The Balloonist

by MacDonald Harris

  She gave me one of her firm, searching, slightly hostile looks. But there was no irony in my manner, or none showed, and she decided it was not tactical to take umbrage.

  “And even to Finland, you might have added.”

  “Even to Finland.” “You were pleased to be sarcastic, once, about the Italian lakes,” she reminded me.

  “But Stresa is a very pleasant place.”

  “No doubt. And this is apropos of?”

  “Nothing, except that my Pondicherry uncle, who never comes to Europe, owns a villa there.”

  “Thank you very much for the invitation, but, as I have tried to explain in my stumbling way, I have researches that unfortunately keep me in Paris.”

  “Oh, you are a thing,” she declared, her mouth tightening in vexation. “I haven’t made you an invitation.”

  “And had you intended to?”

  “Yes, I had, in due time, but you force a person into the most awkward situations, crudities even, through this ill-mannered habit of yours of leaping to the end of a speech before one has got there.”

  “I am sorry. Please start over again and deliver the whole speech, and I will listen attentively.”

  “What might have been a delightful sojourn you have now made impossible.”

  “It is impossible anyhow, because my work keeps me here.”

  “You can bring your wires and crystals to Italy. No one will disturb you.”

  “I’m not quite sure I understand. You will not disturb me?”

  “You take me for a frivolous woman, I know. How can I convince you that I am interested in serious matters? If fashionable young men were all that is needed, I can assure you, there are plenty in the offing.” (This an allusion, no doubt, to the mysterious and Peninsular fiancé.) “But if you will make only a slight effort of the memory, you will recall that our friendship began initially because of my deep interest in your scientific work. J’ai une telle envie d’être sérieuse!”

  “In that case, you can come to rue de Rennes and hold the wires while I solder them.”

  “Then you won’t come to Stresa?”

  “What is it exactly that we can do in Stresa and cannot do here?”

  “Oh, bother!” she burst, exasperated, and turned to the window.

  It is impossible to shut out this marrow-piercing cold, but the whiteness at any rate can be excluded by shutting the eyes. At least one of my senses, thank God, is voluntary. The whiteness is an illusion, and so is the blackness, or rather the deep charcoal grey that replaces it when the eyes are closed. This light filtering through the lids ought to be pink; has my blood too turned pale in this penetrating milkiness, am I exsanguinated? I ought to have eaten my beef stew, and perhaps I have, I muse vaguely from my vantage point somewhere just on the verge of consciousness, since its odour is no longer apparent. Or perhaps I forgot to eat it because my mind has involuntarily rejected nourishment, although why it should do this is an enigma I am too far from an objective and rational state just now to examine. The human head, that undiscovered planet. There is a lot to be explained yet by somebody, Dr. James or perhaps Charcot, about how this fine machine works. For instance, I am almost entirely awake now but the words from the Paris boudoir still ring in my head as though they had been spoken only a moment before. “Oh, bother!” Bother indeed. It is a bother to be cold, to be hungry, to be driven by this imbecilic impulse to entangle one’s limbs ardorously with other persons with whom one may not have very much else in common. It is a bother to rush off to unlikely parts of the globe for purposes that, when regarded calmly, seem quite unnecessary. “All the trouble in the world,” I believe it was Pascal who said, “comes because men will not remain quietly in their own rooms,” or something like that. With the steely effort of will I have mastered now through long practice, I force myself back to sleep, not to sleep but to slip out of consciousness and into a realm of myself where I know a certain happiness lies, to dream true. For a while what courses through the brain filaments comes partly from the epidermis and retina, partly from more mysterious telegraph stations in another country, places we are forbidden to go when awake. I know where I want to go, but to go there I must take a journey. Since it is necessary, I abandon myself to these consecutive, vivid, and yet disconnected impressions of a tiresome trip over an entirely unnecessary number of Alps. The pictures are all in the right order but tilted to one side or the other and wavery; some small boy has scratched or bent the stereopticon. Dijon. A lake with poplars. Dôle, a square church steeple. Cinders and rushing air, rattle of carrosserie, the odour of coal-burning machinery mingled with that of some hygienic Swiss disinfectant, then via wuerstel & mustard, a humble but nourishing Teutonic smell, to the chemical odour of soap (I remember that the soap had the legend KROEBER impressed into it) and so to Milano Stazione Centrale, an enormous crystal roof full of steam and noise, with the odour of hot rolls. Libri, giornali! Portabagagli! Outside a broad piazza in the sunshine. Carrozza, signore? Subito, subito, ecco! Creak of harness and wheel grit on dusty road, and so on to the villa on the hillside. A view over the lake, with some vineyards around it, and here and there in the middle distance a peasant tying up the vines. November; the sun warm but an autumnal chill in the air as the shadows grow longer.

