Chapter Four
From the moonless night outside, as empty or teeming as a theatre before the play, came a howling. A wolf? A madman, mimicking a wolf? A wolf, mimicking a madman? Some stupid dog who desperately wanted to be taken for a wolf, finding its own tame life unspectacular enough that it would give anything to be, even for a moment, in the pathetic chimera of its fantasy, somebody else?
Coronel Feosalma thought none of these things, asleep under two counterpanes and a sheet as he was, but it might have inseminated, symbolically, whatever dream he was having. Then again, it might not. We will never know, Reader, you and I; and I don’t know about you, but, speaking solely for myself, I consider my life not one whit poorer for it.
The door to the coronel’s room creaked open. If that noble Spanish personage had been awake, he would have heard eager footsteps, pieces of furniture being stumbled into, mild oaths being vented over the injuries sustained from said stumbling, and a mumbled resolution to proceed with the task in hand.
But the eye, the eye of a soldier never fully closes. Not literally—of course they do. What I mean is, they have been trained, you see, to maintain alertness even when the siren song of sleep entices their lids to lower. So it was with the coronel: he sensed, half-awake—and even when awake, he could at best call upon perhaps a fifth of the senses of which he might have boasted when a young, virile and non-dotardish man, strutting about the motley streets of Saville, led by his near-permanent erection, like a dowsing rod to water, to the filthier variety of puta; plus, now his sensuous capacity must have been reduced by, I’d say, another eighth, given that the heavy black blanket of air suffused by the heat of his fireplace weighed upon his face and spun his senses awry, so, um, you do the maths—but he sensed the tread of an interloper, the counterpane pulled back, the insertion of a bodily presence into his bed, and quick breaths upon his forehead.
“Eye-Goo! Wake up! It’s me!”
The coronel grabbed the knife he was in the habit of keeping beneath his pillow and thrust it to just under Pluck’s nose.
“I just wanted to remind you of our walk tomorrow! Or—goodness gracious—should I rather say, ‘today’!”
“Get out of my bed, you rat, or I’ll run you through!”
“I’m cold!”
“Get out this instant!”
The coronel could not see his friend—nor did he want to—but the hurt in Pluck’s voice made itself felt through the dark.
“Why are you being so mean to me?”
“A man must be left to his peace in his own bed!”
“But this isn’t your bed! This bed belongs to the hotel! And as you’re a guest of the hotel, and I’m a guest of the hotel, well, then, don’t you see? I have just as much right to be in this bed as you. So, ha!”
“Cretin!”
“And besides—a married man might very well share his bed with his wife. So that so-called truth you attempted to observe falls rather flat on its face, wouldn’t you say?”
“I am not a married man! And you are not my wife!”
“But why haven’t you married, Eye-Goo? That’s what you haven’t told me.”
There was silence, whilst the coronel considered the likelihood of his persuading the authorities that a homicide was justifiable. A vision of Pluck’s corpse, in ribbons, played about his imagination, when it was broken by Pluck’s persisting:
“Did you never fall in love?”
“. . .If you must know, you ape, I did once love a woman.”
“And did she love you?”
“Naturally. Her name. . .was Irina.”
“Beautiful name.”
“Yes.”
“What was it again?”
“‘Irina’.”
“Oh. I thought you’d said something else. Beg your pardon. ‘Irina’ isn’t that pretty, but I suppose it’s all right.”
“Yes.”
“It’s certainly better than some others I could name.”
“Yes.”
“Like ‘Grogda’.”
“Yes.”
“Or ‘Ermengarde’.”
“Yes.”
“Or—”
“I met her in Callao, on the eve of war. She and all the young had come to the port to welcome us. She smiled at me. I returned the smile. She had flowers in her hair, she pulled one out, and wove it through the buttonhole of my tunic. I was on duty—I was on my way to the first battle I would ever fight—and I thought—in fact, I had a premonition—that I would not return alive, so never see her, or talk with her, or share a thing with her—save that flower and that smile—but, I thought, at least I would have that, that perfectly pure memory, that image embalmed beneath my forehead on which I could meditate, as I lay one day on a field awaiting death, or shipped off to other massacres in other lands, or legless and hushed in a hospital, or what have you. At least I would have that. But I survived the battle, to my surprise, and felt hardened, and finally a man—back when to feel yourself a man was the greatest virtue a youth could pursue, and the way to become a man was to steal the youth from another by the point of your bayonet—and when our platoon returned to town, and we were drinking ourselves into a stupor at the cantina, lo and behold—”
“You’re hogging the covers!” Pluck cut him off. He began thrashing about, bouncing the coronel about on the bed in a most undignified manner, while he fought a losing battle with the counterpanes; the coronel slapped at him, very womanishly, it must be said, then, through no intention of Pluck’s, the noble old gentleman became so tangled up in the covers that he could barely move his arms.
