Giovanni's Room (8 page)

“How do you feel?” he asked me. “This is a very important day for you.”

“I feel fine,” I said. “How do you feel?”

“Like a man,” he said, “who has seen a vision.”

“Yes?” I said. “Tell me about this vision.”

“I am not joking,” he said. “I am talking about you.
You
were the vision. You should have seen yourself tonight. You should see yourself now.”

I looked at him and said nothing.

“You are—how old? Twenty-six or seven? I am nearly twice that and, let me tell you, you are lucky. You are lucky that what is happening to you now is happening
now
and not when you are forty, or something like that, when there would be no hope for you and you would simply be destroyed.”

“What is happening to me?” I asked. I had meant to sound sardonic, but I did not sound sardonic at all.

He did not answer this, but sighed, looking briefly in the direction of the redhead. Then he turned to me. “Are you going to write to Hella?”

“I very often do,” I said. “I suppose I will again.”

“That does not answer my question.”

“Oh. I was under the impression that you had asked me if I was going to write to Hella.”

“Well. Let's put it another way. Are you going to write to Hella about this night and this morning?”

“I really don't see what there is to write about. But what's it to you if I do or I don't?”

He gave me a look full of a certain despair which I had not, till that moment, known was in him. It frightened me. “It's not,” he said, “what it is to
me
. It's what it is to
you
. And to her. And to that poor boy, yonder, who doesn't know that when he looks at you the way he does, he is simply putting his head in the lion's mouth. Are you going to treat them as you've treated me?”

“
You?
What have
you
to do with all this? How have I treated
you
?”

“You have been very unfair to me,” he said. “You have been very dishonest.”

This time I did sound sardonic. “I suppose you mean that I would have been fair, I would have been honest if I had—if—”

“I mean you could have been fair to me by despising me a little less.”

“I'm sorry. But I think, since you bring it up, that a lot of your life
is
despicable.”

“I could say the same about yours,” said Jacques. “There are so many ways of being despicable it quite makes one's head spin. But the way to be really despicable is to be contemptuous of other people's pain. You ought to have some apprehension that the man you
see before you was once even younger than you are now and arrived at his present wretchedness by imperceptible degrees.”

There was silence for a moment, threatened, from a distance, by that laugh of Giovanni's.

“Tell me,” I said at last, “is there really no other way for you but this? To kneel down forever before an army of boys for just five dirty minutes in the dark?”

“Think,” said Jacques, “of the men who have kneeled before you while you thought of something else and pretended that nothing was happening down there in the dark between your legs.”

I stared at the amber cognac and at the wet rings on the metal. Deep below, trapped in the metal, the outline of my own face looked upward hopelessly at me.

“You think,” he persisted, “that my life is shameful because my encounters are. And they are. But you should ask yourself
why
they are.”

“Why are they—shameful?” I asked him.

“Because there is no affection in them, and no joy. It's like putting an electric plug in a dead socket. Touch, but no contact. All touch, but no contact and no light.”

I asked him: “Why?”

“That you must ask yourself,” he told me, “and perhaps one day, this morning will not be ashes in your mouth.”

I looked over at Giovanni, who now had one arm around the ruined-looking girl, who could have once been very beautiful but who never would be now.

Jacques followed my look. “He is very fond of you,” he said, “already. But this doesn't make you happy or proud, as it should. It makes you frightened and ashamed. Why?”

“I don't understand him,” I said at last. “I don't know what his friendship means; I don't know what he means by friendship.”

Jacques laughed. “You don't know what he means by friendship
but you have the feeling it may not be safe. You are afraid it may change you. What kind of friendship have you had?”

I said nothing.

“Or for that matter,” he continued, “what kind of love affairs?”

I was silent for so long that he teased me, saying, “Come out, come out, wherever you are!”

And I grinned, feeling chilled.

“Love him,” said Jacques, with vehemence, “love him and let him love you. Do you think anything else under heaven really matters? And how long, at the best, can it last? since you are both men and still have everywhere to go? Only five minutes, I assure you, only five minutes, and most of that,
hélas!
in the dark. And if you think of them as dirty, then they
will
be dirty—they will be dirty because you will be giving nothing, you will be despising your flesh and his. But you can make your time together anything but dirty; you can give each other something which will make both of you better—forever—if you will
not
be ashamed, if you will only
not
play it safe.” He paused, watching me, and then looked down to his cognac. “You play it safe long enough,” he said, in a different tone, “and you'll end up trapped in your own dirty body, forever and forever and forever—like me.” And he finished his cognac, ringing his glass slightly on the bar to attract the attention of Madame Clothilde.

She came at once, beaming; and in that moment Guillaume dared to smile at the redhead. Mme. Clothilde poured Jacques a fresh cognac and looked questioningly at me, the bottle poised over my half full glass. I hesitated.

“
Et pourquoi pas?
” she asked, with a smile.

So I finished my glass and she filled it. Then, for the briefest of seconds, she glanced at Guillaume; who cried, “
Et le rouquin là!
What's the redhead drinking?”

Mme. Clothilde turned with the air of an actress about to
deliver the severely restrained last lines of an exhausting and mighty part. “
On t'offre, Pierre
,” she said, majestically. “What will you have?”—holding slightly aloft meanwhile the bottle containing the most expensive cognac in the house.

“
Je prendrai un petit cognac
,” Pierre mumbled after a moment and, oddly enough, he blushed, which made him, in the light of the pale, just-rising sun, resemble a freshly fallen angel.

Mme. Clothilde filled Pierre's glass and, amid a beautifully resolving tension, as of slowly dimming lights, replaced the bottle on the shelf and walked back to the cash register; offstage, in effect, into the wings, where she began to recover herself by finishing the last of the champagne. She sighed and sipped and looked outward contentedly into the slowly rising morning. Guillaume had murmured a “
Je m'excuse un instant
,
Madame
,” and now passed behind us on his way to the redhead.

