He found Luciana sitting alone at a table in the Allied officers’ night club, where the drunken Anzac major whohad brought her there had been stupid enough to desert her for the ribald company of some singing comrades atthe bar.
“All right, I’ll dance with you,” she said, before Yossarian could even speak. “But I won’t let you sleep withme.”
“Who asked you?” Yossarian asked her.
“You don’t want to sleep with me?” she exclaimed with surprise.
“I don’t want to dance with you.”
She seized Yossarian’s hand and pulled him out on the dance floor. She was a worse dancer than even he was,but she threw herself about to the synthetic jitterbug music with more uninhibited pleasure than he had everobserved until he felt his legs falling asleep with boredom and yanked her off the dance floor toward the table atwhich the girl he should have been screwing was still sitting tipsily with one hand around Aarfy’s neck, herorange satin blouse still hanging open slovenly below her full white lacy brassière as she made dirty sex talkostentatiously with Huple, Orr, Kid Sampson and Hungry Joe. Just as he reached them, Luciana gave him aforceful, unexpected shove that carried them both well beyond the table, so that they were still alone. She was atall, earthy, exuberant girl with long hair and a pretty face, a buxom, delightful, flirtatious girl.
“All right,” she said, “I will let you buy me dinner. But I won’t let you sleep with me.”
“Who asked you?” Yossarian asked with surprise.
“You don’t want to sleep with me?”
“I don’t want to buy you dinner.”
She pulled him out of the night club into the street and down a flight of steps into a black-market restaurant filledwith lively, chirping, attractive girls who all seemed to know each other and with the self-conscious militaryofficers from different countries who had come there with them. The food was elegant and expensive, and theaisles were overflowing with great streams of flushed and merry proprietors, all stout and balding. The bustlinginterior radiated with enormous, engulfing waves of fun and warmth.
Yossarian got a tremendous kick out of the rude gusto with which Luciana ignored him completely while she shoveled away her whole meal with both hands. She ate like a horse until the last plate was clean, and then sheplaced her silverware down with an air of conclusion and settled back lazily in her chair with a dreamy andcongested look of sated gluttony. She drew a deep, smiling, contented breath and regarded him amorously with amelting gaze.
“Okay, Joe,” she purred, her glowing dark eyes drowsy and grateful. “Now I will let you sleep with me.”
“My name is Yossarian.”
“Okay, Yossarian,” she answered with a soft repentant laugh. “Now I will let you sleep with me.”
“Who asked you?” said Yossarian.
Luciana was stunned. “You don’t want to sleep with me?”
Yossarian nodded emphatically, laughing, and shot his hand up under her dress. The girl came to life with ahorrified start. She jerked her legs away from him instantly, whipping her bottom around. Blushing with alarmand embarrassment, she pushed her skirt back down with a number of prim, sidelong glances about therestaurant.
“Now I will let you sleep with me,” she explained cautiously in a manner of apprehensive indulgence. “But notnow.”
“I know. When we get back to my room.”
The girl shook her head, eyeing him mistrustfully and keeping her knees pressed together. “No, now I must gohome to my mamma, because my mamma does not like me to dance with soldiers or let them take me to dinner,and she will be very angry with me if I do not come home now. But I will let you write down for me where youlive. And tomorrow morning I will come to your room for ficky-fick before I go to my work at the French office.
Capisci?”
“Bullshit!” Yossarian exclaimed with angry disappointment.
“Cosa vuol dire bullshit?” Luciana inquired with a blank look.
Yossarian broke into loud laughter. He answered her finally in a tone of sympathetic good humor. “It means thatI want to escort you now to wherever the hell I have to take you next so that I can rush back to that night clubbefore Aarfy leaves with that wonderful tomato he’s got without giving me a chance to ask about an aunt orfriend she must have who’s just like her.”
“Come?”
“Subito, subito,” he taunted her tenderly. “Mamma is waiting. Remember?”
“Si, si. Mamma.”
