"We built a tree hut up there last year," I said, pointing.
"Where?" Clarisse stepped close to me to see where my finger was pointing. "I don't see."
"There," I said, my voice breaking, and pointed again.
Very quietly, she put her arm around me. I was so surprised and bewildered I almost cried out. Then, trembling, her lips kissed me, and my own hands were moving to hold her and I was shaking and shouting inside myself.
The silence was like a green explosion. The water bubbled on in the creek bed. I couldn't breathe.
I knew it was all over. I was lost. From this moment on, it would be a touching, an eating of foods, a learning of language and algebra and logic, a movement and an emotion, a kissing and a holding, a whirl of feeling that caught and sucked me drowning under. I knew I was lost forever now, and I didn't care. But I did care, and I was laughing and crying all in one, and there was nothing to do about it, but hold her and love her with all my decided and rioting body and mind.
I could have gone on fighting my war against Mother and Dad and school and food and things in books, but I couldn't fight this sweetness on my lips and this warmness in my hands, and the new odor in my nostrils.
"Clarisse, Clarisse," I cried, holding her, looking over her shoulder blindly, whispering to her. "Clarisse!"
The Parrot Who Met Papa
The kidnaping was reported all around the world, of course.
It took a few days for the full significance of the news to spread from Cuba to the United States, to the Left Bank in Paris and then finally to some small good cafe* in Pamplona where the drinks were fine and the weather, somehow, was always just right.
But once the meaning of the news really hit, people were on the phone, Madrid was calling New York, New York was shouting south at Havana to verify, please verify this crazy thing.
And then some woman in Venice, Italy, with a blurred voice called through, saying she was at Harry's Bar that very instant and was destroyed, this thing that had happened was terrible, a cultural heritage was placed in immense and irrevocable danger. . . .
Not an hour later, I got a call from a baseball pitcher-cum-novelist who had been a great friend of Papa's and who now lived in Madrid half the year and Nairobi the rest. He was in tears, or sounded close to it.
"Tell me,” he said, from halfway around the world, "what happened? What are the facts?"
Well, the facts were these: Down in Havana, Cuba, about fourteen kilometers from Papa's Finca Vigia home, there is a bar in which he used to drink. It is the one where they named a special drink for him, not the fancy one where he used to meet flashy literary lights such as K-K-Kenneth Tynan and, er, Tennessee W-Williams (as Mr. Tynan would say it). No, it is not the Floridita; it is a shirt-sleeves place with plain wooden tables, sawdust on the floor, and a big mirror like a dirty cloud behind the bar. Papa went there when there were too many tourists around the Floridita who wanted to meet Mr. Hemingway. And the thing that happened there was destined to be big news, bigger than the report of what he said to Fitzgerald about the rich, even bigger than the story of his swing at Max Eastman on that long-ago day in Charlie Scribner's office. This news had to do with an ancient parrot.
That senior bird lived in a cage right atop the bar in the Cuba Libre. He had "kept his cage" in that place for roughly twenty-nine years, which means that the old parrot had been there almost as long as Papa had lived in Cuba.
And that adds up to this monumental fact: All during the time Papa had lived in Finca Vigia, he had known the parrot and had talked to him and the parrot had talked back. As the years passed, people said that Hemingway began to talk like the parrot and others said no, the parrot learned to talk like him! Papa used to line the drinks up on the counter and sit near the cage and involve that bird in the best kind of conversation you ever heard, four nights running. By the end of the second year, that parrot knew more about Hem and Thomas Wolfe and Sherwood Anderson than Gertrude Stein did. In fact, the parrot even knew who Gertrude Stein was. All you had to say was "Gertrude" and the parrot said:
"Pigeons on the grass alas."
At the other times, pressed, the parrot would say, "There was this old man and this boy and this boat and this sea and this big fish in the sea. . .." And then it would take time out to eat a cracker.
Well, this fabled creature, this parrot, this odd bird, vanished, cage and all, from the Cuba Libre late one Sunday afternoon.
