Giovanni's Room (6 page)

I stood at the bar for quite a while alone, for Jacques had escaped from Guillaume but was now involved, poor man, with two of the knife-blade boys. Giovanni came back for an instant and winked.

“Are you sure?”

“You win. You're the philosopher.”

“Oh, you must wait some more. You do not yet know me well enough to say such a thing.”

And he filled his tray and disappeared again.

Now someone whom I had never seen before came out of the shadows toward me. It looked like a mummy or a zombie—this was the first, overwhelming impression—of something walking after it had been put to death. And it walked, really, like someone
who might be sleepwalking or like those figures in slow motion one sometimes sees on the screen. It carried a glass, it walked on its toes, the flat hips moved with a dead, horrifying lasciviousness. It seemed to make no sound; this was due to the roar of the bar, which was like the roaring of the sea, heard at night, from far away. It glittered in the dim light; the thin, black hair was violent with oil, combed forward, hanging in bangs; the eyelids gleamed with mascara, the mouth raged with lipstick. The face was white and thoroughly bloodless with some kind of foundation cream; it stank of powder and a gardenia-like perfume. The shirt, open coquettishly to the navel, revealed a hairless chest and a silver crucifix; the shirt was covered with round, paper-thin wafers, red and green and orange and yellow and blue, which stormed in the light and made one feel that the mummy might, at any moment, disappear in flame. A red sash was around the waist, the clinging pants were a surprisingly sombre grey. He wore buckles on his shoes.

I was not sure that he was coming towards me, but I could not take my eyes away. He stopped before me, one hand on his hip, looked me up and down, and smiled. He had been eating garlic and his teeth were very bad. His hands, I noticed, with an unbelieving shock, were very large and strong.

“
Eh bien
,” he said, “
il te plaît?
”

“
Comment?
” I said.

I really was not sure I had heard him right, though the bright, bright eyes, looking, it seemed, at something amusing within the recess of my skull, did not leave much room for doubt.

“You like him—the barman?”

I did not know what to do or say. It seemed impossible to hit him; it seemed impossible to get angry. It did not seem real, he did not seem real. Besides—no matter what I said, those eyes would mock me with it. I said, as drily as I could:

“How does that concern you?”

“But it concerns me not at all, darling.
Je m'en fou
.”

“Then please get the hell away from me.”

He did not move at once, but smiled at me again. “
Il est dangereux
,
tu sais
. And for a boy like you—he is
very
dangerous.”

I looked at him. I almost asked him what he meant. “Go to hell,” I said, and turned my back.

“Oh, no,” he said—and I looked at him again. He was laughing, showing all his teeth—there were not many. “Oh, no,” he said, “I go not to hell,” and he clutched his crucifix with one large hand. “But you, my dear friend—I fear that you shall burn in a very hot fire.” He laughed again. “Oh, such fire!” He touched his head. “Here.” And he writhed, as though in torment. “Every
where
.” And he touched his heart. “And here.” And he looked at me with malice and mockery and something else; he looked at me as though I were very far away. “Oh, my poor friend, so young, so strong, so handsome—will you not buy me a drink?”

“
Va te faire foutre
.”

His face crumpled in the sorrow of infants and of very old men—the sorrow, also, of certain, aging actresses who were renowned in their youth for their fragile, childlike beauty. The dark eyes narrowed in spite and fury and the scarlet mouth turned down like the mask of tragedy. “
T'aura du chagrin
,” he said. “You will be very unhappy. Remember that I told you so.”

And he straightened, as though he were a princess and moved, flaming, away through the crowd.

Then Jacques spoke, at my elbow. “Everyone in the bar,” he said, “is talking about how beautifully you and the barman have hit it off.” He gave me a radiant and vindictive smile. “I trust there has been no confusion?”

I looked down at him. I wanted to do something to his cheerful, hideous, worldly face which would make it impossible for him ever again to smile at anyone the way he was smiling at me. Then I
wanted to get out of this bar, out into the air, perhaps to find Hella, my suddenly so sorely menaced girl.

