CUBA

After they were all gone he lay on the fiber matting on the floor and listened to the wind. It was blowing a gale from the northwest and he spread blankets on the floor, piled pillows to brace against the stuffed chairback he placed against the leg of the living-room table, and wearing a long, peaked cap to shade his eyes, read his mail in the good light from the big reading lamp that stood on the table. His cat lay on his chest and he pulled a light blanket over them both and opened and read the letters and drank from a glass of whisky and water that he replaced on the floor between sips. His hand found the glass when he wanted it.

The cat was purring, but he could not hear him because he had a silent purr, and he would hold a letter in one hand and touch the cat’s throat with the finger of his other hand.

“You have a throat mike, Boise,” he said. “Do you love me?”

The cat kneaded his chest softly with the claws just catching in the wool of the man’s heavy blue jersey and he felt the cat’s long, lovingly spread weight and the purring under his fingers.

“She’s a bitch, Boise,” he told the cat and opened another letter.

The cat put his head under the man’s chin and rubbed it there.

“They’ll scratch the hell out of you, Boise,” the man said and stroked the cat’s head with the stubble of his chin. “Womens don’t like them. It’s a shame you don’t drink, Boy. You do damned near everything else.”

The cat had originally been named after the cruiser Boise but now, for a long time, the man had called him Boy for short.

He read the second letter through without comment and reached out and took a drink of the whisky and water.

“Well,” he said. “We aren’t getting anywhere. I’ll tell you, Boy. You read the letters and I’ll lie on your chest and purr. How would you like that?”

The cat put his head up to rub against the man’s chin and the man rubbed against it pushing his beard stubble down between the cat’s ears and along the back of his head and between his shoulder blades while he opened the third letter.

“Did you worry about us, Boise, when the blow came up?” he asked. “I wish you could have seen us come into the mouth of the harbor with the sea breaking over the Morro. You’d have been spooked, Boy. We came in in a bloody, huge, breaking sea like a damn surfboard.”

The cat lay, contentedly, breathing in rhythm with the man. He was a big cat, long and loving, the man thought, and poor from much night hunting.

“Did you do any good while I was away, Boy?” He had laid the letter down and was stroking the cat under the blanket. “Did you get many?” The cat rolled on his side and offered his stomach to be caressed the way he had done when he was a kitten, in the time when he had been happy. The man put his arms around him and held him tight against his chest, the big cat on his side, his head under the man’s chin. Under the pressure of the man’s arms he turned suddenly and lay flat against the man, his claws dug into the sweater, his body pressed tight. He was not purring now.

“I’m sorry, Boy,” the man said. “I’m awfully sorry. Let me read this other damned letter. There’s nothing we can do. You don’t know anything to do—do you?”

The cat lay against him, heavy and unpurring and desperate. The man stroked him and read the letter. “Just take it easy, Boy,” he said. “There isn’t any solution. If I ever find any solution I’ll tell you.”

By the time he had finished the third and longest letter the big black and white cat was asleep. He was asleep in the position of the Sphinx, but with his head lowered in the man’s chest.

I’m awfully glad, the man thought. I ought to undress and take a bath and go to bed properly but there will be no hot water and I wouldn’t sleep in a bed tonight. Too much movement. The bed would throw me. Probably won’t sleep here either with that old beast on me.

“Boy,” he said. “I’m going to lift you off so I can lie on my side.”

He lifted the heavy limp weight of the cat, that came alive suddenly in his hands, and then was limp again, and laid him by his side, then turned over to rest on his right elbow. The cat lay along his back. He had resented it while he was being moved but now he was asleep again, curled up against the man. The man took the three letters and read them through for the second time. He decided not to read the papers and reached up and put the light out and lay on his side, feeling the touch of the cat’s body against his buttocks. He lay with his two arms around a pillow and his head on another pillow. Outside the wind was blowing hard and the floor of the room still had some of the motion of the flying bridge. He had been on the bridge nineteen hours before they had come in.

He lay there and tried to sleep, but he could not. His eyes were very tired and he did not want the light on, nor to read, so he lay there and waited for morning. Through the blankets he could feel the matting, made to the measure of the big room, that had been brought from Samoa on a cruiser six months before Pearl. It covered all the tiled floor of the room, but where the French doors opened onto the patio it had been bent back and buckled by the movement of the doors and he could feel the wind get under it and billow it as the wind came in under the gap below the door frames. He thought this wind would blow from the northwest at least another day, then go into the north and finally blow itself out from the northeast. That was the way it moved in winter but it might stay in the northeast for several days, blowing hard, before it settled into the brisa which was the local name for the northeast trade wind. Blowing at gale force out of the northeast against the Gulf Stream it made a very heavy sea, one of the heaviest he had ever seen anywhere, and he knew no Kraut would surface in it. So, he thought, we will be ashore at least four days. Then they will be up for sure.

He thought about this last trip and how the blow had caught them sixty miles down the coast and thirty offshore and the punishing trip in when he had decided to come into Havana rather than Bahía Honda. He had punished her all right. He had punished her plenty and there were several things he would have to check. It probably would have been better to put in at Bahía Honda. But they had been in there too much lately. He had been out twelve days, too, expecting to be out not more than ten. He was low on certain things and he could not be at all sure of the duration of this blow; so he had made the decision to come into Havana and had taken the beating. In the morning he would bathe, shave, clean up, and go in and make his report to the Naval Attaché. They might have wanted him to stay down the coast. But he knew nothing would surface in this weather; it was impossible for them to. That was all there was to it, really. If he was right on that, the rest of it would be OK although things were not always that simple. They certainly were not.

The floor hardened against his right hip and his thigh and right shoulder, so he lay on his back now and rested against the muscles of his shoulders, drawing his knees up under the blanket and letting his heels push against the blanket. This took some of the tiredness out of his body and he put his left hand on the sleeping cat and stroked him.

“You relax awfully well, Boy, and you sleep good,” he said to the cat. “I guess it isn’t too bad, then.”

He thought of letting some of the other cats out so he would have them to talk to and for company now that Boise was asleep. But he decided against it. It would hurt Boise and make him jealous. Boise had been outside the house waiting for them when they had driven up in the station wagon. He had been terribly excited and had been underfoot during the unloading, greeting everyone and slipping in and out each time a door was opened. He had probably waited outside every night since they left. From the time he had orders to go, the cat knew it. Certainly he could not tell about orders; but he knew the first symptoms of preparation, and, as they proceeded through the various phases to the final disorder of the people sleeping in the house (he always had them sleep in by midnight when leaving before daylight), the cat became steadily more upset and nervous until, finally when they loaded to leave, he was desperate and they had to be careful to lock him in so that he would not follow down the drive, into the village, and out onto the highway.

One time on the Central Highway he had seen a cat that had been hit by a car and the cat, fresh hit and dead, looked exactly like Boy. His back was black and his throat, chest, and forefeet were white and there was the black mask across his face. He knew it couldn’t be Boy because it was at least six miles from the farm; but it had made him feel sick inside and he had stopped the car and gone back and lifted the cat and made sure it was not Boy and then laid him by the side of the road so nothing else would run over him. The cat was in good condition, so he knew he was someone’s cat, and he left him by the road so they would find him and know about him rather than have to worry about him. Otherwise he would have taken the cat into the car and had him buried at the farm.

That evening, coming back to the farm, the body of the cat was gone from where he had left him so he thought that his people must have found him. That night, when he had sat in the big chair reading, with Boise by his side in the chair, he had thought that he did not know what he would do if Boise should be killed. He thought, from his actions and his desperations, that the cat felt the same way about the man.

He sweats them out worse than I do. Why do you do it, Boy? If you would take them easier you would be much better off. I take them as easy as I can, he said to himself. I really do. But Boise can’t.

At sea he thought about Boise and his strange habits and his desperate, hopeless love. He remembered him the first time he had seen him when he was a kitten playing with his reflection on the glass top of the cigar counter of the bar at Cojímar that was built out on the rocks overlooking the harbor. They had come down to the bar on a bright Christmas morning. There were a few drunks there left over from the celebration of the night before, but the wind was blowing freshly from the east through the open restaurant and the bar, and the light was so bright and the air felt so new and cool that it was no morning for drunks.

“Shut the doors against that wind,” one of them said to the proprietor.

“No,” the proprietor said. “I like it. Go and find a lee somewhere else if it’s too fresh.”

“We pay to be comfortable,” one of the leftovers from the night’s drinking said.

“No. You pay for what you drink. Find another place to be comfortable.”

He looked out across the open terrace of the bar at the sea, dark blue and with whitecaps, with the fishing boats crisscrossing it sailing and trolling for dolphin. There were half a dozen fishermen at the bar and two tables of them sitting on the terrace. They were fishermen who had done well the day before, or who believed the good weather and the current would hold and were taking a chance and staying in for Christmas. None of them that the man, whose name was Thomas Hudson, knew ever went to church even on Christmas and none of them dressed, consciously, as fishermen. They were the most unfishermanlike fishermen he had ever known and they were among the very best. They wore old straw hats, or were bareheaded. They wore old clothes and were sometimes barefooted and sometimes they wore shoes. You could tell a fisherman from a countryman, or guajiro, because the countrymen wore formalized pleated shirts, wide hats, tight trousers, and riding boots when they came to town and nearly all of them carried machetes, while the fishermen wore the remnants of any old clothes they had and were cheerful, self-confident men. The country men were reserved and shy unless they were drinking. The only way you could tell a fisherman, surely, was by his hands. The hands of the old men were gnarled and brown, spotted with sun blotches, and the palms and fingers were deep cut and scarred by the handlines. The young men’s hands were not gnarled; but most of them had the sun blotches and they were all deeply scarred and the hair on the hands and arms of all but the very darkest men was bleached by the sun and the salt.

Thomas Hudson remembered how on this Christmas morning, the first Christmas of the war, the proprietor of the bar had asked him, “Do you want some shrimps?” and brought a big plate piled with fresh cooked prawns and put it on the bar while he sliced a yellow lime and spread the slices on a saucer. The prawns were huge and pink and their antennae hung down over the edge of the bar for more than a foot and he had picked one up and spread the long whiskers to their full width and remarked that they were longer than those of a Japanese admiral.

Thomas Hudson broke the head off the Japanese admiral prawn and then split open the belly of the shell with his thumbs and shucked the prawn out and it was so fresh and silky feeling under his teeth, and had such a flavor, cooked in sea water with fresh lime juice and whole black peppercorns, that he thought he had never eaten a better one; not even in Málaga nor in Tarragona nor in Valencia. It was then that the kitten came over to him, scampering down the bar, to rub against his hand and beg a prawn.

“They’re too big for you, cotsie,” he said. But he snipped off a piece of one with his thumb and finger and gave it to the kitten who ran with it back to the tobacco counter to eat it quickly and savagely.

Thomas Hudson looked at the kitten, with his handsome black and white markings, his white chest and forelegs and the black, like a formal mask across his eyes and forehead, eating the prawn and growling, and asked the proprietor who he belonged to.

“You if you want him.”

“I have two at the house. Persians.”

“Two is nothing. Take this one. Give them a little Cojímar blood.”

“Papa, can’t we have him?” asked the one of his sons, that he did not think about any more, who had come up from the steps of the terrace where he had been watching the fishing boats come in, seeing the men unstep their masts, unload their coiled lines, and throw their fish ashore. “Please, papa, can’t we have him? He’s a beautiful cat.”

“Do you think he’d be happy away from the sea?”

“Certainly, papa. He’ll be miserable here in a little while. Haven’t you seen how miserable the cats are in the streets? And they were probably just like him once.”

“Take him,” the proprietor said. “He’ll be happy on a farm.”

“Listen, Tomás,” one of the fishermen who had been listening to the conversation from the table said. “If you want cats I can get an Angora, a genuine Angora, from Guanabacoa. A true Tiger Angora.”

“Male?”

“As much as you,” the fisherman said. At the table they all laughed.

Nearly all Spanish joking had that same base. “But with fur on them,” the fisherman tried for another laugh and got it.

“Papa, can we please have this cat?” the boy asked. “This cat is a male.”

“Are you sure?”

“I know, papa. I know.”

“That’s what you said about both the Persians.”

“Persians are different, papa. I was wrong on the Persians and I admit it. But I know now, papa. Now I really know.”

“Listen, Tomás. Do you want the Angora Tiger from Guanabacoa?” the fisherman asked.

“What is he? A witchcraft cat?”

“Witchcraft nothing. This cat never even heard of Saint Barbara. This cat is more of a Christian than you are.”

“Es muy posible,” another fisherman said and they all laughed.

“What does this famous beast cost?” Thomas Hudson asked.

“Nothing. He’s a gift. A genuine Angora Tiger. He’s a Christmas gift.”

“Come on up to the bar and have a drink and describe him to me.”

The fisherman came up to the bar. He wore hornrimmed glasses and a clean, faded, blue shirt that looked as though it would not stand another washing. It was lacy thin in back between the shoulders and the fabric was beginning to rip. He had on faded khaki trousers and was barefoot on Christmas. His face and hands were burned a dark wood color and he put his scarred hands on the bar and said to the proprietor, “Whisky with ginger ale.”

“Ginger ale makes me sick,” Thomas Hudson said. “Let me have one with mineral water.”

“It’s very good for me,” the fisherman said. “I like Canada Dry. Otherwise I don’t like the taste of the whisky. Listen, Tomás. This is a serious cat.”

“Papa,” the boy said, “before you and this gentleman start drinking, can we have this cat?”

He had tied a shrimp husk on the end of a piece of white cotton string and was playing with the kitten, who was standing on his hind legs, as a rampant lion does in heraldry, boxing with the lure the boy swung at him.

