It was a terrific scandal, if you were in Paris at the time you certainly heard of it, and saw the pictures printed in all the newspapers, of Giovanni, just after he was captured. Editorials were written and speeches were made, and many bars of the genre of Guillaume's bar were closed. (But they did not stay closed long.) Plain-clothes policemen descended on the quarter, asking to see everyone's papers, and the bars were emptied of tapettes. Giovanni was nowhere to be found. All of the evidence, above all, of course, his disappearance, pointed to him as the murderer. Such a scandal always threatens, before its reverberations cease, to rock the very foundations of the state. It is necessary to find an explanation, a solution, and a victim with the utmost possible speed. Most of the men picked up in connection with this crime were not picked up on suspicion of murder. They were picked up on suspicion of having what the French, with a delicacy I take to be sardonic, call les gouts particuliers. These 'tastes,' which do not constitute a crime in France, are nevertheless regarded with extreme disapprobation by the bulk of the populace, which also looks on its rulers and 'betters' with a stony lack of affection. When Guillaume's corpse was discovered it was not only the boys of the street who were frightened; they, in fact, were a good deal less frightened than the men who roamed the streets to buy them, whose careers, positions, aspirations, could never have survived such notoriety. Fathers of families, sons of great houses, and itching adventurers from Belleville were all desperately anxious that the case be closed, so that things might, in effect, go back to normal and the dreadful whiplash of public morality not fall on their backs. Until the case was closed they could not be certain which way to jump, whether they should cry out that they were martyrs, or remain what, at heart, of course, they were, simple citizens, bitter against outrage and anxious to see justice done and the health of the state preserved.

It was fortunate, therefore, that Giovanni was a foreigner. As though by some magnificently tacit agreement, with every day that he was at large, the press became more vituperative against him and more gentle toward Guillaume. It was remembered that there perished with Guillaume one of the oldest names in France. Sunday supplements were run on the history of his family; and his old, aristocratic mother, who did not survive the trial of his murderer, testified to the sterling qualities of her son and regretted that corruption had become so vast in France that such a crime could go so long unpunished. With this sentiment the populace was, of course, more than ready to agree. It is perhaps not as incredible as it certainly seemed to me, but Guillaume's name became fantastically entangled with French history, French honor, and French glory, and very nearly became, indeed, a symbol of French manhood.

'But listen,' I said to Hella, 'he was just a disgusting old fairy. That's all he was!'

'Well, how in the world do you expect the people who read newspapers to know that? If that's what he was, I'm sure he didn't advertise it—and he must have moved in a pretty limited circle.'

'Well—somebody knows it. Some of the people who write this drivel know it.'

'There doesn't seem to be much point,' she said, quietly, 'in defaming the dead.'

'But isn't there some point in telling the truth?'

'They're telling the truth. He's a member of a very important family and he's been murdered. I know what you mean. There's another truth they're not telling. But newspapers never do, that's not what they're for.'

I sighed. 'Poor, poor, poor Giovanni.'

'Do you believe he did it?'

'I don't know. It certainly looks as though he did it. He was there that night. People saw him go upstairs before the bar closed and they don't remember seeing him come down.'

'Was he working there that night?'

'Apparently not. He was just drinking. He and Guillaume seemed to have become friendly again.'

'You certainly made some peculiar friends while I was away.'

'They wouldn't seem so damn peculiar if one of them hadn't got murdered. Anyway, none of them were my friends—except Giovanni.'

'You lived with him. Can't you tell whether he'd commit murder or not?'

'How? You live with me. Can I commit a murder?'

'You? Of course not.'

'How do you know that? You don't know that. How do you know I'm what you see?'

'Because'—she leaned over and kissed me—'I love you.'

'Ah! I loved Giovanni—'

'Not as I love you,' said Hella.

'I might have committed murder already, for all you know. How do you know?'

'Why are you so upset?'

