Nowhere (16 page)

McCoy jeered. “Don’t worry, a Blond has an iron jaw and a granite head. I should have known you were an SM man.”

“Put a sock in it, McCoy, and give me some help. How can I keep this woman from molesting me without having her actually arrested or really hurting her?”

Wryly he shook his head. “How to get somebody to do something they hate and still have them love you. That’s a Yank for you! But over here that kinda shit don’t go. Want somebody off your back, you drop ’em.”

“Come on, be serious. I’ve got a problem.” Despite Olga’s ruthless using of me for her own purposes, sexual and political, my basic sympathies were still weighted towards her cause.

“I’m telling you,” said McCoy. “You don’t have to put up with anything from a Blond. You can throw her out the window.”

“I’m afraid I don’t subscribe to the Sebastiani code, and I must say I am appalled to know that you do. Even though you’ve lived here for years, you still call yourself an American.”

“Pigshit,” McCoy growled. “Did you not ask my help?”

“I regret that,” I said frostily. Olga made a sound. She was becoming conscious. I had to slug her again or flee. I really do hate to hit a girl, especially one with whom I have recently had intimate congress—though now that I think about it, would an utter stranger be more appropriate?

I fled. I ran down the hall and around the corner and into a veritable wall consisting of the large body of the man who listened to the recorded voice of Enrico Caruso while bathing. He was about to let himself into what I assumed to be his room.

“
Per favore, signore
,” I pleaded, exhausting my store of ready Italian, “can you give me refuge? I’ll explain this as soon as I can.

He performed a (given his figure) necessarily generous shrug and gestured, with a rolled-out palm, for me to proceed him into the room. Then he swept in behind me and closed the door before Olga had reached that section of the hall, though I could hear her running footfalls. With another similar gesture he indicated I should take a seat on the sofa, a decent-looking piece of furniture upholstered in flowered brocade. We were in a comfortable sitting room. My Mediterranean friend appeared to have a suite for himself. One of the several doors undoubtedly led to a bedroom, and another set, louvered, he now opened to reveal a neat little kitchenette of the type I once enjoyed in Manhattan (if you can say that about a combined roach resort and mouse spa in which the fridge was on permanent defrost whatever the adjustment and only half a burner worked on the quarter-sized stove).

The large man had been carrying, somewhere beneath my line of sight, which was focused first on his huge hairy face and now on his massive middle body, a string bag full of groceries. This he now placed in the little sink and began to empty. There were several elongated boxes of the size in which spaghetti was packed, a handful of greenery, a great wedge of cheese, and some other surely edible items.

Next he brought me a tumbler full of red wine, carrying in his other large hand a raffia-wrapped vessel of gallon capacity. With an amiable display of very white teeth, he pantomimed Bottom’s Up, then went back to the kitchenette I could hardly see when he stood before it.

I thought I should wait a while before speaking, lest Olga be listening at doors, and therefore I drank my wine in silence. The big fellow refilled the glass occasionally without my asking, but his principal effort was applied to cooking spaghetti in a giant-sized pot and grinding, with mortar and pestle, enough garlic to scent the room, and then what from the bouquet I could identify as basil (having had, a few years previously, an affair with a married woman who would rather cook for me than go to bed: her husband was OK at sex but a slob when it came to cuisine, said she, “with this food revolution exploding all around us”).

By the time my friend served up the
pesto genovese,
on a side table which became dining-sized by the elevation of two hinged panels, I was a bit pissed from having gulped the wine into a stomach lately agitated by my passionate encounter with Olga. He had given each of us a mound of greenflecked spaghetti that rose from tabletop to eye-level, and now, before I could so much as approach my portion with a weary hand, he had reduced his own by half, in the consuming of which he lowered his head, tucked the fork into the side of the heap, and shoveled violently while his lips produced a suction that a Hoover might have envied.

I finally wound a few strands onto my fork and ingested them: very tasty. I took another slug of red.

