Part 3
5
THE BEGINNING AS DREAM
The strange thing about dreams is not so much what happens in them, but what one feels in them. In dreams there are new categories of emotion. In all dreams, even bad ones, there is a sense of imminent resolution such as one scarcely ever experiences when awake. By resolution I mean the answering of all questions. In my dream we were crossing a city. The city might have been London; it was a city, anyway, which was familiar; a city in which everything was interesting, in which everything was both striking and intimate. I was crossing this city in a bus and at the beginning I was on top of the bus (it was a double-decker bus without a roof). At the beginning of the journey in the bus it was dusk or night. I remember the coldness of the air outside, the coldness of the wind which swept over the seats on top of the bus without a roof, and at the same time the affirmative warmth of myself in my clothes. The bus passed through many streets with crowds of people, lights, cinemas, underground railway stations. It was a long journey and we had an appointment at the other end of the city, an appointment which at that moment it seemed important to keep. But after we had been travelling for about an hour, it became clear that although this bus was going in the right direction, it was taking a much longer time than we could possibly have imagined. And so I decided that we would get off the bus at the next stop, in a crowded place where we might be able to find a taxi. We would go the rest of the way by taxi. Deciding this in no way made me regret what we had done; it had nevertheless been a good idea to take the bus. No sooner had I made this decision than the bus left the main thoroughfares and drove, without stopping now, along narrow back streets beneath warehouses, bridges and high brick walls that we couldn’t see over. These were the outskirts of the city, still familiar, still intimate, still a pleasure to see. And I had the sense that we were getting near an estuary or perhaps even the sea. By now it was clear that the route the bus was taking was the wrong one; it was more than that even, it was a route that had been abandoned, yes, that is how it felt to me, although I did not formulate it in my dream quite like that. And yet in riding in this bus which was following an abandoned route there was still the same strong sense of rightness. And this was confirmed when the high wall beside the bus suddenly disappeared and there was a view of water below, with ships along the quayside and, nearer than the ships, a pool of vivid green light on the water, across which a white bird, a huge white bird flew. It didn’t fly like a swan; it flew, not with its legs tucked up but with its legs hanging down, its neck curved not stretched straight out, its big, heavy wings, rather clumsy, white, tinged with green reflexions from the water beneath it. It was a vision of a bird such as I had never known before. And it was enough to justify, to explain everything else that had happened and was happening or would happen. The bus didn’t stop. We sat back in our seats, the cold night air blowing against our faces.
And then the bus, never going very fast, changed into a train, a train which we were responsible for driving. There was nothing very complicated mechanically about this. We were now in the front of the vehicle and it was running along lines, still following or continuing the same route as the bus had taken. I keep on saying ‘we’ because I wasn’t by myself, but I wasn’t with any other specific people either, I was in the first person plural. We were now in front of the train which was running a little faster along a single track. Although we were in a deep cutting with high stone walls (or were they brick? they were black brick), although we were in this cutting, I had a sense of being at a very high altitude.
I saw a bend in the line ahead. I wasn’t the one who was driving at this moment, but I was looking up at the configuration of the lines of bricks at the top of the cutting wall, high above us, and I could tell by the way that they were converging that round this next bend the cutting would open out and that we would be flooded with light. It was now no longer night. The fact that I could read this in the walls gave me a great sense of satisfaction (although perhaps partly my pleasure came from my anticipation of that opening out and the bright light which was awaiting us round the bend). The train was now going fast. As we turned the bend, there, as I had foreseen, the cutting walls fell away. We were high up, high up, above a whole landscape and a whole bay, a bay of the sea—an idyllic landscape, blue sea, hills, gentle beaches, woods. All laid out below us. But at the same moment as we turned the bend we saw that the lines of the railway descended at an extremely sharp angle, like the lines of a switchback train; and not only this, we saw that they led, several hundred feet below, straight into the sea.
This constituted one of those moments of imminent resolution of which I spoke. The end of the line, like this, leading into the sea, explained the strange nature of all our previous journey and the reason why the route had been abandoned. The view beneath us was of an ineffable beauty, which made even more sense of the whole journey than the white bird had. The white bird in that small circle of light. And now the whole landscape and seascape beneath us. There was no question of stopping the train. For an instant we were balanced at the top of the steep descent, and then we began to descend, fast and dangerously. This had been foreseeable from the very instant that we had turned the corner but had in no way diminished my pleasure. And although there was a grave inevitability about the end we were approaching, it seemed neither tragic nor pathetic. To the rest of us I shouted out: Swim! as we hurtled down. The train disappeared deep under the water. I was not drowned. But some of us (belonging to my first person plural) were.
‘The progress of today in every field is nothing else but the absurd of yesterday.’
Today I wish to write about an event which took place in September 1910.
The Aero Club of Milan had offered a prize of £3,000 to the first man to fly over the Alps. Geo Chavez, twenty-four years old, a Peruvian already famous in the aviation world, has been waiting for several days in Brig, beneath the Simplon Pass in Switzerland, for the weather to improve. Several other competitors are also waiting.
Most of the pilots are of the opinion that it is already too late to attempt the flight this year; June or July would be more suitable months. During the last five days they have made trial flights, climbing to over a thousand metres but then returning to the small field called Siberia where canvas hangars have been erected. All of them have complained of the treachery of the air currents which tug at their planes as soon as they approach the entrance to the massif: all except Weymann, the American, who wears a pince-nez and says about everything that you have to get used to it.
A few weeks ago, Chavez broke the world altitude record. Across the Alps there is no need to climb as high as he did then. Yet the mountains appear to constitute an absolute frontier. The buildings of Brig crouch low on the ground before them. The mountains induce the idea that there is nothing beyond them. To believe that Italy and Domodossola are on the far side is an act of faith, supported, it is true, by the traffic on the Simplon road and by history, for it was near here that Hannibal and Napoleon crossed the Alps with their armies, but denied by the five senses within whose pentagon each man is alone.
I quote from the report by Luigi Barzini, a well-known Italian journalist, in the Corriere della Sera of 23 September 1910: ‘This morning around ten o’clock the news from the Simplon was not at all encouraging. On the north side the weather was calm. But a wind was blowing through the valley at the bottom of which, like white stones after a landslide, were the small snow-covered houses of the village. On the Monscera and in Italy the weather was splendid.
‘ “I would like very much to go,” Chavez told me sadly, “I will never find better weather conditions on the Italian side.”
‘He kept on telephoning his friend Christiaens who was making meteorological observations on the Kulm.
‘All of a sudden Chavez says: “I must go and see. A car.” We took a racing car belonging to a young American and sped up the mountain, deafened by the roar of the engine, and hanging on to our very seats so as not to be thrown out at the corners.
‘A very strong east wind was blowing against the very highest peaks, at perhaps 3,000 metres, dragging clouds along with it. But lower down the weather was perfect. The trees were still. The smoke of fires lit by tourists in the woods was rising slowly into the sky. It was not too cold, although above 1,300 metres everything was white with snow …
‘Chavez looked around him, studying the air. A continuous working of his jaw showed that he was grinding his teeth. Nothing else showed that he was preoccupied or anxious. He had not shaved, he had got up quickly in the morning and he had just forgotten this detail of his toilet in the dawn of the victorious day.
‘He spoke little. He asked the time. “I must go,” he exclaimed. And after a few minutes he added, “If I can’t get through, I’ll land at the Simplon Hospice, I’ll certainly be able to get as far as that.”
‘Christiaens climbed into the car and exchanged a few words with the aviator—serious words.
‘ “The wind?” asked Chavez.
‘ “There’s still wind,” Christiaens replied.
‘ “No chance of going through?”
‘ “No.”
‘ “What’s the wind speed?”
‘ “Fifteen and increasing.”
‘In the valley of Krummbach the pines were moving and the grass was bent low under the icy wind.
‘ “It’s very strong!” said Chavez, “it’s making the pines sway and it takes some wind to do that …”
‘A car was coming up from the valley. It was Paulhan, who had gone ahead to explore. We stopped and Paulhan told us that towards the Monscera the weather was absolutely calm. The two aviators became engrossed studying the likely air currents.
‘The wind was blowing from the Fletschhorn, which was covered in snow.
‘ “It’s not very likely to change,” said Paulhan, “and the currents will make whirlpools. If you get caught in one of them—.” An eloquent gesture concluded the sentence.
‘Chavez and Paulhan climbed a few hundred metres towards the Hubschhorn and then watched from there for a few minutes. The wind seemed less strong. Coming down Chavez was torn by doubts.
‘ “Wait till tomorrow,” said Christiaens.
‘ “I’m going now,” Chavez said suddenly, “let’s go quickly to Brig.” ’
He must dress accordingly. There are no rules save his own. But these he has repeatedly checked with himself, so that what he is doing does not seem to him to be for the first time. Nothing will seem original from now on—except his luck over which he has no control, and his welcome when he lands in Milan. He puts on a tight-fitting suit of thick Chinese paper—the same kind of paper which the great Chinese calligraphers used to write on. The sight of his own legs as he dresses encourages him. He has been a champion runner. Before a race he has many times felt the weakness in his legs which he feels now and which is not a weakness but is a waiting for the beginning. On an impulse he asks one of the mechanics in the hangar to lend him a pencil and he writes on the paper on both legs: Vive Chavez! Over the paper suit he puts on water-proof working overalls, specially quilted with cotton, then some sweaters, and on top a leather shooting jacket.
When everything was checked and the cloths wrapped round the pipes against the cold, Chavez prepared to take off. He glanced at the mountains; against the blue sky they looked nearer than they had ever done during the last week. He glanced across at the spectators along the side of the field: he was determined not to come back and land once more in Siberia.
There’s a priest over there, he said to one of his mechanics, all we need now is a gravedigger.
He waved to his friends. He is enclosed, made secure, by the familiar deafening roar of the engine, which after a run of sixty yards lifts him into the air.
The spectators see the plane take off and gain height easily and well. The engine sounds regular. They look up at the plane with its elegant curved wings against the sky and in different ways they all think of it as a bird. But when Chavez heads for the entrance to the massif, they lose sight of the plane. It totally disappears from view.
He has crashed! someone shouts.
He has gone into the hillside where the pine-trees are.
He can’t have done, he was higher than that.
You can’t tell.
Look! Look! There he is.
Where?
About half-way up the forest!
And they find the plane again. But it is no longer like a bird in the sky. Against the greyish pine-trees and then against the grey shale face, it is like a moth, but a moth that can no longer fly and is crawling slowly across the surface of a grey window.
Chavez is fighting the wind that is already blowing him too far to the east, but he is also fighting a sense of unreality. He has never flown like this: the more he gains height, the lower he is: it is the mountain that is gaining height.
When it was clear that this was not another trial flight, the news was telephoned to the cities of Europe. In Milan a white flag was run up on the roof of the Duomo. This was the agreed sign that an aviator had taken off from Brig to cross the Alps with the intention of coming to Milan. As soon as he had crossed the mountains, a red flag would go up. In the piazza round the cathedral a crowd began to collect. Whilst waiting for the red flag to be hoisted, they chatted and often glanced up at the sky. In spirit and formation this crowd was very different from the crowd which had assembled in the piazza in May 1898.
The Hotel Victoria in Brig is full of journalists, flying enthusiasts and friends of the competitors. Among them is the principal protagonist of this book, whom I will now call, for the sake of convenience, G.
He is twenty-three years old and a friend of Charles Weymann, the American pilot with the pince-nez.
A few months previously he flew as Weymann’s passenger in one of the first night flights ever made. Weymann had been impressed by his calm and his good navigating sense. Unexpectedly clouds had obscured the moon and the sudden total darkness had compelled them to make a forced landing in unknown hilly country. It was an experience, Weymann was reported by the press as saying, that I would rather not have again. But it would have been a damn sight worse if I’d been alone.
Weymann found it hard to understand why his young friend, who was an enthusiast for flying, didn’t want to learn to fly himself. I’m willing to teach you, he said, and they’re lining up for that privilege in Pau and New York.
G. was recognizably the same person as the boy of fifteen. Beatrice would have recognized him at once. But his complexion was sallower and his face thinner, which made his nose appear larger than before. When he smiled the gaps of his missing teeth still made him leer.
It would be different, said Weymann in his slow American voice, if you had no money. You need money to fly. But I guess you have plenty.
I have too many other interests.
What are your other interests? What do you do?
He smiled at Weymann ironically, for he knew that Weymann was a man incapable of discovering the truth even when it was placed in front of him. I travel, he said.
The pince-nez magnified the simplicity of the American’s blue eyes. Exactly, he said, so you could fly. You have the attitude and the determination, the two things needed.
Weymann counted the two on the fingers of his hand.
I am too impatient. I wouldn’t last a month by myself.
You need to be quick, said Weymann. He was small, dapper and wore a bow tie.
My mind would be on other things.
Such as? asked Weymann, his eyes open wide.
The maid who serves us breakfast.
She’s sweet, conceded Weymann, his eyes blinking.
She fills my life.
But we’ve only been here a day.
She’s engaged to a clerk who works in the Town Hall and they are going to get married at Christmas.
You’re joking, said Weymann, beginning to suspect that he was being teased.
No, said G.
Weymann spoke like a patient schoolmaster: We are making history. We are pioneers, we are the first to open a new chapter. I guess we are a little mad. But how can you compare what we are doing—the early birds like us—with a twenty-four-hour infatuation with a little Swiss waitress whom you haven’t even spoken to. How can you put one before the other like that. You’re not a schoolboy. You’re not being serious. I just can’t believe you. He grasped his companion’s arm. Tell me what your worry is.
Whether she got my note before lunch.
Weymann burst out laughing. He had decided that since this ugly, intense young man (whom he liked because of what they had experienced together) did not want to talk truthfully about himself, it was better to stop talking. His laugh was a way of withdrawing from the conversation. Poker tonight? he asked.
The next day Weymann said to another friend: He’s so damned secretive. I don’t know what he is up to. I can’t make out whether he’s interested in the money or the adventure—or both, like us, I guess.
The news that Chavez has taken off with the determination not to turn back arrives at the Hotel Victoria during lunch. Everybody rushes out on to the terrace to see the plane as it flies down the Rhone valley before turning south towards the massif. They shout and wave.
After a week of false rumours and disappointments everyone was reconciled to the idea that the Alps would not be crossed by an aeroplane this year. Why does it not occur to them that this attempt may end in disappointment too, that Chavez when he approaches the Saltina gorge may find the currents too strong and be forced to turn back? Perhaps because it is the last chance: tomorrow everyone is leaving: and so they seize upon the last hope of an event. Perhaps also because they have seen Chavez, they have watched him for a week and they have read his face. This is not to talk of his fate but of his character.
Chavez sees the crowd on the terrace below but does not wave back to them. He feels superstitious. The next time he waves must be on arrival.
During the last week many peasants have come to Brig in the hope of seeing a flying machine disappear over the mountains. And now the hotel staff, the waiters, the maids, the cook, the dishwashers, the gardener and his wife, appear to be as excited as the guests. There are many elements in such excitement—curiosity, the uncertainty of the outcome, a vicarious sense of achievement because they have all been near to the man they can see in the sky; but what may be deepest is the satisfaction of witnessing, and so of taking part in, what they believe will be an historic occasion. This is a very primitive satisfaction, connecting the time of one’s own life with the time of one’s ancestors and descendants. The great pole of history is notched across at the same point as the small stick of one’s own life.
When G. left the dining-room, he did not go out on to the terrace but ran to the courtyard at the back of the hotel, where there was a large wooden building. Its ground floor was open like a barn, and there was a stone trough and a fountain around which the hotel laundry was washed. Above, on the second storey, were the maids’ rooms. She was standing on the outside wooden staircase, gazing up at the sky. He called her by name—Leonie! and held out his hand to indicate that she should come down. Taking her by the arm, he told her to be quick: they would see best from the balcony of his room.
She might then have declined. It was the weakest moment of his strategy. She knew perfectly well that two things were happening at the same time: the plane was flying overhead like a bird, and the man who had pursued her with notes, with jokes, with whispered conversations, with declarations of love and extravagant compliments during five days was now hurrying her up into his room; more than that, she knew that he knew that she had two hours off duty every afternoon. She followed him because the unusualness of both the things which were happening confirmed that the occasion was exceptional. The noise of the engine, the excited shouting and the fact that everybody, with their backs turned towards her, was pointing up at the sky, encouraged her to take advantage of her normal, unexceptional self. He stood at the doorway to let her pass and it was as though under his cover she slipped past this self. On the stairs she began to giggle.
In his room she fell silent. He strode across the floor and flung open the French windows on to the balcony above the crowded terrace. The plane was banking as it turned, and both of them in the room could see the silhouetted head and shoulders of Chavez, smaller than a boot-button.
Leonie was frightened to come near to the window lest somebody on the terrace, looking up, caught sight of her. She stood well back from the window in the middle of the room, without any possibility of pretending any more that they were there to watch the plane heading for the mountains. (She could have fled the room, you say. Yet she was not frivolous. He had proposed nothing to her yet. She knew parts of what be would propose. She was neither frivolous nor naive. But there was the other part, his proposal to her exceptional self, that self which was surrounded by life other than her own as the receding roar of the aircraft engine was surrounded by silent air.)
Within an instant he had shut the windows and had turned round to face her. That he had succeeded, that it was indeed she, Leonie, who was standing there, looking with uncertainty at him, was established once and for all in his mind by the most characteristic facts about her: her large fingers, her broad squashed-looking nose, the coarse stringy wisps of hair escaping from under her maid’s cap, her peasant’s unpowdered complexion with, to the left of her chin, a pale slight discoloration the size of a small fingernail, her rounded shoulders and bosom, her brown eyes the colour of dark wood. He scarcely noticed the features which had made Weymann call her sweet, for these she had in common with many others.
He put his arms round her. She stood there, her cheek against his chest, waiting. She listened to his words. My heart. My happiness. My brown-eyed lamb. Leonie, Queen of the Alps. (But such words recorded for a third person lose their precision and their outrageous eloquence.) She was passive neither in her listening nor in her apparent submission to his will. She was constructing, precisely and furiously, the meaning of what had happened to her.
A week ago she had never seen him nor even imagined a man like him. He was rich. He was the friend of men who flew aeroplanes. He bad flown in an aeroplane himself. He travelled from country to country. He spoke a peculiar German. He had a face like a man in a story. She counted on none of these facts for what they might say in themselves. They were merely items of proof that he was different from anybody else who had spoken to her. Yet, if this had been all, she would have attached no great significance to his being different. Her expectations in life were modest. She knew very well that the world was full of people who were utterly different from the townspeople of Brig or the peasants of the Valais, and that they could have nothing to say or do with her. But he—and this is what so profoundly impressed her—addressed himself to her, Leonie. For a week he had concentrated on nothing else but seeking her out, offering her presents and compliments, talking with her and demonstrating to her her own uniqueness. Like all people who are not set upon deceiving themselves, Leonie was able to distinguish intuitively between sincerity and insincerity. She knew that he was not lying to her, even if she remained ignorant of the truth he was telling her. She could distinguish, too, as most women can, between a man who is begging for favours, or, alternatively, may try to grasp them, and a man who, in face of a particular woman, is compelled to present himself to her as he is. This is some of what she meant when she said to herself: he has come for me.
When Zeus, in order to approach a woman he had fallen in love with, disguised himself as a bull, a satyr, an eagle, a swan, it was not only to gain the advantage of surprise: it was to encounter her (within the terms of those strange myths) as a stranger. The stranger who desires you and convinces you that it is truly you in all your particularity whom he desires, brings a message from all that you might be, to you as you actually are. Impatience to receive that message will be almost as strong as your sense of life itself. The desire to know oneself surpasses curiosity. But he must be a stranger, for the better you, as you actually are, know him, and likewise the better he knows you, the less he can reveal to you of your unknown but possible self. He must be a stranger. But equally he must be mysteriously intimate with you, for otherwise instead of revealing your unknown self, he simply represents all those who are unknowable to you and for whom you are unknowable. The intimate and the stranger. From this contradiction in terms, this dream, is born the great erotic god which every woman in her imagination either feeds or starves to death.
When he answered Weymann’s question: what do you do? by saying: I travel, the answer was neither superficial nor evasive. The constant stranger must continually travel.
For a moment longer her arms hung straight at her side. Out of the window she could see the sky above the mountains, September blue, familiar as the colour of a plate. The Blériot engine was still just audible.
The plane fell fifty metres, like a dead plaice dropped. Chavez wanted to turn back. What prevented him was what he had previously said to himself even although, at the time of saying it, it was unimaginable to him that his plane might drop like a dead fish.
Never again will a single story be told as though it were the only one.
Her upbringing and education at home, at school and in church has prepared her for the situation she now finds herself in. She must reject this unknown man who is about to ruin her life. She must save her honour. She must guard herself, her womanhood, for her beloved Eduard who has courted her for two years and with whom she will live in the house near the river where he keeps the beehives, and who will be the father to her children who will go to the same school in Brig as she went to. She is in danger of mortal sin. She must resist the evil temptation. In this way Leonie had been prepared. She must think of her own mother and of what she would wish for her daughter now. She, the daughter of her mother, she, the child of God, she, the promise of her beloved Eduard, she, the bride of her bridegroom in two months’ time, she, the mother of her future children, she, the elder sister of her younger sisters, she must preserve her honour as daughter, Christian, promise, bride, mother, sister. But she as I? I, Leonie, what should I do to preserve my honour? I did not know what to do. For this she had not been prepared. In her life as it is she cannot kiss this man. But he is not in her life; he is outside it. I was alone with him. There was nobody else. She will never again, she senses, be in the arms of a man outside her life. It was like a dream. What she does with him is not part of her life—although others will consider it so and its consequences may continue all her lifetime. What she does with him will be the doing of that part of her which is not in her life. My weakness was stronger than I was.
He slid his hands down her back until they were under her buttocks. Then slowly and deliberately he lifted her up. Her feet left the ground. He lowered her, but not so that her feet took her full weight.
She had the sensation that wherever his hands went they lifted her and took away some of her weight. He was putting his hands between her and gravity. She looked up into his eyes, which were entirely concentrated upon her. He was smiling and the gaps in his teeth looked as dark as his eyes. Although she could still recognize the sunlight streaming through the window, she could believe that there was a black curtain behind her back, black like his eyes and the gaps in his teeth, and that this black curtain was being slowly drawn around them until finally it would be like a black round tent. She felt him touching the parts of her which were naturally down-weighted, heavy, pendant, and each time he touched them he lifted them up and took away some of their weight. It was then that she put her arms round him.
His hands, which had counteracted the pull of gravity on all those parts of her body of whose mass—however slight—she could be conscious, had a further effect. Within the mass of each of these parts she felt a force of attraction, drawing it, not yet continually but in broken impulses, towards him and the larger mass of his body. (The sensation was comparable to the obvious one in her breasts but was deeper and more diffused.)
She began to repeat his name.
Any attempt at an exhaustive description of what she was experiencing is bound to be absurd. The experience was central to her life: everything that she had been, surrounded her present experience as land surrounds a lake. Everything that she had been was turned to sand and shelved at the borders of this experience to disappear beneath its waters and become its unseen, mysterious lake bed. To express her experience it would be necessary for us to reconstruct around ourselves her unique language. And this is impossible. Armed with the entire language of literature we are still denied access to her experience. There is only one possible way of, briefly, entering that experience: to make love to her. Then why do I want to describe her experience exhaustively, definitively, when I fully recognize the impossibility of doing so? Because I love her. I love you, Leonie. You are beautiful. You are gentle. You can feel pain and pleasure. You are tiny and I take you in my hand. You are large as the sky and I walk under you. It was he who said this.
He placed her seated on the bed and went to the door. From the bed she held out her arms to him.
No, he said, not like drunken peasants.
The sudden harshness of his words did not hurt or surprise her. She simply waited to see what he would do next.
He told her to undress. She hesitated—not because she was unwilling but because she did not know how she should undress with him watching her. He started taking his own clothes off. She undid the buttons of her cuffs but no more. He stood there on the far side of the room, naked. She had often swept and cleaned this room. He stood there naked. Remembering the past, remembering that she had washed the curtains which he had just pulled across the window, she lowered her head.
Leonie, look up. He sees you. Look at him seeing you. You are being seen as you are. When you were born, before you opened your round crinkled mouth and cried out, you were first seen, not as yourself, but as the alternative to a boy. Their eyes went to your sex—a line drawn on your pink damp tummy—before they looked at your expanding eyes. You were a girl and they called you Leonie. Look, his looking surrounds you. He recognizes you as each mirror you have ever stopped in front of has reflected you. The mirror reflects: he recognizes. He stands naked seeing you. As you bend forward to take off your worn slip with a hole in it under one arm, he sees your two breasts fall forward not quite silently.
Your image covers the entire surface of his body like another skin. All your appearances surround his penis.
You have never seen yourself like this.
Looking at you he recognizes you. His recognition cannot be put out. It burns what it recognizes. And by the light of its burning it recognizes more and more until it is so bright that it recognizes as familiar what it has never seen.
He has never seen you naked and now you are.
Some say of my writing that it is too overburdened with metaphor and simile: that nothing is ever what it is but is always like something else. This is true, but why is it so? Whatever I perceive or imagine amazes me by its particularity. The qualities it has in common with other things—leaves, a trunk, branches, if it is a tree: limbs, eyes, hair, if it is a person—appear to me to be superficial. I am deeply struck by the uniqueness of each event. From this arises my difficulty as a writer—perhaps the magnificent impossibility of my being a writer. How am I to convey such uniqueness? The obvious way is to establish uniqueness through development. To persuade you, for example, of the uniqueness of Leonie’s experience by telling you the story of what happened when Eduard discovered that Leonie had been unfaithful to him. In this way the uniqueness of an event can be explained by its causes and effects. But I have little sense of unfolding time. The relations which I perceive between things—and these often include casual and historical relations—tend to form in my mind a complex synchronic pattern. I see fields where others see chapters. And so I am forced to use another method to try to place and define events. A method which searches for co-ordinates extensively in space, rather than consequentially in time. I write in the spirit of a geometrician. One of the ways in which I establish co-ordinates extensively is by likening aspect with aspect, by way of metaphor. I do not wish to become a prisoner of the nominal, believing that things are what I name them. On the bed they were not such prisoners.
On the road across the Kulm pass Chavez sees figures waving to him. Among them are Christiaens and Luigi Barzini. In a few hours the Corriere della Sera will carry a report of this moment.
‘A profound emotion nails us to the spot. We do not move. We are lifeless, our souls shining in our eyes, and our hearts beating fast. We are spellbound by the great beauty of what we are seeing. A thousand years of life cannot annul this memory.
‘After a few seconds we jump back into the car. Christiaens is beside us. Two Swiss police climb in also—and we are away! We look at each other; our eyes are red. The Swiss guards too have tears in their eyes as they mutter germanically: Mein Gott, mein Gott. The plane is now just about to enter the Krummbach valley which two hours ago was rent by wind and lightning. It is above the fields around the hospice. It looks as though he is losing height.
‘ “He’s landing,” we yell. “There he is! He’s landing!”
‘It is clear that the aviator has a moment of doubt. He may be thinking of landing; then he decides that the wind is not as terrible as he feared and he continues…’
All pilots at that time took their bearings from what they could see on the ground. And the ground reassured them, for on it they could expect to land and to receive help. When Blériot, the year before, had flown the Channel, a French destroyer had escorted him. Briefly, for about ten minutes, he lost contact with the ship and saw only the sea; he said afterwards that during those long minutes he had felt terrifyingly alone. Chavez’ decision now makes him the first man to fly deliberately beyond the sight and reach of other men.
The cold surrounds him like the four walls of a cell; but the cold also enters the cell. One wall presses relentlessly and continually against him. The right side of his face and body are icy. It is the wall of the wind: the wind which he once (twenty minutes ago) so wrongly under-estimated. The wrong no longer appears to him a matter of miscalculation but of transgression. It is the original sin to explain his life, now identical with this flight. The wall opposite that of the wind is made of rock and snow.
On his left he can see Monte Leone. The snow, white in the sunlight, both emphasizes the presence of the mountain and transforms it into a kind of absence.
Not a stain would remain on that white.
He tries to break through the wall of wind. Whenever he turns to the right, the roar of the Gnome engine becomes louder, because the wind blows it back at him, but the plane hangs almost stationary in the air. He has lost height which he must regain if he is to cross the Monscera. Yet he is frightened to climb. The wind above him is stronger than the wind blowing at him and it blows up there from all directions at once. It is bad when the plane drops, but it is even worse when it is lifted up by the wind. Then his own legs, his own feet in their boots above the engine move in a sickening way: the linen on the top surface of the wings blisters irregularly as though the wind had already torn holes on its underside.
Below the shoulders of Monte Leone and much nearer to him, the lower mountains rise like the broken eroded galleries of a semicircular amphitheatre in which he is alone in the centre.
He remembers Paulhan’s last words of advice: Keep high! Keep high! The words have become absurd.
His immediate difficulty will be to clear the far ridge of the amphitheatre after he has flown across the arena. The wind is edging him further and further into the semi-circle, towards the blind galleries. If he can clear the ridge where it breaks (west of the Glatthorn), there will be worse difficulties to face. He is too far east and he believes he has to climb three or four hundred metres to cross the Monscera. The wind, holding him down, and forcing him to the east, is cornering him and the corner where it will smash him to pieces will be in the gorge of the Gondo.
He must have considered whether he should turn into the wind and circle the arena to gain height. Yet, I believe, the idea of turning round, even momentarily, filled him with horror. If he once circled this theatre of blind gulleys and ridges, he would never break out of the circle but would die in it when his engine stopped. He would rather fight in a corner.
He can no longer distinguish between rock and silence. The surfaces of his body are by now completely numb from the cold. The most that his consciousness can oppose to the rocks which surround him is air and the noise of the engine at his feet. He flies on towards the Glatthorn like an arrow towards its target.
He is beside a rock face which is like the loose hide of a gigantic mule stretched across the frame of the letter A and, apparently, blown inwards, between the legs of the letter, by the same wind which is blowing against him and his plane. On the mule-hide of this rock Chavez sees the shadow of his wings, sometimes lurching away, sometimes rushing towards him as the shadow crosses folds. Looking down he sees rock rising up at him. Ahead he can see higher peaks still. Reverberating and echoing against the rock beside and below him, the noise of his engine falls and rises like his shadow, and his shadow seems to clatter with the noise of his engine and of falling stones.
Here there could have been no question of conscious decisions.
Here I cannot calculate as I write.
Chavez has the impression that he is about to enter the jaws of an animal whose passages and gullet and stomach and arse are made of solid rock, an animal whose digestion is geological. An animal that can kill before it is alive, and eat when it is dead.
Here it is not a matter of courage or the lack of it; here men divide themselves into those who still want to live and those who do not. Which they are may be revealed in the way they scream. Some ascend with their screams; some die with them. Chavez climbed, indifferent to the risk of stalling, indifferent to everything, except to the necessity of escaping from the jaws of the animal: upwards.
He was in the Gondo.
At Domodossola, in communication with Brig by telephone, everyone waits. The factories have stopped work. The workers are watching the sky. The old forego their siesta. The young are making their way to the field where Chavez will land, refuel and then take off for Milan. On every balcony and in every window which has a view of the Ossola valley, green, peaceful but climbing up to pine forests and then to rocks, people stand, eyes half-shut, staring into the sky above the Alps. There is no wind.
It is a tragedy! We ought to be able to see him by now.
Perhaps he has turned back.
But he crossed the Simplon.
How do you know?
Roberto told us.
And Roberto?
Signor Lucchini, the clerk of the Mayor, came into the Garibaldi twenty minutes ago and said that he had passed the hospice.
Praise be to God.
Since this morning I knew it was going to be a tragedy. I dreamt about him last night.
That’s because you are in love with him.
To clap my eyes on him just once!
And we’ll all call out his name—Geo! Geo!
Thousands in Domodossola pick out the plane, minute against the pine forest. It is lower than they expected. With shouts the watchers try to quieten each other, so as to be able to hear the engine. It is too far away. Slowly the movement of the aeroplane becomes clear. It is coming down towards Domodossola.
Duray, racing-car driver and friend of Chavez, unrolls two lengths of white calico on the grass of the landing-field to make a cross, visible from the air; a crowd of boys compete to help him peg the cloth to the ground.
The plane is flying and losing height so regularly, so serenely, that all of those watching feel personally elated.
He is the first man to fly the Alps; he has done what was previously thought impossible. It is a momentous event that we are witnessing, yet, look! it is simpler than we imagined, he is flying straighter than a bird and effortlessly, and that is how he has flown over the Alps; achieving greatness is perhaps less hard than we have been led to believe. This sequence of feelings (formulated in many different ways) leads to a conclusion of sudden elation. Why can we not all achieve what we wish?
The Mayor, being driven in a car to the landing field and wearing his ceremonial robes in order to welcome the great aviator, announces to his companions on the back seat that the town will name a street after Chavez to commemorate his victory over the mountains.
An express train for Milan left Domodossola station at 14.18 hours. A young man in the train spots the Blériot monoplane through the carriage window and pulls the alarm signal. The train comes to a sudden halt. The young man jumps down on to the track and runs along the length of the train shouting to the other passengers to watch and pointing with his arm at the plane which is now only a little higher than the tree, and in which Chavez is clearly visible. When he reaches the locomotive, the young man stops and waves with both arms at the sky, hoping that Chavez will see him and wave back; he will then have been the first to salute the hero. But Chavez does not wave back. A fact about which the young man and his friends who were flying enthusiasts were to speculate for many years.
Leonie’s head is thrown back like a singer’s singing. Her eyes too have rolled back so that he sees only the whites of them, not the irises. Her mouth is open and her throat swollen. She makes a noise in her throat which is a word said very slowly but he does not decipher it.
Some cry, some lie motionless, some thump with their fists, some lie curled up, some push their tongues between their lips, some clench their brows and set their mouths in determination, some wave their hands and others open them until they are like starfish: no two are the same until they leave behaviour behind, until they come with him to that moment when everything is simultaneous and every one of them is there together.
He experiences every orgasm as though it were simultaneous with every other. All that has occurred or will occur between each, all the events, actions, causes and consequences which have and will separate in time woman from woman, surround this timeless moment as a circumference surrounds the circle it defines. All are there together. All despite all their differences are there together. He joins them.
Sexual desire, however it is provoked or produced circumstantially, and whatever its objective terms and duration may be, is subjectively fixed to two points in time: our beginning and our end. When analysed, sexual desire has components which are violently nostalgic and lead us as far back as the experience of birth itself: other components are the result of an ineradicable appetite for the unknown, the furthest away, the ultimate of life—which can finally only be found in its negation—death. At the moment of orgasm these two points in time, our beginning and our end, may seem to fuse into one. When this happens everything that lies between them, that is to say our whole life, becomes instantaneous. It is thus that I explain the protagonist of my book to myself.
He lay on his back beside Leonie, holding her hand, his eyes shut. She no longer saw secret promises in his face. She knew what he promised and the secret involved the two of them. With her hand he wasn’t holding, she touched his face. She followed with the tips of two fingers the contours of an eyebrow and then down the side of his nose, past the corner of his mouth, which twitched when she passed it, to his chin. By touching his face in this way she could make her feeling of familiarity more natural and destroy a little of its mystery. She could localize the feeling of familiarity in what she felt in her fingertips. And thus she was less overwhelmed by it. She wanted to cup her hand over his nose. She raised her hand to her own nose to smell it. She placed it on his forehead instead. She would have played like this, with isolated words occurring to her with a sense of odd illumination in her head (as though she knew that there was light, white like snow, behind all that she saw or pictured and that this light gave everything a white outline until the instant she saw it), she would have continued like this until he spoke or moved. But a man shouting on the staircase interrupted her. A moment later a woman shouted on the terrace just under the window. Several more shouts followed.
Had Leonie belonged to a different social class, she might have reacted differently. Her immediate response might well have been to question the right of others in a hotel to raise their voices and disturb her. As it was, a raised voice was a warning signal; she had learnt since childhood that when you heard somebody raising their voice, you either disappeared or prepared yourself to be unjustly abused. She feared that the people were shouting because they were looking for her.
She pulled her hand away from his. He opened his eyes.
They are looking for me, she whispered, they are coming to look for me. Nobody will come in here, he said, and closed his eyes again. There was a knock at the door.
What is it? he asked.
A man’s voice on the other side of the door: Chavez has crashed.
Where?
When he came down to land at Domodossola.
You mean he made the crossing and then crashed?
At the very last moment, yes, a couple of metres above the landing field, he didn’t level out, he just dived into the ground at about a hundred kilometres an hour.
Is he dead?
No. He has broken both his legs, but they said on the telephone he isn’t badly hurt otherwise. He’s been taken to hospital.
All right. Thank you for telling me.
Are you coming down?
I’ll see you later. He turned to Leonie. You see, he said, they weren’t looking for you. And he began to laugh.
How can you laugh, she asked, when your friend must be suffering so much.
I’m laughing at us.
At me because I was frightened?
No, at the two of us here whilst he was crossing the Alps.
He may die.
And one day I’ll die and you too, with your beautiful brown eyes and your white teeth. There is never any time to lose.
Don’t you have any feelings for him at all?
I had no time.
I don’t understand what you say.
No chance ever comes twice.
They just told you he crashed.
Then I will try to console his fiancée.
Who are you? She said this fiercely but in a whisper as though she were frightened that he might answer in a voice loud enough for the whole hotel to hear. She believed that he might be the Devil. Abruptly she turned her back on him and buried her face in the pillow. Why me? she asked.
You are like you are, that’s why.
Why me out of all the others? There are so many.
You as well as many others.
Am I—she raised her head to look at him and then changed her mind about what to say: I must go, she said, they’ll be looking for me. Let me go.
Yes, he said.
Don’t you really care about your friend who is hurt?
You talk about him but you don’t mean him.
I don’t understand what you say.
When you ask about him, you are thinking of yourself.
No—when I saw him flying off—
—but by then I had already come to find you.
He placed his hand on her shoulder. Her whole body turned towards him and she lay on her back looking up at him. She could see in his face what had happened to them both after he had come to find her; his face was different; but it was not the face of the Devil.
She knew that he could not take her with him when he left. It was not worth her asking. It was not even worth asking whether he would be leaving tomorrow or the day after. That much she could discover from the hall porter. She might ask whether he would return to Brig. But she already knew the answer. Chavez had crossed the Alps. No aviator would try from here again. He would not come back. Everything she had ever noticed in the world stood between his life and hers.
