Set This House on Fire (11 page)

“—and I’m not simply talking about what they call the language barrier,” he was saying. “I’m really not so simple-minded or naive or arrogant, or whatever you want to call it, to expect them all to speak the language. And I’m not talking about that waiter, who looks like a nice guy with nothing wrong with him that a couple of gallons of penicillin wouldn’t cure. I’m only speaking of the stupidity, really, the
economic
stupidity of a cafe owner in a resort town where at least half the clientele must be English-speaking, who can’t or won’t employ a waiter who speaks the language. After all, we have to face it, don’t we, that English is the pre-eminent language of the world? Well, don’t we?”

“Yes indeed, Mason,” I said. “By all means.” Three gulps of beer, which had rocked me like dynamite, brought new lunatic dimensions to my exhaustion: gazing straight at him through gritty, aching eyes I tried to tell whether it was he, or merely the struggles of the day, that had brought me now to such a numb, anticlimactic despondency. On the outside he had changed hardly at all. Much of his gangling look had gone; the weight he had taken on since I had last seen him was attractive, it hadn’t sleekly plumped up his jowls but gave solid lines of maturity to that slim smart pretty-boyishness I knew he had always secretly abhorred. Clothes-horse, too, he remained: the silk brocade sport shirt he wore was bright with glints of threaded gold, made for a princely waist; it must have cost as much as an entire suit of clothes, and no one I knew, except Mason, could wear it with such ease or let it flap out, beach-fashion, as he did, without looking like a clown. Mason was an immensely attractive young man, and the years since I had last seen him had added a suave luster to his beauty.

And with all of this I felt burdened under the blackest sort of gloom. Mason’s voice buzzed back into focus.

“I notice you speak the language pretty well, Petesy boy.” His voice was abruptly so arch that it was hard to tell whether he spoke with admiration or remonstrance.

“I think Italy’s gotten you all upset, Mason,” I said wearily. “I had to learn it. I’ve been here for three years, after all.”

“Well, Peter Leverett—” Rosemarie began.

“Call him Peter or Petesy, Rosemarie, or Goo-Goo or Lover Man, for Jesus sake. But not Peter Leverett. Where did this double-name business come from? Is that all the rage now?”

“I’m sorry, darling. Well, Peter—do you mind?—I think I know what Mason’s trying to convey. Do you mind, darling?” She turned to him briefly, but whether she ignored the glance of reproach he shot her, or merely didn’t detect it, I couldn’t tell. “What I think Mason’s trying to convey is the sort of—well, trauma that affects one when one comes to a foreign country. Even when you’ve been abroad before. I don’t know, getting off the boat in Naples, the terrible heat and the strange dark little people and all the horrible noise and confusion. Then last May, when we first got here, Mason came down with this dreadful psychosomatic cold—”

“Now, sweetie,” Mason protested wryly, “please come off that psychosomatic dodge. It was a cold. Period.”

“Well, darling, I’m not blaming you, even if it was psychosomatic. It just fits in with what I’m saying, that coming to a place like Italy can so upset the mind-body relationship that something like a cold is easy to get. That’s all. I remember on the way up here from Naples when you took those antihistamine tablets—remember that first day?—you said, ‘I’m dizzy and it must be because I can’t understand one word these wops are saying—’”

“Sweetie,” he said in an exasperated tone, “I suppose by now I’ve exposed myself
irremediably
to you and to Peter as the most grotesque sort of Rotarian, simply because of my vicious, xenophobic remark about the guy who runs this coffee house, but I want to assure you, baby, that I have never yet used the word wop, and that you are lying through your teeth—”

“I’m sorry, darling,” she put in. Her hand flew to the back of his, in a hurried show of appeasement. “I’m sorry, really. I didn’t mean to imply—”

“You just said it,” he said sourly.

“Well, darling, I didn’t mean to imply what you said. All I’m trying to tell Peter is that what I think you were trying to convey was that one can get off on the wrong foot in a strange land simply because the customs and the language—”

“Anyway, they weren’t antihistamine pills. They were aspirin. I may be a chucklehead straight out of the Lions Club but I’m not a hypochondriac, for Jesus sake.”

