Timebends (29 page)

The
SS America,
the least expensive way to cross the Atlantic, was two-thirds empty and rode high and vicious on rough February seas. I was desperate enough to spend my time as lone swimmer in the pool, pretending it was merely the real ocean, where one never got seasick, until it got so rough that the pool had to be closed down before I was bashed to death against the tile walls. I spent most of the last twenty-four hours at the bar standing with Albert Sharpe, who had just quit as the star of
Finian's Rainbow,
having earned all the money he would need for the rest of his life in his Irish country cottage. I let him shower my head with one gorgeous Irish story on top of another until dawn broke into the lounge portholes and we went out on deck to greet the land fog.

The first shock of Europe was a series of very simple absurdities. The great concrete piers of Cherbourg were brokenly tilted into the water; passengers were taken in by lighter to a temporary dock. Here was civil ruin rather than the wreckage of armies, and it was somehow ungraspable. I had never before thought of myself as in any way an innocent, but I did now. (The next time I had this same feeling was many years later, walking through the streets of
a Harlem whose familiar apartment houses were burned out, standing in ruin.) Next, the gigantic nineteenth-century railroad station, whose stories-high, cathedrallike vaulted roof of glass panes, stretching several blocks, was totally smashed, an eyeless structure all that remained. It was all a monstrous vandalism, a rage and a spite so awesome as to strike fear into the heart for the species.

A young American in our train compartment, after fifteen minutes of inaction, suddenly called out, “When is this shootin' match supposed to start!” We all laughed, the Europeans and Vinny and I, embarrassed at his insensitivity to the deprivation all around. Absurd, too, the obsequiousness in the trainmen toward us, the
Übermenschen,
the lords of the earth, Americans. I enjoyed the feeling, unearned though it might be, even as I saw us through their resentful and envious eyes.

The sun never seemed to rise over Paris, the winter sky like a lid of iron graying the skin of one's hands and making faces wan. A doomed and listless silence, few cars on the streets, occasional trucks running on wood-burning engines, old women on ancient bicycles. Who that I passed had collaborated with the Nazis and who had hid in a cellar accompanied by his heartbeat? And what would I have done? I ordered an orange, toast, and two fried eggs for breakfast in Les Ministères across the street from the hotel, and the woman in charge and the cook and two waiters came out to watch me eat this massive amount of food, and to watch me pay for it out of a roll of cheap francs. The concierge at the Pont-Royal on the rue du Bac wore tails, but the sleeves were unraveling, and his chin always showed little nicks from having shaved with cold water. A hungry-looking, garishly got-up young woman in black lace stockings with a fallen hem on her skirt was allowed to sit in the lobby all night for the convenience of the guests, and she watched my approach with a philosopher's superior curiosity. The round brass bars across the revolving door were missing, like a lot of the plumbing and metal fittings, stolen by the Germans in the last desperate months. The concierge had to rush across Paris and back once a day to feed his rabbits. Rabbits were saving a lot of people.

In the streets no man seemed to have a matching jacket and trousers, and many who looked like professionals wore mufflers to hide bare shirtless chests. Bicycles and bicycles—which I would recall in Beijing thirty-five years later—and people hanging from crowded buses that stank like the ones in Cairo. Later on in China, Egypt, Venezuela, so much would remind me of this time in the
City of Light; the genius of Europe had been to bomb itself into what was not yet named the Third World. There were still fresh bouquets of flowers lying on sidewalks beneath plaques set in buildings to memorialize some Resistant shot there by the Nazis, who after all were also Europeans; had there been, in effect, two civil wars, in 1914 and 1939? I wrote to Mary, lonely for her, that the country seemed a wounded animal that would never rise to its feet again—France was finished. Sartre was said to hang out in the Montana Bar, but I never found him. The papers were relying on America to rearrange a new civilization, it seemed to me—as though we had the slightest idea of what to do with this failed continent. It was disappointing; I would have to go back to thinking myself into a future that certainly did not promise to exist here.

