Set This House on Fire (79 page)

They had reached a rise in the path, and from this place the town could be seen above them, timeless and golden in the evening light, riding like an old ship ravaged but serene above all in the benign twilit glow of its antiquity, and a bell from the church tower rang out even as they gained the rise, one single silver chime descending upon the lemon groves and the terraced vineyards and the walled paths zigzagging like the brown blasted trails of lightning toward the sea. Smoke from the priest’s cigarette fumed about them; the acolyte, sidling up beside Cass, made an unspeakable sound in the back of his throat, spat against the wall, and clapped the holy vessels to his breast. “What is that?” said Cass, halting. “What is that, Father? What did you say?”

“Un-Christian,” the priest replied, looking up with curiosity into Cass’ eyes. “I only said that it is doubtless un-Christian to judge a man when he is only
indirectly
the cause of—”

“No,” Cass said, “the man himself. The other one. Her father. You say he is dead.”

“Indeed, he died only a few hours ago. I have just come from his side.”

“Michele—”

“Yes, that was his given name. His patronymic was Ricci, a strange irony considering his circumstances. I do not know who told him of his daughter’s death. I suspect it was his wife, who seems very stupid, like most peasant women. A shame. He might have lived. But this afternoon when I arrived his will to live was quite obviously gone. Oh, what sorrow in our town!”

Cass sat down on the edge of the wall. “And so he is dead,” he said to the priest.

“Yes, my dear sir, and saved from damnation by the closest margin. Because when I came to him he was in a frenzy, shrieking curses at me like a madman. A demon! But as I say, his will to live was over and so finally he settled down and I administered to him the last rites. He slept for a while and then I thought he was gone. But after a bit he woke up, grinding his teeth and weeping. Mistaught wretch. He kept cursing our Saviour, and he called out over and over again for his daughter. You seem to have an interest in this man. Can you tell me what it was he was suffering from? Was it some form of cancer? I have never seen anything like it before, and I have watched so many people die. Because he lay there for a while and he stopped weeping and he closed his eyes again and he became weaker and weaker, and this time I thought surely he was gone. Believe me, I have watched so many people die. But my dear sir, listen to this. Presently he awoke again and I observed that he had both hands grasped around his root. Though he was not in the virile state, of course. I thought for a moment that this was only some childish peasant gesture that he had gone back to in his extremity. But now his eyes opened and I heard him cry out:
‘Animo! Animo!
Courage!’ he cried. And then, as God is my witness, from that root of his burst forth the most stupendous fountain of blood I have ever seen! And in the midst of this terrible stream of blood I heard him cry out again:
‘Animo!
Courage!’ Such blood! It was everywhere! And then his hands fell limp, and then his eyes closed. And he lay back and died. Do you suppose this was some form of—”

Cass rose to his feet, fever-swept by the sun, storm-hunted, amid the flood of ancient groaning seas.

“Tutto!”
he whispered. “All, then?
All?”
He stepped toward the priest.
“Help me.”

But the priest, who was helpless, took one step away as Cass took another step forward and then collapsed unconscious in the dust.

“But I came back,” Cass said to me, “I came back home. Not that night or the next day or even the next night, but early in the morning of the day after that, before the dawn came up. I was not alone. Luigi walked me from the police station; I had been there all that time. He shook hands with me at the palace door, and then he said good-by to me. I remember how still and dark the streets were. And I stood there for a minute in the chill of the morning, watching Luigi as he walked back up the deserted street with that slow, ambling, flat-footed policeman’s gait of his and then disappear into the darkness. The madness was not quite over… .

