The Balloonist

by MacDonald Harris

  I had come to Paris that spring with the idea of working in the Bibliothèque Nationale, but for one reason or another I rarely got around to it. At Quai d’Orléans at five o’clock I would find myself mesmerized into conversations with Luisa which I had not chosen and which surely had not been organized by her, since she was scarcely capable of organizing the contents of her handbag. Did I care for Rilke? He and I were almost perfect strangers. She informed me that he had invented “la poésie des choses.” Bully for him. She wondered if I liked riding. She rode every morning in the Bois, very early when the world was asleep (by “le monde” she meant six hundred people out of a population of two and a half million, and probably she was speaking of nine o’clock in the morning). And: she would drop casually that it was this very evening that a diva only rarely heard was to appear in recital at the Salle Meyer, and she was curious if I planned to attend. I would reply that I never went to such things, and she would say “Ah!” in her most interested and yet distant manner. There would be a silence, which I would have been wise to leave alone, but deuce take it all! In spite of myself I would end by inquiring politely, “Are you?” Oh no, she would explain in a kind of dreamy sarcasm, you see it wasn’t considered fashionable for young ladies to make their way about a large city alone, it might subject them to insults or other embarrassments, a stupid prejudice but for the present at least society was organized in this way, que voulez-vous? Naturally I would end by offering to protect her from ruffians, amorous cabmen, etc., and find myself presently sitting in the Salle Meyer listening to a plump Milanese soprano trill her way through the Mad Song from Lucia. It was not long until she was clearly taking me for granted, a thing I abominate. “À demain, n’est-ce pas?” she would remind me mellifluously as we parted. “Chez ma tante.”

  At the aunt’s the next day a hungry Balkan violinist played czardas, the conversation was of Rodin, the gloomy footman served loukoumi and tea. I learned quite by accident that Luisa was engaged. Her fiancé was a young Spanish officer of artillery who, it seemed, was considered a family joke. His name was Alberto but for some reason he was called the Peninsula. Perhaps it was because he was Spanish, or because he was only semi-attached to the family. I never actually encountered him at Quai d’Orléans, although there was a photograph of him on the piano: a self-satisfied young man with a strong jaw, something like a bulldog, and a meaty nose. His eyebrows met over the nose, so that he really only had one of them. I cannot say why I found this last detail repugnant, or amusing. I don’t know what I expected eyebrows to do. The aunt’s sloped outward and I found this eccentric too. The aunt never did ask me about my emanations, as Luisa had promised she would, but on my final visit to Quai d’Orléans she did interrogate me about my position in life. I told her that I was attached to the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm and had every expectation of becoming its librarian in due time, and in the meanwhile I was devoting myself to my researches, which had won me a modest recognition along with membership in an international society or two. This crass little speech was pompous but so, I felt, was the question.

  “Luisa tells me you are interested in spiritualism.”

  “Not at all.”

  “Well then, in electricity or something. It’s much the same thing.”

  “It’s the furthest thing possible from the same thing.”

  “Is it true that, with electricity, one can tell what people are doing in the next room?”

  “Only if they are sending out waves with a coulomb apparatus.”

  “What is it exactly that you are discovering then? I am sorry that I am such a stupid old woman.” The head vibrated back and forth, denying all, as she smiled and made this apology.

  By this time I was feeling quite arrogant, not to say hilarious. “I believe that intelligences on the stars may be attempting to send us telegraph messages. If so, it is a question of the greatest importance. Are you interested in such matters?”

  But, like her niece, she countered all questions by changing the subject. “Do you know, I wonder if you have noticed that Luisa is a remarkable young person. We expect extraordinary things from her. Extraordinary. Do you know that she reads Dante?”

  I agreed that she was educated beyond the common sphere of woman, but my phraseology here was unfortunate and evoked a blank stare.

