Across the River and Into the Trees Page 13

�Pin me no pin curls, my beloved,� he said to the Portrait, �and I will try to lay it on the line in round, heavy, hard silver dollars or with the other.�

  I mustn�t get rough, he thought.

  Then he said to the portrait, for he did not capitalize her now in his mind, �You are so God-damned beautiful you stink. Also you are jail-bait. Renata�s two years older now. You are under seventeen.�

  And why can�t I have her and love her and cherish her and never be rude, nor bad, and have the five sons that go to the five corners of the world; wherever that is? I don�t know. I guess the cards we draw are those we get. You wouldn�t like to re-deal would you dealer?

  No. They only deal to you once, and then you pick them up and play them. I can play them, if I draw any damn thing at all, he told portrait; who was unimpressed.

  �Portrait,� he said. �You better look the other way so that you will not be unmaidenly. I am going to take a shower now and shave, something you will never have to do, and put on my soldier-suit and go and walk around this town even though it is too early.�

  So, he got out of bed, favoring his bad leg, which hurt him always. He pulled the reading light with his bad hand. There was sufficient light, and he had been wasting electricity for nearly an hour.

  He regretted this as he regretted all his errors. He walked past portrait, only looking casually, and looked at himself in the mirror. He had dropped both parts of his pajamas and he looked at himself critically and truly.

  �You beat-up old bastard,� he said to the mirror. Portrait was a thing of the past. Mirror was actuality and of this day.

  The gut is flat, he said without uttering it. The chest is all right except where it contains the defective muscle. We are hung as we are hung, for better or worse, or something, or something awful.

  You are one half a hundred years old, you bastard you. Now go in and take a shower, and scrub good, and afterwards put on your soldier suit. Today is another day.

  CHAPTER XX

  THE Colonel stopped at the reception desk in the lobby, but the concierge was not there yet. There was only the night porter.

  �Can you put something in the safe for me?�

  �No, my Colonel. No one may open the safe until the assistant manager or the concierge arrives. But I will guard anything for you that you wish.�

  �Thank you. It�s not worth the trouble,� and he buttoned the Gritti envelope, with the stones inside, the envelope addressed to himself, into the inside left pocket of his tunic.

  �There�s no real crime here now,� the night porter said.

  It had been a long night and he was happy to speak to someone. �There never really was, my Colonel. There are only differences of opinion and politics.�

  �What do you have for politics?� the Colonel asked; for he was lonely too.

  �About what you would expect.�

  �I see. And how is your thing going?�

  �I think it goes quite well. Maybe not as well as last year. But still quite well. We were beaten and we have to wait a while now.�

  �Do you work at it?�

  �Not much. It is more the politics of my heart than of . my head. I believe in it with my head too, but I have very little political development.�

  �When you get it you won�t have any heart.�

  �Maybe not. Do you have politics in the army?�

  �Plenty,� the Colonel said. �But not what you mean.�

  �Well, we better not discuss it then. I have not meant to be intrusive.�

  �I asked the question; the original question rather. It was only to talk. It was not an interrogation.�

  �I don�t think it was. You do not have the face of an inquisitor, my Colonel, and I know about the Order, although I am not a member.�

  �You may be member material. I�ll take it up with the Gran Maestro.�

  �We come from the same town; but from distinct quarters.�

  �It�s a good town.�

  �My Colonel, I have so little political development that I believe all honorable men are honorable.�

  �Oh you�ll get over that,� the Colonel assured him. �Don�t worry, boy. You�ve got a young party. Naturally you make errors.�

  �Please don�t talk like that.�

  �It was just rough early morning joking.�

  �Tell me, my Colonel, what do you really think about Tito?�

  �I think several things. But he�s my next door neighbor. I�ve found it better not to talk about my neighbor.�

  �I�d like to learn.�

  �Then learn it the hard way. Don�t you know people don�t give answers to such questions?�

  �I had hoped they did.�

  �They don�t,� the Colonel said. �Not in my position. All I can tell you is that Mister Tito has plenty problems.�

  �Well, I know that now truly,� the night porter who was really only a boy said.

