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Which brings us to Kate McCloud. Kate! McCloud! My love, my anguish, my Götterdämmerung, my very own Death in Venice: inevitable, perilous as the asp at Cleopatra's breast.
It was late winter in Paris; I had returned there after spending several unsober months in Tangier, most of them as a habitué of Jay Hazlewood's Le Parade, a swanky little joint operated by a kind and gangling Georgia guy who had made a moderate fortune from dispensing proper martinis and jumbo hamburgers to homesick Americans; he also, for the favored of his foreign clientele, served up the asses of Arab lads and lassies—without charge of course just a courtesy of the house.
One night at the bar at Parade, I met someone who was to influence future events immensely. He had slicked-down blond hair parted in the middle, like a hair-tonic ad published in the twenties; he was trim and freckled and fresh-colored; he had a good smile and healthy teeth, if a few too many of them. He had a pocketful of kitchen matches that he kept lighting with his thumbnail. He was about forty, an American, but with one of those off-center accents that happen to people who are used to speaking a number of languages: it's not an affectation but rather more like an indefinable speech defect. He bought me a couple of drinks, we rolled some dice; later I asked Jay Hazlewood about him.
"Nobody," said Jay in his deceptive red-clay drawl. "His name is Aces Nelson."
"But what does he do?"
Jay said, and said it so solemnly: "He's a friend of the rich."
"And that's all?"
"All? Shit!" said Jay Hazlewood. "Being a friend of the rich, making a living out of it, one day of that is harder than a month's worth of twenty niggers working on a chain gang."
"But bow does he make a living out of it?"
Hazlewood widened one eye, squinted the other—a Dixie horse trader—but I wasn't joshing him: I really didn't understand.
"Look," he said, "there are a lot of pilot fish like Aces Nelson. There's nothing special about him. Except that he's a little cuter than most of them. Aces is okay. Comparatively. He hits Tangier two, three times a year, always on someone's yacht; he spends every summer moving from one yacht to another—the Gaviota, the Siesta, the Cbristina, the SisterA
Jay Hazlewood never smoked: a true son of the Georgia hills, he chewed plug tobacco. Now he spouted a brown stream into his special private spittoon. "Hard work? I know. I've damn near fucked cobras. That's how I got the pesetas to open this bar. But I was doing it for myself. To make something of me. Aces, he's lost in the life. Right now he's here with Bab's bunch."
Tangier is a white piece of cubist sculpture displayed against a Mountainside facing the Bay of Gibraltar. One descends from the top of the mountain, through a middle-class suburb sprinkled with ugly Mediterranean villas, to the «modern» town, a broiling miasma of overly wide boulevards, cement-colored high-rises, to the sleaky maze of the sea-coasted Casbah. Except for those present for presumably legitimate business purposes, virtually every foreign Tangerine is ensconced there for at least one, if not all, of four reasons: the easy availability of drugs, lustful adolescent prostitutes, tax loopholes, or because he is so undesirable, no place north of Port Said would let him out of the airport or off a ship. It is a dull town where all the essential risks have been removed.
At that time, the five reigning queens of the Casbah were two Englishmen and three American women. Eugenia Bankhead was among the females-a woman as original as her sister Tallulah, someone who made a mad sunshine of her own in the twilights of the harbor. And Jane Bowles, that genius imp, that laughing, hilarious, tortured elf. Author of a sinisterly marvelous novel, Two Serious Ladies, and of a single play, In the Summer House, of which the same description could be given, the late Mrs. Bowles lived in an infinitesimal Casbah house, a dwelling so small-scaled and low-ceilinged that one had almost to crawl from room to room; she lived there with her Moorish lover, the famous Cherifa, a rough old peasant woman who was the empress of herbs and rare spices at the largest of Tangier's open-air bazaars-an abrasive personality only a genius as witty and dedicated to extreme oddity as Mrs. Bowles could have abided. ("But," said Jane with a cherubic laugh, "I do love Cherifa. Cherifa doesn't love me. How could she? A writer? A crippled Jewish girl from Ohio? All she thinks about is money. My money. What little there is. And the house. And how to get the house. She tries very seriously to poison me at least every six months. And don't imagine I'm being paranoid. It's quite true.")
Mrs. Bowles' dollhouse was the reverse of the walled palace that belonged to the neighborhood's third genetically authentic queen, dime-store maharani Barbara Hutton-the Ma Barker of Bab's bunch, to quote Jay Hazlewood. Miss Hutton, with an entourage of temporary husbands, momentary lovers and others of unspecified (if any) occupation, usually reigned in her Moroccan mansion a month or so each year. Fragile, terrified, she rarely voyaged beyond its walls; exceedingly few locals were invited inside them. A wandering waif-Madrid today, Mexico tomorrow-Miss Hutton never traveled; she merely crossed frontiers, carting forty trunks and her insular ambiente with her.
"Hey there! How'd you like to go to a party?" Aces Nelson; he was calling to me from a café terrace in the Petit Socco, a Casbah piazza and great hubble-bubbling alfresco salon from noon to noon; it was past midnight now.
"Look," said Aces, who wasn't high on anything but his own high spirits; in fact, he was drinking the Arabé. "I have a present for you." And he juggled in his hands a wiggling plump-stomached bitch puppy, an Afro-haired pickani
Dogs, cats, kids, I had never had anything dependent upon me; it was too time-consuming a chore just changing my own diapers. So I said: "Forget it. Give her to the Chinaman."
Aces leveled at me a gambler's gaze. He set the puppy on the center of the café table, where she stood a moment, trembling traumatically, then squatted to pee. Aces! You son of a bitch. The nuns. The bluffs above St. Louis. I picked her up and wrapped her in a Lanvin scarf De