Giovanni's Room (9 page)

“But you think that trouble is coming,” I said.

“Oh, yes,” said Giovanni, with a quick, startled look at me, as if he were wondering if I had understood a word of what he had said, “we are certainly going to have a little trouble soon again. Not right away, of course; that is not his style. But he will invent something to be angry at me about.”

Then we sat in silence for awhile, smoking cigarettes, surrounded by oyster shells, and finishing the wine. I was all at once very tired. I looked out into the narrow street, this strange, crooked corner where we sat, which was brazen now with the sunlight and heavy with people—people I would never understand. I ached abruptly, intolerably, with a longing to go home; not to that hotel, in one of the alleys of Paris, where the concierge barred the way with my unpaid bill; but home, home across the ocean, to things and people I knew and understood; to those things, those places, those people which I would always, helplessly, and in whatever bitterness of spirit, love above all else. I had never realized such a sentiment in myself before, and it frightened me. I saw myself, sharply, as a wanderer, an adventurer, rocking through the world, unanchored. I looked at Giovanni's face, which did not help me. He belonged to this strange city, which did not belong to me. I began to see that, while what was happening to me was not so strange as it would have comforted me to believe, yet it was strange beyond belief. It was not really so strange, so unprecedented, though voices deep within me boomed, For shame! For shame! that I should be so abruptly, so hideously entangled with a boy; what was strange was that this was but one tiny aspect of the dreadful human tangle occurring everywhere, without end, forever.

“
Viens
,” said Giovanni.

We rose and walked back into the bar and Giovanni paid our bill. Another bottle of champagne had been opened and Jacques and Guillaume were now really beginning to be drunk. It was going to be ghastly and I wondered if those poor, patient boys were ever going to get anything to eat. Giovanni talked to Guillaume for a moment, agreeing to open up the bar; Jacques was too busy with the pale tall boy to have much time for me; we said good-morning and left them.

“I must go home,” I said to Giovanni when we were in the street. “I must pay my hotel bill.”

Giovanni stared. “
Mais tu es fou
,” he said mildly. “There is certainly no point in going home now, to face an ugly concierge and then go to sleep in that room all by yourself and then wake up later, with a terrible stomach and a sour mouth, wanting to commit suicide. Come with me; we will rise at a civilized hour and have a gentle aperitif somewhere and then a little dinner. It will be much more cheerful like that,” he said with a smile, “you will see.”

“But I must get my clothes,” I said.

He took my arm. “
Bien sûr
. But you do not have to get them
now.
” I held back. He stopped. “Come. I am sure that I am much prettier than your wallpaper—or your concierge. I will smile at you when you wake up. They will not.”

“Ah,” I could only say, “
tu es vache.
”

“It is you who are
vache
,” he said, “to want to leave me alone in this lonely place when you know that I am far too drunk to reach my home unaided.”

We laughed together, both caught up in a stinging, teasing sort of game. We reached the Boulevard de Sébastopol. “But we will not any longer discuss the painful subject of how you desired to desert Giovanni, at so dangerous an hour, in the middle of a hostile city.” I began to realize that he, too, was nervous. Far down the boulevard a cab meandered toward us, and he put up his hand. “I will show you my room,” he said. “It is perfectly clear that you would have to see it one of these days, anyway.” The taxi stopped beside us, and Giovanni, as though he were suddenly afraid that I would really turn and run, pushed me in before him. He got in beside me and told the driver: “
Nation.
”

The street he lived on was wide, respectable rather than elegant, and massive with fairly recent apartment buildings; the street ended in a small park. His room was in the back, on the ground floor of the last building on this street. We passed the vestibule and the elevator into a short, dark corridor which led to his room. The room
was small, I only made out the outlines of clutter and disorder, there was the smell of the alcohol he burned in his stove. He locked the door behind us, and then for a moment, in the gloom, we simply stared at each other—with dismay, with relief, and breathing hard. I was trembling. I thought, if I do not open the door at once and get out of here, I am lost. But I knew I could not open the door, I knew it was too late; soon it was too late to do anything but moan. He pulled me against him, putting himself into my arms as though he were giving me himself to carry, and slowly pulled me down with him to that bed. With everything in me screaming
No!
yet the sum of me sighed
Yes
.

