Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Truman Capote, 1958

I am always drawn back to places where I have lived, the houses and their
neighborhoods. For instance, there is a brownstone in the East Seventies where,
during the early years of the war, I had my first New York apartment. It was one
room crowded with attic furniture, a sofa and fat chairs upholstered in that itchy,
particular red velvet that one associates with hot days on a tram. The walls were
stucco, and a color rather like tobacco-spit. Everywhere, in the bathroom too, there
were prints of Roman ruins freckled brown with age. The single window looked out
on a fire escape. Even so, my spirits heightened whenever I felt in my pocket the
key to this apartment; with all its gloom, it still was a place of my own, the first, and
my books were there, and jars of pencils to sharpen, everything I needed, so I felt,
to become the writer I wanted to be.
It never occurred to me in those days to write about Holly Golightly, and probably
it would not now except for a conversation I had with Joe Bell that set the whole
memory of her in motion again.
Holly Golightly had been a tenant in the old brownstone; she’d occupied the
apartment below mine. As for Joe Bell, he ran a bar around the corner on Lexington
Avenue; he still does. Both Holly and I used to go there six, seven times a day, not
for a drink, not always, but to make telephone calls: during the war a private
telephone was hard to come by. Moreover, Joe Bell was good about taking
messages, which in Holly’s case was no small favor, for she had a tremendous many.
Of course this was a long time ago, and until last week I hadn’t seen Joe Bell in
several years. Off and on we’d kept in touch, and occasionally I’d stopped by his bar
when passing through the neighborhood; but actually we’d never been strong friends
except in as much as we were both friends of Holly Golightly. Joe Bell hasn’t an easy
nature, he admits it himself, he says it’s because he’s a bachelor and has a sour
stomach. Anyone who knows him will tell you he’s a hard man to talk to. Impossible
if you don’t share his fixations, of which Holly is one. Some others are: ice hockey,
Weimaraner dogs, Our Gal Sunday (a soap serial he has listened to for fifteen years),
and Gilbert and Sullivan — he claims to be related to one or the other, I can’t
remember which.
And so when, late last Tuesday afternoon, the telephone rang and I heard «Joe
Bell here,» I knew it must be about Holly. He didn’t say so, just: «Can you rattle right
over here? It’s important,» and there was a croak of excitement in his froggy voice.
I took a taxi in a downpour of October rain, and on my way I even thought she
might be there, that I would see Holly again.
But there was no one on the premises except the proprietor. Joe Bell’s is a quiet
place compared to most Lexington Avenue bars. It boasts neither neon nor
television. Two old mirrors reflect the weather from the streets; and behind the bar,
in a niche surrounded by photographs of ice-hockey stars, there is always a large
bowl of fresh flowers that Joe Bell himself arranges with matronly care. That is what
he was doing when I came in.

