“Yes sir”
‘And another thing, Margitai!”
“Yes sir.”
“Don’t lose them!” The general smiled,
“No chance, sir.”
“Well, well, well, well,” Custer said, sinking contentedly against the back of his chair. Meanwhile Heloise had taken the chair Suzy offered her
“Where did they capture you?” Custer asked George.
“Hm, outside Harry’s Bar”
“What impudence!” the general exclaimed. ‘And where did they take you?”
“To a village.”
‘Ah!”
“We had nothing to eat or drink for four days,” said George, playing along,
“Swine!” said Custer as he brought his fist down on the table.
“Then we managed to escape,” George said. “This lady and myself.”
“Well, well, well, well,” Custer said.
“They chased us across the desert for days and days.”
“You don’t say?”
“it was rough.” George said, “but we saved the jeep.”
“Well done!”
‘And today we found Margitai and the others.”
“Is there anything you need?”
Td like to let my aunt in Alabama know I’m OK.”
“Already done,” Custer said.
“Thank you, sir.”
“1 have also faxed the President. He is looking forward to seeing you in Washington and congratulating you himself—and he wants to give you the Medal of Honor personally”
“1 don’t deserve it.” George said.
“That’s up to us to decide.” said Custer, cutting him short. And’ then he added: “1 suggest we go out and celebrate. What do you say?”
“It sounds great to me,” said Suzy.
“Let’s go to Harry’s Bar,” Custer said as he stood up.
They all went out, Suzy leading the way, then Heloise, and finally Custer and George. Custer put his arm around George’s shoulder, while his eyes were drawn irresistibly to Heloise’s quivering gluteals, as she walked ahead of him aquiver as usual and slightly unsteady on her dusty, high-heeled, black patent leather evening shoes.
END OF CHAPTER TEN
INTERMEZZO
BETWEEN CHAPTERS TEN AND ELEVEN
Dear Abelard,
I have already mentioned the grim castle in Somerset where my father sent me one winter in the early 1950s to study English, a language you almost have to know in my business.
The owner of this castle was a mild-mannered, very British-looking gentleman, one of those people they use in television advertisements for Scotch whisky. His salient features were a ruddy complexion, a set of whiskers that grew right up to his eyes, and two buckteeth, the kind people sometimes end up with if they were thumbsuckers as babies.
His helpmate was about twenty years younger than he, a little brunette who wasn’t half bad. There was an odd, intermittent gasp in her laugh that might have been quite appropriate in certain interesting situations.
There was also a cook. Her distinguishing feature was her missing denture and her boundless love for the song “You Belong to Me.” which she was forever playing on a little phonograph in the kitchen. She was very good at enriching Campbell’s soups with a few drops of cream. She too was caught up in the lively atmosphere of the manor and busied herself at night by giving dazzling parties in her room, to which she invited the sta-bleboys and the men and women servants of the house.
The dining room had three walls of austere walnut wainscot, and the fourth wall consisted of a magnificent window overlooking the grounds. The dining-room table was dominated by a huge cylindrical cactus, from which two enormous red glasses dangled on a red ribbon. The phallic reference was clear to everyone.
That is where I idled away three short months one bitter-cold English winter. Occasionally a letter would come from my father. He had only gone to sixth grade in Germany before the First World War, but when it came to sending stern yet loving instructions, he wrote simple, extremely effective prose. To tell the truth, I did not receive very many of these missives in my time, because I was more obedient than reprobate as a son; but when they came, they always filled me with heavy yet salutary feelings of guilt.
After receiving one of these letters, I decided to move to London, where I lived the first three days on the proceeds of twelve country-fresh eggs that I had brought from Somerset and sold to a buxom waitress. In London I shared a room with a Swedish girl, which is the main reason why I still have a strange accent when I speak English.
