she shoveled away her whole meal with both hands. She ate like a horse until the last plate was clean, and then she placed her silverware down with an air of conclusion and settled back lazily in her chair with a dreamy and congested look of sated gluttony. She drew a deep, smiling, contented breath and regarded him amorously with a melting gaze.
‘Okay, Joe,’ she purred, her glowing dark eyes drowsy and grateful. ‘Now I will let you sleep with me.’
‘My name is Yossarian.’
‘Okay, Yossarian,’ she answered with a soft repentant laugh. ‘Now I will let you sleep with me.’
‘Who asked you?’ said Yossarian.
Luciana was stunned. ‘You don’t want to sleep with me?’ Yossarian nodded emphatically, laughing, and shot his hand up under her dress. The girl came to life with a horrified start. She jerked her legs away from him instantly, whipping her bottom around. Blushing with alarm and embarrassment, she pushed her skirt back down with a number of prim, sidelong glances about the restaurant.
‘Now I will let you sleep with me,’ she explained cautiously in a manner of apprehensive indulgence. ‘But not now.’
‘I know. When we get back to my room.’ The girl shook her head, eyeing him mistrustfully and keeping her knees pressed together. ‘No, now I must go home to my mamma, because my mamma does not like me to dance with soldiers or let them take me to dinner, and she will be very angry with me if I do not come home now. But I will let you write down for me where you live. And tomorrow morning I will come to your room for ficky-fick before I go to my work at the French office. Capisci?’
‘Bullshit!’ Yossarian exclaimed with angry disappointment.
‘Cosa vuol dire bullshit?’ Luciana inquired with a blank look.
Yossarian broke into loud laughter. He answered her finally in a tone of sympathetic good humor. ‘It means that I want to escort you now to wherever the hell I have to take you next so that I can rush back to that night club before Aarfy leaves with that wonderful tomato he’s got without giving me a chance to ask about an aunt or friend she must have who’s just like her.’
‘Come?’
‘Subito, subito,’ he taunted her tenderly. ‘Mamma is waiting. Remember?’
‘Si, si. Mamma.’ Yossarian let the girl drag him through the lovely Roman spring night for almost a mile until they reached a chaotic bus depot honking with horns, blazing with red and yellow lights and echoing with the snarling vituperations of unshaven bus drivers pouring loathsome, hair-raising curses out at each other, at their passengers and at the strolling, unconcerned knots of pedestrians clogging their paths, who ignored them until they were bumped by the buses and began shouting curses back. Luciana vanished aboard one of the diminutive green vehicles, and Yossarian hurried as fast as he could all the way back to the cabaret and the bleary-eyed bleached blonde in the open orange satin blouse. She seemed infatuated with Aarfy, but he prayed intensely for her luscious aunt as he ran, or for a luscious girl friend, sister, cousin, or mother who was just as libidinous and depraved. She would have been perfect for Yossarian, a debauched, coarse, vulgar, amoral, appetizing slattern whom he had longed for and idolized for months. She was a real find. She paid for her own drinks, and she had an automobile, an apartment and a salmon-colored cameo ring that drove Hungry Joe clean out of his senses with its exquisitely carved figures of a naked boy and girl on a rock. Hungry Joe snorted and pranced and pawed at the floor in salivating lust and groveling need, but the girl would not sell him the ring, even though he offered her all the money in all their pockets and his complicated black camera thrown in. She was not interested in money or cameras. She was interested in fornication.
