It was about dusk, one evening during the supreme madness of the carnival season, that I encountered my friend. He had clearly been down on the waterfront in the thick of the festivities as he had that febrile look, eyes too shiny, cheeks too pink, of one who has slept little and drunk much and danced through the night. I tried to duck into a shop, but it was too late. He grabbed my arm and breathlessly cried. “It’s the Russian princess, the one with the golden eyes, in the black velvet!”
“Still black velvet?” I asked, “Still mourning the distant loss of her virginity?”
“Ah, you mock me!” he gulped, clutching at his tie and striking a tragic pose that effectively blocked the door.
Embarassed by the sharp looks the proprietor was giving me, I dragged my friend out into the street, in spite of the increasing chill of the gathering twilight. “Come have some tea before you catch your death” I soothed, “where’s your coat?”
“I hung it up this morning, because the pig with the black feet was eating it.” he said as if this made sense. We came to a tea house and found a table behind a large plant where his histrionics would be less public. He slouched sideways in his chair like one of the more conspicuous saints in his final moments. “How can I go on?” he moaned, “I thought I’d get over it, but no, it gets worse every year, more and more bitter every day. I am tormented by dreams by night and haunted by regrets by day. Ah!”
I ordered a pot of Earl Grey and a plate of cakes from a passing waiter. When I turned back he had thrown back his head and would have been staring at the ceiling except that he had covered his eyes with soiled pudgy fingers, giving the appearance that someone had laid 2 pounds of knockwurst across his face. “You couldn’t learn from others, you couldn’t bend, and so you broke like a dry stick.” I lectured unsympathetically.
A heavy sigh from behind the knockwurst. Then we sat in silence.
At last the tea came and I picked out a hard cookie crunching it noisily. Signs of life quickly returned to my companion who gobbled cakes and slurped tea, miraculously revived. “Aren’t you going to save a treat for the Baron?” I asked.
“What, after the ungrateful rascal ate my coat? Certainly not. The princess, now, she would never have done such a thing. For her I would have brought a whole plate of treats! Lord how I miss her!” he declared spitting little gusts of poundcake crumbs.
I paid for the tea while he licked the last of the icing off his fat fingers.
