Giovanni's Room (10 page)

I wonder if I can stand this another moment. “No,” I stammer. “No. Not often.”

“But you are a believer?”

I smile. It is not even a patronizing smile, though, perhaps, I wish it could be, “Yes.”

But I wonder what my smile could have looked like. It did not reassure her. “You must pray,” she says, very soberly. “I assure you. Even just a little prayer, from time to time. Light a little candle. If it were not for the prayers of the blessed saints, one could not live in this world at all. I speak to you,” she says, drawing herself up slightly, “as though I were your
maman
. Do not be offended.”

“But I am not offended. You are very nice. You are very nice to speak to me this way.”

She smiles a satisfied smile. “Men—not just babies like you, but old men, too—they always need a woman to tell them the truth.
Les hommes
,
ils sont impossibles
.” And she smiles, and forces me to smile at the cunning of this universal joke, and turns out the light in the master bedroom. We go down the hall again, thank heaven, to my drink. This bedroom, of course, is quite untidy, the light burning, my bathrobe, books, dirty socks, and a couple of dirty
glasses, and a coffee cup half full of stale coffee—lying around, all over the place; and the sheets on the bed a tangled mess.

“I'll fix this up before morning,” I say.

“
Bien sûr.
” She sighs. “You really must take my advice, monsieur, and get married.” At this, suddenly, we both laugh. Then I finish my drink.

The inventory is almost done. We go into the last room, the big room, where the bottle is, before the window. She looks at the bottle, then at me. “But you will be drunk by morning,” she says.

“Oh, no! I'm taking the bottle
with
me.”

It is quite clear that she knows this is not true. But she shrugs her shoulders again. Then she becomes, by the act of wrapping the shawl around her head, very formal, even a little shy. Now that I see she is about to leave, I wish I could think of something to make her stay. When she has gone back across the road, the night will be blacker and longer than ever. I have something to say to her—to her?—but of course it will never be said. I feel that I want to be forgiven; I want
her
to forgive me. But I do not know how to state my crime. My crime, in some odd way, is in being a man and she knows all about this already. It is terrible how naked she makes me feel, like a half-grown boy, naked before his mother.

She puts out her hand. I take it, awkwardly.

“
Bon voyage
,
monsieur
. I hope that you were happy while you were here and that, perhaps, one day, you will visit us again.” She is smiling and her eyes are kind but now the smile is purely social, it is the graceful termination of a business deal.

“Thank you,” I say. “Perhaps I will be back next year.” She releases my hand and we walk to the door.

“Oh!” she says, at the door, “please do not wake me up in the morning. Put the keys in my mailbox. I do not, any more, have any reason to get up so early.”

“Surely.” I smile and open the door. “Good-night, Madame.”

“
Bonsoir
,
Monsieur. Adieu!
” She steps out into the darkness. But there is a light coming from my house and from her house across the road. The town lights glimmer beneath us and I hear, briefly, the sea again.

She walks a little away from me, and turns. “
Souvenez-vous
,” she tells me. “One must make a little prayer from time to time.”

And I close the door.

She has made me realize that I have much to do before morning. I decide to clean the bathroom before I allow myself another drink. And I begin to do this, first scrubbing out the tub, then running water into the pail to mop the floor. The bathroom is tiny and square, with one frosted window. It reminds me of that claustrophobic room in Paris. Giovanni had had great plans for remodelling the room and there was a time, when he had actually begun to do this, when we lived with plaster all over everything and bricks piled on the floor. We took packages of bricks out of the house at night and left them in the streets.

I suppose they will come for him early in the morning, perhaps just before dawn, so that the last thing Giovanni will ever see will be that grey, lightless sky over Paris, beneath which we stumbled homeward together so many desperate and drunken mornings.

PART TWO

I
REMEMBER THAT LIFE
in that room seemed to be occurring beneath the sea. Time flowed past indifferently above us; hours and days had no meaning. In the beginning, our life together held a joy and amazement which was newborn every day. Beneath the joy, of course, was anguish and beneath the amazement was fear; but they did not work themselves to the beginning until our high beginning was aloes on our tongues. By then anguish and fear had become the surface on which we slipped and slid, losing balance, dignity, and pride. Giovanni's face, which I had memorized so many mornings, noons, and nights, hardened before my eyes, began to give in secret places, began to crack. The light in the eyes became a glitter; the wide and beautiful brow began to suggest the skull beneath. The sensual lips turned inward, busy with the sorrow overflowing from his heart. It became a stranger's face—or it made me so guilty to look on him that I wished it were a stranger's face. Not all my
memorizing had prepared me for the metamorphosis which my memorizing had helped to bring about.

Our day began before daybreak, when I drifted over to Guillaume's bar in time for a preclosing drink. Sometimes, when Guillaume had closed the bar to the public, a few friends and Giovanni and myself stayed behind for breakfast and music. Sometimes Jacques was there—from the time of our meeting with Giovanni he seemed to come out more and more. If we had breakfast with Guillaume, we usually left around seven o'clock in the morning. Sometimes, when Jacques was there, he offered to drive us home in the car which he had suddenly and inexplicably bought, but we almost always walked the long way home along the river.

Spring was approaching Paris. Walking up and down this house tonight, I see again the river, the cobblestoned
quais
, the bridges. Low boats passed beneath the bridges and on those boats one sometimes saw women hanging washing out to dry. Sometimes we saw a young man in a canoe, energetically rowing, looking rather helpless, and also rather silly. There were yachts tied up along the banks from time to time, and houseboats, and barges; we passed the fire-house so often on our way home that the firemen got to know us. When winter came again and Giovanni found himself in hiding in one of these barges, it was a fireman who, seeing him crawl back into hiding with a loaf of bread one night, tipped off the police.

