WHEN THEY first met him, in the wagons-lits, he was not so nervous. Tall, straw-colored, standing smoking in the corridor, he looked like an English cigarette. Indeed, there was something about him so altogether parched and faded that he seemed to bear the same relation to a man that a Gold Flake bears to a normal cigarette. English, surely, said the young American lady. The young American man was not convinced. If English, then a bounder, he said, adjusting his glasses to peer at the stranger with such impassioned curiosity that his eyes in their light-brown frames seemed to rush dangerously forward, like strange green headlights on an old-fashioned car. As yet, he felt no unusual interest in the stranger who had just emerged from a compartment; this curiosity was his ordinary state of being.
It was so hard, the young lady complained, to tell a bounder in a foreign country; one was never sure; those dreadful striped suits that English gentlemen wear . . . and the Duke of Windsor talking in a cockney accent. Here on the Continent, continued the young man, it was even more confusing, with the upper classes trying to dress like English gentlemen and striking the inevitable false notes; the dukes all looked like floorwalkers, but every man who looked like a floorwalker was unfortunately not a duke. Their conversation continued in an agreeable rattle-rattle. Its inspiration, the Bounder, was already half-dismissed. It was not quite clear to either of them whether they were trying to get into European society or whether this was simply a joke that they had between them. The young man had lunched with a viscountess in Paris and had admired her house and her houseboat, which was docked in the Seine. They had poked their heads into a great many courtyards in the Faubourg St. Germain, including the very grandiose one, bristling with guards who instantly ejected them, that belonged to the Soviet Embassy. On the whole, architecture, they felt, provided the most solid answer to their social curiosity: the bedroom of Marie Antoinette at the Petit Trianon had informed them that the French royal family were dwarfs, a secret already hinted at in Mme Pompadour’s bedroom at the Frick museum in New York; in Milan, they would meet the Sforzas through the agency of their Castello; at Stra, on the Brenta, they would get to know the Pisani. They had read Proust, and the decline of the great names in modern times was accepted by them as a fact; the political speeches of the living Count Sforza suggested the table-talk of Mme Verdurin, gracing with her bourgeois platitudes the board of an ancient house. Nevertheless, the sight of a rococo ceiling, a great swaying crystal chandelier, glimpsed at night through an open second-story window, would come to them like an invitation which is known to exist but which has been incomprehensibly lost in the mails; a vague sadness descended, yet they did not feel like outsiders.
Victors in a world war of unparalleled ferocity, heirs of imperialism and the philosophy of the enlightenment, they walked proudly on the dilapidated streets of Europe. They had not approved of the war and were pacifist and bohemian in their sympathies, but the exchange had made them feel rich, and they could not help showing it. The exchange had turned them into a prince and a princess, and, considering the small bills, the weekly financial anxieties that attended them at home, this was quite an accomplishment. There was no door, therefore, that, they believed, would not open to them should they present themselves fresh and crisp as two one-dollar bills. These beliefs, these dreams, were, so far, no more to them than a story children tell each other. The young man, in fact, had found his small role as war-profiteer so distasteful and also so frightening that he had refused for a whole week to go to his money-changer and had cashed his checks at the regular rate at the bank. For the most part, their practical, moral life was lived, guidebook in hand, on the narrow streets and in the cafés of the Left Bank—they got few messages at their hotel.
Yet occasionally when they went in their best clothes to a fashionable bar, she wearing the flowers he had bought her (ten cents in American money), they hoped in silent unison during the first cocktail for the Dr.-Livingstone-I-presume that would discover them in this dark continent. And now on the train that was carrying them into Italy, the European illusion quickened once more within them. They eyed every stranger with that suspension of disbelief which, to invert Wordsworth, makes its object poetical. The man at the next table had talked all through lunch to two low types with his mouth full, but the young man remained steady in his conviction that the chewer was a certain English baronet traveling to his villa in Florence, and he had nearly persuaded the young lady to go up and ask him his name. He particularly valued the young lady today because, coming from the West, she entered readily into conversation with people she did not know. It was a handicap, of course, that there were two of them (“My dear,” said the young lady, “a couple looks so complete”), but they were not inclined to separate—the best jockey in a horse race scorns to take a lighter weight. Unfortunately, their car, except for the Bounder at the other end, offered very little scope to his imaginative talent or her loquacity.
But, as they were saying, Continental standards were mysteriously different; at the frontier at Domodossola a crowd gathered on the rainy platform in front of their car. Clearly there was some object of attraction here, and, dismissing the idea that it was herself, the young lady moved to the window. Next to her, a short, heavy, ugly man with steel-rimmed spectacles was passing some money to a person on the platform, who immediately hurried away. Other men came up and spoke in undertones through the window to the man beside her. In all of this there was something that struck the young lady as strange—so much quiet and so much motion, which seemed the more purposeful, the more businesslike without its natural accompaniment of sound. Her clear, school-teacher-on-holiday voice intruded resolutely on this quarantine. “Qu’est-ce que se passe?” she demanded. “Rien,” said her neighbor abruptly, glancing at her and away with a single, swiveling movement of the spectacled eyes. “C’est des amis qui rencontrent des amis.” Rebuffed, she turned back to the young man. “Black market,” she said. “They are changing money.” He nodded, but seeing her thoughts travel capably to the dollar bills pinned to her underslip, he touched her with a cautioning hand. The dead, non-committal face beside her, the briefcase, the noiseless, nondescript young men on the platform, the single laugh that had rung out in the Bounder’s end of the car when the young lady had put her question, all bade him beware: this black market was not for tourists. The man who had hurried away came back with a dirty roll of bills which he thrust through the window. “Ite, missa est,” remarked the young lady sardonically, but the man beside her gave no sign of having heard; he continued to gaze immovably at the thin young men before him, as though the transaction had not yet been digested.
