Giovanni's Room (21 page)

Much has been written of love turning to hatred, of the heart growing cold with the death of love. It is a remarkable process. It is far more terrible than anything I have ever read about it, more terrible than anything I will ever be able to say.

I don't know, now, when I first looked at Hella and found her stale, found her body uninteresting, her presence grating. It seemed to happen all at once—I suppose that only means that it had been happening for a long time. I trace it to something as fleeting as the tip of her breast lightly touching my forearm as she leaned over me to serve my supper. I felt my flesh recoil. Her underclothes, drying in the bathroom, which I had often thought of as smelling even rather improbably sweet and as being washed much too often, now began to seem unaesthetic and unclean. A body which had to be covered with such crazy, catty-cornered bits of stuff began to seem grotesque. I sometimes watched her naked body move and wished that it were harder and firmer, I was fantastically intimidated by her breasts, and when I entered her I began to feel that I would never get out alive. All that had once delighted me seemed to have turned sour on my stomach.

I think—I think that I have never been more frightened in my life. When my fingers began, involuntarily, to loose their hold on Hella, I realized that I was dangling from a high place and that I had been clinging to her for my very life. With each moment, as my fingers slipped, I felt the roaring air beneath me and felt everything in me bitterly contracting, crawling furiously upward against that long fall.

I thought that it was only, perhaps, that we were alone too much and so, for a while, we were always going out. We made expeditions to Nice and Monte Carlo and Cannes and Antibes. But we were not rich and the south of France, in the wintertime, is a playground
for the rich. Hella and I went to a lot of movies and found ourselves, very often, sitting in empty, fifth-rate bars. We walked a lot, in silence. We no longer seemed to see things to point out to each other. We drank too much, especially me. Hella, who had been so brown and confident and glowing on her return from Spain, began to lose all this; she began to be pale and watchful and uncertain. She ceased to ask me what the matter was, for it was borne in on her that I either did not know or would not say. She watched me. I felt her watching and it made me wary and it made me hate her. My guilt, when I looked into her closing face, was more than I could bear.

We were at the mercy of bus schedules and often found ourselves in the wintry dawn huddled sleepily together in a waiting room or freezing on the street corner of some totally deserted town. We arrived home in the grey morning, crippled with weariness, and went straight to bed.

I was able, for some reason, to make love in the mornings. It may have been due to nervous exhaustion; or wandering about at night engendered in me a curious, irrepressible excitement. But it was not the same, something was gone: the astonishment, the power, and the joy were gone, the peace was gone.

I had nightmares and sometimes my own cries woke me up and sometimes my moaning made Hella shake me awake.

“I wish,” she said, one day, “you'd tell me what it is. Tell me what it is; let me help you.”

I shook my head in bewilderment and sorrow and sighed. We were sitting in the big room, where I am standing now. She was sitting in the easy chair, under the lamp, with a book open on her lap.

“You're sweet,” I said. Then: “It's nothing. It'll go away. It's probably just nerves.”

“It's Giovanni,” she said.

I watched her.

“Isn't it,” she asked, carefully, “that you think you've done something awful to him by leaving him in that room? I think you blame yourself for what happened to him. But, darling, nothing you could have done would have helped him. Stop torturing yourself.”

“He was so beautiful,” I said. I had not meant to say it. I felt myself beginning to shake. She watched me while I walked to the table—there was a bottle there then as now—and poured myself a drink.

I could not stop talking, though I feared at every instant that I would say too much. Perhaps I wanted to say too much.

“I can't help feeling that I placed him in the shadow of the knife. He wanted me to stay in that room with him; he begged me to stay. I didn't tell you—we had an awful fight the night I went there to get my things.” I paused. I sipped my drink. “He cried.”

“He was in love with you,” said Hella. “Why didn't you tell me that? Or didn't you know it?”

I turned away, feeling my face flame.

“It's not your fault,” she said. “Don't you understand that? You couldn't keep him from falling in love with you. You couldn't have kept him from—from killing that awful man.”

“You don't know anything about it,” I muttered. “You don't know anything about it.”

“I know how you feel—”

“You
don't
know how I feel.”

