Dictation (12 page)

After this she came to Fumicaro to work as a chambermaid at the Villa Garibaldi; she hadn't told her mother a thing about where the cobbler had put his legs and his arms, and not only because he had shown her the heavy metal of his belt. The cobbler was not to blame; it was her mother's mourning that was at fault, because if Caterina had not worn herself out with mourning the cobbler would have done his husband business in the regular way, with Caterina; and instead he had to do it with Viviana. All men have to do husband business, even if they are not regular husbands; it is how men are. How you are also, Signore, an American, a tourist.

It was true. In less than two hours Frank Castle had become the lover of a child. He had carried her into his bed and coaxed her story from her, beginning with his little finger's trip across her forehead. Then he had let his little finger go riding elsewhere, riding and riding, until her sweat returned, and he began to sweat himself; the black night window was not feeding them enough air. Air! It was like trying to breathe through a straw. He drew the key from the door and steered her, both of them barefoot, down the curling stairs, and walked with her out onto the gravel, through the arch. There was no moon, only a sort of gliding whitish mist low to the ground, and transitory; sometimes it was there, sometimes not. At the foot of the invisible hill, below the long hairy slope of mountainside, Como stretched like a bit of black silk nailed down. A galaxy prickled overhead, though maybe not: lights of villas high up, chips of stars—in such a blackness it was impossible to know the difference. She pointed far out, to the other side of the lake: nothingness. Yet there, she said, stood the pinkish palace of Il Duce, filled with seventy-five Fascist servants, and a hundred soldiers who never slept.

***

After breakfast, at the first meeting of the morning, a young priest read a paper. It seemed he had forgotten the point of the conference—public relations—and was speaking devoutly, illogically. His subject was purity. The flesh, he said, is holy bread, like the shewbread of the Israelites, meant to be consecrated for God. To put it to use for human pleasure alone is defilement. The words inflamed Frank Castle: he had told Viviana to save his room for last and to wait for him there in the afternoon. At four o'clock, after the day's third session, while the others went down the mountain—the members had been promised a ride across Como in a motor launch—he climbed to the green door of the Little Annex and once again took the child into his bed.

He knew he was inflamed. He felt his reason had been undermined, like a crazy man's. He could not get enough of this woman, this baby. She came to him again after dinner; then he had to attend the night session, until ten; then she was in his bed again. She was perfectly well. He asked her about the nausea. She said it was gone, except very lightly, earlier that day; she was restored. He could not understand why she was yielding to him this way. She did whatever he told her to. She was only afraid of meeting Guido, Mr. Wellborn's assistant, on her way to the Little Annex: Guido was the one who kept track of which rooms were finished, and which remained, and in what order. Her job was to make the beds and change the towels and clean the floors and the tub. Guido said the Little Annex must be done first. It was easy for her to leave the Little Annex for last—it had only two rooms in it, and the other was empty. The person who was to occupy the empty room had not yet arrived. He had sent no letter or telegram. Guido had instructed Viviana to tend to the empty room all the same, in case he should suddenly make his appearance. Mr. Wellborn was still expecting him, whoever it was.

On the third day, directly after lunch, it was Frank Castle's turn to speak. He was, after all, he said, only a journalist. His paper would be primarily neither theological nor philosophical—on the contrary, it was no more than a summary of a series of radio interviews he had conducted with new converts. He would attempt, he said, to give a collective portrait of these. If there was one feature they all had in common, it was what Jacques Maritain named as "the impression that evil was truly and substantially someone." To put it otherwise, these were men and women who had caught sight of demons. Let us not suppose, Frank Castle said, that—at the start—it is the love of Christ that brings souls into the embrace of Christ. It is fear; sin; evil; true cognizance of the Opposer. The corridor to Christ is at bottom the Devil, just as Judas was the necessary corridor to redemption.

