I can see him now as clear as if he were sitting here. Don’t disturb me. I can practically hear his voice. The things he said.
So many people are talking about class war, saying that now we’ve got rid of the old rulers, we will run things our way — everything will be ours because we are the people. I’m not sure what that means, but I have a bad feeling that’s not quite how it will work out. There’ll be something the old lot will have kept that they won’t be passing on. And it won’t be anything you can take by force, either … Nor can you steal it by getting a grant and lazing about at a university … As I said, it isn’t something I understand. But I feel there is something the bourgeois have hidden away from us. What is it? Just thinking of it fills my mouth with saliva. My whole body cramps and I curl up inside. The bald man said it was a reflex. What’s a reflex, for God’s sake?
Let go of my hand. It’s just nerves: that’s why I’m trembling. I’m fine now.
I never understood him straightaway when he said something, not that first moment, and yet I understood him, understood him as a person, so to speak. Some time later I asked a doctor what a reflex was. He told me reflex was when you tap someone’s knee with a little rubber hammer and the knee kicks … that’s reflex. But he meant a different kind of kicking, another sort of reaction.
Once he had vanished and I was looking for him in vain up and down the city, I felt that he himself was a sort of reflex, just as he was, raincoat and all. The man as whole, do you see? Not his writing. The thing you scratch out with your pen, that can’t be so important; after all, there are so many books in the world, in shops and in libraries … Sometimes it seems there are so many books that all thought must have been squeezed out of them, all those words have left no room for thought, just words endlessly crowding and pressing on the page. No, whatever he wrote was certainly not that important. And he no longer thought about having written books — if anything, he was a little ashamed of it. When the subject came up in conversation, he’d give an embarrassed smile, as I remember once when, carefully but clumsily, I started talking about his books. It was as if I had reminded him of some youthful folly. I felt sorry for him then. There must have been some vast fury, desire, passion, or sadness raging in him. Mentioning his books was like sprinkling salt on a frog in the spirit of scientific inquiry, just to see how the electricity worked — you could practically see him jerking. His mouth twisted this way and that, and he wouldn’t know where to look. It was dropping salt on a naked mind.
It’s as if the great statues, the famous paintings, and the clever books were not things in themselves; as if he were a tiny living atom of everything that was being destroyed. He was being destroyed with the whole of which he was a part. Now it seems the statues and books will be around for a long time yet, even while the thing they call culture vanishes.
God only knows how this works.
I watched him and, as the bombs were falling, thought how stupid I’d been in my childhood — in the ditch, and later in the maid’s room in that highly refined household, and then in London when the Greek taught me all kinds of airs and graces — when I thought the rich were cultured. Now I know that the rich just peck at culture, indulge in it a little, dipping in this or that dish of it, and chatter about it. That’s something one learns very slowly and at great cost. Learns what? That culture is what happens when a person or a people overflow with some great joy! They say the Greeks were cultured because the whole nation rejoiced. Even the tinkers who made cheap little statuettes, and the traders in oil, and the military, the populace at large, and all the wise men who stood in the agora arguing about beauty or wisdom. Try to imagine a people that can experience joy. That joy is culture. But that generation vanished, and in their place came people who still spoke Greek, but couldn’t feel or think as they did.
Do you fancy reading a book about the Greeks? Apparently there is a library here, where the pope lives … Don’t look so insulted! The saxophonist told me he goes there in secret, to read. Of course, darling, he is just boasting when he says that. The truth is he really only reads detective stories. All the same, it is not impossible that there should be libraries here in Rome where they look after books and where we could find out how Greece came to an end. I mean, the thing people call culture. Because now, you see, there are only experts. But experts can’t reproduce the joy that culture did. Is this boring you? Fine, I won’t go on about it. I only want you to be cheerful and satisfied. I won’t bother you with such foolish thoughts again.
You’re looking askance at me. I can tell by your nose you don’t believe me. You are thinking it is not Greek culture that interests me, and I simply want to know why this man died.
How sharp you are! Yes, I confess, I’d like to read a book that explained culture: what it is and how it can begin to fall apart one day. How it can come to pieces in the figure of a single man: the way his nervous system withers away, the nerves that contained so much life, that carried all the stuff people thought a long time ago, and which other people recall with longing, so that, for a moment or two, they feel they are better than the common run of animals. It seems to me that a man like that does not die alone — a great many things die with him. You don’t believe me? I don’t really know, myself, but I’d like to read such a book.
They say Rome was once a cultured city. Even those who couldn’t read or write — the people in market stalls — even they were cultured. They might have been dirty, but they went to the public baths and, once there, argued there about what was wrong or right. Do you think the fool came here for that reason? Because he wanted to die here? Because he believed that everything that people once called culture, that gave them joy, was gone? That he came here, where everything was turning into one vast heap of rubbish but there were still a few monuments of culture remaining — that remained the way that you could still see feet sticking out from beneath the soil in Buda, in the Vérmező, after the siege: the yellow feet of the dead buried under twelve inches of soil? Is that why he came here? To this town, to this hotel? Because he wanted the smell of culture round him when he died?
Yes, he died in this room. I asked the desk clerk. Are you happy now, knowing that? There, I’ve given you this too. I don’t have anything left. You’ve put the jewels in a safe place, haven’t you? You are my guardian angel, darling.
Listen — believe me, when he died, it was in this bed, so the desk clerk told me. Yes, the very bed you are lying in, gorgeous. And I am sure he was thinking: “Now, at last!” And he will have smiled. These madmen, these peculiar people, always smile at the end.
Wait, let me cover you.
Are you asleep, darling?
Posillipo, 1949–Salerno, 1978
Epilogue
… Because I tell you, buddy, believe me I tell you how it really is. You just mind to keep a long way clear of people in the cement trade. What you staring at? Don’t you know what that is? Don’t you watch TV? You really are a novice. You have a lot to learn in our lovely big village, New York. I can see you’re pretty new here, an economic migrant, or an illegal. Be glad if they let you stay. And keep your mouth shut. Because all kinds of trash is holed up here. But we two, we’re from Zala, the pair of us, the old country, we Hungarians should stick together. Here’s your bludimari. Drink up, brother.
As I say, be really careful that you don’t go within a mile of the cement trade. Our street here, Forty-sixth, has enough safe rooms. But farther down, in Thirty-eighth, that’s where the Family get together … you know, the Family. Avoid the place after midnight. And if you meet one or two of them, be careful to be on your best behavior. Because that’s what they like, these padrones: full of good manners. How will you know a padrone? … Well, they dress smart to start with. They’re highly refined people, silver hair, sideburns, everything just so. Suits and shoes all the best material cut to the best length. And they wear hats. They tip big. They draw of a wad of greenbacks from the pocket of their pants. They do it so, left-handed. They don’t even look to see whether it’s Washington or Lincoln on the front, they just throw it down. It’s like Sunday in church, in the middle of mass, when the guy comes along with his green collection bag. You must have seen it in the movies — great film, right? But if a member of the Family calls you and invites you to attend an evening course, just be polite and say no thank you, not my line of work.