The Girl on the Via Flaminia Read online

  “The bartender said it was pre-liberation cognac,” Robert said.

  “I believe you. It is very good cognac. But I don’t want any.”

  “Okay.”

  He drank the cognac he had poured for her.

  They were still firing their guns, and the bells rang.

  He thought of the bell ringer, some priest, cold in the church tower, swinging the great ropes. Now, up there, he assumed, the bell ringer was in the tower, the starlight would be visible beyond the shape of the dark belfry and the hanging swinging bells, and how the sound must be deafening. He would be an old man, like the priests in the church of the Capuchins, the caretakers of the sacred skeletons whose bones they made into altars, and he wore, not sandals probably, but thick army boots, as he had seen some of the priests wear, and a rope was tied around his waist, and his hands would be calloused by the ropes. That priest would make that music, and the soldiers made their own. But the priest wouldn’t be drunk. He would be diligently devout. He went toward the bed and sat down beside her.

  “It’s midnight,” he said. “Usually we kiss at midnight on New Year’s in America.”

  He leaned down towards her.

  “No,” the girl said.

  “Why not?”

  “I’m tired,” Lisa said.

  They were all out at parties, he thought, at home; parties at somebody’s house or parties at some restaurant, and the shops in Times Square had boarded up all their windows. They were waiting for midnight in his own country, and the crowds were beginning to gather under the electric teletype in the square, moving sluggishly and thickly from the square to the circle, with horns, blowing the horns, pushing, endangering the plate glass, the tin horns blowing and the auto horns blowing, and passing under the marquees of the theaters and in front of the movie houses where, because of the cold, the cashiers in the cages wore their fur coats and the barkers outside the movie houses wore their operatic capes. Then the hats, the liquor, the waiting for the clock to strike; and how, when it did and you were young, you went to the window and blew on a tin horn or rattled a cowbell out into the frosty darkness, and shouted, and when you were older you kissed and shouted. The very last party he could remember having been at on a New Year’s Eve he had been very drunk. But here, he wasn’t even drunk, there were no paper hats, there were no tin horns, and the girl he had was too tired to kiss him.

  “You were out pretty late,” Robert said. “Who was the friend? The one who talked so much?”

  “A friend.”

  “Does your friend have a mustache?”

  “What?” she said.

  “Maybe your friend sings arias through his mustache,” Robert said.

  “Why should it matter?”

  “It doesn’t,” he said, sitting there. He thought suddenly of something that had happened: they were coming down the Corso, at night, in a weapons carrier, and an MP blew a whistle, and they stopped the weapons carrier, and the MP hoisted a guy up into the truck. He’d been shot. He’d been shot in the foot. It had happened in the dark under the arcade. There had been a girl with the soldier, and then somebody in the darkness of the arcade had shot him. The foot bled into the floor of the weapons carrier. The guy’s boot was full of blood.

  “No, it doesn’t matter,” Robert said. “Except you know how the Americans are.”

  “No,” she said. “How are the Americans?”

  “Suspicious,” he said.

  “Really?”

  “And jealous.”

  “What a surprise,” she said. “I did not think the Americans were capable of jealousy.”

  “They’re capable. Where were you?”

  “It does not matter.”

  “If you say that again,” he said, “I’ll—”

  “Yes?”

  “Break your neck.”

  “It does not matter,” she said.

  “Goddamit!”

  “Are you angry?” she said.

  “No!”

  “I thought you were angry,” she said. “But I forgot. The Americans are above anger. Only Antonio is stupid enough to get angry.”

  He took her arms, knowing he was hurting her.

  The guns fired sporadically in the distance. They were still celebrating.

  “Are you trying to get me to blow my cork?” he said.

  “Che dici?”

  “Blow my cork,” he said. “Steam me up!”

  “I?” she said. “Impossible.”

  “Yes, you!”

  “But I’m just a girl,” she said. “An Italian girl you met in a war. An adventure. How can I possibly make you angry?”

