The Light in the Piazza and Other Italian Tales (25 page)

At the sea they sat before a rough fire in the
albergo
(there were no other guests) and her mind wheeled slowly around him like a gull. It was going to dawn on him someday, she thought, how well she got along, how easily she got things, not the sort of things the Cogginses got, which nobody wanted, but the sort of things one coveted.
She started out of this, startling herself; this was wrong, all wrong—he was better than that. He was self-amused, even in his furies, and never lost the thread of reason (this being one reason Italians preyed on him; the reason in a reasonless quarrel delighted them; they would probably have gone on fighting with him for a generation or so, if he had remained, for when the maid stole the case of economics texts on loan from the States and was forced to admit it, she returned to him books in the same case, weighed within an
etto
of the original weight, the books even being in English and some, she pointed out, having been printed in the States: they were mainly mystery novels, but included a leather-bound history of World War I dedicated to the Veterans of Foreign Wars—he found this appropriate). And even he would admit that what he needed most for his nerves in a country so uncivilized was an evening at the bowling alley, a stroll through a drugstore, a ride down the turnpike, an evening at the neighbourhood movie house. These things were not as much a myth to Martha as might be thought to look at her, in her classic Roman grays and black, for Woolworth’s and Radio City had once stabilized her more than human voices. He believed this, and the rain sprang up off the sea, lashing in ropes against the tall windows. Her heart sank. “Its so nice here in summer,” she said faintly. His face had turned silent; in Italy he had acquired a touch of despair that she felt sorry for. He could make her feel responsible for the weather.

She never knew if he heard her at all. A shift of wind off the sea had blown one of the glass doors wide, and a maid rushed through to close it, but they scarcely noticed, if at all. They had reached the shore, an extremity of sorts, and had already discovered themselves on the other side of a wall, shut, enclosed, in the garden that everyone knows is there, where even the flowers are carnivorous and stir to avid life at the first footfall. He had caught her hand, near the cup, among the silver. She sat with her face half-turned aside, until her hand and arm reddened from the fire. She did not remember leaving the table and going upstairs.

The room where they stood for a time, clinging together a step from the closed door, was unlighted, dark, though on this troubled coast it seemed a darkness prepared and waiting with something like self-knowledge, to be discovered, mapped, explored, claimed, possessed and changed for good, no inch of it left innocent of them, nothing she had ever felt to be alive not met and dealt with. They were radical and unhurried, as if under imperial orders, and it seemed no one night could contain them; yet it managed to. As she fell asleep she heard the rain stop; it had outdistanced them by a little, as though some sort of race had been going quietly on.

The next morning there was a thin light on the sea, which hung leaden and waveless below their windows, its breast burnishing slightly, convexly meeting the fall of the light, like a shield. She saw a bird on the windowsill outside. Its feathers blew, ruffling in the wind, and once it shifted and looked in for a moment; she saw the tiny darting gleam of its regard.

The silver light held through the whole day. They drove far up the coast toward Pisa and she feared for a moment toward midday, voicelessly without decision as they seemed to be, they would come full circle at Genoa, where she had first seen him, in which case the sky would fall in broken masses of gray light. But the way is longer than it might be thought to be, and the slowly unwinding journey seemed perpetual, the fields and villages strict and sharply drawn with winter, the coast precipitous and wild, vanishing only to reappear, and their own speed on nearly deserted roads was deceptive—no matter what the speedometer said, they seemed adrift. They came on a fishing village and stayed there; she could never remember the name of it, but perhaps she never knew.

Where they were drifting, however, was not toward Genoa and the sky falling, or to any mythical kingdom, but like thousands of others before and after them, it was only toward Sunday afternoon. He was sitting putting on his shoe in the pension, when the shoelace suddenly snapped in his narrow fingers, jarring him into a tension that had seemed to be gone forever; if there was anything he immediately
returned himself to, after the ravishment of strange compelling voyages, it was order; he was wrenched by broken shoelaces, and it was to that slight thing she traced what he said when they were leaving: “It disturbs me to think I’m the one you aren’t going to forget—yet it’s true, I know it is.”

His arms were around her; he was human and gentle; but she filled up instantly with panic—it was time he had let in on them, in one phrase. Had he meant to be so drastic as that? But it had always been there, she reasoned desperately, and though watching the abyss open without alarm is always something of a strain, she tried to manage it. Yet going down the stair she felt numb and scraped her wrist against a rough wall surface. Reaching the car ahead of him, she sat, looking at the surface of the harshly rubbed skin, which had shaved up in places like thinly rolled trimming of chalk, and the flecking of red beneath, the wonder of having blood at all at a moment when her ample, somewhat slow, slightly baroque body had just come to rest as finally as stone.

Miles later on the way back to Rome she asked him, “What about you? Are you going to forget it?” He glanced at her at once. “No.” And repeated it, “No.”

On that she would be able to stay permanently, she believed; it was her raft on the long, always outflowing tide of things, and once back in Rome could linger, not being obliged to be anywhere, in the bare strict narrow rented room, and ride the wake of his footsteps hurrying down toward the empty street, but one day she discovered on walking home alone that the rain had stopped for once, and traveling a broad street—Via Cola di Rienzo—that rose toward a high bridge above the Tiber, the sky grew gray and broad and flashed with light into which the
tramontana
, came bitterly streaming, drawing even the wettest and deadest leaves up into it, and the whole yawning city beneath was resonant with air like wind entering an enormous bell. This is the center of the world, she thought, this city, with a certain pride, almost like a native might, or should have.

