The Light in the Piazza and Other Italian Tales (28 page)

There was a sudden silence, rather like somebody had died, and the street door to the
negozio
could be heard to open. Signora Rossi broke into a laugh, at first an honest laugh—possibly the only one she had ever given—shading immediately into a ripple of pleasant amusement of the elegant
padrona
at her pretty little
assistente;
she turned on her narrow black stiletto heels and, having touched her hair, folded her hands in that certain pleasing way and moved toward the door.)

When Jim Wilbourne reached his own apartment, there at the head of the first flight of steps that ran down into the open courtyard, the landlord was lurking, paunchy and greasy haired with a long straight nose and tiny whistle-sized mouth, a walking theater of everything that had been done to him by the Wilbournes and all he could do in return because of it; here was the demon, the one soul who proved that inferno did exist, at least in Italy. Jim Wilbourne felt the back of his neck actually stiffen at the sight of Signor Micozzi in his white linen suit. The demon’s energy, like the devastating continuous inexhaustible energy of Italy, was always fresh and ready for the fray; the
time was always now. Jesus, another round, Jim Wilbourne thought; will I die before I leave this place? Smoking, saying nothing, he climbed the stair to within two steps of the waiting figure that had bought that new white suit, it would seem, especially to quarrel in. The two of them, on perfect eye level, stared at each other. Jim Wilbourne dropped his cigarette, stepped on it and walked deliberately past. His hand was on the bolt when the first words fell in all the smear of their mock courtesy.

“Scusi un momento, Signor Wilbourne, per cortesia.”

For a moment, at the door, they ran through the paces of their usual nasty exchange. It was all he could do to keep from striking physically; in Italy that would have involved him so deeply he would never be free; Italy was the original tar baby; he knew that; getting out was the thing now; he had a sense of salvage and rescue, of swimming the ocean.

“Scusi, scusi!”

“Prego!”

They were shouting by now, their mutual contempt oozing wretchedly out of every word. He stepped inside and slammed the door.

His wife poked her head into the corridor. She was working; she was always working. Thin, in a pair of knee-length slacks of the sort nobody at all in Italy wore, which hung awkwardly, showing how much weight she’d lost in one nagging illness after another, her dark hair lank and flat, lying close to her head, framing like two heavy pencil lines her sharp face and great flat eyes. “All that bastard had to do was stand a few inches to the left when he passed the window, and I would have dropped this right on him,” she said. She pointed to a ceramic umbrella stand she had made herself. It must have weighed seventy pounds at least. Her voice, slightly hoarse by nature with a ready tough fundamental coarseness in everything she observed when they were alone (she was never much “like herself” with other people), was a sort of life to him. He could not even remember life without it. “They called from the university about
some survey on Neapolitan family management. It was due last week. I called your office, but nobody answered.” “I was there all morning, but nobody rang.” A world of old quarrels hung in shadowy phalanxes between every word of an exchange like this one, but both of them wearied to pour enough energy into any one of them to make it live. He stood in the doorway of her studio where she had even hung up a Van Gogh reproduction—the whole place looked American now. The Italian furniture had acquired the aspect of having been bought in a Third Avenue junk shop. “The dear old telephone system,” she said, turning away, the corner of her mouth bitten in. He picked up the paper and stood reading it, leaning against a gilded chest of drawers, pushing at the dark hair above his ear with restless fingers. How would she have picked it up, he wondered, the umbrella stand? She would doubtless have managed. It was then the phone started ringing. “If that’s the landlord—” he said. He knew it was. It was a favorite trick of Signor Micozzi’s, when the door slammed in his face, to circle down to the bar on the corner and ring upstairs, continuing the argument without the loss of a syllable. Martha Ingram would never get into this sort of mess—The thought wrote itself off the page. He crashed the paper to the floor. His wife whirled around and saw the way he looked. “Now, Jim, please!”

