Paul Theroux - Mr. Bones - Twenty Stories

“Please sit down,” Benny said. He was stern, giving me an order. The “please” was hostile.

Seated across from them, I saw that Laurie had been crying, her face fixed and ugly with misery. For a moment I felt sorry for her, and then she gave me such a hateful look — dark glistening eyes, smeared cheeks, twisted mouth — that I knew they had something against me.

Benny’s chin was lifted in indignation, and it all seemed stagy and portentous to me, intended to impress me with its seriousness. He reached below the table to his lap, found what he was looking for — a notebook, which he slapped on the table and poked across to me. I saw at once that it was my own notebook, dirty at the edges, ink-smeared, and with a familiar white label pasted to the cover.

“So this is what you think of us,” Benny said. “After all we’ve done for you.”

I put my hand over the notebook to prevent them from snatching it back.

“I’m bald and toothy, am I?” he said, and never looked balder or toothier. “Neck flesh like a scrotum. Hairy ears. Chipmunk overbite. Goose-eyed.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” My voice was high and unconvincing.

“I habitually stand with my prehensile feet pointing at ten minutes to two.”

I made the mistake of smiling at that.

“And I’m beaky and old,” Laurie said. “Beaky and old! Who do you think you are to write that about me? I’m thirty-seven. You think that’s old?” But protesting she began to cry again with a scowling face, and she looked feeble as she clawed at her reddened eyes.

I said, “You have no right to read my diary. That’s an invasion of privacy.”

“You invaded our house,” Benny said. He remembered something else. “The Punch and Judy show.”

Laurie looked up from her hands. “Oh, and Jaunty’s a homunculus, is he?”

Jaunty was their two-year-old son, a whiny stumbling child with an enormous head. “Homunculus” was a favorite word of mine at the time.

“You’ve abused our hospitality,” Benny said.

“You read my private diary,” I said. “I call that abusive.”

“Laurie found it on the floor.” He looked anguished, as protesting liars often do. “When she picked it up she saw a few pages.”

“Bull.”

“He’s calling us liars,” Laurie said. She cocked her head. “Ever think you might be crazy?”

“You’re what we call a passenger,” Benny said. “We want you out of here. You’re just ridiculing us.”

What surprised me was the coziness of the “we” and the “us.” They were a couple who constantly quarreled — as I also described in detail in the “Punch and Judy” section of the notebook — who hated each other’s company, who seemed to welcome me for the novelty of their having the diversion of someone else to talk to. And now here they were, side by side, facing me, united in their hatred of me, their common enemy. It seemed theatrical and false when Benny clumsily put his arm around Laurie, who was still tearfully hiccupping, and she looked burdened by the arm.

By then it was too late for me to go anywhere but to my room, where I packed the little I owned in my bag and lay fully clothed on my bed, sleepless and hot. At first light, before the Shainheits were awake, I crept out of the house and walked quickly up the Via Nolfi to the center of the town. I knew a cheap hotel there, the Albergo Due Mori, two black marble cherubs on its Moorish gatepost wearing turbans. I stayed for a week, writing about the confrontation with Benny and Laurie, and avoiding the public beach, where I might see them again.

This seemed yet another obstacle to my becoming a writer. It was bad enough to be mocked (“staring at a blank sheet of paper!”); it was worse for my privacy to be violated, indeed to have no privacy. But at the Albergo Due Mori I had something to write, and I was undisturbed. An Englishman staying at the hotel told me that Robert Browning had come here and was inspired to write a poem after seeing a certain painting in a church: The Guardian Angel by Guercino. I found the church and the painting, and I wrote a poem too, wishing for a guardian angel.

Early one morning, seeing Benny Shainheit’s Volkswagen parked near the Albergo Due Mori, I checked out and walked to the coast road with my bag and put my thumb out— autostop, as hitchhiking was called, the random pickup. The first car that stopped held three Germans, two young men and a pretty woman, Johanna, going to Venice. I went with them; it was a day’s drive. We walked around late-afternoon Venice, we flirted with American girls, and then we pooled our money and drank beer and bought fruit to eat, washing it in a public sink. When night fell we drove to a hayfield outside the city, where we slept, the men on a blanket in our clothes, Johanna curled up in the back seat of the car.

Come with us on the road north, they said in the morning, being friendly. “Find us some American girls and you can have Johanna.” One of the men muttered to Johanna, who came over to me and shook her hair back with a movement of her head and kissed me on the mouth.

They all laughed, seeing how startled I was, and then I laughed too, but I said no. They dropped me on the main road south, where I stuck out my thumb— autostop. I got a ride from some men who said, “ Siamo comunisti, ” and when I asked them where they were from, one laughed and said, “Kansa Seety.” They were from Bologna, and they left me a few miles south of it. Not long after, a red Alfa Romeo drew up and the man inside leaned over and said, “ Tedesco? ”

“No. American,” I said, and patted my chest pocket, drew out my passport, and showed him.

He was in his late thirties, perhaps forty, a handsome man in sunglasses, who sat at an angle, driving with one hand and chatting to me. His English was good, but when I asked him what he did for a living, he laughed and said, “I am lazy.” I took this complacency to mean he had money.

“You Americans are so free,” he said. “Your passport in your pocket and autostop. That is all you need. You are lucky.”

It was a beautiful day, a hot afternoon in July, as we sped toward the coast — and I did feel lucky, in this fast car with this smiling man who was taking me south. When he asked me where I was going, I said Fano, because it was there that I could get my bearings. We passed Rimini and Cattolica, which I’d seen from the northbound car with the Germans.

“You’re a student?” he asked.

“A writer,” I said. I disclosed my secret with hope, with anxiety, holding my breath. And I told myself that I could call myself a writer even if I was not published.

“ Bravo, ” he said.

That gave me hope, someone who didn’t mock me, who believed me. We talked about Italian writers. I mentioned Moravia and Pavese and Primo Levi. He said that he knew Levi — he was from Florence. I asked him his name, and he told me, “Ubaldini,” and I said, “As in Dante.”

“Another Ubaldini. But maybe the same family. Who knows?”

We talked about Dante, we talked about the summer’s films, Otto e Mezzo and Che Fine ha Fatto Baby Jane? He said that he dabbled in the film business. He did some writing—“but not serious, like you.” He said he could introduce me to some publishers, and I thought: Yes, I could stay in Italy, keep writing, have an Italian publisher, raise an Italian family, perhaps near the coast here, in a villa, watch the sun rise over the Adriatic, live in the local way, in the slow, lazy, stop-go life of Italy.

We were then near Pesaro. Without a word, instead of continuing to Fano he jerked the car inland on a rising road. He must have seen a question on my face.