'Wouldn't you be upset if a friend of yours was accused of murder and was hiding somewhere? What do you mean, why am I so upset? What do you want me to do, sing Christmas carols?'

'Don't shout. It's just that I never realized he meant so much to you.'

'He was a nice man,' I said, finally. 'I just hate to see him in trouble.'

She came to me and put her hand lightly on my arm. 'We'll leave this city soon, David. You won't have to think about it any more. People get into trouble, David. But don't act as though it were, somehow, your fault. It's not your fault.'

'I know it's not my fault!' But my voice, and Hella's eyes, astounded me into silence. I felt, with terror, that I was about to cry.

Giovanni stayed at large nearly a week. As I watched, from Hella's window, each night creeping over Paris, I thought of Giovanni somewhere outside, perhaps under one of those bridges, frightened and cold and not knowing where to go. I wondered if he had, perhaps, found friends to hide him—it was astonishing that in so small and policed a city he should prove so hard to find. I feared, sometimes, that he might come to find me—to beg me to help him, or to kill me. Then I thought that he probably considered it beneath him to ask me for help; he, no doubt, felt by now that I was not worth killing. I looked to Hella for help. I tried to bury each night, in her, all my guilt and terror. The need to act was like a fever in me, the only act possible was the act of love.

He was finally caught, very early one morning, in a barge tied up along the river. Newspaper speculation had already placed him in Argentina, so it was a great shock to discover that he had got no farther than the Seine. This lack, on his part, of 'dash' did nothing to endear him to the public. He was a criminal, Giovanni, of the dullest kind, a bungler; robbery, for example, had been insisted on as the motive for Guillaume's murder; but, though Giovanni had taken all the money Guillaume had in his pockets, he had not touched the cash-register and had not even suspected, apparently, that Guillaume had over one thousand francs hidden in another wallet at the bottom of his closet. The money he had taken from Guillaume was still in his pockets when he was caught; he had not been able to spend it. He had not eaten for two or three days and was weak and pale and unattractive. His face was on newsstands all over Paris. He looked young, bewildered, terrified, depraved; as though he could not believe that he, Giovanni, had come to this; had come to this and would go no further, his short road ending in a common knife. He seemed already to be rearing back, every inch of his flesh revolting before that icy vision. And it seemed, as it had seemed so many times, that he looked to me for help. The newsprint told the unforgiving world how Giovanni repented, cried for mercy, called on God, wept that he had not meant to do it. And told us, too, in delicious detail, how he had done it: but not why. Why was too black for the newsprint to carry and too deep for Giovanni to tell.

I may have been the only man in Paris who knew that he had not meant to do it, who could read why he had done it beneath the details printed in the newspapers. I remembered again the evening I had found him at home and he told me how Guillaume had fired him. I heard his voice again and saw the vehemence of his body and saw his tears. I knew his bravado, how he liked to feel himself debrouillard, more than equal to any challenge, and saw him swagger into Guillaume's bar. He must have felt that, having surrendered to Jacques, his apprenticeship was over, love was over, and he could do with Guillaume anything he liked. He could, indeed, have done with Guillaume anything at all—but he could not do anything about being Giovanni. Guillaume certainly knew. Jacques would have lost no time in telling him, that Giovanni was no longer with le jeune Americain; perhaps Guillaume had even attended one or two of Jacques' parties, armed with his own entourage; and he certainly knew, all his circle knew, that Giovanni's new freedom, his loverless state, would turn into license, into riot—it had happened to every one of them. It must have been a great evening for the bar when Giovanni swaggered in alone.

I could hear the conversation:

'Alors, tu es revenu?' This from Guillaume, with a seductive, sardonic, speaking look.

Giovanni sees that he does not wish to be reminded of his last, disastrous tantrum, that he wishes to be friendly. At the same moment Guillaume's face, voice, manner, smell, hit him; he is actually facing Guillaume, not conjuring him up in his mind; the smile with which he responds to Guillaume almost causes him to vomit. But Guillaume does not see this, of course, and offers Giovanni a drink.