  “These spheres of which you speak, my dear Captain,” she informed me, “are of a bygone era. Persons of advanced thought, these days, no longer believe that half the human race is confined in one sphere and the other half in another, or rather free to wander around and do exactly as it pleases. Apropos, tell me something, dites donc, why is it that you are a military man and yet you don’t wear a uniform?”

  “Primo,” I explained, “I am on detached duty; secundo, the container ought to indicate the contents, and taken apart from or inside my clothes, I am not very uniform.”

  “Inside your clothes you are not the same?”

  “Profoundly different.”

  “Ah.” A skeptical look came into her eye, but she said nothing, only waggled her head.

  I forget what else happened at this last tea. A good many idiocies. I talked for a little while to the mother, or attempted to, but it was thick going. For one thing she stood slightly too close to me for the conversation to be comfortable. It was about an arm’s length, or three quarters of a metre. As inconspicuously as I could I would back away about a hand’s breadth, she would follow me by the same distance, and so on. This has happened to me before and it is a futile exercise at best. Such a ballet can describe large circles around a fashionable salon. Perhaps, I thought, I ought to get over this nineteenth-century aversion toward the mere propinquity of other flesh. On the other hand, perhaps there was something deep in my blood too Lutheran and Nordic for these tropical birds. At any rate, the mother, Madame Hickman née Silva e Costa, stood too close to me in a sari and caste mark and holding a saucer with a pastry on it, conversing with me in a thin timid voice slightly below the threshold of audibility, glancing about her now and then rather apprehensively as though to see whether anybody was observing. It was only with the greatest attention that I could make out what she was saying. I had the impression that at any moment she might whisper, “I have been abducted by these people. Please rescue me.” She smelled of musk and nervousness, like a small animal. She spoke a mixture of French and what she imagined to be English, so that understanding her, in addition to a physical feat, was an exercise in comparative philology.

  “Do you like Paris?” I at length detected.

  “Very much.”

  “Have you had many new experiences?” Or perhaps she said, “Have you made very many new experiments,” since the French word is ambiguous, even at normal loudness.

  “Experiences? How?”

  Glancing around again, she hazarded, “Do you know Mifeuya?” or so it sounded to me. I was not sure how to respond. Who or what? A Japanese painter? A seaport in Turkey?

  “How?”

  “Millefeuille, a pastry.”

  Ah. “Certainly, madame,” I told her with as much respect as I could muster for the subject, “I know it very well.”

  While waiting for me to answer she had taken a tiny bite of the confection on her saucer, and now she chewed it with a timid rotary motion of her jaw while she tried to speak at the same time. “C’est ra-vi-ssant,” I finally caught. It was not clear whether she meant the millefeuille or what she was now enjoying. For her it was probably the same; her mouth was full, of the word, of the thing, and it was ravissant. Talking to her was very simple now that I had caught the trick of it; you had only to pretend that you were talking to a very small child, perhaps three, who had just discovered bonbons and wanted to know if you had heard about them too. You had only to assure her, with a gravity proper to the subject, “I do indeed, and they are very good.”

  The mother melted, evaporated into the collection of guests, or perhaps merged into the Astrakhan carpet. I found myself in a bay window looking out o
ver the river with the fashionable photographer from rue de la Paix, whom I hoped to interrogate about the possibilities of using photography in an airship to record meteorological phenomena. But it was difficult to talk to him when he was continually glancing around and over my head, probably in search of someone who was wealthier than I and more likely to pay a large sum to have his visage recorded on a glass plate. These swervings of his nose were held in place by a tense jockey, a pair of gold-rimmed spectacles. Finally he noticed me. “You are an artist?” he inquired.

  “Hardly.”

  “Not an artist?”

  “I am a natural philosopher, more or less.”

  “Odd, you profoundly resemble an artist. Believe me, in my profession it is necessary to make a study of physiognomy and I know what I am talking about.”

  “Perhaps a naturalist is not very different from an artist, physiognomistically speaking.”

