Last Stories and Other Stories (9780698135482) (22 page)

The boy knew well the tri-tiered stands of gum, candies and cough drops in little boxes, and then around the corner he knew a specific double-shelved pastry case, with cookies like full moons eclipsed at the center by smaller planets of jam. These cookies did not seem stealable, so he bought one with his mother's money, then ran off with it to lurk amidst the sunken weedgrown columns of the Teatro Romano, seeking to deny what he had seen.

The psychotherapist Wilhelm Stekel asserts that our fundamental emotion is
hatred.
Hence
we may conceive of the masochism merely as a painting over the sadistic portrait beneath. Such an assertion would be monstrous, could it not be proved.
Are we created in Mary's image—or, if you like, is she one of us? If so, what sadism does her portrait conceal? If not, is she inhuman? Or is Stekel incorrect?

Next question: Considering the way that some families have of devouring their weakest or most foreign member in some
dramma eroico
, I wonder whether Nino's father had been sacrificed? His sense that his wife no longer needed him had been, as such feelings almost invariably are, entirely correct; without Nino and his demands the couple would have been worse off; hence if anyone had to go the father was the one. And why not? He was already as worn as the Arco di Riccardo. Such parapathies, once initiated, may well continue. Families are hungry. Could this explain why Nino chose to vandalize the Madonna, and why his mother said nothing? Pretending to him that she must visit her sister,
she hurried out with a rag and a bucket of soapy water, struggling to clean the marble, but it did no good.

By this time we had all divided into factions, each of us attracted by the flavor of a sympathetic idea, just as in the Canal Grande a school of long green fingerlings will gather round an ice cream cone whose melting whiteness makes especially foul light in that dark water right above another gift to Neptune, namely a pallid rubber glove whose protrusions swiggle and sway in the listless current—and if you want to sit at a café with your friends and speculate as to whether that ice cream cone was dropped in the water by a careless child, or thrown in by the parent of a child who was naughty (who, for instance, whined), or whether it fell from the hands of a sticky child who had eaten too much and suddenly began to vomit, why, then, I wonder why you don't have better things to do; and it may be much the same with the variously attractive theories about why the Madonna bled when the brick struck her forehead. Nobody except for that despicable boy knew the whole story. He'd lied to his mother, who suspected him but found it more relaxing, God bless her, to believe him; she took a long hot bath, and afterwards he rubbed her feet, all the while sarcastically abusing her for her lack of faith in him. But which way did he judge the question? When his brick hurt that perfect woman, her eyes had
moved;
she had
seen
him; this was absolutely for certain; and the blood which spattered his wrist was an earnest of her suffering, which horrified and humiliated him but mostly (in that instant at least) caused him to be terrified of discovery and punishment; as soon as he had gotten away, the horror of what he had done began to prey on him, until he decided not to think about it ever again; and when this strategy failed, he commenced to nourish resentment against Our Lady, who had caused him such suffering. If only she had stayed dead! Who was she to magick the merest nasty thoughtlessness into an atrocity, by being present in her body so unexpectedly? If I drive round the corner at high speed and some old lady is stupid enough to be crossing the street just then and no one has ever been in my way before at that corner, which I have taken at high speed all my life, how can the outcome be my fault? And so he became a Madonna-hater. (The young man's mother took him
to the Gran Teatro di Trieste. He licked his lips at the flowers and lace on Carmen's costume.)

His mother was now an elderly marble-skinned woman, her head tilted back, her hair almost like a gilded mushroom cap. She wore a thin smile, with her nostrils flaring and her eyes not quite closed. The muscles and bones were taut on her face.

One of his father's cousins was a pharmacist, and it was to him that Nino presently applied for employment. In the back room of the man's shop, where he compounded his preparations, there hung an anatomical model of a woman, gloriously naked, and her belly opened so that one could see her internal organs. Opening her belly that night, with the half-formed intention of doing mischief, Nino found a little girl inside. He took her out, and instantly fell in love with her, for her anus was as pretty as the tawny ring in the white cup from which the espresso has been drunk; and so he finally grew up into a man and joined the army.

