Love, Let Me Not Hunger

by Paul Gallico

  “Bleeding Christ Almighty, what is she then? You heard!”

  Mr. Albert croaked a reply that welled from his heart with no idea of how incongruous it must sound, “A good girl,” he said.

  Again Toby’s cry of rage echoed from the walls of the enclosure—“Whore! Whore! Whore! A rotten, stinking whore selling herself to every bloody Spiggoty in town—”

  Mr. Albert waved an arm helplessly. “Toby, don’t,” he begged. “She was only doing it for them and for you.” He remembered something suddenly and added—“A minute ago you were shaking my hand for doing the same thing. What’s the difference?”

  “Out!” Toby howled. “Get out! All of you! Get out of here. I can’t stand the sight of any of you. Out! OUT!” His voice, charged with hysteria returned to the pure yammer of hurt animal.

  “Vámonos” said the chauffeur for the third and last time and flipped the lever of his synchro-mesh. Mr. Albert got into the car. As they backed out of the gate he called, “Look after things, Toby.”

  The last he saw of Toby, the boy was lying on the ground, writhing in agony, beating at the grass with his fists, kicking it with his feet like a child out of all control of temper.

  But when Rose came trudging home at half-past eleven, Toby threw her out bodily, bag and baggage. He called her every foul and filthy name he could think of as he tossed her suitcase into the road and followed it with all the articles of her clothing he could find in her living quarters. He strewed the ground with them, and handled them as though they were covered with slime.

  “Whore!!! Go back to your brothel!”

  Nor did Rose answer him or cry out, or attempt to speak a word. She was pale in the dim light from the sky so that the carmine of her mouth stood out dark and blotchy. She bent over, picking up each piece of apparel, collecting them in one arm. When she had them all she knelt, opened the suitcase, and stuffed them in. Then she snapped it shut, picked it up, and, turning her back upon Toby and the encampment, went off down the path towards the road leading to the town.

  Toby stood watching her, his mouth, his head, and his heart still filled and brimming over with revulsion.

  C H A P T E R

  2 2

  Thereupon Mr. Albert took up life at the Finca Pozoblanco, and it was not like anything he had imagined or feared, for he was rarely called upon to perform.

  Possession seemed to be what was important to the Marquesa. The knowledge that she owned a man who any time she chose to call for him could send her off into gales of laughter appeared to be sufficient for her. Very soon she learned that Mr. Albert had a passion for and a way with animals, and so before long he found himself in charge of the small diverse zoo which the Marquesa kept for no apparent reason, since she never visited it. It consisted of a Spanish mountain lion, a lynx, a pair of avid, bright-eyed foxes, a raccoon, a spider monkey, and a Barbary ape. Perhaps she kept it to amuse children who with their elders and relatives from Madrid or Barcelona sometimes paid terrified visits to the finca. But at any rate there they were and, like all the others had done, succumbed to the peculiar charm of Mr. Albert.

  Clothes were provided for him, the same kind of uniform worn by the workers on the estate: white cotton trousers, white smock bound with a red sash, and sandals. This was one of the first things which had happened to Mr. Albert upon his arrival for almost at once his own garments were taken away from him for safe keeping, since these were regarded by the Marquesa—and hence the major-domo—as the costume which was a part of his act. Albert saw there was no point in trying to disabuse them of this idea.

  The social difference between himself and Janos had been established immediately upon their arrival. The dwarf was led off in one direction and Mr. Albert in another. The farm abounded in dogs of various kinds, including breeds used for hunting, and there were spacious kennels, where the two great Danes were settled. The fox terrier was permitted to gambol about the house, for Janos was awarded a room in the private quarters of the Marquesa. Mr. Albert was taken into a building which served as the garages over which were the servants’ bedrooms, and one of these was assigned to him.

  It was a plain, clean, white-washed rectangle containing a white painted iron bedstead with a mattress, cotton sheets, and a pillow encased in a cheap cotton pillow-slip; there was a wardrobe, a mirror in the door, a chest of drawers, two chairs, and a washstand. The sole decoration consisted of a small ebony crucifix with the figure of Christ thereon carved in ivory. It was old, beautiful, and sorrowful.

