"Hemingway, Ernest - Across the River and Into the Trees" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hemingway Ernest)

УYou mean it.Ф
УSure. I donТt guarantee anything. IТll see what I can do. How many children have you got?Ф
УSix. Two male and four female.Ф
УHell, you mustnТt have believed in the Regime. Only six.Ф
УI didnТt believe in the Regime.Ф
УYou donТt have to give me that stuff,Ф the Colonel said. УIt would have been quite natural for you to have believed in it. Do you think I hold that against a man after weТve won?Ф
They were through the dull part of the canal that runs from Piazzale Roma to CaТFoscari, though none of it is dull, the Colonel thought.
It doesnТt all have to be palaces nor churches. Certainly that isnТt dull. He looked to the right, the starboard, he thought. IТm on the water. It was a long low pleasant building and there was a trattoria next to it.
I ought to live here. On retirement pay I could make it all right. No Gritti Palace. A room in a house like that and the tides and the boats going by. I could read in the mornings and walk around town before lunch and go every day to see the Tintorettos at the Accademia and to the Scuola San Rocco and eat in good cheap joints behind the market, or, maybe, the woman that ran the house would cook in the evenings.
I think it would be better to have lunch out and get some exercise walking. ItТs a good town to walk in. I guess the best, probably. I never walked in it that it wasnТt fun. I could learn it really well, he thought, and then IТd have that.
ItТs a strange, tricky town and to walk from any part to any other given part of it is better than working crossword puzzles. ItТs one of the few things to our credit that we never smacked it, and to their credit that they respected it.
Christ, I love it, he said, and IТm so happy I helped defend it when I was a punk kid, and with an insufficient command of the language and I never even saw her until that clear day in the winter when I went back to have that small wound dressed, and saw her rising from the sea. Merde, he thought, we did very well that winter up at the juncture.
I wish I could fight it again, he thought. Knowing what I know now and having what we have now. But theyТd have it too and the essential problem is just the same, except who holds the air.
And all this time he had been watching the bow of the beat-up beautifully varnished, delicately brass-striped boat, with the brass all beautifully polished, cut the brown water, and seen the small traffic problems.
They went under the white bridge and under the unfinished wood bridge. Then they left the red bridge on the right and passed under the first high-flying white bridge. Then there was the black iron fret-work bridge on the canal leading into the Rio Nuovo and they passed the two stakes chained together but not touching: like us the Colonel thought. He watched the tide pull at them and he saw how the chains had worn the wood since he first had seen them. ThatТs us, he thought. ThatТs our monument. And how many monuments are there to us in the canals of this town?
Then they still went slowly until the great lantern that was on the right of the entrance to the Grand Canal where the engine commenced its metallic agony that produced a slight increase in speed.
Now they came down and under the Accademia between the pilings where they passed, at touching distance, a heavily loaded black, diesel boat full of cut timber, cut in chunks, to burn for firewood in the damp houses of the Sea City.
УThatТs beech, isnТt it?Ф the Colonel asked the boatman.
УBeech and another wood that is cheaper that I do not recall, at this moment, the name of.Ф
УBeech is, to an open fire, as anthracite coal is to a stove. Where do they cut that beech?Ф
УIТm not a man of the mountains. But I think it comes from up beyond Bassano on the other side of the Grappa. I went there to the Grappa to see where my brother was buried. It was an excursion that they made from Bassano, and we went to the big ossario. But we returned by Feltre. I could see it was a fine timber country on the other side as you came down the mountains into the valley. We came down that military road, and they were hauling lots of wood.Ф
УIn what year was your brother killed on Grappa?Ф
УIn nineteen-eighteen. He was a patriot and inflamed by hearing dТAnnunzio talk, and he volunteered before his class was called. We never knew him very well because he went so quickly.Ф
УHow many were you in the family?Ф
УWe were six. We lost two beyond the Isonzo, one on the Bainsizza and one on the Carso. Then we lost this brother I speak of on the Grappa and I remained.Ф
УIТll get you the God-damned jeep complete with handles,Ф the Colonel said. УNow letТs not be morbid and look for all the places where my friends live.Ф
They were moving up the Grand Canal now and it was easy to see where your friends lived.
УThatТs the house of the Contessa Dandolo,Ф the Colonel said.
He did not say, but thought, she is over eighty, and she is as gay as a girl and does not have any fear of dying. She dyes her hair red and it looks very well. She is a good companion and an admirable woman.
Her palazzo was pleasant looking, set well back from the Canal with a garden in front and a landing place of its own where many gondolas had come, in their various times, bringing hearty, cheerful, sad and disillusioned people. But most of them had been cheerful because they were going to see the Contessa Dandolo.
Now, beating up the Canal, against the cold wind off the mountains, and with the houses as clear and sharp as on a winter day, which, of course, it was, they saw the old magic of the city and its beauty. But it was conditioned, for the Colonel, by his knowing many of the people who lived in the palazzos; or if no one lived there now, knowing to what use the different places had been put.
ThereТs AlvaritoТs motherТs house, he thought, and did not say.
She never lives there much and stays out at the country house near Treviso where they have trees. SheТs tired of there not being trees in Venice. She lost a fine man and nothing really interests her now except efficiency.
