Paolo Tasca, left all alone in the house, marched about in the brief summer of electric light, his arms flexed like those of a stage strong man, marched about as to "The Entry of the Gladiators", saying "Aaaah" occasionally, occasionally deliberately colliding with a piece of furniture, then throwing the piece of furniture to one side, saying "Aaaah" as the orchestra orchestrated the effect with cymbals and Chinese blocks. He raised his muscled arms above his head, filled his chest to maximum, showed the audience his handsome Italian teeth. "Aaaah." He marched about on big feet, bending too much at his bare brown knees, hearing the circus brass in his head, Paolo Tasca, il tigre Italiano, who would take on all corners, five falls at all-in wrestling, bare-fist boxing or with the gloves. A man entered the ring, a fat man of fifty, with peasant's strength congealed to boozer's fat. The whispers went around: "It is his father. It is father and son. The father has done him great wrong. How? Yes, yes, great wrong. It is not to be talked about. What, you say unfair? Unfair for the son to strike his father? An unfilial act, you say? Never. Consider but the harm the fat one has done. He says he is an old man, but he is still young enough. You will see." Paolo Tasca, with a clenched tigerish "Aaaaah," squared up to the trembling fat. The trembling fat said, "I a sorry. I not a know you so a strong. I not a see your a muscle before. You a train every a evening and I not a know. I not a see you with no shirt since you a little baby. I sorry I make a challenge. I make a public apology." Paolo led with his left, followed with a sharp uppercut with his right, peppered the bewildered gross body with an ammunition-belt full of blows, slammed the many chins with a crack of his left again, upped with his right, laid the body low on the canvas, which shook seismically. Then he changed to all-in wrestling, raising with ease the supine carcase by its stumps of legs, swinging it round and round by the ankles. Round and round and round. The side-drum throbbed in violent crescendo. In vertigo Paolo swung to his limit, and then: "Aaaaah." The carcase swung away into air, over the heads of the dumbfounded audience, hit and burst the canvas roof, went spinning off with a loud and terrified cry into the blue night. "He is avenged. The son is avenged. The father has got his deserts. But what strength. What virile beauty. Imagine" – (and now the audience was all female) – "imagine having that magnificent body to oneself. Such ecstasy." Paolo entertained smugly for five minutes or so a wealth of voluptuous images. He had once seen Gina Lollobrigida when on holiday in Rome. Anna Magnani had once sent him a signed photograph. "Aaaah." Paolo lay back in a chair for an instant with his eyes closed. Then he came to and began to cry very gently. He was an exile. He was unloved. He was hungry.
He began to pace the room again. There was nothing in the house but water, and that was in the tap, sun-hot, for there was no ice-box. Nay, there was not even tapwater at this hour. Paolo felt great self-pity. His tongue lolled and he panted. It was a desert march, mile after burning mile. Laughing cruelly, the gross cruel sergeant, his father, uncorked his water-bottle. "You swine," muttered the ranks, "the selfish swine." "That," said Paolo thickly, "is my father. You watch. I am not afraid, even if you are. I will cut the swine's throat. Watch." He stuck him like a swine with his clasp-knife, blood stained the desert, the greasy hulk was left for the sand-drift to cover. "Give water to this man. He is dying. His need is very great." The dying man was now Paolo. Dying, unloved, friendless, hungry, tortured with thirst, in a strange place, thousands of miles from civilisation. There was a small cemetery by the tiny Catholic church here in Dunia Town. He would be buried there. Visitors would ask, "Who was this Italian who died so far from his native land?" Their hosts, handing round bottles of beer, would reply, "Ah, sad, very sad. He was a brilliant young man, molto intelligente, the most skilful marble-cutter in Africa. He died of starvation. Yes, starvation. It is incredible, in this year of Our Lord, but it is, God help us, true. His father, through jealousy of his youth, looks and superior potency, starved him to death. His father starved everybody to death. His son in Dunia, his wife and daughter in Viareggio, Italy. But he did not starve his Tripoli whore, oh no. Her he fattened with oily curries, plumped with Export Stout. Ah yes, in his unwholesome and unseasonable lust he did." And now it was the Sovereign Pontiff himself damning Nando Tasca, solemnly cutting him off from the body of the Church like a withered twig. No, not a withered twig. If there was anything that Nando Tasca did not resemble, it was a withered twig. "Hic homo," said Pope Paolo, whose Latin was somewhat shaky, "excommunicandus est. Aaaaaaah. Hic homo est homo molto cattivo." "Ere," said Pope Paolo in English as shaky, "is your passport. Your passport to Ell. Aaaaaah." Paolo became, in