  The crucifix had a curious effect upon Mr. Albert; it made him welcome. He had never been a religious man. In childhood and early youth he had been apprised that there was a God and sometimes when he found himself in a bad spot during the war he would call upon Him or curse Him, using His name as well as that of Jesus to express fear, anxiety, or relief; but as he bumped onwards through life, the God-feeling and the God-figure diminished within him as it became clear that, whatever else He was, this Deity was neither concerned with the fate of Mr. Albert nor interested in him.

  The old man sat upon the side of the bed which had a nice spring to it, his few belongings rolled into a parcel at his feet. It had been years since he had slept in a decent bed and between sheets. The crucifix made him feel almost sheltered, as though along with living quarters he had been given a talisman to protect him. Being uneducated and having no sense of history, Mr. Albert had no way of knowing that this was the manner in which eighteen centuries ago the valued slave of a Roman nobleman in that area might have been looked after and cared for.

  He ate in a communal dining room with grooms, chauffeurs, carpenters, gardeners, and mechanics. The food was good and plentiful. If at first it was too oily for his stomach, he soon got used to it for fastidious eating was not part of a life such as Mr. Albert had lived.

  In place of his bowler hat he wore a straw sombrero on his head. With his spectacles down on the end of his nose and his mild, blue eyes twinkling over them, his white moustache bristling, nothing still could keep him from looking British and incongruous in his uniform and his surroundings.

  He missed the companionship of the circus and of course, was doomed to a kind of Coventry through the language barrier, though not an unfriendly one for the other men exchanged smiles, glances, and nods with him and he was soon picking up two or three phrases of Spanish, and all in all he was not too unhappy. After his first week there a ginger cat from one of the barns attached itself to him, and when he took it to his room to live with him no one objected, and thereafter he was not quite so lonely. He named the cat Miss Marmalade and held long conversations with her.

  Janos he saw upon only two occasions before the death of the dwarf. They had been reminders that the gossip of the town might not have been wholly without foundation.

  The first of these was the day that Mr. Albert was summoned for a performance and he was made aware of this when Don Francisco handed him his own clothes and the new bowler which had been imported from Madrid. He ordered him to put them on and report to him at the villa.

  The dread that was always present at the back of Mr. Albert’s mind was the humiliation of being compelled to be the butt before a gathering—part of an evening’s entertainment. He now found that he was being called upon for something far more degrading. It was nine o’clock in the morning. He was summoned to the bedroom of the Marquesa and she was alone except for Janos who was dressed in his clown’s costume with his face chalked and made up.

  This room of the Marquesa, unlike the gay, light boudoir where she held her morning levees, was sombre. The walls were dead white; the carved beams that crossed the ceiling were of dark Spanish oak, as were the great four-poster bed and the heavy furniture; the tapestries upon the walls were of sober colours, and the carved statue of the Virgin with Child in a niche at the far end of the room had the patina of age upon it. The paintings were of gloomy-looking men and women in black, gloomy clothes. Along one side of the far wall by a leaded casement window where Janos waited were bucket
s of water all prepared.

  When Mr. Albert was ushered into the room—he was sent in alone, Don Francisco merely opening the door and motioning him inside—the Marquesa was sitting upon her commode. She was clad in a red peignoir drawn close under her chins, and in place of the usual tiered and towering transformations she wore upon her head she now had a wig of dark flowing hair that fell to below her waist in the position she had assumed, and which upon one so obese and pale was ten times more repulsive. She had not so much as a speck of make-up on her features, and for the first time Mr. Albert saw her eyelids unpainted. They were crinkled and blotched from years of being stained, like the skin at the throat of a lizard, and from beneath these the green eyes shone, the only touch of colour in the great blank moon of her countenance.

  The Marquesa finished and, arising, unconcernedly closed the lid and went to sit upon the edge of the four-poster looking like one of the papier-mâché figures carried through the streets in a carnival.

