Dictation (11 page)

He sat on the rim of the bathtub and watched her. He did not feel especially sympathetic, but he did not feel disgust either. It was as if he were watching a waterfall—a thing belonging to nature. Only the odor was unnatural. Now and then she turned her head and threw him a wild look.
Condemn what thou art, that thou mayest deserve to be what thou art not,
he said to himself; it was Saint Augustine. It seemed right to him to think of that just then. The woman went on vomiting. A spurt of colorless acrid liquid rushed from her mouth. Watching serenely, he thought of some grand fountain where dolphins, or else infant cherubim, spew foamy white water from their bottomless throats. He saw her shamelessly: she was a solid little nymph. She was the coarse muse of Italia. He recited to himself,
If to any man the tumult of the flesh were silenced, silenced the phantasies of earth, waters, and air, silenced, too, the poles.

She reached back with one hand and grasped the braid that lay along her neck. Her nape, bared, was running with sweat, and also with tears that trailed from the side of her mouth and around. It was a short robust neck, like the stem of a mushroom.

"Are you over it?" he said.

She lifted her knees from the floor and sat back on her heels. Now that she had backed away from it, he could see the shape of the toilet bowl. It was, to his eyes, foreign-looking: high, much taller than the American variety, narrow. The porcelain lid, propped upright, was bright as a mirror. The rag she had been scrubbing it with was lost in her skirt.

Now she began to hiccup.

"Is it over?"

She leaned her forehead along the base of the washstand. The light was not good—it had to travel all the way from the lamp on the table in the bedchamber and through the door, dimming as it came; nevertheless her color seemed high. Surely her lips were swollen; they could not have been intended to bulge like that. He believed he understood just how such a face ought to have been composed. With her head at rest on the white pillar of the sink, she appeared to him (he said these words to himself slowly and meticulously, so clarified and prolonged was the moment for him) like an angel seen against the alabaster column that upholds the firmament. Her hiccups were loud, frequent; her shoulders jerked, and still the angel did not fall.

She said,
"Le dispiace se mi siedo qui? Sono molto stanca."

The pointless syllables—i t was his first day in Italy—made him conscious of his stony stare. His own head felt stone: was she a Medusa?—those long serpents of her spew. It occurred to him that, having commenced peacefully enough, he was far less peaceful now. He was, in fact, staring with all his might, like a statue, a stare without definition or attachment, and that was foolish. There was a glass on the shelf over the sink. He stood up and stepped over her feet (the sensation of himself as great arch-of-triumph darkening her body) and filled the glass with water from the tap and gave it to her.

She drank as quickly as a child, absorbed. He could hear her throat race and shut on its hinge, and race again. When the glass was empty she said,
"Molto gentile da parte sua. Mi sento così da ieri. È solo un piccolo problema."
All at once she saw how it was for him: he was a foreigner and could not understand. Recognition put a smoke of anxiety over her eyes. She said loudly,
"Scusi"
and lapsed into a brevity of English as peculiar as any he had ever heard, surprising in that it was there at all: "No belief! " She jumped up on her thick legs and let her braid hang.
"Ho vomitato!"
she called—a war cry roughened by victorious good humor. The rag separated itself from the folds of her big skirt and slid to the floor, and just then, while he was contemplating the density of her calves and the wonder of their roundness and heaviness, she seemed as he watched to grow lighter and lighter, to escape from the rough aspiring weight that had pulled her up, and she fell like a rag, without a noise.

Her lids had slapped down. He lifted her and carried her—heaved her—onto the bed and felt for her pulse. She was alive. He had never before been close to a fainted person. If he had not seen for himself how in an instant she had shut herself off, like a faucet turned, he would have been certain that the woman he had set down on the naked gray mattress was asleep.

The night window was no better than a blind drawn to: no sight, no breath, no help. Only the sweet grassy smells of the dark mountainside. He ran halfway down the spiral stone staircase and then thought, Suppose, while I am gone, the woman dies. She was only the chambermaid; she was a sound girl, her cheeks vigorous and plump; he knew she would not die. He locked the door and lay down beside her in the lamplight, riding his little finger up and down her temple. It was a marvel and a luxury to be stretched out there with her, unafraid. He assured himself she would wake and not die.

He was in a spiritual condition. He had been chaste for almost six months—demandingly pure, even when alone, even inside his secret mind. His mind was a secret cave, immaculately swept and spare. It was an initiation. He was preparing himself for the first stages of a kind of monasticism. He did not mean that he would go off and become a monk in a monastery: he knew how he was of the world. But he intended to be set apart in his own privacy: to be strong and transcendent, above the body. He did not hope to grow into a saint, yet he wanted to be more than ordinary, even while being counted as "normal." He wanted to possess himself first, so that he could yield himself, of his own accord, to the forces of the spirit.

