Caryl Phillips

Giovanni’s Room

For LUCIEN

I am the man; I su ered, I was there.

– WHITMAN

PART ONE

1

I stand at the window of this great house in the south of France as night falls, the night which is leading me to the most terrible morning of my life. I have a drink in my hand, there is a bottle at my elbow. I watch my re ection in the darkening gleam of the window pane. My re ection is tall, perhaps rather like an arrow, my blond hair gleams. My face is like a face you have seen many times.

My ancestors conquered a continent, pushing across death-laden plains, until they came to an ocean which faced away from Europe into a darker past.

I may be drunk by morning but that will not do any good. I shall take the train to Paris anyway. The train will be the same, the people, struggling for comfort and, even, dignity on the straight-backed, wooden, third-class seats will be the same, and I will be the same. We will ride through the same changing countryside northward, leaving behind the olive trees and the sea and all of the glory of the stormy southern sky, into the mist and rain of Paris.

Someone will o er to share a sandwich with me, someone will o er me a sip of wine, someone will ask me for a match. People will be roaming the corridors outside, looking out of windows, looking in at us. At each stop, recruits in their baggy brown uniforms and colored hats will open the compartment door to ask Complet? We will all nod Yes, like conspirators, smiling faintly at each other as they continue through the train. Two or three of them will end up before our compartment door, shouting at each other in their heavy, ribald voices, smoking their dreadful army cigarettes. There will be a girl sitting opposite me who will wonder why I have not been irting with her, who will be set on edge by the presence of the recruits. It will all be the same, only I will be stiller.

And the countryside is still tonight, this countryside re ected through my image in the pane. This house is just outside a small summer resort—which is still empty, the season has not yet begun.

It is on a small hill, one can look down on the lights of the town and hear the thud of the sea. My girl, Hella, and I rented it in Paris, from photographs, some months ago. Now she has been gone a week. She is on the high seas now, on her way back to America.

I can see her, very elegant, tense, and glittering, surrounded by the light which lls the salon of the ocean liner, drinking rather too fast, and laughing, and watching the men. That was how I met her, in a bar in St. Germain des Pres, she was drinking and watching, and that was why I liked her, I thought she would be fun to have fun with. That was how it began, that was all it meant to me; I am not sure now, in spite of everything, that it ever really meant more than that to me. And I don’t think it ever really meant more than that to her—at least not until she made that trip to Spain and, nding herself there, alone, began to wonder, perhaps, if a lifetime of drinking and watching men was exactly what she wanted. But it was too late by that time. I was already with Giovanni. I had asked her to marry me before she went away to Spain; and she laughed and I laughed but that, somehow, all the same, made it more serious for me, and I persisted; and then she said she would have to go away and think about it. And the very last night she was here, the very last time I saw her, as she was packing her bag, I told her that I had loved her once and I made myself believe it. But I wonder if I had. I was thinking, no doubt, of our nights in bed, of the peculiar innocence and con dence which will never come again which had made those nights so delightful, so unrelated to past, present, or anything to come, so unrelated, nally, to my life since it was not necessary for me to take any but the most mechanical responsibility for them. And these nights were being acted out under a foreign sky, with no-one to watch, no penalties attached—it was this last fact which was our undoing, for nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom. I suppose this was why I asked her to marry me: to give myself something to be moored to. Perhaps this was

why, in Spain, she decided that she wanted to marry me. But people can’t, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than they can invent their parents. Life gives these and also takes them away and the great di culty is to say Yes to life.

I was thinking, when I told Hella that I had loved her, of those days before anything awful, irrevocable, had happened to me, when an a air was nothing more than an a air. Now, from this night, this coming morning, no matter how many beds I nd myself in between now and my nal bed, I shall never be able to have any more of those boyish, zestful a airs—which are, really, when one thinks of it, a kind of higher, or, anyway, more pretentious masturbation.

People are too various to be treated so lightly. I am too various to be trusted. If this were not so I would not be alone in this house tonight. Hella would not be on the high seas. And Giovanni would not be about to perish, sometime between this night and this morning, on the guillotine.

I repent now—for all the good it does—one particular lie among the many lies I’ve told, told, lived, and believed. This is the lie which I told to Giovanni, but never succeeded in making him believe, that I had never slept with a boy before. I had. I had decided that I never would again. There is something fantastic in the spectacle I now present to myself of having run so far, so hard, across the ocean even, only to nd myself brought up short once more before the bulldog in my own backyard—the yard, in the meantime, having grown smaller and the bulldog bigger.

I have not thought of that boy—Joey—for many years; but I see him quite clearly tonight. It was several years ago, I was still in my teens, he was about my age, give or take a year. He was a very nice boy, too, very quick and dark, and always laughing. For a while he was my best friend. Later, the idea that such a person could have been my best friend was proof of some horrifying taint in me. So I forgot him. But I see him very well tonight.

It was in the summer, there was no school. His parents had gone someplace for the weekend and I was spending the weekend at his house, which was near Coney Island, in Brooklyn. We lived in Brooklyn too, in those days, but in a better neighborhood than Joey’s. I think we had been lying around the beach, swimming a little and watching the near-naked girls pass, whistling at them, and laughing. I am sure that if any of the girls we whistled at that day had shown any signs of responding the ocean would not have been deep enough to drown our shame and terror. But the girls, no doubt, had some intimation of this, possibly from the way we whistled, and they ignored us. As the sun was setting we started up the boardwalk towards his house, with our wet bathing trunks on under our trousers.

And I think it began in the shower. I know that I felt something—

as we were horsing around in that small, steamy room, stinging each other with wet towels—which I had not felt before, which mysteriously, and yet aimlessly, included him. I remember in myself a heavy reluctance to get dressed: I blamed it on the heat. But we did get dressed, sort of, and we ate cold things out of his icebox and drank a lot of beer. We must have gone to the movies. I can’t think of any other reason for our going out and I remember walking down the dark, tropical Brooklyn streets with heat coming up from the pavements and banging from the walls of houses with enough force to kill a man, with all the world’s grownups, it seemed, sitting shrill and dishevelled on the stoops and all the world’s children on the sidewalks or in the gutters hanging from re-escapes, with my arm around Joey’s shoulder. I was proud, I think, because his head came just below my ear. We were walking along and Joey was making dirty wisecracks and we were laughing. Odd to remember, for the rst time in so long, how good I felt that night, how fond of Joey.

When we came back along those streets it was quiet; we were quiet too. We were very quiet in the apartment and sleepily got undressed in Joey’s bedroom and went to bed. I fell asleep—for quite awhile, I think. But I woke up to nd the light on and Joey examining the pillow with great, ferocious care.

‘What’s the matter?’

‘I think a bedbug bit me.’

‘You slob. You got bedbugs?’

‘I think one bit me.’

‘You ever have a bedbug bite you before?’

‘No.’

‘Well, go back to sleep. You’re dreaming.’

He looked at me with his mouth open and his dark eyes very big.

It was as though he had just discovered that I was an expert on bedbugs. I laughed and grabbed his head as I had done God knows how many times before, when I was playing with him or when he had annoyed me. But this time when I touched him something happened in him and in me which made this touch di erent from any touch either of us had ever known. And he did not resist, as he usually did, but lay where I had pulled him, against my chest. And I realized that my heart was beating in an awful way and that Joey was trembling against me and the light in the room was very bright and hot. I started to move and to make some kind of joke but Joey mumbled something and I put my head down to hear. Joey raised his head as I lowered mine and we kissed, as it were, by accident.

Then, for the rst time in my life, I was really aware of another person’s body, of another person’s smell. We had our arms around each other. It was like holding in my hand some rare, exhausted, nearly doomed bird which I had miraculously happened to nd. I was very frightened, I am sure he was frightened too, and we shut our eyes. To remember it so clearly, so painfully tonight tells me that I have never for an instant truly forgotten it. I feel in myself now a faint, dreadful stirring of what so overwhelmingly stirred in me then. Great thirsty heat, and trembling, and tenderness so painful I thought my heart would burst. But out of this astounding intolerable pain came joy, we gave each other joy that night. It seemed, then, that a lifetime would not be long enough for me to act with Joey the act of love.

But that lifetime was short, was bounded by that night—it ended in the morning. I awoke while Joey was still sleeping, curled like a baby on his side, toward me. He looked like a baby, his mouth half open, his cheek ushed, his curly hair darkening the pillow and half hiding his damp round forehead and his long eyelashes glinting slightly in the summer sun. We were both naked and the sheet we had used as a cover was tangled around our feet. Joey’s body was brown, was sweaty, the most beautiful creation I have ever seen till then. I would have touched him to wake him up but something stopped me. I was suddenly afraid. Perhaps it was because he looked so innocent lying there, with such perfect trust; perhaps it was because he was so much smaller than me; my own body suddenly seemed gross and crushing and the desire which was rising in me seemed monstrous. But, above all, I was suddenly afraid. It was borne in on me: But Joey is a boy, I saw suddenly the power in his thighs, in his arms, and in his loosely curled sts. The power and the promise and the mystery of that body made me suddenly afraid.

That body suddenly seemed the black opening of a cavern in which I would be tortured till madness came, in which I would lose my manhood. Precisely, I wanted to know that mystery and feel that power and have that promise ful lled through me. The sweat on my back grew cold. I was ashamed. The very bed, in its sweet disorder, testi ed to vileness. I wondered what Joey’s mother would say when she saw the sheets. Then I thought of my father, who had no one in the world but me, my mother having died when I was little.

A cavern opened in my mind, black, full of rumor, suggestion, of half-heard, half-forgotten, half-understood stories, full of dirty words. I thought I saw my future in that cavern. I was afraid. I could have cried, cried for shame and terror, cried for not understanding how this could have happened to me, how this could have happened in me. And I made my decision. I got out of bed and took a shower and was dressed and had breakfast ready when Joey woke up.

I did not tell him my decision, that would have broken my will. I did not wait to have breakfast with him but only drank some co ee and made an excuse to go home. I knew the excuse did not fool

Joey; but he did not know how to protest or insist; he did not know that this was all he needed to have done. Then I, who had seen him that summer nearly every day till then, no longer went to see him.

He did not come to see me. I would have been very happy to see him if he had, but the manner of my leavetaking had begun a constriction which neither of us knew how to arrest. When I nally did see him, more or less by accident, near the end of the summer, I made up a long and totally untrue story about a girl I was going with and when school began again I picked up with a rougher, older crowd and was very nasty to Joey. And the sadder this made him, the nastier I became. He moved away at last, out of the neighborhood, away from our school, and I never saw him again.

I began, perhaps, to be lonely that summer and began, that summer, the ight which has brought me to this darkening window.

And yet—when one begins to search for the crucial, the de nitive moment, the moment which changed all others, one nds oneself pressing, in great pain, through a maze of false signals and abruptly locking doors. My ight may, indeed, have begun that summer—

which does not tell me where to nd the germ of the dilemma which resolved itself, that summer, into ight. Of course, it is somewhere before me, locked in that re ection I am watching in the window as the night comes down outside. It is trapped in the room with me, always has been, and always will be, and it is yet more foreign to me than those foreign hills outside.

We lived in Brooklyn then, as I say; we had also lived in San Francisco, where I was born, and where my mother lies buried, and we lived for awhile in Seattle, and then in New York—for me, New York is Manhattan. Later on, then, we moved from Brooklyn back to New York and by the time I came to France my father and his new wife had graduated to Connecticut. I had long been on my own by then, of course, and had been living in an apartment in the east sixties.

We, in the days when I was growing up, were my father and his unmarried sister and myself. My mother had been carried to the graveyard when I was ve. I scarcely remember her at all, yet she

gured in my nightmares, blind with worms, her hair as dry as metal and brittle as a twig, straining to press me against her body; that body so putrescent, so sickening soft, that it opened, as I clawed and cried, into a breach so enormous as to swallow me alive. But when my father or my aunt came rushing into my room to nd out what had frightened me I did not dare describe this dream, which seemed disloyal to my mother. I said that I had dreamed about a graveyard. They concluded that the death of my mother had had this unsettling e ect on my imagination and perhaps they thought that I was grieving for her. And I may have been, but if that is so, then I am grieving still.

My father and my aunt got on very badly and, without ever knowing how or why I felt it, I felt that their long battle had everything to do with my dead mother. I remember when I was very young how, in the big living room of the house in San Francisco, my mother’s photograph, which stood all by itself on the mantelpiece, seemed to rule the room. It was as though her photograph proved how her spirit dominated that air and controlled us all. I remember the shadows gathering in the far corners of that room, in which I never felt at home, and my father washed in the gold light which spilled down on him from the tall lamp which stood beside his easy chair. He would be reading his newspaper, hidden from me behind his newspaper, so that, desperate to conquer his attention, I sometimes so annoyed him that our duel ended with me being carried from the room in tears. Or I remember him sitting bent forward, his elbows on his knees, staring toward the great window which held back the inky night. I used to wonder what he was thinking. In the eye of my memory he always wears a grey, sleeveless sweater and he had loosened his tie, and his sandy hair falls forward over a square, ruddy face. He was one of those people who, quick to laugh, are slow to anger; so that their anger, when it comes, is all the more impressive, seeming to leap from some unsuspected crevice like a re which will bring the whole house down.

And his sister, Ellen, a little older than he, a little darker, always over-dressed, over made-up, with a face and gure beginning to harden, and with too much jewelry everywhere, clanging and banging in the light, sits on the sofa, reading; she read a lot, all the new books, and she used to go to the movies a great deal. Or she knits. It seems to me that she was always carrying a great bag full of dangerous-looking knitting needles, or a book, or both. And I don’t know what she knitted, though I suppose she must, at least occasionally, have knitted something for my father, or me. But I don’t remember it, any more than I remember the books she read. It might always have been the same book and she might have been working on the same scarf, or sweater, or God knows what, all the years I knew her. Sometimes she and my father played cards—this was rare; sometimes they talked together in friendly, teasing tones, but this was dangerous. Their banter nearly always ended in a ght.

Sometimes there was company and I was often allowed to watch them drink their cocktails. Then my father was at his best, boyish and expansive, moving about through the crowded room with a glass in his hand, re lling people’s drinks, laughing a lot, handling all the men as though they were his brothers, and irting with the women. Or no, not irting with them, strutting like a cock before them. Ellen always seemed to be watching him as though she were afraid he would do something awful, watched him and watched the women and, yes, she irted with the men in a strange, nerve-wracking kind of way. There she was, dressed, as they say, to kill, with her mouth redder than any blood, dressed in something which was either the wrong color, or too tight, or too young, the cocktail glass in her hand threatening, at any instant, to be reduced to shards, to splinters, and that voice going on and on like a razor blade on glass. When I was a little boy and I watched her in company, she frightened me.

But no matter what was happening in that room, my mother was watching it. She looked out of the photograph frame, a pale, blonde woman, delicately put together, dark-eyed, and straight-browed, with a nervous, gentle mouth. But something about the way the eyes

were set in the head and stared straight out, something very faintly sardonic and knowing in the set of the mouth suggested that, somewhere beneath this tense fragility was a strength as various as it was unyielding and, like my father’s wrath, dangerous because it was so entirely unexpected. My father rarely spoke of her and when he did he covered, by some mysterious means, his face; he spoke of her only as my mother and, in fact, as he spoke of her, he might have been speaking of his own. Ellen spoke of my mother often, saying what a remarkable woman she had been but she made me uncomfortable. I felt that I had no right to be the son of such a mother.

