Prater Violet

Prater Violet Read Free Page A

Book: Prater Violet Read Free
Author: Christopher Isherwood
Tags: Gay
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“A tragic Punch,” I said to myself. I couldn’t help smiling as we shook hands, because our introduction seemed so superfluous. There are meetings which are like recognitions—this was one of them. Of course we knew each other. The name, the voice, the features were inessential, I knew that face. It was the face of a political situation, an epoch. The face of Central Europe.
    Bergmann, I am sure, was aware of what I was thinking. “How do you do, sir? ” He gave the last word a slight, ironic emphasis. We stood there, for a moment, looking at each other.
    â€œSit down,” Mr. Chatsworth told us, goodhumoredly.
    He raised his voice. “Garçon, la carte pour monsieur!” Several people looked around. “You’d better have the Tournedos Chasseur,” he added.
    I chose Sole Bonne Femme, which I don’t like, because it was the first thing I saw, and because I was determined to show Chatsworth that I had a will of my own. He had already ordered champagne. “Never drink anything else before sunset.” There was a little place in Soho, he informed us, where he kept his own claret. “Picked up six dozen at an auction last week. I bet my butler I’d find him something better than we had in the cellar. The blighter’s so damned superior, but he had to admit I was right. Made him pay up, too.”
    Bergmann grunted faintly. He had transferred his attention to Chatsworth, now, and was watching him with an intensity which would have reduced most people to embarrassed silence within thirty seconds. Having eaten up his meat with a sort of frantic nervous impatience, he was smoking. Chatsworth ate leisurely, but with great decision, pausing after each mouthful to make a new pronouncement. Bergmann’s strong, hairy, ringless hand rested on the table. He held his cigarette like an accusing forefinger, pointed straight at Chatsworth’s heart. His head was magnificent, and massive as sculptured granite. The head of a Roman emperor, with dark old Asiatic eyes. His stiff drab suit didn’t fit him. His shirt collar was too tight. His tie was askew and clumsily knotted. Out of the corner of my eye, I studied the big firm chin, the grim compressed line of the mouth, the harsh furrows cutting down from the imperious nose, the bushy black hair in the nostrils. The face was the face of an emperor, but the eyes were the dark mocking eyes of his slave—the slave who ironically obeyed, watched, humored and judged the master who could never understand him; the slave upon whom the master depended utterly for his amusement, for his instruction, for the sanction of his power; the slave who wrote the fables of beasts and men.
    From wine, Chatsworth had passed, by a natural sequence of ideas, to the Riviera. Did Bergmann know Monte Carlo? Bergmann grunted negatively. “I don’t mind telling you,” said Chatsworth, “that Monte’s my spiritual home. Never cared much about Cannes. Monte’s got a je ne sais quoi, something all its own. I make a point of getting down there for ten days every winter. Doesn’t matter how busy I am. I just pull up stakes and go. I look at it this way; it’s an investment. If I didn’t have my time at Monte, I just couldn’t stand this bloody London fog and drizzle. I’d come down with the flu, or something. Be in bed for a month. I’m bloody well doing the studio a favor; that’s what I tell them. Garçon! ”
    Pausing to order Crêpes Suzette, without consulting either of us, Chatsworth went on to explain that he wasn’t a gambler, really. “Have to do enough gambling in the motion-picture business, anyway. Roulette’s a damn silly game. Only fit for suckers and old women. I like chemmy, though. Lost a couple of thousand last year. My wife prefers bridge. I tell her that’s her bloody insularity.”
    I wondered if Bergmann’s English was equal to understanding all

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