“All right, aspirin then. Anyway, the thing I think you were trying to tell Peter—”

Except for that day I can remember no time in my life when, sitting bolt upright, I was able to slip without sensation into unconsciousness, but once again I must have drowsed, for as Rosemarie spoke her voice lost both sound and meaning; past the rim of the sleeping square the vast panorama of sky and sea as if filmed over by sheets of yellow-hued dust lost all dimension, and nodding there and dreaming—what was it?—I felt myself in another land, a boy again upon some lowland estuary or riverside where marshlands echoed the incessant fever of a million humming insects and sails like brilliant kites made upon the oceanic sky patterns as swift and ecstatic as the flight of gulls. But the moment shattered in bits like glass and I must have jumped awake as hurriedly as I slept, for I sensed something moist and warming tumbling from my hand, my eyes snapped open, and the beer bottle exploded in a shower of foam around my feet.

“Peter!” Rosemarie cried. “Poor boy! You look perfectly
extinguished!
Why don’t you go lie down for a little while?”

“Well, I would like to go on up to your place and sleep some of this off,” I said groggily. “I’m just absolutely beat. If you’ll just tell me how to get there …”

At this moment Rosemarie’s expression reminded me of nothing so much as that chic, touching vacuity seen on the mortuary images of ancient Egyptian queens. What she said now, though, seemed to rise to soothe me through some instinctive, sweet, almost clairvoyant understanding. It was only later that night, looking into a mirror at my wrecked and blasted reflection, at my red-rimmed eyes and grease-smeared cheeks and bum’s growth of whiskers, that I realized that, possibly in atonement for her earlier rudeness, she was simply trying to be nice. “Oh, I think you must be absolutely exhausted,” she said. “Did you have any trouble getting here?”

“Oh God, it was awful,” I said, taking a deep breath. “Near Pompei, this guy came barreling out of a side road on a Lam-bretta—”

“Petesy, old pal, I’ve got something to tell you,” said Mason.

“I smashed right into him.”

“Oh Lord!” said Rosemarie.

“Petesy baby, excuse me for interrupting—”

“Wham!” I said hoarsely to Rosemarie. “Just like that!”

“Oh my!”

“They’ve got him in the hospital in Naples. I’ve got to call up about him.”

“Oh, Peter—”

“Peter,” Mason was nagging patiently.

“It wasn’t my fault,” I was telling Rosemarie. “The guy already had—”

“Peter, I’ve got news for you.”

“—one eye out.
What,
Mason?”

“Look, Petesy, I hate to say this, but I want to tell you there have been some slight changes. You know I told you in the letter you could stay with us at the villa? Well, what I’ve done is gotten you this terrific room at the Bella Vista—”

“For Christ sake, Mason!” I blurted. I was nearly sick now with frustration, and I heard my voice rising whiny, petulant, and objectionable in my throat. “What’s the big idea?”

“Now don’t get sore, Petesy,” he said affably. “Lemme explain, dollbaby.”

“Dollbaby my ass, Mason,” I said, a tone of prep-school bickering creeping into my words. “I come down here to see you and on the way I practically get killed! I can’t even get a word in edgewise about it, with all this chatter of yours about antihistamine pills. Then you want me to go squat in some flea-bag after you’ve invited—”

“Petesy, Petesy, Petesy,” he murmured, gently shaking his head, “if you’d just let me
explain.”

“All right, then,” I said bitterly, “go ahead and explain.”

“It’s not a flea-bag in the first place. It’s a de-luxe hotel. The guy that runs it is our landlord, a great guy. I reserved you the best room they’ve got, and it’s on
me.
I’m paying for it. You know damned good and well I’d consider it not only a duty but a pleasure to pay for it. And the only reason I did this is this—now Petesy, dammit, don’t look so glum—the only reason I did it this way is because when the picture unit got here Alonzo got everybody rooms in the various hotels and pensions but—and this is just like Alonzo, the old bear—he completely overlooked finding a place for himself. So I put him in your room in the palazzo—”

“Why didn’t he take that so-called terrific room at the hotel you reserved for me? For Christ sake, Mason, you invited
me
—”

“Petesy, dollbaby,” he said in his placid, patient tone, “Petesy, listen! Someone, some tourist just
vacated
that room yesterday, after Alonzo was already here.”

“I suppose if it hadn’t been vacated I’d be sleeping in my car. What’s left of it.”

“Peter, don’t be ludicrous. You know I’d have gotten you a place. You
know
that, don’t you, about your old daddy?”

Now so conciliatory, so smooth and lulling, his voice struck old familiar chords of real affection, and my anger melted away, forcing from me as it vanished a drawn-out sigh. “Oh, O.K., Mason, I’m sorry. I suppose so.”