Years later, when I had become a man, I tried to get my father to talk about my mother. But Ellen was dead, he was about to marry again. He spoke of my mother, then, as Ellen had spoken of her and he might, indeed, have been speaking of Ellen.

They had a ght one night when I was about thirteen. They had a great many ghts, of course; but perhaps I remember this one so clearly because it seemed to be about me.

I was in bed upstairs, asleep. It was quite late. I was suddenly awakened by the sound of my father’s footfalls on the walk beneath my window. I could tell by the sound and the rhythm that he was a little drunk and I remember that at that moment a certain disappointment, an unprecedented sorrow entered into me. I had seen him drunk many times and had never felt this way—on the contrary, my father sometimes had great charm when he was drunk

—but that night I suddenly felt that there was something in it, in him, to be despised.

I heard him come in. Then, at once, I heard Ellen’s voice.

‘Aren’t you in bed yet?’ my father asked. He was trying to be pleasant and trying to avoid a scene, but there was no cordiality in his voice, only strain and exasperation.

‘I thought,’ said Ellen, coldly, ‘that someone ought to tell you what you’re doing to your son.’

‘What I’m doing to my son?’ And he was about to say something more, something awful; but he caught himself and only said, with a resigned, drunken, despairing calm: ‘What are you talking about, Ellen?’

‘Do you really think,’ she asked—I was certain that she was standing in the center of the room, with her hands folded before her, standing very straight and still—‘that you’re the kind of man he ought to be when he grows up?’ And, as my father said nothing: ‘He is growing up, you know.’ And then, spitefully, ‘Which is more than I can say for you.’

‘Go to bed, Ellen,’ said my father—sounding very weary.

I had the feeling, since they were talking about me, that I ought to go downstairs and tell Ellen that whatever was wrong between my father and myself we could work out between us without her help.

And, perhaps—which seems odd—I felt that she was disrespectful of me. For I had certainly never said a word to her about my father.

I heard his heavy, uneven footfalls as he moved across the room, toward the stairs.

‘Don’t think,’ said Ellen, ‘that I don’t know where you’ve been.’

‘I’ve been out—drinking—’ said my father, ‘and now I’d like to get a little sleep. Do you mind?’

‘You’ve been with that girl, Beatrice,’ said Ellen. ‘That’s where you always are and that’s where all your money goes and all your manhood and self-respect, too.’

She had succeeded in making him angry. He began to stammer. ‘If you think—if you think—that I’m going to stand—stand—stand here

—and argue with you about my private life— my private life!—if you think I’m going to argue with you about it, why, you’re out of your mind.’

‘I certainly don’t care,’ said Ellen, ‘what you do with yourself. It isn’t you I’m worried about. It’s only that you’re the only person who has any authority over David. I don’t. And he hasn’t got any mother. And he only listens to me when he thinks it pleases you. Do you really think it’s a good idea for David to see you staggering

home drunk all the time? And don’t fool yourself,’ she added, after a moment, in a voice thick with passion, ‘don’t fool yourself that he doesn’t know where you’re coming from, don’t think he doesn’t know about your women!’

She was wrong. I don’t think I did know about them—or I had never thought about them. But from that evening, I thought about them all the time. I could scarcely ever face a woman without wondering whether or not my father had, in Ellen’s phrase, been

‘interfering’ with her.

‘I think it barely possible,’ said my father, ‘that David has a cleaner mind than yours.’

The silence, then, in which my father climbed the stairs was by far the worst silence my life had ever known. I was wondering what they were thinking—each of them. I wondered how they looked. I wondered what I would see when I saw them in the morning.

‘And listen,’ said my father suddenly, from the middle of the staircase, in a voice which frightened me, ‘all I want for David is that he grow up to be a man. And when I say a man, Ellen, I don’t mean a Sunday school teacher.’

‘A man,’ said Ellen, shortly, ‘is not the same thing as a bull. Goodnight.’

‘Good-night,’ he said, after a moment.

And I heard him stagger past my door.

From that time on, with the mysterious, cunning, and dreadful intensity of the very young, I despised my father and I hated Ellen.

It is hard to say why. I don’t know why. But it allowed all of Ellen’s prophecies about me to come true. She had said that there would come a time when nothing and nobody would be able to rule me, not even my father. And that time certainly came.

It was after Joey. The incident with Joey had shaken me profoundly and its e ect was to make me secretive and cruel. I could not discuss what had happened to me with anyone, I could not even admit it to myself; and, while I never thought about it, it remained, nevertheless, at the bottom of my mind, as still and as

awful as a decomposing corpse. And it changed, it thickened, it soured the atmosphere of my mind. Soon it was I who came staggering home late at night, it was I who found Ellen waiting up for me, Ellen and I who wrangled night in and night out.

My father’s attitude was that this was but an inevitable phase of my growing up and he a ected to take it lightly. But beneath his jocular, boys-together air, he was at a loss, he was frightened.

Perhaps he had supposed that my growing up would bring us closer together—whereas, now that he was trying to nd out something about me, I was in full ight from him. I did not want him to know me. I did not want anyone to know me. And then, again, I was undergoing with my father what the very young inevitably undergo with their elders: I was beginning to judge him. And the very harshness of this judgment, which broke my heart, revealed, though I could not have said it then, how much I had loved him, how that love, along with my innocence, was dying.

My poor father was ba ed and afraid. He was unable to believe that there could be anything seriously wrong between us. And this was not only because he would not then have known what to do about it; it was mainly because he would then have had to face the knowledge that he had left something, somewhere, undone, something of the utmost importance. And since neither of us had any idea of what this so signi cant omission could have been, and since we were forced to remain in tacit league against Ellen, we took refuge in being hearty with each other. We were not like father and son, my father sometimes proudly said, we were like buddies. I think my father sometimes actually believed this. I never did. I did not want to be his buddy, I wanted to be his son. What passed between us as masculine candor exhausted and appalled me. Fathers ought to avoid utter nakedness before their sons. I did not want to know—not, anyway, from his mouth—that his esh was as unregenerate as my own. The knowledge did not make me feel more like his son—or buddy—it only made me feel like an interloper, and a frightened one at that. He thought we were alike. I did not want to think so. I did not want to think that my life would be like his, or

that my mind would ever grow so pale, so without hard places and sharp, sheer drops. He wanted no distance between us, he wanted me to look on him as a man like myself. But I wanted the merciful distance of father and son, which would have permitted me to love him.

One night, drunk, with several other people on the way back from an out of town party, the car I was driving smashed up. It was entirely my fault. I was almost too drunk to walk and had no business driving; but the others did not know this, since I am one of those people who can look and sound sober while practically in a state of collapse. On a straight, level piece of highway something weird happened to all my reactions and the car sprang suddenly out of my control. And a telephone pole, foam white, came crying at me out of the pitch darkness; I heard screams and then a heavy, roaring, tearing sound. Then everything turned absolutely scarlet and then as bright as day and I went into a darkness I had never known before.

I must have begun to wake up as we were being moved to the hospital. I dimly remember movement and voices, but they seemed very far away, they seemed to have nothing to do with me. Then, later, I woke up in a spot which seemed to be the very heart of winter, a high, white ceiling and white walls, and a hard, glacial window, bent, as it seemed, over me. I must have tried to rise, for I remember an awful roaring in my head, and then a weight on my chest and a huge face over me. And as this weight, this face, began to push me under again, I screamed for my mother. Then it was dark again.

When I came to myself at last, my father was standing over my bed. I knew he was there before I saw him, before my eyes focussed and I carefully turned my head. When he saw that I was awake, he carefully stepped closer to the bed, motioning me to be still. And he looked very old. I wanted to cry. For a moment we just stared at each other.

‘How do you feel?’ he whispered, nally.

It was when I tried to speak that I realized I was in pain and immediately I was frightened. He must have seen this in my eyes,

for he said in a low voice, with a pained, a marvellous intensity,

‘Don’t worry, David. You’re going to be alright. You’re going to be alright.’

I still could not say anything. I simply watched his face.

‘You kids were mighty lucky,’ he said, trying to smile. ‘You’re the one got smashed up the most.’

‘I was drunk,’ I said at last. I wanted to tell him everything—but speaking was such agony.

‘Don’t you know,’ he asked, with an air of extreme ba ement—for this was something he could allow himself to be ba ed about

—‘better than to go driving around like that when you’re drunk?

You know better than that,’ he said, severely, and pursed his lips.

‘Why you could all have been killed.’ And his voice shook.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said, suddenly. ‘I’m sorry.’ I did not know how to say what it was I was sorry for.

‘Don’t be sorry,’ he said. ‘Just be careful next time.’ He had been patting his handkerchief between his palms; now he opened this handkerchief and reached out and wiped my forehead. ‘You’re all I’ve got,’ he said then, with a shy, pained grin. ‘Be careful.’

‘Daddy,’ I said. And began to cry. And if speaking had been agony, this was worse and yet I could not stop.

And my father’s face changed. It became terribly old and at the same time absolutely, helplessly young. I remember being absolutely astonished, at the still, cold center of the storm which was occurring in me, to realize that my father had been su ering, was su ering still.

‘Don’t cry,’ he said, ‘don’t cry.’ He stroked my forehead with that absurd handkerchief as though it possessed some healing charm.

‘There’s nothing to cry about. Everything’s going to be all right.’ He was almost weeping himself. ‘There’s nothing wrong, is there? I haven’t done anything wrong, have I?’ And all the time he was stroking my face with that handkerchief, smothering me.

‘We were drunk,’ I said. ‘We were drunk.’ For this seemed, somehow, to explain everything.

‘Your aunt Ellen says it’s my fault,’ he said. ‘She says I never raised you right.’ He put away, thank heaven, that handkerchief, and weakly straightened his shoulders. ‘You got nothing against me, have you? Tell me if you have?’

My tears began to dry, on my face and in my breast. ‘No,’ I said,

‘no. Nothing. Honest.’

‘I did the best I could,’ he said. ‘I really did the best I could.’ I looked at him. And at last he grinned and said, ‘You’re going to be on your back for awhile but when you come home, while you’re lying around the house, we’ll talk, huh? and try to gure out what the hell we’re going to do with you when you get on your feet. OK?’

‘OK,’ I said.

For I understood, at the bottom of my heart, that we had never talked, that now we never would. I understood that he must never know this. When I came home he talked with me about my future but I had made up my mind. I was not going to go to college. I was not going to remain in that house with him and Ellen. And I maneuvered my father so well that he actually began to believe that my nding a job and being on my own was the direct result of his advice and a tribute to the way he had raised me. Once I was out of the house, of course, it became much easier to deal with him and he never had any reason to feel shut out of my life for I was always able, when talking about it, to tell him what he wished to hear. And we got on quite well, really, for the vision I gave my father of my life was exactly the vision in which I myself most desperately needed to believe.

For I am—or I was—one of those people who pride themselves on their willpower, on their ability to make a decision and carry it through. This virtue, like most virtues, is ambiguity itself. People who believe that they are strong-willed and the masters of their destiny can only continue to believe this by becoming specialists in self-deception. Their decisions are not really decisions at all—a real decision makes one humble, one knows that it is at the mercy of more things than can be named—but elaborate systems of evasion, of illusion, designed to make themselves and the world appear to be

what they and the world are not. This is certainly what my decision, made so long ago in Joey’s bed, came to. I had decided to allow no room in the universe for something which shamed and frightened me. I succeeded very well—by not looking at the universe, by not looking at myself, by remaining, in e ect, in constant motion. Even constant motion, of course, does not prevent an occasional mysterious drag, a drop, like an airplane hitting an air pocket. And there were a number of those, all drunken, all sordid, one very frightening such drop while I was in the Army which involved a fairy who was later court-martialed out. The panic his punishment caused in me was as close as I ever came to facing in myself the terrors I sometimes saw clouding another man’s eyes.

What happened was that, all unconscious of what this ennui meant, I wearied of the motion, wearied of the joyless seas of alcohol, wearied of the blunt, blu , hearty, and totally meaningless friendships, wearied of wandering through the forests of desperate women, wearied of the work which fed me only in the most brutally literal sense. Perhaps, as we say in America, I wanted to nd myself.

This is an interesting phrase, not current as far as I know in the language of any other people, which certainly does not mean what it says but betrays a nagging suspicion that something has been misplaced. I think now that if I had had any intimation that the self I was going to nd would turn out to be only the same self from which I had spent so much time in ight, I would have stayed at home. But again, I think I knew, at the very bottom of my heart, exactly what I was doing when I took the boat for France.

2

I met Giovanni during my second year in Paris, when I had no money. On the morning of the evening that we met I had been turned out of my room. I did not owe an awful lot of money, only around six thousand francs, but Parisian hotel-keepers have a way of smelling poverty and then they do what anybody does who is aware of a bad smell, they throw whatever stinks outside.

My father had money in his account which belonged to me but he was very reluctant to send it because he wanted me to come home—

to come home, as he said, and settle down, and whenever he said that I thought of the sediment at the bottom of a stagnant pond. I did not, then, know many people in Paris and Hella was in Spain.

Most of the people I knew in Paris were, as Parisians sometimes put it, of le milieu and, while this milieu was certainly anxious enough to claim me, I was intent on proving, to them and to myself, that I was not of their company. I did this by being in their company a great deal and manifesting toward all of them a tolerance which placed me, I believe, above suspicion. I had written to friends for money, of course, but the Atlantic Ocean is deep and wide and money doesn’t hurry from the other side.

So I went through my address book, sitting over a tepid co ee in a boulevard cafe, and decided to call up an old acquaintance who was always asking me to call, an aging, Belgian-born, American businessman, named Jacques. He had a big, comfortable apartment and lots of things to drink and lots of money. He was, as I knew he would be, surprised to hear from me and before the surprise and the charm wore o , giving him time to become wary, he had invited me for supper. He may have been cursing as he hung up, and reaching for his wallet but it was too late. Jacques is not too bad. Perhaps he is a fool and a coward but almost everybody is one or the other and most people are both. In some ways I liked him. He was silly but he was so lonely; anyway, I understand now that the contempt I felt for

him involved my self-contempt. He could be unbelievably generous, he could be unspeakably stingy. Though he wanted to trust everybody, he was incapable of trusting a living soul; to make up for this, he threw his money away on people; inevitably, then, he was abused. Then he buttoned his wallet, locked his door, and retired into that strong self-pity which was, perhaps, the only thing he had which really belonged to him. I thought for a long while that he, with his big apartment, his well-meant promises, his whisky, his marijuana, his orgies, had helped to kill Giovanni. As, indeed, perhaps he had. But Jacques’ hands are certainly no bloodier than mine.

I saw Jacques, as a matter of fact, just after Giovanni was sentenced. He was sitting bundled up in his greatcoat on the terrace of a cafe, drinking a vin chaud. He was alone on the terrace. He called me as I passed.

He did not look well, his face was mottled, his eyes, behind his glasses, were like the eyes of a dying man who looks everywhere for healing.

‘You’ve heard,’ he whispered, as I joined him, ‘about Giovanni?’

I nodded yes. I remember the winter sun was shining and I felt as cold and distant as the sun.

‘It’s terrible, terrible, terrible,’ Jacques moaned. ‘Terrible.’

‘Yes,’ I said. I could not say anything more.

‘I wonder why he did it,’ Jacques pursued, ‘why he didn’t ask his friends to help him.’ He looked at me. We both knew that the last time Giovanni had asked Jacques for money, Jacques had refused. I said nothing. ‘They say he had started taking opium,’ Jacques said,

‘that he needed the money for opium. Did you hear that?’

