Look at the Harlequins! Page 4

  On the day now in focus, memorable for a more important matter but carrying all kinds of synchronous trivia attached to it like burrs or incrustated like marine parasites, we noticed a butterfly net moving among the beflowered rocks, and presently old Kanner appeared, his panama swinging on its vest-button string, his white locks flying around his scarlet brow, and the whole of his person still radiating ecstasy, an echo of which we no doubt had heard a minute ago.

  Upon Iris immediately describing to him the spectacular green thing, Kanner dismissed it as eine “Pandora” (at least that’s what I find jotted down), a common southern Falter (butterfly). “Aber (but),” he thundered, raising his index, “when you wish to look at a real rarity, never before observed west of Nieder-Österreich, then I will show what I have just caught.”

  He leant his net against a rock (it fell at once, Iris picked it up reverently) and, with profuse thanks (to Psyche? Baalzebub? Iris?) that trailed away accompanimentally, produced from a compartment in his satchel a little stamp envelope and shook out of it very gently a folded butterfly onto the palm of his hand.

  After one glance Iris told him it was merely a tiny, very young Cabbage White. (She had a theory that houseflies, for instance, grow.)

  “Now look with attention,” said Kanner ignoring her quaint remark and pointing with compressed tweezers at the triangular insect. “What you see is the inferior side—the under white of the left Vorderflügel (‘fore wing’) and the under yellow of the left Hinterflügel (‘hind wing’). I will not open the wings but I think you can believe what I’m going to tell you. On the upper side, which you can’t see, this species shares with its nearest allies—the Small White and Mann’s White, both common here—the typical little spots of the fore wing, namely a black full stop in the male and a black Doppelpunkt (‘colon’) in the female. In those allies the punctuation is reproduced on the underside, and only in the species of which you see a folded specimen on the flat of my hand is the wing blank beneath—a typographical caprice of Nature! Ergo it is an Ergane.”

  One of the legs of the reclining butterfly twitched.

  “Oh, it’s alive!” cried Iris.

  “No, it can’t fly away—one pinch was enough,” rejoined Kanner soothingly, as he slipped the specimen back into its pellucid hell; and presently, brandishing his arms and net in triumphant farewells, he was continuing his climb.

  “The brute!” wailed Iris. She brooded over the thousand little creatures he had tortured, but a few days later, when Ivor took us to the man’s concert (a most poetical rendition of Grünberg’s suite Les Châteaux) she derived some consolation from her brother’s contemptuous remark: “All that butterfly business is only a publicity stunt.” Alas, as a fellow madman I knew better.

  All I had to do when we reached our stretch of plage in order to absorb the sun was to shed shirt, shorts, and sneakers. Iris shrugged off her wrap and lay down, bare limbed, on the towel next to mine. I was rehearsing in my head the speech I had prepared. The pianist’s dog was today in the company of a handsome old lady, his fourth wife. The nymphet was being buried in hot sand by two young oafs. The Russian lady was reading an émigré newspaper. Her husband was contemplating the horizon. The two English women were bobbing in the dazzling sea. A large French family of slightly flushed albinos was trying to inflate a rubber dolphin.

  “I’m ready for a dip,” said Iris.

  She took out of the beach bag (kept for her by the Victoria concierge) her yellow swim bonnet, and we transferred our towels and things to the comparative quiet of an obsolete wharf of sorts upon which she liked to dry afterwards.

  Already twice in my young life a fit of total cramp—the physical counterpart of lightning insanity—had all but overpowered me in the panic and blackness of bottomless water. I see myself as a lad of fifteen swimming at dusk across a narrow but deep river with an athletic cousin. He is beginning to leave me behind when a special effort I make results in a sense of ineffable euphoria which promises miracles of propulsion, dream prizes on dream shelves—but which, at its satanic climax, is replaced by an intolerable spasm first in one leg, then in the other, then in the ribs and both arms. I have often attempted to explain, in later years, to learned and ironical doctors, the strange, hideous, segmental quality of those pulsating pangs that made a huge worm of me with limbs transformed into successive coils of agony. By some fantastic fluke a third swimmer, a stranger, was right behind me and helped to pull me out of an abysmal tangle of water-lily stems.

