t five o’clock in the morning Guillaume locked the door of the bar behind us. The streets were empty and grey. On a corner near the bar a butcher had already opened his shop and one could see him within, already bloody, hacking at the meat. One of the great, green Paris buses lumbered past, nearly empty, its bright electric flag waving fiercely to indicate a turn. A garçon de café spilled water on the sidewalk before his establishment and swept it into the gutter. At the end of the long, curving street which faced us were the trees of the boulevard and straw chairs piled high before cafes and the great stone spire of St. Germain des Pres—the most magnificent spire, as Hella and I believed, in Paris. The street beyond the place stretched before us to the river and, hidden beside and behind us, meandered to Montparnasse. It was named for an adventurer who sowed a crop in Europe which is being harvested until today. I had often walked this street, sometimes, with Hella, toward the river, often, without her, toward the girls of Montparnasse. Not very long ago either, though it seemed, that morning, to have occurred in another life.

We were going to Les Halles for breakfast. We piled into a taxi, the four of us, unpleasantly crowded together, a circumstance which elicited from Jacques and Guillaume a series of lewd speculations. This lewdness was particularly revolting in that it not only failed of wit, it was so clearly an expression of contempt and self-contempt; it bubbled upward out of them like a fountain of black water. It was clear that they were tantalizing themselves with Giovanni and me and this set my teeth on edge. But Giovanni leaned back against the taxi window, allowing his arm to press my shoulder lightly, seeming to say that we should soon be rid of these old men and should not be distressed that their dirty water splashed—we would have no trouble washing it away.

‘Look,’ said Giovanni, as we crossed the river. ‘This old whore, Paris, as she turns in bed, is very moving.’

I looked out, beyond his heavy profile, which was grey—from fatigue and from the light of the sky above us. The river was swollen and yellow. Nothing moved on the river. Barges were tied up along the banks. The island of the city widened away from us, bearing the weight of the cathedral; beyond this, dimly, through speed and mist, one made out the individual roofs of Paris, their myriad, squat chimney stacks very beautiful and vari-colored under the pearly sky. Mist clung to the river, softening that army of trees, softening those stones, hiding the city’s dreadful corkscrew alleys and dead-end streets, clinging like a curse to the men who slept beneath the bridges—one of whom flashed by beneath us, very black and lone, walking along the river.

‘Some rats have gone in,’ said Giovanni, ‘and now other rats come out.’ He smiled bleakly and looked at me; to my surprise, he took my hand and held it. ‘Have you ever slept under a bridge?’ he asked. ‘Or perhaps they have soft beds with warm blankets under the bridges in your country?’

I did not know what to do about my hand; it seemed better to do nothing. ‘Not yet,’ I said, ‘but I may. My hotel wants to throw me out.’

I had said it lightly, with a smile, out of a desire to put myself, in terms of an acquaintance with wintry things, on an equal footing with him. But the fact that I had said it as he held my hand made it sound to me unutterably helpless and soft and coy. But I could not say anything to counteract this impression: to say anything more would confirm it. I pulled my hand away, pretending that I had done so in order to search for a cigarette.

Jacques lit it for me.

‘Where do you live?’ he asked Giovanni.

‘Oh,’ said Giovanni, ‘out. Far out. It is almost not Paris.’

‘He lives in a dreadful street, near Nation,’ said Guillaume, ‘among all the dreadful bourgeoisie and their piglike children.’

‘You failed to catch the children at the right age,’ said Jacques. ‘They go through a period, all too brief, helas! when a pig is perhaps the only animal they do not call to mind.’ And, again to Giovanni: ‘In a hotel?’

‘No,’ said Giovanni, and for the first time he seemed slightly uncomfortable. ‘I live in a maid’s room.’

‘With the maid?’

‘No,’ said Giovanni, and smiled, ‘the maid is I don’t know where. You could certainly tell that there was no maid if you ever saw my room.’

‘I would love to,’ said Jacques.

‘Then we will give a party for you one day,’ said Giovanni.

This, too courteous and too bald to permit any further questioning, nearly forced, nevertheless, a question from my lips. Guillaume looked briefly at Giovanni, who did not look at him but out into the morning, whistling. I had been making resolutions for the last six hours and now I made another one: to have this whole thing ‘out’ with Giovanni as soon as I got him alone at Les Halles. I was going to have to tell him that he had made a mistake but that we could still be friends. But I could not be certain, really, that it might not be I who was making a mistake, blindly misreading everything—and out of necessities, then, too shameful to be uttered. I was in a box for I could see that, no matter how I turned, the hour of confession was upon me and could scarcely be averted; unless of course, I leaped out of the cab, which would be the most terrible confession of all.