The trees grew green those mornings, the river dropped, and the brown winter smoke dropped downward out of it, and fishermen appeared. Giovanni was right about the fishermen; they certainly never seemed to catch anything, but it gave them something to do. Along the
quais
the bookstalls seemed to become almost festive, awaiting the weather which would allow the passerby to leaf idly through the dog-eared books, and which would inform the tourist with a passionate desire to carry off to the United States, or Denmark, more colored prints than he could afford, or, when he got
home, know what to do with. Also, the girls appeared on their bicycles, along with boys similarly equipped; and we sometimes saw them along the river, as the light began to fade, their bicycles put away until the morrow. This was after Giovanni had lost his job and we walked around in the evenings. Those evenings were bitter. Giovanni knew that I was going to leave him, but he did not dare accuse me for fear of being corroborated. I did not dare to tell him. Hella was on her way back from Spain and my father had agreed to send me money, which I was not going to use to help Giovanni, who had done so much to help me. I was going to use it to escape his room.

Every morning the sky and the sun seemed to be a little higher and the river stretched before us with a greater haze of promise. Every day the bookstall keepers seemed to have taken off another garment, so that the shape of their bodies appeared to be undergoing a most striking and continual metamorphosis. One began to wonder what the final shape would be. It was observable, through open windows on the
quais
and sidestreets, that
hôteliers
had called in painters to paint the rooms; the women in the dairies had taken off their blue sweaters and rolled up the sleeves of their dresses, so that one saw their powerful arms; the bread seemed warmer and fresher in the bakeries. The small school children had taken off their capes and their knees were no longer scarlet with the cold. There seemed to be more chatter—in that curiously measured and vehement language, which sometimes reminds me of stiffening egg white and sometimes of stringed instruments but always of the underside and aftermath of passion.

But we did not often have breakfast in Guillaume's bar because Guillaume did not like me. Usually I simply waited around, as inconspicuously as possible, until Giovanni had finished cleaning up the bar and had changed his clothes. Then we said good-night and left. The habitués had evolved toward us a curious attitude,
composed of an unpleasant maternalism, and envy, and disguised dislike. They could not, somehow, speak to us as they spoke to one another, and they resented the strain we imposed on them of speaking in any other way. And it made them furious that the dead center of their lives was, in this instance, none of their business. It made them feel their poverty again, through the narcotics of chatter, and dreams of conquest, and mutual contempt.

Wherever we ate breakfast and wherever we walked, when we got home we were always too tired to sleep right away. We made coffee and sometimes drank cognac with it; we sat on the bed and talked and smoked. We seemed to have a great deal to tell—or Giovanni did. Even at my most candid, even when I tried hardest to give myself to him as he gave himself to me, I was holding something back. I did not, for example, really tell him about Hella until I had been living in the room a month. I told him about her then because her letters had begun to sound as though she would be coming back to Paris very soon.

“What is she doing, wandering around through Spain alone?” asked Giovanni.

“She likes to travel,” I said.

“Oh,” said Giovanni, “nobody likes to travel, especially not women. There must be some other reason.” He raised his eyebrows suggestively. “Perhaps she has a Spanish lover and is afraid to tell you—? Perhaps she is with a
torero.
”

Perhaps she is, I thought. “But she wouldn't be afraid to tell me.”

Giovanni laughed. “I do not understand Americans at all,” he said.

“I don't see that there's anything very hard to understand. We aren't married, you know.”

“But she is your mistress, no?” asked Giovanni.

“Yes.”

“And she is still your mistress?”

I stared at him. “Of course,” I said.

“Well then,” said Giovanni, “I do not understand what she is doing in Spain while you are in Paris.” Another thought struck him. “How old is she?”

“She's two years younger than I am.” I watched him. “What's that got to do with it?”

“Is she married? I mean to somebody else, naturally.”

I laughed. He laughed too. “Of course not.”

“Well, I thought she might be an older woman,” said Giovanni, “with a husband somewhere and perhaps she had to go away with him from time to time in order to be able to continue her affair with you. That would be a nice arrangement. Those women are sometimes
very
interesting and they usually have a little money. If
that
woman was in Spain, she would bring back a wonderful gift for you. But a young girl, bouncing around in a foreign country by herself—I do not like that at all. You should find another mistress.”

It all seemed very funny. I could not stop laughing. “Do
you
have a mistress?” I asked him.

“Not now,” he said, “but perhaps I will again one day.” He half frowned, half smiled. “I don't seem to be very interested in women right now—I don't know why. I used to be. Perhaps I will be again.” He shrugged. “Perhaps it is because women are just a little more trouble than I can afford right now.
Et puis
—” He stopped.

I wanted to say that it seemed to me that he had taken a most peculiar road out of his trouble; but I only said, after a moment, cautiously: “You don't seem to have a very high opinion of women.”

“Oh, women! There is no need, thank heaven, to have an opinion about
women
. Women are like water. They are tempting like that, and they can be that treacherous, and they can seem to be that bottomless, you know?—and they can be that shallow. And that
dirty.” He stopped. “I perhaps don't like women very much, that's true. That hasn't stopped me from making love to many and loving one or two. But most of the time—most of the time I made love only with the body.”