. The market is being set up in the square near the Farnese Palace, flowers and artichokes from Sicily and the red oranges and the sogliole and the cefali and the triglie from the Mediterranean and the bricklike triangles of Parmesan cheese and the mortadella and salamis and the white, wet eggs of mozzarella piled on straw. The last, hilarious customers are coming up from the mulatto’s basement night club on the Via Veneto, laughing loudly, speaking half a dozen languages, and starting their cars with a roar of motors on the bluish street. Jack’s drunk, his knuckles a little swollen, sleeps uneasily now in his hotel room three streets away, fearing the onset of morning, even in his dreams preparing for the first two aspirin, the first Alka-Seltzers, the first Bloody Mary of the new day. The policemen on duty on the Via Botteghe Oscure, opposite the headquarters of the Communist party and the home of the Spanish Ambassador, lean against the wall out of the wind and wonder who is going to riot today and what heads will have to be clubbed, and the marine guard in front of the American Embassy waits for his relief, glad to be on the night watch, because the students don’t demonstrate in front of the Embassy at night to show their disapproval of events in Egypt or Hungary or Algeria. Sleepily, the marine guard speculates on why it is that Italian students feel that they have to show their disapproval of upheavals in Africa and Central Europe by marching, waving flags, in front of the American Embassy in Rome. The Tiber flows in its stone banks past the Castel Sant’Angelo and the Palace of Justice, flows under the stone bridges, a narrow, tamed stream to have flowed through all that history, on its way past Ostia toward the sea, past Ostia Antica, which has once been a thriving port of two hundred thousand souls, and is now only excavated ruins and a restored open theatre in the wintry green fields, spreading toward the black lava beaches.

The trucks rumble through the Piazza Colonna with the morning’s newspapers, announcing scandal and crisis; the workmen begin putting up wooden stands for a parade on the avenue leading to the Colosseum, there is a smell of coffee from the all-night cafés, the last whores reluctantly leave the Piazza Barberini, where the fountain plays incessantly, the water cascading down the muscular shoulders and the upturned head and fishtail of the bronze figure of sea and earth.

And all over the city there is the stirring of women getting out of bed to buy bread, to make breakfast, to prepare children for school, there are the repressed, unheard groans of men stiffly pushing themselves into their clothes, sweaty from yesterday’s underpaid labor, preparing for the starvation labor of today.

The clear, wintry Mediterranean dawn, pale green and cold rose, touches the white jerry-built walls of Parioli, built by Mussolini’s millionaires and added to by Marshall Plan millionaires, touches the dome of the Vatican, the tops of the willows in the Borghese gardens, touches Garibaldi’s bared head on the great statue in the janiculum with a peaceful, deceptive, hopeful light.

The Mediterranean light filters into the hotel room where Jack lies, hot-eyed, wakeful, caught in the drift of the past, remembering voices from another age….

He looked at the leather traveling clock. Time to get up. He got out of bed and shaved. His face was haggard in the bright bathroom light and he cut himself under the chin and the cut didn’t stop bleeding for a long time.

He dressed, feeling hazy and thick-fingered. He took Despière’s envelope and put it into a dresser drawer under some shirts. He made sure to take his dark glasses, for disguise against Delaney’s sharp examination.

When he started to go out, he saw an envelope under the salon door. He bent, feeling dizzy, to pick it up. There was no name on it, no address. It was of thin, flimsy paper, and he could feel that there was only a single sheet of paper in it. He opened it soddenly, knowing that it must be some new attack, some last foray by the night.

“Andrus,” he read. It was written in red ink, a nervous, scrawled handwriting. “I came across a quotation that might interest you. It’s from Pliny, arranged by Leonardo da Vinci, in his notebooks. Are you interested in natural history? Here it is…

“‘The great elephant has by nature qualities which are rarely found in man, namely honesty, prudence, a sense of justice, and of religious observance. Consequently, when the moon is new they go down to the rivers and there solemnly cleansing themselves bathe, and after having thus saluted the planet they return to the woods.

“‘They fear shame and only pair at night and secretly, nor do they then rejoin the herd but first bathe in the river.’

“Remember the elephant, Andrus, fear shame, cleanse yourself.

Bresach”

Jack stared dully at the thin sheet of red-scrawled paper. It had been Bresach prowling outside the door, he thought. He’s crazy, he’s capable of anything. Only a lunatic would come to a man’s room at three o’clock in the morning to deliver a message like this.

He folded the letter neatly, and put it in his pocket. It took a great effort of will to open the door into the corridor.

Still, the days were bearable. It was the nights that one had to survive.

H
E WAITED IN THE
restaurant until two thirty and ate his lunch and dawdled over his coffee, but Veronica didn’t appear. He left the restaurant and went back to his hotel, but there was no message for him there. He was irritated with her and for a moment thought of forgetting her and going upstairs and trying to take a nap. He was exhausted from the night before and the session with Delaney in the dubbing room had been unpleasant and tiring. Delaney had nagged at him and been sardonic about the way he looked. “Christ,” Delaney had said, “if you’re going to stay up screwing all night, how can you expect to do your job right?”

He had cut Delaney short and had tried desperately to concentrate, but the effects of the night had been impossible to throw off. He knew that he needed sleep, but he knew he wouldn’t be able to sleep unless he had tried to find Veronica.

He gave Guido the name of the hotel to which he had delivered Veronica the night before. Guido must have had a good lunch, because he was expansive and talkative, although Jack would have liked to be left in peace to doze in the back seat.

“France,” Guido said, roaring down on a traffic light and slamming on the brakes two feet before he hit an old man with a brief case who was crossing the street. “France—that is the country.” He spoke in French, their common bond. “They are blessed, the French. They have everything. All the riches in the soil, all the minerals, all the most beautiful women. And they are not crowded. That is their big blessing. They control the birth. It is not like here, like this senseless Italian incubator, where every day our women give birth to another twenty thousand unemployed. Why, in France, they even have to
import,
workers.” He shook his head at the unbelievable glory of this condition. “Imagine a country like that. The human being is king.” He sighed loudly. “I should have stayed there. When my battalion moved out, I should have had the sense to desert and stay. Later on, I could have constituted myself prisoner and then become a citizen. The happiest months of my life I spent outside Toulon. My captain was a crook and he hired us out to a lady he was in love with who owned a vineyard and we worked on the vines for one whole spring and summer. The lady who owned the vineyard and whom our captain loved was an aristocrat. She told us, ‘My poor children, you are going to lose the war and soon many of you will be dead, drink as much wine as you can now.’ The wine of that coast is heavy and powerful and she understood when we had to sleep under the olive trees in the hot afternoons and she never told the captain. If it is absolutely necessary to work,” Guido said authoritatively, “it is always best to work for an aristocrat.”

Guido had told Jack that he was paid sixteen hundred lire a day, being paid only on the days he actually worked. That amounted to about two dollars and fifty cents a day, and he had three children to feed, but his shirt was always clean and ironed in the morning, he wore a neat tie, his shoes were shined, his hair brilliantly bartered.