Set This House on Fire by William Styron Read Free Book Online

every joint. All of the hotels were shut down for the night, or displayed no-vacancy signs. So I drove onto a jetty overlooking the harbor, there put the top up, and settled back for sleep. The mosquitoes wouldn’t let me alone. Frequenters of resorts, big July mosquitoes wet and gross with a summer’s licentiousness, they bore down upon me on the shore breeze, whining with excitement and mooning ceaselessly about my ears. After an hour’s battle I gave up and closed the windows. The car was soon an oven, stifling and breathless, in which only barely dozing I dreamed the exhausting nightmares of half-sleep. Half a dozen times I was aroused to see a flock of stars go slipping over the horizon, then I dropped back into clammy slumber, where odd smells invaded my dreams, breaths out of time past—low tide at home in Virginia, mud and seaweed, fish nets drying in the sun.
    When finally I awoke I cocked one sore eye open in the full blast of morning light. Away off, I could hear people yelling and splashing in the waves; above, peering down at me through the windshield, were two rueful, bearded faces.
    “È morto?” I heard one ask the other.
    “Un inglese. Soffocato.”
    When I stirred, the two old men retreated slowly off across the sand, with looks of deep mystery. It was past nine o’clock; I was drenched in sweat, with a violent headache, and my body had that jittery feeling which accompanies a hangover. I knew I should be on my way, and was—after coffee and a wilted bun in a beachside joint thronged with strident Romans in bathing suits, all of them swilling Coca-Cola.
    Such is the power of certain calamities on the mind that, once freed of the initial shock, one is able to view with bright clarity all the events leading up to the actual blow. The tone, the mood, the character of whatever transpired before, takes on the gray hue, itself, of disaster and is embalmed in memory with an awful sense of predestination. It is in such a way that I remember the road out of Formia, through Naples and beyond. Leaving the sea, the highway became wide and straight again. But it was Saturday, market day, and the road was swarming with traffic—wagons and carts piled high with produce and fodder, towed by donkeys, all moving so leisurely as to appear like sinister, stationary objects in my path. The sun rose higher and higher over the dusty countryside. Its fire settled down upon the hills; close by stood fields of blighted corn and trees in windless, shriveling groves. Up from the highway the heat rose in greasy waves. And through these waves, roaring, balefully glittering, and often straight at me, came a devil’s pageant of vehicles—motorscooters and buses loaded down with vacationers, and caravans of hurtling cars. There were huge trucks, too, carrying gasoline, whipping past me at seventy and leaving a trail of scalding blue vapor on the air. Near Capua, outside of Naples, there was an epidemic of sheep into which I almost skidded, and I had to poke a gingerly path among their sad, expressively wagging behinds. In spite of the sun I put the top down again to get the wind. I also remember turning on the radio again, this time for distraction. By the time I reached the outskirts of Naples the steering wheel was slippery with perspiration. To my disgust I found myself sniveling with tension and with fatigue and murmuring aloud words of courage.
    But it was the Alfa Romeo on the Autostrada to Pompei that led to my downfall. I had passed through Naples by then, for a brief moment calm, thinking that with only an hour more to go Sambuco was in the bag. There was less traffic; it was nearly noon, lunchtime, when most Italians abandon the road to purposeful Anglo-Saxons. It seemed to have turned cooler—though no doubt I was deceived—and I relaxed for the first time, diverted by the outer suburbs of the city, where black smoke was billowing up from a thousand factory chimneys. The noise I heard behind me was abrupt and