Second Circle

THAT winter it was too cold, and I had to find another hotel. I finally found one on the Rue Littre, just off the Place de Rennes. It was called the Hotel de Londres, and it had an elevator, at least so it said on the bronze plate out in front. It was a very fine baroque plaque, with acanthus leaves and a frieze running around it, and it read:

Hôtel de Londres Confort Moderne Chauffage Centrale Avec Ascenseur.

Beauty of this kind affects my emotions, and I believed the words. The words were true. The heating was central, although it seemed to have some difficulty reaching the region of the fourhundred-franc rooms, where I lived; and there was a bathroom down the hall, if that was what was meant by Modern Comfort. As for the elevator, it was the pride of the house. In addition to the bronze plate on the sidewalk there was a sign in the vestibule repeating, as in an incantation, “Hôtel de Londres avec Ascenseur,”and on the marble wall was a painted hand pointing toward it dramatically with an outstretched finger. The hand apparently wore a glove, and below it was written “Elevator” in letters of gold. Following in the direction indicated, you finally came upon the thing itself, a bronze grille with cupids blowing trumpets and Vulcan, the god of elevators, pounding out a gear on his anvil. There was a brass button plate and an elegant door handle; the bronzework shone, the brass was polished, and on the door handle hung a sign lettered by hand in green paint: “The elevator does not march.”

“Why does not the elevator march?” I inquired of Mme. Méduse, the concierge.

She was a famous pessimist, with an unlimited faith in the frailty of all mortal substance. “It is broken,” she explained. “Who can say why? Que voulez-vous? It is the way of all flesh.”

I carried my cardboard suitcase, my 1910 Oliver, and my dog-eared collection of books up the stairs, and polished the mirror over the commode until it shone like a diamond. It was a good hotel, even if the elevator did not march.

The elevator did not march all winter, and in the spring came Signor Cespuglio. I first heard of him from Mine. Méduse, who informed me that he was a libertine and a hypochondriac. Evidence: He smoked opium and he wore flannel underwear that covered him from his elbows to his knees. He was also, I found out later, an epicurean, a bibliophile, a Garibaldian, a Dante scholar, and a famous patron of zoos, and he would have been a count except that he was an ardent republican and had left Italy in disgust at the time of the March on Rome. He was somewhat smaller than normal size, with a straggling goatee and a pair of waxed mustaches, and he wore a pair of very small steel spectacles. I met him on the landing one day and he took off his hat to me. It was a soft black felt with a short brim turned down all around, the kind of hat worn by road-show Svengalis in provincial theaters. “Buongiorno,” I said instinctively.

“Speak French, figlio” he told me severely. “It is the language of reason. God in heaven, we are informed, speaks Hebrew, and the souls of the damned in hell speak Tuscan, but we here in this unhappy limbo are neither gods nor devils, and we have only our reason to guide us. As for English, which I judge from your necktie to be your native tongue, it is not a language at all; it is a disease of the larynx.”

He was an incurable pedagogue, and it seemed natural to him to reply to a casual greeting with a discourse on comparative philology. His knowledge, however, was not confined solely to books. He was, among other things, an expert on the life and work of Leonardo da Vinci, whom he admired particularly for his versatility, and he strove assiduously to cultivate this virtue in himself. “Scholarship,” he told me once, “is not necessarily confined to the acquisition of useless knowledge, You are a student of comparative literature. Excellent! Could you repair a cream separator? Leonardo designed one, and had it built in his own workshops. If you intend to become a scholar you could not do better than to take Leonardo for your model. He was not only a scholar, a sculptor, and a painter, but also a humanist, an archaeologist, a civil engineer, and an expert on fortifications. In addition to painting the Mona Lisa he invented the airplane, the automobile, the machine gun, the safety pin, and the urethral catheter. If he did not invent the elevator it was only because he saw no use for it; he was a superb athlete, and he was fond of violent exercise. Do you have a screw driver?”

“A screw driver?” I repeated, startled.

“I need it to fix the elevator,” explained Signor Cespuglio.

Signor Cespuglio fixed the elevator. He went down into the cellar with the screw driver, and after half an hour there was a burring noise and the car rose, clanking, and ascended into the attic. “That marches now,” Mine. Méduse cried down into the dark pit.