But the family at one time lent the house to George Gordon, Lord Byron, and nobody sleeps now in ByronТs bed nor in the other bed, two flights below, where he used to sleep with the gondolierТs wife. They are not sacred, nor relics. They are just extra beds that were not used afterwards for various reasons, or possibly to respect Lord Byron who was well loved in this town, in spite of all the errors he committed. You have to be a tough boy in this town to be loved, the Colonel thought. They never cared anything for Robert Browning, nor Mrs. Robert Browning, nor for their dog. They werenТt Venetians no matter how well he wrote of it. And what is a tough boy, he asked himself. You use it so loosely you should be able to define it. I suppose it is a man who will make his play and then backs it up. Or just a man who backs his play. And IТm not thinking of the theatre, he thought. Lovely as the theatre can be.
And yet, he thought, seeing now the little villa, close up against the water, ugly as a building you would see on the boat train from Havre or Cherbourg, coming into the banlieue before Paris as you came into town. It was over-run with badly administered trees, and not a place that you would live in if you could help it. There he lived.
They loved him for his talent, and because he was bad, and he was brave. A Jewish boy with nothing, he stormed the country with his talent, and his rhetoric. He was a more miserable character than any that I know and as mean. But the man I think of to compare him with never put the chips on the line and went to war, the Colonel thought, and Gabriele dТAnnunzio (I always wondered what his real name was, he thought, because nobody is named dТAnnunzio in a practical country and perhaps he was not Jewish and what difference did it make if he was or was not,) had moved through the different arms of the service as he had moved into and out of the arms of different women.
All the arms were pleasant that dТAnnunzio served with and the mission was fast and easily over, except the Infantry. He remembered how dТAnnunzio had lost an eye in a crash, flying as an observer, over Trieste or Pola, and how, afterwards, he had always worn a patch over it and people who did not know, for, then, no one really knew, thought it had been shot out at the Veliki or San Michele or some other bad place beyond the Carso where everyone died, or was incapacitated, that you knew. But dТAnnunzio, truly, was only making heroic gestures with the other things. An Infantryman knows a strange trade, he thought; perhaps the strangest. He, Gabriele, flew, but he was not a flier. He was in the Infantry but he was not an Infantryman and it was always the same appearances.
And the Colonel remembered one time when he had stood, commanding a platoon of assault troops, while it was raining in one of the interminable winters, when the rain fell always; or at least, always when there were parades or speeches to the troops, and dТAnnunzio, with his lost eye, covered by the patch, and his white face, as white as the belly of a sole, new turned over in the market, the brown side not showing, and looking thirty hours dead, was shouting, УMorire non ш basta,Ф and the Colonel, then a lieutenant, had thought, УWhat the muck more do they want of us?Ф
But he had followed the discourse and, at the end, when the Lieutenant Colonel dТAnnunzio, writer and national hero, certified and true if you must have heroes, and the Colonel did not believe in heroes, asked for a moment of silence for our glorious dead, he had stood stiffly at attention. But his platoon, who had not followed the speech, there being no loud speakers then, and they being slightly out of hearing of the orator, responded, as one man, at the pause for the moment of silence for our glorious dead, with a solid and ringing УEvviva dТ Annunzio.Ф
They had been addressed before by dТAnnunzio after victories, and before defeats, and they knew what they should shout if there was any pause by an orator.
The Colonel, being then a lieutenant, and loving his platoon, had joined with them and uttered, with the tone of command, УEvviva dТAnnunzio,Ф thus absolving all those who had not listened to the discourse, speech, or harangue, and attempting, in the small way a lieutenant can attempt anything, except to hold an indefensible position, or intelligently direct his own part in an attack, to share their guilt.
But now he was passing the house where the poor beat-up old boy had lived with his great, sad, and never properly loved actress, and he thought of her wonderful hands, and her so transformable face, that was not beautiful, but that gave you all love, glory, and delight and sadness; and of the way the curve of her fore-arm could break your heart, and he thought, Christ they are dead and I do not know whether either one is buried even. But I certainly hope they had fun in that house.
УJackson,Ф he said, Уthat small villa on the left belonged to Gabriele dТAnnunzio, who was a great writer.Ф
УYes, sir,Ф said Jackson, УIТm glad to know about him. I never heard of him.Ф
УIТll check you out on what he wrote if you ever want to read him,Ф the Colonel said. УThere are some fair English translations.Ф
УThank you, sir,Ф said Jackson. УIТd like to read him anytime I have time. He has a nice practical looking place. What did you say the name was?Ф
УDТAnnunzio,Ф the Colonel said. УWriter.Ф
He added to himself, not wishing to confuse Jackson, nor be difficult, as he had been with the man several times that day, writer, poet, national hero, phraser of the dialectic of Fascism, macabre egotist, aviator, commander, or rider, in the first of the fast torpedo attack boats, Lieutenant Colonel of Infantry without knowing how to command a company, nor a platoon properly, the great, lovely writer of Notturno whom we respect, and jerk.
Up ahead now there was a crossing place of gondolas at the Santa Maria del Giglio and, beyond, was the wooden dock of the Gritti.
УThatТs the hotel where we are stopping at, Jackson.Ф