“David. Don't shut me out. Please don't shut me out. Let me help you.”

“Hella. Baby. I know you want to help me. But just let me be for awhile. I'll be all right.”

“You've been saying that now,” she said, wearily, “for a long time.” She looked at me steadily for awhile and then she said, “David. Don't you think we ought to go home?”

“Go home? What for?”

“What are we staying here for? How long do you want to sit in this house, eating your heart out? And what do you think it's doing to me?” She rose and came to me. “Please. I want to go home. I want to get married. I want to start having kids. I want us to live someplace, I want
you
. Please David. What are we marking time over here for?”

I moved away from her, quickly. At my back she stood perfectly still.

“What's the
matter
, David? What do you
want
?”

“I don't know. I don't
know.
”

“What is it you're not telling me? Why don't you tell me the truth? Tell me the
truth
.”

I turned and faced her. “Hella—bear with me,
bear
with me—a little while.”

“I want to,” she cried, “but where
are
you? You've gone away somewhere and I can't find you. If you'd only let me reach you—!”

She began to cry. I held her in my arms. I felt nothing at all.

I kissed her salty tears and murmured, murmured I don't know what. I felt her body straining, straining to meet mine and I felt my own contracting and drawing away and I knew that I had begun the long fall down. I stepped away from her. She swayed where I had left her, like a puppet dangling from a string.

“David, please let me be a woman. I don't care what you do to me. I don't care what it costs. I'll wear my hair long, I'll give up cigarettes, I'll throw away the books.” She tried to smile; my heart turned over. “Just let me be a woman, take me. It's what I want. It's
all
I want. I don't care about anything else.” She moved toward me. I stood perfectly still. She touched me, raising her face, with a desperate and terribly moving trust, to mine. “Don't throw me back into the sea, David. Let me stay here with you.” Then she kissed me, watching my face. My lips were cold. I felt nothing on my lips. She kissed me again and I closed my eyes, feeling that
strong chains were dragging me to fire. It seemed that my body, next to her warmth, her insistence, under her hands, would never awaken. But when it awakened, I had moved out of it. From a great height, where the air all around me was colder than ice, I watched my body in a stranger's arms.

It was that evening, or an evening very soon thereafter, that I left her sleeping in the bedroom and went, alone, to Nice.

I roamed all the bars of that glittering town, and at the end of the first night, blind with alcohol and grim with lust, I climbed the stairs of a dark hotel in company with a sailor. It turned out, late the next day, that the sailor's leave was not yet ended and that the sailor had friends. We went to visit them. We stayed the night. We spent the next day together, and the next. On the final night of the sailor's leave, we stood drinking together in a crowded bar. We faced the mirror. I was very drunk. I was almost penniless. In the mirror, suddenly, I saw Hella's face. I thought for a moment that I had gone mad, and I turned. She looked very tired and drab and small.

For a long time we said nothing to each other. I felt the sailor staring at both of us.

“Hasn't she got the wrong bar?” he asked me, finally.

Hella looked at him. She smiled.

“It's not the only thing I got wrong,” she said.

Now the sailor stared at me.

“Well,” I said to Hella, “now you know.”

“I think I've known it for a long time,” she said. She turned and started away from me. I moved to follow her. The sailor grabbed me.

“Are you—is she—?”

I nodded. His face, open-mouthed, was comical. He let me go and I passed him and, as I reached the doors, I heard his laughter. We walked for a long time in the stone-cold streets, in silence.
There seemed to be no one on the streets at all. It seemed inconceivable that the day would ever break.

“Well,” said Hella, “I'm going home. I wish I'd never left it.”

“If I stay here much longer,” she said, later that same morning, as she packed her bag, “I'll forget what it's like to be a woman.”

She was extremely cold, she was very bitterly handsome.

“I'm not sure any woman
can
forget that,” I said.

“There are women who have forgotten that to be a woman doesn't simply mean humiliation, doesn't simply mean bitterness. I haven't forgotten it yet,” she added, “in spite of you. I'm not going to forget it. I'm getting out of this house, away from you, just as fast as taxis, trains, and boats will carry me.”

