Heloise and Bellinis (3 page)

END OF THE INTERMEZZO BETWEEN CHAPTERS THREE AND FOUR

About ten o’clock one morning, exactly two weeks after George rented the room, the two of them came down the stairs and walked into the bar. Harry greeted them quite naturally and asked if they would like some coffee. George ordered double coffee for two.

George and Heloise seemed perfectly happy, to judge by their incredibly radiant glances. They didn’t utter a word the whole time they sat in the bar; they were absorbed in thought.

Heloise had lost a bit of her tan, and George’s face seemed drawn but rested, Harry continued in silence to polish his gleaming counter. He lifted the bottles one by one, dusted them, and put them back.

George got up^ and said, “Harry, we’re leaving. Would you get me the bill?”

“Here it is. 1 drew it up in advance.” He set the bill in front of George.

George signed it and told Harry to send it to his wealthy aunt in Alabama. “Ill write down the address for you.”

Harry said that he already had the address. He didn’t think it proper to forward the bill. He didn’t even have the heart to tell George that he had been reported killed in action.

“Thanks for everything, Harry See you soon.”

“Good-bye, Private Smith. Good-bye, madam.” Harry held the door for them, and there was a sudden gust of very dry torrid air.

George and Heloise stepped out into the dusty street. There was an unearthly calm, as if the city had suddenly died. The only sound was a car horn in the distance, and then silence. George put his arm around Heloise’s waist, and the two of them slowly ambled down the street. When they got to the corner, George noticed a jeep parked across the street. There was an American soldier at the wheel. George went over to him and said, “Hi, Tom.”

“Hi, George,” the soldier replied.

“Do you mind if I take the jeep, buddy?”

“When will 1 get it back?”

“Maybe never.”

“OK.” Tom owed George a lot of favors. “Whenever you like.”

Tom got out of the jeep, bowed to George, and helped Heloise get in.

“She’s beautiful,” Tom said.

“Forget it.” George smiled.

“See you soon.”

George turned the key and the engine started to belch. He put it into first gear, and the jeep moved forward, raising a cloud of dust behind. They took the first right and headed for the hills. Tom ran to the corner and watched them drive away until the cloud of dust behind them disappeared on the far horizon.

END OF CHAPTER FOUR

Dear Abelard,

As I said before, the author’s great advantage is that he knows exactly what his characters are doing, and he can choose what to tell and what not to tell. But there is no denying that the reader may have an even greater advantage. He can stop reading whenever he wants to, regretting only that he has wasted his money.

But you have always had so little money that you would probably have nothing to do except go on reading, even if you wanted to stop. That’s why i am writing to you, I certainly wouldn’t ask you for advice or suggestions about what George and Heloise should do, because I know perfectly well what they are going to do. 1 just wanted to draw your attention to a couple of things that occurred to me as I was narrating this very unusual love story. You will have noticed that Heloise took it for granted that George would pay for dinner and the hotel. That certainly wouldn’t go down well with the feminists, because no self-respecting women’s-libber would accept such a patently ambiguous situa-tion.

My sister-in-law Ornella, for example, is not, strictly speaking, a feminist. She has reasons of her own for insisting that she is liberated, though she really isn’t. She would have insisted on paying her share of the bill, and that would have put Harry in the embarrassing position of taking cash payment for only half the check. The funny part is that if my sister-in-law had been in Heloise’s place, especially after a couple of drinks, she would have been perfectly happy to indulge in erotic games with George. But her mania for paying her own way would have ruined everything before it even started. 1 don’t know if you remember how beautiful my sister-in-law is—you always seem rather intimidated around my relatives; but believe me, she is one of the most beautiful women 1 have ever desired. But she has one terrible defect: she won’t let anyone pay for her. Otherwise she might have become very rich by now, even richer than my cousin Wanda, provided of course that my cousin had become a belly dancer in the Tan. giers souk instead of a Latin teacher in Verona.

In my short life I have met women far less attractive who have been paid a great deal of money even when they claimed to be making love just for the sake of love. Ever since the days when whorehouses were legal, I have had the utmost respect for women who calmly offer a remedy for lust in exchange for money. When I was a youth, there were marvelous professionals who could satisfy any man who ended up between their legs. You are too young to remember them, but those houses were full of human warmth and kindness. If you never knew them you have missed out on something really important in terms of the spirit and the flesh alike.

We used to play tricks to frighten the priests and old married gentlemen who came on the sly, like setting off the alarm bell that meant the police were about to raid. But pranks aside, believe me when I say that a night spent there, and maybe the next morning as well, with the occasional game of billiards thrown in, was a human experience I wouldn’t have missed for all the tea in China.

We set off the alarm bell hundreds of times, but in all those years I never saw the police come even once.

END OF THE INTERMEZZO BETWEEN CHAPTERS FOUR AND FIVE

Private Tom Margitai decided to stay and watch as the cloud of dust raised by the jeep slowly grew smaller on the horizon and finally vanished completely.

Watching things until the very end was a mania of Tom’s, and every time he did so, he had the same thought: if he didn’t watch till the end, he would not live long enough to have another chance to do it again. He couldn’t have cared less about the jeep; it was already the fourth he had lost that week. The first two blew up while he was off buying cigarettes; the third one blew a tire, so he left it on the side of the road. Every time he went back to headquarters to get another one, the duty officer had nothing to say He simply gave a weary nod by way of indicating that Tom could take his pick of the enormous collection that was always parked on the wharf at the port. For that matter, Tom was glad to have done George a favor, because the last time they’d gone to Harry’s Bar, George had sponsored ten rounds of Bellinis, the most expensive drink you could order there. Tom of course knew that George had been reported killed in action. At first he was sorry he hadn’t said something to his friend, but then he decided that it was probably just as well he hadn’t, seeing the company George was in. In fact, he decided then and there that he wouldn’t tell a soul he had seen George on the street that morning, and in the best of health, to judge by the way he looked.