“You moronic oaf!”
“What’s happened?!” Pluck flailed around under the covers, lost. “Eye-Goo! Where are you?! Why have you left me all alone?!”
“Release me at once!”
“I hear your voice! Where are you? I hear your voice!”
“Release me so I might kill you!”
Pluck lashed out in all directions in an attempt to find his way out of the linen’s labyrinth and help his friend, unwillingly smacking the coronel a few times in the process. “Hold on! I’m coming for you! I’ll save you, my old friend! Never fear!”
When they were both exhausted from the struggle, they were bound together, back to back, tightly in the wrapping like hooks in a ball of yarn.
“I wish we had a knife,” Pluck mused.
“I had one,” answered the coronel, “but it’s lost someplace in this mess.”
“I wish we could get hold of it.”
“So do I.”
“We’ve got no choice, then, but to call for help,” Pluck resolved. “Shall you do the honours, or shall I?”
“It would be of the utmost indignity to be seen in such a state.”
“Well, if you hadn’t hogged the covers to begin with, none of this would have happened, would it?”
“I’m saving my strength for when we are freed and I can reclaim my knife.”
“But you won’t need the knife once we are freed, you fool!” Pluck laughed.
The coronel chuckled as well, but for a somewhat different reason.
“Okay, here goes: Help!” Pluck’s scream sounded like a frightened bird.
“Quiet, you imbecile! You’ll wake the whole place!”
“That’s the idea, you know.”
“No! Let us wait until the cleaner comes in the morning. We can pay her to keep this disgrace to herself, so no one else might know.”
“What do you mean, ‘we’?! You got us into this mess, my friend—I hardly think it honourable of you to expect me to pay towards the bribery of a public official.”
“The hotel cleaner is hardly a public official.”
“She might be a spy, for all you know; in which case, ipso facto, she would be classed as such. You simply do not know, my dim friend. And that, above all, is what I hope you will take from our friendship: the lesson that you are an ignorant pig, entirely dependent upon my superior brain.”
“A brain I would very much love to see—dashed upon the carpet.”
“I will ignore that remark, out of respect for our friendship.”
The first, reluctant strains of dawn peeked through the shutters.
“Here goes.”
“Don’t you dare.”
“Help!”
“Shut up!”
“Coronel Eye-Goo is stuck in bed with me!”
“You moronic louse!”
“I’m not a mouse!”
“Idiot!”
“I’m a man!”
“Hardly!”
“Help! Somebody, we’re dying!”
The door flew open and Monsieur Lapin-Défunt stood there in his robe. He held forward a lantern to view the scene.
The coronel cleared his throat. “Monsieur, I beg you to forgive this idiocy. This moron Pluck, with whom I know you to be all too well acquainted, has—”
“Eye-Goo loves a girl named Leena! Eye-Goo’s in love! He’s in love!”
Monsieur Lapin-Défunt inched into the room, stunned by the scene with which he found himself presented.
“He’s disgusting!” Pluck went on. “Love! What a sissy!” Pluck decided that now was as good a time as any to instigate a learned philosophical disquisition on the subject, and so he asked of the French gentleman: “Monsieur! Answer a well-meaning inquiry, if you’d be so kind. Have you ever experienced love? Tell me, in all truthfulness. I pray you have not.”
“What are you babbling about, you nitwit?!” returned Lapin-Défunt.
“Love emasculates, it impurifies, it renders one incapable of enjoying the nobler pursuits!” Pluck explained. “It is a wretched, disreputable, ungentlemanly and altogether demeaning business! Or so I’ve heard.”
“Now that you’ve been awakened by this half-wit, monsieur,” the coronel addressed Lapin-Défunt calmly, “I beg you to disentangle me from him. You can imagine the degradation I feel in being bound to such a creature.”
“I can imagine very well. Wait a moment, please.”
“We’ll stay here!” Pluck promised jovially.
After a few minutes of Pluck expounding his theory of the vulgar repulsiveness of love, Lapin-Défunt returned, bearing a cleaver from the kitchen.
“Help!” Pluck squealed. “Monsieur Lapin-Défunt wants to murder the coronel!”
“Will you shut up?! I’ve come to free you!”
“The coronel and I do not require any assistance, monsieur; certainly not from a barbarian like yourself. Am I not right, coronel?”
“Please free me so that I may kill this clown, monsieur,” begged the coronel.
“I entirely concur, coronel,” said Pluck, with an appreciable tone of satisfaction. “The French gentleman is nothing but a clown.”
Lapin-Défunt bent close to Pluck and sawed away at the bedcoverings.
“I hope you understand, monsieur, that you will be reimbursing the hotel for the damage you’re inflicting on the linen,” Pluck told him.
Lapin-Défunt worked in silence for a time.
“Help!” Pluck blurted before Monsieur Lapin-Défunt’s ear.
