Catch-22(70)

“The dirtiest,” Yossarian agreed.

“What are you fellows talking about?” Aarfy asked with genuine puzzlement, tucking his face away protectively inside the cushioning insulation of his oval shoulders. “Aw, come on, Joe,” he pleaded with a smile of mild discomfort. “Quit punching me, will you?”

But Hungry Joe would not quit punching until Yossarian picked him up and pushed him away toward his bedroom. Yossarian moved listlessly into his own room, undressed and went to sleep. A second later it was morning, 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 up because he had a visitor waiting just outside the door. Luciana! He could hardly believe it. And she was alone in the room with him after Michaela had departed, lovely, hale and statuesque, steaming and rippling with an irrepressible affectionate vitality even as she remained in one place and frowned at him irately. She stood like a youthful 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 him hard 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 tall casement windows, letting inside an effulgent flood of sunlight and crisp fresh air that washed through the stuffy room like an invigorating tonic. She placed her pocketbook on a chair and began tidying the room, picking his things up from the floor and off the tops of the furniture, throwing his socks, handkerchief and underwear into an empty 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 and combed his hair. When he ran back, the room was in order and Luciana was almost undressed. Her expression was relaxed. She left her earrings on the dresser and padded barefoot to the bed wearing just a pink rayon chemise that came down to her hips. She glanced about the room prudently to make certain there was nothing she had overlooked in the way of neatness and then drew back the coverlet and stretched herself out luxuriously with an 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 all turned out to be true, for she cried “finito!” almost as soon as he started and wondered why he didn’t stop, until he 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 wondered about the pink chemise that she would not remove. It was cut like a man’s undershirt, with narrow shoulder straps, and concealed the invisible scar on her back that she refused to let him see after he had made her tell him it was there. She grew tense as fine steel when he traced the mutilated contours with his finger tip from a pit in her shoulder blade almost to the base of her spine. He winced at the many tortured nights she had spent in the hospital, drugged or in pain, with the ubiquitous, ineradicable odors of ether, fecal matter and disinfectant, of human flesh mortified and decaying amid the white uniforms, the rubber-soled shoes, and the eerie night lights glowing dimly until dawn in the corridors. She had been wounded in an air raid.

“Dove?” he asked, and he held his breath in suspense.

“Napoli.”

“Germans?”

“Americani.”

His heart cracked, and he fell in love. He wondered if she would marry him.

“Tu sei pazzo,” she told him with a pleasant laugh.

“Why am I crazy?” he asked.

“Perchè non posso sposare.”

“Why can’t you get married?”

“Because I am not a virgin,” she answered.

“What has that got to do with it?”

“Who will marry me? No one wants a girl who is not a virgin.”

“I will. I’ll marry you.”

“Ma non posso sposarti.”

“Why can’t you marry me?”

“Perchè sei pazzo.”

“Why am I crazy?”

“Perchè vuoi sposarmi.”

Yossarian wrinkled his forehead with quizzical amusement. “You won’t marry me because I’m crazy, and you say I’m crazy because I want to marry you? Is that right?”