Across the River and Into the Trees (17 page)

“Portrait, keep your God-damn chin up so you can break my heart easier.”

It certainly was a lovely present, the Colonel thought.

“Can you maneuver?” he asked the portrait. “Good and fast?”

Portrait said nothing and the Colonel answered, You known damn well she can. She’d out-maneuver you the best day you were ever born and she would stay and fight where you would eff-off, discreetly.

“Portrait,” he said. “Boy or daughter or my one true love or whatever it is; you know what it is, portrait.”

The portrait, as before, did not answer. But the Colonel, who was a General now again, early in the morning at the only time he really knew, and with Valpolicella, knew as absolutely as though he had just read his third Wassermann that there was no eff-off in portrait, and he felt shame for having talked to portrait roughly.

“I’ll be the best God-damned boy you ever witnessed today. And you can tell your principal that.”

Portrait, as was her fashion, was silent.

She probably would speak to a horse-cavalryman, the General, for now he had two stars, and they grated on his shoulders, and showed white in the vague, scuffed red on the plaque in front of his jeep. He never used command cars, nor semi-armoured vehicles complete with sand bags.

“The hell with you, portrait,” he said. “Or get your T.S. slip from the universal chaplain of us all, with combined religions. You ought to be able to eat on that.”

“The hell with you,” the portrait said, without speaking. “You low class soldier.”

“Yes,” the Colonel said, for now he was a Colonel again, and had relinquished all his former rank.

“I love you, portrait, very much. But don’t get rough with me. I love you very much because you are beautiful. But I love the girl better, a million times better, hear it?”

There was no sign that she heard it, so he tired of it.

“You are in a fixed position, portrait,” he said. “Without or with any frame. And I am going to maneuver.”

The portrait was as silent as she had been since the concierge had brought her into the room, and aided and abetted by the second waiter, had shown her to the Colonel and to the girl.

The Colonel looked at her and saw she was indefensible, now that the light was good, or almost good.

He saw, too, that she was the portrait of his own true love, and so he said, “I am sorry for all the stupidnesses I say. I do not wish ever to be brutal. Maybe we could both sleep a little while, with luck, and then, perhaps, your Mistress would call on the telephone?”

Maybe she will even call, he thought.

THE hall porter pushed the
Gazzetino
under the door, and the Colonel had it, noiselessly, almost as soon as it had passed through the slit.

He very nearly took it from the hall porter’s hand. He did not like the hall porter since he had found him, one day, going through his bag, when he, the Colonel, had re-entered the room after having left it, presumably for some time. He had to come back to the room to get his bottle of the medicine, which he had forgotten, and the hall porter was well through his bag.

“I guess you don’t say stick them up in this hotel,” the Colonel had said. “But you’re no credit to your town.”

There was silence produced, and re-produced, by the striped waist-coated man with the Fascist face, and the Colonel said, “Go on, boy, look through the rest of it. I don’t carry any military secrets with my toilet articles.” Since then, there was scant friendship between them, and the Colonel enjoyed trying to take the morning paper from the striped waist-coated man’s hand; noiselessly, and when he heard, or saw it first make a move under the door.

“OK, you won today, jerk,” he said in the best Venetian dialect he could summon at that hour. “Go hang yourself.”

But they don’t hang themselves, he thought. They just have to go on putting papers under other people’s doors that do not even hate them. It must be quite a difficult trade being an ex-Fascist. Maybe he is not an ex-Fascist too. How do you know.

I can’t hate Fascists, he thought. Nor Krauts either, since unfortunately, I am a soldier.

“Listen, Portrait,” he said. “Do I have to hate the Krauts because we kill them? Do I have to hate them as soldiers and as human beings? It seems too easy a solution to me.”

Well, portrait. Forget it. Forget it. You’re not old enough to know about it. You are two years younger than the girl that you portray, and she is younger and older than hell; which is quite an old place.

“Listen, portrait,” he said, and saying it, knew that now as long as he lived, he would have someone to talk to at the early hours that he woke.

