The Names (Vintage Contemporaries) by DeLillo Don

Author:DeLillo, Don [DeLillo, Don]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780307817181
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2012-04-10T16:00:00+00:00

In the light of a lowering sky the city is immediate and sculptured. None of summer’s white palls, its failures of distance and perspective. There are shadow-angles, highlighted surfaces, areas of grayish arcs and washes. Laundry blows on rooftops and balconies. Against an urgent sky, with dull thunder pounding over the gulf, this washwork streaming in the wind can be an emblematic and touching thing. Always the laundry, always the lone old woman in black who keeps to a corner of the elevator, the bent woman in endless mourning. She disturbs the composure of the modern building with its intercom and carpeted lobby, its marble veneer.

Some nights the wind never stops, beginning in a clean shrill pitch that broadens and deepens to a careless and suspenseful force, rattling shutters, knocking things off the balconies, creating a pause in one’s mind, a waiting-for-the-full-force-to-hit. Inside the apartment, closet doors swing open, creak shut. The next day it’s there again, a clatter in the alleys.

A single cloud, low-lying, serpentine, clings to the long ridge of Hymettus. The mountain seems to collect weather, to give it a structure, an aspect beyond the physical, weather’s menace, say, or the inner light of things. The sun and moon rise behind the mountain and in the last moments of certain days a lovely dying appears in the heights, a delivering into violet, burnt rose. The cloud is there now, a shaped thing, dense and white, concealing the radar that faces east.

Girls wear toggle coats. In heavy rain there is flooding, people die. A certain kind of old man is seen in a black beret, hands folded behind him as he walks.

Charles Maitland paid a visit, making a number of sound effects as he got out of his rubberized slicker. He walked to an armchair and sat down.

“Time for my midnight cup of cocoa.”

It was seven o’clock and he wanted a beer.

“Where are your rugs?” he said.

“I don’t have any.”

“Everyone in the area has rugs. We all have rugs. It’s what we do, James. Buy rugs.”

“I’m not interested in rugs. I’m not a rug person, as the Bordens would say.”

“I was over there yesterday. They have some Turkomans and Baluchis, fresh from customs. Very nice indeed.”

“Means nothing to me.”

“Weaving districts are becoming inaccessible. Whole countries in fact. It’s almost too late to go to the source. It is too late in many cases. They seem to go together, carpet-weaving and political instability.”

We thought about this.

“Or martial law and pregnant women,” I said.

“Yes,” he said slowly, looking at me. “Or gooey desserts and queues for petrol.”

“Plastic sandals and public beheadings.”

“Pious concern for the future of the Bedouins. What does that go with?”

He sat forward now, turning the pages of a magazine on the coffee table. A sound of rain on the terrace rail.

“Who is it, do you think?” I said. “Is it the Greek? Eliades?”

He looked at me sharply.

“Just a guess,” I said. “I noticed them at dinner that night.”

“You noticed nothing. She would never give anyone cause to notice.

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