Dictation (13 page)

"No belief!" It was becoming their life's motto.

The air felt miraculously dense, odorous with lake and bush. It could almost be sucked in, it was so liquidly thick. They spiraled higher, driving back the whiplike growth that snapped at their eyes. She could not stop laughing, and that made him start again. He knew he was besotted.

Directly in front of them the grasses appeared to part. Noises; rustle and flutter and an odd abrasive sound—there was no mistake, the bushes were moving. The noises ran ahead with every step they took; the disturbance in the bushes and the growling scrape were always just ahead. He thought of the malcontents who were said to have their hiding places in the mountains—thugs; he thought of the small mountain beasts that might scramble about in such a place—a fox? He was perfectly ignorant of the usual habitat of foxes. Then—in what was left of the dusk—he caught sight of a silhouette considerably bigger and less animate than a fox. It was a squarish thing kicking against the vegetation and scudding on the stones. It looked to be attached to a pallid human shape, broad but without glimmer, also in silhouette.

"Hello?" said an elderly American voice. "Anybody back there speak English?"

"Hello," Frank Castle called.

The square thing was a suitcase.

"Damn cab let me off at the bottom. Said he wouldn't go up the hill in the dark. Didn't trust his brakes. Damn lazy thieving excuse—I paid him door to door. This can't be the regular way up anyhow."

"Are you headed for the Villa Garibaldi?"

"Three days late to boot. You mixed up in it? Oh, it just stirs my blood when they name a bed to sleep in after a national hero."

"I'm mixed up in it. I came on the
Benito Mussolini,"
Frank Castle said.

"Speaking of never getting a night's sleep. So did I. Didn't see you aboard. Didn't see anyone. Stuck to the bar. Not that I can see you now, getting pitch black. Don't know where the hell I am. Dragging this damn thing. Is that a kid with you? I'll pay him to lug my bag."

Frank Castle introduced himself, there on the angle of the mountainside, on the Roman road, in the tunneling night. He did not introduce Viviana. All his life it would be just like that. She crept back off the bit of path into the thornbushes.

"Percy Nightingale," the man said. "Thank you kindly but never mind, if the kid won't take it, I'll carry it myself. Damn lazy types. How come you're on the loose, they haven't corralled you for the speeches?"

"You've missed mine."

"Well, I don't like to get to these things too early. I can sum up all the better if I don't sit through too many speeches—I do a summing-up column for the
All-Parish Taper.
Kindles Brooklyn and Staten Island. What've I missed besides you?"

"Three days of inspiration."

"Got my inspiration in Milan, if you want the truth. Found a cheapo hotel with a bar and had myself a bender. Listen, if you get up to Milan again take a gander at the
Last Supper—
it's just about over. Peeling. I give it no more'n fifty years. And for God's sake don't skip that messed-up
Pietà
—half done, arms and legs in such a tangle you wouldn't believe. Extra legs stuck in. My God, what now?" They had come flat out against a wall.

Viviana jumped into the middle of the stone road and zigzagged leftward. An apparition of battlements: high box hedges. Without any warning they had emerged right under the iron staircase abutting the kitchen of the Villa Garibaldi.

Climbing, the man with the suitcase said, "The name's familiar. Haven't I heard you on the radio, WJZ, those interviews with convicts?"

"Converts."

"I know what I said."

Viviana had evaporated.

"Are you the one Mr. Wellborn's expecting?"

"Mister who?"

"Wellborn," Frank Castle said. "The director. You'd better go to his office first. I think we're going to be neighbors."

"Love thy neighbor as thyself. He doesn't sound like a Wop."

"He's a Presbyterian from New Jersey."

"Myself, I'm a specialist. Not that I ever got my degree. I specialize in Wops and Presbyterians. Ad hoc and à la carte. We all have to make a living."

In his cups, Frank Castle thought. Then he remembered that he was drunk himself. He dug into his pocket and said with patient annoyance, "You know you can still catch the night session if you want. Here, take my program. It lists the whole conference. They were handing these out after Mass on the first day."

Percy Nightingale said, "After Mass? Liturgy giving birth to jargon. The sublime giving birth to what you'd damn well better be late arriving at."

But it was too dark to read.

