Set This House on Fire (78 page)

That is funny, Cass thought. It is very funny indeed. For if I have killed a man, why and how is it understood that he killed himself. Very curious … Beyond the villa now, pacified, the sea lay as still as glass. He dozed off. When he awoke again it was high noon, and the people had vanished from the lawn. The limousine had disappeared, too. A large collie prowled the shadowy veranda, muttering to itself. Cass saw one of the serv- ants come out from the kitchen and pretend to offer the dog something to eat, then rap it sharply across the nose. He heard the two servants talking softly to one another in the noon stillness. They had stolen a wrist watch from one of the family, and were worried. The man’s name was Guido, hers was Assunta. After a moment they went back into the kitchen and the collie, still nursing its insult, slouched away into the lee of the villa and out of sight. Cass touched his brow, drew his hand back from the wet skin, aware that he was boiling with fever. Crabwise on his side, he inched toward the stagnant pool and drank from his cupped hand. He shivered as the fever raged within. A horned toad skittered down the sandy bank, paused, gazing at him with beady malevolent eyes.

He slept. When he awoke, he knew that the sun had passed its zenith. The light of full afternoon blazed down, yet the shadow of the rocky outcropping against which he reclined enveloped him, and into the shadows the mosquitoes were swarming, chewing his face and arms. He moved slowly out closer to the stream where there were no mosquitoes. Recumbent, he propped his head against his hand, gazing again at the sea. And sluggishly now, the gulf once more began its upheaval. He watched intently, without blinking, watched the geysers heave up in soundless convulsion, yet now farther out, poised against the horizon, lacking quite the same imminent threat as before. Bells had begun clanging far off up the mountain, in the town, raising an antiphony of peril and alarm. People seemed to be shouting somewhere, in terror. Was it for this? For this weird, silent, volcanic upheaval, presaging the world’s end? Or was what he heard only the echo of something which had assailed his ears before? Watching the sea in its mute cataclysm, he dozed off again, shot stiffly erect even as his head plunged earthward from his hand.
Cassio.
His eyes roved upward along the cliffside, searching for the owner of that miraculous, familiar voice. But there. There only feet away beside the pool, perched on a rock above it with an air of timid curiosity, Francesca knelt, gazing not at him but into the shadowy waters. And why was she looking into the pool in such a fashion? Why should she call to him, and then only dream away, peering down with such a diffident, hesitant, even mournful expression, as if searching in the water for some drowned shadow of her former self? He half-rose, in an agony of longing calling out to her with lips and tongue which, strive as they might, could utter not even the whisper of a sound; now, even as he tried to speak to her, she sprouted gossamer wings, faded utterly from sight, no more substantial than that fatuous “September Morn” which had been summoned up, God knew why, out of that drumming household of his childhood, and for which he had mistaken her.

Consumed by fever, he fell back once more and slept. Sorrow prowled through his dreams like an enormous beast, allowing him no rest or ease. When he awoke again it was midafternoon; the sea, now calm again, was dotted with boats, birds, sails. How dared they venture forth on such treacherous waters?

The limousine nosed its way slowly up the drive, came to a halt in its asphalt berth at the side of the house. “Uncle Frank,” he heard the girl say, “did you eat up all the
panettone?”
Beyond, the gulf was still and serene. The people got out of the car with empty picnic baskets and went into the house. Presently the boy named Kenny came out onto the veranda, stretching himself. He felt the muscles of his arms and yawned. Over his breast, inscribed in blue on a white T-shirt, were the words iona college. In a moment the man they called Bruno emerged from the house, carrying a bag of golf clubs, and soon he began chipping white balls across the lawn in Cass’ direction. Some of the balls went too far, burying themselves among the weeds below the ledge upon which Cass was lying; when he came to retrieve the balls he was puffing, short of breath, and Cass could see the hair in long bristles on his legs and the sweat in blue half-moons plastering his blue shirt against his armpits.

