Famous Last Words (22 page)

And the minute he had said this, Quinn regretted it, knowing how priggish it must sound.

“Rather well known, hunh?”

“Yes sir.”

“May an ignorant slob ask why?”

Quinn walked right in: “yes, sir,” he said. And reddened immediately. Damn.

“Well,” said Freyberg. “Tell a person. Why is it rather well known?”

“Because, sir, it was the last thing Schubert wrote.”

“Oh, really, fascinating. The last thing he wrote before what?”

“Before he died, sir.”

Freyberg got off the cot and crossed to the desk which

held the gramophone and records. He fingered the records lightly. weaaťng his gloves. His back was now to Quinn.

“I’ve finished reading the walls up to where it says they were married.”

“Yes sir.”

“And I’ve noted it doesn’t say they lived happily ever

after.”

“No sir.”

“Isn’t that kind of odd—for a fairy tale? Not to say they lived happily ever after?”

“Maybe, sir. But this isn’t a fairy tale.”

“Oh, yes. I forgot. It’s mythology.” Freyberg had now

picked up the Schubert sonata in its jacket and was looking at its label.

“Poor old Wally Simpson.” Freyberg’s voice was like a

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candy melting in the throat. “Mauberley sure pulls all the stops out on that one. She sure was quite a dame….”

“I thought so,” said Quinn.

“She’s a whore,” said Freyberg.

“And you’re a bastard, sir, if I may say so, sir, for saying that, sir.”

Freyberg was genuinely taken aback. Quinn automatically stood at attention waiting to be reprimanded. But it never came to that. Freyberg gave a slight cough and then smiled.

“You know, it’s fascinating,” he said, “the way you lay yourself on the line for these people. I could have you brigged for what you just said. But don’t get all worked up about it, Quinn. I’m not going to do it. I’m simply remarking…1 find it fascinating, the way you lay yourself on the line.”

“I haven’t said 1 think what’s on the walls is a pretty story, sir. I’ve only said I think I understand what he’s trying to do.”

“Whitewash the truth?”

“Tell the truth. About himself. Including the mistakes he made. And…”

“And…?”

Quinn said, “It’s just—there are more people guilty than just these people on the wall. And…”

“And?”

“And you keep trying to make it seem these people here

were the only guilty people in the whole world.”

Freyberg smiled. “Well yeah,” he said. “I guess there was Hitler too.”

Quinn said; “all I mean is—they weren’t alone. Damn it!

You’d blame the whole war on Mauberley, if you could.”

Freyberg only smiled after this and then said, “Lieutenant Quinn, I would like to ask you a question.”

“Yes sir,”

“Can you tell me why it is your heart goes out to all these people here?” Freyberg made a kind of a dancer’s turn that took in all the walls. “I really do need an answer. Lieutenant.

I really do. Because, you see, my heart does not go out to any of these people here. And I want to know why. I want to know why, because it makes me feel somewhat less than adequate that I cannot spare them any feeling.”

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Quinn was hoping this would be followed by one of Freyberg’s smiles. But it was not. Instead. Captain Freyberg said; “do you think it could be that I cannot spare that feeling for them because they cannot spare that feeling for me?”

Quinn said: “yes, sir”—very carefully. “It could be.”

“You sound doubtful, Lieutenant.”

“It’s just that we haven’t finished reading, Captain. And it doesn’t seem fair to condemn a lot of people whose stories have only half been told.”

Freyberg looked at the walls. “Does your heart go out to me. Lieutenant, the way it does to all these others?”

“That isn’t fair, sir. And you know it. I never said my heart went out to anyone. You did.”

Freyberg looked at Quinn and now—at last—he smiled.

” ‘I never said my heart went out to anyone,’ ” he said.

“Unquote.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’m very glad to hear it, Quinn. Believe me.”

“Yes, sir. I do believe you.”

“Good.” Freyberg studied the record still in his hands.

“You know, when I was reading I kept thinking: any minute now we’re going to meet one of these Fascist bastards that Mauberley doesn’t like. And it hasn’t happened, yet. Do you think it will?”

Quinn did not answer.

