“I’m from Alabama, and you?”
“Czechoslovakia.”
George had a sudden urge to tell her his life story The martinis and the wine had something to do with it. He told her about his father and his brickyard. George’s mother had died of cancer, and his bereaved father thereupon married a dancer. He died soon after, a happy man. He had a heart attack on a houseboat, where he spent Saturdays and Sundays copulating like a teenager from dawn till dusk, the few Saturdays and Sundays he had left to live. But neither George nor his father had ever been in love.
George told her he was twenty-two, and how after graduation from high school he had joined the United States Army. He didn’t know why—at least not until this morning, when he thought that maybe what his minister used to say wasn’t all nonsense, and maybe there was some truth in what he said about the inscrutable ways of God’s providence. Because ever since he laid eyes on Heloise for the first time, all aquiver in her high-heeled evening shoes (he didn’t say this to her, and in fact he wondered why she was wearing evening shoes), he knew at last why he was in Lebanon. If she had been Jewish, he would have joined the Israeli army at once. If she had been an Arab or a Russian, he would have been just as willing to serve in Libya or in the Carpathians. All he needed was to look at her for the rest of his days. He understood at last that he had not come all this way to save Lebanon from the seventh invasion of the Jews or to turn back the thirteenth revolution of the Christians. Nor was he there to be the object of the paranoia of the brothers of their brothers. The only reason he was there was to avoid the terrible misfortune of Heloise suddenly disappearing—-like a light going out in an instant. All the light in the world. He had at long last understood. There had been another reason too, even before this wonderful meeting: to save Harry’s Bar and wonderful Harry as well.
“Harry!” he shouted. “The check!”
Harry came over with a sheet of paper in his hand. This is what it said:
Dear Pvt. Smith,
As of yesterday you owed me sixteen thousand
dollars, and you still owe it to me. But today, if
you don’t mind, I want you to be my guest.
Harry Cipriani
Harry did not usually look at women customers for their beauty, but he too was struck by Heloise, and made what was a totally unusual gesture for him. The verb treat was not in his vocabulary But Harry thought that at a time when his best-looking customers were Arafat Jr. and Qaddafi 111, a woman like this deserved special treatment.
Private Smith looked Harry in the eye and had trouble getting up from the table, because he was very tired and he had had quite a bit to drink.
‘‘You’re a great man, Harry!’’ he said. “Would you have a room?”
“Sure, there’s one free on the top floor.”
“I want it now!”
“How long will you be staying?”
“How long do you think?”
“I rent rooms for a minimum of two weeks, although you’re free to leave even after an hour.”
“Then I’ll stay two weeks.”
“Fine, Private Smith. I’ll show you to the room. Any luggage?”
“No luggage. Just her.”
George turned to Heloise and smiled. The smile she gave him back was indescribable; it was sadder than sadness itself. That was when he realized he was terribly in love.
END OF CHAPTER THREE
INTERMEZZO
BETWEEN CHAPTERS THREE AND FOUR
Dear Abelard,
The advantage the author has over the reader is that he knows everything his characters do, and he can decide what to tell and what not to tell The reader has to settle for whatever the author thinks he should know.
The reason I say this is that, knowing your erotic penchant, I’m sure you have already turned ahead in the book to see what happened when our heroes, Heloise and George, went into the room on the top floor over Harry’s Bar, The truth of the matter is that even I don’t know everything they did. And words alone would not suffice. At the very least I would have to borrow images, sounds, words, and deeds from my film-director brother-in-law. He is famous for his erotic movies, and the experts consider him tops in the field.
I really hope that someday this story is filmed; then we can see all the things 1 haven’t described. What I can tell you is that everything I know I heard from Harry in Beirut. He had to keep George’s presence a secret from his wife. She would not have approved, because the whole family knew George never paid his bill. So Harry told his wife that he rented the room first to the Tolmezzo Mountain-Climbing Association, then to touring drummers from Detroit, the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, and finally Arafat Jr, with four odalisques. Harry had to say something to account for all the noise and laughter that rang down four stories from the room where George and Heloise were staying. Sometimes you could even hear them over all the commotion in the bar, which happened to be full of Ameri. can sailors at the time, because the Sixth Fleet was on shore leave. One evening an armoire fell over with such a crash that the lights downstairs went out. Sitting at the bar was Count Guillon, a handsome aristocrat from Treviso who was totally deaf. He pointed to the ceiling and winked. “Mice!”
Before retiring for the night, Harry would put fourteen bottles of cabernet outside the door of the room, two bottles of port, half a dozen shrimp sandwiches and half a dozen chicken. And he would remove the dirty dishes from the day before. Occasionally he listened for further sound from the room, but for some reason all he ever heard was joyous laughter. Things went on like that for two weeks.
One day the MPs came looking for a certain Private George Smith. Harry did not want to lose his license, so he said he didn’t know the man; he’d never even seen him. George had been reported missing in action, and his aunt in Alabama, his mother’s sister and a war widow herself, had been duly notified, it had been recommended that George be awarded the highest honor given to US soldiers shot down by Radical Party snipers.