At that time my future career had still not been settled for me, though I already had my suspicions. Until I was nineteen, I had always considered my name a simple family oddity. My father had opened Harry’s Bar in Venice for business about a year before my mother brought me into the world. Both of them thought it was perfectly normal to call me Arrigo, even though 1 had no grandfathers or great-grandfathers of that name, and there had never been even a trace of an Arrigo anywhere in the family.
The English for Arrigo is Harry, and though it is perfectly ordinary for a bar to be named for a barman, it is quite exceptional that a boy be named for a bar. The fact that I was the only person in the world who had been named after a bar should at least have made me suspicious.
I finished high school in 1949, and we discussed as a family what I would do in the future. Discussed in a manner of speaking, because very little attention was paid to my opinions in these family gatherings. Personally I would have liked to become a race-car driver, but there was absolutely no place for that sort ofthing in either of the only two broad categories my father would allow: study or work.
ft was decided without further ado that I would study law at the University of Padua, partly because there was a law office over Harry’s Bar where I could work as a legal apprentice. I think the vicinity of the bar had some influence on my father’s decision. After all, he probably thought, if that doesn’t pan out, he can always come downstairs and work,
My life in those years is a dream that I have happily cherished all these years.
In our free time, and there was a lot of it in Padua, we played billiards. We went to the retired officers’ mess for lunch, not just because it was inexpensive, 150 lire, but mainly to try to date a couple of very blond waitresses who were the sole ornaments of that austere place. We were not concerned with the great social issues. Our leader, Tribuno, was a third-year medical student who sat himself down in the anatomy professor’s chair at the beginning of the first lecture of the academic year. When we had elections at school we used punches and shoves instead of votes to support our candidates. 1 don’t know if that was right or wrong, but it was certainly more congenial to the modest political capabilities of our brains. In the evening I usually dragged my drowsy twenty-year-old self to Harry’s Bar so my father could take a break. And that was how things went until exam time, without a care in the world.
The Foundations of Private Law was the first reef I encountered in law school. It was there that my legal career actually came to an end. I barely passed the exam. That was at three in the afternoon. At six o’clock I walked down the stairs from the law office and got up on the stool behind the cash register in Harry’s Bar.
END OF THE INTERMEZZO BETWEEN CHAPTERS TEN AND ELEVEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
In which Harry Cipriani wakes up on the wrong side of the bed and begins a new day,
Many historians have gone to a great deal of trouble to recount the deeds of the Prince of Conde. One of the best-known details is how incredibly calm he was the night before the battle of Rocroi. The Great Conde slept soundly through the night without a moment’s interruption. His admirers, however, have gone to any length to foster a cult of personality and they have almost always glossed over certain details that might actually have been extremely important. No one, for example, has ever told us what the prince ate for dinner that night before he went to bed. There is no way of knowing now, b
ut it seems doubtful that our hero had much more than a steak and a salad. If, for example, his orderly had arranged for the cook to prepare spareribs and sauerkraut, there is no doubt that the Spaniards would have fared better in the battle, and history might have taken an altogether different course.
Harry Cipriani, the owner of Harry’s Bar in Beirut, woke up about four in the morning. He was covered in perspiration and breathing heavily: A horrible dream had been tormenting him for an hour. The main character in his nightmare was Raspetti, the awful food critic who was the darling of the upwardly mobile classes.
Harry’s dream was that the Times’ Bryan Miller was having dinner and shouting across the room as he waved an enormous cockroach he said he found in his fish soup. Raspetti and four Michelin Guide inspectors were at the next table, and when they saw what was happening they burst out laughing. Several customers got up and walked out in disgust. And Harry, immobilized by shame, was stammering meaningless phrases.
Fortunately, he woke up at that point. His pasty mouth immediately reminded him of the previous night’s menu: beef stew and lyonnaise potatoes. And the bottle and a half of cabernet he had drunk was still gurgling in his stomach. He got up for a drink of water and to slow his heartbeat. His heart continued to pound even after he woke up from the nightmare.
