Breakfast at Tiffany's
by Truman Capote
(Penguin, 1958)
I am always drawn back to places where I have lied, the houses and their neighbourhoods.
Page 9.
My spirits heightened whenever I felt in my pocket the key to this apartment; with all its gloom, it still was a place of my own, the first, and my books were there, and jars of pencils to sharpen, everything I needed.
Page 9.
Holly Golightly had been a tenant in the old brownstone; she’d occupied the apartment below mine.
Page 9.
‘You recall a certain Mr. I.Y. Yunioshi? A gentleman from Japan.”
‘From California,’ I said, recalling Mr. Yunioshi perfectly. He’s a photographer on one of the picture magazines, and when I knew him he lived in the studio apartment on the top floor of the brownstone.
Page 11.
I looked at my watch. I hadn’t any place to go but I though it was getter to leave.
Page 14.
‘It’s a peculiar fact - but, the older I grow, that side of things seems to be on my mind more and more. I don’t remember thinking about it so much even when I was a youngster and it’s every other minute. Maye the older you grow and the less easy it is to put thought into action, maybe that’s why it gets all locked up in your head and becomes a burden.’
Page 15.
I’d been living in the house about a week when I noticed that the mailbox belonging to Apt. 2 had a name-slot fitted with a curious card. Printed, rather Cartier-formal, it read: Miss Holiday Golightly; and, underneath, in the corner, Travelling. It nagged me like a tune: Miss Holiday Golightly, Travelling.
Page 16.
For all her chic thinness, she had an almost breakfast-cereal air of health, a soap and lemon cleanness, a rough pink darkening in the cheeks. Her mouth was large, her nose upturned. A pair of dark glasses blotted out her eyes. It was a face beyond childhood, yet this side of belonging to a woman. I thought her anywhere between sixteen and thirty; as it tuned out, she was shy two months of her nineteenth birthday.
Page 17.
‘The next time a girl wants a little powder-room change,’ she called, not teasing at all, ‘take my advice, darling: don’t give her twenty-cents!”
Page 18.
She was never without dark glasses, she was always well groomed, there was a consequential good taste in the plainness of her clothes, the blues and greys and lack of lustre that made her, herself, shine so.
Page 19.
I discovered, from observing the trash-basket outside her door, that her regular reading consisted of tabloids and travel folders and astrological charts; that she smoked an esoteric cigarette called Picayunes; survived on cottage cheese and melba toast; that her vari-coloured hair was somewhat self-induced.
Page 20.
She had a cat and she played the guitar. On days when the sun was strong, she would wash her hair, and together with the cat, a red tiger-striped tom, sit out on the fire escape thumbing a guitar while her hair dried.
Page 20.
‘I can’t get excited by a man until he’s forty-two.’
Page 23.
Like many people with a bold fondness for volunteering intimate information, anything that suggested a direct question, a pinning-down, put her on guard.
Page 24.
‘She’s strictly a girl you’ll read where she ends up at the bottom of a bottle of Seconals.’
Page 33.
‘She’s such a goddamn liar, maybe she don’t know herself any more.’
Page 34.
‘There’s so few things men can talk about. If a man doesn’t like baseball, then he must like horses, and if he doesn’t like either of them, well, I’m in trouble anyways: he don’t like girls.’
Pages 38-39.
‘I knew damn well I’d never be a movie star. It’s too hard; and if you’re intelligent, it’s too embarrassing.’
Page 39.
‘I want to still be me when I wake up one fine morning and have breakfast at Tiffany’s.’
Page 39.
‘I don’t want to own anything until I know I’ve found the place where me and things gelong together.’
Page 40.
‘What’s wrong with a decent look at a guy you like? Men are beautiful, a lot of them are.’
Page 49.
On Monday, when I went down for the morning mail, the card on Holly’s box had been altered, a name added: Miss Golightly and Miss Wildwood were now travelling together.
Page 50.
Her bedroom was consistent with her parlour: it perpetuated the same camping-out atmosphere; crates and suitcases, everything packed and ready to go, like the belongings of a criminal who feels the law not far behind.
Page 51.
Holly had a laundry problem; the room was strewn, like a girls’ gymnasium.