At this moment, suddenly, a hubbub of singing, of agitated voices shouting slogans was heard. A kind of frenzy of noise, which had an unruly, an unmistakably seditious character, moved toward the train from somewhere outside the shed. The train gave a loud puff. “A revolution!” thought the young lady, clasping the young man’s hand with a pang of terror and excitement; he, like everyone else in the car, had jumped to his feet. A strange procession came into sight, bright and bedraggled in the rain—an old woman in a white dress and flowered hat waving a large red flag, two or three followers with a homemade-looking bouquet, and finally a gray-bearded old man dressed in an ancient frock coat, carrying an open old-fashioned black umbrella and leaping nimbly into the air. Each of the old man’s hops was fully two yards high; his thin legs in the black trousers were jackknifed neatly under him; the umbrella maintained a perfect perpendicular; only his beard flew forward and his coat-tails back; at the summit of each hop, he shouted joyously, “Togliatti!” The demonstration was coming toward the car, where alarm had given way to amazement; Steel Glasses alone was undisturbed by the appearance of these relics of political idealism; his eyes rested on them without expression. Just as they gained the protection of the shed, the train, unfortunately, began to move. The followers, lacking the old man’s gymnastic precision, were haphazard with the bouquet; it missed the window, which had been opened for the lira-changing, and fell back into the silent crowd. The train picked up speed.
In the compartment, the young man was rolling on the seat with laughter; he was always the victim of his emotions, which—even the pleasurable ones—seemed to overrun him like the troops of some marauding army. Thus happiness, with him, had a look of intensest suffering, and the young lady clucked sympathetically as he gasped out, “The Possessed, The Possessed.” To the newcomer in the compartment, however, the young man’s condition appeared strange. “What is the matter with him?” the young man, deep in the depths of his joy, heard an odd, accented little voice asking; then the young lady’s voice was explaining, “Dostoevski . . . a small political center . . . a provincial Russian town.” “But no,” said the other voice, “it is Togliatti, the leader of Italian Communists who is in the next compartment. He is coming from the Peace Conference where he talks to Molotov.” The words, Communist, Molotov, Peace Conference, bored the young man so much that he came to his senses instantly, sat up, wiped his glasses, and perceived that it was the Bounder who was in the compartment, and to whom the young lady was now re-explaining that her friend was laughing because the scene on the platform had reminded him of something in a book. “But no,” protested the Bounder, who was still convinced that the young lady had not understood him. He appeared to come to some sort of decision and ran out into the corridor, returning with a Milanese newspaper folded to show an item in which the words, Togliatti, Parigi, Pace, and Molotov all indubitably figured. The young lady, weary of explanation, allowed a bright smile as of final comprehension to pass over her features and handed the paper to the young man, who could not read Italian either; in such acts of submission their conversations with Europeans always ended. They had got used to it, but they sometimes felt that they had stepped at Le Havre into some vast cathedral where a series of intrusive custodians stood between them and the frescoes relating with tireless patience the story of the Nativity. Europeans, indeed, seemed to them often a race of custodians, didactic automatons who answered, like fortune-telling machines, questions to which one already knew the answer or questions which no one would conceivably ask.
True to this character, the Bounder, now, had plainly taken a shine to the young lady, who was permitting him to tell her facts about the Italian political situation which she had previously read in a newspaper. That her position on Togliatti was identical with his own, he assumed as axiomatic, and her dissident murmurs of correction he treated as a kind of linguistic static. Her seat on the wagons-lits spoke louder to him than words; she could never persuade him that she hated Togliatti from the left, any more than she could convince a guide in Paris of her indifference to Puvis de Chavannes. Her attention he took for assent, and only the young man troubled him, as he had troubled many guides in many palaces and museums by lingering behind in some room he fancied; an occasional half-smothered burst of laughter indicated to the two talkers that he was still in the Dostoevski attic. But the glances of tender understanding that the young lady kept rather pointedly turning toward her friend were an explanation in pantomime; his alarms stilled, the visitor neatly drew up his trousers and sat down.
They judged him to be a man about forty-two years old. In America he might have passed for younger; he had kept his hair, light-brown and slightly oiled, with a ripple at the brow and a half-ripple at the back; his figure, moreover, was slim—it had not taken on that architectural form, those transepts, bows, and barrel-vaulting, that with Americans demonstrate (how quickly often!) that the man is no longer a boy but an Institution. Like the young lady’s hairdresser, like the gay little grocer on Third Avenue, he had retained in middle age something for which there is no English word, something très mignon, something gentil, something joli garçon. It lay in a quickness and lightness of movement, in slim ankles, small feet, thin, agile wrists, in a certain demure swoop of lowering eyelids, in the play of lashes, and the butterfly flutter of the airy white handkerchief protruding from the breast pocket. It lay also in a politeness so eager as to seem freshly learned and in a childlike vanity, a covert sense of performance, in which one could trace the swing of the censer and the half-military, half-theatrical swish of the altar-boy’s skirts.
But if this sprightliness of demeanor and of dress gave the visitor an appearance of youthfulness, it also gave him, by its very exaggeration, a morbid appearance of age. Those quick, small smiles, those turns of the eye, and expressive raisings of the eyebrow had left a thousand tiny wrinkles on his dust-colored face; his slimness too had something cadaverous in it—chicken-breasted he appeared in his tan silk gabardine suit. And, oddly enough, this look of premature senility was not masculine but feminine. Though no more barbered and perfumed than the next Italian man, he evoked the black mass of the dressing-table and the hand-mirror; he reminded them of that horror so often met in Paris, city of beauty, the well-preserved woman in her fifties. At the same time, he was unquestionably a man; he was already talking of conquests. It was simply, perhaps, that the preservation of youth had been his main occupation; age was the specter he had dealt with too closely; like those middle-aged women he had become its intimate through long animosity.
Yet just as they had decided that he was a man somehow without a profession (they had come to think in unison and needed the spoken word only for a check), he steered himself out of a small whirlpool of ruffled political feelings and announced that he was in the silk business. He was returning from London, and had spent a week in Paris, where he had been short of francs and had suffered a serious embarrassment when taking a lady out to lunch. The lady, it appeared, was the wife of the Egyptian delegate to the Peace Conference, whom he had met—also—on the wagons-lits. There was a great deal more of this, all either very simple or very complicated, they were unable to say which, for they could not make out whether he was telling the same story twice, or, whether, as in a folk tale, the second story repeated the pattern of the first but had a variant ending. His English was very odd; it had a speed and a precision of enunciation that combined with a vagueness of grammar so as to make the two Americans feel that they were listening to a foreign language, a few words of which they could recognize. In the same way, his anecdotes had a wealth and circumstantiality of detail and an overall absence of form, or at least so the young lady, who was the only one who was listening, reported later to the young man. The young man, who was tone-deaf, found the visitor’s conversation reminiscent of many concerts he had been taken to, where he could only distinguish the opening bars of any given work; for him, Mr. Sciarappa’s stories were all in their beginnings, and he would interrupt quite often with a reply square in the middle, just as, quite often, he used to break in with wild applause when the pianist paused between the first and second movements of a sonata.
