No Place for an Angel (28 page)

Not only Arethusa, but Barry Day had fled here, she smiled to reflect, pursued not by a river god but by a little girl from Arkansas. She had lied, she had cheated, she was two-faced and unscrupulous and she had got him to marry her and she thought he belonged to her forever and no one could ever convince her she had done anything wrong. She was even willing to forgive him for stealing $2,000 from her father's safe if only he would come home to Arkansas. Poor Barry Day, thought Irene, but why run so hard? There should have been some way of dodging her instead. She would never meet this charming creature, Irene somehow knew. Linell McIntosh was as mythical, as little a part of the universe Irene amply moved through, as nymphs named Arethusa. “So pretty and innocent,” Barry had told her, unable to stop babbling. “So trusting and sweet. She even had talent. She could have painted anything she wanted to. It meant nothing to her, nothing. She got together with her family and smashed every dream I ever had.”

As Irene walked back to the hotel, a boy followed her. He was small and leathery-looking, perhaps far older than his size indicated; a triumph perhaps of malnutrition. She was still unafraid and walked on. The streets grew narrower; few people were in evidence. She had been reassured by Mario that only toward each other were Sicilians apt to be violent, that any woman present as a stranger would be completely safe. Still, the footsteps behind her
persisted block after block, then suddenly they stopped. She had about reached the pensione door, and as she opened it, she turned. The boy was stopped still, regarding her fixedly, and just lighting a cigarette, the match cupped in his hands at that precise moment flaring up to strongly illuminate his face. He meant that to happen, Irene realized; he wanted me to see. She remembered the road worker, the flash of that one gold earring. She opened the door and climbed the stair, feeling refreshed but weary.

“He wants you,” said Mario, “but I will stay. I will sleep in the hall.”

The fever, however, being somewhat lower, she told Mario that he could leave. “There's a boy hanging around,” she said. “I don't know what he wants. M'ha seguita. He followed me.”

“Naturale,” said Mario.

“He wants admiration, I believe,” she said.

“Davvero?” said Mario. He smiled at her.

The next day Barry slept for hours on end. Irene went out with Mario to see something of the surroundings. She turned her attention to Siracusa and learned that it had once been a Greek city, much larger in those days than at present. It now sat shrunken on the empty plain it had once dominated. The remains of a great wall built by the tyrant Dionysus to keep out the invading Athenians could be seen, if one wanted to rent a carriage and guide. Dionysus had built it in a single night, Irene read with astonishment. Mario was not much interested. He said the Athenians had been enormously civilized but were always wearing themselves out in wars with barbaric people who finally weakened them until their glory faded.

“The same thing will happen to you,” he told Irene. “In Europe you have had it easy; there is enough human decency to know what is barbaric. Everyone knew the Nazis, what they were. But when you go East, then what? And to Africa, what then? And you will go. Look at you now; here you are.” He laughed, teasing her. “Nothing can stop you; you will go on and on. And finally, like the Greeks, worn out, a discard.”

“We shouldn't have let the car go,” said Irene. “I knew it.” He went on talking on the bus. The Sicilians were so barbaric that when they captured the Greek fleet they threw all the soldiers and sailors into slave pits and left them there to die. You could hear them crying for miles, pleading for food, for human answers, for anything but abandonment. “Abandonment is the worst,” he said lightly; “I have never compared, but it must be worse than starving to death.” He said he had never thought anything about Siracusa and had never known any of this before, but had been reading for the last two days: nothing else to do.

“I was afraid you were going to leave me here alone,” said Irene.

They got off the bus that led out to the ruins and walked together down an empty white road. The rain had cooled things off the day before, but now the heat was returning tranquilly into its own.

They poked around from one mass of rubble to another and except for the Greek theatre, which Irene found remarkable, agreed there was nothing to get excited over. They took refuge from the sun beneath olive trees and in the shadow of ruined enclosures. Irene said that perhaps Rome had spoiled her for other places. Mario remarked that he had never liked ruins at all. “I think history must all be pretty awful,” Irene said. “Killing people, one slaughter after another, always a different kind.”

Mario's white American-style shirt had got inside her vision; it encountered her nerves with its discriminating absence of starch; she might have been enclosed in it herself by the time they stopped to get cold coffee at a dry, sun-desiccated collection of bare wooden tables and chairs under a rusty vine. There was a wooden bar and behind that a low windowless shack like a dark hole, a lair. A girl came out of it in tight-fitting black skirt and blouse, the kind of nondescript material so many of the peasant women wore; it had worn, rusted, past the stage of being an article which had been chosen, but seemed more like something which grew where it was. The skirt fitted tightly around the girl's hips, which were broad and strong, like an animal's. The blouse had a low V neck, and her breasts pressed up beneath the cloth, small and tight, acornlike. One could suppose she was young. “Sissignori.” She took the order.

“They've no tourists,” said Irene. “Nobody.” She took off her straw sun hat and fanned herself in the self-amused way her cousins used to do, out on their Maryland farms, just in from gardening or standing by the steps of farmhouses. Her face was flushed, she knew, and her hair damp.

“So few,” said Mario. “None at all. Have you seen a single one?”

“Oh, yes,” she said, “the Golden Arrow bus still runs every day or so by the best hotel. I saw it twice.”

“Ha ragione. I saw but I forgot. It is like these people do not exist—they are not tourists, but birds. They are never in the towns. They come to a first-class hotel, they eat, they compare the food to the last first-class hotel, they leave. Two serious scholars a year perhaps.”

