of the place with an orderly lurch after a very affectionate leave-taking from your colleagues, whom at that moment you feel you love more than anyone else in the world. You are usually brought back to the real world when you run into a customer on the little steamer that takes you back home. You realize that if your condition is recognized, the report of the owner of Harry’s Bar in a state of inebriation will go round the world faster than the speed of sound. So you try to hold yourself steady on the unsteady deck, and you still have to make intelligent responses to the idiotic remarks that usually come from the kind of people you casually encounter on shipboard. All this, of course, while you are doing everything you can to avoid words that might sound like Hasdrubal.
As you walk down the ramp, you make every effort to keep your eye on the ground in order not to stumble, and you walk very carefully so that no reeling motions betray your rather suspect condition. When you have finally gone around the first corner, you are all but indifferent to the fear of being seen from a window, and you let yourself go. You stagger so that you bounce from one wall to the other of the narrow
calk
leading home.
When you get to your door, there is a struggle to find the right key and somehow get it into the invisible lock. Once inside the darkness of your own home, you try not to make any sound that might awaken wife and children, for they would immediately recognize your shameful condition. A friend of mine was telling me about the terrible problems he has every time he comes home drunk late at night. He insists on taking a very large guitar with him, and his problem is to keep from banging it against the door frames and the furniture on his way to the double bed that is already half-occupied by his wife.
This is where 1 ought to explain why i have suffered all my life from the same aftereffects as my father, 1 think the trouble started right after my father and mother went home from Martini’s that famous night in Venice. Young as they were, they followed certain procedures that resulted in my conception. Since my father had bent his elbow considerably that evening, they worried for a long time whether the fruit of their union might come into this world with some mysterious affliction. But this was not the case, except for an endless string of trivial ailments that afflicted me throughout childhood and made my skin so pale that every now and then my father would ask if a fart had got into my bloodstream. I did have a mysterious ailment after all, and my father probably suffered from it for the same hereditary reason I did: it seems that my late grandfather Carlo had the habit, as people did in his day, of drowning in wine the joys and sorrows that usually accompany our life on earth.
END OF THE INTERMEZZO BETWEEN CHAPTERS NINE AND TEN
CHAPTER TEN
In which George and Heloise are taken to the headquarters of the armed forces of the United States of America
,
One jeep followed the other over the dirt road. George was in the second jeep and could see nothing in front of him except a great deal of thick white dust. Finally they reached the barrier of the Israeli-controlled zone, and from that point on the road was asphalt. Now George caught an occasional glimpse of Heloise’s windblown hak He felt a bit depressed and utterly unable to guess what might happen.
They all got out at headquarters. Heloise turned to George, She gave him a tender smile, and he felt better at once. Together they went up to General Custer’s anteroom. Two MPs were standing at attention outside the door, their helmets down to their eyes. Ryland went up to them. “I’m Lieutenant Ryland with Sergeants Amundsen and Nobel, Privates Margitai, and Smith, and”—Ryland cleared his throat as he looked at Heloise—”this lady We have to see the general.”
One of the MPs did an about-face and knocked on the general’s door.
Suzy’s answer came like a shout:
As you walk down the ramp, you make every effort to keep your eye on the ground in order not to stumble, and you walk very carefully so that no reeling motions betray your rather suspect condition. When you have finally gone around the first corner, you are all but indifferent to the fear of being seen from a window, and you let yourself go. You stagger so that you bounce from one wall to the other of the narrow
calk
leading home.
When you get to your door, there is a struggle to find the right key and somehow get it into the invisible lock. Once inside the darkness of your own home, you try not to make any sound that might awaken wife and children, for they would immediately recognize your shameful condition. A friend of mine was telling me about the terrible problems he has every time he comes home drunk late at night. He insists on taking a very large guitar with him, and his problem is to keep from banging it against the door frames and the furniture on his way to the double bed that is already half-occupied by his wife.
This is where 1 ought to explain why i have suffered all my life from the same aftereffects as my father, 1 think the trouble started right after my father and mother went home from Martini’s that famous night in Venice. Young as they were, they followed certain procedures that resulted in my conception. Since my father had bent his elbow considerably that evening, they worried for a long time whether the fruit of their union might come into this world with some mysterious affliction. But this was not the case, except for an endless string of trivial ailments that afflicted me throughout childhood and made my skin so pale that every now and then my father would ask if a fart had got into my bloodstream. I did have a mysterious ailment after all, and my father probably suffered from it for the same hereditary reason I did: it seems that my late grandfather Carlo had the habit, as people did in his day, of drowning in wine the joys and sorrows that usually accompany our life on earth.
END OF THE INTERMEZZO BETWEEN CHAPTERS NINE AND TEN
CHAPTER TEN
In which George and Heloise are taken to the headquarters of the armed forces of the United States of America
,
One jeep followed the other over the dirt road. George was in the second jeep and could see nothing in front of him except a great deal of thick white dust. Finally they reached the barrier of the Israeli-controlled zone, and from that point on the road was asphalt. Now George caught an occasional glimpse of Heloise’s windblown hak He felt a bit depressed and utterly unable to guess what might happen.
They all got out at headquarters. Heloise turned to George, She gave him a tender smile, and he felt better at once. Together they went up to General Custer’s anteroom. Two MPs were standing at attention outside the door, their helmets down to their eyes. Ryland went up to them. “I’m Lieutenant Ryland with Sergeants Amundsen and Nobel, Privates Margitai, and Smith, and”—Ryland cleared his throat as he looked at Heloise—”this lady We have to see the general.”
One of the MPs did an about-face and knocked on the general’s door.
Suzy’s answer came like a shout:
Similar Books