“Do you want him?”

“You know I want him.”

“You can have him.”

“Thank you very much, papa. I’m going to take him out to the car to gentle him.”

Thomas Hudson watched the boy cross the road with the kitten in his arms and get into the front seat with him. The top of the car was down and from the bar he watched the boy, his brown hair flattened by the wind, sitting in the convertible in the bright sunlight. He could not see the kitten because the boy was holding him on the seat, sitting low on the seat out of the wind, stroking the kitten.

Now the boy was gone and the kitten had grown into an old cat and had outlived the boy. The way he and Boise felt now, he thought, neither one wanted to outlive the other. I don’t know how many people and animals have been in love before, he thought. It probably is a very comic situation. But I don’t find it comic at all.

No, he thought, I do not find it comic any more than it is comic for a boy’s cat to outlive him. Many things about it are certainly ridiculous, as Boise was when he growled and then made that sudden tragic cry and stiffened his whole length against the man. Sometimes, the servants said, he would not eat for several days after the man was gone but his hunger always drove him to it. Although there were days when he tried to live by his hunting and would not come in with the other cats, he always came in finally and he would leap out of the room over the backs of the other crowding cats when the door was opened by the servant that brought the tray of ground meat and then leap back in over all the other cats as they milled around the boy who had brought the food. He always ate very quickly and then wanted to leave the cat room as soon as he had finished. There was no cat that he cared for in any way.

For a long time now the man thought that Boise had regarded himself as a human being. He did not drink with the man as a bear would but he ate everything the man ate especially all of those things cats would not touch. Thomas Hudson remembered the summer before when they had been eating breakfast together and he had offered Boise a slice of fresh, chilled mango. Boise had eaten it with delight and he had mango every morning as long as Thomas Hudson was ashore and the mango season lasted. He had to hold the slices for him so he could get them into his mouth since they were too slippery for the cat to pick off the plate and he thought he must rig some sort of a rack, like a toast rack, so the cat could take them without having to hurry.

Then when the alligator pear trees, the big, dark green aguacates with their fruit only a little darker and shinier than the foliage, had come into bearing this time when he had been ashore in September for overhaul, preparing to go down to Haiti, he had offered Boise a spoonful out of the shell, the hollow where the seed had been, filled with oil and vinegar dressing, and the cat had eaten it and then afterwards at each meal, he had eaten half an aguacate.

“Why don’t you climb up in the trees and get them for yourself?” Thomas Hudson had asked the cat as they walked together over the hills of the property. But Boise, of course, had not answered.

He had found Boy up in an alligator pear tree one evening when he had gone out in the dusk to walk and see the flight of blackbirds going in toward Havana where they flew each night from all the countryside to the south and east, converging in long flights to roost, noisily, in the Spanish laurel trees of the Prado. Thomas Hudson liked to watch the blackbirds come flying over the hills and to see the first bats come out in the evening and the very small owls coming out for their night flying when the sun went down into the sea beyond Havana and the lights began to come on over the hills. On that night he had missed Boise, who nearly always walked with him, and he had taken Big Goats, one of Boise’s sons, a big-shouldered, heavy-necked, wide-faced, tremendous-whiskered, black, fighting cat for the walk. Goats never hunted. He was a fighter and a stud cat and that kept him occupied. But he was cheerful, except where his work was concerned, and he liked to walk especially if Thomas Hudson would stop every now and then and push him hard with his foot so that he would lie flat on his side. Thomas Hudson would then stroke the cat’s belly with his foot. It was difficult to stroke Goats too hard or too roughly, and he would as soon be stroked with a shoe on as barefoot.

Thomas Hudson had just reached down and patted him—he liked to be patted as strongly as you would pat a big dog—when he looked up and saw Boise well up in the alligator pear tree. Goats looked up and saw him too.

“What are you doing, you old bastard?” Thomas Hudson called to him “Have you finally started to eat them on the tree?”

Boise looked down at them and saw Goats.

“Come on down and we’ll take a walk,” Thomas Hudson told him. “I’ll give you aguacate for supper.”

Boise looked at Goats and said nothing.

“You look awfully handsome in those dark green leaves. Stay up if you want.”

Boise looked away from them and Thomas Hudson and the big black cat went on through the trees.

“Do you think he’s crazy, Goats?” the man asked. Then to please the cat he said, “Do you remember the night we couldn’t find the medicine?”

Medicine was a magic word with Goats and as soon as he heard it, he lay on his side to be stroked.

“Remember the medicine?” the man asked him and the big cat writhed in his hardy rough delight.

Medicine had become a magic word with him one night when the man had been drunk, really drunk, and Boise would not sleep with him. Princessa would not sleep with him when he was drunk, nor would Willy. No one would sleep with him when he was drunk except Friendless, which was Big Goats’ early name, and Friendless’s Brother, who was really his sister, and who was an unfortunate cat who had many sorrows and occasional ecstasies. Goats liked him drunk better than sober or, perhaps, it was because only when Thomas Hudson was drunk that Goats got to sleep with him that made it seem that way. But on this night Thomas Hudson had been ashore about four days when he got really drunk. It had started at noon at the Floridita and he had drunk first with Cuban politicians that had dropped in, nervous for a quick one; with sugar planters and rice planters; with Cuban government functionaries, drinking through their lunch hour; with second and third secretaries of Embassy, shepherding someone to the Floridita; with the inescapable FBI men, pleasant and all trying to look so average, clean-cut-young-American that they stood out as clearly as though they had worn a bureau shoulder patch on their white linen or seersucker suits. He had drunk double frozen daiquiris, the great ones that Constante made, that had no taste of alcohol and felt, as you drank them, the way downhill glacier skiing feels running through powder snow and, after the sixth and eighth, felt like downhill glacier skiing feels when you are running unroped. Some Navy that he knew came in and he drank with them and then with some of the then-called Hooligan Navy or Coast Guard. This was getting too near to shop, which he was drinking away from, so he went down to the far end of the bar where the old respectable whores were, the fine old whores that every resident drinker at the Floridita had slept with sometime in the last twenty years, and sat on a stool with them and had a club sandwich and drank more double frozens.

When he had come back to the farm that night he was very drunk and none of the cats would sleep with him but Goats, who was not allergic to the basic rum smell, had no prejudice against drunkenness, and revelled in the rich whore smell, as full-bodied as a fine Christmas fruitcake. They slept heavily together, Goats purring loudly whenever he woke, and finally Thomas Hudson, waking and remembering how much he had drunk, said to Goats, “We’ve got to take the medicine.”

Goats loved the sound of the word, which symbolized all this rich life he was sharing, and purred stronger than ever.

“Where is the medicine, Goats?” Thomas Hudson had asked. He turned on the reading light by the bed but it was dead. In the storm that had kept him ashore, wires had blown down or been shorted and not yet repaired and there was no electricity. He felt on the night table by the bed for the big double Seconal capsule, the last one that he had, that would put him to sleep again and let him wake in the morning without a hangover. He knocked it off the table as he reached in the darkness and he couldn’t find it. He felt all over the floor carefully and he couldn’t find it. He had no matches by the bed because he was not smoking and the flashlight battery had been overused by the servants while he was away and was dead.

“Goats,” he had said. “We have to find the medicine.”

He had got out of bed and Goats came down on the floor, too, and they hunted for the medicine. Goats went under the bed, not knowing what he was hunting, but doing all he could, and Thomas Hudson said to him, “The medicine, Goats. Find the medicine.”

Goats made whimpery cries under the bed and ranged all of the area. Finally he came out, purring, and Thomas Hudson, feeling over the floor, touched the capsule. It was dusty and cobwebby under his fingers. Goats had found it.

“You found the medicine,” he had told Goats. “You wonder cat.” After he had washed off the capsule in the palm of his hand with some water from the carafe by the bed and then swallowed it with a drink of water he lay, feeling it take hold slowly, and praised Goats, and the big cat purred at the praise and always afterwards medicine was a magic word to him.

At sea he used to think about Goats as well as Boise. But there was nothing tragic about Goats. Although he had been through some truly bad times he was absolutely entire and, even when he had been beaten in some of his most terrible fights, he was never pitiful. Even when he had not been able to walk up to the house and lay under the mango tree below the terrace panting and soaked wet with sweat so you saw how big his shoulders were and how narrow and thin his flanks, lying there, too dead to move, trying to get the air into his lungs, he was never pitiful. He had the wide head of a lion and he was as unbeaten. Goats was fond of the man, and Thomas Hudson was fond of him and respected and loved him. But there was no question of Goats being in love with him or he in love with Goats as there had come to be with Boise.

Boise had simply become worse and worse. The night he and Goats had found Boise up in the aguacate tree, Boy had stayed out late and not come in when the man had gone to bed. He was sleeping in the big bed then in the bedroom at the far end of the house where there were big windows on all three sides of the room and the breeze blew through at night. When he woke he listened to the noises of the night birds and he was awake and listening when he heard Boise leap up onto the window ledge. Boise was a very silent cat. But he called to the man as soon as he was on the window ledge and Thomas Hudson went to the screen and opened it. Boise leaped in. He had two fruit rats in his mouth.

In the moonlight that came in through the window, throwing the shadow of the trunk of the ceiba tree across the wide, white bed, Boise had played with the fruit rats. Leaping and turning, batting them along the floor, and then carrying one away to crouch and rush the other, he had played as wildly as when he was a kitten. Then he had carried them into the bathroom and after that Thomas Hudson had felt his weight as he jumped up on the bed.

“So you weren’t eating mangoes out of trees?” the man had asked him. Boise rubbed his head against him.

“So you were hunting and looking after the property? My old cat and Brother Boise. Aren’t you going to eat them now you have them?”

Boise had only rubbed his head against the man and purred with his silent purr and then, because he was tired from the hunt, he had gone to sleep. But he had slept restlessly and in the morning he had shown no interest in the dead fruit rats at all.

 

Now it was getting daylight and Thomas Hudson, who had not been able to sleep, watched the light come and the gray trunks of the royal palms show in the gray of the first light. First he saw only the trunks and the outline of their tops. Then, as the light was stronger, he could see the tops of the palms blowing in the gale and then, as the sun began to come up behind the hills, the palm trunks were whitish gray and their blowing branches a bright green and the grass of the hills was brown from the whiter drought and the limestone tops of the far hills made them look as though they were crested with snow.

He got up from the floor and put on moccasins and an old mackinaw coat and, leaving Boise sleeping curled up on the blanket, walked through the living room into the dining room and out through it to the kitchen. The kitchen was in the north end of one wing of the house and the wind was wild outside, blowing the bare branches of the flamboyán tree against the walls and the windows. There was nothing to eat in the icebox and the screened-in kitchen safe was empty of everything but condiments, a can of American coffee, a tin of Lipton’s tea, and a tin of peanut oil for cooking. The Chinaman, who cooked, bought each day’s supply of food in the market. They were not expecting Thomas Hudson back and the Chinaman had undoubtedly gone to the market already to buy the day’s food for the servants. When one of the boys comes, Thomas Hudson thought, I’ll send him into town for some fruit and eggs.

He boiled some water and made himself a pot of tea and took it and a cup and saucer back to the living room. The sun was up now and the room was bright and he sat in the big chair and drank the hot tea and looked at the pictures on the walls in the fresh, bright whiter sunlight. Maybe I ought to change some of them, he thought. The best ones are in my bedroom and I’m never in my bedroom any more.

From the big chair, the living room looked huge after being on the boat. He did not know how long the room was. He had known, when he had ordered the matting, but he had forgotten. However long it was, it seemed three times as long this morning. That was one of the things about being fresh ashore; that and that there was nothing in the icebox. The motion of the boat in the big confused sea the northwester had built up, blowing a gale across the heavy current, was all gone now. It was as far away from him now as the sea itself was. He could see the sea, looking through the open doors of the white room and out of the windows across the tree clumped hills cut by the highway, the farther bare hills that were the old fortifications of the town, the harbor, and the white of the town beyond. But the sea was only the blue beyond the far white spread of the town. It was as distant now as all things that were past and he meant to keep it that way, now that the motion was gone, until it was time to go out onto it again.

The Krauts can have it for the next four days, he thought. I wonder if the fish hang close under them and play around them when they are submerged in weather like this. I wonder how far down the motion goes. There are fish in these waters at any depth that they submerge to. The fish are probably very interested. Some of the submarine bottoms must be pretty foul and the fish would certainly fool around them. They are probably not foul much though on the schedules they run. The fish would be around them anyway. He thought a moment of the sea and how it would really be offshore today with the hills of blue water with the white blowing from their crests and then he put it away from him.

The cat, asleep on the blanket, woke as the man reached over and stroked him. He yawned and stretched his front legs, then curled up again.

“I never had a girl that waked when I did,” the man said. “And now I haven’t even got a cat that does. Go on and sleep, Boy. It’s a damned lie, anyway. I had a girl that woke when I did and even woke before I did. You never knew her, you’ve never known a woman that was any damn good. You had bad luck, Boise. The hell with it.

“You know what? We ought to have a good woman, Boy. We could both be in love with her. If you could support her you could have her. I’ve never seen one that could live on fruit rats very long, though.”

The tea had dulled his hunger for a moment but now he was very hungry again. At sea he would have eaten a big breakfast an hour ago and probably had a mug of tea an hour before that. It had been too rough to cook on the run in and he had eaten a couple of corned beef sandwiches with thick slices of raw onion on them on the flying bridge. But he was very hungry now and he was irritated that there was nothing in the kitchen. I must buy some canned stuff and keep it here for coming in, he thought. But I’ll have to get a cupboard with a lock to be sure they do not use it up and I hate to lock up food in a house.