a rapid and irreverent transition, a devil from the Inferno he had had to read at school, darting here and there with a trident, pricking the swollen corpse of his father like a sausage. At the thought of one of the hot grilled sausages he had eaten (il breakfast inglese) on the Lloyd Triestino ship from Genoa, Paolo began to sob quietly again. He must eat. "Io deuo mangiare," he told a house lizard running up the wall. The lizard scuttled to safety. "Aaaaah," said Paolo, remembering that they had a new neighbour, remembering to have seen the swollen and unhinged door that would not shut. Il cibo." Food, food. Paolo tore, with his mind's teeth, at corned-beef tins, cracked the metal open like nut-shells. He lapped sardines and wallowed in butter, drank off pickle-jars and crammed loaves into his mouth. He marched off, howling like a cat, to Lydgate's house, left right, left right, left wheel, left right, left right, left wheel, door open, left right, left right, halt. Light on. Halted, he peered about him, smelling the smell of another man's house, though so like their own in its squalor, unlike only in the greater quantity of cases and boxes. And there, by the tiny humming ice-box, was a box of tins. "Aaaaah." First, he was athirst. He opened the refrigerator and drank cold water, eyes closed. Then he seized on a half-pound slab of butter and ate it like ice-cream. Then the light went out. In the dark, in the dark. A blinded Samson. His father was at the power-station, pulling, with fiendish laughter, at the huge extinguishing lever. Farabutto. Blind Paolo groped floorwards, met a slim round tin in the food-box, opened it eagerly and licked the smooth butter-like content. His father was at work troll-like, in the box. His father had put into his hand a tin of boot polish.
In bitter agony Paolo polished his tongue against his hard palate, dancing in the dark house of another man. He took blind water from the blind refrigerator, drinking and moaning. Then, afraid, he crammed a dark square shape from the box into his pocket and ran, falling over things out of the tiny black house. Right wheel. Double, double, double. Right wheel. He was home. “Home,” he sobbed, "home, home." Ah, the irony. In the dark, so far from home. In the distance a skull xylophone began to play, over and over, a scale of six notes-D, C sharp, B flat, A, G, E – over and over and over. He thought of the mad scene of Lucia di Lammermoor. Then, in the blackness, he saw something small, a dim round glow-worm mocking him. It was his father, his father as a mocking glow-worm. But nay. He approached it on tip-toe. It had numbers all round, which glow-worms did not have. It had two tiny hands. It was his father's wrist-watch, which his father, in haste to go out and booze, had forgotten "Aaaaah." In the dark he felt a new voluptuousness enter his wronged body. Break it, crack it, kill it, still its mean little ticking heart, seize it by the strap and send it flying against the wall, to fall in dwarfish slivers of glass and bits of useless spring and wheel and ratchet. Do that thing, Paolo, in revenge. But no, what is the use? His father does not need to know the time. He has no appointments, except for beer and sleep, and for these there are no fixed seasons. Work he does not. Aaaaah. Sell it, Paolo, sell it and see if you can buy – See if you can buy –
Very vividly in the dark the lost body of Francesca (yes, yes, he knew, he was not ignorant, but her other name had been Croce, not da Rimini) swam, very substantial, into his boxer's arms. That day they had been reading together a comic paper, listening to the organo Hammond on the radio, and the words of the tune they both knew, full of stretti, stretti, and kisses and perfume and love came into their mouths, and then mouths came together, and then bodies, stretti, stretti. Aaaah. The memory of the substantial furniture-maker's daughter's arms, the fine dark moustache, the mingled spittles. The following nights of stolen love, al fresco, among the empty wine-bottles in the field by the albergo. And other memories: fat Anna, Bice with the squint, Maria, Isabella. And on the Lloyd Triestino boat the married woman. And once in Tripoli. But his father, aaaah, his father had in Benghazi and also in Shurga and N araka and Asmara and other barbarous places done it. The libidinous one, the greedy, the gross and beer-stinking and lustful fat-dripping goat of a one.
Paolo, still with the dark square shape in his pocket, with the watch, wet from his father's sweat, ticking and glowing on his wrist, Paolo marched towards the town. Left right, left right. See me here now, in the dark, a poor Italian boy, walking lonely in a strange land. From certain houses came the blessed light of candles. Paolo the lacy altar-boy held a candle, innocent and undefiled. Now he 'Was no longer innocent. His father had killed his trust, his innocence, violated his heart of piety. All his sins be on his father's fat goatish back, gross and strong for any such burden But he hoped that, in the town, he would not meet his father.