“As I was saying, portrait. The hell with that too. That’s too old for you too. That is one of the things you can’t say no matter how true it is. There are lots of things I can never say to you and maybe that will be good for me. It is about time something was. What do you think would be good for me, Portrait?

“What’s the matter, Portrait?” he asked her. “You getting hungry? I am.”

So he rang the bell for the waiter who would bring breakfast.

He knew that now, even though the light was so good that every wave showed on the Grand Canal, lead colored and solid heavy with the wind, and the tide now high over the landing steps of the Palace directly opposite his room, there would be no telephone call for several hours.

The young sleep good, he thought. They deserve it. “Why do we have to get old?” he asked the waiter who had come in with his glass-eye and the menu.

“I don’t know, my Colonel. I suppose it is a natural process.”

“Yes. I guess I imagine that too. The eggs fried with their faces up. Tea and toast.”

“You don’t want anything American?”

“The hell with anything American except me. Is the
Gran Maestro
astir yet?”

“He has your Valpolicella in the big wicker fiascos of two liters and I have brought this decanter with it.”

“That one,” the Colonel said. “I wish to Christ I could give him a regiment.”

“I don’t think he would want one, really.”

“No,” the Colonel said. “I don’t want one, really, myself.”

THE Colonel breakfasted with the leisure of a fighter who has been clipped badly, hears four, and knows how to relax truly for five seconds more.

“Portrait,” he said. “You ought to relax too. That’s the only thing that is going to be difficult about you. That’s what they call the static element in painting. You know, Portrait, that almost no pictures, paintings rather, move at all. A few do. But not many.

“I wish that your mistress was here and we could have movement. How do girls like you and she know so much so damn young and be so beautiful?

“With us, if a girl is really beautiful, she comes from Texas and maybe, with luck, she can tell you what month it is. They can all count good though.

“They teach them how to count, and keep their legs together, and how to put their hair up in pin curls. Sometime, portrait, for your sins, if you have any, you ought to have to sleep in a bed with a girl who has put her hair up in pin curls to be beautiful tomorrow. Not tonight. They’d never be beautiful tonight. For tomorrow, when we make the competition.

“The girl, Renata, that you are, is sleeping now without ever having done anything to her hair. She is sleeping with it spread out on the pillow and all it is to her is a glorious, dark, silky annoyance, that she can hardly remember to comb, except that her governess taught her. “I see her in the street with the lovely long-legged stride and the wind doing anything it wants to her hair, and her true breasts under the sweater, and then I see the nights in Texas with the pin curls; tight and subjected by metallic instruments.

“Pin me no pin curls, my beloved,” he said to the Portrait, “and I will try to lay it on the line in round, heavy, hard silver dollars or with the other.”

I mustn’t get rough, he thought.

Then he said to the portrait, for he did not capitalize her now in his mind, “You are so God-damned beautiful you stink. Also you are jail-bait. Renata’s two years older now. You are under seventeen.”

And why can’t I have her and love her and cherish her and never be rude, nor bad, and have the five sons that go to the five corners of the world; wherever that is? I don’t know. I guess the cards we draw are those we get. You wouldn’t like to re-deal would you dealer?

No. They only deal to you once, and then you pick them up and play them. I can play them, if I draw any damn thing at all, he told portrait; who was unimpressed.

“Portrait,” he said. “You better look the other way so that you will not be unmaidenly. I am going to take a shower now and shave, something you will never have to do, and put on my soldier-suit and go and walk around this town even though it is too early.”

So, he got out of bed, favoring his bad leg, which hurt him always. He pulled the reading light with his bad hand. There was sufficient light, and he had been wasting electricity for nearly an hour.

He regretted this as he regretted all his errors. He walked past portrait, only looking casually, and looked at himself in the mirror. He had dropped both parts of his pajamas and he looked at himself critically and truly.

“You beat-up old bastard,” he said to the mirror. Portrait was a thing of the past. Mirror was actuality and of this day.