Finally he poured himself a Scotch whisky and water and sat in the chair and read the accumulated daily papers and felt the drink soothe the hunger and ease the nervousness of being home. You can drink today if you want, he told himself. Once you’ve checked in. If it’s this cold, there won’t be many people at the Floridita. It will be good to be there again, though. He did not know whether to eat there or up at the Pacifico. It will be cold at the Pacifico, too, he thought. But I’ll have a sweater and a coat and there is a table in the lee of the wall by the bar that will be out of the wind.

“I wish you liked to travel, Boy,” he told the cat. “We could have a fine day in town.”

Boise did not like to travel. He was terrified that it meant being taken to the vet’s. He was still frightened of the veterinary surgeons. Goats would have made a good car cat, he thought. Probably would have been a hell of a boat cat, too, except for the spraying. I ought to let them all out. I wish I could have brought them some sort of a present. I’ll get catnip in town if there is any and get Goats and Willy and Boy drunk tonight on it. There still should be some catnip in the shelf of drawers of the cat room if it hasn’t gotten too dry and lost its force. It lost its force very quickly in the tropics and the catnip that you raised in the garden had no force at all. I wish we noncats had something that was as harmless as catnip that would have as much effect, he thought. Why don’t we have something like that we can get drunk on?

The cats were very odd about catnip. Boise, Willy, Goats, Friendless’s Brother, Littless, Furhouse, and Taskforce were all addicts. Princessa, which was the name the servants had given Baby, the blue Persian, would never touch catnip; neither would Uncle Woolfie, the gray Persian. With Uncle Woolfie, who was as stupid as he was beautiful, it could have been stupidity or insularity. Uncle Woolfie would never try anything new and would sniff cautiously at any new food until the other cats had taken it all and he was left with nothing. But Princessa, who was the grandmother of all the cats and was intelligent, delicate, high-principled, aristocratic, and most loving, was afraid of the odor of catnip and fled from it as though it were a vice. Princessa was such a delicate and aristocratic cat, smoke gray, with golden eyes and beautiful manners, and such a great dignity that her periods of being in heat were like an introduction to, and explanation and finally exposition of, all the scandals of royal houses. Since he had seen Princessa in heat, not the first tragic time, but after she was grown and beautiful, and so suddenly changed from all her dignity and poise into wantonness, Thomas Hudson knew that he did not want to die without having made love to a princess as lovely as Princessa.

She must be as grave and as delicate and as beautiful as Princessa before they were in love and made the love and then be as shameless and as wanton in their bed as Princessa was. He dreamed about this princess sometimes in the nights and nothing that could ever happen could be any better than the dreams were but he wanted it actually and truly and he was quite sure he would have it if there were any such princess.

The trouble was that the only princess that he had ever made love to outside of Italian princesses, who did not count, was quite a plain girl with thickish ankles and not very good legs. She had a lovely northern skin, though, and shining well-brushed hair and he liked her face and her eyes and he liked her and her hand felt good in his hand when they stood by the rail going through the Canal coming up onto the lights of Ismailia. They liked each other very much and they were already close to being in love; close enough so that she had to be careful about the tone of their voices when they were with other people; and close enough so that, now, when they were holding each other’s hands in the dark against the rail he could feel what there was between them with no doubt about it at all. Feeling this and being sure, he had spoken to her about it and had asked her something since they made a great thing about being completely frank with each other about everything.

“I would like to very much,” she said. “As you know. But I cannot. As you know.”

“But there is some way,” Thomas Hudson had said. “There’s always some way.”

“You mean in a lifeboat?” she said. “I wouldn’t want it in a lifeboat.”

“Look,” he said and he put his hand on her breast and felt it rise, alive, against his fingers.

“That is nice,” she interrupted. “There are two of them you know.”

“I know.”

“That’s very nice,” she said. “You know I love you, Hudson. I just found out today.”

“How?”

“Oh I just found out. It wasn’t terribly difficult. Didn’t you find out anything?”

“I didn’t have to find out anything,” he lied.

“That’s good,” she said. “But the lifeboat is no good. Your cabin is no good. My cabin is no good.”

“We could go to the Baron’s cabin.”

“There’s someone always in the Baron’s cabin. The wicked Baron. Isn’t it nice to have a wicked Baron just as in olden times?”

“Yes,” he said. “But I could make sure there would be no one there.”

“No. That’s no good. Just love me very hard now just the way you are. Feel that you love me all you can and do what you are doing.”

He did and then he did something else.

“No,” she said. “Don’t do that. I couldn’t stand that?”

She did something then and said, “Can you stand that?”

“Yes.”

“Good. I’ll hold there very good. No. Don’t kiss me. If you kiss me here on deck then we might as well have done everything else.”

“Why don’t we do everything else?”

“Where, Hudson? Where? Tell me in this life about where?”

“I’ll tell you about why.”

“I know all about why. Where is the problem.”

“I love you very much.”

“Oh yes. I love you, too. And no good will come of it, except we love each other which is good.”

He did something then and she said, “Please. If you do that I have to go.”

“Let’s sit down.”

“No. Let’s stand up just as we are here.”

“Do you like what you are doing?”

“Yes. I love it. Do you mind?”

“No. But it doesn’t go on forever.”

“All right,” she said and she turned her head and kissed him quickly and then looked out again across the desert they were sliding by in the night. It was winter and the night was cool and they stood close together looking straight out. “You can do it, then. A mink coat is good for something finally in the tropics. You won’t before me?”

“No.”

“You promise?”

“Yes.”

“Oh Hudson. Please. Please now.”

“You?”

“Oh yes. Any time with you. Now. Now. Oh yes. Now.”

“Really now?”

“Oh yes. Believe me now.”

Afterwards they stood there and the lights were much closer and the bank of the canal and the distance beyond was still sliding by.

“Now are you ashamed of me?” she asked.

“No. I love you very much.”

“But it’s bad for you and I was selfish.”

“No. I don’t think it is bad for me. And you’re not selfish.”

“Don’t think it was a waste. It wasn’t a waste. Truly not for me.”

“Then it wasn’t a waste. Kiss me, will you?”

“No. I can’t. Just hold your hand against me tight.”

Later she said, “You don’t mind how fond I am of him?”

“No. He’s very proud.”

“Let me tell you a secret.”

She told him a secret that did not come to him as a great surprise.

“Is that very wicked?”

“No,” he said. “That’s jolly.”

“Oh Hudson,” she said. “I love you very much. Please go and make yourself comfortable in every way and then come back to me here. Should we have a bottle of champagne at the Ritz?”

“That would be lovely. What about your husband?”

“He’s still playing bridge. I can see him through the window. After he finishes he will look for us and join us.”

So they had gone to the Ritz which was at the stern of the ship and had a bottle of Perrier-Jouet Brut 1915 and then another one and after a while the Prince had joined them. The Prince was very nice and Hudson liked him. They had been hunting in East Africa, as he had been, and he had met them at the Muthaiga Club and at Torr’s in Nairobi and they had taken the same boat from Mombasa. The ship was a round-the-world cruise ship which made a stop at Mombasa en route for Suez, the Mediterranean, and eventually Southampton. It was a super luxury ship where all the cabins were private suites. It had been sold out for the world cruise as ships were in those years but some of the passengers had left the ship in India and one of those men who know about everything had told Thomas Hudson in the Muthaiga Club that the ship was coming in with several vacancies and that passage on her might be had quite reasonably. He had told the Prince and Princess, who had not enjoyed flying out to Kenya in those times when the Handley Pages were so slow and the flight so long and tiresome, and they had been delighted with the idea of the trip and the rates.

“We’ll have such a jolly trip and you’re a wonderful chap to have found out about it,” the Prince had said. “I’ll ring them up about it in the morning.”

It had been a jolly trip, too, with the Indian Ocean blue and the ship coming out slowly from the new harbor and then Africa was behind them, and the old white town with the great trees and all the green behind it, then the sea breaking on the long reef as they passed and then the ship gained speed and was in the open ocean and flying fish were splitting out of the water and ahead of the ship. Africa dropped to a long blue line behind them and a steward was beating on a gong and he and the Prince and the Princess and the Baron, who was an old friend and lived out there and was really wicked, were having a dry martini in the bar.

“Pay no attention to that gong and we’ll lunch in the Ritz,” the Baron said. “Do you agree?”

He had not slept with the princess on the ship although by the time they had reached Haifa they had done so many other things that they had both reached a sort of ecstasy of desperation that was so intense that they should have been required by law to sleep with each other until they could not stand it another time simply for the relief of their nerves, if for no other reason. Instead, from Haifa they made a motor trip to Damascus. On the way up, Thomas Hudson sat in the front seat with the chauffeur and the two of them sat in back. Thomas Hudson saw a small part of the Holy Land and a small part of the T. E. Lawrence country and many cold hills and much desert on the way up, and on the way back they sat in the back and the Prince sat in front with the chauffeur. Thomas Hudson saw the back of the Prince’s head and the back of the chauffeur’s head on the return trip and he remembered now that the road from Damascus to Haifa, where the ship was anchored in the harbor, runs down a river. There is a steep gorge in the river but it is very small as it would be on a small-scale relief map and in the gorge there is an island. He remembered the island better than anything on the trip.

The trip to Damascus did not help much and when they had left Haifa and the ship was headed out across the Mediterranean and they were up on the boat deck, that was cold now with a northeast wind, that was making a sea that the ship was beginning to buck slowly, she said to him, “We have to do something.”

“Do you like understatement?”

“No. I want to go to bed and stay in it for a week.”

“A week doesn’t sound very long.”

“A month then. But we have to do it right away and right away we can’t.”

“We can go down to the Baron’s cabin.”

“No. I do not want to do it until we can do it really without worrying.”

“How do you feel now?”

“As though I were going crazy and were already quite a way there ...”

“In Paris we can make love in a bed.”

“But how do I get away? I have no experience of how to get away.”

“You go shopping.”

“But I have to go shopping with someone.”

“You can go shopping with someone. Have you no one you can trust?”

“Oh yes. But I so much did not want to ever have to do that.”

“Don’t do it then.”

“No. I must. I know I must. But that does not make it better.”

“Were you never unfaithful to him before?”

“No. And I thought I never would be. But now it is all that I want to do. But it hurts me that anyone should know.”

“We’ll figure out something.”

“Please put your arm around me and hold me very close against you,” she said. “Please let us not talk, nor think, nor worry. Please just hold your arm tight and love me very much because I ache now everywhere.”

After a while he said to her, “Look, whenever you do this it is going to be as bad for you as now. You don’t want to be unfaithful and you don’t want anyone to know. But it will be like that whenever it happens.”

“I want to do it. But I don’t want to hurt him. I have to do it. It’s not in my hands any more.”

“Then do it. Now.”

“But it’s terribly dangerous now.”

“Do you think there is anyone on this ship that sees us and hears us and knows us that thinks we have not slept together? Do you think the things we have done are any different from that?”

“Oh, of course they are different. There is all the difference. We couldn’t have a baby from what we have done.”

“You’re wonderful,” he had said. “You really are.”

“But if we have a baby I’ll be glad. He wants a baby very much and we never have one. I’ll sleep with him right away and he’ll never know it is ours.”

“I wouldn’t sleep with him right away.”

“No I suppose not. But the next night.”

“How long since you slept with him?”

“Oh I sleep with him every night. I have to, Hudson. I get so excited I have to. I think that’s one reason he plays bridge until so late now. He’d like me to be asleep when he comes in. I think he is getting a little tired since we have been in love.”

“Is this the first time you have ever been in love since you married him?”

“No. I am sorry. But it is not. I have been in love several times. But I have never been unfaithful to him or even considered it. He is so good and nice and such a good husband and I like him so much and he loves me and is always kind to me.”

“I think we had better go down to the Ritz and have some champagne,” Thomas Hudson had said. His feelings were becoming very mixed.

The Ritz was deserted and a waiter brought them the wine at one of the tables against the wall. They kept the Perrier-Jouet Brut (1915) on ice all of the time now and simply asked, “The same wine, Mr. Hudson?”

They raised their glasses to each other and the Princess said, “I love this wine. Don’t you?”

“Very much.”

“What are you thinking about?”

“You.”

“Naturally. All I think about is you. But what about me?”

“I was thinking we should go down to my cabin now. We talk too much and fool around too much and do nothing. What time have you?”

“Ten after eleven.”

“What time have you?” he called to the wine steward.

“Eleven-fifteen, sir.” The steward looked at the clock inside the bar.

When the steward was out of earshot, he asked, “How late will he play bridge?”

“He said he would play late and for me not to stay awake for him.”

“We’ll finish the wine and go to the cabin. I have some there.”

“But Hudson, it is very dangerous.”

“It will always be dangerous,” Thomas Hudson had said. “But not doing it is getting to be a damned sight more dangerous.”

That night he made love to her three times and when he took her to her cabin, she had said that he shouldn’t and he had said it would look much sounder if he did, the Prince was still playing bridge. Thomas Hudson had gone back to the Ritz, where the bar was still open, and ordered another bottle of the same wine and read the papers that had come aboard at Haifa. He realized that it was the first time he had had time to read the papers in a long time and he felt very relaxed and very happy to be reading the papers. When the bridge game broke up and the Prince came by and looked into the Ritz, Thomas Hudson asked him to have a glass of wine before he went to bed and he liked the Prince more than ever and felt a strong kinship with him.

He and the Baron had got off the ship at Marseilles. Most of the others were going on for the rest of the cruise, which finished at Southampton. In Marseilles he and the Baron were sitting at a sidewalk restaurant in the Vieux Port eating moules marinés and drinking a carafe of vin rosé. Thomas Hudson was very hungry and he remembered that he had been hungry most of the time ever since they had left Haifa.

