The Road to Los Angeles (10 page)

"Mamma, listen to him! Using words without knowing what they mean."

I could not tolerate a remark like that. It burned me to the core. She could ridicule my beliefs and persecute me for my philosophy and I would not complain. But no one could make fun of my English. I ran across the room.

"Don't insult me! I can endure a lot of your bilge and folderol, but in the name of the Jehovah you worship, don't insult me!"

I shook my fist in her face and butted her with my chest. "I can stand a lot of your imbecilities, but in the name of your monstrous Yahweh, you sanctimonious, she-nun of a God-worshipping pagan nun of a good-for-nothing scum of the earth, don't insult me! I oppose it. I oppose it emphatically!"

She tilted her chin and pushed me away with her fingertips.

"Please go away. Take a bath. You smell bad."

I swung at her, and the tips of my fingers flecked her face. She clenched her teeth and stamped the floor with both feet.

"You fool! You fool!"

My mother was always too late. She got between us.

"Here, here! What's all this about?"

I hitched up my pants and sneered at Mona.

"It's about time I had supper. That's what it's all about. As long as I'm supporting two parasitical women I guess I'm entitled to something to eat once in a while."

I peeled off my stinking shirt and threw it on a chair in the corner. Mona got it, carried it to the window, opened the window, and threw it out. Then she swung around and defied me to do something about it. I said nothing, merely staring at her coldly to let her know the depth of my contempt. My mother stood dumbfounded, unable to understand what was going on; not in a million years would she have thought to throw away a shirt simply because it stunk. Without speaking I hurried downstairs and around the house. The shirt hung from a fig tree below our window. I put it on and returned to the apartment. I stood in the exact spot I had stood before. I folded my arms and allowed the contempt to gush from my face. "Now," I said. "Try that again. I dare you!"

"You fool!" Mona said. "Uncle Frank's right. You're insane."

"Ho. Him! That boobus Americanus ass." My mother was horrified. Every time I said something she did not understand she thought it had something to do with sex or naked women.

"Arturo! To think of it! Your own uncle!"

"Uncle or not. I positively refuse to retract the charge. He's a boobus Americanus now and forever."

"But your own uncle! Your own flesh and blood!"

"My attitude is unchanged. The charge stands." Supper was spread in the breakfast nook. I didn't wash up. I was too hungry. I went in and sat down. My mother came, bringing a fresh towel. She said I should wash. I took the towel from her and put it beside me. Mona came in unwillingly. She sat down and tried to endure me so near. She spread her napkin and my mother brought in a bowl of soup. But the smell was too much for Mona. The sight of the soup revolted her. She grabbed the pit of her stomach, threw down her napkin and left the table.

"I can't do it. I just can't!"

"Haw! Weaklings. Females. Bring on the food!" Then my mother left. I ate alone. When I was through I lit a cigarette and sat back to give the women some thought. My thought was to find the best possible way to destroy them. There was no doubt of it: they had to be finished. I could burn them, or cut them to pieces, or drown them. At last I decided that drowning would be the best. I could do it in comfort while I took my bath. Then I would toss the remains in the sewer. They would flow down to the sea, where the dead crabs lay. The souls of the dead women would talk to the souls of the dead crabs, and they would talk only of me. My fame would increase. Crabs and women would arrive at one inevitable conclusion: that I was a terror, the Black Killer of the Pacific Coast, yet a terror respected by all, crabs and women alike: a cruel hero, but a hero nevertheless.

Chapter Twelve

AFTER SUPPER I turned on the water for my bath. I was contented from food and in a fine mood for the execution. The warm water would make it even more interesting. While the tub was filling I entered my study, locking the door behind me. Lighting the candle, I lifted the box which concealed my women. There they lay huddled together, all my women, my favorites, thirty women chosen from the pages of art magazines, women not real, but good enough nevertheless, the women who belonged to me more than any real women could ever belong to me. I rolled them up and stuck them under my shirt. I had to do this. Mona and my mother were in the living room and I had to pass them to get into the bathroom.

