Across the River and Into the Trees (13 page)

“It’s wonderful. How are your scaloppine?”

“Very tender and the sauce is not at all sweet. Do you like the vegetables?”

“The cauliflower is almost crisp; like celery.”

“We should have some celery. But I don’t think there is any or the
Gran Maestro
would have brought it.”

“Don’t we have fun with food? Imagine if we could eat together always.”

“I’ve suggested it.”

“Let’s not talk about that.”

“All right,” the Colonel said. “I’ve made a decision too. I’m going to chuck the army and live in this town, very simply, on my retirement pay.”

“That’s wonderful. How do you look in civilian clothes?”

“You’ve seen me.”

“I know it, my dear. I said it for a joke. You make rough jokes sometimes too, you know.”

“I’ll look all right. That is if you have a tailor here who can cut clothes.”

“There isn’t one here, but there is in Rome. Can we drive together to Rome to get the clothes?”

“Yes. And we will live outside the town at Viterbo and only go in for the fittings and for dinner in the evening. Then we’ll drive back in the night.”

“Will we see cinema people and speak about them with candour and perhaps not have a drink with them?”

“We’ll see them by the thousands.”

“Will we see them being married for the second and third time and then being blessed by the Pope?”

“If you go in for that kind of thing.”

“I don’t,” the girl said. “That’s one reason that I cannot marry you.”

“I see,” the Colonel said. “Thank you.”

“But I will love you, whatever that means, and you and I know what it means very well, as long as either of us is alive and after.”

“I don’t think you can love very much after you, yourself, are dead,” the Colonel said.

He started to eat the artichoke, taking a leaf at a time, and dipping them, heavy side down, into the deep saucer of
sauce vinaigrette
.

“I don’t know whether you can either,” the girl said. “But I will try. Don’t you feel better to be loved?”

“Yes,” the Colonel said. “I feel as though I were out on some bare-assed hill where it was too rocky to dig, and the rocks all solid, but with nothing jutting, and no bulges, and all of a sudden instead of being there naked, I was armoured. Armoured and the eighty-eights not there.”

“You should tell that to our writer friend with the craters of the moon face so he could write it tonight.”

“I ought to tell it to Dante if he was around,” the Colonel, suddenly gone as rough as the sea when a line squall comes up, said. “I’d tell him what I’d do if I were shifted, or ascended, into an armoured vehicle under such circumstances.”

Just then the Barone Alvarito came into the dining room. He was looking for them and, being a hunter, he saw them instantly.

He came over to the table and kissed Renata’s hand, saying, “
Ciao
, Renata.” He was almost tall, beautifully built in his town clothes, and he was the shyest man the Colonel had ever known. He was not shy from ignorance, nor from being ill at ease, nor from any defect. He was basically shy, as certain animals are, such as the Bongo that you will never see in the jungle, and that must be hunted with dogs.

“My Colonel,” he said. He smiled as only the truly shy can smile.

It was not the easy grin of the confident, nor the quick slashing smile of the extremely durable and the wicked. It had no relation with the poised, intently used smile of the courtesan or the politician. It was the strange, rare smile which rises from the deep, dark pit, deeper than a well, deep as a deep mine, that is within them.

“I can only stay a moment. I came to tell you that it looks quite good for the shoot. The ducks are coming in heavily from the north. There are many big ducks. The ones you like,” he smiled again.

“Sit down Alvarito. Please.”

“No,” the Barone Alvarito said. “We can meet at the Garage at two-thirty if you like? You have your car?”

“Yes.”

“That makes it very good. Leaving at that hour, we will have time to see the ducks in the evening.”

“Splendid,” the Colonel said.

“
Ciao
, then, Renata. Good-bye, my Colonel. Until two-thirty.”

“We knew each other as children,” the girl said. “But he was about three years older. He was born very old.”

“Yes. I know. He is a good friend of mine.”

“Do you think your compatriot has looked him up in Baedeker?”

“I wouldn’t know,” the Colonel said. “
Gran Maestro
,” he asked, “did my illustrious compatriot look up the
Barone
in Baedeker?”