But at the mention of the silk business, the young man’s eyes had once more burned a terrifying green. With his afflamed imagination, he was at the same time extremely practical. Hostile to Marxist theory, he was marxist in personal matters, having no interest in people’s opinions, or even, perhaps, in their emotions (the superstructure), but passionately, madly curious as to what people did and how they made their money (the base). He did not intend that Mr. Sciarappa (he had presented his card) should linger forever in Paris adding up the lunch bill of the Egyptian delegate’s wife. Having lain couchant for the ten minutes that human politeness required, he sprang into the conversation with a question: did the signor have an interest in the silk mills at Como? And now the visitor betrayed the first signs of nervousness. The question had suggested knowledge that was at least second-hand. The answer remained obscure. Mr. Sciarappa did not precisely own a factory, nor was he precisely in the exporting business. The two friends, who were not lacking in common humanity, precipitately turned the subject to the beauty of Italian silks, the superiority of Italian tailoring to French or even English tailoring, the chic of Italian men. The moment passed, and a little later, under the pretense of needing her help as a translator, Mr. Sciarappa showed the young lady a cablegram dated London which seemed to be a provisional order for a certain quantity of something, but the garbled character of the English suggested that the cable had been composed—in London—by Mr. Sciarappa himself. Nevertheless, the Americans accepted the cablegram as a proof of their visitor’s bona fides, though actually it proved no more than that he was in business, that is, that he existed in the Italy of the post-war world.
The troubled moment, in fact, had its importance for them only in retrospect. A seismographic recording of conditions in the compartment would have shown only the faintest tremor. The desire to believe the best of people is a prerequisite for intercourse with strangers; suspicion is reserved for friends. The young lady in particular, being gregarious, took the kindest view of everyone; she was under the impression that she was the only person in the world who told lies. The young man today fell in with her gullibility, with her “normal” interpretations of life, because he saw that they were heading for friendship with Mr. Sciarappa and felt as yet no positive objections to the idea. They were alone in Italy; a guide would be useful. Moreover, Mr. Sciarappa had announced that he was going on to Rome, where he lived with his parents, at midnight. Already he had invited them to join him for a drink in Milan in the famous Galleria; the worst they could expect was a dinner à trois. Therefore, he acted, temporarily, on the young lady’s persuasion that their visitor was an ordinary member of the upper middle classes in vaguely comfortable circumstances, in other words, that he was an abstraction; in the same way, certain other abstract beliefs of hers concerning true love and happiness had conveyed him, somewhat more critical and cautious, into this compartment with her on a romantic journey into Italy.
But, just as it had come as a surprise to him that love should go on from step to step, that it should move from city to country and cross an ocean and part of a continent, so in Milan it was with a vague astonishment that he beheld Mr. Sciarappa remove his baggage from the taxi in front of their hotel and hurry inside ahead of him to inquire for a room. For the next three days, the trio could be seen any evening promenading, arm in arm, down the long arcade of the Galleria, past the crowded little tables with the pink, and the peach, and the lime, and the orange colored tablecloths, walking with the air of distinguished inseparables, the two tall men and the tallish young lady with a large black hat. Or at noon they could be found there, perspiring and not so distinguished, sipping Americanos, Mr. Sciarappa’s favorite drink, at the café with the orange tablecloths, which Mr. Sciarappa considered the cheapest. At night, they appeared at Giannino’s or Crispi’s (not so expensive as Biffi’s but better food, said Mr. Sciarappa), restaurants where Mr. Sciarappa made himself at home, sending back the wine which the Americans had ordered and getting in its place some thinner and sourer vintage of which he had special knowledge. The one solid trait the two friends could discover in Mr. Sciarappa’s character was a rooted abhorrence of the advertised first-rate, of best hotels, top restaurants, principal shopping streets, famous vineyards; and, since for the first time in many years they saw themselves in a position to command these advantages, they found this trait of Mr. Sciarappa’s rather a cross. In American money, the difference between the best and the mediocre was trifling; indeed even in Italian money, it was often nonexistent. They tried to convince Mr. Sciarappa of this, but their computations he took as an insult to himself and his defeated country. His lip would curl into a small, angry sneer that looked as if it had come out of a permanent-wave machine. “Ah, you Americans,” he would say, “your streets are paved with dollars.”
The two friends, after the first night, spent on bad beds in an airless room hung with soiled lace curtains, moved with a certain thump into the best hotel next door. They would not have stayed in any case, for the young man had a horror of the sordid, and the best hotel proved, when you counted breakfast, to be cheaper than its second-rate neighbor. Nevertheless, in the circumstances, the move had a significant tone—they hoped to fray, if not to sever, their connection with Mr. Sciarappa, and perhaps also, to tell the truth, to insult him a little. The best hotel, half-requisitioned by the Allied armies, smiled on them with brass and silver insignia, freshly washed summer khaki and blond, straight, water-combed American hair; when Mr. Sciarappa came for cocktails in the same gabardine suit, he looked somehow like a man in prison clothes or the inmate of a mental institution. The young lady, who was the specialist in sentiments, felt toward him sorrow, shame, triumph.
They could not make out what he wanted of them.
Whatever business had, on the train, been hurrying him on to Rome had presumably lost its urgency. He never mentioned it again; indeed, the three spoke very little together, and it was this that gave them that linked and wedded look. During the day he disappeared, except for the luncheon apéritif. He went to Como, to Genoa, and, once, in the Galleria, they saw him with an unshaven, white-haired, morose-looking man whom he introduced as his brother-in-law. In restaurants, he was forever jumping up from the table with a gay little wave of the hand to greet a party that was in the act of vanishing into the dark outdoors. Though he was a man who twitched with sociability, whose conversation was a veritable memo pad of given names, connections, ties, appointments, he seemed to be unknown to the very waiters whom he directed in the insolent style of an old customer. The brother-in-law, who plainly disliked him, and they themselves, whom he hated, were his only friends.
