No Place for an Angel (25 page)

Had Barry seen her that evening, deep in furs, warm in the sleek car's depth, her hand out to him whose thin trousers the wind pierced easily? If not that evening, then plenty of others, going here and there, her narrow Italian heels twinkling for a moment over rain-swept stone while he hustled along with a parcel or two of bread, cheese and mortadella, back to Piazza Navona and the two filaments in the electric stove which were all he had to meet the winter with. He had to be tough and he got tough. He got tougher and tougher. He could appreciate and not wish for the savor of Irene Waddell and people like her, and the doors that opened richly to let them in. It was the way Rome had always been, he reflected; there had to be people like him in order for luxury to be defined at all. In his studio near the Esedra, the wind whistled in through the window cracks, but the light was splendid and he forgot the wind for whole chunks of hours together, casting moulds and sanding away at stone surfaces. He wore an old beige sweater with a turtle neck and it filled up gradually with the uniform smell of stone dust. He went out for coffee and wondered if he should go in with somebody more cheaply on the Margutta. He hated loneliness until he could actually lose it; then it became a precious thing and was called privacy. The bars smelled of sawdust which was scattered on their stone floors to drink up the damp.

Then warm weather came, promising an early summer, and he was happy again. He had finished two nearly life-size works, and when the back of his neck got hot he felt rewarded by sunlight, by the universe itself, a nod of approval, and could afford by reason of an encouraging sale to some friends of Charles Waddell's to sit on the Via Veneto in front of Doney's, a swanky cafe, with a Swedish girl whose hair was yellow, whose cheeks were rosy and whose English was very good. Irene chanced to pass and waved at them. “Who was she?” Irene wanted to know when they next met. “She was the loveliest thing I ever saw.” “She's with the Scandinavian Airlines.” “Then her name is Inge. They're all named Inge.” “Helga,” he said (it wasn't). “Will that do?”

Then one day his wife showed up. He had been allowed ten days of sheer delight, which is a lot, he thought, sitting on the bunk in his studio with the letter in his hand wondering whether to stand or flee.

Her name was Linell McIntosh before she married him, one hasty weekend in New York where she had pursued him full of tears and that everlasting love which he had, at one time, not only believed in, but had himself introduced her to. She was from Arkansas and if he had never loved her it would not have been so bad. But he had loved her. He had crashed into love like falling through the roof of a greenhouse and there he was before he knew it within those numb transparent walls, moving among heavy odors, through heated air debilitating as paradise.

Irene was to learn all this in Siracusa as ravings from a bed of fever in a little pensione on the second floor of a building which overlooked the Ionian Sea.

Irene had known from the first that Mario was in Sicily; he had been working for Charles and for others in the American bureaucracy abroad for some years. He and Charles had met during the war. He had done all the right things, had worked in the underground, been captured, escaped, gone over to the Allies at a time when it was worth your life to say so. Charles had been drawn to a group of such people, for whom his admiration was always
great. (“They were the true heroes,” he would say. “They were what the war was all about.”) Mario, as his English was excellent, was easier to keep up with than some of the others. He continued to be satisfying. He appeared in Paris during the Waddells' time of residence there, and studied for a year at the Sorbonne. So he came often to their apartment. He was known to be working on some book or other, and not only working on it; Irene took note, after a year or so, that he had finished it and it was published! Irene cultivated artistic people, but often grew discouraged with them. Why talk so well about things and not do them? She was pleased with Mario and boasted of him and thought of whom he should meet: then he vanished back into Italy. “He has to get work,” Charles explained to her. “Of course he does. He has a good family but isn't rich by any means. They work very hard there,” he added. “It's a false reputation, this dolce far niente.” He was angry at the French at the time, so that all Italians seemed like marvelous people.

Mario could have passed for anything, French or German, English or American. He had a face that openly presented his essence to the world—quick, sensitive, intelligent, withholding only for a while, until he smiled, an exceptional sense of humor: he liked absurdities; that was what you gratefully realized. So he was always changing from the serious young European political thinker, dour and frowning, to a performer's mimicry, his pliant mouth shooting up at the corners, his grey-blue eyes sharp and wild in a nest of wrinkles. For measure and timing he was accurate as a cat. “An aristocratic clown,” Charles called him once. The Waddells loved discovering their superiors.