In the Little Annex, behind the green door, Frank Castle began to pack. The wine had worn off. He wondered whether his stupefying idea—his idiocy—would wear off. He tested his will: was it still firm? He had no will. He had no purpose. He did not know what he was thinking. He was not thinking of a wedding. He felt infinitely bewildered. He stood staring at his shirts. Had Viviana run down the mountain again, into Fumicaro, to fetch her things from her room? They had not planned that part. Somehow he took it for granted that she had no possessions, or that her possessions did not matter, or were invisible. He saw that he had committed the sin of heroism, which always presumes that everyone else is unreal, especially the object of rescue. She was the instrument of his carnality, the occasion of his fall; no more than that, though that was too much. He had pushed too far. A stranger, a peasant's child. He was no more capable of her salvation than of his own.

The doorknob turned. He hardly understood what he would say to her. After all, she was a sort of prostitute, the daughter of a sort of prostitute. He did not know exactly what these women were—the epiphenomena, he supposed, of the gradual movement, all over the globe, of the agricultural classes to the city. He was getting his reason back again. She, on her side, was entirely reasonable. An entrapment. Such women are always looking for free tickets to the New World. She had planted herself in his room—just his luck—to pretend sickness. All right, she hadn't pretended; he could see it wasn't pretense. All the more blatant. A scheme; a pit; a noose. With her bit of English she had examined the conference lists and found her eligible prey: an unmarried man. The whole roster were married men—it was only the priests and himself. So she had done her little research. A sensible girl who goes after what she wants. He was willing to give her some money, though God was his witness he didn't have so much that he could take on an extended program of philanthropy—his magazine, the
Sacral Review,
was making good his expenses. All the same he had to pinch. It was plain to him that she had never expected him to redeem the impulse of his dementia. It was his relief—the relief he felt in coming to his senses—that she had all along meant to exploit. Relief and the return of sanity were what he had to pay for. Mild enough blackmail. He wrenched his head round.

There stood Nightingale, anxiously jubilating and terrifically white. He had, so far, been no more than an old man's voice in the night, and to the extent that a voice represents a soul, he had falsified, he had misrepresented utterly. He was no older than Frank Castle, and it was not only that he was alarmingly indistinct—his ears were blanched; his mouth was a pinkish line; his eyes, blue overrinsed to a transparency, were humps in a face as flat as zinc. He was almost blotted out. His look was a surprise: white down to his shoes, and immensely diffident. His shirt was white, his thighs were white, his shoes the same, and even shyer; he was self-effacing. He had already taken off his pants—he was without dazzle or glare. Washed out to a Celtic pallor. Frank Castle was unsure, with all this contradiction between words and appearance, where to put his confidence.

"You're right. Neighbors," Nightingale said. "You can have your program back. I've got the glory of my own now. It's a wonder
any
one shows up for these things. It puts the priests to sleep, not that you can tell the difference when they're awake. I don't mind myself forgoing the pleasure"—he shook open the little pamphlet—"of, get this, 'Approaches to Bigotry.' 'The Church and the Community, North, East, South, West.' 'The Dioceses of Savannah, Georgia, and Denver, Colorado, Compared.' 'Parish or Perish...' My God, I wish I could go to bed."

"No one's forcing you to attend," Frank Castle said.

"You bet they're not. If I sum up better by turning up late, I sum up best if I don't turn up at all. Listen, I like a weight on me when I sleep. No matter what the climate or the weather, put me in the tropics, I've got to have plenty of blankets. I told them so in the office—they're sending the chambermaid. Not that she isn't taking her own sweet time. No wonder, godforsaken place they've stuck us in, way down here. The rest get to sleep like princes in the palace. I know about me, I always get the short straw, but what's your crime, you're not up at the big house? ... Hey, you packing?"

Was he really packing? There were his shirts in a mound, folded and waiting to be folded, and his camera; there was his open suitcase.

"Not that I blame you, running off. Three days of it should do anyone." Nightingale tossed the pamphlet on the bed. "You've paid your dues. Especially if you got to stick in your two cents with the speechifying—what on?"

Footsteps on the circling stairs. Heavy goat steps. Viviana, obscured by blankets. She did not so much as glance in.

"Interviews with convicts," Frank Castle said.

Nightingale guffawed—the pouncing syllables of a hawk, the thread of the lips drawn covertly in. A hider. Recklessness at war with panic. Mistrusting the one, Frank Castle believed in the other. Panic. "What's your fix on these fellows? Cradle Catholics in my family since Adam, if not before, but I got my catechism from Father Leopold Robin."

"Never heard of him."

"Wouldn't expect you to.
Né
Rabinowitz."

