William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice (70 page)

When finally I awoke I cocked one sore eye open in the full blast of morning light. Away off, I could hear people yelling and splashing in the waves; above, peering down at me through the windshield, were two rueful, bearded faces.

“È morto?”
I heard one ask the other.

“Un inglese. Soffocato.”

When I stirred, the two old men retreated slowly off across the sand, with looks of deep mystery. It was past nine o’clock; I was drenched in sweat, with a violent headache, and my body had that jittery feeling which accompanies a hangover. I knew I should be on my way, and was—after coffee and a wilted bun in a beachside joint thronged with strident Romans in bathing suits, all of them swilling Coca-Cola.

Such is the power of certain calamities on the mind that, once freed of the initial shock, one is able to view with bright clarity all the events leading up to the actual blow. The tone, the mood, the character of whatever transpired before, takes on the gray hue, itself, of disaster and is embalmed in memory with an awful sense of predestination. It is in such a way that I remember the road out of Formia, through Naples and beyond. Leaving the sea, the highway became wide and straight again. But it was Saturday, market day, and the road was swarming with traffic—wagons and carts piled high with produce and fodder, towed by donkeys, all moving so leisurely as to appear like sinister, stationary objects in my path. The sun rose higher and higher over the dusty countryside. Its fire settled down upon the hills; close by stood fields of blighted corn and trees in windless, shriveling groves. Up from the highway the heat rose in greasy waves. And through these waves, roaring, balefully glittering, and often straight at me, came a devil’s pageant of vehicles—motorscooters and buses loaded down with vacationers, and caravans of hurtling cars. There were huge trucks, too, carrying gasoline, whipping past me at seventy and leaving a trail of scalding blue vapor on the air. Near Capua, outside of Naples, there was an epidemic of sheep into which I almost skidded, and I had to poke a gingerly path among their sad, expressively wagging behinds. In spite of the sun I put the top down again to get the wind. I also remember turning on the radio again, this time for distraction. By the time I reached the outskirts of Naples the steering wheel was slippery with perspiration. To my disgust I found myself sniveling with tension and with fatigue and murmuring aloud words of courage.

But it was the Alfa Romeo on the Autostrada to Pompei that led to my downfall. I had passed through Naples by then, for a brief moment calm, thinking that with only an hour more to go Sambuco was in the bag. There was less traffic; it was nearly noon, lunchtime, when most Italians abandon the road to purposeful Anglo-Saxons. It seemed to have turned cooler—though no doubt I was deceived—and I relaxed for the first time, diverted by the outer suburbs of the city, where black smoke was billowing up from a thousand factory chimneys. The noise I heard behind me was abrupt and thunderous, a shocking din which partook both of a salvo of rockets and an airplane in take-off, and above this, pervading it all, a thin, ominous, hurrying whine, as of the approach of a flight of wasps or bees; my eyes sought the mirror, where I saw it bearing down on me in savage haste—the snout of a big black car. With a foretaste of doom and of the fading beauty of life I composed myself to accept a rear-end collision, and a tight, goosey, half-despairing, half-gluttonous feeling swept over me as I watched it become larger and larger, barreling remorselessly on. Five yards from my tail the car swerved, slowed, came abreast: I beheld a fat young Neapolitan, one hand limp and cocky on the wheel, his girl friend all but in his lap, both of them grinning like sharks. We drove side by side for a moment, perilously swaying; then he was off and away with a noise like a string of firecrackers, and with the central finger of one fist raised in ripe phallic tribute. I tore after him for a while, gave up the chase, and fell into aching oppressive woolgathering. My heart was full of murder. I was only dreaming of revenge, doing sixty, when, a little beyond Pompei, I smashed broadside into the motorscooter. …

