Chapter 01

HE LIMPED HURRIEDLY ALONG VIA ROMA, BUMPING INTO THE swarms coming the other way. He kept saying scusate because he wanted to make amends for the way the other doughfeet yelled at the Neapolitans and called them paesan. Meanwhile his chin kept peeling back over his shoulder, for he had the feeling that two MP’s were stalking him. In his pocket there was a hospital pass to which he’d forged a name. He had butterflies in his stomach from last night’s Italian gin, and the sun and his sweat weren’t helping things much. The speed with which he was moving hurt the feet inside his boots: it was all too clear why the medics wouldn’t have given him a Naples pass until it was time to send him back to the line. This was why, limping more than a little he’d taken off to Naples every night this week. The nurses couldn’t figure out why his feet healed so slowly.

Naples. The name spelled a certain freedom and relief to him, in opposition to that other idea of being flown up to south of Florence . . . .

He saw two little concrete posts that made a stile into a covered arcade. Inside there was a crowd loitering, almost as big as that pushing along Via Roma. He sighed to be out of the relentless moving on the sidewalk. It seemed cooler in this arcade. He couldn’t see an MP, and there were a lot of bars. He preferred not to sit at one of the tables on the pavement. What he was looking for was some bar as small and tight as a telephone booth. There he could wedge his chest and swallow one vermouth after another. The butterflies would go away, and he could dwell lovingly on what he would do after the sun went down.

To do? the important thing was to forget that tomorrow or the next day his feet would be well, and he’d be waiting for that plane at Capodichino. After that the truck ride toward Florence, with the sound of the guns getting stronger . . . .

Perhaps his trenchfoot was something sent him by Saint Rita of Cascia, to whom his mother used to have special devotion. Saint Rita had been pierced with thorns during her ecstasies. And he, after standing in his wet foxhole for weeks and listening to the artillery go screaming toward Florence, had been pierced with trenchfoot. Perhaps it was some subconscious cowardice that had broken out in his feet. He’d thought for a long time anyhow that he was going to crack, and trenchfoot was a more honorable way of doing it than becoming a psycho. So he smiled down on the CD patch on his left shoulder and thanked Saint Rita that he’d been able to take the cure in Naples.

First he wanted some vermouth. Then some music. At the GI Red Cross he’d picked up two tickets to the San Carlo while working a little sympathy out of Betty, rapid and abstracted behind the information desk. She was thinking about her date with a colonel tonight. She didn’t have much time for him except her hospitality song and dance. But she’d introduced him to music in Oran. So tonight he would hear La Bohème. And after the opera he hoped for that last release. He’d never been a lover in his life, but tonight he’d like to have somebody kiss him, to feel somebody’s disinterested hands going all over his body. He didn’t much care whom the hands belonged to, but he cringed at the idea of paying on Via Roma for such a rite.

In the middle of the arcade he came upon a bar that was nearly empty. On the marble counter were two shining boilers of the coffee machines. He ripped out of his chest pocket a beatup hundred-lira note and bought some chits. His hands were quivering under their Ayrab and Italian silver rings. The fat Neapolitan behind the cashbox didn’t miss this jittering of his fingers.

A double vermouth was set at his elbow by a girl wearing a fur-piece. She was proud of this and kept emphasizing it by stroking it in the August afternoon. She missed being pretty because she was so mouselike. As she served him, she looked at him, but then her eyes darted away. Then he decided he wouldn’t take off his cap, for he was getting bald at twenty-seven.

—My red face, he said, isn’t from drinking, but from those C-rations they feed us.

The look she threw at the fat Neapolitan made it evident that she was as strictly brought up as Neapolitans could be in wartime. Then her eyes went down to the two wrist watches strapped side by side on his left wrist, like twins in bed.

—Tedeschi watches, he said, unstrapping one for her. I figured they couldn’t use them. Stiffs can’t tell time . . . .

Her father slithered around from behind the cash register, came over, and held out his plump hairy hand for the watch. He weighed it, smelled it, tapped it, and listened to its pulse with a flicker of love in his eyes. The deal was on.

—O my back! Sure you don’t want to buy my cigarettes too? But I smoke two packs a day. So I can’t help your black market, except to get rid of a Tedeschi watch or two.