Suddenly all the lights went on for Paolo, the lights of streets and houses, the high sodium lights of the main road. He bowed from side to side, smiling with good Tuscan teeth. A rat-tailed Potok stared with suspicious eyes, and Paolo bowed more regally. Then he speeded his pace along the empty road. That was unfortunate; he had not noticed that lone man; that man would think him mad. Paolo, approaching the town, began to see more people. He made a grimace at three young Syrian girls who chattered near the Syrian Traders' Society's badminton court, but they would have none of him. They giggled at his bare brown knees, from which he walked. He smiled soulfully at a black woman in a gold gown, noticing too late that her black man was with her. The black man made a fist, scowling, at Paolo. Paolo bowed and bowed, smiling, bowing, putting out finny hands in deprecation of his mistake. Arriving, in a mild mist of sweat, at the moon-face of the stopped town clock, he paused, wondering. Then, yes, yes, he remembered there were shops ever open on the street where he took his midday meal, the meal that was breakfast as well as lunch, so that his father could casuistically call one meal two and say that he, a growing boy, ate well. He could sell the watch at one of these shops full of of gold. He would get, perhaps, twenty bucks. A lot of money.
"Buona sera," he said to the shopman. "This I will sell." The shopman looked at the watch with the twitched nose of a bad smell, shook it and wound it soundly. "Not good," he said. "Very cheap."
Paolo felt at first a kind of joy. He nearly said to the shopman, in some language to be decided on when his mouth opened, "Yes, it is cheap. I always knew it was cheap, but my father said it had cost many hundreds of bucks. Now we have expert confirmation of its real value. And also of the real value of the regard in which this Tripoli whore holds my father." But he said instead, "Cheap, uh? No, no, very expense. I know."
"How much you want?"
"Fifty." Paolo unclenched both hands five rapid times.
The shopman laughed in Syrian scorn. "Ten."
"Thirty." Both races met on this – a bargaining zest which made the English blush to consider and their salaries go nowhere. "You try bloody rob me. Thirty I want." Paolo was not really trying to be offensive: he genuinely believed that, about certain English words, a red qualifier or modifier span like a satellite.
"Ten I give. It is not worth ten. But ten I give."
"Twenty. I speak you bloody robber."
"Fifteen."
Paolo sighed like a busy man with little time to argue.
"Fifteen I take. But I know you bloody rob." The shopman counted fifteen torn pictures of the Caliph and gave them to Paolo. Paolo nearly cried. He had never had so much money before. He said, UT ante grazie." The shopman did not say, "Prego:" That was his Syrian ignorance. Paolo went out trembling, to look for a woman.
Now the State of Dunia was exceptional in possessing no professional body-sellers. This was because the Caliph did not allow polygamy and frowned on divorce. Hence there were no women to be thrown on the streets. The black and beautiful animists who lived out of the towns practised free love in their villages; the Europeans and Australians carried on their suburban week-end rites, based on a scheme of temporary marital exchange, in their distant bungalows; the Chinese and Syrians sold everything except the flesh of their daughters. Occasionally a foreign prostitute would find a sponsor in Dunia and creep in through a hole in the immigration laws. But Dunia on the whole was remarkably chaste, and waste male energy had to be used up in other vices. So the hungry Paolo, moaning through the back-streets like Stephen Dedalus, thinking in terms of a loose and human Catholic society, became further frustrated. His father had told him that, if he were not to suffer thus, he must throw all his strength into the marble-cutting machine, working like two men, but Paolo knew that his father, as well as being a pig, a hypocrite, a lecher, a tyrant, a drunkard, a wife-and-daughter-and-son starver and a bloody robber, was also a liar. But Paolo had never been taught that vicious-circle syllogism whose major premise quotes King Solomon as saying that all men are liars; whatever his father said, the opposite must be true. So he went on, moaning, prize-fighter's arms held out slightly at the sides, walking from his knees, through the few streets of Dunia Town, wondering why hips did not wag at him in the cigarette-smoke of lighted doorways, why perfumed bosoms did not sail out at him from the dark.