  “Go ahead,” he said. “Talk.”

  “If I annoy you, I’ll stop.”

  “Don’t stop,” he said. “It’ll kill you if you stopped now. Go on. You were being an adventure.”

  “Well, it will amuse her.”

  “Amuse who?”

  “Some American girl,” she said. “Your fiancée. The one you pretend not to have. It will amuse her when you are in bed together. Your story about the Lisa you met in Rome.”

  “Yes,” he said. “She’ll love it.”

  “It will be very funny,” she said. “How once in Rome during the war you lived with an Italian girl because she was . . . unlucky.”

  “Are you finished?” Robert said.

  “Yes. I will make a very funny story, no? You see? Why should it matter what I do or where I go?”

  “Except it happens to,” he said.

  “No. It does not matter. It is not important.”

  He could imagine them firing the guns. They were out in the dark, behind the stadium probably where they held the track events in the summertime, drunk, firing the forty-fives they had picked up or the Berettas they had bought. They might even send up some flares, if somebody had a flare gun.

  “It’s important all right,” he said. “Don’t you worry about it being important.”

  “Yes?”

  “Because I like you.” Not love you; he noticed that he was careful. She turned away, almost smiling.

  “Should I be flattered? Yes. I am flattered.”

  “I think I will break your neck,” he said. He thought of them out in the dark, drunk, and firing their guns. Maybe that was how he, too, should have celebrated New Year’s. He had a gun, too. They all had guns.

  “You know,” she said, “perhaps this winter it will snow, too. Just for the Americans. I think it may now just for them.”

  She looked hopefully at him.

  He took his hands from her shoulders.

  “All right,” he said. “Tell me what you want. Obviously you want something.”

  “I? Nothing.” She looked faintly astonished. “I have everything, haven’t I? You heard Antonio. How lucky I am! I am going to America. They won’t escape but I will.” She turned away again, painfully. “Che buona fortuna!”

  He stood up. She lay there, curled up on the red bedspread, under the raincoat. It was again cold enough in the room for his breath to steam. It was some New Year’s.

  “Do you like me at all?” he asked.

  “Così così . . .”

  “Tell me the truth.”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Yes.”

  Her voice changed. She was not pretending anything now. Her mouth was close to the cold pillow.

  “I think I hate you.”

  He could feel himself drain. Anger, annoyance, desire for her, went away. There was an emptiness, an astonished sort of emptiness. That, and a faintly sick feeling. It was as though he had run into a wall. Or was in a room, suddenly, without doors. That, and hearing the guns, thinking at least out there he would have been drunk and it would at least feel like a kind of celebration.

  “But why?” he said. There seemed so little reason for it. There really seemed so little reason for it. “I didn’t think I was that bad . . .”

  “It was not possible,” she said.

  Possible? What had possibilities to do with it
? He looked into his own emptiness.

  “Then why did you start? Why did you tell Nina yes? Why did you have me come here?” Through the darkness, carrying the musette bag, expecting something. Not so long ago.

  “Because,” she said, “I thought nothing was important any more. Because I thought everybody had a soldier. The Americans were rich, they have so much. I thought why not? Take one too. It’s so simple!”

  “Wasn’t it simple?” he asked.

  “No!”

  “But it is simple,” he said. The emptiness was simple, too. Not feeling at all was simple. Guns and drunkenness were simple. “I was lonely,” he said, “you were hungry. What could be simpler? I didn’t ask you to love me.”

  “No,” she said. “Just to go to bed with you.”

  “Yes.”

  “How simple!”

  “Yes,” he said stubbornly, because it was so, because it seemed so to him. She did not know how simple that really was. The other things were complex. The being lost, the nights in a long room where somebody shouted in his sleep, or somebody cried, or somebody coughed, that was complex. Thinking was complex. Thinking what a gun was doing in your hand. Why you went on and on when there was no apparent and true reason why you should go on and on. Why at no point you resisted. Why you let it all happen. “I thought it was simple,” he said.

