The Beast (6 page)

And at the beginning of September, though he fought against it, though it made him feel sick as he did so, one evening he picked up his binoculars and began to do what he had meant to do on the first of January …

He saw a man beat his dog. He saw a woman throw a glass of vodka in her husband’s face then sit down on the floor and start to cry. And worst of all he saw a
middle-aged
couple—a small dark man and a drawn, smartly dressed woman—sit together all evening almost without exchanging a word; sit without touching, sit without
looking
at each other, without smiling …

Two days later he told Lucy that he was beginning to have difficulty sleeping again; and so, for a day or two …

‘You’ve reversed your seasons this year,’ Lucy said, sounding so disappointed that Charles felt tears come into his eyes.

‘But let’s hope that from now on it’ll only be in the fall you can’t sleep. At least that’ll leave you nine months free.’

If
they
didn’t come back, Charles knew, he would never, ever, be free again. Not even for three months in the year.

Two days later—speeding up a process that normally took two months or more, but he had to make up for lost time—he narrowed his choice down to three. The man who beat his dog—he beat him every evening and didn’t feed him enough—a young businessman type with
slicked-down
hair who read the Wall Street Journal every evening and who, while Charles hadn’t actually caught him at
anything
indictable so far, promised, from the way his mouth curled with patronizing arrogance as he turned the pages of the paper and from the way he gave a visible shudder of irritation and impatience every time his phone rang, to be,
with further research, suitable material, and the couple who never spoke or smiled. The woman who had thrown vodka in her husband’s face he had discarded; she seemed, after all, rather pleasant, if over-excitable.

And three days after that—for motives that were suspect, but nevertheless justifiable—he decided that the small dark man and his smart and bloodless wife would be
it
for the year.

Of course it was preposterous to make such a drastic decision after such an unfairly short time, but he was fired not only with the desire to make up for all those wasted—glorious—months, but also with such a sense of
bitterness
that he would probably have chosen any couple who even vaguely resembled himself and Lucy, however many extenuating circumstances they had in their favour.

And as if fate were conspiring with him in his attempt to concentrate into as short a period as possible what normally took so long, only five days after that—five days in which he had hardly missed a move of his grey and loveless couple, and by God they
were
grey, they
were
loveless; and prejudiced though he might have been, there really weren’t, as far as he could tell, any extenuating circumstances—he saw in the paper the crime of which he knew he would accuse them.

It was a crime that rocked the city; rocked the country. Two small children were kidnapped from their parents’ home in Brooklyn, and found twelve hours later in Central Park, chopped into small pieces and stuffed inside several brown paper bags. Brown paper bags from a Red Apple supermarket …

There was no apparent motive for the appalling killing. No note had been left, no demand for money made. (Indeed, even if the children hadn’t been found dead almost
immediately
,
the theory of a kidnapping for ransom wouldn’t have been feasible, since the parents weren’t at all wealthy.) No, it was the work of a maniac, or maniacs—for the police suspected that more than one person must have been involved—who had killed for no reason other than a demented hatred of life; or a demented quest for some repulsive and insanely perverted pleasure. For it seemed that the children—and oh they were lovely, from their photographs in the paper: a little girl of seven, and a boy of just six—had been sexually assaulted and tortured before being cut up …

That very night Charles sat down and wrote his letter—and it was a letter; he was too choked with the taste of ashes in his mouth, the feeling that if only he had done his duty earlier he might in some way have prevented this atrocious crime, to compose a poem or even a two-or three-line limerick—of accusal. He even addressed the envelope. The only thing he left blank was the name of the grey couple opposite; partly because he had no idea what their names were as yet—his investigations had hardly reached that point—and partly because, hysterical though he was, he told himself he should wait just a little longer, if only a week, first to be absolutely certain that the miserable little man and his wife were worthy of what he was going to accuse them of, and secondly to make sure that the police didn’t make any immediate arrest. Though from what the papers said, there seemed little chance of that.