 

He was damned hungry now, too, he thought. Where the hell were those servants? At least one should have shown up. It was blowing colder than ever outside. It reminded him of the cold day there on the steep street in Marseilles that ran down to the port, sitting at the café table with their coat collars up eating the moules out of the thin black shells you lifted from the hot, peppery milk broth with hot melted butter floating in it, drinking the wine from Tavel that tasted the way Provence looked, and watching the wind blow the skirts of the fisherwomen, the cruise passengers and the ill-dressed whores of the port as they climbed the steep cobbled street with the mistral lashing at them.

“You have been a very naughty boy,” the Baron had said. “Very naughty indeed.”

“Do you want some more moules?”

“No. I want something solid.”

“Shouldn’t we have a bouillabaisse, too?”

“Two soups?”

“I’m hungry. And we won’t be here again for a long time.”

“I should think you might be hungry. Good. We’ll have a bouillabaisse and then a good Châteaubriand very rare. I’ll build you up, you bastard.’”

“What are you going to do?”

“The question is what are you going to do. Do you love her?”

“No.”

“That’s much better. It is better for you to leave now. Much better.”

“I promised to spend some time with them for the fishing.”

“If it were the shooting it might be worthwhile,” the Baron had said. “The fishing is very cold and very unpleasant and she has no business to make a fool of her husband.”

“He must know about it.”

“He does not. He knows she is in love with you. That is all. You are a gentleman so whatever you do is all right. But she has no business to make a fool of her husband. You wouldn’t marry her, would you?”

“No.”

“She couldn’t marry you anyway and there is no need that he should be made unhappy unless you are in love with her.”

“I’m not. I know that now.”

“Then I think you should get out.”

“I’m quite sure that I should.”

“I’m so glad that you agree. Now tell me truly, how is she?”

“She’s very well.”

“Don’t be silly. I knew her mother. You should have known her mother.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t.”

“You should be. I don’t know how you got yourself mixed up with such good dull people. You don’t need her for your painting or anything like that, do you?”

“No. That’s not the way it’s done. I like her very much. I still like her. But I’m not in love with her and it’s getting very complicated.”

“I’m so glad that you agree. Now where do you think that you will go?”

“We’ve just come from Africa.”

“Exactly. Why don’t you go to Cuba for a while or the Bahamas? I could join you if I get hold of any money at home.”

“Do you think you will get any money at home?”

“No.”

“I think I will stay in Paris for a while. I’ve been away from town for a long time.”

“Paris isn’t town. London is town.”

“I’d like to see what’s going on in Paris.”

“I can tell you what’s going on.”

“No. I mean I want to see the pictures and some people and go to the Six-Day and Auteuil and Enghien and Le Tremblay. Why don’t you stay?”

“I don’t like racing and I can’t afford to gamble.”

 

And why go on with that? he thought now. The Baron was dead and the Krauts had Paris and the Princess did not have a baby. There would be no blood of his in any royal house, he thought, unless he had a nosebleed sometime in Buckingham Palace, which seemed extremely unlikely. If one of those boys did not come in twenty minutes, he decided, he would go down into the village and get some eggs and some bread. It is a hell of a thing to be hungry in your own house, he thought. But I’m too damned tired to go down there.

Just then he heard someone in the kitchen and he pushed the buzzer that was set in the underside of the big table and heard it burr twice in the kitchen.

The second houseboy came in with his faintly fairy, half Saint Sebastian, sly, crafty, and long-suffering look and said, “You rang?”

“What the hell do you think I did? Where is Mario?”

“He went for the mail.”

“How are all the cats?”

“Very well. Without news. Big Goats fought with El Gordo. But we treated the wounds.”

“Boise looks thin.”

“He goes out much at night.”

“How is Princessa?”

“She was a little sad. But she eats well now.”

“Did you have difficulty getting meat?”

“We got it from Cotorro.”

“How are the dogs?”

“All of them are well. Negrita is with puppies again.”

“Couldn’t you keep her shut up?”

“We tried but she escaped.”

“Has anything else happened?”

“Nothing. How was the voyage?”

“Without incident.”

As he talked, irritated and short as always with this boy who he had let go twice but had taken back each time when his father had come and pled for him, Mario, the first houseboy, came in carrying the papers and the mail. He was smiling and his brown face was gay and kind and loving.

“How was the voyage?”

“A little rough at the end.”

“Figúrate. Imagine it. It’s a big norther. Have you eaten?”

“There’s nothing to eat.”

“I brought eggs and the milk and bread. Tú,” he said to the second houseboy. “Go in and prepare the caballero’s breakfast. How do you want the eggs?”

“As usual.”

“Los huevos como siempre,” Mario said. “Was Boise there to meet you?”

“Yes.”

“He has suffered very much this time. More than ever.”

“And the others?”

“Only one bad fight between Goats and Fats.” He used the English names proudly. “The Princessa was a little sad. But it was nothing.”

“¿Y tú?”

“Me?” He smiled shyly and very pleased. “Very well. Thank you very much.”

“And the family?”

“All very well, thank you. Papa is working again.”

“I am glad.”

“He is, too. Did none of the other gentlemen sleep here?”

“No, They all went into town.”

“They must be tired.”

“They are.”

“There were calls from various friends. I have them all written down. I hope you can recognize them. I can do nothing with the English names.”

“Write them as they sound.”

“But they do not sound the same to me as to you.”

“Did the Colonel call?”

“No sir.”

“Bring me a whisky with mineral water,” Thomas Hudson said. “And bring milk for the cats, please.”

“In the dining room or here?”

“The whisky here. The milk for the cats in the dining room.”

“Instantly,” Mario said. He went to the kitchen and came back with a whisky and mineral water. “I think it is strong enough,” he said.

Should I shave now or wait until after breakfast? Thomas Hudson thought. I ought to shave. That’s what I ordered the whisky for, to get me through the shaving. All right, go in and shave then. The hell with it, he thought. No. Go in and do it. It’s good for your damned morale and you have to go into town after breakfast.

Shaving, he sipped the drink halfway through lathering, after lathering, and during the process of relathering, and changing blades three times in getting the two-week stubble off his cheeks, chin, and throat. The cat walked around and watched him while he shaved and rubbed against his legs. Then suddenly he bounded out of the room and Thomas Hudson knew he had heard the milk bowls being put down on the tiled floor of the dining room. He had not heard the click himself nor had he heard any calling. But Boise had heard it.

Thomas Hudson finished shaving and poured his right hand full of the wonderful ninety-degree pure alcohol that was as cheap in Cuba as miserable rubbing alcohol in the States and doused it over his face, feeling its cold bite take away the soreness from the shaving.

I don’t use sugar, nor smoke tobacco, he thought, but by God I get my pleasure out of what they distill in this country.

The lower parts of the bathroom windows were painted over because the stone paved patio ran all around the house, but the upper halves of the windows were of clear glass and he could see the branches of the palm trees whipping in the wind. She’s blowing even heavier than I thought. There would almost be time to haul out. But you can’t tell. It all depends on what she does when she goes into the northeast. It certainly had been fun not to think about the sea for the last few hours. Let’s keep it up, he thought. Let’s not think about the sea nor what is on it or under it, or anything connected with it. Let’s not even make a list of what we will not think of about it. Let’s not think of it at all. Let’s just have the sea in being and leave it at that. And the other things, he thought. We won’t think about them either.

“Where would the señor like to have breakfast?” Mario asked.

“Any place away from the puta sea.”

“In the living room or in the señor’s bedroom?”

“In the bedroom. Pull out the wicker chair and put the breakfast on a table by it.”

He drank the hot tea and ate a fried egg and some toast with orange marmalade.

“Is there no fruit?”

“Only bananas.”

“Bring some.”

“Are they not bad with alcohol?”

“That is superstition.”

“But while you were away a man died in the village from eating bananas when he was drinking rum.”

“How do you know he wasn’t just a banana-eating rummy who died from rum?”

“No, señor. This man died very suddenly from drinking a small amount of rum after eating a large quantity of bananas. They were his own bananas from his garden. He lived on the hill behind the village and worked for the route number seven of the buses.”

“May he rest in peace,” Thomas Hudson said. “Bring me a few bananas.”

Mario brought the bananas, small, yellow, ripe, from the tree in the garden. They were hardly bigger, peeled, than a man’s fingers and they were delicious. Thomas Hudson ate five of them.

“Observe me for symptoms,” he said. “And bring the Princessa to eat the other egg.”

“I gave her an egg to celebrate your return,” the boy said. “I also gave an egg to Boise and to Willy.”

“What about Goats?”

“The gardener said it was not good for Goats to eat much until his wounds are healed. His wounds were severe.”

“What sort of a fight was it?”

“It was very serious. They fought for nearly a mile. We lost them in the thorn brush beyond the garden. They fought with no noise at all; the way they fight now. I don’t know who won. Big Goats came in first and we took care of his wounds. He came to the patio and lay beside the cistern. He couldn’t jump to the top of it. Fats came in an hour later and we cared for his wounds.”

“Do you remember how loving they were when they were brothers?”

“Of course. But I am afraid now that Fats will kill Goats. He must weigh nearly a pound more.”

“Goats is a great fighting cat.”

“Yes, señor. But figure out for yourself what a full pound means.”

“I don’t think it can mean as much in cats as it does in fighting cocks. You think of everything in terms of fighting chickens. It doesn’t mean much in men unless one man must weaken himself to make the weight. Jack Dempsey weighed only 185 pounds when he won the championship of the world. Willard weighed 230. Goats and Fats are both big cats.”

“The way they fight, a pound is a terrible advantage,” Mario said. “If they were being fought for money, no one would give away a pound. They would not give away ounces.”

“Bring me some more bananas.”

“Please, señor.”

“You really believe that nonsense?”

“It’s not nonsense, señor.”

“Then bring me another whisky and mineral water.”

“If you order me to.”

“I ask you to.”

“If you ask, it is an order.”

“Then bring it.”

The boy brought in the whisky with ice and cold, charged mineral water and Thomas Hudson took it and said, “Observe me for symptoms.” But the worried look on the boy’s dark face made him tire of the teasing and he said, “Truly, I know it will not make me sick.”

“The señor knows what he is doing. But it was my duty to protest.”

“That’s all right. You’ve protested. Has Pedro come yet?”

“No, señor.”

“When he comes tell him to have the Cadillac ready to go to town at once.”

Now you take a bath, Thomas Hudson said to himself. Then you dress for Havana. Then you ride into town to see the Colonel. What the hell is wrong with you? Plenty is wrong with me, he thought. Plenty. The land of plenty. The sea of plenty. The air of plenty.

He sat in a wicker chair with his feet up on the extension that pulled out from under the seat and looked at the pictures on the wall of his bedroom. At the head of the bed, the cheap bed with the no-good mattress that had been bought as an economy because he never slept in it except in case of quarrels, there was Juan Gris’s Guitar Player. Nostalgia hecha hombre, he thought in Spanish. People did not know that you died of it. Across the room, above the bookcase, was Paul Klee’s Monument in Arbeit. He didn’t love it as he loved the Guitar Player but he loved to look at it and he remembered how corrupt it had seemed when he first bought it in Berlin. The color was as indecent as the plates in his father’s medical books that showed the different types of chancres and venereal ulcers, and how frightened of it his wife had been until she had learned to accept its corruption and only see it as a painting. He knew no more about it now than when he first saw it in Flechtheim’s Gallery in the house by the river that wonderful cold fall in Berlin when they had been so happy. But it was a good picture and he liked to look at it.

Above the other bookcase was one of Masson’s forests. This was Ville d’Avray and he loved it the way he loved the Guitar Player. That was the great thing about pictures; you could love them with no hopelessness at all. You could love them without sorrow and the good ones made you happy because they had done what you always tried to do. So it was done and it was all right, even if you failed to do it.

Boise came into the room and jumped up onto his lap. He jumped beautifully and could leap, without effort showing, to the top of the high chest of drawers in the big bedroom. Now, having leaped moderately and neatly, he settled down on Thomas Hudson’s lap and made loving pushes with his forepaws.

“I’m looking at the pictures, Boy. You’d be better off if you liked pictures.”

Who knows though but he may get as much from leaping and from night hunting as I get from the pictures, Thomas Hudson thought. It is a damned shame he can’t see them though. You can’t tell. He might have frightful taste in pictures.

“I wonder who you’d like, Boy. Probably the Dutch period when they painted such wonderful still lifes of fish and oysters and game. Hey, lay off me there. This is the day time. You’re not supposed to do that sort of thing in the day time.”

Boise continued with his lovemaking and Thomas Hudson pushed him onto his side to quiet him.

“You have to observe a few decencies, Boy,” he said. “I haven’t even gone out to see the other cats, to please you.”

Boise was happy and Thomas Hudson felt the purr in his throat with his fingers.

“I have to bathe, Boy. You spend half your time doing that. But you do it with your own tongue. That’s when you won’t pay any attention to me. When you wash yourself you’re just like a damned businessman at his office. That’s business. That’s not to be interrupted. Well, I have to bathe now. But instead I sit here drinking in the morning like a damned rummy. That’s one of the differences between us. You couldn’t steer eighteen hours either. I can, though. Twelve anytime. Eighteen when I have to. Nineteen yesterday and this morning. But I can’t jump and I can’t hunt at night like you. We do some pretty damn fancy hunting at night though. But you’ve got your radar in your whiskers. And a pigeon probably has his Huff Duff in that incrustation above his beak. Anyway, all homing pigeons have the incrustation. What sort of ultra-high frequencies have you got, Boy?”