The signorina’s eyes began to sparkle in a pleased way, as though her father had telegraphed her to play up to him. He began to wonder if perhaps she might come to the opera with him and how it would feel to touch her hair. Her breasts pressed the counter as she leaned over to look at the watch her father was appraising. He thought that no GI had touched her—yet.

His elbow gave a jerk and the glass of vermouth splintered on the floor. Its smell arose in the hot air—sweet, dry, and wistful. The signorina looked disdainful but served another glass. From his cash drawer her father counted out four thousand-lira notes in Allied military currency. That left only one Tedeschi watch to be sold. He toyed again with the idea of taking the signorina to the opera, of sliding the Tedeschi watch on her wrist in some darkened box. She had slim hands with nails a little gray under their chipped vermilion paint. He leaned on both his elbows, thrusting his face a little closer to her furpiece. And the second glass of vermouth hit the floor.

The Neapolitan flounced out with a broom and swept up the splinters. The signorina drew another double vermouth setting it quite a length from his elbow. He watched the cold superiority creep over her face as pettishly she stroked her furpiece. She looked at him the way a nun regards the convent cat who has just made a mess in the parlor. He laughed to cover his chagrin, but he didn’t care much for the sound of his laugh. It trailed into a cough, and he started thinking up some more ways to get in touch with the signorina. She was only a foot away from him, but she seemed to be receding into an icy planet. He had the impression that she’d continue to sell him double vermouths till closing time, but that she considered him just some maggot in boots and suntans that had wriggled out of the cracks in the arcade. And with this thought his elbow flinched into a spasm that sent the third glass jingling to the floor.

Out came the broom; a fourth vermouth was poured. Panicky, he lifted it to his lips, noticing that his whole arm vibrated like a drunkard’s who laces a towel round his neck to guide a pick-me-up to his mouth in the morning. He closed his eyes and swallowed three doubles in a row. He waited, leaning his red face in his hands, till he could feel the stuff flickering in his gut with an uneasy flame. The tremors in his muscles gave one final flip and ironed out into a kind of feverish peace. He lifted his glance to look at the signorina, but she’d moved off to wait on some New Zealand soldier at the far end of the bar. Where she’d been standing, he now saw his own face in the mirror behind the tiers of wine bottles.

—Michael Patrick, he said, how even your own mother could have loved you? . . .

For his was a face pretty much like everyone else’s who isn’t anybody in America and less than that in the army. His eyes were raw from a week’s drinking; his cheeks looked burnt from the inside by a fire without point or focus. And his body, slim and lithe, was good enough to draw fire from Jerry and to dish it out in return. His cap was set on his head, not at the jive angle that young parachutists love but strategically, to mask the fact that at twenty-seven he was losing his hair, but fast. He couldn’t bear to look at himself, and he didn’t see how anybody else would want to either. Naturally this signorina had moved away. He was just another GI who’d been on the line and was going back to it. There were thousands in Naples like him, except that they pretended to be surer of themselves. They had the ability, in place of his tired negation, to dramatize themselves for the appropriate minute. They hadn’t yet seen the pointlessness of themselves.

Nevertheless he moved toward the signorina with his empty glass. As long as he could afford to buy her rotten vermouth, she’d have to serve him. He pushed his glass almost imperiously into her folded hands. This brought a smile to her face, her small pointed teeth looking as though they’d nip her own lips, or whomever she kissed.

Michael Patrick had an envy of Italians, seeing a certain kinship between them and the Irish. But the Irish stayed hurt all their lives; the Italians had a bounce-back in them. All his life he’d been silent, waiting and listening for some cue that would set him off on one of those oily harangues that people vent at wakes, twisting their rhetoric and loving it for its own cadence and invention. But after months of being alone with himself a reserve of chatter had been dammed up in him, punctuated with shellfire. He so wanted to talk on and on just for the joy of creating sentences! But he couldn’t talk to himself. Nor did he want what is known as polite conversation. He wondered if in all Naples tonight there was someone to whom he could address himself, in whom he could find the function of an Ear, an Ear that would listen him out of himself till there’d be nothing more to say. Actually he had nothing special to say—a mere loving recitation of facts about himself, the flight of the plane from the evac hospital, his thoughts while circling over Rome. And after that he might start on the old days in Easton, Pennsylvania, on his brother who always did him dirt in their partnership in the seed business. His life was bursting to be released to someone, someone who would really listen to him. Words —they meant so little, but he felt like a bottle with a narrow opening that must be drained drop by drop. He wanted to purge himself by talking. After that he might feel like reaching forward with his mouth opened for a kiss . . . .

