‘Oh, me! Nothing ever happens to me.’ And she turned down the corners of her rather predatory and also vulnerable mouth to indicate that she was both joking and not joking. ‘I’m built like a brick stonewall.’ We both laughed. She peered at me. ‘They tell me you’re living way out at the end of Paris, near the zoo.’

‘I found a maid’s room out there. Very cheap.’

‘Are you living alone?’

I did not know whether she knew about Giovanni or not. I felt a hint of sweat on my forehead. ‘Sort of,’ I said.

‘Sort of? What the hell does that mean? Do you have a monkey with you, or something?’

I grinned. ‘No. But this French kid I know, he lives with his mistress, but they ght a lot and it’s really his room so sometimes, when his mistress throws him out, he bunks with me for a couple of days.’

‘Ah!’ she sighed. ‘ Chagrin d’amour!’

‘He’s having a good time,’ I said. ‘He loves it.’ I looked at her.

‘Aren’t you?’

‘Stonewalls,’ she said, ‘are impenetrable.’

The waiter arrived. ‘Doesn’t it,’ I dared, ‘depend on the weapon?’

‘What are you buying me to drink?’ she asked.

‘What do you want?’ We were both grinning. The waiter stood above us, manifesting a kind of surly joie de vivre.

‘I believe I’ll have’—she batted the eyelashes of her tight blue eyes

—‘ un ricard. With a hell of a lot of ice.’

Deux ricards,’ I said to the waiter, ‘ avec beaucoup de la glace.’

Oui, monsieur.’ I was sure he despised us both. I thought of Giovanni and of how many times in an evening the phrase, Oui monsieur fell from his lips. With this eeting thought there came another, equally eeting: a new sense of Giovanni, his private life and pain, and all that moved like a ood in him when we lay together at night.

‘To continue,’ I said.

‘To continue?’ She made her eyes very wide and blank. ‘Where were we?’ She was trying to be coquettish and she was trying to be hard-headed. I felt that I was doing something very cruel.

But I could not stop. ‘We were talking about stonewalls and how they could be entered.’

‘I never knew,’ she simpered, ‘that you had any interest in stonewalls.’

‘There’s a lot about me you don’t know.’ The waiter returned with our drinks. ‘Don’t you think discoveries are fun?’

She stared discontentedly at her drink. ‘Frankly,’ she said, turning toward me again, with those eyes, ‘no.’

‘Oh you’re much too young for that,’ I said. ‘ Everything should be a discovery.’

She was silent for a moment. She sipped her drink. ‘I’ve made,’ she said, nally, ‘all the discoveries that I can stand.’ But I watched the way her thighs moved against the cloth of her jeans.

‘But you can’t just go on being a brick stonewall forever.’

‘I don’t see why not,’ she said. ‘Nor do I see how not.’

‘Baby,’ I said, ‘I’m making you a proposition.’

She picked up her glass again and sipped it, staring straight outward at the boulevard. ‘And what’s the proposition?’

‘Invite me for a drink. Chez toi.’

‘I don’t believe,’ she said, turning to me, ‘that I’ve got anything in the house.’

‘We can pick up something on the way,’ I said.

She stared at me for a long time. I forced myself not to drop my eyes. ‘I’m sure that I shouldn’t,’ she said at last.

‘Why not?’

She made a small, helpless movement in the wicker chair. ‘I don’t know. I don’t know what you want.’

I laughed. ‘If you invite me home for a drink,’ I said, ‘I’ll show you.’

‘I think you’re being impossible,’ she said, and for the rst time there was something genuine in her eyes and voice.

‘Well,’ I said, ‘I think you are.’ I looked at her with a smile which was, I hoped, both boyish and insistent. ‘I don’t know what I’ve said that’s so impossible. I’ve put all my cards on the table. But you’re still holding yours. I don’t know why you should think a man’s being impossible when he declares himself attracted to you.’

‘Oh, please,’ she said, and nished her drink, ‘I’m sure it’s just the summer sun.’

‘The summer sun,’ I said, ‘has nothing to do with it.’ And when she still made no answer, ‘All you’ve got to do,’ I said, desperately, ‘is decide whether we’ll have another drink here or at your place.’

She snapped her ngers abruptly and did not succeed in appearing jaunty. ‘Come along,’ she said, ‘I’m certain to regret it. But you really will have to buy something to drink. There isn’t anything in the house. And that way,’ she added, after a moment, ‘I’ll be sure to get something out of the deal.’

It was I, then, who felt a dreadful holding back. To avoid looking at her, I made a great show of getting the waiter. And he came, as surly as ever, and I paid him, and we rose and started walking toward the rue de Sèvres, where Sue had a small apartment.

Her apartment was dark and full of furniture. ‘None of it is mine,’

she said. ‘It all belongs to the French lady of a certain age from whom I rented it, who is now in Monte Carlo for her nerves.’ She was very nervous, too, and I saw that this nervousness could be, for a little while, a great help to me. I had bought a small bottle of cognac and I put it down on her marble-topped table and took her in my arms. For some reason I was terribly aware that it was after seven in the evening, that soon the sun would have disappeared from the river, that all the Paris night was about to begin, and that Giovanni was now at work.

She was very big and she was disquietingly uid— uid, without, however, being able to ow. I felt a hardness and a constriction in her, a grave distrust, created already by too many men like me, ever to be conquered now. What we were about to do would not be pretty.

And, as though she felt this, she moved away from me. ‘Let’s have a drink,’ she said. ‘Unless of course, you’re in a hurry. I’lll try not to keep you any longer than absolutely necessary.’

She smiled and I smiled, too. We were as close in that instant as we would ever get—like two thieves. ‘Let’s have several drinks,’ I

said.

‘But not too many,’ she said, and simpered again, suggestively, like a broken-down movie queen facing the cruel cameras again after a long eclipse.

She took the cognac and disappeared into her corner of a kitchen.

‘Make yourself comfortable,’ she shouted out to me. ‘Take o your shoes. Take o your socks. Look at my books—I often wonder what I’d do if there weren’t any books in the world.’

I took o my shoes and lay back on her sofa. I tried not to think.

But I was thinking that what I did with Giovanni could not possibly be more immoral than what I was about to do with Sue.

She came back with two great brandy snifters. She came close to me on the sofa and we touched glasses. We drank a little, she watching me all the while, and then I touched her breasts. Her lips parted and she put her glass down with extraordinary clumsiness and lay against me. It was a gesture of great despair and I knew that she was giving herself, not to me, but to that lover who would never come.

And I—I thought of many things, lying coupled with Sue in that dark place. I wondered if she had done anything to prevent herself from becoming pregnant; and the thought of a child belonging to Sue and me, of my being trapped that way—in the very act, so to speak, of trying to escape—almost precipitated a laughing jag. I wondered if her blue jeans had been thrown on top of the cigarette she had been smoking. I wondered if anyone else had a key to her apartment, if we could be heard through the inadequate walls, how much, in a few moments, we would hate each other. I also approached Sue as though she were a job of work, a job which it was necessary to do in an unforgettable manner. Somewhere, at the very bottom of myself, I realized that I was doing something awful to her and it became a matter of my honor not to let this fact become too obvious. I tried to convey, through this grisly act of love, the intelligence, at least, that it was not her, not her esh, that I despised—it would not be her I could not face when we became vertical again. Again, somewhere at the bottom of me, I realized

that my fears had been excessive and groundless and, in e ect, a lie: it became clearer every instant that what I had been afraid of had nothing to do with my body. Sue was not Hella and she did not lessen my terror of what would happen when Hella came: she increased it, she made it more real than it had been before. At the same time, I realized that my performance with Sue was succeeding even too well, and I tried not to despise her for feeling so little what her laborer felt. I travelled through a network of Sue’s cries, of Sue’s tom-tom sts on my back, and judged, by means of her thighs, by means of her legs, how soon I could be free. Then I thought, The end is coming soon, her sobs became even higher and harsher, I was terribly aware of the small of my back and the cold sweat there. I thought Well let her have it for Christ sake, get it over with, then it was ending and I hated her and me, then it was over, and the dark, tiny room rushed back. And I wanted only to get out of there.

She lay still for a long time. I felt the night outside and it was calling me. I leaned up at last and found a cigarette.

‘Perhaps,’ she said, ‘we should nish our drinks.’

She sat up and switched on the lamp which stood beside her bed. I had been dreading this moment. But she saw nothing in my eyes—

she stared at me as though I had made a long journey on a white charger all the way to her prison house. She lifted her glass.

A la votre,’ I said.

A la votre?’ She giggled. ‘ A la tienne, chéri !’ She leaned over and kissed me on the mouth. Then, for a moment, she felt something; she leaned back and stared at me, her eyes not quite tightening yet; and she said, lightly, ‘Do you suppose we could do this again sometime?’

‘I don’t see why not,’ I told her, trying to laugh. ‘We carry our own equipment.’

She was silent. Then: ‘Could we have supper together—tonight?’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I’m really sorry, Sue, but I’ve got a date.’

‘Oh. Tomorrow, maybe?’

‘Look, Sue. I hate to make dates. I’ll just surprise you.’

She nished her drink. ‘I doubt that,’ she said. She got up and walked away from me. ‘I’ll just put on some clothes and come down with you.’

She disappeared and I heard the water running. I sat there, still naked, but with my socks on, and poured myself another brandy.

Now I was afraid to go out into that night which had seemed to be calling me only a few moments before.

When she came back she was wearing a dress and some real shoes, and she had sort of u ed up her hair. I had to admit she looked better that way, really more like a girl, like a schoolgirl. I rose and started putting on my clothes. ‘You look nice,’ I said.

There were a great many things she wanted to say, but she forced herself to say nothing. I could scarcely bear to watch the struggle occurring in her face, it made me so ashamed. ‘Maybe you’ll be lonely again,’ she said, nally. ‘I guess I won’t mind if you come looking for me.’ She wore the strangest smile I had ever seen. It was pained and vindictive and humiliated but she inexpertly smeared across this grimace a bright, girlish gaiety—as rigid as the skeleton beneath her abby body. If fate ever allowed Sue to reach me, she would kill me with just that smile.

‘Keep a candle,’ I said, ‘in the window’—and she opened her door and we passed out into the streets.

3

I left her at the nearest corner, mumbling some schoolboy excuse, and watched her stolid gure cross the boulevard toward the cafes.

I did not know what to do or where to go. I found myself at last along the river, slowly going home.

And this was perhaps the rst time in my life that death occurred to me as a reality. I thought of the people before me who had looked down at the river and gone to sleep beneath it. I wondered about them. I wondered how they had done it—it, the physical act. I had thought of suicide when I was much younger, as, possibly, we all have, but then it would have been for revenge, it would have been my way of informing the world how awfully it had made me su er. But the silence of the evening, as I wandered home, had nothing to do with that storm, that far-o boy. I simply wondered about the dead because their days had ended and I did not know how I would get through mine.

The city, Paris, which I loved so much, was absolutely silent.

There seemed to be almost no one on the streets, although it was still very early in the evening. Nevertheless, beneath me—along the river bank, beneath the bridges, in the shadow of the walls, I could almost hear the collective, shivering sigh—were lovers and ruins, sleeping, embracing, coupling, drinking, staring out at the descending night. Behind the walls of the houses I passed, the French nation was clearing away the dishes, putting little Jean Pierre and Marie to bed, scowling over the eternal problems of the sou, the shop, the church, the unsteady State. Those walls, those shuttered windows, held them in and protected them against the darkness and the long moan of this long night. Ten years hence, little Jean Pierre and Marie might nd themselves out here beside the river and wonder, like me, how they had fallen out of the web of safety. What a long way, I thought, I’ve come—to be destroyed!

Yet it was true, I recalled, turning away from the river down the long street home, I wanted children. I wanted to be inside again, with the light and safety, with my manhood unquestioned, watching my woman put my children to bed. I wanted the same bed at night and the same arms and I wanted to rise in the morning, knowing where I was. I wanted a woman to be for me a steady ground, like the earth itself, where I could always be renewed. It had been so once; it had almost been so once. I could make it so again, I could make it real. It only demanded a short, hard strength for me to become myself again.

I saw a light burning beneath our door as I walked down the corridor. Before I put my key in the lock the door was opened from within. Giovanni stood there, his hair in his eyes, laughing. He held a glass of cognac in his hand. I was struck at rst by what seemed to be the merriment on his face. Then I saw that it was not merriment but hysteria and despair.

I started to ask him what he was doing home, but he pulled me into the room, holding me around the neck tightly, with one hand.

He was shaking. ‘Where have you been?’ I looked into his face, pulling slightly away from him. ‘I have looked for you everywhere.’

‘Didn’t you go to work?’ I asked him.

‘No,’ he said. ‘Have a drink. I have bought a bottle of cognac to celebrate my freedom.’ He poured me a cognac. I did not seem to be able to move. He came toward me again, thrusting the glass into my hand.

‘Giovanni—what happened?’

He did not answer. He suddenly sat down on the edge of the bed, bent over. I saw then that he was also in a state of rage. ‘ Ils sont sale, les gens, tu sais? ’ He looked up at me. His eyes were full of tears.

‘They are just dirty, all of them, low and cheap and dirty.’ He stretched out his hand and pulled me down to the oor beside him.