From that time on, the elevator worked perfectly, except that it ran in a curious and eccentric manner which it had taken for its own. Like all eccentrics, the elevator guided its conduct by a set of inflexible rules. In its case there were two chief rules, which were: 1) it stopped only going down, and 2) it started only going up. If I, for example, wanted to descend when the elevator was below me, I pushed the button on my floor and after a moment I would hear the elevator below in the shaft shudder and stir into motion. The cables slithered by in the shaft, one going up and the other going down, and finally the elevator appeared. But it did not stop. (Rule 1, the elevator stops only going down.) Instead it ascended haughtily past me and mounted all the way to the attic, where it struck the ceiling with a hollow clunk. There was a metallic grinding noise as the mechanism changed gears, the cables began slithering by in the opposite direction, and the elevator descended until it stopped about six inches below my landing. I got in. The doors shut, and the elevator started upward again. (Rule 2, the elevator starts only going up.) We mounted in the shaft until we struck the ceiling again; there was an unnerving shock, the mechanism reversed, and we started downward on our final journey. The elevator was able to stop at the ground floor, due to Rule 1, and I emerged into the vestibule. Mine. Méduse was at her usual post, leaning on the counter. “That marches now?” she inquired.

“Perfectly,” I admitted.

I PONDERED over this, and found it every day more wonderful. Then I made an even more remarkable discovery: Signor Cespuglio was married.

His wife had evidently kept to her room during the first few days, but after a week or so she emerged. She was young and not bad-looking: small, pale, with large dark eyes and gleaming black hair which she wore drawn up behind her head in a knot in the Spanish manner. Evidently she was bored; as you passed her in the corridor she often turned and gazed sullenly after you through half-closed lids, sucking her cheeks in the manner of Anna Magnani. In spite of this obvious gambit she did not appeal to me; I had been trained to appreciate the long-limbed and coltish type of American beauty, and she was short-legged, low-bosomed, and brooding, like a Provençal peasant. In spite of her experiments at voluptuousness there was a hard mercenary quality to her glance, as though she were appraising everything in terms of francs. It was incredible. What ludicrous senile infatuation had led Signor Cespuglio to a union with this creature? I recalled his pointed beard and his goatlike glance; a new and disquieting aspect of his character seemed to be suggested.

The days passed, and I found no solution to the mystery. Meanwhile I became Signor Cespuglio’s friend. I frequently went with him to the zoo in the Bois de Vincennes, where he taught me to observe the habits of animals with the perspicacious objectivity of a scientist; I learned quickly, and I applied the methods he taught me to a surreptitious study of his own character. I soon discovered that he was a very systematic person. He awoke every morning at ten and his wife served him breakfast in his room; it consisted of coffee, croissants, and his Corriere della Sera, which was airmailed to him every day from Milan. At eleven thirty he put on his black hat and went for a promenade, in good weather to the Bois de Vincennes, in bad weather to the antiquaries along the Left Bank. I often accompanied him on these expeditions. My studies suffered, but I acquired a considerable body of information on such subjects as the mating habits of the African date palm and the superiority of the social organizations of orangutans (polygamy, hedonism, and anarchy) to that of human beings (monogamy, puritanism, and coalition cabinets). At one we separated; I went to my lectures at the Sorbonne and he went off to the Bibliothèque Nationale. At the library he occupied himself in the Dante Collection, making copious notes in a curious shorthand which consisted entirely of little pothooks and was written from right to left. I did not find out until much later that this was actually the script of Leonardo’s notebooks, a complicated hieroglyphic which was understood by no more than a half dozen living men. At four o’clock his serious studies were over, and he devoted the rest of the day to the lighter pleasures of mmd and body. He made his way leisurely back to Montparnasse via the quays and the Boulevard SaintMichel, stopping along the way to browse in bookstores and eventually ending up on the terrace of the Rotonde, where he drank exactly three Ricards, one after the other. I often met him there on my way home from the university, and sat down to converse with him. It was the best time of the day.

“Signor Cespuglio,” I asked him one time, “do you advise a young man to marry?”

“Certainly,” he told me. “One should be natural in whatever one does, and it is natural for all the beasts to go in pairs.”

“There are those who also find pleasure in the

state,” I pointed out.

“It is aKvays a pleasure to do what is natural, he replied. “Hedonism is naturalism, and vice versa.”