The gut is flat, he said without uttering it. The chest is all right except where it contains the defective muscle. We are hung as we are hung, for better or worse, or something, or something awful.

You are one half a hundred years old, you bastard you. Now go in and take a shower, and scrub good, and afterwards put on your soldier suit. Today is another day.

THE Colonel stopped at the reception desk in the lobby, but the concierge was not there yet. There was only the night porter.

“Can you put something in the safe for me?”

“No, my Colonel. No one may open the safe until the assistant manager or the concierge arrives. But I will guard anything for you that you wish.”

“Thank you. It’s not worth the trouble,” and he buttoned the Gritti envelope, with the stones inside, the envelope addressed to himself, into the inside left pocket of his tunic.

“There’s no real crime here now,” the night porter said.

It had been a long night and he was happy to speak to someone. “There never really was, my Colonel. There are only differences of opinion and politics.”

“What do you have for politics?” the Colonel asked; for he was lonely too.

“About what you would expect.”

“I see. And how is your thing going?”

“I think it goes quite well. Maybe not as well as last year. But still quite well. We were beaten and we have to wait a while now.”

“Do you work at it?”

“Not much. It is more the politics of my heart than of . my head. I believe in it with my head too, but I have very little political development.”

“When you get it you won’t have any heart.”

“Maybe not. Do you have politics in the army?”

“Plenty,” the Colonel said. “But not what you mean.”

“Well, we better not discuss it then. I have not meant to be intrusive.”

“I asked the question; the original question rather. It was only to talk. It was not an interrogation.”

“I don’t think it was. You do not have the face of an inquisitor, my Colonel, and I know about the Order, although I am not a member.”

“You may be member material. I’ll take it up with the
Gran Maestro
.”

“We come from the same town; but from distinct quarters.”

“It’s a good town.”

“My Colonel, I have so little political development that I believe all honorable men are honorable.”

“Oh you’ll get over that,” the Colonel assured him. “Don’t worry, boy. You’ve got a young party. Naturally you make errors.”

“Please don’t talk like that.”

“It was just rough early morning joking.”

“Tell me, my Colonel, what do you really think about Tito?”

“I think several things. But he’s my next door neighbor. I’ve found it better not to talk about my neighbor.”

“I’d like to learn.”

“Then learn it the hard way. Don’t you know people don’t give answers to such questions?”

“I had hoped they did.”

“They don’t,” the Colonel said. “Not in my position. All I can tell you is that Mister Tito has plenty problems.”

“Well, I know that now truly,” the night porter who was really only a boy said.

“I hope you do,” the Colonel said. “I wouldn’t call it, as knowledge, any pearl of great price. Now, good-day, for I must take a walk for the good of my liver, or something.”

“Good day, my Colonel.
Fa brutto tempo
.”

“
Bruttissimo
,” the Colonel said and, pulling the belt of his raincoat tight, and settling his shoulders into it, and the skirts well down, he stepped out into the wind.

THE Colonel took the ten
centesimi
gondola across the Canal, paying the usual dirty note, and standing with the crowd of those condemned to early rising.

He looked back at the Gritti and saw the windows of his room; still open. There was no promise nor threat of rain; only the same strong wild, cold wind from the mountains. Everyone in the gondola looked cold and the Colonel thought, I wish I could issue these wind-proof coats to everyone on board. God, and every officer that ever wore one, knows they are not water-proof, and who made the money out of that one?

You can’t get water through a Burberry. But I suppose some able jerk has his boy in Groton now, or maybe Canterbury, where the big contractors’ boys go, because our coats leaked.

And what about some brother officer of mine who split with him? I wonder who the Benny Meyers of the ground forces were? There probably wasn’t only one. Probably, he thought, there must be very many. You must not be awake yet, to talk that simply. They do keep the wind out though. The raincoats. Raincoats my ass.

The gondola pulled up between the stakes on the far bank of the canal and the Colonel watched the black-clad people climb up out of the black-painted vehicle. Is she a vehicle? he thought. Or must a vehicle have wheels or be tracked?