Now the cab-driver asked us where we wanted to go, for we had arrived at the choked boulevards and impassable side-streets of Les Halles. Leeks, onions, cabbages, oranges, apples, potatoes, cauliflowers, stood gleaming in mounds all over, on the sidewalks, in the streets, before great metal sheds. The sheds were blocks long and within the sheds were piled more fruit, more vegetables, in some sheds, fish, in some sheds, cheese, in some whole animals, lately slaughtered. It scarcely seemed possible that all this could ever be eaten. But in a few hours it would all be gone and trucks would be arriving from all corners of France—and making their way, to the great profit of a beehive of middlemen, across the city of Paris—to feed the roaring multitude. Who were roaring now, at once wounding and charming the ear, before and behind, and on either side of our taxi—our taxi driver, and Giovanni, too, roared back. The multitude of Paris seems to be dressed in blue everyday but Sunday, when, for the most part, they put on an unbelievably festive black. Here they were now, in blue, disputing, every inch, our passage, with their wagons, handtrucks, camions, their bursting baskets carried at an angle steeply self-confident, on the back. A red-faced woman, burdened with fruit, shouted—to Giovanni, the driver, to the world—a particulary vivid cochonnerie, to which the driver and Giovanni, at once, at the top of their lungs, responded, though the fruit lady had already passed beyond our sight and perhaps no longer even remembered her precisely obscene conjectures. We crawled along, for no one had yet told the driver where to stop, and Giovanni and the driver, who had, it appeared, immediately upon entering Les Halles, been transformed into brothers, exchanged speculations, unflattering in the extreme, concerning the hygiene, language, private parts, and habits, of the citizens of Paris. (Jacques and Guillaume were exchanging speculations, unspeakably less good-natured, concerning every passing male.) The pavements were slick With leavings, mainly cast-off, rotten leaves, flowers, fruit and vegetables which had met with disaster natural and slow, or abrupt. And the walls and corners were combed with pissoirs, dull-burning, makeshift braziers, cafes, restaurants, and smoky yellow bistros—of these last, some so small that they were little more than diamond shaped, enclosed corners holding bottles and a zinc-covered counter. At all these points, men, young, old, middle-aged, powerful, powerful even in the various fashions in which they had met, or were meeting, their various ruin; and women, more than making up, in shrewdness and patience, in an ability to count and weigh—and shout—whatever they might lack in muscle; though they did not, really, seem to lack much. Nothing here reminded me of home, though Giovanni recognized, revelled in it all.

‘I know a place,’ he told the driver, ‘tres bon marche’—and told the driver where it was. It developed that it was one of the driver’s favorite rendezvous.

‘Where is this place?’ asked Jacques, petulantly. ‘I thought we were going to’—and he named another place.

‘You are joking,’ said Giovanni, with contempt. ‘That place is very bad and very expensive, it is only for tourists. We are not tourists,’ and he added, to me, ‘When I first came to Paris I worked in Les Halles—a long time, too. Nom de Dieu, quelle boulot! I pray always never to do that again.’ And he regarded the streets through which we passed with a sadness which was not less real for being a little theatrical and self-mocking.

Guillaume said, from his corner of the cab: ‘Tell him who rescued you.’

‘Ah, yes,’ said Giovanni, ‘behold my saviour, my patron.’ He was silent a moment. Then: ‘You do not regret it, do you? I have not done you any harm? You are pleased with my work?’

‘Mais oui,’ said Guillaume.

Giovanni sighed. ‘Bien sûr.’ He looked out of the window again, again whistling. We came to a corner remarkably clear. The taxi stopped.

‘Ici,’ said the driver.

‘Ici,’ Giovanni echoed.

I reached for my wallet but Giovanni sharply caught my hand, conveying to me with an angry flick of his eyelash the intelligence that the least these dirty old men could do was pay. He opened the door and stepped out into the street. Guillaume had not reached for his wallet and Jacques paid for the cab.

‘Ugh,’ said Guillaume, staring at the door of the cafe before which we stood, ‘I am sure this place is infested with vermin. Do you want to poison us?’

‘It’s not the outside you’re going to eat,’ said Giovanni. ‘You are in much more danger of being poisoned in those dreadful, chic places you always go to, where they always have the face clean, mais, mon Dieu, les fesses!’ He grinned. ‘Fais-moi confiance. Why would I want to poison you? Then I would have no job and I have only just found out that I want to live.’

He and Guillaume, Giovanni still smiling, exchanged a look which I would not have been able to read even if I had dared try; and Jacques, pushing all of us before him as though we were his chickens, said with that grin: ‘We can’t stand here in the cold and argue. If we can’t eat inside, we can drink. Alcohol kills all microbes.’

And Guillaume brightened suddenly—he was really remarkable, as though he carried, hidden somewhere on his person, a needle filled with vitamins, which automatically, at the blackening hour, discharged itself into his veins. ‘Il y a les jeunes dedans,’ he said, and we went in.

Indeed there were young people, half a dozen at the zinc counter before glasses of red and white wine, along with others, not young at all. A pockmarked boy and a very rough-looking girl were playing the pinball machine near the window. There were a few people sitting at the tables in the back, served by an astonishingly clean-looking waiter. In the gloom, the dirty walls, the sawdust-covered floor, his white jacket gleamed like snow. Behind these tables one caught a glimpse of the kitchen and the surly, obese cook. He lumbered about like one of those overloaded trucks outside, wearing one of those high, white hats, and with a dead cigar stuck between his lips.

Behind the counter sat one of those absolutely inimitable and indomitable ladies, produced only in the city of Paris, but produced there in great numbers, who would be as outraged and unsettling in any other city as a mermaid on a mountain-top. All over Paris they sit behind their counters like a mother bird in a nest and brood over the cash-register as though it were an egg. Nothing occurring under the circle of heaven where they sit escapes their eye, if they have ever been surprised by anything, it was only in a dream—a dream they long ago ceased having. They are neither ill- nor good-natured, though they have their days and styles, and they know, in the way, apparently, that other people know when they have to go to the bathroom, everything about everyone who enters their domain. Though some are white-haired and some not, some fat, some thin, some grandmothers and some but lately virgins, they all have exactly the same shrewd, vacant, all-registering eye; it is difficult to believe that they ever cried for milk, or looked at the sun; it seems they must have come into the world hungry for banknotes, and squinting helplessly, unable to focus their eyes until they came to rest on a cash-register.

