by Norman Lock
“What was that big thump?” asks Henry.
“Paris,” says Jules.
“Ah!”
21.
At last, Henry has her in his arms—la belle époque! She is winsome; she is amorous; she is all that his chaste muse is not. He tickles her pink breast with his mustache. The mustache remains on her breast—it is false (the mustache, not the breast, which is ample), but no matter. All is permitted in the boudoir of this, the seductress of France in the nought years of a new century. La belle époque contains all that can be said to be of earthly delight. She is, for Henry, food, drink, music, song, and the novel whose writing will elude him; for he is too old now to write of her charms, La Belle’s, but not—happily—to enjoy them, here, in her luxurious bed.
“Light, more light!” he says, wanting to see everything, jealous of even the shadow that falls on her from the naughty marble vase by Daum—a column of a bastardized Tuscan order, veined with vines and kissed by a bare-legged maiden very like Isadora Duncan.
Henry turns up the wick, and the flame beats up inside the glass chimney. A yellow light engulfs the room, seeping through the diaphanous bed curtains, and lies against La Belle’s unclothed body.
“Oh, but you are bruised!” Henry cries.
“Pablo did it to me.”
“The brute!”
“It’s only paint,” she replies gaily. “Cerulean, this morning; viridian, yesterday. The yellow ocher is from a week ago. Pablo comes every day to destroy me with his art.”
“I would thrash him were I younger.”
“But it is pleasant to make art.”
“I no longer wish it.”
“What do you wish?”
“To understand my desire and, having understood it, submit to my fate.”
They rise, and together they go to the Eiffel Tower. For only there, at the top of it, can Henry possess what is, in actuality, a city—of desire and indulgence. Paris, in la belle époque. (A city and a time doomed by time to become less lovely than they are now at this moment. But neither the city nor the time, nor Henry, knows this.)
Henry looks out at the gray houses, the green parks, the broad avenues, the arching bridges, and the Seine. He imagines women in the houses, letting down cello-colored hair; under trees musical with spring rain; on the avenues and bridges, dizzy with the rolling light. He sees them on the river, indolent in small boats, their faces lifted to receive a benevolent sun and the fathomless longing of men.
He steps from the uppermost landing, prepared to rise into the clear blue Parisian air—upheld by waves of desire, transmitted by M. Eiffel’s magic tower like a radio program of boleros. And he does rise—Henry does—in his white sailor suit. Insouciant. Poised. The hollows of his bones buoyant with momentary light. Belle is waving to him, her long scarf tugged by an amorous wind.
Then Henry falls, as he must, all the way back to Rye—there, to live out his life with the memory of this, his life’s beautiful epoch. And having suffered desire, to shed words that float like leaves on water stilled after a hectic passage. Henry has come to rest, in Rye, content. He puts down his pen and lets his eyes fall onto the page, onto the last word to be set down there. And the word is joy.
Ideas of Space
Found among the papers of Umberto da Silva,
Ravenna, 1761–1833
1.
I had lived always among the trees; and when, at last, I came out onto the plain, my head reeled and I was sick. The uninterrupted light was, in its novelty, nearly fatal—a plague of nettles, a yellow noise, a magisterial voice deaf to all human entreaty. I mean to say that I had not, until that moment, seen the sun whole and undivided. Always, it had hidden behind a screen of foliage or, in winter, bones of twig and fescue. The light was thin and strained. A dusk even at midday. To see it, all at once and of a sudden, was a blow to the senses—not just to my eyes, though they stung and the light turned black within them, but to the other organs of sense through which the world invades and trammels up the mind. I smelled light like a rust or mold, tasted its bitterness, and felt it against my skin—hot and barbed.
Brought to my knees, I wished I had not left the thickset woods to savor distances. What did I know of distance, immensities of space, emptiness, or the vegetable and mineral composition of the world outside the forest? I had heard how, on the plain, one’s eyes might rove with nothing to arrest them, that they might sweep in a circuit and encounter nothing but grass and, in the distance, a haze that might be clouds or mountains or—strangest of all—the sea. All of us had listened to stories of a broad river dividing the plain, which appeared in the distance no more than a crooked length of string. We heard how a caravan might toil for days on end and not come to the end of it. I accepted the travelers’ accounts without question. I understood that, outside the ancient forest (in which we were born and would one day be no more than dust), people were to the plain as ants are to the forest paths and cramped clearings separating one house from another. But I had not yet felt space as ants must in their unceasing transits. I had no notion then of the dimensions of vastness or the sickness it might cause in me—what bewilderment and fear. Not even from the highest branch could I see anything but trees in an endlessly repeated pattern. The sky itself seemed hemmed in by them, like a piece of blue cloth rucked and snagged by branches. I looked around me with loathing.