And that's why my phone was ringing itself off the hook. And that's why one of the big magazines got a special State Department clearance and flew me down to Cuba to see if I could find so much as the cage, anything remaining of the bird or anyone resembling a kidnaper. They wanted a light and amiable article, with overtones, as they said. And, very honestly, I was curious. I had heard rumors of the bird. In a strange kind of way, I was concerned.
I got off the jet from Mexico City and taxied straight across Havana to that strange little cafe"-bar.
I almost failed to get in the place. As I stepped through the door, a dark little man jumped up from a chair and cried, "No, nol Go away! We are closedl"
He ran out to jiggle the lock on the door, showing that he really meant to shut the place down. All the tables were empty and there was no one around. He had probably just been airing out the bar when I arrived.
"I've come about the parrot," I said.
"No, no," he cried, his eyes looking wet. "I won't talk. It's too much. If I were not Catholic, I would ldll myself. Poor Papa. Poor El C6rdobal"
^'El Cojdoba?" I murmured.
"That," he said fiercely, "was the parrof s name!"
"Yes," I said, recovering quickly. "El C6rdoba. I've come to rescue him."
That made him stop and blink. Shadows and then sunlight went over his face and then shadows again.
"Impossible! Could you? No, no. How could anyone! Who are you?"
"A friend to Papa and the bird," I said quickly. "And the more time we talk, the farther away goes the criminal. You want El C6rdoba back tonight? Pour us several of Papa's good drinks and talk."
My bluntness worked. Not two minutes later, we were drinking Papa's special, seated in the bar near the empty place where the cage used to sit. The little man, whose name was Antonio, kept wiping that empty place and then wiping his eyes with the bar rag. As I finished the first drink and started on the second, I said:
"This is no ordinary kidnaping."
"You're telling me!" cried Antonio. "People came from all over the world to see that parrot, to talk to El C6rdoba, to hear him, ah, God, speak with the voice of Papa. May his abductors sink and burn in hell, yes, hell."
"They will," I said. "Whom do you suspect?"
"Everyone. No one."
"The kidnaper," I said, eyes shut for a moment, savoring the drink, "had to be educated, a book reader, I mean, that's obvious, isn't it? Anyone like that around the last few days?"
"Educated. No education. Senor, there have always been strangers the last ten, the last twenty years, always asking for Papa. When Papa was here, they met him. With Papa gone, they met El C6rdoba, the great one. So it was always strangers and strangers."
"But think, Antonio," I said, touching his trembling elbow. "Not only educated, a reader, but someone in the last few days who was—how shall I put it?—odd. Strange. Someone so peculiar, muy eccSntrico, that you remember him above all others. Someone who—"
"jMadre de DiosF' cried Antonio, leaping up. His eyes stared off into memory. He seized his head as if it had just exploded. "Thank you, senor. , sil What a creature! In the name of Christ, there was such a one yesterday! He was very small. And he spoke like this: very high—eeeee. Like a muchacha in a school play, eh? Like a canary swallowed by a witch! And he wore a blue-velvet suit with a big yellow tie."
"Yes, yes!" I had leaped up now and was almost yelling. "Go on!"
"And he had a small very round face, senor, and his hair was yellow and cut across the brow like this—zitti And his mouth small, very pink, li
ke candy, yes? He-he was like, yes, uno muneco, of the kind one wins at carnivals."
"Kewpie dolls!"
" /Si/ At Coney Island, yes, when I was a child, Kewpie dolls! And he was so high, you see? To my elbow. Not a midget, no—but—and how old? Blood of Christ, who can say? No lines in his face, but—thirty, forty, fifty. And on his feet he was wearing—"
"Green booties!" I cried.
"Shoes, boots!"
"Si." He blinked, stunned. "But how did you
I exploded, "Shelley Capon!"
"That is the name! And his friends with him, senor, all laughing—no, giggling. like the nuns who play basketball in the late afternoons near the church. Oh, senor, do you think that they, that he—"
"I don't think, Antonio, I know. Shelley Capon, of all the writers in the world, hated Papa. Of course he would snatch El C6rdoba. Why, wasn't there a rumor once that the bird had memorized Papa's last, greatest, and as-yet-not-put-down-on-paper novel?"
"There was such a rumor, senor. But I do not write books, I tend bar. I bring crackers to the bird. I—"
"You bring me the phone, Antonio, please."