At length, weary, he came to the Dunia Hotel, and paused a moment outside its entrance. In the lighted window of the restaurant he saw cakes and dried fish-strips. He would buy himself a little cake: the butter he had eaten would be glad of it. His father, having said that he was going to meet a man in the Dunia Hotel, would undoubtedly be drinking with a woman in the Kool Kaffi. Where, wondered Paolo bitterly, did he find these women? He need not fear that he would meet his father. So Paolo went in and bought his little cake, beating the man down automatically from two decems to one (ten decems to one buck; to one buck two hundred lire). He stood and watched the eaters sadly, sadly eating his little cake standing. Then, being at rest, he felt his bladder full of Lydgate's cold water, so he passed through to the hotel's vestibule. Behind the reception desk sat the under-manager, George Lim, an intense studious thin man with glasses and stretched parchment skin. Paolo said, pointing upstairs, "My fader come?"
George Lim said, "Elsewhere he is drinking. He is sailing on a sea of drink in some other haven. You know the line of your great poet Leopardi? ‘E dolce naufragar in questo mare.''' Paolo nodded, his goat's mouth open. "He will be shipwrecked some day but he will find the shipwreck sweet," said George Lim. "Shipwrecked in a sea of " – (he laughed at the paradox) – "Lighthouse Beer." Paolo looked frightened and went upstairs. At the bar upstairs nobody drank. At a table there were some workmen teaching a large monkey how to take orange crush from a glass. The ape carried under its arm a picture, though now much mauled, of Lydgate and his New Guinea friends. Paolo passed on, turned left to the corridor where the lavatories were, and saw a thing which made his heart jump with excitement. A bedroom door was open, and an affectionate leave-taking was in progress between a man whose face was familiar to Paolo (a man whose name, he now remembered, was not unlike a hiccough) and a woman he knew to be the Chadi wife of an Australian. The woman wore an alphabet-patterned frock. She had the domed forehead of a milk-chocolate Mary Tudor, and her great pouting lips gave the man a kiss in which, on both sides, buck teeth were rattlingly involved. The man saw Paolo first. Be broke off, lips moist in the corridor light, looked surprised, then fearful, then ingratiating. "My sister," he said, smiling falsely. "I kiss my sister good-bye." To Paolo, who understood the words, shock came to perch on excitement. Then the man went back into the room and shut the door. The Chadi woman stood looking at Paolo, holding in her right fist a small bunch of currency notes, her brown eyes doubtful. Paolo looked at her, not knowing what to say, not knowing what language to use to say what he had to say, when he knew what he would say, in. He knew one word of Chadi – "Proh", meaning "hot". So he said, wiping his brow with his hand. "Proh,"
She agreed, doubtfully. Then she stuffed the money in her handbag. Paolo pulled out his fistful of wealth, saying in Sudu, "I have money also." A picture of the Caliph floated down to the corridor linoleum. The tiny face looked disapprovingly up, between them, the head of the head of the faithful. Paolo picked him from the floor and said, "You come with me, uh?" to the Chadi faithless wife. She lifted her Tudor face in disdain and began to walk down the corridor towards the back exit of the hotel. Paolo began eagerly to follow. Then he remembered his bladder. "I come at once," he said. "Excuse." He rushed into the Gentlemen's, performed with difficulty – because of a certain ambiguity of organic function – the task of voiding Lydgate's water, and came out again. He ran down the corridor and met the Chadi lady at the foot of the stairs. He said again, breathlessly, "You come with me, uh?" She said, in fair Sudu with a sort of hot-potato accent:
"I go to meet my husband. I am late."
Peasant unscrupulousness scratched with dirty nails at the white shirt (his only white shirt) of chivalry. Be said, "Perhaps I come too. I tell your husband what. I see." Then, seeing the materials of shock and horror begin, with water, to be stirred in her face, he relented with haste, saying, "It is only a joke. I will say nothing." For people will occasionally do things out of gratitude, though less frequently than out of fear, if they will not do them for money. The Chadi lady, still in fair Sudu, gave Paolo a longer speech, most of which he understood. "It is Max Hup," she seemed to say. "I live with him before and have a child of him. Only him I see when he comes from Shurga where he works. Other men now never. I am a good wife to my husband. And," she added, "to Max Hup."
"Aaaah," said Paolo, nodding in approval. "Because you have a child by him. That is right. That is good. We should not," he moralised, and here the simple language nearly burst at the seams, "we should not ignore either the father or the mother of our children. If, of course, we can be sure they are our own. Too many take the pleasure but are unwilling to take the – " He cast round wildly for the Sudu word for responsibility but could not find it. "Like my father," he said. His father was a gift for any moralist.
