Heloise and Bellinis (11 page)

The upshot was that I was more dead than alive when 1 left her room. You might have expected Lorenza to die right after the last thrilling high note came from her gasping throat, but instead she recovered at once without a trace of loneliness or homesickness.

And that wasn’t an isolated incident, because every night I left my room with the excuse that I had to go to the bathroom, and every night Lorenza and I played the same death scene. When I went back to bed the last night, my father put down the book he was pretending to read and looked at my face. He was worried because I looked so pale, and wondered if I had diarrhea, the only ailment that alarmed the family ever since an acute gastroenteritis almost sent me to my Maker when I was two years old.

Then I went to the famous manor house in Somerset, leaving Lorenza in London in full bloom. She even came up to see me a couple of weekends. Fortunately for me she stopped coming; otherwise, what with one thing and another, I am not sure I would ever have made it back to Italy.

It seems, dear Abelard, that women like that aren’t as rare as you might think.

I doubt that you have ever met a woman like that. Otherwise, conceited as you are, you would have told me all about it. But if you ever do, I would advise you to run the other way. If you are ever at the pitch of excitement and someone screams “Help me, Abelard, you’re killing me!” stop at once and let her die. Remember Lorenza! She takes flowers to the cemetery for two husbands, and her third husband was miraculously saved by running off with a flamenco dancer.

END OF THE INTERMEZZO BETWEEN CHAPTER THIRTEEN AND CHAPTER X

George looked out of the airplane window and saw the coast of Maine to his right. It was the first sight of land after an endless sea of clouds. George could not remember a cloudless Atlantic crossing, and every time he had happened to be on one of these airlifts, he wondered if all that rain would pour out one day and drown Europe. Before he knew Heloise, he had often imagined himself as the skipper of an enormous ark loaded with all kinds of animals. And usually the last two human beings to embark were women, a blond and a brunette. He would give them an austere welcome-aboard that betrayed none of his cunning in wanting them both on ship. Once the flood started, the approaching end and his great charm would do the rest.

Now he smiled at the thought of the imaginary games he used to play for whole lazy days at a time. He had never confessed them to his spiritual father, though it did occur to him that he might be commiting a mortal sin. His religion showed the same severity toward thoughts, words, and actions. Essentially he agreed about actions, but he was less sure about words. And he never understood what thoughts had to do with it, so he saw no reason to be a stickler about them.

He noticed that Heloise was sleeping peacefully and decided not to wake her, though he would have liked her to see the coast. In another hour they would land in New York, the capital of the empire,

George had wonderful memories of the years he had lived there with his aunt from Alabama, It was clearer to him now that New York always made him feel as if he were in love. The city’s rough edges and something very human in its asymmetry always evoked strong, deep feelings in him. His aunt had a small apartment on Sixty-third Street, between Fifth and Madison. He had never strayed far into the park, and rarely did he go farther east than Second Avenue or farther south than Forty-fifth Street. He was so fond of the neighborhood that he didn’t need any place else, though he was fully aware of the many areas that made up the immensity he knew as Manhattan. Every time he went to New York, it was enough to breathe deep in the dry air. He was as happy strolling within the precincts of those four streets as he would have been walking along a friendly valley surrounded by high mountains.

Now he longed to share all this with Heloise. They would gaily run down the cracked pavements of Lexington Avenue hand in hand. The minute they let go, they would feel as anguished as if they were saying farewell at the edge of a desert, and they -would be overwhelmed by the sight of the towering skyscrapers along Sixth Avenue. He wondered if she would be as awestruck as he by the Gothic steel pillars of the twin towers of the World Trade Center. They would laugh a lot, cozy and warm in the protective embrace of the city of man.

Then Heloise stirred. She opened her eyes and smiled. “When do we land?”

“Half an hour.”

Tm happy”

“So am I, and 1 love you.”

“Me too.”

She closed her eyes and seemed to go back to sleep.