This one’s hair is black and grey and she has a face which comes from Brittany; and she, like almost everyone else standing at the bar, knows Giovanni and, after her fashion, likes him. She has a big, deep bosom and she clasps Giovanni to it; and a big, deep voice.

‘Ah, mon pote!’ she cries. ‘Tu es revenu! You have come back at last! Salaud! Now that you are rich and have found rich friends you never come to see us any more! Canaille!’

And she beams at us, the ‘rich’ friends, with a friendliness deliciously, deliberately vague; she would have no trouble reconstructing every instant of our biographies from the moment we were born until this morning. She knows exactly who is rich—and how rich—and she knows it isn’t me. For this reason, perhaps, there was a click of speculation infinitesimally double behind her eyes when she looked at me. In a moment, however, she knows that she will understand it all.

‘You know how it is,’ says Giovanni, extricating himself and throwing back his hair, ‘when you work, when you become serious, you have no time to play.’

‘Tiens,’ she says, with mockery. ‘Sans blague?’

‘But I assure you,’ says Giovanni, ‘even when you are a young man like me, you get very tired’—she laughs—‘and you go to sleep early’—she laughs again—‘and alone,’ says Giovanni, as though this proved everything, and she clicks her teeth in sympathy and laughs again.

‘And now,’ she says, ‘are you coming or going? Have you come for breakfast or have you come for a nightcap? Nom de Dieu, you do not look very serious, I believe you need a drink.’

‘Bien sûr,’ says someone at the bar, ‘after such hard work he needs a bottle of white wine—and perhaps a few dozen oysters.’

Everybody laughs. Everybody, without seeming to, is looking at us and I am beginning to feel like part of a travelling circus. Everybody, also, seems very proud of Giovanni.

Giovanni turns to the voice at the bar. ‘An excellent idea, friend,’ he says, ‘and exactly what I had in mind.’ Now he turns to us. ‘You have not met my friends,’ he says, looking at me, then at the woman. ‘This is Monsieur Guillaume,’ he tells her, and with the most subtle flattening of his voice, ‘my patron. He can tell you if I am serious.’

‘Ah,’ she dares to say, ‘but I cannot tell if he is,’ and covers this daring with a laugh.

Guillaume, raising his eyes with difficulty from the young men at the bar, stretches out his hand and smiles. ‘But you are right, Madame,’ he says. ‘He is so much more serious than I am that I fear he will own my bar one day.’

He will when lions fly, she is thinking, but professes herself enchanted by him and shakes his hand with energy.

‘And Monsieur Jacques,’ says Giovanni, ‘one of our finest customers.’

‘Enchanté, Madame,’ says Jacques, with his most dazzling smile, of which she, in responding, produces the most artless parody.

‘And this is monsieur l’americain,’ says Giovanni, ‘otherwise known as: Monsieur David. Madame Clothilde.’

And he stands back slightly. Something is burning in his eyes and it lights up all his face, it is joy and pride.

‘Je suis ravi, monsieur,’ she tells me and looks at me and shakes my hand and smiles.

I am smiling too, I scarcely know why; everything in me is jumping up and down. Giovanni carelessly puts an arm round my shoulder. ‘What have you got good to eat?’ he cried. ‘We are hungry.’

‘But we must have a drink first!’ cried Jacques.

‘But we can drink sitting down,’ said Giovanni, ‘no?’

‘No,’ said Guillaume, to whom leaving the bar, at the moment, would have seemed like being driven from the promised land, ‘let us first have a drink, here at the bar, with Madame.’

Guillaume’s suggestion had the effect—but subtly, as though a wind had blown over everything or a light been imperceptibly intensified—of creating among the people at the bar, a troupe, who would now play various roles in a play they knew very well. Madame Clothilde would demur, as, indeed, she instantly did, but only for a moment; then she would accept, it would be something expensive; it turned out to be champagne. She would sip it, making the most noncommittal conversation, so that she could vanish out of it a split-second before Guillaume had established contact with one of the boys at the bar. As for the boys at the bar, they were each invisibly preening, having already calculated how much money he and his copain would need for the next few days, having already appraised Guillaume to within a decimal of that figure, and having already estimated how long Guillaume, as a fountainhead, would last, and also how long they would be able to endure him. The only question left was whether they would be vache with him, or chic, but they knew that they would probably be vache. There was also Jacques, who might turn out to be a bonus, or merely a consolation prize. There was me, of course, another matter altogether, innocent of apartments, soft beds, or food, a candidate, therefore, for affection, but, as Giovanni’s mome, out of honorable reach. Their only means, practically at least, of conveying their affection for Giovanni and me was to relieve us of these two old men. So that there was added, to the roles they were about to play, a certain, jolly aura of conviction and, to self-interest, an altruistic glow.

I ordered black coffee and a cognac, a large one. Giovanni was far from me, drinking marc between an old man who looked like a receptacle of all the world’s dirt and disease and a young boy, a redhead, who would look like that man one day, if one could read, in the dullness of his eye, anything so real as a future. Now, however, he had something of a horse’s dreadful beauty; some suggestion, too, of the storm trooper; covertly, he was watching Guillaume; he knew that both Guillaume and Jacques were watching him. Guillaume chatted, meanwhile, with Madame Clothilde, they were agreeing that business was awful, that all standards had been debased by the nouveau riche, and that the country needed DeGaulle. Luckily they had both had this conversation so many times before that it ran, so to speak, all by itself, demanding of them nothing in the way of concentration. Jacques would, shortly, offer one of the boys a drink but, for the moment, he wished to play uncle to me.

