Vladimir Nabokov. Transparent things

1


     Here's the person I want. Hullo, person! Doesn't hear me.
     Perhaps    if   the   future   existed,   concretely   and
individually, as something that could be discerned by a  better
brain, the past would not be so seductive: its demands would be
balanced  by  those  of the future. Persons might then straddle
the middle stretch of the seesaw when considering this or  that
object. It might be fun.
     But  the  future has no such reality (as the pictured past
and the perceived present possess); the future is but a  figure
of speech, a specter of thought.
     Hullo,  person!  What's  the  matter,  don't  pull me. I'm
not bothering him. Oh, all right. Hullo, person  .  .  .
(last time, in a very small voice).
     When  we concentrate on a material object, whatever
its situation, the very  act  of  attention  may  lead  to  our
involuntarily  sinking into the history of that object. Novices
must learn to skim over matter if they want matter to  stay  at
the  exact  level  of  the  moment. Transparent things, through
which the past shines!
     Man-made objects, or natural ones, inert in themselves but
much used by careless life (you are thinking, and quite rightly
so, of a hillside stone over which a multitude of small animals
have scurried  in  the  course  of  incalculable  seasons)  are
particularly  difficult  to keep in surface focus: novices fall
through the surface, humming happily  to  themselves,  and  are
soon reveling with childish abandon in the story of this stone,
of  that  heath.  I  shall  explain. A thin veneer of immediate
reality is spread  over  natural  and  artificial  matter,  and
whoever  wishes to remain in the now, with the now, on the now,
should  please  not  break  its  tension  film.  Otherwise  the
inexperienced   miracle-worker  will  find  himself  no  longer
walking on water but descending  upright  among  staring  fish.
More in a moment.


2


     As  the  person,  Hugh  Person  (corrupted  "Peterson" and
pronounced "Parson" by some) extricated his angular  bulk  from
the  taxi  that  had brought him to this shoddy mountain resort
from Trux, and while his head was still lowered in  an  opening
meant  for  emerging  dwarfs,  his  eyes  went  up  --  not  to
acknowledge the helpful gesture sketched by the driver who  had
opened  the  door  for him but to check the aspect of the Ascot
Hotel (Ascot! ) against  an  eight-year-old  recollection,  one
fifth  of  his life, engrained by grief. A dreadful building of
gray stone and brown wood, it sported cherry-red shutters  (not
all of them shut) which by some mnemoptical trick he remembered
as  apple  green.  The  steps  of  the  porch were flanked with
electrified carriage lamps on a pair of iron posts. Down  those
steps  an aproned valet came tripping to take the two bags, and
(under one arm) the  shoebox,  all  of  which  the  driver  had
alertly  re-moved  from  the  yawning  boot.  Person pays alert
driver.
     The unrecognizable hall was no doubt as squalid as it  had
always been.
     At  the desk, while signing his name and relinquishing his
passport, he asked in  French,  English,  German,  and  English
again  if  old  Kronig,  the  director whose fat face and false
joviality he so clearly recalled, was still around.
     The  receptionist  (blond  bun,  pretty  neck)  said   no,
Monsieur  Kronig  had  left  to become manager, imagine, of the
Fantastic in Blur (or so  it  sounded).  A  grassgreen  skyblue
postcard   depicting   reclining   clients   was   produced  in
illustration or proof. The caption was in three  languages  and
only the German part was idiomatic. The English one read: Lying
Lawn  --  and,  as  if on purpose, a fraudulent perspective had
enlarged the lawn to monstrous proportions.
     "He died last year," added the girl  (who  en  face
did not resemble Armande one bit), abolishing whatever interest
a photochrome of the Majestic in Chur might have presented. "So
there  is  nobody  who might remember me?" "I regret," she said
with his late wife's habitual intonation.
     She also regretted  that  since  he  could  not  tell  her
which  room  on  the third floor he had occupied she, in
turn, could not give it to him, especially  as  the  floor  was
full.  Clasping  his  brow  Person  said  it  was in the middle
three-hundreds and faced east, the  sun  welcomed  him  on  his
bedside rug, though the room had practically no view. He wanted
it  very  badly, but the law required that records be destroyed
when a director, even a former director, did  what  Kronig  had
done  (suicide  being  a form of account fakery, one supposed).
Her assistant, a handsome young fellow in black, with  pustules
on  chin  and throat, took Person up to a fourth-floor room and
all the way kept staring with a telly  viewer's  absorption  at
the  blank  bluish wall gliding down, while, on the other hand,
the no less rapt mirror in the lift reflected, for a few  lucid
instants,  the  gentleman  from  Massachusetts, who had a long,
lean, doleful face with a slightly undershot jaw and a pair  of
symmetrical  folds  framing his mouth in what would have been a
rugged,  horsey,  mountain-climbing  arrangement  had  not  his
melancholy  stoop  belied  every inch of his fantastic majesty.
The window faced east all right but there certainly was a view:
namely, a tremendous crater full of excavating machines (silent
on Saturday afternoon and all Sunday).
     The apple-green-aproned valet brought the two valises  and
the cardboard box with "Fit" on its wrapper; after which Person
remained alone. He knew the hotel to be antiquated but this was
overdoing  it.  The belle chambre au quatriõme, although
too large for one guest and too cramped  for  a  group,  lacked
every  kind of comfort. He remembered that the lower room where
he, a big man of thirty-two, had  cried  more  often  and  more
bitterly  than  he ever had in his sad childhood, had been ugly
too but at least had not been so sprawling and cluttered as his
new abode. Its bed was a nightmare. Its "bathroom" contained  a
bidet  (ample enough to accommodate a circus elephant, sitting)
but no bath. The toilet  seat  refused  to  stay  up.  The  tap
expostulated,  letting  forth  a  strong  squirt of rusty water
before settling down to produce the meek normal stuff --  which
you do not appreciate sufficiently, which is a flowing mystery,
and,  yes,  yes,  which deserves monuments to be erected to it,
cool shrines! Upon leaving that ignoble lavatory,  Hugh  gently
closed  the  door after him but like a stupid pet it whined and
immediately followed him into the room. Let us  now  illustrate
our difficulties.


3


     In  his  search for a commode to store his belongings Hugh
Person, a tidy man, noticed that the middle drawer  of  an  old
desk  relegated  to  a  dark corner of the room, and supporting
there a bulbless and shadeless lamp resembling the carcass of a
broken umbrella, had not been reinserted properly by the lodger
or servant (actually neither) who had been the last to check if
it was empty (nobody had). My good Hugh tried to woggle it  in;
at first it refused to budge; then, in response to the antagony
of  a  chance  tug  (which  could  not  help profiting from the
cumulative energy of several jogs) it shot out  and  spilled  a
pencil. This he briefly considered before putting it back.
     It  was  not  a  hexagonal  beauty  of Virginia juniper or
African cedar, with the maker's name imprinted in silver  foil,
but  a  very  plain,  round, technically faceless old pencil of
cheap pine, dyed a dingy lilac. It had been mislaid  ten  years
ago  by  a  carpenter who had not finished examining, let alone
fixing, the old desk, having gone away for a tool that he never
found. Now comes the act of attention.
     In his shop, and long before that at the  village  school,
the  pencil  has  been  worn down to two-thirds of its original
length. The bare wood  of  its  tapered  end  has  darkened  to
plumbeous  plum,  thus  merging  in  tint with the blunt tip of
graphite whose blind gloss  alone  distinguishes  it  from  the
wood. A knife and a brass sharpener have thoroughly worked upon
it and if it were necessary we could trace the complicated fate
of  the  shavings,  each mauve on one side and tan on the other
when fresh, but now reduced to atoms of dust whose  wide,  wide
dispersal  is panic catching its breath but one should be above
it, one gets used to it fairly soon (there are worse  terrors).
On  the  whole,  it whittled sweetly, being of an old-fashioned
make. Going back a number of seasons (not as  far,  though,  as
Shakespeare's  birth  year when pencil lead was discovered) and
then picking up the thing's story again in the "now" direction,
we see graphite, ground very fine, being mixed with moist  clay
by  young girls and old men. This mass, this pressed caviar, is
placed in a metal cylinder which has a  blue  eye,  a  sapphire
with  a  hole  drilled  in  it,  and through this the caviar is
forced. It issues in one continuous  appetizing  rodlet  (watch
for  our  little  friend!),  which  looks as if it retained the
shape of an earthworm's digestive tract (but watch,  watch,  do
not  be  deflected!).  It  is  now  being  cut into the lengths
required for these particular pencils (we glimpse  the  cutter,
old  Elias Borrowdale, and are about to mouse up his forearm on
a side trip of inspection but we stop, stop and recoil, in  our
haste to identify the individual segment). See it baked, see it
boiled  in  fat  (here  a  shot  of  the fleecy fat-giver being
butchered, a shot of the butcher, a shot  of  the  shepherd,  a
shot  of  the shepherd's father, a Mexican) and fitted into the
wood.
     Now let us not lose our precious  bit  of  lead  while  we
prepare the wood. Here's the tree! This particular pine!
It  Is  cut down. Only the trunk is used, stripped of its bark.
We hear the whine of a newly invented power saw,  we  see  logs
being  dried  and  planed. Here's the board that will yield the
integument of the pencil  in  the  shallow  drawer  (still  not
closed).  We recognize its presence in the log as we recognized
the log in the tree and the tree in the forest and  the  forest
in  the  world  that  Jack built. We recognize that presence by
something that is perfectly clear to us but  nameless,  and  as
impossible  to  describe  as  a smile to somebody who has never
seen smiling eyes.
     Thus the entire little drama, from crystallized carbon and
felled pine to  this  humble  implement,  to  this  transparent
thing,  unfolds  in a twinkle. Alas, the solid pencil itself as
fingered briefly by Hugh Person still somehow  eludes  us!  But
he won't, oh no.


4


     This  was  his  fourth visit to Switzerland. The first one
had been eighteen years before when he had  stayed  for  a  few
days  at  Trux with lus father. Ten years later, at thirty-two,
he had revisited that old lakeside town  and  had  successfully
courted  a sentimental thrill, half wonder and half remorse, by
going to see their hotel. A steep lane  and  a  flight  of  old
stairs  led  to  it  from  lake level where the local train had
brought him to a  featureless  station.  He  had  retained  the
hotel's  name, Locquet, because it resembled the maiden name of
his mother, a  French  Canadian,  whom  Person  Senior  was  to
survive  by  less  than  a  year.  He  also  remembered that it
was drab and cheap, and abjectly stood next to  another,
much  better  hotel, through the rez-de-chaussee windows
of which you could make out the phantoms  of  pale  tables  and
underwater  waiters.  Both  hotels  had  gone now, and in their
stead there rose  the  Banque  Bleue,  a  steely  edifice,  all
polished surfaces, plate glass, and potted plants.
     He had slept in a kind of halfhearted alcove, separated by
an archway  and  a clothes tree from his father's bed. Night is
always a giant but this one was especially terrible.  Hugh  had
always  had his own room at home, he hated this common grave of
sleep, he grimly hoped that the promise of separate bedchambers
would  be  kept  at  subsequent  stops  of  their  Swiss   tour
shimmering ahead in a painted mist. His father, a man of sixty,
shorter  than  Hugh  and  also pudgier, had aged unappetizingly
during  his  recent   widowhood;   his   things   let   off   a
characteristic   foresmell,  faint  but  unmistakable,  and  he
grunted and sighed in his sleep,  dreaming  of  large  unwieldy
blocks  of  blackness,  which  had to be sorted out and removed
from one's path or over which one had to clamber  in  agonizing
attitudes of debility and despair. We cannot find in the annals
of European tours, recommended by the family doctors of retired
old  parties  to allay lone grief, even one trip which achieved
that purpose.
     Person Senior had always had clumsy hands but of late  the
way  he  fumbled  for things in the bathwater of space, groping
for  the  transparent  soap  of  evasive  matter,   or   vainly
endeavored  to tie or untie such parts of manufactured articles
as had to be fastened or  unfastened,  was  growing  positively
comic.  Hugh had inherited some of that clumsiness; its present
exaggeration annoyed  him  as  a  repetitious  parody.  On  the
morning  of  the  widower's  last  day in so-called Switzerland
(i.e., very shortly before the event that for him  would  cause
everything  to become "so-called") the old duffer wrestled with
the Venetian blind  in  order  to  examine  the  weather,  just
managed  to  catch  a  glimpse of wet pavement before the blind
redescended in a rattling avalanche, and decided  to  take  his
umbrella.  It  was  badly  folded,  and he began to improve its
condition. At first Hugh watched in disgusted silence, nostrils
flaring and twitching. The scorn was unmerited  since  lots  of
things  exist,  from live cells to dead stars, that undergo now
and then accidental little mishaps at the not  always  able  or
careful hands of anonymous shapers. The black laps flipped over
untidily  and  had to be redone, and by the time the eye of the
ribbon was ready for use (a tiny tangible circle between finger
and thumb), its button had  disappeared  among  the  folds  and
furrows  of  space.  After  watching  for  a  while these inept
gropings, Hugh wrenched the umbrella out of his father's  hands
so  abruptly that the old man kept kneading the air for another
moment before responding with a gentle apologetic smile to  the
sudden  discourtesy.  Still  not  saying  a word, Hugh fiercely
folded and buttoned up the  umbrella  --  which,  to  tell  the
truth,  hardly  acquired  a  better shape than his father would
have finally given it.
     What were  their  plans  for  the  day?  They  would  have
breakfast  in  the  same place where they had dined on the eve,
and would then do some shopping and a  lot  of  sightseeing.  A
local  miracle of nature, the Tara cataract, was painted on the
watercloset door in the passage, as well  as  reproduced  in  a
huge  photograph  on  the  wall  of  the  vestibule. Dr. Person
stopped at the desk to inquire with his habitual  fussiness  if
there  was any mail for him (not that he expected any). After a
short search a telegram for a Mrs. Parson turned up, but
nothing for him  (save  the  muffled  shock  of  an  incomplete
coincidence).  A  rolled-up measuring tape happened to be lying
near his elbow, and he started to  wind  it  around  his  thick
waist, losing the end several times and explaining the while to
the  somber  concierge  that  he intended to purchase in town a
pair of summer trousers and wished to go about it lucidly. That
rigmarole was so hateful to Hugh that he started to move toward
the exit even before the gray tape had been rewound again.


5


     After  breakfast  they  found  a  suitable-looking   shop.
Confections.  Notre  vente  triomphale  de  soldes.  Our
windfall triumphantly sold,  translated  his  father,  and  was
corrected  by  Hugh  with  tired contempt. A basket with folded
shirts stood on an iron tripod outside the window,  unprotected
from  the  rain  that  had  now increased. There came a roll of
thunder. Let's pop in here, nervously said  Dr.  Person,  whose
fear of electric storms was yet another source of irritation to
his son.
     That morning, lrma, a weary and worried shopgirl, happened
to be  alone  in  charge of the shabby garment store into which
Hugh reluctantly followed his father.  Her  two  co-workers,  a
married  couple,  had  just  been  hospitalized after a fire in
their little apartment, the boss was away on business, and more
people were dropping in than habitually would on a Thursday. At
present she was in the act of helping three elderly women (part
of a busload from London) to make up their  minds  and  at  the
same  time  directing another person, a German blonde in black,
to a place for passport pictures. Each old woman in turn spread
the same flower-patterned dress  against  her  bosom,  and  Dr.
Person eagerly translated their cockney cackle into bad French.
     The  girl  in  mourning  came  back  for  a parcel she had
forgotten. More dresses were  spread-eagled,  more  price  tags
squinted  at.  Yet  another  customer  entered  with two little
girls. In between Dr. Person asked for a pair of slacks. He was
given a few pairs to try on in an adjacent  cubicle;  and  Hugh
slipped out of the shop.
     He  strolled  aimlessly, keeping in the shelter of various
architectural projections, for it was in vain  that  the  daily
paper of that rainy town kept clamoring for arcades to be built
in its shopping district. Hugh examined the items in a souvenir
store.  He found rather fetching the green figurine of a female
skier made of a substance he could  not  identify  through  the
show glass (it was "alabasterette," imitation aragonite, carved
and colored in the Grumbel jail by a homosexual convict, rugged
Armand  Rave,  who  had  strangled  his  boyfriend's incestuous
sister). And what about that comb in a real-leather etui,  what
about,  what  about it -- oh, it would get fouled up in no time
and it would take an hour of work  to  remove  the  grime  from
between  its  tight teeth by using one of the smaller blades of
that  penknife  there,  bristling  in  a  display  of  insolent
innards.  Cute  wrist watch, with picture of doggy adorning its
face, for only twenty-two francs. Or should one buy (for  one's
college  roommate) that wooden plate with a central white cross
surrounded by all twenty-two cantons? Hugh, too, was twenty-two
and had always been harrowed by coincident symbols.
     A dingdong bell and a blinking  red  light  at  the  grade
crossing  announced  an  impending  event:  inexorably the slow
barrier came down.
     Its brown curtain was  only  half  drawn,  disclosing  the
elegant  legs,  clad  in  transparent black, of a female seated
inside. We are in a terrific hurry to  recapture  that  moment!
The curtain of a sidewalk booth with a kind of piano stool, for
the  short  or  tall,  and  a slot machine enabling one to take
one's own snapshot for passport or sport. Hugh  eyed  the  legs
and  then  the  sign on the booth. The masculine ending and the
absence of an acute accent flawed the unintentional pun:




        HOTOS

        3 Poses


     As he, still a virgin, imagined those daring  attitudes  a
double  event  happened: the thunder of a nonstop train crashed
by, and magnesium lightning flashed from the booth. The  blonde
in  black,  far  from  being electrocuted, came out closing her
handbag. Whatever funeral she had wished  to  commemorate  with
the  image  of  fair  beauty  craped  for  the occasion, it had
nothing to do with a third simultaneous event next door.
     One should follow her, it would be a good lesson -- follow
her instead of going to gape at a waterfall:  good  lesson  for
the  old  man. With an oath and a sigh Hugh retraced his steps,
which was once a trim metaphor, and went back to the shop. Irma
told neighbors later that she had been sure the  gentleman  had
left  with his son for at first she could not make out what the
latter was saying despite his fluent French. When she did,  she
laughed  at her stupidity, swiftly led Hugh to the fitting room
and, still  laughing  heartily,  drew  the  green,  not  brown,
curtain open with what became in retrospect a dramatic gesture.
Spatial  disarrangement and dislocation have always their droll
side, and few things are funnier than three pairs  of  trousers
tangling  in  a frozen dance on the floor -- brown slacks, blue
jeans, old pants of gray flannel.  Awkward  Person  Senior  had
been  struggling  to  push  a shod foot through the zigzag of a
narrow trouser leg when he felt  a  roaring  redness  fill  his
head.  He  died  before  reaching the floor, as if falling from
some  great  height,  and  now  lay  on  his  back,   one   arm
outstretched, umbrella and hat out of reach in the tall looking
glass.