Yossarian let the girl drag him through the lovely Roman spring night for almost a mile until they reached achaotic bus depot honking with horns, blazing with red and yellow lights and echoing with the snarlingvituperations of unshaven bus drivers pouring loathsome, hair-raising curses out at each other, at their passengersand at the strolling, unconcerned knots of pedestrians clogging their paths, who ignored them until they werebumped by the buses and began shouting curses back. Luciana vanished aboard one of the diminutive greenvehicles, and Yossarian hurried as fast as he could all the way back to the cabaret and the bleary-eyed bleachedblonde in the open orange satin blouse. She seemed infatuated with Aarfy, but he prayed intensely for herluscious aunt as he ran, or for a luscious girl friend, sister, cousin, or mother who was just as libidinous anddepraved. She would have been perfect for Yossarian, a debauched, coarse, vulgar, amoral, appetizing slatternwhom he had longed for and idolized for months. She was a real find. She paid for her own drinks, and she hadan automobile, an apartment and a salmon-colored cameo ring that drove Hungry Joe clean out of his senses withits exquisitely carved figures of a naked boy and girl on a rock. Hungry Joe snorted and pranced and pawed atthe floor in salivating lust and groveling need, but the girl would not sell him the ring, even though he offered herall the money in all their pockets and his complicated black camera thrown in. She was not interested in moneyor cameras. She was interested in fornication.
She was gone when Yossarian got there. They were all gone, and he walked right out and moved in wistfuldejection through the dark, emptying streets. Yossarian was not often lonely when he was by himself, but he waslonely now in his keen envy of Aarfy, who he knew was in bed that very moment with the girl who was just rightfor Yossarian, and who could also make out any time he wanted to, if he ever wanted to, with either or both ofthe two slender, stunning, aristocratic women who lived in the apartment upstairs and fructified Yossarian’s sexfantasies whenever he had sex fantasies, the beautiful rich black-haired countess with the red, wet, nervous lipsand her beautiful rich black-haired daughter-in-law. Yossarian was madly in love with all of them as he made hisway back to the officers’ apartment, in love with Luciana, with the prurient intoxicated girl in the unbuttonedsatin blouse, and with the beautiful rich countess and her beautiful rich daughter-in-law, both of whom wouldnever let him touch them or even flirt with them. They doted kittenishly on Nately and deferred passively toAarfy, but they thought Yossarian was crazy and recoiled from him with distasteful contempt each time he madean indecent proposal or tried to fondle them when they passed on the stairs. They were both superb creatureswith pulpy, bright, pointed tongues and mouths like round warm plums, a little sweet and sticky, a little rotten.
They had class; Yossarian was not sure what class was, but he knew that they had it and he did not, and that theyknew it, too. He could picture, as he walked, the kind of underclothing they wore against their svelte feminineparts, filmy, smooth, clinging garments of deepest black or of opalescent pastel radiance with flowering laceborders fragrant with the tantalizing fumes of pampered flesh and scented bath salts rising in a germinating cloudfrom their blue-white breasts. He wished again that he was where Aarfy was, making obscene, brutal, cheerfullove with a juicy drunken tart who didn’t give a tinker’s dam about him and would never think of him again.
But Aarfy was already back in the apartment when Yossarian arrived, and Yossarian gaped at him with that samesense of persecuted astonishment he had suffered that same morning over Bologna at his malign and cabalisticand irremovable presence in the nose of the plane.
“What are you doing here?” he asked.
“That’s right, ask him!” Hungry Joe exclaimed in a rage. “Make him tell you what he’s doing here!”
With a long, theatrical moan, Kid Sampson made a pistol of his thumb and forefinger and blew his own brainsout. Huple, chewing away on a bulging wad of bubble gum, drank everything in with a callow, vacant expressionon his fifteen-year old face. Aarfy was tapping the bowl of his pipe against his palm leisurely as he paced backand forth in corpulent self-approval, obviously delighted by the stir he was causing.
“Didn’t you go home with that girl?” Yossarian demanded.
“Oh, sure, I went home with her,” Aarfy replied. “You didn’t think I was going to let her try to find her wayhome alone, did you?”
“Wouldn’t she let you stay with her?”
“Oh, she wanted me to stay with her, all right.” Aarfy chuckled. “Don’t you worry about good old Aarfy. But Iwasn’t going to take advantage of a sweet kid like that just because she’d had a little too much to drink. Whatkind of a guy do you think I am?”