After several of those July amours to which I have alluded, he fell for a certain Triestina named Francesca whose waist-length chestnut hair, carefully combed, shone red, yellow and all the other colors as she sat with a rose in her folded hands. Some of her suitors could play the viola d'amore of nice red wood, but Nino, having enlisted in the engineers' battalion, knew how to detonate things; and thanks to his unswerving application to dishonesty he could glamorize his occupations into something resembling the candylike floral depictions on a certain psalterium in Dubrovnik. So Francesca married him.

Nino's mother congratulated them, with a tenderly submissive smile, as if she were relieved to fade out of this story. And Nino said to himself: Now I must become good.— He not only forgave the Madonna, but prepared even to love her.

But she went on bleeding; the neighbors remarked it; no one could explain who had injured her, and why she did not heal.

His wife was now a gentle, melancholy, elegant woman in brownish-black, wearing a brooch below her withered throat, a lace collar of moderate
width, and round earrings of some precious stone which coincidentally resembled his dead mother's eyes. As for him, he had resigned from the army in order to become a greengrocer, an occupation so respectable that he fancied himself nearly as worthwhile as a gold-relief saint with an upraised spear. Outside their window, the high-masted ships rocked quietly in the mirror-harbor. Of course they had children, a daughter who reminds me of a cherry tree growing out of the ruin of the old Basilica, and two busy little boys like the blooming bush on one of the high ledges of the Arco di Riccardo. I remember passing by their window and seeing the sons in their formal jackets, sitting at the piano for their lesson, while the potted orchid behind them grew sluttishly wild. Just as some rich orders like to get their old wooden icons sheathed in hammered silver, so Nino sometimes embellished his life with extramarital adventures, in order to display his loyalty to what he called happiness; while Francesca perfumed her underwear with dried orange blossoms.

One day Nino got a rash on his belly which declined to improve. He grew ill. At such times he had always been childishly peevish and dependent, so that the family could never do enough to please him. Finally Francesca gently said: Darling, I've heard that Our Lady's blood works miracles.

Terrified, he sat up and said: What must I do?

I'll go with you. We'll pray. Then you must kiss her on the forehead, and swallow the blood.

Needless to say he preferred not to go. On the other hand, he feared suspicion and exposure as a result of any refusal—although only a little, for he had thrown that brick so long ago that his crime seemed unreal to him—and his rash itched so badly that he could scarcely sleep.

So his wife led him there. He crept up toward Our Lady of the Flowers, groaning with pain.

It was that time in mid or late afternoon when the Triestine summer, not having entirely established its sticky grip, allows a cloud or two to dim the sun, and an innocuous remembrance of the
bora
to rise deliciously in the shaded parks where children go fishing for tiny prey with hands, hopes and sticks; and even the old couples who sit together doing nothing are refreshed into holding hands there in the mottled shade of the chestnut trees of the Giardino Pubblico “M. Tommasini,” the
bare-breasted stone nymph pissing happily from the circular array of jets, the many-windowed apartment façades glowing slate-green or whitish-pink outside the shady zone; tonight will be humid again, so people will open their windows, and the mosquitoes will feast all night. They descended the semicircular seat-steps of the Teatro Romano, and Nino could not help but look at the column which in boyhood he had damaged, first dreading that the brick might have healed itself, which would render this world's laws still less predictable, then sad and guilty when he saw that it had not, and finally angry that he had been made to be sad.— He wished to pulverize Our Lady into gravel.

We're almost there, darling.

Nino did not reply, because the Madonna's smile came into view before the rest of her, and it unnerved him as much as ever. For years he had tactfully avoided reminding her of his existence, but now she herself had dragged him back! What was
wrong
with this world? He tried to say to himself: She's nothing but a vampire!—never mind that he was the one who had come to drink blood.

He had forgotten her sadly smiling slightly bewildered face, and that infuriating way that her eyes had of looking lost. The Christ child in her arms was a sexless little adult.