Luciano di Lieto: a liquid, resourceful name, one fit for a trapeze artist, or a writer of sonnets, or an explorer of the Antilles, a name certainly deserving more in the way of talents than those of the person who bore it. By turns hod carrier, road worker, peddler of erotic trinkets at the local ruins, a pickpocket so inept as to earn from the police the nickname “Fessacchiotto”—the Stumblebum—the man di Lieto was a triumph of stunted endowments. One day at the age of twelve he poked a meddlesome hand around in the engine of an automobile, and was shorn of two fingers, clipped off neatly by the fan. A few years later, plunged into some adolescent daydream, he wandered in front of a Naples streetcar, breaking both legs and leaving one elbow impaired forever. Only months after this, barely out of his casts, experimenting with fireworks at a seaside
festa,
he bent his dark, crazy regard down upon the muzzle of a Roman candle, and blew out his right eye. When I slammed into him he was twenty-three and in the fever of early manhood. All of these facts were revealed to me before the ambulance came, and perhaps no more than an hour past that moment when di Lieto came roaring out of a side road on a sputtering Lambretta and into my path, legs akimbo, poised tautly forward like a jockey, hair wild and rampant over his blasted vision, mouth and jaws working with hoots of joy even as I braked frantically on squealing rubber and plowed into him. It seemed as if those joyful cries were one and a part of the collision itself, preceding it for a chilling second before I even saw him and going on and on after the moment of rackety impact, when I sent the motorscooter flying forty feet up the road and kept skidding helplessly on, watching the blur of gray denim overalls and tousled black hair, still hooting, bounce up over the front of the car. Clawing at space, he seemed to suspend there for a moment in mid-air, before gliding with white floundering legs and arms across the hood of the car toward me, shattering the windshield in an icy explosion of glass. Like a collapsed puppet dangling on strings, he floated away past me and was gone. I finally came to a stop on the other side of the road in a shower of flip-flopping tennis balls, the radio undone by the impact and alive with deafening crackles and peeps.

When I recovered, I brushed the glass from my lap and stole shakily out of the car. I found myself alone with di Lieto, who lay face-up in the road, blood trickling gently from nose and ears, and with a sort of lopsided, dreamy expression on his features, part agony, part a smile, as if in this mindless repose he were being borne yearningly, at last, through the floodgates of his destiny. I gazed down at him, numb with shock and horror. He was still breathing but rather tentatively; one eye socket was pink and sunken (I thought this my doing), and with a grisly feeling I glanced around me for the missing eye. For a long while, or so it seemed, no one was around and no one came: it was a country crossroad, high noon in the sultry summertime, with insects humming and the smell of weeds, and with hawks that looked like buzzards circling high over the blazing fields. For what felt like an endless time I kept trampling around the prostrate di Lieto, reeling with shock and heaving shudders of anguish.

What followed immediately afterward seemed to be only a grotesque fantasia of events lacking sequence or order, in which I am able to pick out mostly random impressions, as of scenes from a movie film dimly remembered. I do recall finally a car moving out of the horizon, a dusty rattletrap weaving leisurely, which I hailed, and then two Pompeian matrons, profoundly emancipated, fuddled with wine, in rustles and flounces of shiny black silk, who debarked unsteadily from the heap and blinked in the dazzling sunlight, uncomprehending. “What is this here?” they murmured, stooping over di Lieto, and then spied the blood, clutched their hands to their breasts, and commenced sending up boozy entreaties to the Pompeian Madonna.
“Santa Maria del Rosario! Povero ragazzo!”
What happened to him? they cried. One, with an incomprehension that added brutal fire to the hellishness of the moment, asked me if he had fallen from a tree; immediately they wanted to pour water on him, turn him over, move him. I tried to tell them he must not be touched; only when my voice had risen to a hoarse cracked shout did they stop their outcry and clatter back to town for help.

In the long space that followed I sensed the heights of Vesuvius looming oppressive at my back. I sat on the bumper of the car and gazed toward di Lieto, who kept pluckily breathing, twitching a little and awaiting our rescue: it came at last and in a deluge. Cars began to stop, and trucks and carts; as if summoned there by hungry intuition a small village full of people appeared at the spot, trooping from all four directions toward the crossroad, galloping in clouds of dust across the fields. It was as if in an instant the desolate scene had been transformed into one of bustling life, every soul for miles gathered to the place with the instinct of a flock of homing, weather-wise birds. I remember only sitting head in hands on the bumper while they milled about, bending over di Lieto, pressing their ears to his chest for the heartbeat and making solemn pronouncements. “It’s just a concussion,” one said. “No,” said another, an old stripped-to-the-waist farmer with skin burnt brown as a mummy, “his spine is broken. That’s why we mustn’t move him. Look, see how he twitches in the legs. That’s always the sign of a broken spine.” The crowd shuffled, jabbered away in a spirit both grave and somehow enraptured; many had brought parts of their interrupted lunches; they stood there looking on contentedly, munching on bread and cheese and passing around bottles of wine. A man asked me gently how I felt and if I was hurt; someone else gave me a shot of brandy, which quickly set me to retching. “Fessacchiotto,” I heard a glum voice say through the spinning blue as I heaved, “the Stumblebum finally caught it.” Then I saw two motorcycle cops, helmeted like spacemen, brake to a stop at the crossroad. They shooed the crowd toward the ditches like a swarm of buzzing flies and forthwith set up camp, making lordly measurements of my skid marks, stalking around the car and unearthing all sorts of data.