The most remarkable symptom of this hatred, which ate into the conversation leaving acid holes of boredom, which kept him glancing at other tables as though in hope of succor or release, was a tone of unshakable, impolite disbelief. “Ah, I am not such a fool,” his pretty face would almost angrily indicate if they told him that they had spent their morning in the castle-fort of the Sforzas, where beneath the ramparts bombed by the Liberators, a troupe of Italian players with spotlights lent by the American army was preparing to do an American pacifist play. Every statement volunteered by the two friends broke on the edge of Mr. Sciarappa’s contempt like the very thinnest alibi; parks and the public buildings they described to him became as transparent as falsehoods—anyone of any experience knew there were no such places in Milan. When they praised the wicked-looking Filippo Lippi Madonna they had seen in the Sforza Gallery, Mr. Sciarappa and his disaffected brother-in-law, who was supposed to speak no English, exchanged, for the first time, a fraternal, sidewise look: a masterpiece, indeed, their incredulous eyebrows ejaculated—they had heard that story before.
That Mr. Sciarappa should question their professions of enthusiasm was perhaps natural. His own acquaintance with Italy’s artistic treasures seemed distant; they had had the reputation with him of being much admired by English and American tourists; the English and American air-forces, however, had quoted them, as he saw, at a somewhat lower rate. Moreover, it was as if the devaluation of the currency had, for Mr. Sciarappa’s consistent thought, implicated everything Italian; cathedrals, pictures, women had dropped with the lira. He could not imagine that anyone could take these things at their Baedeker valuation, any more than he could imagine that anyone in his right mind would change dollars into lira at the official rate. The two friends soon learned that to praise any Italian product, were it only a bicycle or a child in the street, was an insult to Mr. Sciarappa’s intelligence. They would be silent—and eventually were—but the most egregious insult, the story that they had come to Italy as tourists, they could not wipe away.
He felt himself to be the victim of an imposture, that was plain. But did he believe that they were rich pretending to be poor, or poor pretending to be rich? They could not tell. On the whole, it seemed as if Mr. Sciarappa’s suspicions, like everything else about him, had a certain flickering quality; the light in him went on and off, as he touched one theory or another, cruising in his shaft like an elevator. And, as the young man said, you could not blame Mr. Sciarappa for wondering: was it in the character of a rich man or a poor that they stayed in the best hotel, which was slightly less expensive than an American auto-camp?
The obscurity of their financial position justified Mr. Sciarappa’s anger. Nevertheless, though sympathetic, they grew tired of spending their evenings with a stranger who was continually out of sorts because he could not make up his mind whether they were worth swindling. “We did not come to Italy to see Mr. Sciarappa,” they would say to each other every night as they rode up in the elevator, and would promise themselves to evade this time, without fail, the meeting he had fixed for the next day. Yet as noon came on the following morning, they would find that they were approaching the Galleria. He is waiting, they would say to each other, and without discussion they would hurry on toward the café with the orange tablecloths, where they were late but never quite late enough to miss Mr. Sciarappa.
He was never glad to see them. He rose to acknowledge them with a kind of bravura laziness of his tall “English” figure, one shoulder lifted in a shrug of ennui or resignation. He kissed the young lady’s hand and said to the young man perfunctorily, and sometimes with a positive yawn, “Hello, sit down, my dear.” One of his odd little tricks was to pretend that they were not together. The young man’s frequent absences of mind he treated literally, when it suited him, as if they were absences of body, and once he carried this so far as to run his fingers up and down the young lady’s bare arm as the three of them rode in a taxi, inquiring as he did so, in the most civil tone imaginable, whether she found her friend satisfactory. His conversation was directed principally to the young lady, but for all that he had no real interest in her. It was the young man whom he watched, often in the mirror of her face, which never left her friend as he talked wildly, excitedly, extravagantly, with long wrists flung outward in intensity of gesture: did Mr. Sciarappa see beauty and strangeness in him or the eccentricity of money? Or was he merely trying to determine which it was that she saw?
It was irresistible that they should try to coax Mr. Sciarappa (or Scampi, as they had begun to call him, after fried crayfish-tails, his favorite dish) out into the open. The name of a certain lady, middlingly but authentically rich, who was expecting to see them in Venice, began to figure allusively, alluringly, in their conversation. These pointers that they directed toward Polly Herkimer Grabbe had at first a merely educational purpose. National pride forbade that they should allow Scampi to take them for rich Americans when a really good example of the genre existed only a day’s journey away. But their first references to the flower-bulb heiress, to her many husbands, her collection of garden statuary, her career as an impresario of modern architecture, failed, seemingly, to impress Scampi; he raised his eyes briefly from the plate of Saltimbocca (Jump-in-your-mouth) that he was eating, and then returned to his meal. The language difficulties made it sometimes impossible to tell whether Mr. Sciarappa really heard what they said. They had remarked once, for example, in conversational desperation, that they had come to Italy to retrace the footsteps of Lord Byron: they were on their way from Lausanne, where he had composed “The Prisoner of Chillon” in a bedroom of the Hotel Angleterre, to Venice to visit his house on the Grand Canal. “Ah well, my dear,” said Mr. Sciarappa, “if he is an English lord, you do not have to worry; his house will not be requisitioned, and you will have the use of his gondolier.” There had been no way the young man could find of preventing the young lady from supplying the poet’s dates, and now, it seemed, Scampi was under the impression that everyone they knew in Venice was dead. It required the largest brush-strokes to bring Miss Grabbe to life for him. By the third night, when the young man had finished a wholly invented account of Miss Grabbe’s going through the customs with a collection of obscene fountain statuary, Mr. Sciarappa showed interest and inquired how old Miss Grabbe was. The next evening, at cocktails, he had an auto-pullman ticket to Venice.
He was leaving the next morning at seven. The two Americans, remembering that the flower-bulb heiress was, after all, their friend, felt appalled and slightly frightened at what they had done. They thought of dropping some note of warning into the letter of introduction which of course they would have to write. But then they reflected that if Miss Grabbe was richer than they, she was also proportionately shrewder: glass bricks only could Mr. Sciarappa sell her for that submarine architectural salon she spoke of opening in the depths of the Grand Canal. Miss Grabbe’s intelligence was flighty (she had once forgotten to include the furnace in a winter house that so hugged the idea of warmth that the bathtubs were done in buff), but her estimates were sharp; no contractor or husband had ever padded a bill on her; she always put on her glasses to add up a dinner check. Men, it was true, had injured her, and movements had left her flat, but these misadventures she had cheerfully added to her capital. An indefatigable Narcissa, she adapted herself spryly to comedy when she perceived that the world was smiling; she was always the second to laugh at a pratfall of her spirit. Mr. Sciarappa, at worst, could only be another banana-peel on the vaudeville stage of her history. It was possible, of course, that he might bore her, thought the two friends, reasoning from experience; this alone she would not forgive them, yet Miss Grabbe’s judgments of men were often strikingly lenient—she had been unattached when they left her in Paris.
