Blue Collar, White Collar, No Collar Part 6

"One hundred huevos," I said.

"Good boy," he crooned, "good boy." He paused a moment to catch his breath. "And do you know where I'm calling from?" he asked, struggling to keep down the effervescence in his voice.

I reached out to stroke the amazon's b.r.e.a.s.t.s-her name was Linda, by the way, and she was a student of cosmetology. "I think I can guess," I said. "Calidad?"

"Funny thing," Uncle Dagoberto said, "there are some shoes here, in the customs warehouse-fine Italian shoes, the finest, thirty thousand in a single lot-and no one has claimed them. Can you imagine that?"

There was such joy in his tone that I couldn't resist playing out the game with him. "There must be something wrong with them," I said.

I could picture his grin. "Nothing, nothing at all. If you're one-legged."

That was two years ago.

Today, Uncle Dagoberto is the undisputed shoe king of our city. He made such a killing on that one deal that he was able to buy his way into the cartel that "advises" the government. He has a t.i.tle now-Undersecretary for International Trade-and a vast, brightly lit office in the President's palace.

I've changed too, though I still live with my mother on La Calle Verdad and I still attend the university. My shoes-I have some thirty pairs now, in every style and color those clever Italians have been able to devise-are the envy of all, and no small attraction to the nubile and status-hungry young women of the city. I no longer study semantics, hermeneutics, and the deconstruction of deconstruction, but have instead been pursuing a degree in business. It only makes sense. After all, the government doesn't seem half so unfriendly these days.

George Chambers.

(I THOUGHT MY FATHER LOOKED LIKE FDR).

For a while I worked (another of my famous "jobs") as an occupational therapist at the Sunset Hill House. Every weekday at 2 pm I arrived to teach the "Golden Opportunities Workshop." A large, sunny room on the first floor. Scattered about were looms, workbenches, tool-boxes, painting easels, materials to knit and weave and crochet, several typewriters, a small hand-press with a set of type, and a boxing bag.

When I came through the door they were always there, waiting. Those who could still get about una.s.sisted sat on the long pew-like bench. They sat quietly, disinterested, as if each were waiting to be called to some private inner office. Those who had come in wheelchairs always wheeled to the end of the room and sat there staring out the large bay window that overlooked the sawmill in the valley below. One man, who seemed to have been appointed the spokesman of the others, always began the "Golden Opportunities" hour with the same question. "What," he would commence, "have they told you to do to us today?" Neither he, nor anyone else waited for my reply. He, his name was Mr. Brekke, went to the boxing bag and began to fit on the thin leather practice gloves. The others remained silent.

I began the hour setting each person to some task. Mrs. Blead wheeled herself to the doll box to begin a.s.sembling the doll she never finished. Father Bane, a retired priest, was writing a book called Stories from the Confessional. Beside him, always in the same place, was Mrs. Brood, trying to knit. It was hard for her to work the needles with her stiff fingers. Soon, everyone was engaged in some task. Mr. Brekke, having fitted on his gloves, was punching the bag, slowly, rhythmically, as if he were keeping time to a funeral procession. Mrs. Brood, stumbling among her needles, would smile in Mr. Brekke's direction, call him "that nice man" and continue her work. Instead of saying "knit one, pearl two" as I had taught her to get the rhythm of the work, she kept repeating "s.h.i.t f.u.c.k, p.i.s.s c.u.n.t." Before she finished a.s.sembling the doll, Mrs. Blead, holding a soft plastic leg above her head to attract my attention, would ask if I had seen that bad little girl Suzie, her daughter. Yes, I would say, she is in the hall. That would satisfy her and she would spend the rest of the hour plugging and unplugging the doll's leg into the soft plastic torso in her left hand.

At 3:30 pm there was always the same crisis. Then the "Humpty-Dumpty" hour, a children's show with live animals, clowns, and cartoons, was on television. Most of the people in the Workshop wanted to watch it, but it was against Sunset Hill House regulations. Usually, one or two would start weeping. That time always provoked one man, whose name I forget, to speak seriously about the "great fall" that was the occasion of Humpty-Dumpty's demise. "It was" he would say, "a great fall." By then, most had stopped their work and sat where they were, waiting until 4 pm. Except for the slow slamming of Mr. Brekke's fists into the punching bag and the weeping for Humpty-Dumpty, the room was silent.

At 4 the steam-whistle from the saw mill down the valley could be heard as the white-suited attendants came to gather the people from the workshop. As they were conducted out of the room one could hear the attendants saying "and how are we today and we must be going along now and very soon we will be eating our supper."

John Cheever.

THE WORLD OF APPLES.

