"Hemingway, Ernest - The Garden of Eden" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hemingway Ernest)

Ernest Hemingway

The Garden of Eden


Chapter One

THEY WERE LIVING at le Grau du Roi then and the hotel was on a canal that ran
from the walled city of Aigues Mortes straight down to the sea. They could see
the towers of Aigues Mortes across the low plain of the Camargue and they rode
there on their bicycles at some time of nearly every day along the white road
that bordered the canal. In the evenings and the mornings when there was a
rising tide sea bass would come into it and they would see the mullet jumping
wildly to escape from the bass and watch the swelling bulge of the water as the
bass attacked.
A jetty ran out into the blue and pleasant sea and they fished from the jetty
and swam on the beach and each day helped the fishermen haul in the long net
that brought the fish up onto the long sloping beach. They drank aperitifs in
the cafe on the corner facing the sea and watched the sails of the mackerel
fishing boats out in the Gulf of Lions. It was late in the spring and the
mackerel were running and fishing people of the port were very busy. It was a
cheerful and friendly town and the young couple liked the hotel, which had four
rooms upstairs and a restaurant and two billiard tables downstairs facing the
canal and the light house. The room they lived in looked like the painting of
Van Gogh's room at Arles except there was a double bed and two big windows and
you could look out across the water and the marsh and sea meadows to the white
town and bright beach of Palavas.
They were always hungry but they ate very well. They were hungry for breakfast
which they ate at the cafe, ordering brioche and cafe au lait and eggs, and the
type of preserve that they chose and the manner in which the eggs were to be
cooked was an excitement. They were always so hungry for breakfast that the girl
often had a headache until the coffee came. But the coffee took the headache
away. She took her coffee without sugar and the young man was learning to
remember that.
On this morning there was brioche and red raspberry preserve and the eggs were
boiled and there was a pat of butter that melted as they stirred them and salted
them lightly and ground pepper over them in the cups. They were big eggs and
fresh and the girl's were not cooked quite as long as the young man's. He
remembered that easily and he was happy with his which he diced up with the
spoon and ate with only the flow of the butter to moisten them and the fresh
early morning texture and the bite of the coarsely ground pepper grains and the
hot coffee and the chickory-fragrant bowl of cafe au lait.
The fishing boats were well out. They had gone out in the dark with the first
rising of the breeze and the young man and the girl had wakened and heard them
and then curled together under the sheet of the bed and slept again. They had
made love when they were half awake with the light bright outside but the room
still shadowed and then had lain together and been happy and tired and then made
love again. Then they were so hungry that they did not think they would live
until breakfast and now they were in the cafe eating and watching the sea and
the sails and it was a new day again.