Heloise and Bellinis Read Free Page B

CHAPTERS FOUR AND FIVE
    Dear Abelard,
    As I said before, the author’s great advantage is that he knows exactly what his characters are doing, and he can choose what to tell and what not to tell. But there is no denying that the reader may have an even greater advantage. He can stop reading whenever he wants to, regretting only that he has wasted his money.
    But you have always had so little money that you would probably have nothing to do except go on reading, even if you wanted to stop. That’s why i am writing to you, I certainly wouldn’t ask you for advice or suggestions about what George and Heloise should do, because I know perfectly well what they are going to do. 1 just wanted to draw your attention to a couple of things that occurred to me as I was narrating this very unusual love story. You will have noticed that Heloise took it for granted that George would pay for dinner and the hotel. That certainly wouldn’t go down well with the feminists, because no self-respecting women’s-libber would accept such a patently ambiguous situa-tion.
    My sister-in-law Ornella, for example, is not, strictly speaking, a feminist. She has reasons of her own for insisting that she is liberated, though she really isn’t. She would have insisted on paying her share of the bill, and that would have put Harry in the embarrassing position of taking cash payment for only half the check. The funny part is that if my sister-in-law had been in Heloise’s place, especially after a couple of drinks, she would have been perfectly happy to indulge in erotic games with George. But her mania for paying her own way would have ruined everything before it even started. 1 don’t know if you remember how beautiful my sister-in-law is—you always seem rather intimidated around my relatives; but believe me, she is one of the most beautiful women 1 have ever desired. But she has one terrible defect: she won’t let anyone pay for her. Otherwise she might have become very rich by now, even richer than my cousin Wanda, provided of course that my cousin had become a belly dancer in the Tan. giers souk instead of a Latin teacher in Verona.
    In my short life I have met women far less attractive who have been paid a great deal of money even when they claimed to be making love just for the sake of love. Ever since the days when whorehouses were legal, I have had the utmost respect for women who calmly offer a remedy for lust in exchange for money. When I was a youth, there were marvelous professionals who could satisfy any man who ended up between their legs. You are too young to remember them, but those houses were full of human warmth and kindness. If you never knew them you have missed out on something really important in terms of the spirit and the flesh alike.
    We used to play tricks to frighten the priests and old married gentlemen who came on the sly, like setting off the alarm bell that meant the police were about to raid. But pranks aside, believe me when I say that a night spent there, and maybe the next morning as well, with the occasional game of billiards thrown in, was a human experience I wouldn’t have missed for all the tea in China.
    We set off the alarm bell hundreds of times, but in all those years I never saw the police come even once.
    END OF THE INTERMEZZO BETWEEN CHAPTERS FOUR AND FIVE

CHAPTER FIVE
In which Tom Margitai has some doubts and George and Heloise stop to rest on their journey by jeep
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    Private Tom Margitai decided to stay and watch as the cloud of dust raised by the jeep slowly grew smaller on the horizon and finally vanished completely.
    Watching things until the very end was a mania of Tom’s, and every time he did so, he had the same thought: if he didn’t watch till the end, he would not live long enough to have another chance to do it again. He couldn’t have cared less about the jeep; it was already the fourth he had lost that week. The first two blew up while he was off buying cigarettes; the third one