The Magic Barrel

Fiction | Short Story Collection | Adult | Published in 1958

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“Behold the Key”Chapter Summaries & Analyses

“Behold the Key” Summary

Carl Schneider, an American graduate student, has come to Rome with his wife and two small children to complete his PhD on the Risorgimento (the 19th-century movement for Italian unification). He knows the risks, since Rome is expensive and he has only a few thousand dollars, but his 28 years have begun to “weigh” on him and he longs for a last, youthful adventure. However, Rome has “disappointed” him, mostly with its lack of affordable housing. He and his wife are unhappy in their cramped hotel rooms, the children have been sick almost constantly, and each promising apartment hides an unexpected expense or flaw. Finally, he resorts to a “two-bit” amateur agent, a middle-aged clerk named Vasco Bevilacqua, hoping that he might find something off the beaten track. Bevilacqua seems knowledgeable and dapper but bears a distinct whiff of desperation. Carl soon learns that he is only available for one hour a day: his lunch hour. Bevilacqua claims to love Americans partly because of their “openness.” However, in his dealings on Carl’s behalf, he seems short-tempered with his own people. He claims to have had a hard life, especially during the war, in which he was wounded twice (by the Americans and then the Germans) and lost his father to an Allied bombardment.

After frustrating Carl with some time-wasting errors, Bevilacqua locates what seems to be an ideal apartment within Carl’s price range. The owner is an aging Contessa who has recently become engaged. However, the only key to the place is in the possession of her ex-lover, a 40-ish lounge lizard named De Vecchis, who seems as desperate for money as Bevilacqua. When Carl finally locates him, he demands a hefty sum for the key, which Carl contemptuously refuses. He lowers the price several times, eventually to one-fifth of his original offer, but Carl refuses to pay a cent, enraging De Vecchis. Carl then uses a combination of blackmail and bribery to extract the Contessa’s address from the apartment’s portiere; Carl’s wife, overhearing, exclaims, “How shameful.” The Contessa, who is planning her honeymoon, puts him off, but Bevilacqua locates a professional lock-picker who finally opens the door to the apartment. However, it is too late: Carl, Bevilacqua, and the portiere walk in shock through the once-beautiful rooms, which are all destroyed. The furniture has been demolished with a “dull axe,” the books and rugs torn to bits, the walls defaced with lipstick and red wine. De Vecchis appears triumphantly in the door, holding out the key and exclaiming, “Ecco la chiave!” (“Behold the key!”) (82). Bevilacqua rages at him, then laments to Carl that this mutual enmity is “our condition.” Carl rejects his cynicism, saying that he “loves” Italy. De Vecchis throws the key at them; Bevilacqua ducks, and the key hits Carl squarely in the forehead, “leaving a mark he could not rub out” (83).

“Behold the Key” Analysis

If “Angel Levine” chronicles a double breakthrough, “Behold the Key,” by contrast, marks a triple failure, for none of its characters grows appreciably or fulfills his responsibilities to humanity. To research a paper, Carl has selfishly moved his entire family to Rome despite his awareness that the city is still recovering from the war and that family apartments will be scarce at best. Nearing 30 and determined to take a “chance” in life before his youth is gone, he soon has terrible regrets and starts to blame the Italians themselves, whom he finds to be “aloof” and “indifferent” to his grievous inconvenience. Though an aficionado of Italian culture and history, he is less sympathetic to the people, who have been through more than a little inconvenience of their own. Many of them have lost their homes and relatives to bombing raids and have been trapped between the Fascist, German, and Allied armies during the tumultuous years of World War II.

Bevilacqua, the shabby part-time agent he hires, mirrors Carl’s desperation and resorts to blaming his fellow Italians for his own apparent errors. Bevilacqua, unlike Carl, though, has been through the grinder of war and has few prospects, while Carl enjoys the benefits of a wealthy mother-in-law who paid for his family’s passage to Rome. Given this unearned financial support, Carl himself oozes a prim hypocrisy in his treatment of Italians such as De Vecchis, a hapless “kept man” who has recently been discarded by his lover, a Contessa who has moved on to an advantageous marriage. Ironically, Carl’s poor accommodations in Rome have let him to dream of being a kept man himself, so his disdain for the Contessa’s ex-lover highlights his (very midcentury) American complacency. Likewise, the aging De Vecchis—whose name literally means “old”—has scant hopes of another golden hookup like the Contessa and desperately needs money—hence his attempts to extort it from Carl. Although he whittles down the price of the apartment’s key to 15,000 lira, or about 23 dollars, Carl accuses him of fishing for a “bribe” and angrily refuses to pay him a cent, a declaration that smacks of hypocrisy given that Carl himself immediately resorts to bribery and blackmail to get the Contessa’s address from the portiere.

In his bitter negotiations with Carl, De Vecchis regards him not as an individual but as a proxy for American arrogance and oppression. Hurling the term “bribe” back in his face, he alludes to the United States’ Cold War machinations in Italy, which included using foreign aid as a bribe to push its politics to the right, and to the American appropriation of Italian culture. The blinkered strife between the two characters reaches its climax in the final scene, when De Vecchis takes on the metaphorical mantle of the Roman governor Pontius Pilate, who delivered the scourged Jesus Christ to the mob with the bitter words “Ecce homo” (“Behold the man”); in other words, “Look at what you made me do.” Likewise, De Vecchis, who has destroyed Carl’s “savior” (the apartment of his dreams), now proceeds to blame Carl for his own actions, hurling the key at him and Bevilacqua with the viciously sarcastic exclamation, “Ecce la chiave!” (82). The fact that Carl is Jewish may be part of De Vecchis’s rancorous joke. As the two Italians curse each other, Carl feebly protests that he “loves” their country. Yet among these three, love and empathy for others are notably lacking—there has been no Malamudian leap of faith in this particular tale. Appropriately, the last, resonant words of the story allude not to Jesus Christ but instead to Cain, who killed his brother Abel and was marked on the forehead for his fratricide, just as Carl is marked by his long-sought key.