Cast a Cold Eye (9 page)

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 aflamed 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?