She poured him another vermouth. In grabbing for the chit to pay her, he spilled everything he had in his breast pocket over the top of the bar. The two opera tickets lay face up before her.

—If you’d like to come tonight, he said in a rush. If your father would let you. . . . It’s La Bohème.

A quick delight coursed over her face, like all the women in the world when a treat is offered them.

—O my back, Michael Patrick said, raising his voice. You Ginso girls are all alike. You automatically assume that every GI wants to get in your pants. . . . And of course you’re right.

He put out his hand and touched the wolf’s head that bit its own tail and clasped her furpiece. She straightened up, and he saw that she was looking at his fingernails, bitten back so far that they formed mangled halfmoons.

—Listen, he said, trying to force the stridency out of his voice. I’m not pulling any hero stuff on you. But this is my last night in Napoli. Do you know where I’m going tomorrow? I don’t look forward to it. . . . Oh I know you’ve all been bombed here. But this is different. . . . I’ll be out there all alone with the noise, running through hell all by myself. It’s different. You have no idea of how alone it is. And while I was there last month, I dreamed of all the things I’d do if I ever got back to Napoli. . . . And here I am, and nothing’s panning out the way I hoped it would. . . . I feel like a kid reaching for jam on a shelf that’s too high up. And I don’t know what it really is I’m reaching for. Maybe life itself. . . . Do you suppose maybe I’m already dead? What would you do if I touched you? I’m in a dream from which I can’t wake up. . . . Capeesh?

—Now if I was an officer, you’d be nicer to me. I haven’t got any gum or chocolates. Just me and two opera tickets and some cigarettes.

He knew he was hitting too gloomy a strain. So he drank another vermouth and lit a cigarette. He carried his butts in a small plastic case. Inside the transparent cover was the picture of a dark girl he’d found when his company looted a farmhouse near Poggibonsi. He’d never had a steady girl in his life like all the other GI’s.

—No, I don’t know whatall about music, he said, re-establishing himself on her plane. In the States I was too busy for it. Then when I hit Oran, all the cravings of my life caught up with me. Like a disease when you stop treatment in the middle of the cure. One day at the Red Cross in Oran I found out that the music expresses all that I look for and never find. . . . I don’t see very much to our own music. You see, it doesn’t give me that feeling of watching someone die, and you can’t do anything to help.

—O my back! he said excitedly. That’s what I mean. I hate that goddam tune. It reminds me of a fat old bitch jigtiming on the edge of her grave. She’s wearing black lace stockings, she’s tearing off her corset, she’s kicking off her shoes, and the paint is running down her face.

With another vermouth in his hand Michael Patrick walked to the entrance of the bar and looked out into the arcade. The hour was close to sunset and the place was humming like an anthill. A lounging kid screamed, Wanna eat, Joe? Old ladies in black passed on the arms of their daughters. Neapolitan doctors and lawyers swarmed by arm in arm from their offices, gesticulating and complaining. And Michael Patrick saw that sunlight in this arcade had a thick swooning texture like tried gold melting. The vermouth was now well into his brain, his nerves no longer snapped. He began to taste that half-mulled feeling of time deliciously unrolling before him. This reaching out in vain was only felt when he tried to mesh himself with the gears of other people. When he was drinking alone, he was aware of certain untapped potentialities in himself. But when he talked to others, something in him went limp and kept sneering at him that he was alone alone alone and wrapped in some inaccessible womb, that nobody else really cared, or that they were doubled up with secret laughter at the sight of him.

These long-felt nibblings of defeat so enraged him that he spun round in his boots and went back to the bar. The signorina had been watching him where he stood between her and the setting sun. This time he broached her almost in ardor.