6


     This  Henry  Emery  Person,  our Person's father, might be
described as a well-meaning, earnest, dear little man, or as  a
wretched  fraud,  depending  on  the  angle  of  light  and the
position of the observer. A lot of handwringing goes  about  in
the  dark  of  remorse,  in  the  dungeon of the irreparable. A
schoolboy, be he as strong as the Boston strangler -- show your
hands, Hugh -- cannot cope with all his fellows when  all  keep
making  cruel  remarks  about  his  father.  After two or three
clumsy fights with the  most  detestable  among  them,  he  had
adopted   a   smarter   and   meaner   attitude   of   taciturn
semiacquiescence which horrified him when he  remembered  those
times;  but  by  a curious twist of conscience the awareness of
his own horror comforted him as proving he was not altogether a
monster.  He  now  had  to  do  something  about  a  number  of
recollected unkindnesses of which he had been guilty up to that
very  day; they were to be as painfully disposed of as had been
the dentures and glasses which the authorities left with him in
a paper bag. The only kinsman he could turn  up,  an  uncle  in
Scranton,  advised him over the ocean to have the body cremated
abroad rather than shipped home; actually, the less recommended
course proved to be the easier one in many respects, and mainly
because it allowed Hugh to  get  rid  of  the  dreadful  object
practically at once.
     Everybody  was  very helpful. One would like in particular
to express one's gratitude to Harold Hall, the American  consul
in  Switzerland, who was instrumental in extending all possible
assistance to our poor friend.
     Of  the  two  thrills  young  Hugh  experienced,  one  was
general,  the  other  specific. The general sense of liberation
came first, as a great breeze, ecstatic and clean, blowing away
a lot of life's rot. Specifically, he was delighted to discover
three thousand dollars in his  father's  battered,  but  plump,
wallet. Like many a young man of dark genius who feels in a wad
of  bills  all the tangible thickness of immediate delights, he
had no practical sense, no ambition to make more money, and  no
qualms  about  his  future  means  of subsistence (these proved
negligible when it transpired that the cash had been more  than
a  tenth  of the actual inheritance). That same day he moved to
much finer lodgings in Geneva, had homard þ l'amèricaine
for dinner, and went to find his first whore in  a  lane  right
behind his hotel.
     For  optical  and  animal  reasons  sexual  love  is  less
transparent than many other much more complicated  things.  One
knows,  however,  that  in  his  home  town  Hugh had courted a
thirty-eight-year-old mother and her sixteen-year-old  daughter
but  had  been impotent with the first and not audacious enough
with the second. We have here a banal case of protracted erotic
itch, of lone practice for its habitual  satisfaction,  and  of
memorable  dreams.  The  girl  he accosted was stumpy but had a
lovely, pale, vulgar face with Italian eyes. She  took  him  to
one  of the better beds in a hideous old roominghouse -- to the
precise "number," in fact, where ninety-one, ninety-two, nearly
ninety-three years ago a Russian novelist had sojourned on  his
way  to  Italy. The bed -- a different one, with brass knobs --
was made, unmade, covered with a frock coat, made  again;  upon
it  stood  a half-open green-checkered grip, and the frock coat
was  thrown  over   the   shoulders   of   the   night-shirted,
bare-necked,  dark-tousled traveler whom we catch in the act of
deciding what to take out of the valise (which he will send  by
mail  coach  ahead) and transfer to the knapsack (which he will
carry himself across the mountains to the Italian frontier). He
expects his friend Kandidatov, the painter, to  join  him  here
any moment for the outing, one of those lighthearted hikes that
romantics  would  undertake  even  during  a  drizzly  spell in
August; it rained even more in those uncomfortable  times;  his
boots  are  still  wet  from  a  ten-mile ramble to the nearest
casino.  They  stand  outside  the  door  in  the  attitude  of
expulsion,  and  he  has  wrapped his feet in several layers of
German-language newspaper, a  language  which  incidentally  he
finds  easier  to  read  than  French.  The main problem now is
whether to confide to his knapsack or  mail  in  his  grip  his
manuscripts: rough drafts of letters, an unfinished short story
in  a  Russian  copybook  bound  in  black  cloth,  parts  of a
philosophical essay in a blue cahier acquired  in  Geneva,  and
the  loose  sheets of a rudimentary novel under the provisional
title of Faust in Moscow. As he sits at that deal table,
the very same upon which our Person's  whore  has  plunked  her
voluminous  handbag,  there shows through that bag, as it were,
the first  page  of  the  Faust  affair  with  energetic
erasures  and untidy insertions in purple, black, reptile-green
ink. The sight of his handwriting fascinates him; the chaos  on
the  page is to him order, the blots are pictures, the marginal
jottings are wings. Instead of sorting his papers,  he  uncorks
his  portable  ink  and moves nearer to the table, pen in hand.
But at that minute there comes a joyful banging  on  the  door.
The door flies open and closes again.
     Hugh  Person  followed his chance girl down the long steep
stairs, and to her favorite street corner where they parted for
many years. He had hoped that the girl would keep him till morn
-- and thus spare him a night  at  the  hotel,  with  his  dead
father  present  in every dark corner of solitude; but when she
saw him inclined to stay she misconstrued his  plans,  brutally
said  it  would take much too long to get such a poor performer
back into shape, and ushered him  out.  It  was  not  a  ghost,
however,  that  prevented  him  from  falling  asleep,  but the
stuffiness. He opened wide  both  casements;  they  gave  on  a
parking place four floors below; the thin meniscus overhead was
too  wan  to illumine the roofs of the houses descending toward
the invisible lake; the light of a garage picked out the  steps
of  desolate stairs leading into a chaos of shadows; it was all
very dismal and very distant, and our  acrophobic  Person  felt
the  pull  of  gravity  inviting  him to join the night and his
father. He had walked in his sleep many times as  a  naked  boy
but  familiar  surroundings  had  guarded him, till finally the
strange disease had abated. Tonight, on the highest floor of  a
strange  hotel, he lacked all protection. He closed the windows
and sat in an armchair till dawn.


7


     In the nights of his youth when Hugh had suffered  attacks
of  somnambulism,  he  would  walk  out  of  his room hugging a
pillow, and wander downstairs. He remembered awakening  in  odd
spots,  on  the steps leading to the cellar or in a hall closet
among galoshes and storm coats, and while not overly frightened
by those barefoot trips, the boy did not care "to behave like a
ghost" and begged to be locked up in his bedroom. This did  not
work  either,  as  he would scramble out of the window onto the
sloping  roof  of  a  gallery  leading   to   the   schoolhouse
dormitories.  The  first time he did it the chill of the slates
against his soles roused him, and he traveled back to his  dark
nest  avoiding  chairs and things rather by ear than otherwise.
An old and silly doctor advised his parents to cover the  floor
near  his  bed  with  wet towels and place basins with water at
strategic  points,  and  the  only  result  was   that   having
circumvented all obstacles in his magic sleep, he found himself
shivering  at  the  foot  of  a chimney with the school cat for
companion. Soon after  that  sally  the  spectral  fits  became
rarer;  they  practically stopped in his late adolescence. As a
penultimate echo came the strange case of the struggle  with  a
bedside  table.  This was when Hugh attended college and lodged
with a fellow student. Jack Moore (no relation), in  two  rooms
of the newly built Snyder Hall. Jack was awakened in the middle
of  the  night,  after  a  weary day of cramming, by a burst of
crashing sounds coming from the bed-sitting room.  He  went  to
investigate.  Hugh, in his sleep, had imagined that his bedside
table, a little three-legged affair (borrowed  from  under  the
hallway  telephone),  was  executing a furious war dance all by
itself, as he had seen a similar article do at  a  seance  when
asked  if  the visiting spirit (Napoleon) missed the springtime
sunsets of St. Helena.  Jack  Moore  found  Hugh  energetically
leaning  from  his  couch  and  with  both  arms  embracing and
crushing the inoffensive object, in a ludicrous effort to  stop
its inexistent motion. Books, an ashtray, an alarm clock, a box
of cough drops, had all been shaken off, and the tormented wood
was  emitting  snaps  and  crackles  in the idiot's grasp. Jack
Moore pried the two apart. Hugh silently turned over  and  went
to sleep.



8


     During  the  ten  years  that  were to elapse between Hugh
Person's first and second visits to Switzerland he  earned  his
living  in  the  various  dull  ways  that  fall  to the lot of
brilliant young people who lack any special  gift  or  ambition
and  get accustomed to applying only a small part of their wits
to humdrum or charlatan tasks. What they  do  with  the  other,
much  greater,  portion,  how  and where their real fancies and
feelings are housed, is not exactly a mystery -- there  are  no
mysteries  now -- but would entail explications and revelations
too sad, too frightful, to face.  Only  experts,  for  experts,
should probe a mind's misery.
     He  could  multiply  eight-digit  numbers in his head, and
lost that capacity in the course  of  a  few  gray  diminishing
nights   during  hospitalization  with  a  virus  infection  at
twenty-five. He had published a poem in a college  magazine,  a
long rambling piece that began rather auspiciously:

     Blest are suspension dots . . .
     The sun was setting a heavenly example to the lake…Š


     He  was  the  author  of  a  letter to the London Times
which was reproduced a few years  later  in  the  anthology
To the Editor: Sir, and a passage of which read:


     Anacreon  died  at eighty-five choked by "wine's skeleton"
(as another Ionian put  it),  and  a  gypsy  predicted  to  the
chessplayer Alyokhin that he would be killed in Spain by a dead
bull.

     For  seven  years  after graduating from the university he
had been the secretary and anonymous associate of  a  notorious
fraud, the late symbolist Atman, and was wholly responsible for
such footnotes as:

     The  cromlech  (associated  with  mieko,  milch,  milk) is
obviously a symbol of the Great  Mother,  just  as  the  menhir
("mein Herr") is as obviously masculine.

     He  had  been in the stationery business for another spell
and a fountain pen he had promoted bore his  name:  The  Person
Pen. But that remained his greatest achievement.
     As  a  sulky  person  of  twenty-nine  he  joined  a great
publishing firm, where  he  worked  in  various  capacities  --
research  assistant,  scout,  associate  editor,  copy  editor,
proofreader, flatterer of our authors. A sullen slave,  he  was
placed  at  the  disposal  of  Mrs.  Flankard, an exuberant and
pretentious lady with a florid  face  and  octopus  eyes  whose
enormous   romance   The  Stag  had  been  accepted  for
publication  on  condition  that  it  be  drastically  revised,
ruthlessly  cut,  and  partly  rewritten.  The  rewritten bits,
consisting of a few pages here  and  there,  were  supposed  to
bridge  the  black  bleeding  gaps of generously deleted matter
between the retained chapters. That job had been  performed  by
one  of Hugh's colleagues, a pretty ponytail who had since left
the firm. As a novelist she possessed  even  less  talent  than
Mrs. Flankard, and Hugh was now cursed with the task of healing
not  only  the  wounds  she had inflicted but the warts she had
left intact. He had tea several times with Mrs. Flankard in her
charming suburban house decorated almost exclusively  with  her
late husband's oils, early spring in the parlor, surnmertime in
the  dining  room, all the glory of New England in the library,
and winter in the bedchamber.  Hugh  did  not  linger  in  that
particular  room,  for  he  had  the  uncanny feeling that Mrs.
Flankard was planning to be raped beneath Mr. Flankard's  mauve
snowflakes. Like many overripe and still handsome lady artists,
she  seemed  to  be  quite  unaware that a big bust, a wrinkled
neck, and the smell of stale femininity on an  eau  de  Cologne
base  might  repel a nervous male. He uttered a grunt of relief
when "our" book finally got published.
     On the strength of The Stag's commercial success he
found himself assigned a more glamorous task. "Mister  R.",  as
he  was called in the office (he had a long German name, in two
installments, with a  nobiliary  particle  between  castle  and
crag),  wrote  English considerably better than he spoke it. On
contact with paper it acquired a shapeliness,  a  richness,  an
ostensible  dash,  that  caused  some  of  the  less  demanding
reviewers in his adopted country to call him a master stylist.
     Mr. R. was a touchy, unpleasant, and  rude  correspondent.
Hugh's  dealings  with  him  across  the  ocean -- Mr. R. lived
mostly in Switzerland or France -- lacked the  hearty  glow  of
the Flankard ordeal; but Mr. R., though perhaps not a master of
the  very  first rank, was at least a true artist who fought on
his own ground with his own weapons for the  right  to  use  an
unorthodox  punctuation  corresponding  to  singular thought. A
paperback edition of one of his earlier  works  was  painlessly
steered  into  production by our accommodating Person; but then
began a long wait for the new novel which R.  had  promised  to
deliver  before  the  end of that spring. Spring passed without
any result -- and Hugh flew over to Switzerland for a  personal
interview  with the sluggish author. This was the second of his
four European trips.


9


     He made Armande's acquaintance in a Swiss railway carriage
one dazzling afternoon between Thur and Versex on  the  eve  of
his meeting with Mr. R. He had boarded a slow train by mistake;
she  had  chosen  one that would stop at the small station from
which a bus line went up to Witt,  where  her  mother  owned  a
chalet.  Armande  and  Hugh  had  simultaneously settled in two
window seats facing each other on the lake side of  the  coach.
An  American  family  occupied the corresponding four-seat side
across the aisle. Hugh unfolded the Journal de Genõve.
     Oh, she was pretty and would have been exquisitely so had her lips been fuller. She had dark eyes, fair hair, a honey-hued skin. Twin dimples of the crescentic type came down her tanned cheeks on the sides of her mournful mouth. She wore a black suit over a frilly blouse. A book lay in her lap under her black-gloved hands. He thought, he recognized that flame-and-soot paperback. The mechanism of their first acquaintance was ideally banal.
     They exchanged a glance of urbane disapproval as the three
American kids  began  pulling  sweaters  and  pants  out  of  a
suitãase in savage search for something stupidly left behind (a
heap  of  comics -- by now taken care of, with the used towels,
by a brisk  hotel  maid).  One  of  the  two  adults,  catching
Armande's  cold  eye,  responded  with  a  look of good-natured
helplessness. The conductor came for the tickets.
     Hugh, tilting his head slightly, satisfied himself that he
had been  right:  it  was  indeed  the  paperback  edition   of
Figures in a Golden Window.
     "One of ours," said Hugh with an indicative nod.
     She  considered  the  book  in her lap as if seeking in it
some explanation of his remark. Her skirt was very short.
     "I mean," he said,  "I  work  for  that  particular
publisher.   For  the  American  publisher  of  the  hard-cover
edition. Do you like it?"
     She answered in fluent but  artificial  English  that  she
detested  surrealistic  novels of the poetic sort. She demanded
hard realistic stuff reflecting our age. She liked books  about
Violence and Oriental Wisdom. Did it get better farther on?
     "Well, there's a rather dramatic scene in a Riviera villa,
when the little girl, the narrator's daughter -- "
     "June."
     "Yes.  June  sets  her new dollhouse on fire and the whole
villa burns down; but there's not much violence, I'm afraid; it
is all  rather  symbolic,  in  the  grand  manner,  and,  well,
curiously  tender  at  the  same time, as the blurb says, or at
least said, in our first edition. That cover is by  the  famous
Paul Plam."
     She  would  finish  it,  of  course, no matter how boring,
because every task in life should be brought  to  an  end  like
completing  that  road  above  Witt,  where they had a house, a
chalet de luxe, but had to trudge up to the Drakonita  cableway
until   that   new  road  had  been  finished.  The  Burning
Window or whatever it was called had been  given  her  only
the  day  before, on her twenty-third birthday, by the author's
stepdaughter whom he probably --
     "Julia."
     Yes. Julia and she had both taught  in  the  winter  at  a
school   for  foreign  young  ladies  in  the  Tessin.  Julia's
stepfather had just divorced her mother whom he had treated  in
an  abominable  fashion.  What  had  they  taught? Oh, posture,
rhythmics -- things like that.
     Hugh and the new, irresistible person had by now  switched
to  French, which he spoke at least as well as she did English.
Asked to guess her nationality he suggested  Danish  or  Dutch.
No,  her father's family came from Belgium, he was an architect
who got killed last summer while supervising the demolition  of
a  famous  hotel  in  a defunct spa; and her mother was born in
Russia, in a very noble milieu, but of course completely ruined
by the revolution. Did he like his job? Would he  mind  pulling
that  dark blind down a little? The low sun's funeral. Was that
a proverb, she queried? No, he had just made it up.
     In a diary he kept in fits  and  starts  Hugh  wrote  that
night in Versex:
     "Spoke  to  a girl on the train. Adorable brown naked legs
and golden sandals. A schoolboy's insane desire and a  romantic
tumult  never  felt previously. Armande Chamar. La particule
aurait jurè avec la  derniõre  syllabe  de  mon  prènom.  I
believe  Byron  uses 'chamar,' meaning 'peacock fan,' in a very
noble   Oriental   milieu.   Charmingly   sophisticated,    yet
marvelously  naive.  Chalet  above Witt built by father. If you
find yourself in those parages.  Wished  to  know  if  I
liked  my job. My job! I replied; "Ask me what I can do,
not what I do, lovely  girl,  lovely  wake  of  the  sun
through  semitransparent black fabric. I can commit to memory a
whole page of the  directory  in  three  minutes  flat  but  am
incapable of remembering my own telephone number. I can compose
patches of poetry as strange and new as you are, or as anything
a  person may write three hundred years hence, but I have never
published one scrap of verse except some juvenile  nonsense  at
college.  I  have  evolved on the playing courts of my father's
school a devastating return of service -- a cut clinging  drive
-- but am out of breath after one game. Using ink and aquarelle
I  can  paint  a lakescape of unsurpassed translucence with all
the mountains of paradise reflected therein, but am  unable  to
draw a boat or a bridge or the silhouette of human panic in the
blazing  windows  of  a  villa by Plam. I have taught French in
American schools but have never been able  to  get  rid  of  my
mother's  Canadian  accent,  though  I  hear  it clearly when I
whisper French words. Ouvre ta robe, Dèjanire that I may
mount sur mon bøcher. I can levitate one inch  high  and
keep  it  up for ten seconds, but cannot climb an apple tree. I
possess a doctor's degree in philosophy, but have no German.  I
have  fallen in love with you but shall do nothing about it. In
short I am an all-round genius.' By  a  coincidence  worthy  of
that  other genius, his stepdaughter had given her the book she
was  reading.  Julia  Moore  has  no  doubt  forgotten  that  I
possessed  her  a couple of years ago. Both mother and daughter
are intense travelers. They have visited Cuba  and  China,  and
such-like   dreary,   primitive  spots,  and  speak  with  fond
criticism of the many charming and odd people they made friends
with there. Parlez-moi de son stepfather. Is he  trõs
fasciste?  Could  not  understand  why  I  called Mrs. R.'s
left-wingism  a  commonplace  bourgeois   vogue.   Mais   au
contraire,  she  and  her  daughter adore radicals! Well, I
said, Mr. R., lui, is immune  to  politics.  My  darling
thought that was the trouble with him. Toffee-cream neck with a
tiny   gold  cross  and  a  grain  de  beautè.  Slender,
athletic, lethal!"


