Giovanni's Room (18 page)

“It
is
sort of nice,” I said.

“Well,” said Hella, “I think we ought to take Giovanni out to dinner or something one of these days. After all, he did sort of rescue you.”

“That's a good idea,” I said. “I don't know what he's doing these days but I imagine he'll have a free evening.”

“Does he hang around with Jacques much?”

“No, I don't think so. I think he just ran into Jacques tonight.” I paused. “I'm beginning to see,” I said, carefully, “that kids like Giovanni are in a difficult position. This isn't, you know, the land of opportunity—there's no provision made for them. Giovanni's poor, I mean he comes from poor folks, and there isn't really much that he can do. And for what he
can
do, there's terrific competition. And, at that, very little money, not enough for them to be able to think of building any kind of future. That's why so many of them wander the streets and turn into gigolos and gangsters and God knows what.”

“It's cold,” she said, “out here in the Old World.”

“Well, it's pretty cold out there in the New One, too,” I said. “It's cold out here, period.”

She laughed. “But we—we have our love to keep us warm.”

“We're not the first people who thought that as they lay in bed.”
Nevertheless, we lay silent and still in each other's arms for awhile. “Hella,” I said at last.

“Yes?”

“Hella, when the money gets here, let's take it and get out of Paris.”

“Get out of Paris? Where do you want to go?”

“I don't care. Just out. I'm sick of Paris. I want to leave it for awhile. Let's go south. Maybe there'll be some sun.”

“Shall we get married in the south?”

“Hella,” I said, “you have to believe me, I can't do anything or decide anything. I can't even see straight until we get out of this town. I don't want to get married here; I don't even want to think about getting married here. Let's just get out.”

“I didn't know you felt this way,” she said.

“I've been living in Giovanni's room for months,” I said, “and I just can't stand it anymore. I have to get out of there. Please.”

She laughed nervously and moved slightly away from me. “Well, I really don't see why getting out of Giovanni's room means getting out of Paris.”

I sighed. “Please, Hella. I don't feel like going into long explanations now. Maybe it's just that if I stay in Paris I'll keep running into Giovanni and—” I stopped.

“Why should that disturb you?”

“Well—I can't do anything to help him and I can't stand having him watch me—as though—I'm an American, Hella, he thinks I'm
rich
.” I paused and sat up, looking outward. She watched me. “He's a very nice man, as I say, but he's very persistent—and he's got this
thing
about me, he thinks I'm God. And that room is so stinking and dirty. And soon winter'll be here and it's going to be cold—” I turned to her again and took her in my arms. “Look. Let's just go. I'll explain a lot of things to you later—later—when we get out.”

There was a long silence.

“And you want to leave right away?” she said.

“Yes. As soon as that money comes, let's rent a house.”

“You're sure,” she said, “that you don't just want to go back to the States?”

I groaned. “No. Not yet. That isn't what I mean.”

She kissed me. “I don't care where we go,” she said, “as long as we're together.” Then she pushed me away. “It's almost morning,” she said. “We'd better get some sleep.”

I got to Giovanni's room very late the next evening. I had been walking by the river with Hella and, later, I drank too much in several bistros. The light crashed on as I came into the room and Giovanni sat up in bed, crying out in a voice of terror, “
Qui est là? Qui est là?
”

I stopped in the doorway, weaving a little in the light, and I said, “It's me, Giovanni. Shut up.”

Giovanni stared at me and turned on his side, facing the wall, and began to cry.

I thought,
Sweet Jesus!
and I carefully closed the door. I took my cigarettes out of my jacket pocket and hung my jacket over the chair. With my cigarettes in my hand I went to the bed and leaned over Giovanni. I said, “Baby, stop crying. Please stop crying.”

Giovanni turned and looked at me. His eyes were red and wet, but he wore a strange smile, it was composed of cruelty and shame and delight. He held out his arms and I leaned down, brushing his hair from his eyes.

“You smell of wine,” said Giovanni, then.

“I haven't been drinking wine. Is that what frightened you? Is that why you are crying?”

“No.”

“What is the matter?”

“Why have you gone away from me?”

I did not know what to say. Giovanni turned to the wall again. I had hoped, I had supposed that I would feel nothing: but I felt a tightening in a far corner of my heart, as though a finger had touched me there.

“I have never reached you,” said Giovanni. “You have never really been here. I do not think you have ever lied to me, but I know that you have never told me the truth—why? Sometimes you were here all day long and you read or you opened the window or you cooked something—and I watched you—and you never said anything—and you looked at me with such eyes, as though you did not see me. All day, while I worked, to make this room for you.”

I said nothing. I looked beyond Giovanni's head at the square windows which held back the feeble moonlight.

“What are you doing all the time? And why do you say nothing? You are evil, you know, and sometimes when you smiled at me, I hated you. I wanted to strike you. I wanted to make you bleed. You smiled at me the way you smiled at everyone, you told me what you told everyone—and you tell nothing but lies. What are you always hiding? And do you think I did not know when you made love to me, you were making love to no one?
No one!
Or everyone—but not
me
, certainly. I am nothing to you, nothing, and you bring me fever but no delight.”

I moved, looking for a cigarette. They were in my hand. I lit one. In a moment, I thought, I will say something. I will say something and then I will walk out of this room forever.

“You know I cannot be alone. I have told you. What is the matter? Can we never have a life together?”

He began to cry again. I watched the hot tears roll from the corners of his eyes onto the dirty pillow.

“If you cannot love me, I will die. Before you came I wanted to die, I have told you many times. It is cruel to have made me want to live only to make my death more bloody.”

I wanted to say so many things. Yet, when I opened my mouth, I made no sound. And yet—I do not know what I felt for Giovanni. I felt nothing for Giovanni. I felt terror and pity and a rising lust.

