Set This House on Fire (72 page)

“Well, Mason pretended to chew over these notions, but it was clear that he thought I was hopelessly naive. If not a hick and a clodhopper in most ways, with the soul of a licensed embalmer. But all that’s aside. He had sex on the brain, and I guess you might say that more than anything else it led to his undoing. He went one step too far. He tried rape and he succeeded.

“But why did Mason do it in this case, right then, that night, right there? He didn’t exactly lack resources, you know. There are whorehouses in Naples that specialize in his kind of itch, if itch it was, and for a couple thousand lire he could have bought himself a nice authentic rape, complete with locked unwilling thighs and frantic hands and Neapolitan screams, and he wouldn’t have even gotten scratched if he hadn’t wanted to. But no, he had something else in mind, I know. So that that night, if you discount the business about the earrings and his rage over Francesca’s alleged thievery—which was just a cover-up for something deeper —and put aside for a moment this theory about his impotence—which must be only part of the story—then you come up with one answer: he was raping
me.
No, God knows I don’t want to make it look like I’m transferring to myself any of that final and degrading suffering which Francesca endured alone. I just mean this, you see: he must have understood what was happening. He must have seen how things were shaping up. Because for more time than I care to think about I had allowed him to own me—out of spinelessness at first, out of whiskey-greed and desolation of the spirit, but at last out of necessity. And the paradox is that this slavish contact with Mason that I had to preserve in order to save Michele freed me to come into that knowledge of selflessness I had thirsted for like a dying man, and into a state where such a thing as dependence on the likes of Mason would be unheard-of, an impossibility. And Mason must have understood this, too, and not so dimly either. I think he must have understood it a lot more than I did. He knew that for a while he had the pluperfect victim—a man he could own completely, and who lay back and slopped up his food and his drink, and who was so close to total corruption himself that he gloried in being owned. But he sensed, too, that his victim had changed now, had found something—some focus, some strength, some reality—and this was a dangerous situation for a man who wished to keep a firm grip on his property: bum that I still remained, each hour I strove to bring Michele back to health, each day I sweated and strained to regain my sanity by taking on this burden which God alone knows why I accepted—save that to shirk it would have been to die—I moved closer to a condition of freedom, and Mason knew it even if I didn’t, and this he couldn’t bear.

“So that night he held out on me. I don’t think—scoundrel that he was—he had any
conscious
intention of hurting Michele by keeping those pills. But he kept them, no doubt waiting for that moment when, as he told me, I would
‘come to my senses’
—which is to say the moment when by some act of fealty, some cheap bargain, through some humiliation, I would repudiate this new independence of mine, renounce any ideas I might have expressed about getting out of Sambuco, leaving him without a lap dog—and so put him into the driver’s seat again. Then and only then the bastard planned to give me the pills back, I guess.

“But the pills weren’t all. There was Francesca too, and by raping her he raped the two of us: that night I felt he had committed some filthy, unspeakable violation upon life itself. His timing was perfect. At that very moment when through Francesca I had conceived of life as having some vestige of a meaning, he tore that meaning limb from limb. Who knows why he did it? Because her beauty and her innocence drove him crazy? Because he knew she was mine? Because the sodden wreck he owned was struggling out of the mire, out of his grasp? Because in her terrible fright and distraction she called out, ‘Cass! Cass!’ when if she had stayed quiet, not shouting that name which must have been like anathema in his ears, he might have let her go?

“Who knows why he did it, but he
did
it, and at last I smashed his fucking skull in.”

With his head bowed, Cass fell silent, and he remained quiet for a long time. When at last he resumed, he said in a soft and gentle voice: “So I guess now the time has come to tell you how I killed him, and everything else.