  �I hope you do,� the Colonel said. �I wouldn�t call it, as knowledge, any pearl of great price. Now, good-day, for I must take a walk for the good of my liver, or something.�

  �Good day, my Colonel. Fa brutto tempo.�

  �Bruttissimo,� the Colonel said and, pulling the belt of his raincoat tight, and settling his shoulders into it, and the skirts well down, he stepped out into the wind.

  CHAPTER XXI

  THE Colonel took the ten centesimi gondola across the Canal, paying the usual dirty note, and standing with the crowd of those condemned to early rising.

  He looked back at the Gritti and saw the windows of his room; still open. There was no promise nor threat of rain; only the same strong wild, cold wind from the mountains. Everyone in the gondola looked cold and the Colonel thought, I wish I could issue these wind-proof coats to everyone on board. God, and every officer that ever wore one, knows they are not water-proof, and who made the money out of that one?

  You can�t get water through a Burberry. But I suppose some able jerk has his boy in Groton now, or maybe Canterbury, where the big contractors� boys go, because our coats leaked.

  And what about some brother officer of mine who split with him? I wonder who the Benny Meyers of the ground forces were? There probably wasn�t only one. Probably, he thought, there must be very many. You must not be awake yet, to talk that simply. They do keep the wind out though. The raincoats. Raincoats my ass.

  The gondola pulled up between the stakes on the far bank of the canal and the Colonel watched the black-clad people climb up out of the black-painted vehicle. Is she a vehicle? he thought. Or must a vehicle have wheels or be tracked?

  Nobody would give you a penny for your thoughts, he thought. Not this morning. But I�ve seen them worth a certain amount of money when the chips were down.

  He penetrated into the far side of the city, the side that finally fronted on the Adriatic, and that he liked the best. He was going in by a very narrow street, and he was going to not keep track of the number of more or less north and south streets that he crossed, nor count the bridges, and then try and orient himself so he would come out at the market without getting up any dead ends.

  It was a game you play, as some people used to play double Canfield or any solitary card games. But it had the advantage of you moving while you do it and that you look at the houses, the minor vistas, the shops and the trattorias and at old palaces of the city of Venice while you are walking. If you loved the city of Venice it was an excellent game.

  It is a sort of solitaire ambulante and what you win is the happiness of your eye and heart. If you made the market, on this side of town, without ever being stymied, you won the game. But you must not make it too easy and you must not count.

  On the other side of the town, game was to leave from the Gritti and make the Rialto by the Fondamente Nuove without a mistake.

  Then you could climb the bridge and cross it and go down into the market. He liked the market best. It was the part of any town he always went to first.

  Just then he heard the two young men behind him
saying the things about him. He knew they were young men by their voices and he did not look back, but listened carefully for distance and waited for the next turn to see them, as he turned.

  They are on their way to work, he decided. Maybe they are former Fascists or maybe they are something else, or maybe it is just the line that they are talking. But they are making it pretty personal now. It isn�t just Americans, it is also me, myself, my gray hair, the slightly crooked way I walk, the combat boots (those, of that stripe, disliked the practicability of combat boots. They liked boots that rang on the flag stones and took a high black polish.).

  It is my uniform which they find to be without grace. Now it is why I am walking at this hour, and now it is their absolute security that I can no longer make love.

  The Colonel swung sharp to the left at the next corner, seeing what he had to deal with and the exact distance, and when the two young men came around the corner which was formed by the apse of the church of Frari there was no Colonel. He was in the dead angle behind the apse of the ancient church and as they passed, he, hearing them come by their talk, stepped out with a hand in each low pocket of his raincoat and turned himself, and the raincoat, with the two hands in the pockets, toward them.

