Two Weeks in Another Town (7 page)

“Yes,” Jack said. He thought of himself and the first time he had seen Paris, during the war, and the pull that the city had exerted upon him, so that, finally, much later, he had come to live there.

“There are some men,” Despière said, “who can only live fully in the capitals of countries not their own. I am one of them. You,
Dottore,
I suspect, are another. The happy exiles. The
Maestro,
now.” He squinted at Delaney, whose mood had improved somewhat during Despière’s recitation. “The
Maestro
is a different animal. He is invincibly American. That means he is brusque, careless, constantly worried, and uneasy when he finds himself living among people who are not constantly worried.”

“Balls,” Delaney said, but he was smiling.

“He has given us a typically charming response,” Despière said. “On the subject of cities. New York. I could live happily in New York, too. Although I think any American who manages to live there must end up with a crippled soul. What we need,” he declaimed with a wide sweep of his hand, “is an interchange of cities. A city should be regarded as a university—open to qualified and serious students, to be lived in for four or five years for the knowledge to be gained from it—and then to be left for other places—and to be revisited from time to time for brushing up on certain subjects and for sentimental reunion. In Paris,” he said, grinning, “I brush up on comedy and intrigue and camouflage and despair. In Rome on wine and love and architecture and atheism. When I am an old man, I intend to settle on a farm near Frascati, drinking the white wine, and each time I feel the approach of death, come into the city and have a coffee on the Piazza del Popolo…” He stopped and looked across, puzzled, at Jack. “What’s the matter,
Dottore?”

Jack was sitting with his head bent over his plate, his handkerchief up to his nose. He was rocking a little on his chair and the handkerchief was slowly turning red. “Nothing. I’ll see you tomorrow.” He stood up, blinking his eyes because he couldn’t see very well. He tried to smile. “Sorry. I think I’d better go home.”

Despière jumped up. “I’ll go with you,” he said.

Jack waved him back. “I’d rather you wouldn’t,” he said. He started out of the restaurant, gagging, trying not to throw up, walking uncertainly, feeling the sweat come out on his face, not answering the headwaiter when the headwaiter said something to him on the way to the door. Outside, he leaned against the building, breathing deeply of the night air, tasting blood.

I’m never sick, he thought, with an edge of panic, I’m never sick, what’s happening? He had an ominous feeling of change, of crossing over from one season to another, of a cold current suddenly flowing through him, of being exposed and vulnerable to accident. Standing there shakily, feeling the blood wet on his lips, his head tilted back against the cold stone, he had a dreamlike sense of events, words, people being translated into numbers and being put down in a long row of figures and the figures being added up mysteriously, endlessly, by an invisible, noiseless, unstoppable machine. If only I were drunk, he thought, I’d know I’d get over this in the morning. But he had only had half a glass of thin wine. Not velvet, he thought. Chaos begins at the top. Where is the man who hit me?
“Arrivederci, Roma,”
he heard the man’s voice singing, drunken and mocking. When the
Doria
went down.

He shook his head and the bleeding stopped, as suddenly as it had begun. Now he felt the cold night air reviving him. He wasn’t dizzy or nauseated any more, just weary and hazily apprehensive, and he had to open his eyes very wide and take deep, conscious breaths to reassure himself that he was not on a station platform on a wet night, saying good-bye.

He started walking back toward the hotel, pacing slowly, forcing himself to think about taking one step after another and making serious decisions about such things as curbstones and keeping from being run over and whether or not to buy a newspaper at the lighted kiosk on the street corner.

He heard high heels coming up behind him and a woman passed him on the sidewalk and he saw that it was the German whore from the bar. Hamburg, he remembered, and the large reddened hands. Lewdly, he reflected on the nature of the business the red hands had been involved in that night. The woman was wearing red shoes. She was walking fast and she gave the impression of being angry, as though the night had disappointed her. Another number in the addition.

He went into his hotel. From the bar downstairs came the sound of a radio playing a song he had never heard before. Upstairs, the corridors of the hotel were long and silent and dimly lit and the travelers’ shoes outside the doors were like the last personal effects of people who had been executed that afternoon at cocktail time.

