William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice (120 page)

He looked down at the table, amazed to see that in less than half an hour he had consumed a full liter of wine—on an empty stomach at that. He turned toward the waiter with the command, half-spoken, for another
mezzo litro.
At this instant there passed close by across his vision a depressing, mean tableau which darkened the day like a cloud. For not ten yards away, in clamorous full view of the bright morning, there took place a brutal catastrophe. Here one of that ragged procession of women from the valley had wheezed to a halt; she was of any age at all, pop-eyed with toil, sweating, bent over like a broken limb beneath the everlasting load of fagots. Behind her stood a little girl in tatters, sucking on her thumb. As Cass turned, the woman made a final desperate humping motion with her back but the enormous hummock of wood, badly balanced and off-kilter, came tumbling off her shoulders and fell to the cobblestones with a clatter. Then as he watched, the woman threw up her arms—it was a noiseless gesture, touched not with anger or despair but only inevitability, acceptance of a world in which heavy loads fall and must be forever rehoisted—and with the little girl pushing too, she huffed and puffed the bundle along the ground to a nearby wall. At once there took place something that caused the sweat to roll down beneath his armpits and to stand out in cold droplets on his brow. For now the woman had backed up with her shapeless rear end against the wall; stooped over donkey-like she began to bray hoarse commands to the child, who with skinny arms aquiver, flower-stalk legs trembling with effort, commenced to tug and heave the load onto the woman’s back. The child strained and tugged, the woman arched her back, and for an instant the bundle rolled up and onto her shoulders, awesomely, as if hoisted there by some block and tackle invisible in the heavens. But it went up not quite far enough, it teetered and tottered, the phantom ropes were severed, and the bundle came back down to earth with a mighty crash. The child began to weep. The woman began to stomp about the bundle, muttering and flailing her arms. As if forced, sympathetically, into some rebellion by the sight, Cass’ stomach knotted up in a swift paroxysm of pain. He started to rise from his chair, thought better of it, sat down again. What in Christ’s name could he do or say? Madam, permit me if you will to carry your burden, to whatever remote and heartbreaking destination. He heard a groan pass his lips and turned away: Filippone, the slant-shouldered waiter, came drooping out from beneath the awning. Fixing his eyes on a distant wall, Cass made his mind a blank, conscious only of a greasy thumbprint on one lens of his glasses, through which he read, unthinking, three blurred white faded words:
VO-TATE DEMOCRAZIA CRISTIANA.
“Un altro mezzo litro”
he halfwhispered, not looking up. When, finally forced by the urge to make himself even more distressed, he turned back again, the woman had shouldered her prodigious load. Stooped, misshapen, of another century, she padded bare-soled beneath her tower of wood across the square, trailed by the child with legs like the stems of flowers.

Far off in the valley toward Scala, grindingly off-key, church bells banged and clattered in remote confusion like celestial pots and pans. Filippone came and went. Cass took a deep gulp of wine, downing in fact half the bottle before removing his nose from its rim, conscious now that in some stale and left-over fashion, he was once again drunk, but exhaustedly, unpleasantly so, and that the day already had begun to gray over with the old apprehensions. His bright brief moment of elation had drained utterly away. Heavy weights seemed to burden him. He sought urgently for something to buoy him up, some merry swirl of color or motion in the near-deserted square, found nothing—fat chinless Saverio, scrounging mindlessly at his uplifted pecker, boldly outlined through his pants. With a whistle Umberto summoned him toward the luggage piled around the bus, and like a baggy animated scarecrow he took off, still tumescent, uttering magical paeans. Now the square lay level and deserted, like a lake becalmed. On a green promontory half a mile across the valley someone laughed, a woman called,
“Non fa niente!”
in a silvery voice, as clearly as if it had been spoken into his ear. In the hush that followed, he raised his eyes from the piazza toward the sea: there a streak of blazing light reflected from the zenith-ascending sun caught him flush in the eyes, making him for one stupefying instant as blind as a mole. And at this very moment from the belfry high above him a flock of pigeons erupted forth like feathered rockets and filled the unseen air around him with a tumult of wings. Hallucination! His heart was seized by a despairing clumsy terror. Blinded, he heard drumming all around him a multitude of wings; a yellowish taste like that of sulphur rushed up beneath his tongue and in the darkness he thought he heard thunderous footsteps from afar, approaching on the surface of the sea. Once again the woman seemed to be crouched nearby —
’Shpinga!”
she was croaking to the child, in that all but impenetrable dialect, and the air about his head was sweet with the odor of blossoms he had never smelled before. Instantaneously, with the speed and majesty of light, a cold wind blew through his mind: footsteps, blossoms, birds, terror —all were gone, while in their stead came a familiar clear white space, clear as water, of illimitable repose.

