William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice (121 page)

Mournfully, without speaking, Luigi nodded his head. He began to mop his brow—a restive, unhappy motion. Then, “Cass—” he began.

“Wait a minute, can’t you? I got out and walked back to see what it was we had struck. I kept thinking it must be a bag of flour or meal—I don’t know why. It seemed to look like one as I went up to it. But as I approached I saw that it was not a sack of anything at all. It was—it was a dog. It had been brutally crushed. All of its hinder parts right on up to its chest had been smashed flat—flat as those cutlets that that butcher down the street makes out of those thick slices of beef after pounding on them for half an hour. You know? The back part of the dog was crushed just as flat as that—”

“Listen, Cass—”

“Yet the poor beast was still living! Lying there so horribly mangled he was nonetheless still alive, and as he lay there he gave a heartbreaking whimper and tried with his forepaws to raise himself from the earth. This part was so vivid, I remember: watching the animal as he moaned and whimpered and with his eyes rolling white and anguished tried to get up from the road. Then the driver came down from the bus—it’s strange, because although he looked familiar to me he seemed to have no face at all —the driver came and stood beside me watching the poor dog’s struggles and kept saying, T wonder whose dog is that?’ Then all of a sudden there appeared beside us this peasant woman, this bent-over scrawny woman I thought I had seen just now. She just stood there with us for a bit, watching the dog too, and then she said, ‘The dog was mine.’ Then the bus driver went to the side of the road and picked up a big stick. He came back—still without a face, you see, that was one of the strangest parts—and he began to beat the dog in the head furiously with the stick, saying over and over again, T must put him out of his misery, I must put the poor beast out of his misery!’ Furiously he kept pounding at the dog’s skull and muttering over and over to himself these stricken words. But the dog refused to die! Oh, it was frightful to watch! To watch this animal in its desperate suffering, whining and moaning there in the road, his eyes rolling in agony, still trying to rise, while all the time the fellow kept thrashing away at his skull, hoping to free the beast from his torture but with each blow only adding to his pain! Then—”

“Then what?” said Luigi. The corporal’s face seemed now to loom up through murky, unfathomed depths of water. For an instant Cass thought he was going to faint but caught himself; no longer elated by his discovery but, indeed, horrified by it, he was pressed toward its ending by some force far beyond comprehension or control, and was sick to his soul with a profound, clammy dread.

“Then—” he said. “Then I looked down through the billowing dust, and this is what I saw. It was not now the dog’s head he was beating, but the head of the woman, this scrawny peasant woman with the fagots. Somehow she had turned into the dog. Lying there crushed and mangled, with her poor tormented body pressed against the dust, she let out piteous cries, shrieking, ’God! God!’ over and over again. ’Release me from this misery!’ And each time she called out,
down
would come the flailing stick which would knock her bleeding head against the earth, only for the head to rise again to cry out for deliverance from all this agony, and each time again the stick would strike her, futilely, releasing her not into death but only into an endless mystery of pain. Do you understand? Don’t you see!” Cass began to shout, hoarsely and drunkenly.
“Liberatemi!”
she kept screaming. ’Release me! Release me!’ And then far aloft I heard the man’s voice saying again and again as he laid on with the stick: ‘I’m trying! I’m trying!’ And I heard his terrible sobs of remorse as he kept beating her, and as he kept saying then, ’I cannot!’ And as in the depths of my dream I realized that this was only He who in His capricious error had created suffering mortal flesh which refused to die, even in its own extremity. Which suffered all the more because even He in His mighty belated compassion could not deliver His creatures from their living pain. Which—” But now he halted. He felt his lips trembling.
“Che
—” he resumed. “He is
beating
us, yet
mercifully
—” he tried again. But it was no use. His wits, such as they had been, had abandoned him. Luigi gazed back at him with the half-dead expression of a man trapped by a lecture in some unknown language. Luigi had not understood him and beyond this, he knew, suspected him of being crazy. His suspicion he could take but his incomprehension seemed to him now a form of betrayal, and Cass heaved himself up from his seat unsteadily, knocking over the chair. “Don’t you understand what I mean, Luigi? Why is it then,” he demanded in a distraught voice, “when we erase one disease another comes to strike us down! Is it not His own feeble way of trying to get rid of us? Answer me that! Is it not? Is it not?” There was no reply.

He felt strangled in the grip of an almighty fear.
“Stupido! Idiota!”
he said with a belch. “Disease of the minds!” Then he turned and fled the corporal, lurching away across the square from his entreating outstretched hands, appalled at the fool he bad made of himself and at the furious braying sounds he heard heaving up from his chest… .