  “Profoundly different. Profoundly different.” The gold spectacles controlled the nose now and held it exactly in my direction. “Art is permanent; nature is in flux. Nature is dust and vapors, noxious. What we see about us, these fair prospects”—the nose bolted briefly toward the decolletage of a lady a little distance away—are in reality a constantly degenerating panorama of corruption.”

  “How long will a photograph last?”

  “With good care, fifty years or even a century.”

  I was about to comment that the same was true of a man, but we were interrupted by the aunt, who took him away to waggle her head at him in a corner.

  The whole collection, for some reason, affected me that afternoon as a nest of madfolk; I could hope for little better from the pederastic English poet or the professor of art history. I found myself filled with a powerful desire to escape, but in the vestibule I encountered Luisa, who was looking bright, wistful, and a little flushed from the stimulation of society. “Ah … then …” she articulated tentatively.

  “And so it’s farewell,” I told her with a conventionally regretful smile.

  “Surely only au revoir. You were going to give me a list of apparatus, and …” She didn’t finish, she trailed off.

  And what? Oh, those three little dots at the end of her sentences.

  “To begin with, all that is needed is a head, my dear lady. And a library full of books.”

  “You are pleased to mock at me. It is only your male conceit. At least you might tell me the books to read.”

  “I am very pressed. I leave Paris for Stockholm tomorrow.”

  “And what is it that calls you back?” she inquired sweetly.

  “Another affection, perhaps?” (Another, I noted, was a very interesting and perhaps even slightly presumptuous locution on her part.)

  “Only a balloon ascension, to tell the truth.”

  “I would adore a balloon ascension. You must take me with you.”

  It was difficult for me to explain to her why, given the mores of our time, it was impossible for a well-bred young woman to remain for fifteen or twenty hours suspended in a basket with a man without recourse to the amenities of civilisation. “I am sorry. It is not some sort of a picnic, you know. It’s a serious scientific venture, involving hard work, boring details, and so on.”

  “I am not afraid of hard work and I am not easily bored. Surely I could be useful. I could take readings of your barometer or something.”

  “Goodbye, mademoiselle,” I told her, smiling and offering my hand.

  “Au revoir,” she corrected me, smiling just as conventionally.

  Immediately upon my return to the Royal Institute I began preparations for the flight I had projected from the Stockholm district to southern Finland, the purpose of which was to try out in practice the steering apparatus I had finally devised after a good many years of thought. The route I planned was suited to this end because it lay mainly over the sea, where the guide ropes were less likely to become entangled in the landscape or otherwise damaged. I had written to Waldemer before I left Paris to invite him to accompany me on this flight. Unfortunately, I explained, I would be unable to pay his transatlantic expenses, since the flight was supported only by a very small appropriation from the Institute, but I hoped that his newspaper would finance his voyage to Europe in return for exclusive coverage. When I came back from Paris, however, I found a letter from New York on my desk. Waldemer was unable to extract the travel money from his editor and besides, a thousand regrets, he was occupied with another assignment which would keep him busy for several months, a comprehensive series of articles on the tinned-food industry, which was on the point of bringing the highest refinements of the palate to the masses. It was clear from his letter that he genuinely regretted not to be with me, although this was not because he preferred my company to that of the soup magnates; it was because he regarded aeronavigation as a more important technical development than the preservation of food. He would have and did prefer my company to that of soup magnates, let it be clear; it was just that his personal pleasures were always a secondary consideration with Waldemer. He was a dedicated and consecrated professional, a hero of modern journalism. It was too bad, because to tell the truth I enjoyed his company (I was not quite so consecrated), and besides, he was an invaluable assistant and one I had taken a great deal of pains and effort to train.