Frank Castle felt himself heat up. The faintest rise of vertigo. It was stupid to give in to peculiar sensations just because Viviana hadn't looked in the door. He said, "Would you mind asking the chambermaid"—the word tugged at his tongue, as if it had fallen into something glutinous—"to stop by when she's finished at your place? They haven't changed my towels—"

"A whole speech on seeing the light? That's what you did? Too pious for me."

"Scientific. I put in the statistics. Enough to please even a specialist. How many converts per parish, what kinds of converts, from what kinds of backgrounds."

But he was listening to the small sounds in the next room.

Nightingale said, "Clare Boothe Luce. There's your trophy."

"We get all sorts these days. Because of the ascent of the Devil. Everyone's scared of the Devil. The rich and the poor. The soft and the arrogant—"

"And who's the Devil? You one of these fellows think Adolf's the new Satan? At least he holds off against the Commies."

"I'm willing to think you're the Devil," Frank Castle said.

"You're the touchy one."

"Well, a bit of the Devil's in all of us."

"Touchy and pious—I told you pious. Now you wouldn't think it would take a year to drop two blankets on a bed! All right, I'll send you that girl." He took two steps into the corridor and turned back. "This Father Robin wore the biggest crucifix you ever saw. Maybe it only looked big—I was just a kid. But that's how it is with these convicts—they're self-condemned, so they take their punishment more seriously than anybody. It gives me the willies when they come in hotter'n Hades. They act like a bunch of Holy Rollers with lights in their sockets. Show me a convert, I'll show you a fellow out to get even with someone. They're killers."

"Killers?"

"They kill the old self for the sake of the new self. Conversion," Nightingale said, "is revenge."

"You're forgetting Christ."

"Oh Jesus God. I never forget Christ. Why else would I end up in this goddamn shack in this godforsaken country? Maybe the Fascists'll make something out of these Wops yet. Put some spine in 'em. You want that girl? I'll get you that girl."

Left to himself, Frank Castle dropped his head into his hands. With his eyes shut, staring into the flesh of the lids, he could see a whirligig of gold flecks. He had met a man and instantly despised him. It seemed to him that everyone here, not counting the handful of priests, was a sham—mountebanks all. And, for that matter, the priests as well. Public-relations types. Journalists, editors. In an older time these people would have swarmed around the marketplace selling indulgences and hawking pigs' hair.

The chambermaid came in. She was a fleshless uncomprehending spindly woman of about forty, perspiring at the neck, with ankles like balloons. There was a purple mark in the middle of her left cheek. "Signore?" she said.

He went into the toilet and brought out a pair of fresh bath towels. "I won't need these. I'm leaving. You might as well do whatever you want with them."

She shook her head and backed away. He had already taken it in that she would not be able to follow a word. And anyhow his charade made no sense. Still, she accepted the towels with a maddening docility; she was no different from Viviana. Any explanation, no explanation, was all the same to these creatures.

He said, "Where's the other maid who always comes?"

The woman stared.

"Viviana," he said.

"Ah!
L'altra cameriera."

"Where is she?"

With the towels stuck firmly under one armpit, she lifted her shoulders and held out her palms; then shut the door smartly behind her. A desolation entered him. He decided to attend the night session.

The meadow-long conference board had grown slovenly. Notebooks, squashed paper balls, pencils without points, empty pitchers and dirty cups, an exhausted coffee urn, languid eyeglasses lying with their earpieces askew; here and there a leg thrown up on the table. Formality had vanished, decay was crawling through. The meeting was well under way; the speaker was citing Pascal. It was very like a chant—he had sharp tidy hand gestures, a grocer slicing cheese. "' Not only do we understand God only through Jesus Christ, but we understand ourselves only through Jesus Christ. We understand life and death only through Jesus Christ. Outside Jesus Christ we do not know what life is, nor death, nor God, nor ourselves.' These words do not compromise; they do not try to get along with those who are indifferent to them, or with those who would laugh at them. They are neither polite nor gentle. They take their stand, and their stand is eternal and absolute. Today the obligation of Catholic public relations is not simply to defend the Church, though there is plenty of that to be done as well. In America especially we live with certain shadows, yet here in the mountains and valleys of Fumicaro, in glorious Italy, the Church is a serene mother, and it is of course easy to forget that she is troubled elsewhere. Elsewhere she is defamed as the refuge of superstition. She is accused of unseemly political advantages. She is assaulted as a vessel of archaism and as an enemy of the scientific intelligence. She is pointed to as an institution whose whole raison d'être is the advance of clerical power. Alas, the Church in her true soul, wearing her heavenly garments, is not sufficiently understood or known.