Cold Cuts
A regular at Mambo's night club who works nights at the city morgue. He announces the day's suicides to the room as entertainment and asks only to be sent one Christmas card a year.
One Christmas card, so that once a year somebody thinks of him as a human being like any other. He asks Mambo for it outright.
The book
At a glance
- A regular at Mambo's night club, in one long scene
- Nights at the city morgue, from midnight
- Never explained. He is Cold Cuts throughout
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeCold Cuts appears in the night club section of A Spy in the House of Love, the 1954 novel by the French-born American writer Anaïs Nin. He is a minor figure with one long scene, and he is the closest thing the book has to comedy.
The painter Jay introduces him to Sabina as the best friend of the displaced artists drinking at Mambo's — a group Jay describes as transplanted plants at the wilting stage. Cold Cuts drinks with them until Mambo cuts him off, because he has to be at the morgue at midnight and sober enough to receive the dead politely.
What he brings to the table is the day's deaths, delivered as anecdotes. What he asks in return is one Christmas card a year, which is the point at which the joke stops being a joke.
This profile is drawn from the Swallow Press edition of 1995, read in the Internet Archive's scan of the book.
How the book draws them
- The introductionJay presents him to Sabina as the exiles' best friend, in the middle of a speech comparing transplanted people to plants dying of a change of soil.
- The jobHe works nights at the morgue. He explains that at midnight he must be fit to receive the dead politely, without stuttering or bungling anything, because the dead are sensitive.
- Cut off earlyHe notices that Mambo has stopped serving him sooner than usual and works out why: Mambo does not want him to lose the job. He says he should not be so loyal to him.
- Wrestling the microphoneLeft in charge of announcements, he cannot keep the stand upright. It yields and sways under his embrace like a flexible young reed, and it looks as though the two of them will end up on the floor together.
- The suicide he brings to the tableHe offers the room a perfect suicide for exiles: a European singer, pampered in her own country, who strangled herself with all her coloured scarves tied together. Jay reconstructs the scene around it — the trunk of old programmes, the yellowed love letters — and Cold Cuts agrees that is exactly how it happened.
- "She hung herself on the umbilical cord of the past."His verdict on the singer, delivered in the same breath as the reconstruction, and the best line he gets.
- The Christmas cardHe explains what he cannot stand about the work: nobody wants to be reminded of death, so nobody sends him a card. He asked Mambo to send one and Mambo promised, then started drumming, and once Mambo is drumming nothing can sober him up.