“Well, as for the rest of that night, of course, you know almost as much as I do. And for the circus act he made me go through up- stairs—about that I still draw a total blank, and perhaps it’s a blessing. It seems to me I have a dim memory of having gone through the same thing just a few nights before. Acting the clown, acting out drunkenly, helplessly, any role Mason dreamed up for me. Mason in charge, running me through my paces, and the movie creeps howling—that troglodyte Burns, and those vacant-faced actresses; and Cripps, that director, who sort of took care of me once, he seemed like a good egg, as I remember. But both times I was in the very heart of a coma. But about that night … Later, I recall going up the back stairs and lifting those pills from Mason’s bathroom. And ah yes—I forgot to tell you: on my way out I got that picture I’d painted for him. I went into the room where I knew he stored all of his beautiful blue art and I found that picture and on the way back down the stairs I ripped it up with my bare hands, frame and all, and stuffed it into an ashcan on the street. It was what, looking back on it, you might call strike one against the house of Flagg. And after that, of course, there was the trip with you to the valley to see Michele. And dragging back up through the valley in the dawn, sober now, but so beaten down with exhaustion that I felt all my nerve ends twitching as if on the verge of some fit or convulsion, and after that—after settling you down to sleep—going upstairs and pacing, and fighting sleep, fighting sleep, consumed even in my half-dead weariness by a fury which I knew would not let me sleep, which I knew would allow me no letup or peace until I had confronted Mason and exacted my just pound of flesh. It was
all
I wished—this you must understand—and it was not much, or so it seemed to me; nothing would right his wrong or restore Francesca’s loss, yet stretched to the very limit of all I understood that meant toleration and endurance, and for the sake of my manhood alone, or what was left of it, for the sake of whatever notion of honor I still honored, I knew I had to have some indication—
something,
some token, some mark, some sign—even if it was only a hand bloodied with his blood, or a fist bruised and broken where I had driven it into that smooth, peerless, polished, vainglorious face.

“And that was all, you see. All. Nothing else was in my mind. Had you told me even then, even in the midst of all my foaming, infuriate craze for revenge, that I would be capable of killing him—that indeed, within an hour, I
would
kill him—I would have said that you exaggerated my hatred and rage. Hate him I did, and my rage was like some great snapping mad dog inside me, but no, murder was not in my mind. Only shortly after, when I got that news which turned my blood to water—just then I understood once and for all that it is, in fact, the easiest thing in the world to wish to kill a man, and then to kill him without a qualm, without hesitation or pause or delay… .”

Cass fell silent again. Then he said: “But to kill a man, even in hatred, even in revenge, is like an amputation. Though this man may have done you the foulest injustice in the world, when you have killed him you have removed a part of yourself forever. For here was so-and-so. Here was some swine, some blackguard, some devil. But what made him tick? What made him do the things he did? What was his history? What went on in his mind? What, if you had let him live, would he have become? Would he have stayed a swine, unregenerate to the end? Or would he have become a better man? Maybe he could have imparted to you some secrets. You do not know. You have acted the role of God, you have judged him and condemned him. And by condemning him, by killing him, all the answers to those questions pass with him into oblivion. Only
you
remain—shorn of all that knowledge, and with as much pain as if somehow you had been dismembered. It is a pain that will stay with you as long as you live… . All the time I spent with Mason, I felt I never knew him, never could put my hands on him. He was like a gorgeous silver fish in a still pond: make a grab for him, and he has slithered away, and there you are with a handful of water. But maybe that was just the thing about him, you see? He was like mercury. Smoke. Wind. It was as if he was hardly a man at all, but a creature from a different race who had taken on the disguise of a man, an imperfect disguise, so that while you saw that he walked and talked and smelled like a man, you were nonetheless aware that here was a creature so strange, so
new
—so remote from the depths of your own experience, your own life, your own past—that there were times when you looked at him with your mouth wide-open, in awe, wondering that you could communicate with each other at all. For him there was no history, or, if there was, it began on the day he was born. Before that there was nothing, and out of that nothing sprang this creature, committed to nothingness because of the nothingness that informed all time before and after the hour of his birth. And it was impossible to understand a creature like this… . And so—

“Once early that summer I was drinking with Mason, and I had a reverie—about America—one of those sharp pangs of homesickness that would come over me every now and then, no matter how hard I tried to push them down. It was evening and we were sitting on his terrace, looking over the sea. I listened to Mason talk about his play—about this new look in morals. It seemed to me then that suddenly I was carried back to a time many years before, when I had come up from the South and Poppy and I were starting out in New York, in a drab little apartment on the West Side, where I was trying to be a painter and Poppy would go out each day to work at some damn Catholic youth club or something. Yet, strange, it was not Poppy and me I was dreaming of, but something else—of others, of other young married people of whatever age and time, other young kids I had never known nor would ever know. Before the babies come. Pretty young wives named Cathy or Mary or Barbara, and guys named Tim and Al and Dave, all of them in these sort of cheerless little apartments all over America—and the percolator boiling, and a rainy Sunday morning, and the guy in his underdrawers and the girl in curlers, feeding the goldfish. Or the two of them nibbling each other’s ears and then going back to bed, mad with love, or then on the other hand just quarreling, or reading the newspapers while soggy, degrading music comes out of the radio. Why I had this vision I don’t know—it was a very sorry vision in many ways—but I had it and I remembered that wet gray light of New York on a winter morning and the butter melting in a dish on the table, but mainly—mainly just these brave and pretty girls, and the brave boys they married, all hurried toward the same weird impossible destiny. Young lovers, Stardust—piled up through unimaginable centuries. And suddenly, though I had never known them and never would know them, I loved them—I loved them all—and I wished them well.