'I thought you might need a bar-man,' Giovanni says.

'But are you looking for work? I thought your American would have bought you an oil-well in Texas by now.'

'No. My American'—he makes a gesture—'has flown!' They both laugh.

'The Americans always fly. They are not serious,' says Guillaume.

'C'est vrai,' says Giovanni. He finishes his drink, looking away from Guillaume, looking dreadfully self-conscious, perhaps almost unconsciously, whistling. Guillaume, now, can hardly keep his eyes off him, or control his hands.

'Come back, later, at closing, and we will talk about this job,' he says at last.

And Giovanni nods and leaves. I can imagine him, then, finding some of his street-cronies, drinking with them, and laughing, stiffening up his courage as the hours tick by. He is dying for someone to tell him not to go back to Guillaume, not to let Guillaume touch him. But his friends tell him how rich Guillaume is, how he is a silly old queen, how much he can get out of Guillaume if he will only be smart.

No one appears on the boulevards to speak to him, to save him. He feels that he is dying.

Then the hour comes when he must go back to Guillaume's bar. He walks there alone. He stands outside awhile. He wants to turn away, to run away. But there is no place to run. He looks up the long, dark, curving street as though he were looking for someone. But there is no one there. He goes into the bar. Guillaume sees him at once and discreetly motions him upstairs. He climbs the stairs. His legs are weak. He finds himself in Guillaume's rooms, surrounded by Guillaume's silks, colors, perfumes, staring at Guillaume's bed.

Then Guillaume enters and Giovanni tries to smile. They have a drink. Guillaume is precipitate, flabby, and moist, and with each touch of his hand, Giovanni shrinks further and more furiously away. Guillaume disappears to change his clothes and comes back in his theatrical dressing gown. He wants Giovanni to undress....

Perhaps at this moment Giovanni realizes that he cannot go through with it, that his will cannot carry him through. He remembers the job. He tries to talk, to be practical, to be reasonable, but of course, it is too late, Guillaume seems to surround him like the sea itself. And I think that Giovanni, tortured into a state like madness, feels himself going under, is overcome, and Guillaume has his will. I think if this had not happened, Giovanni would not have killed him.

For, with his pleasure taken, and while Giovanni still lies suffocating, Guillaume becomes a business man once more and, walking up and down, gives excellent reasons why Giovanni cannot work for him any more. Beneath whatever reasons Guillaume invents the real one lies hidden and they both, dimly, in their different fashions, see it: Giovanni, like a falling movie star, has lost his drawing power. Everything is known about him, his secrecy has been discovered. Giovanni certainly feels this and the rage which has been building in him for many months begins to be swollen now with the memory of Guillaume's hands and mouth. He stares at Guillaume in silence for a moment and then begins to shout. And Guillaume answers him. With every word exchanged Giovanni's head begins to roar and a blackness comes and goes before his eyes. And Guillaume is in seventh heaven and begins to prance about the room—he has scarcely ever gotten so much for so little before. He plays this scene for all its worth, deeply rejoicing in the fact that Giovanni's face grows scarlet, and his voice thick, watching, with pure delight, the bone-hard muscles in his neck. And he says something, for he thinks the tables have been turned; he says something, one phrase, one insult, one mockery too many; and in a split-second, in his own shocked silence, in Giovanni's eyes, he realizes that he has unleashed something he cannot turn back.

Giovanni certainly did not mean to do it. But he grabbed him, he struck him. And with that touch, and with each blow, the intolerable weight at the bottom of his heart began to lift: now it was Giovanni's turn to be delighted. The room was overturned, the fabrics were shredded, the odor of perfume was thick. Guillaume struggled to get out of the room, but Giovanni followed him everywhere: now it was Guillaume's turn to be surrounded. And perhaps at the very moment Guillaume thought he had broken free, when he had reached the door perhaps, Giovanni lunged after him and caught him by the sash of the dressing gown and wrapped the sash around his neck. Then he simply held on, sobbing, becoming lighter every moment as Guillaume grew heavier, tightening the sash and cursing. Then Guillaume fell. And Giovanni fell—back into the room, the streets, the world, in the presence and the shadow of death.