‘All except you. Tous, sauf toi.’ He held my face between his hands and I suppose such tenderness has scarcely ever produced such terror as I then felt. ‘ Ne me laisse pas tomber, je t’en prie,’ he said, and kissed me, with strange insistent gentleness on the mouth.

His touch could never fail to make me feel desire; yet his hot, sweet breath also made me want to vomit. I pulled away as gently as I could and drank my cognac. ‘Giovanni,’ I said, ‘please tell me what happened. What’s the matter?’

‘He red me,’ he said. ‘Guillaume. Il m’a mis à la porte.’ He laughed and rose and began walking up and down the tiny room. ‘He told me never to come to his bar any more. He said I was a gangster and a thief and a dirty little street boy and the only reason I ran after him— I ran after him—was because I intended to rob him one night.

Après l’amour. Merde! ’ He laughed again.

I could not say anything. I felt that the walls of the room were closing in on me.

Giovanni stood in front of our whitewashed windows, his back to me. ‘He said all these things in front of many people, right downstairs in the bar. He waited until people came. I wanted to kill him, I wanted to kill them all.’ He turned back into the center of the room and poured himself another cognac. He drank it at a breath, then suddenly took his glass and hurled it with all his strength against the wall. It rang brie y and fell in a thousand pieces all over our bed, all over the oor. I could not move at once; then, feeling that my feet were being held back by water but also watching myself move very fast, I grabbed him by the shoulders. He began to cry. I held him. And, while I felt his anguish entering into me, like acid in his sweat, and felt that my heart would burst for him, I also wondered, with an unwilling, unbelieving contempt, why I had ever thought him strong.

He pulled away from me and sat against the wall which had been uncovered. I sat facing him.

‘I arrived at the usual time,’ he said. ‘I felt very good today. He was not there when I arrived and I cleaned the bar as usual and had a little drink and a little something to eat. Then he came and I could see at once that he was in a dangerous mood—perhaps he had just been humiliated by some young boy. It is funny’—and he smiled

—‘you can tell when Guillaume is in a dangerous mood because he then becomes so respectable. When something has happened to

humiliate him and make him see, even for a moment, how disgusting he is, and how alone, then he remembers that he is a member of one of the best and oldest families in France. But maybe, then, he remembers that his name is going to die with him. Then he has to do something, quick, to make the feeling go away. He has to make much noise or have some very pretty boy or get drunk or have a ght or look at his dirty pictures.’ He paused and stood up and began walking up and down again. ‘I do not know what happened to him today, but when he came in he tried at rst to be very business-like—he was trying to nd fault with my work. But there was nothing wrong and he went upstairs. Then by and by, he called me. I hate going up to that little pied-à-terre he has up there over the bar, it always means a scene. But I had to go and I found him in his dressing gown, covered with perfume. I do not know why, but the moment I saw him like that, I began to be angry. He looked at me as though he were some fabulous coquette—and he is ugly, ugly, he has a body just like sour milk!—and then he asked me how you were. I was a little astonished, for he never mentions you. I said you were ne. He asked me if we still lived together. I think perhaps I should have lied to him but I did not see any reason to lie to such a disgusting old fairy, so I said, Bien sûr. I was trying to be calm. Then he asked me terrible questions and I began to get sick watching him and listening to him. I thought it was best to be very quick with him and I said that such questions were not asked, even by a priest or a doctor, and I said he should be ashamed. Maybe he had been waiting for me to say something like that, for then he became angry and he reminded me that he had taken me out of the streets, et il a fait ceci et il a fait cela, everything for me because he thought I was adorable, parce-qu’il m’adorait—and on and on and that I had no gratitude and no decency. I maybe handled it all very badly, I know how I would have done it even a few months ago, I would have made him scream, I would have made him kiss my feet, je te jure!

but I did not want to do that, I really did not want to be dirty with him. I tried to be serious. I told him that I had never told him any lies and I had always said that I did not want to be lovers with him

—and—he had given me the job all the same. I said I worked very

hard and was very honest with him and that it was not my fault if—

if I did not feel for him as he felt for me. Then he reminded me that once—one time—and I did not want to say yes, but I was weak from hunger and had trouble not to vomit. I was still trying to be calm and trying to handle it right. So I said, Mais a ce moment là je n’avais pas un copain. I am not alone any more, je suis avec un gars maintenant. I thought he would understand that, he is very fond of romance and the dream of delity. But not this time. He laughed and said a few more awful things about you, and he said that you were an American boy, after all, doing things in France which you would not dare to do at home, and that you would leave me very soon. Then, at last, I got angry and I said that he did not pay me a salary for listening to slander and then I heard someone come into the bar downstairs so I turned around without saying anything more and walked out.’

He stopped in front of me. ‘Can I have some more cognac?’ he asked, with a smile. ‘I won’t break the glass this time.’

I gave him my glass. He emptied it and handed it back. He watched my face. ‘Don’t be afraid,’ he said. ‘We will be alright. I am not afraid.’ Then his eyes darkened, he looked again toward the windows.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘I hoped that that would be the end of it. I worked in the bar and tried not to think of Guillaume or of what he was thinking or doing upstairs. It was aperitif time, you know? and I was very busy. Then, suddenly I heard the door slam upstairs and the moment I heard that I knew that it had happened, the awful thing had happened. He came into the bar, all dressed now, like a French business man, and came straight to me. He did not speak to anyone as he came in, and he looked white and angry and, naturally, this attracted attention. Everyone was waiting to see what he would do.

And, I must say, I thought he was going to strike me, or he had maybe gone mad and had a pistol in his pocket. So I am sure I looked frightened and this did not help matters, either. He came behind the bar and began saying that I was a tapette and a thief and told me to leave at once or he would call the police and have me put

behind bars. I was so astonished I could not say anything and all the time his voice was rising and people were beginning to listen and, suddenly, mon cher, I felt that I was falling, falling from a great, high place. For a long while I could not get angry and I could feel the tears, like re, coming up. I could not get my breath, I could not believe that he was really doing this to me. I kept saying, what have I done? What have I done? And he would not answer and then he shouted, very loud, it was like a gun going o , ‘ Mais tu le sais, salop!

You know very well! And nobody knew what he meant, but it was just as though we were back in that theatre lobby again, where we met, you remember? Everybody knew that Guillaume was right and I was wrong, that I had done something awful. And he went to the cash-register and took out some money—but I knew that he knew that there was not much money in the cash-register at such an hour

—and pushed it at me and said, ‘Take it! Take it! Better to give it to you than have you steal it from me at night! Now go!’ And, oh, the faces in that bar, you should have seen them, they were so wise and tragic and they knew that now they knew everything, that they had always known it, and they were so glad that they had never had anything to do with me. Ah! Les encules! The dirty sons-of-bitches!

Les gonzesses! ’ He was weeping again, with rage this time. ‘Then, at last, I struck him and then many hands grabbed me and now I hardly know what happened but by and by I was in the street, with all these torn bills in my hand and everybody staring at me. I did not know what to do, I hated to walk away but I knew if anything more happened the police would come and Guillaume would have me put in jail. But I will see him again, I swear it, and on that day

—!’

He stopped and sat down, staring at the wall. Then he turned to me. He watched me for a long time, in silence. Then, ‘If you were not here,’ he said, very slowly, ‘this would be the end of Giovanni.’

I stood up. ‘Don’t be silly,’ I said. ‘It’s not so tragic as all that.’ I paused. ‘Guillaume’s disgusting. They all are. But it’s not the worst thing that ever happened to you. Is it?’

‘Maybe everything bad that happens to you makes you weaker,’

said Giovanni, as though he had not heard me, ‘and so you can stand less and less.’ Then, looking up at me, ‘No. The worst thing happened to me long ago and my life has been awful since that day.

You are not going to leave me, are you?’

I laughed, ‘Of course not.’ I started shaking the broken glass o our blanket onto the oor.

‘I do not know what I would do if you left me.’ For the rst time I felt the suggestion of a threat in his voice—or I put it there. ‘I have been alone so long—I do not think I would be able to live if I had to be alone again.’

‘You aren’t alone now,’ I said. And then, quickly, for I could not, at that moment, have endured his touch: ‘Shall we go for a walk?

Come—out of this room for a minute.’ I grinned and cu ed him roughly, football fashion, on the neck. Then we clung together for an instant. I pushed him away. ‘I’ll buy you a drink,’ I said.

‘And will you bring me home again?’ he asked.

‘Yes. I’ll bring you home again.’

Je t’aime, tu sais?

Je le sais, mon vieux.’

He went to the sink and started washing his face. He combed his hair. I watched him. He grinned at me in the mirror, looking, suddenly, beautiful and happy. And young—I had never in my life before felt so helpless or so old.

‘But we will be alright!’ he cried. ‘ N’est-ce pas?

‘Certainly,’ I said.

He turned from the mirror. He was serious again. ‘But you know—

I do not know how long it will be before I nd another job. And we have almost no money. Do you have any money? Did any money come from New York for you today?’

‘No money came from New York, today,’ I said, calmly, ‘but I have a little money in my pocket.’ I took it all out and put it on the table.

‘About four thousand francs.’

‘And I’—he went through his pockets, scattering bills and change.

He shrugged and smiled at me, that fantastically sweet and helpless and moving smile. ‘ Je m’excuse. I went a little mad.’ He went down on his hands and knees and gathered it up and put it on the table beside the money I had placed there. About three thousand francs’

worth of bills had to be pasted together and we put those aside until later. The rest of the money on the table totalled about nine thousand francs.

‘We are not rich,’ said Giovanni, grimly, ‘but we will eat tomorrow.’

I somehow did not want him to be worried. I could not endure that look on his face. ‘I’ll write my father again tomorrow,’ I said.

‘I’ll tell him some kind of lie, some kind of lie that he’ll believe and I’ll make him send me some money.’ And I moved toward him as though I were driven, putting my hands on his shoulders, and forcing myself to look into his eyes. I smiled and I really felt at that moment that Judas and the Saviour had met in me. ‘Don’t be frightened. Don’t worry.’

And I also felt, standing so close to him, feeling such a passion to keep him from terror, that a decision—once again!—had been taken from my hands. For neither my father, nor Hella, was real at that moment. And yet even this was not as real as my despairing sense that nothing was real for me, nothing would ever be real for me again—unless, indeed, this sensation of falling was reality.

The hours of this night begin to dwindle and now, with every second that passes on the clock, the blood at the bottom of my heart begins to boil, to bubble, and I know that no matter what I do anguish is about to overtake me in this house, as naked and silver as that great knife which Giovanni will be facing very soon. My executioners are here with me, walking up and down with me, washing things, and packing, and drinking from my bottle. They are everywhere I turn. Walls, windows, mirrors, water, the night outside

—they are everywhere. I might call—as Giovanni, at this moment, lying in his cell, might call. But no one will hear. I might try to

explain. Giovanni tried to explain. I might ask to be forgiven—if I could name and face my crime, if there were anything, or anybody, anywhere, with the power to forgive.

No. It would help if I were able to feel guilty. But the end of innocence is also the end of guilt.

No matter how it seems now, I must confess: I loved him. I do not think that I will ever love anyone like that again. And this might be a great relief if I did not also know that, when the knife has fallen, Giovanni, if he feels anything will feel relief.

I walk up and down this house—up and down this house. I think of prison. Long ago, before I had ever met Giovanni, I met a man at a party at Jacques’ house who was celebrated because he had spent half his life in prison. He had then written a book about it which displeased the prison authorities and won a literary prize. But this man’s life was over. He was fond of saying that, since to be in prison was simply not to live, the death penalty was the only merciful verdict any jury could deliver. I remember thinking that, in e ect, he had never left prison, prison was all that was real to him, he could speak of nothing else. All his movements, even to the lighting of a cigarette, were stealthy, wherever his eyes focussed one saw wall rise up. His face, the color of his face, brought to mind darkness and dampness, I felt that if one cut him his esh would be the esh of mushrooms. And he described to us, in avid, nostalgic detail, the barred windows, the barred doors, the judas, the guards standing at far ends of corridors, under the light. It is three tiers high inside the prison and everything is the color of gunmetal.

Everything is dark and cold, except for those patches of light, where authority stands. There is on the air, perpetually, the memory of sts against the metal, a dull, booming tom-tom possibility, like the possibility of madness. The guards move and mutter and pace the corridors and boom dully up and down the stairs. They are in black, they carry guns, they are always afraid, they scarcely dare be kind.

Three tiers down, in the prison’s center, is the prison’s great, cold heart, there is always activity: trusted prisoners wheeling things about, going in and out of the o ces, ingratiating themselves with

the guards for privileges of cigarettes, alcohol, and sex. The night deepens in the prison, there is muttering everywhere, and everybody knows—somehow—that death will be entering the prison courtyard early in the morning. Very early in the morning, before the trusties begin wheeling great garbage cans of food along the corridors, three men in black will come noiselessly down the corridor, one of them will turn the key in the lock. They will lay hands on someone and rush him down the corridor, rst to the priest and then to a door which will open only for him, which will allow him, perhaps, one glimpse of the morning before he is thrown forward on his belly on a board and the knife falls on his neck.

I wonder about the size of Giovanni’s cell. I wonder if it is bigger than his room. I know that it is colder. I wonder if he is alone or with two or three others; if he is perhaps playing cards, or smoking, or talking, or writing a letter—to whom would he be writing a letter?—or walking up and down. I wonder if he knows that the approaching morning is the last morning of his life. (For the prisoner, usually, does not know: the lawyer knows and tells the family or friends but does not tell the prisoner.) I wonder if he cares.