“Then I stirred a little and looked up and heard Mason say: ‘Let me tell you, dollbaby, do you know what the world’s going to be like in a hundred years?’ I’d lost track of the conversation but his eyes were gleaming—almost prophetic—as if he really knew. It was one of those moments when he was at his best, when I kind of liked him. He took a big puff out of this cigar he was smoking, and rared back, and for a moment, I swear, he looked so serene and knowing that you would have thought he had just planted his flagstaff on Mars.

“But I was still in that reverie of mine, and I didn’t answer. Come to think of it, I wish I
had
asked him to tell me what he thought the world was going to be like in a hundred years because now, you see, I’ll never know. It was a mystery he took with him.” That morning Cass remembered hearing the village clock strike five. On the sagging couch, still oozing with the cool damp of the night just passed, he lay with limp arms akimbo, palms upturned, breathing in shallow breaths as his eyes roved the ceiling, the shaded casement windows, the dingy walls carapaced with soot and spiderweb tracings and the wet gray accretions of mildew and time. The clutter of the room thrust up the specter-shapes around him in the graying darkness, the gathering light: the towering walnut wardrobe and the table still littered with indistinct objects (he made out a pipe, five empty wine bottles, a lava ashtray from the slopes of Vesuvius shaped like the head of death) and the ponderous easel with its dangling doll and white rectangular shape of canvas, chaste and untouched. He was a vessel. He sensed his own breathing and a dull throbbing ache along his rib cage and he felt too the slow inward-throbbing of his consciousness, but his thoughts made few connections with each other and, pliant as a strand of weed beneath streaming water, he lay there, inert, drained, exhausted, receiving all. Flies like winged blots, aroused by the heat, spun in eccentric paths somewhere far above him near the ceiling, mindlessly buzzing. And now other sounds of waking fell upon his ears—a bird call, and a girl’s sweet drowsy voice singing and, from afar, puttering and somnolent, fishing boats on the gulf, moving languidly to harbor through the dawn. Then these sounds, too, faded and died, and all was still again save for the dim buzzing of the flies in the ghostly space of air above him.

One thing remained supreme: he must not sleep. He must not, could not, sleep, though a horde of unseen forces seemed to impel him toward it. In a moment of total lassitude he allowed his eyes to close; it took the whole of his strength and will to open them again, and his eyelids came apart with an aching flutter, fighting to erase the gray light. He must not sleep, he thought painfully, he could not sleep; and now, as if viewing himself through the eyes of some drowsy stranger he saw himself pushing back sleep, with leaden feet and faltering steps forcing back the door of sleep, that titanic oaken door as lofty and as ponderous as the entry to some medieval keep, which pressed open against all his puny efforts to close it, and behind which, it seemed, all the demons of slumber howled for his soul with a noise like that of a thousand hysteric pipes. Yet now, wonder of wonders, he was closing it. Drowsily he watched himself shouldering back the prodigious door, saw the space of darkness diminish as he filled the breach between the door’s edge and the stony jamb, saw the massive hinges quiver with the strain; but then, in an instant, fantasy became dream; sound asleep for what seemed hours, he had indeed forced the door back, forced back sleep (or so a small and treacherous voice murmured in his ear), yet behind the door there was a lovely quattrocento castle—was there not?—and here he strolled amid a crowd of lords and ladies, halberds and masked falcons, wan lovers, and squads of murmuring nuns, in a place where courtyards blossomed with almond trees, and psalteries and lutes played exquisitely and invisibly, and over all was the scent of almond and lemon and balsam. … He awoke with a start, choked upon the fragment of a snore. All was quiet. The light was still dim and gray. Only seconds had passed.