My Amputations (Fiction collective ;) (18 page)

Professor Rosa Bartoli had reserved a room for him at the Argentina in Florence. Why'd he felt so safe lately? was it possible The Impostor was
no
where. Mason drove north, pushing his luck, enjoying winter warmth. The nefarious trickster arrived at suppertime. In the lobby the TV showed a cartoon of a woman belly-dancing and doing a strip. Tease? She wasn't fooling! She ended her act with only her reflexes X-rayed. Hanging from the construction site of her body was a placard with this message: “ . . . Egli la aspetta.” He felt yucky hungry horny and free—no lecture till Monday and it was only Friday. Determined not to fall for any rigmarole of false clues, a hateful vendetta of his own mind, he was a masoned wall of faith. Self-confidence was his middle name. No pun. Concreteness could be seen all over historic Florence, as he walked. He looked into the
facade of the city: workers in stone had made it a towering monument to something he reluctantly understood. Well, even
he
was beginning to realize the real subject of his story wasn't this damned quest he'd thought he was on. He stuttered angrily realizing it: “I'll b-b-be d-d-damned!” He pulled out a Camel and struck a match to it. Wasn't he really playing the ultimate pinball machine of luck and trying (even with a false name) to be himself. Don't answer that. A true freemason? or just an ex-apple cart urchin adrift in a string-of-lucky breaks. He slept then got up and went out: daylight was a silicon blessing. Was Eye
really
watching him? or was it just his paranoia? Free as he felt he still felt trapped. Yet he went forth: into the chapels churches cloisters galleries fortresses gardens and like a good winter wanderer, scanned the squares—crossed and recrossed Ponte Vecchio finding the people more interesting than the whatnots the tourist-trap jewelry the sexy manikins. Lotta girls with slender brown legs. After doing the Uffizi he went to Dante's house: went down on his hopeless knees before it and burned a candle for five minutes. Passersby thought him a fool. He felt like he was fucking in public. Relentlessly he explored the Medici Chapel, seeing the way Michelangelo left the marble to speak of itself as marble, and moved on to Piazza della Signori. Museum floors were hard. Inside Museo Nazionale the dreamer of bird-seeds became aware of the hugeness of his new hunger (seemingly endless, right). He'd already focused one slanted eye on a ristorante boasting tripe in the Florentine manner. As he made a scientific investigation of the menu, a kid snatched a purse from an old woman and split on his bike. Mason whispered to himself, you are not a moralist. As he wandered he vaguely thought about Monday: his lecture wouldn't be just another narcissistic rug-cutting act. Then he got his tripe: in a tomato sauce: it was good.
The seven-headed, fire-breathing dragon that now faced Mason did not promise to be just or moral. It was midnight and somehow he hadn't gotten very far: hadn't he been trying to cross Piazza Saint Giovanni since noon? Had time caved in on him? Sunlight at one point—now a full moon. Some impious rite of . . . 
“The horror! The horror!”
Had he been going around in circles since mid-day. Hadn't Bartoli been with him. The taste of sparkling silverware and the soave they'd drunk at lunch was still in his mouth. The Duomo sat there like a giant toad with semidivine intentions. Sentimental boys and girls giggled in the shadows of its facade. What'd set him off? Bartoli's question: “Are you for
real?
” American words crowded with fresco-saints in silver and gold! As the beast roared, the kids went on with their mockery of his disorientation. Or were they laughing at the past: at, say, daisies in chalcedony or precious stones around the neck of one of the Medici women. Mason stumbled about the piazza, unable to decide which way to go. Too many variables! Too many directions! And, jokingly, hadn't he admitted to Rosa Bartoli, “Yes, you're right, I'm
not
the person I claim to be,” but wasn't it clear in his face that he was putting her on. He was talking to himself now: “She gained my confidence then betrayed me: promised not to tell
any
body: yet she went off, leaving me blind drunk—or stoned?—to reveal my secret to the world.
Curse
her!
Aliosha!
I was once a boy who believed in
everybody!
I trusted. I had confidence!” The kids snickered. Mason swung his fist at the moon. He howled and barked, then fell to his knees, slobbering. No dignity? Everything that rises will converge. The winds blew. One could always fly home! Or die, after an uneventful, passive, stupid life! Okay. So, he'd gone along with Rosa. He'd played the game. A lunch game: “Yes, you're right: I'm not who you
think
I am. I'm the Hunter Gracchus. I'm . . . I'm
lost!