"You know where the bird is, senor?"
"I have the hunch beyond intuition, the big one. Gracias." I dialed the Havana Libre, the biggest hotel in town.
"Shelley Capon, please."
The phone buzzed and clicked.
Half a million miles away, a midget boy Martian lifted the receiver and played the flute and then the bell chimes with his voice: "Capon here."
"Damned if you aren't!" I said. And got up and ran out of the Cuba Libre bar.
Racing back to Havana by taxi, I thought of Shelley as I'd seen him before. Surrounded by a storm of friends, living out of suitcases, ladling soup from other people's plates, borrowing money from billfolds seized from your pockets right in front of you, counting the lettuce leaves with relish, leaving rabbit pellets on your rug, gone. Dear Shelley Capon.
Ten minutes later, my taxi with no brakes dropped me running and spun on to some ultimate disaster beyond town.
Still running, I made the lobby, paused for information, hurried upstairs, and stopped short before Shelley's door. It pulsed in spasms like a bad heart. I put my ear to the door. The wild calls and cries from inside might have come from a flock of birds, feather-stripped in a hurricane. I felt the door. Now it seemed to tremble like a vast laundromat that had swallowed and was churning an acid-rock group and a lot of very dirty linen. Listening, my underwear began to crawl on my legs.
I knocked. No answer. I touched the door. It drifted open. I stepped in upon a scene much too dreadful for Bosch to have painted.
Around the pigpen living room were strewn various life-size dolls, eyes half-cracked open, cigarettes smoking in burned, limp fingers, empty Scotch glasses in hands, and all the while the radio belted them with concussions of music broadcast from some Stateside asylum. The place was sheer carnage. Not ten seconds ago, I felt, a large dirty locomotive must have plunged through here. Its victims had been hurled in all directions and now lay upside down in various parts of the room, moaning for first aid.
In the midst of this hell, seated erect and proper, well dressed in velveteen jerkin, persimmon bow tie, and bottle-green booties, was, of course, Shelley Capon. Who with no surprise at all waved a drink at me and cried:
"I knew that was you on the phone. I am absolutely telepathic! Welcome, Raimundo!"
He always called me Raimundo. Ray was plain bread and butter. Raimundo made me a don with a breeding farm full of bulls. I let it be Raimundo.
"Raimundo, sit down! No . . . fling yourself into an interesting position."
"Sorry," I said in my best Dashiell Hammett manner, sharpening my chin and steeling my eyes. "No time."
I began to walk around the room among his friends Fester and Soft and Ripply and Mild Innocuous and some actor I remembered who, when asked how he would do a part in a film, had said, "I'll play it like a doe."
I shut off the radio. That made a lot of people in the room stir: I yanked the radio's roots out of the wall. Some people sat up. I raised a window. I threw the radio out. They all screamed as if I had thrown their mothers down an elevator shaft.
The radio made a satisfying sound on the cement sidewalk below. I turned, with a beatific smile on my face. A number of people were on their feet, swaying toward me with faint menace. I pulled a twenty-dollar bill out of my pocket, handed it to someone without looking at him, and said, "Go buy a new one." He ran out the door slowly. The door slammed. I heard him fall down the stairs as if he were after his morning shot in the arm.
"All right, Shelley," I said, "where is it?"
"Where is what, dear boy?" he said, eyes wide with innocence.
"You know what I mean." I stared at the drink in his tiny hand.
Which was a Papa drink, the Cuba Libre's very own special blend of papaya, lime, lemon, and rum. As if to destroy evidence, he drank it down quickly.
I walked over to three doors in a wall and touched one.
"That's a closet, dear boy." I put my hand on the second door.
"Don't go in. You'll be sorry what you see." I didn't go in.
I put my hand on the third door. "Oh, dear, well, go ahead," said Shelley petulantly. I opened the door.
Beyond it was a small anteroom with a mere cot and a table near the window.
On the table sat a bird cage with a shawl over it. Under the shawl I could hear the rustle of feathers and the scrape of a beak on the wires.
Shelley Capon came to stand small beside me, looking in at the cage, a fresh drink in his little fingers.