“It’s a wonderful room, Peter,” Rosemarie volunteered. “I made Fausto—he’s the proprietor—fix it up this afternoon just for you. It’s got a marvelous view. When the Kinsolvings—they’re the people who live below us at the palazzo—when the Kinsolvings first came here, they said, they stayed there for a few nights and loved it.”

Mason tittered. “All fifty-seven of them.”

I rose, no longer outraged, but feeling nonetheless cranky, rude, and somberly disappointed. “I met them down on the road,” I said. “The girl—what’s her name—Poppy—told me, Rosemarie, to ask you if you’d lend her whozis—the serving girl—to help out tonight. Seems that one of the little ones caught a cold.”

“Where are you going?” Mason asked.

“Mason,” I said solemnly, “I think I might have killed me a guinea today, but I’ve got to phone up to find out. Then,” I added, turning on my heel, “I’m going up to that terrific room of mine and go to bed.”

“Petesy,” I heard his voice protesting as I went inside the cafe, “Peter, don’t
be
that way. You’re supposed to come to dinner tonight!”

But profoundly drunk from half a beer, my bones like jelly from fatigue, an ominous ticketing sounding in my ears, and, like some stricken diabetic, bizarrely lurching everywhere—with these afflictions I scarcely heard him; indeed, by then so bedraggled was my state that much of the brief remainder of that afternoon I remember in fantastic scraps and snippets, as if illuminated by flashbulbs set off intermittently in the deepest dark. The phone call I clearly recollect: an abortive parley with madwomen, held in a stifling booth which I shared with a swarm of malodorous flies.
“Macché, signore! Chi desidera all’ospedale?”
The lines were crossed, there was a shrill meticulous voice in French—
“lei Marseille, Naples!”
—and many wrathful replies in Neapolitan; after ten minutes I gave up, leaving the two operators locked in horrible bilingual colloquy. Then with despairing indifference I began not to care about di Lieto, and conceived of him cold and dead, and emerged unsteadily from the dripping cupboard, heading once more for the terrace and the square. A bus drew to a stop in the center of the piazza; from its doors poured forth a horde of middle-aged albinos, haggardly berating each other in German. They formed ranks as I stood there, in
Lederhosen
and dowdy flowered frocks cackling over their Baedekers and clumping forward through a whirling cloud of pigeons toward the church across the way. As I averted my eyes I spied Mason, who rose from the table and hailed me.

“Pierre, you aren’t sore, are you?” he said seriously. “Look, if you are I’ll just tell Alonzo to switch with you.”

And I wasn’t really sore at him, I honestly believe, but only tired. This I told him.

“That’s the boy, Petesy. Look, you go up to the hotel and sack in for a while, then you’re due at the palazzo for dinner at seven-thirty. O.K., man?”

“O.K., Mason.
Ciao. Ciao,
Rosemarie.”

A blank spot. I remembered my bags, which were in the car, but how I got there I am unable to recollect. Someone, at any rate, was lounging at the wheel—a big, flat-faced sallow fellow about my own age, who, when I came into sight, gave me a huge smile filled with snaggled teeth and blackened gums, like a blighted sunrise.

“Tell me,” I said, “what are you doing inside?”

“Sto attento alla machina”
he said, still beaming. “I am taking care of your car.”

“Well, descend,” I commanded. “You have no business inside there like that.”

“Sissignore! Subito!”
he exclaimed, clambering out. “Had I not come along those boys would have hurt it more than they did. As it is, you see, they have smashed up your windshield and left a large hole in the front end—”

“What in God’s name are you talking about?” I said.

“Those boys from Scala. They are very bad. They came along with a big stick and began to beat up your machine.” As he said this a poignant and final misery seized me, now after so long almost insupportable; it was as if di Lieto’s ghost had stalked me to this mountaintop, for as he spoke the brooding globed skull and vacant eyes, the mouth which, so like that of di Lieto’s in the midst of his canceled desolate slumber, twitched slack and forever uncomprehending and benign—all these informed me that this one, too, was mindless as a chicken, and an awesome feeling neither terror nor compassion but part of both swept over me, made electric and vast in my exhaustion along with some ancient, fleeting hunch that what I beheld, though cruelly marred, was indorsed by heaven.
“Io mi occupavo dell’automobile,”
he babbled on. “I chased those boys away. Have you an American cigarette?”