The following evening as he lifted his binoculars, to train them on the window of the twelfth floor of the
building
opposite, a golden glow caught his eye—and lifting his glasses five floors up, he saw that the light in the penthouse was on …

For a moment he was so stunned he didn’t know what to do. He thought he would faint, or go out of his mind. Now! To come back now! Oh, it wasn’t fair. It wasn’t possible! Not now, while duty, guilt and oppressed humanity shrieked at him with the voice of murdered children—to come back! What was he going to do? What
was
he going to do? What could he do?

He didn’t know; but even as those voices howled within him—and to those howling for justice or revenge or at least some sort of compensation, there were joined others crying for joy, for hope, and in the face of all the evidence, of all the contradictions, in the face of death itself, for love and life—his glasses swung up to the French windows of the penthouse, and hesitantly maybe, unwillingly maybe, but ah, blissfully, stayed there.

For they—
They
—were not only back, but brown, golden, glowing, ripe with all the months of summer, they were more glorious, more ecstatically beautiful than ever. They were not just beautiful, they were Beauty itself. And as Charles gazed at them, drank them greedily, crazily in, almost drowning in this fresh perfect water after his months in the desert, he not only felt his cheeks wet with tears, but also realized without a doubt, without, after only a few minutes, a further thought for that other couple five floors down, that
this
, that he was so insanely staring at, was the way; and love such as this was great enough to take in any murder, however foul, and any horror. Indeed it had to take it in, in order to triumphantly overcome it; and shine all the more brightly just because the earth it was blazing on was so dark. Furthermore, those children hadn’t been murdered because he had neglected his duty for all those months, but simply, and appallingly, because he had doubted this love.

He spent the whole of that evening—until They went to bed at midnight—staring at them, reeling with happiness; and though next morning he felt calmer, even in the light of the day in his bookstore surrounded by the knowledge of the world, he couldn’t help but tell himself that his choice was so clear that it was positively sinful to entertain serious doubts about it. He
must
reject the darkness, and choose that vision of love; and if he didn’t, he would die.

He spent the following three evenings gazing into the golden penthouse; and on the fourth did two, as he thought, momentous things. First he called Lucy, apologized for not having seen her or spoken to her recently, told her that he hadn’t been at all well but now was much better—and asked her if she would marry him.

‘Yes, of course I will’, Lucy said, without a moment’s hesitation; and then, like Charles himself, became a bit emotional.

The second thing he did, half an hour later when he had pulled himself together (though he was still flushed and trembling), was take the anonymous letter he had written to the police about the murdered children, re-read it,
consider
for a moment tearing it up, consider for another very brief moment making a last gesture by finding out and putting in it, after all, the name of the grey unhappy couple over the way who so resembled, or had so resembled, Lucy and himself, consider for an even briefer moment putting in it his own name, and finally, decide to do
something
that was possibly mad but was also, he was
convinced
deep, deep down, absolutely the right and only thing to do.

He wrote in the letter that he didn’t know the name of the couple concerned, but that they lived in a penthouse … He gave the address.

How else could he have ended the task that had occupied him for so long? he asked himself. In what other way could he have found release, and found a way to resolve the contradictions of the earth? And, as he had thought before, who else but Them could have taken upon
Themselves
the sins and sorrows of the whole world? Who else would have been strong enough, had had power enough, have had love enough? Not that other couple, certainly; and even more certainly not himself. No—only
They
could do it; could accept even the foulest abomination, and
transform
it into life.

Two minutes later, a small dark man with a European accent and an insistent cough, he went down to the street and, trembling uncontrollably now, mailed his letter.

*

The following Saturday evening, as he and Lucy were having a celebratory dinner and agreeing to get married very quickly—on a special licence even—coming from the kitchen with a bottle of champagne, he was just in time to see the police burst into the penthouse opposite and arrest the young man, and to see the young woman throw herself to her death from her terrace; and the Saturday after that, as he sat in the hotel room where he and Lucy were spending their honeymoon, he was still reading reports in the papers about the very rich and very beautiful young couple who had, according to the confession of the man, killed the two small Brooklyn children just for fun, and onto whose trail the police had been put by the receipt of an anonymous letter.

