Two Weeks in Another Town (24 page)

“You’re not going to be angry with me now, are you?”

“No, of course not.”

“Do you know why I really have asked all these questions?” Veronica said, her voice still very low.

“Why?”

“Because if I know more about you,” she said, soberly, “you will fade less slowly when you are gone. You will be more real to me. It will take much longer before it all seems like a dream to me, this time we have…Is that a bad reason?”

“No, darling,” Jack said gently. “It’s a very good reason.”

“I wouldn’t be angry if you asked
me
questions,” she said. “I’d be very happy. I’d like the dream to last longer for you, too…Any questions you want.”

Veronica seemed to be waiting; waiting, he felt, to judge the quality of his feeling for her by the kind of questions he would ask. He felt a twinge of guilt because until now he had taken her so matter-of-factly, so much in the present, without any real desire to know more about her than she had revealed so far, casually, with no probing on his part. To know, he felt, is to be entangled. Subconsciously Veronica understood this, too, he was sure, and was insisting on being known, in a blind, female need for entanglement.

“At lunch the other day,” he said, “I wanted to ask you a question.”

“Yes?”

“You said that when you were two years old, you were in San Sebastián, in Spain…”

“Oh, that.” Her voice was flat, disappointed. Obviously, this was not the kind of question she had hoped for.

“I figured out that was during the Spanish Civil War,” Jack said.

“It was.” Now she was impatient, uninterested.

“What the hell were you doing in Spain during the Civil War?”

“My father was a career soldier,” she said carelessly.

“In the Spanish Army?” Jack asked, confused.

Veronica laughed. “Didn’t they have newspapers in America in 1937?” she said. “In the Italian Army. My father was non-intervening on the side of Franco. Don’t you remember
any
of that?”

“Of course I do,” Jack said. “Only it never occurred to me that they made a family affair out of things like that.”

“My father was very domestic,” Veronica said. “He loved his family. And he was a colonel, so he had us delivered to him in Spain.”

“What was it like? Do you remember?”

“It’s a funny thing,” Veronica said. “All the Americans I meet, when I tell them my father fought in Spain for Franco, get enormously interested. I thought people had forgotten all about that So many people have been killed since then…”

“It was a very interesting war for Americans,” Jack said drily. “We’re still suffering from it, if you want to know the truth.”

“That’s funny,” she said. “We’re not.”

“Maybe if you fight a war yourself you get over it faster,” Jack said. “Anyway, what was it like?”

Veronica shrugged. “I don’t remember much,” she said. “I remember the beach. It was a nice beach for children. There’s an island out in the middle of the bay that I sailed to. And the melons. The melons were delicious. Often now, when I eat a melon in a restaurant, I suddenly feel like a little girl in Spain again.”

She remembers melons from that war, Jack thought, tasting his own bitter memories from that time, remembering the boys who had gone to school with him who had been killed in those years. Perhaps, he thought, killed by Veronica’s father, that domestic man.

“Where is your father now?” he asked.

“Dead,” she said flatly.

One for our side, Jack thought, without charity. Somehow, the idea of the colonel, cozily fighting his war out of the seaside villa at San Sebastián
(did he dandle you on his knee between firing parties?)
canceled the impulse toward pity that Jack usually felt at the thought of all the dead who had fallen, on all sides, in the wars of his time. “Was he killed in Spain?” he asked.

“No,” Veronica said. “He was wounded there, but not too badly. He was wounded in Ethiopia, too. He was always up in front. He was very brave, everybody has told me. Actually, he was one of the first men in the Italian Army to be killed in World War Two. We were in Tripoli with him. His general had just come back from an interview with Mussolini, and Mussolini had sworn to the general that Italy would not go into the war. This was the summer when France was falling. My mother gave a garden party to celebrate because we weren’t going to have a war. I was dressed in a pink dress and white gloves and I helped pass little cakes with the drinks. Then, of course, we were in it, and one week later my father was dead. He was in an unarmed plane inspecting the positions facing the British, and he was shot down.”

Three wars, Jack thought cynically, three hits. He was obviously in the wrong line of business, Veronica’s father. Too many garden parties.