‘How do you feel?’ he asked me. ‘This is a very important day for you.’

‘I feel fine,’ I said. ‘How do you feel?’

‘Like a man,’ he said, ‘who has seen a vision.’

‘Yes?’ I said. ‘Tell me about this vision.’

‘I am not joking,’ he said. ‘I am talking about you. You were the vision. You should have seen yourself tonight. You should see yourself now.’

I looked at him and said nothing.

‘You are—how old? Twenty-six or -seven? I am nearly twice that and, let me tell you, you are lucky. You are lucky that what is happening to you now is happening now and not when you are forty, or something like that, when there would be no hope for you and you would simply be destroyed.’

‘What is happening to me?’ I asked. I had meant to sound sardonic but I did not sound sardonic at all.

He did not answer this, but sighed, looking briefly in the direction of the redhead. Then he turned to me. ‘Are you going to write to Hella?’

‘I very often do,’ I said. ‘I suppose I will again.’

‘That does not answer my question.’

‘Oh. I was under the impression that you had asked me if I was going to write to Hella.’

‘Well. Let’s put it another way. Are you going to write to Hella about this night and this morning?’

‘I really don’t see what there is to write about. But what’s it to you if I do or I don’t?’

He gave me a look full of a certain despair which I had not till that moment, known was in him. It frightened me. ‘It’s not,’ he said, ‘what it is to me. It’s what it is to you. And to her. And to that poor boy, yonder, who doesn’t know that when he looks at you the way he does, he is simply putting his head in the lion’s mouth. Are you going to treat him as you’ve treated me?’

‘You? What have you to do with all this? How have I treated you?’

‘You have been very unfair to me,’ he said. ‘You have been very dishonest.’

This time I did sound sardonic. ‘I suppose you mean that I would have been fair, I would have been honest if I had—if—’

‘I mean you could have been fair to me by despising me a little less.’

‘I’m sorry. But I think, since you bring it up, that a lot of your life is despicable.’

‘I could say the same about yours,’ said Jacques. ‘There are so many ways of being despicable it quite makes one’s head spin. But the way to be really despicable is to be contemptuous of other people’s pain. You ought to have some apprehension that the man you see before you was once even younger than you are now and arrived at his present wretchedness by imperceptible degrees.’

There was silence for a moment, threatened, from a distance, by that laugh of Giovanni’s.

‘Tell me,’ I said at last, ‘is there really no other way for you but this? To kneel down forever before an army of boys for just five dirty minutes in the dark?’

‘Think,’ said Jacques, ‘of the men who have kneeled before you while you thought of something else and pretended that nothing was happening down there in the dark between your legs.’

I stared at the amber cognac and at the wet rings on the metal. Deep below, trapped in the metal, the outline of my own face looked upward hopelessly at me.

‘You think,’ he persisted, ‘that my life is shameful because my encounters are. And they are. But you should ask yourself why they are.’

‘Why are they—shameful?’ I asked him.

‘Because there is no affection in them, and no joy. It’s like putting an electric plug in a dead socket. Touch, but no contact. All touch, but no contact and no light.’

I asked him: ‘Why?’

‘That you must ask yourself,’ he told me, ‘and perhaps one day this morning will not be ashes in your mouth.’

I looked over at Giovanni, who now had one arm around the ruined-looking girl, who could have once been very beautiful but who never would be now.

Jacques followed my look. ‘He is very fond of you,’ he said, ‘already. But this doesn’t make you happy or proud, as it should. It makes you frightened and ashamed. Why?’

‘I don’t understand him,’ I said at last. ‘I don’t know what his friendship means, I don’t know what he means by friendship.’

Jacques laughed. ‘You don’t know what he means by friendship but you have the feeling it may not be safe. You are afraid it may change you. What kind of friendship have you had?’

I said nothing.

‘Or for that matter,’ he continued, ‘what kind of love affairs?’

I was silent for so long that he teased me, saying, ‘Come out, come out, wherever you are!’

And I grinned, feeling chilled.

‘Love him,’ said Jacques, with vehemence, ‘love him and let him love you. Do you think anything else under heaven really matters? And how long, at the best, can it last, since you are both men and still have everywhere to go? Only five minutes, I assure you, only five minutes, and most of that, helas! in the dark. And if you think of them as dirty, then they will be dirty—they will be dirty because you will be giving nothing, you will be despising your flesh and his. But you can make your time together anything but dirty, you can give each other something which will make both of you better—forever—if you will not be ashamed, if you will only not play it safe.’ He paused, watching me, and then looked down to his cognac. ‘You play it safe long enough,’ he said, in a different tone, ‘and you’ll end up trapped in your own dirty body, forever and forever and forever—like me.’ And he finished his cognac, ringing his glass slightly on the bar to attract the attention of Madame Clothilde.

She came at once, beaming; and in that moment Guillaume dared to smile at the redhead. Mme. Clothilde poured Jacques a fresh cognac and looked questioningly at me, the bottle poised over my half full glass. I hesitated.

‘Et pourquoi pas?’ she asked, with a smile.

So I finished my glass and she filled it. Then, for the briefest of seconds, she glanced at Guillaume; who cried, ‘Et le rouquin la! what’s the redhead drinking?’

Mme. Clothilde turned with the air of an actress about to deliver the severely restrained last lines of an exhausting and mighty part. ‘On t’offre, Pierre,’ she said, majestically. ‘What will you have?’—holding slightly aloft meanwhile the bottle containing the most expensive cognac in the house.