He passed twenty doors. There was not a sound coming from behind any of them. The guests, locked in, safe with their unchanging names and undivided lives, slept secretly, not divulging their positions. There were no red shoes before any of the twenty doors. He made sure of that.

He forgot the number of his room and for a moment stood stupidly in the middle of the hushed corridor, overcome with the feeling that he would never find it again. Look for the room with a bloodstained jacket hanging in the wardrobe. No, he remembered, the old lady is cleaning it.
Per pulire, per favore, Dottore.

Then he had a brilliant idea. He looked at his key. There was a big plastic tag to which the key was attached and on the tag there was a number. 654. He was favorably impressed with his wisdom and the cold and logical precision of his thinking processes. He traveled cleverly down the corridor, avoiding both walls, and stopped in front of 654. He had the feeling that he had never been there before, but that he had been at another door, marked with the same number, and that significant transactions had taken place there. Night clerks, making their nighttime errors. Where had the other door been? In what city? New York, Los Angeles, London? There was the smell of laurel and eucalyptus, tropic and medicinal, about 654. Beverly Hills, he remembered, Delaney’s town. Delaney’s punishment, with the fog coming in from the Pacific, and a girl in a convertible late at night and a dog in the back seat that kept barking, the bared, carnivorous, California fangs of love.

He put the key into the lock and went into the room, bachelor-like, without children, that he was sure he had never visited before, smelling the eucalyptus and the laurel. The glass on the etchings of Rome reflected the light from the glass chandelier coldly, cutting medieval Rome into chaotic fragments, rhomboid battlements, polygonal towers, unrecognizable to the dead men who had built it.

He went into the bathroom and stared at his face, first over one basin, then over the other. One for me and one for whoever. He almost recognized himself, like the ghost watchers coming out of theatres year after year, and his name was on the tip of his tongue. I bet it’s him, he said, in a girl’s voice.

He went into the bedroom and looked at the picture of his wife and his son and his daughter. The picture had been taken in the Alps, on a skiing holiday, and a whole family was smiling there in the mountain sunshine, the sunny claims of memory. The helicopter was down, in a swirl of snow, on the ledge at three thousand meters, with the dead men in it, in polite attitudes, waiting to be photographed. He sat on the bed and looked at the telephone and thought of himself picking the instrument up and saying, “I will take the midnight plane, or the dawn plane, or the unscheduled plane.” But he didn’t touch the telephone.

He undressed, hanging his clothes up carefully (the liars who advertised valises that did not crease three suits). He lay naked in the darkness between the sheets, saying to himself, Morning, morning.

He thought of the red shoes and the red German hands, handling lire and flesh. Then he slept.

T
HE BULL ROARS IN
his pen, but the president, in a black mask, and wearing a Berber headdress, comes into the ring and declares the bull unsuitable. The crowd attempts to pour gasoline over him. It is imperative, for a reason that is not clear, to get the bull out of his pen without permitting him to enter the arena. Two attendants, dressed in white, goad a white cow, theoretically in heat, into the passageway, lit by a glass chandelier, before the entrance to the bull’s pen. The cow is frightened and makes difficulties and wedges herself across the passageway. The white-clothed attendants struggle with the white cow to straighten her out and present her most appetizing, or bull-baiting, view to the pen entrance. The bull roars underground. The cow lows, tenor, then contralto, tosses her head from side to side, supplicating the chandelier. The president, still dressed in black, appears, unharmed, legally elected, and raises the iron door to the bull’s pen. The bull comes out, black, humped, wide-horned, like a wave going over sand. The froth, the spume, the wrack, the curl of the breaker, the suck of the tide, is Attendant Number One, impaled, then trampled, no longer white.

After humanity, the animal kingdom. The bull regards the white, supplicating cow, theoretically in heat, opts for death as against procreation, bunches his legs delicately, drives the horns into the white, frantic flank, so appetizing on other occasions. The white cow is no longer white, no longer standing, her flank no longer frantic, her supplication finished. The bull stands beside her, dreaming under the glass chandelier.