Not too far west of the village, near an old ruin called the Villa Cardassi (its original owner, a Victorian Englishman, was a classicist: the motto
DUM SPIRO, SPERO
can still be seen engraved above the marble portico) there is a promontory among the rocks where people go to watch the sea. Here the trees are stunted and bent from incessant winds. A stone wall surrounding the point protects the maladroit, or the drunken, or the unwary: the drop, straight down upon the rocks in the valley, is almost a quarter of a mile. On clear days from this point the whole vast Mediterranean seems to open up from horizon to horizon: the sheer cliffs of Capri far off in the west, and the lazy umber coast marching southward to Calabria, and all around, infinite and glistening, the emerald sea. Here Cass found himself a short while after—though how he got there, he later recollected, he scarcely knew, except that he must have been a sight as he zigzagged up through the town with his hair in his face, belching and hiccupping, with a maniacal glint of terror in his eye. At the wall he stopped short, breathing heavily, and peered down over the familiar brink. Someone hardly larger than a gnat toiled far below in a toy-sized lemon grove; a swollen torrent in the valley, white with spume, looked no more forbidding than a rivulet of milk. Dizzied, bereft of all save the merest whisper of self-preservation, he leaned far out over the frightful gorge, tormented by a horror of these gallant heights so ardent and so powerful that it was almost like love.
“Prendimi”
he whispered. “Take me now.” As he leaned, a powdery crumble of mortar gave way beneath his hand, pitching him forward, and he had one instant’s foretaste of oblivion as groves and vineyards and distant flood all spun lopsided and immense before his vision, all beckoning. With a cry strangled in his throat he tried to regain balance with his other arm and began to strain and tug himself back over the parapet. But all was lost. Lost! More mortar gave way; he slipped again. For a moment he dove forward into thin air, arms thrown out, supplicant, and all space seemed his destiny. Spread-eagled in nothingness, he held himself by his aching thighs, and by his heels, miraculously trapped beneath some rock or stone. At last with floundering arms and straining legs he pulled himself back up over the ledge, inch by inch and in a softly raining shower of dust. Then he was safe; he felt as if he were drawn fast, secured by unseen hands. He sank down shuddering on a stone bench beside the wall. With his eyes closed he sat there for long blind minutes, feeling the sun and the warm wind which soon dried the sweat that had drenched his hair and lulled and pacified his fright and his infirmity and allowed a dim light of sobriety to reach his brain. The yodel of a bus in the valley startled him; he opened his eyes.

A rustling behind him in the underbrush caused him to look around. The bushes parted, revealing the spade-shaped head of Saverio, who like some depraved and hellish apparition out of Hieronymus Bosch came vaulting on all fours from the foliage, then stood erect before him, grinning and gesticulating. From his tatters an aroma of filth and poverty rose like steam, and his right eye, demoralized by one of God knew how many thousand blown fuses littering the inside of his skull, rolled bloodshot and unruly in its socket and fixed itself with a demonic sidewise leer upon nothing. His lips flew frantically, conveying with groans the tortured outlines of a message and filling the air around him with globules of spit. Then as if someone had given his head a dismayed and impatient kick, his words became sensible, the spray around him diminished, and his apostate eye, like the little white bulletin in those spirit jars wherein one discovers one’s fortune, rolled greasily into place. “I’ve been hunting for you,
Signor Keen”
he said. “The girl who wishes to work for you! Here she is!”

The girl who came walking up the path was the girl of the police station. Sweet-faced, slim, full-breasted, she approached him gravely, though with the faintest breath of some forlorn and disconsolate smile. She had put on a pair of shoes, perhaps for this occasion; they must have been borrowed, for they were sizes too large and they flapped about her brown ankles as she came near him.

“She wishes to work for you!” Saverio yelled in his ear.

“I have no money,” he said in a whisper, still shaken, gazing at her, wondering at her beauty.

“She wishes to work for you!” Saverio repeated senselessly.

“Shut up,” he said. And he opened his mouth to speak to the girl, but suddenly he felt so weak and depleted that his sight blurred and the earth made a lurching motion beneath him. He thrust his face into his hands. “I have no money to pay you,” he said again. But he realized that if he could not hire her, neither could he allow her twice to walk out of his life. So he said, “Come see me tomorrow,” in a tone of dismissal. And for some reason he could not trust himself to look at her again as he heard her turn and leave, followed by the shambling half-wit, flip-flapping in her enormous shoes back down the path.