“I went into the courtyard. There was a light burning and I could see where the movie people had wrecked the tiles, the long streaks gouged out in the floor. The place was a mess and I remember pausing, looking up at Mason’s balcony as if I half-expected some sound, some stir, perhaps good old Rosemarie to come mincing out as she used to do, primping, stroking that hair of hers and puckering up her mouth in boredom as she waited for Mason, and indeed for an instant I somehow thought I heard Mason’s voice far-off and muffled in that tired and peevish vi- brato, but it was only some other voice I heard, close by the town, calling out in sleep. So I turned and walked across the courtyard until I came to the door; it was ajar as usual, and I walked in. I could barely see, but I could tell that someone had cleaned up the place. The table was cleared, the easel was upright, and there was a chemical smell in the air, as if the place had been sprayed for mosquitoes. I went on downstairs in the dark. I could hear that familiar trickling night-sound, the toilet leaking, and I passed the bedrooms where I could hear breathing and I knew the kids were sound asleep. Finally I came to the last room and I softly opened the door. Again I could hear breathing, this time that gentle sibilance which had been part of my nights for so many years, and I knew that Poppy was asleep, too. I went close to the bed and looked down at her, and she stirred, still asleep, and then buried her head in the pillow with one hand crumpled beneath her like a child’s. I pulled the sheet over her shoulder and then I walked over to the window and sat down and gazed out at the gulf. There was not a sound anywhere. I could smell that warm rose-fragrance from the garden below, and beyond was the sea, blacker than the night. There were fishing boats far out toward Paestum, and on each boat a globe of clear twinkling light, grouped together like stars. For a moment I had a dizzy feeling as if I were looking straight downward into the belly of some new and marvelous constellation.

“I felt drained of strength and will, past thought of grief, past thought of anything except for that old vast gnawing hunger which began to grow and grow in me like a flower. And as I sat there, with the hunger growing and blossoming inside me, I knew that I had come to the end of the road and had found there nothing at all. There was nothing. There was a nullity in the universe so great as to encompass and drown the universe itself. The value of a man’s life was nothing, and his destiny nothingness. What more proof did I need than that I had traveled halfway across the earth in search of some kind of salvation, and had found it, only to have it shattered in my fingertips? What more proof did I need than that in the bargain I had slain a man wrongly, had taken a man’s life for a crime he did not commit? The hunger persisted. I looked out at the sea, almost expecting to see the terrible storm and the boiling and churning again, the fire and the tornadoes, but my brain was clear and the hallucinations were gone. I thought of being. I thought of nothingness. I put my head into my hands, and for a moment the sharp horror of
being
seemed so enormous as to make the horror of nothingness less than nothing by its side, and I began to tremble, and for long minutes I sat there, wondering if now at last wasn’t the moment to take Poppy and the kids in a single swift hell of blood and butchery, and be done with it all forever. It began to prey on me, this thought, obsess me, and it must have gotten me so worked up that I made a noise in my throat, because I heard Poppy stir and give a sigh, and I turned in the chair and gazed toward the bed. She was still sleeping. It would be easy. But right then I heard Luigi’s voice, adamant and outraged as it had been not more than an hour before: “Tu
pecchi nell’avere tanto senso di colpa!
You sin in this guilt of yours! You
sin
in your guilt!’ And suddenly I ceased trembling and became calm as if like some small boy on the verge of a tantrum I had been halted, the childish fit arrested by some almighty parental voice. I sat back again and gazed out at the dark gulf, and the spell of anxiety vanished, as quickly as it had come.

“Because that is just what Luigi had told me, you see, when I woke up in the police station. Gentle, kindly, lost Luigi—he raised the roof, he shackled me with handcuffs to the leg of a cot, and he gave me bloody hell. And as I sat there in the room with Poppy I began to know that what he said was true.