Here in the south of France it does not often snow; but snowflakes, in the beginning rather gently and now with more force, have been falling for the last half hour. It falls as though it might quite possibly decide to turn into a blizzard. It has been cold down here this winter, though the people of the region seem to take it as a mark of ill-breeding in a foreigner if he makes any reference to this fact. They themselves, even when their faces are burning in that wind which seems to blow from everywhere at once, and which penetrates everything, are as radiantly cheerful as children at the seashore. “
Il fait beau bien?
—throwing their faces toward the lowering sky in which the celebrated southern sun has not made an appearance in days.

I leave the window of the big room and walk through the house. While I am in the kitchen, staring into the mirror—I have decided to shave before all the water turns cold—I hear a knocking at the door. Some vague, wild hope leaps in me for a second and then I realize that it is only the caretaker from across the road come to make certain that I have not stolen the silver or smashed the dishes or chopped up the furniture for firewood. And, indeed, she rattles the door and I hear her voice out there, cracking,
M'sieu! M'sieu!
M'sieu, l'américain!
” I wonder, with annoyance, why on earth she should sound so worried.

But she smiles at once when I open the door, a smile which weds the coquette and the mother. She is quite old and not really French; she came many years ago, “when I was a very young girl, sir,” from just across the border, out of Italy. She seems, like most of the women down here, to have gone into mourning directly the last child moved out of childhood. Hella thought that they were all widows, but, it turned out, most of them had husbands living yet. These husbands might have been their sons. They sometimes played
belote
in the sunshine in a flat field near our house, and their eyes, when they looked at Hella, contained the proud watchfulness of a father and the watchful speculation of a man. I sometimes played billiards with them, and drank red wine, in the
tabac
. But they made me tense—with their ribaldries, their good-nature, their fellowship, the life written on their hands and in their faces and in their eyes. They treated me as the son who has but lately been initiated into manhood; but at the same time, with great distance, for I did not really belong to any of them; and they also sensed (or I felt they did) something else about me, something which it was no longer worth their while to pursue. This seemed to be in their eyes when I walked with Hella and they passed us on the road, saying, very respectfully,
Salut
,
Monsieur-dame
. They might have been the sons of these women in black, come home after a lifetime of storming and conquering the world, home to rest and be scolded and wait for death, home to those breasts, now dry, which had nourished them in their beginnings.

Flakes of snow have drifted across the shawl which covers her head; and hang on her eyelashes and on the wisps of black and white hair not covered by the shawl. She is very strong yet, though, now, a little bent, a little breathless.

“
Bonsoir
,
monsieur. Vous n'êtes pas malade?
”

“No,” I say, “I have not been sick. Come in.”

She comes in, closing the door behind her, and allowing the shawl to fall from her head. I still have my drink in my hand and she notices this, in silence.

“
Eh bien
,” she says. “
Tant mieux
. But we have not seen you for several days. You have been staying in the house?”

And her eyes search my face.

I am embarrassed and resentful; yet it is impossible to rebuff something at once shrewd and gentle in her eyes and voice. “Yes,” I say, “the weather has been bad.”

“It is not the middle of August, to be sure,” says she, “but you do not have the air of an invalid. It is not good to sit in the house alone.”

“I am leaving in the morning,” I say, desperately. “Did you want to take the inventory?”

“Yes,” she says, and produces from one of her pockets the list of household goods I signed upon arrival. “It will not be long. Let me start from the back.”

We start toward the kitchen. On the way I put my drink down on the night table in my bedroom.

“It doesn't matter to me if you drink,” she says, not turning around. But I leave my drink behind anyway.

We walk into the kitchen. The kitchen is suspiciously clean and neat. “Where have you been eating?” she asks, sharply. “They tell me at the
tabac
you have not been seen for days. Have you been going to town?”