END OF CHAPTER X

Dear Abelard,

I am almost through with these letters, but I would like to try to explain what Heloise was really like. In addition to being essentially all aquiver, Heloise could probably be best described as a primordial woman, I don’t know if you have ever had the good fortune to meet one.

I doubt it, because your suspicious nature, your repressed fantasies, and your insistence on always getting your money’s worth would preclude the remotest possibility of ever meeting that kind of woman. But 1 have.

It was in America; I don’t remember exactly when, Fm not sure if it was night or day, and I don’t know if I was awake or dreaming. It was a period when I had nothing on my mind, and you know how sometimes an imperceptible detail can catch your attention—that’s how I met a primordial woman. The first thing I noticed was her eyes. She was a brand-new American; she was actually born in Ireland. Her eyes were incredibly round, with the look of surprise that early man must have felt on this earth, and they were as blue as African oceans. Her ears were small, like those of the monkeys of the Serengeti Plain. Her high, full breast was divinely perfect, her hips were as round as the world, and her skin was white as the summer moon. I can’t remember what excuse I made to introduce myself, but whatever remark I made, she said, “I know!” in a way I never heard before and will never hear again: drawling, warm, unhurried, and knowing, yet hopelessly and desolately final.

I swear, I never heard anyone say “I know” that way, and if you don’t think that is a good enough reason to want to understand the source of such an unusual rendition of such an ordinary remark as “I know,” it means that again you are very slow on the uptake. Sometimes I wonder why I take the time and trouble to write to you at all.

It would be a lie to say that I desired her at once. I just wanted to take a closer look and talk some more. I asked if she would have lunch or dinner with me, on the pretext that this would give us a chance to talk about her work. We made a date to meet at Smith & Wollensky’s, a steakhouse that had something genuinely American about it. Naturally it was evening. She was very late, which I subsequently realized was an innate but charming defect. She was also a bit high, very cheerful, and not at all primordial. The whole staff of the restaurant frowned as we entered; they did not much approve of an older man taking a rather euphoric young woman out to dinner. I ordered everything I could to get the bill up to the impeccably respectable amount of four hundred dollars. I had to act the good paterfamilias when she spilled her glass on the pants of the man at the next table. And I all but fled from the restaurant igno. miniously pursued by the hatcheck girl, who spurned the large, guilt-ridden tip and scornfully handed it back. I managed to hail a taxi all by myself, and Heloise—that was her name—sank back into the seat and gave me a full view of her round thighs.

I asked her up to my room when we got to the hotel, but her refusal, 1 later realized, was something inborn; it was one of the things that made her a primordial woman.

Let me explain—1 wouldn’t want you to think it was intense, lustful desire that had me in its grip that night. It was not like the time 1 went to Cortina with the set purpose of making love to a buxom lass from Bolzano while pretending 1 was actually looking for a temporary maid. I called her in Bolzano as soon as I got to Cortina to ask her why she wasn’t there. She said she couldn’t come because her father had just died, and the funeral was the next day.

I really don’t know what possessed me, but the next thing I said was that I would come to Bolzano to be with her in her grief, and maybe we could meet, outside the café where she waitressed. She said she would look forward to my condolences about three in the afternoon, when she finished her shift.

And believe me, scared as you are of driving fast, you would never have survived the ride from Cortina to Bolzano, because the engine was sex-powered that day, and I took the curves on one wheel. I got stopped by the carabinieri outside Dobbiaco. They asked me where I was going in such a hurry, and 1 told them I was going to a friend’s funeral They let me go but suggested I slow down or there’d be two funerals instead of one,