Will I see you tomorrow?
Yes, I will find you.
She recognized that he was lying. The total unexpectedness of what had happened did not mean that it was likely to happen again. A more sophisticated and privileged woman would have found it hard to accept that the encounter was unrepeatable, and so would probably have needed the lie and have failed to recognize it as such. For Leonie it was not hard to accept. The choices open to her had always been limited; she thought of most of the conditions of living as unchangeable; and so the idea of the extraordinary was central to her life. She was superstitious.
She shivered. He pulled up the sheet to cover her. As he did so, he saw her body stretched almost straight, save that one hip was slightly raised. There are women—often they are wide-hipped and plump—whose bodies become unforeseeably beautiful when recumbent. Their natural formation, like a landscape’s, seems to be horizontal. And just as landscapes are for ever continuous, the horizon receding as the eye of the traveller advances, so, to the sense of touch, these bodies seem borderless and infinitely extended, quite regardless of their actual size. His hand set out. The large dark triangle of hair on her pale skin announced unequivocally the mystery which it hid.
She would have liked to have said before washing, whilst they were still extraordinary, lying on the bed, that if he asked her to go away with him, she would go. It would have been a way of telling him how she felt: all he had supposed about her had been right: he had known more about her than anybody else had: so now he must know—because she did not believe that she would see him again—that she loved him, loved him like her own child. Yet if she spoke of going away with him, he would lie and misunderstand what she said. She must find another way to tell him. She feared that if she did not tell him, Eduard might kill himself or her. She believed that her telling him would protect them all later.
And so it happened that the young peasant bride who, an hour and a half earlier, had been shy to undress in front of him, suddenly threw off the sheet and kneeling on the bed seized hold of his head, pressed his face against her stomach, and, with her own head thrown back, so that she saw blue light in the pear-shaped blobs of glass hanging from the candelabra in the centre of the ceiling, repeatedly called out his name, whilst tears ran down her face.
Later, in the evening, G. saw Weymann. Weymann, normally so imperturbable, was distinctly nervous. During the afternoon, after the news of Chavez’ crash, Weymann took off in his plane and tried to climb towards the Simplon; the prize for reaching Milan still remained to be won. But the wind proved too strong and he turned back to land again in the field with the canvas hangars.
What time did you take off?
At 3.43, about two hours after Geo.
Was the wind much stronger?
Not appreciably on the ground. But when I climbed to about a thousand metres, just after the Napoleon bridge, there I hit it full force. It’s always been there, about the same spot. Suddenly it comes at you, and it knocks you sideways, like the slipstream of an express train. It couldn’t have been much less when he went through. But I don’t believe in taking unreasonable risks, and he did.
He succeeded though. So didn’t the risks seem less? He’d proved the risks weren’t that great.
He’s proving it in hospital I’m afraid.
But he crossed!
You don’t think like that when you hit that wind. You can feel it straining every strut and joint of the kite.
Supposing he crossed and landed safely but then had engine trouble on the ground, would you have turned back then? Supposing he proved it without mishap, would you have turned back?
Yes, I study my plane and the weather conditions, nothing else. You have to stay very sober in the air, my friend. You have to be quite sure of what you can or you can’t do. And if you’re in doubt, don’t do it. Geo wanted to be a hero. And that’s fatal in the air.
He has shown that something was possible which people thought impossible. Isn’t that an achievement?
I pay my respects to his courage, but it’s a dangerous example.
That’s why there’s a prize offered. If there wasn’t any danger—
No. No. I don’t mean the natural hazards of flying. I mean the danger of encouraging foolhardiness and the taking of unnecessary risks. In the end flying’s like everything else, the secret of success is a healthy respect for what you’re up against. If you want to get on, you don’t pee into the wind. I’m not a coward, but I’m not an idiot either.
You’re saying he is an idiot.
He’s a hero. But I’ll lay you whatever odds you want that at this moment he’s cursing himself for an idiot. They say it’s not at all sure that he’ll ever have the proper use of his legs again.
You feel bad about turning back.
Come with me. I’m driving to Domodossolo tomorrow to go and see him. I’ve borrowed a Fiat. Or are you still waiting for a reply to your letters to that maid? What’s her name?
She’s called Leonie.
The same as the mountain over there? Leone.
It’s spelt differently.
I wouldn’t trust either of them! joked Weymann.
I’ll come to Domodossola.
THE BEGINNING AS DREAM
The strange thing about dreams is not so much what happens in them, but what one feels in them. In dreams there are new categories of emotion. In all dreams, even bad ones, there is a sense of imminent resolution such as one scarcely ever experiences when awake. By resolution I mean the answering of all questions. In my dream we were crossing a city. The city might have been London; it was a city, anyway, which was familiar; a city in which everything was interesting, in which everything was both striking and intimate. I was crossing this city in a bus and at the beginning I was on top of the bus (it was a double-decker bus without a roof). At the beginning of the journey in the bus it was dusk or night. I remember the coldness of the air outside, the coldness of the wind which swept over the seats on top of the bus without a roof, and at the same time the affirmative warmth of myself in my clothes. The bus passed through many streets with crowds of people, lights, cinemas, underground railway stations. It was a long journey and we had an appointment at the other end of the city, an appointment which at that moment it seemed important to keep. But after we had been travelling for about an hour, it became clear that although this bus was going in the right direction, it was taking a much longer time than we could possibly have imagined. And so I decided that we would get off the bus at the next stop, in a crowded place where we might be able to find a taxi. We would go the rest of the way by taxi. Deciding this in no way made me regret what we had done; it had nevertheless been a good idea to take the bus. No sooner had I made this decision than the bus left the main thoroughfares and drove, without stopping now, along narrow back streets beneath warehouses, bridges and high brick walls that we couldn’t see over. These were the outskirts of the city, still familiar, still intimate, still a pleasure to see. And I had the sense that we were getting near an estuary or perhaps even the sea. By now it was clear that the route the bus was taking was the wrong one; it was more than that even, it was a route that had been abandoned, yes, that is how it felt to me, although I did not formulate it in my dream quite like that. And yet in riding in this bus which was following an abandoned route there was still the same strong sense of rightness. And this was confirmed when the high wall beside the bus suddenly disappeared and there was a view of water below, with ships along the quayside and, nearer than the ships, a pool of vivid green light on the water, across which a white bird, a huge white bird flew. It didn’t fly like a swan; it flew, not with its legs tucked up but with its legs hanging down, its neck curved not stretched straight out, its big, heavy wings, rather clumsy, white, tinged with green reflexions from the water beneath it. It was a vision of a bird such as I had never known before. And it was enough to justify, to explain everything else that had happened and was happening or would happen. The bus didn’t stop. We sat back in our seats, the cold night air blowing against our faces.
And then the bus, never going very fast, changed into a train, a train which we were responsible for driving. There was nothing very complicated mechanically about this. We were now in the front of the vehicle and it was running along lines, still following or continuing the same route as the bus had taken. I keep on saying ‘we’ because I wasn’t by myself, but I wasn’t with any other specific people either, I was in the first person plural. We were now in front of the train which was running a little faster along a single track. Although we were in a deep cutting with high stone walls (or were they brick? they were black brick), although we were in this cutting, I had a sense of being at a very high altitude.
I saw a bend in the line ahead. I wasn’t the one who was driving at this moment, but I was looking up at the configuration of the lines of bricks at the top of the cutting wall, high above us, and I could tell by the way that they were converging that round this next bend the cutting would open out and that we would be flooded with light. It was now no longer night. The fact that I could read this in the walls gave me a great sense of satisfaction (although perhaps partly my pleasure came from my anticipation of that opening out and the bright light which was awaiting us round the bend). The train was now going fast. As we turned the bend, there, as I had foreseen, the cutting walls fell away. We were high up, high up, above a whole landscape and a whole bay, a bay of the sea—an idyllic landscape, blue sea, hills, gentle beaches, woods. All laid out below us. But at the same moment as we turned the bend we saw that the lines of the railway descended at an extremely sharp angle, like the lines of a switchback train; and not only this, we saw that they led, several hundred feet below, straight into the sea.
This constituted one of those moments of imminent resolution of which I spoke. The end of the line, like this, leading into the sea, explained the strange nature of all our previous journey and the reason why the route had been abandoned. The view beneath us was of an ineffable beauty, which made even more sense of the whole journey than the white bird had. The white bird in that small circle of light. And now the whole landscape and seascape beneath us. There was no question of stopping the train. For an instant we were balanced at the top of the steep descent, and then we began to descend, fast and dangerously. This had been foreseeable from the very instant that we had turned the corner but had in no way diminished my pleasure. And although there was a grave inevitability about the end we were approaching, it seemed neither tragic nor pathetic. To the rest of us I shouted out: Swim! as we hurtled down. The train disappeared deep under the water. I was not drowned. But some of us (belonging to my first person plural) were.
‘The progress of today in every field is nothing else but the absurd of yesterday.’
Today I wish to write about an event which took place in September 1910.
The Aero Club of Milan had offered a prize of £3,000 to the first man to fly over the Alps. Geo Chavez, twenty-four years old, a Peruvian already famous in the aviation world, has been waiting for several days in Brig, beneath the Simplon Pass in Switzerland, for the weather to improve. Several other competitors are also waiting.
Most of the pilots are of the opinion that it is already too late to attempt the flight this year; June or July would be more suitable months. During the last five days they have made trial flights, climbing to over a thousand metres but then returning to the small field called Siberia where canvas hangars have been erected. All of them have complained of the treachery of the air currents which tug at their planes as soon as they approach the entrance to the massif: all except Weymann, the American, who wears a pince-nez and says about everything that you have to get used to it.
A few weeks ago, Chavez broke the world altitude record. Across the Alps there is no need to climb as high as he did then. Yet the mountains appear to constitute an absolute frontier. The buildings of Brig crouch low on the ground before them. The mountains induce the idea that there is nothing beyond them. To believe that Italy and Domodossola are on the far side is an act of faith, supported, it is true, by the traffic on the Simplon road and by history, for it was near here that Hannibal and Napoleon crossed the Alps with their armies, but denied by the five senses within whose pentagon each man is alone.
I quote from the report by Luigi Barzini, a well-known Italian journalist, in the Corriere della Sera of 23 September 1910: ‘This morning around ten o’clock the news from the Simplon was not at all encouraging. On the north side the weather was calm. But a wind was blowing through the valley at the bottom of which, like white stones after a landslide, were the small snow-covered houses of the village. On the Monscera and in Italy the weather was splendid.
‘ “I would like very much to go,” Chavez told me sadly, “I will never find better weather conditions on the Italian side.”
‘He kept on telephoning his friend Christiaens who was making meteorological observations on the Kulm.
‘All of a sudden Chavez says: “I must go and see. A car.” We took a racing car belonging to a young American and sped up the mountain, deafened by the roar of the engine, and hanging on to our very seats so as not to be thrown out at the corners.
‘A very strong east wind was blowing against the very highest peaks, at perhaps 3,000 metres, dragging clouds along with it. But lower down the weather was perfect. The trees were still. The smoke of fires lit by tourists in the woods was rising slowly into the sky. It was not too cold, although above 1,300 metres everything was white with snow …
‘Chavez looked around him, studying the air. A continuous working of his jaw showed that he was grinding his teeth. Nothing else showed that he was preoccupied or anxious. He had not shaved, he had got up quickly in the morning and he had just forgotten this detail of his toilet in the dawn of the victorious day.
‘He spoke little. He asked the time. “I must go,” he exclaimed. And after a few minutes he added, “If I can’t get through, I’ll land at the Simplon Hospice, I’ll certainly be able to get as far as that.”
‘Christiaens climbed into the car and exchanged a few words with the aviator—serious words.
‘ “The wind?” asked Chavez.
‘ “There’s still wind,” Christiaens replied.
‘ “No chance of going through?”
‘ “No.”
‘ “What’s the wind speed?”
‘ “Fifteen and increasing.”
‘In the valley of Krummbach the pines were moving and the grass was bent low under the icy wind.
‘ “It’s very strong!” said Chavez, “it’s making the pines sway and it takes some wind to do that …”
‘A car was coming up from the valley. It was Paulhan, who had gone ahead to explore. We stopped and Paulhan told us that towards the Monscera the weather was absolutely calm. The two aviators became engrossed studying the likely air currents.
‘The wind was blowing from the Fletschhorn, which was covered in snow.
‘ “It’s not very likely to change,” said Paulhan, “and the currents will make whirlpools. If you get caught in one of them—.” An eloquent gesture concluded the sentence.
‘Chavez and Paulhan climbed a few hundred metres towards the Hubschhorn and then watched from there for a few minutes. The wind seemed less strong. Coming down Chavez was torn by doubts.
‘ “Wait till tomorrow,” said Christiaens.
‘ “I’m going now,” Chavez said suddenly, “let’s go quickly to Brig.” ’
He must dress accordingly. There are no rules save his own. But these he has repeatedly checked with himself, so that what he is doing does not seem to him to be for the first time. Nothing will seem original from now on—except his luck over which he has no control, and his welcome when he lands in Milan. He puts on a tight-fitting suit of thick Chinese paper—the same kind of paper which the great Chinese calligraphers used to write on. The sight of his own legs as he dresses encourages him. He has been a champion runner. Before a race he has many times felt the weakness in his legs which he feels now and which is not a weakness but is a waiting for the beginning. On an impulse he asks one of the mechanics in the hangar to lend him a pencil and he writes on the paper on both legs: Vive Chavez! Over the paper suit he puts on water-proof working overalls, specially quilted with cotton, then some sweaters, and on top a leather shooting jacket.
When everything was checked and the cloths wrapped round the pipes against the cold, Chavez prepared to take off. He glanced at the mountains; against the blue sky they looked nearer than they had ever done during the last week. He glanced across at the spectators along the side of the field: he was determined not to come back and land once more in Siberia.
There’s a priest over there, he said to one of his mechanics, all we need now is a gravedigger.
He waved to his friends. He is enclosed, made secure, by the familiar deafening roar of the engine, which after a run of sixty yards lifts him into the air.
The spectators see the plane take off and gain height easily and well. The engine sounds regular. They look up at the plane with its elegant curved wings against the sky and in different ways they all think of it as a bird. But when Chavez heads for the entrance to the massif, they lose sight of the plane. It totally disappears from view.
He has crashed! someone shouts.
He has gone into the hillside where the pine-trees are.
He can’t have done, he was higher than that.
You can’t tell.
Look! Look! There he is.
Where?
About half-way up the forest!
And they find the plane again. But it is no longer like a bird in the sky. Against the greyish pine-trees and then against the grey shale face, it is like a moth, but a moth that can no longer fly and is crawling slowly across the surface of a grey window.
Chavez is fighting the wind that is already blowing him too far to the east, but he is also fighting a sense of unreality. He has never flown like this: the more he gains height, the lower he is: it is the mountain that is gaining height.
When it was clear that this was not another trial flight, the news was telephoned to the cities of Europe. In Milan a white flag was run up on the roof of the Duomo. This was the agreed sign that an aviator had taken off from Brig to cross the Alps with the intention of coming to Milan. As soon as he had crossed the mountains, a red flag would go up. In the piazza round the cathedral a crowd began to collect. Whilst waiting for the red flag to be hoisted, they chatted and often glanced up at the sky. In spirit and formation this crowd was very different from the crowd which had assembled in the piazza in May 1898.
The Hotel Victoria in Brig is full of journalists, flying enthusiasts and friends of the competitors. Among them is the principal protagonist of this book, whom I will now call, for the sake of convenience, G.
He is twenty-three years old and a friend of Charles Weymann, the American pilot with the pince-nez.
A few months previously he flew as Weymann’s passenger in one of the first night flights ever made. Weymann had been impressed by his calm and his good navigating sense. Unexpectedly clouds had obscured the moon and the sudden total darkness had compelled them to make a forced landing in unknown hilly country. It was an experience, Weymann was reported by the press as saying, that I would rather not have again. But it would have been a damn sight worse if I’d been alone.
Weymann found it hard to understand why his young friend, who was an enthusiast for flying, didn’t want to learn to fly himself. I’m willing to teach you, he said, and they’re lining up for that privilege in Pau and New York.
G. was recognizably the same person as the boy of fifteen. Beatrice would have recognized him at once. But his complexion was sallower and his face thinner, which made his nose appear larger than before. When he smiled the gaps of his missing teeth still made him leer.
It would be different, said Weymann in his slow American voice, if you had no money. You need money to fly. But I guess you have plenty.
I have too many other interests.
What are your other interests? What do you do?
He smiled at Weymann ironically, for he knew that Weymann was a man incapable of discovering the truth even when it was placed in front of him. I travel, he said.
The pince-nez magnified the simplicity of the American’s blue eyes. Exactly, he said, so you could fly. You have the attitude and the determination, the two things needed.
Weymann counted the two on the fingers of his hand.
I am too impatient. I wouldn’t last a month by myself.
You need to be quick, said Weymann. He was small, dapper and wore a bow tie.
My mind would be on other things.
Such as? asked Weymann, his eyes open wide.
The maid who serves us breakfast.
She’s sweet, conceded Weymann, his eyes blinking.
She fills my life.
But we’ve only been here a day.
She’s engaged to a clerk who works in the Town Hall and they are going to get married at Christmas.
You’re joking, said Weymann, beginning to suspect that he was being teased.
No, said G.
Weymann spoke like a patient schoolmaster: We are making history. We are pioneers, we are the first to open a new chapter. I guess we are a little mad. But how can you compare what we are doing—the early birds like us—with a twenty-four-hour infatuation with a little Swiss waitress whom you haven’t even spoken to. How can you put one before the other like that. You’re not a schoolboy. You’re not being serious. I just can’t believe you. He grasped his companion’s arm. Tell me what your worry is.
Whether she got my note before lunch.
Weymann burst out laughing. He had decided that since this ugly, intense young man (whom he liked because of what they had experienced together) did not want to talk truthfully about himself, it was better to stop talking. His laugh was a way of withdrawing from the conversation. Poker tonight? he asked.
The next day Weymann said to another friend: He’s so damned secretive. I don’t know what he is up to. I can’t make out whether he’s interested in the money or the adventure—or both, like us, I guess.
The news that Chavez has taken off with the determination not to turn back arrives at the Hotel Victoria during lunch. Everybody rushes out on to the terrace to see the plane as it flies down the Rhone valley before turning south towards the massif. They shout and wave.
After a week of false rumours and disappointments everyone was reconciled to the idea that the Alps would not be crossed by an aeroplane this year. Why does it not occur to them that this attempt may end in disappointment too, that Chavez when he approaches the Saltina gorge may find the currents too strong and be forced to turn back? Perhaps because it is the last chance: tomorrow everyone is leaving: and so they seize upon the last hope of an event. Perhaps also because they have seen Chavez, they have watched him for a week and they have read his face. This is not to talk of his fate but of his character.
Chavez sees the crowd on the terrace below but does not wave back to them. He feels superstitious. The next time he waves must be on arrival.
During the last week many peasants have come to Brig in the hope of seeing a flying machine disappear over the mountains. And now the hotel staff, the waiters, the maids, the cook, the dishwashers, the gardener and his wife, appear to be as excited as the guests. There are many elements in such excitement—curiosity, the uncertainty of the outcome, a vicarious sense of achievement because they have all been near to the man they can see in the sky; but what may be deepest is the satisfaction of witnessing, and so of taking part in, what they believe will be an historic occasion. This is a very primitive satisfaction, connecting the time of one’s own life with the time of one’s ancestors and descendants. The great pole of history is notched across at the same point as the small stick of one’s own life.
When G. left the dining-room, he did not go out on to the terrace but ran to the courtyard at the back of the hotel, where there was a large wooden building. Its ground floor was open like a barn, and there was a stone trough and a fountain around which the hotel laundry was washed. Above, on the second storey, were the maids’ rooms. She was standing on the outside wooden staircase, gazing up at the sky. He called her by name—Leonie! and held out his hand to indicate that she should come down. Taking her by the arm, he told her to be quick: they would see best from the balcony of his room.
She might then have declined. It was the weakest moment of his strategy. She knew perfectly well that two things were happening at the same time: the plane was flying overhead like a bird, and the man who had pursued her with notes, with jokes, with whispered conversations, with declarations of love and extravagant compliments during five days was now hurrying her up into his room; more than that, she knew that he knew that she had two hours off duty every afternoon. She followed him because the unusualness of both the things which were happening confirmed that the occasion was exceptional. The noise of the engine, the excited shouting and the fact that everybody, with their backs turned towards her, was pointing up at the sky, encouraged her to take advantage of her normal, unexceptional self. He stood at the doorway to let her pass and it was as though under his cover she slipped past this self. On the stairs she began to giggle.
In his room she fell silent. He strode across the floor and flung open the French windows on to the balcony above the crowded terrace. The plane was banking as it turned, and both of them in the room could see the silhouetted head and shoulders of Chavez, smaller than a boot-button.
Leonie was frightened to come near to the window lest somebody on the terrace, looking up, caught sight of her. She stood well back from the window in the middle of the room, without any possibility of pretending any more that they were there to watch the plane heading for the mountains. (She could have fled the room, you say. Yet she was not frivolous. He had proposed nothing to her yet. She knew parts of what be would propose. She was neither frivolous nor naive. But there was the other part, his proposal to her exceptional self, that self which was surrounded by life other than her own as the receding roar of the aircraft engine was surrounded by silent air.)
Within an instant he had shut the windows and had turned round to face her. That he had succeeded, that it was indeed she, Leonie, who was standing there, looking with uncertainty at him, was established once and for all in his mind by the most characteristic facts about her: her large fingers, her broad squashed-looking nose, the coarse stringy wisps of hair escaping from under her maid’s cap, her peasant’s unpowdered complexion with, to the left of her chin, a pale slight discoloration the size of a small fingernail, her rounded shoulders and bosom, her brown eyes the colour of dark wood. He scarcely noticed the features which had made Weymann call her sweet, for these she had in common with many others.
He put his arms round her. She stood there, her cheek against his chest, waiting. She listened to his words. My heart. My happiness. My brown-eyed lamb. Leonie, Queen of the Alps. (But such words recorded for a third person lose their precision and their outrageous eloquence.) She was passive neither in her listening nor in her apparent submission to his will. She was constructing, precisely and furiously, the meaning of what had happened to her.
A week ago she had never seen him nor even imagined a man like him. He was rich. He was the friend of men who flew aeroplanes. He bad flown in an aeroplane himself. He travelled from country to country. He spoke a peculiar German. He had a face like a man in a story. She counted on none of these facts for what they might say in themselves. They were merely items of proof that he was different from anybody else who had spoken to her. Yet, if this had been all, she would have attached no great significance to his being different. Her expectations in life were modest. She knew very well that the world was full of people who were utterly different from the townspeople of Brig or the peasants of the Valais, and that they could have nothing to say or do with her. But he—and this is what so profoundly impressed her—addressed himself to her, Leonie. For a week he had concentrated on nothing else but seeking her out, offering her presents and compliments, talking with her and demonstrating to her her own uniqueness. Like all people who are not set upon deceiving themselves, Leonie was able to distinguish intuitively between sincerity and insincerity. She knew that he was not lying to her, even if she remained ignorant of the truth he was telling her. She could distinguish, too, as most women can, between a man who is begging for favours, or, alternatively, may try to grasp them, and a man who, in face of a particular woman, is compelled to present himself to her as he is. This is some of what she meant when she said to herself: he has come for me.
When Zeus, in order to approach a woman he had fallen in love with, disguised himself as a bull, a satyr, an eagle, a swan, it was not only to gain the advantage of surprise: it was to encounter her (within the terms of those strange myths) as a stranger. The stranger who desires you and convinces you that it is truly you in all your particularity whom he desires, brings a message from all that you might be, to you as you actually are. Impatience to receive that message will be almost as strong as your sense of life itself. The desire to know oneself surpasses curiosity. But he must be a stranger, for the better you, as you actually are, know him, and likewise the better he knows you, the less he can reveal to you of your unknown but possible self. He must be a stranger. But equally he must be mysteriously intimate with you, for otherwise instead of revealing your unknown self, he simply represents all those who are unknowable to you and for whom you are unknowable. The intimate and the stranger. From this contradiction in terms, this dream, is born the great erotic god which every woman in her imagination either feeds or starves to death.
When he answered Weymann’s question: what do you do? by saying: I travel, the answer was neither superficial nor evasive. The constant stranger must continually travel.
For a moment longer her arms hung straight at her side. Out of the window she could see the sky above the mountains, September blue, familiar as the colour of a plate. The Blériot engine was still just audible.
The plane fell fifty metres, like a dead plaice dropped. Chavez wanted to turn back. What prevented him was what he had previously said to himself even although, at the time of saying it, it was unimaginable to him that his plane might drop like a dead fish.
Never again will a single story be told as though it were the only one.
Her upbringing and education at home, at school and in church has prepared her for the situation she now finds herself in. She must reject this unknown man who is about to ruin her life. She must save her honour. She must guard herself, her womanhood, for her beloved Eduard who has courted her for two years and with whom she will live in the house near the river where he keeps the beehives, and who will be the father to her children who will go to the same school in Brig as she went to. She is in danger of mortal sin. She must resist the evil temptation. In this way Leonie had been prepared. She must think of her own mother and of what she would wish for her daughter now. She, the daughter of her mother, she, the child of God, she, the promise of her beloved Eduard, she, the bride of her bridegroom in two months’ time, she, the mother of her future children, she, the elder sister of her younger sisters, she must preserve her honour as daughter, Christian, promise, bride, mother, sister. But she as I? I, Leonie, what should I do to preserve my honour? I did not know what to do. For this she had not been prepared. In her life as it is she cannot kiss this man. But he is not in her life; he is outside it. I was alone with him. There was nobody else. She will never again, she senses, be in the arms of a man outside her life. It was like a dream. What she does with him is not part of her life—although others will consider it so and its consequences may continue all her lifetime. What she does with him will be the doing of that part of her which is not in her life. My weakness was stronger than I was.
He slid his hands down her back until they were under her buttocks. Then slowly and deliberately he lifted her up. Her feet left the ground. He lowered her, but not so that her feet took her full weight.
She had the sensation that wherever his hands went they lifted her and took away some of her weight. He was putting his hands between her and gravity. She looked up into his eyes, which were entirely concentrated upon her. He was smiling and the gaps in his teeth looked as dark as his eyes. Although she could still recognize the sunlight streaming through the window, she could believe that there was a black curtain behind her back, black like his eyes and the gaps in his teeth, and that this black curtain was being slowly drawn around them until finally it would be like a black round tent. She felt him touching the parts of her which were naturally down-weighted, heavy, pendant, and each time he touched them he lifted them up and took away some of their weight. It was then that she put her arms round him.
His hands, which had counteracted the pull of gravity on all those parts of her body of whose mass—however slight—she could be conscious, had a further effect. Within the mass of each of these parts she felt a force of attraction, drawing it, not yet continually but in broken impulses, towards him and the larger mass of his body. (The sensation was comparable to the obvious one in her breasts but was deeper and more diffused.)
She began to repeat his name.
Any attempt at an exhaustive description of what she was experiencing is bound to be absurd. The experience was central to her life: everything that she had been, surrounded her present experience as land surrounds a lake. Everything that she had been was turned to sand and shelved at the borders of this experience to disappear beneath its waters and become its unseen, mysterious lake bed. To express her experience it would be necessary for us to reconstruct around ourselves her unique language. And this is impossible. Armed with the entire language of literature we are still denied access to her experience. There is only one possible way of, briefly, entering that experience: to make love to her. Then why do I want to describe her experience exhaustively, definitively, when I fully recognize the impossibility of doing so? Because I love her. I love you, Leonie. You are beautiful. You are gentle. You can feel pain and pleasure. You are tiny and I take you in my hand. You are large as the sky and I walk under you. It was he who said this.
He placed her seated on the bed and went to the door. From the bed she held out her arms to him.
No, he said, not like drunken peasants.
The sudden harshness of his words did not hurt or surprise her. She simply waited to see what he would do next.
He told her to undress. She hesitated—not because she was unwilling but because she did not know how she should undress with him watching her. He started taking his own clothes off. She undid the buttons of her cuffs but no more. He stood there on the far side of the room, naked. She had often swept and cleaned this room. He stood there naked. Remembering the past, remembering that she had washed the curtains which he had just pulled across the window, she lowered her head.
Leonie, look up. He sees you. Look at him seeing you. You are being seen as you are. When you were born, before you opened your round crinkled mouth and cried out, you were first seen, not as yourself, but as the alternative to a boy. Their eyes went to your sex—a line drawn on your pink damp tummy—before they looked at your expanding eyes. You were a girl and they called you Leonie. Look, his looking surrounds you. He recognizes you as each mirror you have ever stopped in front of has reflected you. The mirror reflects: he recognizes. He stands naked seeing you. As you bend forward to take off your worn slip with a hole in it under one arm, he sees your two breasts fall forward not quite silently.
Your image covers the entire surface of his body like another skin. All your appearances surround his penis.
You have never seen yourself like this.
Looking at you he recognizes you. His recognition cannot be put out. It burns what it recognizes. And by the light of its burning it recognizes more and more until it is so bright that it recognizes as familiar what it has never seen.
He has never seen you naked and now you are.
Some say of my writing that it is too overburdened with metaphor and simile: that nothing is ever what it is but is always like something else. This is true, but why is it so? Whatever I perceive or imagine amazes me by its particularity. The qualities it has in common with other things—leaves, a trunk, branches, if it is a tree: limbs, eyes, hair, if it is a person—appear to me to be superficial. I am deeply struck by the uniqueness of each event. From this arises my difficulty as a writer—perhaps the magnificent impossibility of my being a writer. How am I to convey such uniqueness? The obvious way is to establish uniqueness through development. To persuade you, for example, of the uniqueness of Leonie’s experience by telling you the story of what happened when Eduard discovered that Leonie had been unfaithful to him. In this way the uniqueness of an event can be explained by its causes and effects. But I have little sense of unfolding time. The relations which I perceive between things—and these often include casual and historical relations—tend to form in my mind a complex synchronic pattern. I see fields where others see chapters. And so I am forced to use another method to try to place and define events. A method which searches for co-ordinates extensively in space, rather than consequentially in time. I write in the spirit of a geometrician. One of the ways in which I establish co-ordinates extensively is by likening aspect with aspect, by way of metaphor. I do not wish to become a prisoner of the nominal, believing that things are what I name them. On the bed they were not such prisoners.
On the road across the Kulm pass Chavez sees figures waving to him. Among them are Christiaens and Luigi Barzini. In a few hours the Corriere della Sera will carry a report of this moment.
‘A profound emotion nails us to the spot. We do not move. We are lifeless, our souls shining in our eyes, and our hearts beating fast. We are spellbound by the great beauty of what we are seeing. A thousand years of life cannot annul this memory.
‘After a few seconds we jump back into the car. Christiaens is beside us. Two Swiss police climb in also—and we are away! We look at each other; our eyes are red. The Swiss guards too have tears in their eyes as they mutter germanically: Mein Gott, mein Gott. The plane is now just about to enter the Krummbach valley which two hours ago was rent by wind and lightning. It is above the fields around the hospice. It looks as though he is losing height.
‘ “He’s landing,” we yell. “There he is! He’s landing!”
‘It is clear that the aviator has a moment of doubt. He may be thinking of landing; then he decides that the wind is not as terrible as he feared and he continues…’
All pilots at that time took their bearings from what they could see on the ground. And the ground reassured them, for on it they could expect to land and to receive help. When Blériot, the year before, had flown the Channel, a French destroyer had escorted him. Briefly, for about ten minutes, he lost contact with the ship and saw only the sea; he said afterwards that during those long minutes he had felt terrifyingly alone. Chavez’ decision now makes him the first man to fly deliberately beyond the sight and reach of other men.
The cold surrounds him like the four walls of a cell; but the cold also enters the cell. One wall presses relentlessly and continually against him. The right side of his face and body are icy. It is the wall of the wind: the wind which he once (twenty minutes ago) so wrongly under-estimated. The wrong no longer appears to him a matter of miscalculation but of transgression. It is the original sin to explain his life, now identical with this flight. The wall opposite that of the wind is made of rock and snow.
On his left he can see Monte Leone. The snow, white in the sunlight, both emphasizes the presence of the mountain and transforms it into a kind of absence.
Not a stain would remain on that white.
He tries to break through the wall of wind. Whenever he turns to the right, the roar of the Gnome engine becomes louder, because the wind blows it back at him, but the plane hangs almost stationary in the air. He has lost height which he must regain if he is to cross the Monscera. Yet he is frightened to climb. The wind above him is stronger than the wind blowing at him and it blows up there from all directions at once. It is bad when the plane drops, but it is even worse when it is lifted up by the wind. Then his own legs, his own feet in their boots above the engine move in a sickening way: the linen on the top surface of the wings blisters irregularly as though the wind had already torn holes on its underside.
Below the shoulders of Monte Leone and much nearer to him, the lower mountains rise like the broken eroded galleries of a semicircular amphitheatre in which he is alone in the centre.
He remembers Paulhan’s last words of advice: Keep high! Keep high! The words have become absurd.
His immediate difficulty will be to clear the far ridge of the amphitheatre after he has flown across the arena. The wind is edging him further and further into the semi-circle, towards the blind galleries. If he can clear the ridge where it breaks (west of the Glatthorn), there will be worse difficulties to face. He is too far east and he believes he has to climb three or four hundred metres to cross the Monscera. The wind, holding him down, and forcing him to the east, is cornering him and the corner where it will smash him to pieces will be in the gorge of the Gondo.
He must have considered whether he should turn into the wind and circle the arena to gain height. Yet, I believe, the idea of turning round, even momentarily, filled him with horror. If he once circled this theatre of blind gulleys and ridges, he would never break out of the circle but would die in it when his engine stopped. He would rather fight in a corner.
He can no longer distinguish between rock and silence. The surfaces of his body are by now completely numb from the cold. The most that his consciousness can oppose to the rocks which surround him is air and the noise of the engine at his feet. He flies on towards the Glatthorn like an arrow towards its target.
He is beside a rock face which is like the loose hide of a gigantic mule stretched across the frame of the letter A and, apparently, blown inwards, between the legs of the letter, by the same wind which is blowing against him and his plane. On the mule-hide of this rock Chavez sees the shadow of his wings, sometimes lurching away, sometimes rushing towards him as the shadow crosses folds. Looking down he sees rock rising up at him. Ahead he can see higher peaks still. Reverberating and echoing against the rock beside and below him, the noise of his engine falls and rises like his shadow, and his shadow seems to clatter with the noise of his engine and of falling stones.
Here there could have been no question of conscious decisions.
Here I cannot calculate as I write.
Chavez has the impression that he is about to enter the jaws of an animal whose passages and gullet and stomach and arse are made of solid rock, an animal whose digestion is geological. An animal that can kill before it is alive, and eat when it is dead.
Here it is not a matter of courage or the lack of it; here men divide themselves into those who still want to live and those who do not. Which they are may be revealed in the way they scream. Some ascend with their screams; some die with them. Chavez climbed, indifferent to the risk of stalling, indifferent to everything, except to the necessity of escaping from the jaws of the animal: upwards.
He was in the Gondo.
At Domodossola, in communication with Brig by telephone, everyone waits. The factories have stopped work. The workers are watching the sky. The old forego their siesta. The young are making their way to the field where Chavez will land, refuel and then take off for Milan. On every balcony and in every window which has a view of the Ossola valley, green, peaceful but climbing up to pine forests and then to rocks, people stand, eyes half-shut, staring into the sky above the Alps. There is no wind.
It is a tragedy! We ought to be able to see him by now.
Perhaps he has turned back.
But he crossed the Simplon.
How do you know?
Roberto told us.
And Roberto?
Signor Lucchini, the clerk of the Mayor, came into the Garibaldi twenty minutes ago and said that he had passed the hospice.
Praise be to God.
Since this morning I knew it was going to be a tragedy. I dreamt about him last night.
That’s because you are in love with him.
To clap my eyes on him just once!
And we’ll all call out his name—Geo! Geo!
Thousands in Domodossola pick out the plane, minute against the pine forest. It is lower than they expected. With shouts the watchers try to quieten each other, so as to be able to hear the engine. It is too far away. Slowly the movement of the aeroplane becomes clear. It is coming down towards Domodossola.
Duray, racing-car driver and friend of Chavez, unrolls two lengths of white calico on the grass of the landing-field to make a cross, visible from the air; a crowd of boys compete to help him peg the cloth to the ground.
The plane is flying and losing height so regularly, so serenely, that all of those watching feel personally elated.
He is the first man to fly the Alps; he has done what was previously thought impossible. It is a momentous event that we are witnessing, yet, look! it is simpler than we imagined, he is flying straighter than a bird and effortlessly, and that is how he has flown over the Alps; achieving greatness is perhaps less hard than we have been led to believe. This sequence of feelings (formulated in many different ways) leads to a conclusion of sudden elation. Why can we not all achieve what we wish?
The Mayor, being driven in a car to the landing field and wearing his ceremonial robes in order to welcome the great aviator, announces to his companions on the back seat that the town will name a street after Chavez to commemorate his victory over the mountains.
An express train for Milan left Domodossola station at 14.18 hours. A young man in the train spots the Blériot monoplane through the carriage window and pulls the alarm signal. The train comes to a sudden halt. The young man jumps down on to the track and runs along the length of the train shouting to the other passengers to watch and pointing with his arm at the plane which is now only a little higher than the tree, and in which Chavez is clearly visible. When he reaches the locomotive, the young man stops and waves with both arms at the sky, hoping that Chavez will see him and wave back; he will then have been the first to salute the hero. But Chavez does not wave back. A fact about which the young man and his friends who were flying enthusiasts were to speculate for many years.
Leonie’s head is thrown back like a singer’s singing. Her eyes too have rolled back so that he sees only the whites of them, not the irises. Her mouth is open and her throat swollen. She makes a noise in her throat which is a word said very slowly but he does not decipher it.
Some cry, some lie motionless, some thump with their fists, some lie curled up, some push their tongues between their lips, some clench their brows and set their mouths in determination, some wave their hands and others open them until they are like starfish: no two are the same until they leave behaviour behind, until they come with him to that moment when everything is simultaneous and every one of them is there together.