Asa Bas...o...b.. the old laureate, wandered around his work house or study-he had never been able to settle on a name for a house where one wrote poetry-swatting hornets with a copy of La Stampa and wondering why he had never been given the n.o.bel Prize. He had received nearly every other sign of renown. In a trunk in the corner there were medals, citations, wreaths, sheaves, ribbons, and badges. The stove that heated his study had been given to him by the Oslo P.E.N. Club, his desk was a gift from the Kiev Writer's Union, and the study itself had been built by an international a.s.sociation of his admirers. The presidents of both Italy and the United States had wired their congratulations on the day he was presented with the key to the place. Why no n.o.bel Prize? Swat, swat. The study was a barny, raftered building with a large northern window that looked off to the Abruzzi. He would sooner have had a much smaller place with smaller windows but he had not been consulted. There seemed to be some clash between the alt.i.tude of the mountains and the disciplines of verse. At the time of which I'm writing he was eighty-two years old and lived in a villa below the hill town of Monte Carbone, south of Rome.

He had strong, thick white hair that hung in a lock over his forehead. Two or more cowlicks at the crown were usually disorderly and erect. He wet them down with soap for formal receptions, but they were never supine for more than an hour or two and were usually up in the air again by the time champagne was poured. It was very much a part of the impression he left. As one remembers a man for a long nose, a smile, birthmark, or scar, one remembered Bas...o...b..for his unruly cowlicks. He was known vaguely as the Cezanne of poets. There was some linear preciseness to his work that might be thought to resemble Cezanne but the vision that underlies Cezanne's paintings was not his. This mistaken comparison might have arisen because the t.i.tle of his most popular work was The World of Apples-poetry in which his admirers found the pungency, diversity, color, and nostalgia of the apples of the northern New England he had not seen for forty years.

Why had he-provincial and famous for his simplicity-chosen to leave Vermont for Italy? Had it been the choice of his beloved Amelia, dead these ten years? She had made many of their decisions. Was he, the son of a farmer, so naive that he thought living abroad might bring some color to his stern beginnings? Or had it been simply a practical matter, an evasion of the publicity that would, in his own country, have been an annoyance? Admirers found him in Monte Carbone, they came almost daily, but they came in modest numbers. He was photographed once or twice a year for Match or Epoca-usually on his birthday-but he was in general able to lead a quieter life than would have been possible in the United States. Walking down Fifth Avenue on his last visit home he had been stopped by strangers and asked to autograph sc.r.a.ps of paper. On the streets of Rome no one knew or cared who he was and this was as he wanted it.

Monte Carbone was a Saracen town, built on the summit of a loaf-shaped b.u.t.te of sullen granite. At the top of the town were three pure and voluminous springs whose water fell in pools or conduits down the sides of the mountain. His villa was below the town and he had in his garden many fountains, fed by the springs on the summit. The noise of falling water was loud and unmusical-a clapping or clattering sound. The water was stinging cold, even in midsummer, and he kept his gin, wine, and vermouth in a pool on the terrace. He worked in his study in the mornings, took a siesta after lunch, and then climbed the stairs to the village.

The tufa and pepperoni and the bitter colors of the lichen that takes root in the walls and roofs are no part of the consciousness of an American, even if he had lived for years, as Bas...o...b..had, surrounded by this bitterness. The climb up the stairs winded him. He stopped again and again to catch his breath. Everyone spoke to him. Salve, maestro, salve! When he saw the bricked-up transept of the twelfth-century church he always mumbled the date to himself as if he were explaining the beauties of the place to some companion. The beauties of the place were various and gloomy. He would always be a stranger there, but his strangeness seemed to him to be some metaphor involving time as if, climbing the strange stairs past the strange walls, he climbed through hours, months, years, and decades. In the piazza he had a gla.s.s of wine and got his mail. On any day he received more mail than the entire population of the village. There were letters from admirers, propositions to lecture, read, or simply show his face, and he seemed to be on the invitation list of every honorary society in the Western world excepting, of course, that society formed by the past winners of the n.o.bel Prize. His mail was kept in a sack, and if it was too heavy for him to carry, Antonio, the postina's son, would walk back with him to the villa. He worked over his mail until five or six. Two or three times a week some pilgrims would find their way to the villa and if he liked their looks he would give them a drink while he autographed their copy of The World of Apples. They almost never brought his other books, although he had published a dozen. Two or three evenings a week he played backgammon with Carbone, the local padrone. They both thought that the other cheated and neither of them would leave the board during a game, even if their bladders were killing them. He slept soundly.

Of the four poets with whom Bas...o...b..was customarily grouped one had shot himself, one had drowned himself, one had hanged himself, and the fourth had died of delirium tremens. Bas...o...b..had known them all, loved most of them, and had nursed two of them when they were ill, but the broad implication that he had, by choosing to write poetry, chosen to destroy himself was something he rebelled against vigorously. He knew the temptations of suicide as he knew the temptations of every other form of sinfulness and he carefully kept out of the villa all firearms, suitable lengths of rope, poisons, and sleeping pills. He had seen in Z-the closest of the four-some inalienable link between his prodigious imagination and his prodigious gifts for self-destruction, but Bas...o...b..in his stubborn, countrified way was determined to break or ignore this link-to overthrow Marsyas and Orpheus. Poetry was a lasting glory and he was determined that the final act of a poet's life should not-as had been the case with Z-be played out in a dirty room with twenty-three empty gin bottles. Since he could not deny the connection between brilliance and tragedy he seemed determined to bludgeon it.