The formalities were unusually rapid, because they wanted to have the ceremony before the gubernatorial primaries; it was meant to give a touch of class to the incumbent’s campaign.
I have something else to say about Harry’s hearing George and Heloise laugh, That’s what makes me think there was something very special about them. Laughter is not the usual way men and women express their utter happiness at the culminating moment of you-know-what. They usually groan or wail or moan. And it is generally believed that the weepier the moan, the greater the satisfaction. But I’ve never been altogether convinced that was true. And the proof is that when George and Heloise came to climax, instead of moaning the way most people do, they laughed with joy. That’s what 1 think the laughter Harry heard was probably about.
I’m not joking when I tell you something I actually witnessed when my father and I were running a hotel in Asolo. A lucious South American woman and a nobleman from Milan occasionally came to stay. They would go to their room, and after a while it was impossible to decide whether the noise that could even be heard in the lobby of the Sole Hotel a mile away was the South American woman cooing with love or a hefty contralto warming up her vocal cords.
They came rather often, and soon the whole town knew about their audio performance. When they came through the door of the hotel, the bar would already be full of fans hoping to make a night of it with a cup of coffee. After a few minutes of silent preliminaries, the sounds would start up. One listener was an elderly Greek teacher and a music lover, and when the couple upstairs started their concertizing, he would exclaim to himself: “Sublime, marvelous. What resonance!”
The first act usually lasted about an hour, and then the audience would take a stroll in the garden and comment on the performance. When the Milanese nobleman made his rather bewildered way down the stairs after the second act, he would often be greeted by applause and congratulations. One afternoon old Signora Noemi, a charming centenarian accompanied by her eighty-year-old daughter, even tried to give him a kis
s.
There must have been a terrific struggle in that room—I mean the room that George and Heloise shared—because Harry told me it took two architects, seventeen carpenters, a plumber, and an electrician more than two months to get everything back in order. Which made George’s bill that much higher.
END OF THE INTERMEZZO BETWEEN CHAPTERS THREE AND FOUR
CHAPTER FOUR
In which George and Heloise finally leave the room and go out into the world.
About ten o’clock one morning, exactly two weeks after George rented the room, the two of them came down the stairs and walked into the bar. Harry greeted them quite naturally and asked if they would like some coffee. George ordered double coffee for two.
George and Heloise seemed perfectly happy, to judge by their incredibly radiant glances. They didn’t utter a word the whole time they sat in the bar; they were absorbed in thought.
Heloise had lost a bit of her tan, and George’s face seemed drawn but rested, Harry continued in silence to polish his gleaming counter. He lifted the bottles one by one, dusted them, and put them back.
George got up^ and said, “Harry, we’re leaving. Would you get me the bill?”
“Here it is. 1 drew it up in advance.” He set the bill in front of George.
George signed it and told Harry to send it to his wealthy aunt in Alabama. “Ill write down the address for you.”
Harry said that he already had the address. He didn’t think it proper to forward the bill. He didn’t even have the heart to tell George that he had been reported killed in action.
“Thanks for everything, Harry See you soon.”
“Good-bye, Private Smith. Good-bye, madam.” Harry held the door for them, and there was a sudden gust of very dry torrid air.
George and Heloise stepped out into the dusty street. There was an unearthly calm, as if the city had suddenly died. The only sound was a car horn in the distance, and then silence. George put his arm around Heloise’s waist, and the two of them slowly ambled down the street. When they got to the corner, George noticed a jeep parked across the street. There was an American soldier at the wheel. George went over to him and said, “Hi, Tom.”
“Hi, George,” the soldier replied.
“Do you mind if I take the jeep, buddy?”
“When will 1 get it back?”
“Maybe never.”
“OK.” Tom owed George a lot of favors. “Whenever you like.”
Tom got out of the jeep, bowed to George, and helped Heloise get in.
“She’s beautiful,” Tom said.
“Forget it.” George smiled.
“See you soon.”
George turned the key and the engine started to belch. He put it into first gear, and the jeep moved forward, raising a cloud of dust behind. They took the first right and headed for the hills. Tom ran to the corner and watched them drive away until the cloud of dust behind them disappeared on the far horizon.
END OF CHAPTER FOUR
INTERMEZZO
BETWEEN CHAPTERS FOUR AND FIVE
Dear Abelard,
As I said before, the author’s great advantage is that he knows exactly what his characters are doing, and he can choose what to tell and what not to tell. But there is no denying that the reader may have an even greater advantage. He can stop reading whenever he wants to, regretting only that he has wasted his money.
But you have always had so little money that you would probably have nothing to do except go on reading, even if you wanted to stop. That’s why i am writing to you, I certainly wouldn’t ask you for advice or suggestions about what George and Heloise should do, because I know perfectly well what they are going to do. 1 just wanted to draw your attention to a couple of things that occurred to me as I was narrating this very unusual love story. You will have noticed that Heloise took it for granted that George would pay for dinner and the hotel. That certainly wouldn’t go down well with the feminists, because no self-respecting women’s-libber would accept such a patently ambiguous situa-tion.
