Set This House on Fire (52 page)

Yet again it rained, and still he did not know why he pressed on. Between the snow-capped peak of Vesuvius and the calm dark bay, a jetty, seaweed-slimy in the low tide, lay poised like a cliff in the green of summer. At its edge three bare-legged urchins, shivering, and a solemn fat priest stood fishing in the downpour, and Cass paused thoughtfully, wondering if he had the talent to sketch the sweet and crazy scene—decided he didn’t, passed on. The
grappa
bottle was nearly empty. In Sorrento, in midafternoon, he found himself in a grimy bar somewhere at the edge of the sea, drinking Strega, learning songs in tongue-twisting dialect from a sweaty barkeep in B.V.D.’s, playing mechanical football with a cross-eyed boy in American Army clothes, and washing his hands at a scummy sink whose drain emptied onto the water fifty feet below; there, inanely winding his watch, he fumbled it into the sea with a splash, and was immediately dissolved in loony grief.
“Sono pazzo!”
he exclaimed tearfully to the barkeep. “I’m mad! Mad!” And before he knew it he was on his motorscooter again, blundering around the hairpin turns toward Positano and Amalfi. Above Positano he blew a tire, squatted by the roadside and repaired it with numb fingers. Farther on he ran out of gas, which in terms of Sambuco was either a curse or a blessing, depending upon how one views all that came after. For as he stood drenched at the roadside, a truck carrying barrels of wine drew to a halt, and from one window a most peculiar face peered out. Hooked like a scimitar, a majestic nose rode adventurously forth, dominating, indeed almost overshadowing, the face; upon its stately arch small wens were sprinkled like pumpkin seeds and from the two caverns beneath, great thickets of hair sprouted black and luxuriant. Of the chin there was almost nothing: above the point where it should have been, and shadowed almost to obscurity by the huge bowsprit of a nose, a mouth with thin red lips described a V-shaped smile, wet and lubricious. Something about the man’s face, the nose especially, gave it a look at once humorous and benign, like a cross between Punch and Torquemada; his hair, like Franz Liszt’s, hung seedily to his shoulders.
“Che t’è successo?”
he said. To which Cass replied: “No gas, my friend.” The face smiled. “Hang onto the back,” he said. “You look cold. Open the
tappo
and have some wine, but be careful not to spill it. Hang onto the back and I’ll take you where you’re going.”

Which was the most curious part of all. For the face in the truck could not have known where Cass was going, any more than Cass did himself. And a long time afterward, thinking that without that offer he doubtless would never have landed where he did, he wondered if that face had really been as queer and sinister as he remembered it. Yet as Cass hung himself with one hand to the rear of the truck and allowed himself to be pulled behind, he felt the road rise beneath him, and now through pouring rain he felt himself being towed higher and higher along the margin of some wild and yawning gorge, where foaming torrents rushed a thousand feet below, and the sea fell away in the distance like gray water in a dishpan, steaming and indistinct. Directly in front of his muzzle the bung of one barrel was riven through by a wooden cock, and with his free hand he gave it a twist, so that the wine spurted red and bubbly into his out-thrust lower jaw. Higher and higher the truck climbed, towing its drinker. When they reached the peak level ground, Cass had gulped a pint without wasting a drop, and now as the truck halted in a strange rainy piazza, before he could thank the weird face in the cab, he had fallen from the motorscooter in a soggy, deplorable heap, a red and white banner floating insanely across his vision:

BENVENUTO A SAMBUCO
BIENVENU A SAMBUCO
WILLKOMMEN IN SAMBUCO
WALCOME TO SAMBUCO

The truck was gone. Merciful God, he thought, heaving slowly to his feet, I’m in a bleeding infantile neurotic cycle. He climbed dreamily back onto the motorscooter, tried to start it, remembered his lack of fuel, and was about to push it toward shelter, when at this moment Saverio came splashing across the square, stuttering, snaggled mouth ajar, nearly toppling him again as he took possession of the knapsack riding aft.
“Bella Vista!”
he roared.
“Tutti i conforti
…
panorama scenico
…
prezzi moderati!”
Through the downpour the creature gazed at him imploringly, with wild dislocated eyes. Cass shivered. I have gone to sleep, he thought, I’ve gone to sleep and am dreaming of hell. He sneezed, swaying groggily, aware that the day was verging on darkness and oblivion.
“Dica,”
he said to the idiot, “where can I get a drink?”