He couldn’t get back to sleep, so at six o’clock he went out for the morning papers. By seven o’clock he had already downed five cups of coffee and was beginning to feel better, but he knew his day was ruined. He waited until the cleaning people came at seven-thirty and then began to go over the previous day’s receipts. Business was good. The Beirut bar was probably the most profitable after the ones in Venice and New York. The odd war that had been going on for years brought a great many people to Beirut—newspapermen, curiosity seekers, gunrunners, and a host of tourists as well. They crossed the Atlantic on War-Express charter flights for the excitement of experiencing a bombing. The main thrill of the tour was that you could buy the return ticket only in Beirut a few minutes before the return flight. There was deathly suspense in the air until the very last moment. And this last-ditch atmosphere substantially increased people’s willingness to spend. People who had money were happy to spend it all—who knows, they might die at any moment. People who didn’t have any money cheerfully used up all their credit on the assumption that death would cancel all debts. So the cash register rang and the lOUs mounted rapidly at Harry’s Bar. Harry was not too worried about the lOUs: his sister Karmel was a fine lawyer, and her specialty was bad-debt collection.
The doors of Harry’s Bar opened about ten o’clock in the morning. There were several different phases of a day at Harry’s. Kitchen activity was the main thing in the morning. The dining room was often empty then, and it was normal to hear the sounds of pots and pans and the rapid remarks the cooks exchanged as they got things ready for the day A customer wandered in from time to time. At that hour they usually ordered coffee or orange juice.
About eleven o’clock that particular morning—and it wasn’t the first time—-a tour leader opened both doors to show the dining room to a couple of dozen men and women who were visiting sanctuaries of all the religions. Harry’s Bar was one of them. More than once Harry had thought of installing a holy-wine fount by the door so that these pilgrims could dip their fingers and make the sign of the cross.
The regular customers usually turned up at eleven-thirty; they were the ones who boasted that they had attended the opening eight years before. A table was set aside for them every day Harry referred to them as the senators. They were not people whose presence attracted attention, but you noticed at once if they weren’t there. As the day went on, the small room, fifteen by thirty feet in all, began to take on a life of its own. This may have been the inmost secret of Harry’s Bar. It was the human spirit that dominated the place, but within the boundaries Harry laid down. They were the boundaries of civility, which had been passed down to Harry by his father, who had learned them from his grandfather, who in turn had tried to grasp everything his great-grandfather taught him.
Waves of feeling constantly rolled across the room and met without colliding, because they arose from the heart of what was best in people. Harry perceived the leitmotiv of this equilibrium as the enduring sound of a balanced and well-tempered harmony
If anyone or anything upset this harmony, Harry intervened at once. It wasn’t always easy, but things always got straightened out in the end. The life force came from everywhere: from the kitchen, where the cooks were under constant pressure; from the bar, where the waiters were attentive but relaxed in serving the customers; and from the reassuring presence of Harry himself, who shared their life from morning to night.
That day, there was still almost no one there at noon, when General Custer walked into the bar with George, Heloise, and Suzy
As usual Harry had accepted far more reservations than there were tables. He always did. Not for lucre, but just because he hated to say no. He found it an intolerable discourtesy to refuse someone a table.
The general walked in first, and Harry greeted him with the blend of natural courtesy and affection he would have shown a relative.
‘‘Harry, have you got a table?” Custer asked.
‘‘Take this one.” Harry led him to the left corner table, the best table in the house. Harry had already promised it to three different parties that morning on the telephone.
“Hello, Private Smith.” Harry turned to Heloise. “Hello, madam. And how are you?” he asked Suzy. Without another word Harry brought them four Bel-linis. This was the time of the year, August, when the peaches had a marvelous pink color and the Bellini was at its peak.