“My father hated Mussolini,” Veronica said. “Of course, he never told me or my sister. We were too young. But he kept a diary and I’ve read it since then…”

The disease of colonels, Jack thought. The running diary.

“The reason his general went to Mussolini at that time,” Veronica said, “was to tell him that there wasn’t enough equipment or enough men in North Africa to hold off the British. He and my father worked out a long report together. It’s all in my father’s diary. That’s the way it always was in the Italian Army,” she said bitterly. “There wasn’t enough equipment so they used up men instead and they were killed. Not like your army.”

“Oh,” Jack said, “there were several men killed in our army, too.”

“You know what I mean,” Veronica said. “In Italy it was all graft and propaganda—pretty uniforms, parades, big speeches—Mussolini roaring and lying and making faces. And then after that, ammunition that didn’t fit the guns, or tanks without gasoline, or officers who were out dancing when they should’ve been learning how to read a map. The English killed my brother, too, in Africa. He was eighteen years old. He was at the garden party my mother gave in Tripoli, too, to celebrate because Mussolini had told my father’s commanding officer that there wasn’t going to be a war.” Veronica took a cigarette out of her bag and lit it. Jack looked over at the scratch of the match and saw that the flame was wavering, that her hand was trembling, belying the flat, even, unemotional tone of Veronica’s voice. “I tell you,” she said, “one day I will have to live somewhere else than Italy.”

It was late when they drove up in front of Veronica’s hotel, and the little square on which the hotel was located was deserted. The hotel was a small one. The front door was open and the narrow lobby was brilliantly lit. When Jack switched off the car headlights in front of the hotel he saw the night porter sitting in a wooden armchair, his back to the street, staring at himself in a huge mirror that ran along the back wall of the lobby. The night porter was young and very good-looking and it must have taken him a half-hour to comb his hair into such shining black perfection. Thoughtfully admiring himself, grateful for the brilliance and luxuriance of his hair, aesthetically pleased by the smooth olive forehead, the intelligent dark eyes, the rich warm shape of the mouth, the strong jaws, the sculptured, powerful Roman throat, the porter let the hours of the night pass without boredom or annoyance, happy in the bright, unchanging reflection of himself in the polished, rewarding mirror. There were no German priests on view at the moment.

“Look at that,” Veronica said harshly. “Where else in the world would you ever see anything like it? And he won’t be the least embarrassed when I come in and find him like that. He’ll give me the key as though he was giving me two dozen roses and before I’m halfway up the stairs to the first floor he’ll be back there in that chair again.”

Jack chuckled. “Actually,” he said, “it’s one of the most appealing sights I’ve seen in Rome.”

“It doesn’t appeal to me,” Veronica said. She started to open the door to get out. Jack leaned over and held her. He put his arm around her and kissed her. For a moment she was tense, unwilling, then sank into him, held his face between her hands, kissed him hungrily.

“What I’d like to do,” he said, “is go in with you.”

She shook her head. “He won’t let you.”

“I’ll bribe him.”

“He’d lose his job. The priests run around the corridors like mice.”

“All right then,” Jack said. “Come back to
my
hotel.”

“I bet Robert is waiting there this minute,” she said. “No.”

“I have a brilliant idea,” Jack said, “I’ll rent a room for tonight. Right now.”

Veronica thought for a moment. Then she smiled. “American know-how,” she said. “No wonder you won the war. Come on.”

They got out of the car and went into the lobby. Slowly, turning away reluctantly from the mirror, the porter stood up and bowed to them, saying,
“Buona sera, signorina,”
and walked lightly, but with dignity, behind the desk to take her key off its hook.

“Tell him I want a nice big room with bath,” Jack said.

In Italian, Veronica made the request. The porter looked pained, desperate. He leaned over the plan of the hotel that was tacked on a board, studied it as though it were a map indicating the position of buried treasure. He shook his head. The treasure had been removed by others. In Italian, his voice deep with mourning, he spoke to Veronica.

“It’s no use,” she said. “The house is all filled up. He will be delighted to reserve a room for tomorrow…”

“That’s a big help,” Jack said sourly. “You’re moving into your friend’s apartment tomorrow, aren’t you?”

“Yes.” Veronica was smiling at his frustration, enjoying it, taking it as a compliment to herself.