—Tell me the difference between your life and mine. Don’t answer, even if you could. . . . It’s a question of time. . . . But how important that is, like looking back over a hundred years after you’ve lived through them. . . . I suppose you’ve got a fidanzato? A little Ginso who’s a P/W in Africa?

She stared curiously into his eyes, having caught the word fidanzato. And she seemed to catch some of the virus of his desperation, for her hands lay quiet where they’d been fretting her furpiece.

—You lucky lucky girl. . . . And that long stretch you’ve got ahead of you. . . . He’ll come home to you when the war’s over. Then you’ll have one of those Neapolitan weddings, which will be the last thing you’ll have to look forward to till a big black hearse pulls you through the streets. . . . O that long long time you’ve got ahead of you! You’ll both go walking arm in arm on summer evenings on Via Chiaia. You’ll stop for ice cream or caffè espresso. And each year there’ll be one more kid by your side. . . . How many rooms will you have? Maybe two, and one big bed with a picture of the Madonna of Pompei over it. She’ll watch you two kissing and fighting at night, and she’ll hear your cries when your kids are born. . . . I can see them now . . . Neapolitan kids I kind of liked even when they stole from me. . . . That’ll be your life. It’s not very much, but it’s life. And it’s more than GI’s think it is. . . .

Michael Patrick had started to flail his arms about just like a Ginso. But his voice hadn’t risen out of that low weariness that always sounded as though he were going to cry. The signorina’s father had come out from behind the cash register, put both hands on his hips, and was watching them with a kind of sly benevolence. Neapolitans take their theater wherever they find it. The old man had a stomach that rippled and creased under a GI belt fastened into a rattail along his shiny pencil-striped pants. Then he made a motion, graceful and insinuating, that his daughter should serve a drink on the house.

—Sometimes, said Michael Patrick, wiping his mouth with an olive-drab handkerchief, I like you Eyeties better than I do my own. There’s something . . . good . . . and gentle in most of you. . . . Where are we going in this war? . . . I don’t know, for all the orientation talks they used to give us. . . . There’s something about Italy and you Eyeties that gets me. There’s dirt and poverty here. . . . But there’s something else that gets me. Seems to survive your battered towns and your bitter men and your degraded women. . . . Why is all this? Why must it be? Something terrible has come into this world. . . .

There was a small Kiwi listening now at the back of the bar. He wore tight shorts and a crazy beret. He leaned against his Marsala and cheered feebly:

In his life Michael Patrick hadn’t said three sentences in a row. Yet here he was like a priest at the time for the monthly collection, ringing all the changes on a theme. The signorina’d been watching him with penetration. He took his vermouth and paced again restlessly to the door of the bar, where the iron shutters were rolled up over his head. His gait was easy now in those same polished boots in which he’d got trenchfoot.

Through a sudden gap in the crowd he saw to the other arch of the arcade, to a flight of stairs down into Via Verdi. Up these bounded three Alpini lieutenants in their shorts and feathered sugarloaf caps. He mused on what it must be like to be an Italian soldier in August, 1944—half of them walking shyly around Naples, unable to have a girl because the Allies were paying twenty hundred lire; half of them in P/W stockades scattered from India to the States. Italian soldiers of a vanquished army, inured to the idea of patria and screaming throngs in Piazza Venezia and their names among the fallen on a bronze plate in the municipio. . . .

And Michael Patrick saw the posters with which the arcade was spattered, urging the Neapolitans to join a hundred political parties, to drive out the king if they wanted white bread for their babies. And there were some hammer-and-sickles daubed in red on the walls. And there was a quotation from a Mussolini speech on the heroism of the people of Naples. The hysterical block letters had been half scratched out; there were mud and liquid streaks blotching the Duce’s ranting words.

Office girls padded by him in their makeshift sandals. They had no stockings to wear. The fuzz and the sandfly bites showed on their dark legs. They crooned together in a misty passion, resting their heads on one another’s shoulders:

Core, o core ’ngrato,

T’aie pigliato ’a vita mia;

Tutto è passato,

E nun ’nce pienze chiù . . .