I drained my second Ricard. But in your case,” I persisted recklessly. “Surely you have

reached an age when —”

1 stopped, perceiving that he was taking a malicious satisfaction in my discomfort. ”Figlio, you arc impudent,”he said, “but in this case you are right. I have passed the age of passions, thank God. You are a student of comparative literature. Do you know your Plato? In the first book of the Republic, Socrates inquires of the aged Cephalus whether he is still capable of the act of love. I he old man replies that he well remembers the thing of which Socrates speaks, but that the day he was delivered of it he felt as though he had escaped from a mad and furious master. Mot admirable. Yet one must be natural in all things. I never married in my youth, considering myself superior to the state, and my punishment is that I must submit to it in my old age.”

“And how do you find it?”

“Ecstasy is lacking,” said Signor Cespuglio. And then he added, “Still, it is pleasant to have one’s coffee served in the morning.”

For a while neither of us said anything. It was six o’clock; the iron shutters of the shops, were clanging shut along the boulevard. We paid the waiter and rose, Signor Cespuglio putting on his hat somewhat shakily with both hands, and made our way back to the hotel.

We parted on the fourth floor of the hotel. “Arrivederci, Maestro,” I told him.

“Speak French,” he reminded me severely.

SIGNOR CESPUGLIO might well congratulate himself on having passed the age of passions, but his wife had not. She was, in fact, in the furious flower of her nubility. I met her once in the office. “I am called Marie-Ange,” she told me, staring at me darkly.

“Enchanted,” I said, nervously taking down my key.

“My husband is Luigi Gespuglio,” she continued, “He is a doctor of philosophy and a Commendatore, but he has no more love in his soul. He is an old man. When he cats, the juice comes from the corners of his mouth. Do you like novels:

“Some novels,” I replied cautiously.

“Come to my room sometime, and I will show you the novels of M. Paul de Kock. They are quite piquant, with illustrations. You have no idea. My husband goes to the Bibliotheque every afternoon and docs not come home until six.”

“Unfortunately I am a university student,” I began a little stiffly, “and in the aftcinoon

But she was hardly listening. “Mats tu es chic, le petit. Toi, comment t’appelles-tu?“

“My name is G. David Schine,” I told MarieAnge politely. “I am grateful for your invitation, but I am a devout Catholic, and the works of Paul de Kock are all on the Index.”

But this was not the end; the overtures continued until I dropped a hint to the chambermaid, who was an intimate confidante of Marie-Ange, that I was afflicted with a loathsome disease. Then they stopped abruptly. So much, I thought, for the literary interests of Mme. Luigi Cespuglio.

“Que voulez-vous?” said Mme. Meduse. “Madame is young, Monsieur is old, and it is the way of all flesh. Besides, she is a Southerner, and the race is not adept at chastity.” Her tone implied that they left this curious perversion to the AngloSaxons, who might find what pleasure in it they could.

“And so?”

“I give her a week,” said Mme. Méduse.

She was too generous. That very afternoon, when I came back to the hotel about two o’clock, a young man got into the elevator with me wearing the uniform of the Paris subway system: blue cotton pants, a lopsided blue cap with his hair sticking out on one side, and a greasy blue coat with the monogram of the Metro system on the lapels. His necktie, a soiled ribbon of gray cotton, was fastened in a knot so tight it seemed impossible he would ever undo it. His coat was open, and there was a button missing near the bottom of his shirt; I could see the black hairs of his stomach through the opening. In the midst of observing this detail I noticed that he was watching me; I nodded, but he only stared, with an air of hostility mingled with a slight uneasiness. He got out of the elevator at the fourth floor with me and went straight into Mine. Cespuglio’s room without knocking.

I went in my room and tried to read. But the walls were thin; it was a warm spring day, and the windows were open. Muffled voices intruded; innuendoes, titters, a noise of tussling, an overturned chair, muffled expostulations, and then — the sound of panting. I shut up my book and went downstairs.

“You were right,” I told Mme. Méduse.

“Nest-ce pas?” she said complacently. “He is chic, don’t you think? His name is Désiré, age twenty-two, a collector of tickets in the Vavin Metro station. He earns twelve thousand francs a week. I adore uniforms.”

“Then you permit that sort of thing here?”

“But what?”

“Such visits.”

“Monsieur,” Mme. Meduse told me, “this is after all not a monastery, it is a hotel.”