  They stopped and he looked at them both in the face and smiled his old and worn death smile. Then he looked down at their feet, as you always look at the feet of such people, since they wear their shoes too tight, and when you take the shoes off them you see their hammer-toes. The Colonel spat on the pavement and said nothing.

  The two of them, they were the first thing he had suspected, looked at him with hatred and with that other thing. Then they were off like marsh-birds, walking with the long strides of herons too, the Colonel thought, and something of the flight of curlews, and looking back with hatred, waiting to have the last word if the distance was ever safe.

  It is a pity they weren�t ten against one, the Colonel thought. They might have fought. I should not blame them, since they were defeated.

  But their manners were not good in respect to a man of my rank and age. Also it was not intelligent to think all fifty year old Colonels would not understand their language. Nor was it intelligent to think old Infantrymen would not fight this early in the morning against the simple odds of two to one.

  I�d hate to fight in this town where I love the people. I would avoid it. But couldn�t those badly educated youths realize what sort of animal they were dealing with? Don�t they know how you get to walk that way? Nor any of the other signs that combat people show as surely as a fisherman�s hands tell you if he is a fisherman from the creases from the cord cuts.

  It is true they only saw my back and ass and legs and boots. But you�d think they might have told from the way they must move. Maybe they don�t anymore. But when I had a chance to look at them and think, Take the two of them out and hang them, I believe they understood. They understood quite clearly.

  What�s a man life worth anyway? Ten thousand dollars if his insurance is paid up in our army. What the hell has that got to do with it. Oh yes, that was what I was thinking about before those jerks showed; how much money I had saved my government, in my time when people like Benny Meyers were in the trough.

  Yes, he said, and how much you lost them at the Chateau that time at ten G�s a head. Well nobody ever really understood it except me, I guess. There�s no reason to tell them now. Your commanding general sometimes puts things down as the Fortunes of War. Back at Army they know such things are bound to happen. You do it, as ordered, with a big butcher-bill and you�re a hero.

  Christ, I am opposed to the excessive butcher-bill, he thought. But you get the orders, and you have to carry them out. It is the mistakes that are no good to sleep with. But why the hell sleep with them anyway. It never did any good. But they can certainly crawl into a sack sometimes. They can crawl in and stay in there with you.

  Cheer up, boy, he said. Remember you had a lot of money on you when you picked that one. And you might have been stripped if you lost. You can�t fight a lick anymore with your hands, and you didn�t have any weapon.

  So don�t be gloomy, boy, or man, or Colonel, or busted General. We�re almost to the market now and you made it without hardly noticing.

  Hardly noticing is bad, he added.

  CHAPTER XXII

  HE loved the market. A great part of it was close-packed and crowded into several side streets, and it was so concentrated that it was difficult not to jostle people, unintentionally, and each time you stopped to look, to buy, or to admire, you formed an �lot de resistance against the flow of the morning attack of the purchasers.

  The Colonel liked to study the spread and high piled cheeses and the great sausages. People at home think mortadella is a sausage, he thought.

  Then he said to the woman in the booth, �Let me try a little of that sausage, please. Only a sliver.�

  She cut a thin, paper thin, slice for him, ferociously, and lovingly, and when the Colonel tasted it, there was the half smokey, black pepper-corned, true flavor of the meat from the hogs that ate acorns in the mountains.

  �I will take a quarter of a kilo.�

  The Barone�s lunches for the shooting blinds were of a Spartan quality, which the Colonel respected, since he knew no one should eat much while shooting. He felt, though, that he might augment the lunch with this sausage, and share it with the poler and picker-upper. He might give a slice to Bobby, the retriever, who would be wet through to his hide many times, and enthusiastic still, but shaking with cold.

  �Is this the best sausage that you have?� he asked the woman. �Have you nothing that does not show and is reserved for better and steadier customers?�

  �This is the best sausage. There are many other sausages, as you know. But this is the best.�

  �Then give me one eighth of a kilo of a sausage that is highly fortifying, but is not highly seasoned.�

  �I have it,� she said. �It is a little new but exactly as you describe.�

  This sausage was for Bobby.