He took my cigarette from my lips and puffed on it, sitting up in bed, his hair in his eyes again.

“I have never known anyone like you before. I was never like this before you came. Listen. In Italy I had a woman and she was very good to me. She loved me, she loved
me
, and she took care of me and she was always there when I came in from work, in from the vineyards, and there was never any trouble between us, never. I was young then and did not know the things I learned later or the terrible things you have taught me. I thought all women were like that. I thought all men were like me—I thought I was like all other men. I was not unhappy then and I was not lonely—for she was there—and I did not want to die. I wanted to stay forever in our village and work in the vineyards and drink the wine we made and make love to my girl. I have told you about my village—? It is very old and in the south, it is on a hill. At night, when we walked by the wall, the world seemed to fall down before us, the whole, far-off, dirty world. I did not ever want to see it. Once we made love under the wall.

“Yes, I wanted to stay there forever and eat much spaghetti and drink much wine and make many babies and grow fat. You would not have liked me if I had stayed. I can see you, many years from now, coming through our village in the ugly, fat, American motor car you will surely have by then and looking at me and looking at all of us and tasting our wine and shitting on us with those empty smiles Americans wear everywhere and which you wear all the time and driving off with a great roar of the motors and a great sound of tires and telling all the other Americans you meet that they must come and see our village because it is so picturesque. And you will have no idea of the life there, dripping and bursting and beautiful
and terrible, as you have no idea of my life now. But I think I would have been happier there and I would not have minded your smiles. I would have had my life. I have lain here many nights, waiting for you to come home, and thought how far away is my village and how terrible it is to be in this cold city, among people whom I hate, where it is cold and wet and never dry and hot as it was there, and where Giovanni has no one to talk to, and no one to be with, and where he has found a lover who is neither man nor woman, nothing that I can know or touch. You do not know, do you, what it is like to lie awake at night and wait for someone to come home? But I am sure you do not know. You do not know anything. You do not know any of the terrible things—that is why you smile and dance the way you do and you think that the comedy you are playing with the short-haired, moon-faced little girl is love.”

He dropped the cigarette to the floor, where it lay burning faintly. He began to cry again. I looked at the room, thinking: I cannot bear it.

“I left my village one wild, sweet day. I will never forget that day. It was the day of my death—I wish it had been the day of my death. I remember the sun was hot and scratchy on the back of my neck as I walked the road away from my village and the road went upward and I walked bent over. I remember everything, the brown dust at my feet, and the little pebbles which rushed before me, and the short trees along the road and all the flat houses and all their colors under the sun. I remember I was weeping, but not as I am weeping now, much worse, more terrible—since I am with you, I cannot even cry as I cried then. That was the first time in my life that I wanted to die. I had just buried my baby in the churchyard where my father and my father's fathers were and I had left my girl screaming in my mother's house. Yes, I had made a baby but it was born dead. It was all grey and twisted when I saw it and it made no sound—and we spanked it on the buttocks and we sprinkled it
with holy water and we prayed but it never made a sound, it was dead. It was a little boy, it would have been a wonderful, strong man, perhaps even the kind of man
you
and Jacques and Guillaume and all your disgusting band of fairies spend all your days and nights looking for, and dreaming of—but it was dead, it was my baby and we had made it, my girl and I, and it was dead. When I knew that it was dead, I took our crucifix off the wall and I spat on it and I threw it on the floor and my mother and my girl screamed and I went out. We buried it right away, the next day, and then I left my village and I came to this city where surely God has punished me for all my sins and for spitting on His holy Son, and where I will surely die. I do not think that I will ever see my village again.”

I stood up. My head was turning. Salt was in my mouth. The room seemed to rock, as it had the first time I had come here, so many lifetimes ago. I heard Giovanni's moan behind me. “
Chéri. Mon très cher
. Don't leave me. Please don't leave me.” I turned and held him in my arms, staring above his head at the wall, at the man and woman on the wall who walked together among roses. He was sobbing, it would have been said, as though his heart would break. But I felt that it was my heart which was broken. Something had broken in me to make me so cold and so perfectly still and far away.

Still, I had to speak.

“Giovanni,” I said. “Giovanni.”

He began to be still, he was listening; I felt, unwillingly, not for the first time, the cunning of the desperate.

“Giovanni,” I said, “you always knew that I would leave one day. You knew my fiancée was coming back to Paris.”

“You are not leaving me for her,” he said. “You are leaving me for some other reason. You lie so much, you have come to believe all your own lies. But I,
I
have senses. You are not leaving me for a
woman
. If you were really in love with this little girl, you would not have had to be so cruel to me.”

“She's not a little girl,” I said. “She's a woman and no matter what you think, I
do
love her—”

“You do not,” cried Giovanni, sitting up, “love anyone! You never have loved anyone, I am sure you never will! You love your purity, you love your mirror—you are just like a little virgin, you walk around with your hands in front of you as though you had some precious metal, gold, silver, rubies, maybe
diamonds
down there between your legs! You will never give it to anybody, you will never let anybody
touch it
—man
or
woman. You want to be
clean
. You think you came here covered with soap and you think you will go out covered with soap—and you do not want to
stink
, not even for five minutes, in the meantime.” He grasped me by the collar, wrestling and caressing at once, fluid and iron at once, saliva spraying from his lips and his eyes full of tears, but with the bones of his face showing and the muscles leaping in his arms and neck. “You want to leave Giovanni because he makes you stink. You want to despise Giovanni because he is not afraid of the stink of love. You want to
kill
him in the name of all your lying little moralities. And you—you are
immoral
. You are, by far, the most immoral man I have met in all my life. Look,
look
what you have done to me. Do you think you could have done this if I did not love you? Is
this
what you should do to love?”