I smiled. “Things my father never told me.”

“
Somebody
,” said Jacques, “your father or mine, should have told us that not many people have ever died of love. But multitudes have perished, and are perishing every hour—and in the oddest places!—for the lack of it.” And then: “Here comes your baby.
Sois sage. Sois chic.
”

He moved slightly away and began talking to the boy next to him.

And here my baby came indeed, through all that sunlight, his face flushed and his hair flying, his eyes, unbelievably, like morning stars. “It was not very nice of me to go off for so long,” he said, “I hope you have not been too bored.”

“
You
certainly haven't been,” I told him. “You look like a kid about five years old waking up on Christmas morning.”

This delighted, even flattered him, as I could see from the way he now humorously pursed his lips. “I am sure I cannot look like that,” he said. “I was always disappointed on Christmas morning.”

“Well, I mean very
early
on Christmas morning, before you saw
what was under the tree.” But his eyes have somehow made of my last statement a
double entendre
, and we are both laughing.

“Are you hungry?” he asked.

“Perhaps I would be if I were alive and sober. I don't know. Are you?”

“I think we should eat,” he said with no conviction whatever, and we began to laugh again.

“Well,” I said, “What shall we eat?”

“I scarcely dare suggest white wine and oysters,” said Giovanni, “but that is really the best thing after such a night.”

“Well, let's do that,” I said, “while we can still walk to the dining room.” I looked beyond him to Guillaume and the redhead. They had apparently found something to talk about; I could not imagine what it was. And Jacques was deep in conversation with the tall, very young, pockmarked boy, whose turtleneck black sweater made him seem even paler and thinner than he actually was. He had been playing the pinball machine when we came in; his name appeared to be Yves. “Are they going to eat now?” I asked Giovanni.

“Perhaps not now,” said Giovanni, “but they are certainly going to eat. Everyone is very hungry.” I took this to refer more to the boys than to our friends, and we passed into the dining room, which was now empty, the waiter nowhere in sight.

“Mme. Clothilde!” shouted Giovanni, “
On mange ici
,
non?
”

This shout produced an answering shout from Mme. Clothilde and also produced the waiter, whose jacket was less spotless, seen in closeup, than it had seemed from a distance. It also officially announced our presence in the dining room to Jacques and Guillaume and must have definitely increased, in the eyes of the boys they were talking to, a certain tigerish intensity of affection.

“We'll eat quickly and go,” said Giovanni. “After all, I have to work tonight.”

“Did you meet Guillaume here?” I asked him.

He grimaced, looking down. “No. That is a long story.” He grinned. “No, I did not meet him here. I met him”—he laughed—“in a cinema!” We both laughed. “
C'était un film du far west
,
avec Gary Cooper.
” This seemed terribly funny, too; we kept laughing until the waiter came with our bottle of white wine.

“Well,” said Giovanni, sipping the wine, his eyes damp, “after the last gun shot had been fired and all the music came up to celebrate the triumph of goodness and I came up the aisle, I bumped into this man—Guillaume—and I excused myself and walked into the lobby. Then here he came, after me, with a long story about leaving his scarf in
my
seat because, it appeared, he had been sitting
behind
me, you understand, with his coat and his scarf on the seat
before
him and when I sat down I pulled his scarf down with me. Well, I told him I didn't work for the cinema and I told him what he could do with his scarf—but I did not really get angry because he made me want to laugh. He said that all the people who worked for the cinema were thieves and he was sure that they would keep it if they so much as laid eyes on it, and it was very expensive, and a gift from his mother and—oh, I assure you, not even Garbo ever gave such a performance. So I went back and of course there was no scarf there and when I told him this it seemed he would fall dead right there in the lobby. And by this time, you understand, everybody thought we were together and I didn't know whether to kick him or the people who were looking at us; but he was very well dressed, of course, and I was not and so I thought, well, we had better get out of this lobby. So we went to a cafe and sat on the terrace and when he had got over his grief about the scarf and what his mother would say and so on and so on, he asked me to have supper with him. Well, naturally, I said no; I had certainly had enough of him by that time, but the only way I could prevent another scene, right there on the terrace, was to promise to have supper with him a few days later—I did not intend to go,” he said,
with a shy grin, “but when the day came, I had not eaten for a long time and I was very hungry.” He looked at me and I saw in his face again something which I have fleetingly seen there during these hours: under his beauty and his bravado, terror, and a terrible desire to please; dreadfully, dreadfully moving, and it made me want, in anguish, to reach out and comfort him.

Our oysters came and we began to eat. Giovanni sat in the sun, his black hair gathering to itself the yellow glow of the wine and the many dull colors of the oyster where the sun struck it.

“Well”—with his mouth turned down—“dinner was awful, of course, since he can make scenes in his apartment, too. But by this time I knew he owned a bar and was a French citizen. I am not and I had no job and no
carte de travail
. So I saw that he could be useful if I could only find some way to make him keep his hands off me. I did not, I must say”—this with that look at me—“altogether succeed in remaining untouched by him; he has more hands than an octopus, and no dignity whatever,
but
”—grimly throwing down another oyster and refilling our glasses of wine—“I
do
now have a
carte de travail
and I have a job. Which pays very well,” he grinned. “It appears that I am good for business. For this reason, he leaves me mostly alone.” He looked out into the bar. “He is really not a man at all,” he said, with a sorrow and bewilderment at once childlike and ancient, “I do not know what he is, he is horrible. But I will keep my
carte de travail
. The job is another matter, but”—he knocked wood—“we have had no trouble now for nearly three weeks.”