Whether he knows or not, cares or not, he is certainly afraid.

Whether he is with others or not, he is certainly alone. I try to see him, his back to me, standing at the window of his cell. From where he is perhaps he can only see the opposite wing of the prison; perhaps, by straining a little, just over the high wall, a patch of the street outside. I do not know if his hair has been cut or is long—I should think it would have been cut. I wonder if he is shaven. And now a million details, proof and fruit of intimacy, ood my mind. I wonder, for example, if he feels the need to go to the bathroom, if he has been able to eat today, if he is sweating, or dry. I wonder if anyone has made love to him in prison. And then something shakes me, I feel shaken hard and dry, like some dead thing in the desert, and I know that I am hoping that Giovanni is being sheltered in someone’s arms tonight. I wish that someone were here with me. I would make love to whoever was here all night long, I would labor with Giovanni all night long.

Those days after Giovanni had lost his job, we dawdled; dawdled as doomed mountain climbers may be said to dawdle above the chasm, held only by a snapping rope. I did not write my father—I put it o from day to day. It would have been too de nitive an act. I knew which lie I would tell him and I knew the lie would work—only—I was not sure that it would be a lie. Day after day we lingered in that room and Giovanni began to work on it again. He had some weird idea that it would be nice to have a bookcase sunk in the wall and he chipped through the wall until he came to the brick and began pounding away at the brick. It was hard work, it was insane work, but I did not have the energy or the heart to stop him. In a way he was doing it for me, to prove his love for me. He wanted me to stay in the room with him. Perhaps he was trying, with his own strength, to push back the encroaching walls, without, however, having the walls fall down.

Now—now, of course, I see something very beautiful in those days, which were such torture then. I felt, then, that Giovanni was dragging me with him to the bottom of the sea. He could not nd a job. I knew that he was not really looking for one, that he could not.

He had been bruised, so to speak, so badly that the eyes of strangers lacerated him like salt. He could not endure being very far from me for very long. I was the only person on God’s cold, green earth who cared about him, who knew his speech and silence, knew his arms, and did not carry a knife. The burden of his salvation seemed to be on me and I could not endure it.

And the money dwindled—it went, it did not dwindle, very fast.

Giovanni tried to keep panic out of his voice when he asked me, each morning, ‘Are you going to American Express today?’

‘Certainly,’ I would answer.

‘Do you think your money will be there today?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘What are they doing with your money in New York?’

Still, still, I could not act. I went to Jacques and borrowed ten thousand francs from him again. I told him that Giovanni and I were

going through a di cult time but that it would be over soon.

‘He was very nice about it,’ said Giovanni.

‘He can, sometimes, be a very nice man.’ We were sitting on a terrace near Odéon. I looked at Giovanni and thought, for a moment, how nice it would be if Jacques would take him o my hands.

‘What are you thinking?’ asked Giovanni.

For a moment I was frightened and I was also ashamed. ‘I was thinking,’ I said, ‘that I’d like to get out of Paris.’

‘Where would you like to go?’ he asked.

‘Oh, I don’t know. Anywhere. I’m sick of this city,’ I said suddenly, with a violence that surprised us both. ‘I’m tired of this ancient pile of stone and all these goddam, smug people. Everything you put your hands on here comes to pieces in your hands.’

‘That,’ said Giovanni, gravely, ‘is true.’ He was watching me with a terrible intensity. I forced myself to look at him and smile.

‘Wouldn’t you like to get out of here for awhile?’ I asked.

‘Ah!’ he said, and raised both hands, brie y, palms outward, in a kind of mock resignation. ‘I would like to go wherever you go. I do not feel so strongly about Paris as you do, suddenly. I have never liked Paris very much.’

‘Perhaps,’ I said—I scarcely knew what I was saying—‘we could go to the country. Or to Spain.’

‘Ah,’ he said, lightly, ‘you are lonely for your mistress.’

I was guilty and irritated and full of love and pain. I wanted to kick him and I wanted to take him in my arms. ‘That’s no reason to go to Spain,’ I said, sullenly. ‘I’d just like to see it, that’s all. This city is expensive.’

‘Well,’ he said, brightly, ‘let us go to Spain, perhaps it will remind me of Italy.’

‘Would you rather go to Italy? Would you rather visit your home?’

He smiled. ‘I do not think I have a home there any more.’

And then: ‘No. I would not like to go to Italy—perhaps after all, for the same reason you do not want to go to the United States.’

‘But I am going to the United States,’ I said, quickly. And he looked at me. ‘I mean, I’m certainly going to go back there one of these days.’

‘One of these days,’ he said. ‘Everything bad will happen—one of these days.’

‘Why is it bad?’

He smiled, ‘Why, you will go home and then you will nd that home is not home any more. Then you will really be in trouble. As long as you stay here, you can always think: One day I will go home.’ He played with my thumb and grinned. ‘ N’est-ce pas?

‘Beautiful logic,’ I said. ‘You mean I have a home to go to as long as I don’t go there?’

He laughed. ‘Well, isn’t it true? You don’t have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back.’

‘I seem,’ I said, ‘to have heard this song before.’

‘Ah, yes,’ said Giovanni, ‘and you will certainly hear it again. It is one of those songs that somebody, somewhere, will always be singing.’

We rose and started walking. ‘And what would happen,’ I asked, idly, ‘if I shut my ears?’

He was silent for a long while. Then: ‘You do, sometimes, remind me of the kind of man who is tempted to put himself in prison in order to avoid being hit by a car.’

‘That,’ I said, sharply, ‘would seem to apply much more to you than to me.’

‘What do you mean?’ he asked.

‘I’m talking about that room, that hideous room. Why have you buried yourself there so long?’

‘Buried myself? Forgive me, mon cher Americain, but Paris is not like New York, it is not full of palaces for boys like me. Do you think I should be living in Versailles instead?’

‘There must—there must,’ I said, ‘be other rooms.’

Cane manque, les chambres. The world is full of rooms—big rooms, little rooms, round rooms, square ones, rooms high up, rooms low down—all kinds of rooms! What kind of room do you think Giovanni should be living in? How long do you think it took me to nd the room I have? And since when, since when’—he stopped and beat with his fore nger on my chest—‘have you so hated the room?

Since when? Since yesterday, since always? Dis-moi.’

Facing him, I faltered. ‘I don’t hate it. I—I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.’

His hands dropped to his sides. His eyes grew big. He laughed.

‘Hurt my feelings! Am I now a stranger that you speak to me like that, with such an American politeness?’

‘All I mean, baby, is that I wish we could move.’

‘We can move. Tomorrow! Let us go to a hotel. Is that what you want? Le Crillon peut-être?

I sighed, speechless, and we started walking again.

‘I know,’ he burst out, after a moment, ‘I know! You want to leave Paris, you want to leave the room—ah! you are wicked. Comme tu es mérchant!’

‘You misunderstand me,’ I said. ‘You misunderstand me.’

He smiled grimly, to himself. ‘ J’espère bien.’

Later, when we were back in the room, putting the loose bricks Giovanni had taken out of the wall into a sack, he asked me, ‘This girl of yours—have you heard from her lately?’

‘Not lately,’ I said. I did not look up. ‘But I expect her to turn up in Paris almost any day now.’

He stood up, standing in the center of the room, under the light, looking at me. I stood up, too, half smiling, but also, in some strange, dim way, a little frightened.

Viens m’embrasser,’ he said.

I was vividly aware that he held a brick in his hand, I held a brick in mine. It really seemed for an instant that if I did not go to him,

we would use these bricks to beat each other to death.

Yet, I could not move at once. We stared at each other across a narrow space that was full of danger, that almost seemed to roar, like a ame.

‘Come,’ he said.

I dropped my brick and went to him. In a moment I heard his fall.

And at moments like this I felt that we were merely enduring and committing the longer and lesser and more perpetual murder.

4

At last there came the note which I had been waiting for, from Hella, telling me the day and hour she would arrive in Paris. I did not tell this to Giovanni, but walked out alone that day and went to the station to meet her.

I had hoped that when I saw her something instantaneous, de nitive, would have happened to me, something to make me know where I should be and where I was. But nothing happened. I recognized her at once, before she saw me, she was wearing green, her hair was a little shorter, and her face was tan, and she wore the same brilliant smile. I loved her as much as ever and I still did not know how much that was.

When she saw me she stood stock-still on the platform, her hands clasped in front of her, with her wide-legged, boyish stance, smiling.

For a moment we simply stared at each other.

Eh bien,’ she said, ‘ t’embrasse pas ta femme?’

Then I took her in my arms and something happened then. I was terribly glad to see her. It really seemed, with Hella in the circle of my arms, that my arms were home and I was welcoming her back there. She tted in my arms, she always had, and the shock of holding her caused me to feel that my arms had been empty since she had been away.

I held her very close in that high, dark shed, with a great confusion of people all about us, just beside the breathing train. She smelled of the wind and the sea and of space and I felt in her marvellously living body the possibility of legitimate surrender.

Then she pulled away. Her eyes were damp. ‘Let me look at you,’

she said. She held me at arm’s length, searching my face. ‘Ah. You look wonderful. I’m so happy to see you again.’

I kissed her lightly on the nose and felt that I had passed the rst inspection. I picked up her bags and we started toward the exit. ‘Did

you have a good trip? And how was Seville? And how do you like bull- ghts? Did you meet any bull- ghters? Tell me everything.’

She laughed. ‘Everything is a very tall order. I had a terrible trip, I hate trains, I wish I’d own but I’ve been in one Spanish airplane and I swore never, never again. It rattled, my dear, in the middle of the air just like a model T Ford—it had probably been a model T

Ford at one time—and I just sat there, praying and drinking brandy.

I was sure I’d never see land again.’ We passed through the barrier, into the streets.’ Hella looked about delightedly at all of it, the cafés, the self-contained people, the violent snarl of the tra c, the blue-caped tra c policeman and his white, gleaming club. ‘Coming back to Paris,’ she said, after a moment, ‘is always so lovely, no matter where you’ve been.’ We got into a cab and our driver made a wide, reckless circle into the stream of tra c. ‘I should think that even if you returned here in some awful sorrow, you might—well, you might nd it possible here to begin to be reconciled.’

‘Let’s hope,’ I said, ‘that we never have to put Paris to that test.’

Her smile was at once bright and melancholy. ‘Let’s hope.’ Then she suddenly took my face between her hands and kissed me. There was a great question in her eyes and I knew that she burned to have this question answered at once. But I could not do it yet. I held her close and kissed her, closing my eyes. Everything was as it had been between us and at the same time everything was di erent.

I told myself I would not think about Giovanni yet, I would not worry about him yet; for tonight, anyway, Hella and I should be together with nothing to divide us. Still, I knew very well that this was not really possible: he had already divided us. I tried not to think of him sitting alone in that room, wondering why I stayed away so long.

Then we were sitting together in Hella’s room on the rue de Tournon, sampling Fundador. ‘It’s much too sweet,’ I said. ‘Is this what they drink in Spain?’

‘I never saw any Spaniards drinking it,’ she said, and laughed.

They drink wine. I drank gin- zz—in Spain I somehow had the feeling that it was healthy,’ and she laughed again.

I kept kissing her and holding her, trying to nd my way in her again, as though she were a familiar, darkened room in which I fumbled to nd the light. And, with my kisses, I was trying also to delay the moment which would commit me to her, or fail to commit me to her. But I think she felt that the inde nitive constraint between us was of her doing and all on her side. She was remembering that I had written her less and less often while she had been away. In Spain, until near the end, this had probably not worried her; not until she herself had come to a decision did she begin to be afraid that I might also have arrived at a decision, opposite to hers. Perhaps she had kept me dangling too long.

She was by nature forthright and impatient; she su ered when things were not clear; yet she forced herself to wait for some word or sign from me and held the reins of her strong desire tightly in her hands.

I wanted to force her to relinquish the reins. Somehow, I would be tongue-tied until I took her again. I hoped to burn out, through Hella, my image of Giovanni and the reality of his touch—I hoped to drive out re with re. Yet, my sense of what I was doing made me double-minded. And at last she asked me, with a smile, ‘Have I been away too long?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘It’s been a long time.’

‘It was a very lonely time,’ she said, unexpectedly. She turned slightly away from me, lying on her side, looking toward the window. ‘I felt so aimless—like a tennis ball, bouncing, bouncing—I began to wonder where I’d land. I began to feel that I’d, somewhere, missed the boat.’ She looked at me. ‘You know the boat I’m talking about. They make movies about it where I come from. It’s the boat that, when you miss it, it’s a boat, but when it comes in, it’s a ship.’

I watched her face. It was stiller than I had ever known it to be before.

‘Didn’t you like Spain,’ I asked, nervously, ‘at all?’

She ran one hand, impatiently, through her hair. ‘Oh. Of course, I like Spain, why not? It’s very beautiful. I just didn’t know what I

was doing there. And I’m beginning to be tired of being in places for no particular reason.’

I lit a cigarette and smiled. ‘But you went to Spain to get away from me—remember?’

She smiled and stroked my cheek. ‘I haven’t been very nice to you, have I?’

‘You’ve been very honest.’ I stood up and walked a little away from her. ‘Did you get much thinking done, Hella?’

‘I told you in my letter—don’t you remember?’