‘Je prendrai un petit cognac,’ Pierre mumbled after a moment and, oddly enough, he blushed, which made him, in the light of the pale, just rising sun, resemble a freshly fallen angel.

Mme. Clothilde filled Pierre’s glass and, amid a beautifully resolving tension, as of slowly dimming lights, replaced the bottle on the shelf and walked back to the cash-register; offstage, in effect, into the wings, where she began to recover herself by finishing the last of the champagne. She sighed and sipped and looked outward contentedly into the slowly rising morning. Guillaume had murmured a ‘Je m’excuse un instant, Madame,’ and now passed behind us on his way to the redhead.

I smiled. ‘Things my father never told me.’

‘Somebody,’ said Jacques, ‘your father or mine, should have told us that not many people have ever died of love. But multitudes have perished, and are perishing every hour—and in the oddest places!—for the lack of it.’ And then: ‘Here comes your baby. Sois sage. Sois chic.’

He moved slightly away and began talking to the boy next to him.

And here my baby came indeed, through all that sunlight, his face flushed and his hair flying, his eyes, unbelievably, like morning stars. ‘It was not very nice of me to go off for so long,’ he said, ‘I hope you have not been too bored.’

‘You certainly haven’t been,’ I said to him. ‘You look like a kid about five years old waking up on Christmas morning.’

This delighted, even flattered him, as I could see from the way he now humorously pursed his lips. ‘I am sure I cannot look like that,’ he said. ‘I was always disappointed on Christmas morning.’

‘Well, I mean very early on Christmas morning, before you saw what was under the tree.’ But his eyes have somehow made of my last statement a double entendre, and we are both laughing.

‘Are you hungry?’ he asked.

‘Perhaps I would be if I were alive and sober. I don’t know. Are you?’

‘I think we should eat,’ he said, with no conviction whatever, and we began to laugh again.

‘Well,’ I said, ‘what shall we eat?’

‘I scarcely dare suggest white wine and oysters,’ said Giovanni, ‘but that is really the best thing after such a night.’

‘Well, let’s do that,’ I said, ‘while we can still walk to the dining room.’ I looked beyond him to Guillaume and the redhead, they had apparently found something to talk about, I could not imagine what it was; and Jacques was deep in conversation with the tall, very young, pockmarked boy, whose turtleneck black sweater made him seem even paler and thinner than he actually was. He had been playing the pinball machine when we came in, his name appeared to be Yves. ‘Are they going to eat now?’ I asked Giovanni.

‘Perhaps not now,’ said Giovanni, ‘but they are certainly going to eat. Everyone is very hungry.’ I took this to refer more to the boys than to our friends, and we passed into the dining room, which was now empty, the waiter nowhere in sight.

‘Mme. Clothilde!’ shouted Giovanni, ‘on mangeici, non?’

This shout produced an answering shout from Mme. Clothilde and also produced the waiter, whose jacket was less spotless, seen in closeup, than it had seemed from a distance. It also officially announced our presence in the dining room to Jacques and Guillaume and must have definitely increased, in the eyes of the boys they were talking to, a certain tigerish intensity of affection.

‘We’ll eat quickly and go,’ said Giovanni. ‘After all, I have to work tonight.’

‘Did you meet Guillaume here?’ I asked him.

He grimaced, looking down. ‘No. That is a long story.’ He grinned. ‘No, I did not meet him here. I met him’—he laughed—‘in a cinema!’ We both laughed. ‘C’etait un film du far west, avec Gary Cooper.’ This seemed terribly funny, too, we kept laughing until the waiter came with our bottle of white wine.

‘Well,’ said Giovanni, sipping the wine, his eyes damp, ‘after the last gun-shot had been fired and all the music came up to celebrate the triumph of goodness and I came up the aisle, I bumped into this man—Guillaume—and I excused myself and walked into the lobby. Then here he came, after me, with a long story about leaving his scarf in my seat because, it appeared, he had been sitting behind me, you understand, with his coat and his scarf on the seat before him and when I sat down I pulled his scarf down with me. Well, I told him I didn’t work for the cinema and I told him what he could do with his scarf—but I did not really get angry because he made me want to laugh. He said that all the people who worked for the cinema were thieves and he was sure that they would keep it if they so much as laid eyes on it, and it was very expensive, and a gift from his mother and—oh, I assure you, not even Garbo ever gave such a performance. So I went back and of course there was no scarf there and when I told him this it seemed he would fall dead right there in the lobby. And by this time, you understand, everybody thought we were together and I didn’t know whether to kick him or the people who were looking at us; but he was very well dressed, of course, and I was not and so I thought, well, we had better get out of this lobby. So we went to a cafe and sat on the terrace and when he had got over his grief about the scarf and what his mother would say and so on and so on, he asked me to have supper with him. Well, naturally, I said no, I had certainly had enough of him by that time, but the only way I could prevent another scene, right there on the terrace, was to promise to have supper with him a few days later—I did not intend to go,’ he said, with a shy grin, ‘but when the day came I had not eaten for a long time and I was very hungry.’ He looked at me and I saw in his face again something which I have fleetingly seen there during these hours: under his beauty and his bravado, terror, and a terrible desire to please; dreadfully moving, and it made me want, in anguish, to reach out and comfort him.

Our oysters came and we began to eat. Giovanni sat in the sun, his black hair gathering to itself the yellow glow of the wine and the many dull colors of the oyster where the sun struck it.