She was gone when Yossarian got there. They were all gone, and he walked right out and moved in wistful dejection through the dark, emptying streets. Yossarian was not often lonely when he was by himself, but he was lonely now in his keen envy of Aarfy, who he knew was in bed that very moment with the girl who was just right for Yossarian, and who could also make out any time he wanted to, if he ever wanted to, with either or both of the two slender, stunning, aristocratic women who lived in the apartment upstairs and fructified Yossarian’s sex fantasies whenever he had sex fantasies, the beautiful rich black-haired countess with the red, wet, nervous lips and her beautiful rich black-haired daughter-in-law. Yossarian was madly in love with all of them as he made his way back to the officers’ apartment, in love with Luciana, with the prurient intoxicated girl in the unbuttoned satin blouse, and with the beautiful rich countess and her beautiful rich daughter-in-law, both of whom would never let him touch them or even flirt with them. They doted kittenishly on Nately and deferred passively to Aarfy, but they thought Yossarian was crazy and recoiled from him with distasteful contempt each time he made an indecent proposal or tried to fondle them when they passed on the stairs. They were both superb creatures with pulpy, bright, pointed tongues and mouths like round warm plums, a little sweet and sticky, a little rotten. They had class; Yossarian was not sure what class was, but he knew that they had it and he did not, and that they knew it, too. He could picture, as he walked, the kind of underclothing they wore against their svelte feminine parts, filmy, smooth, clinging garments of deepest black or of opalescent pastel radiance with flowering lace borders fragrant with the tantalizing fumes of pampered flesh and scented bath salts rising in a germinating cloud from their blue-white breasts. He wished again that he was where Aarfy was, making obscene, brutal, cheerful love with a juicy drunken tart who didn’t give a tinker’s dam about him and would never think of him again.
But Aarfy was already back in the apartment when Yossarian arrived, and Yossarian gaped at him with that same sense of persecuted astonishment he had suffered that same morning over Bologna at his malign and cabalistic and irremovable presence in the nose of the plane.
‘What are you doing here?’ he asked.
‘That’s right, ask him!’ Hungry Joe exclaimed in a rage. ‘Make him tell you what he’s doing here!’ With a long, theatrical moan, Kid Sampson made a pistol of his thumb and forefinger and blew his own brains out. Huple, chewing away on a bulging wad of bubble gum, drank everything in with a callow, vacant expression on his fifteen- year old face. Aarfy was tapping the bowl of his pipe against his palm leisurely as he paced back and forth in corpulent self-approval, obviously delighted by the stir he was causing.
‘Didn’t you go home with that girl?’ Yossarian demanded.
‘Oh, sure, I went home with her,’ Aarfy replied. ‘You didn’t think I was going to let her try to find her way home alone, did you?’
‘Wouldn’t she let you stay with her?’
‘Oh, she wanted me to stay with her, all right.’ Aarfy chuckled. ‘Don’t you worry about good old Aarfy. But I wasn’t going to take advantage of a sweet kid like that just because she’d had a little too much to drink. What kind of a guy do you think I am?’
‘Who said anything about taking advantage of her?’ Yossarian railed at him in amazement. ‘All she wanted to do was get into bed with someone. That’s the only thing she kept talking about all night long.’
‘That’s because she was a little mixed up,’ Aarfy explained. ‘But I gave her a little talking to and really put some sense into her.’
‘You bastard!’ Yossarian exclaimed, and sank down tiredly on the divan beside Kid Sampson. ‘Why the hell didn’t you give her to one of us if you didn’t want her?’
‘You see?’ Hungry Joe asked. ‘There’s something wrong with him.’ Yossarian nodded and looked at Aarfy curiously. ‘Aarfy, tell me something. Don’t you ever screw any of them?’ Aarfy chuckled again with conceited amusement. ‘Oh sure, I prod them. Don’t you worry about me. But never any nice girls. I know what kind of girls to prod and what kind of girls not to prod, and I never prod any nice girls. This one was a sweet kid. You could see her family had money. Why, I even got her to throw that ring of hers away right out the car window.’ Hungry Joe flew into the air with a screech of intolerable pain. ‘You did what?’ he screamed. ‘You did what?’ He began whaling away at Aarfy’s shoulders and arms with both fists, almost in tears. ‘I ought to kill you for what you did, you lousy bastard. He’s sinful, that’s what he is. He’s got a dirty mind, ain’t he? Ain’t he got a dirty mind?’
‘The dirtiest,’ Yossarian agreed.
‘What are you fellows talking about?’ Aarfy asked with genuine puzzlement, tucking his face away protectively inside the cushioning insulation of his oval shoulders. ‘Aw, come on, Joe,’ he pleaded with a smile of mild discomfort. ‘Quit punching me, will you?’ But Hungry Joe would not quit punching until Yossarian picked him up and pushed him away toward his bedroom. Yossarian moved listlessly into his own room, undressed and went to sleep. A second later it was morning, and someone was shaking him.
‘What are you waking me up for?’ he whimpered.
It was Michaela, the skinny maid with the merry disposition and homely sallow face, and she was waking