He experiences every orgasm as though it were simultaneous with every other. All that has occurred or will occur between each, all the events, actions, causes and consequences which have and will separate in time woman from woman, surround this timeless moment as a circumference surrounds the circle it defines. All are there together. All despite all their differences are there together. He joins them.
Sexual desire, however it is provoked or produced circumstantially, and whatever its objective terms and duration may be, is subjectively fixed to two points in time: our beginning and our end. When analysed, sexual desire has components which are violently nostalgic and lead us as far back as the experience of birth itself: other components are the result of an ineradicable appetite for the unknown, the furthest away, the ultimate of life—which can finally only be found in its negation—death. At the moment of orgasm these two points in time, our beginning and our end, may seem to fuse into one. When this happens everything that lies between them, that is to say our whole life, becomes instantaneous. It is thus that I explain the protagonist of my book to myself.
He lay on his back beside Leonie, holding her hand, his eyes shut. She no longer saw secret promises in his face. She knew what he promised and the secret involved the two of them. With her hand he wasn’t holding, she touched his face. She followed with the tips of two fingers the contours of an eyebrow and then down the side of his nose, past the corner of his mouth, which twitched when she passed it, to his chin. By touching his face in this way she could make her feeling of familiarity more natural and destroy a little of its mystery. She could localize the feeling of familiarity in what she felt in her fingertips. And thus she was less overwhelmed by it. She wanted to cup her hand over his nose. She raised her hand to her own nose to smell it. She placed it on his forehead instead. She would have played like this, with isolated words occurring to her with a sense of odd illumination in her head (as though she knew that there was light, white like snow, behind all that she saw or pictured and that this light gave everything a white outline until the instant she saw it), she would have continued like this until he spoke or moved. But a man shouting on the staircase interrupted her. A moment later a woman shouted on the terrace just under the window. Several more shouts followed.
Had Leonie belonged to a different social class, she might have reacted differently. Her immediate response might well have been to question the right of others in a hotel to raise their voices and disturb her. As it was, a raised voice was a warning signal; she had learnt since childhood that when you heard somebody raising their voice, you either disappeared or prepared yourself to be unjustly abused. She feared that the people were shouting because they were looking for her.
She pulled her hand away from his. He opened his eyes.
They are looking for me, she whispered, they are coming to look for me. Nobody will come in here, he said, and closed his eyes again. There was a knock at the door.
What is it? he asked.
A man’s voice on the other side of the door: Chavez has crashed.
Where?
When he came down to land at Domodossola.
You mean he made the crossing and then crashed?
At the very last moment, yes, a couple of metres above the landing field, he didn’t level out, he just dived into the ground at about a hundred kilometres an hour.
Is he dead?
No. He has broken both his legs, but they said on the telephone he isn’t badly hurt otherwise. He’s been taken to hospital.
All right. Thank you for telling me.
Are you coming down?
I’ll see you later. He turned to Leonie. You see, he said, they weren’t looking for you. And he began to laugh.
How can you laugh, she asked, when your friend must be suffering so much.
I’m laughing at us.
At me because I was frightened?
No, at the two of us here whilst he was crossing the Alps.
He may die.
And one day I’ll die and you too, with your beautiful brown eyes and your white teeth. There is never any time to lose.
Don’t you have any feelings for him at all?
I had no time.
I don’t understand what you say.
No chance ever comes twice.
They just told you he crashed.
Then I will try to console his fiancée.
Who are you? She said this fiercely but in a whisper as though she were frightened that he might answer in a voice loud enough for the whole hotel to hear. She believed that he might be the Devil. Abruptly she turned her back on him and buried her face in the pillow. Why me? she asked.
You are like you are, that’s why.
Why me out of all the others? There are so many.
You as well as many others.
Am I—she raised her head to look at him and then changed her mind about what to say: I must go, she said, they’ll be looking for me. Let me go.
Yes, he said.
Don’t you really care about your friend who is hurt?
You talk about him but you don’t mean him.
I don’t understand what you say.
When you ask about him, you are thinking of yourself.
No—when I saw him flying off—
—but by then I had already come to find you.
He placed his hand on her shoulder. Her whole body turned towards him and she lay on her back looking up at him. She could see in his face what had happened to them both after he had come to find her; his face was different; but it was not the face of the Devil.
She knew that he could not take her with him when he left. It was not worth her asking. It was not even worth asking whether he would be leaving tomorrow or the day after. That much she could discover from the hall porter. She might ask whether he would return to Brig. But she already knew the answer. Chavez had crossed the Alps. No aviator would try from here again. He would not come back. Everything she had ever noticed in the world stood between his life and hers.
Will I see you tomorrow?
Yes, I will find you.
She recognized that he was lying. The total unexpectedness of what had happened did not mean that it was likely to happen again. A more sophisticated and privileged woman would have found it hard to accept that the encounter was unrepeatable, and so would probably have needed the lie and have failed to recognize it as such. For Leonie it was not hard to accept. The choices open to her had always been limited; she thought of most of the conditions of living as unchangeable; and so the idea of the extraordinary was central to her life. She was superstitious.
She shivered. He pulled up the sheet to cover her. As he did so, he saw her body stretched almost straight, save that one hip was slightly raised. There are women—often they are wide-hipped and plump—whose bodies become unforeseeably beautiful when recumbent. Their natural formation, like a landscape’s, seems to be horizontal. And just as landscapes are for ever continuous, the horizon receding as the eye of the traveller advances, so, to the sense of touch, these bodies seem borderless and infinitely extended, quite regardless of their actual size. His hand set out. The large dark triangle of hair on her pale skin announced unequivocally the mystery which it hid.
She would have liked to have said before washing, whilst they were still extraordinary, lying on the bed, that if he asked her to go away with him, she would go. It would have been a way of telling him how she felt: all he had supposed about her had been right: he had known more about her than anybody else had: so now he must know—because she did not believe that she would see him again—that she loved him, loved him like her own child. Yet if she spoke of going away with him, he would lie and misunderstand what she said. She must find another way to tell him. She feared that if she did not tell him, Eduard might kill himself or her. She believed that her telling him would protect them all later.
And so it happened that the young peasant bride who, an hour and a half earlier, had been shy to undress in front of him, suddenly threw off the sheet and kneeling on the bed seized hold of his head, pressed his face against her stomach, and, with her own head thrown back, so that she saw blue light in the pear-shaped blobs of glass hanging from the candelabra in the centre of the ceiling, repeatedly called out his name, whilst tears ran down her face.
Later, in the evening, G. saw Weymann. Weymann, normally so imperturbable, was distinctly nervous. During the afternoon, after the news of Chavez’ crash, Weymann took off in his plane and tried to climb towards the Simplon; the prize for reaching Milan still remained to be won. But the wind proved too strong and he turned back to land again in the field with the canvas hangars.
What time did you take off?
At 3.43, about two hours after Geo.
Was the wind much stronger?
Not appreciably on the ground. But when I climbed to about a thousand metres, just after the Napoleon bridge, there I hit it full force. It’s always been there, about the same spot. Suddenly it comes at you, and it knocks you sideways, like the slipstream of an express train. It couldn’t have been much less when he went through. But I don’t believe in taking unreasonable risks, and he did.
He succeeded though. So didn’t the risks seem less? He’d proved the risks weren’t that great.
He’s proving it in hospital I’m afraid.
But he crossed!
You don’t think like that when you hit that wind. You can feel it straining every strut and joint of the kite.
Supposing he crossed and landed safely but then had engine trouble on the ground, would you have turned back then? Supposing he proved it without mishap, would you have turned back?
Yes, I study my plane and the weather conditions, nothing else. You have to stay very sober in the air, my friend. You have to be quite sure of what you can or you can’t do. And if you’re in doubt, don’t do it. Geo wanted to be a hero. And that’s fatal in the air.
He has shown that something was possible which people thought impossible. Isn’t that an achievement?
I pay my respects to his courage, but it’s a dangerous example.
That’s why there’s a prize offered. If there wasn’t any danger—
No. No. I don’t mean the natural hazards of flying. I mean the danger of encouraging foolhardiness and the taking of unnecessary risks. In the end flying’s like everything else, the secret of success is a healthy respect for what you’re up against. If you want to get on, you don’t pee into the wind. I’m not a coward, but I’m not an idiot either.
You’re saying he is an idiot.
He’s a hero. But I’ll lay you whatever odds you want that at this moment he’s cursing himself for an idiot. They say it’s not at all sure that he’ll ever have the proper use of his legs again.
You feel bad about turning back.
Come with me. I’m driving to Domodossolo tomorrow to go and see him. I’ve borrowed a Fiat. Or are you still waiting for a reply to your letters to that maid? What’s her name?
She’s called Leonie.
The same as the mountain over there? Leone.
It’s spelt differently.
I wouldn’t trust either of them! joked Weymann.
I’ll come to Domodossola.
6
This morning as I was shaving I thought of a friend of mine who lives in Madrid and whom I haven’t seen for fifteen years. Looking at my own image in the mirror I asked myself whether, after so long, we would recognize each other immediately if we met by accident in the street. I pictured to myself our meeting in Madrid and I began to imagine his feelings. He is a friend to whom I am deeply attached, but I hear from him only once or twice a year and he does not occupy a constant place in my thoughts. After I had shaved, I went down to my letterbox and there found a ten-page letter from him.
Such ‘coincidences’ are not uncommon and everyone is more or less familiar with them. They offer us an insight into how approximate and arbitrary is our normal reading of time. Calendars and clocks are our inadequate inventions. The structure of our minds is such that the true nature of time usually escapes us. Yet we know there is a mystery. Like a never-seen object in the dark, we can feel our way over some of its surfaces. But we have not identified it.
The way my imagination forces me to write this story is determined by its intimations about those aspects of time which I have touched but never identified. I am writing this book in the same dark.
A SITUATION OF WOMEN
Up to then the social presence of a woman was different in kind from that of a man. A man’s presence was dependent upon the promise of power which he embodied. If the promise was large and credible, his presence was striking. If it was small or incredible, he was found to have little presence. There were men, even many men, who were devoid of presence altogether. The promised power may have been moral, physical, temperamental, economic, social, sexual—but its object was always exterior to the man. A man’s presence suggested what he was capable of doing to you or for you.
By contrast, a woman’s presence expressed her own attitude to herself, and defined what could and could not be done to her. No woman lacked presence altogether. Her presence was manifest in her gestures, voice, opinions, expressions, clothes, chosen surroundings, taste—indeed there was nothing she could do which did not contribute to her presence.
To be born woman was to be born within an allotted and confined space, into the keeping of man. A woman’s presence developed as the precipitate of her ingenuity in living under such tutelage within such a limited cell. She furnished her cell, as it were, with her presence; not primarily in order to make it more agreeable to herself, but in the hope of persuading others to enter it.
A woman’s presence was the result of herself being split into two, and of her energy being inturned. A woman was always accompanied—except when quite alone—by her own image of herself. Whilst she was walking across a room or whilst she was weeping at the death of her father, she could not avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping. From earliest childhood she had been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually. And so she came to consider the surveyor and the surveyed within her as the two constituent yet always distinct elements of her identity as a woman.
A woman had to survey everything she was and everything she did because how she appeared to others, and ultimately how she appeared to men, was of crucial importance for her self-realization. Her own sense of being in herself was supplanted by a sense of being appreciated as herself by another. Only when she was the content of another’s experience did her own life and experience seem meaningful to her. In order to live she had to install herself in another’s life.
Men surveyed women before treating them. Consequently how a woman appeared to a man might determine how she would be treated. To acquire some control over this process, women had to contain it, and so they interiorized it. That part of a woman’s self which was the surveyor treated the part which was the surveyed, so as to demonstrate to others how her whole self should be treated. And this exemplary treatment of herself by herself constituted her presence. Every one of her actions, whatever its direct purpose, was also simultaneously an indication of how she should be treated.
If a woman threw a glass on the floor, this was an example of how she treated her own emotion of anger and so of how she would wish it to be treated by others. If a man had done the same, his action would only have been an expression of his anger. If a woman made good bread, this was an example of how she treated the cook in herself and accordingly of how she as a cook-woman should be treated by others. Only a man could make good bread for its own sake.
This subjunctive world of the woman, this realm of her presence, guaranteed that no action undertaken within it could ever possess full integrity; in each action there was an ambiguity which corresponded to an ambiguity in the self, divided between surveyor and surveyed. The so-called duplicity of woman was the result of the monolithic dominance of man.
A woman’s presence offered an example to others of how she would like to be treated—of how she would wish others to follow her in the way, or along the way, she treated herself. She could never cease offering this example, for it was the function of her presence. When, however, social convention or the logic of events demanded that she behave in a manner which contradicted the example she wished to give, she was said to be coquettish. Social convention insists that she should appear to reject something just said to her by a man. She turns away in apparent anger, but at the same time she fingers her necklace and repeatedly lets it drop as tenderly as her own glance upon her breast.
When she is alone in her room and sure of being alone, a woman may look at herself in a mirror and put out her tongue. This makes her laugh and, on other occasions, cry.
It was with a woman’s presence that men fell in love. That part of a man which was submissive was mesmerized by the attention which she bestowed upon herself, and he dreamt of her bestowing the same attention upon himself. He imagined his own body, within her realm, being substituted for hers. This was a theme which occurred constantly in romantic poems about unrequited love. That part of a man which was masterful dreamt of possessing, not her body—this he called lust—but the variable mystery of her presence.
The presence of a woman in love could be very eloquent. The way she glanced or ran or spoke or turned to greet her lover might contain the quintessential quality of poetry. This would be obvious not only to the man she loved, but to any disinterested spectator. Why? Because the surveyor and the surveyed within herself were momentarily unified, and this unusual unity produced in her an absolute single-mindedness. The surveyor no longer surveyed. Her attitude to herself became as abandoned as she hoped her lover’s attitude to her would be. Her example was at last one of abandoning example. Only at such moments might a woman feel whole.
The state of being in love was usually short-lived—except in unhappy cases of unrequited love. Far shorter lived than the nineteenth-century romantic emphasis on the condition would lead us to believe. Sexual passion may have varied little throughout recorded history. But the account one renders to oneself about being in love is always informed and modified by the specific culture and social relations of the time.
For the nineteenth-century European middle classes the state of being in love was characterized by a sense of excessive uncertainty in an otherwise certain world. It was a state exempt from the promise of Progress. Its characteristic uncertainty was the result of considering the beloved as though he or she were free. Nothing that was an expression of the beloved’s wishes could be taken for granted. No single decision of the beloved could guarantee the next. Each gesture had to be read for its fresh meaning. Every arrangement became questionable until it had taken place. Doubt produced its own form of erotic stimulation: the lover became the object of the beloved’s choice in full liberty. Or so it seemed to the couple in love. In reality, the bestowing of such liberty upon the other, the assumption that the other was so free, was part of the general process of idealizing and making the beloved seem unique.
Each lover believed that he or she was the willing object of the other’s unlimited freedom and, simultaneously, that his or her own freedom, so circumscribed until now, was at last and finally assured within the terms of the other’s adoration. Thus each became convinced that to marry was to free oneself. Yet as soon as a woman became convinced of this (which might be long before her formal engagement) she was no longer single-minded, no longer whole. She had to survey herself now as the future betrothed, the future wife, the future mother of X’s children.
For a woman the state of being in love was a hallucinatory interregnum between two owners, her bridegroom taking the place of her father, or later, perhaps, a lover taking the place of her husband.
The surveyor-in-herself quickly became identified with the new owner. She would begin to watch herself as if she were him. What would Maurice say, she would ask, if his wife (that is me) did this? Look at me, she would address the mirror, see what Maurice’s wife is like. The surveyor-in-herself became the new owner’s agent. (A relationship which might well include as much deceit or chicanery as can be found between any proprietor and agent.)
The surveyed-within-herself became the creature of proprietor and agent, of whom both must be proud. She, the surveyed, became their social puppet and their sexual object. The surveyor made the puppet talk at dinner like a good wife. And when it seemed to her fit, she lay the surveyed down on a bed for her proprietor to enjoy. One might suppose that when a woman conceived and gave birth, surveyor and surveyed were temporarily reunited. Perhaps sometimes this happened. But childbirth was so surrounded with superstitution and horror that most women submitted to it, screaming, confused, or unconscious, as to a punishment for their intrinsic duplicity. When they emerged from their ordeal and held the child in their arms they found they were the agents of the loving mother of their husband’s child.
I hope the preceding few pages will throw some light on the story I am about to tell and in particular on G.’s insistence upon Camille being ‘solitary’ (i.e., unsurveyed by her own agency).
KARL MARX HAS BEEN RELEGATED TO THE ATTIC
Giolitti in 1911
Since his father’s death in 1908, this is the first time G. has returned to Italy. Lawyers in Livorno settled the problems of his inheritance; he owns three factories, two cargo vessels and fifteen houses near the centre of the city.
The evening haze over Lake Maggiore gives everything the look of a backdrop to a theatre set. The islands seem painted. On the hill rising up behind Stresa are the large villas of the rich. Most of them were built in the nineteenth century. Around their windows and doors are painted vine leaves and oranges and birds. At one of the largest villas with an imitation Renaissance watch-tower, Weymann and G. have been invited to dine.
Why did he crash?
Although there were hundreds of witnesses, accounts of what actually happened vary considerably, as do the explanations. Around the dinner table several theories are suggested.
Chavez was in complete control and was about to make a perfect landing. But unhappily, as a result of the strain of the flight and the buffeting of the wind, one of his wings folded a few seconds before his wheels touched the ground. This immediately forced the nose of the plane down and it dived, engine first, into the earth.
This theory is proposed and defended with authority by Monsieur Maurice Hennequin who, since he is an engineer working for Peugeot, was indeed the semi-official Peugeot representative at the competition, has to be listened to with respect. He has a habit of holding his listeners’ attention by suddenly stopping in the middle of a sentence to take in a mouthful of food. He gesticulates rigidly with his large hands, as if they were wooden doors opening and shutting to let his words out and to prevent anybody else’s ever entering into the home of his argument.
It would not have been a perfect landing. Chavez misjudged his speed. He was trying to land at about ninety kilometres an hour instead of sixty. What, however, caused the crash was not one but both wings folding, folding up like the wings of a butterfly when it alights.
This is the opinion of the Italian host, a director of the Pirelli rubber firm in Milan who has made generous donations to the Aero Club and believes, like Lord Northcliffe, that aviation has a great military and commercial future. His voice is habitually modulated to express the sweetness of reason itself. The position of his villa, its painted ceilings, the idea of dining beneath Chinese lanterns on the open platform of the imitation watch tower, the live flamingoes in the garden below, the new factory opened, all testify, he feels, to the reasonableness of his views. He believes in encouraging trade unions and offering incentives to his workers. How often has he quoted to his less successful and more belligerent business colleagues the words of the great Giolitti as Prime Minister:
‘The upward movement of the popular classes is accelerating day by day, and it is an invincible movement, because it is common to all civilized countries and is based upon the principle of the equality of all men. Let no one delude himself that he can prevent the popular classes from conquering their share of political and economic influence. It depends chiefly on us, on the attitude of the constitutional parties in their relations with the popular classes, whether the emergence of these shall be a new conservative force, a new element of prosperity and greatness, or whether instead it shall be a whirlwind that will be the ruin of our country’s fortunes.’
Only as a last resort would the host think in terms similar to those of his uncle: The cavalry! Don’t delay! Martial law and the cavalry! And then he would not shout such words in a Milan hotel; he would quietly pick up a telephone.
His wife asks whether it would not have been safer to land in the lake.
As the result of the cold experienced during the crossing, the pilot’s hands became so numb and frozen that he could no longer handle his controls properly.
This is the suggestion of the Contessa R., who is a great patron of the Milanese opera.
The Contessa raises her hand, its fingers supplely converging towards an apex. It is a dancer’s miming gesture for a flower about to open: it is also the gesture of a child trying to pick something out of a jar. Suddenly, on the word ‘frozen’, she shoots out fingers and thumb and holds them stiffly outstretched while she passes her other hand over the supposedly frozen one, indicating by tentative touches how icy its surface must be.
What intelligence! a man whispers to the young lady beside him, what intelligence behind those grey hairs! By Christmas, the young woman replies, she will have recovered from the loss of Gino, and her hair will be as black as five years ago.
Why does nobody consult Monsieur Chavez himself? The speaker is a woman of about thirty. Her voice is slightly rasping, as if it had once been ruined by a fit of inordinate demonic laughter. Are not most of the controls worked by the feet?
Could you please tell me her name?
Madame Hennequin. Surely you were introduced?
Her first name, I mean.
I do not know her maiden name.
Her prénom.
Ah. I am so sorry. Camille.
Geo remembers nothing after the Gondo gorges.
Poor Geo!
The hostess, wearing a golden bracelet made in the form of an ancient Etruscan one, extends her arm in beckoning invitation to Weymann. Monsieur Weymann, she says (Weymann is a friend of Maurice Hennequin—hence the invitation), you are the flyer and our guest of honour, tell us your opinion.
Weymann smiles but replies tersely in English: You can’t trust a plane like that. Do you know what its wings are made of? Cotton and wood.
Chavez was suffering from a kind of euphoria. He believed that he had succeeded in his venture and the worst was behind him; at the last moment he became reckless.
This is the theory of Harry Schuwey, a Belgian industrialist.
A woman who was just previously smiling at Camille Hennequin and sharing some joke with her says: I don’t find that very convincing, Harry. Her manner of address indicates that she is probably his mistress.
And she?
Mathilde. Mathilde Le Diraison.
My dear Mathilde, replies the Belgian, that is because you have no imagination at all. A young man of twenty-four who has just flown over the Alps for the first time in history believes that he is immortal, the world seems to lie at his feet (the Belgian gives a little laugh), believe me, moments of success are the most dangerous.
But he is immortal, says Madame Hennequin, schoolchildren will learn his name in the history books.
If she were not so well dressed one might mistake her for a schoolteacher. Her features and her figure possess a kind of angularity which suggests a distinct if circumscribed independence of mind.
That will depend, says her husband, on what he does in his further exploits. (In Monsieur Hennequin’s choice of the word ‘exploits’ there is an unconscious condescension, the result of jealousy.) His is a great achievement, I would be the last to deny it, but in the coming years there will be many more even more spectacular ones. Am I not right? He addresses himself to his host whose agreement is certain.
In ten years somebody will fly the Atlantic, says the host.
The first man to fly round the world! says the host’s wife wearily.
Will somebody fly to the moon one day? asks Madame Hennequin. Monsieur Hennequin smiles indulgently at his exotic wife and says with pride: She is an extremist, a dreamer, is Camille.
I am scarcely less interested in her than G. I will describe her to you as I now see her. She is thin. Her bones look as though they are too big for her skin; an effect not unlike that of a child wearing clothes she has outgrown. Her movements are very fastidious, as though they too are too small for her and she must take care not to outdo them. Her face glows, and her eyes are both soft and very translucent, like absolutely clear water in which fur is reflected.
She notices G. gazing at her. Most men when they stare at an unknown woman who attracts them, have already begun in their imagination the process of seducing and undressing her; they already see her in certain positions with certain expressions on her face; they are already beginning to dream about her. And so, when she intercepts their look, one of two things happens: either they continue to stare at her shamelessly because her real existence does not disturb their dream: or else she will read a flicker of shame in their eyes expressed as a momentary hesitation to which she will be obliged to respond either encouragingly or discouragingly.
He stares at her without shame or insolence. In his imagination he has not laid a finger upon her. His purpose is to present himself as he is. Everything else can follow. It is as though he imagines himself naked before her. And she is aware of this. She recognizes that the man looking at her is utterly confident that he has no need to hide anything, no need of any deception or covering. How is she to respond to such imprudence? This time the choice is not between encouragement or discouragement. If she lowers her eyes or looks away, it will be tantamount to admitting that she has appreciated his temerity: to turn away will be to admit that she has seen him as he is. (She will guard for herself, she will preserve the memory of his magnificent imprudence.) The more modest response is to hold his gaze, to stare blatantly back at him in the pretence that she has noticed nothing. This is what she does. Yet the longer they look at each other, the more conscious she is of him addressing himself unreservedly and exclusively to her. Although surrounded by observers, and although he is several metres away and she does not yet know his name, the mere act of their looking at each other has been transformed into their first secret encounter.
What were those extraordinary lines of Mallarmé you quoted to me this morning? Monsieur Hennequin asks his wife.
A woman dancer, she recites slowly and distinctly, is not a woman who dances for she is in no way a woman and she does not dance.
The Belgian gently rolls the wine in his glass.
It is beautiful, says the Contessa, and it is true. A great artist is more than a man or a woman, a great artist is a god.
In my opinion Mallarmé was trying to destroy language, says Monsieur Hennequin, he wanted to deny words the meaning they have, and I suppose it was a long-drawn out act of revenge.
Revenge? I don’t follow, says the host, looking at the palm trees silhouetted against the lake and in the back of his mind playing with the idea of installing an electrical generator so that the house and gardens may be lit with electric light.
A revenge against his public, the public who didn’t appreciate him as he wanted to be appreciated.
It is beautiful, repeats the Contessa, a dancer is not a dancer, a singer is not a singer. How true it is. Sometimes I myself wonder who I am.
I have one or two acquaintances in Brussels, says the Belgian, who wouldn’t agree with you there. They have, if I may so put it, they have first-hand experience of a number of women dancers. Only Mathilde laughs and the Belgian bows his head to her in pretended gratitude. (He wields power. He sits with his big arse on everything that might give him cause to doubt anything he does or says.) You don’t accept, Maurice, the genius of your Mallarmé? asks the host. In this house above this garden he likes to encourage talk about poetry.
Mallarmé may or may not have been a genius. I am not in a position to judge. But he was an obscurantist, and I believe in clarity. As an engineer it’s almost a professional article of faith. Confused machines just aren’t possible.
Mallarmé was a genius, he was immortal, said Madame Hennequin, far ahead of his time.
If we could all live a thousand years, says G., we would each, at least once during that period, be considered a genius. Not because of our great age, but because one of our gifts or aptitudes, however slight in itself, would coincide with what people at that particular moment took to be the mark of genius.
You don’t believe in genius! says the Contessa, shocked.
No, I think it’s an invention.
Several guests have left the table to look over the parapet at the moonlit gardens below. He sees a statue, white, sinuous and indistinct at its edges. Yet the way it is placed makes it part of the geometry of the garden with its straight paths, stone steps and polygonal fountains. The lights on the islands across the lake flicker, but otherwise everything is as still as the past.
Such an historical silence cannot last.
G. turns round to address Monsieur Hennequin: I know little about Mallarmé: I do not read poetry, but is the thought of Mallarmé’s which Madame was so good as to quote to us really so confused? Some experiences are indescribable but they are nonetheless real. Can you, for example, Monsieur Hennequin, describe the tone and quality of your wife’s voice? But I am sure that you would recognize it anywhere, as I would too, Madame Hennequin.
Madame Hennequin watches her husband to see how he will respond to the strange young man who has singled her out.
We talk of the mysterious tragedy of Chavez’ crash, says G., hundreds of people witnessed it, yet nobody can describe what he saw. Why? Because it was too unexpected. The unexpected is often indescribable.
He looks at Camille. He will call her, he decides, Camomille.
Mallarmé, G. continues, is saying that when a woman dances she can become transformed. Words which applied to her before, will no longer apply. It may even be necessary to call her by a different name.
Monsieur Hennequin places himself between the young man and his wife. Monsieur Hennequin is slim for his age but he has large heavy thighs. Women are women, he says, putting his hands up to bar entry, whether they are dancing, dressing, entertaining our guests, looking after our children or making us happy. And let us be grateful for that.
Our beautiful ladies, says the host, must be beginning to feel the cold night air rising from the lake. Let us go indoors.
They talk of attraction and magnetism; these notions suggest a force acting between two given bodies; what is left out of account is how utterly the bodies appear to change in themselves; they are no longer the given bodies. The fact of being given has changed them.
It is not that you see her so differently; it is that she frames a different world. The shape of her nose doesn’t change much. In outline she is the same. But within her unchanged contours everything you perceive is different. She is like an island whose coastline still corresponds to what was shown on the map, but on which, and surrounded by which, you now live. The sound of the sea on all her beaches—unless you accept the dictatorship of your intelligence—ultimately that is the only thing you can oppose to death.
For bruises sand is cool and like silk to the touch. For wounds it is inflaming and harsh, each particle contributing its degree of pain.
But by abstract metaphor I distance myself from my unique perception of her.
The tip of each of her fingers, with its bitten nail, is as expressive as an eye looking at me. I follow from the tip of each finger past the two knuckles to where it joins her hand. Her hand looks curiously thin and ineffective. As an object her hand looks as though it has been discarded. I can imagine or foresee it being different. It might caress me. It might hammer against my back. It might present itself as a five-teated udder to my mouth for me to suck each finger. None of this, however, is of any importance. My attention happened to fall upon her hand. It might just as well have been another part of her. Her elbow. Sharp with her bone pressing against her skin and making it white and bloodless. What can I foresee her elbow doing? Nothing of significance. Yet I perceive it in the same way as her hand. I receive from it the same promise and in the same way it fulfils its promise. I isolate parts in order to follow my eyes, instant by instant, faithfully. But my eyes move, reading her, at incredible speed. The fresh evidence of each part, of each new sight of her, contributes to my perception of her as a whole, and makes this whole continually move and pulsate like a heart, like my own heart.
What is her promise? Of her love in the future? But that is not yet fulfilled. If I made love with her it would be to complete, to put an end to, something that had already happened to us. When you describe something, when you name it, you separate it from yourself. Or to some degree. To fuck is like naming what has happened in the only language adequate to expressing it. (Only when nothing has happened is it possible to separate sex from love.) All acts of physical love are anticipatory and retrospective. Hence their unique significance.
My eyes touch her almost but not quite in the same way as my hands might. If I touched her, her skin, the surface of her body, a contradictory sensation would accompany my sense of touch. I would have the feeling that what I was touching also enclosed me: that this exterior surface (which is her skin with its variegated pores, its degrees of softness and heat and its different smells) that this exterior surface was at the same time, according to another mode of experience, an interior surface. I do not speak symbolically: I am referring to sensation itself. Touching her from the outside would make me aware of being inside.
I look at her fingers as though I were on the point of inhabiting each one, as though I might become the content of its form. I and her phalanxes. Absurd. Yet what is the absurd? Only a moment of incongruity between two different systems of thinking. I am speaking of her fingers, the flesh and bones of another person, and I am speaking too of my imagination. Yet my imagination is not separable from my own body; nor is hers.
The light which, falling upon her, discloses her, is like the light that falls upon and discloses cities and oceans. The facts of her physical being are the events of the world, the space in which she moves is the space of the universe, not because I am unmindful of everything except her, but because I am prepared to risk all that is not her for the sake of all that she is.
The way she plants her feet, the exact length of her back, the tone of her rasping voice (which he said he would recognize anywhere)—each of these and every other quality I see in her, appears as significant as a miracle. There is no end to what she can offer: it is infinite. And I am not deluding myself. I desire her single-mindedly. The value of everything about her, the significance of her smallest movement, the power of what differentiates her from every other woman—this may be determined for both of us by what I am prepared to risk for her. And that is the world. And so she will acquire the value of the world: she will contain, so far as she and I are concerned, all that is outside her, myself included. She will enclose me. Yet I will be free, for I will have chosen to be there, as I never chose to be here in the world and the life which I am ready to abandon for her.
Je t’aime, Camomille, comment je t’aime. That is what he must say.
The guests entered the large room where the furnishings were dark and heavy and the lamps cast bright distinct circles of light—like those lit arenas on conference tables in which it was traditional to depict statesmen signing treaties. The arrangement of the room suggested its principal use as a place where Milanese politicians and businessmen came to work out their plans undisturbed: it offered comfort but not distraction: it was a male room, like a minister’s private reception room in a parliament building. There was nothing in it (except now the women’s bare arms) which was equivalent to the flamingoes in the garden. As the guests entered this sober but comfortable room through the large double door beneath a portrait painting of Giolitti, he noticed Madame Hennequin talking with her friend Mathilde Le Diraison and there was something in the relationship between the two women which intrigued him. They had an air of scarcely disguised conspiracy, such as sometimes sisters preserve between them even after they have become adults and their parents are dead.
In a corridor Madame Hennequin had passed a huge mirror in the shape of the sun and in this mirror she had found herself trying to see the mantle over her shoulders and the fringe over her forehead as he might see them. Through his eyes she found herself pleasing.
Now in the room she compared him with her husband. They were unequally matched. Monsieur Hennequin was stronger and had greater authority. He was like a father; with her two children at home she often referred to her husband as Papa; he was a man who understood the world. His discretion about his mistress—even this—was an example of how well he understood it. Whereas the other, who spoke French badly, did not read poetry but could explain Mallarmé: Mallarmé whose poetry she loved so much because it was inexplicable: the other was imprudent and careless. But since they were so unequally matched she could allow herself to smile at him. Circumspectly, in her own rather distant manner and always in reference to her husband who could at any moment rescue her from the consequences of her own childishness, she was willing, for the duration of the evening, to flirt with this friend of the American aviator: to pretend that a relation existed where in fact there was none.
She asked him what kind of man Chavez was. He replied that he had only met him once or twice, but that Chavez was a nervous man and perhaps also a desperate one. He addressed his reply, however, as much to Monsieur Hennequin as to Madame Hennequin. It was as if he were aware of the comparison she had made and the conclusions she had reached. Having alerted her to his interest, he was now content for them both to concentrate on her husband, the owner.
On a low table near which they sat was a large glass statue of a swan, rose-coloured, and mounted on a silver turntable which revolved. It was neither art nor toy, but an ornament denoting wealth. Madame Hennequin, looking directly at him, put her hand on the swan’s neck and murmured the famous line of Mallarmé:
Un cygne d’autrefois se souvient que c’est lui
Magnifique mais qui sans espoir se délivre …
The harsh rose-coloured glass made the skin of her thin hand seem milkily translucent.
No more? asked Monsieur Hennequin encouragingly. He was aware that the American aviator’s friend had roused his wife’s interest and he hated Mallarmé, but he wanted to demonstrate his tolerance in such matters.
It goes on like this, said Madame Hennequin, but don’t try to understand it, just listen to the sound of what I’m saying.
She recited the whole four-line stanza and the following one, allowing her voice to transform the nostalgia of the poem into a kind of longing. The poem is about opportunities missed, but, by the very act of saying it out loud, she seized an opportunity. By reciting some lines from it she took the opportunity of letting the sound of the words express all that she felt to be independent to herself, all that was outside the reckoning but not the protection of her husband. She was like a tree, she considered, that grew in the soil of her husband’s garden but the leaves of which moved independently in the wind.
Whilst she spoke Monsieur Hennequin leaned back in his chair and smiled at the ceiling, painted with garlands. It was her spirituality, he congratulated himself, which made her such a good mother, although it also explained her reticence, her excessive modesty towards him. His heavy thighs and stomach pressed against his clothes and creased them. She lacked heat, he concluded, but on the other hand she would always be innocent.
G. refrained from glancing at her.
You have a poet’s voice, said the host, and then repeated the last two words in Italian to make them sound more appropriately poetic.
The Contessa quickly started her own conversation with those around her.
G. leant forward and pushed the glass swan quite forcefully so that its silver turntable began to revolve. It ceased to look like a swan and resembled a tall-necked, many-sided carafe of rosé wine.
The swan is drunk, said a young man.
G. turned towards Monsieur Hennequin and said: There is something I have often noticed which I do not fully understand and which I believe, Monsieur, you may be able to inform me about.
I will do my best.
Perhaps you do not often have the opportunity of visiting fairs?
You mean trade fairs?
Fairs in the street where there are shooting stalls and moving pictures and performing fleas and roundabouts and switchbacks …
I have seen them from a distance, yes.
I am an habitué of such fairs. They fascinate me.
Why do they fascinate you? interrupted Madame Hennequin.
They are full of games for adults and there are very few places where you can watch adults playing.
Simple-minded adults, said Monsieur Hennequin, those who patronize these fairs are of very low calibre.
You are entirely right, Monsieur Hennequin. You must surely have visited one once to understand them so well? Now, to come to my question. Do you think that flying round repeatedly in a circle, as happens on a certain kind of roundabout, do you think this might have a temporary effect—for purely physiological reasons—on the brain?
It can induce a sense of giddiness …
I mean more. Could character be temporarily changed by it?
Please explain, said Monsieur Hennequin, what you have in mind.
At these fairs there is a special kind of roundabout, a combination of a roundabout and a series of swings. The seats are suspended on chains and when they turn—
A centrifugal force comes into play, said Monsieur Hennequin, and they are thrown outwards. I have seen the kind of which you are speaking. We call them les petites chaises.
Good. Now you can control—up to a point—how you swing outwards and in what direction. It’s all a question of how far you lean back, how high you push your feet up, how you swing with your shoulders and how you pull with your arms on the chains either side. It’s not very different from what every girl learns on an ordinary swing.
I know, said Madame Hennequin.
The game which most of the riders play as soon as the roundabout starts to turn, is to try to swing themselves near enough to whoever is behind or in front of them so as to join hands with them and then to swing together, as a pair, holding on to each other’s chains. It’s quite difficult to do this, often only their fingertips touch—The seats are spaced in such a way, interrupted Monsieur Hennequin, to ensure that they never come into contact. Otherwise it could be dangerous.
Exactly. But everyone who rides on this kind of roundabout is transformed. As soon as it begins to turn and they begin to gain height as they swing out, their faces and expressions are changed. They leave the earth behind them, they throw back their heads and their feet go up towards the sky. I doubt whether they even hear the music which is playing. Each tries to take hold of the arm trailing in front of him, they cry out in delight as they gather speed, and the faster they go, the freer they play, as they rise and fall, separate and converge. The pairs who succeed in holding on to one another fly straighter and higher than the rest. I have watched this many times and nobody escapes the transformation. The shy become bold. The awkward become graceful. Then when it stops most of them revert to their old selves. As soon as their feet touch the ground, their expressions again become suspicious or closed or resigned. And when they walk away from the roundabout, it is almost impossible to believe that they are the same beings, men and women, who a moment ago were so free and abandoned in the air.
Madame Hennequin set the swan turning as he had done earlier.
Now what I want to ask you, Monsieur Hennequin, is whether you think this transformation might arise from the effect on the nervous system of gravity being modified by a centrifugal force? Is that possible?