It was time to move on someplace else. The opera didn’t begin for another hour, yet an infantry itch was in his legs. He hadn’t found the Ear he wanted. The vermouth had heated him to the bubbling slow gold of the broiling sun in the arcade. The tune that the girls had sung invaded him with a yearning stronger than his tentative desire for the smug little signorina with her furpiece, pitiful as an Easter hat on a hungry whore.

Michael Patrick set down his glass with a gesture that he strove to make as calm as possible. He took the girl’s hand. Her father sighed noisily behind the cash register. She didn’t withdraw her hand, though a remoteness which veiled her eyes showed a disappointment that he hadn’t played her game her way.

—Good-by to you and your lousy vermouth. I don’t know what I’ll do with the other opera ticket. . . . And when I say good-by, I mean addio. . . . There’ll be so many others who’ll come in this bar and plank down twenty-four lire for vermouth. . . . But how sick you must be of all of us, the whole goddam crowd with their trousers tucked into their buckled boots, their shoulder patches, their yelling, and their cussing. . . . But anyhow I never rumpled your hair or made a pass at your breasts. . . . I’ll remember you longer than you’ll remember me. . . . Why? Because you’ll be one of the last things I saw in Naples. . . . Next week, a few hundred miles north of here, there’s something waiting for me with my name on it. . . . I feel it.

—Well, said Michael Patrick, avoiding his own smile in the mirror, there are worse places to be buried than in Italy. In the summer the ground is warm and dry, and the GI mattress cover seals in the rot and stink. . . . But . . . I wish someone would tell me why I must go up to Florence when life’s all around me here.

He clapped his hand over his mouth, tasting the dank tobacco on his blunt fingernails. This was the same hand that had sold seed packets to housewives in Easton, Pennsylvania, that had jerked the trigger of his carbine, that had slipped Tedeschi watches off the sprawled hushed bodies of Feldwebels, that had cooked a chicken in an OP at Frosinone. He pushed his cap a little farther back on his head—to where the hair began to fade out—and went off into the arcade.

The sun knifed his eyes, dilated from Vermouth. Blinking, he hated the fierce Neapolitan sun. Until he hit the light, he’d been at just the right stage, but he knew how margins are: you exceed them because you’re always reaching for a horizon.

Pigeons were scooping down through the domed skylight of the arcade, scudding mockingly through the grates where the glass used to be, dropping their white excretions on the stone parquet. They had a meditative way of calling one another that carried like a ground bass under the squeaking hurrying human beings below them.

The vermouth he’d drunk was pressing on his abdomen, so he nosed out a dark slit opening off the arcade into a garden with a fountain. It was cool in this court within a court. And since no housewives were screaming to one another across the balconies, Michael Patrick stood on the rim of the fountain, unbuttoned his trousers, and drilled the dead water in the pool.

—Mamma mia! a voice cried behind his shoulder. Ecco le porcherie pubbliche che fanno gli Alleati!

Hastily he righted his fly and tottered back off the fountain. A woman in a soiled house dress was scolding at him from a balcony. She had a baby by the hand and a smile on her big face as though the whole world was among the category of her children. Her child wrapped its little legs around the gratings and waved at Michael Patrick, whose face got redder than ever.

Then with another wave the two whisked behind the long shutter of the balcony door.

He’d have liked to call them back to talk to him for a little while, yet he was ashamed that they’d surprised him going about his business. Something in the woman’s face had been so innocent of meanness, something easy and strong in the sloppy braid of her hair about her temples. She reminded him of all the good mothers he’d ever known, who go about their childbearing and cooking and slavery with a comic abstraction and a delight in what they are doing. He knew that she loved her child. And something told him that at the very moment of her railing, she’d loved himself too. But now she’d gone back into her house. Probably on the stove she had a kettle of pasta cooking, making supper for her man and the other children. Anyhow she’d gone.