Page 51.
Holly said she couldn’t bear to see anything in a cage.
Page 52.
She was forever on her way out, not always with Rusty Trawler, but usually, and usually, too, they were joined by Mag Wildwood and the handsome Brazilian, whose name was José Ybarra-Jaegar.
Page 54.
The average personality reshapes frequently, every few years even our bodies undergo a complete overhaul - desirable or not, it is a natural thing that we should change.
Page 55.
Holly was not a girl who could keep anything.
Page 57.
‘Everybody has to feel superior to somebody,’ she said. ‘But it’s customary to present a little proof before you take the privilege.’
Page 59.
She sat up on the army cot, her face, her naked breasts coldly blue in the sun-lamp light. ‘It should take you about four seconds to walk from here to the door. I’ll give you two.’
Page 60.
As April approached May, the open-windowed, warm spring nights were lurid with the party sounds, the loud-playing gramophone, and martini laughter that emanated from Apt. 1.
Page 61.
It was no novelty to encounter suspicious specimens among Holly’s callers, quite the contrary; but one day late that spring, while passing through the brownstone’s vestibule, I noticed a very provocative man examining her mailbox. A person in his early fifties with a hard, weathered face, grey forlorn eyes. He wore an old sweat-stained grey hat, and his cheap summer suit, a pale glue, hung too loosely on his lanky frame; his shoes were grown and grand-new. He seemed to have no intention of ringing Holly’s bell. Slowly, as though he were reading Braille, he kept rubbing a finger across the embossed lettering of her name.
Page 61.
He blinked, he frowned. ‘her name’s not Holly. She was a Lulamae Barnes. Was,’ he said, shifting the toothpick in his mouth, ‘till she married me. I’m her husband. Doc Golightly. I’m a horse doctor, animal man. Do some farming, too. Near Tulip, Texas.’
Page 63.
We must’ve had a hunnerd dollars’ worth of magazines come into that house. Ask me, that’s what done it. Looking at show-off pictures. Reading dreams. That’s what started her walking down the road. Every day she’d walk a little further: a mile, and come home. Two miles, and come home. One day she just kept on.’
Page 65.
‘I advised you I need a friend. Because I don’t want to surprise her. Scare her none. That’s why I’ve held off. Be my friend: let her know I’m here.’
Page 66.
For the first time since I’d known her, she seemed to feel a need to justify herself.
Page 68.
She smoothed her tousled hair, and the colours of it glimmered like a shampoo advertisement.
Page 68.
‘Never love a wild thing, Mr. Bell,’ Holly advised him. ‘That was Doc’s mistake. He was always lugging home wild things.’
Page 69.
A telegram from Tulip, Texas: Received notice young Fred killed in action overseas stop your husband and children join in the sorrow of our mutual loss stop letter follows love Doc.
Page 74.
José moved into the apartment, his name replacing Mag Wildwood’s on the mailbox.
Page 74.
Now … she rarely spoke a sentence that did not begin, ‘After we’re married – ‘ or ‘When we move to Rio – ‘ Yet Jos had never suggested marriage. She admitted it. ‘But, after all, he knows I’m preggers. Well, I am, darling. Six weeks gone. I don’t know why that should surprise you. It didn’t me.’
Pages 75-76.
‘I’d rather have cancer than a dishonest heart.’
Page 77.
‘Darling,’ she instructed me, ‘would you reach in the drawer there and give me my purse. A girl doesn’t read this sort of thing without her lipstick.’
Page 90.
‘All the badgers want from me is a couple of free grabs and my services as a state’s witness against Sally - nobody has any intention of prosecuting me, they haven’t a ghost of a case. Well, I may be rotten to the core, Maude, but: testify against a friend I will not.’
Page 93.
The sky was red Friday night, it thundered, and Saturday, departing day, the city swayed in a squall-like downpour. Sharks might have swum through the air, though it seemed improbably a plane could penetrate it.
Page 94.
Never mind why, but once I walked from New Orleans to Nancy’s Landing, Mississippi, just under five hundred miles. It was a light-hearted lark compared to the journey to Joe Bell’s bar.
Pages 95-96.