Freyberg said; “oh—it probably will. By the time we’ve

finished reading. Like you said, the story’s only half been told.” He looked up at Quinn. “By the way—I’m assuming

you mean we’ve only just read half; not that he’s only rMd us half.” He smiled. And snapped the record in two. handing one of the pieces to Quinn. “Half isn’t good enough, is it?”

“No, sir.”

Freyberg tucked the other half of the record under his arm in its blue jacket. “Goodnight,” he said. And went away.

Quinn looked down at the jagged thing in his hands and

was sorry. And he wondered why men like Freyberg were

compelled to be the way they were.

Just before he blew out the lamp. Quinn looked at the animals

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over his head—and the moon and the stars and the hand—

and he remembered something long forgotten. Mauberley’s mother, so the story went, had lost her mind because she was obsessed with perfection she could not achieve as a pianist. That no one could achieve. Just as Freyberg was obsessed with perfections of another kind that no one could achieve. Because—if they could—there would be nothing

written on the walls at all. And Freyberg would love that.

He would rejoice in all that white. Then Quinn arranged the pillow so it wouldn’t muss his hair—and blew out the lamp.

FOUR

19371940

In the nightmare of the dark

All the dogs of Europe bark,

And the Jiving nations wait,

Each sequestered in its hate;

Intellectual disgrace

Stares from every human face,

And the seas of pity lie

Locked and frozen in each eye.

W. H. Auden

Spain: 1937

The famous raid from the air on the town of Guernica had taken place in April of 1937. All that spring cine! summer.

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German warplanes continued their support of General Franco with more bombardments along the Biscayne coast of Spain.

Not long after the fall of Bilbao I went into the northern provinces of Navarre and Asturias with Isabella Loverso.

We travelled by motorcar.

Isabella Loverso was going on a “mission”—the object of which remained unspoken, though I assumed it had to do

with the cabal. In June, when I returned to Paris—unsettled in the aftermath of Wallis’s marriage to the Duke—Isabella had indicated to me she would be glad of my company

during this journey. “It is never good to travel alone through the regions of war,” she had said. “If one is by oneself, one disappears too easily.”

It was not, I must confess, for Isabella alone that 1 agreed to make the journey. In the back of my mind I also thought it might provide the subject matter, or at least the stimulus, for some new thing to write. My publisher had been prodding me with cablegrams and notes—very terse—reminding me

1 had not published since 1934. 1 remember how, in one of his notes, he said: “in this age of political malcontents the still, sane voice of Mauberley would be most welcome.”

Somehow, I doubted this—in the face of Ernest’s incumbency and the rising star of Steinbeck, both of whom seemed

to have cornered the market, if not in “still, sane voices”

then certainly in voices that were still considered sane.

Nonetheless, for reasons of my own, I thought it was imperative to try for another book. On the one hand, 1 needed

to exorcize the sting of Julia Franklin’s remarks; on the other, 1 had to overcome the crippling fact thai putting pen to paper had become anathema to me. At home in the Meurice or at the Grande Bretagne and Bristol, 1 had been filling two and three waste paper baskets a day.

When you pass into the north of Spain from France, there is little chance you will not encounter something that reminds you of the past. Your own or everyone’s. The names

of Biarritx, St. Jean-de-Lu/. and Navarre ring all the bells of English Kings, crusades and chivalry. But the furthest past

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of all is rung by the caves of Altamira. where the painted walls reverberate with the cries of Ice Age animals and men that have been dead two hundred thousand years and more.

Castille and Aragon lie to the south, and to the north—

the sea, the sun and-the yellow glare of the Biscayne Bay.

It is all a place of umbered soil and whitewashed stone and the sound rides over it of insects, even through the night, and of storms that never come and of songs you will never forget. It was to that place we made our way, midsummer of 1937. Seven years ago and a half.

In the midst of that journey, I discovered what it was that put Isabella Loverso in jeopardy, providing the edges on which she walked and the fear she had expressed when she said she was afraid she would disappear. It had to do with her past and with her marriage, of which, till then, I had never heard her speak. At

the outset, she and her husband, Barone Masimo Loverso, had been part of the coterie surrounding Mussolini.