Besides, Mr. Sciarappa was looking quite presentable this evening, even though he had not yet changed his suit. Bright, eager, intensely polite, useful, informative, he seemed once more the figure they had seen in the train corridor; some innocent, cavalier hope that had died in those long Milan evenings had revived in him, as the expectation of parting made the two friends recede from him a little and become strangers once more. The letter of introduction wrote itself out, somehow, more affectionately than the friends had planned it. “Enclosed,” it said, “please find Mr. Sciarappa, who has been most helpful to us in Milan.”
Signorina Grabbe was waiting alone with a gondola in the orange-lampshade glow of a Canaletto sunset when their autobus drew up, two days later, at the station. Against the Venetian panorama of white domes and pink towers, Mr. Sciarappa was so pronouncedly absent that it seemed an indelicacy to inquire after him. The two friends, whom solitude and a consciousness of indiscretion had worked up to a pitch of anxiety and melodramatic conjecture, now felt slightly provoked that Miss Grabbe had not, in this short interval, been married or murdered for her money. At the very least, they had expected to be scolded for sending her that curious envoy, but Mr. Sciarappa’s arrival seemed barely to have disturbed Miss Grabbe, who had been busy, so she said, with an inner experience. “Your friend turned up,” she remarked at last, in the tone of one who acknowledges a package. “What on earth did you find to talk to him about?” The young man groaned. Miss Grabbe had put her rich, plump, practiced finger on the flaw in Mr. Sciarappa as prosaically as if he had been a piece of yard-goods—was there nothing more to be said of him? “We found him rather odd,” the young man murmured in half-apology. “Oh, my dear,” said Miss Grabbe, raising her dyed black eyebrows, “all the men you meet on the wagons-lits are like that. You must go to the little campos and the trattorias to meet the real Italians.”
And as Miss Grabbe went on to talk, in the dipping, swaying gondola, of the intense, insular experience she had found, blazing as the native grappa, in the small, hot squares, the working-class restaurants and dirty churches of Venice, Mr. Sciarappa seemed indeed a poor thing to have offered her, a gimcrack souvenir such as one might have bought in a railway station. The young man blushed angrily as he felt his own trip and that of the young lady shrink to fit inside Mr. Sciarappa’s nipped-in gabardine suit. He was only saved from despair by a memory of Miss Grabbe, as he had last seen her in Paris, alone, with her hunter’s look, and three saucers under her vermouth glass, at a table in a Left Bank café—“Isn’t it divine?” she had called out to him; “don’t you love it, don’t you hate New York?”
Compared to Miss Grabbe, he perceived, he himself and the young lady would always appear to skim the surface of travel. They were tourists; Miss Grabbe was an explorer. Looking at the two ladies as they sat facing him in the gondola, he saw that their costumes perfectly expressed this difference: the young lady’s large black hat, long gloves, high-heeled shoes, and nylon stockings were a declaration of nationality and a stubborn assertion of the pleasure-principle (what a nuisance that hat had been as it scraped against his neck on the autobus, on the train, in the Metro in Paris); Miss Grabbe’s snood and sandals, her bright glass-bead jewelry, her angora sweater, and shoulder-strap leather handbag, all Italian as the merceria, she wore in the manner of a uniform that announced her mobility in action and her support of the native products. Moreover, her brown face had a weather-beaten look, as though it had been exposed to the glare of many merciless suns; and her eyes blazed out of the sun-tan powder around them with the bright blue stare of a scout; only her pretty, tanned legs suggested a life less hardy—they might have been going to the beach. Like Mr. Sciarappa (for all his little graces), Miss Grabbe seemed to have been parched and baked by exposure, hardened and chapped by the winds of rebuff and failure. In contrast, the young lady, with her pallor and her smile, looked faintly unreal, like a photograph of a girl whose engagement has just been announced. And the young man felt himself joined to her in this sheltered and changeless beatitude; at the same time, in the company of Miss Grabbe as in that of Mr. Sciarappa, he was aware of a slight discomfort, a sense of fatuity, like the brief, antagonized embarrassment he noticed in himself whenever, in answer to the inevitable question, he replied, with a touch of storminess, that he was traveling in Europe for pleasure.
That he and the young lady were happy became, in this context, a crime, or, at best, a breach of taste, like the conspicuous idleness of the rich. They could hardly, he remarked to himself, be expected to give up their mutual delight because others were not so fortunate; they had already settled this question with regard to steak and cotolette. Yet, catching Miss Grabbe’s eye measuring his happiness in the gondola, he felt inclined to withdraw his feelings to some more private place, just as certain sensitive patrons of restaurants preferred nowadays to feast indoors, secure from the appraisal of the poor. His state, as he well knew, was of peculiar interest to Miss Grabbe: for twenty years, Polly Grabbe had made herself famous by coming to Europe, semi-annually, in pursuit of love. These sorties of hers had the regularity and the directness of buyers’ trips that are signalized by a paid notice in the Paris Herald, announcing to the dressmaking trade that Miss Blank of Franklin Simon is staying at the Crillon. Under the eye of that transatlantic experience, the young man felt a little discomfited, as if he had been modeling a housedress before a cosmopolite audience. He had no wish to judge Miss Grabbe, yet he felt installed in a judgment by the dream of perpetual monogamy into which the young lady had invited him. In an effort to extricate himself, he inquired of Miss Grabbe very civilly, as one traveler to another, how she found the Venetian men, but the heiress only stared at him coldly and asked what he took her for.