I had heard it. It was a newspaper speculation which, however, I had reasons of my own for believing, remembering the extent of Giovanni’s desperation, knowing how far this terror which was so vast that it had simply become a void had driven him. ‘Me, I want to escape,’ he had told me, ‘ je veuz m’evader—this dirty world, this

dirty body. I never wish to make love again with anything more than the body.’

Jacques waited for me to answer. I stared out into the street. I was beginning to think of Giovanni dying—where Giovanni had been there would be nothing, nothing forever.

‘I hope it’s not my fault,’ Jacques said at last. ‘I didn’t give him the money. If I’d known—I would have given him everything I had.’

But we both knew this was not true.

‘You two together,’ Jacques suggested, ‘you weren’t happy together?’

‘No,’ I said. I stood up. ‘It might have been better,’ I said, ‘if he’d stayed down there in that village of his in Italy and planted his olive trees and had a lot of children and beaten his wife. He used to love to sing,’ I remembered suddenly, ‘maybe he could have stayed down there and sung his life away and died in bed.’

Then Jacques said something that surprised me. People are full of surprises, even for themselves, if they have been stirred enough.

‘Nobody can stay in the garden of Eden,’ Jacques said. And then: ‘I wonder why.’

I said nothing. I said goodbye and left him. Hella had long since returned from Spain and we were already arranging to rent this house and I had a date to meet her.

I have thought about Jacques’ question since. The question is banal but one of the real troubles with living is that living is so banal. Everyone, after all, goes the same dark road—and the road has a trick of being most dark, most treacherous, when it seems most bright—and it’s true that nobody stays in the garden of Eden.

Jacques’ garden was not the same as Giovanni’s, of course. Jacques’

garden was involved with football players and Giovanni’s was involved with maidens—but that seems to have made so little di erence. Perhaps everybody has a garden of Eden, I don’t know; but they have scarcely seen their garden before they see the aming sword. Then, perhaps, life only o ers the choice of remembering the garden or forgetting it. Either, or: it takes strength to remember, it

takes another kind of strength to forget, it takes a hero to do both.

People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their innocence; people who forget court another kind of madness, the madness of the denial of pain and the hatred of innocence; and the world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget. Heroes are rare.

Jacques had not wanted to have supper in his apartment because his cook had run away. His cooks were always running away. He was always getting young boys from the provinces, God knows how, to come up and be cooks; and they, of course, as soon as they were able to nd their way around the capital, decided that cooking was the last thing they wanted to do. They usually ended up going back to the provinces, those, that is, who did not end up on the streets, or in jail, or in Indo-China.

I met him at a rather nice restaurant on the rue de Grenelle and arranged to borrow ten thousand francs from him before we had nished our aperitifs. He was in a good mood and I, of course, was in a good mood too, and this meant that we would end up drinking in Jacques’ favorite bar, a noisy, crowded, ill-lit sort of tunnel, of dubious—or perhaps not dubious at all, of rather too emphatic—

reputation. Every once in a while it was raided by the police, apparently with the connivance of Guillaume, the patron, who always managed, on the particular evening, to warn his favorite customers that if they were not armed with identi cation papers they might be better o elsewhere.

I remember that the bar, that night, was more than ordinarily crowded and noisy. All of the habitués were there and many strangers, some looking, some just staring. There were three or four very chic Parisian ladies sitting at a table with their gigolos or their lovers or perhaps simply their country cousins, God knows; the ladies seemed extremely animated, their males seemed rather sti ; the ladies seemed to be doing most of the drinking. There were the usual paunchy, bespectacled gentlemen with avid, sometimes despairing eyes, the usual, knife-blade lean, tight-trousered boys.

One could never be sure, as concerns these latter, whether they were after money or blood or love. They moved about the bar incessantly, cadging cigarettes and drinks, with something behind their eyes at once terribly vulnerable and terribly hard. There were, of course, les folles, always dressed in the most improbable combinations, screaming like parrots the details of their latest love-a airs—their love-a airs always seemed to be hilarious.

Occasionally one would swoop in, quite late in the evening, to convey the news that he—but they always called each other ‘she’—

had just spent time with a celebrated movie star, or boxer. Then all of the others closed in on this newcomer and they looked like a peacock garden and sounded like a barnyard. I always found it di cult to believe that they ever went to bed with anybody for a man who wanted a woman would certainly have rather had a real one and a man who wanted a man would certainly not want one of them. Perhaps, indeed, that was why they screamed so loud. There was the boy who worked all day, it was said, in the post-o ce, who came out at night wearing makeup and earrings and with his heavy blond hair piled high. Sometimes he actually wore a skirt and high heels. He usually stood alone unless Guillaume walked over to tease him. People said that he was very nice but I confess that his utter grotesqueness made me uneasy; perhaps in the same way that the sight of monkeys eating their own excrement turns some people’s stomachs. They might not mind so much if monkeys did not—so grotesquely—resemble human beings.

This bar was practically in my quartier and I had many times had breakfast in the nearby working man’s cafe to which all the nightbirds of the neighborhood retired when the bars closed.

Sometimes I was with Hella, sometimes I was alone. And I had been in this bar, too, two or three times; once very drunk. I had been accused of causing a minor sensation by irting with a soldier. My memory of that night was, happily, very dim, and I took the attitude that no matter how drunk I may have been I could not possibly have done such a thing. But my face was known and I had the feeling that people were taking bets about me. Or, it was as though they were

the elders of some strange and austere holy order and were watching me in order to discover, by means of signs I made but which only they could read, whether or not I had a true vocation.

Jacques was aware, I was aware, as we pushed our way to the bar

—it was like moving into the eld of a magnet or like approaching a small circle of heat—of the presence of a new barman. He stood, insolent and dark and leonine, his elbow leaning on the cash-register, his ngers playing with his chin, looking out at the crowd.

It was as though his station was a promontory and we were the sea.

Jacques was immediately attracted. I felt him, so to speak, preparing himself for conquest. I felt the necessity for tolerance.

‘I’m sure,’ I said, ‘that you’ll want to get to know the barman. So I’ll vanish any time you like.’

There was, in this tolerance of mine, a fund, by no means meagre, of malicious knowledge—I had drawn on it when I called him up to borrow money. I knew that Jacques could only hope to conquer the boy before us if the boy was, in e ect, for sale; and if he stood with such arrogance on an auction block he could certainly nd bidders richer and more attractive than Jacques. I knew that Jacques knew this. I knew something else: that Jacques’ vaunted a ection for me was involved with desire, the desire, in fact, to be rid of me, to be able, soon, to despise me as he now despised that army of boys who had come, without love, to his bed. I held my own against this desire by pretending that Jacques and I were friends, by forcing Jacques, on pain of humiliation, to pretend this. I pretended not to see, although I exploited it, the lust not quite sleeping in his bright, bitter eyes and, by means of the rough, male candor with which I conveyed to him his case was hopeless, I compelled him, endlessly, to hope. And I knew, nally, that in bars such as these I was Jacques’ protection. As long as I was there the world could see and he could believe that he was out with me, his friend, he was not there out of desperation, he was not at the mercy of whatever adventurer chance, cruelty, or the laws of actual and emotional poverty might throw his way.

‘You stay right here,’ said Jacques. ‘I’ll look at him from time to time and talk to you and that way I’ll save money—and stay happy, too.’

‘I wonder where Guillaume found him,’ I said.

For he was so exactly the kind of boy that Guillaume always dreamed of that it scarcely seemed possible that Guillaume could have found him.

‘What will you have?’ he now asked us. His tone conveyed that, though he spoke no English, he knew that we had been speaking about him and hoped we were through.

Une ne a l’eau,’ I said; and ‘ un cognac sec,’ said Jacques, both speaking too quickly, so that I blushed and realized by a faint merriment on Giovanni’s face as he served us that he had seen it.

Jacques, wilfully misinterpreting Giovanni’s nuance of a smile, made of it an opportunity. ‘You’re new here?’ he asked in English.

Giovanni almost certainly understood the question but it suited him better to look blankly from Jacques to me and then back again at Jacques. Jacques translated his question.

Giovanni shrugged. ‘I have been here a month,’ he said.

I knew where the conversation was going and I kept my eyes down and sipped my drink.

‘It must,’ Jacques suggested, with a sort of bludgeoning insistence on the light touch, ‘seem very strange to you.’

‘Strange?’ asked Giovanni. ‘Why?’

And Jacques giggled. I was suddenly ashamed that I was with him.

‘All these men’—and I knew that voice, breathless, insinuating, high as no girl’s had ever been, and hot, suggesting, somehow, the absolutely motionless, deadly heat which hangs over swamp ground in July—‘all these men,’ he gasped, ‘and so few women. Doesn’t that seem strange to you?’

‘Ah,’ said Giovanni, and turned away to serve another customer,

‘no doubt the women are waiting at home.’

‘I’m sure one’s waiting for you,’ insisted Jacques, to which Giovanni did not respond.

‘Well. That didn’t take long,’ said Jacques, half to me, half to the space which had just held Giovanni. ‘Aren’t you glad you stayed?

You’ve got me all to yourself.’

‘Oh, you’re handling it all wrong,’ I said. ‘He’s mad for you. He just doesn’t want to seem too anxious. Order him a drink. Find out where he likes to buy his clothes. Tell him about that cunning little Alfa Romeo you’re just dying to give away to some deserving bartender.’

Very funny,’ said Jacques.

‘Well,’ I said, ‘faint heart never won fair athlete, that’s for sure.’

‘Anyway, I’m sure he sleeps with girls. They always do, you know.’

‘I’ve heard about boys who do that. Nasty little beasts.’

We stood in silence for awhile.

‘Why don’t you invite him to have a drink with us?’ Jacques suggested.

I looked at him.

‘Why don’t I? Well, you may nd this hard to believe, but, actually, I’m sort of queer for girls myself. If that was his sister looking so good, I’d invite her to have a drink with us. I don’t spend money on men.’

I could see Jacques struggling not to say that I didn’t have any objection to allowing men to spend money on me; I watched his brief struggle with a slight smile, for I knew he couldn’t say it; then he said, with that cheery, brave smile of his:

‘I was not suggesting that you jeopardize, even for a moment, that’—he paused—‘that immaculate manhood which is your pride and joy. I only suggested that you invite him because he will almost certainly refuse if I invite him.’

‘But man,’ I said, grinning, ‘think of the confusion. He’ll think that I’m the one who’s lusting for his body. How do we get out of that?’

‘If there should be any confusion,’ said Jacques, with dignity, ‘I will be happy to clear it up.’

We measured each other for a moment. Then I laughed. ‘Wait till he comes back this way. I hope he orders a magnum of the most expensive champagne in France.’

I turned, leaning on the bar. I felt somehow, elated. Jacques, beside me, was very quiet, suddenly very frail and old, and I felt a quick, sharp, rather frightened pity for him. Giovanni had been out on the oor, serving the people at tables, and he now returned with a rather grim smile on his face, carrying a loaded tray.

‘Maybe,’ I said, ‘it would look better if our glasses were empty.’

We nished our drinks. I set down my glass.

‘Barman?’ I called.

‘The same?’

‘Yes.’ He started to turn away. ‘Barman,’ I said, quickly, ‘we would like to o er you a drink, if we may.’

Eh, bien! ’ said a voice behind us, ‘ cest fort ça! Not only have you nally—thank heaven!—corrupted this great American football player, you use him now to corrupt my barman. Vraiment, Jacques!

At your age!

It was Guillaume standing behind us, grinning like a movie star, and waving that long white handkerchief which he was never, in the bar at any rate, to be seen without. Jacques turned, hugely delighted to be accused of such rare seductiveness, and he and Guillaume fell into each other’s arms like old theatrical sisters.

Eh bien, ma cheri, comment vas tu? I have not seen you for a long time.’

‘But I have been awfully busy,’ said Jacques.

‘I don’t doubt it! Aren’t you ashamed, veille folle?

Et toi? You certainly don’t seem to have been wasting your time.’

And Jacques threw a delighted look in the direction of Giovanni, rather as though Giovanni were a valuable race horse or a rare bit of china. Guillaume followed the look and his voice dropped.

Ah, ça, mon cher, c’est strictement du business, comprendstu?

They moved a little away. This left me surrounded, abruptly, with an awful silence. At last I raised my eyes and looked at Giovanni, who was watching me.

‘I think you o ered me a drink,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I o ered you a drink.’

‘I drink no alcohol while I work, but I will take a Coca-Cola.’ He picked up my glass. ‘And for you—it is the same?’

‘The same.’ I realized I was quite happy to be talking with him and this realization made me shy. And I felt menaced since Jacques was no longer at my side. Then I realized that I would have to pay, for this round anyway; it was impossible to tug Jacques’ sleeve for the money as though I were his ward. I coughed and put my ten thousand franc note on the bar.

‘You are rich,’ said Giovanni, and set my drink before me.

‘But no. No. I simply have no change.’

He grinned. I could not tell whether he grinned because he thought I was lying or because he knew I was telling the truth. In silence he took the bill and rang it up and carefully counted out my change on the bar before me. Then he lled his glass and went back to his original position at the cash-register. I felt a tightening in my chest.

A la votre,’ he said.

A la votre.’ We drank.

‘You are an American?’ he asked at last.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘From New York.’

‘Ah! I am told that New York is very beautiful. Is it more beautiful than Paris?’

‘Oh, no,’ I said, ‘ no city is more beautiful than Paris—’

‘It seems the very suggestion that one could be is enough to make you very angry,’ grinned Giovanni. ‘Forgive me. I was not trying to be heretical.’ Then, more soberly and as though to appease me, ‘You must like Paris very much.’

‘I like New York, too,’ I said, uncomfortably aware that my voice had a defensive ring, ‘but New York is very beautiful in a very di erent way.’

He frowned. ‘In what way?’

‘No one,’ I said, ‘who has never seen it can possibly imagine it. It’s very high and new and electric—exciting.’ I paused. ‘It’s hard to describe. It’s very—twentieth century.’

‘You nd that Paris is not of this century?’ he asked with a smile.

His smile made me feel a little foolish. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘Paris is old, is many centuries. You feel, in Paris, all the time gone by. That isn’t what you feel in New York—’He was smiling. I stopped.

‘What do you feel in New York?’ he asked.

‘Perhaps you feel,’ I told him, ‘all the time to come. There’s such power there, everything is in such movement. You can’t help wondering— I can’t help wondering—what it will all be like—many years from now.’

‘Many years from now? When we are dead and New York is old?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘When everyone is tired, when the world—for Americans—is not so new.’

‘I don’t see why the world is so new for Americans,’ said Giovanni.

‘After all, you are all merely emigrants. And you did not leave Europe so very long ago.’

‘The ocean is very wide,’ I said. ‘We have led di erent lives than you, things have happened to us there which have never happened here. Surely you can understand that this would make us a di erent people?’

‘Ah! If it had only made you a di erent people!’ he laughed. ‘But it seems to have turned you into another species. You are not, are you, on another planet? For I suppose that would explain everything.’

‘I admit,’ I said with some heat—for I do not like to be laughed at

—‘that we may sometimes give the impression that we think we are.

But we are not on another planet, no. And neither, my friend, are you.’

He grinned again. ‘I will not,’ he said, ‘argue that most unlucky fact.’

We were silent for a moment. Giovanni moved to serve several people at either end of the bar. Guillaume and Jacques were still talking. Guillaume seemed to be recounting one of his interminable anecdotes, anecdotes which invariably pivoted on the hazards of business or the hazards of love, and Jacques’ mouth was stretched in a rather painful grin. I knew that he was dying to get back to the bar.