10


     He did do  something  about  it,  despite  all  that  fond
criticism  of  himself.  He wrote her a note from the venerable
Versex Palace where he was to have cocktails in a  few  minutes
with our most valuable author whose best book you did not like.
Would  you permit me to call on you, say Wednesday, the fourth?
Because I shall be by then at the Ascot  Hotel  in  your  Witt,
where  I am told there is some excellent skiing even in summer.
The main object of my stay here, on the other  hand,  is
to  find  out  when  the  old  rascal's  current  book  will be
finished. It is queer to recall how keenly only .the day before
yesterday I had looked forward to seeing the great man at  last
in the flesh.
     There  was even more of it than our Person had expected on
the strength  of  recent  pictures.  As  he  peeped  through  a
vestibule  window  and  watched  him  emerge  from  his car, no
clarion of repute, no scream of glamour  reverbed  through  his
nervous system, which was wholly occupied with the bare-thighed
girl in the sun-shot train. Yet what a grand sight R. presented
-- his  handsome  chauffeur  helping  the  obese old boy on one
side, his black-bearded secretary supporting him on the  other,
and two chasseurs from the hotel going through a mimicry
of  tentative  assistance  on  the porch steps. The reporter in
Person noted that Mr. R. wore  Wallabees  of  a  velvety  cocoa
shade,  a  lemon  shirt  with a lilac neck scarf, and a rumpled
gray suit that seemed to have no  distinction  whatever  --  at
least, to a plain American. Hullo, Person! They sat down in the
lounge near the bar.
     The  illusory  quality of the entire event was enhanced by
the  appearance  and  speech  of  the  two   characters.   That
monumental  man  with his clayey makeup and false grin, and Mr.
Tamworth of the brigand's beard, seemed  to  be  acting  out  a
stiffly  written scene for the benefit of an invisible audience
from which Person, a dummy, kept turning away as if moved  with
his  chair  by  Sherlock's concealed landlady, no matter how he
sat or where he looked in the course of  the  brief  but  boozy
interview.  It  was indeed all sham and waxworks as compared to
the reality of Armande, whose image was stamped on the  eye  of
his  mind  and  shone  through  the  show  at  various  levels,
sometimes upside down, sometimes on the teasing  marge  of  his
field  of vision, but always there, always, true and thrilling.
The  commonplaces  he  and  she  had  exchanged   blazed   with
authenticity when placed for display against the forced guffaws
in the bogus bar.
     "Well,  you certainly look remarkably fit," said Hugh with
effusive mendacity after the drinks had been ordered.
     Baron R. had coarse features, a sallow complexion, a lumpy
nose with  enlarged  pores,  shaggy  bellicose   eyebrows,   an
unerring  stare,  and  a  bulldog  mouth full of bad teeth. The
streak of nasty inventiveness so conspicuous  in  his  writings
also  appeared  in the prepared parts of his speech, as when he
said, as he did now, that far from "looking fit" he  felt  more
and  more  a  creeping resemblance to the cinema star Reubenson
who once played old gangsters in Florida-staged films;  but  no
such actor existed.
     "Anyway   --  how  are  you?"  asked  Hugh,  pressing  his
disadvantage.
     "To make a story quite short," replied Mr. R. (who had  an
exasperating way not only of trotting out hackneyed formulas in
his  would-be colloquial thickly accented English, but also. of
getting them wrong), "I had not been feeling any  too  healthy,
you  know,  during  the winter. My liver, you know, was holding
something against me."
     He took a long sip of whiskey, and, rinsing his mouth with
it in a manner Person had  never  yet  witnessed,  very  slowly
replaced  his  glass on the low table. Then, þ deux with
the muzzled stuff, he swallowed it and shifted  to  his  second
English style, the grand one of his most memorable characters:
     "Insomnia and her sister Nocturia harry me, of course, but
otherwise  I  am as hale as a pane of stamps. I don't think you
met Mr. Tamworth. Person, pronounced Parson; and Tamworth: like
the English breed of black-blotched swine."
     "No," said Hugh, "it does not come from Parson, but rather
from Peterson."
     "O.K., son. And how's Phil?"
     They discussed briefly R.'s publisher's vigor, charm,  and
acumen.
     "Except  that  he  wants  me  to write the wrong books. He
wants -- " assuming a coy throaty voice as he named the  titles
of  a  competitor's novels, also published by Phil -- "he wants
A Boy for Pleasure but would settle for  The  Slender
Slut,  ,and  all  I can offer him is not Tralala but
the first and dullest tome of my Tralatitions. "
     "I assure you that he is waiting for the  manuscript  with
utmost impatience. By the way -- "
     By  the  way, indeed! There ought to exist some rhetorical
term for that twist of nonlogic. A unique view through a  black
weave  ran by the way. By the way, I shall lose my mind if I do
not get her.
     " -- by the way, I met a person  yesterday  who  has  just
seen your stepdaughter -- "
     "Former  stepdaughter,"  corrected Mr. R. "Quite a time no
see, and I hope it remains so. Same stuff, son"  (this  to  the
barman).
     "The  occasion  was rather remarkable. Here was this young
woman, reading -- "
     "Excuse me," said the secretary warmly, and folding a note
he had just scribbled, passed it to Hugh.
     "Mr. R. resents all mention of Miss Moore and her mother."
     And I don't blame him. But where was Hugh's  famous  tact?
Giddy  Hugh  knew quite well the whole situation, having got it
from Phil, not Julia, an impure but reticent little girl.
     This part of our translucing is pretty boring, yet we must
complete our report.
     Mr. R. had discovered one day, with the help  of  a  hired
follower,  that  his  wife  Marion  was  having  an affair with
Christian Pines, son of  the  well-known  cinema  man  who  had
directed  the film Golden Windows (precariously based on
the best of our author's novels). Mr. R. welcomed the situation
since  he   was   assiduously   courting   Julia   Moore,   his
eighteen-year-old  stepdaughter,  and  now  had  plans  for the
future, well worthy of a sentimental lècher whom three or  four
marriages  had  not  sated  yet. Very soon, however, he learned
from the same sleuth, who is at present dying in  a  hot  dirty
hospital  on  Formosa,  an island, that young Pines, a handsome
frog-faced playboy, soon also to die, was  the  lover  of  both
mother  and  daughter, whom he had serviced in Cavaliõre, Cal.,
during two summers. Hence the separation acquired more pain and
plenitude than R. had expected. In the midst of all  this,  our
Person, in his discreet little way (though actually he was half
an  inch  taller  than big R.), had happened to nibble, too, at
the corner of the crowded canvas.


11


     Julia liked tall men with strong hands and sad eyes.  Hugh
had  met  her first at a party in a New York house. A couple of
days later he ran into her at Phil's place and she asked if  he
cared  to  see Cunning Stunts, an "avant garde" hit, she
had two tickets for herself and her mother, but the latter  had
had  to  leave for Washington on legal business (related to the
divorce proceedings as Hugh correctly surmised): would he  care
to  escort  her?  In matters of art, "avant garde" means little
more than conforming to some  daring  philistine  fashion,  so,
when  the  curtain opened, Hugh was not surprised to be regaled
with the sight of a naked hermit sitting on a cracked toilet in
the middle of an empty stage. Julia giggled,  preparing  for  a
delectable evening. Hugh was moved to enfold in his shy paw the
childish  hand  that  had accidentally touched his kneecap. She
was wonderfully pleasing to the  sexual  eye  with  her  doll's
face,  her  slanting eyes and topaz-teared earlobes, her slight
form in an orange blouse and black skirt,  her  slender-jointed
limbs,  her exotically sleek hair squarely cut on the forehead.
No less pleasing was the conjecture that in his Swiss  retreat,
Mr. R„ who had bragged to an interviewer of being blessed with a
goodish  amount  of tèlèpathie power, was bound to experience a
twinge of jealousy at the present moment of spacetime.
     Rumors had been circulating that the play might be  banned
after   its   very   first  night.  A  number  of  rowdy  young
demonstrators in protest against that  contingency  managed  to
disrupt  the  performance  which they were actually supporting.
The bursting of a few festive little bombs filled the hall with
bitter smoke, a brisk fire started among unwound serpentines of
pink and green toilet paper, and  the  theater  was  evacuated.
Julia  announced  she  was  dying  of frustration and thirst. A
famous bar next to the theater proved  hopelessly  crowded  and
"in  the  radiance of an Edenic simplification of mores" (as R.
wrote in another connection) our Person took the  girl  to  his
flat.  Unwisely  he  wondered -- after a too passionate kiss in
the taxi had led him to spill a few firedrops of impatience  --
if  he  would  not  disappoint  the  expectations of Julia, who
according to Phil had been debauched at thirteen by R„ right  at
the start of her mother's disastrous marriage.
     The  bachelor's  flat  Hugh rented on East Sixty-fifth had
been found for him by his firm. Now it so happened  that  those
rooms  were the same in which Julia had visited one of her best
young males a couple of years before. She had the good taste to
say nothing, but the image of that  youth,  whose  death  in  a
remote  war  had  affected  her greatly, kept coming out of the
bathroom or fussing with things in the fridge, and  interfering
so oddly with the small business in hand that she refused to be
unzipped  and  bedded.  Naturally  after  a decent interval the
child gave in and soon found herself assisting big Hugh in  his
blundersome  love-making."  No' sooner, however, had the poking
and panting run their customary course and Hugh, with a  rather
forlorn  show  of jauntiness, had gone for more drinks, than me
image of bronzed and white-buttocked Jimmy Major again replaced
bony reality. She noticed that the closet mirror as  seen  from
the  bed  reflected  exactly  the  same still-life arrangement,
oranges in a wooden bowl, as it had in the  garland-brief  days
of  Jim,  a  voracious consumer of the centenarian's fruit. She
was almost sorry when  upon  looking  around  she  located  the
source  of  the vision in the folds of her bright things thrown
over the back of a chair.
     She canceled their next assignation at the last moment and
soon afterwards went off to Europe. In Person's mind the affair
left hardly anything more than a stain  of  light  lipstick  on
tissue paper -- and a romantic sense of having embraced a great
writer's  sweetheart.  Time,  however,  sets  to  work on those
ephemeral  affairs,  and  a  new  flavor  is   added   to   the
recollection.
     We  now  see a torn piece of La Stampa and an empty
wine bottle. A lot of construction work was going on.


12


     A lot of construction  work  was  going  on  around  Witt,
scarring  and  muddying  the  entire hillside upon which he was
told he would find Villa Nastia. Its immediate surroundings had
more or less been tidied up, forming an oasis of  quiet  amidst
the  clanging and knocking wilderness of clay and cranes. There
even gleamed a boutique among the shops  forming  a  hemicircle
around  a  freshly  planted young rowan under which some litter
had already been left, such as a workman's empty bottle and  an
Italian newspaper. Person's power of orientation now failed him
but  a  woman  selling  apples from a neighboring stall set him
straight again. An overaffectionate large white dog started  to
frisk  unpleasantly  in  his  wake  and  was called back by the
woman.
     He walked up a steepish asphalted path which had  a  white
wall on one side with firs and larches showing above. A grilled
door in it led to some camp or school. The cries of children at
play came from behind the wall and a shuttlecock sailed over it
to  land  at his feet. He ignored it, not being the sort of man
who picks up things for strangers -- a glove, a rolling coin.
     A little farther, an interval in the stone wall revealed a
short flight of stairs and the door of a  whitewashed  bungalow
signed  Villa  Nastia in French cursive. As happens so often in
R.'s fiction, "nobody answered the bell." Hugh noticed  several
other  steps  lateral  to the porch, descending (after all that
stupid climbing!) into the pungent dampness of  boxwood.  These
led  him  around the house and into its garden. A boarded, only
half-completed splash pool adjoined a small lawn, in the center
of which a stout middle-aged lady,  with  greased  limbs  of  a
painful pink, lay sun-bathing in a deck chair. A copy, no doubt
the  same,  of  the  Figures et cetera paperback, with a
folded letter (which we thought wiser  our  Person  should  not
recognize)  acting  as  marker,  lay  on  top  of the one-piece
swimsuit into which her main bulk had been stuffed.
     Madame  Charles  Chamar,  nèe  Anastasia   Petrovna
Potapov  (a  perfectly  respectable  name that her late husband
garbled as "Patapouf"), was the daughter of  a  wealthy  cattle
dealer who had emigrated with his family to England from Ryazan
via  Kharbin  and  Ceylon soon after the Bolshevist revolution.
She had long grown accustomed  to  entertaining  this  or  that
young  man  whom  capricious  Armande had stood up; but the new
beau was dressed like a salesman, and had something  about  him
(your genius, Person! ) that puzzled and annoyed Madame Chamar.
She  liked  people to fit. The Swiss boy, with whom Armande was
skiing at the moment on the permanent snows  high  above  Witt,
fitted.  So  did  the  Blake twins. So did the old guide's son,
golden-haired Jacques, a bobsled champion. But  my  gangly  and
gloomy  Hugh  Person,  with his awful tie, vulgarly fastened to
his cheap white shirt, and impossible chestnut  suit,  did  not
belong  to  her  accepted  world.  When  told  that Armande was
enjoying herself elsewhere and might not be back  for  tea,  he
did  not  bother  to  conceal  his surprise and displeasure. He
stood scratching his cheek. The inside of his Tyrolean hat  was
dark with sweat. Had Armande got his letter?
     Madame  Chamar  answered  in  the noncommittal negative --
though she might have consulted the telltale book  marker,  but
out of a mother's instinctive prudence refrained from doing so.
Instead   she   popped  the  paperback  into  her  garden  bag.
Automatically, Hugh mentioned that he had recently visited  its
author.
     "He lives somewhere in Switzerland, I think?"
     "Yes, at Diablonnet, near Versex."
     "Diablonnet  always  reminds  me of the Russian for 'apple
trees': yabloni. He has a nice house?"
     "Well, we met in Versex, in a hotel, not at his home.  I'm
told  it's  a  very  large  and  a very old-fashioned place. We
discussed business  matters.  Of  course  the  house  is
always full of his rather, well, frivolous guests. I shall wait
for a little while and then go."
     He  refused  to  shed his jacket and relax in a lawn chair
alongside Madame Chamar. Too much sun caused his head to  swim,
he  explained.  "Alors allons dans la maison," she said,
faithfully translating from Russian. Seeing the efforts she was
making to rise, Hugh offered to help  her;  but  Madame  Chamar
bade  him  sharply  stand  well  away  from  her chair lest his
proximity prove a  "psychological  obstruction."  Her  unwieldy
corpulence  could  be moved only by means of one precise little
wiggle; in order to make it she had  to  concentrate  upon  the
idea of trying to fool gravity until something clicked inwardly
and  the  right  jerk  happened  like  the miracle of a sneeze.
Meantime she lay in  her  chair  motionless,  and  as  it  were
ambushed,  with  brave  sweat glistening on her chest and above
the purple arches of her pastel eyebrows.
     "This is completely unnecessary," said Hugh, "I  am  quite
happy  to  wait  here  in the shade of a tree, but shade I must
have. I never thought it would be so  hot  in  the  mountains."
Abruptly,  Madame  Chamar's  entire body gave such a start that
the frame of her deck chair emitted an almost  human  cry.  The
next  moment  she  was in a sitting position, with both feet on
the ground.
     "Everything is well," she declared cozily, and  ãtood  up,
now  robed in bright terry cloth with the suddenness of a magic
metamorphosis. "Come, I want to offer you a nice cold drink and
show you my albums."
     The drink turned out to be a tall faceted glass  of  tepid
tapwater with a spoonful of homemade strawberry )am clouding it
a  mallowish hue. The albums, four big bound volumes, were laid
out on a very low, very round table in the very  moderne
living room.
     "I  now  leave  you for some minutes," said Madame Chamar,
and in full view of the public ascended with  ponderous  energy
the   completely  visible  and  audible  stairs  leading  to  a
similarly overt second floor, where one could see a bed through
an open door and a bidet through another. Armande used  to  say
that  this  product  of  her  late  father's  art was a regular
showpiece attracting tourists from distant  countries  such  as
Rhodesia and Japan.
     The  albums were quite as candid as the house, though less
depressing. The Armande series,  which  exclusively  interested
our  voyeur  malgrè lui, was inaugurated by a photograph
of the late Potapov, in his seventies, looking very dapper with
his gray little imperial and his Chinese house  jacket,  making
the wee myopic sign of the Russian cross over an invisible baby
in  its  deep  cot.  Not  only did the snapshots follow Armande
through all the phases of the past and all the improvements  of
amateur  photography,  but the girl also came in various states
of innocent undress. Her  parents  and  aunts,  the  insatiable
takers  of cute pictures, believed in fact that a girl child of
ten, the dream of a Lutwidgean, had the  same  right  to  total
nudity  as  an infant. The visitor constructed a pile of albums
to screen the flame of his interest from  anybody  overhead  on
the  landing,  and  returned  several  times to the pictures of
little Armande in her bath, pressing a proboscidate rubber  toy
to  her  shiny  stomach  or standing up, dimple-bottomed, to be
lathered. Another revelation of impuberal softness (its  middle
line  just  distinguishable  from the less vertical grass-blade
next to it) was afforded by a photo of her in which she sat  in
the  buff on the grass, combing her sun-shot hair and spreading
wide, in false perspective, the lovely legs of a giantess.
     He heard a toilet flush upstairs and with a  guilty  wince
slapped  the  thick  book  shut.  His  retractile heart moodily
withdrew, its throbs quietened; but nobody came down from those
infernal heights, and he, went back,  rumbling,  to  his  silly
pictures.
     Toward  the  end of the second album the photography burst
into color to celebrate the vivid vestiture of  her  adolescent
molts.  She  appeared  in  floral  frocks, fancy slacks, tennis
shorts, swimsuits, amidst the harsh greens  and  blues  of  the
commercial  spectrum.  He  discovered the elegant angularity of
her sun-tanned shoulders, the  long  line  of  her  haunch.  He
learned  that  at eighteen the torrent of her pale hair reached
the small of her back. No matrimonial agency could have offered
its clients such variations on the theme of one virgin. In  the
third  album  he  found, with an enjoyable sense of homecoming,
glimpses of his immediate surroundings:  the  lemon  and  black
cushions  of  the  divan  at  the other end of the room and the
Denton mount of a bird-wing butterfly on the  mantelpiece.  The
fourth,  incomplete  album began with a sparkle of her chastest
images: Armande in a pink parka, Armande jewel-bright,  Armande
careening on skis through the sugar dust.
     At  last,  from  the  upper part of the transparent house,
Madame Chamar warily trudged downstairs, the jelly  of  a  bare
forearm  wobbling  as  she clutched at the balustrade rail. She
was now clad in an elaborate summer dress with flounces, as  if
she  too,  like  her daughter, had been passing through several
stages of change. "Don't get up,  don't  get  up,"  she  cried,
patting  the  air  with one hand, but Hugh insisted he'd better
go. "Tell her," he added, "tell your daughter when she  returns
from her glacier, that I was extremely disappointed. Tell her I
shall  be  staying  a week, two weeks, three weeks here, at the
grim Ascot Hotel in the pitiful village of  Witt.  Tell  her  I
shall  telephone  if she does not. Tell her," he continued, now
walking down a slippery path among  cranes  and  power  shovels
immobilized  in  the gold of the late afternoon, "tell her that
my system is poisoned by her, by her twenty sisters, her twenty
dwindlings in backcast, and that I shall  perish  if  I  cannot
have her."
     He  was  still  rather simple as lovers go. One might have
said to fat, vulgar Madame Chamar: how dare  you  exhibit  your
child  to  sensitive strangers? But our Person vaguely imagined
that this was a case of  modern  immodesty  current  in  Madame
Chamar's set. What "set," good Lord? The lady's mother had been
a  country veterinary's daughter, same as Hugh's mother (by the
only coincidence worth noting in the whole rather sad  affair).
Take those pictures away, you stupid nudist!
     She  rang him up around midnight, waking him in the pit of
an evanescent, but definitely bad, dream (after all that melted
cheese and young potatoes with a bottle of green  wine  at  the
hotel's  carnotzet). As he scrabbled up the receiver, he
groped with the other hand for  his  reading  glasses,  without
which,  by  some  vagary  of  concomitant  senses, he could not
attend to the  telephone  properly.  "You  Person?"  asked  her
voice.
     He  already  knew, ever since she had recited the contents
of the card he had given her on the train, that she  pronounced
his first name as "You."
     "Yes,  it's  me,  I mean 'you,' I mean you mispronounce it
most enchantingly."
     "I do not mispronounce anything. Look, I never received --
"
     "Oh, you do! You drop your haitches like  --  like  pearls
into a blindman's cup."
     "Well,  the  correct  pronunciation  is  'cap.' I win. Now
listen, tomorrow I'm occupied, but what about Friday -- if  you
can be ready þ sept heures precises?"
     He certainly could.
     She  invited  "Percy,"  as she declared she would call him
from now on, since he detested "Hugh," to come with her  for  a
bit  of  summer  skiing  at  Drakonita, or Darkened Heat, as he
misheard it, which caused him to  conjure  up  a  dense  forest
protecting  romantic  ramblers from the blue blaze of an alpine
noon. He said he had never learned  to  ski  on  a  holiday  at
Sugarwood,  Vermont,  but  would be happy to stroll beside her,
along a footpath not only provided for him by  fancy  but  also
swept  clean  with  a  snowman's  broom -- one of those instant
unverified visions which can fool the cleverest man.


