Dictation (14 page)

"All this public distortion is real enough, but our obligation is even more fundamental than finding the right lens of clarification to set over the falsifying portrait. The need to defend the Church against the debasement of the ignorant or the bigoted is, how shall we call it, a mere ripple in the sacred river. Our task as opinion makers—and we should feel no shame over this phrase, with all its American candor, for are we not Americans at an American colloquy, though we sit here charmed by the antiquity of our surroundings?—our task, then, is to show the timelessness of our condition, the applicability of our objectifying vision even to flux, even to the immediate instant. We are to come with our banner inscribed Eternity, and demonstrate its pertinence in the short run; indeed, in the shortest run of all, the single life, the single moment. We must let flower the absolute in the concrete, in the actual rise and fall of existence. Our aim is transmutation, the sanctification of the profane."

It was impossible to listen; Nightingale was right. Frank Castle sank down into some interior chamber of mind. He was secretive; he knew this about himself. It was not that he had habits of concealment, or that, as people say, he kept his own counsel. It was instead something akin to sensation, an ache or a bump. Self-recognition. Every now and then he felt the jolt of who he was and what he had done. He was a man who had invented his own designations. He was undetermined. He was who he said he was. No one, nothing, least of all chance, had placed him. Like Augustine, he interpreted himself, and hotly. Oh, hotly. Whereas this glacial propagandist, reciting his noble text, bleating out "absolute" and "concrete" and "transmutation," had fallen into his given slot like a messenger from fate. Once fallen, fixed. Rooted. A stalactite.

Far behind the speaker, just past the lofty brass-framed doorway—a distance of several pastures, a whole countryside—a plump little figure glimmered. Viviana! There she was; there she stood. You would need a telescope to bring her close. Even with his unaccoutered eye, Frank Castle noticed how nicely she was dressed. If he had forgotten that she might have possessions, here was something pleasant—though it was only a blouse and skirt. She was clutching an object, he could not make out what. The blouse had a bright blue ribbon at the neck, and long sleeves. It might have been the ribbon, or the downward flow of the sleeves, or even the skirt, red as paint, which hung lower than he was used to—there was a sudden propriety in her. The wonderful calves were hidden: those hot globes he had only that afternoon drawn wide apart. Her thighs, too, were as hot and heavy as corn bread. Across such a space her head, remote and even precarious, was weighted down, like the laden head of a sunflower. She was absorbed by the marble floor tiles of the Villa Garibaldi. She would not come near. She eclipsed herself. She was a bit of shifting reflection.

He wondered if he should wait the speaker out. Instead he got up—every step a crash—and circled the table's disheveled infinitude. No one else moved. He was a scandal. Under the chandelier the speaker stuck to his paper. Frank Castle had done the same the day before, when they had all walked out on him for a ride across Como. Now here he was deserting, the only one to decamp. It was almost ten o'clock at night; the whole crew of them had been up since eight. One had made a nest of his rounded arms and was carefully, sweetly, cradling his face down into it. Another was propped back with his mouth open, brazenly asleep, something between a wheeze and a snuffle puffing intermittently out.

In the hall outside he said, "You've changed your clothes."

"We go Milano!"

She was in earnest then. Her steady look, diverted downward, was patient, docile. He did not know what to make of her; but her voice was too high. He set an admonitory finger over his own mouth. "Where did you disappear to?"

"I go, I put"—he watched her labor after the words; excitement throttled her—
"fiore. Il santo!
To make
un buon viaggio."

He was clear enough about what a
santo
was. "A saint? Is there a saint here?"

"You see before, in the road. You see," she insisted. She held up a metal cylinder. It was the flashlight from his bedside cabinet in the Little Annex. "Signore, come."

"Do you have things? You're taking things?"

"La mia borsa, una piccolo valigia.
I put in the signore's room."

They could not stand there whispering. He followed where she led. She took him down the mountainside again, along the same half-buried road, to a weedy stone stump. It was the smothered little shrine he had noticed earlier. It grew right up out of the middle of the path. The head, with its rotted nose, was no more than a smudge. Over it, as tall as his hipbone, a kind of stone umbrella, a shelter like an upside-down U, or a fragment of vertical bathtub, seemed to be turning into a mound of wild ivy. Spiking out of this dense net was the iris Viviana had stuck there.

