Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin
'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. Tou 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. Ill 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, anyway,' 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 anymore, 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 be-wilderedly 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
'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 anymore. 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 time's 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 Ugh ter 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 anymore. 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 anymore.
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 bis 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.
James Baldwin, Giovanni's Room