“Truly, my Colonel. I have not seen him pull his Baedeker during the meal.”

“Give him full marks,” the Colonel said. “Now look. I believe that the Valpolicella is better when it is newer. It is not a
grand vin
and bottling it and putting years on it only adds sediment. Do you agree?”

“I agree.”

“Then what should we do?”

“My Colonel, you know that in a Great Hotel, wine must cost money. You cannot get Pinard at the Ritz. But I suggest that we get several fiascos of the good. You can say they come from the Contessa Renata’s estates and are a gift. Then I will have them decanted for you. This way, we will have better wine and make an impressive saving. I will explain it to the manager if you like. He is a very good man.”

“Explain it to him,” the Colonel said. “He’s not a man who drinks labels either.”

“Agreed.”

“In the meantime you might as well drink this. It is, very good, you know.”

“It is,” the Colonel said. “But it isn’t
Chambertin
.”

“What did we use to drink?”

“Anything,” the Colonel said. “But now I seek perfection. Or, rather, not absolute perfection, but perfection for my money.”

“I seek it, too,” the
Gran Maestro
said. “But rather vainly.”

“What do you want for the end of the meal?”

“Cheese,” the Colonel said. “What do you want, Daughter?”

The girl had been quiet and a little withdrawn, since she had seen Alvarito. Something was going on in her mind, and it was an excellent mind. But, momentarily, she was not with them.

“Cheese,” she said. “Please.”

“What cheese?”

“Bring them all and we’ll look at them,” the Colonel said.

The
Gran Maestro
left and the Colonel said, “What’s the matter, Daughter?”

“Nothing. Never anything. Always nothing.”

“You might as well pull out of it. We haven’t time for such luxuries.”

“No. I agree. We will devote ourselves to the cheese.”

“Do I have to take it like a corn cob?”

“No,” she said, not understanding the colloquialism, but understanding exactly what was meant, since it was she who had been doing the thinking. “Put your right hand in your pocket.”

“Good,” the Colonel said. “I will.”

He put his right hand in his pocket and felt what was there, first with the tips of his fingers, and then with the insides of his fingers, and then with the palm of his hand; his split hand.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “And now we begin the good part of it again. We will dedicate ourselves to the cheese with happiness.”

“Excellent,” the Colonel said. “I wonder what cheeses he has?”

“Tell me about the last war,” the girl said. “Then we will ride in our gondola in the cold wind.”

“It was not very interesting,” the Colonel said. “To us, of course, such things are always interesting. But there were only three, maybe four, phases that really interested me.”

“Why?”

“We were fighting a beaten enemy whose communications had been destroyed. We destroyed many divisions on paper, but they were ghost divisions. Not real ones. They had been destroyed by our tactical aviation before they ever got up. It was only really difficult in Normandy, due to the terrain, and when we made the break for Georgie Patton’s armour to go through and held it open on both sides.”

“How do you make a break for armour to go through? Tell me, please.”

“First you fight to take a town that controls all the main roads. Call the town St. Lo. Then you have to open up the roads by taking other towns and villages. The enemy has a main line of resistance, but he cannot bring up his divisions to counter-attack because the fighter-bombers catch them on the roads. Does this bore you? It bores the hell out of me.”

“It does not bore me. I never heard it said understandably before.”

“Thank you,” the Colonel said, “Are you sure you want more of the sad science?”

“Please,” she said. “I love you, you know, and I would like to share it with you.”

“Nobody shares this trade with anybody,” the Colonel told her. “I’m just telling you how it works. I can insert anecdotes to make it interesting, or plausible.”

“Insert some, please.”

“The taking of Paris was nothing,” the Colonel said. “It was only an emotional experience. Not a military operation. We killed a number of typists and the screen the Germans had left, as they always do, to cover their withdrawal. I suppose they figured they were not going to need a hell of a lot of office workers any more and they left them as soldiers.”

“Was it not a great thing?”

“The people of Leclerc, another jerk of the third or fourth water, whose death I celebrated with a magnum of Perrier-Jouet Brut 1942, shot a great number of rounds to make it seem important and because we had given them what they had to shoot with. But it was not important.”