»Naturally,» he said, rooting a gladiola deep into the bowl, «naturally I wouldn’t
have got you over here if it wasn’t I wanted your opinion. It’s peculiar. A very
peculiar thing has happened.»
«You heard from Holly?»
He fingered a leaf, as though uncertain of how to answer. A small man with a fine
head of coarse white hair, he has a bony, sloping face better suited to someone far
taller; his complexion seems permanently sunburned: now it grew even redder. «I
can’t say exactly heard from her. I mean, I don’t know. That’s why I want your
opinion. Let me build you a drink. Something new. They call it a White Angel,» he
said, mixing one-half vodka, one-half gin, no vermouth. While I drank the result, Joe
Bell stood sucking on a Tums and turning over in his mind what he had to tell me.
Then: «You recall a certain Mr. I.Y. Yunioshi? A gentleman from Japan.»
«From California,» I said, recalling Mr. Yunioshi perfectly. He’s a photographer on
one of the picture magazines, and when I knew him he lived in the studio apartment
on the top floor of the brownstone.
«Don’t go mixing me up. All I’m asking, you know who I mean? Okay. So last
night who comes waltzing in here but this selfsame Mr. I. Y. Yunioshi. I haven’t seen
him, I guess it’s over two years. And where do you think he’s been those two years?»
«Africa.»
Joe Bell stopped crunching on his Tums, his eyes narrowed. «So how did you
know?»
«Read it in Winchell.» Which I had, as a matter of fact.
He rang open his cash register, and produced a manila envelope. «Well, see did
you read this in Winchell.»
In the envelope were three photographs, more or less the same, though taken
from different angles: a tall delicate Negro man wearing a calico skirt and with a shy,
yet vain smile, displaying in his hands an odd wood sculpture, an elongated carving
of a head, a girl’s, her hair sleek and short as a young man’s, her smooth wood eyes
too large and tilted in the tapering face, her mouth wide, overdrawn, not unlike
clown-lips. On a glance it resembled most primitive carving; and then it didn’t, for
here was the spit-image of Holly Golightly, at least as much of a likeness as a dark
still thing could be.
«Now what do you make of that?» said Joe Bell, satisfied with my puzzlement.
«It looks like her.»
«Listen, boy,» and he slapped his hand on the bar, «it is her. Sure as I’m a man fit
to wear britches. The little Jap knew it was her the minute he saw her.»
«He saw her? In Africa?»
«Well. Just the statue there. But it comes to the same thing. Read the facts for
yourself,» he said, turning over one of the photographs. On the reverse was written:
Wood Carving, S Tribe, Tococul, East Anglia, Christmas Day, 1956.
He said, «Here’s what the Jap says,» and the story was this: On Christmas day Mr.
Yunioshi had passed with his camera through Tococul, a village in the tangles of
nowhere and of no interest, merely a congregation of mud huts with monkeys in the
yards and buzzards on the roofs. He’d decided to move on when he saw suddenly a
Negro squatting in a doorway carving monkeys on a walking stick. Mr. Yunioshi was

impressed and asked to see more of his work. Whereupon he was shown the carving
of the girl’s head: and felt, so he told Joe Bell, as if he were falling in a dream. But
when he offered to buy it the Negro cupped his private parts in his hand (apparently
a tender gesture, comparable to tapping one’s heart) and said no. A pound of salt
and ten dollars, a wristwatch and two pounds of salt and twenty dollars, nothing
swayed him. Mr. Yunioshi was in all events determined to learn how the carving
came to be made. It cost him his salt and his watch, and the incident was conveyed
in African and pig-English and finger-talk. But it would seem that in the spring of that
year a party of three white persons had appeared out of the brush riding horseback.
A young woman and two men. The men, both red-eyed with fever, were forced for
several weeks to stay shut and shivering in an isolated hut, while the young woman,
having presently taken a fancy to the wood-carver, shared the woodcarver’s mat.
«I don’t credit that part,» Joe Bell said squeamishly. «I know she had her ways,
but I don’t think she’d be up to anything as much as that.»
«And then?»
«Then nothing,» he shrugged. «By and by she went like she come, rode away on a
horse.»
«Alone, or with the two men?»
Joe Bell blinked. «With the two men, I guess. Now the Jap, he asked about her up
and down the country. But nobody else had ever seen her.» Then it was as if he
could feel my own sense of letdown transmitting itself to him, and he wanted no part
of it. «One thing you got to admit, it’s the only definite news in I don’t know how
many» — he counted on his fingers: there weren’t enough — «years. All I hope, I
hope she’s rich. She must be rich. You got to be rich to go mucking around in
Africa.»
«She’s probably never set foot in Africa,» I said, believing it; yet I could see her
there, it was somewhere she would have gone. And the carved head: I looked at the
photographs again.
«You know so much, where is she?»
«Dead. Or in a crazy house. Or married. I think she’s married and quieted down
and maybe right in this very city.»
He considered a moment. «No,» he said, and shook his head. «I’ll tell you why. If
she was in this city I’d have seen her. You take a man that likes to walk, a man like
me, a man’s been walking in the streets going on ten or twelve years, and all those
years he’s got his eye out for one person, and nobody’s ever her, don’t it stand to
reason she’s not there? I see pieces of her all the time, a flat little bottom, any
skinny girl that walks fast and straight — » He paused, as though too aware of how
intently I was looking at him. «You think I’m round the bend?»
«It’s just that I didn’t know you’d been in love with her. Not like that.»
I was sorry I’d said it; it disconcerted him. He scooped up the photographs and
put them back in their envelope. I looked at my watch. I hadn’t any place to go, but
I