They had worked for him tirelessly in the early days, devoting not only their time and money, but the prestige of

their name when Mussolini was still the relatively unknown editor of II Popoio. During the First World War, they called themselves Socialists. But in 1919 they proclaimed the Fascist Party, whose name was derived from the groups of workers—known as /asci—brought together under the hand of

Mussolini to agitate for a change in the social order. Very soon they were a major political force, gaining fame and support for their opposition to the rising threat of Communism.

They broke up Communist meetings and demonstrations,

wrote and published editorials against the

Communist ideal and, during the civil wars of 1921, took to the barricades. By the fall of 1922, the King himself sent out a call for Mussolini to take the Prime Ministership and save the country from the Communist menace. ‘Isabella smiled when she recounted these events.

“They called it The March on Rome,” she said. “But the

truth is, we rode in a private railway car from Milan and were met at the gates of the city by a military escort. All told, we ‘marched’ no more than a mile—and iJ Duce sat in

-imf.— - - J.^sgff<Ť^yťffl.^^layy^^^,,L^^|^^^.f”.^^-“.^. ;-,. -ay…t,^;,.:^ , 160

the rear of a motorcar! It is all a legend, you see? A story—

though people who were there and saw him riding tell you that he walked.…”

Perhaps it was seeing Mussolini riding in that motorcar that laid the foundations of Isabella’s rebellion against him.

His back was all she saw—and all her husband saw—for the next four weeks, and then, in November of 1922, Mussolini assumed dictatorial powers. What had been a shared ideal became a single man: a god.

Over the next two years, “constructive criticism” was still allowed. But in June of 1924, the door was finally shut on “constructive criticism” when Barone Loverso’s best friend, Giocomo Matteotti was murdered. Matteotti had long been an outspoken opponent of fascist violence—and in 1924 he made the mistake of publishing his views in a book called The Fascists Exposed. His murder, of course, exposed them openly for all to see. But the effect was silence—the allpervading silence of fear. The press was censored. Silenced.

The non-Fascist members of Parliament protested by seceding; thus being silenced. And the people finally lost the right to freely exercise their vote—silenced—when the Fascist Grand Council was established in 1929, putting forth a single party slate of candidates from which the people had to choose their representatives.

As for Isabella’s husband, Barone Masimo Loverso, he

died of a gunshot wound that was said to be self-inflicted.

This was on June llth, 1924. His friend, Matteotti, had been killed by a gang of thugs the day before. II Duce’s explanation was that Isabella’s husband must have played some part in Matteotti’s death, and afterward regretted it. His murderers attended his funeral; and Isabella, Baronessa Loverso, sought her retirement at the Palazzo d’Aquila in Venice.

For the next two weeks she spent every waking moment

destroying every word her husband had ever written. Essays, articles, poems—even his letters written before they were married. And then she drew down all the shades and closed all the doors.

Silenced.

So it seemed.

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“What saved you,” I asked, “when your husband died?”

Isabella stared from the back of the Daimler in which we rode. “Harry Wyndham,” she said.

I had always wondered how Diana’s father had entered

Isabella’s life.

“Harry Wyndham found me in mourning,” she said. “And

he found me greatly afraid.”

For a mile or more of dusty road, this was her only answer.

Finally the silence became so oppressive I asked if she had any children.

Isabella didn’t answer. Instead she settled into her furs—

light summer furs to keep off the chill after sunset. The road was giving off dust: yellow dust which powdered the windows.

The chauffeur drove at an ox-cart’s pace, for now we

had begun to encounter refugees on their way to the border towns of Irun and Henlaye, and the freedom—if they could achieve it—of St. Jean-de-Luz and Biarritz.

“Look! We are coming to San Sebastian,” said Isabella.

“Yes. But your children…”

She closed her eyes.

“They were buried with my husband,” she said and lifted up her hands to spread the furs around her ears, as if she were afraid to hear the words.

It was minutes before she spoke again.

“Harry Wyndham was like a patient, loving father,” she

said.

“Yes.”

“It was wonderful,” she said. “Wonderful to be a child