So this was the end! Destiny had brought this! The very thought of it! I looked around the closet and tried to feel sentimental. But it wasn't very sad: I was too eager to go ahead with the execution to be sad. But just for the sake of formality I stood still and bowed my head as a token of farewell. Then I blew out the candle and stepped into the living room. I left the door open behind me. It was the first time I ever left the door open. In the living room sat Mona, sewing. I crossed the rug, a slight bulge under my waist. Mona looked up and saw the open door. She was greatly surprised.

"You forgot to lock your 'study,'" she sneered.

"I know what I'm about, if you please. And I'll lock that door whenever I damn well feel like it."

"But what about Nietzsche, or whatever you call him?"

"Never mind Nietzsche, you Comstock trull."

The tub was ready. I undressed and sat in it. The pictures lay face down on the bath mat, within range of my hand.

I reached down and picked off the top picture.

For some reason I knew it was going to be Helen. A faint instinct told me so. And Helen it was. Helen, dear Helen! Helen with her light brown hair! I had not seen her for a long time, almost three weeks. A strange thing about Helen, that strangest of women: the only reason I cared for her was because of her long fingernails. They were so pink, such breath-taking fingernails, so sharp and exquisitely alive. But for the rest of her I cared nothing, beautiful though she was throughout. She sat naked in the picture, holding a soft veil about her shoulders, every bit a marvelous sight, yet not interesting to me, except for those beautiful fingernails.

"Goodbye, Helen," I said. "Goodbye, dear heart. I shall never forget you. Until the day I die I shall always remember the many times we went to the deep cornfields of Anderson's book and I went to sleep with your fingers in my mouth. How delicious they were! How sweetly I slept! But now we part, dear Helen, sweet Helen. Goodbye, goodbye."

I tore the picture to pieces and floated them on the water.

Then I reached down again. It was Hazel. I had named her so because of her eyes in a picture of natural colors. Yet I didn't care for Hazel either. It was her hips I cared about - they were so pillowy and so white. What times we had had, Hazel and I! How beautiful she really was! Before I destroyed her I lay back in the water and thought of the many times we had met in a mysterious room pierced with dazzling sunlight, a very white room, with only a green carpet on the floor, a room that existed only because of her. In the corner, leaning against the wall, and for no good reason, but always there, a long slender cane with a silver tip flashing diamonds in the sunlight. And from behind a curtain that I never quite saw because of the mistiness, and yet could never quite deny, Hazel would walk in such a melancholy way to the middle of the room, and I would be there admiring the globed beauty of her hips, on my knees before her, my fingers melting for the touch of her, and yet I never spoke to darling Hazel but to her hips, addressing them as though they were living souls, telling them how wonderful they were, how useless life was without them, the while taking them in my hands and drawing them near me. And I tore that picture to pieces too, and watched the pieces absorb the water. Dear Hazel . . .

Then there was Tanya. I used to meet Tanya at night in a cave we kids built one summer a long time ago along the Palos Verdes Cliffs near San Pedro. It was near the sea, and you could smell the ecstasy of lime trees growing there. The cave was always strewn with old magazines and newspapers. In one corner lay a frying pan I had stolen from my mother's kitchen, and in another corner a candle burned and made hissing noises. It was really a filthy little cave after you had been there a little while, and very cold, for water dripped from the sides. And there I met Tanya. But it was not Tanya I loved. It was the way she wore a black shawl in the picture. And it wasn't the shawl either. One was incomplete without the other, and only Tanya could wear it that way. Always when I met her I found myself crawling through the opening of the cave to the center of the cave and pulling the shawl away as Tanya's long hair fell loosely about her, and then I would hold the shawl to my face and bury my lips in it, admiring its black brilliance, and thanking Tanya over and over for having worn it again for me. And Tanya would always answer, "But it's nothing, you silly. I do it gladly. You're so silly." And I would say "I love you, Tanya."

There was Marie. Oh Marie! Oh you Marie! You with your exquisite laughter and deep perfume! I loved her teeth and mouth and the scent of her flesh. We used to meet in a dark room whose walls were covered by cobwebbed books. There was a leather chair near the fireplace, and it must have been a very great house, a castle or a mansion in France, because across the room, big and solid, stood the desk of Emile Zola as I had seen it in a book. I would be sitting there reading the last pages of Nana, that passage about the death of Nana, and Marie would rise like a mist from those pages and stand before me naked, laughing and laughing with a beautiful mouth and an intoxicating scent until I had to put the book down, and she walked before me and laid her hands on the book too, and shook her head with a deep smile, so that I could feel her warmth coursing like electricity through my fingers.

