Set This House on Fire (73 page)

Downstairs now he heard a cry—a small high tormented wail which arose in ascending quavering tones and then ceased abruptly, as if garroted—and even as the noise was strangled off he rose up on one elbow, heart pounding and nerves aflame and in a sudden panic of jittery apprehension yet almost simultaneously aware that it was only one of the children, crying out in sleep. For long moments he lay there propped on his elbow, ear cocked, listening, but there was no sound from below. He lay back again. At least I am sober, he thought, at least I will be able to handle the bastard with the calm forbearance and sobriety that he don’t deserve but will get… . His eyes searched the ceiling. In languid dizzy loopings the flies traced thin black rubbery patterns in the air; one, emboldened by the gathering light, disengaged itself from the swarm, darted out and lit upon the wall, stickily fidgeting. Another removed itself from the mass, and then another; one lit upon his arm. In a half-hour, he thought, the nasty little buggers’ll be all over the room, poking their noses in everything. He brushed the fly away. It returned almost instantly, lighting upon his ear, gummily buzzing. He groaned, slapped at it, halfdeafening himself. I must do something, he thought. I got to do something about those flies at Michele’s. They’ll poison everybody in the place, the kids, Ghita, Francesca. … He shot erect abruptly on the couch. Francesca! Merciful God, he thought, where was she? The same sweaty and abominable fear he had had two hours before in the valley, when he learned that she had not shown up there at all, engulfed him now: not only had Mason once taken her at some point in the midst of the evening just past, not only had he—the word lay in his mind like something scabrous and diseased—
raped
her, but now at this very moment she wai still upstairs with him, wrapped in his unspeakable embrace. Droplets of sweat stood out upon his brow. He found himself trembling violently, and he felt goose pimples break out in a cool rash up and down his arms. Then, almost as quickly as it came, the panic subsided, receded, and passed firmly away: he must not let himself get so out of hand.

No, Michele must have been right, he thought with relief again, as he sank back on the couch. Because though say the slimy bastard had the insolence and swinishness in him to do what he done once, he would neither have the guts or the chance to get her and do it again, so Michele must have been right and she is not up there but staying with that gardener’s daughter. … He lay there blinking in the somber light, touching his tongue now to a sore cut place on his upper lip, some raw wound acquired God knows when during the chaotic blundering evening that resided in his mind less a space of time possessing even the vaguest semblance of sequence and order than a scrambled collection of tilted, disordered impressions, like a scrapbook pasted together by a baby or an idiot. The piano. Yes, a little—no, it could
not
have been a piano he had fallen over; then if not, how could he still have the dim but certain memory of a keyboard flashing up to meet his jaw and his teeth biting down on ivory? He rubbed the cut again with his tongue, drowsily pondering. I’ll swear to Christ right now, he thought, not another bleeding drop of booze ever again. A scrap of music went through his mind like a butterfly, tender, innocent, aching, sweet, somehow bruised, hurt, promising love and assuring repose.
Batti, batti
…
pace o vita mia.
Fair barelegged barefooted Zerlina imploring her country lover
patience, patience,
asking him to forgive. The music returned again, a fragile translucent wing.
Bat
…
ti
…
bat
…
ti
… Why did it haunt him now? He closed his eyes, opened them again, listened; far down the slope a bus horn trumpeted faintly, faded out with a sound of perishing mnemonic brass, alloying scattered fragments of hunger and memory and desire. Merciful God, he thought. Sweet bleeding Father of us all, I have come to this. Come to the point where I know I should forgive him for everything, the miserable snake, only to find that there are some things that cannot be forgiven. So now I will simply have to stomp his face in or something, but no … I do not know. And he did not know. He did not know what, when he finally gained access to Mason (not long now, he knew, for Giorgio would be unlocking the doors), he would do: he only knew that he would do something, that Mason would be calmly and simply and inflexibly dealt with at last. A sour, corrosive taste came to his mouth, as if he had been sucking on a piece of brass.