  The aeronautical side of this particular flight, however, would not be excessively demanding, and in a pinch I could always manage the newly invented guide ropes by myself. What then did I need a partner for at all? I answered my own question: the balloon was designed to elevate approximately a hundred and fifty kilograms, and lacking this weight it would be necessary to carry along sandbags or something else to make up for it. Surely some human being could be found who was at least more useful than a sandbag, if only for reading the barometer. How had that example got into my head? Why did I telegraph Luisa? It was a folly. I think more than anything else I did it to challenge, through a definite and quite concrete proposal, her feminine whim of the kind she was always expressing without any notion of the practical entailments, declaring her readiness to be hypnotized, to go down into coal mines, to be present at a dissection, etc., simply to indicate that she was as sturdy and as reckless as any man. After a while you felt a malicious but irresistible impulse to say, Here is the corpse, dear lady, take up the scalpel yourself and find the hypogastric nerve, climb into the coal basket, and don’t blame me if you soil your gown. This was a dangerous tactic with Luisa. If I had known her as well as I did later, I would not have tried it.

  To cut the matter short, I telegraphed asking her to join me on the flight to Finland and received an answer almost with the speed of the electrical impulse. Her reply was precise, orderly, and substantial, detailing exactly which train she was taking in order to arrive at the Kungsholm Station on the following Monday, and adding that she was bringing along dust-proof travelling clothes and a salt reputed to be specific against altitude. Why dust-proof? Did she imagine the balloon was dusty? Probably she had noticed the clothes in a ladies’ magazine. As for altitude, the steering apparatus I proposed to try out depended on the balloon remaining quite close to the earth and it was doubtful that we would rise even as high as the Vendôme column, but I didn’t bother to send a counter-telegram explaining all this to her. Instead, I instructed the workmen to prepare the balloon for an ascension on Tuesday, weather permitting, and then busied myself collecting the instruments and charts I needed.

  On Monday at three o’clock in the afternoon I met her at the station. She was impeccably clad in a surcoat with blue fox fur at the hem, the same fur at the tops of her boots, and a muff to match, and she was followed by a porter pushing an enormous wagon full of luggage. The portents were not good. Removing one hand gracefully from the muff, she offered it to me and then restored it to its warm place. It was an ordinary day in May, the temperature was quite mild. “Sweden!” she exulted, tossing the hair from her high forehead. “Comme c’est charmant! I love the air, it smells of something like ship�
��s tar. And those fillettes, the little girls with the riding crops—” (I had no idea what she was talking about)-”elles sont délicieuses. Where do you live?”

  Without responding in any precise way to this question, I told her I had arranged lodgings for her for the night in a small hotel near the Institute. “Ah,” she replied, delighted with everything. “How very thoughtful of you.” Just as graciously she followed me to the end of the platform and smiled winningly at the porter while I tipped him, and allowed herself to be put into a cab. It was mean and curmudgeonly of me to reflect that if I had been meeting Waldemer it would not have been necessary for me to tip the porter for carrying his baggage. Contrary to my expectations, it was possible to affix all her bags in or on the cab in some way, top, sides, and rear. We went off. It was five minutes to the hotel.

  What in the blazes was I to do with her? I had other things to occupy me during the evening—the final adjustment of instruments, a call at the weather office to look at the maps. She was charming, fragrant, feminine, flattering, accommodating, cheerful, and quite imperious in her need to be entertained or otherwise done something with at every moment. At the hotel, which was a modest affair without a lift, she signed the register in a fine baroque hand and then followed the ill-humoured hotel servant as he bumped and battered his way along a narrow corridor with a portmanteau in each hand. “Oh dear. I’m not sure this will do at all,” she murmured from the depths of the corridor. And I too had begun to fear that the hotel would not do for such an elegant person and wondered what I had had in mind in selecting it. In actual fact, when we arrived at the room it was not excessively squalid. There were hunting prints on the wall and a vase of roses, even a square piano. From the window it was possible to catch a glimpse of the Kungsträgård. She sat at the piano and played a fragment of Schubert, then sprang up and pulled aside the curtains.