Bluebeard - Kurt Vonnegut [72]
As an example of what she saw as sudden craziness, she told him about Mussolini’s ordering his minister of culture to marry her.
He replied, according to Marilee: “If you have one atom of love for America in your heart, you will marry him.”
Thus did a coal miner’s daughter become the Con-tessa Portomaggiore.
30
MARILEE DID NOT learn until the war was nearly over that her husband was a British agent. She, too, thought him a weakling and a fool, but forgave him that since they lived so well and he was so nice to her. “He had the most amusing and kind and flattering things to say to me. He really enjoyed my company. We both loved to dance and dance.”
So there was another woman in my life with a mania for dancing, who would do it with anybody as long as they did it well.
“You never danced with Dan Gregory,” I said.
“He wouldn’t,” she said, “and you wouldn’t either.”
“I couldn’t,” I said. “I never had.”
“Anybody who wants to can,” she said.
She said that the news that her husband was a British spy made almost no impression on her. “He had all these uniforms for different occasions, and I never cared what any of them were supposed to mean. They were covered with emblems which I never bothered to decode. I never asked him: “Bruno, what did you get this medal for? What does the eagle on your sleeve mean? What are those two crosses on your collar points?” So when he told me that he was a British spy, that was just more of the junk jewelry of warfare. It had almost nothing to do with me or him.”
She said that after he was shot she expected to feel a terrible emptiness, but did not. And then she understood that her real companion and mate for life was the Italian people. “They spoke to me so lovingly wherever I went, Rabo, and I loved them in return, and did not give a damn about what junk jewelry they wore!”
“I’m home, Rabo,” she said. “I never would have got here if it hadn’t been for the craziness of Dan Gregory. Thanks to loose screws in the head of an Armenian from Moscow, I’m home, I’m home.”
“Now tell me what you’ve been doing with all these years,” she said.
“For some reason I find myself dismayingly uninteresting,” I said.
“Oh, come, come, come,” she said. “You lost an eye, you married, you reproduced twice, and you say you’ve taken up painting again. How could a life be more eventful?”
I thought to myself that there had been events, but very few, certainly, since our Saint Patrick’s Day love-making so long ago, which had made me proud and happy. I had old soldier’s anecdotes I had told my drinking buddies in the Cedar Tavern, so I told her those. She had had a life. I had accumulated anecdotes. She was home. Home was somewhere I never thought I’d be.
Old Soldier’s Anecdote Number One: “While Paris was being liberated,” I said, “I went to find Pablo Picasso, Dan Gregory’s idea of Satan—to make sure he was O.K.,” I said.
“He opened his door a crack, with a chain across it inside, and said he was busy and did not wish to be disturbed. You could still hear guns going off only a couple of blocks away. Then he shut and locked the door again.”
Marilee laughed and said, “Maybe he knew all the terrible things our lord and master used to say about him.” She said that if she had known I was still alive, she would have saved a picture in an Italian magazine which only she and I could fully appreciate. It showed a collage Picasso had made by cutting up a poster advertising American cigarettes. He had reassembled pieces of the poster, which originally showed three cowboys smoking around a campfire at night, to form a cat.
Of all the art experts on Earth, only Marilee and I, most likely, could identify the painter of the mutilated poster as Dan Gregory.
How is that for trivia?
“So that is probably the only point at which Picasso paid the least bit of attention to one of the most popular American artists in history,” I speculated.
“Probably,” she said.
Old Soldier’s Anecdote Number Two: “I was captured when the war had only a few