“CHEER UP,” Harry said. “It isn’t really a serious matter.”
“You don’t think so?”
He only smiled. It was a great gift, that smile, sudden, frank, wholly disarming, and, like a child’s, shaped by secret mischief. It was impossible to talk seriously about anything in the face of such an abrupt and charming defense. She looked at him, studied him as she might have examined a perfect stranger—the close-cut, sandy hair, the small eyes, bland and sad as a dog’s, the soft lips and the thrilling brightness of his smile. Harry was almost handsome, certainly, but, she thought, strangely unreal. There was a sense of the alien about him. You never quite thought of him in three dimensions.
“No,” he went on, “we’ll get over it. And anything you can get over isn’t really serious—like the measles.”
“Or smallpox.”
Harry smiled again and poured some beer into her glass. They were sitting in a little trattoria beside the Arno. It was twilight, the long gold twilight of Tuscany in late summer, and all of the tables were taken. Along the sidewalks on both sides of the street the bright, close-pressed crowds flowed as slowly as the river. They had just arrived in Pisa that afternoon from Rome.
“We’ll stay here a couple of days and rest,” he said. “It’s a restful place. We can sit by the window in the hotel room and have late breakfasts and see the river. In the morning I’ll take you over to see the campanile. It really does lean, you know.”
“Does it?” she said. “I’m not sure I’m going to stay with you. I’m not at all sure I ought to.”
“Don’t be silly,” he said. “Of course you’ll stay.”
“You’re so sure of me. Why are you always so sure?”
She was fumbling in her pocketbook for matches. She thought for a moment that she was going to cry and she didn’t want that to happen. He leaned across the table and lit her cigarette with his lighter.
“Where would you go?”
“You bastard,” she said.
“No, I’m serious,” Harry said. “For once I’m being perfectly serious. Let’s try and be rational about this whole thing. Where would you go?”
“Home. I think I’d like to go home.”
“Out of the question,” he said. “What would you do when you got there—get a divorce?”
“Stop it, Harry. I don’t know what I’m going to do.”
“I want to know,” he said quickly. “Do you want a divorce or don’t you? It’s just that simple. Either—or.”
“I don’t know, Harry. I don’t know what to do yet. I’m trying to work all this out in my mind. Will you please stop asking me dumb questions?”
“What about the baby? You ought to think about that. Did you ever stop to think about the baby?”
At last she began to cry. He gave her his handkerchief.
“Please,” he said. “Even if these people can’t understand English, they can’t ignore a sobbing woman.”
She stiffened a little.
“You care what they think, don’t you?”
“There, you see, you’ve stopped now.”
“I could say it in Italian,” she said. “I could stand up and say it in very simple Italian. This is my husband who is making me cry. My husband is always making me cry. My husband is always sleeping with other women. When I find out about it we leave. We are always leaving places.”
“You know what they’d say? They’d say, why don’t you leave him? The logical answer.”
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”
“I don’t know,” Harry said. “I never really thought of it until just now.”
“You can’t even imagine it. After all this time, you can’t even conceive of my leaving you. Now that I’m pregnant, you’re certain.”
“Do we have to go through all this?”
“You can’t even imagine my leaving you, can you?”
“No,” he said. “To tell you the truth I can’t.”
“All right,” she said. “Suppose I don’t. Suppose I just stay. Then what?”
“Everything,” he said, smiling wonderfully. “Then everything. We’ll begin again. No reason why not. We could go up to Paris. I know some people there.”
“Why not home?”
“Why not?”
“Are you serious? Would you really go home?”
“I might even go to work,” he said. “Idle hands …”
“The awful thing,” she said, “is that I never know when you’re telling the truth. I never know whether I can trust you.”
He signaled for the waiter.
“I suppose you’ll have to,” he said, “I suppose you’ll just have to take that chance.”
They crossed the street and edged into the crowd walking along the bank of the river. It was getting dark now and the mountains to the north were only a bulk of heavy shadows. The mountains were disappearing and the river was dark. She could smell the river and she could hear it, but she could only see it where light fell. She felt dazed, as if not only Harry but the whole world was unreal, vanishing. It gets dark and the mountains go away.