"What a shame you didn't arrive at seven tonight," he said.
"Why seven?"
"Why, then, Raimundo, we would have just finished our curried fowl stuffed with wild rice. I wonder, is there much white meat, or any at all, under a parrot's feathers?"
"You wouldn't!?" I cried.
I stared at him.
"You would," I answered myself.
I stood for a moment longer at the door. Then, slowly, I walked across the small room and stopped by the cage with the shawl over it. I saw a single word embroidered across the top of the shawl: mother.
I glanced at Shelley. He shrugged and looked shyly at his boot tips. I took hold of the shawl. Shelley said, "No. Before you lift it ... ask something."
"Like what?"
"DiMaggio. Ask DiMaggio."
A small ten-watt bulb clicked on in my head. I nodded. I leaned near the hidden cage and whispered: "DiMaggio. 1939."
There was a sort of animal-computer pause. Beneath the word mother some feathers stirred, a beak tapped the cage bars. Then a tiny voice said:
"Home runs, thirty. Batting average, .381."
I was stunned. But then I whispered: "Babe Ruth. 1927."
Again the pause, the feathers, the beak, and: "Home runs, sixty. Batting average, .356. Awk."
"My God," I said.
"My God," echoed Shelley Capon.
"That's the parrot who met Papa, all right."
"That's who it is."
And I lifted the shawl.
I don't know what I expected to find underneath the embroidery. Perhaps a miniature hunter in boots, bush jacket, and wide-brimmed hat. Perhaps a small, trim fisherman with a beard and turtleneck sweater perched there on a wooden slat. Something tiny, something literary, something human, something fantastic, but not really a parrot.
But that’s all there was.
And not a very handsome parrot, either. It looked as if it had been up all night for years; one of those disreputable birds that never preens its feathers or shines its beak. It was a kind of rusty green and black with a dull-amber snout and rings under its eyes as if it were a secret drinker. You might see it half flying, half hopping out of cafe"-bars at three in the morning. It was the bum of the parrot world.
Shelley Capon read my mind. "The effect is better," he said, "with the shawl over the cage."
I put the shawl back over the b
ars.
I was thinking very fast. Then I thought very slowly. I bent and whispered by the cage:
"Norman Mailer."
"Couldn't remember the alphabet," said the voice beneath the shawl.
"Gertrude Stein," I said.
"Suffered from undescended testicles," said the voice.
"My God," I gasped.
I stepped back. I stared at the covered cage. I blinked at Shelley Capon.
"Do you really know what you have here, Capon?"
"A gold mine, dear Raimundo!" he crowed.
"A mint!" I corrected.
"Endless opportunities for blackmail!"
"Causes for murderl" I added.
"Think!" Shelley snorted into his drink. "Think what Mailer's publishers alone would pay to shut this bird up!"
I spoke to the cage:
"F. Scott Fitzgerald."
Silence.
"Try 'Scottie,' " said Shelley.
"Ah," said the voice inside the cage. "Good left jab but couldn't follow through. Nice contender, but—"
"Faulkner," I said.
"Batting average fair, strictly a singles hitter."
"Steinbeck!"
"Finished last at end of season."
"Ezra Pound!"
"Traded off to the minor leagues in 1932."
"I think ... I need . . . one of those drinks." Someone put a drink in my hand. I gulped it and nodded. I shut my eyes and felt the world give one turn, then opened my eyes to look at Shelley Capon, the classic son of a bitch of all time.
"There is something even more fantastic," he said. "You've heard only the first half."
"You're lying," I said. "What could there be?"
He dimpled at me—in all the world, only Shelley Capon can dimple at you in a completely evil way. "It was like this," he said. "You remember that Papa had trouble actually getting his stuff down on paper in those last years while he lived here? Well, he'd planned another novel after Islands in the Stream, but somehow it just never seemed to get written.
"Oh, he had it in his mind, al right—the story was there and lots of people heard him mention it—but he just couldn't seem to write it. So he would go to the Cuba Libre and drink many drinks and have long conversations with the parrot. Raimundo, what Papa was telling El C6rdoba all through those long drinking nights was the story of his last book. And, in the course of time, the bird has memorized it."
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