13


     Now we have to bring into focus the main street of Witt as
it was on Thursday, the day after her telephone call. It  teems
with  transparent  people and processes, into which and through
which we might sink with an angel's or author's delight, but we
have to single out for this report  only  one  Person.  Not  an
extensive  hiker, he limited his loafing to a tedious survey of
the village. A grim stream of  cars  rolled  and  rolled,  some
seeking  with  the  unwieldy  wariness of reluctant machinery a
place to park, others coming from, or  heading  for,  the  much
more  fashionable resort of Thur, twenty miles north. He passed
several  times  by  the  old  fountain  dribbling  through  the
geranium-lined  trough  of a hollowed log; he examined the post
office and the bank, the church and the tourist agency,  and  a
famous  black  hovel that was still allowed to survive with its
cabbage patch and scarecrow crucifix between  a  boarding-house
and a laundry.
     He drank beer in two different taverns. He lingered before
a sports  shop; relingered -- and bought a nice gray turtleneck
sweater with a tiny and very pretty American  flag  embroidered
over  the  heart.  "Made  in  Turkey,"  whispered its label. He
decided it was time for some more refreshments -- and  saw  her
sitting  at  a  sidewalk cafe. You swerved toward her, thinking
she was alone; then noticed, too late, a second handbag on  the
opposite  chair.  Simultaneously  her companion came out of the
tea shop and, resuming her seat, said in that lovely  New  York
voice,  with  that harlot dash he would have recognized even in
heaven:
     "The john is a joke."
     Meanwhile Hugh Person, unable  to  shed  the  mask  of  an
affable grin, had come up and was invited to join them.
     An  adjacent  customer, comically resembling Person's late
Aunt Melissa whom we like very  much,  was  reading  l'Erald
Tribune. Armande believed (in the vulgar connotation of the
word)  that  Julia Moore had met Percy. Julia believed she had.
So did Hugh, indeed, yes. Did his aunt's double permit  him  to
borrow  her  spare  chair? He was welcome to it. She was a dear
soul, with five cats, living in a toy house, at the  end  of  a
birch avenue, in the quietest part of --
     Interrupting  us  with  an earsplitting crash an impassive
waitress, a poor woman in her own right, dropped  a  tray  with
lemonades  and  cakes,  and crouched, splitting into many small
quick gestures peculiar to that woman, her face impassive.
     Armande informed Percy that Julia had  come  all  the  way
from Geneva to consult her about the translation of a number of
phrases  with  which  she,  Julia,  who  was  going tomorrow to
Moscow, desired to "impress" her Russian friends. Percy,  here,
worked for her stepfather.
     "My  former stepfather, thank Heavens," said Julia.
"By the way,  Percy,  if  that's  your  nom  de  voyage,
perhaps  you  may help. As she explained, I want to dazzle some
people in Moscow, who promised me the company of a famous young
Russian poet. Armande has supplied me with a number of  darling
words,  but  we  got stuck at -- " (taking a slip of paper from
her bag) -- "I want to know how to say:
     'What a cute little church, what a big snowdrift.' You see
we do it first  into  French  and  she  thinks  'snowdrift'  is
rafale  de neige, but I'm sure it can't be rafale
in French and rafalovich in Russian,  or  whatever  they
call a snowstorm."
     "The  word  you  want,"  said  our Person, "is congõre,
feminine gender, I learned it from my mother."
     "Then it's sugrob in  Russian,"  said  Armande  and
added dryly: "Only there won't be much snow there in August."
     Julia  laughed.  Julia looked happy and healthy. Julia had
grown even prettier than she had been two years  ago.  Shall  I
now  see  her  in dreams with those new eyebrows, that new long
hair? How fast do dreams catch up with new fashions?  Will  the
next dream still stick to her Japanese-doll hairdo?
     "Let  me  order something for you," said Armande to Percy,
not making, however, the offering  gesture  that  usually  goes
with that phrase.
     Percy  thought  he  would like a cup of hot chocolate. The
dreadful fascination of meeting an old flame in public! Armande
had nothing to fear, naturally. She  was  in  a  totally
different  class, beyond competition. Hugh recalled R.'s famous
novella Three Tenses.
     "There was something else we didn't quite settle, Armande, or did we?"
     "Well, we spent two hours at it," remarked Armande, rather
grumpily -- not realizing, perhaps, that  she  had  nothing  to
fear.  The  fascination  was  of  a  totally  different, purely
intellectual or artistic order,  as  brought  out  so  well  in
Three  Tenses:  a fashionable man in a night-blue tuxedo
is supping on a  lighted  veranda  with  three  bare-shouldered
beauties,  Alice,  Beata,  and  Claire, who have never seen one
another before.  A.  is  a  former  love,  B.  is  his  present
mistress, C. is his future wife.
     He  regretted  now  not having coffee as Armande and Julia
were having. The chocolate proved unpalatable. You were  served
a cup of hot milk. You also got, separately, a little sugar and
a  dainty-looking  envelope of sorts. You ripped open the upper
margin of the envelope. You added the beige dust  it  contained
to  the ruthlessly homogenized milk in youi cup. You took a sip
-- and hurried to add sugar. But no  sugar  could  improve  the
insipid, sad, dishonest taste.
     Armande,  who had been following the various phases of his
astonishment and disbelief, smiled and said:
     "Now  you  know  what  'hot  chocolate'  has  come  to  in
Switzerland.  My  mother," she continued, turning to Julia (who
with the revelatory sans-géne of the Past Tense,  though
actually  she  prided herself on her reticence, had lunged with
her little spoon toward Hugh's cup and collected a sample), "my
mother actually broke into tears when she was first served this
stuff, because she remembered so tenderly the chocolate of  her
chocolate childhood."
     "Pretty  beastly,"  agreed  Julia,  licking her plump pale
lips, "but still I prefer it to our American fudge."
     "That's because you are the most unpatriotic  creature  in
the world," said Armande.
     The  charm  of  the Past Tense lay in its secrecy. Knowing
Julia, he was quite sure she  would  not  have  told  a  chance
friend  about their affair -- one sip among dozens of swallows.
Thus, at this  precious  and  brittle  instant,  Julia  and  he
(alias  Alice  and  the  narrator)  formed a pact of the
past,  an  impalpable  pact   directed   against   reality   as
represented   by   the   voluble   street   corner,   with  its
swish-passing automobiles, and trees, and strangers. The B.  of
the  trio  was  Busy  Witt, while the main stranger -- and this
touched off another thrill -- was his sweetheart of the morrow,
Armande, and Armande was as little aware of the  future  (which
the  author, of course, knew in every detail) as she was of the
past that Hugh now retasted with his brown-dusted mýk. Hugh,  a
sentimental  simpleton,  and  somehow  not  a  very good
Person (good ones are above that, he was merely a  rather  dear
one),  was  sorry  that  no  music  accompanied  the  scene, no
Rumanian fiddler dipped heartward  for  two  monogram-entangled
sakes.   There   was   not   even  a  mechanical  rendition  of
"Fascination" (a waltz) by the cafe's loudplayer.  Still  there
did  exist  a kind of supporting rhythm formed by the voices of
foot passengers, the clink of crockery, the  mountain  wind  in
the venerable mass of the corner chestnut.
     Presently,  they started to leave. Armande reminded him of
tomorrow's excursion. Julia shook hands with him and begged him
to pray  for  her  when  she  would  be  saying  to  that  very
passionate,  very  prominent  poet  je t'aime in Russian
which sounded in English (gargling  with  the  phrase)  "yellow
blue  tibia." They parted. The two girls got into Julia's smart
little car. Hugh Person started walking back to his hotel,  but
then pulled up short with a curse and went back to retrieve his
parcel.

14

     Friday morning. A quick Coke. A belch. A hurried shave. He
put on  his  ordinary  clothes,  throwing in the turtleneck for
style. Last interview with the mirror. He plucked a black  hair
out of a red nostril.
     The  first  disappointment  of  the day awaited him on the
stroke of seven at their rendezvous (the  post-office  square),
where  he  found  her  attended  by three young athletes, Jack,
Jake, and Jacques, whose copper  faces  he  had  seen  grinning
around  her  in  one  of  the  latest photographs of the fourth
album. Upon noticing the  sullen  way  his  Adam's  apple  kept
working  she  gaily  suggested  that perhaps he did not care to
join them after all "because we want to walk  up  to  the  only
cable  car  that  works  in  summer and that's quite a climb if
you're not used to it." White-toothed  Jacques,  half-embracing
the  pert  maiden, remarked confidentially that monsieur
should change into sturdier brogues, but Hugh retorted that  in
the  States  one hiked in any old pair of shoes, even sneakers.
"We hoped," said Armande, "we might induce you to learn skiing:
we keep all the gear up there, with the  fellow  who  runs  the
place,  and  he's  sure  to  find  something for you. You'll be
making tempo turns in five lessons. Won't you, Percy?  I  think
you  should  also  need  a parka, it may be summer here, at two
thousand feet, but you'll find polar conditions  at  over  nine
thousand."  "The  liittle  one  is  right,"  said  Jacques with
feigned admiration,  patting  her  on  the  shoulder.  "It's  a
forty-minute  saunter,"  said one of the twins. "Limbers you up
for the slopes.'"
     It soon transpired that Hugh would not be able to keep  up
with  them  and  reach the four-thousand-foot mark to catch the
gondola )ust north of Witt. The promised "stroll" proved to  be
a  horrible  hike,  worse  than  anything he had experienced on
school picnics in Vermont or New Hampshire. The trail consisted
of very steep ups and very slippery  downs,  and  gigantic  ups
again, along the side of the next mountain, and was full of old
ruts,  rocks, and roots. He labored, hot, wretched Hugh, behind
Armande's blond bun, while she lightly followed light  Jacques.
The  English  twins  made  up the rear guard. Possibly, had the
pace been a little more leisurely, Hugh might have managed that
simple climb, but his heartless and mindless  companions  swung
on  without  mercy,  practically bounding up the steep bits and
zestfully sliding down the declivities, which  Hugh  negotiated
with  outspread arms, in an attitude of entreaty. He refused to
borrow the stick he was  offered,  but  finally,  after  twenty
minutes of torment, pleaded for a short breathing spell. To his
dismay  not Armande but Jack and Jake stayed with him as he sat
on a stone, bending his head and  panting,  a  pearl  of  sweat
hanging from his pointed nose. They were taciturn twins and now
merely  exchanged  silent  glances as they stood a little above
him on the trail, arms akimbo. He felt  their  sympathy  ebbing
and  begged  them  to  continue  on  their way, he would follow
shortly. When they had gone he waited a little and then  limped
back to the village. At one spot between two forested stretches
he  rested  again,  this  time  on an open bluff where a bench,
eyeless but eager, faced an admirable view.  As  he  sat  there
smoking,  he noticed his party very high above him, blue, gray,
pink, red, waving to him  from  a  cliff.  He  waved  back  and
resumed his gloomy retreat.
     But  Hugh  Person  refused  to  give  up.  Mightily  shod,
alpenstocked, munching gum,  he  again  accompanied  them  next
morning.  He  begged  them to let him set his own pace, without
waiting for  him  anywhere,  and  he  would  have  reached  the
cableway had he not lost his bearings and ended up in a brambly
burn at the end of a logging road. Another attempt a day or two
later  was more successful. He almost reached timberline -- but
there the weather changed, a damp fog  enveloped  him,  and  he
spent  a  couple  of  hours  shivering  all  alone  in a smelly
shippon, waiting for the whirling mists to uncover the sun once
more.
     Another time he volunteered to carry after her a  pair  of
new  skis she had just acquired -- weird-looking, reptile-green
things made of metal and fiberglass. Their  elaborate  bindings
looked like first cousins of orthopèdie devices meant to help a
cripple  to  walk.  He  was  allowed to shoulder those precious
skis, which at first felt miraculously light but soon  grew  as
heavy  as great slabs of malachite, under which he staggered in
Armande's wake like a clown helping to change properties  in  a
circus  arena. His load was snatched from him as soon as he sat
down for a rest.  He  was  offered  a  paper  bag  (four  small
oranges) in exchange but he pushed it away without looking.
     Our  Person  was  obstinate  and  monstrously  in  love. A
fairy-tale element seemed to imbue with its Gothic  rose  water
all  attempts to scale the battlements of her Dragon. Next week
he made it and thereafter established  himself  as  less  of  a
nuisance.


15


     As  he  sat  sipping rum on the sun terrace of the Cafè du
Glacier below Drakonita Hut  and  rather  smugly  contemplated,
with the exhilaration of liquor in the mountain air, the skiing
area  (such  a  magic  sight  after  so  much  water and matted
grass!); as he took in the glaze of the upper  runs,  the  blue
herringbones   lower   down,  the  varicolored  little  figures
outlined by the brush of chance against the brilliant white  as
if  by  a  Flemish  master's  hand, Hugh told himself that this
might make an admirable  jacket  design  for  Christies  and
Other  Lassies,  a  great skier's autobiography (thoroughly
revised and enriched by a number of hands in the  office),  the
typescript  of  which he had recently copy-edited, querying, as
he  now  recalled,  such   terms   as   "godilles"   and
"wedeln"  (rom  ?).  It was fun to peer over one's third
drink at the painted little people skimming along, losing a ski
here, a pole there, or  victoriously  veering  in  a  spray  of
silver powder. Hugh Person, now shifting to kirsch, wondered if
he  could  force himself to follow her advice ("such a nice big
slouchy sporty-looking  Yank  and  can't  ski!")  and  identify
himself  with  this  or  that  chap charging straight down in a
stylish crouch, or else be doomed to repeat for ever  and  ever
the  after-fall  pause of a bulky novice asprawl on his back in
hopeless, good-humored repose.
     He never could pinpoint, with his dazzled and watery eyes,
Armande's silhouette among the skiers. Once,  however,  he  was
sure  he  had  caught her, floating and flashing, red-anoraked,
bare-headed, agonizingly graceful, there, there, and now there,
jumping a bump, shooting down nearer and nearer, going  into  a
tuck -- and abruptly changing into a goggled stranger.
     Presently  she  appeared from another side of the terrace,
in  glossy  green  nylon,  carrying  her  skis,  but  with  her
formidable  boots  still  on. He had spent enough time studying
skiwear in Swiss shops to  know  that  shoe  leather  had  been
replaced  by  plastic, and laces by rigid clips. "You look like
the first girl on the moon," he said, indicating her  .  boots,
and  if  they  had  not been especially close fitting she would
have wiggled her toes inside as a woman does when her  footwear
happens  to  be  discussed  in  flattering  terms (smiling toes
taking over the making of mouths).
     "Listen," she said as she considered  her  Mondstein  Sexy
(their  incredible  trade  name), "I'll leave my skis here, and
change into walking shoes and return  to  Witt  with  you  þ
deux. I've quarreled with Jacques, and he has left with his
dear friends. All is finished, thank God."
     Facing   him   in  the  heavenly  cable  car  she  gave  a
comparatively polite version of what she  was  to  tell  him  a
little later in disgustingly vivid detail. Jacques had demanded
her  presence  at the onanistic sessions he held with the Blake
twins at their chalet. Once already he had made Jack  show  her
his implement but she had stamped her foot and made them behave
themselves.  Jacques had now presented her with an ultimatum --
either she join them in their nasty games  or  he  would  cease
being  her lover. She was ready to be ultramodern, socially and
sexually, but this was offensive, and vulgar,  and  as  old  as
Greece.
     The  gondola  would have gone on gliding forever in a blue
haze sufficient for paradise had not a robust attendant stopped
it before it turned to reascend for good. They got out. It  was
spring in the shed where the machinery performed its humble and
endless  duty. Armande with a prim "excuse me" absented herself
for a moment. Cows stood among  the  dandelions  .outside,  and
radio music came from the adjacent buvette.
     In a timid tremor of young love Hugh wondered if he might dare kiss her at some likely pause in their walk down the winding path. He would try as soon as they reached the rhododendron belt where they might stop, she to shed her parka, he to remove a pebble from his right shoe. The rhododendrons and junipers gave way to alder, and the voice of familiar despair started urging him to put off the pebble and the butterfly kiss to some later occasion. They had entered the fir forest when she stopped, looked around, and said (as casually as if she were suggesting they pick mushrooms or raspberries) :
     "And  now  one  is going to make love. I know a nice mossy
spot just behind those trees where we won't  be  disturbed,  if
you do it quickly."
     Orange  peel marked the place. He wanted to embrace her in
the preliminaries required by his nervous flesh (the  "quickly"
was  a  mistake)  but  she withdrew with a fishlike flip of the
body, and sat down on the whortleberries to take off her  shoes
and  trousers.  He was further dismayed by the ribbed fabric of
thick-knit black tights that she wore under her ski pants.  She
consented  to pull them down only just as far as necessary. Nor
did she let him kiss her, or caress her thighs.
     "Well, bad luck," she said  finally  but  as  she  twisted
against  him  trying  to draw up her tights, he regained all at
once the power to do what was expected of  him.  "One  will  go
home  now,"  she  remarked  immediately afterwards in her usual
neutral  tone,  and  in  silence  they  continued  their  brisk
downhill walk.
     At  the  next  turn of the trail the first orchard of Witt
appeared at their feet, and farther  down  one  could  see  the
glint of a brook, a lumberyard, mown fields, brown cottages.
     "I  hate  Witt," said Hugh. "I hate life. I hate myself. I
hate that beastly old bench." She stopped to look the  way  his
fierce  finger pointed, and he embraced her. At first she tried
to evade his lips but he persisted desperately. All at once she
gave in, and the minor miracle happened. A shiver of tenderness
rippled her features,  as  a  breeze  does  a  reflection.  Her
eyelashes  were  wet,  her  shoulders  shook in his clasp. That
moment of soft agony was never to  be  repeated  --  or  rather
would  never  be  granted  the  time  to  come back again after
completing the cycle innate  in  its  rhythm;  yet  that  brief
vibration  in  which  she  dissolved  with  the sun, the cherry
trees, the  forgiven  landscape,  set  the  tone  for  his  new
existence  with  its  sense  of "all-is-well" despite her worst
moods, her silliest caprices, her harshest demands. That  kiss,
and  not anything preceding it, was the real beginning of their
courtship.
     She disengaged herself without a  word.  A  long  file  of
little boys followed by a scoutmaster climbed toward them along
the  steep  path.  One  of  them hoisted himself on an adjacent
round rock and jumped down with a  cheerful  squeal.  "Gruss
Gott,"  said  their teacher in passing by Armande and Hugh.
"Hello there," responded Hugh. "He'll think you're crazy," said
she.
     Through a beech grove and across a river, they reached the
outskirts of Witt. A short  cut  down  a  muddy  slope  between
half-built   chalets  took  them  to  Villa  Nastia.  Anastasia
Petrovna was in the kitchen, placing flowers  in  vases.  "Come
here.  Mamma,"  cried  Armande:  "Zheniba  privela, I've
brought my fiancè."



