Cast a Cold Eye (12 page)

“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.

The Old Men

T
O THE YOUNG
man in the hospital nightshirt, the continuous moaning of the old voice across the hall was at first a simple irritant, like the clanking of radiator pipes. Could not somebody put a stop to it? was his involuntary, impatient query. He was furious with the hospital, with the doctor, and above all with his own irrelevance in having fallen off a ladder in his friend’s New England studio and landed here, at the county seat, with a broken elbow, in the private wing of an institution that, in everything but the charge
per diem,
resembled penury itself. The windy old voice perpetually crying “Nurse, nurse!” from just across the corridor, groaning, quavering, soughing, seemed to typify everything that was antiquated and
unnecessary
in the whole situation. Despite the young man’s efforts to take a more humane view, the notion that his old neighbor could be turned off with one severe twist of the wrist, like a leaking faucet, persisted in the young man’s head, together with the conviction that he himself, in the old man’s position, would have shown more self-control. Once he had allowed himself to voice this comparative judgment, however, he was immediately filled with chagrin, for he was a just young man, of a cool but chivalrous disposition, and he recognized that there had been nothing, as yet, in his young life to test his powers of self-restraint; all he could say with positiveness was that in order to utter such vivid groans as proceeded from the opposite room he would have to be a different person—i.e., to be ailing and old.

Yet the fact that he knew himself to be, on the contrary, rosy-cheeked, gold-haired, well-favored, a graduate student of history at Harvard University, the indulged son of his parents, did not dispose of his irritation. In fact, it only quickened it by making it appear unreasonable. To grit his teeth and endeavor not to hear would have been the conventional recourse, but his native hospitality and politeness now suddenly forbade him to eliminate the suffering old man from his consciousness, even if this had been physically possible. He felt a social obligation to listen. Yet the faculty of sympathetic attention, the young man rapidly discovered, as he tried remorsefully to exercise it, is like the faculty of hearing: it ceases to reply to a regularly offered stimulus, just as one ceases to be able to hear a clock ticking in a room. He found, upon experiment, that it was possible to replenish his compassion by picturing the old man as dying (in the manner of a jaded libertine who resorts to a mental image to resuscitate the inert
fact
of love), but even this spur to fellow-feeling soon failed to prick his imagination. In a very short time, he resigned himself to the truth that he could feel sad about the old man but not really sorry, and that for every squeeze of generalized pity, there was a spurt of concrete hatred and repugnance.

“Am I a monster?” he asked himself curiously. “Or is this what everyone secretly feels toward another’s ills, toward the intrusion of a foreign body into the consciousness—a reflex of distaste and censure?” In common with many of his generation who had missed the overseas war, he had kept, up to this moment, a boy’s methodical piety toward the paraplegic, the refugee, the concentration-camp inmate, and even, in a peculiar way (typical also of his age and class), toward the torturer, who seemed to share somehow with the victim the distinction of participating in the actual. Now with the actual close at hand, in the form of a living sufferer, he was astonished to find it more remote from his own center of being, more irrelevant to his purposes and interests, than the sight of a plane crashing he had recently watched in a newsreel. A slight tremor of anxiety went through him: would others extrude him from their midst so casually when his time came, or was he himself deficient in the ordinary corpuscles of humanity?

A screen had been cutting off his view of the invalid across the hall, but at mealtime he gradually became aware of a process of ingestion that was going on in that room, a steady munching and salivating, which he felt rather than heard. This surprised him very much, and once, when the screen was moved, he caught a glimpse of a lump of bedclothes in the middle of the iron bedstead, which surprised him also, in the same way. There was something very active in that lump, very much alive, though how a mere convexity of bedclothes could communicate that impression, the young man could not tell.

All along, some reasoner in himself had been urging on him the idea that the old fellow was not really very sick, but the fact that such a suggestion could even occur to him was so shocking to his conscience that he had not stopped to consider it on its merits. Now, however, he sat up in bed and began to attend more objectively to his neighbor, who at present was banging feebly with what sounded like a spoon on a glass. A nurse grumbled next door in the diet kitchen; there was a rustle of starched skirts. “Use your bell, Mr. Ciccone,” she commanded. A faint moan answered her; a creak of arch-preservers followed, as the nurse moved swiftly toward the bed. “Mr. Ciccone!” she cried sharply. The young man’s heart gave a lurch (“Forgive me,” he dumbly articulated, winging the thought after the old man, to catch him there, on the brink), but then from behind the screen came a grunt and a gurgling tobaccoey noise, like the mirth of a subterranean river-god. The old man was laughing.