“Who said anything about taking advantage of her?” Yossarian railed at him in amazement. “All she wanted todo was get into bed with someone. That’s the only thing she kept talking about all night long.”
“That’s because she was a little mixed up,” Aarfy explained. “But I gave her a little talking to and really putsome sense into her.”
“You bastard!” Yossarian exclaimed, and sank down tiredly on the divan beside Kid Sampson. “Why the helldidn’t you give her to one of us if you didn’t want her?”
“You see?” Hungry Joe asked. “There’s something wrong with him.”
Yossarian nodded and looked at Aarfy curiously. “Aarfy, tell me something. Don’t you ever screw any of them?”
Aarfy chuckled again with conceited amusement. “Oh sure, I prod them. Don’t you worry about me. But neverany nice girls. I know what kind of girls to prod and what kind of girls not to prod, and I never prod any nicegirls. This one was a sweet kid. You could see her family had money. Why, I even got her to throw that ring ofhers away right out the car window.”
Hungry Joe flew into the air with a screech of intolerable pain. “You did what?” he screamed. “You did what?”
He began whaling away at Aarfy’s shoulders and arms with both fists, almost in tears. “I ought to kill you forwhat you did, you lousy bastard. He’s sinful, that’s what he is. He’s got a dirty mind, ain’t he? Ain’t he got adirty mind?”
“The dirtiest,” Yossarian agreed.
“What are you fellows talking about?” Aarfy asked with genuine puzzlement, tucking his face away protectivelyinside the cushioning insulation of his oval shoulders. “Aw, come on, Joe,” he pleaded with a smile of milddiscomfort. “Quit punching me, will you?”
But Hungry Joe would not quit punching until Yossarian picked him up and pushed him away toward hisbedroom. Yossarian moved listlessly into his own room, undressed and went to sleep. A second later it wasmorning, and someone was shaking him.
“What are you waking me up for?” he whimpered.
It was Michaela, the skinny maid with the merry disposition and homely sallow face, and she was waking him upbecause he had a visitor waiting just outside the door. Luciana! He could hardly believe it. And she was alone inthe room with him after Michaela had departed, lovely, hale and statuesque, steaming and rippling with anirrepressible affectionate vitality even as she remained in one place and frowned at him irately. She stood like ayouthful female colossus with her magnificent columnar legs apart on high white shoes with wedged heels,wearing a pretty green dress and swinging a large, flat white leather pocketbook, with which she cracked himhard across the face when he leaped out of bed to grab her. Yossarian staggered backward out of range in a daze,clutching his stinging cheek with bewilderment.
“Pig!” She spat out at him viciously, her nostrils flaring in a look of savage disdain. “Vive com’ un animale!”
With a fierce, guttural, scornful, disgusted oath, she strode across the room and threw open the three tallcasement windows, letting inside an effulgent flood of sunlight and crisp fresh air that washed through the stuffyroom like an invigorating tonic. She placed her pocketbook on a chair and began tidying the room, picking histhings up from the floor and off the tops of the furniture, throwing his socks, handkerchief and underwear into anempty drawer of the dresser and hanging his shirt and trousers up in the closet.
Yossarian ran out of the bedroom into the bathroom and brushed his teeth. He washed his hands and face andcombed his hair. When he ran back, the room was in order and Luciana was almost undressed. Her expressionwas relaxed. She left her earrings on the dresser and padded barefoot to the bed wearing just a pink rayonchemise that came down to her hips. She glanced about the room prudently to make certain there was nothing shehad overlooked in the way of neatness and then drew back the coverlet and stretched herself out luxuriously withan expression of feline expectation. She beckoned to him longingly, with a husky laugh.
“Now,” she announced in a whisper, holding both arms out to him eagerly. “Now I will let you sleep with me.”
She told him some lies about a single weekend in bed with a slaughtered fiancé in the Italian Army, and they allturned out to be true, for she cried, “finito!” almost as soon as he started and wondered why he didn’t stop, untilhe had finitoed too and explained to her.
He lit cigarettes for both of them. She was enchanted by the deep suntan covering his whole body. He wonderedabout the pink c............