Long After Midnight Read Online Free PDF Page A

           Very
quietly, she put her arm around me. I was so surprised and bewildered I almost
cried out. Then, trembling, her lips kissed me, and my own hands were moving to
hold her and I was shaking and shouting inside myself.
                 The
silence was like a green explosion. The water bubbled on in the creek bed. I
couldn't breathe.
                 I
knew it was all over. I was lost. From this moment on, it would be a touching,
an eating of foods, a learning of language and algebra and logic, a movement
and an emotion, a kissing and a holding, a whirl of feeling that caught and
sucked me drowning under. I knew I was lost forever now, and I didn't care. But
I did care, and I was laughing and
crying all in one, and there was nothing to do about it, but hold her and love
her with all my decided and rioting body and mind.
                 I
could have gone on fighting my war against Mother and Dad and school and food
and things in books, but I couldn't fight this sweetness on my lips and this
warmness in my hands, and the new odor in my nostrils.
                 "Clarisse,
Clarisse," I cried, holding her, looking over her shoulder blindly,
whispering to her. "Clarisse!"

 
The Parrot Who
Met Papa
 
 
                  
                 The kidnaping was reported all around the world, of
course.
                 It
took a few days for the full significance of the news to spread from Cuba to the United States , to the Left Bank in Paris and then finally to some small good cafe*
in Pamplona where the drinks were fine and the weather,
somehow, was always just right.
                 But
once the meaning of the news really hit, people were on the phone, Madrid was calling New York , New York was shouting south at Havana to verify, please verify this crazy thing.
                 And
then some woman in Venice , Italy , with a blurred voice called through,
saying she was at Harry's Bar that very instant and was destroyed, this thing
that had happened was terrible, a cultural heritage was placed in immense and
irrevocable danger. . . .
                 Not
an hour later, I got a call from a baseball pitcher-cum-novelist who had been a
great friend of Papa's and who now lived in Madrid half the year and Nairobi the rest. He was in tears, or sounded close
to it.
                 "Tell
me,” he said, from halfway around the world, "what happened? What are the
facts?"
                 Well,
the facts were these: Down in Havana , Cuba , about fourteen kilometers from Papa's Finca Vigia home, there is a bar
in which he used to drink. It is the one where they named a special drink for
him, not the fancy one where he used to meet flashy literary lights such as
K-K-Kenneth Tynan and, er ,
Tennessee W-Williams (as Mr. Tynan would say it). No,
it is not the Floridita ; it is a shirt-sleeves place
with plain wooden tables, sawdust on the floor, and a big mirror like a dirty
cloud behind the bar. Papa went there when there were too many tourists around
the Floridita who wanted to meet Mr. Hemingway. And
the thing that happened there was destined to be big news, bigger than the
report of what he said to Fitzgerald about the rich, even bigger than the story
of his swing at Max Eastman on that long-ago day in Charlie Scribner's office.
This news had to do with an ancient parrot.
                 That
senior bird lived in a cage right atop the bar in the Cuba Libre .
He had "kept his cage" in that place for roughly twenty-nine years,
which means that the old parrot had been there almost as long as Papa had lived
in Cuba.
                 And
that adds up to this monumental fact: All during the time Papa had lived in Finca Vigia , he had known the
parrot and had talked to him and the parrot had talked back. As the years
passed, people said that Hemingway began to talk like the parrot and others
said no, the parrot