Studying that afternoon was impossible. I went for a walk in a vaguely troubled state which I recognized as a moral struggle, a disease from which I had previously considered myself immune. Could I remain loyal to Signor Cespuglio and not tell him what everyone else in the hotel knew? On the other hand, how to tell him? My position was a ridiculous one, and Mme. Méduse was right; a hotel is not a monastery. There is nothing more embarrassing to youth than to be forced into a position of standing up for virtue. But virtue, I told myself, was not really involved; it was a question of the honor of Signor Cespuglio. Honor! The word had an antiquated medieval ring. It suggested to me a vague picture of Signor Cespuglio and the raffish Désire meeting at dawn in the Bois de Boulogne, examining their weapons with grim expressions while a horse-drawn ambulance awaited at the edge of the clearing. Yet honor it was; I felt that if the public humiliation of Signor Cespuglio were allowed to continue, not only his honor but my own would be damaged. I decided to go to the Rotonde and drink several Ricards, and perhaps forget the whole thing.

At that moment, however, I glanced down the street and saw cold disaster approaching. Signor Cespuglio himself, unmistakable in his black hat and his tottering gait, had turned the corner and was making his way down the sidewalk to the hotel. It was not yet three o’clock.

It was absolutely necessary to prevent him from going to his room. I greeted him and tried to stop him, but he plunged resolutely along, and finally I was forced to join him and walk by his side. “You are not at the Bibliothèque?” I asked.

“It is the Feast of the Assumption,” he explained, “and all the public buildings are closed. Naturally as a nonbeliever I cannot take such superstitions seriously, but a knowledge of Church ritual is sometimes useful. Today, for example, it saved me from taking the Metro all the way to the Bibliothèque Nationale only to find the door locked in my face. Instead I spent a pleasant two hours in the bookstalls along the river. Apropos of the Metro, may I borrow your screw driver again?”

For the moment the connection eluded me. “Is there something wrong with the elevator?”

“There will be,” he told me.

THERE was nothing that would stop him. I had managed to work myself into a perfect ecstasy of apprehension as I imagined the scene about to take place; a cold film of perspiration stood on my face. But when we got out of the elevator Signor Cespuglio, instead of unlocking his door, merely applied his ear to the thin panel and straightened up with an air of satisfaction.

“Ah,” he remarked. “The Black Ram.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“You don’t remember your Shakespeare? ‘Awake! Even now, now, very now, an old black ram Is tupping your white ewe. Arise, arise! Awake the snorting citizens with the bell. Or else the devil will make a grandsire of you.’ Othello, Act I, Scene 1.”

I was dumfounded. We had entered my room, and I offered him a scat, which he accepted with aplomb. “But surely,” I protested after a moment, “you can’t find the situation a pleasant one.”

“On the contrary, it is all perfectly natural, he explained genially. “One must taste all experiences, and among the great common experiences of all men is that of being a cuckold. What would be natural about a marriage in which the wife is faithful to the husband? It is practically a sin against nature.”

“But,” I pointed out. “it is just as natural for the husband to become indignant.”

“Quite so,” he admitted. “I am trying to work up a suitable indignation, but it is not easy; all the passions are feeble at my age. In the meantime I am content to let them remain together. After a while that itself will become their punishment.”

‘I’m afraid I don’t quite follow you.”

“I have always been impressed,” explained Signor Cespuglio, “with the punishment which Dante contrives for the adulterous lovers Paolo and Francesca. You will remember the incident, Canto V of the Inferno, Second Circle, the carnal sinners. Dante in his wisdom knew that to separate the lovers would only cast a veil of romantic sentimentalism over the whole affair. Instead he condemns them to remain together forever, clasped in each other’s arms and rotated violently in a hot wind. And so they fly around endlessly, in full view of a crowd of interested spectators. The situation is full of dramatic irony. Imagine, for instance, the fragrance of the human body after one has been whirled around in a humid tornado for several hundred years without taking a bath. In my opinion, the reason Francesca comes so willingly to speak to Dante is that she is ready to do anything to escape from the wearisome embrace of her lover for a few minutes.”

“And so you intend to let the lovers go on stewing in the rank sweat of their enseaméd bed?”

“Hamlet, Act III, Scene 4,” identified Signor Cespuglio instantly. “If you knew your Dante as well as your Shakespeare you might in time become a student of literature. Where did you say the screw driver was?”