The telephone rang twice, and then stopped. She didn’t even make a move to answer it; she knew who it was. Her father had called her at precisely three o’clock every Thursday afternoon for the last two years. It was ridiculous of course; those two rings, that were meant to wake her if she had been sleeping after lunch. She never slept on a Thursday afternoon, and as for today—she had hardly slept last night, and hadn’t sat down since lunch.

Today was the day of her last lesson.

Everything was ready. She had washed her hair this morning, and done the housework with rollers on her head. She had bathed, and slowly, painfully, and extraordinarily—it was only the second time in her life that she had done it, and the first time had only been an experiment she had felt so guilty about that she had confessed to the priest two days later—shaved the black sweating hairs under her arms with her father’s razor. She had pressed her green and yellow cotton dress, and made sure that her white sandals were completely white. She had had a last look at the notes she had made for her lesson, and had put her red books in a neat pile and fixed a thick red rubber band around them. And finally, triumphantly, and with that same strange sense of guilt that she had felt when she had first used her father’s razor, she had folded up the day
before yesterday’s newspaper and lain it on top of her books.

And now there was almost nothing she could do but wait; wait until half past three, when she would go out into the white, hot sun, walk down the white sandy path through the pinewoods, stand by the roadside with the brown bathers, take the bus to the station, take the train halfway into Rome, and walk—walk for the last time—the two or three hundred yards to the school.

She dressed carefully, put on her shoes, and got out the white gloves she would wear, so as not to dirty her hands while carrying the newspaper. She looked in her white handbag and made sure that she had exactly enough money for the bus and train fares there and back. She glanced at herself briefly in the mirror in her bedroom. And then, smiling slightly, trying to move as slowly as possible, she walked around the whole apartment, as if saying goodbye to it. She looked at her own bare room, that had only a bed, a chest of drawers, a wardrobe and the mirror in it; she went into her father’s room, that was furnished as sparsely as hers, except that it had a double bed in it; a relic of the days, twenty or more years ago, when she had had a mother, and her father a wife. She went into the dining room, with its shiny marble floor and its shiny wooden table and its great bowl of dried flowers on the shiny wooden sideboard, where she and her father ate together in the evening. She went into the living room, with its three blue wire-legged armchairs, and its one blue wire-legged divan, where she and her father watched the television in the evening—and from whose windows she could, if she had wanted, have looked out over the pine trees to the crowded, noisy beach. And lastly, she went into the spotless white kitchen, where she prepared her own
and her father’s meals; and from whose windows, that faced away from the sea, and from which one could see the road that cut through the woods to the city, just three days ago, while she had been washing the floor, she had seen a flame-coloured car stop, and pick up a girl in an orange T-shirt …

She closed her eyes for a second. Should she have phoned the police, she wondered. But what was the use? After all, she hadn’t actually seen the driver’s face, after he had got out of the car with such strange gallantry to open the door for the girl, and she obviously didn’t remember the number, and it would be a terrible thing if she did call the police and help get a perfectly innocent person into trouble. Added to which, if she had told the police what she had seen, they would have come here and disturbed her and might even have wanted her to go out; and they would surely have ruined these last two days, in which her whole time—apart from the essential cleaning and cooking—had been dedicated to preparing for her last lesson. And she couldn’t have let anything interfere with that. Tomorrow, maybe, she would think things over more clearly, and come to some decision. She might even call Padre Enrico and ask his opinion. If, of course, tomorrow …

She opened her eyes, and looked at her watch, and left the kitchen. She was a little early, but it didn’t really matter, she decided. She would walk more slowly through the pinewood to the road, and say goodbye to the trees, too. After all, there would be no more Thursday afternoons from now on.