"Who are you?"

"I am Nana."

"Really Nana?"

"Really."

"The girl who died here?"

"I am not dead. I belong to you."

And I would take her in my arms.

There was Ruby. She was an erratic woman, so unlike the others, and so much older too. I always came upon her as she ran across a dry hot plain beyond the Funeral Range in Death Valley, California. That was because I had been there once in the spring, and I never forgot the beauty of that vast plain, and there it was I met the erratic Ruby so often afterward, a woman of thirty-five, running naked across the sand, and I chasing after her and finally catching her beside a pool of blue water which always gave off a red vapor the moment I dragged her into the sand and sank my mouth against her throat, which was so warm and not so lovely, because Ruby was growing old and cords protruded slightly, but I was mad about her throat, and I loved the touch of her cords rising and falling as she panted where I had caught her and brought her to the earth.

And Jean! How I loved Jean's hair! It was as golden as straw, and always I saw her drying the long strands under a banana tree that grew on a knoll among the Palos Verdes Hills. I would be watching her as she combed out the deep strands. Asleep at her feet coiled a snake like the snake under the feet of the Virgin Mary. I always approached Jean on tiptoe, so as not to disturb the snake, who sighed gratefully when my feet sank into him, giving me such an exquisite pleasure everywhere, lighting up the surprised eyes of Jean, and then my hands slipped gently and cautiously into the eerie warmth of the golden hair, and Jean would laugh and tell me she knew it was going to happen this way, and like a falling veil she would droop into my arms.

But what of Nina? Why did I love that girl? And why was she crippled? And what was it within my heart that made me love her so madly simply because she was so hopelessly maimed? Yet it was all so, and my poor Nina was crippled. Not in the picture, oh she wasn't crippled there, only when I met her, one foot smaller than the other, one foot like that of a doll, the other a proper shape. We met in the Catholic church of my boyhood, St Thomas's in Wilmington, where I, dressed in the robes of a priest, stood with a scepter at the high altar. All around toe on their knees were the sinners, weeping after I had castigated them for their sins, and not one of them had the courage to look upon me because my eyes shone with such mad holiness, such a detestation of sin. Then from the back of the church came this girl, this cripple, smiling knowing she was going to break me from my holy throne and force me to sin with her before the others, so that they could mock me and laugh at me, the holy one, the hypocrite before all the world. Limping she came, disrobing at every painful step, her wet lips a smile of approaching triumph, and I with the voice of a falling king, shouting to her to go away, that she was a devil who bewitched me and made me helpless. But she came forward irresistibly, the crowd horror-stricken, and she put her arms around my knees and hugged me to her, hiding that crippled little foot, until I could endure it no longer, and with a shout I fell upon her and joyfully admitted my weakness while around me rose the rumble of a mob which gradually faded into a bleak oblivion.

And so it was. So it was that one by one I picked them up, remembered them, kissed them good-bye, and tore them to pieces. Some were reluctant to be destroyed, calling in pitiful voices from the misty depths of those vast places where we loved in weird half-dreams, the echoes of their pleas lost in the shadowed darkness of that which was Arturo Bandini as he sat comfortably in a cool bathtub and enjoyed the departure of things which once were, yet never were, really.

But there was one in particular which I was loath to destroy. She alone caused me to hesitate. She it was whom I had named the Little Girl. She it seemed was always that woman of a certain murder case in San Diego; she had killed her husband with a knife and laughingly admitted the crime to the police. I used to meet her in the rough squalor of early Los Angeles before the days of the Gold Rush. She was very cynical for a little girl, and very cruel. The picture I had cut from the detective magazine left nothing to imagine. Yet she wasn't a little girl at all. I merely called her that. She was a woman who hated the sight of me, the touch of me, yet found me irresistible, cursing me, yet loving me fabulously. And I would see her in a dark mud-thatched hut with the windows darkened, the heat of the town driving all the natives to sleep so that not a soul stirred in the streets of that early day of Los Angeles, and lying on a cot she would be, panting and cursing me as my feet sounded upon the deserted street and finally at her door. The knife in her hand would amuse me and make me smile, and so would her hideous screams.