I found it for him, in the flowerpot where I kept my corkscrews and bottle openers.

“Thank you,” he said. “And now, come along, if you would like to learn something a little more practical than the metrics of the Provencal ballade.”

We got into the elevator and went down to the cellar, where he unscrewed the faceplate that held the elevator button to the wall, and twisted the two wires together. He did the same on every floor, each time replacing the faceplate so that the mechanism appeared intact. Before he left the elevator he also turned the electric heater up to full, although it was a warm spring day, unscrewed the control knob, and slipped it into his pocket. Then he turned to me. “Let us go back to your room and continue our conversation,” he said. “I believe we were talking about Dante, or perhaps it was Hamlet. Leave the door open; it is insufferably hot this afternoon.”

When I glanced at my alarm clock in the room I saw it was five o’clock, the hour of the aperitif, “I have no Ricard,” I apologized, “but if you would care for an unpretentious little white wine —”

“With pleasure,” said Signor Cespuglio.AFTER

about half an hour we heard a slight noise from the landing, the faint click of a door latch, followed by silence.

“Ecco,” Signor Cespuglio whispered. “The Black Ram.”

I glanced cautiously out the half-opened door. Désiré presently sidled into view and slipped into the elevator, glancing around him nervously with a simulated air of bravado, and pushed the control button. Nothing happened. He pushed all the buttons in succession, including the switch that turned the light off and on.

“Marie-Ange!” he hissed into the corridor. “The elevator does not march.”

“But what are you doing, idiot? Go down — somebody will see you.”

“I am not doing anything, I tell you, the elevator does not march. I will descend by the stair.

“You will not descend by the stair, species of a goose. Push the button.”

“ I tell you —”

“I tell you it is only necessary to push the button.”

“Come and do it yourself then, if you are so clever,” he snarled.

“Ah, imbecile.”

She hesitated for a moment, then she padded out furtively, barefooted, in her blue dressing gown, and pushed the button herself. Desire threw up his hands and sulked. We could see them inside the elevator performing an ill-tempered dumb-show, gesticulating silently and pushing the buttons one after the Other. They were so preoccupied that neither of them noticed when Signor Cespuglio slipped into the corridor with his screw driver and performed a slight operation on the wires behind the faceplate on the wall.

When she heard the door clang shut, MarieAnge turned with the hoarse cry of a trapped animal, but it was too late. The machinery clanked into motion, and the elevator slowly disappeared from sight. “ Lasciate ogm speran~a voi ch’ entrate,” Signor Cespuglio quoted absent-mindedly into the dark chasm.

We started down the stairway to the vestibule, and meanwhile the elevator descended into the cellar and climbed upward again, the enraged cries of the lovers arousing the tenants on each floor as they passed. By the time we reached the bottom of the stairs a considerable crowd had collected. The elevator had disappeared somewhere into the upper stories of the building; far above us we heard the clunk of the reversal, and the car began to come down again. There was nothing that would stop it. The tenants ran to all floors at once and pushed the buttons, but the elevator continued its journey with the implacable stupidity of all machinery. Each time it passed us in the vestibule Marie-Ange and Désiré turned to point hysterical fingers of accusation at Signor Cespuglio, then, as they disappeared up the longshaft, we could hear them turning back to hurl obscenities at each other. The heater, we noted as the car passed, was glowing cheerfully, and after the twentieth trip Desire had taken off his coat and shirt. His perspiration-soaked necktie, however, was knotted too tightly for his damp fingers, and he had left it on; it dangled from his naked neck like a noose. As for Marie-Ange, she could not take anything off, since except for the blue dressing gown she did not have anything on. “Assassin!" she cried each time as she passed, in a voice which grew constantly weaker, pointing a trembling finger at Signor Gespuglio. “Help, for the love of God! We roast! Save us, in the name of the Holy Virgin!”

“Surely something could be done,” indignantly protested an old lady in a mauve peignoir.

“The elevator is inarrestable,” declared Mine. Méduse. “Que voulez-vous? It is the way of all flesh.”

“But at least one could send for an electrician!”

But it was the l east of the Assumption, and all the artisans were on a holiday; the elevator was obliged to continue its journey until the next morning at eight o clock, when an electrician from the Boulevard Raspail arrived on his bicycle.