‘All the time I thought his name was Giuseppe, and now I find out his name is Yossarian.
That’s really very funny.’
‘Ma, make him feel good,’ the brother urged.
‘Say something to cheer him up.’
‘Giuseppe.’
‘It’s not Giuseppe, Ma. It’s Yossarian.’
‘What difference does it make?’ the mother answered in the same mourning tone, without looking up.
‘He’s dying.’
Her tumid eyes filled with tears and she began to cry, rocking back and forth slowly in her chair with her hands lying in her lap like fallen moths.
Yossarian was afraid she would start wailing.
The father and brother began crying also.
Yossarian remembered suddenly why they were all crying, and he began crying too.
A doctor Yossarian had never seen before stepped inside the room and told the visitors courteously that they had to go.
The father drew himself up formally to say goodbye.
‘Giuseppe,’ he began.
‘Yossarian,’ corrected the son.
‘Yossarian,’ said the father.
‘Giuseppe,’ corrected Yossarian.
‘Soon you’re going to die.’
Yossarian began to cry again.
The doctor threw him a dirty look from the rear of the room, and Yossarian made himself stop. The father continued solemnly with his head lowered.
‘When you talk to the man upstairs,’ he said, ‘I want you to tell Him something for me.
Tell Him it ain’t right for people to die when they’re young.
I mean it.
Tell Him if they got to die at all, they got to die when they’re old.
I want you to tell Him that.
I don’t think He knows it ain’t right, because He’s supposed to be good and it’s been going on for a long, long time. Okay?’
‘And don’t let anybody up there push you around,’ the brother advised.
‘You’ll be just as good as anybody else in heaven, even though you are Italian.’
‘Dress warm,’ said the mother, who seemed to know.
Colonel Cathcart Colonel Cathcart was a slick, successful, slipshod, unhappy man of thirty-six who lumbered when he walked and wanted to be a general.
He was dashing and dejected, poised and chagrined.
He was complacent and insecure, daring in the administrative stratagems he employed to bring himself to the attention of his superiors and craven in his concern that his schemes might all backfire.
He was handsome and unattractive, a swashbuckling, beefy, conceited man who was putting on fat and was tormented chronically by prolonged seizures of apprehension.
Colonel Cathcart was conceited because he was a full colonel with a combat command at the age of only thirty-six; and Colonel Cathcart was dejected because although he was already thirty-six he was still only a full colonel.
Colonel Cathcart was impervious to absolutes.
He could measure his own progress only in relationship to others, and his idea of excellence was to do something at least as well as all the men his own age who were doing the same thing even better.
The fact that there were thousands of men his own age and older who had not even attained the rank of major enlivened him with foppish delight in his own remarkable worth; on the other hand, the fact that there were men of his own age and younger who were already generals contaminated him with an agonizing sense of failure and made him gnaw at his fingernails with an unappeasable anxiety that was even more intense than Hungry Joe’s.
Colonel Cathcart was a very large, pouting, broadshouldered man with close-cropped curly dark hair that was graying at the tips and an ornate cigarette holder that he purchased the day before he arrived in Pianosa to take command of his group.
He displayed the cigarette holder grandly on every occasion and had learned to manipulate it adroitly.
Unwittingly, he had discovered deep within himself a fertile aptitude for smoking with a cigarette holder.
As far as he could tell, his was the only cigarette holder in the whole Mediterranean theater of operations, and the thought was both flattering and disquieting.
He had no doubts at all that someone as debonair and intellectual as General Peckem approved of his smoking with a cigarette holder, even though the two were in each other’s presence rather seldom, which in a way was very lucky, Colonel Cathcart recognized with relief, since General Peckem might not have approved of his cigarette holder at all.
When such misgivings assailed Colonel Cathcart, he choked back a sob and wanted to throw the damned thing away, but he was restrained by his unswerving conviction that the cigarette holder never failed to embellish his masculine, martial physique with a high gloss of sophisticated heroism that illuminated him to dazzling advantage among all the other full colonels in the American Army with whom he was in competition.
Although how could he be sure?
Colonel Cathcart was indefatigable that way, an industrious, intense, dedicated military tactician who calculated day and night in the service of himself.
He was his own sarcophagus, a bold and infallible diplomat who was always berating himself disgustedly for all the chances he had missed and kicking himself regretfully for all the errors he had made.
He was tense, irritable, bitter and smug.
He was a valorous opportunist who pounced hoggishly upon every opportunity Colonel Korn discovered for him and trembled in damp despair immediately afterward at the possible consequences he might suffer.
He collected rumors greedily and treasured gossip.