16


     Witt had a new tennis court. One  day  Armande  challenged
Hugh to a set.

     Ever  since  childhood  and its nocturnal fears, sleep had
been our Person's habitual problem. The problem was twofold. He
was obliged, sometimes for hours, to woo  the  black  automaton
with  an  automatic repetition of some active image -- that was
one trouble. The other referred to the quasi-insane state  into
which  sleep  put  him,  once it did come. He could not believe
that  decent  people  had  the  sort  of  obscene  and   absurd
nightmares  which  shattered  his night and continued to tingle
throughout the day. Neither  the  incidental  accounts  of  bad
dreams  reported  by friends nor the case histories in Freudian
dream  books,  with  their  hilarious  elucidations,  presented
anything  like  the  complicated vileness of his almost nightly
experience.
     In his adolescence he attempted to solve the first part of
the problem by an ingenious method  which  worked  better  than
pills  (these  if  too  mild  induced  too little sleep, and if
strong enhanced the vividness of monstrous visions). The method
he hit upon was repeating in mind with metronomic precision the
successive strokes of an outdoor game. The  only  game  he  had
ever  played  in  his  youth  and could still play at forty was
tennis. Not only did he play tolerably  well,  with  a  certain
easy  stylishness  (caught  years ago from a dashing cousin who
coached the boys at the New England school of which his  father
had  been headmaster), but he had invented a shot which neither
Guy, nor Guy's  brother-in-law,  an  even  finer  professional,
could  either  make or take. It had an element of art-for-art's
sake about it, since it could not deal with low, awkward balls,
required an ideally balanced stance (not easy to  assume  in  a
hurry) and, by itself, never won him a match. The Person Stroke
was executed with a rigid arm and blended a vigorous drive with
a clinging cut that followed the ball from the moment of impact
to  the  end of the stroke. The impact (and this was the nicest
part) had to occur at the far end of the racket's netting, with
the performer standing well away from the bounce  of  the  ball
and as it were reaching out for it. The bounce had to be fairly
high  for  the head of the racket to adhere properly, without a
shadow of "twist," and then to propel the  "glued"  ball  in  a
stiff  trajectory. If the "cling" was not enduring enough or if
it started too proximally, in the middle  of  the  racket,  the
result  was  a  very  ordinary,  floppy, slow-curving "galosh,"
quite  easy,  of  course,  to  return;  but   when   controlled
accurately,   the   stroke  reverberated  with  a  harsh  crack
throughout  one's  forearm  and  whizzed  off  in  a   strongly
controlled, very straight skim to a point near the baseline. On
hitting  the  ground  it clung to it in a way felt to be of the
same order as the adherence of the ball to the  strings  during
the  actual  stroke.  While  retaining its direct velocity, the
ball hardly rose from the  ground;  in  fact,  Person  believed
that,  with  tremendous, all-consuming practice, the shot could
be made nor to bounce at all  but  roll  with  lightning  speed
along  the  surface  of  the  court.  Nobody  could  return  an
unbouncing ball, and no doubt in the  near  future  such  shots
would  be  ruled  out  as  illegal spoilsports. But even in its
inventor's rough version it could be  delightfully  satisfying.
The  return was invariably botched in a most ludicrous fashion,
because of the low-darting ball refusing to be scooped up,  let
alone  properly  hit.  Guy and the other Guy were intrigued and
annoyed whenever Hugh managed to bring off his "cling drive" --
which unfortunately for him was not often. He recouped  himself
by  not telling the puzzled professionals, who tried to imitate
the stroke (and achieved merely a feeble spin), that the  trick
lay  not in the cut but in the cling, and not only in the cling
itself but in the place where it occurred at the  head  of  the
strings as well as in the rigidity of the reaching-out movement
of  the arm. Hugh treasured his stroke mentally for years, long
after the chances to use it dwindled to one or two shots  in  a
desultory game. (In fact, the last time he executed it was that
day  at  Witt  with Armande, whereupon she walked off the court
and could not be coaxed back.) Its chief use had been  a  means
of putting himself to sleep. In those predormitory exercises he
greatly   perfected   his   stroke,   such  as  quickening  its
preparation (when  tackling  a  fast  serve)  and  learning  to
reproduce  its  mirror  image  backhandedly (instead of running
around the ball  like  a  fool).  No  sooner  had  he  found  a
comfortable  place for his cheek on a cool soft pillow than the
familiar firm thrill would start running through his  arm,  and
he  would  be  slamming his way through one game after another.
There  were  additional  trimmings:  explaining  to  a   sleepy
reporter, "Cut it hard and yet keep it intact"; or winning in a
mist of well-being the Davis Cup brimming with the poppy.
     Why  did he give up that specific remedy for insomnia when
he married Armande? Surely not because she criticized  his  pet
stroke  as  an  insult  and  a  bore? Was it the novelty of the
shared bed, and the presence of another brain humming near his,
that disturbed the privacy of  the  somnorific  --  and  rather
sophomoric  --  routine?  Perhaps.  Anyhow  he  gave up trying,
persuaded himself that one or two entirely sleepless nights per
week constituted for him a harmless norm, and on  other  nights
contented  himself  with  reviewing  the  events of the day (an
automaton in its own right), the cares  and  misõres  of
routine  life  with  now  and then the peacock spot that prison
psychiatrists called "having sex."
     He had said that on top of the trouble in going to  sleep,
he experienced dream anguish?
     Dream  anguish  was  right!  He  might  vie  with the best
lunatics in regard  to  the  recurrence  of  certain  nightmare
themes.  In  some cases he could establish a first rough draft,
with versions following in well-spaced succession, changing  in
minute   detail,  polishing  the  plot,  introducing  some  new
repulsive situation, yet every time rewriting a version of  the
same,  otherwise  inexisting,  story.  Let's hear the repulsive
part. Well, one erotic dream in particular had  kept  recurring
with  cretinous  urgency over a period of several years, before
and after Armande's death. In that dream which the psychiatrist
(a weirdie, son of an  unknown  soldier  and  a  Gypsy  mother)
dismissed  as  "much  too  direct,"  he  was offered a sleeping
beauty on a great platter garnished with flowers, and a  choice
of  tools  on  a cushion. These differed in length and breadth,
and their number and assortment varied  from  dream  to  dream.
They  lay  in  a  row,  neatly  aligned:  a  yard-long  one  of
vulcanized rubber with  a  violet  head,  then  a  thick  short
burnished  bar,  then  again a thinnish skewerlike affair, with
rings of raw meat and translucent lard alternating, and  so  on
-- these  are  random  samples.  There  was  not  much sense in
selecting one rather than another -- the coral or  the  bronze,
or  the  terrible  rubber  -- since whatever he took changed in
shape and size, and could not be properly  fitted  to  his  own
anatomical  system,  breaking  off  at  the  burning  point  or
snapping in two between the legs or bones of the more  or  less
disarticulated  lady.  He desired to stress the following point
with the fullest, fiercest, anti-Freudian force. Those  oneiric
torments  had nothing to do, either directly or in a "symbolic"
sense, with anything he had experienced in conscious life.  The
erotic  theme  was just one theme among others, as A Boy for
Pleasure remained just an extrinsic whimsy in  relation  to
the  whole  fiction  of the serious, too serious writer who had
been satirized in a recent novel.
     In another no less ominous nocturnal experience, he  would
find  himself  trying  to  stop or divert a trickle of grain or
fine gravel from a rift in  the  texture  of  space  and  being
hampered  in  every conceivable respect by cobwebby, splintery,
filamentary  elements,  confused  heaps  and  hollows,  brittle
debris, collapsing colossuses. He was finally blocked by masses
of  rubbish,  and  that  was death. Less frightening but
perhaps imperiling a person's brain to an even  greater  extent
were  the  "avalanche" nightmares at the rush of awakening when
their imagery turned into the movement of  verbal  colluvia  in
the  valleys  of  Toss  and  Thurn,  whose  gray rounded rocks.
Roches ètonnèes, are so termed because of their  puzzled
and    grinning    surface,    marked    by    dark   "goggles"
(ecarquillages). Dream-man is an idiot not wholly devoid
of animal cunning; the fatal flaw in his  mind  corresponds  to
the splutter produced by tongue twisters: "the risks scoundrels
take."
     He  was  told  what  a pity he had not seen his analyst as
soon as the nightmares grew worse. He replied 'he did  not  own
one.  Very  patiently  the doctor rejoined that the pronoun had
been used not possessively but domestically as, for example, in
advertisements: "Ask your grocer." Had Armande  ever  consulted
an  analyst? If that was a reference 'to Mrs. Person and not to
a child or a cat, then the answer was no. As a girl she  seemed
to  have been interested in Neobuddhism and that sort of stuff,
but in America new friends urged her to  get,  what  you  call,
analyzed  and  she  said  she might try it after completing her
Oriental studies. He was advised that in  calling  her  by  her
first  name  one simply meant to induce an informal atmosphere.
One always  did  that.  Only  yesterday  one  had  put  another
prisoner  completely at ease by saying: You'd better tell Uncle
your dreams or you might burn. Did Hugh, or rather Mr.  Person,
have  "destructive  urges"  in his dreams -- this was something
that had not been made  sufficiently  clear.  The  term  itself
might not be sufficiently clear. A sculptor could sublimate the
destructive  urge  by attacking an inanimate object with chisel
and hammer. Major surgery offered one of the most useful  means
of  draining  off  the destructive urge: a respected though not
always lucky practitioner had admitted privately how  difficult
he  found  it  to  stop himself from hacking out every organ in
sight during an operation. Everyone had secret tensions  stored
up  from  infancy. Hugh need not be ashamed of them. In fact at
puberty sexual desire arises as a substitute for the desire  to
kill, which one normally fulfills in one's dreams; and insomnia
is  merely  the  fear  of  becoming  aware  in  sleep  of one's
unconscious desires for slaughter and sex. About eighty percent
of all dreams enjoyed by adult males are sexual.  See  Clarissa
Dark's  findings  --  she  investigated  singlehanded  some two
hundred healthy jailbirds  whose  terms  of  imprisonment  were
shortened,  of  course,  by  the  number of nights spent in the
Center's dormitory. Well, one hundred seventy-eight of the  men
were  seen to have powerful erections during the stage of sleep
called HAREM ("Has A Rapid Eye  Movement")  marked  by  visions
causing  a  lustful ophthalmic roll, a kind of internal ogling.
By the way, when did Mr. Person begin to hate Mrs.  Person?  No
answer.  Was  hate, maybe, part of his feeling for her from the
very first moment? No answer. Did he ever buy her a  turtleneck
sweater?  No answer. Was he annoyed when she found it too tight
at the throat?
     "I shall vomit," said Hugh, "if you persist  in  pestering
me with all that odious rot."


17


     We shall now discuss love.
     What  powerful  words,  what weapons, are stored up in the
mountains, at suitable spots, in special caches of the  granite
heart,  behind  painted  surfaces of steel made to resemble the
mottling of the adjacent rocks! But when moved to  express  his
love,  in the days of brief courtship and marriage, Hugh Person
did not know where to look for words that would  convince  her,
that would touch her, that would bring bright tears to her hard
dark  eyes!  Per  contra,  something  he  said  by  chance, not
planning the pang and the poetry, some  trivial  phrase,  would
prompt  suddenly  a  hysterically happy response on the part of
that dry-souled, essentially unhappy woman. Conscious  attempts
failed.  If,  as  happened  sometimes, at the grayest of hours,
without the remotest sexual intent, he interrupted his  reading
to  walk  into her room and advance toward her on his knees and
elbows like an ecstatic, undescribed, unarboreal sloth, howling
his adoration, cool Armande would tell him to get up  and  stop
playing  the  fool. The most ardent addresses he could think up
-- my  princess,  my  sweetheart,  my  angel,  my  animal,   my
exquisite beast -- merely exasperated her. "Why," she inquired,
"can't you talk to me in a natural human manner, as a gentleman
talks  to  a lady, why must you put on such a clownish act, why
can't you be serious, and plain, and believable?" But love,  he
said,   was  anything  but  believable,  real  life  was
ridiculous, yokels laughed at love. He tried to kiss the hem of
her skirt or bite the crease of her trouserleg, her instep, the
toe of her furious foot -- and as he  groveled,  his  unmusical
voice  muttering  maudlin,  exotic,  rare,  common nothings and
every-things,  into  his  own  ear,  as  it  were,  the  simple
expression   of   love   became  a  kind  of  degenerate  avian
performance executed by the male alone, with no female in sight
-- long  neck  straight,  then  curved,   beak   dipped,   neck
straightened  again.  It all made him ashamed of himself but he
could not stop and she could not understand, for at such  times
he never came up with the right word, the right waterweed.
     He  loved  her  in spite of her unlovableness. Armande had
many trying, though not necessarily rare, traits, all of  which
he  accepted as absurd clues in a clever puzzle. She called her
mother, to her  face,  skotina,  "brute"  --  not  being
aware,  naturally,  that  she  would  never see her again after
leaving with Hugh for New York and death.  She  liked  to  give
carefully  planned  parties, and no matter how long ago this or
that gracious gathering had taken place  (ten  months,  fifteen
months,  or  even  earlier before her marriage, at her mother's
house in Brussels or Witt) every party and topic  remained  for
ever  preserved  in  the  humming  frost  of her tidy mind. She
visualized those parties in retrospect as stars on the veil  of
the  undulating  past, and saw her guests as the extremities of
her own personality: vulnerable points that had to  be  treated
thenceforth  with  nostalgic respect. If Julia or June remarked
casually that they had  never  met  art  critic  C.  (the  late
Charles  Chamar's  cousin),  whereas  both  Julia  and June had
attended the party, as registered in Armande's mind, she  might
get  very  nasty, denouncing the mistake in a disdainful drawl,
and adding, with belly-dance contortions:  "In  that  case  you
must  have forgotten also the little sandwiches from Põre Igor"
(some special shop) "which you enjoyed so much." Hugh had never
seen such a vile temper, such  morbid  amour-propre,  so
self-centered  a  nature.  Julia, who had skied and skated with
her, thought her a darling, but most women criticized her,  and
in  telephone  chats  with  one  another  mimicked  her  rather
pathetic little tricks of attack and retort. If anybody started
to say "Shortly before I broke my leg -- " she would  chime  in
with  the  triumphant:  "And I broke both in my childhood!" For
some occult  reason  she  used  an  ironic  and  on  the  whole
disagreeable  tone  of  voice  when  addressing  her husband in
public.
     She had strange whims. During their honeymoon  in  Stresa,
on  their  last  night there (his New York office was clamoring
for  his  return),  she   decided   that   last   nights   were
statistically  the  most  dangerous ones in hotels without fire
escapes, and their hotel looked indeed most combustible,  in  a
massive old-fashioned way. For some reason or other, television
producers  consider  that  there is nothing more photogenic and
universally fascinating than a good fire. Armande, viewing  the
Italian  telenews,  had  been upset or feigned to be upset (she
was fond of making herself interesting) by one such calamity on
the local screen -- little flames like  slalom  flaglets,  huge
ones like sudden demons, water squirting in intersecting curves
like  so  many rococo fountains, and fearless men in glistening
oilskin who directed all  sorts  of  muddled  operations  in  a
fantasy  of  smoke  and  destruction.  That night at Stresa she
insisted they rehearse (he in his sleeping  shorts,  she  in  a
Chudo-Yudo  pajama)  an  acrobatic escape in the stormy murk by
climbing down the overdecorated face of their hotel, from their
fourth story to the second one, and thence to  the  roof  of  a
gallery   amidst   tossing  remonstrative  trees.  Hugh  vainly
reasoned with her. The spirited girl affirmed that as an expert
rock-climber she knew it could be done by using footholds which
various applied ornaments, generous juttings and little  railed
balconies  here  and  there provided for one's careful descent.
She ordered Hugh to follow her and train an electric  torch  on
her  from  above.  He was also supposed to keep close enough to
help her  if  need  be  by  holding  her  suspended,  and  thus
increased  in  vertical  length, while she probed the next step
with a bare toe.
     Hugh, despite forelimb strength, was  a  singularly  inept
anthropoid.  He  badly messed up the exploit. He got stuck on a
ledge  just  under  their  balcony.   His   flashlight   played
erratically  over  a  small  part of the faãade before slipping
from his grasp. He called down from his perch entreating her to
return. Underfoot a shutter opened abruptly.  Hugh  managed  to
scramble  back onto his balcony, still roaring her name, though
persuaded by now that she had  perished.  Eventually,  however,
she  was  located  in  a  third-floor  room  where he found her
wrapped up in a blanket smoking peacefully, supine on  the  bed
of  a  stranger,  who  sat  in  a  chair  by the bed, reading a
magazine.
     Her sexual oddities perplexed and distressed Hugh. He  put
up  with them during their trip. They became routine stuff when
he returned with a difficult bride to his New  York  apartment.
Armande decreed they regularly make love around teatime, in the
living  room,  as  upon  an  imaginary  stage,  to  the  steady
accompaniment  of  casual  small  talk,  with  both  performers
decently  clothed,  he  wearing  his  best  business suit and a
polka-dotted tie, she a smart black dress closed at the throat.
In concession to nature, undergarments could be parted, or even
undone, but only very, very discreetly, without the least break
in the elegant chit-chat: impatience was  pronounced  unseemly,
exposure,  monstrous. A newspaper or coffee-table book hid such
preparations as he absolutely had to  conduct,  wretched  Hugh,
and  woe  to  him  if  he  winced  or fumbled during the actual
commerce; but far worse than the awful pull of  long  underwear
in  the  chaos  of his pinched crotch or the crisp contact with
her  armor-smooth  stockings  was  the  prerequisite  of  light
colloquy,  about acquaintances, or politics, or zodiacal signs,
or servants, and in the meantime, with  visible  hurry  banned,
the  poignant  work  had  to  be  brought  surreptitiously to a
convulsive  end  in  a  twisted  half-sitting  position  on  an
uncomfortable  little  divan. Hugh's mediocre potency might not
have survived the  ordeal  had  she  concealed  from  him  more
completely than she thought she did the excitement derived from
the  contrast  between  the  fictitious  and  the  factual -- a
contrast  which  after  all  has  certain  claims  to  artistic
subtlety  if  we  recall  the  customs  of  certain Far Eastern
people, virtually halfwits in  many  other  respects.  But  his
chief support lay in the never deceived expectancy of the dazed
ecstasy   that   gradually   idiotized   her   dear   features,
notwithstanding her efforts to maintain the flippant patter. In
a sense he preferred the parlor setting to the even less normal
decor of those rare occasions when she desired him  to  possess
her  in  bed,  well under the bedclothes, while she telephoned,
gossiping .with a female friend or hoaxing an unknown male. Our
Person's capacity to  condone  all  this,  to  find  reasonable
explanations and so forth, endears him to us, but also provokes
limpid mirth, alas, at times. For example, he told himself that
she  refused  to  strip because she was shy of her tiny pouting
breasts and the scar of a ski accident along her  thigh.  Silly
Person!
     Was  she  faithful  to  him throughout the months of their
marriage spent in frail, lax, merry America? During their first
and last winter there she went a few times to ski without  him,
at  Aval,  Quebec, or Chute, Colorado.. While alone, he forbade
himself to dwell in thought on the banalities  of  '  betrayal,
such as holding hands with a chap or permitting him to kiss her
good  night. Those banalities were to him quite as excruciating
to imagine as would be voluptuous intercourse. A steel door  of
the  spirit remained securely shut as long as she was away, but
no sooner had she arrived, her face brown and shiny, her figure
as trim as that . of an air hostess, in  that  blue  coat  with
flat  buttons  as  bright  as  counters of gold, than something
ghastly opened up in him and a  dozen  lithe  athletes  started
swarming  around  and prying her apart in all the motels of his
mind, although actually, as  we  know,  she  had  enjoyed  full
conjunction  with  only  a  dozen crack lovers in the course of
three trips.
     Nobody, least of all  her  mother,  could  understand  why
Armande  married  a  rather  ordinary  American with a not very
solid jt"b, but we must end now our discussion of love.