Now here was his temptation. It seemed right—foreordained—that he would come to Italy to be lured and tempted. The small rapture versus the greater rapture—the rapture in the body and the rapture in God, and he was for the immensity. Who would not choose an ocean, with its heaven-tugged tides, over a single drop? He looked down at the woman's face and saw two wet black drops, each one an opened eye.

"Do you feel sick again? Are you all right?" he said, and took away his little finger.

"No belief! No belief!"

The terrible words, in her exhausted croak, stirred him to the beginning of a fury. What he had done, what he had endured, to be able to come at last to belief! And a chambermaid, a cleaner of toilets, could cry so freely against it!

He knew her meaning: she was abashed, shame punched out her tears, she was sunk in absurdity and riddle. But still it shook him—he turned against her—because every day of his life he had to make this same pilgrimage to belief all over again, starting out each dawn with the hard crow's call of no belief.

"No belief! No belief!" she croaked at him.

"Stop that."

She raised herself on her wrist, her arm a bent pole. "Signore,
mi scusi,
I make the room—"

"Stay where you are."

She gestured at the pile of sheets on the chair, and fell back again.

"Do they know you're sick? Does Mr. Wellborn know?"

She said laboriously, "I am two day sick." She touched her stomach and hiccupped. "I am no sick two day like now."

He could not tell from this whether she meant she was better or worse. "Do you want more water?"

"Signore,
grazie,
no water."

"Where do you stay?" He did not ask where she lived; he could not imagine that she lived anywhere.

Her look, still wet, trailed to the window. "In the town."

"That's all the way down that long road I drove up."

"Sì."

He reflected. "Do you always work so late?"

"Signore, in this morning when I am sick I no make the room, I come back to make finish the room. I make finish all the room"—her eyes jumped in the direction of the Villa—"only the signore's room I no make."

He let out his breath: a wind so much from the well of his ribs that it astonished him. "They don't know where you are." He was in awe of his own lung. "You can stay here," he said.

"Oh, Signore,
grazie,
no—"

"Stay," he said, and elevated his little finger. Slowly, slowly, he dragged it across her forehead. A late breeze, heavy with the lazy fragrance of some alien night bloomer, had cooled her. He tasted no heat in the tiny salted cavern between her nose and her mouth. The open window brought him the smell of water; during the taxi's climb to the Villa Garibaldi he had scarcely permitted himself a glimpse of old shining Como, but now his nostrils were free and full: he took in the breath of the lake while again letting out his own. He unbuttoned his shirt and wiped every cranny of her face with it, even inside her ears; he wiped her mushroom neck. He had worn this shirt all the way from Leghorn, where the
Benito Mussolini
had docked, to Milan, and from the train station in Milan to Fumicaro. He had worn it for twenty hours. By now it was dense with the exhalations of Italy, the sweat of Milan.

When he spoke of Milan she pushed away his shirt. Her mother, she told him, lived in Milan. She was a maid at the Hotel Duomo, across from the cathedral. Everyone called her Caterina, though it wasn't her name. It was the name of the previous maid, the one who got married and went away. They were like that in Milan. They treated the maids like that. The Duomo was a tourist hotel; there were many Americans and English; her mother was quick with foreign noises. Her mother's English was very good, very quick; she claimed to have learned it out of a book. An American had given her a bilingual dictionary to keep, as a sort of tip.

In Milan they were not kind. They were so far north they were almost like Germans or Swiss. They cooked like the Swiss, and they had cold hearts like the Germans. Even the priests were cold. They said ordinary words so strangely; they accused Caterina of a mischief called "dialect," but the mischief was theirs, not hers. Caterina had a daughter, whom she had left behind in Calabria. The daughter lived with Caterina's old mother, but when the daughter was thirteen Caterina had summoned her north to Milan, to work in the hotel. The daughter's name was Viviana Teresa Accenno, and it was she who now lay disbelieving in Frank Castle's bed in the Little Annex of the Villa Garibaldi. Viviana at thirteen was very small, and looked no more than nine or ten. The manager of the Duomo did not wish to employ her at all, but Caterina importuned, so he put the girl into the kitchen to help with the under-chefs. She washed celery and broccoli; she washed the grit out of the spinach and lettuce. She reached with the scrub brush under the stove and behind it, crevices where no one else could fit. Her arm then was a little stick for poking. Unlike Caterina, she hardly ever saw any Americans or English. Despite the bilingual dictionary, Viviana did not think that her mother could read anything at all—it was only that Caterina's tongue was so quick. Caterina kept the dictionary at the bottom of her wardrobe; sometimes she picked it up and cradled it, but she never looked into it. Still, her English was very fine, and she tried to teach it to Viviana. Viviana could make herself understood, she could say what she had to, but she could never speak English like Caterina.