He caught his head before it had fallen to the table top, and snapped erect with a shudder. He blinked. Somehow in his seizure his spectacles had fallen away from his eyes and dangled down suspended from one ear. Retrieving them with trembling fingers, he adjusted them upon his nose and focused his eyes on the square. Miracle of miracles—as in Paris—hardly five seconds had passed: Saverio, still galloping, had not yet reached the bus; the pigeons in bottle-green and fluttery glide had only at this instant gained the parapet around the fountain. A hand crashed down violently between his shoulder blades.
“A-hii!”
he cried, in an ecstasy of terror. Bleeding Christ!

“It is all taken care of, my friend!” said Luigi in a jaunty voice. Cass forced himself to listen, wide-eyed, composed, afraid to reveal his inner condition. Far off on the sea, like some last remnant of his hallucination, he thought he saw waterspouts—a black forest rushing toward the horizon, the sea itself boiling faintly in convulsion. Then all was still. His heart thudded against his breastbone like an overworked pump. “It is all taken care of. Signora Carotenuto has seen the girl today, and she is at this very moment somewhere in town. She is going to send Saverio to hunt for her and bring her to you.”

“But you—” He found it difficult to speak. “Saverio?”

“Yes. I myself would wish for a more respectable messenger.” He halted. “Saverio is what you might say—” His voice, rather solemn, trailed off.

“What?”

“It is just that Saverio—Nothing. I’ll tell you something about him some day. It is all right.”

Near the bus now Cass saw the cafe owner—a fat woman with a bun at the back of her neck—talking to the half-wit, gesticulating. After a moment Saverio turned from the woman and hustled up a cobbled street. As he did so, a maroon Cadillac nosed its way into the piazza, a sport-shirted young man at the wheel, a blond girl beside him, the eyes of both shuttered behind dark sun glasses. The car eased past the fountain, the sound of its horn piercing, chromatic, very loud. Like a shoal of minnows, a gang of boys began to wriggle and twist round the car, shouting. The young American, smartly handsome, once more sounded his harmonic, turgid horn.
Wonk!
The car halted, throbbing with power barely audible, in the middle of the square.

“One of my countrymen,” Cass murmured, somewhat recovered. “I think I will go to Russia.”

“Here, Cass, I brought you some mozzarella,” Luigi said, sitting down. “Eat it. You’ve got to eat, my friend. You’re going to kill yourself with this wine.”

“I think I will go to Russia.”

“How alike you are, you Americans and the Russians!”

“Come?”

“I mean it is true, Cass. Your similarities are much more striking than your differences. And neither of you seem to be aware of it. There are dozens of them, besides the obvious one of the wish for world power. Your reliance on science and the scientific method. Your puritanism. That is quite true, Cass. Have you never thought that in spite of the emphasis on sex in the United States it merely comes out as the same unhealthy puritanism that exists in Russia?”

“I don’t know if I have thought of it or not.”

“And your concentration upon material things. You were talking about art in America. I should hate to be an artist in either country. As for your own, you are free I gather to create as you wish but you have no real public. The people really do not care. In Russia, on the other hand, there is a vast public which cares, but one which the artist is not free to create for. You see, it is all the same thing.” He paused. “But I sympathize with you. I would choose the dictatorship of the Kremlin—if I had to choose—to the dictatorship of the mob. Because there is always the matter of your respective leaders.”

“How do you mean?”

“Why, it is quite apparent. Your president and the dictator in the Kremlin. They are both peasants. But yours is a cretin, and the other is shrewd. I would always cast my lot with a shrewd man, no matter how ruthless.”

“You would?”

“It is just this, Cass. Some day the Russians will have the refrigerators and the bathrooms that you Americans have. But though it is repressed at the moment, the Russians have a fund of spirituality which you Americans have never developed. They will be educated people with refrigerators and bathrooms. You will be ignorant people with refrigerators and bathrooms, and the educated people will triumph.
Capito?”

