Inez: A Novel Read Online Free PDF

knowing he was young, thirty-three, one of the youngest chefs d’orchestre in the world. Briefly, he admired his aquiline profile, his black, curling mane, the infinitely sensual lips. The dark, gypsy-olive skin worthy of his Mediterranean and Central European hyphenated names. Now he will dress in a black turtleneck sweater and dark wool trousers and will throw on the Spanish cape that gives him the soignee air of a kob, a splendid antelope in prehistoric meadows that would swagger into the street wearing a silver collar like the ruff of a Spanish hidalgo …
    Nevertheless, as he regarded himself with deep regard (and
liking his likeness), he no longer saw his own vain image; it was being obliterated by that of the woman, a very special woman who dared plant her person in the center of the musical universe of Hector Berlioz and Gabriel Atlan-Ferrara.
    It was an impossible image. Or maybe merely difficult. He admitted that. He wanted to see her again. The idea distressed him and pursued him as he strode arrogantly into the night of the German blitzkrieg over London; it wasn’t the first war, it wasn’t the first terror of the eternal combat of man-is-the-wolf of-man, but, making his way, as sirens wailed, among the people forming a queue to go down to the underground, he told himself that these bureaucrats with headcolds, bone-tired waitresses, mothers with babies, old men clutching thermoses, children dragging blankets, these Londoners with their weariness and bleary eyes and insomniac skin were unique, they belonged not to “the history of war” but to the specific actuality of this war. What was he in a city where more than fifteen hundred people could die in a single night? What was he in a London where bombed-out shops displayed signs proclaiming BUSINESS AS USUAL? What was he, leaving the sandbagged theater in Bow Street, but a pathetic figure captured amid the terror of a rain of ice from a shattered shop window, the whinnying of a horse frightened by the flames, and the red aureole that lit up the crouching city?
    He walked toward his hotel on Piccadilly, the Regent’s Palace, where a soft bed was waiting, a place to forget the voices he overheard as he cut through the lines for the underground.
    “Don’t waste any shillings in the gas meter.”
    “Chinese all look alike, how do you tell them apart?”
    “We’ll all sleep together, it’s not too bad.”
    “Yes, but next to whom? Yesterday my butcher touched me.”
    “Well, we English know about perversion from elementary school on.”
    “Thank God the children are in the country.”
    “Don’t be too complacent. Southampton, Bristol, and Liverpool have all been bombed.”
    “And in Liverpool there wasn’t any anti-aircraft defense; why, that’s dereliction of duty!”
    “It’s the Jews who’re to blame for this war, as usual.”
    “They’ve bombed the House of Commons, the Abbey, the Tower of London. Aren’t you surprised when you find you still have a house?”
    “We know ‘ow to take it, mate, we know ’ow to take it.”
    “And we know ’ow to help a buddy, more nor ever, mate.”
    “More nor ever.”
    “Good evening, Mr. Atlan,” said the first violin, wrapped in a sheet that had little effect against the night cold. He looked like a ghost that had escaped from the Faust oratorio.
    Gabriel nodded with dignity, but at just that moment he was seized by the most un -dignified of urgencies. He needed desperately to urinate. He hailed a taxi to speed his return to the hotel. The taxi driver smiled at him amiably.
    “First, gov’ner, I don’t know me way around the city anymore. Second, the streets are bang-up with broken glass, and tires don’t grow on trees. Sorry, gov’ner. It’s too risky where you want to go.”
    He looked for the first alleyway among the many that weave together Brewer’s Yard and St. Martin’s Lane, trapping the odor of chips, lamb cooked in lard, and rancid eggs. The city’s breath was sour and