I don’t know if it was a reaction against grief or what, but the fact of the matter is that the moment we met we both decided at once to go to the nearest hotel we could ind. We walked in, tossed our identiication to the sleepy porter, and ran up to the room. 1 had the very exciting sight of her enormous butt all the way up the stairs. Once in the room, she reached greedily for the whiskey bottle, and from behind I tried to rip off her black silk apron. I saw that her black-seamed black stockings, which is what women wore before 1968, were held up by two garters on a thin elastic belt, also black, just over her lace panties. And that is where I directed the weapons at my disposal, i.e., my hands and everything else. She nearly shrieked with all the desire pent up in her body as she mourned with her mother and sisters her father’s long illness and death. It was one of those incredible things—you don’t know which way to turn and how many things you can do at once, and it hardly even seems possible until you have gone all the way and tried everything. And still there is always something unfinished, and there always seems to be something else you could try. There were other times I have been possessed by what might be called rampant desire, but the time with the girl from Bolzano was really the utmost. And I never saw her again.

As I was saying, I didn’t have that kind of desire for Heloise, but her refusal stirred a different kind of desire, something deeper and more mature.

Cheer up now. I think the time has finally come to tell you what happened that first afternoon when George and Heloise went upstairs at Harry’s Bar in Beirut. I hope you’re satisied.

As soon as Harry closed the door after them, George and Heloise took off all their clothes. George kissed her slender, almost childlike, unworldly mouth. They rolled onto the bed, his lips brushed her suddenly stiff nipples, his chin caressed her full and welcoming abdomen, and then he sank his face between her legs. And as he did so, he was surprised by the scent. At first it was a sensation, a preliminary sign of distant sex. When he plunged into the lips of her vagina, he was enveloped by the soft and pungent, intense smell of earth rotting at dawn in the first rays of the sun, still not hot enough to assimilate the damp offal of nocturnal animals—an odor he didn’t sense just with his nose: it went straight to his head, mentally repulsive yet instinctively attractive.

As a European, I would like to stop for this detail to show that America is also ahead of us in the matter of bidets. The reason the United States still doesn’t import bidets certainly has nothing to do with trade protectionism. If they had bidets, a great many people would miss this wonderful gift of nature. I am speaking of odor. In Italy if you’re lucky, the sexual organs smell of Palm-olive soap, when they don’t reek of some really inferior brand.

I could spend a whole month on the coast of Portugal sniffing the faint fragrance the trade winds waft from the distant coasts of America to our side of the Atlantic. This must be the reason so many explorers throughout history have risked death to sail west. Sailing upwind, to boot. Naturally!

Harry Cipriani, connoisseur that he was, never had bidets installed in his rooms. How right he was, George thought. But let’s get back to what I was telling you about, primordial woman.

Because it was the earthy sighs and cares that issued from her pleasure-sealed eyes (emanations George thought must be the food of the gods) that gave him courage. He plunged his tongue into soft warm channels and lingered over the tender firmness of her swollen clitoris. And then his mouth tasted the flavor of that odor. He had an irresistible longing to go deeper, farther down in pursuit of other unfamiliar rotundities, and he found them inexplicably yielding.

Meanwhile he swelled with pleasure almost to bursting, and there seemed to be tacit mutual agreement that the moment had come to climb back from those depths. His mouth was still full of these mysterious fragrances as it joined Heloise’s in a deep kiss, while down below he approached the origin of life, which he could sense was ready and willing.

He entered slowly. He went all the way in and then came back for greater strength, as he went in and out and in and out. Small shouts of pain and joy issued rapidly from the throat of this primordial woman now totally obedient to the violent ongoing strokes of love. In the end, their powerful engines were humming together. The speed continued to increase madly, and the bushings melted^ the valves broke, and all equilibrium was shattered in one ultimate, annihilating, definitive howl. Primordial woman. Heloise.

He sank exhausted in her embrace. When he looked her in the face, he could also detect the hint of a smile. He was calm again; his organ turned soft and rolled out of the friendly recesses. He turned slowly onto his side and sighed. He looked into her eyes, open now and full of wonderment. Now the corners of her mouth openly displayed a delicate conspiratorial smile. Heloise.