For a moment everything seemed perfectly still. Even the faint street noises died. I had my back to her but I felt her eyes. I felt her waiting—everything seemed to be waiting.

‘I wasn’t sure about that letter.’ I was thinking, Perhaps I can get out of it without having to tell her anything. ‘You were sort of—o hand

—I couldn’t be sure whether you were glad or sorry to be throwing in with me.’

‘Oh,’ she said, ‘but we’ve always been o hand, it’s the only way I could have said it. I was afraid of embarrassing you—don’t you understand that?’

What I wanted to suggest was that she was taking me out of desperation, less because she wanted me than because I was there.

But I could not say it. I sensed that, though it might be true, she no longer knew it.

‘But perhaps,’ she said, carefully, ‘you feel di erently now. Please say so if you do.’ She waited for my answer for a moment. Then:

‘You know, I’m not really the emancipated girl I try to be at all. I guess I just want a man to come home to me every night. I want to be able to sleep with a man without being afraid he’s going to knock me up. Hell, I want to be knocked up. I want to start having babies.

In a way, it’s really all I’m good for.’ There was silence again. ‘Is that what you want?’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I’ve always wanted that.’

I turned to face her, very quickly, or as though strong hands on my shoulders had turned me around. The room was darkening. She

lay on the bed, watching me, her mouth slightly open, and her eyes like lights. I was terribly aware of her body, and of mine. I walked over to her and put my head on her breast. I wanted to lie there, hidden and still. But then, deep within, I felt her moving, rushing to open the gates of her strong, walled city and let the king of glory come in.

Dear Dad, I wrote, I won’t keep any secrets from you any more, I found a girl and I want to marry her and it wasn’t that I was keeping secrets from you, I just wasn’t sure she wanted to marry me. But she’s nally agreed to risk it, poor soft-headed thing that she is, and we’re planning to tie the knot while we’re still over here and make our way home by easy stages. She’s not French, in case you’re worried (I know you don’t dislike the French, it’s just that you don’t think they have our virtues—I might add, they don’t). Anyway, Hella—her name is Hella Lincoln, she comes from Minneapolis, her father and mother still live there, he’s a corporation lawyer, she’s just the little woman—Hella would like us to honeymoon here and it goes without saying that I like anything she likes.

So. Now will you send your loving son some of his hard-earned money.

Tout de suite. That’s French for pronto.

Hella—the photo doesn’t really do her justice—came over here a couple of years ago to study painting. Then she discovered she wasn’t a painter and just about the time she was ready to throw herself into the Seine, we met, and the rest, as they say, is history. I know you’ll love her, Dad, and she’ll love you. She’s already made me a very happy man.

Hella and Giovanni met by accident, after Hella had been in Paris for three days. During those three days I had not seen him and I had not mentioned his name.

We had been wandering about the city all day and all day Hella had been full of a subject which I had never heard her discuss at such length before: women. She claimed it was hard to be one.

‘I don’t see what’s so hard about being a woman. At least, not as long as she’s got a man.’

‘That’s just it,’ said she. ‘Hasn’t it ever struck you that that’s a sort of humiliating necessity?’

‘Oh, please,’ I said. ‘It never seemed to humiliate any of the women I knew.’

‘Well,’ she said, ‘I’m sure you never thought about any of them—

in that way.’

‘I certainly didn’t. I hope they didn’t, either. And why are you?

What’s your beef?’

‘I’ve got no beef,’ she said. She hummed, low in her throat, a kind of playful, Mozart tune. ‘I’ve got no beef at all. But it does seem—

well, di cult—to be at the mercy of some gross, unshaven stranger before you can begin to be yourself.’

‘I don’t know if I like that,’ I said. ‘Since when have I been gross?

or a stranger? It may be true that I need a shave but that’s your fault, I haven’t been able to tear myself away from you.’ And I grinned and kissed her.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘you may not be a stranger now. But you were once and I’m sure you will be again—many times.’

‘If it comes to that,’ I said, ‘so will you be, for me.’

She looked at me with a quick, bright smile. ‘Will I?’ Then: ‘But what I mean about being a woman is, we might get married now and stay married for fty years and I might be a stranger to you every instant of that time and you might never know it.’

‘But if I were a stranger— you would know it?’

‘For a woman,’ she said, ‘I think a man is always a stranger. And there’s something awful about being at the mercy of a stranger.’

‘But men are at the mercy of women, too. Have you never thought of that?’

‘Ah!’ she said, ‘men may be at the mercy of women—I think men like that idea, it strokes the misogynist in them. But if a particular man is ever at the mercy of a particular woman—why, he’s somehow stopped being a man. And the lady, then, is more neatly trapped than ever.’

‘You mean, I can’t be at your mercy? But you can be at mine?’ I laughed. ‘I’d like to see you at anybody’s mercy, Hella.’

‘You may laugh,’ she said, humorously, ‘but there is something in what I say. I began to realize it in Spain—that I wasn’t free, that I couldn’t be free until I was attached—no, committed—to someone.’

‘To someone? Not some thing?’

She was silent. ‘I don’t know,’ she said at last, ‘but I’m beginning to think that women get attached to some thing really by default.

They’d give it up, if they could, anytime, for a man. Of course they can’t admit this, and neither can most of them let go of what they have. But I think it kills them—perhaps I only mean,’ she added, after a moment, ‘that it would have killed me.’

‘What do you want, Hella? What have you got now that makes such a di erence?’

She laughed. ‘It isn’t what I’ve got. It isn’t even what I want. It’s that you’ve got me. So now I can be—your obedient and most loving servant.’

I felt cold. I shook my head in mock confusion. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘Why,’ she said, ‘I’m talking about my life. I’ve got you to take care of and feed and torment and trick and love—I’ve got you to put up with. From now on, I can have a wonderful time complaining about being a woman. But I won’t be terri ed that I’m not one.’ She looked at my face, and laughed. ‘Oh, I’ll be doing other things,’ she cried. ‘I won’t stop being intelligent. I’ll read and argue and think and all that—and I’ll make a great point of not thinking your thoughts—and you’ll be pleased because I’m sure the resulting confusion will cause you to see that I’ve only got a nite woman’s mind, after all. And, if God is good, you’ll love me more and more and we’ll be quite happy.’ She laughed again. ‘Don’t bother your head about it, sweetheart. Leave it to me.’

Her amusement was contagious and I shook my head again, laughing with her. ‘You’re adorable,’ I said. ‘I don’t understand you at all.’

She laughed again. ‘There,’ she said, ‘that’s ne. We’re both taking to it like ducks to water.’

We were passing a book-store and she stopped. ‘Can we go in for just a minute?’ she asked. ‘There’s a book I’d like to get. Quite,’ she added, as we entered the shop, ‘a trivial book.’

I watched her with amusement as she went over to speak to the woman who ran the shop. I wandered idly over to the farthest book shelf, where a man stood, his back to me, lea ng through a magazine. As I stood beside him, he closed the magazine and put it down, and turned. We recognized each other at once. It was Jacques.

Tiens! ’ he cried. ‘Here you are! We were beginning to think that you had gone back to America.’

‘Me?’ I laughed. ‘No, I’m still in Paris. I’ve just been busy.’ Then, with a terrible suspicion, I asked , ‘Who’s we?’

‘Why,’ said Jacques, with a hard, insistent smile, ‘your baby. It seems you left him alone in that room without any food, without any money, without, even, any cigarettes. He nally persuaded his concierge to allow him to put a phone call on his bill and called me.

The poor boy sounded as though he would have put his head in the gas oven. If,’ he laughed, ‘he had had a gas oven.’

We stared at each other. He, deliberately, said nothing. I did not know what to say.

‘I threw a few provisions in my car,’ said Jacques, ‘and hurried out to get him. He thought we should drag the river for you. But I assured him that he did not know Americans as well as I and that you had not drowned yourself. You had only disappeared in order—

to think. And I see that I was right. You have thought so much that now you must nd what others have thought before you. One book,’

he said, nally, ‘that you can surely spare yourself the trouble of reading is the Marquis de Sade.’

‘Where is Giovanni now?’ I asked.

‘I nally remembered the name of Hella’s hotel,’ said Jacques.

‘Giovanni said that you were more or less expecting her and so I

gave him the bright idea of calling you there. He has stepped out for an instant to do just that. He’ll be along presently.’

Hella had returned, with her book.

‘You two have met before,’ I said, awkwardly. ‘Hella, you remember Jacques.’

She remembered him and also remembered that she disliked him.

She smiled politely and held out her hand. ‘How are you?’

Je suis ravi, mademoiselle,’ said Jacques. He knew that Hella disliked him and this amused him. And, to corroborate her dislike, and also because at that moment he really hated me, he bowed low over her outstretched hand and became, in an instant, outrageously and o ensively e eminate. I watched him as though I were watching an imminent disaster from many miles away. He turned playfully to me. ‘David has been hiding from us,’ he murmured,

‘now that you are back.’

‘Oh?’ said Hella, and moved closer to me, taking my hand, ‘that was very naughty of him. I’d never have allowed it—if I’d known we were hiding.’ She grinned. ‘But then, he never tells me anything.’

Jacques looked at her. ‘No doubt,’ he said, ‘he nds more fascinating topics when you are together than why he hides from old friends.’

I felt a great need to get out of there before Giovanni arrived. ‘We haven’t eaten supper yet,’ I said, trying to smile, ‘perhaps we can meet you later?’ I knew that my smile was begging him to be kind to me.

But at that moment the tiny bell which announced every entry into the shop rang, and Jacques said, ‘Ah. Here is Giovanni.’ And, indeed, I felt him behind me, standing stock-still, staring, and felt in Hella’s clasp, in her entire body, a kind of wild shrinking and not all of her composure kept this from showing in her face. When Giovanni spoke his voice was thick with fury and relief and unshed tears.

‘Where have you been?’ he cried. ‘I thought you were dead! I thought you had been knocked down by a car or thrown into the

river—what have you been doing all these days?’

I was able, oddly enough, to smile. And I was astonished at my calm. ‘Giovanni,’ I said, ‘I want you to meet my ancée. Mlle Hella.

Monsieur Giovanni.’

He had seen her before his outburst ended and now he touched her hand with a still, astounded politeness and stared at her with black, steady eyes as though he had never seen a woman before.

Enchanté, mademoiselle,’ he said. And his voice was dead and cold.

He looked brie y at me, then back at Hella. For a moment we, all four, stood there as though we were posing for a tableau.

‘Really,’ said Jacques, ‘now that we are all together, I think we should have one drink together. A very short one,’ he said to Hella, cutting o her attempt at polite refusal, and taking her arm. ‘It’s not every day,’ he said, ‘that old friends get together.’ He forced us to move, Hella and he together, Giovanni and I ahead. The bell rang viciously as Giovanni opened the door. The evening air hit us like a blaze. We started walking away from the river, toward the boulevard.

‘When I decide to leave a place,’ said Giovanni, ‘I tell the concierge, so that at least she will know where to forward my mail.’

I ared brie y, unhappily. I had noticed that he was shaven and wore a clean, white shirt and tie—a tie which surely belonged to Jacques. ‘I don’t see what you’ve got to complain about,’ I said. ‘You sure knew where to go.’

But with the look he gave me then my anger left me and I wanted to cry. ‘You are not nice,’ he said. ‘ Tu n’est pas chic du tout.’ Then he said no more and we walked to the boulevard in silence. Behind us I could hear the murmur of Jacques’ voice. On the corner we stood and waited for them to catch up with us.

‘Darling,’ said Hella, as she reached me, ‘you stay and have a drink if you want to. I can’t, I really can’t, I don’t feel well at all.’ She turned to Giovanni. ‘Please forgive me,’ she said, ‘but I’ve just come back from Spain and I’ve hardly sat down a moment since I got o

the train. Another time, truly—but I must get some sleep tonight.’

She smiled and held out her hand but he did not seem to see it.

‘I’ll walk Hella home,’ I said, ‘and then I’ll come back. If you’ll tell me where you’re going to be.’

Giovanni laughed, abruptly. ‘Why, we will be in the quarter,’ he said. ‘We will not be di cult to nd.’

‘I am sorry,’ said Jacques, to Hella, ‘that you do not feel well.

Perhaps another time.’ And Hella’s hand, which was still uncertainly outstretched, he bowed over and kissed a second time. He straightened and looked at me. ‘You must bring Hella to dinner at my house one night.’ He made a face. ‘There is no need to hide your ancée from us.’

‘No need whatever,’ said Giovanni. ‘She is very charming. And we’—with a grin, to Hella—‘will try to be charming, too.’

‘Well,’ I said, and took Hella by the arm, ‘I’ll see you later.’

‘If I am not here,’ said Giovanni, both vindictive and near tears,

‘by the time you come back again, I will be at home. You remember where that is—? It is near a zoo.’

‘I remember,’ I said. I started backing away, as though I were backing out of a cage, ‘I’ll see you later. A tout à l’heure.’

A la prochaine,’ said Giovanni.

I felt their eyes on our backs as we walked away from them. For a long while Hella was silent—possibly because, like me, she was afraid to say anything. Then: ‘I really can’t stand that man. He gives me the creeps.’ After a moment: ‘I didn’t know you’d seen so much of him while I was away.’

‘I didn’t,’ I said. To do something with my hands, to give myself a moment of privacy, I stopped and lit a cigarette. I felt her eyes. But she was not suspicious; she was only troubled.