  All this is banal and might have been expected from a perusal of tourist brochures. But abruptly, in an absolute silence broken only by the faint cries of birds, a portrait by Vermeer appears in the doorway. A composition so fixed in its outline and every nuance of colour that it can be examined months or even years later with each of its qualities intact. The frame an arched doorway of greyish stone; behind this a quantity of mimosa and a marble balustrade. The light as in all Vermeers from behind and to one side, illuminating the subject diagonally. A long gown of pink brocade falling to the floor, drawn in to a high waist under the breasts. The forearms in the full sleeves crossed lightly over the waist, ending in a pair of finely modeled hands with fingers absently twined together. Hands, shoulders, and gown turned partly away, since she had come from the courtyard still illuminated with the fading daylight into the darker salon and turned to face me so that the soft mass of hair was drawn back over the shoulder. The singular visage with its pale llama-like brow and long lip, the mouth that tightened only slightly at the corners, contemplated me with a seraphic calm. And everything, it seemed to me, lay in this expectant and mysterious apparition of pastel tapestry, lay concealed and yet eloquent, its existence promised only in the white reality of the hands and face. I didn’t move, neither did she, and our very motionlessness and failure to speak was oracular, announcing to both of us that something wordless and transcendent was about to manifest itself, perhaps something powerful and pagan concealed in the green and tepid involutions of these wine hills. In the silence I heard the unmistakable, grating, violin-like note of the evening’s first cicada.

  In some way my cigar was put out, she moved about eluding me playfully down the corridor with her demi-Gioconda smile, and we were transported weightlessly into a yellow room full of angled evening shadows. High-ceilinged, painted in vivid Pompeiian ochre, shuttered windows facing the lake, which through the narrow horizontal openings could be seen below and not very far away, wrinkling in the evening breeze. When I turned from these shutters the brocade was in the act of slipping from—in contrast to its own elegance and stiffness—an astonishingly fragile shoulder. The fiendish craft of that gown became apparent—under it the eye expected a pink analogous to the brocade, but the reality was so far finer and paler that the soul received a little shock, a spasm of unbelief. She was adept at prophecies; the Vermeer glance had foretold the yellow room, the brocaded gown her complexion. It had been cold in Finland, it was warm here, so that this demonstration could be as prolonged and intricate as she liked. In such a climate she evidently did not feel that any clothing other than the gown was necessary. Standing with her feet a little apart on the marble floor, she removed a white carnation from the bouquet at the bedside and turned to me f
or a moment with the flower held at her throat in a kind of misdirected pudeur, then laid it with a slightly exaggerated theatricality on the linen expanse of the bed. There it lay, that plaguish virginal blossom, long like her American legs and rather self-consciously symbolic. The hypocrite! It was not in flower gardens that she had learned this thing of standing with her feet slightly apart and one foot turned out in the boyish grace of a dancer (perhaps that was it, the aunt had sent her to ballet classes), so that at the place where the legs finally came together a space of yellow wall was visible between them; nor this gesture of loosing the hair ribbon with both hands raised to the left, the hardly more than adolescent breasts inclining at an angle and causing a faint and corresponding crease to appear in the waist at the right; nor the candor of the forward-held hips, the apex of the triangle between them shaded in the exact texture of the dark mass that fell over her shoulders: in short, was this the would-be balloonist and magnetographer? Something was seriously in disparity here.