Boise lay there heavy and solid and long, purring silently and very happy.

“What does your search receiver say, Boy? What’s your pulse width? What’s your pulse repetition frequency? I’ve got a magnetron built in. But don’t tell anybody. But with the consequent higher resolution attained by the UHF, enemy whores can be detected at a greater distance. It’s microwave, Boy, and you’re purring it right now.”

So that’s how you kept your resolution not to think about it until we get going again. It wasn’t the sea you wanted to forget. You know you love the sea and would not be anywhere else. Go on out to the porch and look at her. She is not cruel or callous nor any of that Quatsch. She is just there and the wind moves her and the current moves her and they fight on her surface but down below none of it matters. Be thankful that you are going out on her again and thank her for being your home. She is your home. Don’t talk nor think nonsense about her. She is not your trouble. You’re making a little more sense, he told himself. Although you don’t make too damned much ashore. All right, he told himself. I have to make so much sense at sea that I don’t want to make any ashore.

Ashore is a lovely place, he thought. Today we would see just how lovely it could be. After I see the goddamned Colonel, he thought. Well I always enjoy seeing him because it builds up my morale. Let’s not go into the Colonel, he thought. That’s one of those things we are going to skip while we have a lovely day. I will go to see him. But I won’t go into him. Enough has gone into him already that will never get out. And enough has gone out of him that they will never get back in. So I thought you weren’t going to go into him. I’m not. I’m just going in to see him and report.

He finished the drink, lifted the cat off his lap, stood up and looked at the three paintings, and then went in and took a shower. The water heater had only been on since the boys came in the morning and there was not much hot water. But he soaped himself clean, scrubbed his head, and finished off with cold water. He dressed in white flannel shirt, dark tie, flannel slacks, wool socks and his ten-year-old English brogues, a cashmere pullover sweater, and an old tweed jacket. He rang for Mario.

“Is Pedro here?”

“Yes, señor. He has the car outside.”

“Make me a Tom Collins with coconut water and bitters to take. Put it in one of the cork holders.”

“Yes, señor. Don’t you want a coat?”

“I’ll take a coat to wear back if it gets cold.”

“Will you be back for lunch?”

“No. Nor for dinner.”

“Do you want to see any of the cats before you go? They are all out in the lee of the wind in the sun.”

“No. I will see them tonight. I want to bring them a present.”

“I go to make the drink. It will take a moment for the coconut.”

Now why in hell wouldn’t you go to see the cats? he asked himself. I don’t know, he answered. That one I did not understand at all. That was a new one.

Boise was following him, a little worried at this going away, but not panicky since there was no baggage and no packing. “Maybe I did it for you, Boy,” Thomas Hudson said. “Don’t you worry. I’ll be back sometime tonight or in the morning. With my ashes dragged, I hope. Properly, I hope. Then maybe we will make a little better sense around here. Vámonos a limpiar la escopeta.”

He came out of the long, bright living room that still seemed enormous and down the stone steps into the even greater brightness of the Cuban winter morning. The dogs played around his legs and the sad pointer came up grovelling and wagging his lowered head.

“You poor miserable beast,” he said to the pointer. He patted him and the dog fawned on him. The other mongrel dogs were gay and prancing in the excitement of the cold and the wind. There were some dead branches broken off the ceiba tree that grew out of the patio and they lay on the steps where they had fallen in the wind. The chauffeur came from behind the car, shivering exaggeratedly, and said, “Good morning, Mr. Hudson. How was the voyage?”

“Good enough. How are the Cars?”

“All in perfect shape.”

“I’ll bet,” Thomas Hudson said in English. Then to Mario, who came out of the house and down the steps to the car carrying the tall dark, rusty-colored drink, wrapped round with a sheet of moulded cork that came to within a half-inch of the rim of the glass, “Get a sweater for Pedro. One of those that buttons in front. From Mr. Tom’s clothes. See that the steps are cleaned of this trash.”

Thomas Hudson handed the drink to the chauffeur to hold and stooped to pet the dogs. Boise was sitting on the steps, watching them with contempt. There was Negrita, a small black bitch going gray with age, her tail curled over her back, her tiny feet and delicate legs almost sparkling as she played, her muzzle as sharp as a fox terrier and her eyes loving and intelligent.

He had seen her one night in a bar following some people out and asked what breed of dog she was.

“Cuban,” the waiter said. “She’s been here four days. She follows everyone out but they always shut the doors of their cars on her.”

They had taken her home to the Finca and for two years she had not been in heat and Thomas Hudson had thought she was too old to breed. Then, one day, he had to break her loose from a police dog and after that she had police dog pups, pups from a pit bull, pointer pups, and a wonderful unknown pup that was bright red and looked as though his father might have been an Irish setter except that he had the chest and shoulders of a pit bull and a tail that curled up over his back like Negrita’s.

Now her sons were all around her and she was pregnant again.

“Who did she breed with?” Thomas Hudson asked the chauffeur.

“I don’t know.”

Mario, who came out with the sweater and gave it to the chauffeur, who took off his frayed uniform coat to put it on, said, “The father is the fighting dog in the village.”

“Well, goodbye, dogs,” Thomas Hudson said. “So long, Boy,” he said to the cat who came bounding down through the dogs to the car. Thomas Hudson, sitting in the car now, holding the cork-wrapped drink, leaned out of the window and touched the cat who rose on his hind legs to push his head against his fingers. “Don’t worry, Boy. I’ll be back.”

“Poor Boise,” Mario said. He picked him up and held him in his arms and the cat looked after the car as it turned, circling the flower bed, and went down the uneven gully-washed driveway until it was hidden by the hill slope and the tall mango trees. Then Mario took the cat into the house and put him down and the cat jumped up onto the window sill and continued to look out at where the driveway disappeared under the hill.

Mario stroked him but the cat did not relax.

“Poor Boise,” the tall Negro boy said. “Poor, poor Boise.”

In the car Thomas Hudson and the chauffeur went down the driveway and the chauffeur jumped out and unchained the gate and then climbed back in and drove the car through. A Negro boy was coming up the street and he called to him to close the gate and the boy grinned and nodded his head.

“He is a younger brother of Mario.”

“I know,” Thomas Hudson said.

They rolled through the squalor of the village side street and turned onto the central highway. They passed the houses of the village, the two grocery stores open onto the street with their bars and rows of bottles flanked by shelves of canned goods, and then were past the last bar and the huge Spanish laurel tree whose branches spread all the way across the road and were rolling downhill on the old stone highway. The highway ran downhill for three miles with big old trees on either side. There were nurseries, small farms, large farms with their decrepit Spanish colonial houses that were being cut up into subdivisions, their old hilly pastures being cut by streets that ended at grassy hillsides, the grass brown from the drought. The only green now on the land, in this country of so many greens, was along the watercourses where the royal palms grew tall and gray, their green tops slanted by the wind. This was a dry norther, dry, hard, and cold. The Straits of Florida had been chilled by the other northers that had come before it and there was no fog and no rain with this wind.

Thomas Hudson took a sip of the ice-cold drink that tasted of the fresh green lime juice mixed with the tasteless coconut water that was still so much more full-bodied than any charged water, strong with the real Gordon’s gin that made it alive to his tongue and rewarding to swallow, and all of it tautened by the bitters that gave it color. It tastes as good as a drawing sail feels, he thought. It is a hell of a good drink.

The cork glass-holder kept the ice from melting and weakening the drink and he held it fondly in his hand and looked at the country as they drove into town.

“Why don’t you coast down here and save gas?”

“I will if you say,” the chauffeur answered. “But this is government gas.”

“Coast for the practice,” Thomas Hudson said. “Then you will know how to do it when it is our gas and not the government’s.”

They were down on the flat now where flower-growers’ fields ran off the left and on the right were the houses of the basket-weavers.

“I must get a basket-weaver to come up and mend the big mat in the living room where it is worn.”

“Sí, señor.”

“Do you know one?”

“Sí, señor.”

The chauffeur, whom Thomas Hudson disliked very much for his general misinformation and stupidity, his conceit, his lack of understanding of motors, and his atrocious care of the cars and general laziness, was being very short and formal because of the reprimand about coasting. With all his faults he was a splendid driver, that is, he was an excellent car handler with beautiful reflexes in the illogical and neurotic Cuban traffic. Also he knew too much about their operations to be fired.

“Are you warm enough with the sweater?”

“Sí, señor.”

The hell with you, Thomas Hudson thought. You keep that up and I’ll ream you out good.

“Was it very cold in your house last night?”

“It was terrible. It was horroroso. You can’t imagine it, Mr. Hudson.”

Peace had been made and they were now crossing the bridge, where the trunk of the girl who had once been cut into six pieces by her policeman lover and the pieces wrapped in brown paper and scattered along the Central Highway, had been found. The river was dry now. But on that evening it had been running with water and cars had been lined up for half a mile in the rain while their drivers stared at the historic spot.

The next morning the papers published photographs of the torso on their front pages and one news story pointed out that the girl was undoubtedly a North American tourist since no one of that age living in the tropics could be so undeveloped physically. How they had already arrived at her exact age Thomas Hudson never knew since the head was not discovered until some time later in the fishing port of Batabano. But the torso, as shown in the front pages, did fall rather short of the best fragments of Greek sculpture. She was not an American tourist, though; and it turned out that she had developed whatever attractions she had in the tropics. But for a while Thomas Hudson had to give up doing any road work in the country outside the Finca because anybody seen running or even hurrying, was in danger of being pursued by the populace crying, “There he goes! That’s him! That’s the man who chopped her up!”

Now they were over the bridge and going up the hill into Luyano where there was a view, off to the left, of El Cerro that always reminded Thomas Hudson of Toledo. Not El Greco’s Toledo. But a part of Toledo itself seen from a side hill. They were coming up on it now as the car climbed the last of the hill and he saw it again clearly and it was Toledo all right, just for a moment, and then the hill dipped and Cuba was close on either side.

This was the part he did not like on the road into town. This was really the part he carried the drink for. I drink against poverty, dirt, four-hundred-year-old dust, the nose-snot of children, cracked palm fronds, roofs made from hammered tins, the shuffle of untreated syphilis, sewage in the old beds of brooks, lice on the bare necks of infested poultry, scale on the backs of old men’s necks, the smell of old women, and the full-blast radio, he thought. It is a hell of a thing to do. I ought to look at it closely and do something about it. Instead you have your drink the way they carried smelling salts in the old days. No. Not quite that, he thought. Sort of a combination of that and the way they drank in Hogarth’s Gin Lane. You’re drinking against going in to see the Colonel, too, he thought. You’re always drinking against something or for something now, he thought. The hell you are. Lots of times you are just drinking. You are going to do quite a lot of it today.

He took a long sip of the drink and felt it clean and cold and fresh-tasting in his mouth. This was the worst part of the road where the street car line ran and the traffic was bumper to bumper on the level crossing of the railroad when the gates were down. Ahead now beyond the lines of stalled cars and trucks was the hill with the castle of Atares where they had shot Colonel Crittenden and the others when that expedition failed down at Bahía Honda forty years before he was born and where they had shot one hundred and twenty-two American volunteers against that hill. Beyond, the smoke blew straight across the sky from the tall chimneys of the Havana Electric Company and the highway ran on the old cobblestones under the viaduct, parallel to the upper end of the harbor where the water was as black and greasy as the pumpings from the bottoms of the tanks of an oil tanker. The gates came up and they moved again and now they were in the lee of the norther and the wooden-hulled ships of the pitiful and grotesque wartime merchant marine lay against the creosoted pilings of the wooden docks and the scum of the harbor lay along their sides blacker than the creosote of the pilings and foul as an uncleaned sewer.

He recognized various craft that he knew. One, an old barque, had been big enough for a sub to bother with and the sub had shelled her. She was loaded with timber and was coming in for a cargo of sugar, Thomas Hudson could still see where she had been hit, although she was repaired I now, and he remembered the live Chinamen and the dead Chinamen on her deck when they had come alongside her at sea. I thought you weren’t going to think about the sea today.

I have to look at it, he said to himself. Those that are on it are a damned sight better off than those that live in what we have just been riding through. This harbor that I has been fouled for three or four hundred years isn’t the I sea anyway. And this harbor isn’t bad out by the mouth. Nor even so bad over by the Casablanca side. You’ve known good nights in this harbor and you know it.

“Look at that,” he said. The chauffeur, seeing him looking, started to stop the car. But he told him to go on. “Keep going to the Embassy,” he said.

He had looked at the old couple that lived in the board and palm frond lean-to they had built against the wall that separated the railway track from a tract of ground where the electric company stored coal they unloaded from the harbor. The wall was black with coal dust from the coal that was hauled overhead on the unloader and it was less than four feet from the roadbed of the railway. The lean-to was built at a steep slant and there was barely room for two people to lie down in it. The couple who lived in it were sitting in the entrance cooking coffee in a tin can. They were Negroes, filthy, scaly with age and dirt, wearing clothing made from old sugar sacks, and they were very old. He could not see the dog.

“¿Y el perro?” he asked the chauffeur. “Since a long time I haven’t seen him.” They had passed these people now for several years. At one time the girl, whose letters he had read last night, had exclaimed about the shame of it each time they passed the lean-to.

“Why don’t you do something about it, then?” he had asked her. “Why do you always say things are so terrible and write so well about how terrible they are and never do anything about it?”

This made the girl angry and she had stopped the car, gotten out, gone over to the lean-to and given the old woman twenty dollars and told her this was to help her find a better place to live and to buy something to eat.

“Si, señorita,” the old woman said. “You are very amiable.”