“Where does everything go in the dark?” she had asked when she was a child.
“Things just goes to sleep,” the colored nurse had said. “They just curl up and go to sleep.”
They moved across the bridge with the crowd and then they were on a narrow cobbled street with cafes and restaurants and movie theaters. They heard a military band playing faintly somewhere and they heard the laughter and the rich syllables of the language all around them. Farther along the street they entered a small square. At the corner there was a tight circle of people around a single figure. The man was very pale under a light, powerfully built, in bathing trunks and sneakers. He stood relaxed, slump-shouldered, while a short fat man, his bald head shining in the lamplight, walked slowly around the circle of viewers displaying a placard with a picture of the man in bathing trunks.
“What is he?” she asked. “A magician?”
Harry laughed. “No,” he said. “He’s some kind of a strong man. Do you want to watch?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never seen one.”
“Let’s.”
There was a hush as the man began his performance. He lifted heavy weights over his head, straining, his pale muscles bulging and the sweat glistening all over his body. When he had finished, the short man passed through the crowd taking a few coins in his hat. The strong man leaned against the lamppost breathing heavily. She thought he looked so lonely out there in that zone of light, alone and almost naked. He did not seem to be looking at anyone or anything. He seemed unaware of the crowd. He only rested, breathing hard, tautly aloof like a beast in a cage. She took Harry’s hand in hers.
“Let’s go,” Harry said. “This is a bore.”
“Wait,” she said. “He’s going to do something with ropes.”
Two men from the crowd carefully wrapped him in a net of knotted ropes. When they had finished, he could not move his hands or his feet, and they stepped back into the crowd. The strong man remained still for a moment. Then he closed his eyes and began to strain against the ropes. Sweat was slick on his forehead. The large veins in his neck showed blue and swollen against his skin. Very slowly, painfully it seemed, he began a shrugging motion with his shoulders. The ropes left raw red lines where they bit into his flesh. For a desperate moment it seemed to her that he would never be able to free himself, but then he twisted sharply and somehow freed one arm. The crowd clapped and the short man passed the hat again while the strong man finished wriggling free of the rest of the ropes.
“He’s going to try chains next,” she said. “Let’s see him get out of chains.”
“It’s just a trick. Don’t you see that? Come on.”
“I want to see it.”
“For Christ’s sake!” Harry said. “Oh, all right.”
This time he was wrapped tightly in chains. He stood looking blankly into the faces of the crowd while two men wrapped him in chains.
The strong man started with his whole body twisting against the chains. Abruptly he slipped and fell and there was a gasp and the brute sound of iron on stone. He lay as still as a fallen doll on the street.
“Let’s go,” Harry said.
“I want to watch,” she said. “I want you to stay and see it.”
“He’ll never get loose now. They’ll have to set him free.”
“I don’t think so.”
“This is silly,” Harry said. “I can’t see any earthly reason why we should have to stand here and watch this.”
“Look!” she said. “He’s moving now.”
The strong man began to writhe on the street. He moved along on his back, tense and fluttering like a fish out of water. He rolled over onto his stomach and now they could see blood on his lips and the glazed, fanatic concentration in his eyes.
“You don’t have to look,” she said. “Close your eyes if you don’t want to look at it.”
She watched the man in chains and she felt a strange exhilaration. She felt her own body move, tense with the subtle rhythm of his struggle. One arm free, then, slowly, very slowly, the other, and, at last sitting up, he twisted his hurt legs free. While his companion passed the hat, the strong man sat in the street and looked at his legs, smiling a little. She turned away and looked at Harry. Poor Harry would never understand. Whatever she finally decided to do, Harry would never understand.
“Let’s go back to the hotel and have dinner,” he said.
They walked back the way they had come, and as they crossed the bridge over the Arno she saw that there was a new moon and she could see the dark shape of the mountains. They were still there, and she could feel the strength and flow of the river, and she could feel her child, the secret life struggling in her womb.