Self, he thought. Merciful Christ.
Self.
If I don’t find a way out of it soon I’ll be over the bleeding edge for sure.

Journal entry
Sabato 4 Maggio:

“What saves me in the last analysis I have no way of telling. Sometimes the sensation I have that I am 2 persons & by that I mean the man of my dreams & the man who walks in daylight is so strong and frightening that at times I am actually scared to look into a mirror for fear of seeing some face there that I have never seen before. Like today for instance & its not just the wine either but some kind of God or daemon that’s got hold of me with his fangs and brittly crackling claws & will not let go til my flesh is parted from my soul. I mean, for instance after going berserk as I did, shouting, raging at Luigi & getting up as I did & rushing head-long to the brink of the cliff it was as if the dream had posessed me & I was dwelling in that self-same dream & a voice was telling me—NOW. Now is the time. Wait no longer. Come to me & all will be peace & quietness & repose. What saved me I don’t know. Some reason within me so far has always prevailed & prevail it will I pray, prevail prevail. Lest old Cass go bug house & bring down his abode & dwelling place in confusion & in dust.

“Resolution made this date & sworn to by the name of all thats left that still makes sense: to let no drop of C2H50H pass these lips til June 15, which is Poppy’s birthday & perhaps then she will vouchsafe me the celebration. It is the booze which is the grave digger & the spade & the earth & the grave diggers wife & family too. Each man picks his own brand of poison.

“2
A.M.
At least I am not so far gone that I am not able to see & feel those fabulous lights on the surface of the deep. I am not blind yet. Luigi told me with his bland & exasparating sarcasm that the fishing boats are not nearly so pretty—
graziose,
his word—since the U.S. army left & the fishermen took to using those old surplus gasoline pressure-lamps. When they used plain old kerosene lanterns, they were much more graziose said he, curling his mustachiod lip around a cigar. Ecco Luigi. He is worried & confused. He is not yet really sure how to approach the U.S. with me, maybe because he feels in some instinctive way that deep down my emotions are as ambiguous as his own. Anyway the lights are marvelous, gasoline or not. Not so much like stars either, as first I thought but blurred & swollen if you get to looking at them long enough until at last with all boundaries effaced & all frame-work & all perspective lost in hypnotic limitless dark they look only like pure white blossoms, fat chrysanthemums lost and swarming in the black bosom of some oriental notion of eternity. They have some kind of message I think, but I can only look. I can not divine. Nor plumb. Nor lift a hand if my very life were staked upon it. There are times when I am vulnerable & look at it most honestly when I think Captain Slotkin was right, when he looked at me with those sad dark Jewish eyes and said something on the order of, O.K. son if you want to put it on the ethical level & remove it from the psycho-analytical then put it this way—self destruction is the last refuge of the cowardly man. And I remember saying somewhat self pityingly—not at all, self destruction is the triumph of a man whos back is to the wall, it is at least one cut above imperishible self loathing. He had no come-back to that though I could tell from his look that he knew I was hedge-ing & knew I knew that what he said was truth. Why he seemed to care for me in some kind of non professional and non-navy way I don’t know unless as Ive often thought theres more kinship deep down between a southern methodist & a jew from Brookline Mass. (even a psycho-analytical one) then there is between two Pennsylvanians, & no doubt two people who have known Isaiah or Job 38 are more like to feel some strange & persuasive bond than a couple of mackeral-snappers who have never known anything but N.Y. Journal American in their life. In the end maybe it was just that I conned him somehow & being a jew I think he was impressed that a buck assed marine private from Columbus County N.C. only one cut above a share cropper actually, & with only 2 H.S. years could have cared & I mean really care for Sophocles and old Michel Eyquem not to speak of all the rest which came as easy to me as water & at 21 or so had a workable theory of painting worked out all my own. I wonder what happened to Slotkin, probably practising in Boston or somewhere & making a mint. But whenever I think of him & maybe thats only because he was about the only person I ever felt I could talk to about what was eating me, I get an extraordinary feeling in my bones, & can recall as clear as the shining air that day when I quoted that line from Oedipus that hit me so between the eyes, from the book he gave me, now should I die I were not wholly wretched etc., & he said something on the order of—yes we fail often but it is our birthright no less than the Greeks to try to free people into the condition of love. Which was a moment he seemed to make so much natural & gentle & decent sense that I almost gave into the bastard.