  But you do not say that you buy sausages for a dog in Italy where the worst crime is to be considered a fool and many people go hungry. You may give expensive sausage to a dog before a man who works for his living and knows what a dog goes through in water in cold weather. But you do not buy them, stating your purpose in possessing them, unless you are a fool, or a millionaire from the war and from after.

  The Colonel paid for the wrapped-up package and proceeded on through the market inhaling the smell of roasted coffee and looking at the amount of fat on each carcass in the butcher section, as though he were enjoying the Dutch painters, whose names no one remembers, who painted, in perfection of detail, all things you shot, or that were eatable.

  A market is the closest thing to a good museum like the Prado or as the Accademia is now, the Colonel thought.

  He took a short cut, and was at the fish-market.

  In the market, spread on the slippery stone floor, or in their baskets, or their rope-handled boxes, were the heavy, gray-green lobsters with their magenta overtones that presaged their death in boiling water. They have all been captured by treachery, the Colonel thought, and their claws are pegged.

  There were the small soles, and there were a few alba-core and bonito. These last, the Colonel thought, looked like boat-tailed bullets, dignified in death, and with the huge eye of the pelagic fish.

  They were not made to be caught except for their voraciousness. The poor sole exists, in shallow water, to feed man. But these other roving bullets, in their great bands, live in blue water and travel through all oceans and all seas.

  A nickel for your thoughts now, he thought. Let�s see what else they have.

  There were many eels, alive and no longer confident in their eeldom. There were fine prawns that could make a scampi brochetto spitted and broiled on a rapier-like instrument that could be used as a Brooklyn icepick. There were medium sized shrimp, gray and opalescent, a
waiting their turn, too, for the boiling water and their immortality, to have their shucked carcasses float out easily on an ebb tide on the Grand Canal.

  The speedy shrimp, the Colonel thought, with tentacles longer than the mustaches of that old Japanese admiral, comes here now to die for our benefit. Oh Christian shrimp, he thought, master of retreat, and with your wonderful intelligence service in those two light whips, why did they not teach you about nets and that lights are dangerous?

  Must have been some slip-up, he thought.

  Now he looked at the many small crustaceans, the razor-edge clams you only should eat raw if you had your typhoid shots up to date, and all the small delectables.

  He went past these, stopping to ask one seller where his clams came from. They came from a good place, without sewerage and the Colonel asked to have six opened. He drank the juice and cut the clam out, cutting close against the shell with the curved knife the man handed him. The man had handed him the knife because he knew from experience the Colonel cut closer to the shell than he had been taught to cut.

  The Colonel paid him the pittance that they cost, which must have been much greater than the pittance those received who caught them, and he thought, now I must see the stream and canal fishes and get back to the hotel.

  CHAPTER XXIII

  THE Colonel arrived at the lobby of the Hotel Gritti-Palace. His gondolieres were paid off and, now, inside the hotel, there was no wind.

  It had taken two men to bring the gondola up the Grand Canal from the market. They had both worked hard, and he had paid them what it was worth, and some more.

  �Are there any calls for me?� he asked the concierge, who was now in attendance.

  The concierge was light, fast, sharp-faced, intelligent and polite, always, without subservience. He wore the crossed keys of his office on the lapels of his blue uniform without ostentation. He was the concierge. It is a rank very close to that of Captain, the Colonel thought. An officer and not a Gentleman. Make it top sergeant in the old days; except he�s dealing always with the brass.

  �My lady has called twice,� the concierge said in English. Or whatever that language should be called we all speak, the Colonel thought. Leave it at English. That is about what they have left. They should be allowed to keep the name of the language. Cripps will probably ration it shortly anyway.

  �Please put me through to her at once,� he told the concierge.