“There's been no confusion,” I snapped. “Don't you go getting confused, either.”

“I think I can safely say,” said Jacques, “that I have scarcely ever been less confused than I am at this moment.” He had stopped smiling; he gave me a look which was dry, bitter, and impersonal. “And, at the risk of losing forever your so remarkably candid friendship, let me tell you something. Confusion is a luxury which only the very, very young can possibly afford and you are not that young anymore.”

“I don't know what you're talking about,” I said. “Let's have another drink.”

I felt that I had better get drunk. Now Giovanni went behind the bar again and winked at me. Jacques' eyes never left my face. I turned rudely from him and faced the bar again. He followed me.

“The same,” said Jacques.

“Certainly,” said Giovanni, “that's the way to do it.” He fixed our drinks. Jacques paid. I suppose I did not look too well, for Giovanni shouted at me playfully, “Eh? Are you drunk already?”

I looked up and smiled. “You know how Americans drink,” I said. “I haven't even started yet.”

“David is far from drunk,” said Jacques. “He is only reflecting bitterly that he must get a new pair of suspenders.”

I could have killed Jacques. Yet it was only with difficulty that I kept myself from laughing. I made a face to signify to Giovanni that the old man was making a private joke, and he disappeared again. That time of evening had come when great batches of people were leaving and great batches were coming in. They would all encounter each other later anyway, in the last bar, all those, that is, unlucky enough to be searching still at such an advanced hour.

I could not look at Jacques—which he knew. He stood beside
me, smiling at nothing, humming a tune. There was nothing I could say. I did not dare to mention Hella. I could not even pretend to myself that I was sorry she was in Spain. I was glad. I was utterly, hopelessly, horribly glad. I knew I could do nothing whatever to stop the ferocious excitement which had burst in me like a storm. I could only drink, in the faint hope that the storm might thus spend itself without doing any more damage to my land. But I was glad. I was only sorry that Jacques had been a witness. He made me ashamed. I hated him because he had now seen all that he had waited, often scarcely hoping, so many months to see. We had, in effect, been playing a deadly game and he was the winner. He was the winner in spite of the fact that I had cheated to win.

I wished, nevertheless, standing there at the bar, that I had been able to find in myself the force to turn and walk out—to have gone over to Montparnasse perhaps and picked up a girl. Any girl. I could not do it. I told myself all sorts of lies, standing there at the bar, but I could not move. And this was partly because I knew that it did not really matter anymore; it did not even matter if I never spoke to Giovanni again; for they had become visible, as visible as the wafers on the shirt of the flaming princess, they stormed all over me, my awakening, my insistent possibilities.

That was how I met Giovanni. I think we connected the instant that we met. And remain connected still, in spite of our later
séparation de corps
, despite the fact that Giovanni will be rotting soon in unhallowed ground near Paris. Until I die there will be those moments, moments seeming to rise up out of the ground like Macbeth's witches, when his face will come before me, that face in all its changes, when the exact timbre of his voice and tricks of his speech will nearly burst my ears, when his smell will overpower my nostrils. Sometimes, in the days which are coming—God grant me the grace to live them—in the glare of the grey morning, sour-mouthed, eyelids raw and red, hair tangled and damp from my
stormy sleep, facing, over coffee and cigarette smoke, last night's impenetrable, meaningless boy who will shortly rise and vanish like the smoke, I will see Giovanni again, as he was that night, so vivid, so winning, all of the light of that gloomy tunnel trapped around his head.

A
T FIVE O
'
CLOCK
in the morning Guillaume locked the door of the bar behind us. The streets were empty and grey. On a corner near the bar a butcher had already opened his shop and one could see him within, already bloody, hacking at the meat. One of the great, green Paris buses lumbered past, nearly empty, its bright electric flag waving fiercely to indicate a turn. A
garçon de cafe
spilled water on the sidewalk before his establishment and swept it into the gutter. At the end of the long, curving street which faced us were the trees of the boulevard and straw chairs piled high before cafes and the great stone spire of Saint-Germain-des-Prés—the most magnificent spire, as Hella and I believed, in Paris. The street beyond the
place
stretched before us to the river and, hidden beside and behind us, meandered to Montparnasse. It was named for an adventurer who sowed a crop in Europe which is being harvested until today. I had often walked this street, sometimes, with Hella,
towards the river, often, without her, towards the girls of Montparnasse. Not very long ago either, though it seemed, that morning, to have occurred in another life.

