PARIS LETTER ·
Nous avons glisse sur sa melancolique blcmcheur
Pour nous trcuver soudain devant des maisons
mortes depuis des siecles sans imagination
L'une d'elles etait recouverte d'un suaire noir
Des vols d'oiseaux transparents se sont echappes
de ses fentes
Defiant les espaces aimantes de la servitude
C'est
a
ce moment-la qu'a opere le charme
Miraculeux declic au franchir d'utn seuil
Use par des millions de pas captifs·*
503
Patrick beamed with childish pleasure as I pointed to these lines;
then he took out his pen, flipped the book open to the title page and
wrote:
Pour mon viel (sic!) ami Harold Kaplan. En souvenir de nos
annees libres. Avec l'amitie de Patrick.
Delighted,
I
went back to the buffet and· resumed my work on the
sandwiches.
I
had scarcely eaten two or three when the scandal occurred.
There was an exchange of conversation between Patrick and Malaparte.
Patrick dashed his glass into Malaparte's face, stood up and, forgetting
that he was the Portuguese consul, said:
"Monsieur, vous etes une
ordure!"
Malaparte reacted slowly, with the ponderous dignity of a
famous man. He sat in the couch and wiped the armagnac from his
parchment-colored face, while Patrick stood there and repeated, in
French, "Sir, you are offal! Do you hear me, sir, you are filth!" At
last Curzio Malaparte rose to his feet and, addressing himself severely
to Claude-Edmonde Magny, who was wringing her hands, shuffling her
feet and murmuring unintelligibly, with that completely gaga look
people get when they are at a loss for words, "Madame," he said sternly,
"you invite me to your house-and what happens?
I
am insulted!''
Having delivered this announcement, he continued to wipe his face,
which was now quite dry.
"You are pure filth, sir," Patrick was intoning. "Unadulterated
offal."
Marcelle Sibon rushed up to me and told me, for godsakes, to take
him away, he was drunk. So I took him away. Patrick was indeed
drunk, but perfectly lucid ; he allowed himself to be led away, muttering
imprecations. On the way down I told him that now I should have to
*We slipped over its melancholy whiteness
To fi nd ourselves suddenly before houses dead for
centuries without imagination
One of them was covered over with a black burial-cloth
Flights of transparent birds escaped from its cracks
Defying the magnetized spaces of servitude
It is at that moment the charm worked
Miraculous click at the crossing of a threshold
Worn down by millions of captive steps