By the time we found this great house it was clear that I had no right to come here. By the time we found it, I did not even want to see it. But by this time, also, there was nothing else to do. There was nothing else I wanted to do. I thought, it is true, of remaining in Paris in order to be close to the trial, perhaps to visit him in prison. But I knew there was no reason to do this. Jacques, who was in constant touch with Giovanni's lawyer, and in constant touch with me, had seen Giovanni once. He told me what I knew already, that there was nothing I, or anyone, could do for Giovanni any more.

Perhaps he wanted to die. He pleaded guilty, with robbery as the motive. The circumstances under which Guillaume had fired him received great play in the press. And, from the press, one received the impression that Guillaume had been a good-hearted, a perhaps somewhat erratic philanthropist who had had the bad judgment to befriend the hardened and ungrateful adventurer, Giovanni. Then the case drifted downward from the headlines. Giovanni was taken to prison to await trial.

And Hella and I came here. I may have thought—I am sure I thought, in the beginning—that, though I could do nothing for Giovanni, I might, perhaps, be able to do something for Hella. I must have hoped that there would be something Hella could do for me. And this might have been possible if the days had not dragged by, for me, like days in prison. I could not get Giovanni out of my mind, I was at the mercy of the bulletins which sporadically arrived from Jacques. All that I remember of the autumn is waiting for Giovanni to come to trial. Then, at last, he came to trial, was found guilty, and placed under sentence of death. All winter long I counted the days. And the nightmare of this house began.

Much has been written of love turning to hatred, of the heart growing cold with the death of love. It is a remarkable process. It is far more terrible than anything I have ever read about it, more terrible than anything I will ever be able to say.

I don't know, now, when I first looked at Hella and found her stale, found her body uninteresting, her presence grating. It seemed to happen all at once—I suppose that only means that it had been happening for a long time. I trace it to something as fleeting as the tip of her breast lightly touching my forearm as she leaned over me to serve my supper. I felt my flesh recoil. Her underclothes, drying in the bathroom, which I had often thought of as smelling even rather improbably sweet and as being washed much too often, now began to seem unaesthetic and unclean. A body which had to be covered with such crazy, catty-cornered bits of stuff began to seem grotesque. I sometimes watched her naked body move and wished that it were harder and firmer, I was fantastically intimidated by her breasts, and when I entered her I began to feel that I would never get out alive. All that had once delighted me seemed to have turned sour on my stomach.

I think—I think that I have never been more frightened in my life. When my fingers began, involuntarily, to loose their hold on Hella, I realized that I was dangling from a high place and that I had been clinging to her for my very life. With each moment, as my fingers slipped, I felt the roaring air beneath me and felt everything in me bitterly contracting, crawling furiously upward against that long fall.

I thought that it was only, perhaps, that we were alone too much and so, for a while, we were always going out. We made expeditions to Nice and Monte Carlo and Cannes and Antibes. But we were not rich and the south of France, in the wintertime, is a playground for the rich. Hella and I went to a lot of movies, and found ourselves, very often, sitting in empty, fifth-rate bars. We walked a lot, in silence. We no longer seemed to see things to point out to each other. We drank too much, especially me. Hella, who had been so brown and confident and glowing on her return from Spain, began to lose all this, she began to be pale and watchful and uncertain. She ceased to ask me what the matter was, for it was borne in on her that I either did not know, or would not say. She watched me. I felt her watching and it made me wary and it made me hate her. My guilt, when I looked into her closing face, was more than I could bear.

We were at the mercy of bus schedules and often found ourselves, in the wintry dawn, huddled sleepily together in a waiting room or freezing on the street-corner of some totally deserted town. We arrived home in the grey morning, crippled with weariness, and went straight to bed.