It is more likely the result of the very low mental capacity of the class of people who go to such places. For the most part they are little better than children.
You don’t think it would have the same effect on us?
I doubt it very much.
Hasn’t it always been man’s dream to fly? Is that so childish? asked Madame Hennequin.
I fear, my dear, your imagination takes too much for granted, said Monsieur Hennequin. A fairground stunt like this has got nothing to do with flying. You should ask Monsieur Weymann.
The conversation changed. Somebody remarked on the painting of Giolitti. The host laughed and said the painter must have been a political opponent. Do you know what Giolitti’s enemies call him? They call him a Bologna sausage, because, they say, he is half ass and half pig!
I understood you admired him, said the Belgian.
In Bologna pig may be a pet name, said Mathilde Le Diraison.
Yes, I do admire him, said the host. He is the creator of modern Italy. He has often been here, in this room, and it was he himself who said that about his own portrait, and he added that the painter was from Bologna! And this is exactly how he is a great man. He knows how unimportant personal opinions are. What matters is organization. Organization and persuasion.
The conversation turned to politics and then to Germany and the news of the continuing riots in Berlin. Monsieur Hennequin feared that a revolution breaking out in one country in Europe might quickly spread to the others. Monsieur Hennequin was always oscillating between supreme confidence and sudden fear.
His host shook his head reassuringly. There will be no revolution in Europe, the danger is past, and the reason is simple. The leaders of the working masses do not want power. They only want improvements. They have learnt the techniques of bargaining. They have to pretend to ask for more than they want to receive what they do want. From time to time they bring out the word Socialism. This word is the equivalent of temporarily breaking off negotiations, but always with the intention of re-starting them. If we educate people properly, if we use the benefits of modern science, if we curb the power of monarchy and rely upon parliamentary government, there is no reason at all why the present social order should ever change violently.
The host came over, stood behind Monsieur Hennequin and put his hand on his shoulder. You are sceptical, he continued, come, let me show you a recent photograph of Turati and the Socialist Deputies in Rome. It is a curious picture. And very reassuring.
Monsieur Hennequin got up. Madame Hennequin began to say something but was interrupted—
You are beautiful. You have eyes which say everything. And you have the voice of a corn-crake.
She laughs. A corn-crake! Is that a compliment?
I love you. How I love you. I must see you tomorrow.
In the year 1910, which in this respect was in no way exceptional, over half a million Italians emigrated abroad in order to find work and avoid starvation.
THE NATURE OF LIKENESS
In writing about Camille I cannot get close enough to her.
Who is drawing me
between pencil and paper?
One day I shall judge the likeness
but she who judges
will not be the woman who now
so expectantly poses.
I am what I am.
What I am like is how you see me.
Domodossola, like Brig, was crowded with journalists and flying enthusiasts. It is a small town of narrow cobbled streets. Its roofs are covered with clumsy irregular tiles of blackish-red stone, similar in colour to the rocks of the Gondo. When seen from the air the overhanging eaves hide the small streets and the whole town looks like a scattered pile of blackish-red slivers of shale, the deposit of a landslide.
In the Piazza Mercato the Mayor had ordered a large blackboard to be put up. On it, with white chalk in copperplate script, was written the latest medical bulletin concerning Chavez.
Being Sunday morning, there was a market and the square and streets were crowded. During the night the weather had changed and it was hard to believe that they had dined, twenty kilometres away, on the open platform of the tower above Lake Maggiore. He was slowly making his way towards the hospital. When he saw Camille walking in front he was not surprised.
She was wearing a trotteur of pale lilac grey. Its cut and its colour made her look more enterprising than she had in evening dress. Her walk was light and decided. On her head she wore a low-crowned hat with white flowers, tilted forwards. Her brown hair was swept up at the back into a chignon. He guessed that her trim elegance early in the morning in this provincial town meant that she had slept little or badly.
The temperature of hair to the touch varies considerably from person to person, regardless of the surrounding temperature. There are heads of hair which always tend to be cool; others which seem to generate their own heat in the coldest conditions. In the cold air, whilst she remained quite oblivious of his presence a few metres behind her, he could foresee that Camille’s hair would be unusually warm.
She stopped to look into a shop window of gloves and furs. Abruptly he took her arm from behind. She wheeled round with a little cry and with her fists clenched in anger. When she saw that it was he and not a stranger, she could not prevent the relief from showing on her face. She continued to frown, but a smile wavered along her mouth.
He asked after her husband and said that he wanted to propose to him that if the weather were not worse this afternoon, they, with Monsieur Schuwey and Madame Le Diraison, might accompany him on a motor trip to Santa Maria Maggiore.
During the night she had asked herself many times about his absurd declaration of love. Why had she not turned her back on him? Why had she not protested? She told herself it was because she was too surprised. Yet she might have been forewarned. She had after all consciously encouraged his evident interest in her. But what she could never have foreseen, what still confused her, was the way in which, suddenly, and clearly by an act of will, he was addressing her in the room as though they were alone, as though he had dropped from the sky, or come up from the earth, exactly beside her, without having to interrupt or cross the territory of those who surrounded her. She did not protest because there seemed to be nobody to protest to; nobody could have seen him. Had she made a scene, it would have been about something which had already ceased to exist. At one moment during the night she woke up convinced he was standing by the window. For the same reason she could not cry out.
She was telling him how she had lost a pair of gloves on the train coming from Paris. He asked if he might accompany her into the shop. She hesitated. He assured her there was no other shop in the town and he would be glad to interpret for her.
This morning she saw yesterday’s incident differently. What had happened (mysteriously) had happened; but it was without consequence thanks to the order and routine of her normal life. She was in Domodossola with her husband. In four or five days she would return to Paris and her children. This man (with whom she was in a glove shop explaining that she wanted long white gloves) had taken advantage of one moment at a dinner party such as could not occur again. The incident had been finished before it began.
The woman who served them in the shop spoke at length about the heroism of Chavez. Geo Chavez, he translated to Camille, was a victor over the mountains, a conqueror, to whose present pains the woman behind the counter would gladly minister all night and to the least of whose wishes she would be proud to be a slave. She spoke as a mother although to her great regret she never had a son. One of her daughters worked in Milan, a second helped her with the shop.
The gloves which Camille wished to try on were of the thinnest white leather and tight-fitting. The woman, who was proud to live in the town which would nurse Chavez back to health, brought one of the gloves to her mouth and breathed into it before handing it across the counter to Camille. If it was still difficult to put on, she explained, she would sprinkle some talc
When memory connects one experience with another, the nature of the connection may vary considerably. There are connections by contrast, connections by similitude, connections by way of sensuous metaphor, connections of logical sequence, etc, etc The relation between the two experiences may sometimes be one of mutual comment. In this case the connection is multiform and complex. Yet the comment, although extremely precise, cannot be verbalized any more than a chord in music can be. The experience of watching the Italian shopkeeper breathing into a glove summoned up and commented upon his memory of the mysterious warmth he once found in the clothes of Miss Helen, his last governess. Likewise his memory commented upon his present experience. The comments, however, remain unwritable.
The Italian woman blew into the second glove before passing it to Camille. Filled with her breath, the glove took on the form of a hand which suddenly and deeply frightened Camille. It was a languid boneless hand, a hand without will, a hand floating in the air like a dead fish with its white stomach uppermost. It was a hand she did not want. It was a hand that could not clench itself. It was a hand which in caressing would in no way be a hand and would not caress; it would lead away. At that moment she knew what he was offering her. He was offering her the possibility of being what she pretended to be. He was proposing that she turn Mallarmé’s words into lived mornings and afternoons. But she immediately put her knowledge out of her mind by dismissing the self which recognized it, as unserious. All she had to do to remain safe, she told herself, was to be wary of being unrealistic.
The gloves fitted her perfectly. The leather across her tiny bony knuckles was so tight that it shone as if it were wet.
Take one hand in the other, he told her.
She did so.
You see, he said, you take your left hand in your right.
Is it strange? she asked.
No, he said, but it means you are confident, you are the mistress of your own fate.
She laughed, reassured that he recognized this. I am quite content, she said.
You can be content and a slave. Contentment has little to do with it. Why do you say content?
She thought it best not to answer. I am easily startled though, she said, like I was in the street just now.
Startled! You turned upon me with the fury of a virago defending her honour, and when you recognized it was me you extended me an utterly confident welcome.
Camille pulled off the gloves angrily, lay them on the counter and turned towards the door. He asked the shopkeeper how much they were.
I don’t want them, said Camille.
He paid for them. The shopkeeper folded them in mauve tissue paper. Camille stood facing the door. From behind he took both of her elbows in his hands.
(What can I foresee her elbow doing? Nothing of significance. Yet I perceive it in the same way as her hand. I receive from it the same promise and in the same way it fulfils its promise. Her elbows are in his hands.)
Trust me, he said. Nobody else knows why you take your left hand in your right. It doesn’t compromise you.
I don’t want the gloves, she said.
They won’t compromise you either, he said, it is certain that you would have bought them. And I offer them to you only as a modest homage to your elegance, Madame Hennequin, this morning.
The formality with which he spoke confused her. It was impossible to decide whether its falseness was deliberate or the result of his far from perfect grasp of the language. Either way it emphasized how by showing her anger she had been indiscreet.
It is too early for us to disagree, he said, and he held out the gloves to her and bowed.
She took them.
Je t’aime, Camille, he said, opening the shop door.
The hospital is near the centre of the town. A square yellow building, it looks like a classical early-nineteenth-century villa in its own garden. The main door is flanked by camellia trees. In the doorway is a table with a book open upon it. The book is for passers-by or visitors who do not wish to disturb the flyer, to write messages or tributes in. For some, however, it seems a sinister omen, for in certain parts of the Mediterranean a book is placed by the front door when there has been a death in the house; and in this book neighbours and acquaintances sign their names as an expression of condolence.
Weymann is waiting for him at the top of the stairs.
He says he remembers nothing after the Gondo, Weymann whispers.
How does he seem?
Very shaken and erratic.
What do the doctors really think?
His injuries are not serious. He has no concussion. There’s nothing to prevent him making a complete recovery.
Except?
I didn’t say except.
But except?
He’s too nervous, says Weymann.
They enter the room in which there are already half a dozen men, including Christiaens and Chavez’ close friend Duray. On the wall opposite the bed are pinned telegrams from all over the world: enough to cover the entire wall.
To the wounded man the wall might have represented a vast transparent window on to the world’s view of his achievement; but it does not, it remains a wall with confused meaningless rectangles of paper pinned to it, some of which stir slightly when the door is opened. His temperature is only slightly above normal. His brain is lucid. Time and again his imagination approaches the irreversibility of the events since he announced ‘I’m going now’. Their irreversibility confronts him like a rock face which moves with him as he turns his head or shifts his gaze. However high he climbs, however daringly he breaks through the wall of the wind westwards, it is still there, in front of his eyes and above his swollen lips. He repeatedly makes the approach but the geology of the events never changes. Meanwhile these silent endlessly recurring private approaches make everything else said or seen in his room seem as far away as the words he cannot read on the telegrams.
They found him under the débris of his plane with his face pressed against the earth. He did not lose consciousness.
G. takes Chavez’ hand and offers his congratulations. He is unaccustomed to finding a man mysterious; mystery, for him, is the prerogative of women. About men he asks only questions to which the number of answers is limited, as one asks what time it is—according to a clock or a watch. He looks into Chavez’ dark eyes, whose expression is suspicious, at his swollen lips which, even when unbruised, were absurdly full and curved, at the backs of his hands, and he sees the whole appearance of the small young man, forced to lie unexpectedly there in a bed in a hospital in a garden in Domodossola, as an outer covering no less arbitrary or opaque than the misshapen cylinders of plaster round his legs. A hand on a woman’s breast conjures up the same mystery. Beneath the tangible extends the enormity of what is intangible and invisible. A doctor can take the plaster off his legs. But a surgeon making an incision in his flesh and opening up the organs within would not disclose the mystery. The mystery lies in the vastness of the system by which Chavez, so long as he is alive, constitutes the world in which he is living (which includes your hand shaking his) as his own unique experience.
This morning I went into a glove shop and the woman who served me spoke of you as though you were a saint, a saint with the courage of a hero.
I know, interrupted Chavez, they think of me like that. Perhaps they are right or perhaps they are not. Anyway the question will never be settled because, meanwhile, I’m dying.
The weather improved. He suggested that Monsieur Hennequin should drive the motor car. In the late afternoon they were driving through a pine forest which overlooked the lake. Madame Hennequin wanted to stop so that they could walk a little in the forest.
The light enters the forest almost horizontally. Each entry between the trees into the depths of the forest acquires in this light an exaggerated stereoscopic quality. The trees which are against the light look entirely black. The tree trunks which are sunlit are a greyish honey colour. The same light falls upon the taffeta and silk of the two women’s dresses which are pearly and luminous. As the women walk, their feet in their buttoned boots tread lightly but deeply into a carpet of pine needles, rotted cones, moss and the leaves of flowers. Every surface is more than usually vivid, but in the forest everything loses something of its substantiality.
To Camille he has been no more than formally polite, so as to emphasize to her the depth and seriousness of the conspiracy which now links them. He has concentrated his attention upon Monsieur Hennequin and Harry Schuwey. He is encouraging the latter to talk about the resources of the Congo. He appears to listen with interest; every so often he asks a supplementary question or makes an encouraging sign of agreement. Yet despite the impression he gives, he is scarcely listening to what is being said. In a mixed language, where words are only one of the expressive means—a language not essentially different from that in which he questioned himself as a child but now possessing a wider range of references—he addresses, silently, the two men whom he is walking between.
How did you choose them? You chose them for exactly the same reasons as you would have chosen any other woman. Men in your position must have the best. The best is not an absolute, though. Men in your position must have the best for men in your position. If you choose a woman without considering this you may jeopardize your position and the putting of your position in jeopardy may cause you—and therefore her—unhappiness. Cut the cloth according to the purse, and choose the wearer of the cloth according to its cut. But apart from being men with positions you are men with penises.
On their left, the ground rises steeply so that the roots of the distant trees are level with the top branches of the near ones. Beween the higher distant trees there are rocks, jagged in shape but covered in green moss. On their right, when there is a sufficiently straight avenue to look down, they can see the surface of the lake shimmering like mica below.
And your penises are much given to idealizing. Your penises want the best possible—and to hell with your positions. How can you satisfy both?
A forest is not incontrovertible like a mountain. It is tolerant, like the sea, of everything which occurs within it.
You cannot. But you can protect yourselves or you can try to protect yourselves against the worst consequences of an open rift. And this you have done from the moment you attained the age of responsibility, with the help of your colleagues, your friends, your church, your professors, your novelists, your dressmakers, your comedians, your lawyers, your forces of order, your public men and of course your women.
Monsieur Hennequin wonders whether what his friend is saying might be of interest to Peugeot. Everything that motor cars will need should be of interest to Peugeot. He would like to visit the Congo himself. He has been to Algeria but in his opinion that is scarcely Africa. Africa begins with the jungle. He picks up a stick from the path and with it he lightly taps the trunks of the trees which are within his reach as they pass them.
You had to find a third value, a third interest that your social ambition, which, unlike pure ambition, must always wear the dress of conformity, and the idealism of your penises could acknowledge as arbiter. And this third value was property. The third interest was an interest in owning. Not a remote merely financial interest, but a passionate one which stirs you physically, which becomes a sense as acute as the sense of touch. Indeed you have seen to it that your children are taught to touch nothing that is not theirs, not a flower nor an animal nor the hand of a stranger. To touch is to claim as property. To fuck is to possess. And you take possession either by paying rent or by buying outright.
The women were walking behind the men. Harry Schuwey is explaining that whereas ivory is a luxury material today, rubber with the development of the motor industry is becoming an essential one and that therefore the future of the Congo lies in rubber. The forest is very still except for the party advancing along the path. Occasionally, high up among the topmost branches, a bird sings a few notes and then stops.
Has nobody told you about your houses? I discovered it a long time ago. You are walking leisurely—in any city in Europe—through a well-off residential quarter down a street of your own houses or apartments.
The trees are spruce firs or larches. Lichen grows more readily on the former. Many dead branches are festooned with matted pale green hair, like dried seaweed. On other branches lines and clusters of lichen algae are fixed like tarnished white silver press-studs.
Their window-frames and shutters have been freshly painted but their colour barely differentiates them from the façades around them, which absorb the sunlight but give off a slight granular scintillation like starched linen table-napkins. You look up at the curtained windows in which the curtains are so still that they might be carved out of stone, at the wrought iron-work of balconies imitating plants, at ornamental flourishes referring to other cities and other times, you pass polished wooden double doors with brass bells and plates, the silence of the street consists of the barely perceptible noise of a distant crowd, a crowd made up of so many people so far away that their individual exertions, their individual inhaling and exhaling combine in a sound of continuous unpunctuated breathing, gentle as a breeze, this silence which is not entirely a silence, receives and contains the noise of a front door being shut by a maid, or the yapping of a dog among upholstered furniture and heavy carpets, as a canteen with its green baize lining receives the knives and forks deposited in it. Everything is peaceful and well-appointed. And then suddenly you realize with a shock that each residence, although still, is without a stitch of clothing, is absolutely naked! And what makes it worse is their stance. They are shamelessly displaying themselves to every passer-by!
As the party strolls on, the spaces they see between trunks and branches change in shape and colour. Colour and shape can conspire to suggest the presence, there, between two trees, of a deer.
Look! whispers Mathilde.
The process is the obverse of that of natural camouflage whereby animals merge with their surroundings; her knowledge that deer live in the forest has led Mathilde to create an animal out of the surroundings.
He has deduced from the way Mathilde smiles at him that Camille has confided in her. In her attitude there is an openness, an undisguised curiosity such as women can only afford to show to a new lover or suitor of an intimate friend.
I really thought it was a deer, says Mathilde.
The path leads to a clearing, a meadow of tall grass in which every blade is rendered separate and distinct by the horizontal light and which is full of the stillness and peace of early autumn wherein it seems that all development has been suspended, all consequences indefinitely delayed. Monsieur Hennequin, ignoring the present arguments of Harry Schuwey, stoops to pick some meadow saffron which he presents to his wife. The moment reminded him of the year in which he had courted her.
You chose this woman as you made her your own. At any moment the degree of conviction in your choice depended on your estimate of how exclusively she belonged to you. In the end she belonged to you entirely, and then you were able to say: I have chosen her.
Camille takes the flowers in her gloved hand. And Mathilde pins them to her friend’s blouse.
It is necessary to believe that what you choose for yourself is good. But a part of yourself—the part that was cunning, listened to other men and had known since childhood that life benefits those who benefit themselves—this part remained sceptical. By marrying her, you would lose the opportunity of marrying another. By possessing her you would limit your possible powers of possession. True, you could still choose your mistress. But in the end the same would apply to your choice of her. And so the sceptical part of yourself asked: is she desirable enough to convince me consistently of my own good sense in making her mine? Is her desirability such that it can console me for finding her, rather than any other, desirable?
Camille laughs at a joke of Mathilde’s. Monsieur Hennequin walks through the high grass like a man walking into water. Harry Schuwey is explaining why the official annexation of the Congo which occurred two years ago will benefit trade.
Had the answer been No, you would have dropped her as though she had ceased to exist.
I have never seen such large butterflies, shouts Monsieur Hennequin and running a little distance tries to catch one in his cap.
In order to console you for the loss of all or nearly all the other women in the world, she had to become an ideal. She collaborated with you in the choice of the qualities to be idealized. You chose Camille’s innocence, delicacy, maternal feeling, spirituality. She emphasized these for you. She suppressed the aspects of herself which contradicted them. She became your myth. The only myth which was entirely your own.
Schuwey is arguing that the colonial methods of King Leopold and his private Congo Free State were effective enough twenty years ago and that it was hypocritical of the other European powers to condemn the use of forced labour and harsh repressive measures when they themselves had once used similar methods—less effectively. Nevertheless, Schuwey says, it is perfectly true that kings make bad businessmen because they always put revenue before investment.
You—you have idealized different qualities in Mathilde. She is different in temperament and she is not your wife but your mistress. She has, you say, the most beautiful neck in the world. She is lazy, you believe, as only a pleasure-loving woman can be. She is, you pride yourself, devilishly attractive to men. To idealize the last quality is uniquely satisfying—so long as a second proposition, about which you feel less confident, pertains: and she does not deceive me.
When you consider leaving Camille, when you find that Mathilde, is, after all, too extravagant and erratic, it will not be because you are dissatisfied with what they are but because they will no longer be able to compensate you for what they are not!
I hate you. You have power not because of your wealth but because most men obey you. Everything they learn makes them envy you and envy leads to obedience. They want to be like you. So they live by the same laws, and in the end they choose obedience as their own good.
Your power in yourself is paltry. Your eyes peer out like dead men propped up at their windows to make the crowds in the street below believe they are being watched. Ears, which are the most innocent, the most receptive feature of the face, become either side of your head useless vestigial appendages from a former age, like the useless nipples on your chests. Where do you live? At your fingertips? In your heart? At the bottom of your dreams? Across your shoulders?
You live in the ill-lit, airless space between your last skin and your clothes. You live in your own perambulating mezzanine. Your passions are like rashes.
I hear the lark, says Camille, but I can’t see it.
You cannot threaten me. Your existence reconciles me to the idea of my own death.
I do not want to live indefinitely in a world which you dominate; life in such a world should be short. Life would choose death rather than your company. And even death is reluctant to take you. You will live long.
Monsieur Hennequin approaches the group standing in the corner of the meadow. He holds his clasped hands out in front of him. Apparently he has caught a butterfly.
Let it go, says Camille, you are worse than a small boy.
You wouldn’t have said that to Linnaeus, replies Monsieur Hennequin.
Who was he? asks Schuwey.
Monsieur Hennequin throws his hands up into the air above his head and opens them. There is no butterfly. He roars with laughter.
When you laugh, you laugh crazily (panting in momentary relief) at the person you might have been, and of whom the joke briefly reminded you.
As soon as one of you disappears, there is another to take his place, and the number of places is increasing. There will be shortages of everything in the world before there is a shortage of you!
After the meadow, the path leads to a point which commands a wide view of the plain and the first southern slopes of the Alps. When they stop talking, the silence, the expanse of the lake, the snow on a single Alpine peak, the late extension of the autumn afternoon, combine to make an amalgam which is like a lens for the imagination of even the habitually unimaginative: the lens enables them to glimpse the space surrounding their own lives.
Why should I fear you? It is you who speak of the future and believe in it. You use the future to console yourself for the youth you never had. I do not. I shall be beyond the far reaches of your ridiculous and monstrous continuity, as Geo Chavez has gone. I shall be dead, so why should I fear?
I fear the idea now: the idea of your immortality: the idea of the eternity you impose upon the living before they are dead.
On the return walk to the car he again affably accompanies the men. The forest is darker and cooler. The smell of pine is stronger. In the dusk of the trees the unity of the trees is more pronounced. A single twig of a larch has small bossy protuberances running on alternative sides along its length. When the twig was smaller, each of these was a needle. When the twig becomes a branch, each of these will be a twig. And branches grow from the trunk in the same way. The forest is the result of the same stitch being endlessly repeated.
As he helps Camille into the back of the motor car, he passes her a note. She will read it later. In it is written: My corn-crake, my little one, my most desired, I have something to tell you and you alone. Meet me tomorrow afternoon. I shall wait for you in a car outside Stresa Station tomorrow afternoon.
Monsieur Hennequin discovered the note the same evening. Camille had put it between the pages of Mallarmé’s Poésies which at that time she always kept by her side. The oil lamp on the writing table started to smoke; she called her husband from the adjoining room and asked him to adjust it. (In their Paris house they already had electricity.) By accident Monsieur Hennequin knocked the book off the table. The note fluttered separately to the ground. He stopped to pick up both paper and book. The folded piece of paper intrigued him: he wondered whether Camille had begun to write her own poetry. He unfolded it. The note was signed. He put it back in the book, kissed Camille on the top of her head and left the room as though nothing had happened.
Camille, unsuspecting, instructed her maid to prepare a bath. She had decided that she would ignore the note. But she could not cease asking herself and trying to answer the question: what is it in me that makes him so heedless and so insistent?
After a quarter of an hour Monsieur Hennequin had assessed the full magnitude of the wrong done to him, and he entered his wife’s room without knocking and as though he had just at that instant discovered her infidelity. The door banged against the wall. Camille had unpinned her hair and was in a dressing gown. Monsieur Hennequin did not raise his voice. He spoke harshly between his teeth.
Camille, you must be mad. Can you explain yourself?
She looked up at him, surprised.
Open that book, you know already what is in it. There is a note—a note of assignation addressed to you. From whom is it?
You have no right to spy on me. It is humiliating for both of us.
From whom is it?
Since you have read it and it is signed, you obviously know.
From whom is it?
You tell me—and you can tell me, too, how many other notes I have received from the same gentleman, You are being very stupid, Maurice.
From whom is it?
He stood upright in front of her, his fists clenched, his head slightly inclined so that he could see the place on her head where he had kissed her before leaving the room to decide what it was necessary for him to do. She, in her chair, either had to lean back as though cowering away from him, or else stare at his watch-chain, a few inches from her face. She stared at the gold chain.
I have nothing to be ashamed of, she said. I did not intend to reply to his note, which I found very foolish, and I have done nothing whatsoever to encourage him. You must really believe me.
From whom is it?
Can you say nothing else, Maurice? Why don’t you ask me what has happened. Me. Before jumping to your own conclusions.
From whom is it?
My God, what is the matter with you?
I want to hear you speak his name.
Then I am afraid I shall not give you that satisfaction.
Exactly. Because you know as well as I do that your voice will betray you. You will not be able to keep your feelings—if they can be called feelings—you won’t be able to keep your feelings out of your voice. Say his name now.
I refuse. You are being absurd.
You refuse. Of course you refuse, I have seen the two of you together. I was blind. Blinded by my own trust in you. But now I can see. From the first moment you met him, you ogled him, you put yourself at his side, eyeing him, murmuring—
You have gone out of your mind. You have no right to say these things to me. I have done nothing.
Done nothing! In two days you haven’t had the time to do anything—as you so delicately put it. But you have wanted to, and like—like a prostitute you have interested him.
She tried to push him away with her hands. Then she lowered her head and began to cry.
We shall leave for Paris tomorrow afternoon, he said. You can tell Yvonne to pack. He strode to the door and turned to face her again. The shamelessness of it is what I find so disgusting, he said, the vulgarity! In two days under my very eyes in a small town where we are all of us of necessity on each other’s doorsteps!
Doorsteps! she said, angry whilst crying.
I shall warn him tomorrow morning, he said, if I catch sight of him again with you, I shall shoot him—and have every court in France on my side. I shall shoot him down like—
Would it not be more honourable to challenge him to a duel?
I daresay you see yourself as a great courtesan. But you have neither the tact nor the charm for that. And you happen to be living in the twentieth century.
I beg you not to speak to him.
Him!
Where her gown crossed over he could see her white, rising breasts. Let us go back to Paris, she said, if that will really satisfy you, but do not speak to him.
Evidently, my dear Camille, you are frightened of what I will learn from him.
Very well.
He took the key out of the door and left the room. He took the key because otherwise she might lock him out. She had done so on several occasions after disputes; and later tonight—he was aware of it now—it was possible that he might decide to fuck her like a prostitute.
Camille slept fitfully. At six she got up. Her husband was not in his room and had apparently not slept in his bed. She opened the shutters. The sky was blue without a cloud in it. The pace of the day had not yet established its rhythm; time, like the street with only a few people in it, seemed elongated. The length of the day and the depth of the blue sky constituted a stage whose dimensions suddenly made her shiver. From the window she could see the railway station.
She waited impatiently for the time when she could decently send Yvonne with a message to Mathilde, asking the latter to join her as quickly as possible because she needed her help.
Whilst waiting she ordered coffee.
From the window she saw a cat cross the courtyard with that undeviating fleetness which characterizes cats when they have direct access to what they want. The cat had heard the noise of the coffee grinder being turned by the peasant girl in the kitchen, who sat on a stool and held the grinder between her knees. For the cat the noise signified cream. When the maid finished grinding the coffee, she would go to the wooden larder in the wall and take down a large jug of cream. She would pour the cream from this jug into small silver jugs, and if the cat rubbed itself against her leg, she would also pour some into a chipped blue and white plate and place it by the door to the yard for the cat to drink.
She looked several times through her wardrobe to decide what to wear today. They would be catching the train to Paris. She was being taken home to her children, herself like a child who had misbehaved. She had a dark travelling suit in linen lined with patterned satin, which would be highly suitable. She decided, however, to wear her trotteur of pale lilac grey. She was being taken home under protest.
It was not for her advice that she needed Mathilde but for her assistance. Mathilde was a person, Camille considered, with different standards from her own and with far more luxurious tastes. Mathilde understood contracts and because she understood them, she was able to keep them. When she married Monsieur Le Diraison, aged sixty-four, she undertook to make the rest of his life agreeable in exchange for the inheritance she would receive at his death. And for five years she had spoilt the old sick man like a child. She, Camille, would be incapable of carrying out such a bargain; she believed that life should be finer than that. She believed in a justice whose essence was spiritual, not material. She liked the parable of the labourers in the vineyard of whom the last to be hired, who worked for only one hour, were nevertheless paid the same amount as those who had borne the burden and heat of the whole day.
She needed Mathilde’s assistance precisely because she wanted to redress an injustice. If her husband had spoken to him as he had threatened to do (and his absence seemed to confirm that this might be the case) she wanted to go out into the town this morning, accompanied by Mathilde, in the hope that they might meet him. She never wished to see him again, but she wanted to give him her assurance that however unsuitable, imprudent and mistaken his pursuit of her had been, she had never for one moment considered it base.
She foresaw that Mathilde would dismiss this plan as quixotic and childish. But she knew that Mathilde would do what she asked: partly out of friendship, even more out of her fear of boredom.
What are we waiting for in this horrid little provincial town? Mathilde had said yesterday morning, I believe we are waiting, my dear, for the hero to die.
As the local train drew into Domodossola station, Monsieur Hennequin opened the carriage door, ready to jump down on the platform. He was not impatient and he knew he had time to kill, but the more briskly he acted, the more certain he was of the correctness of his decision. A number of workers got out of the same train, but instead of making for the exit they crossed the lines towards the shunting yards. There were no cabs waiting outside the station and he could only see one other person at the far end of the Corso.
He passed his hand over his side pocket to satisfy himself once again that the automatic pistol, to obtain which he had made the tedious night journey, was solidly there. Its solidity, like the briskness of his actions, acted as a confirmation; it was like hearing an acquaintance say of him: Maurice acted calmly and firmly.
Passing the hotel, he looked up at his own bedroom window and remembered Camille’s taunt about fighting a duel. It was the traditional time of day for duels and for executions. He told himself that after a night without sleep, in the early morning, before the day for most people had begun, you might have an unusual sense of your own destiny.
He walked into the old centre of the town where there is an irregularly shaped piazza and the pavement in front of the shops is arcaded. The blackboard on which was written last night’s medical bulletin concerning Chavez had been placed under the arcades in case it rained during the night. The writing was smudged at one corner. The instability and irregularity of the patient’s cardiac functions give rise to continuing anxiety …
The shop windows under the arcades had large wooden shutters folded across them. They were painted green, but because they had been painted on different occasions, each had its own distinctive shade. Above the shutters were the shop signs. Several family names occurred more than once over different shops. When the shops were open, it was obvious from what was displayed in their windows that they were little more than poorly stocked stalls in a remote provincial town. But with their shutters up they looked different. It was possible to imagine that they were shops full of rare articles. Monsieur Hennequin walked several times round the arcade.
He would have liked Camille to witness the forthcoming encounter. She would see the young man shown up for what he was—a cynical philanderer with the mentality of a petty criminal. And she would also learn how far he, her husband, was prepared to go in order to protect her.
He no longer blamed Camille. Last night be had glimpsed in her the tart who, according to Monsieur Hennequin, is found in every woman but who only makes herself evident if the woman is denied the controls which her nature requires. He had ignored the warning contained in her infatuation with Mallarmé’s poetry: this poetry had stimulated and irritated her taste for the limitless, the boundless. But finally, he convinced himself she was not to blame: she was innocent. Her weakness was the weakness of her sex.
In protecting her from this weakness, in putting a stop to the leering young man’s felonies, he was acting on behalf of all husbands for the sake of all wives. Women who were far more cunning than Camille, far more capable of pursuing their own interests, suffered from the same weakness: the weakness of succumbing to their own false first impressions. Women, able to twist men round their little fingers as soon as they knew them, could be rendered as impressionable as an eleven-year-old before a stranger whom they did not yet know. Women could calculate, they could make elaborate strategic and tactical plans, they could be patient and persistent, they could be merciless and generous—but their first impressions were invariably faulty. They could not see what was in front of them. This was why philanderers, so long as they were dealing with women, had need of so little diguise or distinction.
Monsieur Hennequin came to believe that what he intended to do was a duty placed upon him as a consequence of the weakness and inferiority of others. He was in no way aware of having to defend his own interests, or of having to try to escape from the solitude being imposed upon him. He left the arcade and the shuttered shops.
Monsieur Hennequin stood in the doorway of the bedroom. I don’t imagine you are surprised to see me, he said and shut the door behind him. We men are not the fools you take us for, he continued, and we know exactly how to deal with your type.
The bedroom was a modest one with a wooden plank floor. On the bed, instead of blankets, there was a large eiderdown in a white coverlet. The pillows were stuffed, not with feathers, but with grain. It was the hotel where the drivers of the Simplon mail coach used to stay. G. was still in bed but had raised himself up on one elbow.
As soon as he had shut the door behind him, Monsieur Hennequin pointed the pistol at the man in bed. Either you stop or I will kill you.
The man in bed stared at the pistol. (Is it the mere sight of gun metal which reminds him so strongly of the smell in the gun room of his childhood?) He heard Monsieur Hennequin’s voice continue as though in the room next door.
If I see you in my wife’s company again, here or anywhere else, I swear that I will shoot you on the spot.
Monsieur Hennequin was perfectly well aware of which way the gun in his hand was pointing—it was not his life that was in jeopardy. Further, he had reckoned since his first discovery of the note that it supplied him with evidence which would assure his receiving a purely nominal sentence even if he killed the man lying in the bed. Very little in his own life was menaced and he was now putting a stop to what might later have become a serious danger. Yet the invocation, the use of the threat of death may sometimes have a wider effect than the intended one. When once death is invoked, the choice of who must die may seem oddly arbitrary. In any case Monsieur Hennequin began to tremble.
He was not frightened, but he sensed that at this moment he was justifying his whole life. It was as if he was now prepared to choose death for himself rather than compromise or deny the meaning of his life. The important thing was the choice of death; whether for himself or another—always with the gun in his hand pointing at the man in the bed in front of him—seemed unimportant. It no longer mattered whether or not Camille witnessed the scene. To threaten or take the life of an avowed enemy was to enhance his own. He was discovering with excitement a new power.
If I have the slightest reason to suspect that you have seen her, I will shoot you like a dog whilst you sleep.
G. began to laugh. The pretences had been dropped and the truth which was revealed was absurdly familiar. The truth was Monsieur Hennequin, visibly trembling, the words coming out of his mouth with strange cries of pleasure, a pistol in his hand.
If I see you approaching the wife of any colleague or acquaintance of mine I shall shoot you as you leave the gathering.
Often he had been asked: why do you laugh, love?
After days of intrigue and hope and calculations, after doubts and heart-searchings, after boldness and timidity and further boldness, what truth is disclosed? His trousers flung across a chair, her wrap put aside or the coverlet of the bed pulled back, two rough triangles of darkish hair are disclosed and within them the parts whose exact forms first-year medical students are taught to recognize as typical of the entire human species. There is no mistaking any of it, and in this total lack of ambiguity there is a truly comic banality. The longer the mask has been worn, the longer the familiar has been hidden, the more comic the revelation becomes, for the more the pair of them are meant to be astounded at what they have always known.
You tried to take advantage of the innocence of my wife—as I’m sure you have taken advantage of God knows how many other unfortunate women. But this time, thank God, it is not too late.
When Beatrice fell back on the bed laughing, she was no longer laughing at the absurd man in black in the trap, but at what she knew would now become obvious on her bed, beneath the portrait of her father, according to a freedom apparently granted by a wasp sting.
Keep quiet. Stop laughing. Or you will get a bullet in your chest now.
He continued to laugh because at last he was face to face with the unexceptional. It was partly a laugh of relief, as though, against all reason, he had feared that the other might, in this, be exceptional. And partly he laughed at the great first joke of the commonplace becoming inexorable, like a penis becoming erect.
Monsieur Hennequin considered that his laughter was like that of a madman alone in his cell. And this idea that the leering man in the bed might be mad disturbed and discouraged him, for he believed that, although the mad must be forcibly restrained and in certain cases exterminated, madness itself was nevertheless self-defeating, and so his avowed enemy appeared to represent a less substantial menace than the one he had resolved, without hesitation or compromise, to put a stop to.
You are mad, he said. But mad or not you will have no second warning.
Monsieur Hennequin walked backwards out of the door, prolonging to the last possible moment the excitement (which the mad laughter had done so much to diminish) of pointing the gun at the man who had tried to seduce his wife.
Madame Hennequin and Mathilde Le Diraison are riding in a dilapidated carriage with a hood with holes in it and a driver with a straw hat, along the Via al Calvario, towards the church of San Quirico, which lies to the south, ten minutes from the centre of Domodossola.
They met G. in the Piazza Mercato. He greeted them quickly and, looking at Camille, said: Your husband with a pistol in his hand has just threatened to shoot me if I speak to you again. I must speak to you again. I will wait for you both at the church of San Quirico. We cannot talk here. Come as soon as you can. Then, without allowing them time to reply, he stepped back into the arcade and was gone.
Your friend is nothing if not dramatic, remarks Mathilde.
Do you think it is true?
That Maurice threatened him, yes.
He didn’t have a gun.
Every man has some friend who has a pistol.
Do you think Maurice is capable of killing him?
For you, my dear, men will do anything! Mathilde laughs.
Please be serious.
Do you feel serious?