“Because when I woke up in the police station I had one single thought left in my mind. And that was that I should be punished for what I had done as swiftly as possible. That I should be taken away and clapped in irons and made to serve out the years in retribution for this monstrous thing that I had done. Yet when I woke up I could not understand this calm of Luigi’s, this benign tolerance—as if I were a friendly guest instead of a murderer apprehended and done for. I was lying on a cot. The strength was all drained out of me, but the fever was gone and I was so hungry that I was chewing at the air. It must have been some time around midnight—there was a clock on the wall—though of what day I had no idea. There was just the two of us in this tiny little room. The place was badly lit and it had that dry musty smell about it of rat shit behind the walls and plain dirt and old crumbling plaster, a real Italian police station. And the first thing I saw was that face, not so much smiling down at me—Luigi almost never smiled—as radiating a sort of enormous and godawful solicitude which somehow always had the effect of a tender and wistful smile even when the face was as solemn as the face on a hanging judge. I asked him how long I had slept, and he told me a night and a day and part of another night. Then I asked him if Poppy and the kids were O.K., and he said yes, they were O.K., and he mentioned you and how you had watched out after them, and he told me to lie back and take it easy. So I did. Then he gave me some bread and cheese to eat and some
mortadella
and a bottle of that greasy orange soda they make in Naples which tastes like rancid butter. Right then, right after I’d finished gulping all this down, I asked him. I said: ‘Well, when do I go? When do you take me to Salerno?’ But he didn’t answer. He got up from the chair with his bandolier clicking and clacking and he walked over to the window. The night was still and dark, and I could hear a dog barking way off toward Scala, and it reminded me not of the midsummer that it was but of cold autumn nights at home, long ago. I asked him again and still he didn’t answer. Then I noticed something odd. I saw that on one of his sleeves the corporal’s chevron had been torn off and that in its place hung the chevron of a sergeant, dangling by a thread. And I said: ‘Why the sergeant’s stripes, Luigi?’ And he said: ‘I
am
a sergeant.’ Then I said: ‘Parrinello?’ And he said:
‘Finito. I
am in charge of the
carabinieri
in Sambuco. In other words, I am in charge of myself.’ Then I said: ‘You really mean Parrinello is gone?’ And he said: ‘Transferred. Transferred I believe to Eboli.’ And he added: ‘They will remove some kilos off his gut there.’ To which I said:
‘Auguri.’
But he said: I need no congratulations. What is a couple of thousand more lire a month?
Poco o nulla.
But soon I’ll get a subordinate and I’ll be able to browbeat him. To dominate him. I’ll become a Parrinello. I’ll grow fat and surly, and the cycle will be complete.’

“I asked him again when he was going to take me to Salerno and deliver me to the authorities. I can’t tell you my anguish to get this thing over and done with, now that I fully knew what I had done. There was nothing left. I felt as empty and as crushed as an old tin can at the dump and all I wanted was to be buried, covered up, entombed forever. I said:
‘Vieni,
Luigi. Let us get started And it was then that he turned and came back and sat down in the most grave and meticulous way and told me what he had done—his lie and his cover-up for me, and all the rest. And he had even done more than that. Because at some time during the next day, after Francesca died, that detective, Di Bartolo, had begun to have his doubts about Francesca’s story. Not that he doubted Luigi—by then Luigi was his fair-haired boy—but it had occurred to him, as well it might, that the whole tale Luigi reported to him had been only a kind of wild fantasy in the head of a dying girl. But Luigi, mind you, had already counted on this, and late the night before what he had done to bolster his own lie was to locate and spirit away the shoes that the funeral people had taken off Mason’s body and he took these and with a flashlight he went up to the Villa Cardassi and there, by God, he erased every footprint he could find near the parapet, mine and Mason’s, and then carefully traced a line of Mason’s footprints from the brink straight backward to the villa and the path, erasing his own as he went. And for good measure, stumbling across the bloody stone I’d used on Mason, he heaved this away off into the brush where it wouldn’t ever be found. So that the next day when Luigi and Di Bartolo went up to the villa there was a perfect
single
running track of footprints leading right up to the exact spot where Mason went over. The track of a man bent on suicide. And the shoes from Mason’s body fit these tracks to the exact centimeter, right on down to the embossed design in the crepe soles. And as Luigi went through all this, telling me how Di Bartolo had finally closed the case off as murder and suicide, it occurred to me in the most desolate and creepy way that by these lies of his, all this mad deception, what he had done was to simultaneously allow me to escape into freedom and to trap himself as securely as if he had been a bug caught in the sticky gut of a pitcher plant. For now of course he couldn’t recant, he couldn’t alter his story; he was in as deep as he could get. Nor could I go to Salerno and give myself up, prove that I was the culprit without implicating Luigi and impaling him on a hook he’d never be able to wriggle off of. Yet as he told me these things and it dawned upon me the position we were both in, sheer crazy panic came over me: it was the idea of liberty. For here my only idea had been to give myself up, immure myself, entomb myself for my crime. And the notion of this awful and imminent liberty was as frightening to me as that terror that must overcome people who dread open spaces. The feeling was the same. Yearning for enclosure, for confinement, I was faced with nothing but the vista of freedom like a wide and empty plain. I shot up on that cot and I said: ‘Why did you he for me, Luigi?
Why,
in the name of God?’