The next time they came by the couple were living in the same place and they waved happily. They had bought a dog. It was a white dog too, small and curly, probably not bred originally, Thomas Hudson thought, for the coal dust trade.

“What do you think has become of the dog?” Thomas Hudson asked the chauffeur.

“It probably died. They have nothing to eat.”

“We must get them another dog,” Thomas Hudson said.

Past the lean-to, which was now well behind them, they passed on the left the mud colored plastered walls of the headquarters of the general staff of the Cuban army. A Cuban soldier with some white blood stood indolently but proudly in his khakis faded from his wife’s washings, his campaign hat much neater than General Stillwell’s, his Springfield at the most comfortable angle across the ill-covered bones of his shoulder. He looked at the car absently. Thomas Hudson could see he was cold in the norther. I suppose he could warm up by walking his post, Thomas Hudson thought. But if he stays in that exact position and does not waste any energy the sun should be on him soon and that will warm him. He must not have been in the army very long to be so thin, he thought. By spring, if we still come by here in the spring, I probably will not recognize him. That Springfield must be awfully heavy for him. It is a shame he cannot stand guard with a light plastic gun the way bullfighters now use a wooden sword in their work with the muleta so their wrists will not tire.

“What about the division that General Benitez was going to lead into battle in Europe?” he asked the chauffeur. “Has that division left yet?”

“Todavía no,” the chauffeur said. “Not yet. But the general is practicing learning to ride a motorcycle. He practices early in the morning along the Malecon.”

“It must be a motorized division then,” Thomas Hudson said. “What are those packages that the soldiers and officers are carrying as they come out of the Estado Mayor?”

“Rice,” the chauffeur said. “There was a cargo of rice came in.”

“Is it difficult to get now?”

“Impossible. It’s in the clouds.”

“Do you eat badly now?”

“Very badly.”

“Why? You eat at the house. I pay for everything, no matter how far the price goes up.”

“I mean when I eat at home.”

“When do you eat at home?”

“Sundays.”

“I’ll have to buy you a dog,” Thomas Hudson said.

“We have a dog,” the chauffeur said. “A really beautiful and intelligent dog. He loves me more than anything in the world. I cannot move a foot that he does not want to come with me. But, Mr. Hudson, you cannot realize nor appreciate, you who have everything, what this war means in suffering to the people of Cuba.”

“There must be much hunger.”

“You cannot realize it.”

No, I can’t, Thomas Hudson thought. I can’t realize it at all. I can’t realize why there should ever be any hunger in this country ever. And you, you son of a bitch for the way you look after the motors of cars, you ought to be shot, not fed. I would shoot you with the greatest of pleasure. But he said, “I will see what I can do about getting you some rice for your house.”

“Thank you very much. You cannot conceive of how hard life is now for us Cubans.”

“It must be really bad,” Thomas Hudson said. “It is a shame I cannot take you to sea for a rest and a vacation.”

“It must be very difficult at sea, too.”

“I believe it is,” Thomas Hudson said. “Sometimes, even on a day such as today, I believe it is.”

“We all have our crosses to bear.”

“I would like to take my cross and stick it up the culo of a lot of people I know.”

“It is necessary to take things with calm and patience, Mr. Hudson.”

“Muchas gracias,” said Thomas Hudson.

They had turned into San Isidro street below the main railway station and opposite the entrance to the old P. and O. docks where the ships from Miami and Key West used to dock and where the Pan American airways had its terminal when they were still flying the old clippers. It was abandoned now that the P. and O. boats had been taken over by the Navy and Pan American was flying DC-2’s and DC-3’s to the Rancho Boyeros airport and the Coast Guard and the Cuban navy had their sub chasers tied up where the cuppers used to land.

Thomas Hudson remembered this part of Havana best from the old days. The part that he loved now had then been just the road to Matanzas; an ugly stretch of town, the castle of Atares, a suburb whose name he did not know, and then a brick road with towns strung along it. You sped through them so that you did not remember one from another. Then he had known every bar and dive around this part of town and San Isidro had been the great whorehouse street of the waterfront. It was dead now, with not a house functioning on it, and had been dead ever since they closed it and shipped all the whores back to Europe. That great shipment had been the reverse of how Villefranche used to be when the American ships on the Mediterranean station would leave and all the girls would be waving. When the French ship left Havana with the girls aboard, all the waterfront was crowded and it was not only men that were saying goodbye, waving from the shore, the docks, and the sea wall of the harbor. There were girls in the chartered launches and the bum-boats that circled the ship and ran alongside her as she went out the channel. It was very sad, he remembered, although many people thought it was very funny. Why whores should be funny he had never understood. The shipment was supposed to be very comic, though. But many people were sad after the ship had gone and San Isidro street had never recovered. The name still moved him, he thought, although it was a dull enough street now and you hardly ever saw a white man or woman on it except for truck drivers and delivery cart pushers. There were gay streets in Havana where only Negroes lived and there were some very tough streets and tough quarters, such as Jesús y María, which was just a short distance away. But this part of town was just as sad as it had been ever since the whores had gone.

Now the car had come out onto the waterfront itself where the ferry that ran across to Regla docked and where the coastwise sailing ships tied up. The harbor was brown and rough, but the sea that was running did not make whitecaps. The water was too brown. But it was fresh and clear brown-looking after the black foulness of the inner parts of the bay. Looking across it, he saw the calm of the bay that lay in the lee of the hills above Casablanca where the fishing smacks were anchored, where the gray gunboats of the Cuban navy lay, and where he knew his own ship was anchored, although he could not see her from here. Across the bay he saw the ancient yellow church and the sprawl of the houses of Regla, pink, green, and yellow houses, and the storage tanks and the refinery chimneys of Belot and behind them the gray hills toward Cojímar.

“Do you see the ship?” the chauffeur asked.

“Not from here.”

Here they were to the windward of the smoking chimneys of the Electric Company and the morning was as bright and clean and the air as clear and new-washed as on the hills of the farm. Everyone moving about the docks looked cold in the norther.

“Let’s go to the Floridita first,” Thomas Hudson said to the chauffeur.

“We are only four blocks from the Embassy here.”

“Yes. But I said I wished to go to the Floridita first.”

“As you wish.”

They rode straight up into town and were out of the wind and, passing the warehouses and stores, Thomas Hudson smelled the odor of stored flour in sacks and flour dust, the smell of newly opened packing cases, the smell of roasting coffee that was a stronger sensation than a drink in the morning, and the lovely smell of the tobacco that came strongest just before the car turned to the right toward the Floridita. This was one of the streets he loved but he did not like to walk along it in daylight because the sidewalks were too narrow and there was too much traffic and at night when there was no traffic they were not roasting the coffee and the windows of the storehouses were closed so you could not smell the tobacco.

“It is closed,” the chauffeur said. The iron shutters were still down on both sides of the café.

“I thought it would be. Go on down Obispo now to the Embassy.”

This was the street he had walked down a thousand times in the daytime and in the night. He did not like to ride down it because it was over so quickly but he could not justify himself delaying in reporting any longer and he drank the last of his drink and looked at the cars ahead, the people on the sidewalk, and the crossing traffic on the north and south streets, and saved the street for later when he could walk it. The car stopped in front of the Embassy and Consulate building and he went in.

Inside you were supposed to fill out your name and address and the object of your visit at a table where a sad clerk with plucked eyebrows and a moustache across the extreme lower part of his upper lip looked up and pushed the paper toward him. He did not look at it and went into the elevator. The clerk shrugged his shoulders and smoothed his eyebrows. Perhaps he had emphasized them a little too much. Still they were cleaner and neater that way than wooly and bushy and they did go with his moustache. He had, he believed, the narrowest moustache it was possible to achieve and still have a moustache. Not even Errol Flynn had a narrower one, not even Pincho Gutiérrez, not even Jorge Negrete. Still that son of a bitch Hudson had no right to walk in like that and ignore him.

“What sort of maricones have you on the door now?” Thomas Hudson asked the elevator operator.

“That’s not a maricón. That’s nothing.”

“How’s everything here?”

“Good. Fine. The same as always.”

He got off at the fourth floor and walked down the hall. He went in the middle door of the three and asked the Marine warrant officer at the desk if the Colonel was in.

“He flew down to Guantánamo this morning.”

“When will he be back?”

“He said he might go to Haiti.”

“Is there anything for me?”

“Nothing with me.”

“Did he leave any message for me?”

“He said to tell you to stick around.”

“How was he feeling?”

“Awful.”

“How did he look?”

“Terrible.”

“Was he plugged at me?”

“I don’t think so. He just said to tell you to stick around.”

“Is there anything I ought to know?”

“I don’t know. Is there?”

“Cut it out.”

“Okay. I suppose you had it pretty dusty. But you weren’t working for him in this office. You get out to sea. I don’t give a goddam—”

“Take it easy.”

“Are you staying out in the country?”

“Yes. But I’m going to be in town today and tonight.”

“He won’t be back today or tonight. I’ll call you out in the country when he comes in.”

“You’re sure he’s not plugged at me?”

“I know he’s not plugged at you. What’s the matter? Have you got a bad conscience?”

“No. Is anybody else plugged at me?”

“As far as I know not even the Admiral is plugged at you. Go on out and get drunk for me.”

“I’m going to get drunk for myself first.”

“Get drunk for me, too.”

“What’s the matter? You’re drunk every night, aren’t you?”

“That’s not enough. How did Henderson do?”

“All right. Why?”

“Nothing.”

“Why?”

“Nothing. I just asked you. You have any complaints?”

“We don’t make complaints.”

“What a man. What a leader.”

“We formulate charges.”

“You can’t. You’re a civilian.”

“Go to hell.”

“I don’t have to. I’m there now.”

“You call me as soon as he gets in. And make my compliments to the Colonel and tell the Colonel I checked in.”

“Yes sir.”

“What’s the sir for?”

“Politeness.”

“Goodbye, Mr. Hollins.”

“Goodbye, Mr. Hudson. Listen. Keep your people where you can find them in a hurry.”

“Thank you very much, Mr. Hollins.”

Down the hall a Lieutenant Commander that he knew came out of the code room. His face was brown from golf and from the beach at Jaimanitas. He looked healthy and his unhappiness did not show. He was young and a very good Far East man. Thomas Hudson had known him when he had had the motor car agency in Manila and a branch agency in Hong Kong. He spoke Tagalog and good Cantonese. Naturally he also spoke Spanish. So he was in Havana.

“Hi, Tommy,” he said. “When did you get into town?”

“Last night.”

“How were the roads?”

“Moderately dusty.”

“You’ll turn the goddamned car over some time.”

“I’m a careful driver.”

“You always were,” the Lieutenant Commander, whose name was Fred Archer, said. He put his arm around Thomas Hudson’s shoulders. “Let me feel of you.”

“Why?”

“You cheer me up. It cheers me up when I feel of you.”

“Have you been over to eat at the Pacífico?”

“Not for a couple of weeks. Should we go?”

“Anytime.”

“I can’t make lunch but we can eat there tonight. Do you have anything for tonight?”

“No. Just afterwards.”

“Me afterwards, too. Where shall I meet you? The Floridita?”

“Come on up there when the shop shuts.”

“Good. I have to come back here afterwards. So we can’t get too drunk.”

“Don’t tell me you bastards work nights now.”

“I do,” Archer said. “It isn’t a popular move.”

“I’m awfully glad to see you, Mr. Freddy,” Thomas Hudson said. “You make me feel cheerful, too.”

“You don’t have to feel cheerful,” Fred Archer said. “You’ve got it.”

“You mean I’ve had it.”

“You’ve had it. And you’ve rehad it. And you’ve rehad it doubled.”

“Not in spades.”

“Spades won’t be any use to you, brother. And you’ve still got it.”

“Write it out for me sometime, Freddy. I’d like to be able to read it early in the mornings.”

“You got a head in her yet?”

“No. Where the head was is about thirty-five thousand dollars worth of junk I signed for.”

“I know. I saw it in the safe. What you signed.”

“They’re goddamned careless then.”

“You can say that again.”

“Is everybody careless?”

“No. And things are a lot better. Really, Tommy.”

“Good,” said Thomas Hudson. “That’s the thought for today.”

“Don’t you want to come in? There’s some new guys you’d like. Two really nice guys. One of them really beat up.”

“No. Do they know anything about the business?”

“No. Of course not. They just know you’re out there and they’d like to meet you. You’d like them. Nice guys.”

“Let’s meet them another time,” Thomas Hudson said.

“Okay, chief,” Archer said. “I’ll come up to your place when the joint closes.”

“The Floridita.”

“That’s what I meant.”

“I’m getting stupid.”

“It’s just sheepherder’s madness,” Archer said. “Do you want me to bring any of these characters?”

“No. Not unless you want to very much. Some of my mob may be around.”

“I should think you bastards wouldn’t want to see each other ashore.”

“Sometimes they get sort of lonesome.”

“What they ought to do is net them all and lock them up.”

“They’d get out.”

“Go on,” Archer said. “You’re late at the place.”

Fred Archer went in the door opposite the code room and Thomas Hudson walked down the hall and walked down the stairs instead of taking the elevator. Outside it was so bright the glare hurt his eyes and it was still blowing heavily from the north-northwest.

He got into the car and told the chauffeur to go up O’Reilly to the Floridita. Before the car circled the Plaza in front of the Embassy building and the Ayuntamiento and turned into O’Reilly he saw the size of the waves in the mouth of the harbor and the heavy rise and fall of the channel buoy. In the mouth of the harbor the sea was very wild and confused and clear green water was breaking over the rock at the base of the Morro, the tops of the seas blowing white in the sun.

