»Listen, daughter,» he said. »Don’t be sorry for me.»
»I’m not. Not at all. I just love you.»
»It isn’t much of a trade is it?» He said oficio instead of trade, because they spoke Spanish together too, when they left French, and when they did not wish to speak English before other people. Spanish is a rough language, the Colonel thought, rougher than a corncob sometimes. But you can say what you mean in it and make it stick.
»Es un oficio bastante malo,» he repeated, »loving me.»
»Yes. But it is the only one I have.»
»Don’t you write any more poetry?»
»It was young girl poetry. Like young girl painting. Everyone is talented at a certain age.»
At what age do you become old in this country, the Colonel thought. No one is ever old in Venice, but they grow up very fast. I grew up very rapidly in the Veneto myself, and I was never as old as I was at twenty-one.
»How is your mother?» he asked, lovingly.
»She is very well. She does not receive and she sees almost no one because of her sorrow.»
»Do you think she would mind if we had a baby?»
»I don’t know. She is very intelligent, you know. But I would have to marry someone, I suppose. I don’t really want to.»
»We could be married.»
»No,» she said. »I thought it over, and I thought we should not. It is just a decision as the one about crying.»
»Maybe you make wrong decisions. Christ knows I’ve made a few and too many men are dead from when I was wrong.»
»I think, perhaps, you exaggerate. I don’t believe you made many wrong decisions.»
»Not many,» the Colonel said. »But enough. Three is plenty in my trade, and I made all three.»
»I’d like to know about them.»
»They’d bore you,» the Colonel told her. »They beat the hell out of me to remember them. So what would they do to some outsider?»
»Am I an outsider?»
»No. You’re my true love. My last and only and true love.»
»Did you make them early or late? The decisions.»
»I made them early. In the middle. And late.»
»Wouldn’t you tell me about them? I would like to have a share in your sad trade.»
»The hell with them,» the Colonel said. »They were made and they’ve all been paid for. Only you can’t pay for that.»
»Can you tell me about that and why?»
»No,» the Colonel said. And that was the end of that.
»Then let’s have fun.»
»Let’s,» the Colonel said. »With our one and only life.»
»Maybe there are others. Other lives.»
»I don’t think so,» the Colonel said. »Turn your head sideways, beauty.»
»Like this?»
»Like that,» the Colonel said. »Exactly like that.»
So, the Colonel thought, here we come into the last round and I do not know even the number of the round. I have loved but three women and have lost them thrice.
You lose them the same way you lose a battalion; by errors of judgment; orders that are impossible to fulfill, and through impossible conditions. Also through brutality.
I have lost three battalions in my life and three women and now I have a fourth, and loveliest, and where the hell does it end?
You tell me, General, and, incidentally, while we are discussing the matter, and it is a frank discussion of the situation and in no sense a Council of War, as you have so often pointed out to me General: GENERAL WHERE IS YOUR CAVALRY?
I have thought so, he said to himself. The Commanding Officer does not know where his cavalry is, and his cavalry are not completely accurate as to their situation, nor their mission, and they will, some of them, enough, muck off as cavalry have always mucked off in all the wars since they, the Cavalry, had the big horses.
»Beauty,» he said, »Ma très chère et bien aimée. I am very dull and I am sorry.»
»You are never dull, to me, and I love you and I only wish we could be cheerful tonight.»
»We damn well will be,» said the Colonel. »Do you know anything particular we should be cheerful about?»
»We might be cheerful about us, and about the town. You’ve often been very cheerful.»
»Yes,» the Colonel agreed. »I have been.»
»Don’t you think we could do it once more?»
»Sure. Of course. Why not?»
»Do you see the boy with the wave in his hair, that is natural, and he only pushes it a little, skillfully, to be more handsome?»
»I see him,» the Colonel said.
»He is a very good painter, but he has false teeth in front because he was a little bit pédéraste once and other pédérastes attacked him one night on the Lido when there was a full moon.»
»How old are you?»