"San Francesco!" she said; the kitchen staff had told her. Such hidden old saints were all over the hills of Fumicaro.

"No," Frank Castle said.

"Molti santi.
You no belief? Signore, see! San Francesco."

She gave him the flashlight. In its white pool everything had a vivid glaze, like a puppet stage. He peered at the smudge. Goddess or god? Emperor's head, mounted like a milestone to mark out sovereignty? The chin was rubbed away. The torso had crumbled. It hardly looked holy. Depending on the weather, it might have been as old as a hundred years, or a thousand; two thousand. Only an archeologist could say. But he did not miss how the flashlight conjured up effulgence. A halo blazed. Viviana was on her knees in the scrub; she tugged him down. With his face in leaves he saw the eroded fragment of the base, and, half sunken, an obscure tracing, a single intact word:
DELEGI
. I chose; I singled out. Who chose, what or who was singled out? Antiquity alone did not enchant him: the disintegrating image of some local Roman politico or evanescent godlet. The mighty descend to powder and leave chalk on the fingertips.

Her eyes were shut; she was now as she had been in her small faint, perfectly ordered; but her voice was crowded with fierce little mutterings. She was at prayer.

"Viviana. This isn't a saint."

She stretched forward and kissed the worn-away mouth.

"You don't know
what
it is. It's some old pagan thing."

"San Francesco," she said.

"No."

She turned on him a smile almost wild. The thing in the road was hallowed. It had a power; she was in thrall to sticks and stones. "Il
santo,
he pray for us." In the halo of the flashlight her cheeks looked oiled and sleek and ripe for biting. She crushed her face down into the leaves beside his own—it was as if she read him and would consent to be bitten—and said again, "Francesco."

He had always presumed that sooner or later he would marry. He had spiritual ambition; yet he wanted to join himself to the great protoplasmic heave of human continuity. He meant to be fruitful: to couple, to procreate. He could not be continent; he could not sustain purity; he was not chaste. He had a terrible inquisitiveness; his fall with Viviana was proof enough. He loved the priests, with their parched lip-corners and glossy eyes, their enigmatic loins burning for God. But he could not become like them; he was too fitful. He had no humility. Sometimes he thought he loved Augustine more than God.
Imitatio Dei:
he had come to Christ because he was secretive, because Jesus lived, though hiddenly. Hence the glory of the thousand statues that sought to make manifest the reticent Christ. Sculptors, like priests, are least of all secretive.

Often it had seemed to Frank Castle that, marriage being so open a cell, there was no one for him to marry. Wives were famous for needing explanations. He could not imagine being married to a bookish sort—an "intellectual"—but also he feared this more than anything. He feared a wife who could talk and ask questions and analyze and inquire after his history. Sometimes he fancied himself married to a rubber doll about his own size. She would serve him. They would have a rubber child.

A coldness breathed from the ground. Already hoarfrost was beginning to gather—a blurry veil over the broken head in the upended tub.

He said, "Get up."

"Francesco."

"Viviana, let's go." But he hung back himself. She was a child of simple intuitions, a kind of primitive. He saw how primitive she was. She was not a rubber doll, but she would keep clear of the precincts of his mind. This gladdened him. He wondered how such a deficiency could make him so glad.

She said for the third time, "Francesco." He understood finally that she was speaking his name.

They spent the night in his room in the Little Annex. At six the milk driver would be grinding down from the kitchen lot past the arch of the Little Annex. They waited under a brightening sunrise. The mist was fuming free of the mountainside; they could see all the way down to Como. Quietly loitering side by side with the peasant's child, again Frank Castle knew himself slowly churning into chaos: half an hour ago she had stretched to kiss his mouth exactly as she had stretched to kiss the mouth of the pagan thing fallen into the ground. He was mesmerized by the strangeness he had chosen for himself: a whole life of it. She was clinging to his hand like an innocent; her fingers were plaited into his. And then, out of the blue, as if struck by a whirlwind, they were not. She tore herself from him; his fingers were ripped raw; it seemed like a seizure of his own skin; he lost her. She had hurled herself out of sight. Frank Castle watched her run—she looked flung. She ran into the road and down the road and across, behind the high hedges, away from the bricked-up vaults of the Roman aqueduct.

Percy Nightingale was descending from those vaults. Under his open overcoat a pair of bare bluish-white knees paraded.