Meanwhile, George was driving happily along the twisting curves of the hills. The sky was a deep blue, the kind you often have in Lebanon, and the air turned cooler as they gradually went up. Just around a curve he saw a beautiful sloping meadow dotted with cedar trees. He pulled up on the side of the road and looked in the rear for the survival supplies that every good soldier of the United States of America ought to carry with him in a vehicle. He found them in a plastic bag. There was canned meat, crackers, a tin of sardines, a can of ham, a can of spinach and another one of beans, two cans of Coca-Cola, and six aspirins. There was also a bottle of Booth’s gin, which was not standard issue but must have been part of Tom’s unfailing personal stock. George gave silent thanks to Tom and asked Heloise, “Shall we have a bite?”

She smiled at him. The sadness was gone from Heloise’s face. Her mouth opened to reveal her sparkling teeth, and her eyes, deep turquoise now, squeezed shut to share in the joyous delight of her face. George felt as if he had been physically struck by a violent, impulsive rush of affection. He looked at her too, in the same way, and then he gave her a very tender kiss, his lips barely brushing against hers.

He took the bag out of the jeep, and some ten yards away he sat down on the sloping green meadow. She got out and followed him, moving unsteadily on the high heels of her evening shoes, the ones she wore the first time they met, the shoes that did so much to heighten that incredible quivering stride of hers. As he watched her approach, a small gust of wind lifted some dry leaves from the ground. It moved forward in that strange, bizarre way that little whirlwinds have in the grasslands in North Africa, and it came toward her, the only movement in the still afternoon air. The little whirlwind lingered a moment at Heloise’s side. The leaves it had sucked up from the ground spun lightly and rapidly in a shaft at its center. Then the dust devil decided to hit her, slightly disturbing the shreds of her dress and her long black hair, which now seemed to have a brighter sheen, perhaps from happiness.

It seemed to George—indeed, he was absolutely sure—-that nature had marshaled all the delicacy it could just to give Heloise an exquisitely tender caress.

END OF CHAPTER FIVE

Dear Abelard,

I can imagine you already have your doubts about that little whirlwind caressing Heloise. As a matter of fact, I remember that I didn’t believe it either the first time I heard of it, but then I experienced it myself. Twice, in fact.

The first time was in Morocco.

I had stopped in the open countryside—it was a bright November day without a breath of wind, and I wanted to take a close, careful look at one of those rare landscapes you see only in Africa. The landscape stretching out for hundreds and hundreds of miles looks like a mere patch in the clearest sky you can imagine. You get the feeling that the whole world is spread out before you, naked as the day the gods made it. Well, suddenly, as if a spirit had come out of nowhere, some dry leaves in a green meadow started spinning around in an eddy on the ground. The leaves spun faster and faster and started rising from the ground until they were caught up in a spiral that must have been six feet high. This dust devil moved slowly from place to place, and everywhere it went it gathered up new leaves and new strength. And then, just as suddenly as it had sprung up, it dropped to the ground and died out. It left me with the oddest sensation of having been present at the mysterious revelation of one small secret of the world.

The second time was in Kenya, the land of Adam. There is a solemnity about everything in that country, from the long, smooth slopes of the mountains to the gentle surge of the wind, from the swift, silent lope of the giraffes to the aloof, detached glance of the lions.

Late one January afternoon, after driving for several hours along a rough dirt track, I was beginning to think I would never again see a place inhabited by human beings. And then, just around a bend in the road, I came upon an unexpected sight.

Down below, an enormous dry salt lake stretched to the foot of the hill 1 was on. in the distance, the brilliant green slopes of Kilimanjaro marked the far edge of the world. Dozens of little whirls were spinning across the broad expanse. The whitish funnels of dust varied in tone, bright on the side that was lighted by the setting sun and dark on the side caught by advancing night. Each vortex must have been sixty feet high. They moved slowly around the plain in no apparent direction, and everywhere they passed they tossed up small stones and pebbles. One of the vortices was bolder than the rest and ran straight through a herd of resting buffalo, but not one of the animals moved or even took notice of nature’s extravaganza.

So believe me when I say that the story of Heloise’s dust whirl is perfectly plausible, because there are areas of the world where you are in closer touch with the ultimate source of things, and very often something spiritual hovers about things human.

END OF THE INTERMEZZO BETWEEN CHAPTERS FIVE AND SIX

“If 1 were a mountain.” Heloise remarked pensively, “I would love you. i would love you even if I were a meadow, and if I were a little apple tree I would love you. I would love you forever if 1 were any of these things, because Fd always be there with nothing else to do but think about loving you.”

‘And what if you were Heloise?’’ George asked.

“But I am Heloise !” She smiled.

George was a very simple man and always wanted to know how things stood. “I thought you were a mountain, or rather a meadow or an apple tree.”

‘And if I were, would you love me?’

“You know what Fd do?”

“No.”

“Fd climb up the mountain, tiptoe across the meadow as quiet as I could, and then Fd eat the ap-pies.”

‘And then?”

‘And then …” He broke off. Looking at her, he realized that he had never seen her speak with her mouth full as she was doing now. He decided that she was even more desirable when she spoke with her mouth full. And when the right moment came he would ask her always to make sure her mouth was full before she said anything. His next thought was that this must mean he was in love, because if he had seen anyone else but Heloise speak with a full mouth, all he would have felt was a twinge of irritation.

Which is why George stopped after that And then; but his mouth was also full, and Heloise said she liked him even more with his mouth full. The two of them laughed until the tears streamed down, the way only lovers can laugh at the incredibly idiotic things they say when they are in love,

Heloise turned serious and said, “George, look at me.”