The Eternal City
Chapter 39 of Catch-22, “The Eternal City”, is the heart of the novel, though it stands out like an amputated thumb. It is stylistically quite unlike the rest of this five-hundred-page work. There is no humor in it. It is bleak to the point of pugilism: it pulverizes the reader. Yossarian is in Rome looking for Nately’s whore’s twelve-year-old kid sister. She has been forcibly ejected from the brothel in which her older sister worked and no one knows what has become of her. Milo, the cheerful entrepreneur, at first thinks Yossarian wants to have sex with a young virgin and offers to help. Early in the chapter, reference is made to little boys in Africa “stolen away by adult slave traders and sold for money to men who disemboweled them and ate them”. Yossarian first encounters a lone old woman left behind in the smashed apartment where the brothel used to be, the smashing and ejecting done by “tall soldiers with hard white hats and clubs”. She is obviously traumatized to the point of insanity. She keeps saying “Catch-22”. We then read: “He could picture the fiery and malicious exhilaration with which they had made their wreckage, and their sanctimonious, ruthless sense of right and dedication.” There is no one left to take care of the weeping old woman. Next Yossarian goes with Milo to meet the chief of police “who was fiddling with a stout woman with warts and two chins”. This man, Luigi, also thinks Yossarian is in search of a twelve-year-old sex partner and also offers to help. But this meeting comes to an inconclusive end, because Milo gets wind of a traffic in illegal tobacco, which distracts his businessman’s mind, “his twitching mouth slavering” with “epileptic lust”. The corrupt policeman then threatens to arrest Yossarian.
Now things get really unpleasant. Out on the street, in the cold and dark, Yossarian sees a solitary boy dressed in rags with bare feet, pale, poor, cold. He is moved by “intense pity for his poverty”, but does nothing. Immediately, a nursing mother passes “holding an infant in black rags”. He reflects on all the sadness and suffering in the world, about “how many good people were bad people”. Suddenly he is confronted by a young soldier having convulsions and being held down by six other soldiers. A jeep with two military policemen in it races by: one of them remarks, “That’s good. He’s under arrest”, “doubling over with raucous laughter at his jest” and then speeding off. Yossarian moves away and hears a female voice from above pleading, “Please don’t. Please don’t”. He then sees a drunken woman being sexually assaulted by three drunken soldiers, also saying “Pleeshe don’t”. One of them throws a bottle at Yossarian. Soon he comes across a man beating a dog: “The dog whimpered and squealed in brute, dumbfounded hysteria…and groveled and crawled on its belly”, but the man “beat it and beat it anyway”. He threatens to beat a woman who asks him to stop. At the next corner, “a man was beating a small boy brutally in the midst of an immobile crowd of adult spectators who made no effort to intervene”. The man kept knocking the boy down with “hard, resounding open-palm blows to the head, then jerking him up to his feet in order to knock him down again”. “Bright red blood was streaming from his ears”. No one interferes. Next a man with a smashed mouth waits for an ambulance that never comes, while another man is whisked away by police after having his books spilled (he cries ambiguously, “Help! Police!). Yossarian then sees an eighty-year-old woman trying to keep up with a forty-year-old woman but being left behind alone in the night to fend for herself. “The nasty, small, gloating smile with which she glanced back at the laboring old woman was both wicked and apprehensive”. Yossarian does nothing to help. He then notices a gaunt man “with a star-shaped scar in his cheek and a glossy mutilated depression the size of an egg in one temple”, to be followed by a young woman with “her whole face disfigured by a God-awful pink and piebald burn that started on her neck and stretched in a raw, corrugated mass up both cheeks past her eyes!”. We next learn that Aarfy, a comrade of Yossarian, has raped and murdered a simple-minded servant-girl, Michaela, that very night, throwing her out of the window. Aarfy protests, “I only raped her once”, and feels convinced he will not be held accountable. Yossarian assures him he will be arrested for the rape and murder, and sure enough sirens sound. Two “large, tough, brawny M.P.s with icy eyes and firm, sinewy, unsmiling jaws” enter the room—and arrest Yossarian! He has committed the unpardonable crime of going to Rome in search of a lost girl without a pass (Aarfy is left to his own devices). So ends Yossarian’s visit to the eternal city.
I told you it was a bleak chapter. But what are we to make of it, artistically (the mutilated thumb twitching before us)? The chapter is clearly a litany of human (and animal) pain, suffering, poverty, neglect, violence, fear, malice, and indifference. It is crammed with injustice, corruption, callousness, maliciousness, brutality, and evil—all conscience-free. If there is any humor at all, it is of the blackest pitch. The rest of the book is overflowing with humor, albeit also black. This is Catch-22 at its most hard and unforgiving. I think it is intended in two ways. First, it reminds us of the horrors that lie behind the story told in the body of the book (a kind of gritty literary-realist Sergeant Bilko). One might say it points to the underlying politics of war—what we are fighting for, and against. But second, it functions as a kind of rebuke to the rest of the book—a kind of apology for it. All those laughs, the literary acclaim, the fame—but this is the reality: the human horror behind it all. We make art of it, but it isn’t art. Just to describe it, as Heller does and I repeat, is difficult, morally difficult. Really, it just makes you want to cry—to curl up in a ball and cry. And yet we admire the novel. Nately’s whore’s little sister is never found.
