Heloise and Bellinis

by Harry Cipriani

  At three in the afternoon on August 9, General John Custer, commander in chief of the Expeditionary Peace Corps of the United States of America in Lebanon, was puffing a Romeo and Juliet at the desk of what had been the command room. Behind him a smiling portrait of President Reagan II looked over the heads of the visitors who usually entered that room. A door to his right led to the private bathroom, which was not in service because there had been no water for a week. The main door in front of him was closed, and there was an enormous, gaping hole in the wall to his left— the result of tank shelling by the Christian Liberation forces—where his secretary Suzy’s desk had been until two days before. The hole in the fourth-floor wall pro-vided the general with an unobstructed view of the tumultuous traffic along the Avenue des Anglais, and as usual the chaotic noise was loud and clear.

  Custer had just come back to the office after lunching on marvelous green cannelloni at Harry’s Bar. He had spent an amusing half-hour admiring Harry’s skill in preparing fifteen martinis at once. The cigar was an after-lunch gift from Arafat Jr., who was always well supplied with original Cuban products.

  General Custer was at peace with himself. In a phone conversation a few minutes earlier, he had offered his condolences to the general in command of the Italian expeditionary corps, who was grieving because a missile had blown up his arsenal. Fortunately no one had been on guard at the time, so there were no casualties. Nice fellows those Italians, Custer thought, but they did take everything too seriously Custer was a Vietnam veteran and knew that what was essential in the military was to do only what was … essential. By following this rule he had become a highly respected officer, and what’s more, he was still alive after all those years at war.

  There was a knock on the door. ‘‘Come in!” he said.

  ‘‘Lieutenant Eyland reporting, sir/”

  He couldn’t stand this Ryland—a little chap with gold-rimmed glasses who looked like a bookkeeper— and forever fretted in disapproval of his work. Among other things, Ryland always picked the worst moment to arrive, and every time he appeared he brought bad news. It was Custer’s impression that Ryland wore an impassive expression on his face to mask the sadistic pleasure he took in announcing catastrophe.

  “What is it?’ Custer asked impatiently.

  “May I call in Private Tom Margitai? He has something interesting to report, General, sir.”

  “What is it about?”

  “Private George Smith.”

  “They found him.”

  “Eh?”

  “Yes sir, General.”

  “Alive?”

  “Yes sir, General.”

  “Wounded?”

  “Seems not, sir.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “May I call Private Margitai in now, sir?”

  “Come in!”

  Tom came in followed by two military police.

  “Who are you?” General Custer asked them.

  “Sergeant Nobel and Sergeant Amundsen, sir.”

  “Speak up.”

  “We’re responsible for the jeeps in the vehicle pool, and- we noticed that Private Tom Margitai checked out five jeeps in less than a week.”

  “What do you have to say for yourself?” the general asked Tom.

  “Two of them blew up, sir, one had a flat, and I’m driving the fifth one, sir.”

  “So, what’s the problem?” the general asked.

  “The fourth jeep, sir,” Amundsen muttered.

  “What fourth jeep?” It suddenly dawned on him then that one jeep was missing from Tom Margitai’s story “What happened to jeep number four?”

  “1 lent it to Private George Smith,” Tom replied reluctantly. “He needed it.”

  “When?”

  The general started feeling a bit uncomfortable. Something seemed to be out of kilter.

  “July twenty-eighth, sir.”

  “But Smith died on July nineteenth!” Custer ex-

  There were two possibilities, he thought. Either this Margitai was lying because he sold the jeep, or they had made one of the biggest blunders of the war.

  He had received a sympathy telefax from the President the day before, and he himself had penned a handwritten letter to Smith’s aunt. If he was still alive, it could mean the end of Custer’s career and early pension.

  “If youVe made this whole thing up, I’ll put you behind bars for the rest of your life!”