There was a
réunion
of writers in a palais near the rue de Rivoli to which I was invited by Vercors, founder of Éditions de Minuit, the French publisher of
Focus.
Catholic, Communist, Gaullist—artists and the unaffiliated were going to attempt to rebuild their wartime resistance unity, joining once more in reading their poems and making speeches into the government radio microphone that was set up in the grand eighteenth-century entrance hall of the palais, overseen by Frenchified busts of blind Eros and rounded curly-haired lovers like Pyramus and Thisbe. It was very cold standing on the marble floor, even with a couple of hundred men and women there and a glass of red wine. What joy these intellectuals drew from this gesture was not evident; their wartime spiritual unity and political toleration had been cracked by the new and rapidly deepening Cold War.

Vercors, a novelist and essayist and one of the most universally respected heroes of the Resistance, had befriended me and led me through some of the alleyways where he had evaded Germans to deliver Resistance literature and newspapers on his bicycle. If he had been discovered by those other Europeans, they would have shot him dead in the street. It was strange to think that on these lovely Parisian boulevards Frenchmen had been hunted down, shot like vermin. Again I had to wonder how I would have behaved under those circumstances, for the moral, the literary, and the political were one and the same then. As the meeting wore on in the echoing chamber of marble, the readings seeming interminable, without expression, dour, Vercors explained in whispers that this would probably be the last attempt to maintain some semblance of French culture, which would soon be completely fractured by political polemic. He pointed out Louis Aragon and Elsa
Triolet, Camus and Sartre, Mauriac and other Catholic writers. I saw people finish their readings and quietly leave.

With Soviet prestige still tremendous, Russian armies having, by common consent, saved Europe from a thousand years of Nazism, it was not easy to credit tales of Stalinist terror. People like Vercors, a slim and athletically handsome man, tolerant and just, simply went silent before reports of such events, which eviscerated the last fifteen antifascist years of all meaning. That Manichean world, with its simple and unflickering flame, the light against a surrounding darkness, was dying away just then. Truth was hung on the wall like a picture of an old country scene that was neither discarded nor looked at. The heroism of the Soviets and the allied left still went deep; during the war, in labor with Jane, our first child, Mary had wept, half-conscious and in pain, crying out, “Oh, those poor Yugoslavs!”—who at the moment were suffering the Nazi invasion of their snowy mountains.

In a freezing theatre Louis Jouvet, in
Ondine
by Jean Giraudoux, had to play the whole evening in an armchair due to illness, wrapped in muffler and sweater. People were working their toes inside their shoes and blowing on their hands, and everyone sat in his coat. It was another moving page in the sad tale of the death of a country—the heat would never be turned on again in a French theatre, there was doom everywhere, and there really was such a thing as a defeated people. But Jouvet connected with the audience in a personal way I had never experienced before, speaking
to
each of them individually in their beloved tongue. I was bored by the streams of talk and the inaction onstage, but I could understand that it was the language that was saving their souls, hearing it together and being healed by it, the one unity left to them and thus their one hope. I was moved by the tenderness of the people toward him, I who came from a theatre of combat with audiences. They were communing with Jouvet, who I thought stepped out of the role now and then to admire the author's turning of a phrase, something the audience applauded with delight. One element stuck with me, although at the time it was simply one more French strangeness—Jouvet's emotions seemed real, concrete and continuous, but he was surrounded by the unreal, a fantasy. So that words were in themselves the event, they and his emotions. I had gone so far as to cut out some lines in
All My Sons
that were too flashy, too
written,
rather than a phenomenon of what I thought of then as nature.

No day passed without the Marshall Plan somehow featured in
a headline. But the French and British governments were furious that the Germans were also to receive American aid money and have their industries rebuilt before they had restored every single brick they had smashed in England and France. The Germans clearly were to be our new friends, and the savior-Russians the enemy, an ignoble thing, it seemed to me. The new tangle was beginning to coil around itself—in twenty years I would meet Theodor Adorno in Frankfurt and be told that at this very time the German schoolbooks that contained the story of Hitler were being withdrawn under American pressure and replaced with new ones that simply left a void in the Nazi years, that hiatus for which a new German radical generation would revile the United States.