I was able, for some reason, to make love in the mornings. It may have been due to nervous exhaustion; or wandering about at night engendered in me a curious, irrepressible excitement. But it was not the same, something was gone; the astonishment, the power, and the joy were gone, the peace was gone.

I had nightmares and sometimes my own cries woke me up and sometimes my moaning made Hella shake me awake.

'I wish,' she said, one day, 'you'd tell me what it is. Tell me what it is, let me help you.'

I shook my head in bewilderment and sorrow and sighed.

We were sitting in the big room, where I am standing now. She was sitting in the easy chair, under the lamp, with a book open on her lap.

'You're sweet,' I said. Then: 'It's nothing. It'll go away. It's probably just nerves.'

'It's Giovanni,' she said.

I watched her.

'Isn't it,' she asked, carefully, 'that you think you've done something awful to him by leaving him in that room? I think you blame yourself for what happened to him. But, darling, nothing you could have done would have helped him. Stop torturing yourself.'

'He was so beautiful,' I said. I had not meant to say it. I felt myself beginning to shake. She watched me while I walked to the table—there was a bottle there then, as now—and poured myself a drink.

I could not stop talking, though I feared at every instant that I would say too much. Perhaps I wanted to say too much.

'I can't help feeling that I placed him in the shadow of the knife. He wanted me to stay in that room with him, he begged me to stay. I didn't tell you—we had an awful fight the night I went there, to get my things.' I paused. I sipped my drink. 'He cried.'

'He was in love with you,' said Hella. 'Why didn't you tell me that? Or didn't you know it?'

I turned away, feeling my face flame.

'It's not your fault,' she said. 'Don't you understand that? You couldn't keep him from falling in love with you. You couldn't have kept him from—from killing that awful man.'

'You don't know anything about it,' I muttered. 'You don't know anything about it.'

'I know how you feel—'

'You don't know how I feel.'

'David. Don't shut me out. Please don't shut me out. Let me help you.'

'Hella. Baby. I know you want to help me. But just let me be for awhile. I'll be all right.'

'You've been saying that now,' she said wearily, 'for a long time.' She looked at me steadily for awhile and then she said, 'David. Don't you think we ought to go home?'

'Go home? What for?'

'What are we staying here for? How long do you want to sit in this house, eating your heart out? And what do you think it's doing to me?' She rose and came to me. 'Please. I want to go home. I want to get married. I want to start having kids. I want us to live someplace, I want you. Please David. What are we marking time over here for?'

I moved away from her, quickly. At my back she stood perfectly still.

'What's the matter, David? What do you want?'

'I don't know. I don't know.'

'What is it you're not telling me? Why don't you tell me the truth? Tell me the truth!'

I turned and faced her. 'Hella—bear with me, bear with me—a little while.'

'I want to,' she cried, 'but where are you? You've gone away somewhere and I can't find you. If you'd only let me reach you—!'

She began to cry. I held her in my arms. I felt nothing at all.

I kissed her salty tears and murmured, murmured I don't know what. I felt her body straining, straining to meet mine and I felt my own contracting and drawing away and I knew that I had begun the long fall down. I stepped away from her. She swayed, where I had left her, like a puppet dangling from a string.

'David, please let me be a woman. I don't care what you do to me. I don't care what it costs. I'll wear my hair long, I'll give up cigarettes, I'll throw away the books.' She tried to smile; my heart turned over. 'Just let me be a woman, take me. It's what I want. It's all I want. I don't care about anything else.' She moved toward me. I stood perfectly still. She touched me, raising her face, with a desperate and terribly moving trust, to mine. 'Don't throw me back into the sea, David. Let me stay here with you.' Then she kissed me, watching my face. My lips were cold. I felt nothing on my lips. She kissed me again and I closed my eyes, feeling that strong chains were dragging me to fire. It seemed that my body, next to her warmth, her insistence, under her hands, would never awaken. But when it awakened, I had moved out of it. From a great height, where the air all around me was colder than ice, I watched my body in a stranger's arms.