18


     In the second week of February,  about  one  month  before
death separated them, the Persons flew over to Europe for a few
days:  Armande, to visit her mother dying in a Belgian hospital
(the dutiful daughter came too late), and Hugh, at  his  firm's
request,  to  look  up Mr. R. and another American writer, also
residing in Switzerland.
     It was raining hard when a taxi deposited him in front  of
R.'s big, old, and ugly country house above Versex. He made his
way  up  a  graveled  path  between streams of bubbly rainwater
running on both sides of it. He found the front door ajar,  and
while tramping the mat noticed with amused surprise Julia Moore
standing  with  her  back  to him at the telephone table in the
vestibule. She now wore again the pretty pageboy hairdo of  the
past  and  the  same' orange blouse. He had finished wiping his
feet when she put back the receiver and  turned  out  to  be  a
totally different girl.
     "Sorry  to  have made you wait," she said, fixing on him a
pair of smiling eyes.  "I'm  replacing  Mr.  Tamworth,  who  is
vacationing in Morocco."
     Hugh  Person  entered the library, a comfortably furnished
but decidedly  old-fashioned  and  quite  inadequately  lighted
room,  lined with encyclopedias, dictionaries, directories, and
the author's copies of the author's books in multiple  editions
and  translations.  He sat down in a club chair and drew a list
of points to be discussed from  his  briefcase.  The  two  main
questions  were:  how  to  alter  certain much too recognizable
people in the typescript of Tralatitions and what to  do
with that commercially impossible title.
     Presently  R. came in. He had not shaved for three or four
days  and  wore  ridiculous  blue  overalls  which   he   found
convenient   for  distributing  about  him  the  tools  of  his
profession, such as pencils, ball pens, three pairs of glasses,
cards, jumbo clips, elastic bands, and -- in an invisible state
-- the dagger which after a few words of welcome he pointed  at
our Person.
     "I  can  only repeat," he said, collapsing in the armchair
vacated by Hugh and motioning him to a  similar  one  opposite,
"what  I  said  not once but often already: you can alter a cat
but you cannot alter my characters. As to the title, which is a
perfectly respectable synonym of the word 'metaphor,' no savage
steeds will pull it from under me. My doctor  advised  Tamworth
to  lock up my cellar, which he did and concealed the key which
the locksmith will not be able to duplicate before  Monday  and
I'm  too  proud,  you know, to buy the cheap wines they have in
the village, so all I can offer you -- you shake your  head  in
advance  and  you're  jolly  right,  son -- is a can of apricot
juice. Now allow me to talk to you about titles and libels. You
know, that letter you wrote me tickled me black in the face.  I
have  been  accused  of  trifling  with  minors,  but  my minor
characters are untouchable, if you permit me a pun."
     He went on to explain that if your true artist had  chosen
to  form  a  character on the basis of a living individual, any
rewriting aimed at disguising that character was tantamount  to
destroying  the  living prototype as would driving, you know, a
pin through a little doll of clay, and the girl next door falls
dead. If the composition was artistic,  if  it  held  not  only
water  but  wine,  then  it  was  invulnerable in one sense and
horribly fragile in another.  Fragile,  because  when  a  timid
editor  made the artist change "slender" to "plump," or "brown"
to "blond" he disfigured both the image and the niche where  it
stood  and  the  entire  chapel  around  it;  and invulnerable,
because no matter how drastically you changed  the  image,  its
prototype  would  remain  recognizable by the shape of the hole
left in the texture of the tale. But apart from all  that,  the
customers  whom  he  was accused of portraying were much
too cool to announce their presence and  their  resentment.  In
fact  they  would  rather  enjoy  listening  to  the  tattle in
literary salons with a little knowing air, as the French say.
     The question of the title --  Tralatitions  --  was
another  kettle of fish. Readers did not realize that two types
of title existed. One type was the  title  found  by  the  dumb
author or the clever publisher after the book had been written.
.  That  was simply a label stuck on and tapped with the
side ' of the fist. Most of our  worst  best-sellers  had  that
kind  of  title.  But  there was the other kind: the title that
.shone through the book like a watermark, the  title  that  was
born  with the book, the title to which the author had grown so
accustomed during the years of accumulating the  written  pages
that  it  had  become part of each and of all. No, Mr. R. could
not give up Tralatitions.
     Hugh made bold to remark that the tongue tended to substitute an "l" for the ãecond of the three "ts." "The tongue of ignorance," shouted Mr. R. His pretty little secretary tripped in and announced that he should not get excited or tired. The great man rose with an effort and stood quivering and grinning, and proffering a large hairy hand. "Well," said Hugh, "I shall certainly tell Phil how strongly you feel about the points he has raised. Good-bye, sir, you will be getting a sample of the jacket design next week." "So long and soon see," said Mr. R.



19


     We are back in New York and this  is  their  last  evening
together.
     After  serving  them  an excellent supper (a little on the
rich side, perhaps, but not overabundant -- neither was  a  big
eater)  obese  Pauline,  the -femme de mènage, whom they
shared with a Belgian artist in the penthouse immediately above
them, washed the dishes and"  left  at  her  usual  hour  (nine
fifteen  or thereabouts). Since she had the annoying propensity
of sitting down for a moment to enjoy  a  bit  of  TV,  Armande
always  waited  for  her to have gone before running it for her
own pleasure. She now turned it on, let it live for  a  moment,
changed  channels  --  and  killed  the picture with a snort of
disgust (her likes and dislikes in  these  matters  lacked  all
logic,  she  might  watch  one  or two programs with passionate
regularity or on the contrary not touch the set for a  week  as
if  punishing  that marvelous invention for a misdemeanor known
only to her, and Hugh preferred to  ignore  her  obscure  feuds
with  actors  and  commentators).  She  opened a book, but here
Phil's wife rang up to invite her on the morrow to the  preview
of  a  Lesbian  drama  with  a Lesbian cast. Their conversation
lasted  twenty-five  minutes,  Armande  using  a   confidential
undertone,  and  Phyllis  speaking so sonorously that Hugh, who
sat at a round table correcting a batch of galleys, could  have
heard, had he felt so inclined, both sides of the trivial
     torrent.  He  contented  himself  instead  with the resume
Ar-piande gave him upon returning to the settee of  gray  plush
near the fake fireplace. As had happened on previous occasions,
around  ten  o'clock  a  most  jarring  succession of bumps and
scrapes suddenly came from above: it was  the  cretin  upstairs
dragging  a heavy piece of inscrutable sculpture (catalogued as
"Pauline anide") from the center of his  studio  to  the
corner  it  occupied  at night. In invariable response, Armande
glared at the ceiling and remarked that in the case of  a  less
amiable and helpful neighbor she would have complained long ago
to  Phil's  cousin  (who  managed  the  apartment  house). When
placidity was restored, she started to look for  the  book  she
had  had  in  her  hand  before the telephone rang. Her husband
always felt a flow of special tenderness that reconciled him to
the boring or brutal ugliness of what  not  very  happy  people
call  "life"  every  time  that  he  noted  in neat, efficient,
clear-headed Armande  the  beauty  and  helplessness  of  human
abstraction. He now found the object of her pathetic search (it
was  in  the  magazine  rack  near  the  telephone)  and, as he
restored it to her, he was allowed to touch with reverent  lips
her temple and a strand of blond hair. Then he went back to the
galleys of Tralatitions and she to her book, which was a
French  touring  guide  that  listed many splendid restaurants,
forked  and  starred,  but  not  very  many  "pleasant,  quiet,
well-situated  hotels" with three or more turrets and sometimes
a little red songbird on a twig.
     "Here's a cute coincidence," observed Hugh.  "One  of  his
characters,  in  a rather bawdy passage -- by the way should it
be 'Savoie' or 'Savoy'?" "What's the coincidence?"
     "Oh. One of his characters is consulting a  Michelin,  and
says:  there's many a mile between Condom in Gascogne and Pussy
in Savoie."
     "The Savoy is a hotel," said  Armande  and  yawned  twice,
first with clenched jaws, then openly. "I don't know why I'm so
tired," she added, "but I know all this yawning only sidetracks
sleep. I think I'll sample my new tablets tonight."
     "Try  imagining you're skimming on skis down a very smooth
slope. I used to play tennis mentally when I was young  and  it
often helped, especially with new, very white balls."
     She  remained seated, lost in thought, for another moment,
then red-ribboned the  place  and  went  for  a  glass  to  the
kitchen.
     Hugh  liked  to  read  a set of proofs twice, once for the
defects of the type and once for the virtues of  the  text.  It
worked better, he believed, if the eye check came first and the
mind's  pleasure next. He was now enjoying the latter and while
not looking for errors, still had a chance to  catch  a  missed
boo-boo  -- his own or the printer's. He also permitted himself
to query, with the utmost diffidence, in the margin of a second
copy (meant for the author), certain  idiosyncrasies  of  style
and  spelling,  hoping  the great man would understand that not
genius but grammar was being questioned.
     After a long consultation with Phil it  had  been  decided
not  to  do  anything about the risks of defamation involved in
the frankness with which  R.  described  his  complicated  love
life. He had "paid for it once in solitude and remorse, and now
was  ready  to  pay  in hard cash any fool whom his story might
hurt"  (abridged  and  simplified  citation  from  his   latest
letter).  In  a  long  chapter  of a much more libertine nature
(despite the grandiose wording)  than  the  jock  talk  of  the
fashionable  writers  he  criticized,  R.  showed  a mother and
daughter regaling their young lover with  spectacular  caresses
on  a  mountain  ledge  above  a scenic chasm and in other less
perilous spots. Hugh did not know Mrs. R. intimately enough  to
assess  her  resemblance  to  the  matron  of  the  book (loppy
breasts, flabby thighs, coon-bear grunts during copulation, and
so  forth);  but  the  daughter  in  manner  and  movement,  in
breathless speech, in many other features with which he was not
consciously   familiar   but  which  fitted  the  picture,  was
certainly  Julia,  although  the  author  had  made  her
fair-haired,  and  played  down  the  Eurasian  quality  of her
beauty. Hugh read with interest and concentration, but  through
the  translucidity  of the textual flow he still was correcting
proof as some of us try to do -- mending a broken letter  here,
indicating  italics  there,  his  eye  and  his spine (the true
reader's main organ) collaborating rather than  occluding  each
other.  Sometimes  he  wondered what the phrase really meant --
what exactly did "rimiform" suggest  and  how  did  a  "balanic
plum"  look,  or  should  he cap the 'b' and insert a 'k' after
'1'? The dictionary he used at home was less  informative  than
the  huge  battered one in the office and he was now slumped by
such beautiful things as "all the gold of a kew  tree"  and  "a
dappled  nebris."  He queried the middle word in the name of an
incidental character "Adam von  Librikov"  because  the  German
particle  seemed  to  clash  with  the  rest; or was the entire
combination a sly scramble? He finally crossed out  his  query,
but on the other hand reinstated the "Reign of Cnut" in another
passage:  a  humbler  proofreader  before him had supposed that
either the letters in the last word  should  be  transposed  or
that  it  be  corrected  to  "the  Knout" -- she was of Russian
descent, like Armande.
     Our Person, our reader, was not sure he entirely  approved
of  R.'s  luxuriant  and  bastard style; yet, at its best ("the
gray rainbow  of  a  fog-dogged  moon"),  it  was  diabolically
evocative.  He  also  caught himself trying to establish on the
strength of fictional data at what age, in what


20


     It was past eleven by now. He put out the  lights  in  the
living  room and opened the window. The windy March night found
something to finger in the room.  An  electric  sign,  doppler,
shifted to violet through the half-drawn curtains and illumined
the deadly white papers he had left on the table.
     He  let  his  eyes  get  used to the obscurity in the next
room, and presently  stole  in.  Her  first  sleep  was  marked
usually by a clattering snore. One could not help marveling how
such  a  slender  and dainty girl could churn up so ponderous a
vibration. It had bothered Hugh at the  early  stage  of  their
marriage  because  of  the  implicit threat of its going on all
night. But something, some outside noise,  or  a  jolt  in  her
dream,  or  the  discreet  clearing of a meek husband's throat,
caused her to stir, to sigh, to smack  her  lips,  perhaps,  or
turn  on her side, after which she slept mutely. This change of
rhythm had apparently taken place while he was still working in
the parlor; and now, lest the entire cycle recur, he  tried  to
undress as quietly as possible. He later remembered pulling out
very  gingerly  an  exceptionally creaky drawer (whose voice he
never noticed at other times) to get a fresh pair of the briefs
which he wore in lieu of pajamas. He swore under his breath  at
the  old  wood's  stupid  plaint and refrained from pushing the
drawer back; but the floor boards  took  over  as  soon  as  he
started  to tiptoe to his side of the double bed. Did that wake
her? Yes, it did, hazily, or at least teased a hole in the hay,
and she murmured something about the light. Actually  all  that
impinged  on  the  darkness  was an angled beam from the living
room, the door of which he had left  a)ar.  He  now  closed  it
gently as he groped his way to the bed.
     He   lay  open-eyed  for  a  while  listening  to  another
tenacious  small  sound,  the  pinking  of  waterdrops  on  the
linoleum  under  a defective radiator. You said you thought you
were in for a sleepless night? Not exactly.  He  felt  in  fact
quite sleepy and in no need of the alarmingly effective "Murphy
Pill"  which  he  resorted  to  now  and  then; but despite the
drowsiness he was aware that a number of worries had  crept  up
ready  to  pounce.  What  worries?  Ordinary ones, nothing very
serious or special. He lay on his  back  waiting  for  them  to
collect,  which  they  did  in  unison  with  the pale blotches
stealing up to take their accustomed position upon the  ceiling
as  his  eyes  got used to the dark. He reflected that his wife
was again feigning a feminine ailment to keep  him  away;  that
she  probably  cheated in many other ways; that he too betrayed
her in a sense by concealing from her the one night spent  with
another  girl, premaritally, in terms of time, but spatially in
this  very  room;  that  preparing  other  people's  books  for
publication  was  a  debasing  job; that no manner of permanent
drudgery or temporary dissatisfaction mattered in the  face  of
his  ever growing, ever more tender, love for his wife; that he
would have to consult an ophthalmologist sometime  next  month.
He  substituted  an  'n'  for the wrong letter and continued to
scan the motley proof into which the blackness of closed vision
was now turning. A double  systole  catapulted  him  into  full
consciousness  again, and he promised his uncorrected self that
he would limit his daily ration of cigarettes to  a  couple  of
heartbeats.
     "And then you dropped off?"
     "Yes.  I may have still struggled to make out a vague line
of print but -- yes, I slept."
     "Fitfully, I imagine?"
     "No, on the contrary, my sleep was never deeper. You  see,
I had not slept for more than a few minutes the night before."
     "O.K.  Now  I  wonder  if you are aware that psychologists
attached to  great  prisons  must  have  studied,  among  other
things,  that  part  of  thanatology which deals with means and
methods of violent death?"
     Person emitted a weary negative sound.
     "Well, let me put it this way: the  police  like  to  know
what tool was used by the offender; the thanatologist wishes to
know why and how it was used. Clear so far?"
     Weary affirmative.
     "Tools  are,  well  --  tools.  They  may,  in fact, be an
integral part of the worker, as, say, the carpenter's square is
indeed part of the carpenter. Or the tools may be of flesh  and
bone  like  these"  (taking Hugh's hands, patting each in turn,
placing them on his palms for display or as if  to  begin  some
children's game).
     His  huge  hands  were  returned  to  Hugh  like two empty
dishes. Next, it was explained to  him  that  in  strangling  a
young   adult  one  of  two  methods  was  commonly  used:  the
amateurish, none too efficient, frontal attack,  and  the  more
professional  approach  made  from behind. In the first method,
the eight fingers stiffly encircle the victim's neck while  the
two  thumbs  compress his or her throat; one runs, however, the
risk of her or his hands  seizing  one's  wrists  or  otherwise
fighting  off  the  assault.  The  second, much safer way, from
behind, consists in pressing both thumbs hard against the  back
of  the  boy's or, preferably, girl's neck and working upon the
throat with one's fingers. The first hold is  dubbed  among  us
"Pouce,"  the second "Fingerman." We know you attacked from the
rear, but the following question arises: when  you  planned  to
throttle  your  wife  why did you choose the Fingerman? Because
you instinctively  felt  that  its  sudden  and  vigorous  grip
presented  the  best  chance of success? Or did you have other,
subjective, considerations in  mind,  such  as  thinking  you'd
really  hate  to watch lier changes of facial expression during
the process?
     He did not plan anything.  He  had  slept  throughout  the
horrible  automatic act, waking up only when both had landed on
the floor by the bed. He had mentioned dreaming the  house  was
on  fire?  That's right. Flames spurted all around and whatever
one saw came through scarlet strips of  vitreous  plastic.  His
chance bedmate had flung the window wide open. Oh, who was she?
She  came  from  the past -- a streetwalker he had picked up on
his first trip abroad, some twenty years ago, a  poor  girl  of
mixed  parentage,  though  actually  American  and  very sweet,
called Giulia Romeo, the surname  means  "pilgrim"  in  archaic
Italian,  but  then  we  all  are  pilgrims, and all dreams are
anagrams of diurnal reality. He dashed after her  to  stop  her
from  jumping our. The window was large and low; it had a broad
sill padded and sheeted, as was customary in  that  country  of
ice and fire. Such glaciers, such dawns! Giulia, or Julie, wore
a  Doppler  shift over her luminous body and prostrated herself
on the sill, with outspread arms still touching  the  wings  of
the  window.  He glanced down across her, and there, far below,
in the chasm of the yard or garden, the selfsame  flames  moved
like  those  tongues  of red paper which a concealed ventilator
causes to flicker around imitation yule  logs  in  the  festive
shopwindows  of  snowbound childhoods. To leap, or try to lower
oneself  on  knotted  ledgelinen  (the   knotting   was   being
demonstrated  by  a  medievalish,  sort of Flemish, long-necked
shopgirl in a speculum at the back of his dream), seemed to him
madness, and poor Hugh did all he  could  to  restrain  Juliet.
Trying  for  the best hold, he had clutched her around the neck
from  behind,  his  square-nailed  thumbs  digging   into   her
violet-lit  nape,  his  eight fingers compressing her throat. A
writhing windpipe was being shown on a screen of science cinema
across the yard or street, but  for  the  rest  everything  had
become  quite  secure  and  comfortable:  he  had clamped Julia
nicely and would have saved her from certain death  if  in  her
suicidal  struggle  to escape from the fire she had not slipped
somehow over the sill and taken him with  her  into  the  void.
What a fall! What a silly Julia! What luck that Mr. Romeo still
gripped and twisted and cracked that crooked cricoid as X-rayed
by  the  firemen  and  mountain  guides in the street. How they
flew! Superman carrying a young soul in his embrace!
     The impact of the ground was far less brutal than  he  had
expected.  This  is  a bravura piece and not a patient's dream,
Person. I shall have to report you. He hurt his elbow, and  her
night table collapsed with the lamp, a tumbler, a book; but Art
be  praised  --  she  was safe, she was with him, she was lying
quite still. He groped for the fallen lamp and neatly lit it in
its unusual position. For a moment he wondered  what  his  wife
was doing there, prone on the floor, her fair hair spread as if
she were flying. Then he stared at his bashful claws.