Giovanni placed himself before me again and began wiping the bar with a damp cloth. ‘The Americans are funny. You have a funny sense of time—or perhaps you have no sense of time at all, I can’t tell. Time always sounds like a parade chez vous—a triumphant parade, like armies with banners entering a town. As though, with enough time, and that would not need to be so very much for Americans, n’est-ce pas?’ and he smiled, giving me a mocking look, but I said nothing. ‘Well then,’ he continued, ‘as though with enough time and all that fearful energy and virtue you people have, everything will be settled, solved, put in its place. And when I say everything,’ he added, grimly, ‘I mean all the serious, dreadful things, like pain and death and love, in which you Americans do not believe.’

‘What makes you think we don’t? And what do you believe?’

‘I don’t believe in this nonsense about time. Time is just common, it’s like water for a sh. Everybody’s in this water, nobody gets out of it, or if he does the same thing happens to him that happens to the sh, he dies. And you know what happens in this water, time?

The big sh eat the little sh. That’s all. The big sh eat the little sh and the ocean doesn’t care.

‘Oh, please,’ I said. ‘I don’t believe that. Time’s not water and we’re not sh and you can choose to be eaten and also not to eat—

not to eat,’ I added quickly, turning a little red before his delighted and sardonic smile, ‘the little sh, of course.’

‘To choose!’ cried Giovanni, turning his face away from me and speaking, it appeared, to an invisible ally who had been

eavesdropping on this conversation all along. ‘To choose! He turned to me again. ‘Ah, you are really an American. J’adore votre enthousiasme!

‘I adore yours,’ I said, politely, ‘though it seems to be a blacker brand than mine.’

‘Anyway,’ he said mildly, ‘I don’t see what you can do with little sh except eat them. What else are they good for?’

‘In my country,’ I said, feeling a subtle war within me as I said it,

‘the little sh seem to have gotten together and are nibbling at the body of the whale.’

‘That will not make them whales,’ said Giovanni. ‘The only result of all that nibbling will be that there will no longer be any grandeur anywhere, not even at the bottom of the sea.’

‘Is that what you have against us? That we’re not grand?’

He smiled—smiled like someone who, faced with the total inadequacy of the opposition, is prepared to drop the argument.

Peut-être.’

‘You people are impossible,’ I said. ‘You’re the ones who killed grandeur o , right here in this city, with paving stones. Talk about little sh—!’ He was grinning. I stopped.

‘Don’t stop,’ he said, still grinning. ‘I am listening.’

I nished my drink. ‘You people dumped all this merde on us,’ I said, sullenly, ‘and now you say we’re barbaric because we stink.’

My sullenness delighted him. ‘You’re charming,’ he said. ‘Do you always speak like this?’

‘No,’ I said, and looked down. ‘Almost never.’

There was something in him of the coquette. ‘I am attered then,’

he said, with a sudden, disconcerting gravity, which contained, nevertheless, the very faintest hint of mockery.

‘And you,’ I said, nally, ‘have you been here long? Do you like Paris?’

He hesitated a moment and then grinned, suddenly looking rather boyish and shy. ‘It’s cold in the winter,’ he said. ‘I don’t like that.

And Parisians—I do not nd them so very friendly, do you?’ He did not wait for my answer. ‘They are not like the people I knew when I was younger. In Italy we are friendly, we dance and sing and make love—but these people,’ and he looked out over the bar, and then at me, and nished his Coca-Cola, ‘these people, they are cold, I do not understand them.’

‘But the French say,’ I teased, ‘that the Italians are too uid, too volatile, have no sense of measure—’

‘Measure!’ cried Giovanni, ‘ah, these people and their measure!

They measure the gram, the centimetre, these people, and they keep piling all the little scraps they save, one on top of the other, year in and year out, all in the stocking or under the bed—and what do they get out of all this measure? A country which is falling to pieces, measure by measure, before their eyes. Measure. I do not like to o end your ears by saying all the things I am sure these people measure before they permit themselves any act whatever. May I o er you a drink now,’ he asked suddenly, ‘before the old man comes back? Who is he? Is he your uncle?’

I did not know whether the word ‘uncle’ was being used euphemistically or not. I felt a very urgent desire to make my position clear but I did not know how to go about it. I laughed. ‘No,’

I said, ‘he is not my uncle. He is just somebody I know.’

Giovanni looked at me. And this look made me feel that no one in my life had ever looked at me directly before. ‘I hope he is not very dear to you,’ he said, with a smile, ‘because I think he is silly. Not a bad man, you understand—just a little silly.’

‘Perhaps,’ I said, and at once felt like a traitor. ‘He’s not bad,’ I added quickly, ‘he’s really a pretty nice guy.’ That’s not true, either, I thought, he’s far from being a nice guy. ‘Anyway,’ I said, ‘he’s certainly not very dear to me,’ and felt again, at once, this strange tightening in my chest and wondered at the sound of my voice.

Carefully now, Giovanni poured my drink. ‘ Vive l’amerique,’ he said.

‘Thank you,’ I said, and lifted my glass, ‘ vive le vieux continent.’

We were silent for a moment.

‘Do you come in here often?’ asked Giovanni suddenly.

‘No,’ I said, ‘not very often.’

‘But you will come,’ he teased, with a wonderful, mocking light on his face, ‘more often now?’

I stammered: ‘Why?’

‘Ah!’ cried Giovanni. ‘Don’t you know when you have made a friend?’

I knew I must look foolish and that my question was foolish too:

‘So soon?’

‘Why no,’ he said, reasonably, and looked at his watch, ‘we can wait another hour if you like. We can become friends then. Or we can wait until closing time. We can become friends then. Or we can wait until tomorrow, only that means that you must come in here tomorrow and perhaps you have something else to do.’ He put his watch away and leaned both elbows on the bar. ‘Tell me,’ he said,

‘what is this thing about time? Why is it better to be late than early?

People are always saying, we must wait, we must wait. What are they waiting for?’

‘Well,’ I said, feeling myself being led by Giovanni into deep and dangerous water, ‘I guess people wait in order to make sure of what they feel.’

‘In order to make sure!’ He turned again to that invisible ally and laughed again. I was beginning, perhaps, to nd his phantom a little unnerving but the sound of his laughter in that airless tunnel was the most incredible sound. ‘It’s clear that you are a true philosopher.’ He pointed a nger at my heart. ‘And when you have waited—has it made you sure?’

For this I could simply summon no answer. From the dark, crowded center of the bar someone called ‘ Garçon! ’ and he moved away from me, smiling. ‘You can wait now. And tell me how sure you have become when I return.’

And he took his round metal tray and moved out into the crowd. I watched him as he moved. And then I watched their faces, watching

him. And then I was afraid. I knew that they were watching, had been watching both of us. They knew that they had witnessed a beginning and now they would not cease to watch until they saw the end. It had taken some time but the tables had been turned, now I was in the zoo, and they were watching.

I stood at the bar for quite a while alone, for Jacques had escaped from Guillaume but was now involved, poor man, with two of the knife-blade boys. Giovanni came back for an instant and winked.

‘Are you sure?’

‘You win. You’re the philosopher.’

‘Oh, you must wait some more. You do not yet know me well enough to say such a thing.’

And he lled his tray and disappeared again.

Now someone whom I had never seen before came out of the shadows toward me. It looked like a mummy or a zombie—this was the rst, overwhelming impression—of something walking after it had been put to death. And it walked, really, like someone who might be sleep-walking or like those gures in slow motion one sometimes sees on the screen. It carried a glass, it walked on its toes, the at hips moved with a dead, horrifying lasciviousness. It seemed to make no sound; this was due to the roar of the bar, which was like the roaring of the sea, heard at night, from far away. It glittered in the dim light; the thin, black hair was violent with oil, combed forward, hanging in bangs; the eyelids gleamed with mascara, the mouth raged with lipstick. The face was white and thoroughly bloodless with some kind of foundation cream; it stank of powder and a gardenia-like perfume. The shirt, open coquettishly to the navel, revealed a hairless chest and a silver cruci x; the shirt was covered with round, paper-thin wafers, red and green and orange and yellow and blue, which stormed in the light and made one feel that the mummy might, at any moment, disappear in ame.

A red sash was around the waist, the clinging pants were a surprisingly sombre grey. He wore buckles on his shoes.

I was not sure that he was coming toward me but I could not take my eyes away. He stopped before me, one hand on his hip, looked me up and down, and smiled. He had been eating garlic and his teeth were very bad. His hands, I noticed, with an unbelieving shock, were very large and strong.

Eh bien,’ he said, ‘ il te plait?

Comment? ’ I said.

I really was not sure I had heard him right, though the bright, bright eyes, looking, it seemed, at something amusing within the recess of my skull, did not leave much room for doubt.

‘You like him—the barman?’

I did not know what to do or say. It seemed impossible to hit him, it seemed impossible to get angry. It did not seem real, he did not seem real. Besides—no matter what I said, those eyes would mock me with it. I said, as drily as I could:

‘How does that concern you?’

‘But it concerns me not at all, darling. Je m’en fou.’

‘Then please get the hell away from me.’

He did not move at once, but smiled at me again. ‘ Il est dangereux, tu sais. And for a boy like you—he is very dangerous.’

I looked at him. I almost asked him what he meant. ‘Go to hell,’ I said, and turned my back.

‘Oh, no,’ he said—and I looked at him again. He was laughing, showing all his teeth—there were not many. ‘Oh, no,’ he said, ‘I go not to hell,’ and he clutched his cruci x with one large hand. ‘But you, my dear friend—I fear that you shall burn in a very hot re.’

He laughed again. ‘Oh, such re!’ He touched his head. ‘Here.’ And he writhed, as though in torment. ‘Every where.’ And he touched his heart. ‘And here.’ And he looked at me with malice and mockery and something else; he looked at me as though I was very far away.

‘Oh, my poor friend, so young, so strong, so handsome—will you not buy me a drink?’

Va te faire foutre.’

His face crumpled in the sorrow of infants and of very old men—

the sorrow, also, of certain, aging actresses who were renowned in their youth for their fragile, child-like beauty. The dark eyes narrowed in spite and fury and the scarlet mouth turned down like the mask of tragedy. ‘ T’aura du chagrin,’ he said. ‘You will be very unhappy. Remember that I told you so.’

And he straightened, as though he were a princess and moved, aming, away through the crowd.

Then Jacques spoke, at my elbow. ‘Everyone in the bar,’ he said,

‘is talking about how beautifully you and the barman have hit it o .’

He gave me a radiant and vindictive smile. ‘I trust there has been no confusion?’

I looked down at him. I wanted to do something to his cheerful, hideous, worldly face which would make it impossible for him ever again to smile at anyone the way he was smiling at me. Then I wanted to get out of this bar, out into the air, perhaps to nd Hella, my suddenly so sorely menaced girl.

‘There’s been no confusion,’ I snapped. ‘Don’t you go getting confused, either.’

‘I think I can safely say,’ said Jacques, ‘that I have scarcely ever been less confused than I am at this moment.’ He had stopped smiling; he gave me a look which was dry, bitter, and impersonal.

‘And, at the risk of losing forever your so remarkably candid friendship, let me tell you something. Confusion is a luxury which only the very, very young can possibly a ord, and you are not that young any more.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ I said. ‘Let’s have another drink.’

I felt that I had better get drunk. Now Giovanni went behind the bar again and winked at me. Jacques’ eyes never left my face. I turned rudely from him and faced the bar again. He followed me.

‘The same,’ said Jacques.

‘Certainly,’ said Giovanni, ‘that’s the way to do it.’ He xed our drinks. Jacques paid. I suppose I did not look too well, for Giovanni

shouted at me playfully, ‘Eh? Are you drunk already?’

I looked up and smiled. ‘You know how Americans drink,’ I said. ‘I haven’t even started yet.’

‘David is far from drunk,’ said Jacques. ‘He is only re ecting bitterly that he must get a new pair of suspenders.’

I could have killed Jacques. Yet it was only with di culty that I kept myself from laughing. I made a face to signify to Giovanni that the old man was making a private joke, and he disappeared again.

That time of evening had come when great batches of people were leaving and great batches were coming in. They would all encounter each other later anyway, in the last bar, all those, that is, unlucky enough to be searching still at such an advanced hour.

I could not look at Jacques; which he knew. He stood beside me, smiling at nothing, humming a tune. There was nothing I could say.

I did not dare to mention Hella. I could not even pretend to myself that I was sorry she was in Spain. I was glad. I was utterly, hopelessly, horribly glad. I knew I could do nothing whatever to stop the ferocious excitement which had burst in me like a storm. I could only drink, in the faint hope that the storm might thus spend itself without doing any more damage to my land. But I was glad. I was only sorry that Jacques had been a witness. He made me ashamed. I hated him because he had now seen all that he had waited, often scarcely hoping, so many months to see. We had, in e ect, been playing a deadly game and he was the winner. He was the winner in spite of the fact that I had cheated to win.

I wished, nevertheless, standing there at the bar, that I had been able to nd in myself the force to turn and walk out—to have gone over to Montparnasse perhaps and picked up a girl. Any girl. I could not do it. I told myself all sorts of lies, standing there at the bar, but I could not move. And this was partly because I knew that it did not really matter any more; it did not even matter if I never spoke to Giovanni again; for they had become visible, as visible as the wafers on the shirt of the aming princess, they stormed all over me, my awakening, my insistent possibilities.

That was how I met Giovanni. I think we connected the instant that we met. And remain connected still, in spite of our later separation de corps, despite the fact that Giovanni will be rotting soon in unhallowed ground near Paris. Until I die there will be those moments, moments seeming to rise up out of the ground like Macbeth’s witches, when his face will come before me, that face in all its changes, when the exact timbre of his voice and tricks of his speech will nearly burst my ears, when his smell will overpower my nostrils. Sometimes, in the days which are coming—God grant me the grace to live them: in the glare of the grey morning, sour-mouthed, eyelids raw and red, hair tangled and damp from my stormy sleep, facing, over co ee and cigarette smoke, last night’s impenetrable, meaningless boy who will shortly rise and vanish like the smoke, I will see Giovanni again, as he was that night, so vivid, so winning, all of the light of that gloomy tunnel trapped around his head.

3

At ve o’clock in the morning Guillaume locked the door of the bar behind us. The streets were empty and grey. On a corner near the bar a butcher had already opened his shop and one could see him within, already bloody, hacking at the meat. One of the great, green Paris buses lumbered past, nearly empty, its bright electric ag waving ercely to indicate a turn. A garçon de café spilled water on the sidewalk before his establishment and swept it into the gutter.

At the end of the long, curving street which faced us were the trees of the boulevard and straw chairs piled high before cafes and the great stone spire of St. Germain des Pres—the most magni cent spire, as Hella and I believed, in Paris. The street beyond the place stretched before us to the river and, hidden beside and behind us, meandered to Montparnasse. It was named for an adventurer who sowed a crop in Europe which is being harvested until today. I had often walked this street, sometimes, with Hella, toward the river, often, without her, toward the girls of Montparnasse. Not very long ago either, though it seemed, that morning, to have occurred in another life.

We were going to Les Halles for breakfast. We piled into a taxi, the four of us, unpleasantly crowded together, a circumstance which elicited from Jacques and Guillaume a series of lewd speculations.

This lewdness was particularly revolting in that it not only failed of wit, it was so clearly an expression of contempt and self-contempt; it bubbled upward out of them like a fountain of black water. It was clear that they were tantalizing themselves with Giovanni and me and this set my teeth on edge. But Giovanni leaned back against the taxi window, allowing his arm to press my shoulder lightly, seeming to say that we should soon be rid of these old men and should not be distressed that their dirty water splashed—we would have no trouble washing it away.