Bas...o...b..believed, as Cocteau once said, that the writing of poetry was the exploitation of a substrata of memory that was imperfectly understood. His work seemed to be an act of recollection. He did not, as he worked, charge his memory with any practical tasks but it was definitely his memory that was called into play-his memory of sensation, landscapes, faces, and the immense vocabulary of his own language. He could spend a month or longer on a short poem but discipline and industry were not the words to describe his work. He did not seem to choose his words at all but to recall them from the billions of sounds that he had heard since he first understood speech. Depending on his memory, then, as he did, to give his life usefulness he sometimes wondered if his memory were not failing. Talking with friends and admirers he took great pains not to repeat himself. Waking at two or three in the morning to hear the unmusical clatter of his fountains he would grill himself for an hour on names and dates. Who was Lord Cardigan's adversary at Balaklava? It took a minute for the name of Lord Lucan to struggle up through the murk but it finally appeared. He conjugated the remote past of the verb esse, counted to fifty in Russian, recited poems by Donne, Eliot, Thomas, and Wordsworth, described the events of the Risorgimento beginning with the riots in Milan in 1812 up through the coronation of Vittorio Emanuele, listed the ages of prehistory, the number of kilometers in a mile, the planets of the solar system, and the speed of light. There was a definite r.e.t.a.r.d in the responsiveness of his memory but he remained adequate, he thought. The only impairment was anxiety. He had seen time destroy so much that he wondered if an old man's memory could have more strength and longevity than an oak; but the pin oak he had planted on the terrace thirty years ago was dying and he could still remember in detail the cut and color of the dress his beloved Amelia had been wearing when they first met. He taxed his memory to find its way through cities. He imagined walking from the railroad station in Indianapolis to the memorial fountain, from the Hotel Europe in Leningrad to the Winter Palace, from the Eden-Roma up through Trastevere to San Pietro in Montori. Frail, doubting his faculties, it was the solitariness of this inquisition that made it a struggle.

His memory seemed to wake him one night or morning, asking him to produce the first name of Lord Byron. He could not. He decided to disa.s.sociate himself momentarily from his memory and surprise it in possession of Lord Byron's name but when he returned, warily, to this receptacle it was still empty. Sidney? Percy? James? He got out of bed-it was cold-put on some shoes and an overcoat and climbed up the stairs through the garden to his study. He seized a copy of Manfred but the author was listed simply as Lord Byron. The same was true of Childe Harold. He finally discovered, in the encyclopedia, that his lordship was named George. He granted himself a partial excuse for this lapse of memory and returned to his warm bed. Like most old men he had begun a furtive glossary of food that seemed to put lead in his pencil. Fresh trout. Black olives. Young lamb roasted with thyme. Wild mushrooms, bear, venison, and rabbit. On the other side of the ledger were all frozen foods, cultivated greens, overcooked pasta, and canned soups.

In the spring a Scandinavian admirer wrote, asking if he might have the honor of taking Bas...o...b..for a day's trip among the hill towns. Bas...o...b.. who had no car of his own at the time, was delighted to accept. The Scandinavian was a pleasant young man and they set off happily for Monte Felici. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the springs that supplied the town with water had gone dry and the population had moved halfway down the mountain. All that remained of the abandoned town on the summit were two churches or cathedrals of uncommon splendor. Bas...o...b..loved these. They stood in fields of flowering weeds, their wall paintings still brilliant, their facades decorated with griffins, swans, and lions with the faces and parts of men and women, skewered dragons, winged serpents, and other marvels of metamorphoses. These vast and fanciful houses of G.o.d reminded Bas...o...b..of the boundlessness of the human imagination and he felt lighthearted and enthusiastic. From Monte Felici they went on to San Giorgio, where there were some painted tombs and a little Roman theater. They stopped in a grove below the town to have a picnic. Bas...o...b..went into the woods to relieve himself and stumbled on a couple who were making love. They had not bothered to undress and the only flesh visible was the stranger's hairy backside. Tanti, scusi, mumbled Bas...o...b..and he retreated to another part of the forest but when he rejoined the Scandinavian he was uneasy. The struggling couple seemed to have dimmed his memories of the cathedrals. When he returned to his villa some nuns from a Roman convent were waiting for him to autograph their copies of The World of Apples. He did this and asked his housekeeper, Maria, to give them some wine. They paid him the usual compliments-he had created a universe that seemed to welcome man; he had divined the voice of moral beauty in a rain wind-but all that he could think of was the stranger's back. It seemed to have more zeal and meaning than his celebrated search for truth. It seemed to dominate all that he had seen that day-the castles, clouds, cathedrals, mountains, and fields of flowers. When the nuns left he looked up to the mountains to raise his spirits but the mountains looked then like the b.r.e.a.s.t.s of women. His mind had become unclean. He seemed to step aside from its recalcitrance and watch the course it took. In the distance he heard a train whistle and what would his wayward mind make of this? The excitements of travel, the prix fixe in the dining car, the sort of wine they served on trains? It all seemed innocent enough until he caught his mind sneaking away from the dining car to the venereal stalls of the Wagon-Lit and thence into gross obscenity. He thought he knew what he needed and he spoke to Maria after dinner. She was always happy to accommodate him, although he always insisted that she take a bath. This, with the dishes, involved some delays but when she left him he definitely felt better but he definitely was not cured.

