V. (49 page)

But she could not even keep them closed. For the children peeled back one eyelid to reveal a glass eye with the iris in the shape of a clock. This, too, they removed.

I wondered if the disassembly of the Bad Priest might not go on, and on, into evening. Surely her arms and breasts could be detached; the skin of her legs be peeled away to reveal some intricate understructure of silver openwork. Perhaps the trunk itself contained other wonders: intestines of parti-coloured silk, gay balloon-lungs, a rococo heart. But the sirens started up then. The children dispersed bearing away their new-found treasures, and the abdominal wound made by the bayonet was doing its work. I lay prone under a hostile sky looking down for moments more at what the children had left; suffering Christ foreshortened on the bare skull, one eye and one socket, staring up at me: a dark hole for the mouth, stumps at the bottoms of the legs. And the blood which had formed a black sash across the waist, flowing down both sides from the navel.

I went down into the cellar to kneel by her.

"Are you alive."

At the first bomb-bursts, she moaned.

"I will pray for you." Night was coming in.

She began to cry. Tearless, half-nasal; more a curious succession of drawn-out wails, originating far back in the mouth cavity. All through the raid she cried.

I gave her what I remembered of the sacrament of Extreme Unction. I could not hear her confession: her teeth were gone and she must have been past speech. But in those cries - so unlike human or even animal sound that they might have been only the wind blowing past any dead reed - I detected a sincere hatred for all her sins which must have been countless; a profound sorrow at having hurt God by sinning; a fear of losing Him which was worse than the fear of death. The interior darkness was lit by flares over Valletta, incendiary bombs in the Dockyard. Often both our voices were drowned in the explosions or the chattering of the ground artillery.

I did not hear only what I wanted to hear in these sounds that issued unceasing from the poor woman. I have been over it, Paola, and over it. I have since attacked myself more scathingly than any of your doubts could. You will say I had forgotten my understanding with God in administering a sacrament only a priest can give. That after losing Elena I'd "regressed" to the priesthood I would have joined had I not married her.

At the time I only knew that a dying human must be prepared. I had no oil to anoint her organs of sense - so mutilated now - and so used her own blood, dipping it from the navel as from a chalice. Her lips were cold. Though I saw and handled many corpses in the course of the siege, to this day I cannot live with that cold. Often, when I fall asleep at my desk, the blood supply to an arm is cut off. I wake and touch it and am no further from nightmare, for it is night's cold, object's cold, nothing human, nothing of me about it at all.

Now touching her lips my fingers recoiled and I returned from wherever I'd been. The all-clear sounded. She cried once or twice more and fell silent. I knelt by her and began to pray for myself. For her I'd done all I could. How long did I pray? No way of knowing.

But soon the cold of the wind - shared now with what had been a quick body - began to chill me. Kneeling grew uncomfortable. Only saints and lunatics can remain "devoted" for extended periods of time. I did feel far a pulse or heartbeat. None. I arose, limped about the cellar aimlessly, and finally emerged into Valletta without looking back.

I returned to Ta Kali, on foot. My shovel was still where I had left it.

Of Fausto III's return to life, little can be said. It happened. What inner resources were there to give it nourishment are still unknown to the present Fausto. This is a confession and in that return from the rock was nothing to confess. There are no records of Fausto III except for indecipherable entries.

And sketches of an azalea blossom, a carob tree.

There remained two unanswered questions. If he had truly broken his covenant with God in administering the sacrament why did he survive the raid?

And why did he not stop the children: or lift the beam?

In answer to the first one can only suggest that he was now Fausto III, with no further need for God.

The second has caused his successor to write this confession. Fausto Maijstral is guilty of murder: a sin of omission if you will. He will answer to no tribunal but God. And God at this moment is far away.

May He be closer to you.

Valletta: 27 August 1956

Stencil let the last thin scribbled sheet flutter to bare linoleum. Had his coincidence, the accident to shatter the surface of this stagnant pool and send all the mosquitoes of hope zinging away to the exterior night; had it happened?

"An Englishman; a mysterious being named Stencil."