And in the room which had been our bedroom in the beginning of our life in this house, she moved with the desperate haste of someone about to flee—from the open suitcase on the bed, to the chest of drawers, to the closet. I stood in the doorway, watching her. I stood there the way a small boy who has wet his pants stands before his teacher. All the words I wanted to say closed my throat, like weeds, and stopped my mouth.

“I wish, anyway,” I said at last, “that you'd believe me when I say that, if I was lying, I wasn't lying to
you
.”

She turned toward me with a terrible face. “I was the one you were talking to.
I
was the one you wanted to come with you to this terrible house in the middle of nowhere. I was the one you said you wanted to marry!”

“I mean,” I said, “I was lying to myself.”

“Oh,” said Hella, “I see. That makes everything different, of course.”

“I only mean to say,” I shouted, “that whatever I've done to hurt you, I didn't mean to do!”

“Don't shout,” said Hella. “I'll soon be gone. Then you can
shout it to those hills out there, shout it to the peasants, how guilty you are, how you love to be guilty!”

She started moving back and forth again, more slowly, from the suitcase to the chest of drawers. Her hair was damp and fell over her forehead, and her face was damp. I longed to reach out and take her in my arms and comfort her. But that would not be comfort anymore, only torture, for both of us.

She did not look at me as she moved, but kept looking at the clothes she was packing, as though she were not sure they were hers.

“But I
knew
,” she said, “I knew. This is what makes me so ashamed. I knew it every time you looked at me. I knew it every time we went to bed. If only you had told me the truth
then
. Don't you see how unjust it was to wait for
me
to find it out? To put all the burden on
me
? I had the
right
to expect to hear from you—women are always waiting for the
man
to speak. Or hadn't you heard?”

I said nothing.

“I wouldn't have had to spend all this time in this
house;
I wouldn't be wondering how in the name of God I'm going to stand that long trip back. I'd
be
home by now, dancing with some man who wanted to make me. And I'd
let
him make me, too, why not?” And she smiled bewilderedly at a crowd of nylon stockings in her hand and carefully crushed them in the suitcase.

“Perhaps
I
didn't know it then. I only knew I had to get out of Giovanni's room.”

“Well,” she said, “you're out. And now I'm getting out. It's only poor Giovanni who's—lost his head.”

It was an ugly joke and made with the intention of wounding me; yet she couldn't quite manage the sardonic smile she tried to wear.

“I'll never understand it,” she said at last, and she raised her eyes to mine as though I could help her to understand. “That sordid little gangster has wrecked your life. I think he's wrecked mine, too.
Americans should never come to Europe,” she said, and tried to laugh and began to cry, “it means they never can be happy again. What's the good of an American who isn't happy? Happiness was all we had.” And she fell forward into my arms, into my arms for the last time, sobbing.

“Don't believe it,” I muttered, “don't believe it. We've got much more than that, we've always had much more than that. Only—only—it's sometimes hard to bear.”

“Oh, God, I wanted you,” she said. “Every man I come across will make me think of you.” She tried to laugh again. “Poor man! Poor men! Poor
me
!”

“Hella. Hella. One day, when you're happy, try to forgive me.”

She moved away. “Ah. I don't know anything about happiness anymore. I don't know anything about forgiveness. But if women are supposed to be led by men and there aren't any men to lead them, what happens then? What happens then?” She went to the closet and got her coat; dug in her handbag and found her compact and, looking into the tiny mirror, carefully dried her eyes and began to apply her lipstick. “There's a difference between little boys and little girls, just like they say in those little blue books. Little girls want little boys. But little boys—!” She snapped her compact shut. “I'll never again, as long as I live, know
what
they want. And now I know they'll never tell me. I don't think they know how.” She ran her fingers through her hair, brushing it back from her forehead, and, now, with the lipstick, and in the heavy, black coat, she looked again cold, brilliant, and bitterly helpless, a terrifying woman. “Mix me a drink,” she said, “we can drink to old times' sake before the taxi comes. No, I don't want you to come to the station with me. I wish I could drink all the way to Paris and all the way across that criminal ocean.”