"And he is going away," said the Chadi lady. "He is going to Zanzibar. There he has wife and children. He has wife and children also in Jibuti." She began, very quietly, to cry. Paolo took from his left-hand pocket, where there was still also a square hard tin, a somewhat dirty handkerchief. Tonight he would have to wash it so that it might be ready for the morning. He gave this handkerchief to the crying lady. She wiped her eyes and then, looking at the handkerchief, said, "You have nobody to wash for you."
"I do the washing," said Paolo, "for me and my father. I do it on Sundays, when there is no work in the Mosque, and iron it on Monday night. My father bought me an iron," he added, grudgingly. "He also," he super-added, "buys me soap-powder. Little else he buys for me," he concluded.
"I must go now to my husband," said the Chadi lady, with fresh urgency. They were standing in the little dark vestibule at the foot of the furtive stairs. She fumbled in her bag for the lipstick and powder she should have bought but had instead been given by Maximilian Hup. "He is waiting for me in the Kool Kaffi Bar and Restaurant."
"What do I call you?" asked Paolo romantically. "For we must meet again."
"They call me Eileen," she said, "but my name is uncertain."
"Uncertain," said Paolo uncertainly. "That is a beautiful name."
"No, no," she said. "Nobody was ever very sure about names in our family. Sometimes I was called Seven and sometimes I was called Eight. They could not remember how many children there had been. And Max" – (she began to sniffle) – "Max called me Eileen because, he said, it was his mother's name. So now I am Eileen to the world."
Paolo was charmed by this little speech. He made a short chivalrous one of his own. "If ever," he said gallantly, "you go back to your former occupation, I should be happy to be one of your clients." He bowed slightly.
"My life is very dull," she said, "so far from the town. But tomorrow we shall be moving nearer. Now I must go to the Kool Kaffi Bar and Restaurant." Suddenly, as a sort of earnest of her forthcoming re-stablishment of contact with a more sophisticated world, she broke into Australian. "My husband wite for me. He get not very pitient." And, with a sad smile, she ambled off. Paolo, left alone, said, "Aaaaah." A yellow-topped taxi came by, driving it a Chinese youth in sun-glasses against the mild sodium lighting, "You," he said.
"Taxi," said Paolo, feeling lordly. "You take me ome."
As they drove off, the Chinese youth broke into a clipped dry nocturne. "Night now. Light on here. Light on there. In street all lights. People walk in street. Some people go home. Some people not go home. Some go pictures. Some go eat. Some drink."
"My fader drink," said Paolo.
"In Kool Kaffi your father drink. I see. He angry. He say Sudu boy steal watch. He want fight Sudu boy. I see." They arrived at the mean row of throw-cuts' quarters.
"One buck," said the Chinese youth.
"Four centem."
"Eight centem I take."
"Five only I give. Bloody robber."
"Seven I take."
"I give six."
"No time argue," said the Chinese youth. "Six I take. What use money anyway?" This was so unusual an apophthegm from a Chinese that Paolo grew frightened. "Here one buck," he said. "You give me change another time."
Paolo climbed upstairs, not displeased with the evening. He had robbed his father. His right pocket bulged with notes. He had met a woman. He had eaten half a pound of butter and a little cake. Taking off his trousers in the one squalid bedroom shared with his father (a naked light on tossed blankets, torn mosquito-nets, scurrying creatures of the night), he remembered the hard square tin in the left pocket. He took it out and lay on the bed to examine it. It had a picture of a pink healthy pig. Paolo laughed, saying, "Mio padre." There were English words, some of which Paolo understood. "PORKYBOY", it said. "Chopped pork with sodium nitrite. Delicious hot or cold, fried with eggs or chilled with salad. Made in Australia." "My fader," laughed Paolo, as he unrolled the metal with the key provided, seeing a pink band of Porkyboy appear. Soon he lay content, munching the salty and thinly spiced sponge-meat. As he reached the end, poking out the last pink gobs with his fingers, he heard the owner of this and other so whimsically named foods coming up to bed next door. Every sound was clearly audible – the rustle of shirt, tinkle of metal trouser-fasteners, the double clump of shoes. Paolo listened for sounds of a woman, but he heard none. But he heard words that he did not clearly understand, words, as it seemed to him, of Protestant prayer.
"God," went the words from next door. "God, let me sleep. Let me sleep and let me not wake up again. Make it easy. Make it as easy as that." Paolo stared at the wall, his long goat's face made longer with an open mouth of wonder, holding in his right hand the ravaged tin of Porkyboy.
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