So I guess what I will have to do, he thought, is go up there and get him alone somehow and give him a good talking to. Then without much further ado I’ll have to kick his teeth out. The bus horn sounded, far and faint in the valley, and he let his eyelids close. The vexation and the rage and the trembling diminished and faded out. And again the horn blew in a tremulous sad alto like the soft decrescendo of dying trombones and once more, stealthily, between sleep and waking, the titanic doors seemed to open and surround him, allowing him brief swift terminable vistas of time past, irretrievable: his uncle’s voice, amid the green tobacco heat and stillness of a summer noon, and the smell of goats and somewhere a washpail sloshing, and the green phantom forests, tattered with morning mist, of palmetto and cypress and pine; a rowboat foundered upon the mud of some sluggish southern river, and the scent of dockweed, and a buzzard circling high over smoky swampland, and a Negro voice round soft round, female and chuckling. Then the horn blew again, and he halfawoke, sank back into an instant’s dream, like the barest breath of the syllable of a word: swallows wheeled over him in some blue forgotten evening, and there was a swing and a girl—and high, high they went!—and someone’s voice was saying, “Son, oh,
son,
it’s late, it’s time.” And at this sound he almost awoke, stirred, flexed his knees and for a second, dreaming of France, dreamed of poplars on a sun-mad hill, blackbirds beneath them as big as hawks, and of Francesca,
his
Francesca there. … He felt his eyelids flutter. I’ve got to wake up, he thought, but now to a parade-ground or drill-field he was beckoned, long ago at dusk in some southern encampment where white barracks stretched in shadeless ranks to the far horizon and men marching shouldered rifles in the twilight and, wild, triumphant, a band tarantaraed beneath a grove of pines—oh how long away!

He awoke to the sound of his heart thudding; the light was still gray in the room, dusty and fugitive. Softly he stirred, feeling the itchy sweat and clinging of his shirt against his back. No, I cannot go to sleep, he thought again, and now pressing his elbows deep into the sagging couch he gradually arose, sat up, blinking, and eased his feet slowly onto the floor. He stood erect then, stroking and massaging his ribs. He yawned, a gulping inspiration of breath that set a sharp pain snapping through his jaws. And he yawned again, helplessly and loudly, with a shuddering roar. And once more he yawned, bawling like a calf, and the silence afterwards was like a sudden noise in his ears. Merciful God, he thought, I’m a bleeding somnambulist. I got to snap out of it. He turned and moved through the clutter of the room.

For a moment he had trouble locating the knobs of the French doors leading onto the balcony. Then he found them, and he pulled the shaded doors open, and the dawn fell on his eyes in an aureole of pearl-gray light. It was cooler now on the balcony, cool and still. Light filled the valley, defining the terraced slopes and the vineyards and the lemon groves and the great humpbacked barren peak, dominating all, that plunged a thousand feet into a sea peach-gold with dawning and as still as glass. Like water bugs, noiseless now, their fish-lure lights extinguished, a fleet of tiny boats scuttled homeward toward Salerno, trailing white scratches of foam. Birds began talking again, tentative at first in soft drowsy solitary chirrups and cheeps, and there was a feathery stir and rustle among the lemon trees. And now he heard the girl’s voice once more far down the slope, soft and sleepy and indistinct, singing words he could not understand, and for the briefest instant he had the notion that it was Francesca: he leaned forward over the rail as if to get a glimpse of her, realizing even as he did so that it was not, could not be Francesca at all. He shivered, haunted by a notion bleak, malign, beyond countenance; then this notion vanished as quickly as it had come as, distracted by a sudden flicker of white, he caught sight of the girl, far off, plump, laundry perched upon her head, roundly bobbing among the vines as her sweet cheery voice filled the dawn, diminished, faded against the hills. Then he turned his eyes up toward the end of the valley, knowing that from here he could not see Tramonti, yet half-hoping that something—a wisp of smoke from some hidden chimney—might give evidence of its presence there, secluded behind its sheltering pines. Nothing stirred. Somewhere behind those pines, he knew (or hoped now), Michele slept. Well, let him sleep, he thought. Though it won’t do him any good, I guess, at least he will know some kind of foretaste of the ease and oblivion that’s going to come. He took a cigar, slightly crumbled, from the breast pocket of his shirt and lit it, and gazed at the valley through a swirling blue cloud of smoke. He puffed on the cigar and gazed once more into the dawning valley. No, he thought, I guess all the wonder drugs on God’s green earth would never save him. Never … Let him sleep. In the distance, yet closer now, higher up the mountain, the bus horn hooted with its sound of muted perishing brass, its soft dying fall echoing across the hills in fading yellow notes of memory and desire. He champed down on the cigar and for a moment closed his eyes, listening to the falling echo. Who will remember Michele, anyhow? he thought. Slowly he opened his eyes, and gazed
at
the softly brightening sea, thinking: No, unless dust can feel suffering, there will be no one to remember his death. No one. But if dust can feel suffering maybe he will be blown about a while on the air and maybe this suffering dust will get in the eyes of men who feed too well, and maybe they will weep without knowing why, and maybe this dust will tell them how this man died. A lousy sack of pus … He looked away from the sea, smelling the smell of death—smelling Michele and his loathsome disease, hating both. For an instant he was aware that his sudden fury was like that of a child’s. That bleeding Michele and his bleeding T.B., he thought. Is it my fault? Is it my fault he’s started to piss blood? The whole thing—all—it is a stinking pesthole… .