“At the Bella Vista!”

There was no one in the lobby of the Bella Vista. It was grim, cold, deserted, and silent save for a hideous rococo clock whose pendulum snapped back and forth slowly and dolefully in the stillness. There were potted rubber plants, an umbrella stand, and a massive walnut armchair whose mirrored back reflected the oval specter of himself, pale-faced and dripping. It was like the waiting room of a funeral parlor, and the adjoining
salone
revealed even grimmer secrets: plush chairs bedecked in graying antimacassars, a chandelier once meant to cast a glory of light, in which one bulb glimmered dimly, more rubber plants in pots, and a wide view of the sunless valley with its churning rack of clouds and mist. Then in the gloom his eyes picked out a fireplace and a grate filled with feebly glowing coals. Drawn up close beside it an aging couple in sweaters and lumpy tweeds were playing backgammon with broken, haunted expressions and with chilblained, visibly trembling hands. They seemed to be the hotel’s only guests. Somewhere out of sight a canary chirped submissively. The place smelled of wet wool, old books, fish, and Great Britain. Staggering through the hallways, he located the bar. Almost as an afterthought, it was cramped into a tiny, dim, airless anteroom, and there could not have been a gloomier place to drink in all of Europe. By hammering at a bell long enough, he finally summoned an oppressed-looking waiter, who sold him a bottle of caramel-tasting Italian brandy. He took this back into the
salone
and sat down, trying to dry out, but without hope, since the air of the hotel seemed damper even than his clothes. He picked up a copy of the
London Daily Mail,
put it down again—it was six months old. The brandy, foul as it was, warmed him, allaying some of his nervousness and depression. After some minutes he actually felt a kind of deceptive, dull-witted sense of well-being, and told himself that he was not drunk, after all. He looked at the backgammon players, and sneezed again.

He must have sat there for half an hour, brooding, gazing out at the tragic landscape. It conjured up all scenes which in his imagination existed as places to be shunned: Blackpool; Winnipeg; Finland; Shamokin, P.A. The land was darkling and accursed. He tilted the bottle up and drank. In the shadows by the fire the Englishman and his wife massaged their fingers. All of a sudden, try as he might to repress it, a pressure which had been building up all day tore loose, and he broke wind loudly, a prolonged tattoo which he squirmed vainly to muffle, finally relaxed sheepishly and let go—a slow, erratic crepitation, like marbles falling into a hopper. There was a commotion at the backgammon table. He barely noticed it. His disturbance ceased. He brooded some more. Then, after a while, rising unsteadily from the chair, only halfaware that he had begun to fret out loud, and to mumble, he took an infirm step forward, wondering if now was not the time to go back to Rome, and in spite of the rain. “You can take Sambuco and bugger it!” he said aloud. “Bugger it!” He hardly knew he spoke: the Englishwoman, followed more slowly by her husband, snapped erect at the table like a startled doe. He lurched toward the mantelpiece, in the hope of eliciting some warmth for his pants from the meager coals. Suddenly he was trapped, cornered, utterly hemmed in by Sambuco: he felt like one of those gallant cowboys who, pinned to the edge of an abyss by Indians, must turn around to face a storm of arrows or plunge horse and all into the horrendous gully. There was nowhere, he thought with mounting terror, nowhere at all to go. His affliction returned. Windy, turbulent, he edged past the slowly rising, cherry-red, bristling old man and in complete despair fell heavily against the mantel, feeling, as he did, something give way ponderously at his shoulder and fall to earth with an ear-splitting crash.

Slotkin, he thought, old father, old rabbi. Patience, discipline—that’s what I need, and he was still thinking this in dim self-congratulation at his insight, when hell broke loose around him. For the huge vase, in falling—it could not have weighed less than fifty pounds—had narrowly missed the old man; even now as Cass looked dully down at it lying splintered in green shards on the floor he saw two wool-lined slippers shuffle forward, heard a voice quaking and elderly and half-hysteric with rage. “Drunken foul-mouth! Blightah!” the old man quavered, brandishing an invisible riding crop, and Cass, looking up in pity and wonder at the inflamed, mustachioed face, was for the first time aware of what he had done.