‘Well’—with his mouth turned down—‘dinner was awful, of course, since he can make scenes in his apartment, too. But by this time I knew he owned a bar and was a French citizen. I am not and I had no job and no carte de travail. So I saw that he could be useful if I could only find some way to make him keep his hands off me. I did not, I must say’—this with that look at me—‘altogether succeed in remaining untouched by him, he has more hands than an octopus, and no dignity whatever, but’—grimly throwing down another oyster and refilling our glasses of wine—‘I do now have a carte de travail and I have a job. Which pays very well,’ he grinned, ‘it appears that I am good for business. For this reason, he leaves me mostly alone.’ He looked out into the bar. ‘He is really not a man at all,’ he said, with a sorrow and bewilderment at once childlike and ancient, ‘I do not know what he is, he is horrible. But I will keep my carte de travail. The job is another matter, but’—he knocked wood—‘we have had no trouble now for nearly three weeks.’

‘But you think that trouble is coming,’ I said.

‘Oh, yes,’ said Giovanni, with a quick, startled look at me, as if he were wondering if I had understood a word of what he had said, ‘we are certainly going to have a little trouble soon again. Not right away, of course, that is not his style. But he will invent something to be angry at me about.’

Then we sat in silence for a while, smoking cigarettes, surrounded by oyster shells, and finishing the wine. I was all at once very tired. I looked out into the narrow street, this strange, crooked corner where we sat, which was brazen now with the sunlight and heavy with people—people I would never understand. I ached abruptly, intolerably, with a longing to go home; not to that hotel, in one of the alleys of Paris, where the concierge barred the way with my unpaid bill; but home, home across the ocean, to things and people I knew and understood; to those things, those places, those people which I would always helplessly, and in whatever bitterness of spirit, love above all else. I had never realized such a sentiment in myself before, and it frightened me. I saw myself, sharply, as a wanderer, an adventurer, rocking through the world, unanchored. I looked at Giovanni’s face, which did not help me. He belonged to this strange city, which did not belong to me. I began to see that, while what was happening to me was not so strange as it would have comforted me to believe, yet it was strange beyond belief. It was not really so strange, so unprecedented, though voices deep within me boomed, For shame! For shame! that I should be so abruptly, so hideously entangled with a boy; what was strange was that this was but one tiny aspect of the dreadful human tangle, occurring everywhere, without end, forever.

‘Viens,’ said Giovanni.

We rose and walked back into the bar and Giovanni paid our bill. Another bottle of champagne had been opened and Jacques and Guillaume were now really beginning to be drunk. It was going to be ghastly and I wondered if those poor, patient boys were ever going to get anything to eat. Giovanni talked to Guillaume for a moment, agreeing to open up the bar; Jacques was too busy with the pale, tall boy to have much time for me; we said good-morning and left them.

‘I must go home,’ I said to Giovanni when we were in the street. ‘I must pay my hotel bill.’

Giovanni stared. ‘Mais tu es fou,’ he said, mildly. ‘There is certainly no point in going home now, to face an ugly concierge and then go to sleep in that room all by yourself and then wake up later, with a terrible stomach and a sour mouth, wanting to commit suicide. Come with me, we will rise at a civilized hour, and have a gentle aperitif somewhere and then a little dinner. It will be much more cheerful like that,’ he said, with a smile, ‘you will see.’

‘But I must get my clothes,’ I said.

He took my arm. ‘Bien sûr. But you do not have to get them now.’ I held back. He stopped. ‘Come. I am sure that I am much prettier than your wallpaper—or your concierge. I will smile at you when you wake up. They will not.’

‘Ah,’ I could only say, ‘tu es vache.’

‘It is you who are vache,’ he said, ‘to want to leave me alone in this lonely place when you know that I am far too drunk to reach my home unaided.’

We laughed together, both caught up in a stinging, teasing sort of game. We reached the Boulevard Sebastopol. ‘But we will not any longer discuss the painful subject of how you desired to desert Giovanni, at so dangerous an hour, in the middle of a hostile city.’ I began to realize that he, too, was nervous. Far down the boulevard a cab meandered toward us, and he put up his hand. ‘I will show you my room,’ he said, ‘it is perfectly clear that you would have to see it one of these days, anyway.’ The taxi stopped beside us, and Giovanni, as though he were suddenly afraid that I would really turn and run, pushed me in before him. He got in beside me and told the driver: ‘Nation.’

The street he lived on was wide, respectable rather than elegant, and massive with fairly recent apartment buildings; the street ended in a small park. His room was in the back, on the ground floor of the last building on this street. We passed the vestibule and the elevator into a short, dark corridor which led to his room. The room was small, I only made out the outlines of clutter and disorder, there was the smell of the alcohol he burned in his stove. He locked the door behind us, and then for a moment, in the gloom, we simply stared at each other—with dismay, with relief, and breathing hard. I was trembling. I thought, if I do not open the door at once and get out of here, I am lost. But I knew I could not open the door, I knew it was too late; soon it was too late to do anything but moan. He pulled me against him, putting himself into my arms as though he were giving me himself to carry, and slowly pulled me down with him to that bed. With everything in me screaming No! yet the sum of me sighed Yes.

Here in the south of France it does not often snow; but snow-flakes, in the beginning rather gently and now with more force, have been falling for the last half hour. It falls as though it might quite possibly decide to turn into a blizzard. It has been cold down here this winter, though the people of the region seem to take it as a mark of ill-breeding in a foreigner if he makes any reference to this fact. They themselves, even when their faces are burning in that wind which seems to blow from everywhere at once, and which penetrates everything, are as radiantly cheerful as children at the sea-shore. ‘Il fait beau bien?’—throwing their faces toward the lowering sky in which the celebrated southern sun has not made an appearance in days.