  “You should have found someone who thought so, too,” she said. “You were kind enough, even generous—you brought the food, and I had real coffee, just as we had arranged. And you asked so little . . .”

  “I wanted a girl,” he said.

  “And it was not important how,” she said. “Or what she felt. So little—that she should be warm, that she should be here when you wanted her . . .”

  “Is that wrong?”

  “No,” she said. “No. Why should it be wrong if you don’t think it’s wrong?”

  “You needed the food.”

  “The food! Yes. Didn’t I? I did not need anything but the food!”

  “I don’t care about the other things,” he said, slowly. It was a time to be absolutely truthful. “I don’t think I care anymore about the other things.” He would try. He had never really explained it. The way things had changed. But he would try. Here, in this room, cold enough to make his breath steam. And while a celebration of which he was no part was going on. “I wanted a girl,” he said. “I don’t think I wanted love. I wanted a girl because I didn’t like to have to stand under the trees on the Via Veneto or to go under the bridges. I wanted to get away from the Army. I wanted to have a house I could come to, and a girl there, mine. I wanted it as simple as that, as simple as it could possibly be. And I thought I would just be exchanging something somebody needed for something I needed. Something somebody wanted for something I wanted.”

  “The black market,” she said.

  “Yes,” he said, “the black market, if you want to call it that. Everything’s in the black market now. And I didn’t want money for what I had. But you don’t want it simple like that, do you? That’s wrong. That’s ugly. You have to complicate it with love. Oh, you’ll climb up in the hayloft all right, but you have to be in love before you climb up the ladder, don’t you?”

  “Oh,” she said, “you are so delicate. You understand a woman so well!”

  “I’m a dumb American,” Robert said. “You said that before.”

  “From such a great country! With such sympathy for human unhappiness!”

  “We do all right,” he said.

  “Yes,” she said, “and you will make Europe so grateful to you!”

  “I’m not interested in Europe.”

  “What are you interested in?”

  “Me.”

  “Bravo!” she said. “How honest!”

  “Yes,” he said. “And that’s a hell of a lot more than I can say for Europe.” He went to the table, now that it was all said, and filled the small glass with cognac, and drank it. The firing had almost died away. Tomorrow, now that it was all said, he could go out with them again, under the bridges, under the trees. He put the glass down. “Well, it was a lovely New Year’s.” She still lay there, huddled up, not looking at him. He thought of how pretty she had looked the first time he came to the house. He thought regretfully she was still that pretty. Her hair lay blonde and soft on the pillow. “I guess this finishes it,” he said. “You figure out some excuse to tell the Pulcinis tomorrow. Tell them my outfit left town. We moved up north.” He looked at her. He thought: shall I ask her? No, he thought: she’ll say no. “Would it be all right,” he said, “if I kissed you Happy New Year’s anyway?”

  She turned her face deeper into the pillow.

  He went and stood beside the bed. “I ought to kiss somebody a Happy New Year’s.”

  He bent down and kissed the visible corner of her mouth. Her face was very cold. He looked at her for a moment and then went out of the room.

  8.

  Once, near Portofino, when she was seventeen, there had been a water snake under the rock near the edge of the shore. Portofino was very white in the sunlight and very beautiful. It was one of the summers she remembered as a very happy summer. It was just before the war. Lying on the bed now, in the silent room, with the raincoat over her, she thought of the water snake curled under the rock. The snake in the water was a dark green, and the water lifted him, and he floated, dark and green and sinuous. On the blue bay two young men were sculling. Their boat looked so fragile. Their naked shoulders glistened. She watched again in the silence their swift and skillful passage across the soundless water. Then she remembered the stick she had taken, and how with the stick she had thrust and poked at the water snake. The rock was possibly his home. The water his true element. And down from the sunlight came her intrusive stick, disturbing the water and the snake, and driving him from his safety, from the place he had chosen there under the rock, and lying there, not being able to cry, remembering Portofino, how white it was, how beautiful, and how long ago, she regretted and almost pitied the snake she had driven out so long ago in that summer she remembered as being one of the few happy ones.