When Camille heard that her husband had threatened him with a gun, she was reminded of her wedding day. Her anger at the injustice of her husband’s action, her shame on her husband’s behalf, her resentment at the fact that her husband had ignored her protestations and appeals, made her acutely aware that she was his wife, or, more accurately, that she had become his wife according to her own choice. Up to this moment being Madame Hennequin had seemed to be part of her natural life; her marriage was part of the same continuity which led from her childhood through young womanhood to the present. There had been misunderstandings and disagreements between her and her husband, but never before had she felt that the course of her life was out of her control, that what was happening was unnatural to her. She remembered how, at their wedding, Maurice and she had knelt, isolated, alone, in front of the entire congregation, but side by side so that she could feel his warmth, in order to receive communion. He had knelt shyly and with what she then believed to be true humility. Now she imagined him getting to his feet with a pistol in his hand and a look of blank unfeeling on his face.
Suddenly amazement overcame her anger with a thought which restored to her a little of her natural identity, which suggested that she was not entirely helpless and which confirmed her sense of being blindly wronged by her husband. This thought was: Under the threat of being shot, he still wants to speak to me because he can see me as I am.
No, I do not feel serious, says Camille.
You should persuade them to fight a duel for you.
That is what I told Maurice. He said it wasn’t modern.
I don’t see what being modern or not has to do with it. Men don’t change in that respect.
Do you think we do? asks Camille.
You are changing. You are transformed. You are a different person from what you were two days ago. If you could see yourself now—
What would I see?
A woman with two men in love with her!
Mathilde, please promise me one thing—do not, on any account, leave me alone with him.
Not if you both insist?
I am serious now. I cannot see him unless you promise me this.
Fortunately Harry is not jealous. Well, he is jealous, but not to the point of shooting or threatening. Afterwards he may make a scene in private with me, but I can put a stop to that quite quickly.
It would be as much as his life is worth, says Camille, please promise me.
I think Harry is the type of man who might under certain conditions shoot himself, but he would never shoot anybody else. What do you think he would do—Mathilde nods in the direction they are going—if he had reason to be jealous?
Jealous of me? asks Camille.
Yes, says Mathilde smiling.
When she thought: Under the threat of being shot, he still wants to speak to me, her vision of his appearance altered. The alteration was also retrospective. What she had noticed but not remembered came to light. Hundreds of details assembled to form the whole man before her. He attracted everything she had seen him do. Her impressions rushed towards him, attached themselves to him, as though magnetized, and, covering him, became his characteristics. His head addressed her. She saw into it. The head was larger than average. It lunged forward when he spoke. Thick curls fell over the back of his neck. The tops of his ears entered other thickets. His hands with which he gesticulated were smaller than average. The veins on them were rather pronounced. The missing teeth, when his mouth was open, made it seem wider than it was. The gaze of his eyes was insistent. His feet, like his hands, were small. His walk was light and fastidious and in contrast to the heavy thrust of his head and shoulders. She found each physical characteristic eloquent of an aspect of his nature, as a mother may find the characteristics of her infant before it can talk or sit up.
I think he would kill me and then himself, says Camille, laughing.
Where does he live? It would be fortunate if it were Paris.
I don’t know. He says he is half English and half Italian.
That might explain a lot, remarks Mathilde.
Please promise me, says Camille.
Has he told you how he lost his teeth?
Mathilde, listen to me, this could be a matter of life and death.
He has an expression that I’ve only seen on one other man.
Who? asks Camille.
He was a friend of my husband’s, an Armenian who fell in love with me.
Exasperation wells up with tears in Camille’s eyes. Mathilde lowers her voice and whispers: Camille, you can trust me. But you are naive about such situations. The danger is Maurice, and there you can depend on me.
Camille rests her head back against the dusty leather upholstery and lays her gloved white hand on Mathilde’s arm.
How hot it is today! says Mathilde. There are days when grand passion is just not possible. The weather is a woman’s best friend!
We shall be there too soon. I don’t want to have to wait for him. Mathilde, ask him to drive more slowly.
Camille touches the fringe of her hair and stares at her own hand. It looks to her extremely small and delicate, likewise her wrists and forearms. She wants to appear as fresh and as intricate as white lace (she remembers a painting she once saw of a girl on a swing in a garden in Montpellier whose petticoats were bordered with white lace). She wants to appear like that in this green, overgrown, remote landscape for a few minutes before her enforced return to Paris where there are more clothes than trees and the streets are like rooms.
The carriage stops by the church. The same Fiat car in which they made the trip to Santa Maria Maggiore is parked in the shade of a plane tree. There is nobody to be seen. They ask the driver to wait. He nods, gets down and lies on the grass by the side of the road. One of the brass lamps on the Fiat is dazzling in the sun. Camille lowers her head and, pointing her parasol towards the ground, opens it; Mathilde points hers at the sky to open it. They walk together round the church.
He is on the north side sitting on a stone bench. He kisses Camille’s hand and then immediately takes Mathilde’s arm and saying: You are her friend, she confesses to you and so I need not explain what has happened to us. He leads her away towards a path bordered by gravestones. Camille makes as though to follow them. He turns. No, he says, please wait. Sit where I was sitting.
It is very quiet. The doors of the church are locked. There is nobody on the road. It is hard to believe that they have driven no further than the outskirts of the town. To Camille the silence sounds abnormal. She believes that on ordinary mornings carts pass along the road, children play near by, the priest prays in his church, peasants work in the fields. In the silence she can hear the beating of her own heart and his voice, but she cannot distinguish his words.
He is telling Mathilde that he and she will surely meet again and that he will always be in her debt, if she agrees to his plan. He loves Camille: he has never been alone with her: he can no longer write to her: all he asks is that Mathilde take the carriage and wait by the Rosmini College—the driver will know it—where he and Camille will join her by motor car in half an hour. He needs that little time to explain his feelings to the woman with whom he has fallen so desperately in love. He speaks lightly, as though he has no need to convince Mathilde, or as though he knows it is hopeless to try to convince her.
Whilst appealing to Mathilde, he is careful to remain in sight of Camille, to speak conspiratorially in Mathilde’s ear, to make Mathilde laugh once or twice, to continue holding her arm and to give their collusion every appearance of intimacy.
The lightness with which he speaks intrigues Mathilde. It does not force her to decide whether he is telling the truth or not. If what he said was too credible, she would be obliged, as Camille’s friend, to find it incredible. If what he said was obviously untrue, she would be obliged to tell him so. As it is, the question of the truth of what he is saying does not arise, because in the way he speaks he assumes that she already knows the truth. Which she doesn’t. And the fact that she doesn’t arouses a very acute curiosity in her. If she cannot discover the truth directly, then Camille must discover it and tell her. The truth, she feels, will not be terrible for, if it were, he would not assume so easily and naturally that she already knows it. She trusts him immediately because he gives her no reason to. It is Maurice that Mathilde does not trust. And in order to convince herself that she is not being reckless on her friend’s behalf, she imagines how it would be possible for her to ask Harry, who is in a position to put considerable professional pressure on Maurice, to persuade Maurice to be more reasonable. She says she will take the carriage to the college if Camille agrees.
Camille watches them walking up and down behind the gravestones which, old and eroded, are the shape of half-eaten biscuits. The anomaly of the situation makes Camille angry and impatient. Why, she asks, must she, after all the risks she has taken, sit here whilst Mathilde jokes with him over there? She decides that she must speak to him by herself.
A few minutes later the driver gets up from the grass, rubbing his knees. Mathilde steps into the carriage and waves to Camille. Don’t be long, she cries, I can’t work miracles. As the carriage, which is crookedly suspended over its back axle, departs down the deserted road, Camille thinks: Mathilde believes that in Paris I may become the mistress of this man with whom I have just agreed to be left alone.
There is a look which can come into the eyes of a woman (and into the eyes of a man, but very rarely) which is without pride or apology, which makes no demand, which promises no adventure. As an expression, signalled by the eyes, it can be intercepted by another; but it is not addressed, in the usual sense of the word, to another: it takes no account of the receiver. It is not a look which can enter into the eyes of a child for children are too ignorant of themselves: nor into the eyes of most men for they are too wary: nor into the eyes of animals because they are unaware of the passing of time. By way of such a look romantic poets thought they saw a path leading straight to a woman’s soul. But this is to treat it as though it were transparent, whereas in fact it is the least transparent thing in the world. It is a look which declares itself to be itself; it is like no other look. If it is comparable with anything, it is comparable with the colour of a flower. It is like heliotrope declaring itself blue. In company such looks are quickly extinguished for they encourage neither discourse nor exchange. They constitute social absence.
His desire, his only aim, was to be alone with a woman. No more than that. But they had to be deliberately, not fortuitously, alone. It was insufficient for them to be left alone in a room because they happened to be the last to leave. It had to be a matter of choice. They had to meet in order to be alone. What then followed was a consequence of being alone, not the achievement of any previous plan.
In the company of others women always appeared to him as more or less out of focus. Not because he was unable to concentrate upon them but because they were continuously changing in their own regard as they adapted themselves to the coercions and expectations of the others around them.
He was alone with Camille, walking back to the north side of the church which was in the shade. He took her arm. He could feel with his fingers that it was warmer on the inside than on the outside. He was overcome by a sense of extraordinary inevitability. The feeling did not surprise him. He knew that it would arrive, but he could not summon it at will. He felt the absoluteness of the impossibility of Camille being, in any detail, in the slightest trace, different from what she was; he felt she was envisaged by everything which preceded her in time and everything which was separate from her in space; the place always reserved for her in the world was nothing less than her exact body, her exact nature; her eyes in tender contrast to her mouth, her small breasts, her thin rakelike hands with their bitten fingernails, her way of walking with unusually stiff legs, the unusual warmth of her hair, the hoarseness of her voice, her favourite lines from Mallarmé, the regularity of her smallness, the paleness of—with this concentration of meaning which he experienced as a sense of inevitability, came the onset of sexual desire.
I want to tell you, she said—
Your voice, he interrupted, is also like a cicada, not only a corn-crake. Do you know the legend about cicadas? They say they are the souls of poets who cannot keep quiet because, when they were alive, they never wrote the poems they wanted to.
I want to tell you, she repeated, that I love my husband dearly. He is the centre of my life and I am the mother of his children. I consider he was wrong to threaten you, and I want you to know that I gave him no grounds, absolutely no grounds, for believing that he needed to threaten you. He discovered the foolish note you wrote to me—
Foolish? We have met, we are alone, we are talking to each other—and that is all I asked of you. Why was it foolish?
It was foolish to use the words you did, it was foolish to write a note at all.
What foolish words?
Camille stared at an impenetrable cypress tree. Everywhere there was still the same abnormal silence. I do not remember, she said in a hoarse whisper. And saying this she remembered a line by Mallarmé:
… vous mentez, ô fleur nue
De mes lèvres.
I called you my most desired one, my corn-crake.
That was foolish.
But you are.
The inscriptions on the tombstones were mostly illegible. The letters which were formed with curved lines (like U or G) appeared to be more quickly effaced than those composed of straight lines (N or T).
Then you must go. Please go.
The heat of the morning made anything which was out of reach or sight seem unusually distant.
It was not wrong of your husband to threaten me, he said, he has every reason to be jealous.
He has no reason! I am his wife and I love him. And I cannot he held responsible for your feelings. You are mistaken, that is all—mistaken in me. You are not base. I believe in the nobility of your feelings. And this is what I wanted to tell you, I did not encourage my husband to protect me from you for I don’t need any protection. I have known you for two days. Do you really suppose that a woman’s affections can be gained in such a short time? In two weeks or two months perhaps. But in two days! You are mistaken. I think you believe life is like that swing you described. It isn’t. Talking here we are already running a risk for nothing. There is nothing to be gained. Please take me back to join my friend in the carriage. My husband and I are leaving for Paris this afternoon.
Camille spoke with difficulty. It was no longer easy for her to say these things. Yet she said them with sincerity. She saw renunciation as the only proper way of putting an end to the present situation and of undoing the injustice and indignity of her husband’s threats. What she was renouncing was still of little importance. But she believed in destiny. Nothing in her life had led her to believe that she was entirely the mistress of her own fate. She did not think of the future as unmysterious, as entirely foreseeable in the light of decisions made today. She wanted to be able to look back at this moment of genuine renunciation because she considered it a necessary one. But she did not feel compelled to answer for the consequences, expected or unexpected, that might follow from that moment. They might be beyond her control and she recognized this with modesty, with hope and with misgivings.
Then I will find you in Paris! he said.
He will shoot you.
Not if you don’t betray me.
Betray!
It was foolish to keep the note. In Paris you must be wiser.
In Paris I will refuse to see you.
If there was nothing conspiring against us, he said, we would never find out what we are each capable of.
You do not know, you cannot know, what I am capable of. Nobody will ever know. Please take me back.
I think I have dreamt of you all my life without knowing that you existed. I can even guess what you are going to say now. You are going to say: you are mistaken.
You are mistaken! she repeated, unable to stop herself, and unable to repress a laugh.
It was you, Camomille.
By the car he explained to her what she must do with the controls in the driving seat whilst he cranked the engine. She was pleased to do what he instructed her to do, for it offered her an opportunity of showing him that she was capable, that her renunciation was in no way a disguise for incapacity.
At the end of the bonnet she could see his powerful head and shoulders lunging from side to side as he turned the crankshaft. His arms were thin. His forehead was shiny with sweat. After several unsuccessful turns, the engine started. The whole motor car began shaking and her gloved hands on the steering wheel shook in time with the engine. He shouted something which she could not hear. She had the impression that if she climbed down from the car she would have to make a small jump from the trembling car into the absolute stillness of the dust on the road and the walls of the church. She jumped. On the other side of the car he offered her his hand as she climbed up into the passenger seat. When she was seated, he lifted up her arm so that it trailed over the door, then he kissed it between glove and sleeve. She stared at his bowed head. She saw ber other hand lay itself upon his hair. He gave no sign of having felt her touch.
We will go back by the small road through the Viezzo valley, he said, it is only three or four kilometres longer.
SI TU VEUX NOUS NOUS AIMERONS AVEC TES LEVRES SANS LE DIRE
Mallarmé
To morality there are no mysteries. That is why there are no moral facts, only moral judgements. Moral judgements require continuity and predictability. A new, profoundly surprising fact cannot be accommodated by morality. It can be ignored or suppressed; but when once its existence has been recognized, its inexplicability makes it impervious to any immediate moral judgement.
She knows that the man driving her away in his car is indifferent to the chaos he is creating in her ordered life. Because of this indifference she wants to see him as an enemy. He is indifferent to the way she has defended him against her husband. He is indifferent to the effort by which she has renounced him. He is indifferent to the happiness with which she has been satisfied. Every reason which she can find to call him an enemy of her interests she welcomes, and with every reason which she finds she becomes more critically conscious of her own life.
The open motor car creates its own cool breeze. It seems to Camille that there is a correspondence between the cool air blowing against her face and neck and arms and the silvery colour of the underside of the leaves continually shifting on the branches of the trees they pass. Between the trees are green slopes of grass. The landscape is in every detail the setting for the conspiracy of their being alone together.
She contrasts his indifference with the love of her husband, her children, her own family. She hears them addressing her by name. There is no distinction between the name they call her and what they expect from her. Camille is her life.
Camomille, he says. A classmate used to make the same joke at school. There is only the difference of a syllable.
What is it that you love in me? she asks.
Your dreams, your elbows, the doubts at the four corners of your confidence, the unusual warmth of your hair, everything that you want but are frightened of, the smallness of—
I am frightened of nothing in myself and you know nothing about me.
Nothing? I know all that I have written about you.
Who is speaking?
You don’t care what happens to me, she insists.
Then why do you ask me?
Because I am curious to see myself through your eyes. I wonder what has misled you.
Nothing has misled me. My whole life has led me to you.
You are as mad as he.
Who?
Maurice and you are both mad.
But not you and I.
He will shoot you in Paris.
He stops the motor car after a bridge, at a point at which a path appears to lead down to a stream.
I will be in Paris in eight days, he says.
She jumps from the running-board of the car into the stillness of the grass and dust. She lands on her stiff legs and, turning round towards him, scowls. Then she runs a few steps towards the wild acacia trees away from the road. All that she has learned of deportment, all that has become the second nature of her movement as a woman, deserts her. She moves like an awkward child, or like an adult overcome by grief.
And if, she cries out, in her hoarse voice, if I say this—she flings out both arms either side of her—this is Paris a week from now! If I do!
She runs on, stumbling a little, between the trees.
He begins to run after her. She hears him and turns round towards him. Near by is a wooden trellis construction over which a thick abandoned vine is growing.
Stay where you are, she cries out, and lunges out of sight behind the trellis towards some trees.
Out of his sight, she stops running. Unhurriedly and pausing from time to time to look around her, she begins to undress. Above the trees, above the near wooded hills which are like fists covered with green fur, she can see improbable peaks with snow upon them. She looks down to negotiate the hooks of her corset.
It is not myself I will give you. Not the self of mine. Or, if I were you, and believe me I can at this moment imagine it as easily as I can turn the palm of my hand upwards or downwards—or if I were you, the self of you. If you want to number me part by part I shall be as any other, for nobody has found the judge of parts, nobody has found the nipple to judge the breast, the brow to measure the light in the eye, the ear to decide the note of the way, the only way, in which I might walk towards you now between the trees. Part by part I am a woman undressing in a clearing like a room by a stream, hidden from you and waiting, who a few minutes ago renounced you, who will return to my children in Paris tonight, who cannot imagine myself other than the loving wife of my husband, who has never before been what I am now. But I am not the sum of my parts. See me as wholly as your own dear life demands that you see yourself. I have as many hairs on the back of my neck as you may have ways of touching me. It is not myself I give you, it is the meeting of the two of us that I offer you. What you offer me is the opportunity for me to offer this. I offer it. I offer it.
She speaks out loud to him: I am waiting here.
The incongruity of her tone of voice does not surprise him. (It is as though she is calling out a little impatiently through an open dressing-room door.) The words employed at such a moment are bound to be incongruous.
She is sitting in the grass. Her hair falls over her shoulders. Her chemise is loose. Her grey skirt and jacket lie folded on the grass with some other garments.
Because Camille has chosen a setting which reminds her of some Renaissance painting of fauns and nymphs, we are liable to picture her as having the body of a goddess as painted by Titian. This is far from the case. Her arms are thin, her neck knotted and taut, the insides of her thighs have so little flesh upon them that were she standing with her feet together her thighs would scarcely touch each other.
She awaits him as he expected. And yet he is surprised. This combination of surprise and of expectations being precisely fulfilled is unique to moments of sexual passion and is another factor which places them outside the normal course of time. At some moment prior to birth we may, at a level as yet unknown to us, have perceived the whole of our life like that. Before he touches her he knows what touching her will reveal to him. When he touches her he will fully appreciate how alone she has become. Undressing was the act of shedding the interests of those who make up the interests of her life. With her clothes she discarded the men he hates. Her unclothed body is the proof of her solitariness. And it is her solitariness—her solitariness alone—that he recognizes and desires. He has led her from her conjugal bedroom, from the overfurnished apartment, from the street in which the curtained windows are so still that they might be carved out of stone, from the overread pages of Mallarmé, from the clothes which she orders from her costumier and her husband pays for, from the mirrors which are falsely impartial to husband and wife, further and further away from where she belongs until she is herself alone. From that solitude of hers and from his they can now set out. Andiamo.
As he stares at her with eyes more intensely fixed than any she has ever imagined, she sees herself as a dryad, alert in a way that is more animal than human, quick, sensitive, fleet-footed, soft-tongued, shameless. She sees him and the dryad together as a couple, and the sight of them fills her with tenderness. The dryad undoes his shirt. She anticipates the dryad offering herself on all fours, face to the ground, and he mounting her like a goat. She crawls on all fours until she is facing his head and then kisses his eyes from above.
Camomille.
The feeling of tenderness wells over and makes it impossible for Camille to imagine anything viewed from a distance; the idea of the dryad is momentarily obliterated. Gradually such moments become longer and longer until the dryad disappears into the smell of the crushed grass and the surrounding silence, never to return, and Camille becomes entirely concentrated in the act of following with her tongue the underseam of the penis of the man over whose thigh her head is hanging.
He is there under her, above her, beside her. He has no claims on her; he has made none. He is there like the trellis with the vine overgrowing it. He is there like a wall against which she could repeatedly bang her head. He is there, outside herself, like everything else in the world which has not claimed a second residence in her consciousness. She has not said to herself that she loves him. He has convinced her of only one thing. Unlike any other man she has ever encountered, he has convinced her that his desire for her—her alone—is absolute, that it is her existence which has created this desire. Formerly she has been aware of men wanting to choose her to satisfy desires already rooted in them, her and not another, because among the women available she has approximated the closest to what they need. Whereas he appears to have no needs. He has convinced her that the penis twitching in the air above her face is the size and colour and warmth that it is entirely because of what he has recognized in her. When he enters her, when this throbbing, cyclamen-headed, silken, apoplectic fifth limb of his reaches as near to her centre as her pelvis will allow, he, in it, will be returning, she believes, to the origin of his desire. The taste of his foreskin and of a single tear of transparent first sperm which has broken over the cyclamen head making its surface even softer to the touch than before, is the taste of herself made flesh in another.
This can never stop, she whispers, slowly and calmly. My love, my love.
They were fucking in the grass. Both half believed that they were no longer lying down but standing up and walking as they fucked; towards the end they began to run through tall wet grass. He had the further illusion that others were running towards him.
All are there. How can I ever open those words to let their original and still potential meaning out? All are there in their own time and at the same time. It is a matter of supreme indifference to me whether the sweet throat is mine or yours. And here, now, here let the word supreme attain its supremacy. It is of no consequence whose is whose. All parts are one. All are there together. All despite all their differences are there together. He joins them. There is no more need. There, desire is its satisfaction, or, perhaps, neither desire nor satisfaction can be said to exist since there is no antinomy between them: every experience becomes the experience of freedom there: freedom there precludes all that is not itself.
He and Camille lay alone, dishevelled, side by side on the slope by the vine. A peasant passing by on the far bank of the stream spotted them although they were lying quite still. He saw a white arm like a statue’s and a stockinged foot. The peasant was curious and crouched down to observe what would happen next.
Whom were we walking?
I was a knee which wanted the thigh on the other leg.
The sounds of my most tender words were in your arse.
Your heels were my thumbs.
My buttocks were your palms.
I was hiding in one corner of your mouth. You looked for me there with your tongue. There was nothing to be found.
With your throat swollen, my feet in the pit of my stomach, your legs hollow, my head tugging at your body, I was your penis.
You were the light which falling on the dark petals of your vagina became rose.
The blood-vessel was lifted up in the lock of your flowers.
Normally a shooting incident in Domodossola would only have been reported in the local Italian press, but since the town was full of journalists from all over Europe, who were awaiting the death or recovery of Chavez, the story was printed in many different papers. According to their time-honoured tradition when dealing with incidents affecting respectable members of the bourgeoisie, the Swiss newspapers tactfully withheld the full names of those involved.
‘The small town of Domodossola was yesterday the scene of a dramatic crime passionnel. Monsieur H—, a French businessman with interests in the motor car industry, found himself in the town in connection with the recent triumphal crossing of the Alps by the aviator Geo Chavez. At 3.30pm in the crowded Piazza Mercato, Monsieur H—fired three times with an automatic pistol at Monsieur G, a young Englishman who is likewise said to be a flying enthusiast. The latter had just come out of a fruit shop and was walking in one of the picturesque arcades which border the square. The life of the victim, who was wounded in the shoulder, is not in danger. He was taken immediately to the hospital where the aviator hero is also being treated.
‘After the incident Monsieur H—offered no resistance to the police and declared that his only mistake had been to fire from too far away. He claimed that he had already warned the Englishman that he would shoot him if he did not desist from embarrassing and pursuing his wife, Madame H—. “It is an affair,” he said, “of elementary honour and I am certain that when the facts have been established, I will be assured of the sympathy of all decent society.” The Englishman, although he evidently speaks fluent Italian, declined to answer questions.’
On the wall of the old hospital at Domodossola—a new larger hospital has since been built near by—there is a plaque with an inscription which pays tribute to Chavez’ heroism and indicates the room on the first floor where he died on 27 September 1910.
All accounts of his last hours suggest that Chavez remained haunted by his flight. He could not understand what still separated him from the life continuing around him: the life which, with all the ardour of his determined youth, he wanted to re-enter. His achievement, in so far as he could separate it from the disaster which had befallen him, only increased the mocking appeal of this life.
‘I’m going now. Let’s go quickly to Brig.’ Vive Chavez! He remembered writing that on his own legs. What had he done wrong? Whether the fault, the transgression, had been technical or moral was by now hopelessly confused in his mind. He tried to recall what he had screamed when he had entered the Gondo. He could not. And he feared that he would not be able to until he had come out of the Gondo. He was still in it.
There is no plaque on the hospital wall to indicate the room, only three windows away, where G. was taken from the operating theatre after a bullet had been removed from his wound. A middle-aged nurse with the complexion of a Neapolitan was washing his face and neck.
For the first time since the shooting, it was comparatively quiet. From his bed he could see the hospital garden. The absolutely still leaves of a willow tree were sharply distinct in the horizontal evening light. It occurred to him how brief moments of drama are; how swiftly order can be re-established. He was reminded of his father’s garden in Livorno and the pool with the perch in it. And he remembered the exhilaration with which, in that garden, he had discovered that what matters is not being dead. He let out his breath in a hiss.
I’m sorry. Did I hurt you?
No, no. I thought of something. He paused a moment. Then, in a lighter voice, he said: Now, you tell me, you are an experienced woman, I can see that, and you are not over-fastidious. Now, would you say I was like the devil?
Shhhhhh! Don’t think about such things.
You haven’t answered me.
She glanced at the young man’s face, leering, and his dark eyes looking at her and she thought of the story of how an outraged husband had tried to shoot him dead and she said: You don’t look like a devil to me.
(Later when she told the story she pretended that she replied like that because it is the duty of a nurse to keep a patient calm.)
That is what he called me. But imagine trying to shoot the devil! Do you know the only way to get rid of the devil? Offer him what he asks. Would you do that?
In drying his face with a towel she tried to stop him talking by clapping her hand over his mouth.
Now, would you offer him what he asked? he insisted. It’s the only way—even if it’s your soul he wants!
It is wrong to blaspheme even in jest. You shouldn’t talk like that. Bo! he cried.
(She confessed later that she had been so surprised that she couldn’t help laughing.)
The face of his fiancée who had come from Paris and was sitting by his bed was the length of the Gondo away from Chavez. If he stretched out his arm to touch her, he had the impression that his arm was the sleeve of the Gondo, from which his fingertips, moving round her mouth, could just emerge but not the remainder of his body.
His agony of mind was the result of an axiomatic truth, in which he had believed all his life, having been inexplicably overturned. In face of his courage and his survival without serious wounds, God, nature and the world of men should have found themselves in accord. Why were they not? He had proved his right to succeed and he had been forced to forego it. The wind he so wrongly under-estimated, the mountains, the treacherous icy air, the earth which entered his mouth and now his own blood, his very own body refused to accord him his achievement. Why?
During the night he repeatedly muttered: Je suis catholique, je suis catholique.
G. woke up and found himself re-hearing word for word what Camille had said in the motor car on the way back from Domodossola.
I will write to you. Where shall I write to you?
No, do not write. As soon as I arrive in Paris I will give you a sign.
You will be amazed to see what I am capable of. I will astonish you. I shall be cunning. I shall be as cunning as an avocat. I will disguise myself. Can you imagine me as a baker? I will come to you disguised as a baker. Or as an old woman. (She laughed a little.) You will be horrified—and then I will take my disguise off and you will see your corn-crake. If Maurice wants to kill me, he can. I am not afraid. But it is you he will try to kill. It is you who must wear a disguise. What would suit you? You might be a Spaniard. A Spanish priest! It must be something unlike you, so that I can hardly believe—but now I would know you, however you were disguised, I would recognize you anywhere, and Maurice would recognize you because of the light in my eyes when I saw you. Supposing you knew afterwards you must die? And I too knew that you must die? I wouldn’t try to stop you now. Now I wouldn’t. Before, I would have done. I would have tried to save you. I would have refused you. Perhaps I would have been afraid myself. I know now. I would welcome you. That is what you would want. And you would want me then under threat of death more than you have wanted any woman. And afterwards I would die with you—happy.
Next day, Chavez’ last words, whose meaning cannot be interpreted, were: Non, non, je ne meurs pas … meurs pas.
Weymann came into the room with a pained expression on his face. He greeted G. coolly and then went and stood by the window, through which he kept looking out as though something surprising were happening on the lawn below.
The funeral is tomorrow, Weymann said.
I hear everything from the corridor. The walls aren’t very thick here. He died at three o’clock yesterday afternoon.
The whole town is in mourning, said Weymann.
If Hennequin had been a better shot, we could have had a double funeral!
That is a remark in very poor taste.
It would have been my funeral, not yours. Why are you so solemn? Because it is a solemn occasion and your—your—he struggled for the right word and looked out on the invisible events taking place on the lawn below—your philanderings are most inappropriate. The whole town is in mourning. The factories have stopped work.
It will be like an opera by Verdi. The Italians love deaths. Not Death but deaths. Have you noticed?
They feel the tragedy of the occasion.
You said he was an idiot.
That was before I knew he was dying.
Does it make any difference? He asked this in a gentler voice, and Weymann, somewhat mollified, left the window and approached the bed.
He has passed over into the sky, said Weymann in the voice of the priest whom he often resembled, a bit of the sky which the rest of us, who are still alive, call the paradise of lost flyers.
I shall be out of here by tonight and then I will be able to pay my respects too. Have the Hennequins left?
I must tell you that the whole affair in which you were involved has been a considerable embarrassment to all of us. Scenes like the one you provoked give the flying community a bad name. It makes us out to be adventurers—
But aren’t you?
You know exactly what I mean.
Tell me, have they gone back to Paris?
Madame Hennequin was in a state of collapse, if it gives you any satisfaction to know that.
And Monsieur?
He had to be constrained from coming to find you in hospital. The second time he wouldn’t miss, he said.
You should have let him come. I should have liked to have seen him again.
Suddenly Weymann was angry. His thin face became red and his eyes protruded as he stared at the figure in the bed: Yes, I think we should have let him come. What are you doing? What are you playing at? Let me tell you something. This town is full of men. Tomorrow it will be fuller—men coming from all over the world to pay their homage to the magnificent contribution, the historic courage of Geo. Do you know there are peasants who have walked from the mountain villages into town today to line up and pay their last tributes to the man they loved. You should look at their faces. You might learn a little modesty. You might see what it means to be offered hope for your children after a lifetime of toil and sacrifice. You might understand what achievement is. And amongst these men, these men who fill the town like pilgrims and lend it their own dignity, there is a little—there is a little runt!
He banged the door and was gone.
The crowd made the town look like a village. Figures in black pressed against the walls of the narrow streets. In an open doorway several children were barred and held back by women with straight rigid arms, lest they run out into the street as the procession passed and by this single act diminish the long-lasting gravity of the moment. From first-floor windows and from the balconies above hung improvised flags of black crêpe and tricolours with black upon them. It was sunny. The streets through which the cortège would not pass were deserted. All shops and offices were shut. The bells in the campanile tolled very slowly. The last note of each peal seeped almost completely away before the next refilled the silence. The sound was such that even in the arcade from where you could see neither sky nor mountains you were reminded of solitude. In the precincts of the Piazza Mercato there was an unusually strong smell of horses and leather, for carriages and carts had brought mourners from all over the countryside and many had been left there, unattended, while the mourners followed the coffin on foot.
The Stationmaster, wearing a gold-braided cap and a long coat, glanced once more at his own reflection in the glass doors of the waiting-room. It was not a question of vanity at this moment but of vocation; in the same spirit an actor may glance in a mirror before going on stage. Within the waiting-room journalists from all over Europe jostled to book their telephone lines to their capitals.
Assembled outside the hospital the town band began to play a funeral march. The cortège moved off, shuffling at first. In front of the four horses of the hearse, girls in white veils strewed tuberoses on the cobbles and dust. Boys darted back and forth between the main street-corners and the head of the procession to keep the girls supplied with baskets of flowers. The Mayor had announced that the cost of the funeral would be met by the municipality. When they were standing upright, one girl might timidly smile at another; but when they were strewing the flowers on the road, bending forward as if trying to cast a net in a fast-flowing stream, they did so with grave, concentrated expressions, one with her teeth biting her lower lip.
Close behind the hearse walked the hero’s grandmother, brother, fiancée and family friends. The fiancée held her head high with the air of a wife following a cart which is taking her husband, a heretic, to his execution; she defied the occasion; she defied the forces which had killed him. Geo’s brother, a rich young banker, walked with his head down, looking at the flowers on the road, many as yet untrampled. The grandmother walked with a stick, jabbing the ground. Sometimes her stick skewered a flower.
Behind the family came the diplomats, the senators, Chavez’ fellow pilots, the Mayor, the journalists, the representatives of aircraft-engine firms, the local rich. And after a discrete gap there was the straggling procession of thousands, most of whom had seen Chavez when he first appeared, triumphant, on their side of the mountain, when he was coming down to land in the field where Duray had pegged out the white cross in calico. At this sight of a victory being apparently so easily gained, in face of the impossible being so quickly transformed into the possible, they had felt elated. In the newspapers they had read, or had heard others read, sentences like: The great utopia of yesterday has become reality. And so some had asked themselves: Why should we too not achieve what we wish? Those who were in the habit of answering such speculative questions had given their usual answers. The rich must be overthrown. Private property must be destroyed. Others had maintained that Italy must be united, must be given Trieste, must have more colonies; only then would all Italians fulfil their destiny. To those who asked, all the answers seemed theoretical. But the question had remained.
Now with the unexpected death of Chavez, the question was closed. It was as they had always been taught. Achievements are never easy. There is a price to pay for daring. The true heroes are dead ones. When what is desired is immoderate, it lies beyond death. The choice is between accepting life as it is and dying a hero’s death.
Outside the Duomo the speeches began. The crowd listened in a mood of acknowledgement and acceptance. The young, faced with the familiar choice, chose once again in their imagination heroic death. Their elders looked back on their lives, gently, tenderly, as they might look at their own children, trying to find in them proof that a certain kind of cunning and a certain kind of modesty offer the best means for tricking and coaxing the best out of life: life which, when all is said and done, is better than being dead, although the naive courage of the dead hero touches them profoundly because they too were naive like him, and they know full well that the lessons which rid them of their naivety were not ideal, were not what they once wished. The young among the crowd celebrated the heroism of early death; their elders recalled the price of survival.
The Peruvian Ambassador: I am proud to be your compatriot, O Chavez, and I have come to place on your coffin your own country’s homage. We leave to your dear ones the sad duty of tears: strong nations must neither complain nor weep: they can only exalt and glorify their sons who, like you, Chavez, sacrifice their life for the bright light of an ideal …
There was a commotion in the front ranks of the crowd drawn up in a semi-circle round the hearse and the steps of the Duomo. A dozen men pushed their way forward and mounted the steps. They were dressed like Alpine guides and each pair of them carried an object like a stretcher. On these stretchers were arranged massed patterns of wild flowers—edelweiss, arnica, forget-me-nots and red rhododendrons. They placed the stretchers on either side of the church door. As they came down, one of the men shouted out: Above four thousand metres we’ll see you in the air! Then he slapped his own cheek several times.
The Peruvian Ambassador: From your earliest childhood you were a master of energy, and for us your death is a glorious lesson. You were strong, you were great; above the eternal snows, amid the sublime peaks, you flew upon your fragile machine, a token of the audacity and genius of man.
The Mayor announced that a piazza would be named after the dead aviator.
Inside the Duomo there was a short service for Chavez’ family and the distinguished foreign visitors. They remained standing, staring straight ahead of them into the half-light from which gold objects emerged without glitter. They felt the cold air rising from the stones. It is here, not in the streets strewn with flowers outside, that the devout try to relinquish the blind will to live.
The canon: Chavez, the bold and audacious youth who had the fabulous vision of the Alps conquered and fleeing under his glance; the proud, courageous youth whom we saw soaring through the air above us, crossing our valleys more swiftly than an eagle: Chavez, who made us tremble with enthusiasm in anticipation of the imminent triumph—Chavez is no more.
Among the congregation in the cathedral, G. stood near Monsieur Schuwey and Mathilde Le Diraison. His thoughts drifted towards the Hennequins in Paris. Camille was waiting to become his mistress. He doubted whether Monsieur Hennequin would shoot again; he had failed to prevent his wife from cuckolding him and he had failed to avenge himself: after the first time the number of subsequent times made little difference. Taking note of Camille’s determination in the matter, he would concede his wife’s right to a lover provided he suffered no inconvenience and provided she realized that his tolerance was conditional upon her curbing her more extravagant tastes, and upon her never questioning his own arrangements. Camille, in an access of gratitude, would find it in herself to love both husband and lover—in different ways. She would submit to Monsieur Hennequin’s occasional conjugal demands with the reservation in her own mind that she could only truly belong to her lover. She would lend herself to her husband for her lover’s sake.
A mass of candles had been lit for Chavez. The flames created their own air currents so that when a group of them flickered and leaned in one direction, this disturbed another group, making them blow inwards together as if in panic to confer, and then this agitation provoked other flames to burn a little higher, which caused yet others to flatten themselves and circle, unsteadily, round their wicks as if searching for air.
For her husband’s sake she would demand from her lover discretion, punctuality and a certain financial arrangement. She would no longer read Mallarmé for it might remind her too vividly of her approach to that moment when, for the first and only time, she made herself alone, as he was alone. Perhaps one day she would become enthusiastic about another, more sober poet. Time would pass. Everybody would be accommodated. Through boredom or on a sentimental impulse, Camille would give herself, without her accustomed reserve, to Monsieur Hennequin and afterwards she would feel that it was to her husband that she really belonged. But no sooner would she feel this than she would rush to her lover begging him to re-take her and insisting that she wanted to belong to him and to nobody else. Once convinced that she had become her lover’s, she would await an opportunity—which might take months during which time she would occupy herself with the lives of her children and friends—an opportunity to test her attachment by once more offering herself to her husband. And so she would traffic to and fro, each oscillation marked by apparently inexplicable excitability. At first she would await re-possession by her lover far more impatiently than by Monsieur Hennequin. But gradually, so that she might feel, as she would on peaceful days, that she belonged to them both and to her almost grown-up children more than to either, she would commend to her lover more wit and less passion. Ten years later, if she were fortunate, she might acquire a second lover and the first would be cast, with certain minor variations, in the role of the original husband. If she were less fortunate, she would arrange occasional meetings between Monsieur Hennequin, who by then would have a place on the managing board of Peugeot, and her lover, so that by talk and reminiscence she might belong to them both. In old age she would catch sight of herself in a mirror, unawares, solitary, unowned, but then she would think of death: death before whom you have no choice but to make yourself alone.