Miss Grabbe was aware of her legend; it half-pleased her, and yet she resented it, for, at bottom, she was naively unconscious of the plain purport of her acts. She imagined that she came abroad out of a cultural impatience with America; in her own eyes, she was always a rebel against a commercial civilization. She hoped to be remembered for her architectural experiments, her patronage of the arts, her championship of personal freedom, and flattered herself that in Europe this side of her was taken seriously. Men in America, she complained, thought only about business, and the European practice of making a business of love seemed to her, in contrast, the mark of an advanced civilization. Sexual intercourse, someone had taught her, was a quick transaction with the beautiful, and she proceeded to make love, whenever she traveled, as ingenuously as she trotted into a cathedral: men were a continental commodity of which one naturally took advantage, along with the wine and the olives, the bitter coffee and the crusty bread. Miss Grabbe, despite her boldness, was not an original woman, and her boldness, in fact, consisted in taking everything literally. She made love in Europe because it was the thing to do, because European lovers were superior to American lovers (“My dear,” she told the young lady, “there’s all the difference in the world—it’s like comparing the very best California claret to the simplest little vin du pays”), because she believed it was good for her, especially in hot climates, and because one was said to learn languages a great deal more readily in bed. The rapid turnover of her lovers did not particularly disconcert her; she took a quantitative view and sought for a wealth of sensations. She liked to startle and to shock, yet positively did not understand why people considered her immoral. A prehensile approach, she inferred, was laudable where values were in question—what was the beautiful for, if not to be seized and savored?
For Polly Grabbe, as for the big luxury liners and the small school teachers with their yearly piety of Europe, the war had been an enforced hiatus. Though she had wished for the defeat of Hitler and been generous with money to his victims, in her heart she had waited for it to be over with a purely personal impatience. She was among the first to return when travel was once again permitted, an odd, bedizened, little figure, alighting gallantly from the plane, making a spot of color among the American businessmen, her vulturine co-passengers, who were descending on Europe to “look after” their investments. Conditions in Paris shocked these men, deep in their business sense, and Miss Grabbe was dismayed also; her own investment had been swept away. She could not take up where she had left off: people were dead or dispersed or in prison; her past stood about her in fragments, a shattered face looming up here and there like a house-wall in a bombed city; normalcy was far away. But Miss Grabbe did not lack courage. She had learned how to say good-bye and to look ahead for the next thing. Paris, she quickly decided, was beautiful but done for, a shell from which the life had retreated out into the suburbs where a few old friends still persisted, a shell now inhabited by an alien existentialist gossip, and an alien troupe of young men who cadged drinks from her in languid boredom and made love only to each other. Her trip to Italy, therefore, had the character of a farewell and a new beginning, and the hotel suite, into which she now showed the two friends, resembled a branch office which had been opened but was not yet in full operation.
The wide letto matrimoniale in the bedroom, the washstand, and the bidet with the towel over it, the dressing-table on which were arranged, very neatly and charmingly, Miss Grabbe’s toilet waters and perfumes, her powders and lucite brush and comb, her lipsticks, orange sticks, and tweezers, all had an air unmistakably functional, to which the books and magazines, the cigarettes and pretty colored postcards set out, invitingly, in the sitting room contributed their share, so that it was not so surprising as it might have been to see, when the balcony doors were opened, the figure of Mr. Sciarappa lounging on the terrace, like a waiting client, with a copy of Life.
This conception of his position, however, seemed not to have struck Mr. Sciarappa. He was there, it seemed, simply for the practical joke of it, for their shrieks, for Miss Grabbe’s discomfiture. He laughed at them with candid merriment, saying, “Caro, I give you a surprise.” The two friends had not seen him so lively since one night in Milan when a tired fat woman, running for a tramcar, had failed to catch it. He showed no inclination at all to step into the role that stood there, ready for him to try on. He had come, he said, as a courier, proposing to take them to dinner, to the Piazza San Marco, to Harry’s Bar, where the smart English officers went and the international set with their electric-blue suits, blonde mistresses, heavy jaws, and decorations from Balkan kings. With all these little offices and services, his mind was completely occupied. His original mission, Miss Grabbe, had plainly dropped into some oubliette of his faculties, and the two friends, observing him, could nearly have sworn that his sole purpose in coming to Venice had been to prepare a place for them, like Jesus for his disciples in Heaven.
Dinner, however, soon restored him to his normal state of disaffection. Once the four were seated upstairs, in the yellow lamplight at Quadri’s, he was his old self, bored, petulant, abstracted. He jumped up from his chair with almost indecent agility to speak to a bearded gentleman in a respectable suit of clothes, and came back finally to announce that this was Prince Rucellai, an illustrious Florentine nobleman who practiced the trade of antique-dealer. In the manner of all Mr. Sciarappa’s native acquaintances, the prince at once quitted the restaurant, but Mr. Sciarappa’s attention went with him out into the square, abandoning the Americans summarily for the evening. It was as if he suffered from some curious form of amnesia that made him mislay his purpose halfway on the road to accomplishment. He was in Venice and could not remember why, and he stayed on hoping, somehow, for a refreshment of his memory. Now and then, during the following days, the Americans would find him looking at them with a curious concentration, as though their appearance might recall to him his motive in seeking their society. From Miss Grabbe, on the contrary, whose emeralds should have furnished him his clue, he persistently averted his eyes.
The little bohemian heiress, in fact, was the center of his inattention, an inattention principled and profound. From the very first night, apparently, she had associated herself in his mind with culture, and hence, merely by talking about them, she had fallen into the class of objects—cathedrals, works of art, museums, palaces maintained by the state—which, by being free to all, were valuable, in his opinion, to none. And by the same trick by which he substituted an empty space for the cathedral in the Piazza San Marco, he “vanished” Miss Grabbe from the table at dinner. The possibility of her buying a palazzo, which she spoke of continually, he simply declined to credit. His business interest, it would seem, was far too deep to be aroused by it, and no commission could be large enough to make him expand his idea of money to accommodate within it the living heresy of Miss Grabbe. All over Venice, volunteer real-estate agents were at work for her, the concierge at the Grand Hotel, the lift-boy, a gondolier, two Communist painters in a studio across the Canal. Mr. Sciarappa only smiled impatiently whenever this project was mentioned, and once he nudged the young lady and significantly tapped his head.