I leave the window of the big room and walk through the house. While I am in the kitchen, staring into the mirror—I have decided to shave before all the water turns cold—I hear a knocking at the door. Some vague, wild hope leaps in me for a second and then I realize that it is only the caretaker from across the road, come to make certain that I have not stolen the silver, or smashed the dishes or chopped up the furniture for firewood. And, indeed, she rattles the door and I hear her voice out there, cracking, ‘M’sieu! M’sieu! M’sieu, l’americain!’ I wonder, with annoyance, why on earth she should sound so worried.

But she smiles at once when I open the door, a smile which weds the coquette and the mother. She is quite old and not really French; she came many years ago, ‘when I was a very young girl, sir,’ from just across the border, out of Italy. She seems, like most of the women down here, to have gone into mourning directly the last child moved out of childhood. Hella thought that they were all widows, but, it turned out, most of them had husbands living yet. These husbands might have been their sons. They sometimes played Pelote in the sun shine in a flat field near our house, and their eyes, when they looked at Hella, contained the proud watchfulness of a father and the watchful speculation of a man. I sometimes played billiards with them, and drank red wine, in the tabac. But they made me tense—with their ribaldries, their good-nature, their fellowship, the life written on their hands and in their faces and in their eyes. They treated me as the son who has but lately been initiated into manhood; but at the same time, with great distance, for I did not really belong to any of them; and they also sensed (or I felt they did) something else about me, something which it was no longer worth their while to pursue. This seemed to be in their eyes when I walked with Hella and they passed us on the road, saying, very respectfully, Salut, Monsieur-dame. They might have been the sons of these women in black, come home after a lifetime of storming and conquering the world, home, to rest and be scolded and wait for death, home to those breasts, now dry, which had nourished them in their beginnings.

Flakes of snow have drifted across the shawl which covers her head; and hang on her eyelashes and on the wisps of black and white hair not covered by the shawl. She is very strong yet, though, now, a little bent, a little breathless.

‘Bonsoir, monsieur. Vous n’etes pas malade?’

‘No, ‘I say, ‘I have not been sick. Come in.’

She comes in, closing the door behind her, and allowing the shawl to fall from her head. I still have my drink in my hand and she notices this, in silence.

‘Eh bien,’ she says. ‘Tant mieux. But we have not seen you for several days. You have been staying in the house?’

And her eyes search my face.

I am embarrassed and resentful; yet it is impossible to rebuff something at once shrewd and gentle in her eyes and voice. ‘Yes,’ I say, ‘the weather has been bad.’

‘It is not the middle of August, to be sure,’ says she, ‘but you do not have the air of an invalid. It is not good to sit in the house alone.’

‘I am leaving in the morning,’ I say, desperately. ‘Did you want to take the inventory?’

‘Yes,’ she says, and produces from one of her pockets the list of household goods. I signed upon arrival. ‘It will not be long. Let me start from the back.’

We start toward the kitchen. On the way I put my drink down on the night table in my bedroom.

‘It doesn’t matter to me if you drink,’ she says, not turning around. But I leave my drink behind anyway.

We walk into the kitchen. The kitchen is suspiciously clean and neat. ‘Where have you been eating?’ she asks sharply. ‘They tell me at the tabac you have not been seen for days. Have you been going to town?’

‘Yes,’ I say, lamely, ‘sometimes.’

‘On foot?’ she inquires. ‘Because the bus driver, he has not seen you, either.’ All this time she is not looking at me but around the kitchen, checking off the list in her hand with a short, yellow pencil.

I can make no answer to her last, sardonic thrust, having forgotten that in a small village almost every move is made under the village’s collective eye and ear.

She looks briefly in the bathroom. ‘I’m going to clean that tonight,’ I say.

‘I should hope so,’ she says. ‘Everything was clean when you moved in.’ We walk back through the kitchen. She has failed to notice that two glasses are missing, broken by me, and I have not the energy to tell her. I will leave some money in the cupboard. She turns on the light in the guest-room. My dirty clothes are lying all over.

‘Those go with me,’ I say, trying to smile.

‘You could have come just across the road,’ she says. ‘I would have been glad to give you something to eat. A little soup, something nourishing. I cook every day for my husband, what difference does one more make?’

This touches me, but I do not know how to indicate it, and I cannot say, of course, that eating with her and her husband would have stretched my nerves to the breaking point.

She is examining a decorative pillow. ‘Are you going to join your fiancée?’ she asks.

I know I ought to lie, but, somehow, I cannot. I am afraid of her eyes. I wish, now, that I had my drink with me. ‘No,’ I say, flatly, ‘she has gone to America.’

‘Tiens!’ she says. ‘And you—do you stay in France?’ She looks directly at me.

‘For awhile,’ I say. lam beginning to sweat. It has come to me that this woman, a peasant from Italy, must resemble, in so many ways, the mother of Giovanni. I keep trying not to hear her howls of anguish, I keep trying not to see in her eyes what would surely be there if she knew that her son would be dead by morning, if she knew what I had done to her son.

But of course, she is not Giovanni’s mother.

‘It is not good,’ she says, ‘it is not right for a young man like you to be sitting alone in a great big house with no woman.’ She looks, for a moment, very sad; starts to say something more and thinks better of it. I know she wants to say something about Hella, whom neither she, nor any of the other women here had liked. But she turns out the light in the guest room and we go into the big bedroom, the master bedroom, which Hella and I had used, not the one in which I have left my drink. This, too, is very clean and orderly. She looks about the room and looks at me, and smiles.