‘And who is Giovanni?’ she asked, when we started walking again.

She gave a little laugh. ‘I just realized that I haven’t even asked you where you were living. Are you living with him?’

‘We’ve been sharing a maid’s room out at the end of Paris,’ I said.

‘Then it wasn’t very nice of you,’ said Hella, ‘to go o for so long, without any warning.’

‘Well, my God,’ I said, ‘he’s only my room-mate. How was I to know he’d start dragging the river just because I stayed out a couple of nights?’

‘Jacques said you left him there without any money, without any cigarettes, or anything, and you didn’t even tell him you were going to be with me.’

‘There are lots of things I didn’t tell Giovanni. But he’s never made any kind of scene before—I guess he must be drunk. I’ll talk to him later.’

‘Are you going to go back there later?’

‘Well,’ I said, ‘if Idon’t go back there later, I’ll goon over to the room. I’ve been meaning to do that, anyway.’ I grinned. ‘I have to get shaved.’

Hella sighed. ‘I didn’t mean to get your friends mad at you,’ she said. ‘You ought to go back and have a drink with them. You said you were going to.’

‘Well, I may, I may not. I’m not married to them, you know.’

‘Well, the fact that you’re going to be married to me doesn’t mean you have to break your word to your friends. It doesn’t even mean,’

she added, shortly, ‘that I have to like your friends.’

‘Hella,’ I said, ‘I am perfectly aware of that.’

We turned o the boulevard, toward her hotel.

‘He’s very intense, isn’t he?’ she said. I was staring at the dark mound of the Senate, which ended our dark, slightly uphill street.

‘Who is?’

‘Giovanni. He’s certainly very fond of you.’

‘He’s Italian,’ I said. ‘Italians are theatrical.’

‘Well, this one,’ she laughed, ‘must be special, even in Italy! How long have you been living with him?’

‘A couple of months.’ I threw away my cigarette, ‘I ran out of money while you were away—you know, I’m still waiting for money

—and I moved in with him because it was cheaper. At that time he had a job and was living with his mistress most of the time.’

‘Oh?’ she said. ‘He has a mistress?’

‘He had a mistress,’ I said. ‘He also had a job. He’s lost both.’

‘Poor boy,’ she said. ‘No wonder he looks so lost.’

‘He’ll be alright,’ I said, brie y. We were before her door. She pressed the night-bell.

‘Is he a very good friend of Jacques?’ she asked.

‘Perhaps,’ I said, ‘not quite good enough to please Jacques.’

She laughed. ‘I always feel a cold wind go over me,’ she said,

‘when I nd myself in the presence of a man who dislikes women as much as Jacques does.’

‘Well, then,’ I said, ‘we’ll just keep him away from you. We don’t want no cold winds blowing over this girl.’ I kissed her on the tip of her nose. At the same moment there was a rumble from deep within the hotel and the door unlocked itself with a small, violent shudder.

Hella looked humorously into the blackness. ‘I always wonder,’ she said, ‘if I dare go in.’ Then she looked up at me. ‘Well? Do you want to have a drink upstairs before you go back to join your friends?’

‘Sure,’ I said. We tiptoed into the hotel, closing the door gently behind us. My ngers nally found the minuterie and the weak, yellow light spilled over us. A voice, completely unintelligible, shouted out at us and Hella shouted back her name, which she tried to pronounce with a French accent. As we started up the stairs, the light went out and Hella and I began to giggle like two children. We were unable to nd the minute-switch on any of the landings—I don’t know why we both found this so hilarious, but we did, and we held on to each other, giggling, all the way to Hella’s top- oor room.

‘Tell me about Giovanni,’ she asked, much later, while we lay in bed and watched the black night tease her sti , white curtains. ‘He interests me.’

‘That’s a pretty tactless thing to say at this moment,’ I told her.

‘What the hell do you mean, he interests you?’

‘I mean who he is, what he thinks about. How he got that face.’

‘What’s the matter with his face?’

‘Nothing. He’s very beautiful, as a matter of fact. But there’s something in that face—so old-fashioned.’

‘Go to sleep,’ I said. ‘You’re babbling.’

‘How did you meet him?’

‘Oh. In a bar one drunken night, with lots of other people.’

‘Was Jacques there?’

‘I don’t remember. Yes, I guess so. I guess he met Giovanni at the same time I did.’

‘What made you go to live with him?’

‘I told you. I was broke and he had this room—’

‘But that can’t have been the only reason.’

‘Oh, well,’ I said, ‘I liked him.’

‘And don’t you like him any more?’

‘I’m very fond of Giovanni. You didn’t see him at his best tonight, but he’s a very nice man.’ I laughed; covered by the night, emboldened by Hella’s body and my own, and protected by the tone of my voice, I found great relief in adding: ‘I love him, in a way. I really do.’

‘He seems to feel that you have a funny way of showing it.’

‘Oh, well,’ I said, ‘these people have another style from us. They’re much more demonstrative. I can’t help it. I just can’t—do all that.’

‘Yes,’ she said, thoughtfully, ‘I’ve noticed that.’

‘You’ve noticed what?’

‘Kids here—they think nothing of showing a lot of a ection for each other. It’s sort of a shock at rst. Then you begin to think it’s sort of nice.’

‘It is sort of nice,’ I said.

‘Well,’ said Hella, ‘I think we ought to take Giovanni out to dinner or something one of these days. After all, he did sort of rescue you.’

‘That’s a good idea,’ I said. ‘I don’t know what he’s doing these days but I imagine he’ll have a free evening.’

‘Does he hang around with Jacques much?’

‘No, I don’t think so. I think he just ran into Jacques tonight.’ I paused. ‘I’m beginning to see,’ I said, carefully, ‘that kids like Giovanni are in a di cult position. This isn’t, you know, the land of opportunity—there’s no provision made for them. Giovanni’s poor, I mean he comes from poor folks, and there isn’t really much that he can do. And for what he can do, there’s terri c competition. And, at that, very little money, not enough for them to be able to think of building any kind of future. That’s why so many of them wander the streets and turn into gigolos and gangsters and God knows what.’

‘It’s cold,’ she said, ‘out here in the Old World.’

‘Well, it’s pretty cold out there in the New One, too,’ I said. ‘It’s cold out here, period.’

She laughed. ‘But we—we have our love to keep us warm.’

‘We’re not the rst people who thought that as they lay in bed.’

Nevertheless, we lay silent and still in each other’s arms for a while.

‘Hella,’ I said at last.

‘Yes?’

‘Hella, when the money gets here, let’s take it and get out of Paris.’

‘Get out of Paris? Where do you want to go?’

‘I don’t care. Just out. I’m sick of Paris. I want to leave it for awhile. Let’s go south. Maybe there’ll be some sun.’

‘Shall we get married in the south?’

‘Hella,’ I said, ‘you have to believe me, I can’t do anything or decide anything, I can’t even see straight until we get out of this town. I don’t want to get married here, I don’t even want to think about getting married here. Let’s just get out.’

‘I didn’t know you felt this way,’ she said.

‘I’ve been living in Giovanni’s room for months,’ I said, ‘and I just can’t stand it any more. I have to get out of there. Please.’

She laughed nervously and moved slightly away from me. ‘Well, I really don’t see why getting out of Giovanni’s room means getting out of Paris.’

I sighed. ‘Please, Hella. I don’t feel like going into long explanations now. Maybe it’s just that if I stay in Paris I’ll keep running into Giovanni and…’ I stopped.

‘Why should that disturb you?’

‘Well—I can’t do anything to help him and I can’t stand having him watch me—as though—I’m an American, Hella, he thinks I’m rich.’ I paused and sat up, looking outward. She watched me.

‘He’s a very nice man, as I say, but he’s very persistent—and he’s got this thing about me, he thinks I’m God. And that room is so stinking and dirty. And soon winter’ll be here and it’s going to be cold…’ I turned to her again and took her in my arms. ‘Look. Let’s just go. I’ll explain a lot of things to you later—later—when we get out.’

There was a long silence.

‘And you want to leave right away?’ she said.

‘Yes. As soon as that money comes, let’s rent a house.’

‘You’re sure,’ she said, ‘that you don’t just want to go back to the States?’

I groaned. ‘No. Not yet. That isn’t what I mean.’

She kissed me. ‘I don’t care where we go,’ she said, ‘as long as we’re together.’ Then she pushed me away. ‘It’s almost morning,’

she said. ‘We’d better get some sleep.’

I got to Giovanni’s room very late the next evening. I had been walking by the river with Hella and, later, I drank too much in several bistros. The light crashed on as I came into the room and Giovanni sat up in bed, crying out in a voice of terror, ‘ Qui est là?

Qui est là?

I stopped in the doorway, weaving a little in the light, and I said,

‘It’s me, Giovanni. Shut up.’

Giovanni stared at me and turned on his side, facing the wall, and began to cry.

I thought, Sweet Jesus! and I carefully closed the door. I took my cigarettes out of my jacket pocket and hung my jacket over the chair. With my cigarettes in my hand I went to the bed and leaned over Giovanni. I said, ‘Baby, stop crying. Please stop crying.’

Giovanni turned and looked at me. His eyes were red and wet, but he wore a strange smile, it was composed of cruelty and shame and delight. He held out his arms and I leaned down, brushing his hair from his eyes.

‘You smell of wine,’ said Giovanni, then.

‘I haven’t been drinking wine. Is that what frightened you? Is that why you are crying?’

‘No.’

‘What is the matter?’

‘Why have you gone away from me?’

I did not know what to say. Giovanni turned to the wall again. I had hoped, I had supposed that I would feel nothing: but I felt a tightening in a far corner of my heart, as though a nger had touched me there.

‘I have never reached you,’ said Giovanni. ‘You have never really been here. I do not think you have ever lied to me but I know that you have never told me the truth—why? Sometimes you were here all day long and you read or you opened the window or you cooked something—and I watched you—and you never said anything—and you looked at me with such eyes, as though you did not see me. All day, while I worked to make this room for you.’

I said nothing. I looked beyond Giovanni’s head at the square windows which held back the feeble moonlight.

‘What are you doing all the time? And why do you say nothing?

You are evil, you know, and sometimes when you smiled at me I hated you. I wanted to strike you. I wanted to make you bleed. You smiled at me the way you smiled at everyone, you told me what you told everyone—and you tell nothing but lies. What are you always

hiding? And do you think I did not know when you made love to me, you were making love to no one? No one! Or everyone—but not me, certainly. I am nothing to you, nothing, and you bring me fever but no delight.’

I moved, looking for a cigarette. They were in my hand. I lit one.

In a moment, I thought, I will say something. I will say something and then I will walk out of this room forever.

‘You know I cannot be alone. I have told you. What is the matter?

Can we never have a life together?’

He began to cry again. I watched the hot tears roll from the corners of his eyes onto the dirty pillow.

‘If you cannot love me, I will die. Before you came I wanted to die, I have told you many times. It is cruel to have made me want to live only to make my death more bloody.’

I wanted to say so many things. Yet, when I opened my mouth, I made no sound. And yet—I do not know what I felt for Giovanni. I felt nothing for Giovanni. I felt terror and pity and a rising lust.

He took my cigarette from my lips and pu ed on it, sitting up in bed, his hair in his eyes again.

‘I have never known anyone like you before. I was never like this before you came. Listen. In Italy I had a woman and she was very good to me. She loved me, she loved me, and she took care of me and she was always there when I came in from work, in from the vineyards, and there was never any trouble between us, never. I was young then and did not know the things I learned later or the terrible things you have taught me. I thought all women were like that. I thought all men were like me—I thought I was like all other men. I was not unhappy then and I was not lonely—for she was there—and I did not want to die. I wanted to stay forever in our village and work in the vineyards and drink the wine we made and make love to my girl. I have told you about my village—? It is very old and in the south, it is on a hill. At night, when we walked by the wall, the world seemed to fall down before us, the whole, far-o ,

dirty world. I did not ever want to see it. Once we made love under the wall.

‘Yes, I wanted to stay there forever and eat much spaghetti and drink much wine and make many babies and grow fat. You would not have liked me if I had stayed. I can see you, many years from now, coming through our village in the ugly, fat, American motor car you will surely have by then and looking at me and looking at all of us and tasting our wine and shitting on us with those empty smiles Americans wear everywhere and which you wear all the time and driving o with a great roar of the motors and a great sound of tires and telling all the other Americans you meet that they must come and see our village because it is so picturesque. And you will have no idea of the life there, dripping and bursting and beautiful and terrible, as you have no idea of my life now. But I think I would have been happier there and I would not have minded your smiles. I would have had my life. I have lain here many nights, waiting for you to come home, and thought how far away is my village and how terrible it is to be in this cold city, among people whom I hate, where it is cold and wet and never dry and hot as it was there, and where Giovanni has no one to talk to, and no one to be with, and where he has found a lover who is neither man nor woman, nothing that I can know or touch. You do not know, do you, what it is like to lie awake at night and wait for someone to come home? But I am sure you do not know. You do not know anything. You do not know any of the terrible things—that is why you smile and dance the way you do and you think that the comedy you are playing with the short-haired, moon-faced little girl is love.’

He dropped the cigarette to the oor, where it lay burning faintly.

He began to cry again. I looked at the room, thinking: I cannot bear it.‘I left my village one wild, sweet day. I will never forget that day.

