Stanley Elkin - Boswell

“Are you sure you can handle this?” Mussolini’s kid asked me.

“Well,” I said, “if you’d just show me how.”

“It’s very simple,” he said. “You just make a trapezium.”

“Oh,” I said. “In the States you only have to make an H.”

“America is so innocent,” he said.

He drew a trapezium for me and I drove, off toward the Appia Antica, bouncing over the old Roman stones black and shiny as lumps of giant coal. On either side along the narrow road were ancient tumuli, crypts, broken statues, their noses flat as boxers’, the wrecked monuments of Romans dead two thousand years. Spaced every thirty or forty feet were Italians incongruously having picnics, their Fiat 500’s and 600’s pulled up on the grass, their picnic hampers balanced carefully on the tomb-tables. Except for the cars and their clothes they ’ might have been people who had assured themselves of a good view of a triumphal procession by taking up their positions before the others got there. They waited good- naturedly and passed their time by posing each other for photographs beside the ancient monuments. Inside hollowed-out tumuli or in niches from which statues had been removed I could see young lovers hugging and kissing each other. As I drove along several people noticed my super car and waved; I waved back. Some of the younger ones amiably made obscene gestures; I amiably made obscene gestures back.

I came to the Principessa’s villa. It was surrounded by a high stone wall. I stopped the car just outside the gates and honked the horn of the Rameses X-900. It sounded the opening notes of the “Triumphal March” from Aïda. No one came to the gate, and I got out of the car. I was feeling pretty good. Further down the road I saw an old woman in a black cloth coat who stood weeping beside an ancient crypt. I laughed and climbed back into the car.

An old man in a peaked cap came up to the gate on the other side, stared at the car and then said something in Italian.

“Permesso,” I yelled, trying a word I had heard people use when they wanted to get by me on the crowded bus.

He shook his head.

“Scende,” I said, using another word I had heard on the bus. He shook his head sadly.

I pounded the horn. “Ta ta ta ta-ta-ta-ta ta-ta,” I sang. He turned away. “Hey, wait,” I called after him. “Get the Princess. The Principessa.” He looked at me curiously for a moment and waved me away with his arm. “Io” —I pointed to myself— “volere la Principessa.” I speak only in infinitives. It gives my Italian an air of command and a certain good-natured sinister quality, like a Mexican bandit in the movies. The old man answered in Italian. My difficulty with a foreign language is that given time I can usually frame what I want to say, but I can never understand the replies. Perhaps if everyone always spoke only in infinitives, as I do, there would be universal peace and understanding. It would be the dawn of a new era. If everybody to speak as I to do, to be peace, to be dawn of new era. Lions to lie down with lambs.

The fellow started away again, and I got out of the car and rushed up to the gate. “To want to get to see Principessa,” I called.

“—,” he said in Italian.

“To need to talk to marry,” I said.

“—,” he said.

I got back in the car and blew a few more bars of Aïda, but my heart had gone out of it. I was studying Mussolini’s kid’s diagram of the trapezium in order to figure out where reverse was when the old fellow reappeared. He had someone with him, another old man, in a chauffeur’s uniform.

I leaned out the window. “To open the gate,” I said.

“You to speak English?” the new old man asked.

“To do,” I said excitedly.

He looked at me curiously.

“I mean I do,” I said.

“What you to wish?” he asked.

“I want to see your mistress,” I said.

He blushed. My God, I thought, him too? This was some Principessa!

“I want to see the Principessa. I’m a friend of hers.”

“To say your name if you please,” he said.

“Boswell. James Boswell, King of Pennsylvania, Prince of Indiana, Duke of the Republican Party.”

“I to announce you,” he said quietly, and added, “Mister Boswell.”

“To hurry,” I said.

He went into a little sentry booth I hadn’t noticed before and evidently called the house. In a moment he had reappeared.

“Not to home,” he said.

“Of course she’s home,” I protested. “You’re her chauffeur and you’re home.”

“Please to clear drive,” he said.

“No. I want to see her.”

“To do,” he shouted. There was a gun in his hand.

I got back in the car and drove away.

That night I returned to storm the wall. Mussolini’s kid wanted the Rameses X-900 back, so I had to catch a ride on the rear of a motor-scooter. Going over those stones on the scooter wasn’t as gentle as in the Rameses X-900, which had been rather like being drawn down the Nile in a basket, but I have not entirely lost the common touch. After the fellow let me off in front of the villa he wanted to hang around to see what I was going to do. He pointed to the wall. “Principessa Medici,” he said, and clicked his tongue.

“To appreciate it,” I said, “to beat it, please.” He bounced on his scooter a few times to start it and zoomed off.

I reconnoitered. Finally I chose a spot near the house and began to scale the wall. When 1 got on top, pressing myself tightly against the narrow surface so as not to be seen, I was seen. Three men were waiting for me. “James Boswell, requesting permission to come aboard,” I said. They jumped toward the wall. Before I could let myself back down the other side two of the men had reached up, grabbed me by the ankles and pulled me toward them. The Palace Guard, I thought as I tumbled through the air. I was going to tear them apart as soon as I had recovered myself, but the new old man from that afternoon was standing over me with his gun.

“To rise,” he said in English.

“To stop to point that at me,” I said in Italian.

“To rise,” he said in English.

“To don’t rush me,” I said in Italian. Experience teaches me one thing anyway, I thought. Infinitives will not bring peace to the world.

They took me to the Principessa. When she saw who it was she told them they could go, but asked the new old man to wait outside in case she needed him. She took his gun and held it in her lap.

“My God, Principessa,” I said. “We’ve slept with each other.”

“Don’t be vulgar,” she said, “and don’t presume on old favors. You’ll never receive them again.”

“Doesn’t it mean anything to you?”

“Does it to you?”

Of course it does. Indeed, I have become embarrassed in the presence of divorced persons just imagining their memories of each other. I have always been unable to understand some people’s casual acceptance of intimacy. It amounts, in effect, to an indifference, and yet I have noticed that those people who are the most casual about sexual experience are frequently the most avid in seeking it. Once a man has made love to a woman he is marked for life — they both are. Of course I have not been very successful sexually, and perhaps this is because of my attitude, but I carry what experiences I have had— mostly, sadly, with whores — indelibly. I will see a whore I have been with only once, and it is anguish that she does not remember me.

Once at a party I was in a room with two women with whom I’d had what they would have considered minor affairs. Of course neither knew that I had slept with the other — nor would they have cared much had they known. They might have regarded me with the same interest they would have taken in some mutual hairdresser. Nevertheless I remember being paralyzed with fear, as convention-stricken as a kid. I would always love both of them, I told myself, and our relationships began to seem tragic as I recaptured them. That nothing final had come of them was somehow my responsibility. We should have had children together, sat in hospital corridors during one another’s illnesses, snared cemetery lots. That this was impossible never even occurred to me; I understood only that it was tragic that emotions play out, that feelings lose their edge and in time become meaningless. Perhaps I have too much respect for the gift and for its giver. My mistake, if I make one, is that, like all people on a dole, I have never understood that the giver can usually afford his gift.