The canon: He ascended to heaven and he came down having achieved the most dramatic victory yet on the long road of civilization’s conquest. A pioneer, he has advanced the progress of man. Imagine the future that his glorious achievement has opened to us—nation will no longer be separated from nation, the advantages of civilization will reach the furthest corners of the earth …
Mathilde Le Diraison noticed him standing a few pews away. His arm was in a black sling. She had spoken briefly with Camille before her departure for Paris. Together they had decided that he was a Don Juan, that already in his life there must have been hundreds of women. But it makes no difference, Camille had cried, it makes no difference to know that.
Mathilde Le Diraison asked herself two questions. What was his secret, why had Camille succumbed so quickly? The second question concerned herself. What would it mean if, after loving hundreds of women, he made no attempt to approach her? The two questions were intertwined like the strands of the red silk rope which hung across the end of the pew and which she continually flicked with her fingers so that it kept swinging.
She had a face which might be considered stupid. It was the face of a person, slow to go beyond the immediate, who had no particular wish or talent for abandoning herself to flights of fantasy or of deep emotion. At any moment her face declared: WHAT IS HAPPENING IS HAPPENING TO ME, TO ME, TO ME.
The swinging red silk rope caught G.’s eye. He made his plans quickly. He would go to Paris, visit the Hennequins, make a point of ignoring Camille, reassure the husband and would quickly begin an obvious, public affair with Mathilde Le Diraison. In this way he would avenge himself on Hennequin by making the whole shooting incident appear ridiculous, a question of a doubtful flirtation on the part of his wife which, unfortunately for Hennequin, she was incapable of sustaining; and he would disabuse Camille of her fond illusion that passion can be regulated and that a lover can be something different from a second husband. He would see to it that the affair was as brief as possible and afterwards he would disappear from their circle. He regretted that between Monsieur Schuwey and Mathilde Le Diraison there was scarcely more than a purely contractual relationship. But he supposed that even Schuwey must have some pride invested in the woman he paid to be with him. He would discover where.
…He has fallen, but he has fallen as a hero who has accomplished a great feat, which everyone thought impossible and mad. Honour and glory to him!
As they came out of the Duomo, the mourners screwed up their eyes against the sunlight and bowed their heads. They had the air of having partaken of some secret which they could not share; the more so because, for those who had remained outside, the solemnity of the occasion was lessening. Boys handed more baskets of tuberoses to the girls in white. Some of the girls were laughing. The band struck up another funeral march and the procession slowly moved off towards the station.
A schoolmaster explained that the guide from Formazza who had slapped his own cheek had meant that the spirit of Chavez would live in the mountain air so that, high up, climbers would feel his spirit on their cheeks like you can feel the wind or the heat of the sun.
The train waited silently. It was the second time a train on this line had been specially stopped for Chavez. The pall-bearers who carried the coffin from the hearse to the train were all aviators, among them Paulhan. The station master saluted as they passed. The journalists were already telephoning. The girls in white veils lined the platform. Suddenly the locomotive gave a shrill prolonged whistle.
He thought again of Camille. Not Camille as she would be when he saw her in Paris but Camille as she had been when she challenged him to come to Paris under threat of death, a threat in which he could no longer believe but in which at that moment, before her husband had failed to kill him at point-blank range, he could still believe. She had offered this challenge like an invitation. And in issuing this invitation she had spoken, as no woman had spoken to him before, with the unconfoundable authority, the distance, the astonishing familiarity of a sibyl. Had she been right not only about him but also about her husband, he would have immediately accepted.
The whistle, arranged by the station master and the engine driver as a salute to the hero at the beginning of his last journey, was unlike any of the other sounds which had been heard that morning. It had no resonance, no echo, no meaning. It was a squeal without a soul, like the squeal of a saw. Long after everyone expected it to stop, it continued. It drove out every thought except the anticipatory one that surely it must stop now. Now! Now!
Chavez’ grandmother banged her stick up and down on the platform, but it was impossible to know whether she did this in anger at such an inappropriate initiative being taken by an engine driver, or in the agitation of unbounded grief.
This morning as I was shaving I thought of a friend of mine who lives in Madrid and whom I haven’t seen for fifteen years. Looking at my own image in the mirror I asked myself whether, after so long, we would recognize each other immediately if we met by accident in the street. I pictured to myself our meeting in Madrid and I began to imagine his feelings. He is a friend to whom I am deeply attached, but I hear from him only once or twice a year and he does not occupy a constant place in my thoughts. After I had shaved, I went down to my letterbox and there found a ten-page letter from him.
Such ‘coincidences’ are not uncommon and everyone is more or less familiar with them. They offer us an insight into how approximate and arbitrary is our normal reading of time. Calendars and clocks are our inadequate inventions. The structure of our minds is such that the true nature of time usually escapes us. Yet we know there is a mystery. Like a never-seen object in the dark, we can feel our way over some of its surfaces. But we have not identified it.
The way my imagination forces me to write this story is determined by its intimations about those aspects of time which I have touched but never identified. I am writing this book in the same dark.
A SITUATION OF WOMEN
Up to then the social presence of a woman was different in kind from that of a man. A man’s presence was dependent upon the promise of power which he embodied. If the promise was large and credible, his presence was striking. If it was small or incredible, he was found to have little presence. There were men, even many men, who were devoid of presence altogether. The promised power may have been moral, physical, temperamental, economic, social, sexual—but its object was always exterior to the man. A man’s presence suggested what he was capable of doing to you or for you.
By contrast, a woman’s presence expressed her own attitude to herself, and defined what could and could not be done to her. No woman lacked presence altogether. Her presence was manifest in her gestures, voice, opinions, expressions, clothes, chosen surroundings, taste—indeed there was nothing she could do which did not contribute to her presence.
To be born woman was to be born within an allotted and confined space, into the keeping of man. A woman’s presence developed as the precipitate of her ingenuity in living under such tutelage within such a limited cell. She furnished her cell, as it were, with her presence; not primarily in order to make it more agreeable to herself, but in the hope of persuading others to enter it.
A woman’s presence was the result of herself being split into two, and of her energy being inturned. A woman was always accompanied—except when quite alone—by her own image of herself. Whilst she was walking across a room or whilst she was weeping at the death of her father, she could not avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping. From earliest childhood she had been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually. And so she came to consider the surveyor and the surveyed within her as the two constituent yet always distinct elements of her identity as a woman.
A woman had to survey everything she was and everything she did because how she appeared to others, and ultimately how she appeared to men, was of crucial importance for her self-realization. Her own sense of being in herself was supplanted by a sense of being appreciated as herself by another. Only when she was the content of another’s experience did her own life and experience seem meaningful to her. In order to live she had to install herself in another’s life.
Men surveyed women before treating them. Consequently how a woman appeared to a man might determine how she would be treated. To acquire some control over this process, women had to contain it, and so they interiorized it. That part of a woman’s self which was the surveyor treated the part which was the surveyed, so as to demonstrate to others how her whole self should be treated. And this exemplary treatment of herself by herself constituted her presence. Every one of her actions, whatever its direct purpose, was also simultaneously an indication of how she should be treated.
If a woman threw a glass on the floor, this was an example of how she treated her own emotion of anger and so of how she would wish it to be treated by others. If a man had done the same, his action would only have been an expression of his anger. If a woman made good bread, this was an example of how she treated the cook in herself and accordingly of how she as a cook-woman should be treated by others. Only a man could make good bread for its own sake.
This subjunctive world of the woman, this realm of her presence, guaranteed that no action undertaken within it could ever possess full integrity; in each action there was an ambiguity which corresponded to an ambiguity in the self, divided between surveyor and surveyed. The so-called duplicity of woman was the result of the monolithic dominance of man.
A woman’s presence offered an example to others of how she would like to be treated—of how she would wish others to follow her in the way, or along the way, she treated herself. She could never cease offering this example, for it was the function of her presence. When, however, social convention or the logic of events demanded that she behave in a manner which contradicted the example she wished to give, she was said to be coquettish. Social convention insists that she should appear to reject something just said to her by a man. She turns away in apparent anger, but at the same time she fingers her necklace and repeatedly lets it drop as tenderly as her own glance upon her breast.
When she is alone in her room and sure of being alone, a woman may look at herself in a mirror and put out her tongue. This makes her laugh and, on other occasions, cry.
It was with a woman’s presence that men fell in love. That part of a man which was submissive was mesmerized by the attention which she bestowed upon herself, and he dreamt of her bestowing the same attention upon himself. He imagined his own body, within her realm, being substituted for hers. This was a theme which occurred constantly in romantic poems about unrequited love. That part of a man which was masterful dreamt of possessing, not her body—this he called lust—but the variable mystery of her presence.
The presence of a woman in love could be very eloquent. The way she glanced or ran or spoke or turned to greet her lover might contain the quintessential quality of poetry. This would be obvious not only to the man she loved, but to any disinterested spectator. Why? Because the surveyor and the surveyed within herself were momentarily unified, and this unusual unity produced in her an absolute single-mindedness. The surveyor no longer surveyed. Her attitude to herself became as abandoned as she hoped her lover’s attitude to her would be. Her example was at last one of abandoning example. Only at such moments might a woman feel whole.
The state of being in love was usually short-lived—except in unhappy cases of unrequited love. Far shorter lived than the nineteenth-century romantic emphasis on the condition would lead us to believe. Sexual passion may have varied little throughout recorded history. But the account one renders to oneself about being in love is always informed and modified by the specific culture and social relations of the time.
For the nineteenth-century European middle classes the state of being in love was characterized by a sense of excessive uncertainty in an otherwise certain world. It was a state exempt from the promise of Progress. Its characteristic uncertainty was the result of considering the beloved as though he or she were free. Nothing that was an expression of the beloved’s wishes could be taken for granted. No single decision of the beloved could guarantee the next. Each gesture had to be read for its fresh meaning. Every arrangement became questionable until it had taken place. Doubt produced its own form of erotic stimulation: the lover became the object of the beloved’s choice in full liberty. Or so it seemed to the couple in love. In reality, the bestowing of such liberty upon the other, the assumption that the other was so free, was part of the general process of idealizing and making the beloved seem unique.
Each lover believed that he or she was the willing object of the other’s unlimited freedom and, simultaneously, that his or her own freedom, so circumscribed until now, was at last and finally assured within the terms of the other’s adoration. Thus each became convinced that to marry was to free oneself. Yet as soon as a woman became convinced of this (which might be long before her formal engagement) she was no longer single-minded, no longer whole. She had to survey herself now as the future betrothed, the future wife, the future mother of X’s children.
For a woman the state of being in love was a hallucinatory interregnum between two owners, her bridegroom taking the place of her father, or later, perhaps, a lover taking the place of her husband.
The surveyor-in-herself quickly became identified with the new owner. She would begin to watch herself as if she were him. What would Maurice say, she would ask, if his wife (that is me) did this? Look at me, she would address the mirror, see what Maurice’s wife is like. The surveyor-in-herself became the new owner’s agent. (A relationship which might well include as much deceit or chicanery as can be found between any proprietor and agent.)
The surveyed-within-herself became the creature of proprietor and agent, of whom both must be proud. She, the surveyed, became their social puppet and their sexual object. The surveyor made the puppet talk at dinner like a good wife. And when it seemed to her fit, she lay the surveyed down on a bed for her proprietor to enjoy. One might suppose that when a woman conceived and gave birth, surveyor and surveyed were temporarily reunited. Perhaps sometimes this happened. But childbirth was so surrounded with superstitution and horror that most women submitted to it, screaming, confused, or unconscious, as to a punishment for their intrinsic duplicity. When they emerged from their ordeal and held the child in their arms they found they were the agents of the loving mother of their husband’s child.
I hope the preceding few pages will throw some light on the story I am about to tell and in particular on G.’s insistence upon Camille being ‘solitary’ (i.e., unsurveyed by her own agency).
KARL MARX HAS BEEN RELEGATED TO THE ATTIC
Giolitti in 1911
Since his father’s death in 1908, this is the first time G. has returned to Italy. Lawyers in Livorno settled the problems of his inheritance; he owns three factories, two cargo vessels and fifteen houses near the centre of the city.
The evening haze over Lake Maggiore gives everything the look of a backdrop to a theatre set. The islands seem painted. On the hill rising up behind Stresa are the large villas of the rich. Most of them were built in the nineteenth century. Around their windows and doors are painted vine leaves and oranges and birds. At one of the largest villas with an imitation Renaissance watch-tower, Weymann and G. have been invited to dine.
Why did he crash?
Although there were hundreds of witnesses, accounts of what actually happened vary considerably, as do the explanations. Around the dinner table several theories are suggested.
Chavez was in complete control and was about to make a perfect landing. But unhappily, as a result of the strain of the flight and the buffeting of the wind, one of his wings folded a few seconds before his wheels touched the ground. This immediately forced the nose of the plane down and it dived, engine first, into the earth.
This theory is proposed and defended with authority by Monsieur Maurice Hennequin who, since he is an engineer working for Peugeot, was indeed the semi-official Peugeot representative at the competition, has to be listened to with respect. He has a habit of holding his listeners’ attention by suddenly stopping in the middle of a sentence to take in a mouthful of food. He gesticulates rigidly with his large hands, as if they were wooden doors opening and shutting to let his words out and to prevent anybody else’s ever entering into the home of his argument.
It would not have been a perfect landing. Chavez misjudged his speed. He was trying to land at about ninety kilometres an hour instead of sixty. What, however, caused the crash was not one but both wings folding, folding up like the wings of a butterfly when it alights.
This is the opinion of the Italian host, a director of the Pirelli rubber firm in Milan who has made generous donations to the Aero Club and believes, like Lord Northcliffe, that aviation has a great military and commercial future. His voice is habitually modulated to express the sweetness of reason itself. The position of his villa, its painted ceilings, the idea of dining beneath Chinese lanterns on the open platform of the imitation watch tower, the live flamingoes in the garden below, the new factory opened, all testify, he feels, to the reasonableness of his views. He believes in encouraging trade unions and offering incentives to his workers. How often has he quoted to his less successful and more belligerent business colleagues the words of the great Giolitti as Prime Minister:
‘The upward movement of the popular classes is accelerating day by day, and it is an invincible movement, because it is common to all civilized countries and is based upon the principle of the equality of all men. Let no one delude himself that he can prevent the popular classes from conquering their share of political and economic influence. It depends chiefly on us, on the attitude of the constitutional parties in their relations with the popular classes, whether the emergence of these shall be a new conservative force, a new element of prosperity and greatness, or whether instead it shall be a whirlwind that will be the ruin of our country’s fortunes.’
Only as a last resort would the host think in terms similar to those of his uncle: The cavalry! Don’t delay! Martial law and the cavalry! And then he would not shout such words in a Milan hotel; he would quietly pick up a telephone.
His wife asks whether it would not have been safer to land in the lake.
As the result of the cold experienced during the crossing, the pilot’s hands became so numb and frozen that he could no longer handle his controls properly.
This is the suggestion of the Contessa R., who is a great patron of the Milanese opera.
The Contessa raises her hand, its fingers supplely converging towards an apex. It is a dancer’s miming gesture for a flower about to open: it is also the gesture of a child trying to pick something out of a jar. Suddenly, on the word ‘frozen’, she shoots out fingers and thumb and holds them stiffly outstretched while she passes her other hand over the supposedly frozen one, indicating by tentative touches how icy its surface must be.
What intelligence! a man whispers to the young lady beside him, what intelligence behind those grey hairs! By Christmas, the young woman replies, she will have recovered from the loss of Gino, and her hair will be as black as five years ago.
Why does nobody consult Monsieur Chavez himself? The speaker is a woman of about thirty. Her voice is slightly rasping, as if it had once been ruined by a fit of inordinate demonic laughter. Are not most of the controls worked by the feet?
Could you please tell me her name?
Madame Hennequin. Surely you were introduced?
Her first name, I mean.
I do not know her maiden name.
Her prénom.
Ah. I am so sorry. Camille.
Geo remembers nothing after the Gondo gorges.
Poor Geo!
The hostess, wearing a golden bracelet made in the form of an ancient Etruscan one, extends her arm in beckoning invitation to Weymann. Monsieur Weymann, she says (Weymann is a friend of Maurice Hennequin—hence the invitation), you are the flyer and our guest of honour, tell us your opinion.
Weymann smiles but replies tersely in English: You can’t trust a plane like that. Do you know what its wings are made of? Cotton and wood.
Chavez was suffering from a kind of euphoria. He believed that he had succeeded in his venture and the worst was behind him; at the last moment he became reckless.
This is the theory of Harry Schuwey, a Belgian industrialist.
A woman who was just previously smiling at Camille Hennequin and sharing some joke with her says: I don’t find that very convincing, Harry. Her manner of address indicates that she is probably his mistress.
And she?
Mathilde. Mathilde Le Diraison.
My dear Mathilde, replies the Belgian, that is because you have no imagination at all. A young man of twenty-four who has just flown over the Alps for the first time in history believes that he is immortal, the world seems to lie at his feet (the Belgian gives a little laugh), believe me, moments of success are the most dangerous.
But he is immortal, says Madame Hennequin, schoolchildren will learn his name in the history books.
If she were not so well dressed one might mistake her for a schoolteacher. Her features and her figure possess a kind of angularity which suggests a distinct if circumscribed independence of mind.
That will depend, says her husband, on what he does in his further exploits. (In Monsieur Hennequin’s choice of the word ‘exploits’ there is an unconscious condescension, the result of jealousy.) His is a great achievement, I would be the last to deny it, but in the coming years there will be many more even more spectacular ones. Am I not right? He addresses himself to his host whose agreement is certain.
In ten years somebody will fly the Atlantic, says the host.
The first man to fly round the world! says the host’s wife wearily.
Will somebody fly to the moon one day? asks Madame Hennequin. Monsieur Hennequin smiles indulgently at his exotic wife and says with pride: She is an extremist, a dreamer, is Camille.
I am scarcely less interested in her than G. I will describe her to you as I now see her. She is thin. Her bones look as though they are too big for her skin; an effect not unlike that of a child wearing clothes she has outgrown. Her movements are very fastidious, as though they too are too small for her and she must take care not to outdo them. Her face glows, and her eyes are both soft and very translucent, like absolutely clear water in which fur is reflected.
She notices G. gazing at her. Most men when they stare at an unknown woman who attracts them, have already begun in their imagination the process of seducing and undressing her; they already see her in certain positions with certain expressions on her face; they are already beginning to dream about her. And so, when she intercepts their look, one of two things happens: either they continue to stare at her shamelessly because her real existence does not disturb their dream: or else she will read a flicker of shame in their eyes expressed as a momentary hesitation to which she will be obliged to respond either encouragingly or discouragingly.
He stares at her without shame or insolence. In his imagination he has not laid a finger upon her. His purpose is to present himself as he is. Everything else can follow. It is as though he imagines himself naked before her. And she is aware of this. She recognizes that the man looking at her is utterly confident that he has no need to hide anything, no need of any deception or covering. How is she to respond to such imprudence? This time the choice is not between encouragement or discouragement. If she lowers her eyes or looks away, it will be tantamount to admitting that she has appreciated his temerity: to turn away will be to admit that she has seen him as he is. (She will guard for herself, she will preserve the memory of his magnificent imprudence.) The more modest response is to hold his gaze, to stare blatantly back at him in the pretence that she has noticed nothing. This is what she does. Yet the longer they look at each other, the more conscious she is of him addressing himself unreservedly and exclusively to her. Although surrounded by observers, and although he is several metres away and she does not yet know his name, the mere act of their looking at each other has been transformed into their first secret encounter.
What were those extraordinary lines of Mallarmé you quoted to me this morning? Monsieur Hennequin asks his wife.
A woman dancer, she recites slowly and distinctly, is not a woman who dances for she is in no way a woman and she does not dance.
The Belgian gently rolls the wine in his glass.
It is beautiful, says the Contessa, and it is true. A great artist is more than a man or a woman, a great artist is a god.
In my opinion Mallarmé was trying to destroy language, says Monsieur Hennequin, he wanted to deny words the meaning they have, and I suppose it was a long-drawn out act of revenge.
Revenge? I don’t follow, says the host, looking at the palm trees silhouetted against the lake and in the back of his mind playing with the idea of installing an electrical generator so that the house and gardens may be lit with electric light.
A revenge against his public, the public who didn’t appreciate him as he wanted to be appreciated.
It is beautiful, repeats the Contessa, a dancer is not a dancer, a singer is not a singer. How true it is. Sometimes I myself wonder who I am.
I have one or two acquaintances in Brussels, says the Belgian, who wouldn’t agree with you there. They have, if I may so put it, they have first-hand experience of a number of women dancers. Only Mathilde laughs and the Belgian bows his head to her in pretended gratitude. (He wields power. He sits with his big arse on everything that might give him cause to doubt anything he does or says.) You don’t accept, Maurice, the genius of your Mallarmé? asks the host. In this house above this garden he likes to encourage talk about poetry.
Mallarmé may or may not have been a genius. I am not in a position to judge. But he was an obscurantist, and I believe in clarity. As an engineer it’s almost a professional article of faith. Confused machines just aren’t possible.
Mallarmé was a genius, he was immortal, said Madame Hennequin, far ahead of his time.
If we could all live a thousand years, says G., we would each, at least once during that period, be considered a genius. Not because of our great age, but because one of our gifts or aptitudes, however slight in itself, would coincide with what people at that particular moment took to be the mark of genius.
You don’t believe in genius! says the Contessa, shocked.
No, I think it’s an invention.
Several guests have left the table to look over the parapet at the moonlit gardens below. He sees a statue, white, sinuous and indistinct at its edges. Yet the way it is placed makes it part of the geometry of the garden with its straight paths, stone steps and polygonal fountains. The lights on the islands across the lake flicker, but otherwise everything is as still as the past.
Such an historical silence cannot last.
G. turns round to address Monsieur Hennequin: I know little about Mallarmé: I do not read poetry, but is the thought of Mallarmé’s which Madame was so good as to quote to us really so confused? Some experiences are indescribable but they are nonetheless real. Can you, for example, Monsieur Hennequin, describe the tone and quality of your wife’s voice? But I am sure that you would recognize it anywhere, as I would too, Madame Hennequin.
Madame Hennequin watches her husband to see how he will respond to the strange young man who has singled her out.
We talk of the mysterious tragedy of Chavez’ crash, says G., hundreds of people witnessed it, yet nobody can describe what he saw. Why? Because it was too unexpected. The unexpected is often indescribable.
He looks at Camille. He will call her, he decides, Camomille.
Mallarmé, G. continues, is saying that when a woman dances she can become transformed. Words which applied to her before, will no longer apply. It may even be necessary to call her by a different name.
Monsieur Hennequin places himself between the young man and his wife. Monsieur Hennequin is slim for his age but he has large heavy thighs. Women are women, he says, putting his hands up to bar entry, whether they are dancing, dressing, entertaining our guests, looking after our children or making us happy. And let us be grateful for that.
Our beautiful ladies, says the host, must be beginning to feel the cold night air rising from the lake. Let us go indoors.
They talk of attraction and magnetism; these notions suggest a force acting between two given bodies; what is left out of account is how utterly the bodies appear to change in themselves; they are no longer the given bodies. The fact of being given has changed them.
It is not that you see her so differently; it is that she frames a different world. The shape of her nose doesn’t change much. In outline she is the same. But within her unchanged contours everything you perceive is different. She is like an island whose coastline still corresponds to what was shown on the map, but on which, and surrounded by which, you now live. The sound of the sea on all her beaches—unless you accept the dictatorship of your intelligence—ultimately that is the only thing you can oppose to death.
For bruises sand is cool and like silk to the touch. For wounds it is inflaming and harsh, each particle contributing its degree of pain.
But by abstract metaphor I distance myself from my unique perception of her.
The tip of each of her fingers, with its bitten nail, is as expressive as an eye looking at me. I follow from the tip of each finger past the two knuckles to where it joins her hand. Her hand looks curiously thin and ineffective. As an object her hand looks as though it has been discarded. I can imagine or foresee it being different. It might caress me. It might hammer against my back. It might present itself as a five-teated udder to my mouth for me to suck each finger. None of this, however, is of any importance. My attention happened to fall upon her hand. It might just as well have been another part of her. Her elbow. Sharp with her bone pressing against her skin and making it white and bloodless. What can I foresee her elbow doing? Nothing of significance. Yet I perceive it in the same way as her hand. I receive from it the same promise and in the same way it fulfils its promise. I isolate parts in order to follow my eyes, instant by instant, faithfully. But my eyes move, reading her, at incredible speed. The fresh evidence of each part, of each new sight of her, contributes to my perception of her as a whole, and makes this whole continually move and pulsate like a heart, like my own heart.
What is her promise? Of her love in the future? But that is not yet fulfilled. If I made love with her it would be to complete, to put an end to, something that had already happened to us. When you describe something, when you name it, you separate it from yourself. Or to some degree. To fuck is like naming what has happened in the only language adequate to expressing it. (Only when nothing has happened is it possible to separate sex from love.) All acts of physical love are anticipatory and retrospective. Hence their unique significance.
My eyes touch her almost but not quite in the same way as my hands might. If I touched her, her skin, the surface of her body, a contradictory sensation would accompany my sense of touch. I would have the feeling that what I was touching also enclosed me: that this exterior surface (which is her skin with its variegated pores, its degrees of softness and heat and its different smells) that this exterior surface was at the same time, according to another mode of experience, an interior surface. I do not speak symbolically: I am referring to sensation itself. Touching her from the outside would make me aware of being inside.
I look at her fingers as though I were on the point of inhabiting each one, as though I might become the content of its form. I and her phalanxes. Absurd. Yet what is the absurd? Only a moment of incongruity between two different systems of thinking. I am speaking of her fingers, the flesh and bones of another person, and I am speaking too of my imagination. Yet my imagination is not separable from my own body; nor is hers.
The light which, falling upon her, discloses her, is like the light that falls upon and discloses cities and oceans. The facts of her physical being are the events of the world, the space in which she moves is the space of the universe, not because I am unmindful of everything except her, but because I am prepared to risk all that is not her for the sake of all that she is.
The way she plants her feet, the exact length of her back, the tone of her rasping voice (which he said he would recognize anywhere)—each of these and every other quality I see in her, appears as significant as a miracle. There is no end to what she can offer: it is infinite. And I am not deluding myself. I desire her single-mindedly. The value of everything about her, the significance of her smallest movement, the power of what differentiates her from every other woman—this may be determined for both of us by what I am prepared to risk for her. And that is the world. And so she will acquire the value of the world: she will contain, so far as she and I are concerned, all that is outside her, myself included. She will enclose me. Yet I will be free, for I will have chosen to be there, as I never chose to be here in the world and the life which I am ready to abandon for her.
Je t’aime, Camomille, comment je t’aime. That is what he must say.
The guests entered the large room where the furnishings were dark and heavy and the lamps cast bright distinct circles of light—like those lit arenas on conference tables in which it was traditional to depict statesmen signing treaties. The arrangement of the room suggested its principal use as a place where Milanese politicians and businessmen came to work out their plans undisturbed: it offered comfort but not distraction: it was a male room, like a minister’s private reception room in a parliament building. There was nothing in it (except now the women’s bare arms) which was equivalent to the flamingoes in the garden. As the guests entered this sober but comfortable room through the large double door beneath a portrait painting of Giolitti, he noticed Madame Hennequin talking with her friend Mathilde Le Diraison and there was something in the relationship between the two women which intrigued him. They had an air of scarcely disguised conspiracy, such as sometimes sisters preserve between them even after they have become adults and their parents are dead.
In a corridor Madame Hennequin had passed a huge mirror in the shape of the sun and in this mirror she had found herself trying to see the mantle over her shoulders and the fringe over her forehead as he might see them. Through his eyes she found herself pleasing.
Now in the room she compared him with her husband. They were unequally matched. Monsieur Hennequin was stronger and had greater authority. He was like a father; with her two children at home she often referred to her husband as Papa; he was a man who understood the world. His discretion about his mistress—even this—was an example of how well he understood it. Whereas the other, who spoke French badly, did not read poetry but could explain Mallarmé: Mallarmé whose poetry she loved so much because it was inexplicable: the other was imprudent and careless. But since they were so unequally matched she could allow herself to smile at him. Circumspectly, in her own rather distant manner and always in reference to her husband who could at any moment rescue her from the consequences of her own childishness, she was willing, for the duration of the evening, to flirt with this friend of the American aviator: to pretend that a relation existed where in fact there was none.
She asked him what kind of man Chavez was. He replied that he had only met him once or twice, but that Chavez was a nervous man and perhaps also a desperate one. He addressed his reply, however, as much to Monsieur Hennequin as to Madame Hennequin. It was as if he were aware of the comparison she had made and the conclusions she had reached. Having alerted her to his interest, he was now content for them both to concentrate on her husband, the owner.
On a low table near which they sat was a large glass statue of a swan, rose-coloured, and mounted on a silver turntable which revolved. It was neither art nor toy, but an ornament denoting wealth. Madame Hennequin, looking directly at him, put her hand on the swan’s neck and murmured the famous line of Mallarmé:
Un cygne d’autrefois se souvient que c’est lui
Magnifique mais qui sans espoir se délivre …
The harsh rose-coloured glass made the skin of her thin hand seem milkily translucent.
No more? asked Monsieur Hennequin encouragingly. He was aware that the American aviator’s friend had roused his wife’s interest and he hated Mallarmé, but he wanted to demonstrate his tolerance in such matters.
It goes on like this, said Madame Hennequin, but don’t try to understand it, just listen to the sound of what I’m saying.
She recited the whole four-line stanza and the following one, allowing her voice to transform the nostalgia of the poem into a kind of longing. The poem is about opportunities missed, but, by the very act of saying it out loud, she seized an opportunity. By reciting some lines from it she took the opportunity of letting the sound of the words express all that she felt to be independent to herself, all that was outside the reckoning but not the protection of her husband. She was like a tree, she considered, that grew in the soil of her husband’s garden but the leaves of which moved independently in the wind.
Whilst she spoke Monsieur Hennequin leaned back in his chair and smiled at the ceiling, painted with garlands. It was her spirituality, he congratulated himself, which made her such a good mother, although it also explained her reticence, her excessive modesty towards him. His heavy thighs and stomach pressed against his clothes and creased them. She lacked heat, he concluded, but on the other hand she would always be innocent.
G. refrained from glancing at her.
You have a poet’s voice, said the host, and then repeated the last two words in Italian to make them sound more appropriately poetic.
The Contessa quickly started her own conversation with those around her.
G. leant forward and pushed the glass swan quite forcefully so that its silver turntable began to revolve. It ceased to look like a swan and resembled a tall-necked, many-sided carafe of rosé wine.
The swan is drunk, said a young man.
G. turned towards Monsieur Hennequin and said: There is something I have often noticed which I do not fully understand and which I believe, Monsieur, you may be able to inform me about.
I will do my best.
Perhaps you do not often have the opportunity of visiting fairs?
You mean trade fairs?
Fairs in the street where there are shooting stalls and moving pictures and performing fleas and roundabouts and switchbacks …
I have seen them from a distance, yes.
I am an habitué of such fairs. They fascinate me.
Why do they fascinate you? interrupted Madame Hennequin.
They are full of games for adults and there are very few places where you can watch adults playing.
Simple-minded adults, said Monsieur Hennequin, those who patronize these fairs are of very low calibre.
You are entirely right, Monsieur Hennequin. You must surely have visited one once to understand them so well? Now, to come to my question. Do you think that flying round repeatedly in a circle, as happens on a certain kind of roundabout, do you think this might have a temporary effect—for purely physiological reasons—on the brain?
It can induce a sense of giddiness …
I mean more. Could character be temporarily changed by it?
Please explain, said Monsieur Hennequin, what you have in mind.
At these fairs there is a special kind of roundabout, a combination of a roundabout and a series of swings. The seats are suspended on chains and when they turn—
A centrifugal force comes into play, said Monsieur Hennequin, and they are thrown outwards. I have seen the kind of which you are speaking. We call them les petites chaises.
Good. Now you can control—up to a point—how you swing outwards and in what direction. It’s all a question of how far you lean back, how high you push your feet up, how you swing with your shoulders and how you pull with your arms on the chains either side. It’s not very different from what every girl learns on an ordinary swing.
I know, said Madame Hennequin.
The game which most of the riders play as soon as the roundabout starts to turn, is to try to swing themselves near enough to whoever is behind or in front of them so as to join hands with them and then to swing together, as a pair, holding on to each other’s chains. It’s quite difficult to do this, often only their fingertips touch—The seats are spaced in such a way, interrupted Monsieur Hennequin, to ensure that they never come into contact. Otherwise it could be dangerous.
Exactly. But everyone who rides on this kind of roundabout is transformed. As soon as it begins to turn and they begin to gain height as they swing out, their faces and expressions are changed. They leave the earth behind them, they throw back their heads and their feet go up towards the sky. I doubt whether they even hear the music which is playing. Each tries to take hold of the arm trailing in front of him, they cry out in delight as they gather speed, and the faster they go, the freer they play, as they rise and fall, separate and converge. The pairs who succeed in holding on to one another fly straighter and higher than the rest. I have watched this many times and nobody escapes the transformation. The shy become bold. The awkward become graceful. Then when it stops most of them revert to their old selves. As soon as their feet touch the ground, their expressions again become suspicious or closed or resigned. And when they walk away from the roundabout, it is almost impossible to believe that they are the same beings, men and women, who a moment ago were so free and abandoned in the air.
Madame Hennequin set the swan turning as he had done earlier.
Now what I want to ask you, Monsieur Hennequin, is whether you think this transformation might arise from the effect on the nervous system of gravity being modified by a centrifugal force? Is that possible?
It is more likely the result of the very low mental capacity of the class of people who go to such places. For the most part they are little better than children.
You don’t think it would have the same effect on us?
I doubt it very much.
Hasn’t it always been man’s dream to fly? Is that so childish? asked Madame Hennequin.
I fear, my dear, your imagination takes too much for granted, said Monsieur Hennequin. A fairground stunt like this has got nothing to do with flying. You should ask Monsieur Weymann.
The conversation changed. Somebody remarked on the painting of Giolitti. The host laughed and said the painter must have been a political opponent. Do you know what Giolitti’s enemies call him? They call him a Bologna sausage, because, they say, he is half ass and half pig!
I understood you admired him, said the Belgian.
In Bologna pig may be a pet name, said Mathilde Le Diraison.
Yes, I do admire him, said the host. He is the creator of modern Italy. He has often been here, in this room, and it was he himself who said that about his own portrait, and he added that the painter was from Bologna! And this is exactly how he is a great man. He knows how unimportant personal opinions are. What matters is organization. Organization and persuasion.
The conversation turned to politics and then to Germany and the news of the continuing riots in Berlin. Monsieur Hennequin feared that a revolution breaking out in one country in Europe might quickly spread to the others. Monsieur Hennequin was always oscillating between supreme confidence and sudden fear.
His host shook his head reassuringly. There will be no revolution in Europe, the danger is past, and the reason is simple. The leaders of the working masses do not want power. They only want improvements. They have learnt the techniques of bargaining. They have to pretend to ask for more than they want to receive what they do want. From time to time they bring out the word Socialism. This word is the equivalent of temporarily breaking off negotiations, but always with the intention of re-starting them. If we educate people properly, if we use the benefits of modern science, if we curb the power of monarchy and rely upon parliamentary government, there is no reason at all why the present social order should ever change violently.
The host came over, stood behind Monsieur Hennequin and put his hand on his shoulder. You are sceptical, he continued, come, let me show you a recent photograph of Turati and the Socialist Deputies in Rome. It is a curious picture. And very reassuring.
Monsieur Hennequin got up. Madame Hennequin began to say something but was interrupted—
You are beautiful. You have eyes which say everything. And you have the voice of a corn-crake.
She laughs. A corn-crake! Is that a compliment?
I love you. How I love you. I must see you tomorrow.
In the year 1910, which in this respect was in no way exceptional, over half a million Italians emigrated abroad in order to find work and avoid starvation.
THE NATURE OF LIKENESS
In writing about Camille I cannot get close enough to her.
Who is drawing me
between pencil and paper?
One day I shall judge the likeness
but she who judges
will not be the woman who now
so expectantly poses.
I am what I am.
What I am like is how you see me.
Domodossola, like Brig, was crowded with journalists and flying enthusiasts. It is a small town of narrow cobbled streets. Its roofs are covered with clumsy irregular tiles of blackish-red stone, similar in colour to the rocks of the Gondo. When seen from the air the overhanging eaves hide the small streets and the whole town looks like a scattered pile of blackish-red slivers of shale, the deposit of a landslide.
In the Piazza Mercato the Mayor had ordered a large blackboard to be put up. On it, with white chalk in copperplate script, was written the latest medical bulletin concerning Chavez.
Being Sunday morning, there was a market and the square and streets were crowded. During the night the weather had changed and it was hard to believe that they had dined, twenty kilometres away, on the open platform of the tower above Lake Maggiore. He was slowly making his way towards the hospital. When he saw Camille walking in front he was not surprised.
She was wearing a trotteur of pale lilac grey. Its cut and its colour made her look more enterprising than she had in evening dress. Her walk was light and decided. On her head she wore a low-crowned hat with white flowers, tilted forwards. Her brown hair was swept up at the back into a chignon. He guessed that her trim elegance early in the morning in this provincial town meant that she had slept little or badly.
The temperature of hair to the touch varies considerably from person to person, regardless of the surrounding temperature. There are heads of hair which always tend to be cool; others which seem to generate their own heat in the coldest conditions. In the cold air, whilst she remained quite oblivious of his presence a few metres behind her, he could foresee that Camille’s hair would be unusually warm.
She stopped to look into a shop window of gloves and furs. Abruptly he took her arm from behind. She wheeled round with a little cry and with her fists clenched in anger. When she saw that it was he and not a stranger, she could not prevent the relief from showing on her face. She continued to frown, but a smile wavered along her mouth.