  Tom swallowed with difficulty and then said, ‘T assure you, General, sir, I saw George Smith on July twenty-eighth near Harry’s Bar. He asked me for the jeep, and 1 gave it to him. I thought he was with military intelligence, so 1 didn’t ask any questions.”

  “Was he alone?” the general asked,

  “No sir.”

  “Whom.was he with?”

  “A woman.”

  ‘Ah!”

  “A real looker, excuse me, sir.”

  Custer remained silent for more than a minute, his head in his hands and his elbows resting on the table. Then he said: “Listen, Private Margitai. If you don’t bring Private George Smith back here within twenty-four hours, together with your goddam jeep and this beautiful girl, IT1 have you up for court martial on grand larceny Twenty years In jail, minimum. Now get out!”

  “Yes sir, General, sir.”

  Tom went out in the custody of Nobel and Amundsen.

  “What are you looking at?” Custer yelled at Ryland.

  Eyland clicked his heels and got out as fast as he could, leaving poor General Custer frowning with terrible thoughts.

  The general suddenly stood up and went out, slamming the door behind him. He decided he would go to Suzy’s. She would console him. He got behind the wheel of the first jeep he found in the courtyard and roared past the guard, who disappeared in the dust he raised in passing.

  Near the Avenue de la Liberté he got caught in a horrible traffic jam. He was stuck for half an hour trying to get rid of a gang of kids who wanted to trade him pistol bullets for chocolate bars. He finally reached the outskirts of Beirut and drove past a row of little houses on a little cedar-lined street. He drew up outside a little white villa, got out of the jeep, and rang the bell. Suzy opened the door. She had come from the swimming pool behind the house and was wearing a beach robe. A large breast, still moist, was visible between its pink lapels. They embraced, and Suzy asked, “Whafs the matter, General? You look depressed/”

  He took her arm and drew her into the garden.

  John Custer sank into a cane chair and said, “Get me a whiskey sour, will you?”

  Suzy prepared a giant whiskey sour with lots of ice, sat down beside him, and softly caressed his head. She listened patiently to the whole story that threatened to blow up in his face.

  END OF CHAPTER SEVEN

  INTERMEZZO

  BETWEEN CHAPTERS SEVEN AND EIGHT

  Dear Abelard,

  You’ll have to admit that the reason I’ve got you to read this far is mainly your indolence, not to mention how irresistibly you are drawn by the subtle fascination of investigating, imagining, and reading any detail concerning what is ultimately the subject nearest to your heart: in a word, sex. But I have already told you that this sort of intimate detail was rarely if ever included in what I was told.

  I can assure you, however, that George and Heloise—at least so I was told—made love practically every time they had a chance, which is to say any time they were alone long enough to attend to the almost spasmodic attraction that constantly brought them together.

  That is all I can tell you for now. Besides, I am sure that their relations involved the normal abnormalities of normal love affairs. And I consider it pointless to discuss that sort ofthing. I have never understood, for example, the point of basing the main theme of a film plot on the extremely boring and banal sexual performance of an aging Marlon Brando with a little brunette whose big hairy pubic triangle is easier for me to remember than her name. The movie was called Last Tango in Paris for purely contingent reasons, to make it
seem Art Deco. Ill tell you quite frankly that I am afraid I actually missed what everyone told me was the most interesting scene, the butter scene, because I fell fast asleep right after the first exhausting carnal encounter, when Marlon Brando, who shouldn’t have been subjected to that kind of stress at his age, made love standing up in his raincoat with the little brunette, who still had her fur coat on.

  So there you have it. There are some things I prefer not to write about, though if anyone who lives for sex or earns a living from it should read this book and be curious to learn the details of what George and Heloise actually did together, I might be willing to oblige him— but only orally, just to teach him a thing or two that would convince him at once that the least he should do is change his business.

