“I’ll be the best God-damned boy you ever witnessed today. And you can tell your principal that.”
Portrait, as was her fashion, was silent.
She probably would speak to a horse-cavalryman, the General, for now he had two stars, and they grated on his shoulders, and showed white in the vague, scuffed red on the plaque in front of his jeep. He never used command cars, nor semi-armoured vehicles complete with sand bags.
“The hell with you, portrait,” he said. “Or get your T.S. slip from the universal chaplain of us all, with combined religions. You ought to be able to eat on that.”
“The hell with you,” the portrait said, without speaking. “You low class soldier.”
“Yes,” the Colonel said, for now he was a Colonel again, and had relinquished all his former rank.
“I love you, portrait, very much. But don’t get rough with me. I love you very much because you are beautiful. But I love the girl better, a million times better, hear it?”
There was no sign that she heard it, so he tired of it.
“You are in a fixed position, portrait,” he said. “Without or with any frame. And I am going to maneuver.”
The portrait was as silent as she had been since the concierge had brought her into the room, and aided and abetted by the second waiter, had shown her to the Colonel and to the girl.
The Colonel looked at her and saw she was indefensible, now that the light was good, or almost good.
He saw, too, that she was the portrait of his own true love, and so he said, “I am sorry for all the stupidnesses I say. I do not wish ever to be brutal. Maybe we could both sleep a little while, with luck, and then, perhaps, your Mistress would call on the telephone?”
Maybe she will even call, he thought.
CHAPTER XVIII
THE hall porter pushed the Gazzetino under the door, and the Colonel had it, noiselessly, almost as soon as it had passed through the slit.
He very nearly took it from the hall porter’s hand. He did not like the hall porter since he had found him, one day, going through his bag, when he, the Colonel, had re-entered the room after having left it, presumably for some time. He had to come back to the room to get his bottle of the medicine, which he had forgotten, and the hall porter was well through his bag.
“I guess you don’t say stick them up in this hotel,” the Colonel had said. “But you’re no credit to your town.”
There was silence produced, and re-produced, by the striped waist-coated man with the Fascist face, and the Colonel said, “Go on, boy, look through the rest of it. I don’t carry any military secrets with my toilet articles.” Since then, there was scant friendship between them, and the Colonel enjoyed trying to take the morning paper from the striped waist-coated man’s hand; noiselessly, and when he heard, or saw it first make a move under the door.
“OK, you won today, jerk,” he said in the best Venetian dialect he could summon at that hour. “Go hang yourself.”
But they don’t hang themselves, he thought. They just have to go on putting papers under other people’s doors that do not even hate them. It must be quite a difficult trade being an ex-Fascist. Maybe he is not an ex-Fascist too. How do you know.
I can’t hate Fascists, he thought. Nor Krauts either, since unfortunately, I am a soldier.
“Listen, Portrait,” he said. “Do I have to hate the Krauts because we kill them? Do I have to hate them as soldiers and as human beings? It seems too easy a solution to me.”
Well, portrait. Forget it. Forget it. You’re not old enough to know about it. You are two years younger than the girl that you portray, and she is younger and older than hell; which is quite an old place.
“Listen, portrait,” he said, and saying it, knew that now as long as he lived, he would have someone to talk to at the early hours that he woke.
“As I was saying, portrait. The hell with that too. That’s too old for you too. That is one of the things you can’t say no matter how true it is. There are lots of things I can never say to you and maybe that will be good for me. It is about time something was. What do you think would be good for me, Portrait?