As the limousine swished uptown through a lessening rain, Holly stripped off her clothes, the riding costume she’d never had a chance to substitute, and struggled into a slim black dress.
Page 97.
‘I’m very scared, Buster. Yes, at last. Because it could go on for ever. Not knowing what’s hours until you’ve thrown it away.’
Page 99.
The owner of the brownstone sold her abandoned possessions, the white-satin bed, the tapestry, her precious Gothic chairs; a new tenant acquired the apartment, his name was Quaintance Smith, and he entertained as many gentlemen callers of a noisy nature as Holly ever had - though in this instance Madame Spanella did not object, indeed she doted on the young man and supplied filet mignon whenever he had a black eye.
Pages 99-100.
Mostly, I wanted to tell about her cat. I had kept my promise; I had found him. It took weeks of after-work roaming through those Spanish Harlem streets, and there were many false alarms - flashes of tiger-striped fur that, upon inspection, were not him. But one day, one cold sunshiny Sunday winter afternoon, it was. Flanked by potted plants and framed by clean lace curtains, he was seated in the window of a warm-looking room: I wondered what his name was, for I was certain he had one now, certain he’d arrived somewhere he belonged. African hut or whatever, I hope Holly has, too.
Page 100.
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Baby was her best friend; she had another friend too: Rosita. Baby was like a wheel, round, rolling; junk rings had left green circles on several of her fat fingers, her teeth were dark as burnt tree stumps, and when she laughed you could hear her at sea, at least so the sailors claimed. Rosita, the other friend, was taller than sot men, and stronger; at night, with the customers on hand, she minded about, lisping in a silly doll voice, but in the daytime she took spacious, loping strides and spoke out in a military baritone.
Page 103.
Ottilie was often afraid that her friends would discover that she could neither read nor write.
Page 104.
Though there was no sign outside, it was called the Champs-Elysées. The proprietress, a spinsterish, smothered-looking invalid, ruled from an upstairs room, where she stayed locked away rocking in a rocking chair and drinking ten to twenty Coca-Colas a day. All counted, she had eight ladies working for her; with the exception or Ottilie, no one of them was under thirty.
Page 104.
How do you feel if you’re in love? she asked. Ah, said Rosita with swooning eyes, you feel as though pepper has been sprinkled on your heart, as though tiny fish are swimming in your veins.
Page 105.
Unlike her friends, Ottilie did not tack Christian pictures on the walls of her room; she did not believe in God, but many gods: of food, light, of death, ruin.
Page 105.
A policeman friend cut a path for them and made room on a bench by the ring. The country people surrounding them seemed embarrassed to find themselves in such stylish company. They looked shyly at Baby’s lacquered nails, the rhinestone combs in Rosita’s hair, the glow of Ottilie’s pearl ear-rings.
Page 107.
Royal’s house was like a house of flowers; wistaria sheltered the roof, a curtain of vines shaded the windows, lilies gloomed at the door.
Page 111.
Each night the young couple waited to make love until they thought Old Bonaparte had gone to sleep.
Page 111.
Only men congregated at the café in the village, at the cockfights. When women wanted to meet they met at the washing stream.
Page 112.
They had been married about five months when Royal began doing the things he’d done before his marriage. Other men went to the café in the evenings, stayed whole Sundays at a cockfight.
Page 112.
The thing that finally made Ottilie threaten to kill her, was the old woman’s habit of sneaking up from nowhere and pinching her so hard you could see the fingernail marks.
Page 113.
Royal summoned mourners. They came form the village, from the neighbouring hills and, wailing like dogs at midnight, laid siege to the house. Old women beat their heads against the walls, moaning men prostrated themselves: it was the art of sorrow, and those who gest mimicked grief were much admired. After the funeral everyone went away, satisfied that they’d done a good job.
Page 115.
One night as they lay half-drowsing, Ottilie felt suddenly another presence in the room. Then, gleaming there at the foot of the bed, she saw, as she had seen before, a watching eye; thus she knew what for some time she had suspected: that Old Bonaparte was dead but not gone.
Pages 115-116.
Yes, said Ottilie, for the drama of it appealed to her. Tell them that I am dead.
Page 121.