He's going to think I'm crazy, thought Irene, who alighted from the Rome-Catania plane, a bit wobbly in the knees, pale and dizzy. It was hot and the tarmac was like black paste. She telephoned to the Catania University for Mario and was directed to him at once by one of those surprising efficiencies that have to occur sometimes in Italy, as though to prove the system had really broken down.

“Irena!” he said, surprised, and offered to come out for her, but she, instead, got a cab in to him.

He came out of the university offices and met her on the street as she was alighting from the cab. “Signora,” he said, ready to laugh. It was half a question. It meant what was she doing there and where was Charles and that the plane had obviously shaken her up and maybe even scared her.

“Oh, Mario,” said Irene, “I'm in a crisis. Can you go to Siracusa with me? I have to rent a car. There's a bus but I think I'll need a car. We've a sick friend there, for all I know he's dying. I tried to telephone from Rome but no luck. You must remember him. Barry Day? An artist from the States. Molto magro.”

“Si . . . Day . . . quello che aveva lo studio in Via Nazionale. Si, lo conosco.”

“Charles would appreciate it more than you know. Traveling alone in Sicily . . . well, for a woman, I don't think it's a good idea.”

“But they are courteous.” He was still smiling. She felt more than ever that this was the right step and that with a little urging he would not only go but would also organize, take over a bit; yet he held back. “No one would harm you.”

“I know, but I— What if he's terribly ill? What if there should be a real emergency? First, I must call again from here to try and reach him or somebody there. Help me call, at least. The language is different. I feel I don't know enough.”

“You are upset,” said Mario. He hesitated.

“I sent a wire off to Charles. He's due in this weekend.”

“Then perhaps he will come also.”

“I hope so. I don't know.”

Suddenly, she really did feel desperate. She thought of Barry in the sense of one of the twins who was lying ill and alone without her. “I have to get to him,” she said to Mario. “I can get Charles to straighten it out with people here that you have to leave. Say it's my brother and he has—oh, something awful—scarlet fever. Peritonitis.”

“You scare me too,” said Mario. Then he consented. He said the work was all but done there and he had planned to return the next day.

In the rented car, Mario driving, they spoke sometimes Italian and sometimes English, and sometimes a little of both. How grand to have found him, thought Irene. She was astounded by her unparalleled luck. And though the mistress of the pensione in Siracusa had been half hysterical about the sick Americano, Mario had managed to get out of her that Barry was still alive. “She doesn't want anyone dying there,” Mario concluded, hanging up the phone. “Sicilians are another race.” He dismissed them all.

“But you said how courteous—” Irene protested.

“Well, they are old-fashioned. They pride themselves on being cavalieri. But here for years before the war they let themselves be Mafia-ridden, bandit-ridden, and now eleven years after the war where are they? The same as before. I think they will never throw it off. The American programs here are nothing; they come to the lectures one after another, week on top of week, and have no idea of English, or what is going on. They could perhaps do a polite conversation but scarcely more than that. How can they continue? Cultures have overflowed them, one after another, and still there is no mainstream here. No, no. The good ones will go to Rome, or get out entirely, and the others will simply sink back into family interest or form some little circle where they talk and dress well and please each other. It will go on like that. And oh my God, in the villages! There is this Guiliano worship. He was against the Mafia. The Mafia had him killed.”

“Oh, I thought he was one of them.”

“They used him for a time, but then he became inconvenient. There is no loyalty. Only what they want to call loyalty. It is all too complicated, and who can really know who did what? They say that his best friend was hired by the Mafia to kill him, but the police story is quite another. He became a problem to the state. So there is yet another story for the state. He was a handsome outlaw. That is all. The women dipped scarves in his blood. Half of their husbands had been murdered by the Mafia. What is there to do? Niente. Niente da fare. . . .” He glanced at her in the mirror. “Don't be worried, Signora. Your friend will live.”

“How lucky I am to have found you,” said Irene. She had said that a dozen times already.

“You would have made it all right,” he said, and his eye flashed at her, again out of the mirror, as though out of the sky, an encouraging gleam. “American women always make it all right.”

She saw that Mario was happy. He was happy to be with her, doing this very thing. When he spoke of Sicily, it had a different ring from when an American criticized something abroad because no matter how scathing he became he was still concerned. Italy drove him crazy but the country was always his own. She began to watch Etna; the cool snowy cone relieved the dense heat. “How fast you drive!” she remarked. “Fa presto.”