He went back into the blaring arcade, the grilling sun, the crowds. An American parachutist lounged against one of the columns, his knee arched so that a boot was off the pavement. He was chewing gum and wiping away the sweat from under his cap. This parachutist was arriving at a price agreement with a small girl in a tight blue dress. Her body was skinny, on her bolero she wore officers’ insignia, wings, and divisional patches. She also chewed gum. Beside her stood a scabrous urchin presiding as auctioneer, screaming out a sales talk, the specifications of her charms. The parachutist had his eyes half-closed and worked lazily on his gum while he reached out for the girl’s waist. He muttered slowly:

Michael Patrick in passing attempted by some secret glance to show the girl that he understood and apologized. But she spat her gum on his shoes. He blushed and entered a little shop where rows of bottles stood like soldiers at attention. He knew very well what he could buy here—Benevento alcohol at five hundred lire a bottle. It carried labels of Scotch, cognac, and gin, but it was all the same stuff with different flavoring. You weren’t supposed to buy it because it went to your liver or to your eyes. But it did hit you with a hard bright drunkenness, and that was what he was seeking. He came out of the shop with the bottle propped like a ramrod inside his trousers. It couldn’t fall to the ground because his pants were tucked into the tops of his boots.

He went back to the courtyard with the fountain and sat down on the rim. Perhaps the woman who had called out the friendly lambasting might appear again. But most of all he wanted to get the sun out of his eyes. Sprawled along the lip of the fountain, he wondered whether he should pull out his bottle and taste it. He put his head between his thighs. Almost at once a dark heaviness passed over him like a wing, and he fell asleep.

No dreams visited him: he blacked out for an hour or so. Often when he tried to sleep sober, he’d hear the shriek and thud of artillery or screaming and lamenting that seemed to seep up from a rocking earth. But this was a sleep of negation in which he ceased to be for a while. On the line sleep had been the one pleasure he’d had to look forward to.

He twitched up suddenly with the beginnings of a sick headache. The Tedeschi watch told him it was time. His chin had been scraping the blue infantry badge above his heart. He got up and dragged along with a new sort of limp, for the bottle stiffened his right knee. He barged across the arcade with his head down, in that same feeling of apprehension when he’d crossed the New York streets with a hangover, the feeling of a frightful doom suspended over his head.

There was a portico running along the outside of the San Carlo Theater. There was also a traffic island and a green-lighted pro station. The opera crowd reached in a queue out of sight, except for a few who waited for their opera guests outside the arches. Or those who were more than usually lonely waited here to invite or to be invited inside.

Michael Patrick managed to get across from the arcade in blind lunges that carried him to the doors of the San Carlo. At first he thought he’d give away his extra ticket to somebody in the waiting line, but instead he ran up the stairway and shoved his ticket at one of the Neapolitans. They wore dirty powdered wigs, brocade crimson coats, knee breeches and stained white stockings. As his ticket was torn in half, he laughed and looked down at the splayed pumps of the ticket taker.

—Trade ya my boots, he said a little thickly, and watched the bowing flunky bounce back from the impact of his own vermouthy breath.

Michael Patrick climbed to his box in the sixth tier at the right-hand corner of the proscenium arch. There was no one else in this palco. The box door was unlocked by yet another character in eighteenth-century costume. Michael Patrick dug out a tip of one hundred lire and settled himself in a high-backed poltrona by the railing of his box. He could look straight down into the orchestra pit, where sweating gossiping men and women were tuning up or chaffing their friends who had dropped in casually on them in the pit. The San Carlo orchestra pit was as friendly and communal as a bomb shelter. Over the burr of the oboe and the running scales of the strings, the players and their guests chattered and fanned themselves with the evening newspaper.

Looking again with relief to see that there wasn’t anybody else besides himself in the box, Michael Patrick loosened his belt and extracted the bottle of cognac from his trouser leg. As he took his first swig, all the lights in the theater blinked out. Red glows appeared over the exits. The flutter and movement in the house abated, giving way to a noisy shushing by the audience. Only the orchestra in their cellar gave off a nimbus of phosphorescence; the footlights stained the velvet curtain as rich and dark as blood. Michael Patrick gasped with delight and leaned far out over the barrier of his box.

A tired old man, a turkey wearing a frock coat, came into the orchestra pit from under the stage. He groped his way among the crowded music desks until his grizzled skull jutted over the podium and the wall of the pit. A hand reached out of the prompter’s box and diddled with a mirror. For a while the old Neapolitan talked to the orchestra, dispensing wisdom and sadness to them like a Dutch uncle. He seemed intolerably weary, sternly kind. Then he lifted his stick and the trombones blatted out a hectic and cynical phrase. The strings muttered and swayed, and the curtain went up on a skylighted garret overlooking the frozen roofs of Paris.