Francesca was now praying steadily. He knelt beside her, moved his lips, and closed his eyes, so as not to be haunted by Our Lady's face. Dove, lily and olive branch, those Marian attributes he promised henceforth to adore. When he could no longer put it off, he stood up and kissed that stone forehead, tasting dust, salt, soot, then blood.

Instantly her bleeding ceased, leaving for a souvenir a reddish-ocher stain on her smooth cold forehead. Simultaneously Nino found himself healed, so that his life became as lovely as the long dead singer Bianca Kaschman, as useless as an artificial sand dollar, as meaninglessly triumphant as wreaths of silver and gold. Again, one must wonder about Our Lady's motives.

Within the year he turned away from his wife, since he now lacked any further need of others. Self-entitled to the seductive stare of a certain Triestina in a pallid formal gown with half a dozen hems, her right knee
crossed over the left to make a platform for her left elbow as she played with the pearls on her triple-stranded necklace, her hair pulled back, everything dim and silver-blue but for the whites of her eyes, he pursued and eventually won her on a blue-grey day of
bora
rain, streetlamp reflections shining on the empty street like cat-eyes, until he finally unlatched the coffers of his heart for her and she saw inside. Francesca, for whom he had so long pretended to be tamed, kept looking desperately between her tanned and slender knees, in case she she had lost some part of herself.— Fortunately, she was comforted, for the long-necked, golden-haloed, blue-grey bird called the Holy Ghost flew to her from out of an old Croatian-Glagolitic missal. Then she took the children, and ran off with a haberdasher.

As for him, ambition bemused him, like a lady's legs reflected in a curving wall of brass—but without Francesca his belly-rash returned. The next time Nino kissed the Madonna's stained forehead, his affliction, as indeed he had expected, refused to divorce him. This was positively insulting, since Our Lady could easily have made another cure; everyone knows she vanquished a cholera epidemic in 1849. Lonely and perhaps not far away from death (so it certainly appeared when he looked into the mirror), Nino would have wooed her had he known how, but found it easier to become a politician—for his life, unlike yours or mine, was comically accidental and meaningless. Incited by slogans about smashing the idols, chipping away at restraint, tearing down the old order, he believed that life should have promised him something, and he was not the only one.

In his schooldays the bad boy had loved Emperor Massimiliano, touched his statue and even refrained from daubing, scratching or chipping it. So it might be “no accident” that he betook himself to the deep and ancient chairs of the Caffè San Marco, worn by generations of nationalists' buttocks.

An eagle on a shroud for Lohengrin, said the Duke, and we'll need turquoise-beaded bands on its wings and sad ruby eyes, because . . .

Silence! The leader arrives—

The leader liked Nino, because he was so good at telling lies, so before the Madonna had wept or bled again he got to take the train all the way to Venice, bearing in his briefcase the money and confidence of the party.
Already he was hoping that someday he could for all purposes become a white statue whose arms would be pompously folded across his toga'd breast, overwatching the red flag which bore the historical weight of Trieste's white fleur-de-lys well enough to slowly, slowly stir, unfurling like a pill dissolving in liquid, then wrapping itself up again, just as Caesar covered his face when he saw Brutus among his assassins . . . and below the flag's balcony, all of us, his followers, even Our Lady (whose statue was naturally much smaller) would be carried into the shadow where arched windows shone silver and cigarette smoke diffused like sea-fog. Thus his hopes, and the train had barely passed Miramar.— Here came the trolley of coffees, candies and cigarettes. The woman who wheeled it wore a frothy white chemise, and there were dark circles under her armpits. As she drew close to his seat, he inhaled the smell of her sweat and was enchanted. Those intimate circles, they reminded him of the light seen through grape leaves. Because he knew what to say, she soon agreed to meet him in a hotel room where the shadow of the lace curtain on the Naples yellow wall resembled a harp, but when he undressed, it turned out that his sickness had spread. Revolted, the woman departed.

What will become of me? he anguished, which is not the same as
what will I become?—
If only Our Lady had left me as I was that first time—if Francesca hadn't dragged me there . . . !—for what he detested above all was confusion. He wished to be what he was, coldly and secretly. But what was that?