  The second time was a year later, on the West-Caucasian coast. I had been drinking with a dozen older companions at the birthday party of the district governor’s son and, around midnight, a dashing young Englishman, Allan Andoverton (who was to be, around 1939, my first British publisher!) had suggested a moonlight swim. As long as I did not venture too far in the sea, the experience seemed quite enjoyable. The water was warm; the moon shone benevolently on the starched shirt of my first evening clothes spread on the shingly shore. I could hear merry voices around me; Allan, I remember, had not bothered to strip and was fooling with a champagne bottle in the dappled swell; but presently a cloud engulfed everything, a great wave lifted and rolled me, and soon I was too upset in all senses to tell whether I was heading for Yalta or Tuapse. Abject fear set loose instantly the pain I already knew, and I would have drowned there and then had not the next billow given me a boost and deposited me near my own trousers.

  The shadow of those repellent and rather colorless recollections (mortal peril is colorless) remained always present in my “dips” and “splashes” (another word of hers) with Iris. She got used to my habit of staying in comfortable contact with the bed of shallows, while she executed “crawls” (if that is what those overarm strokes were called in the Nineteen-Twenties) at quite a distance away; but that morning I nearly did a very stupid thing.

  I was gently floating to and fro in line with the shore and sinking a probing toe every now and then to ascertain if I could still feel the oozy bottom with its unappetizing to the touch, but on the whole friendly, vegetables, when I noticed that the seascape had changed. In the middle distance a brown motorboat manned by a young fellow in whom I recognized L.P. had described a foamy half-circle and stopped beside Iris. She clung to the bright brim, and he spoke to her, and then made as if to drag her into his boat, but she flipped free, and he sped away, laughing.

  It all must have lasted a couple of minutes, but had the rascal with his hawkish profile and white cable-stitched sweater stayed a few seconds longer or had my girl been abducted by her new beau in the thunder and spray, I would have perished; for while the scene endured, some virile instinct rather than one of self-preservation had caused me to swim toward them a few insensible yards, and now when I assumed a perpendicular position to regain my breath I found underfoot nothing but water. I turned and started swimming landward—and already felt the ominous foreglow, the strange, never yet described aura of total cramp creeping over me and forming its deadly pact with gravity. Suddenly my knee struck blessed sand, and in a mild undertow I crawled on all fours onto the beach.

  8

  “I have a confession to make, Iris, concerning my mental health.”

  “Wait a minute. Must peel this horrid thing off—as far down—as far down as it can decently go.”

  We were lying, I supine, she prone, on the wharf. She had torn off her cap and was struggling to shrug off the shoulder straps of her wet swimsuit, so as to expose her entire back to the sun; a secondary struggle was taking place on the near side, in the vicinity of her sable armpit, in her unsuccessful efforts not to show the white of a small breast at its tender juncture with her ribs. As soon as she had wriggled into a satisfactory state of decorum, she half-reared, holding her black bodice to her bosom, while her other hand conducted that delightful rapid monkey-scratching search a girl performs when groping for something in her bag—in this instance a mauve package of cheap Salammbôs and an expensive lighter; whereupon she again pressed her bosom to the spre
ad towel. Her earlobe burned red through her black liberated “Medusa,” as that type of bob was called in the young twenties. The moldings of her brown back, with a patch-size beauty spot below the left shoulder blade and a long spinal hollow, which redeemed all the errors of animal evolution, distracted me painfully from the decision I had taken to preface my proposal with a special, tremendously important confession. A few aquamarines of water still glistened on the underside of her brown thighs and on her strong brown calves, and a few grains of wet gravel had stuck to her rose-brown ankles. If I have described so often in my American novels (A Kingdom by the Sea, Ardis) the unbearable magic of a girl’s back, it is mainly because of my having loved Iris. Her compact little nates, the most agonizing, the fullest, and sweetest bloom of her puerile prettiness, were as yet unwrapped surprises under the Christmas tree.

