It was very hot and Ladros was crowded but the sea had a color he had never seen before and there was something in the air, a suspension of conscience, that made the white beaches and the dark seas of his own country seem censorious and remote. He seemed, in crossing the bay of Naples, to have lost his scruples. The contest was on Saturday and on Friday Simon came down with a bad attack of food poisoning. Emile bought him some medicine in a pharmacy but he was up most of the night and was too weak to get out of bed in the morning. Emile felt for him deeply and wished it were in his power to help. He had wasted his savings and if his sole ambition was ridiculous could he be blamed? Simon asked Emile to take his place and in the end he agreed. It was the brute power of boredom that forced his decision. He had nothing else to do. He got into his bathing trunks, put on Simon’s numeral and went up to the piazza at a little after four. The hot, bright sunlight could still be seen at the foot of the street but the square was in shade. There was a long wait. Presently a boatload of English tourists came in and filled up the tables at the edge of the square and then, in numerical order, the procession started.
He didn’t want to seem sullen, that after all would have been unfair to Simon, but he did want to seem disengaged, to make clear that this was not his idea, not what he wanted. He didn’t look at the faces below him but stared at an advertisement for San Pellegrini mineral water on a wall beyond the café. What would his mother have thought, his uncle, the ghost of his father? Where was the dark house in Parthenia where he had lived? When he had crossed the piazza he waited around with the others and then was led into the café by the proprietor and didn’t realize until then that there were only ten and that he was one of the winners.
It was getting dark by then, deepening into the grape-colored sky that more than anything else made him feel not unpleasantly far from home. Now the piazza was crowded. The ten men stood at the bar drinking coffee and wine, held together by the bond of a common experience and a questionable victory and alienated by the barriers of language. Emile stood between a Frenchman and an Egyptian and the best he could do was to speak a little crude Italian and smile hopefully but fatuously to prove that he was friendly and self-possessed. As it grew darker and darker in the piazza, as the light of day faded and as they stood under the bare lights of the café that had been arranged sensibly and economically to light the work of the bartenders and to flatter no one, they might, but for their lack of clothing, have been a group of workmen, clerks or jurors, stopping for a drink on their way back to wherever their lives were centered, to whereever they were awaited and wanted. Emile did not understand what would happen next and he asked the proprietor in dumb show to explain. The explanation was long and it was a long time before Emile understood that they, the ten winners, would now be auctioned off to the crowd in the piazza. “But I’m an American,” Emile said. “We don’t believe in that!”
“Niente, niente,” the judge said gently and explained to Emile that if he didn’t want to be sold he was free to go. In his own country Emile would have gone home indignantly but he was not in his own country and inquisitiveness or something deeper held him there. He was shocked to think that unfamiliar surroundings, lights and circumstances might influence his morals. To reinforce his character he tried to recall the streets of Parthenia but they were worlds away. Could it be true that his character was partly formed from rooms, streets, chairs and tables? Was his morality influenced by landscapes and kinds of food? Had he been unable to take his personality, his sense of good and evil, across the Bay of Naples?
In the piazza a band began to play and from behind the café a few mortars were fired off. Then the padrone opened the door and called to a man named Ivan, who smiled at his companions and went out onto the terrace where there was a block on which he stood. He seemed to acquiesce gracefully at this turn of events. Emile went out onto the terrace and stood in the shelter of an acacia tree. The bidding began lightheartedly, it seemed a joke, but as the bidding increased he realized that the young man’s skin was up for sale. The bidding rose quickly to a hundred and fifty thousand lire; but then it came in slowly and the stir in the crowd was erotic. Ivan seemed impassive but the beating of his heart could be seen. Was this sin, Emile wondered, and if it was, why should it seem so deeply expressive of everyone there? Here was the sale of the utmost delights of the flesh, its racking forgetfulness. Here were the caves and the fine skies of venery, the palaces and stairways, the thunder and the lightning, the great king and the drowned sailor, and from the voices of the bidders it seemed that they had never wanted anything else. The bidding stopped at two hundred and fifty thousand lire and Ivan stepped off the block and walked into the dark where someone, Emile couldn’t see who, had been waiting with a car. He heard the motor start and saw the headlights shine on the ruined walls as they drove off.
An Egyptian named Ahab came next but something was wrong. He smiled too knowledgeably, seemed much to ready to be sold and to perform what was expected of him and was knocked down at fifty thousand lire in a few minutes. A man called Paolo re-established the atmosphere of sexuality and the bids, as they had been for Ivan, came in slowly and hoarsely. Then a man named Pierre climbed onto the block and there was some delay before the bidding began at all.
Something had gone wrong. The bloom was off him. He had drunk too much wine or was too tired and now he stood on the block like a stick. His slip was cut scant enough to show his pubic hair and his pose was vaguely classical—the hips canted and one hand curved against his thigh—classical and immemorial as if he had appeared repeatedly in the nightmares of men. Here was the face of love without a face, a voice, a scent, a memory, here was a rub and a tumble without the sandy grain of a personality, here was a reminder of all the foolishness, vengefulness and lewdness in love and he seemed to excite, in the depraved crowd, a stubborn love of decency. They would sooner look at the prices on the menu than at him. His look was sly and wicked, he was more openly lascivious than the others but no one seemed to care. There was some subtle change in the atmosphere of the place. Ten thousand. Twelve thousand. Then the bidding stopped. This was the worst of all for Emile to see. Ivan had sold himself to God knows whom, a face in the dark, but it seemed more shameful and more sinful that Pierre, who was willing to perform the sacred and mysterious rites for the least sacred rewards, was wanted by no one and that for all his readiness to sin he might, in the end, have to spend a quiet night in the dormitory counting sheep. Something was wrong, some promise, however obscene, was broken and Emile sweated in shame for his companion, for to lust and to be unwanted seemed to be the grossest indecency. In the end Pierre was knocked down for twenty thousand lire. The padrone turned to Emile to ask if he wanted to reconsider his decision and in an intoxication of pride, a determination to prove that what had happened to Pierre could not happen to him, he went forward and stood on the block looking out boldly at the lights in the piazza as if he had in this way managed to come face to face with the world.
The bidding was spirited enough and he was knocked down for a hundred thousand lire. He stepped off the platform and walked through the tables to where a woman was waiting. It was Melissa.
She drove him up into the hills and through the gates of a villa where he could hear the loud noise of a fountain and nightingales singing in the trees and where he discovered that he had not brought his sense of good and evil across the bay. This eruption of his senses, this severance from the burdens of his life, was so complete that he seemed to fly, to swim, to live and die independently of all the well-known facts, that he seemed violently to destroy and renew himself, demolish and rebuild his spirit on some high sensual plane that was unbound from the earth and its calendar.