and he thought: why am I always a bastard and why can I not suspend this trade of arms, and be a kind and good man as I would have wished to be.
I try always to be just, but I am brusque and I am brutal, and it is not that I have erected the defense against brown-nosing my superiors and brown-nosing the world. I should be a better man with less wild boar blood in the small time which remains. We will try it out tonight, he thought. With whom, he thought, and where, and God help me not to be bad.
“Giorgio,” he said to the barman, who had a face as white as a leper, but with no bulges, and without the silver shine.
Giorgio did not really like the Colonel very much, or perhaps he was simply from Piemonte, and cared for no one truly; which was understandable in cold people from a border province. Borderers are not trusters, and the Colonel knew about this, and expected nothing from anyone that they did not have to give.
“Giorgio,” he said to the pale-faced barman. “Write these down for me, please.”
He went out, walking as he had always walked, with a slightly exaggerated confidence, even when it was not needed, and, in his always renewed plan of being kind, decent and good, he greeted the concierge, who was a friend, the assistant manager, who spoke Swahili and had been a prisoner of war in Kenya, and was a most amiable man, young, full of juice, handsome, perhaps not yet a member of the Order, and experienced.