We were going to Les Halles for breakfast. We piled into a taxi, the four of us, unpleasantly crowded together, a circumstance which elicited from Jacques and Guillaume, a series of lewd speculations. This lewdness was particularly revolting in that it not only failed of wit, it was so clearly an expression of contempt and self-contempt; it bubbled upward out of them like a fountain of black water. It was clear that they were tantalizing themselves with Giovanni and me and this set my teeth on edge. But Giovanni leaned back against the taxi window, allowing his arm to press my shoulder lightly, seeming to say that we should soon be rid of these old men and should not be distressed that their dirty water splashed—we would have no trouble washing it away.

“Look,” said Giovanni, as we crossed the river. “This old whore, Paris, as she turns in bed, is very moving.”

I looked out, beyond his heavy profile, which was grey—from fatigue and from the light of the sky above us. The river was swollen and yellow. Nothing moved on the river. Barges were tied up along the banks. The island of the city widened away from us, bearing the weight of the cathedral; beyond this, dimly, through speed and mist, one made out the individual roofs of Paris, their myriad, squat chimney stacks very beautiful and varicolored under the pearly sky. Mist clung to the river, softening that army of trees, softening those stones, hiding the city's dreadful corkscrew alleys and dead-end streets, clinging like a curse to the men who slept beneath the bridges—one of whom flashed by beneath us, very black and lone, walking along the river.

“Some rats have gone in,” said Giovanni, “and now other rats come out.” He smiled bleakly and looked at me; to my surprise, he took my hand and held it. “Have you ever slept under a bridge?” he
asked. “Or perhaps they have soft beds with warm blankets under the bridges in your country?”

I did not know what to do about my hand; it seemed better to do nothing. “Not yet,” I said, “but I may. My hotel wants to throw me out.”

I had said it lightly, with a smile, out of a desire to put myself, in terms of an acquaintance with wintry things, on an equal footing with him. But the fact that I had said it as he held my hand made it sound to me unutterably helpless and soft and coy. But I could not say anything to counteract this impression: to say anything more would confirm it. I pulled my hand away, pretending that I had done so in order to search for a cigarette.

Jacques lit it for me.

“Where do you live?” he asked Giovanni.

“Oh,” said Giovanni, “out. Far out. It is almost not Paris.”

“He lives in a dreadful street, near
Nation
,” said Guillaume, “among all the dreadful bourgeoisie and their piglike children.”

“You failed to catch the children at the right age,” said Jacques. “They go through a period, all too brief,
hélas!
when a pig is perhaps the
only
animal they do not call to mind.” And, again to Giovanni: “In a hotel?”

“No,” said Giovanni, and for the first time he seemed slightly uncomfortable. “I live in a maid's room.”

“With the maid?”

“No,” said Giovanni, and smiled, “the maid is I don't know where. You could certainly tell that there was no maid if you ever saw my room.”

“I would love to,” said Jacques.

“Then we will give a party for you one day,” said Giovanni.

This, too courteous and too bald to permit any further questioning, nearly forced, nevertheless, a question from my lips. Guillaume looked briefly at Giovanni, who did not look at him but out
into the morning, whistling. I had been making resolutions for the last six hours and now I made another one: to have this whole thing “out” with Giovanni as soon as I got him alone at Les Halles. I was going to have to tell him that he had made a mistake but that we could still be friends. But I could not be certain, really, that it might not be I who was making a mistake, blindly misreading everything—and out of necessities, then, too shameful to be uttered. I was in a box for I could see that, no matter how I turned, the hour of confession was upon me and could scarcely be averted; unless, of course, I leaped out of the cab, which would be the most terrible confession of all.