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    Cold Comfort in a Warm Climate
    Cold Comfort in a Warm Climate
    Cold Comfort in a Warm Climate
    Ebook102 pages1 hour

    Cold Comfort in a Warm Climate

    By Julian Silva

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    Two old friends in their sixties, one an architectural historian dying of cancer, tour Egypt with unpleasant results for all concerned.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherJulian Silva
    Release dateDec 21, 2011
    ISBN9781465939913
    Cold Comfort in a Warm Climate
    Author

    Julian Silva

    BIRTH AND EDUCATION I was born in San Lorenzo, CA, (fictionalized in my novel as San Oriel) in 1927 of Portuguese-American parents. All of my grandparents and one great-grandmother were born in the Bay Area, their ancestors in the Azores. My father taught history at St. Mary’s College for twelve years, then moved for the remainder of his professional life, to San Francisco City College. I attended San Lorenzo Grammar School (there were seven of us in my mid-year graduation class, so San Lorenzo was not exactly a teeming metropolis at the time). I then attended St. Joseph’s in Alameda, leaving in 1944 without a diploma, since I was accepted by St. Mary’s College on a scholarship without one. I attended St. Mary’s for the 1944/45 academic year and in May of 1945, enlisted in the medical corps of the U.S. Naval Reserve. In January of 1947 I finished my lower division work in one semester at SFCC, moved on to USF, from which I graduated in 1949. After graduation I spent six months traveling in Europe and upon returning did a year of graduate work at U. C. Berkeley. PUBLICATIONS My first publication was a short story in Cosmopolitan Magazine, 1964, a study for one of the main characters in THE GUNNYSACK CASTLE. The University of Colorado’s WRITERS FORUM has published seven of my stories over the years, one of which, “The Minimalist” has been anthologized in HIGHER ELEVATIONS: Stories from the West, by Swallow Press, 1993. Stories have also been published in KANSAS QUARTERLY and the San Francisco Chronicle (March 3, 1985). THE GUNNYSACK CASTLE was published by Ohio University Press in 1983 (after the original publisher in Colorado went bankrupt). DISTANT MUSIC: TWO NOVELS (The Gunnysack Castle and The Death of Mae Ramos) was published by the Tagus Press at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, (2007) and MOVE OVER, SCOPES AND OTHER WRITINGS, was also published by Tagus Press, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth (2011)

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      Book preview

      Cold Comfort in a Warm Climate - Julian Silva

      Cold Comfort in a Warm Climate

      A novella

      By Julian Silva

      Copyright 2011 Julian Silva

      Smashwords Edition

      Smashwords Edition License Notes:

      This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

      All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever including Internet usage, without written permission of the author.

      CREDITS

      THE GUNNYSACK CASTLE, Ohio University Press, 1981

      DISTANT MUSIC: TWO NOVELS (THE GUNNSACK CASTLE & THE DEATH OF MAE RAMOS)

      University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, 2007

      MOVE OVER, SCOPES AND OTHER WRITINGS, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, 2010

      WRITERS FORUM, University of Colorado, numbers 6, 7, 8, 10, 17, & 20

      also: Kansas Quarterly, Cosmopolitan Magazine, & The San Francisco Chronicle

      CONTENTS

      Chapter One

      Chapter Two

      Chapter Three

      Chapter Four

      Chapter Five

      Chapter Six

      Chapter Seven

      Chapter Eight

      Chapter One

      If there is a single moment of that miserable trip that remains most vividly engraved upon my memory, it is at the Aswan airport waiting for the plane to take us back to Cairo. There were two ramshackle rooms feeding one into the other, the floors of both matted with a grimy mix of sand and spilled colas of one variety or another. And over all the smell of urine hung like an acrid cloud in the still and stifling air. Still, except for the ubiquitous buzzing flies and the hands languidly lifted to ward them off.

      Until that moment the tour itself had been remarkably smooth. Busses were always at appointed places at appointed times; queues of horse-drawn carriages met the boat at every out-of-the-way spot; even the rickety old train to Luxor was waiting at the Cairo station for us to board the instant we arrived. Such unexpected efficiency in a country in which nothing else seemed to work at all most of us attributed to our director, the plumply pink Geoffrey Pinfold, a flamboyantly eccentric Englishman of indeterminate age. Now that we were headed back to the capital, he had relinquished his powder-blue djellaba for drab western dress. Though he loved the country with a passion not expended upon his homeland, he had never fathomed the mysteries of Air Egypt and with queenly disdain divorced himself from all responsibility for our intolerable wait. The plane due to leave at ten, he had warned us, might, if we were lucky, leave by twelve, or it might, on the other hand, not leave before two. It was all in the hands of Allah, and since Allah’s hands seemed not to reach so far as the Aswan airport, even two seemed an improbably optimistic departure hour.