”

But soon he
really
got lost. The streets didn't make sense. He'd followed his own “logic”—along a certain alley then suddenly the cobblestones spread in a concentric pattern. This was a circle, a circle of mysteriously gloomy buildings (museums? churches?) casting mid-morning shadows into the half where he had now stopped, puzzled, unwilling to retreat or go on. He fingered a folded lottery ticket in his pocket. Straight across the circle, on the stairway of one of the larger structures, was the figure of a person. Man or woman? At this distance, he couldn't tell. Nobody else in sight. Mason started out toward the person. Hesitantly. Halfway across the circle he was able to see that the person was male. Or seemed so . . . When Mason was within ten feet of the unusually still figure he felt a slight murmur of the heart. Then the man flung his cape back, whipped out a sword, and flung it toward Mason. The thing clanged on the stone before him, only inches from his toes. Mason strained through his sunglasses trying to focus the face. It
was
a face. Yet something was wrong. The face wore a mask. Rubber? Deer skin? Did it matter? “This is a private matter,” the stranger said. The voice was gentle, almost sweet. “Pick it up.” Mason hesitated. Why should he? Although he felt compelled to obey without understanding why, he continued to stare at the figure and didn't move. The sword-carrier then jerked another sword from beneath his cape and flashed it in steep sunlight coming down through marble arches. The order came again, this time more forcefully: “I
said
pick it up!”
Who
was this,
what
was this? One of his beloved friends coming back into his life with dramatic humor? A son, a disguised daughter? John Armegurn serving as a hit man? or perhaps Mister Berdseid? No. It was only when the strange swordsman started rushing down the stairway, leaping, skipping, with his sword-tip pointed directly at Mason, that Mason picked up the weapon at his feet, and stumbled back, trying to escape. But the caped-figure advanced too quickly and Mason was obliged to defend himself. He flung wildly and awkwardly—lashing out at his opponent. The dashing figure propped the fist of his left hand on his hip and with sword and
body he made unmistakable gestures of invitation. Mason, still retreating, stumbled on the cobbles. The swordsman continued to rush him, to feint—expertly. Mason's foil was dangling. He kept swinging it back and forth before him to keep the saberman off. Then Mason fell on the wet stone and found the tip of the other's sword pushing against the skin of his neck. The victor spoke gently: “I have a contract for you to sign. Either you sign it or I kill you.” As he spoke he dug the paper from a pocket beneath his cape. He dropped it on Mason's chest. “You may read it first.” The first thing Mason noticed about the official-looking document was its letterhead: Magnan-Rockford Foundation. The swordsman meanwhile pitched a Bic down to the ground at Mason's left. Mason made an effort to read the damned thing. He couldn't concentrate.
“Sign it!”
The tip of the sword dug deeper into Mason's throat. “But—”
“Sign!”
He signed
Mason Ellis
. The moment he wrote the name he realized his mistake. But it was too late.

Mason was up—as he rapped to students of Florence. “
My
Apple, as they say, was not theirs: I smelled whisky on breaths. Gwen, my oldest sister, my mother too, wrote to me rarely. I was alone: in isolation: as though in a country where I didn't know the language. Casual affairs clung to me like fish-smell in the beard. Appletrees nowhere in sight. I screwed married women on kitchen floors: pale fire, pale leeway: possessed with keys to their own dark places these women went mad, on their knees before broken or drunk husbands, clutching Lower East-side yellow rent-stubs and smearing their red, red blood on Flea Market and Klein's furniture. They stayed hidden in First Avenue-deadness even when there was a Way Out. Their Deadness was equal to my own. And of course there were the young women so different from the older, married ones. How
different? They were not shut-in damsels waiting to be serenaded below their windows. No eighty-miles-per-hour jerk was going to climb the vines of their castle-wall to get an axle-grease-coated finger on the elastic of their Bloomingdale-bloomers. My concern was also still Chicago: for the boogie-woogie oobop-shebam girl with sweat under her arms. They were doing the Twist, the Pony, the Cakewalk, the Superman—a dance
I
invented. The pill later did not rhyme with castle. Such a rich history: I'll never know how I spaced-out in Amesville on a John Deere, up to my nose in wet cowshit: I couldn't even see that Cezanne's
Portrait of Henri Gasquest
wasn't really Rod Steiger posing. Although gnatcatchers and beetrappers were after my sanity from the start, I turned out to be Somebody. Wesley could have, too, but he had no
need.