“Yes,” I say lamely, “sometimes.”

“On foot?” she inquires. “Because the bus driver, he has not seen you, either.” All this time she is not looking at me but around the kitchen, checking off the list in her hand with a short, yellow pencil.

I can make no answer to her last, sardonic thrust, having
forgotten that in a small village almost every move is made under the village's collective eye and ear.

She looks briefly in the bathroom. “I'm going to clean that tonight,” I say.

“I should hope so,” she says. “Everything was clean when you moved in.” We walk back through the kitchen. She has failed to notice that two glasses are missing, broken by me, and I have not the energy to tell her. I will leave some money in the cupboard. She turns on the light in the guest room. My dirty clothes are lying all over.

“Those go with me,” I say, trying to smile.

“You could have come just across the road,” she says. “I would have been glad to give you something to eat. A little soup, something nourishing. I cook every day for my husband; what difference does one more make?”

This touches me, but I do not know how to indicate it, and I cannot say, of course, that eating with her and her husband would have stretched my nerves to the breaking point.

She is examining a decorative pillow. “Are you going to join your fiancée?” she asks.

I know I ought to lie, but somehow I cannot. I am afraid of her eyes. I wish, now, that I had my drink with me. “No,” I say, flatly, “she has gone to America.”

“
Tiens!
” she says. “And you—do you stay in France?” She looks directly at me.

“For awhile,” I say. I am beginning to sweat. It has come to me that this woman, a peasant from Italy, must resemble, in so many ways, the mother of Giovanni. I keep trying not to hear her howls of anguish, I keep trying not to see in her eyes what would surely be there if she knew that her son would be dead by morning, if she knew what I had done to her son.

But, of course, she is not Giovanni's mother.

“It is not good,” she says, “it is not right for a young man like you to be sitting alone in a great big house with no woman.” She looks, for a moment, very sad; starts to say something more and thinks better of it. I know she wants to say something about Hella, whom neither she nor any of the other women here had liked. But she turns out the light in the guest room and we go into the big bedroom, the master bedroom, which Hella and I had used, not the one in which I have left my drink. This, too, is very clean and orderly. She looks about the room and looks at me, and smiles.

“You have not been using this room lately,” she says.

I feel myself blushing painfully. She laughs.

“But you will be happy again,” she says. “You must go and find yourself another woman, a
good
woman, and get married, and have babies.
Yes
, that is what you ought to do,” she says, as though I had contradicted her, and before I can say anything, “Where is your
maman?
”

“She is dead.”

“Ah!” She clicks her teeth in sympathy. “That is sad. And your Papa—is he dead, too?”

“No. He is in America.”

“
Pauvre bambino!
” She looks at my face. I am really helpless in front of her and if she does not leave soon, she will reduce me to tears or curses. “But you do not have the intention of just wandering through the world like a sailor? I am sure that would make your mother very unhappy. You will make a home someday?”

“Yes, surely. Someday.”

She puts her strong hand on my arm. “Even if your
maman
, she is dead—that is very sad!—your Papa will be very happy to see bambinos from you.” She pauses, her black eyes soften; she is looking at me, but she is looking beyond me, too. “We had three sons. Two of them were killed in the war. In the war, too, we lost all our money. It is sad, is it not, to have worked so hard all one's life in
order to have a little peace in one's old age and then to have it all taken away? It almost killed my husband; he has never been the same since.” Then I see that her eyes are not merely shrewd; they are also bitter and very sad. She shrugs her shoulders. “Ah! What can one do? It is better not to think about it.” Then she smiles. “But our last son, he lives in the north; he came to see us two years ago, and he brought with him his little boy. His little boy, he was only four years old then. He was so beautiful! Mario, he is called.” She gestures. “It is my husband's name. They stayed about ten days and we felt young again.” She smiles again. “Especially my husband.” And she stands there a moment with this smile on her face. Then she asks, abruptly, “Do you pray?”