The sun had long since passed its summit, but the day had grown hotter. Cass gazed up at the sun, focusing his eyes at a point near the periphery of its blaze. It was definitely, unnaturally hotter and larger; it seemed nearly twice the size it should be, a burgeoning super-nova. He turned his eyes away, for the first time that day touched with the presentiments of an enormity of fear. The people at the villa seemed faintly to sense this too. They did not look up at the sun, but now Kenny returned to the veranda, followed by the woman Bruno had called Shirley, who seemed to be Bruno’s wife; she loosened her halter and Cass heard her say: “It’s like an oven.” She sat down on a chrome and canvas glider, fanning her face; she was a small woman in beach shorts, and her thighs had gone to fat. Kenny took off his T-shirt and began to chin himself on a bar separating two pillars of the veranda. He was smoothly and strongly muscled and he must have risen to the bar thirty times before dropping gracefully on his toes to the porch floor. With his fingertips on his hips then, he walked around the veranda, eying the floor. He scratched the collie behind its ears. He began walking again, paused, ran a comb through his hair. Then he looked out toward the sea and yawned. The bald fat man whom Cass had heard Linda call Uncle Frank came out on the veranda, a portable radio dangling from a thick fist. “Anybody want a pizza?” he said. But there was no answer. The woman called Shirley had gone to sleep. Now Cass heard the sound of a saxophone, borne away instantly on a gust of wind; caught by this same gust, a golf ball soared sideways, floated downwind before his vision and was lost among the weeds.

The sea was placid, held in momentary abeyance, but the sun had grown hotter still, hung in the sky fiery, huge and, like some dead weight, oppressively heavy and near. The bugger is exploding, Cass thought as he edged back into a shadowed place, it’s going to swell up and shrivel us like a bunch of gnats in a flame. He mopped his brow. It must be the reason for the sea boiling up like that. Then why hadn’t the people seemed to notice the sun? The sea. He gazed toward the man named Bruno, who had sat down, with an air of tedium, in an aluminum chair. The man surveyed the lawn strewn with golf balls and he leaned forward slightly with his lips moving, as if reproaching himself. Then he too lay back and went to sleep. Faint from inside the house came Linda’s voice: “Kenny!” And Kenny turned and said: “What?” “Do you think just Gerda Rumbaugh, Lodi, New Jersey will get there? I’m writing her about the murder!” And Kenny said: “I can’t hear you!” “Kenneth Falco, if you don’t—” But the words were blown away, and he saw the boy stroll sullenly into the house as Bruno and his wife, supine and motionless in their metal chairs, lay beneath the blazing sun, and Uncle Frank twiddled the dials of the radio. The sea was still… .

A smell of cooking meat, blown up toward the cliff upon an evening breeze, aroused him when, several hours later, he lay in his last siege of delirium. It was very late in the afternoon. The sun, sunk to the west over Capri, was like a flaming discus, enormous, threatening, crimson. And again the sea had begun to heave and tremble, casting up silently from the depths of the gulf fountains of itself, mountainous and terrible. Far out, black tornadoes crisscrossed the horizon beneath a lowering rack of black cloud; closer, white combers of oceanic surf crashed without ceasing against the shore, in their noiselessness producing an effect of strange delicacy. The only sound was from below, on the lawn, where the peo- ple had gathered in the early evening light. Cass stirred, drenched and aflame. There were steaks cooking on a half-moon-shaped outdoor barbecue. The boy and the girl were again playing badminton; he heard the faint guitar-plunk as shuttlecock met racket, saw the rise and fall of the girl’s breasts, the plump bounce of buttock and thigh. From the veranda, lost in shadows now, came a muted tropical rhythm of maracas, marimbas, castanets, while at the edge of the veranda sat the old man of the villa, the patriarch Emilio—it could be no other—swarthy and gray-haired, in a magenta beach gown, benignly smiling as he watched the family at play. Bruno approached the old man with deference, said something that Cass was unable to hear. Cass raised his eyes toward the heavens: the sun blazed intolerably near. A gust of wind pitched a scrap of newspaper high over the villa; pinwheeling madly, it skidded across the roof’s edge, bounded in and out among the denuded flagpoles and whirled away from the exploding, tormented sea. A cloud of paper napkins swept across the lawn, and someone cried out: “Oh my God! Oh!” The Venetian blinds clashed and clattered in the upper rooms. From somewhere came the tremendous slamming of a wind-blown door; the swarthy old man turned his head in the fading light, still benignly smiling, and the smell of burning meat was suddenly sweet in the air like a pestilence. Then the breeze died out, Linda retrieved the shuttlecock from the place where it had blown and all was silent, save for the soft tropical rattle and scratch of maracas, and all was still, except for the storm, nearer now, convulsing the black waters of the gulf.

It was then that Cass, sick with terror to the bottom of his soul, arose from the mouth of the cave and fled back along the cliffside path toward the town. He does not know whether he was seen by Narduzzo and his clan; possibly, for when he got up he remembers that his feet dislodged from the ledge a shower of rattling stones. He would have been, at any rate, a barbarous apparition with wild disheveled hair and blazing skin, and perhaps in West Englewood they still wonder at the sick and terrified face of this compatriot rising in the fading light above their lawn.