21


     Dear Phil,
     This,  no  doubt,  is  my  last letter to you. I am
leaving  you.  I  am  leaving  you  for  another  even  greater
Publisher. In that House I shall be proofread by cherubim -- or
misprinted  by devils, depending on the department my poor soul
is assigned to. So  adieu,  dear  friend,  and  may  your  heir
auction this off most profitably.
     Its  holographical  nature is explained by the fact that I
prefer it not to be read by Tom Tarn or one of his boy typists.
I am mortally sick  after  a  botched  operation  in  the  only
private  room of a Bolognese hospital. The kind young nurse who
will mail  it  has  told  me  with  dreadful  carving  gestures
something I paid her for as generously as I would her favors if
I  still were a man. Actually the favors of death knowledge are
infinitely more precious than those of love.  According  to  my
almond-eyed  little  spy,  the great surgeon, may his own liver
rot, lied to me when he declared yesterday with a  "deathhead's
grin that the operazione had been perfetta. Well,
it  had  been  so  in  the  sense Euler called zero the perfect
number. Actually, they ripped me open, cast one horrified  look
at  my  decayed fegato, and without touching it sewed me
up again. I shall not bother you with the Tamworth problem. You
should have seen the smug expression  of  the  oblong  fellow's
bearded lips when he visited me this morning. As you know -- as
everybody,  even Marion, knows -- he gnawed his way into all my
affairs,  crawling  into   every   cranny,   collecting   every
German-accented  word  of  mine, so that now he can boswell the
dead man just as he had bossed very well the living one.  I  am
also writing my and your lawyer about the measures I would like
to  be  taken after my departure in order to thwart Tamworth at
every turn of his labyrinthian plans.
     The only child I have ever loved is the ravishing,  silly,
treacherous  little  Julia  Moore.  Every  cent  and  centime I
possess as well as all literary remains that can be twisted out
of Tamworth's clutches must go to her, whatever  the  ambiguous
obscurities  contained  in my will: Sam knows what I am hinting
at and will act accordingly.
     The last two parts of my Opus are in your hands. I am very
sorry  that  Hugh  Person  is  not  there  to  look  after  its
publication. When you acknowledge this letter do not say a word
of  having  received  it,  but  instead, in a kind of code that
would tell me you bear in mind this letter, give me, as a  good
old gossip, some information about him -- why, for example, was
he  jailed,  for  a year -- or more? -- if he was found to have
acted in a purely epileptic trance; why was he  transferred  to
an  asylum  for the criminal insane after his case was reviewed
and no crime found? And why was he shuttled between prison  and
madhouse  for  the next five or six years before ending up as a
privately treated patient? How can one treat dreams, unless one
is a quack? Please tell me all this because Person was  one  of
the  nicest persons I knew and also because you can smuggle all
kinds of secret information for this poor soul in  your  letter
about him.
     Poor  soul  is  right,  you  know. My wretched liver is as
heavy as a rejected manuscript; they manage to keep the hideous
hyena pain at bay by means of frequent injections  but  somehow
or other it remains always present behind the wall of my
flesh  like  the muffled thunder of a permanent avalanche which
obliterates there, beyond me, all the structures  of  my
imagination,  all  the  landmarks  of  my conscious self. It is
comic -- but I used to  believe  that  dying  persons  saw  the
vanity  of  things,  the futility of fame, passion, art, and so
forth. I believed that treasured memories in a dying man's mind
dwindled to rainbow wisps; but now I feel just the contrary: my
most trivial sentiments and those  of  all  men  have  acquired
gigantic   proportions.  The  entire  solar  system  is  but  a
reflection in the crystal of my (or your) wrist watch. The more
I shrivel the bigger I grow. I  suppose  this  is  an  uncommon
phenomenon.  Total rejection of all religions ever dreamt up by
man and total composure in the face of total death! If I  could
explain  this  triple totality in one big book, that book would
become no doubt a new bible and its author the founder of a new
creed. Fortunately for my self-esteem that  book  will  not  be
written  --  not  merely because a dying man cannot write books
but because that particular one  would  never  express  in  one
flash  what  can  only  be  understood immediately. Note
added by the recipient:
     Received on the day of  the  writer's  death.  File  under
Repos -- R.


22


     Person hated the sight and the feel of his feet. They were
uncommonly  graceless  and  sensitive.  Even  as a grown man he
avoided looking at them when undressing. Hence he  escaped  the
American  mania  of  going  barefoot  at home -- that throwback
across childhood to plainer and thriftier times. What  a  jaggy
chill  he experienced at the mere thought of catching a toenail
in the silk of a sock (silk socks were out, too)! Thus a  woman
shivers  at the squeak of a rubbed pane. They were knobby, they
were weak, they always hurt. Buying shoes  equaled  seeing  the
dentist.  He  now cast a long look of dislike at the article he
had bought at Brig on the way to Witt. Nothing is ever  wrapped
up  with  such  diabolical  neatness  as a shoebox. Ripping the
paper off afforded him nervous relief. This pair of revoltingly
heavy brown mountain boots had already once been  tried  on  in
the  shop.  They  were  certainly  the right size, and quite as
certainly they were not as comfortable as the salesman  assured
him  they  were. Snug, yes, but oppressively so. He pulled them
on with a groan and laced them with imprecations. No matter, it
must be  endured.  The  climb  he  contemplated  could  not  be
accomplished  in  town  shoes:  the  first and only time he had
attempted to do so, he had kept losing his footing on  slippery
slabs  of rock. These at least gripped treacherous surfaces. He
also remembered the blisters inflicted by a similar  pair,  but
made  of  chamois,  that  he  had  acquired eight years ago and
thrown away when leaving Witt. Well, the left pinched a  little
less than the right -- lame consolation.
     He  discarded  his  dark  heavy  jacket  and put on an old
windbreaker. As he went down the passage he  encountered  three
steps  before  reaching  the  lift.  The  only purpose he could
assign to them was that they warned him he was going to suffer.
But he dismissed the little ragged edge  of  pain,  and  lit  a
cigarette.
     Typically,  in  the  case of a second-rate hotel, its best
view of the mountains was from  the  corridor  windows  at  its
north  end.  Dark,  almost  black  rocky  heights streaked with
white, some of the ridges blending  with  the  sullen  overcast
sky;  lower down the fur of coniferous forests, still lower the
lighter green of fields. Melancholy mountains! Glorified  lumps
of gravity!
     The  floor  of  the  valley,  with the townlet of Witt and
various hamlets along a narrow river, consisted of dismal small
meadows, with barbed-wire fences enclosing them and with a rank
flowering of tall fennel for sole ornament. The  river  was  as
straight  as a canal and all smothered in alder. The eye roamed
wide but found no comfort in taking in the near  and  the  far,
this muddy cowtrack athwart a mowed slope or that plantation of
regimented larches on the opposite rise.
     The  first  stage of his revisitation (Person was prone to
pilgrimages as had been a French ancestor of  his,  a  Catholic
poet and well-nigh a saint) consisted of a walk through Witt to
a  cluster  of chalets on a slope above it. The town-let itself
seemed even uglier and stragglier. He recognized the  fountain,
and  the bank, and the church, and the great chestnut tree, and
the cafe. And there was the post office, with  the  bench  near
its door waiting for letters that never came.
     He  crossed  the  bridge without stopping to listen to the
vulgar noise of the stream which could tell  him  nothing.  The
slope  had  a  fringe  of firs at the top and beyond them stood
additional firs -- misty phantoms or replacement trees -- in  a
grayish  array under rain clouds. A new road had been built and
new houses had grown, crowding  out  the  meager  landmarks  he
remembered or thought he remembered.
     He  now  had  to find Villa Nastia, which still retained a
dead old woman's absurd Russian diminutive.  She  had  sold  it
just  before her last illness to a childless English couple. He
would glance at the porch, as one uses  a  glazed  envelope  to
slip in an image of the past.
     Hugh  hesitated at a street corner. Just beyond it a woman
was selling vegetables from a stall. Est-ce que vous  savez,
Madame  -- Yes, she did, it was up that lane. As she spoke,
a large, white, shivering dog crawled from behind a  crate  and
with  a  shock of futile recognition Hugh remembered that eight
years ago he had stopped right here and had noticed  that  dog,
which  was pretty old even then and had now braved fabulous age
only to serve his blind memory.
     The surroundings were unrecognizable  --  except  for  the
white  wall. His heart was beating as after an arduous climb. A
blond little girl with a badminton racket crouched  and  picked
up  her  shuttlecock  from  the sidewalk. Farther up he located
Villa Nastia, now painted a celestial  blue.  All  its  windows
were shuttered.


23


     Choosing  one  of  the  marked  trails  leading  into  the
mountains, Hugh recognized another detail of the  past,  namely
the  venerable  inspector of benches -- bird-defiled benches as
old as he -- that were rotting in shady nooks here  and  there,
brown  leaves  below,  green  leaves  above,  by  the side of a
resolutely idyllic footpath ascending toward  a  waterfall.  He
remembered  the inspector's pipe studded with Bohemian gems (in
harmony with its owner's furuncular nose) and  also  the  habit
Armande  had of exchanging ribald comments in Swiss-German with
the old fellow while he  was  examining  the  rubbish  under  a
cracked seat.
     The  region  now  offered tourists an additional number of
climbs and cableways as well as a new motorcar road  from  Witt
to  the  gondola  station which Armande and her friends used to
reach on foot. In his day Hugh had carefully studied the public
map, a great Carte du Tendre or Chart of Torture, spread out on
a billboard near the post office. Had he wished now  to  travel
in  comfort  to  the glacier slopes he could have taken the new
bus which connected Witt  with  the  Drakonita  cable  car.  He
wanted,  however, to do it the old hard way and to pass through
the unforgettable forest on his way up. He hoped the  Drakonita
gondola  would  be the remembered one -- a small cabin with two
benches facing each other. It rode up keeping some twenty yards
above a strip of turfy slope in a cutting between fir trees and
alder bushes. Every thirty seconds or so it negotiated a  pylon
with  a  sudden  rattle  and  shake  but  otherwise glided with
dignity.
     Hugh's memory had bunched into one path the  several  wood
trails  and logging roads that led to the first difficult stage
of the ascent -- namely, a jumble of boulders and a  jungle  of
rhododendrons,  through  which  one  struck upward to reach the
cable car. No wonder he soon lost his way.
     His memory, in the meantime, kept  following  its  private
path. Again he was panting in her merciless wake. Again she was
teasing  Jacques, the handsome Swiss boy with fox-rcd body hair
and dreamy eyes. Again she flirted with  the  eclectic  English
twins,  who called gullies Cool Wars and ridges Ah Rates. Hugh,
despite his tremendous physique, had neither the legs  nor  the
lungs  to  keep  up  with  them  even  in  memory. And when the
foursome had accelerated their climbing pace and vanished  with
their cruel ice axes and coils of rope and other instruments of
torture  (equipment  exaggerated  by ignorance), he rested on a
rock, and, looking down, seemed to see through the moving mists
the making of the very mountains that his tormentors trod,  the
crystalline  crust heaving up with his heart from the bottom of
an immemorial more (sea). Generally, however,  he  would
be  urged  not to straggle after them even before they were out
of the forest, a dismal group of old  firs,  with  steep  muddy
paths and thickets of wet willow herb.
     He now ascended through that wood, panting as painfully as
he had  in  the  past when following Armande's golden nape or a
huge knapsack on a 'naked male back. As then  the  pressure  of
the shoecap upon his right foot had soon scraped off a round of
skin  at  the  joint  of  the third toe, resulting in a red eye
burning there through  every  threadbare  thought.  He  finally
shook the forest off and reached a rock-strewn field and a barn
that  he  thought he recalled, but the stream where he had once
washed his feet and the broken bridge  which  suddenly  spanned
the  gap of time in his mind were nowhere to be seen. He walked
on. The day seemed a little  brighter  but  presently  a  cloud
palmed  the  sun  again.  The path had reached the pastures. He
noticed a large white butterfly drop outspread on a stone.  Its
papery  wings,  blotched  with  black  and maculated with faded
crimson, had  transparent  margins  of  an  unpleasant  crimped
texture,  which  shivered  slightly in the cheerless wind. Hugh
disliked  insects;  this   one   looked   particularly   gross.
Nevertheless,  a  mood  of unusual kindliness made him surmount
the impulse to crush it under a blind boot. With the vague idea
that it must be tired and hungry  and  would  appreciate  being
transferred  to  a nearby pincushion of little pink flowers, he
stooped over the creature but with a great shuffle  and  rustle
it  evaded  his  handkerchief,  sloppily  flapped  to  overcome
gravity, and vigorously sailed away.
     He  walked  up  to  a  signpost.  Forty-five  minutes   to
Lammerspitz,  two hours and a half to Rimperstein. This was not
the way to the glacier gondola. The distances indicated  seemed
as dull as delirium.
     Round-browed  gray  rocks  with  patches of black moss and
pale-green lichen lined  the  trail  beyond  the  signpost.  He
looked at the clouds blurring the distant peaks or sagging like
blubber  between  them.  It  was not worthwhile continuing that
lone climb. Had she passed here, had her soles  once  imprinted
their  elaborate  pattern  in  that  clay?  He  considered  the
remnants of a solitary picnic, bits of eggshell broken  off  by
the  fingers  of  another solitary hiker who had sat here a few
minutes ago, and a crumpled plastic bag into which a succession
of rapid feminine hands had once conveyed with tiny tongs white
apple roundlets, black prunes, nuts, raisins, the sticky  mummy
of  a  banana -- all this digested by now. The grayness of rain
would soon engulf everything. He felt a first kiss on his  bald
spot and walked back to the woods and widowhood.
     Days like this give sight a rest and allow other senses to
function  more freely. Earth and sky were drained of all color.
It was either raining or pretending to rain or not  raining  at
all,  yet  sdll  appearing to rain in a sense that only certain
old Northern  dialects  can  either  express  verbally  or  not
express,  but  versionize, as it were, through the ghost
of a sound produced by a drizzle in a  haze  of  grateful  rose
shrubs.  "Raining  in  Wittenberg, but not in Wittgenstein." An
obscure joke in Tralatitions.



