I was creeping cautiously between the bushes when suddenly I heard footsteps on the gravel path, and Puccini himself with Yasmin on his arm walked past me not ten feet away. I heard him saying to her in Italian, “No gentleman is going to permit a lady to walk back to Lucca all alone at this time of night.”
Was he going to walk her back to the hotel? I followed them to see where they were going. Puccini’s motor car was standing in the drive in the front of the house. I saw him help Yasmin into the passenger seat. Then, with a great deal of fuss and match-striking, he got the acetylene headlamps alight. He cranked the starting handle. The engine fired and ticked over. He unlocked the gates, jumped into the driver’s seat, and off they went with the motor roaring and revving.
I ran out to my own car and got the thing started. I drove fast toward Lucca but I never caught up with Puccini. In fact, I was only halfway there when he passed me on his way home again, alone this time.
I found Yasmin at the hotel.
“Did you get the stuff?”
“Of course,” she said.
“Give it to me quickly.”
She handed it over and by dawn I had made one hundred Puccini straws of good quality. While I was working on them, Yasmin sat in an armchair in my room drinking red Chianti and giving her report.
“Great time,” she said. “Really marvellous. I wish they were all like him.”
“Good.”
“He was so jolly,” she said. “Lots of laughs. And he sang me a bit from the new opera he’s doing.”
“Did he say what he’s calling it?”
“Turio,” she said. “Turidot. Something like that.”
“No trouble from the wife upstairs?”
“Not a peep,” she said. “But it was so funny because even when we were plunged in passion on the sofa, he had to keep reaching out every now and again to bang the piano. Just to let her know he was working hard and not banging some woman.”
“A great man, you think?”
“Terrific,” Yasmin said. “Stupendous. Find me another like him.”
22
FROM LUCCA we headed north for Vienna, and on the way we called on Sergei Rachmaninoff in his lovely house on Lake Lucerne.
“It’s a funny thing,” Yasmin said to me when she came back to the car after what had obviously been a fairly energetic session with the great musician, “it’s a funny thing, but there’s an amazing resemblance between Mr. Rachmaninoff and Mr. Stravinsky.”
“You mean facially?”
“I mean everything,” she said. “They’ve both got small bodies and great big lumpy faces. Enormous strawberry noses. Beautiful hands. Tiny feet. Thin legs. And great equipment.”
“Is it your experience so far,” I asked her, “that geniuses have larger pizzles than ordinary men?”
“Definitely,” she said. “Much larger.”
“I was afraid you’d say that.”
“And they make better use of them,” she said, rubbing it in. “Their swordsmanship is superb.”
“Rubbish.”
“It’s not rubbish, Oswald. I ought to know.”
“Aren’t you forgetting they’ve all had the Beetle?”
“The Beetle helps,” she said. “Of course it helps. But there’s no comparison between the way a great creative genius handles his sword and the way an ordinary fellow does it. That’s why I’m having such a nice time.”
“Am I an ordinary fellow?”
“Don’t be grumpy,” she said. “We can’t all be Rachmaninoff or Puccini.”
I was deeply wounded. Yasmin had pricked me in my most sensitive area. I sulked all the way to Vienna, but the sight of that noble city soon restored my humour.
In Vienna, Yasmin had a hilarious encounter with Dr. Sigmund Freud in his consulting room at Berggasse 19, and I think this visit merits a brief description.
First of all, she made a proper application for an appointment with the famous man, stating that she was in urgent need of psychiatric treatment. She was told there would be four days to wait. So I arranged for her to fill in the time by calling first upon the august Mr. Richard Strauss. Mr. Strauss had just been appointed co-director of the Vienna State Opera and he was, according to Yasmin, rather pompous. But he was easy meat and I got fifty excellent straws from him.