      The hotel had provided us with packed lunches, but the fetid air discouraged all save the heartiest from sampling them. It was the fifteenth day of a sixteen-day tour so nerves were already frayed. We were twenty-five, not including the much put upon Geoffrey, a motley crew ranging in ages from ten to eighty-three. By this time most of us were worn down by fatigue and a variety of illnesses and injuries, our clothes almost as grimy as the setting. Rodney alone stood out.

      From the first day he had disassociated himself from the rest of us, from me as well as the others whenever I openly declared myself one of the group rather than his exclusive traveling companion, and dirty, diseased, and dispirited, I was by now clearly a full- fledged member of the despised group.

      As placid as a stone Buddha, Rodney sat in the far corner of the far lounge dressed in his Brooks Brothers seersucker suit, his newly laundered white shirt spotless, his regimental tie—the only necktie in the entire airport—tightly knotted, his well-manicured hands resting, overlapped, on an elegant Malacca cane, like some relic from the Raj, a pukka sahib declaring without any need of words his superiority to the elements as well as the natives.

      Strangely his gambit seemed to work, for he did contrive to look cooler than the rest of us, I thought, as I watched him with a mixture of exasperation and admiration, of contempt and pity; cooler than anyone else in sight, including the scruffy and harried airport attendants. He didn’t so much as lift his hand to shoo the fly so boldly crawling across his forehead, but sat staring ahead of him, his eyes focused upon nothing visible to the rest of us, his lips curled ever so slightly with the benign but impersonal smile of archaic Greek sculpture, for all the world like some royal personage only half attending to the fulsome flattery of an introductory speech and waiting for his cue to rise and bless the reverent assemblage with a ritual wave of his royal hand.

      The baffled but always polite antagonism deliberately provoked by him in the others had long since turned to a kind of bemused wonder. For most of them he had become a character out of Graham Greene or Somerset Maugham, and rather than fracturing communal feeling, his presence served as a kind of rallying point around which all the rest of the group could unite. Though most remained more intimidated than disdainful, they would all obviously remember him as clearly and as long as they would remember that obligatory but painfully uncomfortable camel ride to the pyramids.

      And there was something truly impressive about him sitting, as cool as you please, in that sweltering and tacky little airport as if he were waiting for a table in some grand hotel restaurant, the Garden Court of the Plaza Athené, perhaps, indifferent to the flies and the heat and the smells; indifferent most of all to the rest of us—which was, generally, acceptable, for his contempt had been so grandly, so sweepingly inclusive, no single individual could take personal offense.

      Except me. I alone could not wring so much as a drop of humor from his histrionic eccentricities. His every gesture, his every expression, was too large for any place but the stage, and because of my peculiar position as his traveling companion, I never knew whether I was part of the audience or part of the show. His observer or his straight man.

      Nothing about Rodney was ever simple. For a starter, I was the only one in the group who even knew he was Rodney. Inexplicably—to me, at least—he had chosen to travel as Bill Lucky, a banal simplification of his last two names which had become his southern California nom de guerre, and I had constantly to remind myself to refer to him in public as Bill if I did not want to entangle myself in interminable explanations. His passport still read Rodney William Leudtke, and since he was a stranger to everyone else on the trip, except me, who had known him always and only as Rodney and continued in private to address him as such, his choice seemed peculiarly alienating. It was almost as if he wanted to distance himself from me; and the more I came to think about it, the more conceivable that possibility became. For I was the only one who could not look upon his behavior without seeing behind the grotesquely comic mask of an overbearing snob the unaccommodated man beneath, a poor cancer-ridden bastard tottering gamely on the edge of extinction.

      As I was the only one privy to his terrible secret, my presence must have served constantly to remind him of the one thing he most wanted to forget. Thus what I had considered a non-believer’s self-sacrificing act of Christian charity had cruelly backfired. For both of us.

      Had his body not been playing host to a voracious and implacable cancer—or rather, cancers, since the original cancer had already, by this time, undergone several metastases—we would not have been in Egypt at all. Certainly not together. When, a year

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