to take the morning paper from the striped waist-coated man’s hand; noiselessly, and when he heard, or saw it first make a move under the door.
“OK, you won today, jerk,” he said in the best Venetian dialect he could summon at that hour. “Go hang yourself.”
But they don’t hang themselves, he thought. They just have to go on putting papers under other people’s doors that do not even hate them. It must be quite a difficult trade being an ex-Fascist. Maybe he is not an ex-Fascist too. How do you know.
I can’t hate Fascists, he thought. Nor Krauts either, since unfortunately, I am a soldier.
“Listen, Portrait,” he said. “Do I have to hate the Krauts because we kill them? Do I have to hate them as soldiers and as human beings? It seems too easy a solution to me.”
Well, portrait. Forget it. Forget it. You’re not old enough to know about it. You are two years younger than the girl that you portray, and she is younger and older than hell; which is quite an old place.
“Listen, portrait,” he said, and saying it, knew that now as long as he lived, he would have someone to talk to at the early hours that he woke.
“As I was saying, portrait. The hell with that too. That’s too old for you too. That is one of the things you can’t say no matter how true it is. There are lots of things I can never say to you and maybe that will be good for me. It is about time something was. What do you think would be good for me, Portrait?