  Getting back to the origin of Harry’s Bar—even you have probably read that it was founded in Venice in 1931 by Giuseppe Cipriani, that he was my father, and that he was a genius in his line. And he probably would have been a genius in any other line he might have gone into, but he was not a genius in that particular field of endeavor known as high finance—anything but. It is true that I too, for example, am clearly a product of one kind of genius he had, because if he hadn’t had a son, Harry’s Bar would not have continued to exist, at least not in the same way we are trying to run it. It would have become one more imitation of all the poor imita-tions there are around the world. As his son 1 should naturally have turned out to be the opposite of him; that is to say, I should have at least had a talent for being either very poor or very rich. This is the quality that, especially in recent years, has distinguished the igure of every honest and dishonest financier alike.

  Instead, at least so far, I don’t think there has been any substantial change in what I have.

  What I am trying to tell you is that every partner our family has ever had has always cheated us in a very partnerly fashion—except for Harry Pickering, the man who financed Harry’s Bar at the start. That was after he repaid a loan my father had given him after the crash in 1929, a loan without any collateral or guarantee, offered so that Pickering could get back to America.

  Let me give you one example: my own. For many years I was an unpaid employee of my father’s partners, and the only tangible recompense I received in the end was a fly-fishing rod manufactured by Hardy, the famous English company. The rod was made of Holy-coona, a material that is only slightly less expensive than Palakoona, and I tried in vain to sell it for the modest sum of $100,000, which is what I thought I deserved for ten years of honest work. What irritated me most in the whole business is that, instead of giving me the finest rod available, they gave me one that when you take a close look is really quite mediocre.

  But don’t let that surprise you, because this kind of behavior was part and parcel of the modus operandi of the people who became my father’s partners when he built the hotel on the Giudecca island in Venice. To give you another example: One of the lady partners decided to build herself a yacht designed by a great English marine architect. It seemed a little expensive, even if she was a millionaire, so she gave orders for it to be shortened a few feet to save a hundred thousand dollars or so. This made the yacht too short for the high seas, and every time she crossed the ocean there was a serious risk of sinking.

  I also remember that this lady took a personal interest in provisioning the crew before every cruise, usually in the company of her second husband, an aging Czech gigolo and former RAF pilot. They would question me very carefully about the price of bottled beer, for example. They always preferred the brands that gave a deposit back to the slightly more expensive no-return brands. And they never ordered more than twenty bottles or so at a time, with a saving of maybe a couple of dollars. She thought very highly of me as a specialist in writing telegrams, because I often saved her a few words without changing the meaning of the messages. I have met a lot of poor people in my life, including you, the poorest of them all, but nobody whose poverty was worse than that of a great many rich people.

  END OF THE INTERMEZZO BETWEEN CHAPTERS SEVEN AND EIGHT

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  In which General Custer continues his visit to Suzy, his secretary.

  Suzy fixed herself a glass full of gin and tonic and sat on a small sofa by the general.

  “So George Smith is alive?”

  ‘Apparently alive and kicking.”

  “Where has he been all this time?”

  “With some woman/”

  “Where?”

  “I don’t know/”

  Suzy suddenly broke out in the silvery laugh that had so often put him in a good humor. This time, however, it did not remove the worried expression from his face.

  “So he’s really not dead!”

  “No,” he replied gloomily.

  “Not even wounded?”

  “No.”

  “What are you going to do now?” Suzy asked.

  “Hm. IVe got to think. In any case, we’ve got to find him. Then well see.”

  “You mean, you still don’t know where he is?”

  “No.”

  “Who’s looking for him?”

  “Ryland.”

  “Oh Lord!”

  “Exactly!”

  Custer gulped down the rest of his whiskey sour. Suzy got up to fix him another. She thought he needed it. She came back and, handing it to him, said, “Darling!”

  Suzy was wonderful. Custer always remembered the day she first knocked on the door of his office. He had said, “Yes,” and she poked her head around the half-open door and asked, “May I come in?”

  A vision, he thought. Maybe he was hallucinating. Then when she was all the way into the room, and he had taken in the rest of that marvelous body, he was moved to stand up. Hats off to beauty! And the senses!