He read for thirty minutes, finished to a mainly barren room, and thought he had been too metaphorical; he should have tried more for the psychological—these were modern men. They all lived, even the priests, along the skin of the world. They had cleared out, he guessed, in order to walk down the mountain into the town in the brightness of midday. There was a hot chocolate shop, with pastry and picture postcards of Fumicaro: clusters of red tiled roofs, and behind them, like distant ice cream cones, the Alps—you could have your feet in Italy and your gaze far into Switzerland. Around the corner from the hot chocolate place, he heard them say, there was a little box of a shop, with a tinkling bell, easily overlooked if you didn't know about it. It was down an alley as narrow as a thread. You could buy leather wallets, and ladies' pocketbooks, also of leather, and shawls and neckties labeled
seta pura.
But the true reason his colleagues were drawn down to the town was to stand at the edge of Como. Glorious disc of lake! It had beckoned them yesterday. It beckoned today. It summoned eternally. The bliss of its flat sun-shot surface; as dazzling as some huge coin. The room had emptied out toward it; he was not offended, not even discontent. He had not come to Fumicaro to show how clever he could be (nearly all these fellows were clever), or how devout; he knew he was not devout enough. And not to discover new renunciations, and not to catch the hooks the others let fly. And not even to be tested. He was beyond these trials. He had fallen not into temptation but into happiness. Happy, happy Fumicaro! He had, he saw, been led to Fumicaro not for the Church—or not directly for the Church, as the conference brochure promised—but for the explicit salvation of one needful soul.

She was again waiting for him. He was drilled through by twin powers: the power of joy, the power of power. She was obedient, she was his own small nun. The roundness of her calves made him think of loaves of round bread, bread like domes. She asked him—it was in a way remarkable—whether his talk had been a success. His "talk." A "success." She was alert, shrewd. It was clear she had a good brain. Already she was catching on. Her mind skipped, it was not static; it was a sort of burr that attached itself to whatever passed. He told her that his paper had not been found interesting. His listeners had drifted off to look at Como. Instantly she wanted to take him there—not through the town, with its lures for tourists, but down an old stone road, mostly overgrown, back behind the Villa Garibaldi, to the lake's unfrequented rim. She had learned about it from some of the kitchen staff. He was willing, but not yet. He considered who he was; where he was. A man on fire. He asked her once more if she was well. Only a little in the morning not, she said. He was not surprised; he was prepared for it. She had missed, she said, three bleedings. She believed she might be carrying the cobbler's seed, though she had washed herself and washed herself. She had cleaned out her insides until she was as dry as a saint.

She lay with her head against his neck. Her profile was very sharp. He had seen her head a hundred times before, in museums: the painted walls of Roman villas. The oversized eyes with their black oval shine, the nose broad but so splendidly symmetrical, the top lip with its two delectably lifted points. Nevertheless she was mysteriously not handsome. It was because of her caste. She was a peasant's child. Her skin was tawny—as if a perpetual brown shadow had dropped close against it, partly translucent. A dark lens stretched over her cheeks, through which he saw, minutely, the clarity of her youth. He thought she was too obedient; she had no pride. Meekness separated her from beauty. She urged her mouth on his neck and counted:
Settembre, Ottobre, Novembre,
all without the bleeding.

He began to explain the beginning of his plan: in a week or two she would see New York.

"New York! No belief!" She laughed—and there was her gold tooth!—and he laughed too, because of his idiocy, his recklessness; he laughed because he had really lost his reason now and was giving himself over to holy belief. She had been disclosed to him, and on her knees; it followed that he had been sent. Her laughter was all youth and clarity and relief—what she had escaped! Deliverance. His was clownishness: he was a shaman. And recognition: he was a madman, driven like a madman, or an idiot.

"You're all right," he said. "You'll be all right."

She went on laughing. "No belief! No belief!
Dio, Dio!"
She laughed out the comedy of her entanglements: a girl like herself, who had no husband, and goes three bleedings without bleeding, will be, she said, "finish"—she had seized the idiom out of the air. There was no place for her but the ditch. There would never be a regular husband for her—not in Fumicaro, not in Milano, not at home in Calabria, not anywhere on any piece of God's earth inhabited by the human family. No one would touch her. They would throw her in the ditch. She was in hell. Finish. God had commanded the American signore to pull her out from the furnace of hell.

He explained again, slowly (he was explaining it to himself), in a slow voice, with the plainest words he could muster, that he would marry her and take her home with him to America. To New York.