Humanity’s turn again. Attendant Number Two, dressed in white, races down the corridor, past the box stall where I am hidden, crouched behind the bolted iron door, next to a man whose face is averted and whose name is on the tip of my tongue.

The attendant’s feet on the corridor make a sandy, dragging noise, like the sound of the wire brush on a drummer’s traps. From his throat comes a noise. Water glugging down a tin rain pipe. Attendant Number Two flees into the stall next to mine and bolts the door, breathing rainily. The bull trots up to the door and surveys it without malice. Then he breaks it down. From the next stall come the sounds one might expect to hear, loud, explicit, intermingled with calls on Christ, as the bull does the work he has been bred to do.

Then Attendant Number Two is as silent as Attendant Number One, as silent as the white cow.

The bull reappears in the corridor, in a dim light, and snuffs intelligently at the door to the stall in which I crouch, next to the man whose face is averted. I hunch against the iron, not breathing, seeing both sides of every question, every door. The other man remains rigid and motionless. The bull decides that the shoes outside the door are data of no importance and turns to seek more interesting diversions. But the man with the averted face has passed his limit of silence and immobility. He moves, he makes a noise, he sighs, he bubbles, he moans. I jab him sharply in reproof, my index finger going in up to the knuckle, between the fourth and fifth ribs. The bull stops, comes back to the door, discovers humanity on the other side of the iron, Columbus off the coast of Hispaniola, land birds, the smell of flowers, sweet water. The bull charges the door. It clangs, but it holds. The bull charges again and again, the horns splintering, sparks flying, the door groaning, the rhythm increasing, becoming intolerable, the dust like rain, the noise like the scream of a jet in close support. I throw my weight against the door, flesh against iron, shuddering with each assault, howling wordlessly. The other man sits on the yellow straw of the stall, his face averted.

The door holds.

The bull backs off, considering.

Then he begins to leap, a lion with horns, athletic, ambitious, an iron gazelle, his hooves reaching higher with each leap, his horns like torches in the open space above the door. Finally, he gets his front legs over the top of the door. He hangs there, filling the space between the door and the ceiling beams. He looks down at me and the other man, who has turned his back and sits regarding the rear wall of the stall.

The bull stares down reflectively, with mild, fatal eyes, and I know that now is the time for distraction, for song and
d
ance and laughter. I go to stage center, squarely in the middle of the stall, and looking winningly at the bull, who has paid his entrance fee and deserves the best, I begin to dance and sing: tap, soft-shoe, buck and wing, modern, classic.
Petrouchka,
entrechats,
Swan Lake, Fancy Free,
my head lolling from side to side, the sweat all over, the music wailing from my throat, drums, violins, French horn, triangle, as the bull watches with intelligent interest, bemused, hung by his horns to the rafters, his front legs, neatly slung over the top of the door, front row in the balcony.

I am singing the chorus of “Walkin’ My Baby Back Home” for the third time when I sense that the man behind me has turned and no longer has his face averted. I have to see the man’s face, I have to say, “Oh, friend, don’t die with your head averted
—”
and for a hundredth of a dream I look away from the appreciative, placid eyes of the bull, to know the face of my partner.

Then the bull moves, the door trembles…

These are the dreams of the Roman night

He awoke.

The room was dark and quiet and no light came in through the cracks in the shutters or through the split between the curtains. The curtains rustled softly in a light breeze.

He lay tight between the sheets, cold with the sweat of the dream, on the lip of death. He had the feeling that if the dream had gone on a moment more he would have seen the man’s face and that the face would have been that of the drunk who had hit him earlier that night. In another room in Rome the drunk was snoring, smiling in his sleep, content with the night’s work.

Why bulls? Jack thought. I haven’t been in Spain for three years.

He sat up and turned on the light and looked at the clock on the table beside the bed. It was four fifteen. He reached for a cigarette and lit it. He rarely smoked and he hadn’t smoked in the middle of the night for many years, but he had to have something to do with his hands. He was surprised that his hands did not shake as he held the match.