In leaving the forest, I had thought to feel space like a wind pleated with flowery airs, its transparent pockets lined with a lint of golden pollen. I had thought to come out onto the plain and be refreshed instantly, as if by cold water. Among the trees, I had begun to imagine that my eyes were “stuck”—that the optical machinery had seized like a lever by rust. To see always only what is in front of one’s eyes, to live walled up—what toll might not such a life take? I had imagined my eyes roughly wakened from their myopic trance. The moment, I thought, would arrive like a storm, a catastrophe of light. But I did not allow for the persistence of that engulfment, how it would wrap me in thick cloths of light, blinding and pernicious.
I lay on the ground, face pressed to the cool grass, the colder earth unlike that of the forest floor, which reeks of mold, rotted leaves, and the animal smell of fungi and morels. I shut my eyes to the clamorous light and waited for the earth to stand still and for night to fall.
2.
Supine in the dark, I watched the steep night endlessly receding, its black depths mapped by stars. I remembered how, alone in a narrow forest clearing where onions and turnips grew, I had seen scattered among the trees the solitary lamps of our settlement. I would go there at night to be alone and, in its confinement, imagine a spacious life beyond the farthest tree. I had been no better than a mole! I might have married another mole and fathered mole children to fill my little mole house. I might have done—but always in me was a mutiny against narrowness. I walked as if bearing on my back the weight of the forest. I yearned to walk in a straight line. Such a simple desire—so simple it could hardly be said to be a desire. Distance was coiled up inside me—in the bones and sinews of my legs—the way movement is in a caged animal or flight in the limed bird. I was pilloried, shackled to the trees, which rose up all around us like mute and merciless judges.
I had known time; but it was, like the forest, featureless. Monotonous. It had stagnated in gray pools. It was the color of wash water. It was used up. It suited sleep. I had slept long—we all had. In that twilight, we would be seized suddenly by the need to sleep. And we would sleep dreaming of trees, of the dusky light that sifted down through the leaves or of rain that differed from the gray light only in its being wet. There was no refreshment in either. Mostly, we dreamed bitter dramas set inside the houses we left only when we must, to work in the fields, the mill, the store, the school—the few occupations allowed us by the forest. Time now would be other than I had known it: faster, more varied and complicated. History would involve the plain as it had never done the forest. I understood and braced myself for its onslaught. I imagined
a wind, shrill and cold—a hurricane sweeping everything before it like dead leaves. I feared it—what it might pull up by the roots from my dark depths. Already, time was changing. The stars seemed to wheel round the black sky; I saw their fiery tracks instead of the unmoving points of light that had hung above the trees. Watching them in their headlong, I was sick again in the grass and had to shut my eyes. I felt vulnerable—uncovered—exposed to that dangerous light, as if caught in a meteor shower. I lay there, shivering until morning.
3.
“I thought you were dead,” he said. I leaned against him as we walked slowly toward the wagon. “You look as if you ought to be.”
“I was sick,” I said. “I need to get in somewhere.”
He helped me onto the wagon seat.
“You slept out all night, then?”
I nodded, saying again, “I need to get inside.” I dared not tell him why—this man of the plain, who went without fear of the immensities of distance.
He flicked the reins over the horse’s back. The wagon rang with his peddler’s wares as it lurched and swayed over the macadam.
“I’m spending the night farther along,” the peddler shouted above the crunch of gravel. “Two hours more. You can see it—there.” He took both reins in his left hand and pointed with the other.
I could see nothing except gray road and grass. But the river was there, next to the road that followed it. Broad and brown, it was beating against yellow gravel and mud a steady retreat from the mountains behind me to an unseen sea ahead. When I leaned out of the wagon, I saw myself come and go in little bays of quiet water, cut into a shoreline stiff with reeds. The light on the river’s back fixed my eyes helplessly in a dazzled stare, freed only when a cloud slid across the face of the sun. But it was the river’s music that ravished me—how one moment it might sound like whiskey falling softly in a glass and the next like a rain of hailstones as it sped across a shallows. How could I have failed to hear it during the long night, unless it had been drowned in the noise of stars?
The river was greater even than my idea of it had been. I envied its disdain and the ease of its procession through space. Nothing stood in the way of its ends, which it attained single-mindedly. It spent itself in its solitary bed without love or recompense, obedient to ice and thaw, drought and freshet, indifferent to its own futility. When the sprawling grassland threatened to overcome me, I had only to turn my gaze on the river to quell it.
“What river is this?” I asked the peddler.
“The Po,” he answered, surprised. “I did not take you for a stranger.”
I would like to have asked him what he saw; I mean to say, how space looked to him and also how it felt as he pushed his way deeper into it. But he would have thought me mad. Is space a dough into which a man might plunge his hands to knead and shape it to his will?
As if he had read my thoughts, the peddler remarked with satisfaction on the plain that lay all round us: “This is mine. For as far as you can see and a little beyond—my territory. Since I was a young man, I’ve cultivated it, until now I can say it belongs to me by right of possession. They know me—in every village, hamlet, and farm for a hundred miles, they know my name and wares.”
“Are there no other peddlers?” I asked.