‘You have not been using this room lately,’ she says

I feel myself blushing painfully. She laughs.

‘But you will be happy again,’ she says. ‘You must go and find yourself another woman, a good woman, and get married, and have babies. Yes, that is what you ought to do,’ she says, as though I had contradicted her, and before I can say anything, ‘Where is your maman?’

‘She is dead.’

‘Ah!’ She clicks her teeth in sympathy. ‘That is sad. And your Papa—is he dead, too?’

‘No. He is in America.’

‘Pauvre bambino!’ She looks at my face. I am really helpless in front of her and if she does not leave soon she will reduce me to tears or curses. ‘But you do not have the intention of just wandering through the world like a sailor? I am sure that would make your mother very unhappy. You will make a home someday?’

‘Yes, surely. Someday.’

She puts her strong hand on my arm. ‘Even if your maman, she is dead—that is very sad!—your Papa will be very happy to see bambinos from you.’ She pauses, her black eyes soften; she is looking at me, but she is looking beyond me, too. ‘We had three sons. Two of them were killed in the war. In the war, too, we lost all our money. It is sad, is it not, to have worked so hard all one’s life in order to have a little peace in one’s old age and then to have it all taken away? It almost killed my husband, he has never been the same since.’ Then I see that her eyes are not merely shrewd, they are also bitter and very sad. She shrugs her shoulders. ‘Ah! What can one do? It is better not to think about it.’ Then she smiles. ‘But our last son, he lived in the north, he came to see us two years ago, and he brought with him his little boy. His little boy, he was only four years old then. He was so beautiful! Mario, he is called.’ She gestures. ‘It is my husband’s name. They stayed about ten days and we felt young again.’ She smiles again. ‘Especially my husband.’ And she stands there a moment with this smile on her face. Then she asks, abruptly, ‘Do you pray?’

I wonder if I can stand this another moment. ‘No,’ I stammer. ‘No. Not often.’

‘But you are a believer?’

I smile. It is not even a patronizing smile, though, perhaps, I wish it could be. ‘Yes.’

But I wonder what my smile could have looked like. It did not reassure her. ‘You must pray,’ she says, very soberly. ‘I assure you. Even just a little prayer, from time to time. Light a little candle. If it were not for the prayers of the blessed saints one could not live in this world at all. I speak to you,’ she says, drawing herself up slightly, ‘as though I were your maman. Do not be offended.’

‘But I am not offended. You are very nice. You are very nice to speak to me this way.’

She smiles a satisfied smile. ‘Men—not just babies like you, but old men, too—they always need a woman to tell them the truth. Les hommes, ils sont impossible.’ And she smiles, and forces me to smile at the cunning of this universal joke, and turns out the light in the master bedroom. We go down the hall again, thank heaven, to my drink. This bedroom of course, is quite untidy, the light burning, my bathrobe, books, dirty socks, and a couple of dirty glasses, and a coffee cup half full of stale coffee—lying around, all over the place: and the sheets on the bed a tangled mess.

‘I’ll fix this up before morning,’ I say.

‘Bien sûr.’ She sighs. ‘You really must take my advice, monsieur, and get married.’ At this, suddenly, we both laugh. Then I finish my drink.

The inventory is almost done. We go into the last big room, where the bottle is, before the window. She looks at the bottle, then at me. ‘But you will be drunk by morning,’ she says.

‘Oh, no! I’m taking the bottle with me.’

It is quite clear that she knows this is not true. But she shrugs her shoulders again. Then she becomes, by the act of wrapping the shawl around her head, very formal, even a little shy. Now that I see she is about to leave I wish I could think of something to make her stay. When she has gone back across the road, the night will be blacker and longer than ever. I have something to say to her—to her?—but of course it will never be said. I feel that I want to be forgiven, I want her to forgive me. But I do not know how to state my crime. My crime, in some odd way, is in being a man and she knows all about this already. It is terrible how naked she makes me feel, like a half grown boy, naked before his mother.

She puts out her hand. I take it, awkwardly.

‘Bon voyage, monsieur, I hope that you were happy while you were here and that, perhaps, one day, you will visit us again’ She is smiling and her eyes are kind but now the smile is purely social, it is the graceful termination of a business deal.

‘Thank you,’ I say. ‘Perhaps I will be back next year.’ She releases my hand and we walk to the door.

‘Oh!’ she says, at the door, ‘please do not wake me up in the morning. Put the keys in my mailbox. I do not, any more, have any reason to get up so early.’

‘Surely.’ I smile and open the door. ‘Goodnight, Madame.’

‘Bonsoir, Monsieur. Adieu!’ She steps out into the darkness. But there is a light coming from my house and from her house across the road. The town lights glimmer beneath us and I hear, briefly, the sea again.

She walks a little away from me, and turns. ‘Souvenezvous,’ she tells me. ‘One must make a little prayer from time to time.’

And I close the door.

She has made me realize that I have much to do before morning. I decide to clean the bathroom before I allow myself another drink. And I begin to do this, first scrubbing out the tub, then running water into the pail to mop the floor. The bathroom is tiny and square, with one frosted window. It reminds me of that claustrophobic room in Paris. Giovanni had had great plans for remodeling the room and there was a time, when he had actually begun to do this, when we lived with plaster all over everything and bricks piled on the floor. We took packages of bricks out of the house at night and left them in the streets.

I suppose they will come for him early in the morning, perhaps just before dawn, so that the last thing Giovanni will ever see will be that grey, lightless sky over Paris, beneath which we stumbled homeward together so many desperate and drunken mornings.