In the night his dreams were obscene and he woke several times trying to shake off this venereal pall or torpor. Things were no better in the light of morning. Obscenity-gross obscenity-seemed to be the only fact in life that possessed color and cheer. After breakfast he climbed up to his study and sat at his desk. The welcoming universe, the rain wind that sounded through the world of apples had vanished. Filth was his destiny, his best self, and he began with relish a long ballad called The Fart That Saved Athens. He finished the ballad that morning and burned it in the stove that had been given to him by the Oslo P.E.N. The ballad was, or had been until he burned it, an exhaustive and revolting exercise in scatology, and going down the stairs to his terrace he felt genuinely remorseful. He spent the afternoon writing a disgusting confession called The Favorite of Tiberio. Two admirers-a young married couple-came at five to praise him. They had met on a train, each of them carrying a copy of his Apples. They had fallen in love along the lines of the pure and ardent love he described. Thinking of his day's work, Bas...o...b..hung his head.

On the next day he wrote The Confessions of a Public School Headmaster. He burned the ma.n.u.script at noon. As he came sadly down the stairs onto his terrace he found there fourteen students from the University of Rome who, as soon as he appeared, began to chant "The Orchards of Heaven"-the opening sonnet in The World of Apples. He shivered. His eyes filled with tears. He asked Maria to bring them some wine while he autographed their copies. They then lined up to shake his impure hand and returned to a bus in the field that had brought them out from Rome. He glanced at the mountains that had no cheering power-looked up at the meaningless blue sky. Where was the strength of decency? Had it any reality at all? Was the gross b.e.s.t.i.a.lity that obsessed him a sovereign truth? The most harrowing aspect of obscenity, he was to discover before the end of the week, was its boorishness. While he tackled his indecent projects with ardor he finished them with boredom and shame. The p.o.r.nographer's course seems inflexible and he found himself repeating that tedious body of work that is circulated by the immature and the obsessed. He wrote The Confessions of a Lady's Maid, The Baseball Player's Honeymoon, and A Night in the Park. At the end of ten days he was at the bottom of the p.o.r.nographer's barrel; he was writing dirty limericks. He wrote sixty of these and burned them. The next morning he took a bus to Rome.

He checked in at the Minerva where he always stayed and telephoned a long list of friends, but he knew that to arrive unannounced in a large city is to be friendless, and no one was home. He wandered around the streets and, stepping into a public toilet, found himself face to face with a male wh.o.r.e, displaying his wares. He stared at the man with the naivete or the r.e.t.a.r.d of someone very old. The man's face was idiotic-doped, drugged, and ugly-and yet, standing in his unsavory orisons, he seemed to old Bas...o...b..angelic, armed with a flaming sword that might conquer ba.n.a.lity and smash the gla.s.s of custom. He hurried away. It was getting dark and that h.e.l.lish eruption of traffic noise that rings off the walls of Rome at dusk was rising to its climax. He wandered into an art gallery on the Via Sistina where the painter or photographer-he was both-seemed to be suffering from the same infection as Bas...o...b.. only in a more acute form. Back in the streets he wondered if there was a universality to this venereal dusk that had settled over his spirit. Had the world, as well as he, lost its way? He pa.s.sed a concert hall where a program of songs was advertised and thinking that music might cleanse the thoughts of his heart he bought a ticket and went in. The concert was poorly attended. When the accompanist appeared, only a third of the seats were taken. Then the soprano came on, a splendid ash blonde in a crimson dress, and while she sang Die Liebhaber der Brucken old Bas...o...b..began the disgusting and unfortunate habit of imagining that he was disrobing her. Hooks and eyes, he wondered? A zipper? While she sang Die Feldspar and went on to Le temps des lilas et le temps des roses ne reviendra plus he settled for a zipper and imagined unfastening her dress at the back and lifting it gently off her shoulders. He got her slip over her head while she sang L' Amore Nascondere and undid the hooks and eyes of her bra.s.siere during Les Reves de Pierrot. His reverie was suspended when she stepped into the wings to gargle but as soon as she returned to the piano he got to work on her garter belt and all that it contained. When she took her bow at the intermission he applauded uproariously but not for her knowledge of music or the gifts of her voice. Then shame, limpid and pitiless as any pa.s.sion, seemed to encompa.s.s him and he left the concert hall for the Minerva but his seizure was not over. He sat at his desk in the hotel and wrote a sonnet to the legendary Pope Joan. Technically it was an improvement over the limericks he had been writing but there was no moral improvement. In the morning he took the bus back to Monte Carbone and received some grateful admirers on his terrace. The next day he climbed to his study, wrote a few limericks and then took some Petronius and Juvenal from the shelves to see what had been accomplished before him in this field of endeavor.