  So it was over, she thought; and now? She had gone to the French that first morning, foolishly, thinking the French were different. There was no difference. She lay, covered by the raincoat, and the small dull faintly anguished thoughts went on in her head. She remembered a picture of herself, in a white dress; it was the summer she was engaged, but then she had not really liked the boy. Now, infinitely distant, there was the portrait, the white dress, the eyes of somebody who had been young. Perhaps she would be able to go back to Genoa; perhaps, in the morning, when she awoke, the war would be over, and then she could go back to Genoa, and see Portofino again, and everything would be in the past: a dream one had had during a very bad time, and in that dream she had done certain things, and waking she would forget them.

  She thought: we do finally what we thought we were incapable of doing, and it is less than we thought the doing would be, and at the same time more. And nobody listens, nobody cares, one is alone. There are no drums, no overture, no curtain rising. The audience is cold, or asleep. And yet—could she have? Could she have gone on? No, it was impossible to have gone on. It was only possible if there was love. He was right in saying that love would have made everything excusable. But there was no love. He did not want love. He wanted something else, something that had only the appearance of love, and it was better that it had ended, and tomorrow she would leave the house, and that would be the end. She should not have returned that morning when she went to the Frenchman’s hotel. It did not matter that there had been no place for her to go; she would have found a place. Nina was wrong: it was not the same for everyone. For everyone it was different. She could not do it. And her thoughts went on: Portofino, the white dress. Roberto sitting drinking vermouth, tomorrow it would be all over, small, faintly anguished, fading into each other.

  Antonio stood in the doorway. “Signora,” he said. “Yes?”

  He hesitat
ed. “Are you ill?” He did not try to come into the room. “It is so cold,” Antonio said. She stood up, brushing her hair back with the flat of her hand. He watched her take a comb from her purse.

  “I wanted to apologize . . .” he said, hesitatingly. Your husband is an American . . .”

  “He was not insulted . . .”

  His face darkened. “They are not all bad—but it’s hard for me to distinguish. I am always angry. Besides,” he said, “our women . . .” He looked contemptuous. “They are worse than the soldiers. The soldiers have some excuse.”

  She sat in the front of the small dressing table, brushing her hair. Her face turned briefly to look at him. She did not say anything.

  “At least,” the boy said, “it is possible to respect you. You have not soiled yourself.”

  The comb paused.

  “One should respect one’s countrywomen. Not to feel they are degrading one . . . isn’t that true, signora?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “I wanted to tell you this,” Antonio said. “Because you are one of the good ones. You make me feel better.”

  She looked at him. He was holding something in his hand.

  “What is that?”

  He glanced down. The Bavarian officer’s bullet lay in the palm of his hand. The light touched its flattened copper.

  “My souvenir,” he said. “A British one.” And as she looked questioningly at him: “A Bavarian surgeon took it out of me in Tripoli. On Christmas Eve. It’s all I have of my war.”

  He balanced the ugly pellet on his palm, and she watched, fascinated. “We all have our souvenirs,” she said, turning back to the mirror, brushing her hair. But he did not go.

  “I was wrong,” the boy said, standing there in the doorway. “My mother thinks anyone who escapes is lucky—yes. And she’s right. Go away, signora—do what they tell you. Go to America . . . at least, there one can stop one’s memories. And ask your husband to excuse me.”

  “There is nothing to excuse,” she said.

  “As for me, who knows?” Antonio said. He smiled again, unpleasantly, in spite of his apologies. “Perhaps I’ll turn thief. Stealing is fashionable, too—and with a gun, well, one is a little more equal. One can—yes, steal tires. That’s a soldier’s profession now—stealing tires and changing their treads. Perhaps I’ll steal tires. Or who knows? Go north . . . rediscover my courage . . . and in the hills die with the look of a patriot.” He paused: “Well, buonanotte, signora.”