My sister-in-law Ornella, for example, is not, strictly speaking, a feminist. She has reasons of her own for insisting that she is liberated, though she really isn’t. She would have insisted on paying her share of the bill, and that would have put Harry in the embarrassing position of taking cash payment for only half the check. The funny part is that if my sister-in-law had been in Heloise’s place, especially after a couple of drinks, she would have been perfectly happy to indulge in erotic games with George. But her mania for paying her own way would have ruined everything before it even started. 1 don’t know if you remember how beautiful my sister-in-law is—you always seem rather intimidated around my relatives; but believe me, she is one of the most beautiful women 1 have ever desired. But she has one terrible defect: she won’t let anyone pay for her. Otherwise she might have become very rich by now, even richer than my cousin Wanda, provided of course that my cousin had become a belly dancer in the Tan. giers souk instead of a Latin teacher in Verona.
In my short life I have met women far less attractive who have been paid a great deal of money even when they claimed to be making love just for the sake of love. Ever since the days when whorehouses were legal, I have had the utmost respect for women who calmly offer a remedy for lust in exchange for money. When I was a youth, there were marvelous professionals who could satisfy any man who ended up between their legs. You are too young to remember them, but those houses were full of human warmth and kindness. If you never knew them you have missed out on something really important in terms of the spirit and the flesh alike.
We used to play tricks to frighten the priests and old married gentlemen who came on the sly, like setting off the alarm bell that meant the police were about to raid. But pranks aside, believe me when I say that a night spent there, and maybe the next morning as well, with the occasional game of billiards thrown in, was a human experience I wouldn’t have missed for all the tea in China.
We set off the alarm bell hundreds of times, but in all those years I never saw the police come even once.
END OF THE INTERMEZZO BETWEEN CHAPTERS FOUR AND FIVE
CHAPTER FIVE
In which Tom Margitai has some doubts and George and Heloise stop to rest on their journey by jeep.
Private Tom Margitai decided to stay and watch as the cloud of dust raised by the jeep slowly grew smaller on the horizon and finally vanished completely.
Watching things until the very end was a mania of Tom’s, and every time he did so, he had the same thought: if he didn’t watch till the end, he would not live long enough to have another chance to do it again. He couldn’t have cared less about the jeep; it was already the fourth he had lost that week. The first two blew up while he was off buying cigarettes; the third one blew a tire, so he left it on the side of the road. Every time he went back to headquarters to get another one, the duty officer had nothing to say He simply gave a weary nod by way of indicating that Tom could take his pick of the enormous collection that was always parked on the wharf at the port. For that matter, Tom was glad to have done George a favor, because the last time they’d gone to Harry’s Bar, George had sponsored ten rounds of Bellinis, the most expensive drink you could order there. Tom of course knew that George had been reported killed in action. At first he was sorry he hadn’t said something to his friend, but then he decided that it was probably just as well he hadn’t, seeing the company George was in. In fact, he decided then and there that he wouldn’t tell a soul he had seen George on the street that morning, and in the best of health, to judge by the way he looked.
Meanwhile, George was driving happily along the twisting curves of the hills. The sky was a deep blue, the kind you often have in Lebanon, and the air turned cooler as they gradually went up. Just around a curve he saw a beautiful sloping meadow dotted with cedar trees. He pulled up on the side of the road and looked in the rear for the survival supplies that every good soldier of the United States of America ought to carry with him in a vehicle.
He found them in a plastic bag. There was canned meat, crackers, a tin of sardines, a can of ham, a can of spinach and another one of beans, two cans of Coca-Cola, and six aspirins. There was also a bottle of Booth’s gin, which was not standard issue but must have been part of Tom’s unfailing personal stock. George gave silent thanks to Tom and asked Heloise, “Shall we have a bite?”
She smiled at him. The sadness was gone from Heloise’s face. Her mouth opened to reveal her sparkling teeth, and her eyes, deep turquoise now, squeezed shut to share in the joyous delight of her face. George felt as if he had been physically struck by a violent, impulsive rush of affection. He looked at her too, in the same way, and then he gave her a very tender kiss, his lips barely brushing against hers.
He took the bag out of the jeep, and some ten yards away he sat down on the sloping green meadow. She got out and followed him, moving unsteadily on the high heels of her evening shoes, the ones she wore the first time they met, the shoes that did so much to heighten that incredible quivering stride of hers. As he watched her approach, a small gust of wind lifted some dry leaves from the ground. It moved forward in that strange, bizarre way that little whirlwinds have in the grasslands in North Africa, and it came toward her, the only movement in the still afternoon air. The little whirlwind lingered a moment at Heloise’s side. The leaves it had sucked up from the ground spun lightly and rapidly in a shaft at its center. Then the dust devil decided to hit her, slightly disturbing the shreds of her dress and her long black hair, which now seemed to have a brighter sheen, perhaps from happiness.
It seemed to George—indeed, he was absolutely sure—-that nature had marshaled all the delicacy it could just to give Heloise an exquisitely tender caress.
END OF CHAPTER FIVE
INTERMEZZO
BETWEEN CHAPTERS FIVE AND SIX
Heloise and Bellinis Page 2