“Um.” Barely listening now, Cass took a generous bite out of the cheese: creamy and ripe, impossibly delectable, it plummeted into his stomach, pacifying there almost instantly the ulcerous raging pain of which he had hardly been aware. But he was severely, dangerously drunk. He felt his head sinking downward, with racking weariness toward the table. A vagrant cloud, shaped like the face of Africa, rode serenely across the sun, bringing nostalgic shadows to the corner of the piazza and now a sudden, frivolous gust of wind: Luigi clapped his hand to his head, too late: his green cap went kiting off in a cloud of dust. As he rose to retrieve it the wind died, suffusing all with radiance and peace. “Muffin dear,” the tall blonde called, sidling out of the car, “tell him to bring the green hatbox
fehst.”

“But it is free there,” Cass heard himself say, half-giggling and in a muffled voice against the wet table. “ ’S a democracy. Everyone eats. It is free.” For what seemed many minutes he sat there like this with his head half-buried in his arms. What made it seem so long, he later recollected, was the dream which appeared out of nowhere, passing across his blackened gaze with all the detailed immediacy of the previous night and loading his spirit with the same intense despairing fear he had felt just before his spasm ten minutes ago. “Cass,” he heard Luigi dimly above him, “Cass, why don’t you go home, get something to eat, go to sleep?” But ignoring him, only half-aware of his voice at all, he allowed the dream to march in stately black parade across his mind—terrified by it, utterly captured, and stricken with wonder at the final treachery of his drunkenness which brought no ease to his anxiety and fear, as by all rights it should, but sharpened to the point of torture his most unholy apprehensions. Then all of a sudden he knew why it had been the woman with the fagots who had set off this seizure. He raised his head from the table, fixing Luigi with his blurred, unsteady gaze. “The woman,” he said. “The woman carrying that wood. Who is she?”

“What woman, Cass?” Puzzlement was all over his face. “What woman do you mean?”

“You know what woman,” he said sharply, scarcely able to manage his impatience. “The beat-up scrawny woman carrying those fagots. The one with the little girl. Who is she?”

“Iddio!”
Luigi exclaimed. “How should anyone know, what peasants! All of them,” he said in tones reminiscent of those sleepy-faced storekeepers of Cass’ youth who went on so about Negroes, “all of them look alike. Cass, indeed I do not know what you are talking about.”

But he had it now, plain! Of course, the woman had merely resembled the woman in his dream, and to be sure, as Luigi had pointed out, they did all look alike. One way or the other, though, no trivial detail such as this could diminish the whole encompassing truth of his dream—a truth which seemed to him now so unimpeachable, so invincibly clear, so grounded in the bedrock of existence that he felt an exultant laugh rise up in his throat as he poured the whole thing out to Luigi, who had begun to fidget. “Don’t move about so like that, Luigi,” he heard himself say with a chuckle. “Keep still a minute while I tell you about this—this visitation I had last night.”

As he spoke his fright receded; he felt almost exhilarated, touched by a roguish gaiety he could only compare to those times long lost in the past when he was able to create, to work; it was so odd a sensation as to be, in a way, unbelievable, and something told him that it was not right to feel this way at all, but a spillway had been opened and he felt himself being borne buoyantly along upon the flood. “It was like taking ether, you see, this dream I had. Like waking from an ether dream, when all the indescribable mysteries have been made clear. I was in one of those Pullman buses, you see, and we were driving up the road from Maiori that goes over the mountain toward Naples. The bus was crowded and noisy. It seemed very hot. I remember I kept fanning myself. There were some loud
vitelloni
from Salerno singing and playing a guitar, and making passes at the girls. We were going up the side of a deep ravine, that big gorge up near the top, just before the summit—you know where I mean? Then suddenly we picked up speed. We went through a little village, driving very fast. I remember calling out to the driver to go slow, that he was going to kill us all. But we kept picking up speed, roaring down the street of this little village. Then suddenly we struck something. I could hear the soft thumping noise beneath the wheels. It’s hard to describe. It was as if he had run over a bag of flour or meal. I remember calling out again to the driver, this time to stop. We stopped and I got out. Strange, now that I think of it: I was the only passenger in the bus who got down—do you follow me?”