  “Come in, old man. Fall down for me,” she said. “I have had a terrible dream. There were maggots eating inside of me but they were the size of great dogs. They burst through my skin and turned their heads and stared at me. I think perhaps I might die soon. I want to laugh. Come in, come in!”

  Mr. Albert entered blinking, his eyes not yet wholly accustomed to the half-light of the room. He was standing on the edge of a long rug which lay upon the black and white tiled floor. He had removed the new bowler hat and was holding it nervously in his fingers across his chest, and the Marquesa said, “Hold it behind you, my funny man. My funny old man. I think I am beginning to laugh already.”

  Janos shouted, “Hoi, hoi, hoi!” and jerked at the other end of the rug so that Mr. Albert’s feet flew up into the air and he landed on his bottom, with a jar that shook him, and the next moment he was gasping and choking, sliding upon the floor like a gaffed fish as Janos doused him with bucket after bucket of water.

  The great bed squeaked, rattled and shook as the Marquesa bounced upon it, whooping and rocking and slapping her sides, her laughter rebounding from the beamed, high vaulted ceiling all the more terrible since no one else was there and it was only hers.

  And as he flopped about the floor, half drowned, the mind of Mr. Albert oddly turned to the ebony and ivory crucifix that hung upon the wall of his room and he wondered whether these things made God laugh too—a man hanging upon a cross, a man degraded before a bestial woman.

  When the buckets were emptied and the Marquesa had collapsed backwards upon the bed in an hysterical spasm, the ordeal was over. And yet even as it was going on Mr. Albert had been aware that something was different with Janos, but whether it was some change in the tone of his usually raucous, strident voice or something mechanical about his actions, he could not say. But when it was finished and with an arm as white as something eyeless from the bottom of the sea the Marquesa waved that she had had enough, and, dripping, Mr. Albert picked himself up from the tiles and made for the door, he felt that the dwarf wished he would not go. Janos did not say anything but Mr. Albert saw in his eyes beneath their made-up, marked lids a dumb pleading.

  The Marquesa, now sitting up in the bed, gasped, “Oh, oh, oh! At least if I die I shall die laughing!” She wiped the corners of her eyes with the sheet. She said to Albert, “Go, I cannot laugh any more.” To Janos she added, “Come here to me, my little Janos.”

  Mr. Albert went out of the room, shutting the door behind him, though he felt that he ought to stay as the Hungarian had begged him to do. And then he realised that Janos had not done so at all, that he had not spoken a word to him throughout the business except to shout, “Hoi, hoi, hoi!”

  As he closed the door Mr. Albert heard the great bed groan once more.

  The second and last time that Mr. Albert saw Janos alive was at a mid-day meal at the end of which he was summoned to the presence of the Marquesa, as usual by Don Francisco, who had time to brief him momentarily, for Mr. Albert was puzzled, as his “costume” had not been produced.

  On the road from Alameda it seemed, she had encountered some gypsies who had a performing bear. On an impulse she had bought it, though whether because it amused her or because of the fact that it had sores and chain galls and showed signs of having been abused, Don Francisco could not say. She had simply ordered him to purchase it, and now she wished to have a word with Mr. Albert with regard to its housing, needs, and care.

  It was five minutes to three when he and the major-domo arrived in the entrance of the villa. The dining room was on one side of the patio. The door to it was shut. On the opposite side, the two double doors flung wide open, was a reception room.

  Don Francisco consulted his watch. “It is not yet three,” he said. “We will wait until the clock strikes.”

  “Is that how she is?” Mr. Albert asked.

  “Yes, that is how she is. One never disobeys an order.”

  Mr. Albert asked, “What would happen if one did?”

  Don Francisco merely regarded him sombrely and made no comment.

  Drawn by curiosity, Mr. Albert wandered down the side of the patio and glanced into the drawing room. It was furnished in Victorian style rather than Spanish, with overstuffed furniture, heavy silken drapes, a grand piano in walnut, and a marble fireplace. On the piano and table tops were dozens of signed photographs of men in uniform and women in ermine and tiaras. Some of them looked familiar to Mr. Albert, as though he ought to know them, and indeed, at some time or other in his own life span he had seen pictures of one or the other of these people, though he did not recognise them now, for they were members of all the royal families of Europe, kings and queens, princes, princelings, princesses and dukes, rulers, ex-rulers, and pretenders.