“I like driving. Once in the war I escaped only by driving well. I passed just ahead of a train and cut off the military police. In the night, sometimes I dream, the train is still breathing in my face like a bull, I am little like a mouse, and I am not going to make it. But I did. There should have been a movie.”

“This was when you left Rome?”

“The Germans were retreating by then. Rome was a chaos. They had been suspicious of me already. I had got through twice to report to the Allies on the defenses of Rome. When the advance pressed closer, suspicion of anyone was excuse enough to shoot. There was nothing more I could do. So I stole a jeep and left for Siena, to my aunt's villa in the country. Three checkpoints I passed okay and at the last, somebody there recognized me. Shouts and shots. It was night, about one o'clock. Very dark evening. I drove with my head down, hugging the floor. Then just at Santa Margherita—the train. I shall never forget it. . . . Your friend now”—he broke off, glancing at her again—“You are good to do this. I do not know if I would do it. I think so often, Americans are really very kind. For my brother perhaps, or someone in the family.”

“Or Francesca,” she smiled. She had met his fidanzata, that quiet, pale, lovely girl. The odd thing was that she had never seen them together. She had once wanted to ask the girl to a dinner party, but Charles had advised her not to. “These things are pretty much family matters,” he said. “But Mario is so modern,” she insisted. She took his advice and let it drop.

“You think Francesca would be alone in Siracusa? Oh, Signora, first, at the very news, the family all falls to the floor. Spaventati. Tutti morti.”

“When will you marry?” Irene asked him.

“I don't really know yet, for a while I wanted to go to the States, but just now it seems impossible. Even if I had the money, there would be this damned visa.”

The reason Mario had had visa trouble was that after the war he had found himself with a good many Communist friends, some of long standing, some who had recently joined the Party, and others who argued about it all the time. He continued these friendships and even enjoyed them. Sometimes they even amused him. Nobody could think any more that Communists could be funny. Though Charles Waddell had got him several jobs, his visa had been turned down. Charles himself could not put up too much pressure in this direction, for there were ways of discovering that he himself was not as one-hundred-percent American as other one-hundred-percent Americans might contrive to think he should be. The times were nothing if not delicate. Delicate and brutal, thought Irene.

They drove through orange groves, past tiny stations cooking, burnishing, shrunken, drying desert-dry in the sun. Even one person could look so lonely and hopeless, walking, working a
vineyard, leading a donkey, or just standing near a railroad station. You could think that life was hopeless for millions and millions of people on earth you didn't know; but maybe it only seems terrible to me, thought Irene, because I would have to leave what I am and know and turn into something I cannot begin to imagine—a Sicilian peasant woman in a worn black dress and drawn-back hair and knobby hands and big flat crusty feet in broken shoes, looking sixty at thirty and eighty at forty and never knowing anything but passionate love and passionate hate, motherhood, and some mumble about the Virgin or a saint. At the moment when her life seemed so superior to all the possible lives that birth might have cast her into, and her present moment certainly a fine one—a mission of rescue, of sheer humanity—it must have been about then that she ceased to think of herself in any way at all, for she began simply not to think at all. She began to talk to Mario and he to her: they talked up several hours without knowing it. Mario went on beautifully driving, his driving—really expert, she later thought—almost interpreting the swing of the curves, the cool rush of the orange groves, the blank stretches of nothing but sun. She thought later, too, a long time later, that if it had been a horse, a span of horses, that he drove that day, perhaps the way she felt might have been intenser yet; or even had they ridden together, galloping. But then she gave it up—that was too much; they both belonged to the mechanical age, to wheels, accelerators, brakes and carburetors. The road mounted curving through the orange groves and the long downward grade opened, leaning toward the sea, the salt flats and the white cliffs surrounding Siracusa shouldered distantly up against the translucent blue of greater distances yet, Africa was out there somewhere; it was impossible to think of horses. She would have been unable to talk at all, for one thing, jerked in the harsh rhythm of animals, worried at times about the poor things in the heat, her head would have hurt and her shoulders got tired. As it was she sat calmly, confident of the shifting wheel beside her, her voice carrying to him perfectly. It was a little like dancing, she thought, leaning to the motion; she lifted a strand of hair blown from under her scarf with one finger and tucked it underneath.