It was a good ride with a slight bump, and a rectification at the end, and the Colonel thought: Checked out, eh? You better be checked out again.
The corridor was now not simply beautiful, but exciting, and putting the key into the lock was not a simple process, but a rite.
“Here it is,” the Colonel said when he swung the door open. “What there is of it.”
“It is charming,” the girl said. “But it is awfully cold with the windows open.”
“I’ll close them.”
“No, please. Leave them open if you like it that way.”
The Colonel kissed her and felt her wonderful, long, young, lithe and properly built body against his own body, which was hard and good, but beat-up, and as he kissed her he thought of nothing.
They kissed for a long time, standing straight, and kissing true, in the cold of the open windows that were onto the Grand Canal.
“Oh,” she said. Then, “Oh.”
“We owe nothing,” the Colonel said. “Not a thing.”
“Will you marry me and will we have the five sons?”
“I will! I will.”
“The thing is that, would you?”
“Of course.”
“Kiss me once again and make the buttons of your uniform hurt me but not too much.”
They stood there and kissed each other true. “I have a disappointment for you, Richard,” she said. “I have a disappointment about everything.”
She said it as a flat statement and it came to the Colonel in the same way as a message came from one of the three battalions, when the battalion commander spoke the absolute truth and told you the worst.
“You are positive?”
“Yes.”
“My poor Daughter,” he said.
Now there was nothing dark about the word and she was his Daughter, truly, and he pitied her and loved her.
“No matter,” he said. “You comb yourself and make a new mouth and all that, and we will have a good dinner.”
“Say once more, first, that you love me and make the buttons very tight.”
“I love you,” the Colonel said quite formally.
Then he whispered into her ear as gently as he knew how to whisper, as his whisper was when they are fifteen feet away and you are a young lieutenant on a patrol, “I love you only, my best and last and only and one true love.”
“Good,” she said, and kissed him hard so he could feel the sweet salt of the blood inside his lip. And I like that too, he thought.
“Now I will comb my hair and make my mouth new and you can watch me.”
“Do you want me to shut the windows?”
“No,” she said. “We will do it all in the cold.”
“Who do you love?”
“You,” she said. “And we don’t have too much luck do we?”
“I don’t know,” the Colonel said. “Go ahead and comb your hair.”
The Colonel went into the bathroom to wash up for dinner. The bathroom was the only disappointing part of the room. Due to the exigencies of the Gritti having been built as a palace, there had been no site for bathrooms at the time of building, and, later, when they were introduced, they had been built down the corridor and those entitled to use them gave due warning before-hand and water was heated and towels laid out.
This bathroom had been cut, arbitrarily, from a corner of the room and it was a defensive, rather than an attacking bathroom, the Colonel felt. Washing, and forced to look in the mirror to check any traces of lipstick, he regarded his face.
It looks as though it had been cut out of wood by an indifferent craftsman, he thought.
He looked at the different welts and ridges that had come before they had plastic surgery, and at the thin, only to be observed by the initiate, lines of the excellent plastic operations after head wounds.
Well, that is what I have to offer as a gueule or a façade, he thought. It is a damn poor offer. The only thing is that it is tanned, and that takes some of the curse off of it. But, Christ what an ugly man.