It was always an effort to open the front door; always the feeling that the air, the sky, the whole outside might sweep over her and drown her made her pause for a
moment, and bite her lips. But it was always an effort and a feeling that she enjoyed. And today she enjoyed it more than ever before; more than she could ever remember having enjoyed anything. She stood there, with her white gloved hand on the door knob, and trembled with
anticipation
, with a sense of joy, of ecstasy almost, for a full minute before finally taking the plunge. And when she did push the door open—very conscious that it might be the last time she would do so, at least for quite a long time—and saw the grey-green umbrella pines beneath her, and felt the vast, nearly visible wave of summer heat engulf her, she wanted to cry out and shout to the whole world that she was here, and that the world should take notice of her; plump, white, Antonietta Misseri, whose thirtieth birthday it was today, and who was going out to her last lesson.

She walked slowly down the steps to the sandy ground—her father was a forest warden in the presidential reserve, and their apartment, in the private wood, was built over a garage that housed fire-fighting equipment—and tried to remember exactly when it was that she had stopped going out for any but the most special reason, such as her lessons. But she couldn’t, really. It was something that had just crept up on her, without her noticing it. When she was small, she had gone out to school quite normally, and had even gone to have an ice-cream once in a while with her school-friends. They had lived in the city then. And as she had grown up, she had known a boy who lived in the same palazzo—a bespectacled, shy boy—and she had gone to the cinema with him sometimes on a Sunday afternoon. And obviously, since her mother had died and she had told her father she didn’t want him to get a maid, even if they could have afforded one, she went out every day to do the
shopping. What was more, until she was about twenty-three or -four, she and her father went to her aunt’s—her father’s sister—every October for two weeks for a holiday, and she had been perfectly happy there. But it was about then, she guessed—when she was about twenty-four—that she first started to feel that she didn’t particularly like going out of the house. It wasn’t that she was frightened—what was there to be frightened of?—nor that her father was particularly strict with her, or jealous of her; he had always said that he knew he could trust his Antonietta. No. It was just that absurdly, inexplicably, she began to feel that ‘outside’ wasn’t altogether real. It
was
absurd, and
inexplicable
. She had never even tried to explain it to herself, let alone to anyone else. But it was so. And once she had had that feeling, and identified it, it began to grow. And since outside wasn’t real—why go outside? She didn’t say
anything
to her father, but simply cut down her shopping days to one a week, and always murmured softly, when he sometimes asked her if she would like to go out to a restaurant, that she had a headache, or that there was something she wanted to see on the television; or simply that she preferred not to, and would prepare an extra nice meal for them both at home. By the time she was twenty-six she didn’t even go to church any more on a Sunday. She would phone the priest occasionally, and ask him to stop by and see her when it was convenient for him; and she would confess, on her knees, in the dining room. And then her father got his forest warden’s job, and they moved into the apartment in the pinewood. And that, for her, had been perfection. Now she had an excuse for not going shopping ever, because it would have involved travelling and carrying heavy bags, and she could reasonably ask her father to get everything they needed when he
finished work each day. He drove to the shops with the list she prepared for him.

He didn’t seem to notice that she never went out; or perhaps he didn’t know. He was a quiet, good-natured, tree-like man himself, who only really loved trees, and he seemed to think it quite natural that his daughter didn’t want to carry heavy bags on the bus; and besides, after a day spent for the most part alone, he quite enjoyed going into Ostia, where he could stop at a bar and have a drink and maybe chat to people. Every Tuesday evening he went out to play cards, and on Sunday afternoons he went to a football match. Of course, sometimes he asked Antonietta if she thought of getting married, wondered why she didn’t go to the beach in the summer, congratulated her—he was fiercely anti-religious for such a gentle man—for not going to church any more, and pressed her to go on holiday with him. But she smiled off his questions, ignored his congratulations, and told him so convincingly that for her, life in this house
was
a holiday—and further, was sure he was quite happy at her aunt’s by himself—that she never gave him any reason to believe that his daughter was at all unhappy, or indeed in any way odd.