Valletta. As if Paola's silence since - God, eight months. Had she, by her refusal to tell him anything, been all this time forcing him closer to the day when he'd have to admit Valletta as a possibility? Why?

Stencil would have liked to go on believing the death and V. had been separate for his father. This he still could choose to do (couldn't he?), and continue on in calm weather. He could go to Malta and possibly end it. He had stayed off Malta. He was afraid of ending it; but, damn it all, staying here would end it too. Funking out; finding V.; he didn't know which he was most afraid of, V. or sleep. Or whether they were two versions of the same thing.

Was there nothing for it but Valletta?

chapter twelve

In which things are not so amusing

I

The party had begun late, with a core of only a dozen Sick. Evening was hot and not likely to get any cooler. They all sweated. The loft itself was part of an old warehouse and not a legal residence; buildings in this area of the city had been condemned years ago. Someday there would be cranes, dump trucks, payloaders, bulldozers to come and level the neighborhood; but in the meantime, nobody - city or landlords - saw any objection in turning a minor profit.

There hung therefore about Raoul, Slab and Melvin's pad a climate of impermanence, as if the sand-sculptures, unfinished canvases, thousands of paperback books suspended in tiers of cement blocks and warped planks, even the great marble toilet stolen from a mansion in the east 70's (since replaced by a glass and aluminum apartment building) were all part of the set to an experimental play which its cabal of faceless angels could cause to be struck at any moment without having to give their reasons.

People would arrive, come the late hours. Raoul, Slab and Melvin's refrigerator was already half filled with a ruby construction of wine bottles; gallon of Vino Paisano slightly above center, left, off-balancing two 25-cent bottles of Gallo Grenache Rose, and one of Chilean Riesling, lower right, and so on. The icebox door was left open so people could admire, could dig. Why not? Accidental art had great vogue that year.

Winsome wasn't there when the party began and didn't show up at all that night. Nor any night after that. He'd had another fight with Mafia in the afternoon, over playing tapes of McClintic Sphere's group in the parlor while she was trying to create in the bedroom.

"If you ever tried to create," she yelled, "instead of live off what other people create, you'd understand."

"Who creates," Winsome said. "Your editor, publisher? Without them, girl, you would be nowhere."

"Anywhere you are, old sweet, is nowhere." Winsome gave it up and left her to scream at Fang. He had to step over three sleeping bodies on the way out. Which one was Pig Bodine? They were all covered by blankets. Like the old pea-and-nutshell dodge. Did it make any difference? She'd have company.

He headed downtown and after a while had wandered by the V-Note. Inside were stacked tables and the bartender watching a ball game on TV. Two fat Siamese kittens played on the piano, one outside chasing up and down the keyboard, one inside, clawing at the strings. It didn't sound like much.

"Roon."

"Man, I need a change of luck, no racial slur intended."

"Get a divorce." McClintic appeared in a foul mood. "Roon, let's go to Lenox. I can't last the weekend. Don't tell me any woman trouble. I got enough for both of us."

"Why not. Out to the boondocks. Green hills. Well people."

"Come on. There is a little girl I have to get out of this town before she flips from the heat. Or whatever it is."

It took them a while. They drank beer till sunset and then headed up to Winsome's where they swapped the Triumph for a black Buick. "It looks like a staff car for the Mafia," said McClintic. "Whoops."

"Ha, ha," replied Winsome. They continued uptown along the nighttime Hudson, veering finally right into Harlem. And there began working their way in to Matilda Winthrop's, bar by bar.

Not long after they were arguing like undergraduates over who was the most juiced, gathering hostile stares which had less to do with color than with an inherent quality of conservatism which neighborhood bars possess and bars where how much you can drink is a test of manhood do not.

They arrived at Matilda's well past midnight. The old lady, hearing Winsome's rebel accent, talked only to McClintic. Ruby came downstairs and McClintic introduced them.

Crash, shrieks, deep-chested laughter from topside. Matilda ran out of the room screaming.

"Sylvia, Ruby's friend, is busy tonight," McClintic said.

