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

encounter with the outrageous din. I didn’t bomb your house! I didn’t bomb your house! I kept trying to say, but found my lips struggling with broken wisps of air, sent flying on the wind by the shocking horn, which thundered on and on.
    And then it was all over. The scene dissolved before me as if suddenly and mercifully drowned: the old woman, whisked away by her grandsons, gone; people, policemen, trucks, cars, all gone; the lot of them vanishing in hot stampede after the ambulance and the ravaged di Lieto—broken, dead or dying, I knew not what, but at last nobly borne to the sound of illustrious, tragic horns which rolled over the sunlit countryside, diminishing, intoning rich mingled notes of triumph and grief.
    On the shore drive between Salerno and Amalfi, just before the road turns off for the long steep ascent to Sambuco, there is a large sign painted on a wall. It is written in bold letters of black on white; the words are in English—
    BEHOLD ABOVE YOU
THE PALACIAL VILLA OF
EMILIO NARDUZZO
OF
WEST ENGLEWOOD, N.J., U.S.A.
    —and one’s eye, impelled by spontaneous obedience to this mandate and in swift search of some majestic dwelling place, roves skyward up and through the high hanging slope of vineyards and orange trees and blinding red poppies, to a ridge of land thrust up like a hatchet blade against the sky: there fixed in the rock is a structure the size and shape of an Esso station, sporting portholes for windows, painted an explosive blue, and flaunting at its proud turreted roof half a dozen American flags. Narduzzo’s villa is not listed in Nagel’s Italy, but it is in its own way one of the marvels of the coast. After the wondrous drive itself, with its raw green pinnacles and peaks, its cliffs coming down from dizzying heights into a tranquil cobalt sea, the effect of Narduzzo’s villa could not be more upsetting or dissonant if one were to blunder around a turning into West Englewood itself.
    I mention this because now in trying to recall the rest of that afternoon I am able to remember practically nothing, until the moment when I must have been shocked into something resembling consciousness by the sight of Narduzzo’s house. Of my departure from the crossroad I do remember backing the car out of the ditch where it had landed and with a signpost prying away the fender, which had wrapped itself around one front tire in a crumpled embrace. I remember too the whole front end of the car: a ruin of splintered chrome, broken metal, headlights knocked wall-eyed, and in the middle of the mess, faintly silhouetted, the ghost of poor di Lieto, his rear end outlined unmistakably in the poised half-crouch of a jockey. And from somewhere underneath there still trickled thin streams of water and grease and oil. Yet although the car seemed to work and though I set out again, at ten miles an hour, the rest of the trip remains only a shadow in my mind of some dim but incomparable misery. It was the sign and villa which brought me to my senses. I stopped in the road with a jerk and in a billow of steam, my distress all suddenly devoured—as I turned my eyes away from the hideous starspangled villa—by the beauty spread out before me.
    By then it was midafternoon, but already above me the great peak on which Sambuco stood had obscured the westering sun, sending a vast blue shadow across the sea. Past the outermost limits of the shadow, where the light still shone, the water was as green as clover, but here toward shore it was a transparent blue, lakelike, upon which half a dozen little boats seemed not so much to float as to suspend, held up over the clear sandy bottom as if by invisible threads. Behind me in the lemon grove I could hear the faint sound of a girl’s voice singing. A splash of oars came across the water, and radio music from below in some fishing town, a shadow-town which never knew twilight or evening, and was forever eclipsed by a somber half-darkness at three in the afternoon. For