The girl brought the coffee; it was poured out of a milk bottle kept chill in an old iron iced-drink container. The sugar came in thin paper bags which said
ZUCCHERO FINE
in red letters. I will never forget what I am doing, seeing now, Irene thought.

“I think they still give performances in that theatre,” she offered.

“Yes, but this is for nothing. It is of no interest. What do they think? That someone today really speaks ancient Greek? And even if they speak it, do they have a Greek heart? Tell me, do they?”

“I suppose not,” she agreed.

“Well, then?” he demanded.

“I don't know,” she returned. The coffee tasted bitter and cool. “Are we supposed to be quarreling?” she asked.

He broke off, his fair face coloring slightly, and shook his head. “Ancora niente di Charles?”

“I think he must still be away or he would have gotten the messages I left. I also sent a wire to the embassy. But things are always uncertain in Italy, aren't they?”

“Someday the light of America will strike us all. We will all be efficient then.”

“Oh, really, Mario!”

His eyes passed hers; then he looked away into the distance.

“Your husband has been good to me,” he said at last.

“I know that.”

She thoughtfully bit her lower lip. She ached still from the trials of yesterday, but she also found them, now the worse was past, a fulfillment. She had been right to come and she really had done something, for Barry was sleeping a sound way back to health. He lay nested and at peace on the far horizon of her consciousness. She had awakened to the thought of Mario, and seeing a fair morning, her spirit had spread itself out like wings. When he nagged her she felt unduly stung and her eyes, astonishing herself as much as him, had filled up with tears. Was it this that made him blunder into what he had said about Charles? She did not ask, but sensed that in apparently ignoring her, contemplating his surroundings, he was righting himself.

Siracusa lay a good distance away; the bus had long since gone away from the white road that had brought them there. She supposed that another would come. Beyond Mario's shoulders, the plain, covered with a dry difficult rubble of white stones, stretched out toward the sea. Yet the sea was hidden from them by distance and the height of the plain.

“What are you thinking, Irena?”

Her strong body had settled already into a deep acquiescence which had not been a matter of decision. A singling out and choosing had been going on about Mario Marcadante, about various others as well, for who knew how long a time, for months maybe; now the wheels and circles and ciphers all had matched and linked, the small hasty dots of light had stopped threading a maze and now had halted, pair by pair in nicely drawn-up ranks, and from somewhere far below the level of hearing the tiniest possible click had unmistakably sounded.

“Whatever it is,” she told him, “it's good.”

They had only left to see the slave pit where all the Athenians had died. The path down to it led back of the café. The girl in black looked after them until the path dipped severely downward. Whatever Irene had expected to see, it was nothing so deep and wild as this. A breath of dense, fragrant air came up to meet them, and there far below, surrounded by towering brown earthen walls, lay a sunken garden, crossed with walks, filled with every sort of tree, plant and vine, deep green, damp and cool by reason, she supposed, of the ragged mouth of a cave that stood elephant-high and shadowy, a stream trickling out of it. She entered the terrible mystery of the place without hesitation, at once concluding that this rich growth must have got its start out of the breasts, fingers, shoulders, skulls and entrails of the men who had died there. She stopped in the pathway. One by one those unlucky men had dropped off into silence and all this of lime trees and great red flowers, cactus, vines and dense broad leaves speckled over with filtering sunlight had grown up out of them. The place kept their final silence yet. For it the last one had just closed his eyes. She had just yesterday herself been tussling close with something that had resembled death and corruption, had had to wash her hair three times to get the ether out, attend to bruises and scratches where in his frantic struggle Barry had tried to strike her loose from him.

She went down slowly with Mario and stood at the cave's mouth. There was no one down there except themselves. The guardian had confirmed this, evidently knowing on sight everything
that was shaping up between them. “Non c'è nessuno dentro,” he had said and climbed back up the path and disappeared. Irene smelled the dark earth from the cave. Gnats formed round her breathing; they danced around Mario's head. She longed to be taken exactly where she was, but had instead to accept in silence the regard he occasionally let fall directly upon her; its content of near anger, or wariness and latent resentment would have to burn out on his own nature: she would not deal with it: this was her decision from the first. An endless chain of lovers must have come here; now one more link was forming. She looked at the lofty walls, their crests at points scarcely visible. She followed him to a sheltered spot, and watched him spread his coat for her. “Many Athenians, now me,” he said, his voice blurring out into the stark desire that had all but joined them already. He pulled her down beside him.

When he kissed her she rested and he kissed her for quite some time. When they moved momentarily apart the gnats rushed in to dance between their faces; she drew up from lying on her elbow. Mario lay beside her like a young tree. He brushed several times at the gnats and she smelled again the breath of the cave. It was cool with the special dark coolness of the earth itself; the earth that let tombs and secret passages be made of it. She could be at home with those too. The vegetation clung together, twined and rooted in whatever lived or rotted; they had entered a sunken island of jungle. It was his hand's motion against her thigh that brought the dead their peace.

Mario had sat up and was smoking. “It's for the insects,” he said. “They do not like smoke.”

“Nor do I,” said Irene. She laid her wrist across his shoulder, the back of her hand brushed against his cheek. “Your mouth will taste like smoke.”

“I know that. The choice was difficult.”

As she watched, the light from high aloft shifted, falling steadily through layers of foliage like a rain of gold. “I feel,” she whispered, “that we have come to the end of the world.”

He glanced at her. “Then it is not so bad.” Snuffing out the cigarette, he moved to bring her closer to him, as she wanted him to.