It was that evening, or an evening very soon thereafter, that I left her sleeping in the bedroom and went, alone, to Nice.

I roamed all the bars of that glittering town and at the end of the first night, blind with alcohol and grim with lust, I climbed the stairs of a dark hotel in company with a sailor. It turned out, late the next day, that the sailor's leave was not yet ended and that the sailor had friends. We went to visit them. We stayed the night. We spent the next day together, and the next. On the final night of the sailor's leave, we stood drinking together in a crowded bar. We faced the mirror. I was very drunk. I was almost penniless. In the mirror, suddenly, I saw Hella's face. I thought for a moment that I had gone mad, and I turned. She looked very tired and drab and small.

For a long time we said nothing to each other. I felt the sailor staring at both of us.

'Hasn't she got the wrong bar?' he asked me, finally.

Hella looked at him. She smiled.

'It's not the only thing I got wrong,' she said.

Now the sailor stared at me.

'Well,' I said to Hella, 'now you know.'

'I think I've known it for a long time,' she said. She turned and started away from me. I moved to follow her. The sailor grabbed me.

'Are you—is she—?'

I nodded. His face, open-mouthed, was comical. He let me go and I passed him and, as I reached the doors, I heard his laughter.

We walked for a long time in the stone-cold streets, in silence. There seemed to be no one on the streets at all. It seemed inconceivable that the day would ever break.

'Well,' said Hella, 'I'm going home. I wish I'd never left it.'

'If I stay here much longer,' she said, later that same morning, as she packed her bag, 'I'll forget what it's like to be a woman.'

She was extremely cold, she was very bitterly handsome.

'I'm not sure any woman can forget that,' I said.

'There are women who have forgotten that to be a woman doesn't simply mean humiliation, doesn't simply mean bitterness. I haven't forgotten it yet,' she added, 'in spite of you. I'm not going to forget it. I'm getting out of this house, away from you, just as fast as taxis, trains, and boats will carry me.'

And in the room which had been our bedroom in the beginning of our life in this house, she moved with the desperate haste of someone about to flee—from the open suitcase on the bed, to the chest of drawers, to the closet. I stood in the doorway, watching her. I stood there the way a small boy who has wet his pants stands before his teacher. All the words I wanted to say closed my throat, like weeds, and stopped my mouth.

'I wish, any way,' I said at last, 'that you'd believe me when I say that, if I was lying, I wasn't lying to you.'

She turned toward me with a terrible face. 'I was the one you were talking to. I was the one you wanted to come with you, to this terrible house in the middle of nowhere. I was the one you said you wanted to marry.'

'I mean,' I said, 'I was lying to myself.'

'Oh,' said Hella, 'I see. That makes everything different, of course.'

'I only mean to say,' I shouted, 'that whatever I've done to hurt you, I didn't mean to do!'

'Don't shout,' said Hella. 'I'll soon be gone. Then you can shout it to those hills out there, shout it to the peasants, how guilty you are, how you love to be guilty!'

She started moving back and forth again, more slowly, from the suitcase to the chest of drawers. Her hair was damp and fell over her forehead, and her face was damp. I longed to reach out and take her in my arms and comfort her. But that would not be comfort any more, only torture, for both of us.

She did not look at me as she moved, but kept looking at the clothes she was packing, as though she were not sure they were hers.

'But I knew,' she said, 'I knew. This is what makes me so ashamed. I knew it every time you looked at me. I knew it every time we went to bed. If only you had told me the truth then. Don't you see how unjust it was to wait for me to find it out? To put all the burden on me? I had the right to expect to hear from you—women are always waiting for the man to speak. Or hadn't you heard?'

I said nothing.