‘Look,’ said Giovanni, as we crossed the river. ‘This old whore, Paris, as she turns in bed, is very moving.’

I looked out, beyond his heavy pro le, which was grey—from fatigue and from the light of the sky above us. The river was swollen and yellow. Nothing moved on the river. Barges were tied up along the banks. The island of the city widened away from us, bearing the weight of the cathedral; beyond this, dimly, through speed and mist, one made out the individual roofs of Paris, their myriad, squat chimney stacks very beautiful and vari-colored under the pearly sky.

Mist clung to the river, softening that army of trees, softening those stones, hiding the city’s dreadful corkscrew alleys and dead-end streets, clinging like a curse to the men who slept beneath the bridges—one of whom ashed by beneath us, very black and lone, walking along the river.

‘Some rats have gone in,’ said Giovanni, ‘and now other rats come out.’ He smiled bleakly and looked at me; to my surprise, he took my hand and held it. ‘Have you ever slept under a bridge?’ he asked.

‘Or perhaps they have soft beds with warm blankets under the bridges in your country?’

I did not know what to do about my hand; it seemed better to do nothing. ‘Not yet,’ I said, ‘but I may. My hotel wants to throw me out.’

I had said it lightly, with a smile, out of a desire to put myself, in terms of an acquaintance with wintry things, on an equal footing with him. But the fact that I had said it as he held my hand made it sound to me unutterably helpless and soft and coy. But I could not say anything to counteract this impression: to say anything more would con rm it. I pulled my hand away, pretending that I had done so in order to search for a cigarette.

Jacques lit it for me.

‘Where do you live?’ he asked Giovanni.

‘Oh,’ said Giovanni, ‘out. Far out. It is almost not Paris.’

‘He lives in a dreadful street, near Nation,’ said Guillaume, ‘among all the dreadful bourgeoisie and their piglike children.’

‘You failed to catch the children at the right age,’ said Jacques.

‘They go through a period, all too brief, helas! when a pig is perhaps the only animal they do not call to mind.’ And, again to Giovanni:

‘In a hotel?’

‘No,’ said Giovanni, and for the rst time he seemed slightly uncomfortable. ‘I live in a maid’s room.’

‘With the maid?’

‘No,’ said Giovanni, and smiled, ‘the maid is I don’t know where.

You could certainly tell that there was no maid if you ever saw my room.’

‘I would love to,’ said Jacques.

‘Then we will give a party for you one day,’ said Giovanni.

This, too courteous and too bald to permit any further questioning, nearly forced, nevertheless, a question from my lips.

Guillaume looked brie y at Giovanni, who did not look at him but out into the morning, whistling. I had been making resolutions for the last six hours and now I made another one: to have this whole thing ‘out’ with Giovanni as soon as I got him alone at Les Halles. I was going to have to tell him that he had made a mistake but that we could still be friends. But I could not be certain, really, that it might not be I who was making a mistake, blindly misreading everything—and out of necessities, then, too shameful to be uttered.

I was in a box for I could see that, no matter how I turned, the hour of confession was upon me and could scarcely be averted; unless of course, I leaped out of the cab, which would be the most terrible confession of all.

Now the cab-driver asked us where we wanted to go, for we had arrived at the choked boulevards and impassable side-streets of Les Halles. Leeks, onions, cabbages, oranges, apples, potatoes, cauli owers, stood gleaming in mounds all over, on the sidewalks, in the streets, before great metal sheds. The sheds were blocks long and within the sheds were piled more fruit, more vegetables, in some sheds, sh, in some sheds, cheese, in some whole animals, lately slaughtered. It scarcely seemed possible that all this could

ever be eaten. But in a few hours it would all be gone and trucks would be arriving from all corners of France—and making their way, to the great pro t of a beehive of middlemen, across the city of Paris—to feed the roaring multitude. Who were roaring now, at once wounding and charming the ear, before and behind, and on either side of our taxi—our taxi driver, and Giovanni, too, roared back. The multitude of Paris seems to be dressed in blue everyday but Sunday, when, for the most part, they put on an unbelievably festive black. Here they were now, in blue, disputing, every inch, our passage, with their wagons, handtrucks, camions, their bursting baskets carried at an angle steeply self-con dent, on the back. A red-faced woman, burdened with fruit, shouted—to Giovanni, the driver, to the world—a particulary vivid cochonnerie, to which the driver and Giovanni, at once, at the top of their lungs, responded, though the fruit lady had already passed beyond our sight and perhaps no longer even remembered her precisely obscene conjectures. We crawled along, for no one had yet told the driver where to stop, and Giovanni and the driver, who had, it appeared, immediately upon entering Les Halles, been transformed into brothers, exchanged speculations, un attering in the extreme, concerning the hygiene, language, private parts, and habits, of the citizens of Paris. (Jacques and Guillaume were exchanging speculations, unspeakably less good-natured, concerning every passing male.) The pavements were slick With leavings, mainly cast-o , rotten leaves, owers, fruit and vegetables which had met with disaster natural and slow, or abrupt. And the walls and corners were combed with pissoirs, dull-burning, makeshift braziers, cafes, restaurants, and smoky yellow bistros—of these last, some so small that they were little more than diamond shaped, enclosed corners holding bottles and a zinc-covered counter. At all these points, men, young, old, middle-aged, powerful, powerful even in the various fashions in which they had met, or were meeting, their various ruin; and women, more than making up, in shrewdness and patience, in an ability to count and weigh—and shout—whatever they might lack in muscle; though they did not, really, seem to lack much.

Nothing here reminded me of home, though Giovanni recognized, revelled in it all.

‘I know a place,’ he told the driver, ‘ tres bon marche’—and told the driver where it was. It developed that it was one of the driver’s favorite rendezvous.

‘Where is this place?’ asked Jacques, petulantly. ‘I thought we were going to’—and he named another place.

‘You are joking,’ said Giovanni, with contempt. ‘That place is very bad and very expensive, it is only for tourists. We are not tourists,’

and he added, to me, ‘When I rst came to Paris I worked in Les Halles—a long time, too. Nom de Dieu, quelle boulot! I pray always never to do that again.’ And he regarded the streets through which we passed with a sadness which was not less real for being a little theatrical and self-mocking.

Guillaume said, from his corner of the cab: ‘Tell him who rescued you.’

‘Ah, yes,’ said Giovanni, ‘behold my saviour, my patron.’ He was silent a moment. Then: ‘You do not regret it, do you? I have not done you any harm? You are pleased with my work?’

Mais oui,’ said Guillaume.

Giovanni sighed. ‘ Bien sûr.’ He looked out of the window again, again whistling. We came to a corner remarkably clear. The taxi stopped.

Ici,’ said the driver.

Ici,’ Giovanni echoed.

I reached for my wallet but Giovanni sharply caught my hand, conveying to me with an angry ick of his eyelash the intelligence that the least these dirty old men could do was pay. He opened the door and stepped out into the street. Guillaume had not reached for his wallet and Jacques paid for the cab.

‘Ugh,’ said Guillaume, staring at the door of the cafe before which we stood, ‘I am sure this place is infested with vermin. Do you want to poison us?’

‘It’s not the outside you’re going to eat,’ said Giovanni. ‘You are in much more danger of being poisoned in those dreadful, chic places you always go to, where they always have the face clean, mais, mon Dieu, les fesses! ’ He grinned. ‘ Fais-moi con ance. Why would I want to poison you? Then I would have no job and I have only just found out that I want to live.’

He and Guillaume, Giovanni still smiling, exchanged a look which I would not have been able to read even if I had dared try; and Jacques, pushing all of us before him as though we were his chickens, said with that grin: ‘We can’t stand here in the cold and argue. If we can’t eat inside, we can drink. Alcohol kills all microbes.’

And Guillaume brightened suddenly—he was really remarkable, as though he carried, hidden somewhere on his person, a needle lled with vitamins, which automatically, at the blackening hour, discharged itself into his veins. ‘ Il y a les jeunes dedans,’ he said, and we went in.

Indeed there were young people, half a dozen at the zinc counter before glasses of red and white wine, along with others, not young at all. A pockmarked boy and a very rough-looking girl were playing the pinball machine near the window. There were a few people sitting at the tables in the back, served by an astonishingly clean-looking waiter. In the gloom, the dirty walls, the sawdust-covered oor, his white jacket gleamed like snow. Behind these tables one caught a glimpse of the kitchen and the surly, obese cook. He lumbered about like one of those overloaded trucks outside, wearing one of those high, white hats, and with a dead cigar stuck between his lips.

Behind the counter sat one of those absolutely inimitable and indomitable ladies, produced only in the city of Paris, but produced there in great numbers, who would be as outraged and unsettling in any other city as a mermaid on a mountain-top. All over Paris they sit behind their counters like a mother bird in a nest and brood over the cash-register as though it were an egg. Nothing occurring under the circle of heaven where they sit escapes their eye, if they have

ever been surprised by anything, it was only in a dream—a dream they long ago ceased having. They are neither ill- nor good-natured, though they have their days and styles, and they know, in the way, apparently, that other people know when they have to go to the bathroom, everything about everyone who enters their domain.

Though some are white-haired and some not, some fat, some thin, some grandmothers and some but lately virgins, they all have exactly the same shrewd, vacant, all-registering eye; it is di cult to believe that they ever cried for milk, or looked at the sun; it seems they must have come into the world hungry for banknotes, and squinting helplessly, unable to focus their eyes until they came to rest on a cash-register.

This one’s hair is black and grey and she has a face which comes from Brittany; and she, like almost everyone else standing at the bar, knows Giovanni and, after her fashion, likes him. She has a big, deep bosom and she clasps Giovanni to it; and a big, deep voice.

Ah, mon pote! ’ she cries. ‘ Tu es revenu! You have come back at last!

Salaud! Now that you are rich and have found rich friends you never come to see us any more! Canaille!

And she beams at us, the ‘rich’ friends, with a friendliness deliciously, deliberately vague; she would have no trouble reconstructing every instant of our biographies from the moment we were born until this morning. She knows exactly who is rich—and how rich—and she knows it isn’t me. For this reason, perhaps, there was a click of speculation in nitesimally double behind her eyes when she looked at me. In a moment, however, she knows that she will understand it all.

‘You know how it is,’ says Giovanni, extricating himself and throwing back his hair, ‘when you work, when you become serious, you have no time to play.’

Tiens,’ she says, with mockery. ‘ Sans blague?

‘But I assure you,’ says Giovanni, ‘even when you are a young man like me, you get very tired’—she laughs—‘and you go to sleep early’—she laughs again—‘and alone,’ says Giovanni, as though this

proved everything, and she clicks her teeth in sympathy and laughs again.

‘And now,’ she says, ‘are you coming or going? Have you come for breakfast or have you come for a nightcap? Nom de Dieu, you do not look very serious, I believe you need a drink.’

Bien sûr,’ says someone at the bar, ‘after such hard work he needs a bottle of white wine—and perhaps a few dozen oysters.’

Everybody laughs. Everybody, without seeming to, is looking at us and I am beginning to feel like part of a travelling circus.

Everybody, also, seems very proud of Giovanni.

Giovanni turns to the voice at the bar. ‘An excellent idea, friend,’

he says, ‘and exactly what I had in mind.’ Now he turns to us. ‘You have not met my friends,’ he says, looking at me, then at the woman. ‘This is Monsieur Guillaume,’ he tells her, and with the most subtle attening of his voice, ‘my patron. He can tell you if I am serious.’

‘Ah,’ she dares to say, ‘but I cannot tell if he is,’ and covers this daring with a laugh.

Guillaume, raising his eyes with di culty from the young men at the bar, stretches out his hand and smiles. ‘But you are right, Madame,’ he says. ‘He is so much more serious than I am that I fear he will own my bar one day.’

He will when lions y, she is thinking, but professes herself enchanted by him and shakes his hand with energy.

‘And Monsieur Jacques,’ says Giovanni, ‘one of our nest customers.’

Enchanté, Madame,’ says Jacques, with his most dazzling smile, of which she, in responding, produces the most artless parody.

‘And this is monsieur l’americain,’ says Giovanni, ‘otherwise known as: Monsieur David. Madame Clothilde.’

And he stands back slightly. Something is burning in his eyes and it lights up all his face, it is joy and pride.

Je suis ravi, monsieur,’ she tells me and looks at me and shakes my hand and smiles.

I am smiling too, I scarcely know why; everything in me is jumping up and down. Giovanni carelessly puts an arm round my shoulder. ‘What have you got good to eat?’ he cried. ‘We are hungry.’

‘But we must have a drink rst!’ cried Jacques.

‘But we can drink sitting down,’ said Giovanni, ‘no?’

‘No,’ said Guillaume, to whom leaving the bar, at the moment, would have seemed like being driven from the promised land, ‘let us rst have a drink, here at the bar, with Madame.’

Guillaume’s suggestion had the e ect—but subtly, as though a wind had blown over everything or a light been imperceptibly intensi ed—of creating among the people at the bar, a troupe, who would now play various roles in a play they knew very well.

Madame Clothilde would demur, as, indeed, she instantly did, but only for a moment; then she would accept, it would be something expensive; it turned out to be champagne. She would sip it, making the most noncommittal conversation, so that she could vanish out of it a split-second before Guillaume had established contact with one of the boys at the bar. As for the boys at the bar, they were each invisibly preening, having already calculated how much money he and his copain would need for the next few days, having already appraised Guillaume to within a decimal of that gure, and having already estimated how long Guillaume, as a fountainhead, would last, and also how long they would be able to endure him. The only question left was whether they would be vache with him, or chic, but they knew that they would probably be vache. There was also Jacques, who might turn out to be a bonus, or merely a consolation prize. There was me, of course, another matter altogether, innocent of apartments, soft beds, or food, a candidate, therefore, for a ection, but, as Giovanni’s mome, out of honorable reach. Their only means, practically at least, of conveying their a ection for Giovanni and me was to relieve us of these two old men. So that there was added, to the roles they were about to play, a certain, jolly aura of conviction and, to self-interest, an altruistic glow.

I ordered black co ee and a cognac, a large one. Giovanni was far from me, drinking marc between an old man who looked like a receptacle of all the world’s dirt and disease and a young boy, a redhead, who would look like that man one day, if one could read, in the dullness of his eye, anything so real as a future. Now, however, he had something of a horse’s dreadful beauty; some suggestion, too, of the storm trooper; covertly, he was watching Guillaume; he knew that both Guillaume and Jacques were watching him. Guillaume chatted, meanwhile, with Madame Clothilde, they were agreeing that business was awful, that all standards had been debased by the nouveau riche, and that the country needed DeGaulle. Luckily they had both had this conversation so many times before that it ran, so to speak, all by itself, demanding of them nothing in the way of concentration.

Jacques would, shortly, o er one of the boys a drink but, for the moment, he wished to play uncle to me.

‘How do you feel?’ he asked me. ‘This is a very important day for you.’

‘I feel ne,’ I said. ‘How do you feel?’

‘Like a man,’ he said, ‘who has seen a vision.’

‘Yes?’ I said. ‘Tell me about this vision.’

‘I am not joking,’ he said. ‘I am talking about you. You were the vision. You should have seen yourself tonight. You should see yourself now.’

I looked at him and said nothing.