Whether it was thirst, the refreshing cool taste of the drink, or the very delicate fruit flavor that sweetly attenuated the tartness of the champagne, the fact remains that anyone with an unencumbered soul would have drunk Bellinis by the dozen,
A few minutes later other people began to arrive. Some of them were important people, and some of them were less important, but they all had one purpose in mind: to go to Harry’s Bar and see Harry The level of background noise gradually increased, but it was never unbearable, and you could always hear your companions, even when speaking softly
Almost the only thing the general talked about was the drinks and Harry
After half an hour, Suzy got up. “Shall we powder our noses?” she asked Heloise.
As soon as the two men were alone, Custer turned to George. “You goddam son of a bitch, where the hell were you?”
“Uh,” replied George, “with her.” and he nodded at Heloise’s vacant chair.
“But where?” Custer exclaimed.
“In a hotel.” George lied,
“In a goddam hotel! You spent two weeks in a goddam hotel,” Custer asked, “without even leaving the goddam room?”
“Yes.”
“With her?” This time Custer nodded at Heloise’s chair.
“Yes, sir.”
“For the glory and freedom of the United States of America! That’s the first time I’ve heard that one in all these years. In a hotel room for two weeks! Did you, by any chance, lose the key?”
“Uh, well, I didn’t remember where I’d put it.” George smiled.
“Listen,” Custer said, “before the ladies come back, I’ve got something to say to you. It will be a lot better for you if this business remains a totally personal goddam fact between us. 1 mean between you, me, and that goddam Ryland. It will be much better for you, for me, for goddam Ryland, and for the United States of America! Got that?”
“Yes sir, General.”
‘And stop saying ‘General’ all the time. You can call me the stupid general in command of the stupidest division of the great US Army!” Custer spoke in a low voice, but his words came out knife sharp in short bursts, and his face got redder and redder.
The two women reappeared in the doorway across the room. Custer gave George a hearty pat on the back and exclaimed, “I’m deligh
ted to be here with our hero!
Harry, four more Bellinis! Hi there, Arafat!” He waved at Arafat Jr., who was sitting two tables away.
Harry brought a tablecloth with the Bellinis and spread it out before them. “The kidney is marvelous today, General. You might like them sliced and sau-téed, and maybe some green asparagus with oil and vinegar.”
“That sounds great, Harry.” Custer said. He turned to the others. ‘And you?”
“That would be fine,” said Heloise.
“Me too,” said Suzy
“And George just loves kidneys, don’t you, George?” Custer asked.
“Yes sir.”
‘All right, Harry, kidney for four and a bottle of cabernet, your stock, please.”
“Very well, General.” Harry said and finished setting the table.
END OF CHAPTER ELEVEN
INTERMEZZO
BETWEEN CHAPTERS ELEVEN AND TWELVE
Dear Abelard,
I wouldn’t want you to misunderstand what I said the other day, that if Heloise had insisted on paying her share of the bill the first time they went to Harry’s Bar, she and George would never have had a love affair. The reason you do not understand me is that you are always determined at any cost to play the protector of the oppressed and exploited. As if the immanent order of things assigned women to that category. I am just trying to open your eyes.
What I am trying to tell you is this: Remember the other day, when you were looking under your girlfriend’s skirt to check the bodywork on her contraption, and with the most innocent air in the world she asked you to lend her three million lire? At that moment, when things couldn’t have been more delightful, the woman who is now your ex-fiancée was simply asking what she considered her due after all this time. I.e., you cannot expect to be offered the use of her contraption for fifteen years without once giving the owner the slightest hope of one day walking her down the aisle. What’s more, you were too insensitive at the time to notice that she tactfully asked you for a loan, not a gift, f am talking about the three million lire. A loan that she obviously would have been willing to repay you after the wedding, so to speak. You are always criticizing me and setting yourself up as the defender of the weak, but you want everything, and gratis, to boot. You are the real exploiter of women. You can hardly wait to call her a whore, when all she wanted was what you owed her.
Heloise and Bellinis Page 6