Nor does Cass know now whether, had he not met that priest on the way back up through the valley, and somewhere near the town, he might not have slaughtered Poppy and the children and himself, just as he had intended but failed to do in Paris long before. For that was what—to save them from this storm, this exploding sun of his own guilt—he was planning to accomplish. To remove from this earth (as once he said) all mark and sign and stain of himself, his love and his vain hopes and his pathetic creations and his guilt… .

But not far from the town the path upon which he hastened home converged with another, and it was at this junction that he fell into procession with the priest, a runty, graying, big-nosed little man in cassock and yellowing white chasuble. Upon his face there was a look of profound and mortal worry. Behind him, leaning forward in the long-limbed and awkward gait of adolescence, trailed a hulking acolyte with a pimply face and underslung jaw, who carried the vessels of the mass against his breast with an air of great gravity and concern, as if he had let them slip from his hands in the past and had suffered for his clumsiness. Because there was no choice Cass fell in beside the priest as they walked up the slope toward Sambuco.

“La pace sia con vol”
said the priest. “It is hot, is it not? I should not be surprised if we had a thunderstorm.” The priest smelled unwashed and the breath escaped from his lips in small whispery gasps as he labored up the hill. Cass did not answer, for the sun seemed to hover nearer, immeasurable and blazing.

“It has been a very tragic time for Sambuco,” the priest went on, creating conversation. “You are American, are you not? I think I have seen you before. Were you not acquainted with the American
suicida,
the man who killed himself?”

Still Cass made no reply and the priest, as if to fill up the breach, spoke over his shoulder to the acolyte, who had begun to fall behind. “Don’t lag so, Pasquale! Gracious, a big boy like you—” He paused for a moment, then continued: “Many times during these past few hours I have wished to say a
maledizione
against that American. But I have suffered myself to remain calm. Immoral as he was, his torment must have been deep to have caused him to take his own life like that. God will judge him.” He was silent for a moment, then repeated with an air of magnitude: “Yes, God will judge him.”

Suddenly Cass was forced to sit down at the side of the path. He felt his limbs tremble and a shudder, icy cold, passed through him as he thrust his face into his hands, shutting out from sight the terrible impending sun.

“You look ill,” he heard the priest say. “You’re shivering. Do you suffer from malaria? These parts are often very bad—”

“Non è niente”
Cass replied, getting up. “It is the heat. I have come a long way.”

“You must be careful with malaria,” said the priest. “It is rarely any longer a fatal disease, but it must be treated with care. There is the bark of a certain wild juniper bush that grows on the high slopes which certain people use—”

“Atabrino,”
Cass said, wondering why he spoke. “Atabrine. Atabrine takes care of it.”

“I have never heard of that bark. Do you use it? Is it like quinine?”

“It is the heat, Father,” Cass replied, “with me it’s the heat. I have come a long way.”

Now as they resumed their way toward town the dry little priest, lighting up a cigarette, said:
“Dico davvero.
You may be sure that God will judge him. But what sins he must account for before the Lord! What sorrow he brought to so many people! What pain and anguish!
Che devastatore era!”

“What a despoiler he was,” Cass murmured in echo. “Yes, but —” Yes, but what?

“And you must understand,” the priest added hastily, “I do not say that because he was an American. I am deeply fond of Americans. When I was a seminarian we had a friendship correspondence club with other seminarians in all parts of the world. It was my great pleasure to correspond with a young seminarian in the town of, I think it is pronounced, Milwaukee, America. And when he was a priest—his name was Father Switzer; are you from Milwaukee? Perhaps you have encountered him—he paid me a visit in Sorrento, just after the war. A fine jolly man, immensely fat, and very generous too. He gave me a canned ham. Even now we send cards to each other at Eastertime.” Behind them the altar boy stumbled, pitched forward against the wall of the path, then righted himself, mumbling apologies.
“Guarda quel ragazzo!
Pa-squale, what a colt you are! No, my dear sir, I am extremely fond of Americans. It does not matter what country this man was from. But the things he must account for before the seat of the Lord! His own life—to take it was a mortal, and I might say cowardly, sin. But to have taken the life of that innocent girl, that virgin! And that is not all. For wickedness begets an infinity of sorrow. The girl’s father, for example. Who knows? To be sure, he must have been desperately ill. But who knows? Without having had to suffer the extreme shock of his daughter’s death he might still be alive. I do not know. None of us here below knows enough about such matters to truly say. But I ask you, my dear sir, would it be un-Christian to judge that he was responsible for that death, too?” He paused and, when Cass made no reply, said: “Yes, I suspect that it is. Un-Christian I mean.”