“Scuse me—” he began, but it was too late, for the
salone,
awakened by the sound of the crash, came alive like a mausoleum overrun by vandals. Three waiters appeared, and several maids; what looked like a cook came on the run, chef’s hat flopping, and a horde of lesser minions—busboys, gardeners, porters. As they surrounded him, and as the old man, still fuming, shook a chapped fist in his face, he could only think that with all this help around, the place surely must be losing money.

“Look here! Ruddy side of the man!” the Englishman was bawling to the assemblage. “Look at him! Who is he, filthy drunken beggar! Nearly brained us, he did, with that vahs!” Dumbly he watched the old man, watched his wife now plucking at his sleeve, watched the parlor as it filled up with spectators, and said to himself over and over, metronomically: This is not happening, this is not happening to me. Then just as his longing to melt through the floor became so intense that he did, for an instant, seem to feel his feet sink beneath him, a wild-eyed little man came on the scene, gesticulating with a menu he held in one plump hand. This, he made out, was someone named Signor Windgasser, a small human, wholly terrifying. Sputtering apologies to the old Englishman, he turned to face Cass and began to flourish the menu beneath his eyes. “You!” he cried. “That vase was worth two hundred thousand lire!” Cass was too dazed, too confused, too inextricably lost to stir; in a blur of muffled sight and sound like the wildest hallucination he watched Windgasser’s lips moving in convulsive outrage, yet could make no sense of what was being said; hand cocked upon his spectral swagger stick, the old man still fumed and fussed; from somewhere in the crowd there was a hoarse croak of uneasy laughter. A frieze of dingy damask curtains swam like water upon his vision; uptilted, the distant valley seemed to slope like a ski chute wrapped in mist toward the unbelievable sea. Nauseated now, weakly heaving, he tried to reply, tried to discover some meaning in this preposterous inquisitorial dream; just then, just as he made his benumbed lips function and, trying out a mouthful of thick strange-sounding words of apology, staggered toward Windgasser with placating hands uplifted, he felt an unyielding rod or bar or fireplace fender clutch his ankle, tripping him, and the parqueted flooring of the Bella Vista rose up to meet him full and shocking in the face, like a slammed door. He lay there, aching, watching ten thousand minute blossoms of fire. Then he felt himself being hoisted by strong hands, by brawny white-sleeved arms that propelled him forward across the room and into the lobby, where someone muttering Italian oaths rammed his knapsack down around his neck and by the seat of his pants hurled him forward again, half-suspended in air, feet paddling like a comic bicyclist’s, out of doors and into the rain.
“Cacciatelo via!”
he heard someone shout, and the jeering word
“Ubriacone!”
A door slammed, and the muffled words came back—“And stay out!” And he was alone once more in the rain.

Then—perhaps it was the intolerable rain again, or the swelling beneath his eye, or the insulting
“Ubriacone,”
with its false imputation that he had drunk too much—something popped like a valve inside him; he took a deep breath, shot his soggy cuffs, and charged back into the hotel like a tormented bear. A grave error. The marble steps, slick from the downpour, were like glass beneath his feet. He was only halfway up to the entrance when like a doormat the earth was whisked away from beneath him. Still roaring, he saw the hotel’s façade spin madly sideways, and at the door one solitary waiter, pop-eyed in dismay, reaching out vainly to arrest his fall. Then he felt his skull crash down upon the edge of a step, and he was sped into oblivion upon great baroque chords of organ music, obliterating shock and pain… .

When he awoke, with an ache in his head but curiously in command of his senses, he smelled an institutional smell of wine and grime, and knew almost at once that he was in a police station. He was lying on a cot, and he heard his own groan as he struggled back to consciousness; though it was a little death to do so, he rose to a sitting position on the cot, gingerly touched his cranium, and felt a lump the size of a small doorknob, fiercely painful to touch. And as he raised his eyes he saw two policemen. One, an immensely obese, bespectacled sergeant, scowled at him from behind a desk. The other, standing, was a young corporal with a mustache, who seemed to regard Cass less with suspicion or hostility than with a kind of bemused speculation, though even this was hard to be sure about, for much of his face was obscured as he spread his jaws wide and with a large hand began industriously to pick his teeth. No one spoke. Cass watched dully as a be-whiskered rat peered out from a hole in the wall behind the sergeant’s desk, sniffed the atmosphere and, like some cafe trifler idly emerging at midafternoon, serenely waddled away out the door and into another room. Rain drummed steadily on the roof overhead. Still drunk, his pain numbed, Cass heard a thin brainless giggle at work in his throat.