“Look, you realize how much deposit he took on this place? Three hundred and fifty dollars. If he so much as hesitates about giving it back.” “That’s what he came for! Of course he hesitates. He’s never had the slightest intention of giving it back.” “All right. Okay. He’s in for a surprise or two.” “But not to him, not to him! Don’t you touch him!” She suddenly began to sob without crying, a grating desperate sound, biting out between the jerks of her breath, “If you touch him we’ll never get out of here, we’ll be here forever in this country, this horrible place, I’ll die, I’ll die here!” She leaped at him, latching on to his arm with both hands, and she had grown so light and he had grown so angry that when he lifted his arm she came up with it, right off the floor, as handy as a monkey. They both began to
laugh—it was ludicrous, and it must have been soon after that they started figuring things out.

Her cry was over; she had even combed her hair. Then she began to bully and mock and dare him slightly; as totally disenchanted as ever, she had begun to be herself again. In some ways he listened, in others he didn’t have to; most of all he was drawn back to where he was a few streets after he departed from Jean Coggins for all eternity, when, abruptly halting in a little crooked alley all alone, at some equi-distance—mentally speaking, at least—between Martha and his wife, he gave over to wonder; for the first time, astringent and hard with himself, he allowed it to happen, he allowed the wonder to operate; fully, beautifully, he watched it curve and break in a clean magnificent wave.

What had he taken there, what had he conquered, so much as a city—a white, ample, ripe city, with towers, streets, parks, treasures? One bold leap of the imagination back there in Venice (the sort of thing he had always wanted to do but had never brought off quite so perfectly) had taken him soaring across the stale and turgid moat of her surrounding experience, had landed him at her very gates. It had been all blindly impulsive, perhaps cruel, but one thing had to be said for it—it had worked.

But there was something he knew and this was it: he could never have created her, and a thousand times, in turning her head, or putting on a glove, she had silently, unconsciously, praised whoever had put her together, ironically, the object of their merciless destruction—Jesus, what a trap! He rebelled at the whole godawful picture: it wasn’t true. Love did not have to refer to anybody; that could all be changed in five minutes of wanting to. He had only to tell her, say so, absolutely—For an instant his mind crazed over like shattered glass, and it was some time before he hauled himself together, as though after another blind charge, this time at a wall, the first of many. Was it there or later, he allowed himself—briefly, but he did allow it—a moment’s wonder at himself, recognizing a young man not even thirty and what he had challenged, taken, known. He knew
in what sense he was the possessor still, and in what sense no matter when he left he would always be.

(About here he came to a corner, and frowning, leaned against a wall. Grace Hartwell saw him; she was coming down from the dressmaker, hurrying home to pack.)

He was clearly aware of the many ways in which his Italian year wore the aspect of failure, of an advance halted, his professional best like chariot wheels miring in the mud, nothing, in short, to be proud of.

He walked on, at last, with a dogged, almost classical stubbornness. This was what it had worn down to. He would live beyond himself again; he would, in future, be again gleaming and new, set right like a fine mechanism; he had to go to the States for that. But in this hour, blazed at by a sudden foreign sun, he presented to him-self neither mystery nor brilliance, any more than he did to his wife or the landlord, in whose terms he did not even despise to live, if only his energy held out till the shores of Italy dropped behind him forever. But Martha, too, had been Italy—a city, his own, sinking forever. There was the wall again, blank and mocking. He could go crashing into it again, over and over and over, as many times as he wanted to.

15

It was George Hartwell who got the full force of the Wilbourne departure after they had left Rome earlier than they had said they were going to, in the night. Now every day or so, the landlord, Signor Micozzi, called Hartwell and “Yes,” he said, “
Va bene,”
he said, and
“Grazie, signor console, molto gentile, sissignore,”
said Signor Micozzi.

Hartwell gave Signor Micozzi appointments when no one else could get one, while the important people went across the hall to see Martha; he swiveled back in his chair and listened and listened…
his mind wandered, sometimes he dozed; he could pick up the refrain whenever he cared to.
“Gente cattiva quei Wilbourne. Cosa potevo fare … cosa? Sono assolutamente assolv tamente senza
…”

“Ma Signor Micozziy lei ha già ricevuto il deposito, non e vero?”

