Chapter 2 Breakfast at Tiffany's-2

Then: "You recall a certain Mr. IY Yunioshi? A gentleman from Japan." "From California," I said, recalling Mr. Yunioshi perfectly. Hes a photographer onone of the picture magazines, and when I knew him he lived in the studio apartment on the top floor of the brownstone. "Dont go mixing me up. All Im asking, you know who I mean? Okay. So lastnight who comes waltzing in here but this selfsame Mr. IY Yunioshi. I havent seenhim, I guess its over two years. And where do you think he's been those two years?" "Africa." Joe Bell stopped crunching on his Tums, his eyes narrowed. "So how did you know?"

"Read it in Winchell." Which I had, as a matter of fact. He rang open his cash register, and produced a manila envelope. "Well, see did you read this in Winchell." In the envelope were three photographs, more or less the same, though taken from different angles: a tall delicate Negro man wearing a calico skirt and with a shy,yet vain smile, displaying in his hands an odd wood sculpture, an elongated carving of a head , a girls, her hair sleek and short as a young mans, her smooth wood eyestoo large and tilted in the tapering face, her mouth wide, overdrawn, not unlikeclown-lips. On a glance it resembled most primitive carving; , for here was the spit-image of Holly Golightly, at least as much of a likeness as a darkstill thing could be.

"Now what do you make of that?" said Joe Bell, satisfied with my puzzlement. "It looks like her." "Listen, boy," and he slapped his hand on the bar, "it is her. Sure as Im a man fitto wear britches. The little Jap knew it was her the minute he saw her." "He saw her? In Africa?" "Well. Just the statue there. But it comes to the same thing. Read the facts for yourself," he said, turning over one of the photographs. On the reverse was written: Wood Carving, S Tribe, Tococul, East Anglia, Christmas Day, 1956. He said, "Heres what the Jap says," and the story was this: On Christmas day Mr.

Yunioshi had passed with his camera through Tococul, a village in the tangles of nowhere and of no interest, merely a congregation of mud huts with monkeys in the yards and buzzards on the roofs. Hed decided to move on when he saw suddenly a Negro squatting in a doorway carving monkeys on a walking stick. Mr. Yunioshi was impressed and asked to see more of his work. Whereupon he was shown the carving of the girls head: and felt, so he told Joe Bell, as if he were falling in a dream. offered to buy it the Negro cupped his private parts in his hand (apparentlya tender gesture, comparable to tapping ones heart) and said no. A pound of salt and ten dollars, a wristwatch and two pounds of salt and twenty dollars, nothingswayed him. . Yunioshi was in all events determined to learn how the carving came to be made. It cost him his salt and his watch, and the incident was conveyed in African and pig-English and finger-talk. But it would seem that in the spring of thatyear a party of three White persons had appeared out of the brush riding horseback.