'I wouldn't have had to spend all this time in this house. I wouldn't be wondering how in the name of God I'm going to stand that long trip back. I'd be home by now, dancing with some man who wanted to make me. And I'd let him make me, too, why not?' And she smiled bewilderedly at a crowd of nylon stockings in her hand and carefully crushed them in the suitcase.

'Perhaps I didn't know it then. I only knew I had to get out of Giovanni's room.'

'Well,' she said, 'you're out. And now I'm getting out. It's only poor Giovanni who's—lost his head.'

It was an ugly joke and made with the intention of wounding me; yet she couldn't quite manage the sardonic smile she tried to wear.

'I'll never understand it,' she said at last, and she raised her eyes to mine as though I could help her to understand. 'That sordid little gangster has wrecked your life. I think he's wrecked mine, too. Americans should never come to Europe,' she said, and tried to laugh and began to cry, 'it means they never can be happy again. What's the good of an American who isn't happy? Happiness was all we had.' And she fell forward into my arms, into my arms for the last time, sobbing.

'Don't believe it,' I muttered, 'don't believe it. We've got much more than that, we've always had much more than that. Only—only—it's sometimes hard to bear.'

'Oh, God, I wanted you,' she said. 'Every man I come across will make me think of you.' She tried to laugh again. 'Poor man! Poor men! Poor me!'

'Hella. Hella. One day, when you're happy, try to forgive me.'

She moved away. 'Ah. I don't know anything about happiness any more. I don't know anything about forgiveness. But if women are supposed to be led by men and there aren't any men to lead them, what happens then? What happens then?' She went to the closet and got her coat; dug in her handbag and found her compact and, looking into the tiny mirror, carefully dried her eyes and began to apply her lipstick. 'There's a difference between little boys and little girls, just like they say in those little blue books. Little girls want little boys. But little boys—!' She snapped her compact shut. 'I'll never again, as long as I live, know what they want. And now I know they'll never tell me. I don't think they know how.' She ran her fingers through her hair, brushing it back from her forehead, and now, with the lipstick, and in the heavy, black coat, she looked, again, cold, brilliant, and bitterly helpless, a terrifying woman. 'Mix me a drink,' she said, 'we can drink to old times' sake before the taxi comes. No, I don't want you to come to the station with me. I wish I could drink all the way to Paris and all the way across that criminal ocean.'

We drank in silence, waiting to hear the sound of tires on gravel. Then we heard it, saw the lights, and the driver began honking his horn. Hella put down her drink and wrapped her coat around her and started for the door. I picked up her bags and followed. The driver and I arranged the baggage in the car; all the time I was trying to think of some last thing to say to Hella, something to help wipe away the bitterness. But I could not think of anything. She said nothing to me. She stood very erect beneath the dark, winter sky, looking far out. And when all was ready, I turned to her.

'Are you sure you wouldn't like me to come with you as far as the station, Hella?'

She looked at me, and held out her hand.

'Good-bye, David.'

I took her hand. It was cold and dry, like her lips.

'Good-bye, Hella.'

She got into the taxi. I watched it back down the drive, onto the road. I waved one last time, but Hella did not wave back.

* * *

Outside my window the horizon begins to lighten, turning the grey sky a purplish blue.

I have packed my bags and I have cleaned the house. The keys to the house are on the table before me. I have only to change my clothes. When the horizon has become a little lighter the bus which will take me to town, to the station, to the train which will take me to Paris, will appear at the bend of the highway. Still, I cannot move.

On the table, also, is a small, blue envelope, the note from Jacques informing me of the date of Giovanni's execution.

I pour myself a very little drink, watching, in the window pane, my reflection, which steadily becomes more faint. I seem to be fading away before my eyes—this fancy amuses me, and I laugh to myself.