“Si, ma questo, signor console, non deve pensare che il deposito e abbastanza per questo
…
hanno rotto tutto!
…
Tutto e rovinato!”

One day soon now, he was going to haul himself together. One has to wake oneself; one cannot go on forever, unraveling the waste, the inconsequential portions of a dream that was not even one’s own. So one day soon now he was going to stop it. He was going to say, like any tourist in the market,
“Quanto allora?”
He might even write a check. It was his American conscience, that was it. …

Poor George Hartwell, there was one success he had had. Everyone assured him of it—the Cogginses, of course. He could take pride in them; who would have thought that Italians would let any American tell them about opera?

He left Martha’s doorway. The sun struck him a glorious blow and the little fountain pulsed from white to green in the new season.

Ah, yes, the Cogginses.
Veni, vidi, vici
.

He looked for his car and found it. Dorothy, Richard and Jean.

They had gone off triumphantly to take the boat at Genoa, had been waved off at the station by contingents of Roman friends, leaving time to go by Venice and revisit that same pensione, having sent on ahead to the boat crate upon crate of tourist junk, a whole case of country wines (a gift from the landlord, by now a lifelong friend). There were also a package of citations and awards from a dozen appreciative music companies, autographed photos of half the singers in Italy and ninety percent of all the chocolate in Perugia, which had been showered upon Jean by admirers from Trastavere to the Parioli, from Milan to Palermo. Perhaps at this moment she was talking to Alfredo again in the pensione, giggling at his soft Venetian accent, all in a palazzo set on waters crackling in the brilliant light, or strolling about the garden, hearing a motorboat churn past. Waiting for Sunday dinner in the central hallways, with one or two of the
same old guests and the proprietor with his head in the books … waiting for Sunday dinner. It was a Western tradition, a binding point for the whole world. And why not? In his vision of Venice, for a moment, Martha Ingram and all her long mad vision stood redeemed. But not for long. Jim Wilbourne was never far enough away; his head turned slowly; his regard scorched slowly across the scene; as though the Cogginses had been in an eighteenth-century engraving deployed in each pleasant detail about their Venetian casa, the edges curled, the loosely woven paper bent backward, the images distorted, changed—one turned away.

Hartwell at last got home, and opened the windows in an empty flat, fetched bread and cheese from the kitchen, fought steadily against the need for whiskey and sat down to unlock the dispatch case. His wife, so easily evoked, crossed the ocean at his nod to stand at his elbow and remark with her warm wit that along with all those dispatches, briefings, summaries, minutes and memoranda from the embassy, he might possibly draw out a poison toad, a severed hand, some small memento of Martha Ingram.

But he did not.

The reports she had done for him were smooth and crisp, brilliant, unblemished. Their cutting edge was razor-keen; their substance unrolled like bolts of silk. There was nothing to add, nothing to take away. It was sinister, and he did not want to think about it alone. But he had to. Who has been destroyed in this as much as me? he wondered. Gordon Ingram is not alone. No, it was against George Hartwell’s present and fond breast that the hurled spear struck.

Knowing this, he could not stand it any longer.

Getting up, slamming out, he got into his car and went nosing about the streets again. The Grand Hotel, a Sunday vision, also, elegance and the Grand Tour, too little exercise, every wish granted, marmalade for tea, and if you’re willing to pay extra, tours can be arranged through the—He had charged halfway across the lobby before he stopped to think, to inquire.

“A little
signora americana
in blue,
sissignore
. She is there,
eccola là.
”

And there she was. He saw her. She was real. Martha was not that crazy.

She was over in a far corner before some enormous windows reaching to the ceiling, canopied with drawn satin portieres, and she was not alone. The Italian floor cleaner who had mopped and dusted the lobby there for at least ten years but had never once before this moment sat down in one of the sofas was now beside her. She had gone upstairs and, using her dictionary (as Hartwell was later to hear), had written down the message that she had to give to someone, and now she was reading it off. A piece of light blue letter paper trembled in her little crooked hand.