  Upon resettling in the waiting sun after this little flurry, Iris protruded her fat underlip as she exhaled smoke and presently remarked: “Your mental health is jolly good, I think. You are sometimes strange and somber, and often silly, but that’s in character with ce qu’on appelle genius.”

  “What do you call ‘genius’?”

  “Well, seeing things others don’t see. Or rather the invisible links between things.”

  “I am speaking, then, of a humble morbid condition which has nothing to do with genius. We shall start with a specific example and an authentic decor. Please close your eyes for a moment. Now visualize the avenue that goes from the post office to your villa. You see the plane trees converging in perspective and the garden gate between the last two?”

  “No,” said Iris, “the last one on the right is replaced by a lamppost—you can’t make it out very clearly from the village square—but it is really a lamppost in a coat of ivy.”

  “Well, no matter. The main thing is to imagine we’re looking from the village here toward the garden gate there. We must be very careful about our here’s and there’s in this problem. For the present ‘there’ is the quadrangle of green sunlight in the half-opened gate. We now start to walk up the avenue. On the second tree trunk of the right-side file we notice traces of some local proclamation—”

  “It was Ivor’s proclamation. He proclaimed that things had changed and Aunt Betty’s protégés should stop making their weekly calls.”

  “Splendid. We continue to walk toward the garden gate. Intervals of landscape can be made out between the plane trees on both sides. On your right—please, close your eyes, you will see better—on your right there’s a vineyard; on your left, a churchyard—you can distinguish its long, low, very low, wall—”

  “You make it sound rather creepy. And I want to add something. Among the blackberries, Ivor and I discovered a crooked old tombstone with the inscription Dors, Médor! and only the date of death, 1889; a found dog, no doubt. It’s just before the last tree on the left side.”

  “So now we reach the garden gate. We are about to enter—but you stop all of a sudden: you’ve forgotten to buy those nice new stamps for your album. We decide to go back to the post office.”

  “Can I open my eyes? Because I’m afraid I’m going to fall asleep.”

  “On the contrary: now is the moment to shut your eyes tight and concentrate. I want you to imagine yourself turning on your heel so that ‘right’ instantly becomes ‘left,’ and you instantly see the ‘here’ as a ‘there,’ with the lamppost now on your left and dead Médor now on your right, and the plane trees converging toward the post office. Can you do that?”

  “Done,” said Iris. “About-face executed. I now stand facing a sunny hole with a little pink house inside it and a bit of blue sky. Shall we start walking back?”

  “You may, I can’t! This is the point of the experiment. In actual, physical life I can turn as simply and swiftly as anyone. But mentally, with my eyes closed and my body immobile, I am unable to switch from one direction to the other. Some swivel cell in my brain does not work. I can cheat, of course, by setting aside the mental snapshot of one vista and leisurely selecting the opposite view for my walk back to my starting point. But if I do not cheat, some kind of atrocious obstacle, which would drive me mad if I persevered, prevents me from imagining the twist which transforms one direction into another, directly opposite. I am crushed, I am carrying the whole world on my back in the process of trying to visualize my turning around and making myself see in terms of ‘right’ what I saw in terms of ‘left’ and vice versa.”

  I thought she had fallen asleep, but before I could entertain the thought that she had not heard, not understood anything of what was destroying me, she moved, rearranged her shoulder straps, and sat up.

  “First of all, we shall agree,” she said, “to cancel all such experiments. Secondly, we shall tell ourselves that what we had been trying to do was to solve a stupid philosophical riddle—on the lines of what does ‘right’ and ‘left’ mean in our absence, when nobody is looking, in pure space, and what, anyway, is space; when I was a child I thought space was the inside of a nought, any nought, chalked on a slate and perhaps not quite tidy, but still a good clean zero. I don’t want you to go mad or to drive me mad, because those perplexities are catching, and so we’ll drop the whole business of revolving avenues altogether. I would like to seal our pact with a kiss, but we shall have to postpone that. Ivor is coming in a few minutes to take us for a spin in his new car, but perhaps you do not care to come, and so I propose we meet in the garden, for a minute or two, just before dinner, while he is taking his bath.”