It should be now that gates are opening before Giovanni and clanging shut behind him, never, for him, to be opened or shut any more. Or perhaps it is already over. Perhaps it is only beginning. Perhaps he still sits in his cell, watching, with me, the arrival of the morning. Perhaps now there are whispers at the end of the corridor, three heavy men in black taking off their shoes, one of them holding the ring of keys, all of the prison silent, waiting, charged with dread. Three tiers down, the activity on the stone floor has become silent, is suspended, someone lights a cigarette. Will he die alone? I do not know if death, in this country, is a solitary or a mass-produced affair. And what will he say to the priest?

Take off your clothes, something tells me, it's getting late.

I walk into the bedroom where the clothes I will wear are lying on the bed and my bag lies open and ready. I begin to undress. There is a mirror in this room, a large mirror. I am terribly aware of the mirror.

Giovanni's face swings before me like an unexpected lantern on a dark, dark night. His eyes—his eyes, they glow like a tiger's eyes, they stare straight out, watching the approach of his last enemy, the hair of his flesh stands up. I cannot read what is in his eyes: if it is terror, then I have never seen terror, if it is anguish, then anguish has never laid hands on me. Now they approach, now the key turns in the lock, now they have him. He cries out, once. They look at him from far away. They pull him to the door of his cell, the corridor stretches before him like the graveyard of his past, the prison spins around him. Perhaps he begins to moan, perhaps he makes no sound. The journey begins. Or, perhaps, when he cries out, he does not stop crying, perhaps his voice is crying now, in all that stone and iron. I see his legs buckle, his thighs jelly, the buttocks quiver, the secret hammer there begins to knock. He is sweating, or he is dry. They drag him, or he walks. Their grip is terrible, his arms are not his own any more.

Down that long corridor, down those metal stairs, into the heart of the prison and out of it, into the office of the priest. He kneels. A candle burns, the Virgin watches him.

Mary, blessed mother of God.

My own hands are clammy, my body is dull and white and dry. I see it in the mirror, out of the corner of my eye.

Mary, blessed mother of God.

He kisses the cross and clings to it. The priest gently lifts the cross away. Then they lift Giovanni. The journey begins. They move off, toward another door. He moans. He wants to spit, but his mouth is dry. He cannot ask that they let him pause for a moment to urinate—all that, in a moment, will take care of itself. He knows that beyond the door which comes so deliberately closer, the knife is waiting. That door is the gateway he has sought so long out of this dirty world, this dirty body.

It's getting late.

The body in the mirror forces me to turn and face it. And I look at my body, which is under sentence of death. It is lean, hard, and cold, the incarnation of a mystery. And I do not know what moves in this body, what this body is searching. It is trapped in my mirror as it is trapped in time and it hurries toward revelation.

When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

I long to make this prophecy come true. I long to crack that mirror and be free. I look at my sex, my troubling sex, and wonder how it can be redeemed, how I can save it from the knife. The journey to the grave is already begun, the journey to corruption is, always, already, half over. Yet, the key to my salvation, which cannot save my body, is hidden in my flesh.

Then the door is before him. There is darkness all around him, there is silence in him. Then the door opens and he stands alone, the whole world falling away from him. And the brief corner of the sky seems to be shrieking, though he does not hear a sound. Then the earth tilts, he is thrown forward on his face in darkness, and his journey begins.

I move at last from the mirror and begin to cover that nakedness which I must hold sacred, though it be never so vile, which must be scoured perpetually with the salt of my life. I must believe, I must believe, that the heavy grace of God, which has brought me to this place, is all that can carry me out of it.

And at last I step out into the morning and I lock the door behind me. I cross the road and drop the keys into the old lady's mailbox. And I look up the road, where a few people stand, men and women, waiting for the morning bus. They are very vivid beneath the awakening sky, and the horizon beyond them is beginning to flame. The morning weighs on my shoulders with the dreadful weight of hope and I take the blue envelope which Jacques has sent me and tear it slowly into many pieces, watching them dance in the wind, watching the wind carry them away. Yet as I turn and begin walking toward the waiting people, the wind blows some of them back on me.

THE END