I took issue with the ache of my own body. Rather than leaning against my own death or ecstasy, I—Pokerface, Boston Blacky, Wild Dick, Holy Joe, Fingers, Mister Zilch—discovered Stein's American space and in that terrain sweated my way along the floor (ground, desert) of an orgy of heavy laughter, dry tongues; voiceless friction, dry areas, yellow eyes, red skin, sharp fingernails; breasts uneven and staccato teethprints in shoulders and necks; climbed into frowns, broke my way through polka-dot shame and awkward, uh, long sentences, twisted rhythm. In other words, I made
direct
contact. I pried open and entered salient spirits: slept well while growling, yodeling and chewing sounds surrounded me: as confusing as that scene where Florence played a bonyleg-squaw shielding the infants as the braves sent arrows into General George Armstrong Custer. She must be
twice
my age, eh? Never mind . . . Had I been the pilot of a two-engine I might have gotten a
wider
view of Stein's American space: from the aircraft I might have watched the wavers below wave at my waving propellers—might have thrown artful kisses to those poor suckers stuck to the terra cotta: those Goldilocks, Big Bens, Fatsos, Molls, Babyfaces, all of ’em! Innocence fun-crushed by tangy sadness, eh? From up there,
ohboy
 . . . the shadow of my craft bewitching the pink earth with its purple shadow: tits for mountains. I might have looked, from
on high, into my own darkness, my potshots, my wild guesses, my calls, this bamblustercated fear, my own—: not for perception or higher wisdom but for the oceans, seas, deserts, cities beyond Celt, that were surely in there. Know what I mean? But, like everybody else, I was stuck by gravity to the spongy earth: in birth action death. Framed. So by the time I first drifted to The Apple—with unreliable Celt just above my head—I needed quick solutions: to the mystery of married women; Deadness; being spaced-out; the problem of wild oats; unfaithful muses; the elusiveness of Stein's space; orgies; but more particularly I wanted a formula to solve the problem of the inherent muddle inevitably found at the bottom of, in the final stitch of, any given perspective. This was not to say: the world, history, couldn't be changed. People made it all up: it could be remade. But how, when and where. I played a lot of angles: for lack of an answer I got together a gang of shadows and captured the black angels, let them down into the slow waters of my own bad eyesight: Albert Ryder was back there riding a white horse against the dawn. The angels were supposed to protect: yet they could not prevent dancing devils from lynching my father at daybreak. I found pieces of my mother's flesh and hair in my bowl of soup. I tore open the chest of history and hundreds of years of blood, gall, acid, crossed-wires, frazzled brain tissue, broken promises, disremembrances, killings galore, starvations, diseases rampant as—. It all poured out. Too much for the normal eye. Terrible: sentimental, romantic. I'll never escape. Times when the hard, cold precise word, thing, refuses to make your point. Poor Amygism. I tried once being the king. Prayed for goodness but kept doing all the wrong things. Love? I gave up: it was hopeless. Wore a shabby beard, carried a tall staff—befitting my rank, spoke to everybody I met about the possible solutions to perspectives, and, uh, about other matters, too. I'm getting long-winded. Don't want to bamboozle you. It's just that I'm still sorta . . . Never mind . . . ”

He was in the bank when everything went out of focus. Next in line, he never got his American Express Travellers Cheques cashed. The floor turned slightly. Pictures reproduced from works by Raphael and Pinturicchio in silver frames behind the counter slid sideways. Mason felt as transparent as a metalpoint on blue handmade paper. His panic was reflected in the eyes of the clerks and other customers. The guard was the first to cry out. He was an old man who fished in his holster for his pistol without luck. The tilt continued for . . . who could tell how long. Time itself left the space. The ceiling cracked, slightly. “Che cos'è?” “
Oh
no!” “Oh
no!
” Was the ancient city of Florence being
bombed?
Mason found himself huddled in a corner with the others. A man who was probably the bank manager started shouting for everybody to go to the basement but nobody made it. Why? Six men with ski masks came in with submachine guns. They shot the guard then told everybody else to make like they were praying to Dante or God or David or Michelangelo himself. They all got their hands up. Although Mason was funny at times, this time he wasn't shaking like Willy Best as he held his hands above his head. His eyes didn't buck. His teeth didn't chatter. The floor beneath them continued to rumble. Five gunmen aimed their guns on the clerks and the manager. One took care of Mason and the other customers and potential customers. He kept talking to them in a Bogart voice, which sounded pretty funny in Italian. An old woman among them fell to her knees and started praying to Lazarus and a fifteenth century Tuscan pilgrim Mason had never heard of. The floor cracked as the clerks filled two canvas sacks with lire at gunpoint. When they finished, the plate-glass window facing the via D. Corso flew to smithereens! Mason couldn't help wondering if some nasty streak of bad luck was following him. He sort of wished he was sitting at a sidewalk cafe enjoying a glass of wine with Italo Calvino . . . When the police arrived, minutes after the robbers fled in their oxydized gray Fiat, the bank—as all of Florence—was still shaking like a drunk the-morning-after.