Because of her good English Caterina became friends with the tourists. They gave her presents—silk scarves, and boxes made of olivewood, with celluloid crucifixes resting on velveteen inside, all the useless things tourists are attracted to—and in return she took parties out in the evenings; often they gave her money. She led them to out-of-the-way restaurants in neighborhoods they would never have found on their own, and to a clever young cobbler she was acquainted with, who worked in a shoe factory by day but measured privately for shoes at night. He would cut the leather on a Monday and have new shoes ready on a Wednesday—the most up-to-date fashions for the ladies, and for the gentlemen oxfords as sober and sturdy as anyone could wish. His prices were as low as his workmanship was splendid. The tourists all supposed he stole the leather from the factory, but Caterina guaranteed his probity and assured them this could not be. His jacket pockets were heavy with bits of leather of many shapes, and also straps and buckles, and tiny corked flacons of dye.

Caterina had all these ways of pleasing tourists, but she would not allow Viviana to learn any of them. Every Easter she made Viviana go back to spend a whole week with the grandmother in Calabria, and when Viviana returned, Caterina had a new Easter husband. She had always had a separate Milan husband, even when her Calabria husband, Viviana's father, was alive. It was not bigamy, not only because Caterina's Calabria husband had died long ago but also because Caterina had never, strictly speaking, been married in the regular way to the Milan husband. It wasn't that Caterina did not respect the priests; each day she went across the street and over the plaza to the cathedral to kneel in the nave, as broad as a sunless grassless meadow. The floor was made holy by the bones of a saint shut up in a box in front of the altar. All the priests knew her, and tried to persuade her to marry the Easter husband, and she always promised that very soon she would. And they in turn promised her a shortcut: if only she showed good will and an honest faith, she could become a decent wife overnight.

But she did not, and Viviana at length understood why: the Easter husband kept changing heads. Sometimes he had one head, sometimes another, sometimes again the first. You could not marry a husband who wore a different head all the time. Except for the heads, the Easter husband was uniformly very thin, from his Adam's apple all the way down to his fancy boots. One Easter he wore the cobbler's head, but Caterina threw him out. She said he was a thief. A silver crucifix she had received as a present from a Scottish minister was missing from the bottom of the wardrobe, though the bilingual dictionary was still there. But the cobbler came back with the news that he had a cousin in Fumicaro, where they were looking for maids for the American villa there; so Caterina decided to send her daughter, who was by now sixteen and putting flesh on her buttocks. For an innocent, Caterina said, the money was safer than in Milan.

And just then the grandmother died; so Caterina and Viviana and the cobbler all traveled down to Calabria for the funeral. That night, in the grandmother's tiny house, Viviana had a peculiar adventure, though as natural as rain; it only felt peculiar because it had never happened before—she had always trusted that someday it would. The cobbler and Caterina were crumpled up together in the grandmother's shabby bed; Caterina was awake, sobbing: she explained how she was a dog loose in the gutters, she belonged nowhere, she was a woman without a place, first a widow, now an orphan and the mother of an orphan. The highfaluting priests in the cathedral could not understand how it was for a widow of long standing. If a widow of long standing, a woman used to making her own way, becomes a wife, they will not allow her to make her own way anymore, she will be poorer as a poor man's wife than as a widow. What can priests, those empty pots, those eunuchs, know of the true life of a poor woman? Lamenting, Caterina fell asleep, without intending to, and then the cobbler with his bony shadow slipped out from the grandmother's bed and circled to the corner where Viviana slept, though now she was as wide awake as could be, in her cot near the stove, a cot dressed up during the day with a rosy fringed spread and crocheted cushions patterned with butterflies. The grandmother had let Viviana hug the pretty cushions at night, as if they were stuffed dolls. Viviana's lids were tight. She imagined that the saint's bones had risen from their northern altar and were sliding toward her in the dark. Caterina kept on clamorously breathing through the tunnel of her throat, and Viviana squeezed her shut eyes down on the butterflies. If she pressed them for minutes at a time, their wings would appear to flutter. She could make their wings stir just by pressing down on them. It seemed she was making the cobbler shudder now as he moved, in just that same way; her will was surely against it, and yet he was shuddering close to the cot. He had his undershirt on, and his bony-faced smile, and he shivered, though it was only September and the cabbage-headed trees in her grandmother's yard were luxuriant in the Calabrian warmth.