It looks wonderful, he said to himself. It not only looks wonderful; it is wonderful. I’m going to have a drink on it. Christ, he thought, I wish I were as solid as Freddy Archer thinks I am. Hell, I am as solid. I always go and I always want to go. What the hell more do they want? For you to eat Torpex for breakfast? Or stick it under your armpits like tobacco? That would be a hell of a good way to get jaundice, he thought. What do you suppose made you think of that? Are you getting spooky, Hudson? I am not, he said. I have certain unavoidable reactions. Many of them have not been classified. Especially not by me. I would just like to be as solid as Freddy thinks instead of being human. I think you have more fun as a human being even though it is much more painful. It is goddamned painful right about now. It would be nice to be like they think, though. All right now. Don’t think about that either. If you don’t think about it, it doesn’t exist. The hell it doesn’t. But that’s the system I’m going on, he thought.

The Floridita was open now and he bought the two papers that were out, Crisol and Alerta, and took them to the bar with him. He took his seat on a tall bar stool at the extreme left of the bar. His back was against the wall toward the street and his left was covered by the wall behind the bar. He ordered a double frozen daiquiri with no sugar from Pedrico, who smiled his smile which was almost like the rictus on a dead man who has died from a suddenly broken back, and yet was a true and legitimate smile, and started to read Crisol. The fighting was in Italy now. He did not know the country where the Fifth Army was fighting but he knew the country on the other side where the Eighth Army was and he was thinking about it when Ignacio Natera Revello came into the bar and stood beside him.

Pedrico set out a bottle of Victoria Vat, a glass with large chunks of ice in it, and a bottle of Canada Dry soda in front of Ignacio Natera Revello and he made a highball hurriedly and then turned toward Thomas Hudson, looking at him through his green-tinted, hornrimmed glasses and feigning to have just seen him.

Ignacio Natera Revello was tall and thin, dressed in a white linen countryman’s shirt, white trousers, black silk socks, well-shined, old brown English brogues, and he had a red face, a yellow, toothbrushy moustache and nearsighted, bloodshot eyes that the green glasses protected. His hair was sandy and brushed stiffly down. Seeing his eagerness for the highball, you might think it was his first of the day. It was not.

“Your ambassador is making an ass of himself,” he said to Thomas Hudson.

“I’ll be a sad son of a bitch,” Thomas Hudson said.

“No. No. Be serious. Let me tell you. Now this is absolutely between you and me.”

“Drink up. I don’t want to hear about it.”

“Well, you should hear about it. And you should do something about it.”

“Aren’t you cold?” Thomas Hudson asked him. “In that shirt and the light trousers?”

“I’m never cold.”

You’re never sober either, Thomas Hudson thought. You start to drink in that little bar by the house and by the time you come here for the first one of the day you’re potted. You probably didn’t even notice the weather when you dressed. Yes, he thought. And what about yourself? What time of day did you take your first drink this morning and how many have you had before this first one? Don’t you cast the first stone at any rummies. It’s not rummies, he thought. I don’t mind him being a rummy. It is just that he is a damned bore. You don’t have to pity bores and you do not have to be kind to them. Come on, he said. You’re going to have fun today. Relax and enjoy it.

“I’ll roll you for this one,” he said.

“Very well,” said Ignacio. “You roll.”

He rolled three kings in one, stood on them, naturally, and won.

That was pleasant. It couldn’t make the drink taste any better. But it was a pleasant feeling to roll three kings in one and he enjoyed winning from Ignacio Natera Revello because he was a snob and a bore and winning from him gave him some useful significance.

“Now we’ll roll for this one,” Ignacio Natera Revello said. He’s the type of snob and bore, that you always think of by all his three names, Thomas Hudson thought, just as you think of him as a snob and a bore. It’s probably like people who put III after their names. Thomas Hudson the third. Thomas Hudson the turd.

“You’re not Ignacio Natera Revello the third are you by any chance?”

“Of course not. You know my father’s name very well.”

“That’s right. Of course I do.”

“You know both my brothers’ names. You know my grandfather’s name. Don’t be silly.”

“I’ll try not to be,” Thomas Hudson said. “I’ll try quite hard.”

“Do,” Ignacio Natera Revello said. “It will be good for you.”

Concentrating, working the leather cup in his best form, doing his hardest and best work of the morning, he rolled four jacks all day.

“My poor dear friend,” Thomas Hudson said. He shook the dice in the heavy leather cup and loved the sound of them. “Such kind good dice. Such rich-feeling and laudable dice,” he said.

“Go on and throw them and don’t be silly.”

Thomas Hudson rolled out three kings and a pair of tens on the slightly dampened bar.

“Want to bet?”

“We have a bet,” Ignacio Natera Revello said. “The second round of drinks.”

Thomas Hudson shook the dice lovingly again and rolled a queen and a jack.

“Want to bet now?”

“The odds are still greatly in your favor.”

“OK. I’ll just take the drinks then.”

He rolled a king and an ace, feeling them come out of the shaker solidly and proudly.

“You lucky sod.”

“Another double frozen daiquiri without sugar and whatever Ignacio wants,” Thomas Hudson said. He was beginning to feel fond of Ignacio.

“Look, Ignacio,” he said. “I never heard of anyone looking at the world through green-colored glasses. Rose colored, yes. Green colored, no. Doesn’t it give everything a sort of grassy look? Don’t you feel as though you were on the turf? Do you never feel as though you had been turned out to pasture?”

“This is the most restful tint for the eyes. It’s been proven by the greatest optometrists.”

“Do you run around much with the greatest optometrists? They must be a pretty wild bunch.”

“I don’t know any optometrists personally except my own. But he is familiar with the findings of the others. He is the best in New York.”

“I want to know the best in London.”

“I know the best optometrist in London. But the very best is in New York. I’ll be glad to give you a card to him.”

“Let’s roll for this one.”

“Very well. You roll back to me.”

Thomas Hudson picked up the leather cup and felt the heavy confident weight of the big Floridita dice. He barely stirred them in order not to irritate their kindness and generosity and rolled out three kings, a ten, and a queen.

“Three kings in one. The clásico.”

“You are a bastard,” Ignacio Natera Revello said and rolled an ace, two queens, and two jacks.

“Another double frozen daiquiri absolutely without sugar and whatever Don Ignacio wishes,” Thomas Hudson said to Pedrico. Pedrico made his smile and the drink. He set down the mixer before Thomas Hudson with at least another full daiquiri in the bottom of it.

“I could do that to you all day,” Thomas Hudson said to Ignacio.

“The horrible thing is that I’m afraid you could.”

“The dice love me.”

“It’s good something does.”

Thomas Hudson felt the faint prickle go over his scalp that he had felt many times in the last month.

“How do you mean that, Ignacio?” he asked very politely.

“I mean that I certainly don’t, with you taking all my money.”

“Oh,” said Thomas Hudson. “Here’s to your good health.”

“I hope you die,” Ignacio Natera Revello said.

Thomas Hudson felt the prickle go over his scalp again. He reached his left hand against the bar where Ignacio Natera Revello could not see it and tapped softly three times with the ends of his fingers.

“That’s nice of you,” he said. “Do you want to roll for another round?”

“No,” the other said. “I’ve lost quite enough money to you for one day.”

“You haven’t lost any money. Only drinks.”

“I pay my bar bill here.”

“Ignacio,” Thomas Hudson said. “That’s the third slightly edgy thing you’ve said.”

“Well, I am edgy. If you’d had someone be as damned rude to you as your bloody ambassador was to me.”

“I still don’t want to hear about it.”

“There you are. And you call me edgy. Look, Thomas. We’re good friends. I’ve known you and your boy Tom for years. By the way how is he?”

“He’s dead.”

“I’m so sorry. I didn’t know.”

“That’s all right,” Thomas Hudson said. “I’ll buy you a drink.”

“I’m so very sorry. Please know how terribly sorry I am. How was he killed?”

“I don’t know yet,” Thomas Hudson said. “I’ll let you know when I know.”

“Where was it?”

“I don’t know that. I know where he was flying but I don’t know anything else.”

“Did he get into London and see any of our friends?”

“Oh yes. He’d been in town several times and to White’s each time and he’d seen whoever was around.”

“Well, that’s a comfort in a way.”

“A what?”

“I mean it’s nice to know he saw our friends.”

“Certainly. I’m sure he had a good time. He always had an awfully good time.”

“Should we drink to him?”

“Shit, no,” Thomas Hudson said. He could feel it all coming up; everything he had not thought about; all the grief he had put away and walled out and never even thought of on the trip nor all this morning. “Let’s not.”

“I think it is the thing to do,” Ignacio Natera Revello said. “I think it is eminently proper and the thing to do. But I must buy the drink.”

“All right. We’ll drink to him.”

“What was his rank?”

“Flight lieutenant.”

“He’d probably have been a wing commander by now or at least squadron leader.”

“Let’s skip his rank.”

“Just as you wish,” Ignacio Natera Revello said. “To my dear friend and your son Tom Hudson. Dulce es moriré pro patria.”

“In the pig’s asshole,” Thomas Hudson said.

“What’s the matter. Was my Latin faulty?”

“I wouldn’t know, Ignacio.”

“But your Latin was excellent. I know from people who were at school with you.”

“My Latin is very beat up,” Thomas Hudson said. “Along with my Greek, my English, my head, and my heart. All I know how to speak now is frozen daiquiri. ¿Tú hablas frozen daiquiri tú?”

“I think we might show a little more respect to Tom.”

“Tom was a pretty good joker.”

“He certainly was. He had one of the finest and most delicate senses of humor I’ve ever known. And he was one of the best-looking boys and with the most beautiful manners. And a damned fine athlete. He was tops as an athlete.”

“That’s right. He threw the discus 142 feet. He played fullback on offense and left tackle on defense. He played a good game of tennis and he was a first-rate wing shot and a good fly fisherman.”

“He was a splendid athlete and a fine sportsman. I think of him as one of the very finest.”

“There’s only one thing really wrong with him.”

“What’s that?”

“He’s dead.”

“Now don’t be morbid, Tommy. You must think of Tom as he was. Of his gaiety and his radiance and his wonderful promise. There’s no sense being morbid.”

“None at all,” Thomas Hudson said. “Let’s not be morbid.”

“I’m glad you agree. It’s been splendid to have a chance to talk about him. It’s been terrible to have the news. But I know you will bear up just as I will, even though it is a thousand times worse for you being his father. What was he flying?”

“Spitfires.”

“Spitties. I shall think of him then in a Spitty.”

“That’s a lot of bother to go to.”

“No, no it isn’t. I’ve seen them in the cinema. I’ve several books on the RAF and we get the publications of the British Information Bureau. They have excellent stuff, you know. I know exactly how he would have looked. Probably wearing one of those Mae Wests and with his chute and his flying togs and his big boots. I can picture him exactly. Now I have to be getting home to lunch. Will you come with me? I know Lutecia would love to have you.”

“No. I have to meet a man here. Thanks very much.”

“Goodbye, old boy,” Ignacio Natera Revello said. “I know you’ll take this thing the way you should.”

“You were kind to help me.”

“No, I wasn’t kind at all. I loved Tom. As you did. As we all did.”

“Thanks for all the drinks.”

“I’ll get them back from you another day.”

He went out. From beyond him, down the bar, one of the men from the boat moved up to Hudson. He was a dark boy, with short, clipped, curly black hair, and a left eye that had a slightly droopy lid; the eye was artificial but this did not show since the government had presented him with four different eyes, bloodshot, slightly bloodshot, almost clear, and clear. He was wearing slightly bloodshot, and he was already a little drunk.

“Hi, Tom. When did you get in town?”

“Yesterday,” then speaking slowly and almost without moving his lips, “Take it easy. Don’t be a fucking comedian.”

“I’m not. I’m just getting drunk. They cut me open they find security written on my liver. I’m the security king. You know that. Listen, Tom, I was standing up next to the phony Englishman and I couldn’t help but hear. Did your boy Tommy get killed?”

“Yeah.”

“Oh shit,” the boy said. “Oh shit.”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Of course not. But when did you hear?”

“Before the last trip.”

“Oh shit.”

“What are you doing today?”

“I’m going to eat over at the Basque Bar with a couple of characters and then we’re all going to get laid.”

“Where are you going to have lunch tomorrow?”

“At the Basque Bar.”

“Ask Paco to call me up from lunch tomorrow, will you?”

“Sure. Out at the house?”

“Yes. At the house.”

“Do you want to come around with us and get laid? We’re going up to Henry’s Sin House?”

“I might come around.”

“Henry’s hunting girls now. He’s been hunting girls ever since breakfast. He’s been laid a couple of times already. But he’s trying to beat the two tomatoes we had. We got them at the Kursaal and they look pretty bad in the daylight. We couldn’t find a goddam thing. This town’s really gone to hell. He’s got the two tomatoes up at the sin house just in case and he’s out hunting girls with Honest Lil. They’ve got a car.”

“Were they doing any good?”

“I don’t think so. Henry wants that little girl. The little one he sees all the time at the Fronton. Honest Lil can’t get her because she’s afraid of him because he’s so big. She said she could get her for me. But she can’t get her for Henry because she’s spooked of his size and his weight and things she’s heard. But Henry doesn’t want anything else now because the two tomatoes topped him off. So now it’s this little girl and he’s in love with her. Just like that. In love with her. He’s probably forgotten about it now and is banging the tomatoes again right now. He’s got to eat, though, and we’re going to meet at the Basque Bar.”

“Make him eat,” Thomas Hudson said.

“You can’t make him do anything. You can. But I can’t. But I’ll beg him to eat. I’ll plead with him to eat. I’ll set him an example by eating.”

“Get Paco to make him eat.”

“Wouldn’t you think he would be hungry after that?”