  Over the mantle of the fireplace there was a life-size painting of an obese, teen-age girl in a white court dress. She wore a tiara and necklace of diamonds and pearls. There were diamond bracelets encircling her arms. Her face was repulsive, her eyes almost lost in folds of fat, the nose short and retroussé with huge nostrils, the mouth small and pursed above a ripple of chins. There had been no attempt by the artist to prettify or to present his subject other than she had been. Even the glossy, dark hair contrasting with the pallor of the face and plastered smooth upon the enormous head had the feeling of a peruke. And yet he had caught the youthfulness too. She looked like a bloated, overgrown, overdressed, overjewelled baby.

  “Gaw!” Mr. Albert half-whispered to himself. “Then she was always like that!” For in his mind he had made up a story about the Marquesa, the kind of thing one read about or saw on the films: that in her youth she had been a famous and ravishing beauty. Then she had been stricken with a mysterious illness which had robbed her of her looks and turned her into a vengeful monster.

  A voice said, “It is the greater tragedy.”

  Mr. Albert looked up in alarm and saw that Don Francisco was standing next to him, his arms folded, his chin resting upon one hand as he contemplated the painting and had read his mind. The major-domo added, “If she had been beautiful once at least she would have had something to lose and therefore something to remember.”

  “Gaw,” Mr. Albert repeated. “Why was she like that?”

  Don Francisco shrugged and said, “Glands, I think. Some of them have the power to make monsters of us. In another room there is a painting of her when she was nine. She was the same then. She was eighteen here. Hers is one of the great families and connected with the royal houses of Spain and Portugal.”

  Mr. Albert experienced a flash of insight which coincided with a pang of sympathy so powerful that it was almost like a physical pain. For he seemed to see the four Marquesas that he knew—the redhaired one from the circus, the bald monster of the boudoir with the golden eyelids, the black-haired creature of the bedchamber and the pathetic girl of the portrait covering her ugliness with diamonds and pearls—blending into one sister in loneliness, trying to escape from what she was.

  “No doctors have ever been able to help her,” th
e major-domo was saying. “She travels from one place to another. She has permanent suites in Claridge’s in London, the Ritz in Paris, and the Plaza in New York, and she owns a palace in Madrid, another in Seville, and a third in Buenos Aires.”

  And, thought Mr. Albert to himself, with it all she was just one of God’s jokes. To add to the comedy, wealth had been bestowed upon her, and she bought herself laughter to join in the celestial fun. Wherever she went, whatever she did, in whichever silken bed she slept, she was alone except by purchase. He saw the truth that this was indeed the greater tragedy, that she had never known any other guise than that in which she was imprisoned and from which she could escape only like a mummer by changing her externals and living behind a mask.

  The works of the French Boule clock on the mantelpiece—it was signed by Henri Martinot, clockmaker to Louis XIV—rattled preliminary to the striking of three.

  “Come,” said Don Francisco, “she will be waiting for us.”

  But in this he erred. Something had gone wrong momentarily with the strict schedule the Marquesa maintained, for just when after the great hall clock had finished chiming and the major-domo pushed open the door to the dining room and entered, an extraordinary sight awaited them. The Marquesa sat alone at the end of the long refectory table, whose dark Spanish wood was covered by a cream tablecloth of lace that fell to within an inch of the floor upon all sides. There was a coffee service before her with an emptied coffee cup, but no servant of any kind in evidence. And what surprised Mr. Albert so at first glance was that Janos was nowhere to be seen either, for he was known to take every meal with the Marquesa.

  But there was something strange and disturbing in the attitude of the Marquesa herself, who seemed totally unaware that they had come into the room. Her wig upon this occasion was snow-white and piled high in the style seen in the portraits of the Pompadour, and it was slightly askew. Her eyelids had been coloured lilac and the contour of her eyes heavily marked in black, but the eyes themselves were turned upwards so that the whites beneath them showed. Her face was flushed and she seemed to have difficulty breathing.