504
PARTISAN REVIEW
face the wrath of Claude-Edmonde, if ever she would speak to me again,
all because of his boorishness. A matter of no importance, he said.
Cela
ne tire pas
a
consequence.
All he had done was to tell Malaparte that
a great friend of his, one Percy Winner, had spoken much to him,
Patrick, of Curzio Malaparte. "Whereupon," said Patrick, his enormous
head swelling with rage, "that
ordure,
that
saloperie
had the nerve to tell
me that yes, he had known a Percy Winner. A rather feebl& chap, he
said! He had even given Winner his personal guarantee!"
"What in the world does that mean?" I asked. "What does he mean
by his personal guarantee?"
"How should I know," said Patrick irritably. "I made him repeat
it three times. Each time he thought I hadn't heard and fimilly he in–
vited me to come over and sit on the sofa. With a magnanimous ges–
ture, like that! The swine! Winner was the only man in America wbo
defended that
saloperie!
Personally, I rather doubted that Patrick's rage had really been
evoked by Malaparte's offhand treatment of Percy Winner. I was rather
surprised, in fact, to learn that Patrick was such a great friend of Win–
ner who (I think) left Africa shortly after we arrived there. In any
case, I told Patrick that for the moment I was far more concerned with
Claude-Edmonde Magny than with Percy Winner. A matter of no im–
portance, said Patrick, looking around for a bar. Which brought me
back to the beginning of our evening. In the bar, I discovered that I was
still clutching my copy of Patrick's poems.
ll
n'y auait plus alors qu'a se fier
a
la chance
Derriere nous
s'
ecroulaient les colonnes du
monde de l'indif!tfrence
Mais il y a l'infaillible force avec laquelle poussent
les pails sur la peau des hommes
Plus rigoureuse que la pesanteur*
Later, much later, I went back to my apartment and decided, as
I undressed, that I would leave for the Basque coast as soon as I could
get a train. I did not know that I had made this decision but it was
there, in the celerity with which I took off my neck-tie and slipped
out of my undershirt. Then I lay down in my bed and thought:
Patrick and I were in Africa, for a moment, together. In the same
uniform. Now we must assimilate the war, each in his way. To live
above the level of the world's inconscience was actually to revisit the
*There was nothing for it now but to trust to our luck
Behind us collapsing were the columns of the world
of indifference
But there is the infallible force with which hair keeps
growing on the skin of men
More rigorous than weight