“Wouldn’t you?’

Just then the biggest man that Thomas Hudson knew, and the most cheerful and with the widest shoulders and the best manners came in through the door of the bar with a smile on his face, which was beading with sweat even on the cold day. His hand was out in greeting. He was so big he made everyone at the bar look stunted and he had a lovely smile. He was dressed in old blue trousers, a Cuban countryman’s shirt, and rope-soled shoes. “Tom,” he said. “You bastard. We’ve been in search of the lovelies.”

His handsome face, as soon as he was out of the wind, sweated even more.

“Pedrico. I’ll have one of those, too. The double size. Or larger if you make them. Imagine seeing you here, Tom. And I’ve forgotten. Here’s Honest Lil. Come over here, my beauty.”

Honest Lil had come in the other door. She looked her best when sitting at the far end of the bar when you saw only her lovely dark face and the grossness that had come over her body was hidden by the polished wood of the bar. Now, coming toward the bar from the door, there was no hiding her body, so she propelled it, swaying, to the bar as rapidly as she could without visibly hurrying and got up onto the stool Thomas Hudson had occupied. This moved him one stool to the right and gave her the covered left flank.

“Hello, Tom,” she said and kissed Thomas Hudson. “Henry is terrible.”

“I’m not at all terrible, my beauty,” Henry told her.

“You’re terrible,” she told him. “Every time I see you, you are more terrible. Thomas, you protect me from him.”

“What’s he being terrible about?”

“He wants a little tiny girl that he is crazy for and the little tiny girl can’t go with him. But she wouldn’t go anyway because she is frightened of him because he is so big and weighs two hundred and thirty pounds.”

Henry Wood blushed, sweat visibly, and took a big sip of his drink.

“Two hundred and twenty-five,” he said.

“What did I tell you?” the dark boy said. “Isn’t that exactly what I told you?”

“Just what business is it of yours to be telling anyone anything?” Henry asked him.

“Two tramps. Two tomatoes. Two broken-down waterfront broads. Two cunts with but a single thought: the rent. We lay them. We trade cunts and re-lay them. It’s strictly from wet decks. I say one friendly understanding word now and I am not a gentleman.”

“They weren’t really awfully good, were they?” Henry said, blushing again.

“Awfully good? We ought to have poured gasoline on them and set them on fire.”

“How horrible,” Honest Lil said.

“Listen, lady,” the dark boy said. “I am horrible.”

“Willie,” Henry said. “Do you want the key to Sin House and go over and see if everything is all right?”

“I do not,” the dark boy said. “I have a key to Sin House as you have evidently forgotten and I do not want to go over there and see if everything is all right. The only way everything is all right there is whenever you or I kick those cunts into the street.”

“But suppose we can’t get anything else?”

“We have got to get something else. Lillian, why don’t you get off that stool and onto that telephone. Forget that little dwarf. Get that gnome out of your mind, Henry. You keep on with things like that and you’ll be psycho. I know. I’ve been psycho.”

“You’re psycho now,” Thomas Hudson told him.

“Maybe I am, Tom. You should know. But I don’t fuck gnomes.” (He pronounced the word Guhnomays.) “If Henry has to have a guhnomay that’s his business. But I don’t believe he has to have one any more than he has to have one-armed women or one-legged women. Let him forget the goddam guhnomay and get Lillian there onto the telephone.”

“I’ll take any good girls we can get,” Henry said. “I hope you’re not mixed up, Willie?”

“We don’t want good girls,” Willie said. “You start on that, right away you’ll get psycho in a different way. Am I right, Tommy? Good girls is the most dangerous thing of all. Besides they will get you either on a contributing to delinquency or on a rape or attempted rape. Out with that good girls stuff. We want whores. Nice, clean, attractive, interesting, inexpensive whores. That can fuck. Lillian, what is keeping you away from that telephone?”

“One thing is that a man is using it and another is waiting by the cigar counter for him to finish,” Honest Lil said. “You’re a bad boy, Willie.”

“I’m a horrible boy,” Willie said. “I’m the worst goddam boy you’ll ever know. But I’d like us to get better organized than we are now.”

“We’re going to have a drink or so,” Henry said. “Then I’m sure Lillian will find someone that she knows. Won’t you, my beauty?”

“Of course,” Honest Lil said in Spanish. “Why couldn’t I? But I want to telephone from a telephone in a booth. Not from here. It isn’t proper to call from here and it isn’t fitting.”

“A delay,” Willie said. “All right. I accept it. Just another delay. Let’s drink then.”

“What the hell have you been doing?” Thomas Hudson asked.

“Tommy, I love you,” Willie said. “What the hell have you been doing yourself?”

“I had a few with Ignacio Natera Revello.”

“That sounds like an Italian cruiser,” Willie said. “Wasn’t there an Italian cruiser named that?”

“I don’t think so.”

“It sounds like it, anyway.”

“Let me see the tabs,” Henry said. “How many were there, Tom?”

“Ignacio took them. I won them from him rolling.”

“How many were there really?” Henry asked.

“I think four.”

“What did you drink before that?”

“A Tom Collins coming in.”

“And at home?”

“Plenty.”

“You’re just a damned rummy,” Willie said. “Pedrico, three more double frozen daiquiris and whatever the lady wants.”

“Un highbalito con agua mineral,” Honest Lil said. “Tommy, come and sit with me at the other end of the bar. They don’t like me to sit at this end of the bar.”

“The hell with them,” Willie said. “Great friends like us that never see each other and then we can’t have a drink with you at this end of the bar. The hell with that.”

“I’m sure you’re all right here, beauty,” Henry said. Then he saw two planter friends of his farther down the bar and went to speak to them without waiting for his drink.

“He’s off now,” Willie said. “He’ll forget about the guhnomay now.”

“He’s very distrait,” Honest Lil said. “He’s awfully distrait.”

“It’s the life we lead,” Willie said. “Just the ceaseless pursuit of pleasure for pleasure’s sake. Goddammit, we ought to pursue pleasure seriously.”

“Tom’s not distrait,” Honest Lil said. “Tom is sad.”

“Cut out that shit,” Willie said to her. “What are you pissed off about? First somebody is distrait. Then somebody is sad. Before that I’m horrible. So what? Where does a cunt like you get off criticizing people all the time? Don’t you know you’re supposed to be gay?”

Honest Lil began to cry, real tears, bigger and wetter than any in the movies. She could always cry real tears any time she wanted to or needed to or was hurt.

“That cunt cries bigger tears than mother used to make,” Willie said.

“Willie, you shouldn’t call me that.”

“Cut it out, Willie,” Thomas Hudson said.

“Willie, you are a cruel wicked boy and I hate you,” Honest Lil said. “I don’t know why men like Thomas Hudson and Henry go around with you. You are wicked and you talk vile.”

“You’re a lady,” Willie said. “You shouldn’t says things like that. Vile is a bad word. It’s like spit on the end of your cigar.”

Thomas Hudson put his hand on the boy’s shoulder.

“Drink up, Willie. Nobody’s feeling too good.”

“Henry’s feeling good. I could tell him what you told me and then he’d feel awful.”

“You asked me.”

“That isn’t what I mean. Why don’t you split your goddam grief? Why did you keep that by yourself the last two weeks?”

“Grief doesn’t split.”

“A grief hoarder,” Willie said. “I never thought you’d be a goddamned grief hoarder.”

“I don’t need any of this, Willie,” Thomas Hudson said to him. “Thank you very much, though. You don’t have to work on me.”

“OK. Hoard it. But it’ll do you no damn good. I tell you I was brought up on the goddamned stuff.”

“So was I,” Thomas Hudson said. “No shit.”

“Were you really? Then maybe your own system’s best. You were getting to look pretty screwy, though.”

“That’s just from drinking and being tired and not relaxed yet.”

“You hear from your woman?”

“Sure. Three letters.”

“How’s that going?”

“Couldn’t be worse.”

“Well,” Willie said. “There we are. You might as well hoard it so as to have something.”

“I’ve got something.”

“Sure. Your cat Boise loves you. I know that. I’ve seen that. How is the screwy old bastard?”

“Just as screwy.”

“He beats the shit out of me,” Willie said. “He does.”

“He certainly sweats things out.”

“Doesn’t he, though? • If I suffered like that cat does I’d be nuts. What are you drinking, Thomas?”

“Another one of those.”

Willie put his arm around Honest Lil’s ample waist. “Listen, Lilly,” he said. “You’re a good girl. I didn’t mean to get you sore. It was my fault. I was feeling emotional.”

“You won’t talk that way any more?”

“No. Not unless I get emotional.”

“Here’s yours,” Thomas Hudson said to him. “Here’s to you, you son of a bitch.”

“Now you’re talking,” Willie said. “Now you’ve got the old pecker pointed north. We ought to have that cat Boise here. He’d be proud of you. See what I meant by sharing it?”

“Yes,” Thomas Hudson said. “I see.”

“All right,” Willie said. “We’ll drop it. Put out your can, here comes the garbage man. Look at that damn Henry. Get a load of him. What do you suppose makes him sweat like that on a cold day like today?”

“Girls,” Honest Lil said. “He is obsessed with them.”

“Obsessed,” Willie said. “You bore a hole in his head anywhere you want with a half-inch bit and women would run out. Obsessed. Why don’t you get a word that would fit it?”

“Obsessed is a strong word in Spanish anyway.”

“Obsessed? Obsessed is nothing. If I get time this afternoon I’ll think up the word.”

“Tom, come down to the other end of the bar where we can talk and I can be comfortable. Will you buy me a sandwich? I’ve been out all morning with Henry.”

“I’m going to the Basque Bar,” Willie said. “Bring him over there, Lil.”

“All right,” Honest Lil said. “Or I’ll send him.”

She made her stately progress to the far end of the bar, speaking to many of the men she passed and smiling at others. Everyone treated her with respect. Nearly everyone she spoke to had loved her at some time in the last twenty-five years. Thomas Hudson went down to the far end of the bar, taking his bar checks with him, as soon as Honest Lil had seated herself and smiled at him. She had a beautiful smile and wonderful dark eyes and lovely black hair. When it would begin to show white at the roots along the line of her forehead and along the line of her part, she would ask Thomas Hudson for money to have it fixed and when she came back from having it dyed it was as glossy and natural-looking and lovely as a young girl’s hair. She had a skin that was as smooth as olive-colored ivory, if there were olive-covered ivory, with a slightly smoky roselike cast. Actually, the color always reminded Thomas Hudson of well-seasoned mahagua lumber when it is freshly cut, then simply sanded smooth and waxed lightly. Nowhere else had he ever seen that smoky almost greenish color. But the mahagua did not have the rose tint. The rose tint was just the color that she used but it was almost as smooth as a Chinese girl’s. There was this lovely face looking down the bar at him, lovelier all the time as he came closer. Then he was beside her and there was the big body and the rose color was artificial now and there was no mystery about any of it, although it was still a lovely face.

“You look beautiful, Honest,” he said to her.

“Oh, Tom, I am so big now. I am ashamed.”

He put his hand on her great haunches and said, “You’re a nice big.”

“I’m ashamed to walk down the bar.”

“You do it beautifully. Like a ship.”

“How is our friend?”

“He’s fine.”

“When am I going to see him?”

“Any time. Now?”

“Oh no. Tom, what was Willie talking about? The part I couldn’t understand?”

“He was just being crazy.”

“No, he wasn’t. It was about you and a sorrow Was it about you and your señora.”

“No. Fuck my señora.”

“I wish you could. But you can’t when she is away.”

“Yeah. I found that out.”

“What is the sorrow, then?”

“Nothing. Just a sorrow.”

“Tell me about it. Please.”

“There’s nothing to tell.”

“You can tell me, you know. Henry tells me about his sorrows and cries in the night. Willie tells me dreadful things. They are not sorrows, so much as terrible things. You can tell me. Everyone tells me. Only you don’t tell me.”

“Telling never did me any good. Telling is worse for me than not telling.”

“Tom, Willie says such bad things. Doesn’t he know it hurts me to hear such words? Doesn’t he know I’ve never used those words and have never done a piglike thing nor a perverted thing?”

“That’s why we call you Honest Lil.”

“If I could be rich doing perverted things and be poor doing normal things, I would be poor.”

“I know. What about the sandwich?”

“I’m not hungry just yet.”

“Do you want another drink?”

“Yes. Please, Tom. Tell me. Willie said there was a cat in love with you. That isn’t true, is it?”

“Yes. It’s true.”

“I think it’s dreadful.”

“No. It’s not. I’m in love with the cat, too.”

“That’s terrible to say. Don’t tease me, Tom, please, Willie teased me and made me cry.”

“I love the cat,” Thomas Hudson said.

“I don’t want to hear about it. Tom, when will you take me out to the bar of the crazies?”

“One of these days.”

“Do the crazies really come there just like ordinary people come here to meet and have drinks?”

“That’s right. The only difference is they wear shirts and trousers made out of sugar sacks.”

“Did you really play on the ball team of the crazies against the lepers?”

“Sure. I was the best knuckle-ball pitcher the crazies ever had.”

“How did you get to know them?”

“I just stopped there one time on the way back from Rancho Boyeros and liked the place.”

“Will you really take me out to the bar of the crazies?”

“Sure. If you won’t be scared.”

“I’ll be scared. But I won’t be too scared if I’m with you. That’s why I want to go out there. To be scared.”

“There’s some wonderful crazies out there. You’ll like them.”

“My first husband was a crazy. But he was the difficult kind.”

“Do you think Willie is crazy?”

“Oh no. He just has a difficult character.”

“He’s suffered very much.”

“Who hasn’t? Willie presumes on his suffering.”