»I will be nineteen.»
»How do you know this?»
»I know it from the Gondoliere. This boy is a very good painter, for now. There aren’t any really good painters now. But with false teeth, now, in his twenty-fifth year, what a thing.»
»I love you very truly,» the Colonel said.
»I love you very truly, too. Whatever that means in American. I also love you in Italian, against all my judgment and all of my wishes.»
»We shouldn’t wish for too God-damn much,» the Colonel said. »Because we are always liable to get it.»
»I agree,» she said. »But I would like to get what I wish for now.»
Neither of them said anything and then the girl said, »That boy, he is a man now, of course, and goes with very many women to hide what he is, painted my portrait once. You can have it if you like.»
»Thank you,» the Colonel said. »I would love it.»
»It is very romantic. My hair is twice as long as it has ever been and I look as though I were rising from the sea without the head wet. Actually, you rise from the sea with the hair very flat and coming to points at the end. It is almost the look of a very nearly dead rat. But Daddy paid him adequately for the portrait, and, while it is not truly me, it is the way you like to think of me.»
»I think of you when you come from the sea too.»
»Of course. Very ugly. But you might like to have this portrait for a souvenir.»
»Your lovely mother would not mind?»
»Mummy would not mind. She would be glad to be rid of it, I think. We have better pictures in the house.»
»I love you and your mother both very much.»
»I must tell her,» the girl said.
»Do you think that pock-marked jerk is really a writer?»
»Yes. If Ettore says so. He loves to joke but he does not lie. Richard, what is a jerk? Tell me truly.»
»It is a little rough to state. But I think it means a man who has never worked at his trade (oficio) truly, and is presumptuous in some annoying way.»
»I must learn to use the term properly.»
»Don’t use it,» the Colonel said.
Then the Colonel asked, »When do I get the portrait?»
»Tonight if you wish it. I’ll have someone wrap it and send it from the house. Where will you hang it?»
»In my quarters.»
»And no one will come in and make remarks and speak badly of me?»
»No. They damn well will not. Also I’ll tell them it is a portrait of my daughter.»
»Did you ever have a daughter?»
»No. I always wanted one.»
»I can be your daughter as well as everything else.»
»That would be incest.»
»I don’t think that would be so terrible in a city as old as this and that has seen what this city has seen.»
»Listen, Daughter.»
»Good,» she said. »That was fine. I liked it.»
»All right,» the Colonel said and his voice was thickened a little. »I liked it, too.»
»Do you see now why I love you when I know better than to do it?»
»Look, Daughter. Where should we dine?»
»Wherever you like.»
»Would you eat at the Gritti?»
»Of course.»
»Then call the house and ask for permission.»
»No. I decided not to ask permission but to send word where I was dining. So they would not worry.»
»But do you really prefer the Gritti?»
»I do. Because it is a lovely restaurant and it is where you live and anyone can look at us that wants to.»
»When did you get like that?»
»I have always been like that. I have never cared what anyone thought, ever. Nor have I ever done anything that I was ashamed of except tell lies when I was a little girl and be unkind to people.»
»I wish we could be married and have five sons,» the Colonel said.
»So do I,» the girl said. »And send them to the five corners of the world.»
»Are there five corners to the world?»
»I don’t know,» she said. »It sounded as though there were when I said it. And now we are having fun again, aren’t we?»
»Yes, Daughter,» the Colonel said.
»Say it again. Just as you said it.»
»Yes, Daughter.»
»Oh,» she said. »People must be very complicated. Please may I take your hand?»
»It’s so damned ugly and I dislike looking at it.»
»You don’t know about your hand.»
»That’s a matter of opinion,» he said. »I’d say you were wrong, Daughter.»
»Maybe I am wrong. But we’re having fun again and whatever the bad thing was is gone now.»
»It’s gone the way the mist is burned off the hollows in broken ground when the sun comes out,» the Colonel said. »And you’re the sun.»
»I want to be the moon, too.»
»You