"New York!" She
did
believe him; she believed him on the instant. Her trust was electric. The beating of her belief entered his rib cage, thrashing and plunging its beak into his spine. He could not help himself: he was his own prisoner, he was inside his own ribs, pecking there. "New York!" she said. For this she had prayed to the Holy Bambino. Oh, not for New York, she had never prayed for America, who could dream it!

No belief: he would chain himself to a rock and be flung into the sea, in order to drown unbelief.

Therefore he would marry Viviana Teresa Accenno. It was his obeisance. It was what had brought him to Italy; it was what had brought him to the Little Annex of the Villa Garibaldi. There were scores of poor young women all over Italy—perhaps in Fumicaro itself—in her position. He could not marry them all. Her tragedy was a commonplace. She was a noisy aria in an eternal opera. It did not matter. This girl was the one he had been led to. Now the power traveled from him to her; he felt the pounding of her gratitude, how it fed her, how it punished him, how she widened herself for him, how stalwart she was, how nervy! He was in her grip, she was his slave; she had the vitality of surrender. For a few moments it made her his master.

He did not return to the salons and chandeliers of the Villa Garibaldi that day—not for the pre-dinner session or for the after-dinner session; and not for dinner either. From then on everything went like quicksilver. Viviana ran to find Guido, to report that she was short of floor wax; he gave her the key to the supply closet, which was also the wine cellar. Easeful Fumicaro! where such juxtapositions reigned. She plucked a flask of each: wax and wine. Mr. Wellborn blinked at such pilfering; it kept the staff content. It was only Guido who was harsh. Still, it was nothing at all for her to slip into the kitchen and spirit away a fat fresh bread and a round brick of cheese. They trod on ivy that covered the path under the windows of the grand high room that held the meadow-long conference board. Frank Castle could hear the cadenced soughing of the afternoon speaker. The sun was low but steady. She took him past enormous bricked-up arches, as tall as city apartment buildings. In the kitchen, where they were so gullible, they called it the Roman aqueduct, but nobody sensible supposed that Romans had once lived here. It was
stupido,
a tale for children. They say about the Romans that they did not have God; the priests would not let them linger in holy Italy if they did not know Jesus, so they must have lived elsewhere. She did not doubt that they had once existed, the Romans, but elsewhere. In Germany, maybe in Switzerland. Only never in Italy. The Pope of those days would never have allowed infidels to stay in such a place as Fumicaro. Maybe in Naples! Far down, under their feet, they could descry a tiny needle: it was the bell tower of the ancient church in Fumicaro. Frank Castle had already inquired about this needle. It had been put there in the twelfth century. Wild irises obscured the stone road; it wound down and down, and was so spare and uneven that they had to go single file. They met no one. It was all theirs. He had a sense of wingedness: how quickly they came to the lip of Como. The lake was all gold. A sun-ball was submerged in it as still as the yolk of an egg, and the red egg on the horizon also did not move. They encamped in a wilderness—thorny bushes and a jumble of long-necked, thick-speared grasses.

The wine was the color of light, immaculately clear, and warm, and wonderfully sour. He had never before rejoiced in such a depth of sourness—after you swallowed some and contemplated it, you entered the second chamber of the sourness, and here it was suddenly applelike. Their mouths burst into orchards. They were not hungry; they never broke off even a crumb of the bread and cheese; of these they would make a midnight supper, and in the early morning they would pay something to the milk driver, who would carry them as far as he could. The rest of the trip they would go by bus, like ordinary people. Oh, they were not ordinary! And in Milan Viviana would tell Caterina everything—everything except where the cobbler had put his legs and his arms; she would not mention the cobbler at all—and Caterina would lead them across the plaza into the cathedral, and the priests would marry them in the shortcut way they had always promised to Caterina and her Easter husband.

It was nearly night. Como had eaten the red egg; it was gone. Streaks of white and pink trailed over water and sky. There was still enough light for each to see the other's face. They passed the bottle of wine between them, back and forth, from hand to hand, stumbling upward, now and then wandering wide of the path—the stones were sometimes buried. A small abandoned shrine blocked the way. The head was eroded, the nose chipped. "This must be a Roman road," he told her. "The Romans built it."