Chapter Eleven
Genevra and Rosella were picking at their lunch, which, like all the hotel’s meals of late, seemed to have been prepared with an increasing lack of care, if not actual, studied contempt, boasting an insipid, viscous mishmash of random elements appearing to originate from various acrid weeds and unspeakable animal parts, proving fundamentally inedible, so that in Genevra and Rosella’s case, they consequently lacked the vigour with which to attempt conversation, when the coronel, one morning, strode—to the extent that he could, at his age, still stride—up.
“I beg of you, Segnora Bergamaschi, a favour,” he mumbled.
“Leave us alone, old man!” hissed Rosella, who had a limited ocular appetite for old, unattractive people.
“Please, Rosa!” Genevra snapped. “Let’s hear what the coronel has to say. Please, coronel”—speaking to the coronel, now, obviously, as indicated by her use of his title coronel—“what can we do for you?”
The coronel, trembling in ecstasy, stretched out his arms, as if offering his wrists to be nailed to a cross, dropped back his head—Rosella was sure he was having a stroke, at, of all places, of course, her table—and declaimed: “I wish to embrace art!”
It transpired that by this outburst, the coronel was really asking if Genevra might condescend to give him drawing lessons, which she graciously did. Beginning that afternoon, and continuing twice a day thereafter, Genevra communicated the rudiments of sketching and painting, until the coronel could inflict on paper crude representations of Pluck—as heroic, horse-borne general; as bloodied saint, flinging the proffered mercy of his tormentors back in their faces; as nude, nubile Greek god—with which to adorn his (Pluck’s) walls, floors and ceilings. He then organised tours of the rooms, to visit the shrine and ponder Pluck’s legacy, for which he charged a very reasonable admission fee, one hundred per cent of which, he vowed, went to the museum’s upkeep.
Then, each night, when the rooms were once more his alone to enjoy, he would ritualistically close the day’s disgraces by masturbating to the album pages, in so doing, conjoining, he felt, with its former owner’s ever-present spirit. The physical result was more akin to a dry-heave, as his thumbnail-sized organ, resembling a hairless newborn hamster which had been somehow accidentally grafted onto his pelvis, sighed a vacant puff of musty air in place of the teeming, life-germinating nectar which had once cascaded from his long, muscular carabina. But upon point of discharge, though his body failed him, his spirit sissonned, ripping away all the militaristic pride he’d erected around his conscience for years, exposing the false, shallow prestige which had paraded through his village and which he, as a boy, had devoted his life to joining and serving; he realised, now, that if he’d had a granule of sense, he would have absconded from duty, the very moment he met that girl in Callao, and sought to marry her and join her and serve her instead! He watched, projected across the unspooling snake of his orgasm behind his lids, a montage of the life with the girl he might have had: family, peace, laughter, farming, daughters and sons and granddaughters and grandsons. Days sweating cleanly beneath a cloudless sky, coaxing life up out of the soil, then nights violating his wife, who would, by law, have been duty-bound to suffer whatever erotic indignities he had a mind to bestow.
He wanted, now, peace. He had forgiven, on Pluck’s behalf—“forgiven”, a term with which his basic training manual had hardly been riddled—all those in the hotel who had contributed to his demise. He knew he would shortly be joining Pluck, wherever he was; the coronel’s body, and spirit, were tired, and saw no point in persisting to fight a battle they were ultimately doomed to lose. All the coronel sought, now, was peaceful co-existence in the bosom of el magnifico.
He wanted peace.
He wanted rest.
He wanted love.
He wanted absolution for all his life up to this moment.
And he felt, somehow, that there was only one man to give it.