He wasn’t an ordinary waiter; he used to work at a dinner-dance spot in one of the big hotels. One night he lost his temper at a drunken brute, pushed his face into a plate of cannelloni, and left the premises. The union suspended him for three months, but he was, in a way, a hero, and when he went back to work they put him on the banquet shift, where he passed mushrooms to Kings and Presidents. He saw a lot of the world, but I sometimes wonder if the world ever saw much more of him than the sleeve of his red coat and his suave and handsome face, a little above the candlelight. It must have been like living in a world divided by a sheet of one-way glass. Sometimes I am reminded of him by those pages and guards in Shakespeare who come in from the left and stand at a door, establishing by their costumes the fact that this is Venice or Arden. You scarcely see their faces, they never speak a line; nor did my father, and when the after-dinner speeches began he would vanish like the pages on stage. I tell people that he was in the administrative end of the hotel business, but actually he was a waiter, a banquet waiter.
The Rockwells’ party was large, and I left at about ten. A hot wind was blowing off the sea. I was later told that this was the sirocco. It was a desert wind, and so oppressive that I got up several times during the night to drink some mineral water. A boat offshore was sounding its foghorn. In the morning, it was both foggy and suffocating. While I was making some coffee, Assunta and the signorina began their morning quarrel. Assunta started off with the usual “Pig! Dog! Witch! Dirt of the streets!” Leaning from an open window, the whiskery old woman sent down her flowery replies: “Dear one. Beloved. Blessed one. Thank you, thank you.” I stood in the door with my coffee, wishing they would schedule their disputes for some other time of day. The quarrel was suspended while the signorina came down the stairs to get her bread and wine. Then it started up again: “Witch! Frog! Frog of frogs! Witch of witches!” etc. The old lady countered with “Treasure! Light! Treasure of my house! Light of my life!” etc. Then there was a scuffle—a tug-of-war over the loaf of bread. I saw Assunta strike the old woman cruelly with the edge of her hand. She fell on the steps and began to moan “Aiee! Aieee!” Even these cries of pain seemed florid. I ran across the courtyard to where she lay in a disjointed heap. Assunta began to scream at me, “I am not culpable, I am not culpable!” The old lady was in great pain. “Please, signore,” she asked, “please find the priest for me!” I picked her up. She weighed no more than a child, and her clothing smelled of soil. I carried her up the stairs into a high-ceilinged room festooned with cobwebs and put her onto a couch. Assunta was on my heels, screaming, “I am not culpable!” Then I started down the one hundred and twenty-seven steps to the village.
The fog streamed through the air, and the African wind felt like a furnace draft. No one answered the door at the priest’s house, but I found him in the church, sweeping the floor with a broom made of twigs. I was excited and impatient, and the more excited I became, the more slow-moving was the priest. First, he had to put his broom in a closet. The closet door was warped and wouldn’t shut, and he spent an unconscionable amount of time trying to close it. I finally went outside and waited on the porch. It took him half an hour to get collected, and then, instead of starting for the villa, we went down into the village to find an acolyte. Presently a young boy joined us, pulling on a soiled lace soutane, and we started up the stairs. The priest negotiated ten steps and then sat down to rest. I had time to smoke a cigarette. Then ten more steps and another rest, and when we were halfway up the stairs, I began to wonder if he would ever make it. His face had turned from red to purple, and the noises from his respiratory tract were harsh and desperate. We finally arrived at the door of the villa. The acolyte lit his censer. Then we made our way into that ruined place. The windows were open. There was sea fog in the air. The old woman was in great pain, but the notes of her voice remained genteel, as I expect they truly were. “She is my daughter,” she said. “Assunta. She is my daughter, my child.”
Then Assunta screamed, “Liar! Liar!”
“No, no, no,” the old lady said, “you are my child, my only child. That is why I have cared for you all my life.”
Assunta began to cry, and stamped down the stairs. From the window, I saw her crossing the courtyard. When the priest began to administer the last rites, I went out.
I kept a sort of vigil in the café. The church bells tolled at three, and a little later news came down from the villa that the signorina was dead. No one in the café seemed to suspect that they were anything but an eccentric old spinster and a cranky servant. At four o’clock the band concert opened up with “Tiger Rag.” I moved that night from the villa to the Hotel National, and left Montraldo in the morning.
The Ocean
I AM KEEPING this journal because I believe myself to be in some danger and because I have no other way of recording my fears. I cannot report them to the police, as you will see, and I cannot confide in my friends. The losses I have recently suffered in self-esteem, reasonableness, and charity are conspicuous, but there is always some painful ambiguity about who is to blame. I might be to blame myself. Let me give you an example. Last night I sat down to dinner with Cora, my wife, at half past six. Our only daughter has left home, and we eat, these days, in the kitchen, off a table ornamented with a goldfish bowl. The meal was cold ham, salad, and potatoes. When I took a mouthful of salad I had to spit it out. “Ah, yes,” my wife said. “I was afraid that would happen. You left your lighter fluid in the pantry, and I mistook it for vinegar.”
As I say, who was to blame? I have always been careful about putting things in their places, and had she meant to poison me she wouldn’t have done anything so clumsy as to put lighter fluid in the salad dressing. If I had not left the fluid in the pantry, the incident wouldn’t have taken place. But let me go on for a minute. During dinner a thunderstorm came up. The sky got black. Suddenly there was a soaking rain. As soon as dinner was over, Cora dressed herself in a raincoat and a green shower cap and went out to water the lawn. I watched her from the window. She seemed oblivious of the ragged walls of rain in which she stood, and she watered the lawn carefully, lingering over the burnt spots. I was afraid that she would compromise herself in the eyes of our neighbors. The woman in the house next door would telephone the woman on the corner to say that Cora Fry was watering her lawn in a downpour. My wish that she not be ridiculed by gossip took me to her side, although as I approached her, under my umbrella, I realized that I lacked the tact to get through this gracefully. What should I say? Should I say that a friend was on the telephone? She has no friends. “Come in, dear,” I said. “You might get struck.”
“Oh, I doubt that very much,” she said in her most musical voice. She speaks these days in the octave above middle C.
“Won’t you wait until the rain is over?” I asked.
“It won’t last long,” she said sweetly. “Thunderstorms never do.”
Under my umbrella, I returned to the house and poured myself a drink. She was right. A minute later the storm blew off, and she went on watering the grass. She had some rightness on her side in both of these incidents, but this does not change my feeling that I am in some danger.