“I haven’t been over here for long,” I said, “but I’ve already been exposed to a number of Sebastiani phenomena, and thus far what I’ve learned seems to cancel itself out in every respect. The prince is in theory a tyrant from a much earlier epoch, but in practice he is apparently harmless. He does nothing but eat rich food. His sexual tastes are pederastic. None of his subjects can be in want, for they enjoy unlimited credit.

“Now the Blonds may be second-class citizens and condemned to the menial work, waiting on tables, pulling rickshaws, and so on, but according to the prince they also practice law and certain other professions that are more or less honorific elsewhere. Their women are obliged to have sexual relations with anyone who asks them, but the only Blond female with whom I am acquainted virtually raped
me,
so one might question how onerous they consider the obligation, for I was all but a stranger to her. And it should be noted that the Blonds are splendid physical specimens, tall and strong and comely, unlike any other oppressed people on record.”

During my remarks the large man nodded frequently but continued to gorge on pesto, refilling his own plate and raising his heavy eyebrows when he looked at mine, still loaded from the first serving. To be polite I gobbled up a few lengths and washed them down with another flood of wine, which I saw was, according to the label, a local estate-bottled vintage of something called Valpolifella
(sic)
and could be characterized as being red and wet.

I resumed. “The scholars of Saint Sebastian are lazy buffoons, and the male writers are a pack of swine. Incidentally, the pornography is allegedly written only by Blond females, but I haven’t checked this out for myself, and I must say I wouldn’t place much credence in the unsupported word of any of the scribblers I have met. On the other hand, again I can’t see that much actual harm is done by any of these gentry, for only a few people read, and according to the official librarian, himself an illiterate, what each reads is the same book, over and over again.

“The law-enforcement procedure is ridiculous. People are punished harshly for rudeness, but on the other hand, anybody can accuse anyone else of any crime and be believed by the police.”

My host raised a full tumbler of wine and poured it down his throat with the sound of a flushing toilet. He smacked his lips and rose to carry his empty plate to the spaghetti pot, which had remained on the stove, looked within, and finding nothing left, sighed massively and went to the wardrobe, where he removed the jacket and vest of the black serge suit he wore, but retained his white shirt and dark necktie. He put on a maroon silk dressing gown and tied its tasseled belt around his tremendous midsection. After politely bowing to me, he loosened his collar, strapped across his eyes the black sleep-mask he took from a pocket in the robe, and lay down upon the bed, which sagged until its mattress-springs almost touched the floor.

Obviously it was time to terminate my exterior monologue. I had got some profit from drawing up the oral bill of particulars with respect to the country I found myself in. I had confirmed my suspicion that Saint Sebastian was an unusually difficult place about which to generalize. No doubt this was true of every society: e.g., how to characterize a city shared at once by the South Bronx junkie, the gilded tenant of Trump Tower, the cop from Queens, and the Broadway headliner? But I had yet to see a significant relation between any two of the Sebastiani milieus, including the court and the Blonds, each of which would seem to have only a theoretical reality for the other. And I thought I could remember from my college reading of history that it is never the oppressed people which make a revolution, but rather the class between the rulers and those at the bottom:
viz.,
the very class which was not in evidence in any large numbers in Saint Sebastian... but then, human beings of any kind were in short supply, owing to the current contrast to the clamorous Manhattan throng amidst which I normally pursued my destiny. On my first day in the capital city I had seen, all told, not as many mortals as one would encounter in a midday walk from my old loft to Rothman’s delicatessen.

Rothman’s Deli! Never when it was accessible did I dream that one day in a far-off land a mental reference to it would move me to nostalgia. Given the difference in time, back home it would be morning now, and the customers would be coming in for their fresh bagels and bialys, milk-blue coffee in bone-white containers, and sweating prune Danish. The street criminals would have wiped the gore from their switchblades, put their Saturday Night Specials on safety, and slunk, or more likely swaggered, to their lairs for a well-earned rest. The tarts were in bed at last to sleep, and the derelicts had not yet risen from their doorways. Here and there a leashed dog would be enjoying his matutinal bowel movement; a few would even be doing it legally, below the curb. The vehicular traffic would not yet have begun to accelerate towards the homicidal mania of noon. Perhaps the odd cabdriver would suggest, with spasmodic gestures and abrupt sounds, the hysteria that would claim him absolutely later in the day, but seen so early the display might be taken for harmless, even charming verve. And at this hour the sidewalk pedestrian undoubtedly ran the least risk all day of being called “motherfucker” by another human being who was an utter stranger to him.