And passing through the post office, far across the gigantic enclosed hall of a thousand rendezvous and small disbursements for postal money orders and electric bills and letters sent
posta aerea
to catch the urgent plane and the smell of ink and blotted bureaucratic forms and contraband cigarettes, she saw Gordon Ingram leaning on a heavy mahogany cane, the sort of thing he would either bring to Europe with him or find for himself the instant he arrived. His back was toward her, that heavy-shouldered bulk, and he was leaning down to write on a sheet of paper, but even while she watched, something must have gone wrong with the pen, for he shook it twice, then threw it aside and walked away. The letter fluttered to the ground and she soon went there and picked it up, but by that time a heel or two had marked it in walking past.

Yet she made out clearly, in handsome script, the best Italian:
“Sebbene
(whereas) …
tu m’abbia accusato di ció che ti piace chia-mare inumanitá …”
(you have accused me of what it gives you satisfaction to call inhumanity, you must realize if you have any mentality at all, that this man in spite of his youth and attractiveness is far less human than anyone of my generation could possibly be, without the least doubt. He takes an interest in you because he must live in this way to know that he is alive at all, and his behavior is certain to disappoint a woman like yourself, such as I have taught you to be, in such a manner as to make you wish that it could never be said by anyone including yourself that you were ever in any contact with him. You know that whatever else you may say or think I have never lied to you—this you cannot deny—I have never once lied to you, whereas you have done nothing but pride yourself on your continual lying as though it were some sort of accomplishment, an art you had mastered so well you could use it carelessly—.)

She went home holding the letter in one hand, and reached the apartment with the heel of one shoe in the other, limping, because she had twisted the heel off in the irregular paving of the
piazzetta
below. She had spent the morning helping George Hartwell draw up a new lecture program, and there had been the interview with the
priest who wanted to start a liberal newspaper in a small town near Bari. At last, anyway, she had a letter, a direct word. She hung up her umbrella, coat and scarf, but dripped still a limping trail into the big
salotto
, which, awaiting her in the quiet, looked utterly vacant, as disinhabited as if it were rented out afresh every three months, and she thought, He can’t have written this; he is dead. Nobody is ever coming here again.

She fell face downward on the couch and slept, half recalling and half dreaming—which, she did not know, and why, she did not know, though the whole held no horror for her whatsoever any more than some familiar common object might—the story of a man who shot and wounded a she-wolf on his way home through the woods at twilight, and coming home, found his wife dead on the couch, a trail of blood leading inward from the door. She was awakened by a banging shutter.

She went out to the terrace and saw that the clouds had cleared before the wind and were racing in long streamers like swift ships, and that a moon, so deeply cold it would always do to think of whenever cold was mentioned, raced without motion. The city beneath it lay like a waste, mysterious, empty discovery, cold and vaulted beneath it, channeling the wind. It came to her for the first time to wonder, standing out on her empty, winter-disarrayed terrace, if a cold like that might not be life’s truest definition, since there was so much of it.

And certain cold images of herself were breaking in upon her now, as though she had waked up in a thunder-ridden night and had seen an image of herself in the mirror, an image that in the jagged and sudden flash seemed to leap unnaturally close. What am I doing? Am I asleep sitting straight up? A thousand times she had said to life in the person of a bird, brilliant and wise in the cage of a friend, or a passing dog (just as she had said to Gordon Ingram), I forgive you everything, please forgive me, too, but getting no answer from either, her mind went on discriminating. She had not been Gordon Ingram’s student for nothing and she longed to discuss with him:

If life unreels from an original intuition, what if that intuition were only accident, what if it were impulse, a blind leap in the dark? An accident must be capable of being either a mistake or a stroke of luck, depending on what it is in relation to whom it happens to. So what do you think of this one, since you were the victim of it? Before you are quite gone, forever and ever, answer that for me at least.

But he was silent; Gordon Ingram was always silent.

Jim Wilbourne, however, told her many things about himself and (she had not been Gordon Ingram’s student for nothing) none of them were supremely interesting things; she listened but was not utterly arrested, sometimes she half listened. So he said, “Listen, Martha—listen,” and she did stop the car (it being her turn to drive) coming back from the sea in the wet sea-heavy night, and she did try to listen, but traffic sprang up from everywhere—there was a confluence of roads and they all led to Rome, a glare and snarl and recklessness in the rain and dark, and someone shouted,
“Stupida! Ma guarda! Guarda!”
They poured past her like the hastening streams of the damned. She turned her face to him and he was talking, haltingly; he fell almost at once into platitudes and she wondered that the person whose face she encountered in the depths of her dreams had nothing more remarkable to say than this.

It did not escape him. He wanted to return everything to its original clear potential, to say that love, like life, is not remarkable, it is as common as bread. But every contact between the two of them was not common; it was remarkable. He was stopped before he started. “I’m listening. I’m listening,” she said.

“It’s the way you’re listening.”

“Don’t let that matter to you,” she said gently, kindly, for the shadow of some nature far beyond anything that had happened to her occasionally came to her. “I live in a mirror, at the bottom of a mirror somewhere.”

“I think we both do. It’s why we make love so well.”

“There must be some way to stop it… to go back to where we might have been, to change. I always wanted to think of it differently. You remember I told you—”

“Yes, I remember.” He urged her to drive on, the stop was dangerous, and presently said out a long sequence of thought not told to her, “I simply can’t ever believe there’s any way back from anything.” The force of the statement reached her, and she sensed it as distantly related to fury. He had made another jump, she realized, and now there was no turning back from that, either. She had finally, like any other woman, to hold on the best way she could.

PART FOUR

12

Coming up from the winter’s recollections was what she and George Hartwell had to do every so often to keep from drowning.

They were still on the terrace, and it was still Sunday morning, a healing timelessness of sun, though Hartwell went on gnawing at things he drew up out of fathomless reservoirs.