“Don’t we have fun with food? Imagine if we could eat together always.”
“I’ve suggested it.”
“Let’s not talk about that.”
“All right,” the Colonel said. “I’ve made a decision too. I’m going to chuck the army and live in this town, very simply, on my retirement pay.”
“That’s wonderful. How do you look in civilian clothes?”
“You’ve seen me.”
“I know it, my dear. I said it for a joke. You make rough jokes sometimes too, you know.”
“I’ll look all right. That is if you have a tailor here who can cut clothes.”
“There isn’t one here, but there is in Rome. Can we drive together to Rome to get the clothes?”
“Yes. And we will live outside the town at Viterbo and only go in for the fittings and for dinner in the evening. Then we’ll drive back in the night.”
“Will we see cinema people and speak about them with candour and perhaps not have a drink with them?”
“We’ll see them by the thousands.”
“Will we see them being married for the second and third time and then being blessed by the Pope?”
“If you go in for that kind of thing.”
“I don’t,” the girl said. “That’s one reason that I cannot marry you.”
“I see,” the Colonel said. “Thank you.”
“But I will love you, whatever that means, and you and I know what it means very well, as long as either of us is alive and after.”
“I don’t think you can love very much after you, yourself, are dead,” the Colonel said.
He started to eat the artichoke, taking a leaf at a time, and dipping them, heavy side down, into the deep saucer of sauce vinaigrette.
“I don’t know whether you can either,” the girl said. “But I will try. Don’t you feel better to be loved?”
“Yes,” the Colonel said. “I feel as though I were out on some bare-assed hill where it was too rocky to dig, and the rocks all solid, but with nothing jutting, and no bulges, and all of a sudden instead of being there naked, I was armoured. Armoured and the eighty-eights not there.”
“You should tell that to our writer friend with the craters of the moon face so he could write it tonight.”
“I ought to tell it to Dante if he was around,” the Colonel, suddenly gone as rough as the sea when a line squall comes up, said. “I’d tell him what I’d do if I were shifted, or ascended, into an armoured vehicle under such circumstances.”
Just then the Barone Alvarito came into the dining room. He was looking for them and, being a hunter, he saw them instantly.
He came over to the table and kissed Renata’s hand, saying, “Ciao, Renata.” He was almost tall, beautifully built in his town clothes, and he was the shyest man the Colonel had ever known. He was not shy from ignorance, nor from being ill at ease, nor from any defect. He was basically shy, as certain animals are, such as the Bongo that you will never see in the jungle, and that must be hunted with dogs.
“My Colonel,” he said. He smiled as only the truly shy can smile.
It was not the easy grin of the confident, nor the quick slashing smile of the extremely durable and the wicked. It had no relation with the poised, intently used smile of the courtesan or the politician. It was the strange, rare smile which rises from the deep, dark pit, deeper than a well, deep as a deep mine, that is within them.
“I can only stay a moment. I came to tell you that it looks quite good for the shoot. The ducks are coming in heavily from the north. There are many big ducks. The ones you like,” he smiled again.
“Sit down Alvarito. Please.”
“No,” the Barone Alvarito said. “We can meet at the Garage at two-thirty if you like? You have your car?”
“Yes.”
“That makes it very good. Leaving at that hour, we will have time to see the ducks in the evening.”
“Splendid,” the Colonel said.
“Ciao, then, Renata. Good-bye, my Colonel. Until two-thirty.”
“We knew each other as children,” the girl said. “But he was about three years older. He was born very old.”