Here were candid and innocent accounts of s.e.xual merriment. There was nowhere that sense of wickedness he experienced when he burned his work in the stove each afternoon. Was it simply that his world was that much older, its social responsibilities that much more grueling, and that lewdness was the only answer to an increase of anxiety? What was it that he had lost? It seemed then to be a sense of pride, an aureole of lightness and valor, a kind of crown. He seemed to hold the crown up to scrutiny and what did he find? Was it merely some ancient fear of Daddy's razor strap and Mummy's scowl, some childish subservience to the bullying world? He well knew his instincts to be rowdy, abundant, and indiscreet and had he allowed the world and all its tongues to impose upon him some structure of transparent values for the convenience of a conservative economy, an established church, and a bellicose army and navy? He seemed to hold the crown, hold it up into the light, it seemed made of light and what it seemed to mean was the genuine and tonic taste of exaltation and grief. The limericks he had just completed were innocent, factual, and merry. They were also obscene, but when had the facts of life become obscene and what were the realities of this virtue he so painfully stripped from himself each morning? They seemed to be the realities of anxiety and love: Amelia standing in the diagonal beam of light, the stormy night his son was born, the day his daughter married. One could disparage them as homely but they were the best he knew of life-anxiety and love-and worlds away from the limerick on his desk that began: "There was a young consul named Caesar/Who had an enormous fissure." He burned his limerick in the stove and went down the stairs.

The next day was the worst. He simply wrote F - - k again and again covering six or seven sheets of paper. He put this into the stove at noon. At lunch Maria burned her finger, swore lengthily, and then said: "I should visit the sacred angel of Monte Giordano." "What is the sacred angel?" he asked. "The angel can cleanse the thoughts of a man's heart," said Maria. "He is in the old church at Monte Giordano. He is made of olive wood from the Mount of Olives and was carved by one of the saints himself. If you make a pilgrimage he will cleanse your thoughts." All Bas...o...b..knew of pilgrimages was that you walked and for some reason carried a seash.e.l.l. When Maria went up to take a siesta he looked among Amelia's relics and found a seash.e.l.l. The angel would expect a present, he guessed, and from the box in his study he chose the gold medal the Soviet Government had given him on Lermontov's Jubilee. He did not wake Maria or leave her a note. This seemed to be a conspicuous piece of senility. He had never before been, as the old often are, mischievously elusive, and he should have told Maria where he was going but he didn't. He started down through the vineyards to the main road at the bottom of the valley.

As he approached the river a little Fiat drew off the main road and parked among some trees. A man, his wife, and three carefully dressed daughters got out of the car and Bas...o...b..stopped to watch them when he saw that the man carried a shotgun. What was he going to do? Commit murder? Suicide? Was Bas...o...b..about to see some human sacrifice? He sat down, concealed by the deep gra.s.s, and watched. The mother and the three girls were very excited. The father seemed to be enjoying complete sovereignty. They spoke a dialect and Bas...o...b..understood almost nothing they said. The man took the shotgun from its case and put a single sh.e.l.l in the chamber. Then he arranged his wife and three daughters in a line and put their hands over their ears. They were squealing. When this was all arranged he stood with his back to them, aimed his gun at the sky, and fired. The three children applauded and exclaimed over the loudness of the noise and the bravery of their dear father. The father returned the gun to its case, they all got back into the Fiat and drove, Bas...o...b..supposed, back to their apartment in Rome.