“Please. You going these machine?” one said deferentially.

“I speak your language,” I told him.

“Allora, va bene.”
When the collision occurred, was the Lambretta approaching the highway from the right or from the left? He was a conscientious-looking man in wringing poplin, very polite, and he began jotting down information in a notebook the size of a ledger.

“He was coming from the left,” I said, “which I think you’ll be able to tell easily from the position of the Lambretta. I couldn’t
help
hitting him. It’s not my fault, anyway. In the meanwhile the man lies there dying. Would you be kind enough to tell me where the ambulance is?”

“Nome?”
he asked genially, ignoring the question.

“Peter Charles Leverett,” I said, spelling it out.

“Nato dove e quando?”

“In Port Warwick, Virginia, 14 April 1925.”

“Dove
Port Warwick, Virginia?
Inghilterra?”

“The U.S.A.”I said.

“Ah, bene. Allora, vostro padre? Nome?”

“Alfred Leverett.”

“Nato dove e quando?”

“In Suffolk, Virginia, U.S.A. I don’t know when, exactly. Make it 1886.”

“Vostra madre?”

“Oh, for Christ sake,” I said.

“Che?”

“Flora Margaret McKee. San Francisco, California, U.S.A. Put down 1900. Listen, could you tell me when the ambulance is coming if it is and, if not, whether it would be possible to put him in one of those cars or trucks and drive him to Naples? I think he’s in a grave condition.”

To try to get anything across to him was like casting notes in bottles upon the limitless deep. In his kindly, bland, unruffled fashion he kept scribbling in his ledger, examining my passport and papers while the fierce sun beat down on us and the crowd shuffled and stirred upon the margin of the crossroad like murmurous watchers at some heathen ritual. At its focus, flat on his back, asprawl in sacrificial repose, di Lieto lay with his tangled sweet look of liberation and racking ecstasy, eyes half-closed and dreaming, attracting flies. Speaking of California, the cop went on cheerfully, his wife’s uncle lived there, or so he believed, in a place called Vilks Bari, where he earned a good living as a worker of mines. Was I aware of that place? And was it near Hollywood? Now in regard to the man in the road, he continued, trying to allay my distress, I would be in severe legal trouble indeed, as I no doubt already knew, had the Lambretta approached from the right instead of from the left, which, from the evidence at hand—the skid marks, the position of the victim and of the Lambretta itself —it no doubt had; as it was, I was free to go at any time, provided I could put my car into operation, provided too I supply him with my next address in Italy (a detail, since I most certainly would not have to go to court, the indications of blame being so overwhelmingly in my favor); as for the man himself, di Lieto—“Fessacchiotto”—he had been spoiling for such a disaster for ten years (had I not been told by someone already about this thieving simpleton—his fingers, his streetcar accident, his eye?) and he had no one but himself to reproach if he should die on the spot, though it is true he was not an evil man, and death is bitter,
in verità,
even for imbeciles.

“Basta, Sergente!”
I said, almost sobbing.
“L’ambulanza!”

Just then we turned our eyes toward one edge of the crossroad, where there was a sudden commotion. A rickety truck drew to a halt beneath a tree. Down from its sides clambered a mob of men and boys, led by a cruelly gnarled old hag who struggled like a wounded bird across the sunlit space of ground, fell at di Lieto’s side, and there on her knees began to howl noisily and piteously.

“Luciano! Luciano!” she wailed. “Luciano-o-o!
Che t’hanno fatto? Povero figlio mio!
Luciano-o-o! Come back, my sweet, come back, come back! Again the monsters have tried to finish thee! Look up into mamma’s eyes, Luciano. Just once, Luciano! Don’t let the monsters finish thee, angel. Show mamma once again thy dear sweet eyes!”