  He asked: “Whom do 1 have the pleasure … ?”

  “The pleasure and honor are all mine, General Custer. I’m your new secretary. My name is Suzanne Sweet.” Two hours later they were at her house sipping whiskey at poolside. He did not go back to headquarters until the following day

  He had heard all kinds of things about her. She had been to bed with almost everyone in the United States Army She did, however, have one great gift. When you were with her, she made you forget the past at once, and you felt that as far as she was concerned, you were the only man in the whole world. A splendid creature.

  He called her the faithless faithful Suzanne. As long as you blotted out the constant suspicion of betrayal, you could be perfectly happy with her. And he was— when he wasn’t overwhelmed by devastating waves of jealousy

  “Darling!” Suzy had said. And at that moment he was sure that her love was true, and that she truly understood him.

  “I have to get back to headquarters.” Custer said,

  “I’ll come too.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Thanks for what? This is when you really need a secretary!”

  She dressed quickly in front of him. While he looked at her naked body, he thought of the prudish-ness of his wife, a Swiss woman he hadn’t once in all their years seen with her girdle off. He silently cursed Ryland and tenderly kissed Suzy’s cheek as they walked to the door.

  They both got into the jeep. She slipped behind the wheel, backed out smoothly, and headed for town.

  END OF CHAPTER EIGHT

  INTERMEZZO

  BETWEEN CHAPTERS EIGHT AND NINE

  Dear Abelard,

  To give you some relief after so much abstinence, let me try to remind you what we were like—I won’t say sexually, but epidermaliy at least—in the 1940s. Or rather, after 1945, the famous year of liberation, when millions of people still drew strength of spirit from looking to a magic future of miracles in a free and peaceful world without war or coniict. Everyone, and 1 mean everyone, was discovering the joy of loving others, forgetful of the fact that some years earlier a guy by the name of God had commanded, “Love thy neighbor as thyself.” Except Fascists—although that had not, of course, been spelled out.

&nbs
p; I remember from those days a friend of mine named Giorgio, a country gentleman with thick black hair slicked back with brilliantine who looked something like Rudolph Valentino and who waltzed backward like nobody else in the world. He used to invite us to his house every night, my sister and me and other friends. We used to tell my mother that we were going to Gior-gio’s to study, though she never believed us. She was rightly suspicious by nature, because for many years she had waited up nights in Verona for my railway engineer grandfather, who often came home at dawn quite soused and smelling of talcum powder after an evening of cheer in some house of pleasure. The smell of talcum powder lingered for days after. Of course, he grumbled that he had been up all night at a secret meeting of clandestine Socialists.

  I discovered the existence of cabernet, which 1 guzzled lying on the magnificent sofas in Giorgio’s house, and with the lights down low, I had little trouble sliding my hand under the sweater of a beautiful girl named Lia. At the same time, I tried to get used to the electrifying sensation of joining my tongue to hers. Getting my other hand under her skirt was out of the question. Partly it was because, by the time I got past the top of her slip and the obstruction of the needless bra and finally managed to brush the tip of my finger against one of her little nipples—wondering whether it really was the nipple or a large mole—Lia would be ashamed to have let things go so far and usually shoved me away. Her face would be red with emotion and frustrated desire. She would get up from the sofa nervously and put a record on the modern American record-player, while i, sated with conquest, gulped down the other half of the bottle. I would go out into the narrow streets of Venice, staggering slightly, my head and heart full of wonderful feelings and very noble intentions.

  More marriages were arranged in Giorgio’s house than in any other place I know—including my own. Giorgio’s is where I decided to marry my wonderful companion in life, the sister of my sister-in-law Ornella, and that’s where Giorgio’s own marriage and a host of others were decided as well. And I will never forget one evening when two people who had never seen each other before decided they were made for each other, just because she (her name was Patrizia) suddenly discovered that he (his name was Gigi) danced the boogie-woogie like, as we said in those days, a god.