  I asked what Bob (L.P.) had been telling her in my dream. “It was not a dream,” she said. “He just wanted to know if his sister had phoned about a dance they wanted us all three to come to. If she had, nobody was at home.”

  We repaired for a snack and a drink to the Victoria bar, and presently Ivor joined us. He said, nonsense, he could dance and fence beautifully on the stage but was a regular bear at private affairs and would hate to have his innocent sister pawed by all the rastaquouères of the Côte.

  “Incidentally,” he added, “I don’t much care for P.’s obsession with moneylenders. He practically ruined the best one in Cambridge but has nothing but conventional evil to repeat about them.”

  “My brother is a funny person,” said Iris, turning to me as in play. “He conceals our ancestry like a dark treasure, yet will flare up publicly if someone calls someone a Shylock.”

  Ivor prattled on: “Old Maurice (his employer) is dining with us tonight. Cold cuts and a macédoine au kitchen rum. I’ll also get some tinned asparagus at the English shop; it’s much better than the stuff they grow here. The car is not exactly a Royce, but it rolls. Sorry Vivian is too queasy to come. I saw Madge Titheridge this morning and she said French reporters pronounce her family name ‘Si c’est riche.’ Nobody’s laughing today.”

  9

  Being too excited to take my usual siesta, I spent most of the afternoon working on a love poem (and this is the last entry in my 1922 pocket diary—exactly one month after my arrival in Carnavaux). In those days I seemed to have had two muses: the essential, hysterical, genuine one, who tortured me with elusive snatches of imagery and wrung her hands over my inability to appropriate the magic and madness offered me; and her apprentice, her palette girl and stand-in, a little logician, who stuffed the torn gaps left by her mistress with explanatory or meter-mending fillers which became more and more numerous the further I moved away from the initial, evanescent, savage perfection. The treacherous music of Russian rhythms came to my specious rescue like those demons who break the black silence of an artist’s hell with imitations of Greek poets and prehistorical birds. Another and final deception would come with the Fair Copy in which, for a short while, calligraphy, vellum paper, and India ink beautified a dead doggerel. And to think that for almost five years I kept trying and kept getting caught—until I fired that painted, pregnant, meek, miserable little assistant!

  I dressed and went downstairs. The french window giving on the terrace was open. Old Maurice,
Iris, and Ivor sat enjoying Martinis in the orchestra seats of a marvelous sunset. Ivor was in the act of mimicking someone, with bizarre intonations and extravagant gestures. The marvelous sunset has not only remained as a backdrop of a life-transforming evening, but endured, perhaps, behind the suggestion I made to my British publishers, many years later, to bring out a coffee-table album of auroras and sunsets, in the truest possible shades, a collection that would also be of scientific value, since some learned celestiologist might be hired to discuss samples from various countries and analyze the striking and never before discussed differences between the color schemes of evening and dawn. The album came out eventually, the price was high and the pictorial part passable; but the text was supplied by a luckless female whose pretty prose and borrowed poetry botched the book (Allan and Overton, London, 1949).

  For a couple of moments, while idly attending to Ivor’s strident performance, I stood watching the huge sunset. Its wash was of a classical light-orange tint with an oblique bluish-black shark crossing it. What glorified the combination was a series of ember-bright cloudlets riding along, tattered and hooded, above the red sun which had assumed the shape of a pawn or a baluster. “Look at the sabbath witches!” I was about to cry, but then I saw Iris rise and heard her say: “That will do, Ives. Maurice has never met the person, it’s all lost on him.”

  “Not at all,” retorted her brother, “he will meet him in a minute and recognize him (the verb was an artist’s snarl), that’s the point!”

  Iris left the terrace via the garden steps, and Ivor did not continue his skit, which a swift playback that now burst on my consciousness identified as a clever burlesque of my voice and manner. I had the odd sensation of a piece of myself being ripped off and tossed overboard, of my being separated from my own self, of flying forward and at the same time turning away. The second action prevailed, and presently, under the holm oak, I joined Iris.