Requiem for a Nun

amazement)

Yes, it was like the dormitory at schooclass="underline" the smelclass="underline" of women, young

women all busy thinking not about men but just man: only a little

stronger, a little calmer, less excited-sitting on the temporarily

idle beds discussing the exigencies-th at's surely the right one,

258 WILLIAM FAULKNER

isn't it?-of their trade. But not me, not Temple: shut up in that room

twenty-four hours a day, with nothing to do but hold fashion shows in

the fur coat and the flashy pants and negligees, with nothing to see

it but a two-foot mirror and a Negro maid; hanging bone dry and safe

in the middle of sin and pleasure like being suspended twenty fathoms

deep in an ocean diving bell. Because he wanted her to be contented,

you see. He even made the last effort himself. But Temple didn't want

to be just contented. So she had to do what us sporting girls call

fall in love.

GOVERNOR

Ah.

STEVENS

That's right.

TEMPLE

(quickly: to Stevens) Hush.

STEVENS

(to Temple) Hush yourself.

(to Governor)

He-Vitelli-they called him Popeye-brought the man there himself.

He-the young man-

TEMPLE

Gavin! No, I tell you!

STEVENS

(to Temple)

You are drowning in an orgasm of abjectness and moderation when all

you need is truth.

(to Governor)

-was known in his own circles as Red, Alabama Red; not to the police,

or not officially, since he was not a criminal, or anyway not yet, but

just a thug, probably cursed more by simple eupepsia than by anything

else. He was a houseman-the bouncer-at the nightclub, joint, on the

outskirts of town, which Popeye owned and which was Popeye's

headquarters. He died shortly afterward in the alley behind Temple's

prison, of a bullet from the same pistol which had done the

Mississippi murder, though Popeye too was dead, hanged in Alabama for

a murder he did not commit, before the pistol was ever found and con-

nected with him.

REQUIEM FOR A NUN 259

GOVERNOR

I see. This-Popeye-

STEVENS

-discovered himself betrayed by one of his own servants, and took a

princely vengeance on his honor's smircher? You will be wrong. You

underrate this precieux, this flower, this jewel. Vitelli. What a name for

him. A hybrid, impotent. He was hanged the next year, to be sure. But even

that was wrong: his very effacement debasing, flouting, even what dignity

man has been able to lend to necessary human abolishment. He should have

been crushed somehow under a vast and mindless boot, like a spider. He

didn't sell her; you violate and outrage his very memory with that crass

and material impugnment. He was a purist, an amateur always: he did not

even murder for base profit. It was not even for simple lust. He was a

gourmet, a sybarite, centuries, perhaps hemispheres before his time; in

spirit and glands he was of that age of princely despots to whom the

ability even to read was vulgar and plebeian and, reclining on silk amid

silken airs and scents, had eunuch slaves for that office, commanding

death to the slave at the end of each reading, each evening, that none

else alive, even a eunuch slave, shall have shared in, partaken of,

remembered, the poem's evocation.

GOVERNOR

I dont think I understand.

STEVENS

Try to. Uncheck your capacity for rage and revulsion -the sort of rage and

revulsion it takes to step on a worm. If Vitelli cannot evoke that in you,

his life will have been indeed a desert.

TEMPLE

Or dont try to. Just let it go. Just for God's sake let it go. I met the

man, how doesn't matter, and I fell what I called in love with him and

what it was or what I called it doesn't matter either because all that

matters is that I wrote the letters-

GOVERNOR

I see. This is the part that her husband didn't know.

260 WILLIAM FAULKNER

TEMPLE

(to Governor)

And what does that matter either? Whether he knows or not? What can

another face or two or name or two matter, since he knows that I lived

for six weeks in a Manuel Street brothel? Or another body or two in the

bed? Or three or four? I'm trying to tell it, enough of it. Cant you see

that? But cant you make him let me alone so I can. Make him, for God's

sake, let me alone.

GOVERNOR

(to Stevens: watching Temple) No more, Gavin.

(to Temple) So you fell in love.

TEMPLE

Thank you for that. I mean, the 'love.' Except that I didn't even fall,

I was already there: the bad, the lost: who could have climbed down the

gutter or lightning rod any time and got away, or even simpler than that:

disguised myself as the nigger maid with a stack of towels and a bottle

opener and change for ten dollars, and walked right out the front door.

So I wrote the letters. I would write one each time . . . afterward,

after they-he left, and sometimes I would write two or three when it

would be two or three days between, when they-he wouldn't-

GOVERNOR

What? What's that?

TEMPLE

-you know: something to do, be doing, filling the time, better than the

fashion parades in front of the two-foot glass with nobody to be

disturbed even by the ... pants, or even no pants. Good letters-

GOVERNOR

Wait. What did you say?

TEMPLE

I said they were good letters, even for-

GOVERNOR

You said, after they left.

(they look at one another. Tem

ple doesn't answer: to Stevens,

though still watching Temple)

REQUIEM FOR A NUN 261

Am I being told that this ... Vitelli would be there in the room too?

STEVENS

Yes, That was why he brought him. You can see now what I meant by

connoisseur and gourmet.

GOVERNOR

And what you meant by the boot too. But he's dead. You know that.

STEVENS

Oh yes. He's dead. And I said 'purist'too. To the last: hanged the next

summer in Alabama for a murder he didn't even commit and which nobody

involved in the matter really believed he had committed, only not even his

lawyer could persuade him to admit that he couldn't have done it if he

wanted to, or wouldn't have done it if the notion had struck him. Oh yes,

he's dead too; we haven't come here for vengeance.

GOVERNOR

(to Temple) Yes. Go on. The letters.

TEMPLE

The letters. They were good letters. I mean--good ones.

(staring steadily at the Governor) What I'm trying to say is, they were

the kind of letters that if you had written them to a man, even eight

years ago, you wouldn't-would-rather your husband didn't see them, no

matter what he thought about your-past.

(still staring at the Governor as she makes her painful confession) Better