It was the day of my death—I wish it had been the day of my death.

I remember the sun was hot and scratchy on the back of my neck as I walked the road away from my village and the road went upward and I walked bent over, I remember everything, the brown dust at

my feet, and the little pebbles which rushed before me, and the short trees along the road and all the at houses and all their colors under the sun. I remember I was weeping, but not as I am weeping now, much worse, more terrible—since I am with you, I cannot even cry as I cried then. That was the rst time in my life that I wanted to die. I had just buried my baby in the churchyard where my father and my father’s fathers were and I had left my girl screaming in my mother’s house. Yes, I had made a baby but it was born dead. It was all grey and twisted when I saw it and it made no sound—and we spanked it on the buttocks and we sprinkled it with holy water and we prayed but it never made a sound, it was dead. It was a little boy, it would have been a wonderful, strong man, perhaps even the kind of man you and Jacques and Guillaume and all your disgusting band of fairies spend all your days and nights looking for, and dreaming of—but it was dead, it was my baby and we had made it, my girl and I, and it was dead. When I knew that it was dead I took our cruci x o the wall and I spat on it and I threw it on the oor and my mother and my girl screamed and I went out. We buried it right away, the next day, and then I left my village and I came to this city where surely God has punished me for all my sins and for spitting on His holy Son, and where I will surely die. I do not think that I will ever see my village again.’

I stood up. My head was turning. Salt was in my mouth. The room seemed to rock, as it had the rst time I had come here, so many lifetimes ago. I heard Giovanni’s moan behind me. ‘ Chéri. Mon très cher. Don’t leave me. Please don’t leave me.’ I turned and held him in my arms staring above his head at the wall, at the man and woman on the wall who walked together among roses. He was sobbing, it would have been said, as though his heart would break.

But I felt that it was my heart which was broken. Something had broken in me to make me so cold and so perfectly still and far away.

Still I had to speak.

‘Giovanni,’ I said. ‘Giovanni.’

He began to be still, he was listening; I felt, unwillingly, not for the rst time, the cunning of the desperate.

‘Giovanni,’ I said, ‘you always knew that I would leave one day.

You knew my ancée was coming back to Paris.’

‘You are not leaving me for her,’ he said. ‘You are leaving me for some other reason. You lie so much, you have come to believe all your own lies. But I, I have senses. You are not leaving me for a woman. If you were really in love with this little girl, you would not have had to be so cruel to me.’

‘She’s not a little girl,’ I said. ‘She’s a woman and no matter what you think, I do love her…’

‘You do not,’ cried Giovanni, sitting up, ‘love anyone! You never have loved anyone, I am sure you never will! You love your purity, you love your mirror—you are just like a little virgin, you walk around with your hands in front of you as though you had some precious metal, gold, silver, rubies, maybe diamonds down there between your legs! You will never give it to anybody, you will never let anybody touch it—man or woman. You want to be clean. You think you came here covered with soap and you think you will go out covered with soap—and you do not want to stink, not even for ve minutes, in the meantime.’ He grasped me by the collar, wrestling and caressing at once, uid and iron at once: saliva spraying from his lips and his eyes full of tears, but with the bones of his face showing and the muscles leaping in his arms and neck.

‘You want to leave Giovanni because he makes you stink. You want to despise Giovanni because he is not afraid of the stink of love. You want to kill him in the name of all your lying little moralities. And you—you are immoral. You are, by far, the most immoral man I have met in all my life. Look, look what you have done to me. Do you think you could have done this if I did not love you? Is this what you should do to love?’

‘Giovanni, stop it! For God’s sake, stop it! What in the world do you want me to do? I can’t help the way I feel.’

‘Do you know how you feel? Do you feel? What do you feel?’

‘I feel nothing now,’ I said, ‘nothing. I want to get out of this room, I want to get away from you, I want to end this terrible scene.’

‘You want to get away from me.’ He laughed; he watched me; the look in his eyes was so bottomlessly bitter it was almost benevolent.

‘At last you are beginning to be honest. And do you know why you want to get away from me?’

Inside me something locked. ‘I—I cannot have a life with you,’ I said.

‘But you can have a life with Hella. With that moonfaced little girl who thinks babies come out of cabbages—or frigidaires, I am not acquainted with the mythology of your country. You can have a life with her.’

‘Yes,’ I said, wearily, ‘I can have a life with her.’ I stood up. I was shaking. ‘What kind of life can we have in this room?—this lthy little room. What kind of life can two men have together, anyway?

All this love you talk about—isn’t it just that you want to be made to feel strong? You want to go out and be the laborer and bring home the money and you want me to stay here and wash the dishes and cook the food and clean this miserable closet of a room and kiss you when you come in through that door and lie with you at night and be your little girl. That’s what you want. That’s what you mean and that’s all you mean when you say you love me. You say I want to kill you. What do you think you’ve been doing to me?’

‘I am not trying to make you a little girl. If I wanted a little girl, I would be with a little girl.’

‘Why aren’t you? Isn’t it just that you’re afraid? And you take me because you haven’t got the guts to go after a woman, which is what you really want?’

He was pale. ‘You are the one who keeps talking about what I want. But I have only been talking about who I want.’

‘But I’m a man,’ I cried, ‘a man! What do you think can happen between us?’

‘You know very well,’ said Giovanni, slowly, ‘what can happen between us. It is for that reason you are leaving me.’ He got up and walked to the window and opened it. ‘ Bon,’ he said. He struck his st once against the window sill. ‘ If I could make you stay, I would,’

he shouted. ‘If I had to beat you, chain you, starve you— if I could make you stay, I would.’ He turned back into the room; the wind blew his hair. He shook his nger at me, grotesquely playful. ‘One day, perhaps, you will wish I had.’

‘It’s cold,’ I said. ‘Close the window.’

He smiled. ‘Now that you are leaving—you want the windows closed. Bien sûr.’ He closed the window and we stood staring at each other in the center of the room. ‘We will not ght any more,’ he said. ‘Fighting will not make you stay. In French we have what is called une separation de corps—not a divorce, you understand, just a separation. Well. We will separate. But I know you belong with me.

I believe, I must believe—that you will come back.’

‘Giovanni,’ I said, ‘I’ll not be coming back. You know I won’t be back.’

He waved his hand. ‘I said we would not ght any more. The Americans have no sense of doom, none whatever. They do not recognize doom when they see it.’ He produced a bottle from beneath the sink. ‘Jacques left a bottle of cognac here. Let us have a little drink—for the road, as I believe you people say sometimes.’

I watched him. He carefully poured two drinks. I saw that he was shaking—with rage, or pain, or both.

He handed me my glass.

A la tienne,’ he said.

A la tienne.’

We drank. I could not keep myself from asking: ‘Giovanni. What are you going to do now?’

‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I have friends. I will think of things to do. Tonight, for example, I shall have supper with Jacques. No doubt tomorrow night I shall also have supper with Jacques. He has become very fond of me. He thinks you are a monster.’

‘Giovanni,’ I said, helplessly, ‘be careful. Please be careful.’

He gave me an ironical smile. ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘You should have given me that advice the night we met.’

That was the last time we really spoke to one another. I stayed with him until morning and then I threw my things into a bag and took them away with me, to Hella’s place.

I will not forget the last time he looked at me. The morning light lled the room, reminding me of so many mornings and of the morning I had rst come there. Giovanni sat on the bed, completely naked, holding a glass of cognac between his hands. His body was dead white, his face was wet and grey. I was at the door with my suitcase. With my hand on the knob, I looked at him. Then I wanted to beg him to forgive me. But this would have been too great a confession; any yielding at that moment would have locked me forever in that room with him. And in a way this was exactly what I wanted. I felt a tremor go through me, like the beginning of an earthquake, and felt, for an instant, that I was drowning in his eyes.

His body, which I had come to know so well, glowed in the light and charged and thickened the air between us. Then something opened in my brain, a secret, noiseless door swung open, frightening me: it had not occurred to me until that instant that, in eeing from his body, I con rmed and perpetuated his body’s power over me.

Now, as though I had been branded, his body was burned into my mind, into my dreams. And all this time he did not take his eyes from me. He seemed to nd my face more transparent than a shop-window. He did not smile, he was neither grave, nor vindictive, nor sad; he was still. He was waiting, I think, for me to cross that space and take him in my arms again—waiting, as one waits at a death-bed for the miracle one dare not disbelieve, which will not happen. I had to get out of there for my face showed too much, the war in my body was dragging me down. My feet refused to carry me over to him again. The wind of my life was blowing me away.

Au revoir, Giovanni.’

Au revoir, mon cher.’

I turned from him, unlocked the door. The weary exhale of his breath seemed to ru e my hair and brush my brow like the very wind of madness. I walked down the short corridor, expecting every instant to hear his voice behind me, passed through the vestibule,

passed the loge of the still sleeping concierge, into the morning streets. And with every step I took it became more impossible for me to turn back. And my mind was empty—or it was as though my mind had become one enormous, anaesthetized wound. I thought only, One day I’ll weep for this. One of these days I’ll start to cry.

At the corner, in a faint patch of the morning sun, I looked in my wallet to count my bus tickets. In the wallet I found three hundred francs, taken from Hella, my carte d’identité, my address in the United States, and paper, paper, scraps of paper, cards, photographs.

On each piece of paper I found addresses, telephone numbers, memos of various rendezvous made and kept—or perhaps not kept

—people met and remembered, or perhaps not remembered, hopes probably not ful lled: certainly not ful lled, or I would not have been standing on that street corner.

I found four bus tickets in my wallet and I walked to the arrêt.

There was a policeman standing there, his blue hood, weighted, hanging down behind, his white club gleaming. He looked at me and smiled and cried, ‘ Ca va?

Oui, merci. And you?’

Toujours. It’s a nice day, no?’

‘Yes.’ But my voice trembled. ‘The autumn is beginning.’

C’est ça.’ And he turned away, back to his contemplation of the boulevard. I smoothed my hair with my hand, feeling foolish for feeling shaken. I watched a woman pass, coming from the market, her string bag full; at the top, precariously, a litre of red wine. She was not young but she was clear-faced and bold, she had a strong, thick body and strong, thick hands. The policeman shouted something to her and she shouted back—something bawdy and good-natured. The policeman laughed; but refused to look at me again. I watched the woman continue down the street—home, I thought, to her husband, dressed in blue working clothes, dirty, and to her children. She passed the corner where the patch of sunlight fell and crossed the street. The bus came and the policeman and I, the only people waiting, got on—he stood on the platform, far from me. The policeman was not young, either, but he had a gusto which

I admired. I looked out of the window and the streets rolled by.

Ages ago, in another city, on another bus, I sat so at the windows, looking outward, inventing for each ying face which trapped my brief attention some life, some destiny, in which I played a part. I was looking for some whisper, or promise, of my possible salvation.

But it seemed to me that morning that my ancient self had been dreaming the most dangerous dream of all.

The days that followed seemed to y. It seemed to turn cold overnight. The tourists in their thousands disappeared, conjured away by time-tables. When one walked through the gardens, leaves fell about one’s head and sighed and crashed beneath one’s feet. The stone of the city, which had been luminous and changing, faded slowly, but with no hesitation, into simple grey stone again. It was apparent that the stone was hard. Daily, shermen disappeared from the river until, one day, the river banks were clear. The bodies of young boys and girls began to be compromised by heavy underwear, by sweaters and mu ers, hoods and capes. Old men seemed older, old women slower. The colors on the river faded, the rain began, and the river began to rise. It was apparent that the sun would soon give up the tremendous struggle it cost her to get to Paris for a few hours every day.

‘But it will be warm in the south,’ I said.

The money had come. Hella and I were busy every day, on the track of a house in Eze, in Cagnes-sur-mer, in Vence, in Monte Carlo, in Antibes, in Grasse. We were scarcely ever seen in the quarter. We stayed in her room, we made love a lot, we went to the movies, and had long, frequently rather melancholy dinners in strange restaurants on the right bank. It is hard to say what produced this melancholy, which sometimes settled over us like the shadow of some vast, some predatory, waiting bird. I do not think that Hella was unhappy, for I had never before clung to her as I clung to her during that time. But perhaps she sensed, from time to time, that my clutch was too insistent to be trusted, certainly too insistent to last.

And from time to time, around the quarter, I ran into Giovanni. I dreaded seeing him, not only because he was almost always with Jacques, but also because, though he was often rather better dressed, he did not look well. I could not endure something at once abject and vicious which I began to see in his eyes, nor the way he giggled at Jacques’ jokes, nor the mannerisms, a fairy’s mannerisms, which he was beginning, sometimes, to a ect. I did not want to know what his status was with Jacques; yet the day came when it was revealed to me in Jacques’ spiteful and triumphant eyes. And Giovanni, during this short encounter, in the middle of the boulevard as dusk fell, with people hurrying all about us, was really amazingly giddy and girlish, and very drunk—it was as though he were forcing me to taste the cup of his humiliation. And I hated him for this.

The next time I saw him it was in the morning. He was buying a newspaper. He looked up at me insolently, into my eyes, and looked away. I watched him diminish down the boulevard. When I got home, I told Hella about it, trying to laugh.