‘You are—how old? Twenty-six or -seven? I am nearly twice that and, let me tell you, you are lucky. You are lucky that what is happening to you now is happening now and not when you are forty, or something like that, when there would be no hope for you and you would simply be destroyed.’

‘What is happening to me?’ I asked. I had meant to sound sardonic but I did not sound sardonic at all.

He did not answer this, but sighed, looking brie y in the direction of the redhead. Then he turned to me. ‘Are you going to write to

Hella?’

‘I very often do,’ I said. ‘I suppose I will again.’

‘That does not answer my question.’

‘Oh. I was under the impression that you had asked me if I was going to write to Hella.’

‘Well. Let’s put it another way. Are you going to write to Hella about this night and this morning?’

‘I really don’t see what there is to write about. But what’s it to you if I do or I don’t?’

He gave me a look full of a certain despair which I had not till that moment, known was in him. It frightened me. ‘It’s not,’ he said,

‘what it is to me. It’s what it is to you. And to her. And to that poor boy, yonder, who doesn’t know that when he looks at you the way he does, he is simply putting his head in the lion’s mouth. Are you going to treat him as you’ve treated me?’

You? What have you to do with all this? How have I treated you?’

‘You have been very unfair to me,’ he said. ‘You have been very dishonest.’

This time I did sound sardonic. ‘I suppose you mean that I would have been fair, I would have been honest if I had—if—’

‘I mean you could have been fair to me by despising me a little less.’

‘I’m sorry. But I think, since you bring it up, that a lot of your life is despicable.’

‘I could say the same about yours,’ said Jacques. ‘There are so many ways of being despicable it quite makes one’s head spin. But the way to be really despicable is to be contemptuous of other people’s pain. You ought to have some apprehension that the man you see before you was once even younger than you are now and arrived at his present wretchedness by imperceptible degrees.’

There was silence for a moment, threatened, from a distance, by that laugh of Giovanni’s.

‘Tell me,’ I said at last, ‘is there really no other way for you but this? To kneel down forever before an army of boys for just ve dirty minutes in the dark?’

‘Think,’ said Jacques, ‘of the men who have kneeled before you while you thought of something else and pretended that nothing was happening down there in the dark between your legs.’

I stared at the amber cognac and at the wet rings on the metal.

Deep below, trapped in the metal, the outline of my own face looked upward hopelessly at me.

‘You think,’ he persisted, ‘that my life is shameful because my encounters are. And they are. But you should ask yourself why they are.’

‘Why are they—shameful?’ I asked him.

‘Because there is no a ection in them, and no joy. It’s like putting an electric plug in a dead socket. Touch, but no contact. All touch, but no contact and no light.’

I asked him: ‘Why?’

‘That you must ask yourself,’ he told me, ‘and perhaps one day this morning will not be ashes in your mouth.’

I looked over at Giovanni, who now had one arm around the ruined-looking girl, who could have once been very beautiful but who never would be now.

Jacques followed my look. ‘He is very fond of you,’ he said,

‘already. But this doesn’t make you happy or proud, as it should. It makes you frightened and ashamed. Why?’

‘I don’t understand him,’ I said at last. ‘I don’t know what his friendship means, I don’t know what he means by friendship.’

Jacques laughed. ‘You don’t know what he means by friendship but you have the feeling it may not be safe. You are afraid it may change you. What kind of friendship have you had?’

I said nothing.

‘Or for that matter,’ he continued, ‘what kind of love a airs?’

I was silent for so long that he teased me, saying, ‘Come out, come out, wherever you are!’

And I grinned, feeling chilled.

‘Love him,’ said Jacques, with vehemence, ‘love him and let him love you. Do you think anything else under heaven really matters?

And how long, at the best, can it last, since you are both men and still have everywhere to go? Only ve minutes, I assure you, only ve minutes, and most of that, helas! in the dark. And if you think of them as dirty, then they will be dirty—they will be dirty because you will be giving nothing, you will be despising your esh and his.

But you can make your time together anything but dirty, you can give each other something which will make both of you better—

forever—if you will not be ashamed, if you will only not play it safe.’

He paused, watching me, and then looked down to his cognac. ‘You play it safe long enough,’ he said, in a di erent tone, ‘and you’ll end up trapped in your own dirty body, forever and forever and forever

—like me.’ And he nished his cognac, ringing his glass slightly on the bar to attract the attention of Madame Clothilde.

She came at once, beaming; and in that moment Guillaume dared to smile at the redhead. Mme. Clothilde poured Jacques a fresh cognac and looked questioningly at me, the bottle poised over my half full glass. I hesitated.

Et pourquoi pas? ’ she asked, with a smile.

So I nished my glass and she lled it. Then, for the briefest of seconds, she glanced at Guillaume; who cried, ‘ Et le rouquin la!

what’s the redhead drinking?’

Mme. Clothilde turned with the air of an actress about to deliver the severely restrained last lines of an exhausting and mighty part.

On t’o re, Pierre,’ she said, majestically. ‘What will you have?’—

holding slightly aloft meanwhile the bottle containing the most expensive cognac in the house.

Je prendrai un petit cognac,’ Pierre mumbled after a moment and, oddly enough, he blushed, which made him, in the light of the pale, just rising sun, resemble a freshly fallen angel.

Mme. Clothilde lled Pierre’s glass and, amid a beautifully resolving tension, as of slowly dimming lights, replaced the bottle on the shelf and walked back to the cash-register; o stage, in e ect, into the wings, where she began to recover herself by nishing the last of the champagne. She sighed and sipped and looked outward contentedly into the slowly rising morning. Guillaume had murmured a ‘ Je m’excuse un instant, Madame,’ and now passed behind us on his way to the redhead.

I smiled. ‘Things my father never told me.’

Somebody,’ said Jacques, ‘your father or mine, should have told us that not many people have ever died of love. But multitudes have perished, and are perishing every hour—and in the oddest places!—

for the lack of it.’ And then: ‘Here comes your baby. Sois sage. Sois chic.’

He moved slightly away and began talking to the boy next to him.

And here my baby came indeed, through all that sunlight, his face ushed and his hair ying, his eyes, unbelievably, like morning stars. ‘It was not very nice of me to go o for so long,’ he said, ‘I hope you have not been too bored.’

You certainly haven’t been,’ I said to him. ‘You look like a kid about ve years old waking up on Christmas morning.’

This delighted, even attered him, as I could see from the way he now humorously pursed his lips. ‘I am sure I cannot look like that,’

he said. ‘I was always disappointed on Christmas morning.’

‘Well, I mean very early on Christmas morning, before you saw what was under the tree.’ But his eyes have somehow made of my last statement a double entendre, and we are both laughing.

‘Are you hungry?’ he asked.

‘Perhaps I would be if I were alive and sober. I don’t know. Are you?’

‘I think we should eat,’ he said, with no conviction whatever, and we began to laugh again.

‘Well,’ I said, ‘what shall we eat?’

‘I scarcely dare suggest white wine and oysters,’ said Giovanni,

‘but that is really the best thing after such a night.’

‘Well, let’s do that,’ I said, ‘while we can still walk to the dining room.’ I looked beyond him to Guillaume and the redhead, they had apparently found something to talk about, I could not imagine what it was; and Jacques was deep in conversation with the tall, very young, pockmarked boy, whose turtleneck black sweater made him seem even paler and thinner than he actually was. He had been playing the pinball machine when we came in, his name appeared to be Yves. ‘Are they going to eat now?’ I asked Giovanni.

‘Perhaps not now,’ said Giovanni, ‘but they are certainly going to eat. Everyone is very hungry.’ I took this to refer more to the boys than to our friends, and we passed into the dining room, which was now empty, the waiter nowhere in sight.

‘Mme. Clothilde!’ shouted Giovanni, ‘ on mangeici, non?

This shout produced an answering shout from Mme. Clothilde and also produced the waiter, whose jacket was less spotless, seen in closeup, than it had seemed from a distance. It also o cially announced our presence in the dining room to Jacques and Guillaume and must have de nitely increased, in the eyes of the boys they were talking to, a certain tigerish intensity of a ection.

‘We’ll eat quickly and go,’ said Giovanni. ‘After all, I have to work tonight.’

‘Did you meet Guillaume here?’ I asked him.

He grimaced, looking down. ‘No. That is a long story.’ He grinned.

‘No, I did not meet him here. I met him’—he laughed—‘in a cinema!’ We both laughed. ‘ C’etait un lm du far west, avec Gary Cooper.’ This seemed terribly funny, too, we kept laughing until the waiter came with our bottle of white wine.

‘Well,’ said Giovanni, sipping the wine, his eyes damp, ‘after the last gun-shot had been red and all the music came up to celebrate the triumph of goodness and I came up the aisle, I bumped into this man—Guillaume—and I excused myself and walked into the lobby.

Then here he came, after me, with a long story about leaving his

scarf in my seat because, it appeared, he had been sitting behind me, you understand, with his coat and his scarf on the seat before him and when I sat down I pulled his scarf down with me. Well, I told him I didn’t work for the cinema and I told him what he could do with his scarf—but I did not really get angry because he made me want to laugh. He said that all the people who worked for the cinema were thieves and he was sure that they would keep it if they so much as laid eyes on it, and it was very expensive, and a gift from his mother and—oh, I assure you, not even Garbo ever gave such a performance. So I went back and of course there was no scarf there and when I told him this it seemed he would fall dead right there in the lobby. And by this time, you understand, everybody thought we were together and I didn’t know whether to kick him or the people who were looking at us; but he was very well dressed, of course, and I was not and so I thought, well, we had better get out of this lobby. So we went to a cafe and sat on the terrace and when he had got over his grief about the scarf and what his mother would say and so on and so on, he asked me to have supper with him.

Well, naturally, I said no, I had certainly had enough of him by that time, but the only way I could prevent another scene, right there on the terrace, was to promise to have supper with him a few days later

—I did not intend to go,’ he said, with a shy grin, ‘but when the day came I had not eaten for a long time and I was very hungry.’ He looked at me and I saw in his face again something which I have eetingly seen there during these hours: under his beauty and his bravado, terror, and a terrible desire to please; dreadfully moving, and it made me want, in anguish, to reach out and comfort him.

Our oysters came and we began to eat. Giovanni sat in the sun, his black hair gathering to itself the yellow glow of the wine and the many dull colors of the oyster where the sun struck it.

‘Well’—with his mouth turned down—‘dinner was awful, of course, since he can make scenes in his apartment, too. But by this time I knew he owned a bar and was a French citizen. I am not and I had no job and no carte de travail. So I saw that he could be useful if I could only nd some way to make him keep his hands o me. I

did not, I must say’—this with that look at me—‘altogether succeed in remaining untouched by him, he has more hands than an octopus, and no dignity whatever, but’—grimly throwing down another oyster and re lling our glasses of wine—‘I do now have a carte de travail and I have a job. Which pays very well,’ he grinned,

‘it appears that I am good for business. For this reason, he leaves me mostly alone.’ He looked out into the bar. ‘He is really not a man at all,’ he said, with a sorrow and bewilderment at once childlike and ancient, ‘I do not know what he is, he is horrible. But I will keep my carte de travail. The job is another matter, but’—he knocked wood

—‘we have had no trouble now for nearly three weeks.’

‘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 a while, smoking cigarettes, surrounded by oyster shells, and nishing 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 Sebastopol. ‘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 oor 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 snow- akes, 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 sea-shore. ‘ 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 rewood. And, indeed, she rattles the door and I hear her voice out there, cracking, ‘ M’sieu! M’sieu! M’sieu, l’americain! ’ 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 Pelote in the sun shine in a at eld 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’etes 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 rebu 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 o 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 brie y 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 di erence 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 ancée?’ 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, atly,

‘she has gone to America.’

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

‘For awhile,’ I say. lam 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 nd 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 lived 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?’

I wonder if I can stand this another moment. ‘No,’ I stammer. ‘No.

Not often.’

‘But you are a believer?’

I smile. It is not even a patronizing smile, though, perhaps, I wish it could be. ‘Yes.’

But I wonder what my smile could have looked like. It did not reassure her. ‘You must pray,’ she says, very soberly. ‘I assure you.

Even just a little prayer, from time to time. Light a little candle. If it were not for the prayers of the blessed saints one could not live in this world at all. I speak to you,’ she says, drawing herself up slightly, ‘as though I were your maman. Do not be o ended.’

‘But I am not o ended. You are very nice. You are very nice to speak to me this way.’

She smiles a satis ed smile. ‘Men—not just babies like you, but old men, too—they always need a woman to tell them the truth. Les hommes, ils sont impossible.’ And she smiles, and forces me to smile at the cunning of this universal joke, and turns out the light in the master bedroom. We go down the hall again, thank heaven, to my drink. This bedroom of course, is quite untidy, the light burning, my bathrobe, books, dirty socks, and a couple of dirty glasses, and a co ee cup half full of stale co ee—lying around, all over the place: and the sheets on the bed a tangled mess.

‘I’ll x this up before morning,’ I say.

Bien sûr.’ She sighs. ‘You really must take my advice, monsieur, and get married.’ At this, suddenly, we both laugh. Then I nish my drink.

The inventory is almost done. We go into the last big room, where the bottle is, before the window. She looks at the bottle, then at me.

‘But you will be drunk by morning,’ she says.

‘Oh, no! I’m taking the bottle with me.’

It is quite clear that she knows this is not true. But she shrugs her shoulders again. Then she becomes, by the act of wrapping the shawl around her head, very formal, even a little shy. Now that I see she is about to leave I wish I could think of something to make her stay. When she has gone back across the road, the night will be blacker and longer than ever. I have something to say to her—to her?—but of course it will never be said. I feel that I want to be forgiven, I want her to forgive me. But I do not know how to state my crime. My crime, in some odd way, is in being a man and she knows all about this already. It is terrible how naked she makes me feel, like a half grown boy, naked before his mother.

She puts out her hand. I take it, awkwardly.

Bon voyage, monsieur, I hope that you were happy while you were here and that, perhaps, one day, you will visit us again’ She is smiling and her eyes are kind but now the smile is purely social, it is the graceful termination of a business deal.

‘Thank you,’ I say. ‘Perhaps I will be back next year.’ She releases my hand and we walk to the door.

‘Oh!’ she says, at the door, ‘please do not wake me up in the morning. Put the keys in my mailbox. I do not, any more, have any reason to get up so early.’

‘Surely.’ I smile and open the door. ‘Goodnight, Madame.’

Bonsoir, Monsieur. Adieu! ’ She steps out into the darkness. But there is a light coming from my house and from her house across the road. The town lights glimmer beneath us and I hear, brie y, the sea again.

She walks a little away from me, and turns. ‘ Souvenezvous,’ she tells me. ‘One must make a little prayer from time to time.’

And I close the door.

She has made me realize that I have much to do before morning. I decide to clean the bathroom before I allow myself another drink.

And I begin to do this, rst scrubbing out the tub, then running water into the pail to mop the oor. The bathroom is tiny and square, with one frosted window. It reminds me of that claustrophobic room in Paris. Giovanni had had great plans for remodeling the room and there was a time, when he had actually begun to do this, when we lived with plaster all over everything and bricks piled on the oor. We took packages of bricks out of the house at night and left them in the streets.

I suppose they will come for him early in the morning, perhaps just before dawn, so that the last thing Giovanni will ever see will be that grey, lightless sky over Paris, beneath which we stumbled homeward together so many desperate and drunken mornings.