Miss Grabbe, for her part, was unaware of his feelings. The first evening on the balcony, she had expressed herself strongly against him. Pointing dramatically to the blue lagoon, the towers, the domes, the clouds, the Palladian front of San Giorgio, all as pink and white, as airy, watery, clear, and neat as the bottles and puffs on her own dressing-table, she had taken the young man’s arm and invited him to choose. “My dear, why do you see him? He is not our sort,” she had said. “Life is too short. He will spoil Venice for you if you let him.” The young man had simply stared. Mr. Sciarappa was a nuisance, but he felt no inclination to trade him for the Venetian “experience.” The bargain was too sharp for his nature. If Mr. Sciarappa obstructed the European view, he also replaced it. The mystery of Europe lay in him as solidly as in the stones of Venice, and it was somewhat less worn by previous inquisitive travelers. Night after night, he and the young lady would sit up examining Mr. Sciarappa with the refined passion of connoisseurs. It was true that sometimes at the dinner-hour they would try to give him the slip, yet they felt a certain relief whenever he rose from behind a potted plant in the hotel lobby to claim, once again, their company. He had become a problem for them in both senses of the word: the impossibility of talking with him was compensated for by the possibilities of talking about him, and the detachment of their attitude was, they felt, atoned for by their neighborliness in the physical sphere. How much, in fact, they had come to feel that they owed Mr. Sciarappa their company, they did not recognize until the afternoon, extraordinary to them, when he was not on hand to collect the debt.
The day of the fiesta he silently disappeared. Like everyone else in Venice he had been planning on the occasion. Colored lanterns had been attached to the gondolas, floats were being decked, and rumors, gay as paper flowers, promised a night of license, masking, and folly. A party of English tourists was expected; Miss Grabbe was trying on eighteenth-century court costumes with the Communists across the Canal. Apparently, Mr. Sciarappa had set this as the date of his own liberation, for at the apéritif hour he was not to be seen, either at the hotel or, as he had stipulated, in the Piazza. The two friends connected his appearance with the arrival of the English tourists, for at the first mention of their existence, his mind had ducked underground, into the tunnel where his real life was conducted. They had known him long enough to see him as a city of Catacombs, and to interpret his lapses of attention as signs of the keenest interest; his silences were the camouflaged entrances to the Plutonian realm of his thoughts. Nevertheless, they felt slightly shocked and abandoned. Like many intellectual people, they were alarmed by the confirmation of theories—was the world as small as the mind? They telephoned their hotel twice, but their friend had left no messages for them, and, disturbed, they allowed Miss Grabbe to go off with her maskers while they watched on the cold jetty the little gondolas chasing up and down the Canal in pursuit of the great floating orchestra which everybody had seen in the afternoon but which now, like Mr. Sciarappa, had unaccountably disappeared.
Some time later, they perceived Mr. Sciarappa alone in a gondola that was rapidly making for the pier. They would not have recognized him had he not called out effusively, “Ah, my friends, I am looking for you all over Venice tonight.”
The full force of this lie was lost on them, for they were less astonished to find Scampi in a falsehood than to find him in a new suit. In dark blue and white stripes, he stepped out of the gondola; gold links gleamed at his wrists; his face was soft from the barbershop, and a strong fragrance of Chanel caused passers-by to turn to stare at them. The bluish-white glare from the dome of San Giorgio, lit up for the occasion, fell on him, accentuating the moment. The heavier material had added a certain substantiality to him; like the men in Harry’s Bar, he looked sybaritic, prosperous, and vain. But this transfiguration was, it became clear, merely the afterglow of some hope that had already set for him. Wherever he had been, he had failed to accomplish his object, if indeed he had had an object beyond the vague adventure of a carnival night. He was more nervous than ever, and he invited them to join him on the Canal in the manner of a man who is weighing the security of companionship against the advantages of the lone hand. The two friends declined, and he put off once more in the gondola, saying, “Well, my dears, you are right; it is just a tourist fiesta.” The two retired to their window to wonder whether the English tourists, and not themselves or Miss Grabbe, had not been, after all, the real Venetian attraction. The Inglesi’s arrival might well have been anticipated in a newspaper, particularly since they had the reputation of being rich collectors of furniture. Mr. Sciarappa’s restless behavior, irrational in a pursuer who has already come up with his prey, was appropriate enough to the boredom and anxiety of waiting. Indeed, sometimes, watching him drum on the table, they had said to themselves that he behaved toward them like a passenger who is detained between trains in a provincial railroad station and vainly tries to interest himself in the billboard and the ticket collector.
Miss Grabbe had taken very little part in all this mental excitement. So far as the two friends could see, he had no erotic interest for her. She was as adamant to his virility as he to the evidence of her money—it would have disturbed all her preconceptions to discover sex in a business suit. She received his disappearance calmly, saying, “I thought you wanted to get rid of him—he has probably found bigger fish.” In general, after her first protest, she had grown accustomed to Mr. Sciarappa, in the manner of the rich. For her he did not assume prominence through the frequency of his attendance, but on the contrary he receded into the surroundings in the fashion of a piece of furniture that is “lived with.” She opened and closed him like a guidebook whenever she needed the name of a hotel or a hairdresser or had forgotten the Italian for what she wanted to say to the waiter. Having money, she had little real curiosity; she was not a dependent of the world. It did not occur to her to inquire why he had come, nor did she ask when he would leave. She too spoke of him as “Scampi,” but tolerantly, without resentment, as nice women call a dog a rascal. She was not, despite appearances, a woman of strong convictions; she accepted any current situation as normative and was not anxious for change. Her money had made her insular; she was used to a mercenary circle and had no idea that outside it lovers showed affection, friends repaid kindness, and husbands did not ask an allowance or bring their mistresses home to bed. So now she accepted Mr. Sciarappa’s dubious presence without particular question; it struck her as far less unnatural than the daily affection she witnessed between the young man and the young lady. She domesticated all the queerness of his being with them in Venice. “My dear,” she remonstrated with the young man, “he simply wants to sell us something,” dissipating Sciarappa as succinctly as if he had been a Fuller Brush man at the door. It irritated them slightly that she would not see the problem of Sciarappa, and they did not guess that now, when they had given up expecting it, she would grapple with their problem more matter-of-factly than they. While the two friends slept, through the night of the fiesta she and Mr. Sciarappa made love; when he departed, in dressing-gown and slippers, she thanked him “for a very pleasant evening.”
