Giovanni's Room

Giovanni had said something in the taxi about his room being very dirty. “I’m sure it is,” I had said lightly, and turned away from him, looking out of the window. Then we had both been silent. When I woke up in his room, I remembered that there had been something strained and painful in the quality of that silence, which had been broken when Giovanni said, with a shy, bitter smile: “I must find some poetic figure.” And he spread his heavy fingers in the air, as though a metaphor were tangible. I watched him. 

“Look at the garbage of this city,” he said, finally, and his fingers indicated the flying street, “all of the garbage of this city? Where do they take it? I don’t know where they take it—but it might very well be my room.” 

“It’s much more likely,” I said, “that they dump it into the Seine.”

 But I sensed, when I woke up and looked around the room, the bravado and the cowardice of his figure of speech. This was not the garbage of Paris, which would have been anonymous: this was Giovanni’s regurgitated life. Before and beside me and all over the room, towering like a wall, were boxes of cardboard and leather, some tied with string, some locked, some bursting, and out of the topmost box before me spilled down sheets of violin music. There was a violin in the room, lying on the table in its warped, cracked case—it was impossible to guess from looking at it whether it had been laid to rest there yesterday or a hundred years before. The table was loaded with yellowing newspapers and empty bottles and it held a single brown and wrinkled potato in which even the sprouting eyes were rotten. Red wine had been spilled on the floor; it had been allowed to dry and it made the air in the room sweet and heavy. (86-87)