PART TWO

1

I remember that life in that room seemed to be occurring beneath the sea, time owed past indi erently above us, hours and days had no meaning. In the beginning our life together held a joy and amazement which was newborn every day. Beneath the joy, of course, was anguish and beneath the amazement was fear; but they did not work themselves to the beginning until our high beginning was aloes on our tongues. By then anguish and fear had become the surface on which we slipped and slid, losing balance, dignity, and pride. Giovanni’s face, which I had memorized so many mornings, noons, and nights, hardened before my eyes, began to give in secret places, began to crack. The light in the eyes became a glitter, the wide and beautiful brow began to suggest the skull beneath. The sensual lips turned inward, busy with the sorrow over owing from his heart. It became a stranger’s face—or it made me so guilty to look on him that I wished it were a stranger’s face. Not all my memorizing had prepared me for the metamorphosis which my memorizing had helped to bring about.

Our day began before daybreak, when I drifted over to Guillaume’s bar in time for a pre-closing drink. Sometimes, when Guillaume had closed the bar to the public, a few friends and Giovanni and myself stayed behind for breakfast and music.

Sometimes Jacques was there—from the time of our meeting with Giovanni he seemed to come out more and more. If we had breakfast with Guillaume, we usually left around seven o’clock in the morning. Sometimes, when Jacques was there, he o ered to drive us home in the car which he had suddenly and inexplicably bought, but we almost always walked the long way home along the river.

Spring was approaching Paris. Walking up and down this house tonight, I see again the river, the cobblestoned quais, the bridges.

Low boats passed beneath the bridges and on those boats one sometimes saw women hanging washing out to dry. Sometimes we saw a young man in a canoe, energetically rowing, looking rather helpless, and, also, rather silly. There were yachts tied up along the banks from time to time, and house-boats, and barges; we passed the rehouse so often on our way home that the remen got to know us. When winter came again and Giovanni found himself in hiding in one of these barges, it was a reman, who, seeing him crawl back into hiding with a loaf of bread one night, tipped o the police.

The trees grew green those mornings, the river dropped, and the brown winter smoke dropped downward out of it, and shermen appeared. Giovanni was right about the shermen, they certainly never seemed to catch anything, but it gave them something to do.

Along the quais the bookstalls seemed to become almost festive, awaiting the weather which would allow the passerby to leaf idly through the dog-eared books, and which would inform the tourist with a passionate desire to carry o to the United States, or Denmark, more colored prints than he could a ord, or, when he got home, know what to do with. Also, the girls appeared on their bicycles, along with boys similarly equipped, and we sometimes saw them along the river, as the light began to fade, their bicycles put away until the morrow. This was after Giovanni had lost his job and we walked around in the evenings. Those evenings were bitter.

Giovanni knew that I was going to leave him but he did not dare accuse me for fear of being corroborated. I did not dare tell him.

Hella was on her way back from Spain and my father had agreed to send me money, which I was not going to use to help Giovanni, who had done so much to help me. I was going to use it to escape his room.

Every morning the sky and the sun seemed to be a little higher and the river stretched before us with a greater haze of promise.

Every day the book-stall keepers seemed to have taken o another

garment, so that the shape of their bodies appeared to be undergoing a most striking and continual metamorphosis. One began to wonder what the nal shape would be. It was observable, through open windows on the quais and sidestreets, that hoteliers had called in painters to paint the rooms; the women in the dairies had taken o their blue sweaters and rolled up the sleeves of their dresses, so that one saw their powerful arms; the bread seemed warmer and fresher in the bakeries. The small school children had taken o their capes and their knees were no longer scarlet with the cold. There seemed to be more chatter—in that curiously measured and vehement language, which sometimes reminds me of sti ening egg white and sometimes of stringed instruments but always of the underside and aftermath of passion.

But we did not often have breakfast in Guillaume’s bar because Guillaume did not like me. Usually I simply waited around, as inconspicuously as possible, until Giovanni had nished cleaning up the bar and had changed his clothes. Then we said good-night and left. The habitués had evolved toward us a curious attitude, composed of an unpleasant maternalism, and envy, and disguised dislike. They could not, somehow, speak to us as they spoke to one another and they resented the strain we imposed on them of speaking in any other way. And it made them furious that the dead center of their lives was, in this instance, none of their business. It made them feel their poverty again, through the narcotics of chatter, and dreams of conquest, and mutual contempt.

Wherever we ate breakfast, and wherever we walked, when we got home we were always too tired to sleep right away. We made co ee and sometimes drank cognac with it; we sat on the bed and talked and smoked. We seemed to have a great deal to tell—or Giovanni did. Even at my most candid, even when I tried hardest to give myself to him as he gave himself to me, I was holding something back. I did not, for example, really tell him about Hella until I had been living in the room a month. I told him about her then because her letters had begun to sound as though she would be coming back to Paris very soon.

‘What is she doing, wandering around through Spain alone?’ asked Giovanni.

‘She likes to travel,’ I said.

‘Oh,’ said Giovanni, ‘nobody likes to travel, especially not women.

There must be some other reason.’ He raised his eyebrows suggestively. ‘Perhaps she has a Spanish lover and is afraid to tell you—? Perhaps she is with a torero.’

Perhaps she is, I thought. ‘But she wouldn’t be afraid to tell me.’

Giovanni laughed. ‘I do not understand Americans at all,’ he said.

‘I don’t see that there’s anything very hard to understand. We aren’t married, you know.’

‘But she is your mistress, no?’ asked Giovanni.

‘Yes.’

‘And she is still your mistress?’

I stared at him. ‘Of course,’ I said.

‘Well then,’ said Giovanni, ‘I do not understand what she is doing in Spain while you are in Paris.’ Another thought struck him. ‘How old is she?’

‘She’s two years younger than I am.’ I watched him. ‘What’s that got to do with it?’

‘Is she married? I mean to somebody else, naturally.’

I laughed. He laughed too. ‘Of course not.’

‘Well, I thought she might be an older woman,’ said Giovanni,

‘with a husband somewhere and perhaps she had to go away with him from time to time in order to be able to continue her a air with you. That would be a nice arrangement. Those women are sometimes very interesting and they usually have a little money. If that woman was in Spain, she would bring back a wonderful gift for you. But a young girl, bouncing around in a foreign country by herself—I do not like that at all. You should nd another mistress.’

It all seemed very funny. I could not stop laughing. ‘Do you have a mistress?’ I asked him.

‘Not now,’ he said, ‘but perhaps I will again one day.’ He half frowned, half smiled. ‘I don’t seem to be very interested in women right now—I don’t know why. I used to be. Perhaps I will be again.’

He shrugged. ‘Perhaps it is because women are just a little more trouble than I can a ord right now. Et puis’—He stopped.

I wanted to say that it seemed to me that he had taken a most peculiar road out of his trouble; but I only said, after a moment, cautiously: ‘You don’t seem to have a very high opinion of women.’

‘Oh, women! There is no need, thank heaven, to have an opinion about women. Women are like water. They are tempting like that, and they can be that treacherous, and they can seem to be that bottomless, you know?—and they can be that shallow. And that dirty.’ He stopped. ‘I perhaps don’t like women very much, that’s true. That hasn’t stopped me from making love to many and loving one or two. But most of the time—most of the time I made love only with the body.’

‘That can make one very lonely,’ I said. I had not expected to say it.He had not expected to hear it. He looked at me and reached out and touched me on the cheek. ‘Yes,’ he said. Then ‘I am not trying to be méchant when I talk about women. I respect women—very much—for their inside life, which is not like the life of a man.’

‘Women don’t seem to like that idea,’ I said.

‘Oh, well,’ said Giovanni, ‘these absurd women running around today, full of ideas and nonsense, and thinking themselves equal to men— quelle rigolade!—they need to be beaten half to death so that they can nd out who rules the world.’

I laughed. ‘Did the women you knew like to get beaten?’

He smiled. ‘I don’t know if they liked it. But a beating never made them go away.’ We both laughed. ‘They were not, any way, like that silly little girl of yours, wandering all over Spain and sending postcards back to Paris. What does she think she is doing? Does she want you or does she not want you?’

‘She went to Spain,’ I said, ‘to nd out.’

Giovanni opened his eyes wide. He was indignant. ‘To Spain. Why not to China? What is she doing, testing all the Spaniards and comparing them with you?’

I was a little annoyed. ‘You don’t understand,’ I said. ‘She is a very intelligent, very complex girl, she wanted to go away and think.’

‘What is there to think about? She sounds rather silly, I must say.

She just can’t make up her mind what bed to sleep in. She wants to eat her cake and she wants to have it all.’

‘If she were in Paris now,’ I said, abruptly, ‘then I would not be in this room with you.’

‘You would possibly not be living here,’ he conceded, ‘but we would certainly be seeing each other, why not?’

‘Why not? Suppose she found out?’

‘Found out? Found out what?’

‘Oh stop it,’ I said. ‘You know what there is to nd out.’

He looked at me very soberly. ‘She sounds more and more impossible, this little girl of yours. What does she do, follow you everywhere? Or will she hire detectives to sleep under our bed? And what business is it of hers, anyway?’

‘You can’t possibly be serious,’ I said.

‘I certainly can be,’ he retorted, ‘and I am. You are the incomprehensible one.’ He groaned and poured more co ee and picked up our cognac from the oor. ‘ Chez toi everything sounds extremely feverish and complicated, like one of those English murder mysteries. To nd out, to nd out, you keep saying, as though we were accomplices in a crime. We have not committed any crime.’ He poured the cognac.

‘It’s just that she’ll be terribly hurt if she does nd out, that’s all.

People have very dirty words for—for this situation.’ I stopped. His face suggested that my reasoning was imsy. I added, defensively

‘Besides, it is a crime—in my country, and, after all, I didn’t grow up here, I grew up there.’

‘If dirty words frighten you,’ said Giovanni, ‘I really do not know how you have managed to live so long. People are full of dirty

words. The only time they do not use them, most people I mean, is when they are describing something dirty.’ He paused and we watched each other. In spite of what he was saying he looked rather frightened himself. ‘If your countrymen think that privacy is a crime, so much the worse for your country. And as for this girl of yours—are you always at her side when she is here? I mean, all day, every day? You go out sometimes to have a drink alone, no? Maybe you sometimes take a walk without her—to think, as you say. The Americans seem to do a great deal of thinking. And perhaps while you are thinking and having that drink, you look at another girl who passes, no? Maybe you even look up at the sky and feel your own blood in you? Or does everything stop when Hella comes? No drinks alone, no looks at other girls, no sky? Eh? Answer me.’

‘I’ve told you already that we’re not married. But I don’t seem to be able to make you understand anything at all this morning.’

‘But anyway—when Hella is here you do sometimes see other people—without Hella?’

‘Of course.’

‘And does she make you tell her everything you have done while you were not with her?’

I sighed. I had lost control of the conversation somewhere along the line and I simply wanted it to end. I drank my cognac too fast and it burned my throat. ‘Of course not.’

‘Well. You are a very charming and good-looking and civilized boy and, unless you are impotent, I do not see what she has to complain about, or what you have to worry about. To arrange, mon cher, la vie pratique, is very simple—it only has to be done.’ He re ected.

‘Sometimes things go wrong, I agree, then you have to arrange it another way. But it is certainly not the English melodrama you make it. Why, that way, life would simply be unbearable.’ He poured more cognac and grinned at me, as though he had solved all my problems. And there was something so artless in this smile that I had to smile back. Giovanni liked to believe that he was hard-headed and that I was not and that he was teaching me the stony facts of life. It was very important for him to feel this: it was

because he knew, unwillingly, at the very bottom of his heart, that I helplessly, at the very bottom of mine, resisted him with all my strength.

Eventually we grew still, we fell silent, and we slept. We awoke around three or four in the afternoon, when the dull sun was prying at odd corners of the cluttered room. We arose and washed and shaved, bumping into each other and making jokes and furious with the unstated desire to escape the room. Then we danced out into the streets, into Paris, and ate quickly somewhere, and I left Giovanni at the door to Guillaume’s bar.

Then I, alone, and relieved to be alone, perhaps went to a movie, or walked, or returned home and read, or sat in a park and read, or sat on a cafe terrace, or talked to people, or wrote letters. I wrote to Hella, telling her nothing, or I wrote to my father asking for money.

And no matter what I was doing, another me sat in my belly, absolutely cold with terror over the question of my life.

Giovanni had awakened an itch, had released a gnaw in me. I realized it one afternoon, when I was taking him to work via the boulevard Montparnasse. We had bought a kilo of cherries and we were eating them as we walked along. We were both insu erably childish and high-spirited that afternoon and the spectacle we presented, two grown men, jostling each other on the wide sidewalk, and aiming the cherry-pips, as though they were spitballs, into each other’s faces, must have been outrageous. And I realized that such childishness was fantastic at my age and the happiness out of which it sprang yet more so; for that moment I really loved Giovanni, who had never seemed more beautiful than he was that afternoon. And, watching his face, I realized that it meant much to me that I could make his face so bright. I saw that I might be willing to give a great deal not to lose that power. And I felt myself ow toward him, as a river rushes when the ice breaks up. Yet, at that very moment, there passed between us on the pavement another boy, a stranger, and I invested him at once with Giovanni’s beauty and what I felt for Giovanni I also felt for him. Giovanni saw this and saw my face and it made him laugh the more. I blushed and he

kept laughing and then the boulevard, the light, the sound of his laughter turned into a scene from a nightmare. I kept looking at the trees, the light falling through the leaves. I felt sorrow and shame and panic and great bitterness. At the same time—it was part of my turmoil and also outside it—I felt the muscles in my neck tighten with the e ort I was making not to turn my head and watch that boy diminish down the bright avenue. The beast which Giovanni had awakened in me would never go to sleep again; but one day I would not be with Giovanni any more. And would I then, like all the others, nd myself turning and following all kinds of boys down God knows what dark avenues, into what dark places?

With this fearful intimation there opened in me a hatred for Giovanni which was as powerful as my love and which was nourished by the same roots.

2

I scarcely know how to describe that room. It became, in a way, every room I had ever been in and every room I nd myself in hereafter will remind me of Giovanni’s room. I did not really stay there very long—we met before the spring began and I left there during the summer—but it still seems to me that I spent a lifetime there. Life in that room seemed to be occurring underwater, as I say, and it is certain that I underwent a sea-change there.

To begin with, the room was not large enough for two, it looked out on a small courtyard. ‘Looked out’ means only that the room had two windows, against which the courtyard malevolently pressed, encroaching day by day, as though it had confused itself with a jungle. We, or rather Giovanni, kept the windows closed most of the time; he had never bought any curtains, neither did we buy any while I was in the room; to insure privacy, Giovanni had obscured the window panes with a heavy, white cleaning polish. We sometimes heard children playing outside our window, sometimes strange shapes loomed against it. At such moments, Giovanni, working in the room, or lying in the bed, would sti en like a hunting dog and remain perfectly silent until whatever seemed to threaten our safety had moved away.

He had always had great plans for remodelling this room and before I arrived he had already begun. One of the walls was a dirty, streaked white where he had torn o the wallpaper. The wall facing it was destined never to be uncovered and on this wall a lady in a hoop skirt and a man in knee breeches perpetually walked together, hemmed in by roses. The wallpaper lay on the oor, in great sheets and scrolls, in dust. On the oor also, lay our dirty laundry, along with Giovanni’s tools and the paint brushes and the bottles of oil and turpentine. Our suitcases teetered on top of something, so that we dreaded ever having to open them and sometimes went without some minor necessity, such as clean socks, for days.

No one ever came to see us, except Jacques, and he did not come often. We were far from the center of the city and we had no phone.