The young man uttered a limp cry. Everything had abruptly coalesced: the name Mr. Ciccone, the pictorial bass with a crack in it, the tremolo and the quaver. Mr. Ciccone was acting. And instantly that collection of noises, to which the young man had been vainly striving to assign a poignant universal reality, acquired life and character. The unseen Mr. Ciccone presented himself: yellow skin, rheumy yet brilliant black eyes, white mustachios, thin liver-spotted hands, long white nightshirt. An Italian grocer, the young man conjectured, with a son in dentistry or the automobile business; a natural obstructionist and fraud, posed, in a white apron, with a mime’s sense of the picturesque, against the escarole and the pomegranates, the barrels of imported almonds and walnuts, weighing out the parmigiano on the non-Detecto scales. The young man laughed joyously aloud. Mr. Ciccone was off his conscience and lodged preferentially in his heart.

From this moment, he came to wait for the groans and laments, for the plaintive tinkle of the spoon on the glass, the short puffs of indignation, the struggle against the bedpan and the hypodermic syringe. Mr. Ciccone, as he soon learned from one of the internes, was not in fact very sick; a leg injury and a mild diabetic condition had combined to put him in the hospital, where he was regarded as a “character” by the nurses on the floor. All day long, they scolded the disobedient old party, who was continually bored and mischievous but never would trust his bell to summon attention. He felt cozened by this “bell” or light, not being able to hear it ring, and preferred to rely, in any personal emergency, on his own histrionic powers, weakly crying, “Nurse, nurse!”, tapping with the spoon on the glass, gasping, choking, playing dead. He was able to counterfeit extremity with such various and graphic realism that, though he had been some time in the hospital, the nurses would still rustle in alarm down the corridor (“Coming, Mr. Ciccone!”), only to find the old man, with the covers drawn up to his chin, chuckling at them and demanding a game of casino or a glass of Coca-Cola. Sometimes, when a new student relief nurse was on the corridor, Mr. Ciccone would actually get his way and would be sitting up in bed, finishing the forbidden beverage, when the head floor-nurse would fly in, all indignant cap and rattling keys—“Why, Mr. Ciccone, you
know
that Coca-Cola is bad for you”—and whisk the glass out of the room.

Mr. Ciccone, naturally, took medicine only under protest. He would bargain for a game of cards in exchange for good behavior, and, failing this, two or three times a day he would put up a convincing resistance to the sedatives, enemas, milk of magnesia, penicillin or insulin injections called for by his chart, only stopping short of direct physical combat, and, having concentrated a whole battery of nurses in his room, submitting all of a sudden with an exaggerated show of weakness as though to twit them for their display of force. After each of these submissions, he would moan for a long time, harrowingly, so that the delighted young man across the way could trace (as he knew someone was meant to) the whole nefarious course of the medicine down Mr. Ciccone’s injured gullet into his protesting stomach or through the tissues of his aged buttocks up to his shuddering heart.

The young man, too, execrated the routines of the hospital. The dreary food, dirty rooms, noise, lack of conveniences, the understaffed and officious personnel with its eternal “Doctor’s orders” vexed his intellect far more than his comfort, yet, on his own behalf,
as a private patient,
he could not nerve himself to complain. Conditions in hospitals all over the country, so he had heard, or read in an article, were nearly as absurd as this; someone ought to speak out against being waked up, as he was, two and a quarter hours before breakfast, at six every morning, on the pretext of having his temperature taken or his bandage examined, and waked up again (assuming he had been allowed to fall asleep) at three in the afternoon with a basin of lukewarm water, a toothbrush, and an order to “wash up” for the night. The idea of paying twelve dollars a day for this nonchalant and peremptory “care” was a constant insult to his acumen, but to protest on this basis was to imply that, had he been paying less, he would have had fewer grounds for objections. This, to a young man of liberal views, was not a tenable position. For purposes of social criticism, he could have wished himself a patient in the wards, where the very generalized injustice of the situation would have given him a right to speak. Shyness, the wish to appear a “good” patient, chivalry toward the nurses, all contributed to silence his criticism, but in his own eyes he was restrained, above all, by the sense that a demonstration against bureaucratic routine and authoritarian slovenliness on the part of a single private patient would so plainly lack a “popular” character.