Suddenly, hearing Royal on the path, she threw her legs akimbo, let her neck go limp, lolled her eyes far back into their sockets. Seen from a distance, it would look as though she had come to some violent, pitiful end; and, listening to Royal’s footsteps quicken to a run, she happily thought: This will give him a good scare.
Page 121.
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Mr. Schaeffer glanced up at the boy and smiled. He smiled at him longer than he meant to, for the boy had eyes like strips of sky - blue as the winter evening - and his hair was as gold as the captain’s teeth. He had a fun-loving face, nimble, clever; and, looking at him, Mr. Schaeffer thought of holidays and good times.
Page 127.
His voice with its Cuban accent was soft and sweet as a banana.
Page 127.
For a long while - for many years, in fact - he had not thought of how it was before he came to the farm. His memory of those times was like a house where no one lives and where the furniture has rotted away.
Page 128.
Recognizing his loneliness, he felt alive. He had not wanted to be alive. To be alive was to remember brown rivers where the fish run, and sunlight on a lady’s hair.
Page 128.
Mr. Schaeffer was the only one who understood their troubled feeling, for he felt it too. It was that his friend had revived the brown rivers where the fish run, and ladies with sunlight in their hair.
Page131.
Except that they did not combine their bodies or think to do so, though such things were not unknown at the farm, they were as lovers.
Page 131.
Tico Feo himself was never in better spirits; he sauntered about with a dancer’s snappy, gigolo grace, and had a joke for everyone.
Page 134.
While the other men were dressing, he sat on the edge of his cot and tuned the guitar. It was strange, for he must have known he would never play it again.
Pages 135-136.
A pair of searchlights has been added to the walls, and they burn there through the night like the eyes of a giant owl. Otherwise, there have not been many changes.
Page 138.
No one has ever disputed Mr. Schaeffer’s claim to the guitar. Several months ago a new prisoner was moved into the sleep house. He was said to be a fine player, and Mr. Schaeffer was persuaded to lend him the guitar. But all the man’s tunes came out sour, for it was as though Tico Feo, tuning his guitar that last morning, had put a curse upon it.
Page 138.
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She is sixty-something. We are cousins, very distant ones, and we have lived together - well, as long as I can remember. Other people inhabit the house, relatives. And though they have power over us, and frequently make us cry, we are not, on the whole, too much aware of hem. We are each other’s best friend. She calls me buddy, in memory of a boy who was formerly her best friend. The other Buddy died in the 1880s, when she was still a child. She is still a child.
Page 141.
It’s always the same: a morning arrives in November, and my friend, as though officially inaugurating the Christmas time of year that exhilarates her imagination and fuels the blaze of her heart, announces: ‘It’s fruitcake weather! Fetch our buggy. Help me find my hat.’
Page 142.
But one way and another we do each year accumulate Christmas savings, a Fruitcake Fund. These moneys we keep hidden in an ancient bead purse under a loose board under the floor, under a chamber pot under my friend’s bed.
Page 144.
Lovely dimes, the liveliest coin, the one that really jingles.
Page 145.
We’ve never laid eyes on her husband, though we’ve heard that he’s an Indian too. A giant with razor scars across his cheeks. They call him Haha because he’s so gloomy, a man who never laughs. As we approach his café (a large log cabin festooned inside and out with chains of arish-gay naked light bulbs and standing by the river’s muddy edge under het shade of rifer trees where moss drifts through the branches like grey mist) our stops slow down.
Page 146.
Is it because my friend is shy with everyone except strangers, that these strangers, and merest acquaintances, seem to us our truest friends?
Page 148.
We’re both quite awed at the prospect of drinking straight whisky; the taste of it brings screwed-up expressions and sour shudders.
Page 149.
We can’t afford the made-in-Japan splendours at the five-and-dime. So we do what we’ve always done: sit for days at the kitchen table with scissors and crayons and stacks or coloured paper.
Page 152.
Gradually in her letters she tends to confuse me with her other friend, the Buddy who died in the 1880s.
Page 156.
A morning arrives in November, a leafless birdless coming of winter morning, when she cannot rouse herself to exclaim: “Oh my, it’s fruitcake weather!”
Page 157.