I remember the rst afternoon I woke up there, with Giovanni fast asleep beside me, heavy as a fallen rock. The sun ltered through the room so faintly that I was worried about the time. I stealthily lit a cigarette, for I did not want to wake Giovanni. I did not yet know how I would face his eyes. I looked about me. Giovanni had said something in the taxi about his room being very dirty. ‘I’m sure it is,’ I had said lightly, and turned away from him, looking out of the window. Then we had both been silent. When I woke up in his room, I remembered that there had been something strained and painful in the quality of that silence; which had been broken when Giovanni said, with a shy, bitter smile: ‘I must nd some poetic gure.’

And he spread his heavy ngers in the air, as though a metaphor were tangible. I watched him.

‘Look at the garbage of this city,’ he said, nally, and his ngers indicated the ying street, ‘all of the garbage of this city? Where do they take it? I don’t know where they take it—but it might very well be my room.’

‘It’s much more likely,’ I said, ‘that they dump it into the Seine.’

But I sensed, when I woke up and looked around the room, the bravado and the cowardice of his gure of speech. This was not the garbage of Paris, which would have been anonymous: this was Giovanni’s regurgitated life.

Before and beside me and all over the room, towering like a wall, were boxes of cardboard and leather, some tied with string, some locked, some bursting, and out of the topmost box before me spilled down sheets of violin music. There was a violin in the room, lying on the table in its warped, cracked case—it was impossible to guess from looking at it whether it had been laid to rest there yesterday or a hundred years before. The table was loaded with yellowing newspapers and empty bottles and it held a single brown and wrinkled potato in which even the sprouting eyes were rotten. Red wine had been spilled on the oor, it had been allowed to dry and it

made the air in the room sweet and heavy. But it was not the room’s disorder which was frightening; it was the fact that when one began searching for the key to this disorder one realized that it was not to be found in any of the usual places. For this was not a matter of habit or circumstances or temperament; it was a matter of punishment and grief. I do not know how I knew this, but I knew it at once; perhaps I knew it because I wanted to live. And I stared at the room with the same nervous, calculating extension of the intelligence and of all one’s forces which occur when gauging a mortal and unavoidable danger: at the silent walls of the room with its distant, archaic lovers trapped in an interminable rose garden, and the staring windows, staring like two great eyes of ice and re, and the ceiling which lowered like those clouds out of which ends have sometimes spoken and which obscured but failed to soften its malevolence behind the yellow light which hung like a diseased and unde nable sex in its center. Under this blunted arrow, this smashed ower of light lay the terrors which encompassed Giovanni’s soul. I understood why Giovanni had wanted me and had brought me to his last retreat. I was to destroy this room and give to Giovanni a new and better life. This life could only be my own, which, in order to transform Giovanni’s, must rst become a part of Giovanni’s room.

In the beginning, because the motives which led me to Giovanni’s room were so mixed; had so little to do with his hopes and desires and were so deeply a part of my own desperation, I invented in myself a kind of pleasure in playing the housewife after Giovanni had gone to work. I threw out the paper, the bottles, the fantastic accumulation of trash, I examined the contents of the innumerable boxes and suitcases, and disposed of them. But I am not a housewife

—men never can be housewives. And the pleasure was never real or deep, though Giovanni smiled his humble, grateful smile and told me in as many ways as he could nd how wonderful it was to have me there, how I stood, with my love and my ingenuity, between him and the dark. Each day he invited me to witness how he had changed, how love had changed him, how he worked and sang and

cherished me. I was in a terrible confusion. Sometimes I thought, but this is your life. Stop ghting it. Stop ghting. Or I thought, but I am happy. And he loves me. I am safe. Sometimes, when he was not near me, I thought, I will never let him touch me again. Then, when he touched me, I thought it doesn’t matter, it is only the body, it will soon be over. When it was over I lay in the dark and listened to his breathing and dreamed of the touch of hands, of Giovanni’s hands, or anybody’s hands, hands which would have the power to crush me and make me whole again.

Sometimes I left Giovanni over our afternoon breakfast, blue smoke from a cigarette circling around his head, and went o to the American Express O ce at Opéra, where my mail would be, if I had any. Sometimes, but rarely, Giovanni came with me; he said that he could not endure being surrounded by so many Americans. He said they all looked alike—as I am sure they did, to him. But they didn’t look alike to me. I was aware that they all had in common something that made them Americans but I could never put my nger on what it was. I knew that whatever this common quality was, I shared it. And I knew that Giovanni had been attracted to me partly because of it. When Giovanni wanted me to know that he was displeased with me, he said I was a ‘ vrai americain’; conversely, when delighted, he said that I was not an American at all; and on both occasions he was striking, deep in me, a nerve which did not throb in him. And I resented this: resented being called an American (and resented resenting it) because it seemed to make me nothing more than that, whatever that was; and I resented being called not an American because it seemed to make me nothing.

Yet, walking into the American Express O ce one harshly bright, midsummer afternoon, I was forced to admit that this active, so disquietingly cheerful horde struck the eye, at once, as a unit. At home, I could have distinguished patterns, habits, accents of speech

—with no e ort whatever; now everybody sounded, unless I listened hard, as though they had just arrived from Nebraska. At home I could have seen the clothes they were wearing, but here I only saw bags, cameras, belts and hats, all, clearly, from the same

department store. At home I would have had some sense of the individual womanhood of the woman I faced: here the most ferociously accomplished seemed to be involved in some ice-cold or sun-dried travesty of sex, and even grandmothers seemed to have had no tra c with the esh. And what distinguished the men was that they seemed incapable of age; they smelled of soap, which seemed indeed to be their preservative against the dangers and exigencies of any more intimate odor; the boy he had been shone somehow, unsoiled, untouched, unchanged, through the eye of the man of sixty, booking passage, with his smiling wife, to Rome. His wife might have been his mother, forcing more oatmeal down his throat, and Rome might have been the movie she had promised to allow him to see. Yet I also suspected that what I was seeing was but a part of the truth and perhaps not even the most important part; beneath these faces, these clothes, accents, rudenesses, was power and sorrow, both unadmitted, unrealized, the power of inventors, the sorrow of the disconnected.

I took my place in the mail line behind two girls who had decided that they wanted to stay on in Europe and who were hoping to nd jobs with the American government in Germany. One of them had fallen in love with a Swiss boy; so I gathered, from the low, intense, and troubled conversation she was having with her friend. The friend was urging her to ‘put her foot down’—on what principle I could not discover: and the girl in love kept nodding her head, but more in perplexity than agreement. She had the choked and halting air of someone who has something more to say but nds no way of saying it. ‘You mustn’t be a fool about this,’ the friend was saying. ‘I know, I know,’ said the girl. One had the impression that, though she certainly did not wish to be a fool, she had lost one de nition of the word and might never be able to nd another.

There were two letters for me, one from my father and one from Hella. Hella had been sending me only postcards for quite awhile. I was afraid her letter might be important and I did not want to read it. I opened the letter from my father rst. I read it, standing just

beyond reach of the sunlight, beside the endlessly swinging double doors.

Dear Butch,’ my father said, ‘ aren’t you ever coming home? Don’t you think I’m only being sel sh but it’s true I’d like to see you. I think you have been away long enough, God knows I don’t know what you’re doing over there, and you don’t write enough for me even to guess. But my guess is you’re going to be sorry one of these ne days that you stayed over there, looking at your navel, and let the world pass you by.

There’s nothing over there for you. You’re as American as pork and beans, though maybe you don’t want to think so any more. And maybe you won’t mind my saying that you’re getting a little old for studying, after all, if that’s what you’re doing. You’re pushing thirty. I’m getting along, too, and you’re all I’ve got. I’d like to see you.

You keep asking me to send you your money and I guess you think I’m being a bastard about it. I’m not trying to starve you out and you know if you really need anything, I’ll be the rst to help you but I really don’t think I’d be doing you a favor by letting you spend what little money you’ve got over there and then coming home to nothing. What the hell are you doing? Let your old man in on the secret, can’t you? You may not believe this, but once I was a young man, too.

And then he went on about my stepmother and how she wanted to see me, and about some of our friends and what they were doing. It was clear that my absence was beginning to frighten him. He did not know what it meant. But he was living, obviously, in a pit of suspicions which daily became blacker and vaguer—he would not have known how to put them into words, even if he had dared. The question he longed to ask was not in the letter and neither was the o er: Is it a woman, David? Bring her on home. I don’t care who she is.

Bring her on home and I’ll help you get set up. He could not risk this question because he could not have endured the answer in the negative. An answer in the negative would have revealed what strangers we had become. I folded the letter and put it in my back pocket and looked out for a moment at the wide, sunlit foreign avenue.

There was a sailor, dressed all in white, coming across the boulevard, walking with that funny roll sailors have and with that aura, hopeful and hard, of having to make a great deal happen in a hurry. I was staring at him, though I did not know it, and wishing I were he. He seemed—somehow—younger than I had ever been, and blonder and more beautiful, and he wore his masculinity as unequivocally as he wore his skin. He made me think of home—

perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition. I knew how he drank and how he was with his friends and how pain and women ba ed him. I wondered if my father had ever been like that, if I had ever been like that—though it was hard to imagine, for this boy, striding across the avenue like light itself, any antecedents, any connections at all. We came abreast and, as though he had seen some all-revealing panic in my eyes, he gave me a look contemptuously lewd and knowing; just such a look as he might have given, but a few hours ago, to the desperately well-dressed nymphomaniac or trollop who was trying to make him believe she was a lady. And in another second, had our contact lasted, I was certain that there would erupt into speech, out of all that light and beauty, some brutal variation of Look, baby. I know you. I felt my face ame, I felt my heart harden and shake as I hurried past him, trying to look stonily beyond him. He had caught me by surprise, for I had, somehow, not really been thinking of him but of the letter in my pocket, of Hella and Giovanni. I got to the other side of the boulevard, not daring to look back, and I wondered what he had seen in me to elicit such instantaneous contempt. I was too old to suppose that it had anything to do with my walk, or the way I held my hands, or my voice—which, anyway, he had not heard. It was something else and I would never see it. I would never dare to see it. It would be like looking at the naked sun. But, hurrying, and not daring now to look at anyone, male or female, who passed me on the wide sidewalks, I knew that what the sailor had seen in my unguarded eyes was envy and desire: I had seen it often in Jacques’

eyes and my reaction and the sailor’s had been the same. But if I were still able to feel a ection and if he had seen it in my eyes, it

would not have helped, for a ection, for the boys I was doomed to look at, was vastly more frightening than lust.

I walked further than I had intended, for I did not dare to stop while the sailor might still be watching. Near the river, on rue des Pyramides, I sat down at a cafe table and opened Hella’s letter.

Mon cher, she began, Spain is my favorite country mais ça n’empêche que Paris est toujours ma ville preferé. I long to be again among all those foolish people, running for metros and jumping o of buses and dodging motorcycles and having tra c jams and admiring all that crazy statuary in all those absurd parks. I weep for the shy ladies in the place de la Concorde. Spain is not like that at all. Whatever else Spain is, it is not frivolous. I think, really, that I would stay in Spain forever—if I had never been to Paris. Spain is very beautiful, stony and sunny and lonely. But by and by you get tired of olive oil and sh and castanets and tambourines—or, anyway, I do. I want to come home, to come home to Paris. It’s funny, I’ve never felt anyplace was home before.

Nothing has happened to me here—I suppose that pleases you, I confess it rather pleases me. The Spaniards are nice, but, of course, most of them are terribly poor, the ones who aren’t are impossible, I don’t like the tourists, mainly English and American dipsomaniacs, paid, my dear, by their families to stay away. (I wish I had a family.) I’m on Mallorca now and it would be a pretty place if you could dump all the pensioned widows into the sea and make drymartini drinking illegal. I’ve never seen anything like it! The way these old hags guzzle and make eyes at anything in pants, especially anything about eighteen—well, I said to myself, Hella, my girl, take a good look. You may be looking at your future. The trouble is that I love myself too much. And so I’ve decided to let two try it, this business of loving me, I mean, and see how that works out. (I feel ne now that I’ve made the decision, I hope you’ll feel ne, too, dear knight in Gimbel’s armor. ) I’ve been trapped into some dreary expedition to Seville with an English family I met in Barcelona. They adore Spain and they want to take me to see a bull- ght—I never have, you know, all the time I’ve been wandering around here. They’re really quite nice, he’s some kind of poet with the B.B.C. and she’s his e cient and adoring spouse. Quite nice,

really. They do have an impossibly lunatick son who imagines himself mad about me, but he’s much too English and much, much too young. I leave tomorrow and shall be gone ten days. Then, they to England and I

—to you!

I folded this letter, which I now realized I had been awaiting for many days and nights, and the waiter came and asked me what I wanted to drink. I had meant to order an aperitif but now, in some grotesque spirit of celebration, ordered a Scotch and soda. And over this drink, which had never seemed more American than it did at that moment, I stared at absurd Paris, which was as cluttered now, under the scalding sun, as the landscape of my heart. I wondered what I was going to do.

I cannot say that I was frightened. Or, it would be better to say that I did not feel any fear—the way men who are shot do not, I am told, feel any pain for awhile. I felt a certain relief. It seemed that the necessity for decision had been taken from my hands. I told myself that we both had always known, Giovanni and myself, that our idyll could not last forever. And it was not as though I had not been honest with him—he knew all about Hella. He knew that she would be returning to Paris one day. Now she would be coming back and my life with Giovanni would be nished. It would be something that had happened to many men once. I paid for my drink and got up and walked across the river to Montparnasse.

I felt elated—yet, as I walked down Raspail toward the cafes of Montparnasse, I could not fail to remember that Hella and I had walked here, Giovanni and I had walked here. And with each step, the face that glowed insistently before me was not her face, but his.

I was beginning to wonder how he would take my news. I did not think he would ght me but I was afraid of what I would see in his face. I was afraid of the pain I would see there. But even this was not my real fear. My real fear was buried and was driving me to Montparnasse. I wanted to nd a girl, any girl at all.

But the terraces seemed oddly deserted. I walked along slowly, on both sides of the street, looking at the tables. I saw no one I knew. I walked down as far as the Closerie des Lilas and I had a solitary drink

there. I read my letters again. I thought of nding Giovanni at once and telling him I was leaving him but I knew he would not yet have opened the bar and he might be almost anywhere in Paris at this hour. I walked slowly back up the boulevard. Then I saw a couple of girls, French whores, but they were not very attractive. I told myself that I could do better than that. I got to the Select and sat down. I watched the people pass, and I drank. No one I knew appeared on the boulevard for the longest while.

The person who appeared, and whom I did not know very well, was a girl named Sue, blonde, and rather pu y, with the quality, in spite of the fact that she was not pretty, of the girls who are selected each year to be Miss Rheingold. She wore her curly blonde hair cut very short, she had small breasts and a big behind, and, in order, no doubt, to indicate to the world how little she cared for appearance or sensuality, she almost always wore tight blue jeans. I think she came from Philadelphia and her family was very rich. Sometimes, when she was drunk, she reviled them, and, sometimes, drunk in another way, she extolled their virtues of thrift and delity. I was both dismayed and relieved to see her. The moment she appeared I began, mentally, to take o all her clothes.

‘Sit down,’ I said. ‘Have a drink.’

‘I’m glad to see you,’ she cried, sitting down, and looking about for the waiter. ‘You’d rather dropped out of sight. How’ve you been?’—

abandoning her search for the waiter and leaning forward to me with a friendly grin.

‘I’ve been ne,’ I told her. ‘And you?’