Mr. Sciarappa, however, did not stay to cement the relationship. He left Venice precipitately, as though retreating ahead of Miss Grabbe’s revelations. He was gone the next afternoon, without spoken adieus, leaving behind him a list of the second-best restaurants in Florence for the young lady, with an asterisk marking the ones where he was personally known to the headwaiter. “Unhappily,” his note ran, “one cannot be on a holiday forever.” On a final zigzag of policy he had careened away from them into the inexplicable. Now that he had declared himself in action, his motives seemed the more obscure. What, in fact, had he been up to? It was impossible to find out from Miss Grabbe, for to her mind sex went without explanations; it seemed to her perfectly ordinary that two strangers who were indifferent to each other should spend the night locked in the privacies of love.
Sitting up in bed, surrounded by hot-water bottles (for she had caught cold in her stomach), she received the two friends at tea-time and related her experiences of the night, using confession matter-of-factly, as a species of feminine hygiene, to disinfect her spirit of any lingering touch of the man. Scampi, she said, accepting the nickname from the young man as a kind of garment for the Italian gentleman, who seemed to stand there before them, shivering and slightly chicken-breasted in the nude, Scampi, she said, was very nice, but not in any way remarkable, the usual Italian man. He had taken her back from the fiesta, where the orchestra had never been found and she had grown tired of the painters, who looked ridiculous in costume when no one else was dressed. He had pinched her bottom on the Riva and undressed her on the balcony; they had tussled and gone to bed. Upon the cold stage of Miss Grabbe’s bald narrative, he capered in and out like a grotesque, now naked, chasing her naked onto the balcony, now gorgeous in a silk dressing-gown and slippers tiptoeing down the corridor of the hotel, now correct in light tan pajamas dutifully, domestically, turning out the light. For a moment, they saw him all shrunken and wizened. (“My dear, he is much older than you think,” said Miss Grabbe confidentially), and another glimpse revealed him in an aspect still more intimate and terrible, tossing the scapular he wore about his neck, and which hung down and interfered with his love-making, back again and again, lightly, flippantly, recklessly, over his thin shoulder.
“Stop,” cried the young lady, seizing the young man’s hands and pressing them in an agony of repentance to her own bosom. “Does it shock you?” inquired Miss Grabbe, lifting her black eyebrows. “Darling, you gave me Sciarappa.”
“No, no,” begged the young lady, for it seemed to her that this was not at all what they had wanted, this mortal exposé, but that, on the contrary, they had had in mind something more sociological, more humane—biographical details, Mr. Sciarappa’s relation with his parents, his social position, his business, his connection with the Fascist state. But of all this, of course, Miss Grabbe could tell them nothing. The poor Italian, hunted down, defenseless, surprised in bed by a party of intruders, had yielded nothing but his manhood. His motives, his status, his true public and social self, everything that the young lady now called “the really interesting part about him,” he had carried off with him to Rome intact. He was gone and had left them with his skin, withered, dry, unexpectedly old. Through Miss Grabbe, they had come as close to him bodily as the laws of nature permit, and there at the core there was nothing—they had known him better in the Galleria in Milan. As for the affective side of him, the emotions and sentiments, here too he had eluded them. Miss Grabbe’s net had been too coarse to catch whatever small feelings had escaped him during the encounter.
A sense of desolation descended on the room, the usual price of confidences. It was a relief when one of the Communist painters came in with some lira, which Miss Grabbe put in her douche-bag. The two friends exchanged a glance of illumination. Had this repository for his country’s debased currency proved too casual for Mr. Sciarappa’s sense of honor? Was this the cause of his flight? If so, was it the lira or his manhood that was insulted? Or were the two, in the end, indistinguishable?
The two friends could never be sure, and when they left Venice shortly afterwards they were still debating whether some tactlessness of Miss Grabbe’s had set Scampi at last in motion or whether his own action, by committing him for an hour or so, had terrified him into instant removal. He was a theoretician of practice so pure, they said to each other on the bus, that any action must appear to him as folly because of the risks to his shrewdness that it involved, a man so worldly that he saw the world as a lie too transparent to fool Rino Sciarappa, who was clever and knew the ropes. As they passed through the bony Apennines, the landscape itself seemed to wear a face baked and disabused as Mr. Sciarappa’s own, and thus to give their theories a geological and national cast. The terraced fields lay scorched, like Mr. Sciarappa’s wrinkles, on the gaunt umber-colored hillsides; like his vernal hopes, plants sprang up only to die here, and the land had the mark of wisdom—it too had seen life. After these reflections, it was a little anticlimactic to meet, half an hour after their arrival in Florence, the face of Italian history, whose destination had been announced as Rome. “He is following us, but he is ahead,” said the young man, abandoning historical explanations forever. Only one conclusion seemed possible—he must be a spy.
In Florence, at any rate, he appeared to be acquainted; he introduced them to a number of American girls who worked in United States offices and to one or two young men who wore American uniforms. All of these people, as he had once promised them in Venice, called him by his first name; yet when the dinner-hour drew near the whole party vanished as agilely as Mr. Sciarappa, and the two friends found themselves once more going to his favorite restaurant, drinking his favorite wine, and being snubbed first by the waiter and then by their impatient guide. If he was a spy, however, his superiors must at last have given him a new assignment, for the next day he left Florence, not without giving the young lady his restaurant key to Rome.
In Rome, curiosity led them, at long last, and with some reluctance, to investigate his address, which he had written out in the young lady’s address book long ago, on the train, outside Domodossola, when their acquaintance had promised to be of somewhat shorter duration. As their steps turned into the dusty Via San Ignazio, they felt their hearts quicken. The European enigma and its architectural solution lay just before them, around a bend in the street, and they still, in spite of everything, should not have been surprised to find a renaissance palace, a coat of arms, and a liveried manservant just inside the door. But the house was plain and shabby; it was impossible to conceive of Mr. Sciarappa’s gabardines proceeding deftly through the entrance. Looking at this yellow house, at the unshaven tenant in his undershirt regarding them from the third-story window, and the mattress and the geranium in the fourth, the two friends felt a return of that mortification and unseemly embarrassment they had experienced in Miss Grabbe’s bedroom. This house too was an obscenity, like the shrunken skin and the scapular, but it also was a shell which Rino Sciarappa did not truly inhabit. By common consent, they turned silently away from it, with a certain distaste which, oddly enough, was not directed at Mr. Sciarappa or his residence, but, momentarily, at each other. The relation between pursuer and pursued had been confounded, by a dialectic too subtle for their eyes.