Then I began to see him around the quarter without Jacques, with the street-boys of the quarter, whom he had once described to me as

lamentable.’ He was no longer so well dressed, he was beginning to look like one of them. His special friend among them seemed to be the same, tall, pock-marked boy, named Yves, whom I remembered having seen brie y, playing the pinball machine, and, later, talking to Jacques on that rst morning in Les Halles. One night, quite drunk myself, and wandering about the quarter alone, I ran into this boy and bought him a drink. I did not mention Giovanni but Yves volunteered the information that he was not with Jacques any more.

But it seemed that he might be able to get back his old job in Guillaume’s bar. It was certainly not more than a week after this that Guillaume was found dead in the private quarters above his bar. strangled with the sash of his dressing gown.

5

It was a terri c scandal, if you were in Paris at the time you certainly heard of it, and saw the pictures printed in all the newspapers, of Giovanni, just after he was captured. Editorials were written and speeches were made, and many bars of the genre of Guillaume’s bar were closed. (But they did not stay closed long.) Plain-clothes policemen descended on the quarter, asking to see everyone’s papers, and the bars were emptied of tapettes. Giovanni was nowhere to be found. All of the evidence, above all, of course, his disappearance, pointed to him as the murderer. Such a scandal always threatens, before its reverberations cease, to rock the very foundations of the state. It is necessary to nd an explanation, a solution, and a victim with the utmost possible speed. Most of the men picked up in connection with this crime were not picked up on suspicion of murder. They were picked up on suspicion of having what the French, with a delicacy I take to be sardonic, call les gouts particuliers. These ‘tastes,’ which do not constitute a crime in France, are nevertheless regarded with extreme disapprobation by the bulk of the populace, which also looks on its rulers and ‘betters’ with a stony lack of a ection. When Guillaume’s corpse was discovered it was not only the boys of the street who were frightened; they, in fact, were a good deal less frightened than the men who roamed the streets to buy them, whose careers, positions, aspirations, could never have survived such notoriety. Fathers of families, sons of great houses, and itching adventurers from Belleville were all desperately anxious that the case be closed, so that things might, in e ect, go back to normal and the dreadful whiplash of public morality not fall on their backs. Until the case was closed they could not be certain which way to jump, whether they should cry out that they were martyrs, or remain what, at heart, of course, they were, simple citizens, bitter against outrage and anxious to see justice done and the health of the state preserved.

It was fortunate, therefore, that Giovanni was a foreigner. As though by some magni cently tacit agreement, with every day that he was at large, the press became more vituperative against him and more gentle toward Guillaume. It was remembered that there perished with Guillaume one of the oldest names in France. Sunday supplements were run on the history of his family; and his old, aristocratic mother, who did not survive the trial of his murderer, testi ed to the sterling qualities of her son and regretted that corruption had become so vast in France that such a crime could go so long unpunished. With this sentiment the populace was, of course, more than ready to agree. It is perhaps not as incredible as it certainly seemed to me, but Guillaume’s name became fantastically entangled with French history, French honor, and French glory, and very nearly became, indeed, a symbol of French manhood.

‘But listen,’ I said to Hella, ‘he was just a disgusting old fairy.

That’s all he was!’

‘Well, how in the world do you expect the people who read newspapers to know that? If that’s what he was, I’m sure he didn’t advertise it—and he must have moved in a pretty limited circle.’

‘Well— somebody knows it. Some of the people who write this drivel know it.’

‘There doesn’t seem to be much point,’ she said, quietly, ‘in defaming the dead.’

‘But isn’t there some point in telling the truth?’

‘They’re telling the truth. He’s a member of a very important family and he’s been murdered. I know what you mean. There’s another truth they’re not telling. But newspapers never do, that’s not what they’re for.’

I sighed. ‘Poor, poor, poor Giovanni.’

‘Do you believe he did it?’

‘I don’t know. It certainly looks as though he did it. He was there that night. People saw him go upstairs before the bar closed and they don’t remember seeing him come down.’

‘Was he working there that night?’

‘Apparently not. He was just drinking. He and Guillaume seemed to have become friendly again.’

‘You certainly made some peculiar friends while I was away.’

‘They wouldn’t seem so damn peculiar if one of them hadn’t got murdered. Anyway, none of them were my friends—except Giovanni.’

‘You lived with him. Can’t you tell whether he’d commit murder or not?’

‘How? You live with me. Can I commit a murder?’

‘You? Of course not.’

‘How do you know that? You don’t know that. How do you know I’m what you see?’

‘Because’—she leaned over and kissed me—‘I love you.’

‘Ah! I loved Giovanni—’

‘Not as I love you,’ said Hella.

‘I might have committed murder already, for all you know. How do you know?’

‘Why are you so upset?’

‘Wouldn’t you be upset if a friend of yours was accused of murder and was hiding somewhere? What do you mean, why am I so upset?

What do you want me to do, sing Christmas carols?’

‘Don’t shout. It’s just that I never realized he meant so much to you.’

‘He was a nice man,’ I said, nally. ‘I just hate to see him in trouble.’

She came to me and put her hand lightly on my arm. ‘We’ll leave this city soon, David. You won’t have to think about it any more.

People get into trouble, David. But don’t act as though it were, somehow, your fault. It’s not your fault.’

I know it’s not my fault!’ But my voice, and Hella’s eyes, astounded me into silence. I felt, with terror, that I was about to cry.

Giovanni stayed at large nearly a week. As I watched, from Hella’s window, each night creeping over Paris, I thought of Giovanni

somewhere outside, perhaps under one of those bridges, frightened and cold and not knowing where to go. I wondered if he had, perhaps, found friends to hide him—it was astonishing that in so small and policed a city he should prove so hard to nd. I feared, sometimes, that he might come to nd me—to beg me to help him, or to kill me. Then I thought that he probably considered it beneath him to ask me for help; he, no doubt, felt by now that I was not worth killing. I looked to Hella for help. I tried to bury each night, in her, all my guilt and terror. The need to act was like a fever in me, the only act possible was the act of love.

He was nally caught, very early one morning, in a barge tied up along the river. Newspaper speculation had already placed him in Argentina, so it was a great shock to discover that he had got no farther than the Seine. This lack, on his part, of ‘dash’ did nothing to endear him to the public. He was a criminal, Giovanni, of the dullest kind, a bungler; robbery, for example, had been insisted on as the motive for Guillaume’s murder; but, though Giovanni had taken all the money Guillaume had in his pockets, he had not touched the cash-register and had not even suspected, apparently, that Guillaume had over one thousand francs hidden in another wallet at the bottom of his closet. The money he had taken from Guillaume was still in his pockets when he was caught; he had not been able to spend it. He had not eaten for two or three days and was weak and pale and unattractive. His face was on newsstands all over Paris. He looked young, bewildered, terri ed, depraved; as though he could not believe that he, Giovanni, had come to this; had come to this and would go no further, his short road ending in a common knife.

He seemed already to be rearing back, every inch of his esh revolting before that icy vision. And it seemed, as it had seemed so many times, that he looked to me for help. The newsprint told the unforgiving world how Giovanni repented, cried for mercy, called on God, wept that he had not meant to do it. And told us, too, in delicious detail, how he had done it: but not why. Why was too black for the newsprint to carry and too deep for Giovanni to tell.

I may have been the only man in Paris who knew that he had not meant to do it, who could read why he had done it beneath the details printed in the newspapers. I remembered again the evening I had found him at home and he told me how Guillaume had red him. I heard his voice again and saw the vehemence of his body and saw his tears. I knew his bravado, how he liked to feel himself debrouillard, more than equal to any challenge, and saw him swagger into Guillaume’s bar. He must have felt that, having surrendered to Jacques, his apprenticeship was over, love was over, and he could do with Guillaume anything he liked. He could, indeed, have done with Guillaume anything at all—but he could not do anything about being Giovanni. Guillaume certainly knew.

Jacques would have lost no time in telling him, that Giovanni was no longer with le jeune Americain; perhaps Guillaume had even attended one or two of Jacques’ parties, armed with his own entourage; and he certainly knew, all his circle knew, that Giovanni’s new freedom, his loverless state, would turn into license, into riot—it had happened to every one of them. It must have been a great evening for the bar when Giovanni swaggered in alone.

I could hear the conversation:

Alors, tu es revenu? ’ This from Guillaume, with a seductive, sardonic, speaking look.

Giovanni sees that he does not wish to be reminded of his last, disastrous tantrum, that he wishes to be friendly. At the same moment Guillaume’s face, voice, manner, smell, hit him; he is actually facing Guillaume, not conjuring him up in his mind; the smile with which he responds to Guillaume almost causes him to vomit. But Guillaume does not see this, of course, and o ers Giovanni a drink.

‘I thought you might need a bar-man,’ Giovanni says.

‘But are you looking for work? I thought your American would have bought you an oil-well in Texas by now.’

‘No. My American’—he makes a gesture—‘has own!’ They both laugh.

‘The Americans always y. They are not serious,’ says Guillaume.

C’est vrai,’ says Giovanni. He nishes his drink, looking away from Guillaume, looking dreadfully self-conscious, perhaps almost unconsciously, whistling. Guillaume, now, can hardly keep his eyes o him, or control his hands.

‘Come back, later, at closing, and we will talk about this job,’ he says at last.

And Giovanni nods and leaves. I can imagine him, then, nding some of his street-cronies, drinking with them, and laughing, sti ening up his courage as the hours tick by. He is dying for someone to tell him not to go back to Guillaume, not to let Guillaume touch him. But his friends tell him how rich Guillaume is, how he is a silly old queen, how much he can get out of Guillaume if he will only be smart.

No one appears on the boulevards to speak to him, to save him.

He feels that he is dying.

Then the hour comes when he must go back to Guillaume’s bar.

He walks there alone. He stands outside awhile. He wants to turn away, to run away. But there is no place to run. He looks up the long, dark, curving street as though he were looking for someone.

But there is no one there. He goes into the bar. Guillaume sees him at once and discreetly motions him upstairs. He climbs the stairs.

His legs are weak. He nds himself in Guillaume’s rooms, surrounded by Guillaume’s silks, colors, perfumes, staring at Guillaume’s bed.

Then Guillaume enters and Giovanni tries to smile. They have a drink. Guillaume is precipitate, abby, and moist, and with each touch of his hand, Giovanni shrinks further and more furiously away. Guillaume disappears to change his clothes and comes back in his theatrical dressing gown. He wants Giovanni to undress… .

Perhaps at this moment Giovanni realizes that he cannot go through with it, that his will cannot carry him through. He remembers the job. He tries to talk, to be practical, to be reasonable, but of course, it is too late, Guillaume seems to surround him like

the sea itself. And I think that Giovanni, tortured into a state like madness, feels himself going under, is overcome, and Guillaume has his will. I think if this had not happened, Giovanni would not have killed him.

For, with his pleasure taken, and while Giovanni still lies su ocating, Guillaume becomes a business man once more and, walking up and down, gives excellent reasons why Giovanni cannot work for him any more. Beneath whatever reasons Guillaume invents the real one lies hidden and they both, dimly, in their di erent fashions, see it: Giovanni, like a falling movie star, has lost his drawing power. Everything is known about him, his secrecy has been discovered. Giovanni certainly feels this and the rage which has been building in him for many months begins to be swollen now with the memory of Guillaume’s hands and mouth. He stares at Guillaume in silence for a moment and then begins to shout. And Guillaume answers him. With every word exchanged Giovanni’s head begins to roar and a blackness comes and goes before his eyes.

And Guillaume is in seventh heaven and begins to prance about the room—he has scarcely ever gotten so much for so little before. He plays this scene for all its worth, deeply rejoicing in the fact that Giovanni’s face grows scarlet, and his voice thick, watching, with pure delight, the bone-hard muscles in his neck. And he says something, for he thinks the tables have been turned; he says something, one phrase, one insult, one mockery too many; and in a split-second, in his own shocked silence, in Giovanni’s eyes, he realizes that he has unleashed something he cannot turn back.

Giovanni certainly did not mean to do it. But he grabbed him, he struck him. And with that touch, and with each blow, the intolerable weight at the bottom of his heart began to lift: now it was Giovanni’s turn to be delighted. The room was overturned, the fabrics were shredded, the odor of perfume was thick. Guillaume struggled to get out of the room, but Giovanni followed him everywhere: now it was Guillaume’s turn to be surrounded. And perhaps at the very moment Guillaume thought he had broken free, when he had reached the door perhaps, Giovanni lunged after him

and caught him by the sash of the dressing gown and wrapped the sash around his neck. Then he simply held on, sobbing, becoming lighter every moment as Guillaume grew heavier, tightening the sash and cursing. Then Guillaume fell. And Giovanni fell—back into the room, the streets, the world, in the presence and the shadow of death.

By the time we found this great house it was clear that I had no right to come here. By the time we found it, I did not even want to see it. But by this time, also, there was nothing else to do. There was nothing else I wanted to do. I thought, it is true, of remaining in Paris in order to be close to the trial, perhaps to visit him in prison.

But I knew there was no reason to do this. Jacques, who was in constant touch with Giovanni’s lawyer, and in constant touch with me, had seen Giovanni once. He told me what I knew already, that there was nothing I, or anyone, could do for Giovanni any more.

Perhaps he wanted to die. He pleaded guilty, with robbery as the motive. The circumstances under which Guillaume had red him received great play in the press. And, from the press, one received the impression that Guillaume had been a good-hearted, a perhaps somewhat erratic philanthropist who had had the bad judgment to befriend the hardened and ungrateful adventurer, Giovanni. Then the case drifted downward from the headlines. Giovanni was taken to prison to await trial.