He asked after her husband and said that he wanted to propose to him that if the weather were not worse this afternoon, they, with Monsieur Schuwey and Madame Le Diraison, might accompany him on a motor trip to Santa Maria Maggiore.
During the night she had asked herself many times about his absurd declaration of love. Why had she not turned her back on him? Why had she not protested? She told herself it was because she was too surprised. Yet she might have been forewarned. She had after all consciously encouraged his evident interest in her. But what she could never have foreseen, what still confused her, was the way in which, suddenly, and clearly by an act of will, he was addressing her in the room as though they were alone, as though he had dropped from the sky, or come up from the earth, exactly beside her, without having to interrupt or cross the territory of those who surrounded her. She did not protest because there seemed to be nobody to protest to; nobody could have seen him. Had she made a scene, it would have been about something which had already ceased to exist. At one moment during the night she woke up convinced he was standing by the window. For the same reason she could not cry out.
She was telling him how she had lost a pair of gloves on the train coming from Paris. He asked if he might accompany her into the shop. She hesitated. He assured her there was no other shop in the town and he would be glad to interpret for her.
This morning she saw yesterday’s incident differently. What had happened (mysteriously) had happened; but it was without consequence thanks to the order and routine of her normal life. She was in Domodossola with her husband. In four or five days she would return to Paris and her children. This man (with whom she was in a glove shop explaining that she wanted long white gloves) had taken advantage of one moment at a dinner party such as could not occur again. The incident had been finished before it began.
The woman who served them in the shop spoke at length about the heroism of Chavez. Geo Chavez, he translated to Camille, was a victor over the mountains, a conqueror, to whose present pains the woman behind the counter would gladly minister all night and to the least of whose wishes she would be proud to be a slave. She spoke as a mother although to her great regret she never had a son. One of her daughters worked in Milan, a second helped her with the shop.
The gloves which Camille wished to try on were of the thinnest white leather and tight-fitting. The woman, who was proud to live in the town which would nurse Chavez back to health, brought one of the gloves to her mouth and breathed into it before handing it across the counter to Camille. If it was still difficult to put on, she explained, she would sprinkle some talc
When memory connects one experience with another, the nature of the connection may vary considerably. There are connections by contrast, connections by similitude, connections by way of sensuous metaphor, connections of logical sequence, etc, etc The relation between the two experiences may sometimes be one of mutual comment. In this case the connection is multiform and complex. Yet the comment, although extremely precise, cannot be verbalized any more than a chord in music can be. The experience of watching the Italian shopkeeper breathing into a glove summoned up and commented upon his memory of the mysterious warmth he once found in the clothes of Miss Helen, his last governess. Likewise his memory commented upon his present experience. The comments, however, remain unwritable.
The Italian woman blew into the second glove before passing it to Camille. Filled with her breath, the glove took on the form of a hand which suddenly and deeply frightened Camille. It was a languid boneless hand, a hand without will, a hand floating in the air like a dead fish with its white stomach uppermost. It was a hand she did not want. It was a hand that could not clench itself. It was a hand which in caressing would in no way be a hand and would not caress; it would lead away. At that moment she knew what he was offering her. He was offering her the possibility of being what she pretended to be. He was proposing that she turn Mallarmé’s words into lived mornings and afternoons. But she immediately put her knowledge out of her mind by dismissing the self which recognized it, as unserious. All she had to do to remain safe, she told herself, was to be wary of being unrealistic.
The gloves fitted her perfectly. The leather across her tiny bony knuckles was so tight that it shone as if it were wet.
Take one hand in the other, he told her.
She did so.
You see, he said, you take your left hand in your right.
Is it strange? she asked.
No, he said, but it means you are confident, you are the mistress of your own fate.
She laughed, reassured that he recognized this. I am quite content, she said.
You can be content and a slave. Contentment has little to do with it. Why do you say content?
She thought it best not to answer. I am easily startled though, she said, like I was in the street just now.
Startled! You turned upon me with the fury of a virago defending her honour, and when you recognized it was me you extended me an utterly confident welcome.
Camille pulled off the gloves angrily, lay them on the counter and turned towards the door. He asked the shopkeeper how much they were.
I don’t want them, said Camille.
He paid for them. The shopkeeper folded them in mauve tissue paper. Camille stood facing the door. From behind he took both of her elbows in his hands.
(What can I foresee her elbow doing? Nothing of significance. Yet I perceive it in the same way as her hand. I receive from it the same promise and in the same way it fulfils its promise. Her elbows are in his hands.)
Trust me, he said. Nobody else knows why you take your left hand in your right. It doesn’t compromise you.
I don’t want the gloves, she said.
They won’t compromise you either, he said, it is certain that you would have bought them. And I offer them to you only as a modest homage to your elegance, Madame Hennequin, this morning.
The formality with which he spoke confused her. It was impossible to decide whether its falseness was deliberate or the result of his far from perfect grasp of the language. Either way it emphasized how by showing her anger she had been indiscreet.
It is too early for us to disagree, he said, and he held out the gloves to her and bowed.
She took them.
Je t’aime, Camille, he said, opening the shop door.
The hospital is near the centre of the town. A square yellow building, it looks like a classical early-nineteenth-century villa in its own garden. The main door is flanked by camellia trees. In the doorway is a table with a book open upon it. The book is for passers-by or visitors who do not wish to disturb the flyer, to write messages or tributes in. For some, however, it seems a sinister omen, for in certain parts of the Mediterranean a book is placed by the front door when there has been a death in the house; and in this book neighbours and acquaintances sign their names as an expression of condolence.
Weymann is waiting for him at the top of the stairs.
He says he remembers nothing after the Gondo, Weymann whispers.
How does he seem?
Very shaken and erratic.
What do the doctors really think?
His injuries are not serious. He has no concussion. There’s nothing to prevent him making a complete recovery.
Except?
I didn’t say except.
But except?
He’s too nervous, says Weymann.
They enter the room in which there are already half a dozen men, including Christiaens and Chavez’ close friend Duray. On the wall opposite the bed are pinned telegrams from all over the world: enough to cover the entire wall.
To the wounded man the wall might have represented a vast transparent window on to the world’s view of his achievement; but it does not, it remains a wall with confused meaningless rectangles of paper pinned to it, some of which stir slightly when the door is opened. His temperature is only slightly above normal. His brain is lucid. Time and again his imagination approaches the irreversibility of the events since he announced ‘I’m going now’. Their irreversibility confronts him like a rock face which moves with him as he turns his head or shifts his gaze. However high he climbs, however daringly he breaks through the wall of the wind westwards, it is still there, in front of his eyes and above his swollen lips. He repeatedly makes the approach but the geology of the events never changes. Meanwhile these silent endlessly recurring private approaches make everything else said or seen in his room seem as far away as the words he cannot read on the telegrams.
They found him under the débris of his plane with his face pressed against the earth. He did not lose consciousness.
G. takes Chavez’ hand and offers his congratulations. He is unaccustomed to finding a man mysterious; mystery, for him, is the prerogative of women. About men he asks only questions to which the number of answers is limited, as one asks what time it is—according to a clock or a watch. He looks into Chavez’ dark eyes, whose expression is suspicious, at his swollen lips which, even when unbruised, were absurdly full and curved, at the backs of his hands, and he sees the whole appearance of the small young man, forced to lie unexpectedly there in a bed in a hospital in a garden in Domodossola, as an outer covering no less arbitrary or opaque than the misshapen cylinders of plaster round his legs. A hand on a woman’s breast conjures up the same mystery. Beneath the tangible extends the enormity of what is intangible and invisible. A doctor can take the plaster off his legs. But a surgeon making an incision in his flesh and opening up the organs within would not disclose the mystery. The mystery lies in the vastness of the system by which Chavez, so long as he is alive, constitutes the world in which he is living (which includes your hand shaking his) as his own unique experience.
This morning I went into a glove shop and the woman who served me spoke of you as though you were a saint, a saint with the courage of a hero.
I know, interrupted Chavez, they think of me like that. Perhaps they are right or perhaps they are not. Anyway the question will never be settled because, meanwhile, I’m dying.
The weather improved. He suggested that Monsieur Hennequin should drive the motor car. In the late afternoon they were driving through a pine forest which overlooked the lake. Madame Hennequin wanted to stop so that they could walk a little in the forest.
The light enters the forest almost horizontally. Each entry between the trees into the depths of the forest acquires in this light an exaggerated stereoscopic quality. The trees which are against the light look entirely black. The tree trunks which are sunlit are a greyish honey colour. The same light falls upon the taffeta and silk of the two women’s dresses which are pearly and luminous. As the women walk, their feet in their buttoned boots tread lightly but deeply into a carpet of pine needles, rotted cones, moss and the leaves of flowers. Every surface is more than usually vivid, but in the forest everything loses something of its substantiality.
To Camille he has been no more than formally polite, so as to emphasize to her the depth and seriousness of the conspiracy which now links them. He has concentrated his attention upon Monsieur Hennequin and Harry Schuwey. He is encouraging the latter to talk about the resources of the Congo. He appears to listen with interest; every so often he asks a supplementary question or makes an encouraging sign of agreement. Yet despite the impression he gives, he is scarcely listening to what is being said. In a mixed language, where words are only one of the expressive means—a language not essentially different from that in which he questioned himself as a child but now possessing a wider range of references—he addresses, silently, the two men whom he is walking between.
How did you choose them? You chose them for exactly the same reasons as you would have chosen any other woman. Men in your position must have the best. The best is not an absolute, though. Men in your position must have the best for men in your position. If you choose a woman without considering this you may jeopardize your position and the putting of your position in jeopardy may cause you—and therefore her—unhappiness. Cut the cloth according to the purse, and choose the wearer of the cloth according to its cut. But apart from being men with positions you are men with penises.
On their left, the ground rises steeply so that the roots of the distant trees are level with the top branches of the near ones. Beween the higher distant trees there are rocks, jagged in shape but covered in green moss. On their right, when there is a sufficiently straight avenue to look down, they can see the surface of the lake shimmering like mica below.
And your penises are much given to idealizing. Your penises want the best possible—and to hell with your positions. How can you satisfy both?
A forest is not incontrovertible like a mountain. It is tolerant, like the sea, of everything which occurs within it.
You cannot. But you can protect yourselves or you can try to protect yourselves against the worst consequences of an open rift. And this you have done from the moment you attained the age of responsibility, with the help of your colleagues, your friends, your church, your professors, your novelists, your dressmakers, your comedians, your lawyers, your forces of order, your public men and of course your women.
Monsieur Hennequin wonders whether what his friend is saying might be of interest to Peugeot. Everything that motor cars will need should be of interest to Peugeot. He would like to visit the Congo himself. He has been to Algeria but in his opinion that is scarcely Africa. Africa begins with the jungle. He picks up a stick from the path and with it he lightly taps the trunks of the trees which are within his reach as they pass them.
You had to find a third value, a third interest that your social ambition, which, unlike pure ambition, must always wear the dress of conformity, and the idealism of your penises could acknowledge as arbiter. And this third value was property. The third interest was an interest in owning. Not a remote merely financial interest, but a passionate one which stirs you physically, which becomes a sense as acute as the sense of touch. Indeed you have seen to it that your children are taught to touch nothing that is not theirs, not a flower nor an animal nor the hand of a stranger. To touch is to claim as property. To fuck is to possess. And you take possession either by paying rent or by buying outright.
The women were walking behind the men. Harry Schuwey is explaining that whereas ivory is a luxury material today, rubber with the development of the motor industry is becoming an essential one and that therefore the future of the Congo lies in rubber. The forest is very still except for the party advancing along the path. Occasionally, high up among the topmost branches, a bird sings a few notes and then stops.
Has nobody told you about your houses? I discovered it a long time ago. You are walking leisurely—in any city in Europe—through a well-off residential quarter down a street of your own houses or apartments.
The trees are spruce firs or larches. Lichen grows more readily on the former. Many dead branches are festooned with matted pale green hair, like dried seaweed. On other branches lines and clusters of lichen algae are fixed like tarnished white silver press-studs.
Their window-frames and shutters have been freshly painted but their colour barely differentiates them from the façades around them, which absorb the sunlight but give off a slight granular scintillation like starched linen table-napkins. You look up at the curtained windows in which the curtains are so still that they might be carved out of stone, at the wrought iron-work of balconies imitating plants, at ornamental flourishes referring to other cities and other times, you pass polished wooden double doors with brass bells and plates, the silence of the street consists of the barely perceptible noise of a distant crowd, a crowd made up of so many people so far away that their individual exertions, their individual inhaling and exhaling combine in a sound of continuous unpunctuated breathing, gentle as a breeze, this silence which is not entirely a silence, receives and contains the noise of a front door being shut by a maid, or the yapping of a dog among upholstered furniture and heavy carpets, as a canteen with its green baize lining receives the knives and forks deposited in it. Everything is peaceful and well-appointed. And then suddenly you realize with a shock that each residence, although still, is without a stitch of clothing, is absolutely naked! And what makes it worse is their stance. They are shamelessly displaying themselves to every passer-by!
As the party strolls on, the spaces they see between trunks and branches change in shape and colour. Colour and shape can conspire to suggest the presence, there, between two trees, of a deer.
Look! whispers Mathilde.
The process is the obverse of that of natural camouflage whereby animals merge with their surroundings; her knowledge that deer live in the forest has led Mathilde to create an animal out of the surroundings.
He has deduced from the way Mathilde smiles at him that Camille has confided in her. In her attitude there is an openness, an undisguised curiosity such as women can only afford to show to a new lover or suitor of an intimate friend.
I really thought it was a deer, says Mathilde.
The path leads to a clearing, a meadow of tall grass in which every blade is rendered separate and distinct by the horizontal light and which is full of the stillness and peace of early autumn wherein it seems that all development has been suspended, all consequences indefinitely delayed. Monsieur Hennequin, ignoring the present arguments of Harry Schuwey, stoops to pick some meadow saffron which he presents to his wife. The moment reminded him of the year in which he had courted her.
You chose this woman as you made her your own. At any moment the degree of conviction in your choice depended on your estimate of how exclusively she belonged to you. In the end she belonged to you entirely, and then you were able to say: I have chosen her.
Camille takes the flowers in her gloved hand. And Mathilde pins them to her friend’s blouse.
It is necessary to believe that what you choose for yourself is good. But a part of yourself—the part that was cunning, listened to other men and had known since childhood that life benefits those who benefit themselves—this part remained sceptical. By marrying her, you would lose the opportunity of marrying another. By possessing her you would limit your possible powers of possession. True, you could still choose your mistress. But in the end the same would apply to your choice of her. And so the sceptical part of yourself asked: is she desirable enough to convince me consistently of my own good sense in making her mine? Is her desirability such that it can console me for finding her, rather than any other, desirable?
Camille laughs at a joke of Mathilde’s. Monsieur Hennequin walks through the high grass like a man walking into water. Harry Schuwey is explaining why the official annexation of the Congo which occurred two years ago will benefit trade.
Had the answer been No, you would have dropped her as though she had ceased to exist.
I have never seen such large butterflies, shouts Monsieur Hennequin and running a little distance tries to catch one in his cap.
In order to console you for the loss of all or nearly all the other women in the world, she had to become an ideal. She collaborated with you in the choice of the qualities to be idealized. You chose Camille’s innocence, delicacy, maternal feeling, spirituality. She emphasized these for you. She suppressed the aspects of herself which contradicted them. She became your myth. The only myth which was entirely your own.
Schuwey is arguing that the colonial methods of King Leopold and his private Congo Free State were effective enough twenty years ago and that it was hypocritical of the other European powers to condemn the use of forced labour and harsh repressive measures when they themselves had once used similar methods—less effectively. Nevertheless, Schuwey says, it is perfectly true that kings make bad businessmen because they always put revenue before investment.
You—you have idealized different qualities in Mathilde. She is different in temperament and she is not your wife but your mistress. She has, you say, the most beautiful neck in the world. She is lazy, you believe, as only a pleasure-loving woman can be. She is, you pride yourself, devilishly attractive to men. To idealize the last quality is uniquely satisfying—so long as a second proposition, about which you feel less confident, pertains: and she does not deceive me.
When you consider leaving Camille, when you find that Mathilde, is, after all, too extravagant and erratic, it will not be because you are dissatisfied with what they are but because they will no longer be able to compensate you for what they are not!
I hate you. You have power not because of your wealth but because most men obey you. Everything they learn makes them envy you and envy leads to obedience. They want to be like you. So they live by the same laws, and in the end they choose obedience as their own good.
Your power in yourself is paltry. Your eyes peer out like dead men propped up at their windows to make the crowds in the street below believe they are being watched. Ears, which are the most innocent, the most receptive feature of the face, become either side of your head useless vestigial appendages from a former age, like the useless nipples on your chests. Where do you live? At your fingertips? In your heart? At the bottom of your dreams? Across your shoulders?
You live in the ill-lit, airless space between your last skin and your clothes. You live in your own perambulating mezzanine. Your passions are like rashes.
I hear the lark, says Camille, but I can’t see it.
You cannot threaten me. Your existence reconciles me to the idea of my own death.
I do not want to live indefinitely in a world which you dominate; life in such a world should be short. Life would choose death rather than your company. And even death is reluctant to take you. You will live long.
Monsieur Hennequin approaches the group standing in the corner of the meadow. He holds his clasped hands out in front of him. Apparently he has caught a butterfly.
Let it go, says Camille, you are worse than a small boy.
You wouldn’t have said that to Linnaeus, replies Monsieur Hennequin.
Who was he? asks Schuwey.
Monsieur Hennequin throws his hands up into the air above his head and opens them. There is no butterfly. He roars with laughter.
When you laugh, you laugh crazily (panting in momentary relief) at the person you might have been, and of whom the joke briefly reminded you.
As soon as one of you disappears, there is another to take his place, and the number of places is increasing. There will be shortages of everything in the world before there is a shortage of you!
After the meadow, the path leads to a point which commands a wide view of the plain and the first southern slopes of the Alps. When they stop talking, the silence, the expanse of the lake, the snow on a single Alpine peak, the late extension of the autumn afternoon, combine to make an amalgam which is like a lens for the imagination of even the habitually unimaginative: the lens enables them to glimpse the space surrounding their own lives.
Why should I fear you? It is you who speak of the future and believe in it. You use the future to console yourself for the youth you never had. I do not. I shall be beyond the far reaches of your ridiculous and monstrous continuity, as Geo Chavez has gone. I shall be dead, so why should I fear?
I fear the idea now: the idea of your immortality: the idea of the eternity you impose upon the living before they are dead.
On the return walk to the car he again affably accompanies the men. The forest is darker and cooler. The smell of pine is stronger. In the dusk of the trees the unity of the trees is more pronounced. A single twig of a larch has small bossy protuberances running on alternative sides along its length. When the twig was smaller, each of these was a needle. When the twig becomes a branch, each of these will be a twig. And branches grow from the trunk in the same way. The forest is the result of the same stitch being endlessly repeated.
As he helps Camille into the back of the motor car, he passes her a note. She will read it later. In it is written: My corn-crake, my little one, my most desired, I have something to tell you and you alone. Meet me tomorrow afternoon. I shall wait for you in a car outside Stresa Station tomorrow afternoon.
Monsieur Hennequin discovered the note the same evening. Camille had put it between the pages of Mallarmé’s Poésies which at that time she always kept by her side. The oil lamp on the writing table started to smoke; she called her husband from the adjoining room and asked him to adjust it. (In their Paris house they already had electricity.) By accident Monsieur Hennequin knocked the book off the table. The note fluttered separately to the ground. He stopped to pick up both paper and book. The folded piece of paper intrigued him: he wondered whether Camille had begun to write her own poetry. He unfolded it. The note was signed. He put it back in the book, kissed Camille on the top of her head and left the room as though nothing had happened.
Camille, unsuspecting, instructed her maid to prepare a bath. She had decided that she would ignore the note. But she could not cease asking herself and trying to answer the question: what is it in me that makes him so heedless and so insistent?
After a quarter of an hour Monsieur Hennequin had assessed the full magnitude of the wrong done to him, and he entered his wife’s room without knocking and as though he had just at that instant discovered her infidelity. The door banged against the wall. Camille had unpinned her hair and was in a dressing gown. Monsieur Hennequin did not raise his voice. He spoke harshly between his teeth.
Camille, you must be mad. Can you explain yourself?
She looked up at him, surprised.
Open that book, you know already what is in it. There is a note—a note of assignation addressed to you. From whom is it?
You have no right to spy on me. It is humiliating for both of us.
From whom is it?
Since you have read it and it is signed, you obviously know.
From whom is it?
You tell me—and you can tell me, too, how many other notes I have received from the same gentleman, You are being very stupid, Maurice.
From whom is it?
He stood upright in front of her, his fists clenched, his head slightly inclined so that he could see the place on her head where he had kissed her before leaving the room to decide what it was necessary for him to do. She, in her chair, either had to lean back as though cowering away from him, or else stare at his watch-chain, a few inches from her face. She stared at the gold chain.
I have nothing to be ashamed of, she said. I did not intend to reply to his note, which I found very foolish, and I have done nothing whatsoever to encourage him. You must really believe me.
From whom is it?
Can you say nothing else, Maurice? Why don’t you ask me what has happened. Me. Before jumping to your own conclusions.
From whom is it?
My God, what is the matter with you?
I want to hear you speak his name.
Then I am afraid I shall not give you that satisfaction.
Exactly. Because you know as well as I do that your voice will betray you. You will not be able to keep your feelings—if they can be called feelings—you won’t be able to keep your feelings out of your voice. Say his name now.
I refuse. You are being absurd.
You refuse. Of course you refuse, I have seen the two of you together. I was blind. Blinded by my own trust in you. But now I can see. From the first moment you met him, you ogled him, you put yourself at his side, eyeing him, murmuring—
You have gone out of your mind. You have no right to say these things to me. I have done nothing.
Done nothing! In two days you haven’t had the time to do anything—as you so delicately put it. But you have wanted to, and like—like a prostitute you have interested him.
She tried to push him away with her hands. Then she lowered her head and began to cry.
We shall leave for Paris tomorrow afternoon, he said. You can tell Yvonne to pack. He strode to the door and turned to face her again. The shamelessness of it is what I find so disgusting, he said, the vulgarity! In two days under my very eyes in a small town where we are all of us of necessity on each other’s doorsteps!
Doorsteps! she said, angry whilst crying.
I shall warn him tomorrow morning, he said, if I catch sight of him again with you, I shall shoot him—and have every court in France on my side. I shall shoot him down like—
Would it not be more honourable to challenge him to a duel?
I daresay you see yourself as a great courtesan. But you have neither the tact nor the charm for that. And you happen to be living in the twentieth century.
I beg you not to speak to him.
Him!
Where her gown crossed over he could see her white, rising breasts. Let us go back to Paris, she said, if that will really satisfy you, but do not speak to him.
Evidently, my dear Camille, you are frightened of what I will learn from him.
Very well.
He took the key out of the door and left the room. He took the key because otherwise she might lock him out. She had done so on several occasions after disputes; and later tonight—he was aware of it now—it was possible that he might decide to fuck her like a prostitute.
Camille slept fitfully. At six she got up. Her husband was not in his room and had apparently not slept in his bed. She opened the shutters. The sky was blue without a cloud in it. The pace of the day had not yet established its rhythm; time, like the street with only a few people in it, seemed elongated. The length of the day and the depth of the blue sky constituted a stage whose dimensions suddenly made her shiver. From the window she could see the railway station.
She waited impatiently for the time when she could decently send Yvonne with a message to Mathilde, asking the latter to join her as quickly as possible because she needed her help.
Whilst waiting she ordered coffee.
From the window she saw a cat cross the courtyard with that undeviating fleetness which characterizes cats when they have direct access to what they want. The cat had heard the noise of the coffee grinder being turned by the peasant girl in the kitchen, who sat on a stool and held the grinder between her knees. For the cat the noise signified cream. When the maid finished grinding the coffee, she would go to the wooden larder in the wall and take down a large jug of cream. She would pour the cream from this jug into small silver jugs, and if the cat rubbed itself against her leg, she would also pour some into a chipped blue and white plate and place it by the door to the yard for the cat to drink.
She looked several times through her wardrobe to decide what to wear today. They would be catching the train to Paris. She was being taken home to her children, herself like a child who had misbehaved. She had a dark travelling suit in linen lined with patterned satin, which would be highly suitable. She decided, however, to wear her trotteur of pale lilac grey. She was being taken home under protest.
It was not for her advice that she needed Mathilde but for her assistance. Mathilde was a person, Camille considered, with different standards from her own and with far more luxurious tastes. Mathilde understood contracts and because she understood them, she was able to keep them. When she married Monsieur Le Diraison, aged sixty-four, she undertook to make the rest of his life agreeable in exchange for the inheritance she would receive at his death. And for five years she had spoilt the old sick man like a child. She, Camille, would be incapable of carrying out such a bargain; she believed that life should be finer than that. She believed in a justice whose essence was spiritual, not material. She liked the parable of the labourers in the vineyard of whom the last to be hired, who worked for only one hour, were nevertheless paid the same amount as those who had borne the burden and heat of the whole day.
She needed Mathilde’s assistance precisely because she wanted to redress an injustice. If her husband had spoken to him as he had threatened to do (and his absence seemed to confirm that this might be the case) she wanted to go out into the town this morning, accompanied by Mathilde, in the hope that they might meet him. She never wished to see him again, but she wanted to give him her assurance that however unsuitable, imprudent and mistaken his pursuit of her had been, she had never for one moment considered it base.
She foresaw that Mathilde would dismiss this plan as quixotic and childish. But she knew that Mathilde would do what she asked: partly out of friendship, even more out of her fear of boredom.
What are we waiting for in this horrid little provincial town? Mathilde had said yesterday morning, I believe we are waiting, my dear, for the hero to die.
As the local train drew into Domodossola station, Monsieur Hennequin opened the carriage door, ready to jump down on the platform. He was not impatient and he knew he had time to kill, but the more briskly he acted, the more certain he was of the correctness of his decision. A number of workers got out of the same train, but instead of making for the exit they crossed the lines towards the shunting yards. There were no cabs waiting outside the station and he could only see one other person at the far end of the Corso.
He passed his hand over his side pocket to satisfy himself once again that the automatic pistol, to obtain which he had made the tedious night journey, was solidly there. Its solidity, like the briskness of his actions, acted as a confirmation; it was like hearing an acquaintance say of him: Maurice acted calmly and firmly.
Passing the hotel, he looked up at his own bedroom window and remembered Camille’s taunt about fighting a duel. It was the traditional time of day for duels and for executions. He told himself that after a night without sleep, in the early morning, before the day for most people had begun, you might have an unusual sense of your own destiny.
He walked into the old centre of the town where there is an irregularly shaped piazza and the pavement in front of the shops is arcaded. The blackboard on which was written last night’s medical bulletin concerning Chavez had been placed under the arcades in case it rained during the night. The writing was smudged at one corner. The instability and irregularity of the patient’s cardiac functions give rise to continuing anxiety …
The shop windows under the arcades had large wooden shutters folded across them. They were painted green, but because they had been painted on different occasions, each had its own distinctive shade. Above the shutters were the shop signs. Several family names occurred more than once over different shops. When the shops were open, it was obvious from what was displayed in their windows that they were little more than poorly stocked stalls in a remote provincial town. But with their shutters up they looked different. It was possible to imagine that they were shops full of rare articles. Monsieur Hennequin walked several times round the arcade.
He would have liked Camille to witness the forthcoming encounter. She would see the young man shown up for what he was—a cynical philanderer with the mentality of a petty criminal. And she would also learn how far he, her husband, was prepared to go in order to protect her.
He no longer blamed Camille. Last night be had glimpsed in her the tart who, according to Monsieur Hennequin, is found in every woman but who only makes herself evident if the woman is denied the controls which her nature requires. He had ignored the warning contained in her infatuation with Mallarmé’s poetry: this poetry had stimulated and irritated her taste for the limitless, the boundless. But finally, he convinced himself she was not to blame: she was innocent. Her weakness was the weakness of her sex.
In protecting her from this weakness, in putting a stop to the leering young man’s felonies, he was acting on behalf of all husbands for the sake of all wives. Women who were far more cunning than Camille, far more capable of pursuing their own interests, suffered from the same weakness: the weakness of succumbing to their own false first impressions. Women, able to twist men round their little fingers as soon as they knew them, could be rendered as impressionable as an eleven-year-old before a stranger whom they did not yet know. Women could calculate, they could make elaborate strategic and tactical plans, they could be patient and persistent, they could be merciless and generous—but their first impressions were invariably faulty. They could not see what was in front of them. This was why philanderers, so long as they were dealing with women, had need of so little diguise or distinction.
Monsieur Hennequin came to believe that what he intended to do was a duty placed upon him as a consequence of the weakness and inferiority of others. He was in no way aware of having to defend his own interests, or of having to try to escape from the solitude being imposed upon him. He left the arcade and the shuttered shops.
Monsieur Hennequin stood in the doorway of the bedroom. I don’t imagine you are surprised to see me, he said and shut the door behind him. We men are not the fools you take us for, he continued, and we know exactly how to deal with your type.
The bedroom was a modest one with a wooden plank floor. On the bed, instead of blankets, there was a large eiderdown in a white coverlet. The pillows were stuffed, not with feathers, but with grain. It was the hotel where the drivers of the Simplon mail coach used to stay. G. was still in bed but had raised himself up on one elbow.
As soon as he had shut the door behind him, Monsieur Hennequin pointed the pistol at the man in bed. Either you stop or I will kill you.
The man in bed stared at the pistol. (Is it the mere sight of gun metal which reminds him so strongly of the smell in the gun room of his childhood?) He heard Monsieur Hennequin’s voice continue as though in the room next door.
If I see you in my wife’s company again, here or anywhere else, I swear that I will shoot you on the spot.
Monsieur Hennequin was perfectly well aware of which way the gun in his hand was pointing—it was not his life that was in jeopardy. Further, he had reckoned since his first discovery of the note that it supplied him with evidence which would assure his receiving a purely nominal sentence even if he killed the man lying in the bed. Very little in his own life was menaced and he was now putting a stop to what might later have become a serious danger. Yet the invocation, the use of the threat of death may sometimes have a wider effect than the intended one. When once death is invoked, the choice of who must die may seem oddly arbitrary. In any case Monsieur Hennequin began to tremble.
He was not frightened, but he sensed that at this moment he was justifying his whole life. It was as if he was now prepared to choose death for himself rather than compromise or deny the meaning of his life. The important thing was the choice of death; whether for himself or another—always with the gun in his hand pointing at the man in the bed in front of him—seemed unimportant. It no longer mattered whether or not Camille witnessed the scene. To threaten or take the life of an avowed enemy was to enhance his own. He was discovering with excitement a new power.
If I have the slightest reason to suspect that you have seen her, I will shoot you like a dog whilst you sleep.
G. began to laugh. The pretences had been dropped and the truth which was revealed was absurdly familiar. The truth was Monsieur Hennequin, visibly trembling, the words coming out of his mouth with strange cries of pleasure, a pistol in his hand.
If I see you approaching the wife of any colleague or acquaintance of mine I shall shoot you as you leave the gathering.
Often he had been asked: why do you laugh, love?
After days of intrigue and hope and calculations, after doubts and heart-searchings, after boldness and timidity and further boldness, what truth is disclosed? His trousers flung across a chair, her wrap put aside or the coverlet of the bed pulled back, two rough triangles of darkish hair are disclosed and within them the parts whose exact forms first-year medical students are taught to recognize as typical of the entire human species. There is no mistaking any of it, and in this total lack of ambiguity there is a truly comic banality. The longer the mask has been worn, the longer the familiar has been hidden, the more comic the revelation becomes, for the more the pair of them are meant to be astounded at what they have always known.
You tried to take advantage of the innocence of my wife—as I’m sure you have taken advantage of God knows how many other unfortunate women. But this time, thank God, it is not too late.
When Beatrice fell back on the bed laughing, she was no longer laughing at the absurd man in black in the trap, but at what she knew would now become obvious on her bed, beneath the portrait of her father, according to a freedom apparently granted by a wasp sting.
Keep quiet. Stop laughing. Or you will get a bullet in your chest now.
He continued to laugh because at last he was face to face with the unexceptional. It was partly a laugh of relief, as though, against all reason, he had feared that the other might, in this, be exceptional. And partly he laughed at the great first joke of the commonplace becoming inexorable, like a penis becoming erect.
Monsieur Hennequin considered that his laughter was like that of a madman alone in his cell. And this idea that the leering man in the bed might be mad disturbed and discouraged him, for he believed that, although the mad must be forcibly restrained and in certain cases exterminated, madness itself was nevertheless self-defeating, and so his avowed enemy appeared to represent a less substantial menace than the one he had resolved, without hesitation or compromise, to put a stop to.
You are mad, he said. But mad or not you will have no second warning.
Monsieur Hennequin walked backwards out of the door, prolonging to the last possible moment the excitement (which the mad laughter had done so much to diminish) of pointing the gun at the man who had tried to seduce his wife.
Madame Hennequin and Mathilde Le Diraison are riding in a dilapidated carriage with a hood with holes in it and a driver with a straw hat, along the Via al Calvario, towards the church of San Quirico, which lies to the south, ten minutes from the centre of Domodossola.
They met G. in the Piazza Mercato. He greeted them quickly and, looking at Camille, said: Your husband with a pistol in his hand has just threatened to shoot me if I speak to you again. I must speak to you again. I will wait for you both at the church of San Quirico. We cannot talk here. Come as soon as you can. Then, without allowing them time to reply, he stepped back into the arcade and was gone.
Your friend is nothing if not dramatic, remarks Mathilde.
Do you think it is true?
That Maurice threatened him, yes.
He didn’t have a gun.
Every man has some friend who has a pistol.
Do you think Maurice is capable of killing him?
For you, my dear, men will do anything! Mathilde laughs.
Please be serious.
Do you feel serious?
When Camille heard that her husband had threatened him with a gun, she was reminded of her wedding day. Her anger at the injustice of her husband’s action, her shame on her husband’s behalf, her resentment at the fact that her husband had ignored her protestations and appeals, made her acutely aware that she was his wife, or, more accurately, that she had become his wife according to her own choice. Up to this moment being Madame Hennequin had seemed to be part of her natural life; her marriage was part of the same continuity which led from her childhood through young womanhood to the present. There had been misunderstandings and disagreements between her and her husband, but never before had she felt that the course of her life was out of her control, that what was happening was unnatural to her. She remembered how, at their wedding, Maurice and she had knelt, isolated, alone, in front of the entire congregation, but side by side so that she could feel his warmth, in order to receive communion. He had knelt shyly and with what she then believed to be true humility. Now she imagined him getting to his feet with a pistol in his hand and a look of blank unfeeling on his face.
Suddenly amazement overcame her anger with a thought which restored to her a little of her natural identity, which suggested that she was not entirely helpless and which confirmed her sense of being blindly wronged by her husband. This thought was: Under the threat of being shot, he still wants to speak to me because he can see me as I am.
No, I do not feel serious, says Camille.
You should persuade them to fight a duel for you.
That is what I told Maurice. He said it wasn’t modern.
I don’t see what being modern or not has to do with it. Men don’t change in that respect.
Do you think we do? asks Camille.
You are changing. You are transformed. You are a different person from what you were two days ago. If you could see yourself now—
What would I see?
A woman with two men in love with her!
Mathilde, please promise me one thing—do not, on any account, leave me alone with him.
Not if you both insist?
I am serious now. I cannot see him unless you promise me this.
Fortunately Harry is not jealous. Well, he is jealous, but not to the point of shooting or threatening. Afterwards he may make a scene in private with me, but I can put a stop to that quite quickly.
It would be as much as his life is worth, says Camille, please promise me.
I think Harry is the type of man who might under certain conditions shoot himself, but he would never shoot anybody else. What do you think he would do—Mathilde nods in the direction they are going—if he had reason to be jealous?
Jealous of me? asks Camille.
Yes, says Mathilde smiling.
When she thought: Under the threat of being shot, he still wants to speak to me, her vision of his appearance altered. The alteration was also retrospective. What she had noticed but not remembered came to light. Hundreds of details assembled to form the whole man before her. He attracted everything she had seen him do. Her impressions rushed towards him, attached themselves to him, as though magnetized, and, covering him, became his characteristics. His head addressed her. She saw into it. The head was larger than average. It lunged forward when he spoke. Thick curls fell over the back of his neck. The tops of his ears entered other thickets. His hands with which he gesticulated were smaller than average. The veins on them were rather pronounced. The missing teeth, when his mouth was open, made it seem wider than it was. The gaze of his eyes was insistent. His feet, like his hands, were small. His walk was light and fastidious and in contrast to the heavy thrust of his head and shoulders. She found each physical characteristic eloquent of an aspect of his nature, as a mother may find the characteristics of her infant before it can talk or sit up.
I think he would kill me and then himself, says Camille, laughing.
Where does he live? It would be fortunate if it were Paris.
I don’t know. He says he is half English and half Italian.
That might explain a lot, remarks Mathilde.
Please promise me, says Camille.
Has he told you how he lost his teeth?
Mathilde, listen to me, this could be a matter of life and death.
He has an expression that I’ve only seen on one other man.
Who? asks Camille.
He was a friend of my husband’s, an Armenian who fell in love with me.
Exasperation wells up with tears in Camille’s eyes. Mathilde lowers her voice and whispers: Camille, you can trust me. But you are naive about such situations. The danger is Maurice, and there you can depend on me.
Camille rests her head back against the dusty leather upholstery and lays her gloved white hand on Mathilde’s arm.
How hot it is today! says Mathilde. There are days when grand passion is just not possible. The weather is a woman’s best friend!
We shall be there too soon. I don’t want to have to wait for him. Mathilde, ask him to drive more slowly.
Camille touches the fringe of her hair and stares at her own hand. It looks to her extremely small and delicate, likewise her wrists and forearms. She wants to appear as fresh and as intricate as white lace (she remembers a painting she once saw of a girl on a swing in a garden in Montpellier whose petticoats were bordered with white lace). She wants to appear like that in this green, overgrown, remote landscape for a few minutes before her enforced return to Paris where there are more clothes than trees and the streets are like rooms.
The carriage stops by the church. The same Fiat car in which they made the trip to Santa Maria Maggiore is parked in the shade of a plane tree. There is nobody to be seen. They ask the driver to wait. He nods, gets down and lies on the grass by the side of the road. One of the brass lamps on the Fiat is dazzling in the sun. Camille lowers her head and, pointing her parasol towards the ground, opens it; Mathilde points hers at the sky to open it. They walk together round the church.