"Greetings," he called, "from a practiced insomniac. I've been examining the local dawn. They do their dawns very nicely in these parts, I'll give 'em that. What detritus we travelers gather as we move among the realms—here you are with two bags, and last night I'm sure I saw you with only one. You don't happen to have any extra booze in one of those?" He stamped vaguely round in an uneven try at a circle. "Who was that rabbit who fled into the bushes?"

"I think you scared it off," Frank Castle said.

"The very sight of me? It's true I'm not dressed for the day. I intend to pull on my pants in time for breakfast. You seem to be waiting for a train."

"For the milk driver."

"Aha. A slow getaway. You'd go quicker with the booze driver. I'd come along for kicks with the booze driver."

"The fact of the matter," Frank Castle said in his flattest voice, "is that you've caught me eloping with the chambermaid."

"What a nice idea. Satan, get thee behind me and give me a push. Long and happy years to you both. The scrawny thing with the pachyderm feet and the birthmark? She made up my bed very snugly—I'd say she's one of the Roman evidences they've got around here." He pointed his long chin upward toward the aqueduct. "Since you didn't invite me to the exhumation, I won't be expected to be invited to the wedding. Believe it or not, here's your truck."

Frank Castle picked up Viviana's bag and his own and walked out into the middle of the road, fluttering his green American bills; the driver halted.

"See you in the funny papers," Nightingale yelled.

He sat in the seat next to the driver's and turned his face to the road. It snaked left and then left again: any moment now a red-skirted girl would scuttle out from behind a dip in the foliage. He tried to tell this to the driver, but the man only chirped narrowly through his country teeth. The empty steel milk cans on the platform in the back of the truck jiggled and rattled; sometimes their flanks collided—a robust clang like cymbals. It struck him then that the abyss in his entrails was his in particular: it wasn't fright at being discovered and judged that had made her bolt, but practical inhibition—she was canny enough, she wasn't about to run off with a crazed person. Lust! He had come to his senses yesterday, though only temporarily; she had come to hers today, and in the nick of time. After which it occurred to him that he had better look in his wallet. Duped. She had robbed him and escaped. He dived into his pocket.

Instantly the driver's open palm was under his nose.

"I paid you.
Basta,
I gave you
basta."

The truck wobbled perilously around a curve, but the hand stayed.

"Good God! Keep hold of the wheel, can't you? We'll go off the road!"

He shook out a flood of green bills onto the seat. Now he could not know how much she had robbed him of. He did not doubt she was a thief. She had stolen cheese from the kitchen and wine from a locked closet. He thought of his camera. It would not surprise him if she had bundled it off in a towel or in a pillowcase in the night. Thievery had been her motive from the beginning. Everything else was ruse, snare, distraction, flimflam; she was a sort of gypsy, with a hundred tricks. He would never see her again. He was relieved. The freakishness of the past three days stung him; he grieved. Never again this surrender to the inchoate; never again the abyss. A joke! He had almost eloped with the chambermaid. Damn that Nightingale!

They rattled—sounding now like a squad of carillons—into Fumicaro. Here was the promenade; here was the hot chocolate shop; here was the church with its bell tower; here was morning-dazzled Como—high and pure the light that rose from it. "Autobus," he commanded the driver. He had spilled enough green gold to command. The country teeth showed the bliss of the newly rich. He was let out at an odd little turn of gossipy street, which looked as if it had never in all its existence heard tell of an autobus; and here—"No belief!"—was Viviana, panting hard. She could not catch her breath, because of the spy. A spy had never figured in their fears, God knows! A confusion and a danger. The spy would be sure to inform Guido, and Guido would be sure to inform Mr. Wellborn, or, worse yet, the cobbler's cousin, who, as it happened, was Guido's cousin too, only from the other side of the family. And then they would not let her go. No, they would not! They would keep her until her trouble became visible and ruinous, and then they would throw her into the ditch. The spy was an untrustworthy man. He was the man they had met on the hill, who took her for a boy. He was the man in the empty room of the Little Annex. The other
cameriera
had told her that on top of all the extra blankets she had brought him he had put all the towels there were, and then, oh! he pulled down the curtains and piled them on top of the towels. And he stood before the other
cameriera
shamelessly, without his
pantaloni!
And so what could she do? She flew down the secret stone path, she flew right past San Francesco without stopping, to get to the autobus piazza before the milk driver.