24


     Direct interference in a person's life does not enter  our
scope  of activity, nor, on the other, tralatitiously speaking,
hand, is his destiny a  chain  of  predeterminate  links:  some
"future"  events may be likelier than others, O.K., but all are
chimeric, and  every  cause-and-effect  sequence  is  always  a
hit-and-miss  affair,  even  if the lunette has actually closed
around your neck, and the cretinous crowd holds its breath.
     Only chaos would result if some of us  championed  Mr.  X,
while  another  group backed Miss Julia Moore, whose interests,
such as distant dictatorships, turned out to clash  with  those
of  her  ailing old suitor Mr. (now Lord) X. The most we can do
when  steering  a  favorite   in   the   best   direction,   in
circumstances  not  involving  injury to others, is to act as a
breath of wind and to apply the  lightest,  the  most  indirect
pressure  such  as  trying  to  induce  a  dream that we
hope our favorite will recall as prophetic if  a  likely
event  does  actually  happen.  On  the  printed page the words
"likely" and "actually" should  be  italicized  too,  at  least
slightly,  to  indicate  a  slight breath of wind
inclining those characters (in the  sense  of  both  signs  and
personae).  In  fact,  we  depend on italics to an even greater
degree than do, in their arch quaintness, writers of children's
books. Human life can be compared to  a  person  dancing  in  a
variety  of  forms  around his own self: thus the vegetables of
our first picture book encircled a boy in his  dream  --  green
cucumber,  blue  eggplant, red beet, Potato põre. Potato
fils, a girly  asparagus,  and,  oh,  many  more,  their
spinning  ronde  going  faster  and faster and gradually
forming a transparent ring  of  banded  colors  around  a  dead
person or planet.
     Another  thing we are not supposed to do is to explain the
inexplicable. Men have learned to live with a black  burden,  a
huge  aching hump: the supposition that "reality" may be only a
"dream." How much  more  dreadful  it  would  be  if  the  very
awareness  of  your  being  aware of reality's dreamlike nature
were also a dream, a built-in hallucination! One should bear in
mind, however, that there is  no  mirage  without  a  vanishing
point,  just  as  there  is  no lake without a closed circle of
reliable land.
     We have shown our need  for  quotation  marks  ("reality,"
"dream").  Decidedly,  the  signs  with which Hugh Person still
peppers the margins of galleys have a metaphysical or  zodiacal
import!  "Dust to dust" (the dead are good mixers, that's quite
certain,  at  least).  A  patient  in  one  of  Hugh's   mental
hospitals,  a  bad  man but a good philosopher, who was at that
time terminally ill (hideous phrase that no  quotes  can  cure)
wrote  for  Hugh  in the latter's Album of Asylums and Jails (a
kind of diary he kept in those dreadful years) :
     It is generally assumed that if man were to establish  the
fact of survival after death, he would also solve, or be on the
way  to solving, the riddle of Being. Alas, the two problems do
not necessarily overlap or blend.
     We shall close the subject on this bizarre note.


25


     What had you expected of your pilgrimage, Person?  A  mere
mirror  rerun  of  hoary  torments? Sympathy from an old stone?
Enforced re-creation of irrecoverable trivia? A search for lost
time in an utterly distinct sense  from  Good-grief's  dreadful
"Je  me  souviens,  je me souviens de la maison oû je
suis  nè"  or,  indeed,  Proust's  quest?  He   had   never
experienced  here  (save  once  at  the end of his last ascent)
anything but boredom and bitterness. Something  else  had  made
him revisit dreary drab Witt.
     Not   a   belief  in  ghosts.  Who  would  care  to  haunt
half-remembered lumps of matter (he did not know  that  Jacques
lay  buried  under  six  feet  of  snow  in  Chute,  Colorado),
uncertain itineraries, a club hut which  some  spell  prevented
him  from  reaching  and  whose  name anyway had got hopelessly
mixed with "Draconite," a stimulant no longer in production but
still advertised on fences, and even cliff walls. Yet something
connected with spectral visitations had impelled  him  to  come
all  the  way from another continent. Let us make this a little
clearer.
     Practically all the dreams in which she  had  appeared  to
him  after  her death had been staged not in the settings of an
American winter but in those of  Swiss  mountains  and  Italian
lakes.  He had not even found the spot in the woods where a gay
band of little hikers had interrupted  an  unforgettable  kiss.
The  desideratum  was  a  moment  of contact with her essential
image in exactly remembered surroundings.
     Upon returning to the Ascot Hotel he  devoured  an  apple,
pulled  off  his  clay-smeared boots with a snarl of rejection,
and, ignoring his sores  and  dampish  socks,  changed  to  the
comfort of his town shoes. Back now to the torturing task!
     Thinking  that some small visual jog might make him recall
the number of the room that he had occupied eight years ago, he
walked the whole length of  the  third-floor  corridor  --  and
after  getting only blank stares from one number after another,
halted: the expedient had worked. He saw a very black 313 on  a
very  white door and recalled instantly how he had told Armande
(who had  promised  to  visit  him  and  did  not  wish  to  be
announced): "Mnemonically it should be imagined as three little
figures  in  profile,  a  prisoner passing by with one guard in
front of him and another behind."  Armande  had  rejoined  that
this  was too fanciful for her, and that she would simply write
it down in the little agenda she kept in her bag.
     A dog yapped on the inner side of the door: the  mark,  he
told   himself,  of  substantial  occupancy.  Nevertheless,  he
carried away a feeling of satisfaction,  the  sense  of  having
recovered an important morsel of that particular past.
     Next,   he   proceeded   downstairs  and  asked  the  fair
receptionist to ring up the hotel in Stresa  and  find  out  if
they could let him have for a couple of days the room where Mr.
and  Mrs.  Hugh Person had stayed eight years ago. Its name, he
said, sounded like "Beau Romeo." She repeated it in its correct
form but said it might take a few minutes. He would wait in the
lounge.
     There were only two people there, a woman eating  a  snack
in a far corner (the restaurant was unavailable, not yet having
been  cleaned  after  a farcical fight) and a Swiss businessman
flipping through an ancient  number  of  an  American  magazine
(which  had  actually  been left there by Hugh eight years ago,
but this line of life nobody followed up). A table next to  the
Swiss  gentleman  was  littered with hotel pamphlets and fairly
recent    periodicals.    His    elbow    rested     on     the
Transatlantic. Hugh tugged at the magazine and the Swiss
gentleman   fairly  sprang  up  in  his  chair.  Apologies  and
counter-apologies blossomed into conversation. Monsieur Wilde's
English resembled in many ways that of Armande, both in grammar
and intonation. He  had  been  shocked  beyond  measure  by  an
article  in  Hugh's  Transatlantic  (borrowing  it for a
moment, wetting his thumb, finding the place and  slapping  the
page  with  the  back  of  his fingers as he returned the thing
opened on the offensive article).
     "One talks here of a man who  murdered  his  spouse  eight
years ago and -- "
     The receptionist, whose desk and bust he could distinguish
in miniature from where he sat, was signaling to him from afar.
She burst out of her enclosure and advanced toward him:
     "One  does  not  reply," she said, "do you want me to keep
trying?"
     "Yes,  oh  yes,"  said  Hugh,  getting  up,  bumping  into
somebody  (the woman who had enveloped the fat that remained of
her ham in a paper napkin and was leaving  the  lounge).  "Yes.
Oh,  excuse  me.  Yes,  by  all  means.  Do call Information or
something."
     Well, that murderer had been given life  eight  years  ago
(Person  was given it, in an older sense, eight years ago, too,
but squandered, squandered all of it in  a  sick  dream!),  and
now,  suddenly,  he was set free, because, you see, he had been
an exemplary prisoner and had even taught his  cell-mates  such
things  as  chess,  Esperanto (he was a confirmed Esperantist),
the best way to make pumpkin pie (he was also a pastry cook  by
trade),  the  signs  of  the  zodiac,  gin rummy, et cetera, et
cetera. For some people, alas, a gal is nothing but a  unit  of
acceleration used in geodesy.
     It  was appalling, continued the Swiss gentleman, using an
expression Armande had got from  Julia  (now  Lady  X),  really
appalling  how  crime  was  pampered  nowadays.  Only  today  a
temperamental waiter who had been accused of stealing a case of
the hotel's Dole  (which  Monsieur  Wilde  did  not  recommend,
between  parentheses)  punched  the  maítre d'hòtel in the eye,
black-buttering it gravely. Did  --  his  interlocutor  suppose
that  the  hotel  called  the police? No, mister, they did not.
Eh bien, on a higher (or lower) level the  situation  is
similar.  Had  the  bilinguist  ever  considered the problem of
prisons?
     Oh, he had. He  himself  had  been  jailed,  hospitalized,
jailed  again, tried twice for throttling an American girl (now
Lady X): "At one stage I had a monstrous cellmate --  during  a
whole  year.  If  I  were a poet (but I'm only a proofreader) I
would describe to  you  the  celestial  nature  .  of  solitary
confinement,  the bliss of an immaculate toilet, the liberty of
thought in the ideal jail. The purpose of prisons" (smiling  at
Monsieur Wilde who was looking at his watch and not seeing much
anyway)  "is  certainly not to cure a killer, nor is it only to
punish him (how can one punish a man who  has  everything  with
him,  within  'him,  around him?). Their only purpose, a
pedestrian purpose but the only logical one, is  to  prevent  a
killer  from  killing  again. Rehabilitation? Parole? A myth, a
joke. Brutes cannot be corrected. Petty thieves are  not  worth
correcting  (in  their  case  punishment  suffices).  Nowadays,
certain deplorable  trends  are  current  in  soi-disant
liberal  circles. To put it concisely a killer who sees himself
as a victim is not only a murderer but a moron." .
     "I think I must go," said poor stolid Wilde.
     "Mental  hospitals,  wards,  asylums,  all  that  is  also
familiar  to  me. To live in a ward in a heap with thirty or so
incoherent idiots is hell. I faked violence in order to  get  a
solitary  cell  or  to  be  locked  up in the damned hospital's
security wing,  ineffable  paradise  for  this  kind  of
patient.  My  only  chance  to  remain  sane  was  by appearing
subnormal. The way was thorny. A handsome and hefty nurse liked
to hit me one forehand slap  sandwiched  between  two  backhand
ones  --  and I returned to blessed solitude. I should add that
every time my case came up, the prison  psychiatrist  testified
that  I  refused  to discuss what he called in his professional
jargon 'conjugal sex.' I am sadly happy to  say,  sadly  proud,
too,  that  neither  the guards (some of them humane and witty)
nor the Freudian inquisitors (all  of  them  fools  or  frauds)
broke or otherwise changed the sad person I am."
     Monsieur  Wilde,  taking  him  for  a drunk or madman, had
lumbered away. The pretty receptionist (flesh is flesh, the red
sting is l'aiguillon rouge, and my love would not  mind)
had  begun  to  signal again. He got up and walked to her desk.
The  Stresa  hotel  was  undergoing  repairs  after   a   fire.
Mais (pretty index erect) --
     All  his  life,  we  are  glad  to  note,  our  Person had
experienced  the  curious  sensation  (known  to  three  famous
theologians  and  two minor poets) of there existing behind him
-- at his shoulder, as it were -- a larger,  incredibly  wiser,
calmer and stronger stranger, morally better than he. This was,
in  fact,  his  main  "umbral companion" (a clownish critic had
taken R. to task for that epithet) and had he been without that
transparent shadow, we would not have bothered to  speak  about
our  dear Person. During the short stretch between his chair in
the lounge and the  girl's  adorable  neck,  plump  lips,  long
eyelashes,  veiled charms. Person was conscious of something or
somebody warning him that he should leave Witt there  and  then
for Verona, Florence, Rome, Taormina, if Stresa was out. He did
not  heed his shadow, and fundamentally he may have been right.
We thought that he had in him a few years of  animal  pleasure;
we  were ready to waft that girl into his bed, but after all it
was for him to decide, for him to die, if he wished.
     Mais! (a jot stronger than "but" or even "however") she had some good news for him. He had wanted to move to Floor Three, hadn't he? He could do so tonight. The lady with the little dog was leaving before dinner. It was a history rather amusing. It appeared that her husband looked after dogs when their masters had to absent themselves. The lady, when she voyaged herself, generally took with her a small animal, choosing from among those that were most melancholic. This morning her husband telephoned that the owner had returned earlier from his trip and was reclaiming his pet with great cries.




26



     The hotel restaurant, a rather dismal place furnished in a
rustic style, was far from full, but  one  expected  two  large
families  on  the  next day, and there was to be, or would have
been (the folds of tenses are badly disarranged  in  regard  to
the  building  under examination) quite a nice little stream of
Germans in the second, and  cheaper,  half  of  August.  A  new
homely  girl  in  a  folklore costume revealing a lot of creamy
bosom had replaced the younger of the two waiters, and a  black
patch  masked the grim captain's left eye. Our Person was to be
moved to room 313 right after dinner; he celebrated the  coming
event by drinking his sensible fill -- a Bloody Ivan (vodka and
tomato  juice)  before the pea soup, a bottle of Rhine with the
pork (disguised as "veal cutlets") and a double marc  with  his
coffee.  Monsieur  Wilde  looked the other way as the dotty, or
drugged, American passed by his table.
     The room was exactly as he wanted  it  or  had  wanted  it
(tangled   tenses  again!)  for  her  visit.  The  bed  in  its
southwestern corner stood neatly caparisoned, and the maid  who
would  or  might  knock in a little while to open it was not or
would not be let in -- if ins and outs, doors  and  beds  still
endured. On the bedside table a new package of cigarettes and a
traveling   clock   had  for  neighbor  a  nicely  wrapped  box
containing the green figurine  of  a  girl  skier  which  shone
through  the  double  kix.  The little bedside rug, a glorified
towel of the same pale blue as the bedspread, was still  tucked
under  the  night  table,  but  since  she  refused  in advance
(capricious! prim!) to stay until dawn, she would not see,  she
would  never  see, the little rug doing its duty to receive the
first  square  of  sun  and   the   first   touch   of   Hugh's
sticking-plastered toes. A bunch of bellflowers and bluebonnets
(their  different  shades  having  a  lovers' quarrel) had been
placed,  either  by  the  assistant  manager,   who   respected
sentiment,  or by Person himself, in a vase on the commode next
to Person's shed tie, which was of a third shade of blue but of
another material (sericanette). A mess of  sprouts  and  mashed
potatoes,   colorfully   mixed  with  pinkish  meat,  could  be
discerned,  if  properly  focused,  performing   hand-over-fist
evolutions in Person's entrails, and one could also make out in
that  landscape of serpents and caves two or three apple seeds,
humble  travelers  from  an  earlier  meal.   His   heart   was
tear-shaped, and undersized for such a big chap.
     Returning  to  the  correct  level,  we see Person's black
raincoat on a hook and his charcoal-gray suitcoat over the back
of a chair. Under the  dwarf  writing  desk,  full  of  useless
drawers,  in  the  northeastern corner of the lamplit room, the
bottom of the wastepaper basket, recently emptied by the valet,
retains a smudge of grease and a shred  of  paper  napkin.  The
little  spitz  dog  is  asleep  on  the back seat of an Amilcar
driven by the kennelman's wife back to Trux.
     Person visited the  bathroom,  emptied  his  bladder,  and
thought  of  taking a shower, but she could come any moment now
-- if she came at all! He pulled on his smart  turtleneck,  and
found a last antacid tablet in a remembered but not immediately
located  coat pocket (it is curious what difficulty some people
have in distinguishing at one glance the right  side  from  the
left in a chaired jacket). She always said that real men had to
be impeccably dressed, yet ought not to bathe too often. A male
whiff   from  the  gousset  could,  she  said,  be  most
attractive in  certain  confrontations,  and  only  ladies  and
chambermaids  should  use  deodorants. Never in his life had he
waited for anybody or anything with such excitement.  His  brow
was moist, he had the shakes, the corridor was long and silent,
the  few  occupants of the hotel were mostly downstairs, in the
lounge, chatting or playing cards, or just happily balancing on
the soft brink of sleep. He bared the bed and rested  his  head
on  the  pillow  while  the  heels  of  his shoes were still in
communication with  the  floor.  Novices  love  to  watch  such
fascinating  trifles  as the shallow hollow in a pillow as seen
through a person's  forehead,  frontal  bone,  rippling  brain,
occipital  bone,  the  back of the head, and its black hair. In
the beginning of our always entrancing,  sometimes  terrifying,
new being that kind of innocent curiosity (a child playing with
wriggly refractions in brook water, an African nun in an arctic
convent  touching  with  delight the fragile clock of her first
dandelion) is not unusual,  especially  if  a  person  and  the
shadows  of  related  matter  are  being followed from youth to
death. Person, this person, was on the imagined brink of
imagined bliss when Armande's footfalls approached --  striking
out  both  "imagined" in the proof's margin (never too wide for
corrections and queries!). This is  where  the  orgasm  of  art
courses  through  the  whole spine with incomparably more force
than sexual ecstasy or metaphysical panic.
     At this moment of her now indelible  dawning  through  the
limpid  door  of  his room he felt the elation a tourist feels,
when taking off and -- to use a  neo-Homeric  metaphor  --  the
earth  slants  and  then  regains  its horizontal position, and
practically in no spacetime we  are  thousands  of  feet  above
land,  and the clouds (fleecy light clouds, very white, more or
less widely separated) seem to lie on a flat sheet of glass  in
a  celestial  laboratory and, through this glass, far below it,
bits of gingerbread earth show, a  scarred  hillside,  a  round
indigo lake, the dark green of pine woods, the incrustations of
villages.  Here  comes  the air hostess bringing bright drinks,
and she is Armande who has just accepted his offer of  marriage
though  he  warned  her that she overestimated a lot of things,
the pleasures of parties in New York,  the  importance  of  his
job, a future inheritance, his uncle's stationery business, the
mountains  of  Vermont  -- and now the airplane explodes with a
roar and a retching cough.
     Coughing, our Person sat up in asphyxiating  darkness  and
groped  for  the  light,  but  the  click  of  the  lamp was as
ineffective as the attempt to move a  paralyzed  limb.  Because
the  bed in his fourth-floor room had been in another, northern
position, he now made for the door and flung it open instead of
trying to escape, as he thought he could,  through  the  window
which  stood  ajar  and  banged  wider as soon as a fatal draft
carried in the smoke from the corridor.
     The fire, fed first by  oil-soaked  rags  planted  in  the
basement  and  then  helped  up  by  lighter  fluid judiciously
sprayed here and there on stairs and walls,  swept  up  rapidly
through the hotel -- although "fortunately," as the local paper
was to put it next morning, "only a few people perished because
only a few rooms happened to be occupied."
     Now  flames  were mounting the stairs, in pairs, in trios,
in redskin file, hand in hand, tongue after tongue,  conversing
and  humming  happily.  It  was  not, though, the heat of their
flicker, but the acrid dark smoke that caused Person to retreat
back into the room; excuse me, said a polite  flamelet  holding
open  the door he was vainly trying to close. The window banged
with such force that its panes broke into a torrent of  rubies,
and  he  realized  before choking to death that a storm outside
was aiding the inside fire.
     At last, suffocation made him try to get out  by  climbing
out  and  down,  but  there were no ledges or balconies on that
side of the roaring house. As he  reached  the  window  a  long
lavender-tipped  flame  danced  up  to stop him with a graceful
gesture of its gloved hand. Crumbling partitions of plaster and
wood allowed human cries to reach him,  and  one  of  his  last
wrong ideas was that those were the shouts of people anxious to
help  him,  and  not  the howls of fellow men. Rings of blurred
colors circled around him, reminding him briefly of a childhood
picture in  a  frightening  book  about  triumphant  vegetables
whirling  faster  and  faster  around a nightshirted boy trying
desperately to awake from the  iridescent  dizziness  of  dream
life.  Its ultimate vision was the incandescence of a book or a
box  grown  completely  transparent  and  hollow.  This  is,  I
believe, it: not the crude anguish of physical death but
the incomparable pangs of the mysterious mental maneuver needed
to  pass  from  one  state of being to another. Easy, you know,
does it, son.

Last-modified: Mon, 12 Jan 1998 20:23:28 GMT










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