Bas...o...b..stretched out in the gra.s.s and fell asleep. He dreamed that he was back in his own country. What he saw was an old Ford truck with four flat tires, standing in a field of b.u.t.tercups. A child wearing a paper crown and a bath towel for a mantle hurried around the corner of a white house. An old man took a bone from a paper bag and handed it to a stray dog. Autumn leaves smoldered in a bathtub with lion's feet. Thunder woke him, distant, shaped, he thought, like a gourd. He got down to the main road where he was joined by a dog. The dog was trembling and he wondered if it was sick, rabid, dangerous, and then he saw that the dog was afraid of thunder. Each peal put the beast into a paroxysm of trembling and Bas...o...b..stroked his head. He had never known an animal to be afraid of nature. Then the wind picked up the branches of the trees and he lifted his old nose to smell the rain, minutes before it fell. It was the smell of damp country churches, the spare rooms of old houses, earth closets, bathing suits put out to dry-so keen an odor of joy that he sniffed noisily. He did not, in spite of these transports, lose sight of his practical need for shelter. Beside the road was a little hut for bus travelers and he and the frightened dog stepped into this. The walls were covered with that sort of uncleanliness from which he hoped to flee and he stepped out again. Up the road was a farmhouse-one of those schizophrenic improvisations one sees so often in Italy. It seemed to have been bombed, spatch-c.o.c.ked, and put together, not at random but as a deliberate a.s.sault on logic. On one side there was a wooden lean-to where an old man sat. Bas...o...b..asked him for the kindness of his shelter and the old man invited him in.

The old man seemed to be about Bas...o...b..s age but he seemed to Bas...o...b..enviably untroubled. His smile was gentle and his face was clear. He had obviously never been harried by the wish to write a dirty limerick. He would never be forced to make a pilgrimage with a seash.e.l.l in his pocket. He held a book in his lap-a stamp alb.u.m-and the lean-to was filled with potted plants. He did not ask his soul to clap hands and sing, and yet he seemed to have reached an organic peace of mind that Bas...o...b..coveted. Should Bas...o...b..have collected stamps and potted plants? Anyhow, it was too late. Then the rain came, thunder shook the earth, the dog whined and trembled, and Bas...o...b..caressed him. The storm pa.s.sed in a few minutes and Bas...o...b..thanked his host and started up the road.

He had a nice stride for someone so old and he walked, like all the rest of us, in some memory of prowess-love or football, Amelia or a good dropkick-but after a mile or two he realized that he would not reach Monte Giordano until long after dark and when a car stopped and offered him a ride to the village he accepted it, hoping that this would not put a crimp in his cure. It was still light when he reached Monte Giordano. The village was about the same size as his own with the same tufa walls and bitter lichen. The old church stood in the center of the square but the door was locked. He asked for the priest and found him in a vineyard, burning prunings. He explained that he wanted to make an offering to the sainted angel and showed the priest his golden medal. The priest wanted to know if it was true gold and Bas...o...b..then regretted his choice. Why hadn't he chosen the medal given him by the French Government or the medal from Oxford? The Russians had not hallmarked the gold and he had no way of proving its worth. Then the priest noticed that the citation was written in the Russian alphabet. Not only was it false gold; it was Communist gold and not a fitting present for the sacred angel. At that moment the clouds parted and a single ray of light came into the vineyard, lighting the medal. It was a sign. The priest drew a cross in the air and they started back to the church.

It was an old, small, poor country church. The angel was in a chapel on the left, which the priest lighted. The image, buried in jewelry, stood in an iron cage with a padlocked door. The priest opened this and Bas...o...b..placed his Lermontov medal at the angel's feet. Then he got to his knees and said loudly: "G.o.d bless Walt Whitman. G.o.d bless Hart Crane. G.o.d bless Dylan Thomas. G.o.d bless William Faulkner, Scott Fitzgerald, and especially Ernest Hemingway." The priest locked up the sacred relic and they left the church together. There was a cafe on the square where he got some supper and rented a bed. This was a strange engine of bra.s.s with bra.s.s angels at the four corners, but they seemed to possess some bra.s.sy blessedness since he dreamed of peace and woke in the middle of the night finding in himself that radiance he had known when he was younger. Something seemed to shine in his mind and limbs and lights and vitals and he fell asleep again and slept until morning.

On the next day, walking down from Monte Giordano to the main road, he heard the trumpeting of a waterfall. He went into the woods to find this. It was a natural fall, a shelf of rock and a curtain of green water, and it reminded him of a fall at the edge of the farm in Vermont where he had been raised. He had gone there one Sunday afternoon when he was a boy and sat on a hill above the pool. While he was there he saw an old man, with hair as thick and white as his was now, come through the woods. He had watched the old man unlace his shoes and undress himself with the haste of a lover. First he had wet his hands and arms and shoulders and then he had stepped into the torrent, bellowing with joy. He had then dried himself with his underpants, dressed, and gone back into the woods and it was not until he disappeared that Bas...o...b..had realized that the old man was his father.

Now he did what his father had done-unlaced his shoes, tore at the b.u.t.tons of his shirt and knowing that a mossy stone or the force of the water could be the end of him he stepped naked into the torrent, bellowing like his father. He could stand the cold for only a minute but when he stepped away from the water he seemed at last to be himself. He went on down to the main road where he was picked up by some mounted police, since Maria had sounded the alarm and the whole province was looking for the maestro. His return to Monte Carbone was triumphant and in the morning he began a long poem on the inalienable dignity of light and air that, while it would not get him the n.o.bel Prize, would grace the last months of his life.

Charles D'Ambrosio.

