The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer [225]
"Is that all you can say?" Minetta sneered. "Ab-so-lute-ly without foun-da-tion," he mimicked.
"All right, then, consider me." Roth ignored his sarcasm. "I'm a Jew, but I'm not religious. I probably am less well informed about it than you are, Minetta. Who are you to say what I feel? I have never detected any similarities in Jews. I consider myself an American."
Goldstein shrugged. "Are you ashamed?" he asked softly.
Roth expelled his breath with annoyance. "That's a species of question I don't like." His heart was thumping powerfully from the tension he felt at arguing into their blank unsympathetic faces. A strong, apparently irrational, anxiety moistened the palms of his; hands. "Is that the only answer you can think of?" he snapped. His voice tapered shrilly.
Aaah, the guineas and Jews are all the same, Minetta told himself. Always getting worked up over nothing. It made him feel superior to the argument.
"Listen, Roth," Goldstein said. "Why do you think Croft and Brown don't like you? It's not because of you, it's because of your religion, because of something that you say has nothing to do with you." Yes, he was uncertain. Roth disturbed him; he was always a little chagrined that Roth was Jewish, for he felt he would give a bad impression to Gentiles.
Roth had a pang because Croft and Brown didn't like him. He knew it, and yet it hurt somehow, hearing it put into words. "I wouldn't say that," he protested. "It's got nothing to do with religion." He was completely confused. It would be comforting if he could believe his religion was the cause of their antipathy, but other problems issued from it, other portents of future failure. He wanted to close his arms over his head, tuck up his knees, and shut out the clamant bickering about him, the incessant hacking of the machetes, the murmur of conversation, and the necessity to keep straining and exerting himself through one pain-racked hour after another. The jungle was protective suddenly, a buffer against all the demands that would be made. He longed to lose himself in it, become separate from the men. "I don't know," he said. It seemed important to stop arguing.
They fell silent, lay again on their packs, relapsing into their private thoughts. Minetta's weariness colored his reverie, made him sad. He thought of Italy, which he had visited with his parents when he was a child. Very few memories remained; he could recall the town in which his father was born and a little of the city of Naples, but the rest had become clouded.
In his father's village the houses tumbled down a hillside in a network of tiny alleyways and dusty courtyards. At the foot of the hill a little mountain stream lashed over the rocks and raced along vigorously into the valley below. The women would carry their laundry down in baskets in the morning, and wash the family clothing on the flat rocks of the bank, kneading and slapping and scrubbing with the ancient absorbed motions of peasant women at work. The boys in the town would fetch water every afternoon from the same stream and carry it up the hill, moving slowly, their small brown legs cording with labor as they toiled up the footpath to the town.
Those were about the only details he could remember, but they stirred him. He seldom thought of the town, and he had forgotten almost all the Italian he once knew how to speak, but when he was moody or reflective he would remember things like the heat of the sun between the walls of the alleyways, or the acrid fermy odors of the dung on the fields.
Now, for the first time in many months, he brooded about the war in Italy and wondered if the town had been destroyed in bombardments. It seemed almost impossible to him; the little houses of rock and plaster must remain forever. And yet. . . He was very depressed. He had seldom thought of returning to that village, but now, transiently, it was what he wanted most to do. Jesus, that place all ruined, he thought. It made him very sad. For a few seconds his mind held in montage all the wrecked towns, the corpses on the road, the perpetual muted thunder of artillery over the horizon; it even contained a place for this patrol on an island in another ocean. Everything's being smashed all over the world. The magnitude of the idea was too great; his mind veered away, careened back giddily to the rock on which he was sitting, absorbed itself once more in the wretchedness and fatigue of his body. Aaah, it's all so big you get lost in it. There's always some goon on top of ya. Despite himself, he pictured his village destroyed, the cold shattered walls standing like the upraised arms of dead soldiers. It shocked him, made him feel guilty as though he were imagining the death of his parents, and he tried to shut out the fantasy. He was enraged at the waste. Again it seemed impossible that the women should not be washing laundry on the rocks. He shook his head. Aaah, that fuggin Mussolini. But he was confused; his father had always told him Mussolini had brought prosperity, and he had accepted it. He could remember the arguments between his uncles and his father. They were so goddam poor they needed a guy who could run things, he told himself now. He remembered one of his father's cousins who had been a big shot in Rome, and had marched with Mussolini's army in 1922. All through his childhood, Minetta had heard tales of those days. "All a the young men, the patriotists, they fight with Mussolini in 'twenty-two," his father had told him, and he had dreamed of marching with them too, of being a hero.