“Never mind,” Jack said to the porter. “Never mind anything.”

“Scusi, signore.”
A look of operatic pain wavered across the porter’s handsome dark face at the realization that he was the obstacle in Rome that night to international love.
“Desolato.”

“I’m
desolato,
too,” Jack said. “You have no idea how
desolato
I am.” He turned to Veronica. “When do I see you again?”

“I’ll telephone you tomorrow morning,” she said, “when I move into the apartment.”

“I won’t be in in the morning. Let’s meet for lunch.”

Veronica nodded.

“The same restaurant,” Jack said. “Ernesto’s. I’m getting very fond of that restaurant. One fifteen.”

“Good,” she said. She squeezed his hand, with the porter watching interestedly. “I’m sorry about tonight. I warned you, though, didn’t I?”

“You warned me.”

She chuckled. “You have only yourself to blame,” she said. “You had a fair offer on the beach.”

“Go to bed,” Jack said. Despite the porter, he kissed her cheek. He and the porter watched her start to climb the staircase, swinging just a little too much, her high heels tapping their tantalizing, promising tattoo on the marble steps. Jack glanced at the porter. The man’s face shone with simple, eloquent, childlike lust as he watched Veronica’s legs disappear up the staircase.

“Good night, friend,” Jack said.

“Buona notte, signore,”
the man said, sighing.

By the time Jack was in the car and turning on the headlights, the porter was back in his wooden armchair in front of the lobby mirror, staring once more, with gratitude and admiration, at his glorious reflection.

The priests have won again, Jack thought, as he started the motor and swung the car roughly in the direction of his hotel. What do you expect in Rome?

I
AM IN A BRIGHTLY
lit room and there is a great deed of smoke. There will be another room, not so brightly lit, also with a great deal of smoke, but that will be later on and more dangerous. Now it is only the smoke of many cigarettes, of five men sitting around a table in rumpled uniforms, playing cards. The room is hot, because the blackout blinds are drawn and the windows closed, and we are playing poker. I lose. Jacks back to back, but I lose. Table stakes. You can only bet what you have in front of you. The man on my right has three tens and he sweeps in the pound notes with a wide, white-toothed grin. I look around at the other four men and I suddenly realize that they are all dead. The winner dead on the beach a few weeks later, the others surviving that, but equally dead in their civilian beds, cancer, suicide, alcoholism. The pound notes rustle, the one-armed elevator boy brings in another bottle of black-market Scotch, the money changes hands. At the moment, I know I will lose a hundred and twenty pounds before the game is over and all London will stink from the smoke of the fires the German planes will start later that night. Now it is dark again and I am approaching a wooden shack at the end of an alley of pine trees. There is the smell of wet loam, spilled whisky, something medicinal. Through cracks in the shack’s clapboarding, light slants out into the night. I go down steps. I watch. Two huge bald men in stained white aprons are working over a table, talking jovially. Then I see what they are working on. It is the body of a man, very white, and they are cutting it into rough sections. The men in aprons under the glaring light pay no attention to me. I want to run away from there but I cannot. The reason I cannot run is because it is myself on the table under the knives. I want to scream but no sound comes forth. I am assailed by sorrow, and then, suddenly, relieved, almost light-hearted. It is over, I think, with a flicker of joy. I have managed it. I have finished. The job is done. Nothing more can happen to me. There is nothing more to be afraid of. The funeral bells are ringing. There is a refreshing wetness on my face
…

The bells became one bell, the clapboard shack became a hotel room, the dew on his face became blood. He awoke. The telephone was ringing by the side of his bed. In the darkness he fumbled for the lamp switch. When he found it and pressed it and the light came on, he looked automatically at the traveling clock on the dresser and saw that it was nearly half past three. He put his hand to his face. His nose was bleeding. He pushed his handkerchief against it. He picked up the phone, with the usual little thrill of fear, the uneasy premonition of bad news that the ringing of a bell at that hour inevitably brings with it.

It was Paris calling and in a moment he heard his wife’s voice, clear, awake, calm. Even as he said hello he could tell from her tone that there wasn’t going to be any bad news and he immediately began to resent being awakened by her.