“Shut up!” that French gentleman hissed.
“We’re dying!” Pluck screamed in a panic. “We’re all going to die!”
The coronel and Lapin-Défunt swore merciless oaths at Pluck to quiet himself, but after a moment, two women appeared at the door: one, a rather stout lady in a man’s robe, with silver hair no longer than her earlobes and an aggressively protuberating chin, and the other, a svelte, fragile young lady with willowy hair and infolding features on her face.
Pluck took one look at them and screamed: “Murderesses! Everybody’s trying to kill me!”
“This is the gentleman who caused such a stir in the ballroom last night, I take it?” asked the elder of the two.
“The same,” answered Monsieur Lapin-Défunt, who rose and bowed to both, though a little more deeply, it must be said, to the younger. “Monsieur Lapin-Défunt, at your service, madame et mademoiselle.” To the elder: “I beg your pardon if this idiot woke you and your daughter from your slumber.”
“This is not my daughter,” the elder lady said, in such a way as to suggest she was tired of having to explain it. “I am Genevra Bergamaschi, and this is my good friend Rosella. Genevra Bergamaschi,” she repeated, when no one made comment. “You might have heard of me. I am a painter.” Pluck, the coronel and Lapin-Défunt looked at each other. “Never mind,” she finally said. “Rosella often poses for me. Her face and figure present, I aver, a consummate analogy of our age.”
“But she’s so slim!” Pluck observed, with a certain distaste.
Rosella puckered her lips and said nothing.
“Italian?” asked Lapin-Défunt.
“Si, signore,” answered Signora Bergamaschi.
“Oh! I just love Italy!” said Pluck from within his ball of yarn. “My best friend Eye-Goo’s Italian! Say something to the nice ladies in Italian, Eye-Goo, won’t you?”
“I have always found Italy the most ravishing of landscapes,” Lapin-Défunt opined, fully conscious of his charm.
Ignoring him, Genevra squinted at the Pluck-coronel-cloth hybrid and stroked her prominent chin. “Fascinating image,” she judged. “Unlike anything I’ve seen before. Gentlemen, would you mind remaining as you are while I run and get my paints? Rosa, just drape yourself upon that monstrosity somehow, will you?”
Rosa stepped up to do as she was bidden: she leant languorously, taking great effort to do so, along the curve of the knot. “Shall I disrobe?”
“Wait till I get back.” The painter hurried out.
“Please get us out of here,” begged the coronel.
“I think we should wait for the signora to return,” opined Lapin-Défunt, eyeing Rosella. “She clearly has a certain composition in mind.”
“Please! The pressure against my chest—I fear my ribs will snap!”
Rosella shot the coronel a contemptuous look. “Art is of greater consequence than your anatomy.”
“She might make lithographs of us!” Pluck fantasised. “We might adorn the walls of people’s homes—from the lowliest coalminer’s hovel to the poshest Belgravian townhouse!”
“At least loosen it a little!” begged the coronel, hoarsely. “I think I might faint!”
“When she comes back, ask her if I should disrobe too,” said Pluck.
Lapin-Défunt went round to the coronel’s side, and pushed his hand and the cleaver in through the folds to try to free up space around him.
“Achoo!” Pluck sneezed, causing everything to shudder and the knife to prick against the coronel’s chest.
“Ahh!” cried the coronel.
“Be careful!” screamed Pluck to Lapin-Défunt. “You’ll kill him!”
“Bless you,” said Rosella.
“Achoo!” Pluck sneezed.
“Ahh!” cried the coronel.
“Is that how you say ‘Gesundheit’ in Italian?” asked Pluck.
“Stop sneezing, you fool!” ordered Lapin-Défunt.
“Bless you,” said Rosella.
“Achoo!”
“Ahh!”
“Damn you!”
“Bless you.”
“Wait!” cried Monsieur Lapin-Défunt.
“What is it?”
“My hand!”
“What about your blasted hand?!” demanded Pluck.
“It’s stuck!” He grabbed his forearm with his free hand and tried to yank it out, but it was jammed amidst the sheets.
“Disrobe,” Pluck suggested.
“Shut up!”
Signora Bergamaschi reappeared, clutching easel, canvas and paints. Suddenly, Pluck sneezed (“Achoo!”) once more, the force of which displaced the spherical wad, causing it to roll forward, Pluck and the coronel within, Lapin-Défunt and Rosella stuck centrifugally without, crushing Signora Bergamaschi and her supplies, squeezing out the door, down the corridor, and down the stately staircase into the lobby, where it rolled over Mister Mifkin, whose poor luck prescribed that it should be his turn on the night shift that night, despite his clumsy attempts to outrun it, and finally smashed into a display case, shattering the glass and some vases and such, unpeeling in the process so that the friends lay scattered about like dead men at Fraubrunnen.
“Who’s in the mood for a walk?” beamed Pluck.