Which she wasn’t, she told herself. She loved to stay at home, and while she saw no point in going out, since
outside
didn’t really exist, there was nothing pathological about her condition. After all, she could and did go out sometimes, when it was absolutely essential—there were some things she couldn’t bring herself to ask even her father to buy—and it didn’t cause her any great shock or distress. Rather the contrary, in fact; that slight fear of drowning, and sense of joy that she always got as she made the effort to open the door, stayed with her the whole time she was outside, and made her return home feeling
quite light-headed and flushed. So much so that she was sometimes tempted to go out more often. But then, she argued with herself, if outside wasn’t real, nor could the feeling it induced in her be real. It was simply the feeling that anyone who finds him or herself in an unreal situation must have, and while it was, or could be, pleasurable, it wasn’t a genuine pleasure, such as staying home gave her. Perhaps, she thought, it was simply the illusion of pleasure. And it was foolish, if not sinful, to indulge in the mere illusion of pleasure.

And so, at the age of twenty-seven, she had stayed home almost every day of the year, cleaning, cooking, sewing, watching television, looking at the view from the windows—looking at it as other people might look at the mere painting of a landscape—and above all, reading books; which were, as far as she was concerned, the highest form of reality in the world.

But then something disturbing had happened. She began to feel that the unreality of the outside world was coming inside, too. The furniture in the apartment, the shiny marble floor—they began to be infected, as if by a disease. They were becoming illusions. And then the television, and the programmes on it. And then the words that she and her father exchanged.

It was at this point that she began to get frightened; because she foresaw the day when everything, including her books, her father, and ultimately herself, was going to become illusion. And that, she realized, would no longer be simply absurd and inexplicable; it would, in fact, be madness. And while she was quite certain that she could live and carry on quite normally even if she were thus mad—just as she was able to go out and function in the
outside
world—she was equally certain that she didn’t want
to live in an entirely unreal world. She wanted to have some rock to cling to; some home of reality, where she could rest and be secure. But where was such a home, such an island in the rising sea? She didn’t know—but she knew she had to find it, turn back the waters, and save the little she had left from destruction.

It had taken two whole months to find, two months in which the infection from outside had, as she had feared, already destroyed her father and her books, and was
starting
to be visible on her own plump white hands when she looked at them carefully; they seemed to shudder under her eyes as the first germs of illusion invaded them. And she had found it in the most curious way. It was a Tuesday evening; her father, as usual, was out playing cards. She was sitting in the living room, trying not to look at her hands, and wishing that she could watch the television. But in the last few days it had thrown her into a panic, to see those grey ghosts on the glass screen, gibbering in a ghost language that strangely she understood; and while, of course, she hadn’t said anything to her father, now that he was out she wasn’t going to subject herself to any unnecessary torment. So after a while, she decided that she would try and find some music on the radio. She got up, went into the kitchen, and picked up the small black plastic set. And then, standing there with it in her hands, she began to think about something else: about what she was going to make for lunch tomorrow, or dinner, or about the weather. And as she thought, without really being conscious of doing so, she turned on the radio and
aimlessly
swivelled the knob that changed the stations. She must have been doing so for some time, and was half mesmerized by the buzz of sounds, when suddenly, in that white spotless kitchen, in the hot summer evening, a
voice spoke from the radio. And as it did, and she heard it, she stood absolutely rigid, and realized that she was
listening
to the voice of reality; or rather, she was listening to reality itself. There was no doubt in her mind. She didn’t understand what the voice was saying—it was
speaking
a foreign language—but there was no mistaking its effect. It froze her, chilled her, as if a glacier had suddenly moved into her veins, and checked, instantly, the process of decomposition that had been going on for the last few months. She looked at her hand—and yes, it
was
real. It was solid. It lived again, uncontaminated, restored. She wanted to cry with relief and happiness. She was safe. She listened to the voice and prayed that it wouldn’t stop; that it would go on and on talking in that foreign language she didn’t understand and yet felt, knew, was the language of reality. She listened to it for ten minutes, without moving from the kitchen; and only when it did, finally, stop, and music started playing, did she dare even to turn around. Then, for a second, she was terrified; terrified that with the ceasing of the voice the glacier would retreat, that her blood would become hot again, and that she would be abandoned again to rottenness and an entirely illusory world. But as she looked at her hand once more she saw that her terror was groundless. The glacier was still there. She
was
safe; or at least, she had been shown the way to safety.