DRUMMOND & SON.

Drummond opened the shop every morning at seven so he and his boy could eat breakfast while the first dropoffs were coming in. The boy liked cereal and sat at the workbench in back, slurping his milk, while Drummond occasionally hustled out to the curb to help a secretary haul a c.u.mbersome IBM from the back seat of a car. The front of the store was a showroom for refurbished machines, displayed on shelves, each with a fresh sheet of white bond rolled into the platen, while the back was a chaos of wrecked typewriters Drummond would either salvage or cannibalize for parts someday. There were two stools and two lamps at the workbench for the rare times when the son felt like joining his father, cleaning keys, but generally after breakfast the boy spent the rest of the day sitting behind Drummond in an old Naugahyde recliner, laughing to himself and saying prayers, or wandering out to the sidewalk to smoke a cigarette. That he step outside to smoke was the only major request Drummond ever made of his son.

"Next week's your birthday," Drummond said.

"Next week." The boy finished his cereal, plunking the spoon against the empty bowl. He said, "I think I'll go outside."

"How about rinsing your bowl?"

"Oh, yeah."

"It's raining pretty hard out."

"That's okay," Pete said, grabbing a broken umbrella he'd found in the street, a batty contraption of bent spokes and torn black fabric.

A clear-plastic curtain separated the two parts of the store, and Drummond kept a careful eye on his son from the bench. Drummond had acquired sole ownership of the business after his father died of emphysema, and he still remembered those last months beside him on the bench, the faint whisper as the plastic tube fed the old man oxygen. He knew the tank was pumping air through his dad's nose and into his lungs, but day after day it sounded as though the life were leaking out of him. The elder Drummond had just cleaned his gla.s.ses with a purple shop rag and nudged them back on the bridge of his nose when he died, and it was as if, for a lingering moment, he were looking over the workbench, among a lifetime's clutter of keys and type bars, dental tools and unraveling ribbons, for his last breath.

Shortly after his dad died, Drummond had started bringing Pete to the shop, and he sometimes guessed that his wife, free of the boy for the first time in years, had discovered she liked living without the burden. She had hinted as much in a letter he recently received, postmarked from her new address in Portland, suggesting that he meet with a social worker to discuss "the future." He missed his wife tremendously when he opened the envelope and saw the beautiful loops of blue cursive running across the page. He hadn't written back yet, because he wasn't sure what to say to this woman whose absence rendered his life so strange. They had eloped during his senior year at West Seattle High, and this would have been their silver anniversary. Without her he felt lonely, but he wasn't angry, and he wondered if their marriage, after twenty-five years, had simply run its course.

The sheets of white paper in the twenty or so typewriters on display waved in unison when Pete opened the door after smoking his cigarette.

"Now is the time, now is the time, now is the time," the boy said, sweeping along the shelf and inspecting the sheets.

"You want to do some keys?" Drummond asked.

"Not now," Pete said, sitting in his brown recliner.

Drummond wore a blue smock and leaned under a bright fluorescent lamp like a jeweler or a dentist, dipping a Q-tip in solvent and dabbing inked dust off the type heads of an Olivetti Lettera 32. The machine belonged to a writer, a young man, about Pete's age, who worked next door, at La Bas Books, and was struggling to finish his first novel. The machine was a mess. Divots pocked the platen and the keys had a cranky, uneven touch, so that they punched through the paper or, on the really recalcitrant letters, the "A" or "Q," stuck midway and swung impotently at the empty air. Using so much muscle made a crescent moon of every comma, a pinp.r.i.c.k of every period. Drummond offered to sell the young man an identical Olivetti, pristine, with case and original instruction manual, but was refused. Like a lot of writers, as Drummond had discovered, the kid believed a resident genie was housed inside his machine. He had to have this one. "Just not so totally f.u.c.ked up," he'd said.

Hardly anybody used typewriters these days, but with the epochal change in clientele brought on by computers Drummond's business shifted in small ways and remained profitably intact. He had a steady stream of customers, some loyally held over from the old days, some new. Drummond was a good mechanic, and word spread among an emerging breed of hobbyist. Collectors came to him from around the city, mostly men, often retired, fussy and strange, a little contrary, who liked the smell of solvents and enjoyed talking shop and seemed to believe an unwritten life was stubbornly buried away in the dusty machines they brought in for restoration. His business had become more sociable as a growing tribe of holdouts banded together. He now kept a coffee urn and a stack of Styrofoam cups next to the register, for customers who liked to hang out. There were pockets of people who warily refused the future or the promise or whatever it was computers were offering and stuck by their typewriters. Some of them were secretaries who filled out forms, and others were writers, a sudden surge of them from all over Seattle. There were professors and poets and young women with colored hair who wrote for the local weeklies. There were aging lefties who made carbons of their correspondence or owned mimeographs and hand-cranked the ink drums and dittoed urgent newsletters that smelled of freshly laundered cotton for their dwindling coteries. Now and then, too, customers walked in off the street, a trickle of curious shoppers who simply wanted to touch the machines, tapping the keys and slapping back the carriage when the bell rang out, leaving a couple of sentences behind.