He went back through the French doors into the living room. In the corner there was an old wooden crate, and in it were a dozen phonograph records, their cardboard jackets frayed and smudged and taped against the ravages of his own hands. He pulled one out. There was no need to look at the label; he knew each by its own faded cover, its own peculiar shadow of greasyfingered stain and grime. He put the record on the battered phonograph, tested the needle with his thumb, set the record spinning along its course, slightly eccentric and wobbling. Then as the needle sputtered and hissed in the first worn gray grooves, he went over to the armchair and sat down. And as he sat there, the music crashed in upon him, aerial and impossible, and with a swift sudden unloosing and opening, as of a thousand magical and lovely windows, consecrating light.

Mozart gives, he thought, giving more in one sweet singing cry than all the politicians since Caesar. A child gives, a shell or a weed that looks like a flower. Michele will die because I have not given. Which now explains a lot, Slotkin. Old father, old rabbi, hell is not giving… .

He jerked erect. Because now, through and across the music’s swift and sudden ecstasy, above the notched hissing and sputtering of the record itself, he heard—or thought he heard—a voice. It was familiar—so familiar, indeed, that, knowing just whose it was, he thought his ears were tricking him—and he waited, head cocked, for the voice to call again. For moments he heard nothing. Then once more he heard the voice, faint yet distinct from somewhere out in the courtyard: “Hey, Cass, buddy, come on up and have a drink!” He sat bolt upright in his chair. Mason! he thought. Triple bleeding God! But it couldn’t be Mason, at this hour of the morning, inviting him for the ten thousandth time to booze it up. Impossible! It could
not
be Mason, who not only aware that he, Cass, knew what he had done to Francesca, but aware too that he must be, at long last, laying for him—it could not be Mason now, playing right into his hands! He listened. Save for the music, there was no sound. Again he leaned back in the chair, and again the voice floated dimly through the music: “Cass! Dollbaby! A drink!”

Heart pumping, he arose from the chair, stood there facing the courtyard door fuzzily defined, ajar. He went to the phonograph and turned the volume down, stood erect, waiting. Once more no sound. He turned the volume up again: the sweet wailing viola reached its crescendo, the violin joining it, and at that instant of wild junction the voice called from the courtyard again, loud and clear, rather petulant now, and demanding: “Cass!” His eyes moved toward the table, fell upon the Vesuvian skull-shaped ashtray, and he stepped forward and picked it up, waiting again, hefting the smooth lava in his hand. Then he put the ashtray back down on the table, thinking: No, that won’t do, that won’t do at all. I might hurt the bastard in a way I’ll regret. If I take him I’ll take him with my two bare hands. And he plunged toward the door, hurled it open with a crash, and stood blinking at the dusky courtyard: there was not a soul in sight. Among the movie equipment—the cameras and the booms and the arc lights—nothing stirred. And high above on Mason’s balcony the door—the same door he had tried to force open only minutes before—was still closed, still firmly locked. My God, he thought, I must be going bughouse. I would have swore on a stack of Bibles … Cautiously, carefully, he gazed around him, but there was no stir or sound. And in a moment he turned and went back into the living room, sat down. He pounded at his head, as if to dislodge the ringing and the echo in his ears: as he did so he heard the voice again, nattering and querulous and insistent, slyly suggestive now above the flutes and strings, and seeming to emanate not from the outside but from a point much closer, close to his ear.
Let me tell you something Cash, old Cassius my boy
… He cautiously turned. His eyes searched the gloom. Nothing moved there, save the flies, crisscrossing in drowsy flight against the ceiling. And again slowly he turned back. And again the voice came, with its strange quality of proximity and distance, suggestive, lewd, and with a soft lubricious lilt:
Let me tell you something, old Cash, virgin tail can be the very best in
… As if on a car radio tuned to a fading wave length, the voice dimmed and became still. He waited, listening. And as once more he sank back, the voice returned, abruptly and with raw insulting loudness, as if the phantom car had emerged from some sound-smothering tunnel:
I’ve had French stuff and I’ve had Spanish stuff in fact you might say I’ve sampled the whole broad spectrum pole to pole but they say that until you get yourself between the thighs of one of the little guinea girls and by guinea I only mean the joking generic term for
… For what? Again the voice disappeared. He lowered his head and for a moment shut out the dawn, pressing his knotted fists tightly against his eyelids. /
mean you know my orientation is essentially liberal
… Stars darted here in the darkness, crumbs and pinpoints of fire, blue whirlpools and globes white with glistery incandescence, and all seemed touched with hints of lunacy. Great God almighty, he thought, the bastard’s spooking me.