Читать онлайн «Sugar Baby»

I caught the fierce expression on his face in the brief impulsive moment of that strange act; and I understood. I don’t mean the symbolism such as it was; that, to me, was pretty superficial and obvious. No. It was rather his deadly earnestness.

It lasted no more than a second or two. Just as long as it took to thrust his hand into his sugar bowl, grasp a handful and fling it out of the window, his squarish jaw set viciously. Then it crumbled again in the gentle solvent of a vague smile.

"Ah-ah; why?" asked one of the other two present, or perhaps both, taken aback and completely mystified.

"Only to show sugar that today I am greater than he, that the day has arrived when I can afford sugar and, if it pleases me, throw sugar away. "

They roared with laughter then. Cletus joined them but laughing only moderately. Then I joined too, meagrely.

"You are a funny one, Cletus," said Umera, his huge trunk shaking with mirth and his eyes glistening.

Soon we were drinking Cletus’s tea and munching chunks of bread smeared thickly with margarine.

"Yes," said Umera’s friend whose name I didn’t catch, "may bullet crack sugar’s head!"

"Amen. "

"One day soon it will be butter’s turn," said Umera. "Please excuse my bad habit. " He had soaked a wedge of bread in his tea and carried it dripping into his enormous mouth, his head thrown back.

"That’s how I learnt to eat bread," he contrived out of a full, soggy mouth. He tore another piece—quite small this time-- and threw it out of the window. "Go and meet sugar, and bullet crack both your heads!"

"Amen. "

"Tell them about me and sugar, Mike, tell them," said Cletus to me.

Well, I said, there was nothing really to tell except that my friend Cletus had what our English friends would call a sweet tooth. But of course the English, a very moderate race, couldn’t possibly have a name for anything like Cletus and his complete denture of thirty-two sweet teeth.

It was an old joke of mine but Umera and his friend didn’t know it and so graced it with more uproarious laughter. Which was good because I didn’t want to tell any of the real stories Cletus was urging. And fortunately too Umera and his friend were bursting to tell more and more of their own hardship stories; for most of us had become in those days like a bunch of old hypochondriac women vying to recount the most lurid details of their own special infirmities.

And I found it all painfully, unbearably pathetic. I never possessed some people’s ability (Cletus’s, for example) to turn everything to good account. Pain lasts far longer on me than on him even when--- strange to say—it is his own pain. It wouldn’t have occurred to me, not in a thousand years, to enact that farcical celebration of victory over sugar. Simply watching it I felt bad. It was like a man standing you a drink because some fellow who once seduced his wife had just died, according to the morning’s papers. The drink would stick in my throat because my pity and my contempt would fall on the celebrator and my admiration on the gallant man who once so justly cuckolded him.