“Did you take part in it?”

“Yes,” the Colonel said. “I think I could safely say, yes.”

“Did you have no great impressions of it? After all, it was Paris and not everyone has taken it.”

“The French, themselves, had taken it four days before. But the grand plan of what we called SHAEF, Supreme, get that word, Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Forces, which included all the military politicians of the rear, and who wore a badge of shame in the form of a flaming something, while we wore a four-leafed clover as a designation, and for luck, had a master plan for the envelopment of the city. So we could not simply take it.

“Also we had to wait for the possible arrival of General or Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery who was unable to close, even, the gap at Falaise and found the going rather sticky and could not quite get there on time.”

“You must have missed him,” the girl said.

“Oh, we did,” the Colonel said. “No end.”

“But was there nothing noble or truly happy about it?”

“Surely,” the Colonel told her. “We fought from Bas Meudon, and then the Porte de Saint Cloud, through streets I knew and loved and we had no deads and did as little damage as possible. At the Etoile I took Elsa Maxwell’s butler prisoner. It was a very complicated operation. He had been denounced as a Japanese sniper. A new thing. Several Parisians were alleged to have been killed by him. So we sent three men to the roof where he had taken refuge and he was an Indo-China boy.”

“I begin to understand a little. But it is disheartening.”

“It is always disheartening as hell. But you are not supposed to have a heart in this trade.”

“But do you think it was the same in the time of the Grand Captains?”

“I am quite sure it was worse.”

“But you got your hand honorably?”

“Yes. Very honorably. On a rocky, bare-assed hill.”

“Please let me feel it,” she said.

“Just be careful around the center,” the Colonel said. “It’s split there and it still cracks open.”

“You ought to write,” the girl said. “I mean it truly. So someone would know about such things.”

“No,” the Colonel disagreed, “I have not the talent for it and I know too much. Almost any liar writes more convincingly than a man who was there.”

“But other soldiers wrote.”

“Yes. Maurice de Saxe. Frederick the Great. Mr. T’sun Su.”

“But soldiers of our time.”

“You use the word our with facility. I like it though.”

“But didn’t many modern soldiers write?”

“Many. But did you ever read them?”

“No. I have read mostly the classics and I read the illustrated papers for the scandals. Also, I read your letters.”

“Burn them,” the Colonel said. “They are worthless.”

“Please. Don’t be rough.”

“I won’t. What can I tell you that won’t bore you?”

“Tell me about when you were a General.”

“Oh, that,” he said and motioned to the
Gran Maestro
to bring Champagne. It was Roederer Brut ’42 and he loved it.

“When you are a general you live in a trailer and your Chief of Staff lives in a trailer, and you have bourbon whisky when other people do not have it. Your G’s live in the C.P. I’d tell you what G’s are, but it would bore you. I’d tell you about G1, G2, G3, G4, G5 and on the other side there is always Kraut-6. But it would bore you. On the other hand, you have a map covered with plastic material, and on this you have three regiments composed of three battalions each. It is all marked in colored pencil.

“You have boundary lines so that when the battalions cross their boundaries they will not then fight each other. Each battalion is composed of five companies. All should be good, but some are good, and some are not so good. Also you have divisional artillery and a battalion of tanks and many spare parts. You live by co-ordinates.”

He paused while the
Gran Maestro
poured the Roederer Brut ’42.

“From Corps,” he translated, unlovingly,
cuerpo d’Armata
, “they tell you what you must do, and then you decide how to do it. You dictate the orders or, most often, you give them by telephone. You ream out people you respect, to make them do what you know is fairly impossible, but is ordered. Also, you have to think hard, stay awake late and get up early.”

“And you won’t write about this? Not even to please me?”

“No,” said the Colonel. “Boys who were sensitive and cracked and kept all their valid first impressions of their day of battle, or their three days, or even their four, write books. They are good books but can be dull if you have been there. Then others write to profit quickly from the war they never fought in. The ones who ran back to tell the news. The news is hardly exact. But they ran quickly with it. Professional writers who had jobs that prevented them from fighting wrote of combat that they could not understand, as though they had been there. I do not know what category of sin that comes under.