And Hella and I came here. I may have thought—I am sure I thought, in the beginning—that, though I could do nothing for Giovanni, I might, perhaps, be able to do something for Hella. I must have hoped that there would be something Hella could do for me. And this might have been possible if the days had not dragged by, for me, like days in prison. I could not get Giovanni out of my mind, I was at the mercy of the bulletins which sporadically arrived from Jacques. All that I remember of the autumn is waiting for Giovanni to come to trial. Then, at last, he came to trial, was found guilty, and placed under sentence of death. All winter long I counted the days. And the nightmare of this house began.

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

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

I think—I think that I have never been more frightened in my life.

When my ngers began, involuntarily, to loose their hold on Hella, I realized that I was dangling from a high place and that I had been clinging to her for my very life. With each moment, as my ngers slipped, I felt the roaring air beneath me and felt everything in me bitterly contracting, crawling furiously upward against that long fall.

I thought that it was only, perhaps, that we were alone too much and so, for a while, we were always going out. We made expeditions to Nice and Monte Carlo and Cannes and Antibes. But we were not rich and the south of France, in the wintertime, is a playground for the rich. Hella and I went to a lot of movies, and found ourselves, very often, sitting in empty, fth-rate bars. We walked a lot, in silence. We no longer seemed to see things to point out to each other. We drank too much, especially me. Hella, who had been so brown and con dent and glowing on her return from Spain, began

to lose all this, she began to be pale and watchful and uncertain. She ceased to ask me what the matter was, for it was borne in on her that I either did not know, or would not say. She watched me. I felt her watching and it made me wary and it made me hate her. My guilt, when I looked into her closing face, was more than I could bear.

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

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

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

‘I wish,’ she said, one day, ‘you’d tell me what it is. Tell me what it is, let me help you.’

I shook my head in bewilderment and sorrow and sighed.

We were sitting in the big room, where I am standing now. She was sitting in the easy chair, under the lamp, with a book open on her lap.

‘You’re sweet,’ I said. Then: ‘It’s nothing. It’ll go away. It’s probably just nerves.’

‘It’s Giovanni,’ she said.

I watched her.

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

‘He was so beautiful,’ I said. I had not meant to say it. I felt myself beginning to shake. She watched me while I walked to the table—

there was a bottle there then, as now—and poured myself a drink.

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

‘I can’t help feeling that I placed him in the shadow of the knife.

He wanted me to stay in that room with him, he begged me to stay.

I didn’t tell you—we had an awful ght the night I went there, to get my things.’ I paused. I sipped my drink. ‘He cried.’

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

I turned away, feeling my face ame.

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

‘You don’t know anything about it,’ I muttered. ‘You don’t know anything about it.’

‘I know how you feel—’

‘You don’t know how I feel.’

‘David. Don’t shut me out. Please don’t shut me out. Let me help you.’

‘Hella. Baby. I know you want to help me. But just let me be for awhile. I’ll be all right.’

‘You’ve been saying that now,’ she said wearily, ‘for a long time.’

She looked at me steadily for awhile and then she said, ‘David.

Don’t you think we ought to go home?’

‘Go home? What for?’

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

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

‘What’s the matter, David? What do you want?

‘I don’t know. I don’t know.’

‘What is it you’re not telling me? Why don’t you tell me the truth?

Tell me the truth!’

I turned and faced her. ‘Hella—bear with me, bear with me—a little while.’

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

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

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

‘David, please let me be a woman. I don’t care what you do to me.

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

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

I roamed all the bars of that glittering town and at the end of the rst night, blind with alcohol and grim with lust, I climbed the stairs of a dark hotel in company with a sailor. It turned out, late the next day, that the sailor’s leave was not yet ended and that the

sailor had friends. We went to visit them. We stayed the night. We spent the next day together, and the next. On the nal night of the sailor’s leave, we stood drinking together in a crowded bar. We faced the mirror. I was very drunk. I was almost penniless. In the mirror, suddenly, I saw Hella’s face. I thought for a moment that I had gone mad, and I turned. She looked very tired and drab and small.

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

‘Hasn’t she got the wrong bar?’ he asked me, nally.

Hella looked at him. She smiled.

‘It’s not the only thing I got wrong,’ she said.

Now the sailor stared at me.

‘Well,’ I said to Hella, ‘now you know.’

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

‘Are you—is she—?’

I nodded. His face, open-mouthed, was comical. He let me go and I passed him and, as I reached the doors, I heard his laughter.

We walked for a long time in the stone-cold streets, in silence.

There seemed to be no one on the streets at all. It seemed inconceivable that the day would ever break.

‘Well,’ said Hella, ‘I’m going home. I wish I’d never left it.’

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

She was extremely cold, she was very bitterly handsome.

‘I’m not sure any woman can forget that,’ I said.

‘There are women who have forgotten that to be a woman doesn’t simply mean humiliation, doesn’t simply mean bitterness. I haven’t forgotten it yet,’ she added, ‘in spite of you. I’m not going to forget

it. I’m getting out of this house, away from you, just as fast as taxis, trains, and boats will carry me.’

And in the room which had been our bedroom in the beginning of our life in this house, she moved with the desperate haste of someone about to ee—from the open suitcase on the bed, to the chest of drawers, to the closet. I stood in the doorway, watching her.

I stood there the way a small boy who has wet his pants stands before his teacher. All the words I wanted to say closed my throat, like weeds, and stopped my mouth.

‘I wish, any way,’ I said at last, ‘that you’d believe me when I say that, if I was lying, I wasn’t lying to you.’

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

‘I mean,’ I said, ‘I was lying to myself.’

‘Oh,’ said Hella, ‘I see. That makes everything di erent, of course.’

‘I only mean to say,’ I shouted, ‘that whatever I’ve done to hurt you, I didn’t mean to do!’

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

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

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

‘But I knew,’ she said, ‘I knew. This is what makes me so ashamed.

I knew it every time you looked at me. I knew it every time we went to bed. If only you had told me the truth then. Don’t you see how unjust it was to wait for me to nd it out? To put all the burden on

me? I had the right to expect to hear from you—women are always waiting for the man to speak. Or hadn’t you heard?’

I said nothing.

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

‘Perhaps I didn’t know it then. I only knew I had to get out of Giovanni’s room.’

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

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

‘I’ll never understand it,’ she said at last, and she raised her eyes to mine as though I could help her to understand. ‘That sordid little gangster has wrecked your life. I think he’s wrecked mine, too.

Americans should never come to Europe,’ she said, and tried to laugh and began to cry, ‘it means they never can be happy again.

What’s the good of an American who isn’t happy? Happiness was all we had.’ And she fell forward into my arms, into my arms for the last time, sobbing.

‘Don’t believe it,’ I muttered, ‘don’t believe it. We’ve got much more than that, we’ve always had much more than that. Only—only

—it’s sometimes hard to bear.’

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

‘Hella. Hella. One day, when you’re happy, try to forgive me.’

She moved away. ‘Ah. I don’t know anything about happiness any more. I don’t know anything about forgiveness. But if women are supposed to be led by men and there aren’t any men to lead them, what happens then? What happens then?’ She went to the closet and

got her coat; dug in her handbag and found her compact and, looking into the tiny mirror, carefully dried her eyes and began to apply her lipstick. ‘There’s a di erence between little boys and little girls, just like they say in those little blue books. Little girls want little boys. But little boys—!’ She snapped her compact shut. ‘I’ll never again, as long as I live, know what they want. And now I know they’ll never tell me. I don’t think they know how.’ She ran her ngers through her hair, brushing it back from her forehead, and now, with the lipstick, and in the heavy, black coat, she looked, again, cold, brilliant, and bitterly helpless, a terrifying woman. ‘Mix me a drink,’ she said, ‘we can drink to old times’ sake before the taxi comes. No, I don’t want you to come to the station with me. I wish I could drink all the way to Paris and all the way across that criminal ocean.’

We drank in silence, waiting to hear the sound of tires on gravel.

Then we heard it, saw the lights, and the driver began honking his horn. Hella put down her drink and wrapped her coat around her and started for the door. I picked up her bags and followed. The driver and I arranged the baggage in the car; all the time I was trying to think of some last thing to say to Hella, something to help wipe away the bitterness. But I could not think of anything. She said nothing to me. She stood very erect beneath the dark, winter sky, looking far out. And when all was ready, I turned to her.

‘Are you sure you wouldn’t like me to come with you as far as the station, Hella?’

She looked at me, and held out her hand.

‘Good-bye, David.’

I took her hand. It was cold and dry, like her lips.

‘Good-bye, Hella.’

She got into the taxi. I watched it back down the drive, onto the road. I waved one last time, but Hella did not wave back.

* * *

Outside my window the horizon begins to lighten, turning the grey sky a purplish blue.

I have packed my bags and I have cleaned the house. The keys to the house are on the table before me. I have only to change my clothes. When the horizon has become a little lighter the bus which will take me to town, to the station, to the train which will take me to Paris, will appear at the bend of the highway. Still, I cannot move.

On the table, also, is a small, blue envelope, the note from Jacques informing me of the date of Giovanni’s execution.

I pour myself a very little drink, watching, in the window pane, my re ection, which steadily becomes more faint. I seem to be fading away before my eyes—this fancy amuses me, and I laugh to myself.

It should be now that gates are opening before Giovanni and clanging shut behind him, never, for him, to be opened or shut any more. Or perhaps it is already over. Perhaps it is only beginning.

Perhaps he still sits in his cell, watching, with me, the arrival of the morning. Perhaps now there are whispers at the end of the corridor, three heavy men in black taking o their shoes, one of them holding the ring of keys, all of the prison silent, waiting, charged with dread. Three tiers down, the activity on the stone oor has become silent, is suspended, someone lights a cigarette. Will he die alone? I do not know if death, in this country, is a solitary or a mass-produced a air. And what will he say to the priest?

Take o your clothes, something tells me, it’s getting late.

I walk into the bedroom where the clothes I will wear are lying on the bed and my bag lies open and ready. I begin to undress. There is a mirror in this room, a large mirror. I am terribly aware of the mirror.

Giovanni’s face swings before me like an unexpected lantern on a dark, dark night. His eyes—his eyes, they glow like a tiger’s eyes, they stare straight out, watching the approach of his last enemy, the hair of his esh stands up. I cannot read what is in his eyes: if it is terror, then I have never seen terror, if it is anguish, then anguish has never laid hands on me. Now they approach, now the key turns in the lock, now they have him. He cries out, once. They look at him

from far away. They pull him to the door of his cell, the corridor stretches before him like the graveyard of his past, the prison spins around him. Perhaps he begins to moan, perhaps he makes no sound. The journey begins. Or, perhaps, when he cries out, he does not stop crying, perhaps his voice is crying now, in all that stone and iron. I see his legs buckle, his thighs jelly, the buttocks quiver, the secret hammer there begins to knock. He is sweating, or he is dry. They drag him, or he walks. Their grip is terrible, his arms are not his own any more.

Down that long corridor, down those metal stairs, into the heart of the prison and out of it, into the o ce of the priest. He kneels. A candle burns, the Virgin watches him.

Mary, blessed mother of God.

My own hands are clammy, my body is dull and white and dry. I see it in the mirror, out of the corner of my eye.

Mary, blessed mother of God.

He kisses the cross and clings to it. The priest gently lifts the cross away. Then they lift Giovanni. The journey begins. They move o , toward another door. He moans. He wants to spit, but his mouth is dry. He cannot ask that they let him pause for a moment to urinate

—all that, in a moment, will take care of itself. He knows that beyond the door which comes so deliberately closer, the knife is waiting. That door is the gateway he has sought so long out of this dirty world, this dirty body.

It’s getting late.

The body in the mirror forces me to turn and face it. And I look at my body, which is under sentence of death. It is lean, hard, and cold, the incarnation of a mystery. And I do not know what moves in this body, what this body is searching. It is trapped in my mirror as it is trapped in time and it hurries toward revelation.

When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

I long to make this prophecy come true. I long to crack that mirror and be free. I look at my sex, my troubling sex, and wonder how it

can be redeemed, how I can save it from the knife. The journey to the grave is already begun, the journey to corruption is, always, already, half over. Yet, the key to my salvation, which cannot save my body, is hidden in my esh.

Then the door is before him. There is darkness all around him, there is silence in him. Then the door opens and he stands alone, the whole world falling away from him. And the brief corner of the sky seems to be shrieking, though he does not hear a sound. Then the earth tilts, he is thrown forward on his face in darkness, and his journey begins.

I move at last from the mirror and begin to cover that nakedness which I must hold sacred, though it be never so vile, which must be scoured perpetually with the salt of my life. I must believe, I must believe, that the heavy grace of God, which has brought me to this place, is all that can carry me out of it.

And at last I step out into the morning and I lock the door behind me. I cross the road and drop the keys into the old lady’s mailbox.

And I look up the road, where a few people stand, men and women, waiting for the morning bus. They are very vivid beneath the awakening sky, and the horizon beyond them is beginning to ame.

The morning weighs on my shoulders with the dreadful weight of hope and I take the blue envelope which Jacques has sent me and tear it slowly into many pieces, watching them dance in the wind, watching the wind carry them away. Yet as I turn and begin walking toward the waiting people, the wind blows some of them back on me.