“No Tubal-cains but me.” He noticed my look of incomprehension and, slapping me hard on the back, produced by way of explanation a verse: “ ‘Sella quoque genuit Tubal-cain qui fuit malleator et faber in cuncta opera aeris et ferri.’ ‘Sella also brought forth Tubal-cain, who was a hammerer and artificer in every work of brass and iron.’ Genesis four: twenty-two.”
His pots and pans chimed an almost musical accompaniment.
“And what are you?” he asked.
I had no answer.
“How do you make your living?”
In the forest, each one did what necessity demanded of him. Because in our occupations we were more or less interchangeable, we seldom thought of ourselves apart from the whole. This is not to say we lived under a tyranny of the collective: The individual will was submerged in a common dreaming, not in an autocracy. To speak of the will is to exalt what was scarcely more than yearning. I wanted no more than what a fly might want, which paces hopelessly the inside of a windowpane: a wider compass. Others may have harbored different longings, but none had strength enough to satisfy them. Likewise, dreaming suggests a richness that was not an aspect of our anarchic hours. Our dreams were poor. It was not only their lack of spaciousness that made them so; they seemed rudimentary and unformed. We dreamed as children do—no, as people who have all their lives been cloistered or blind.
“It is there for the taking,” the peddler said, annexing with his eyes the plain, into which we were venturing like two conquistadors. “It has made me rich, and I shall be richer still before I’m done.” He laughed, but the reason for his laughter was hidden from me.
I stopped at the inn until I became reconciled to space and could walk out on the plain without discomfiture. Even so, it seemed always to recede before me, repulsing my attempts to grapple with it. It was like a painting of a landscape that I tried to enter but could not. My dreams remained closed. In them, I had not yet left the forest.
4.
“My mathematics is helpless against the sea,” he said. “But here, it subdues space—vanquishes it—ensnares it in a fine net of coordinates! There is, believe me, no more remarkable occupation than that of land surveyor! Through the sights of my theodolite, I achieve what no rifle or cannon can: dominion—absolute and irrefutable! Only catastrophe—a paroxysm of nature—can annul the results of my triangulation! And we are not in a region liable to earthquake or other subterranean disturbance. Even should drought or fire lay waste the grass, my survey will remain immaculate because it is beyond contingency and accident.”
By now, I was used to the surveyor’s effusions, having spent three days together traversing the endless grassland. I watched him as he minutely bisected his sandwich, then reduced an apple to meridians of longitude. I wondered why a calculating man should speak with the fervor of an evangelist.
“Were the plain to disappear, we would have its essence—here.” He patted his breast pocket, where a leather-bound notebook lay coincidentally near his heart. “In fact, the plain itself is superfluous; what matters is its mathematical representation. It’s the same with great paintings: The people who sat for Gainsborough are of no consequence. Who remembers Miss Catherine Tatton or the original Lady in Blue?”
We were making our way slowly across the plain. He carried the Ramsden, I, the rod and chain. The sun beat down, and I wondered what provision his mathematics made for sun or rain or night. Perhaps his maps were like dreams, which were curiously devoid of weather, though there was night.
“What do you dream?” I asked.
“I do not dream!” he replied curtly, as if my question had offended him. “What could a land surveyor do there? I detest the very idea of dreaming.”
He put down his theodolite and sat on a slight elevation. I sat beside him. Together, we gazed out over the plain while he collected his thoughts, where his anger had dispersed them.
“From what I have heard of dreaming,” he said, “it is a lawless and an absurd place.”
Again, I noticed how he attributed a space to dreaming; and I thought this justifiable now that my own dreams were becoming more spacious. Each night, I watched myself venture farther out from the end of the trees. My dreaming self looked at the plain through my true eyes, saw what I had already laid eyes on during my journey. How could it be otherwise? Dreams lag always behind the life they comment on, unless one believes in their prophetic quality, which I do not.
“I would not last where all is mutation and caprice, unformed and edged with shadow.” He was silent awhile before whispering with childish candor, “I am afraid of the dark.”
I patted his boot consolingly.
“Mathematics is incompatible with darkness, which is its opposite,” he said e
arnestly. “The opposite of all that is doubtful and obscure. If there is not light enough to see through my theodolite, I am lost! Can you understand that?”
I told him that I could, and he smiled at me in gratitude.
“The plain is nothing!” he said, returning to an earlier theme. “I would much prefer it if there were none—no land at all. Only the survey, only the mathematics. Nothing but them. Only they are of consequence, are unambiguous and beautiful. I look at what is before us and, shutting my eyes to it, see shining in the darkness of my closed eyes a thousand points of light—a radiant topography—a pure and dazzling topology produced by luminous numbers—inscribed with perfect parabolas and arcs that exist only here, in the mind!”
He pressed my hands in his as if to bless me. And then he left me, saying that the remainder of the journey must be made by each one of us alone. He smiled again and, with eyes closed once more, walked into the far distance.
I watched him dwindle until he was no more than a point—not of light, but of darkness against the sunlit plain. And then he vanished in it. How or where he went, I do not know. Perhaps a seam opened in the air or a chasm in the earth. All I know is that he walked out into that green immensity and was seen no more.