Like a child Michael Patrick peered and listened to the persiflage of the painter with green smock and easel and the writer who burned his manuscripts to keep warm. He heard the tenor and the violins in unison lift and drop in long tender melodies that were both sad and gay. Sometimes Michael Patrick would raise his bottle to his lips, never taking his eyes or his ears from that sweet world on the stage.

He watched the violins plug on their mutes. The old maestro concertante leaned over them cajolingly. An aching perfumed strain rose in the darkness till Michael Patrick felt his heart begin to ache with a wild wistfulness. A shy little seamstress came onto the stage carrying a lighted candle. At this moment Michael Patrick ceased to be anywhere particular in this world, least of all in Naples of August, 1944. He was happy.

What was there here in the sweetness of this reality that he’d missed out on in America? He’d opened a door into a world that had nothing to do with merchandising and selling, with the trapped four-four beat of boogie-woogie, with naked girls shaking their navels through cigar smoke on a runway, with nervous old ladies totting up their insurance, with the fact that he wouldn’t live to be twenty-eight, with the gum-beatings of topkicks, with the smell of a world like a slaughterhouse, with groping and misunderstanding and cruelty. He felt himself inundated with the loveliness that men seek in a woman’s arms, that old nuns sense on their death-beds. He saw for the first time in his life that the things which keep the world going are not to be bought or sold, that every flower grows out of decay, that for all the mud and grief there are precious things which make it worth while for us to leave our mothers’ wombs—if someone shows us these priceless things. Before and after this truth, he saw, there’s nothing, nothing at all. . . .

His body was racked with a delight from outside himself. And when the lights came up again at the end of the first act, he fell from his paradise. The applause, the simpering curtain calls had nothing to do with what he’d felt—for the first time to be abstracted from his own sweating tired body, from a regimen that tormented him because it had no meaning he could decipher. So he retired sulkily to the rear of the box, sat on the floor out of range of the theater lights and the chatter of the audience, and drank slowly and methodically. There were no odds in walking down to the foyer and making a pretense at a social promenade. Besides he was pretty drunk.

Near the close of the third act of La Bohème Michael Patrick had emptied his cognac bottle. It lay by his boots like a spent rifle. He leaned heavily on the barrier and stared out at the stage. He couldn’t see too distinctly now, but the music and the voices came up to him in a vortex that carried him along in its conical eye. His sight was blinking and bloodshot.

—Se vuoi . . .

Se vuoi serbarla per ricordo d’amore,

Addio, addio . . . senza rancor . . .

He laid his head on the plush railing by his arms. His tears fell on his knees. He wept very quietly but at length. It was okay to cry because he knew with clarity and brilliance exactly why he was crying. For his own ruined life, for the lives of millions of others like him, whom no one had heard of or thought about. For all the sick wretchedness of a world that no one could, or tried to, understand. For all who passed their stupid little lives in the middle of a huge myth and delusion.

At the end of the opera Michael Patrick felt and reeled his way down the five flights of stairs. He leaned bemused and lost in the portico of the San Carlo till the shrill crowds had gone away. The moon was out above Vesuvius. The bay shimmered out toward Torre Annunziata and Salerno. The night still had the hot heaviness of the daylight hours. Naples was a murmur of sound, the river-rushing of people fleeing and seeking and pretending and betraying.

Then he noticed a girl with a birthmark standing close beside him. Her hands were folded under her breasts. She seemed intensely aware of him. There was a red flower in her hair, and she smiled at him as though she beckoned across some unbridgeable distance. He was too drunk to string ideas together, but it was perfectly clear what they must do, and each understood it in a kind of mute joy. He took her arm, warm and almost weightless in its cotton sleeve. He led her into the arcade and to that quiet fountain place where he’d slept this afternoon. He placed her against a wall out of the moonlight. He kissed her hands and her throat and the mauve birthmark on her cheek, pressing himself gently against her. His fingers went through her hair the way children wander in a dark forest, numb and crying and lost.

FIRST PORTRAIT