It seemed to me in later years that this wrenching shift, this ripping off of Good and Evil labels from one nation and pasting them onto another, had done something to wither the very notion of a world even theoretically moral. If last month's friend could so quickly become this month's enemy, what depth of reality could good and evil have? The nihilism—even worse, the yawning amusement—toward the very concept of a moral imperative, which would become a hallmark of international culture, was born in these eight or ten years of realignment after Hitler's death. For myself I wanted to stand with those who would not give way, not because I was sure I was good but because of a sense that there could be no aesthetic form without a moral world, only notes without a staff—an unprovable but deeply felt conviction.

My introduction to Italy was a prosciutto and pepper sandwich on Italian white bread, the best thing I had ever tasted in my life, bought from a stand in the Milan railroad station. Already I was more at ease with the Italians and Italy, where, compared to France, nothing was serious.

Ezio Tedei, an anarchist short story writer who had spent fourteen years in a Mussolini prison, owned neither shirt nor socks nor underwear, went about Rome in the February cold in only trousers, shoes, and an ancient tweed overcoat, and slept outdoors on an open balcony loaned to him by the half-dozen poor families, with a total of some twenty children, who had simply taken over a palazzo that had belonged to a high Fascist official. After I had insisted on his accepting a shirt, shorts, razor blades, and socks, he appeared some days later in his customary nudeness, explaining that he had given my gifts to some people who needed them. He would sit writing at a desk on this balcony amid the comings and
goings of countless families, oblivious to conversations and shouts a yard away from his ears. The elegant desk, liberated from some sequestered drawing room, had dozens of drawers and compartments where people kept bread and groceries and he his manuscripts and his treasured Parker pen.

I noticed on one of our walks through Rome that here and there a heavy chain held the shutters of a window shut—the legal requirement, Ezio explained, for all bordellos. I wanted to visit one immediately, and he had a favorite to which we now proceeded. Just inside the entrance doorway to what must once have been a grand palace stood a column topped by a pair of copulating bronze lovers, the woman's hair streaming out as though in a high wind. A deep crimson carpet led up a marble stair to what had been a grand ballroom with floor-to-ceiling baroque mirrors. Vast bushels of crystals hung from the deeply carved ceiling, lighted, albeit dimly, by dusty bulbs. Along one wall sat some twenty-five men of all ages, some of them reading newspapers, some playing chess, some asleep, some staring across the room at a line of a dozen women who stood leaning against the mirrored wall, women dressed in Moorish vests with veiled trousers, in pure white confirmation dresses, in ordinary housewifely costumes, in panties with and without bras; with long hair, short hair, piled-up hair; barefoot, in high heels, sandals, street shoes, or shoes sparkling with sprinkles of diamondlike glass. Our century of theatre and actors. Tedei and I sat with the men and waited. The chess games continued, the newspapers kept being folded and unfolded, and the women waited vacantly, as though on line at a bus stop. Apparent indifference united us all. Now a man stood up, with no more evident motivation than a single gull rising out of the flock to take the air, and walked across the parquet to a woman who disappeared with him through a doorway as though she were going to fit him for shoes. It was as stimulating as an auction of old costumes. I remembered Chekhov's writing of his disgust with himself for having visited such a house, and my own sensation of vacancy and remoteness when, at sixteen, I was taken by my brother and his friends to an apartment on the Upper West Side for my first time. But I felt no disgust here. Tedei grinned like a proud host at one of his native city's more interesting attractions; sex, it was obvious, at least just now after twenty-five years of fascism and a terrible war, was interesting, to be sure, but far less important than eating, having a roof over one's head and clothes to keep the body warm. These women may have been a necessity, and they received the respect that necessities deserve, but that was all. The great neorealistic
movies of postwar Italy that were coming out,
Open City, Bicycle Thief,
and the like, reflected this same integration of sexuality into life, a life that was grounded in necessity, the coherencies of food-gathering and the sustaining of family and friendships and human solidarity. In 1948 Italy did not yet know the problems of surplus, let alone glut, and the accompanying fantasies of unbounded, limitless self. Here in this grimy ballroom was a certain sharing of humility before the nature of mankind, a chastening acceptance.