Drummond tore down the old Olivetti. While he worked, he could hear his son laughing to himself.

"What's so funny?" Drummond asked.

"Nothing," the boy said.

"You always say 'nothing,'" Drummond said, "but you keep on laughing. I'd sure like to know for once what you find so funny all the time."

The boy's face hadn't been moved by a real smile in years and he never cried. He had been quite close to Drummond's father-who doted on his only grandchild-but the boy's reaction at the funeral was unreadable: blanker and less emotional than that of a stranger, who at least might have reflected selfishly on his own death, or the death of friends, or death generally, digging up some connection.

But on the short drive from the church to the cemetary, Pete had only sat slumped in his seat, staring out at the rain-swept gray city, laughing.

"What are you laughing at?" Drummond had asked.

"Nothing."

Drummond had pressed the boy. On such a momentous day, the laughing had got to him.

"Tell me," he'd said impatiently.

"I just start to laugh when I see something sad," Pete had said.

"You think it's funny?"

"I don't think I find it funny. But I laugh anyway."

"Some of these are crooked as h.e.l.l," Drummond said now, gently twisting the "T" with a pair of needle-nose pliers. "They'll never seat right in the guides, even if I could straighten them out. You see that?" He turned in his stool and showed the boy the bent type bar, just as his father had shown him ages ago. "Not with the precision you want, anyway. A good typewriter needs to work like a watch."

The boy couldn't carry his end of a conversation, not even with nods of feigned interest. His moods were a kind of unsettled weather, either wind-whipped and stormy with crazy words or becalmed by an overcasting silence. His face, blunt and drawn inward, was now and then seized by spasms, and his body, boggy and soft, was racked by jerky, purposeless movements. He wore slipshod saddle shoes that had flattened and grown wide at the toe like a clown's, collapsing under his monotonous tread. His b.u.t.ton-down blue oxford shirt and his khakis were neatly pressed; Drummond ironed them every morning on a board built into a cupboard in the kitchen. He spritzed them as he'd seen his wife do, putting an orderly crease in slacks that were otherwise so deeply soiled with a greasy sheen that he was never able to wash the stain out.

"I think I'll go outside," Pete said.

"You sure smoke a lot," Drummond told him.

"Am I smiling?"

He wasn't, but Drummond smiled and said that he was. "I feel like I am inside," Pete said.

It was a gray Seattle day. There was a bus stop in front of the shop, and often the people who came in and browsed among the typewriters were just trying to escape the cold. A big, boxy heater with louvred vents hung from the ceiling on threaded pipe, warmly humming, and wet kids would gather in the right spot, huddled with upturned faces under the canted currents of streaming heat. Drummond let them be. He found the familiar moods and rhythms satisfying, the tapping keys enclosed in the larger tapping of the rain. Almost everyone who entered the shop left at least a word behind-their name, some scat, a quote. Even kids who typed a line of gobbledygook managed to communicate their hunger or hurt by an anemic touch or an angry jab. The sullen strokes of a stiffly pointing finger, the frustrated, hammering fist, the tentative, tinkering notes that opened to a torrent as the feel of the machine returned to the hand-all of it was like a single line of type, a continuous sentence. As far back as Drummond could recall, he'd had typewriter parts in his pockets and ink in the crevices of his fingers and a light sheen of Remington gun oil on his skin. His own stained hands were really just a replica of his father's, a version of the original he could still see, smeared violet from handling silk ribbons, the blunt blue-black nails squeezing soft white bread as the first team of Drummond & Son, taking a lunch break, ate their baloney-and-sweet-pickle sandwiches on Sat.u.r.day afternoons.

A rosary of maroon beads dangled between the boy's legs, faintly ticking, as he rocked in his recliner and kept track of the decades. A silent prayer moved his lips.

"Jesus Christ was brain-dead," Pete said. "That's what I've been thinking lately."

Drummond turned on his stool. "Sometimes your illness tells you things, Pete. You know that." The s.m.u.tted skin on the boy's hands was cracked and bleeding. "You need some lotion," Drummond said. Dead flakes sloughed to the floor, and a snow of scurf whitened the boy's lap. "You like that Vaseline, don't you?"

The boy didn't answer.

"You know I worry," Drummond said.

"Especially when I talk about G.o.d."

"Yeah, especially."

"You believe."

"I do," Drummond said, although of late he wasn't sure that was true. "But that's different."

"There's only one true G.o.d," the boy said.

"I know."

"I was thinking of writing a symphony to prove it."

"You want some cla.s.sical?" Drummond asked, reaching for the radio k.n.o.b.

"Don't," Pete said.

"Okay, okay."