Winsome was charming. "You young folks just take it easy," he said. "Old Uncle Roony will drive you anywhere you want, won't look in the rear view mirror, won't be anything but the kindly old chauffeur he is."

Which cheered McClintic up. There being a certain strained politeness in the way Ruby held his arm. Winsome could see how McClintic was daft to get out in the country.

More noise from upstairs, louder this time. "McClintic," Matilda yelled.

"I must go play bouncer," he told Roony. "Back in five."

Which left only Roony and Ruby in the parlor.

"I know a girl I can take along, said he, "I suppose, her name is Rachel Owlglass, who lives on 112th."

Ruby fiddled with the catches on her overnight bag. "Your wife wouldn't like that too much. Why don't McClintic and I just go up in the Triumph. You shouldn't go to that trouble."

"My wife," angry all at once, "is a fucking Fascist, I think you should know that."

"But if you brought along -"

"All I want to do is go now somewhere out of town, away from New York, away to where things you expect to happen do happen. Didn't they ever use to? You're still young enough. It's still that way for kids, isn't it?"

"I'm not that young," she whispered. "Please Roony, be easy."

"Girl, if it isn't Lenox it will be someplace. Further east, Walden Pond, ha ha. No. No, that's public beach now where slobs from Boston who'd be at Revere Beach except for too many other slobs like themselves already there crowding them out, these slobs sit on the rocks around Walden Pond belching, drinking beer they've cleverly smuggled in past the guards, checking the young stuff, hating their wives, their evil-smelling kids who urinate in the water on the sly . . . Where? Where in Massachusetts. Where in the country."

"Stay home."

"No. If only to see how bad Lenox is."

"Baby, baby," she sang soft, absent: "Have you heard,/ Did you know/ There ain't no dope in Lenox."

"How did you do it."

"Burnt cork, she told him. "Like a minstrel show."

"No," he started across the room away from her. "You didn't use anything. Didn't have to. No makeup. Mafia, you know, thinks you're German. I thought you were Puerto Rican before Rachel told me. Is that what you are, something we can look at and see whatever we want? Protective coloration?"

"I have read books," said Paola, "and listen, Roony, nobody knows what a Maltese is. The Maltese think they're a pure race and the Europeans think they're Semitic, Hamitic, crossbred with North Africans, Turks and God knows what all. But for McClintic, for anybody else round here I am a Negro girl named Ruby -" he snorted - "and don't tell them, him, please man."

"I'll never tell, Paola." Then McClintic was back. "You two wait till I find a friend."

"Rach," beamed McClintic. "Good show." Paola looked upset.

"I think us four, out in the country -" his words were for Paola, he was drunk, he was messing it up - "we could make it, it would be a fresh thing, clean, a beginning."

"Maybe I should drive," McClintic said. It would give him something to concentrate on till things got easier, out of the city. And Roony looked drunk. More than that, maybe.

"You drive," Winsome agreed, weary. God, let her be there. All the way down to 112th (and McClintic gunned it) he wondered what he'd do if she wasn't there.

She wasn't there. The door was open, noteless. She usually left some word. She usually locked doors. Winsome went inside. Two or three lights were on. Nobody was there.

Only her slip tossed awry on the bed. He picked it up, black and slippery. Slippery slip, he thought and kissed it by the left breast. The phone rang. He let it ring. Finally:

"Where is Esther?" She sounded out of breath.

"You wear nice lingerie," Winsome said.

"Thank you. She hasn't come in?"

"Beware of girls with black underwear."

"Roony, not now. She has really gone and got her ass in a sling. Could you look and see if there's a note."

"Come with me to Lenox, Massachusetts."

Patient sigh.

"There's no note. No nothing."

"Would you look anyway. I'm in the subway."

Come with me to Lenox [Roony sang], It's August in Nueva York Ciudad; You've told so many good men nix; Please don't put me down with a dark, "see you Dad" . . .

Refrain [beguine tempo]:

Come out where the wind is cool and the streets are colonial lanes.

Though the ghosts of a million Puritans pace in our phony old brains,

I still get an erection when I hear the reed section of the Boston Pops,

Come and leave this Bohemia, life's really dreamy away from the JDs and cops.