In short, I was astonished to discover that I missed New York, perhaps not to the degree that I was ready to sing that fatuous song rendered, at the behest of the Tourist Bureau, by show-biz celebs who love Gotham so ardently as to reside in California, but I did identify in myself a homesickness, if it could be so termed, for the quotidian life of Manhattan as opposed to what I had thus far encountered over here, where everything was so
foreign.
Could I have been turning into what, as a man of culture, I had, my adult life long, despised:
viz.,
the provincial xenophobe?

I pushed away the now cold pesto, went to the door, opened it a crack, and took the lie of the land. It would have been less kind to awaken the enormous man from his nap, I thought, than to leave quietly without tendering my thanks. I had decided to repair to the cable office, if I could elude Olga, and send a message to Rasmussen demanding that he withdraw me from this country where I could not be protected from its capricious nationals.... No, such a negative appeal would never succeed with a sadistic superior. I had it: I would rather employ some such strategy as more than one grim wit had suggested “we” should have done in Vietnam: i.e., simply declare victory and leave. I would assure Rasmussen I had seen enough to write an authoritative report on Saint Sebastian, and suggest what American policy should be towards the little principality: neglect, and rather more indifferent than benign.

“AH,” SAID THE CONCIERGE
as I passed through the lobby, “I do hope you are now eliminating your stools painlessly, my dear sir, and will not again require the services of your Blond colonic irrigationist.”

“By the way,” I replied, “did you see her leave?”

“I have not,” said he. “But I’m sure she has done so if she’s not with you. She would certainly know the consequences if found in the hotel without authorization.”

“Would you mind telling me what those consequences would be?”

He frowned and then said, “I really haven’t the slightest idea. It’s the sort of thing one says.”

“Much of Sebastiani existence consists in such statements, does it not? You people speak on the extravagant side, but so far as I can see, the reality is much tamer.”

He looked crestfallen. I hastened to say, “I’m not criticizing, mind you! It’s certainly preferable to a state of affairs in which violence is commonplace, as it is where I come from, where furthermore it’s fashionable in certain milieus to pretend that at any given time the situation is all that it should be.” Already I was less homesick. “I once lived in an apartment building every tenant of which was robbed at gunpoint, in the lobby, by a band of neighborhood thugs who were contestants in an all-city mugging competition. When our hooligans lost to the Kip’s Bay team, the victims were indignant and gave the criminals a consolation party.”

“Well, then,” he said bitterly, “isn’t everything always more colorful in New York?”

I had perhaps gone too far and hurt his feelings. “I wonder whether you get my meaning?” I asked. “I’m flattering you, by contrast.”

His greasy smile instantly reappeared. “I understand perfectly. Now would you like a boy?”

“No, thank you, and kindly never ask me that question again. What you might do however is tell me why I see so few people wherever I go in Saint Sebastian? And most of those people I do encounter are working at some kind of job that serves the public. But no public is in evidence.” I specified the open-air markets.

He thought for a moment, the tip of a finger at his pursed lips. “I have it! Those who sell fruit buy pets from the bird people, who in turn purchase cheese, and so on.” He wore a self-congratulatory expression, which I did not wish to darken by expressing dubiety.

I left the hotel. Unless Olga was still looking for me in the hallways upstairs, she had made an exit unobserved by the concierge and might attempt to waylay me in the street. I hugged the walls of the building on the short route to the cable office and saw neither her nor anyone else.

The bespectacled clerk was at the counter when I entered the office.

I obtained a cable form from him, as well as the stub of a pencil, unpleasantly marked as if by gnawing. The feckless Rasmussen had not provided me with a code in which to communicate with him. True, what I had to say was hardly the information that men would kill to get, but to be plainspoken in this context would seem unprofessional and might, if discovered, be used by the Firm’s congressional critics as a pretext for appropriation-cutting.