He is on the north side sitting on a stone bench. He kisses Camille’s hand and then immediately takes Mathilde’s arm and saying: You are her friend, she confesses to you and so I need not explain what has happened to us. He leads her away towards a path bordered by gravestones. Camille makes as though to follow them. He turns. No, he says, please wait. Sit where I was sitting.
It is very quiet. The doors of the church are locked. There is nobody on the road. It is hard to believe that they have driven no further than the outskirts of the town. To Camille the silence sounds abnormal. She believes that on ordinary mornings carts pass along the road, children play near by, the priest prays in his church, peasants work in the fields. In the silence she can hear the beating of her own heart and his voice, but she cannot distinguish his words.
He is telling Mathilde that he and she will surely meet again and that he will always be in her debt, if she agrees to his plan. He loves Camille: he has never been alone with her: he can no longer write to her: all he asks is that Mathilde take the carriage and wait by the Rosmini College—the driver will know it—where he and Camille will join her by motor car in half an hour. He needs that little time to explain his feelings to the woman with whom he has fallen so desperately in love. He speaks lightly, as though he has no need to convince Mathilde, or as though he knows it is hopeless to try to convince her.
Whilst appealing to Mathilde, he is careful to remain in sight of Camille, to speak conspiratorially in Mathilde’s ear, to make Mathilde laugh once or twice, to continue holding her arm and to give their collusion every appearance of intimacy.
The lightness with which he speaks intrigues Mathilde. It does not force her to decide whether he is telling the truth or not. If what he said was too credible, she would be obliged, as Camille’s friend, to find it incredible. If what he said was obviously untrue, she would be obliged to tell him so. As it is, the question of the truth of what he is saying does not arise, because in the way he speaks he assumes that she already knows the truth. Which she doesn’t. And the fact that she doesn’t arouses a very acute curiosity in her. If she cannot discover the truth directly, then Camille must discover it and tell her. The truth, she feels, will not be terrible for, if it were, he would not assume so easily and naturally that she already knows it. She trusts him immediately because he gives her no reason to. It is Maurice that Mathilde does not trust. And in order to convince herself that she is not being reckless on her friend’s behalf, she imagines how it would be possible for her to ask Harry, who is in a position to put considerable professional pressure on Maurice, to persuade Maurice to be more reasonable. She says she will take the carriage to the college if Camille agrees.
Camille watches them walking up and down behind the gravestones which, old and eroded, are the shape of half-eaten biscuits. The anomaly of the situation makes Camille angry and impatient. Why, she asks, must she, after all the risks she has taken, sit here whilst Mathilde jokes with him over there? She decides that she must speak to him by herself.
A few minutes later the driver gets up from the grass, rubbing his knees. Mathilde steps into the carriage and waves to Camille. Don’t be long, she cries, I can’t work miracles. As the carriage, which is crookedly suspended over its back axle, departs down the deserted road, Camille thinks: Mathilde believes that in Paris I may become the mistress of this man with whom I have just agreed to be left alone.
There is a look which can come into the eyes of a woman (and into the eyes of a man, but very rarely) which is without pride or apology, which makes no demand, which promises no adventure. As an expression, signalled by the eyes, it can be intercepted by another; but it is not addressed, in the usual sense of the word, to another: it takes no account of the receiver. It is not a look which can enter into the eyes of a child for children are too ignorant of themselves: nor into the eyes of most men for they are too wary: nor into the eyes of animals because they are unaware of the passing of time. By way of such a look romantic poets thought they saw a path leading straight to a woman’s soul. But this is to treat it as though it were transparent, whereas in fact it is the least transparent thing in the world. It is a look which declares itself to be itself; it is like no other look. If it is comparable with anything, it is comparable with the colour of a flower. It is like heliotrope declaring itself blue. In company such looks are quickly extinguished for they encourage neither discourse nor exchange. They constitute social absence.
His desire, his only aim, was to be alone with a woman. No more than that. But they had to be deliberately, not fortuitously, alone. It was insufficient for them to be left alone in a room because they happened to be the last to leave. It had to be a matter of choice. They had to meet in order to be alone. What then followed was a consequence of being alone, not the achievement of any previous plan.
In the company of others women always appeared to him as more or less out of focus. Not because he was unable to concentrate upon them but because they were continuously changing in their own regard as they adapted themselves to the coercions and expectations of the others around them.
He was alone with Camille, walking back to the north side of the church which was in the shade. He took her arm. He could feel with his fingers that it was warmer on the inside than on the outside. He was overcome by a sense of extraordinary inevitability. The feeling did not surprise him. He knew that it would arrive, but he could not summon it at will. He felt the absoluteness of the impossibility of Camille being, in any detail, in the slightest trace, different from what she was; he felt she was envisaged by everything which preceded her in time and everything which was separate from her in space; the place always reserved for her in the world was nothing less than her exact body, her exact nature; her eyes in tender contrast to her mouth, her small breasts, her thin rakelike hands with their bitten fingernails, her way of walking with unusually stiff legs, the unusual warmth of her hair, the hoarseness of her voice, her favourite lines from Mallarmé, the regularity of her smallness, the paleness of—with this concentration of meaning which he experienced as a sense of inevitability, came the onset of sexual desire.
I want to tell you, she said—
Your voice, he interrupted, is also like a cicada, not only a corn-crake. Do you know the legend about cicadas? They say they are the souls of poets who cannot keep quiet because, when they were alive, they never wrote the poems they wanted to.
I want to tell you, she repeated, that I love my husband dearly. He is the centre of my life and I am the mother of his children. I consider he was wrong to threaten you, and I want you to know that I gave him no grounds, absolutely no grounds, for believing that he needed to threaten you. He discovered the foolish note you wrote to me—
Foolish? We have met, we are alone, we are talking to each other—and that is all I asked of you. Why was it foolish?
It was foolish to use the words you did, it was foolish to write a note at all.
What foolish words?
Camille stared at an impenetrable cypress tree. Everywhere there was still the same abnormal silence. I do not remember, she said in a hoarse whisper. And saying this she remembered a line by Mallarmé:
… vous mentez, ô fleur nue
De mes lèvres.
I called you my most desired one, my corn-crake.
That was foolish.
But you are.
The inscriptions on the tombstones were mostly illegible. The letters which were formed with curved lines (like U or G) appeared to be more quickly effaced than those composed of straight lines (N or T).
Then you must go. Please go.
The heat of the morning made anything which was out of reach or sight seem unusually distant.
It was not wrong of your husband to threaten me, he said, he has every reason to be jealous.
He has no reason! I am his wife and I love him. And I cannot he held responsible for your feelings. You are mistaken, that is all—mistaken in me. You are not base. I believe in the nobility of your feelings. And this is what I wanted to tell you, I did not encourage my husband to protect me from you for I don’t need any protection. I have known you for two days. Do you really suppose that a woman’s affections can be gained in such a short time? In two weeks or two months perhaps. But in two days! You are mistaken. I think you believe life is like that swing you described. It isn’t. Talking here we are already running a risk for nothing. There is nothing to be gained. Please take me back to join my friend in the carriage. My husband and I are leaving for Paris this afternoon.
Camille spoke with difficulty. It was no longer easy for her to say these things. Yet she said them with sincerity. She saw renunciation as the only proper way of putting an end to the present situation and of undoing the injustice and indignity of her husband’s threats. What she was renouncing was still of little importance. But she believed in destiny. Nothing in her life had led her to believe that she was entirely the mistress of her own fate. She did not think of the future as unmysterious, as entirely foreseeable in the light of decisions made today. She wanted to be able to look back at this moment of genuine renunciation because she considered it a necessary one. But she did not feel compelled to answer for the consequences, expected or unexpected, that might follow from that moment. They might be beyond her control and she recognized this with modesty, with hope and with misgivings.
Then I will find you in Paris! he said.
He will shoot you.
Not if you don’t betray me.
Betray!
It was foolish to keep the note. In Paris you must be wiser.
In Paris I will refuse to see you.
If there was nothing conspiring against us, he said, we would never find out what we are each capable of.
You do not know, you cannot know, what I am capable of. Nobody will ever know. Please take me back.
I think I have dreamt of you all my life without knowing that you existed. I can even guess what you are going to say now. You are going to say: you are mistaken.
You are mistaken! she repeated, unable to stop herself, and unable to repress a laugh.
It was you, Camomille.
By the car he explained to her what she must do with the controls in the driving seat whilst he cranked the engine. She was pleased to do what he instructed her to do, for it offered her an opportunity of showing him that she was capable, that her renunciation was in no way a disguise for incapacity.
At the end of the bonnet she could see his powerful head and shoulders lunging from side to side as he turned the crankshaft. His arms were thin. His forehead was shiny with sweat. After several unsuccessful turns, the engine started. The whole motor car began shaking and her gloved hands on the steering wheel shook in time with the engine. He shouted something which she could not hear. She had the impression that if she climbed down from the car she would have to make a small jump from the trembling car into the absolute stillness of the dust on the road and the walls of the church. She jumped. On the other side of the car he offered her his hand as she climbed up into the passenger seat. When she was seated, he lifted up her arm so that it trailed over the door, then he kissed it between glove and sleeve. She stared at his bowed head. She saw ber other hand lay itself upon his hair. He gave no sign of having felt her touch.
We will go back by the small road through the Viezzo valley, he said, it is only three or four kilometres longer.
SI TU VEUX NOUS NOUS AIMERONS AVEC TES LEVRES SANS LE DIRE
Mallarmé
To morality there are no mysteries. That is why there are no moral facts, only moral judgements. Moral judgements require continuity and predictability. A new, profoundly surprising fact cannot be accommodated by morality. It can be ignored or suppressed; but when once its existence has been recognized, its inexplicability makes it impervious to any immediate moral judgement.
She knows that the man driving her away in his car is indifferent to the chaos he is creating in her ordered life. Because of this indifference she wants to see him as an enemy. He is indifferent to the way she has defended him against her husband. He is indifferent to the effort by which she has renounced him. He is indifferent to the happiness with which she has been satisfied. Every reason which she can find to call him an enemy of her interests she welcomes, and with every reason which she finds she becomes more critically conscious of her own life.
The open motor car creates its own cool breeze. It seems to Camille that there is a correspondence between the cool air blowing against her face and neck and arms and the silvery colour of the underside of the leaves continually shifting on the branches of the trees they pass. Between the trees are green slopes of grass. The landscape is in every detail the setting for the conspiracy of their being alone together.
She contrasts his indifference with the love of her husband, her children, her own family. She hears them addressing her by name. There is no distinction between the name they call her and what they expect from her. Camille is her life.
Camomille, he says. A classmate used to make the same joke at school. There is only the difference of a syllable.
What is it that you love in me? she asks.
Your dreams, your elbows, the doubts at the four corners of your confidence, the unusual warmth of your hair, everything that you want but are frightened of, the smallness of—
I am frightened of nothing in myself and you know nothing about me.
Nothing? I know all that I have written about you.
Who is speaking?
You don’t care what happens to me, she insists.
Then why do you ask me?
Because I am curious to see myself through your eyes. I wonder what has misled you.
Nothing has misled me. My whole life has led me to you.
You are as mad as he.
Who?
Maurice and you are both mad.
But not you and I.
He will shoot you in Paris.
He stops the motor car after a bridge, at a point at which a path appears to lead down to a stream.
I will be in Paris in eight days, he says.
She jumps from the running-board of the car into the stillness of the grass and dust. She lands on her stiff legs and, turning round towards him, scowls. Then she runs a few steps towards the wild acacia trees away from the road. All that she has learned of deportment, all that has become the second nature of her movement as a woman, deserts her. She moves like an awkward child, or like an adult overcome by grief.
And if, she cries out, in her hoarse voice, if I say this—she flings out both arms either side of her—this is Paris a week from now! If I do!
She runs on, stumbling a little, between the trees.
He begins to run after her. She hears him and turns round towards him. Near by is a wooden trellis construction over which a thick abandoned vine is growing.
Stay where you are, she cries out, and lunges out of sight behind the trellis towards some trees.
Out of his sight, she stops running. Unhurriedly and pausing from time to time to look around her, she begins to undress. Above the trees, above the near wooded hills which are like fists covered with green fur, she can see improbable peaks with snow upon them. She looks down to negotiate the hooks of her corset.
It is not myself I will give you. Not the self of mine. Or, if I were you, and believe me I can at this moment imagine it as easily as I can turn the palm of my hand upwards or downwards—or if I were you, the self of you. If you want to number me part by part I shall be as any other, for nobody has found the judge of parts, nobody has found the nipple to judge the breast, the brow to measure the light in the eye, the ear to decide the note of the way, the only way, in which I might walk towards you now between the trees. Part by part I am a woman undressing in a clearing like a room by a stream, hidden from you and waiting, who a few minutes ago renounced you, who will return to my children in Paris tonight, who cannot imagine myself other than the loving wife of my husband, who has never before been what I am now. But I am not the sum of my parts. See me as wholly as your own dear life demands that you see yourself. I have as many hairs on the back of my neck as you may have ways of touching me. It is not myself I give you, it is the meeting of the two of us that I offer you. What you offer me is the opportunity for me to offer this. I offer it. I offer it.
She speaks out loud to him: I am waiting here.
The incongruity of her tone of voice does not surprise him. (It is as though she is calling out a little impatiently through an open dressing-room door.) The words employed at such a moment are bound to be incongruous.
She is sitting in the grass. Her hair falls over her shoulders. Her chemise is loose. Her grey skirt and jacket lie folded on the grass with some other garments.
Because Camille has chosen a setting which reminds her of some Renaissance painting of fauns and nymphs, we are liable to picture her as having the body of a goddess as painted by Titian. This is far from the case. Her arms are thin, her neck knotted and taut, the insides of her thighs have so little flesh upon them that were she standing with her feet together her thighs would scarcely touch each other.
She awaits him as he expected. And yet he is surprised. This combination of surprise and of expectations being precisely fulfilled is unique to moments of sexual passion and is another factor which places them outside the normal course of time. At some moment prior to birth we may, at a level as yet unknown to us, have perceived the whole of our life like that. Before he touches her he knows what touching her will reveal to him. When he touches her he will fully appreciate how alone she has become. Undressing was the act of shedding the interests of those who make up the interests of her life. With her clothes she discarded the men he hates. Her unclothed body is the proof of her solitariness. And it is her solitariness—her solitariness alone—that he recognizes and desires. He has led her from her conjugal bedroom, from the overfurnished apartment, from the street in which the curtained windows are so still that they might be carved out of stone, from the overread pages of Mallarmé, from the clothes which she orders from her costumier and her husband pays for, from the mirrors which are falsely impartial to husband and wife, further and further away from where she belongs until she is herself alone. From that solitude of hers and from his they can now set out. Andiamo.
As he stares at her with eyes more intensely fixed than any she has ever imagined, she sees herself as a dryad, alert in a way that is more animal than human, quick, sensitive, fleet-footed, soft-tongued, shameless. She sees him and the dryad together as a couple, and the sight of them fills her with tenderness. The dryad undoes his shirt. She anticipates the dryad offering herself on all fours, face to the ground, and he mounting her like a goat. She crawls on all fours until she is facing his head and then kisses his eyes from above.
Camomille.
The feeling of tenderness wells over and makes it impossible for Camille to imagine anything viewed from a distance; the idea of the dryad is momentarily obliterated. Gradually such moments become longer and longer until the dryad disappears into the smell of the crushed grass and the surrounding silence, never to return, and Camille becomes entirely concentrated in the act of following with her tongue the underseam of the penis of the man over whose thigh her head is hanging.
He is there under her, above her, beside her. He has no claims on her; he has made none. He is there like the trellis with the vine overgrowing it. He is there like a wall against which she could repeatedly bang her head. He is there, outside herself, like everything else in the world which has not claimed a second residence in her consciousness. She has not said to herself that she loves him. He has convinced her of only one thing. Unlike any other man she has ever encountered, he has convinced her that his desire for her—her alone—is absolute, that it is her existence which has created this desire. Formerly she has been aware of men wanting to choose her to satisfy desires already rooted in them, her and not another, because among the women available she has approximated the closest to what they need. Whereas he appears to have no needs. He has convinced her that the penis twitching in the air above her face is the size and colour and warmth that it is entirely because of what he has recognized in her. When he enters her, when this throbbing, cyclamen-headed, silken, apoplectic fifth limb of his reaches as near to her centre as her pelvis will allow, he, in it, will be returning, she believes, to the origin of his desire. The taste of his foreskin and of a single tear of transparent first sperm which has broken over the cyclamen head making its surface even softer to the touch than before, is the taste of herself made flesh in another.
This can never stop, she whispers, slowly and calmly. My love, my love.
They were fucking in the grass. Both half believed that they were no longer lying down but standing up and walking as they fucked; towards the end they began to run through tall wet grass. He had the further illusion that others were running towards him.
All are there. How can I ever open those words to let their original and still potential meaning out? All are there in their own time and at the same time. It is a matter of supreme indifference to me whether the sweet throat is mine or yours. And here, now, here let the word supreme attain its supremacy. It is of no consequence whose is whose. All parts are one. All are there together. All despite all their differences are there together. He joins them. There is no more need. There, desire is its satisfaction, or, perhaps, neither desire nor satisfaction can be said to exist since there is no antinomy between them: every experience becomes the experience of freedom there: freedom there precludes all that is not itself.
He and Camille lay alone, dishevelled, side by side on the slope by the vine. A peasant passing by on the far bank of the stream spotted them although they were lying quite still. He saw a white arm like a statue’s and a stockinged foot. The peasant was curious and crouched down to observe what would happen next.
Whom were we walking?
I was a knee which wanted the thigh on the other leg.
The sounds of my most tender words were in your arse.
Your heels were my thumbs.
My buttocks were your palms.
I was hiding in one corner of your mouth. You looked for me there with your tongue. There was nothing to be found.
With your throat swollen, my feet in the pit of my stomach, your legs hollow, my head tugging at your body, I was your penis.
You were the light which falling on the dark petals of your vagina became rose.
The blood-vessel was lifted up in the lock of your flowers.
Normally a shooting incident in Domodossola would only have been reported in the local Italian press, but since the town was full of journalists from all over Europe, who were awaiting the death or recovery of Chavez, the story was printed in many different papers. According to their time-honoured tradition when dealing with incidents affecting respectable members of the bourgeoisie, the Swiss newspapers tactfully withheld the full names of those involved.
‘The small town of Domodossola was yesterday the scene of a dramatic crime passionnel. Monsieur H—, a French businessman with interests in the motor car industry, found himself in the town in connection with the recent triumphal crossing of the Alps by the aviator Geo Chavez. At 3.30pm in the crowded Piazza Mercato, Monsieur H—fired three times with an automatic pistol at Monsieur G, a young Englishman who is likewise said to be a flying enthusiast. The latter had just come out of a fruit shop and was walking in one of the picturesque arcades which border the square. The life of the victim, who was wounded in the shoulder, is not in danger. He was taken immediately to the hospital where the aviator hero is also being treated.
‘After the incident Monsieur H—offered no resistance to the police and declared that his only mistake had been to fire from too far away. He claimed that he had already warned the Englishman that he would shoot him if he did not desist from embarrassing and pursuing his wife, Madame H—. “It is an affair,” he said, “of elementary honour and I am certain that when the facts have been established, I will be assured of the sympathy of all decent society.” The Englishman, although he evidently speaks fluent Italian, declined to answer questions.’
On the wall of the old hospital at Domodossola—a new larger hospital has since been built near by—there is a plaque with an inscription which pays tribute to Chavez’ heroism and indicates the room on the first floor where he died on 27 September 1910.
All accounts of his last hours suggest that Chavez remained haunted by his flight. He could not understand what still separated him from the life continuing around him: the life which, with all the ardour of his determined youth, he wanted to re-enter. His achievement, in so far as he could separate it from the disaster which had befallen him, only increased the mocking appeal of this life.
‘I’m going now. Let’s go quickly to Brig.’ Vive Chavez! He remembered writing that on his own legs. What had he done wrong? Whether the fault, the transgression, had been technical or moral was by now hopelessly confused in his mind. He tried to recall what he had screamed when he had entered the Gondo. He could not. And he feared that he would not be able to until he had come out of the Gondo. He was still in it.
There is no plaque on the hospital wall to indicate the room, only three windows away, where G. was taken from the operating theatre after a bullet had been removed from his wound. A middle-aged nurse with the complexion of a Neapolitan was washing his face and neck.
For the first time since the shooting, it was comparatively quiet. From his bed he could see the hospital garden. The absolutely still leaves of a willow tree were sharply distinct in the horizontal evening light. It occurred to him how brief moments of drama are; how swiftly order can be re-established. He was reminded of his father’s garden in Livorno and the pool with the perch in it. And he remembered the exhilaration with which, in that garden, he had discovered that what matters is not being dead. He let out his breath in a hiss.
I’m sorry. Did I hurt you?
No, no. I thought of something. He paused a moment. Then, in a lighter voice, he said: Now, you tell me, you are an experienced woman, I can see that, and you are not over-fastidious. Now, would you say I was like the devil?
Shhhhhh! Don’t think about such things.
You haven’t answered me.
She glanced at the young man’s face, leering, and his dark eyes looking at her and she thought of the story of how an outraged husband had tried to shoot him dead and she said: You don’t look like a devil to me.
(Later when she told the story she pretended that she replied like that because it is the duty of a nurse to keep a patient calm.)
That is what he called me. But imagine trying to shoot the devil! Do you know the only way to get rid of the devil? Offer him what he asks. Would you do that?
In drying his face with a towel she tried to stop him talking by clapping her hand over his mouth.
Now, would you offer him what he asked? he insisted. It’s the only way—even if it’s your soul he wants!
It is wrong to blaspheme even in jest. You shouldn’t talk like that. Bo! he cried.
(She confessed later that she had been so surprised that she couldn’t help laughing.)
The face of his fiancée who had come from Paris and was sitting by his bed was the length of the Gondo away from Chavez. If he stretched out his arm to touch her, he had the impression that his arm was the sleeve of the Gondo, from which his fingertips, moving round her mouth, could just emerge but not the remainder of his body.
His agony of mind was the result of an axiomatic truth, in which he had believed all his life, having been inexplicably overturned. In face of his courage and his survival without serious wounds, God, nature and the world of men should have found themselves in accord. Why were they not? He had proved his right to succeed and he had been forced to forego it. The wind he so wrongly under-estimated, the mountains, the treacherous icy air, the earth which entered his mouth and now his own blood, his very own body refused to accord him his achievement. Why?
During the night he repeatedly muttered: Je suis catholique, je suis catholique.
G. woke up and found himself re-hearing word for word what Camille had said in the motor car on the way back from Domodossola.
I will write to you. Where shall I write to you?
No, do not write. As soon as I arrive in Paris I will give you a sign.
You will be amazed to see what I am capable of. I will astonish you. I shall be cunning. I shall be as cunning as an avocat. I will disguise myself. Can you imagine me as a baker? I will come to you disguised as a baker. Or as an old woman. (She laughed a little.) You will be horrified—and then I will take my disguise off and you will see your corn-crake. If Maurice wants to kill me, he can. I am not afraid. But it is you he will try to kill. It is you who must wear a disguise. What would suit you? You might be a Spaniard. A Spanish priest! It must be something unlike you, so that I can hardly believe—but now I would know you, however you were disguised, I would recognize you anywhere, and Maurice would recognize you because of the light in my eyes when I saw you. Supposing you knew afterwards you must die? And I too knew that you must die? I wouldn’t try to stop you now. Now I wouldn’t. Before, I would have done. I would have tried to save you. I would have refused you. Perhaps I would have been afraid myself. I know now. I would welcome you. That is what you would want. And you would want me then under threat of death more than you have wanted any woman. And afterwards I would die with you—happy.
Next day, Chavez’ last words, whose meaning cannot be interpreted, were: Non, non, je ne meurs pas … meurs pas.
Weymann came into the room with a pained expression on his face. He greeted G. coolly and then went and stood by the window, through which he kept looking out as though something surprising were happening on the lawn below.
The funeral is tomorrow, Weymann said.
I hear everything from the corridor. The walls aren’t very thick here. He died at three o’clock yesterday afternoon.
The whole town is in mourning, said Weymann.
If Hennequin had been a better shot, we could have had a double funeral!
That is a remark in very poor taste.
It would have been my funeral, not yours. Why are you so solemn? Because it is a solemn occasion and your—your—he struggled for the right word and looked out on the invisible events taking place on the lawn below—your philanderings are most inappropriate. The whole town is in mourning. The factories have stopped work.
It will be like an opera by Verdi. The Italians love deaths. Not Death but deaths. Have you noticed?
They feel the tragedy of the occasion.
You said he was an idiot.
That was before I knew he was dying.
Does it make any difference? He asked this in a gentler voice, and Weymann, somewhat mollified, left the window and approached the bed.
He has passed over into the sky, said Weymann in the voice of the priest whom he often resembled, a bit of the sky which the rest of us, who are still alive, call the paradise of lost flyers.
I shall be out of here by tonight and then I will be able to pay my respects too. Have the Hennequins left?
I must tell you that the whole affair in which you were involved has been a considerable embarrassment to all of us. Scenes like the one you provoked give the flying community a bad name. It makes us out to be adventurers—
But aren’t you?
You know exactly what I mean.
Tell me, have they gone back to Paris?
Madame Hennequin was in a state of collapse, if it gives you any satisfaction to know that.
And Monsieur?
He had to be constrained from coming to find you in hospital. The second time he wouldn’t miss, he said.
You should have let him come. I should have liked to have seen him again.
Suddenly Weymann was angry. His thin face became red and his eyes protruded as he stared at the figure in the bed: Yes, I think we should have let him come. What are you doing? What are you playing at? Let me tell you something. This town is full of men. Tomorrow it will be fuller—men coming from all over the world to pay their homage to the magnificent contribution, the historic courage of Geo. Do you know there are peasants who have walked from the mountain villages into town today to line up and pay their last tributes to the man they loved. You should look at their faces. You might learn a little modesty. You might see what it means to be offered hope for your children after a lifetime of toil and sacrifice. You might understand what achievement is. And amongst these men, these men who fill the town like pilgrims and lend it their own dignity, there is a little—there is a little runt!
He banged the door and was gone.
The crowd made the town look like a village. Figures in black pressed against the walls of the narrow streets. In an open doorway several children were barred and held back by women with straight rigid arms, lest they run out into the street as the procession passed and by this single act diminish the long-lasting gravity of the moment. From first-floor windows and from the balconies above hung improvised flags of black crêpe and tricolours with black upon them. It was sunny. The streets through which the cortège would not pass were deserted. All shops and offices were shut. The bells in the campanile tolled very slowly. The last note of each peal seeped almost completely away before the next refilled the silence. The sound was such that even in the arcade from where you could see neither sky nor mountains you were reminded of solitude. In the precincts of the Piazza Mercato there was an unusually strong smell of horses and leather, for carriages and carts had brought mourners from all over the countryside and many had been left there, unattended, while the mourners followed the coffin on foot.
The Stationmaster, wearing a gold-braided cap and a long coat, glanced once more at his own reflection in the glass doors of the waiting-room. It was not a question of vanity at this moment but of vocation; in the same spirit an actor may glance in a mirror before going on stage. Within the waiting-room journalists from all over Europe jostled to book their telephone lines to their capitals.
Assembled outside the hospital the town band began to play a funeral march. The cortège moved off, shuffling at first. In front of the four horses of the hearse, girls in white veils strewed tuberoses on the cobbles and dust. Boys darted back and forth between the main street-corners and the head of the procession to keep the girls supplied with baskets of flowers. The Mayor had announced that the cost of the funeral would be met by the municipality. When they were standing upright, one girl might timidly smile at another; but when they were strewing the flowers on the road, bending forward as if trying to cast a net in a fast-flowing stream, they did so with grave, concentrated expressions, one with her teeth biting her lower lip.
Close behind the hearse walked the hero’s grandmother, brother, fiancée and family friends. The fiancée held her head high with the air of a wife following a cart which is taking her husband, a heretic, to his execution; she defied the occasion; she defied the forces which had killed him. Geo’s brother, a rich young banker, walked with his head down, looking at the flowers on the road, many as yet untrampled. The grandmother walked with a stick, jabbing the ground. Sometimes her stick skewered a flower.
Behind the family came the diplomats, the senators, Chavez’ fellow pilots, the Mayor, the journalists, the representatives of aircraft-engine firms, the local rich. And after a discrete gap there was the straggling procession of thousands, most of whom had seen Chavez when he first appeared, triumphant, on their side of the mountain, when he was coming down to land in the field where Duray had pegged out the white cross in calico. At this sight of a victory being apparently so easily gained, in face of the impossible being so quickly transformed into the possible, they had felt elated. In the newspapers they had read, or had heard others read, sentences like: The great utopia of yesterday has become reality. And so some had asked themselves: Why should we too not achieve what we wish? Those who were in the habit of answering such speculative questions had given their usual answers. The rich must be overthrown. Private property must be destroyed. Others had maintained that Italy must be united, must be given Trieste, must have more colonies; only then would all Italians fulfil their destiny. To those who asked, all the answers seemed theoretical. But the question had remained.
Now with the unexpected death of Chavez, the question was closed. It was as they had always been taught. Achievements are never easy. There is a price to pay for daring. The true heroes are dead ones. When what is desired is immoderate, it lies beyond death. The choice is between accepting life as it is and dying a hero’s death.
Outside the Duomo the speeches began. The crowd listened in a mood of acknowledgement and acceptance. The young, faced with the familiar choice, chose once again in their imagination heroic death. Their elders looked back on their lives, gently, tenderly, as they might look at their own children, trying to find in them proof that a certain kind of cunning and a certain kind of modesty offer the best means for tricking and coaxing the best out of life: life which, when all is said and done, is better than being dead, although the naive courage of the dead hero touches them profoundly because they too were naive like him, and they know full well that the lessons which rid them of their naivety were not ideal, were not what they once wished. The young among the crowd celebrated the heroism of early death; their elders recalled the price of survival.
The Peruvian Ambassador: I am proud to be your compatriot, O Chavez, and I have come to place on your coffin your own country’s homage. We leave to your dear ones the sad duty of tears: strong nations must neither complain nor weep: they can only exalt and glorify their sons who, like you, Chavez, sacrifice their life for the bright light of an ideal …
There was a commotion in the front ranks of the crowd drawn up in a semi-circle round the hearse and the steps of the Duomo. A dozen men pushed their way forward and mounted the steps. They were dressed like Alpine guides and each pair of them carried an object like a stretcher. On these stretchers were arranged massed patterns of wild flowers—edelweiss, arnica, forget-me-nots and red rhododendrons. They placed the stretchers on either side of the church door. As they came down, one of the men shouted out: Above four thousand metres we’ll see you in the air! Then he slapped his own cheek several times.
The Peruvian Ambassador: From your earliest childhood you were a master of energy, and for us your death is a glorious lesson. You were strong, you were great; above the eternal snows, amid the sublime peaks, you flew upon your fragile machine, a token of the audacity and genius of man.
The Mayor announced that a piazza would be named after the dead aviator.
Inside the Duomo there was a short service for Chavez’ family and the distinguished foreign visitors. They remained standing, staring straight ahead of them into the half-light from which gold objects emerged without glitter. They felt the cold air rising from the stones. It is here, not in the streets strewn with flowers outside, that the devout try to relinquish the blind will to live.
The canon: Chavez, the bold and audacious youth who had the fabulous vision of the Alps conquered and fleeing under his glance; the proud, courageous youth whom we saw soaring through the air above us, crossing our valleys more swiftly than an eagle: Chavez, who made us tremble with enthusiasm in anticipation of the imminent triumph—Chavez is no more.
Among the congregation in the cathedral, G. stood near Monsieur Schuwey and Mathilde Le Diraison. His thoughts drifted towards the Hennequins in Paris. Camille was waiting to become his mistress. He doubted whether Monsieur Hennequin would shoot again; he had failed to prevent his wife from cuckolding him and he had failed to avenge himself: after the first time the number of subsequent times made little difference. Taking note of Camille’s determination in the matter, he would concede his wife’s right to a lover provided he suffered no inconvenience and provided she realized that his tolerance was conditional upon her curbing her more extravagant tastes, and upon her never questioning his own arrangements. Camille, in an access of gratitude, would find it in herself to love both husband and lover—in different ways. She would submit to Monsieur Hennequin’s occasional conjugal demands with the reservation in her own mind that she could only truly belong to her lover. She would lend herself to her husband for her lover’s sake.
A mass of candles had been lit for Chavez. The flames created their own air currents so that when a group of them flickered and leaned in one direction, this disturbed another group, making them blow inwards together as if in panic to confer, and then this agitation provoked other flames to burn a little higher, which caused yet others to flatten themselves and circle, unsteadily, round their wicks as if searching for air.
For her husband’s sake she would demand from her lover discretion, punctuality and a certain financial arrangement. She would no longer read Mallarmé for it might remind her too vividly of her approach to that moment when, for the first and only time, she made herself alone, as he was alone. Perhaps one day she would become enthusiastic about another, more sober poet. Time would pass. Everybody would be accommodated. Through boredom or on a sentimental impulse, Camille would give herself, without her accustomed reserve, to Monsieur Hennequin and afterwards she would feel that it was to her husband that she really belonged. But no sooner would she feel this than she would rush to her lover begging him to re-take her and insisting that she wanted to belong to him and to nobody else. Once convinced that she had become her lover’s, she would await an opportunity—which might take months during which time she would occupy herself with the lives of her children and friends—an opportunity to test her attachment by once more offering herself to her husband. And so she would traffic to and fro, each oscillation marked by apparently inexplicable excitability. At first she would await re-possession by her lover far more impatiently than by Monsieur Hennequin. But gradually, so that she might feel, as she would on peaceful days, that she belonged to them both and to her almost grown-up children more than to either, she would commend to her lover more wit and less passion. Ten years later, if she were fortunate, she might acquire a second lover and the first would be cast, with certain minor variations, in the role of the original husband. If she were less fortunate, she would arrange occasional meetings between Monsieur Hennequin, who by then would have a place on the managing board of Peugeot, and her lover, so that by talk and reminiscence she might belong to them both. In old age she would catch sight of herself in a mirror, unawares, solitary, unowned, but then she would think of death: death before whom you have no choice but to make yourself alone.
The canon: He ascended to heaven and he came down having achieved the most dramatic victory yet on the long road of civilization’s conquest. A pioneer, he has advanced the progress of man. Imagine the future that his glorious achievement has opened to us—nation will no longer be separated from nation, the advantages of civilization will reach the furthest corners of the earth …
Mathilde Le Diraison noticed him standing a few pews away. His arm was in a black sling. She had spoken briefly with Camille before her departure for Paris. Together they had decided that he was a Don Juan, that already in his life there must have been hundreds of women. But it makes no difference, Camille had cried, it makes no difference to know that.
Mathilde Le Diraison asked herself two questions. What was his secret, why had Camille succumbed so quickly? The second question concerned herself. What would it mean if, after loving hundreds of women, he made no attempt to approach her? The two questions were intertwined like the strands of the red silk rope which hung across the end of the pew and which she continually flicked with her fingers so that it kept swinging.
She had a face which might be considered stupid. It was the face of a person, slow to go beyond the immediate, who had no particular wish or talent for abandoning herself to flights of fantasy or of deep emotion. At any moment her face declared: WHAT IS HAPPENING IS HAPPENING TO ME, TO ME, TO ME.
The swinging red silk rope caught G.’s eye. He made his plans quickly. He would go to Paris, visit the Hennequins, make a point of ignoring Camille, reassure the husband and would quickly begin an obvious, public affair with Mathilde Le Diraison. In this way he would avenge himself on Hennequin by making the whole shooting incident appear ridiculous, a question of a doubtful flirtation on the part of his wife which, unfortunately for Hennequin, she was incapable of sustaining; and he would disabuse Camille of her fond illusion that passion can be regulated and that a lover can be something different from a second husband. He would see to it that the affair was as brief as possible and afterwards he would disappear from their circle. He regretted that between Monsieur Schuwey and Mathilde Le Diraison there was scarcely more than a purely contractual relationship. But he supposed that even Schuwey must have some pride invested in the woman he paid to be with him. He would discover where.
…He has fallen, but he has fallen as a hero who has accomplished a great feat, which everyone thought impossible and mad. Honour and glory to him!
As they came out of the Duomo, the mourners screwed up their eyes against the sunlight and bowed their heads. They had the air of having partaken of some secret which they could not share; the more so because, for those who had remained outside, the solemnity of the occasion was lessening. Boys handed more baskets of tuberoses to the girls in white. Some of the girls were laughing. The band struck up another funeral march and the procession slowly moved off towards the station.
A schoolmaster explained that the guide from Formazza who had slapped his own cheek had meant that the spirit of Chavez would live in the mountain air so that, high up, climbers would feel his spirit on their cheeks like you can feel the wind or the heat of the sun.
The train waited silently. It was the second time a train on this line had been specially stopped for Chavez. The pall-bearers who carried the coffin from the hearse to the train were all aviators, among them Paulhan. The station master saluted as they passed. The journalists were already telephoning. The girls in white veils lined the platform. Suddenly the locomotive gave a shrill prolonged whistle.
He thought again of Camille. Not Camille as she would be when he saw her in Paris but Camille as she had been when she challenged him to come to Paris under threat of death, a threat in which he could no longer believe but in which at that moment, before her husband had failed to kill him at point-blank range, he could still believe. She had offered this challenge like an invitation. And in issuing this invitation she had spoken, as no woman had spoken to him before, with the unconfoundable authority, the distance, the astonishing familiarity of a sibyl. Had she been right not only about him but also about her husband, he would have immediately accepted.
The whistle, arranged by the station master and the engine driver as a salute to the hero at the beginning of his last journey, was unlike any of the other sounds which had been heard that morning. It had no resonance, no echo, no meaning. It was a squeal without a soul, like the squeal of a saw. Long after everyone expected it to stop, it continued. It drove out every thought except the anticipatory one that surely it must stop now. Now! Now!
Chavez’ grandmother banged her stick up and down on the platform, but it was impossible to know whether she did this in anger at such an inappropriate initiative being taken by an engine driver, or in the agitation of unbounded grief.
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