  I was in no mood or state for puzzles, however; I postponed cerebration and surrendered myself to the passing moment. Our limbs fitted ingeniously; as in Finland no doubt, although there in the tumult of the occasion I had not noticed it. So nicely were these arms, legs, and so on suited to interweave that they seemed to find their way to each other by themselves without our paying very much attention to how it was done, so that these arrangements and the resultant ecstasies took place, so to speak, quite separate from ourselves and we were free to mount, soul joined to soul, to higher places than we had anticipated or thought possible, cherubim drunk on light in our spheres of grace and harmony. That yellow room! Its ochre was the colour my veins had hungered for. Did they know what they were doing, these arteries pounding in their excessive way? They would do themselves some harm. At last this pulsing that had before seemed generalized throughout my circulatory system, and hers too for all I knew, gathered to a single place, trembled for what seemed an infinitely prolonged instant on the brink of overflowing, and then sprang out arclike and keen in, I was quite certain as I examined the catalogue of my experiences, a totally unprecedented intensity. This phenomenon grew fainter, but only very gradually, like waves dying on sand after a storm.

  We lay for some time like exhausted swimmers, able to reach the beach but not to rise or crawl entirely from the water that still lapped at our ankles. When at last we extricated our slackened limbs and drew apart on that canopied Empire bed, she had the air of being pleased with herself. Pushing back with one hand the mass of soft hair that had fallen over her face, she revealed once more the keen intelligence behind that serene and lofty brow. She was curious about everything. What was that extraordinary large vein here, the one she almost touched with her forefinger? I explained that a man required, at certain times, a copious supply of blood just there. Ah. Might from my point of view this miracle be repeated after a suitable interval? All things would happen in the plenitude of time, I assured her abstractedly. (If she kept pointing things out with her finger this way they surely would.) Whether they would be miracles would depend on the circumstances. She was blithe about the probability. “You know, it’s my jour de fête today, I’m twenty.”

  “Incredible.”

  “How? You would have expected me younger, or older?” I didn’t know what I meant exactly. Perhaps just that it was incredible she should have any age at all.

  At a certain point it was (I felt) my turn to be curious. “How is it that your elders permit you, not yet having reached the age of majority, to go wandering off in this way across the map of Europe so freely?”

  “Who would prevent me?”

  “Your aunt for instance.”

  “Ah, ma tante.” And she explained that the aunt for all her obdurate bosom (one was obdurate, the other cotton wadding) was indulgent toward female peregrinations, believing that the frailer sex should be accorded at least the same freedom of movement permitted to the male. And if a young gentleman of good family should take it into his head to travel via Wagon-Lit from Paris to Stresa, who would gainsay him?

  Who indeed? “Still, I was under the impression you had certain attachments.”

  “I don’t understand to what you are referring. Your way of speaking is so abstract sometimes.”

  “If I am not mistaken, you possess somewhere, although you may temporarily have mislaid him, a fiancé.”

  “Ah, the artillerist!” She burst into peals of laughter. He was a clumsy fellow to whom one sometimes gave sweetmeats, pour s’amuser. She would introduce us sometime and I would see for myself that he was not to be taken seriously. Except by himself; he was of the sort that took everything seriously, to the point where he was a bore. And full of vanities, over matters for which he could hardly take the credit. It was the aunt herself who had christened him the Peninsula because of—how should I say? How had Luisa herself put it?—because of the diameter and span of his young manly powers. The mother too was privy to this joke. “Mother is singular. She never liked Alberto because of his chin.” Neither had I, and now I knew why. The eyebrows too! I was not sure how I was supposed to respond to confidences of this sort. What pitiless and obscene name would these Valkyries devise for me? The Pipestem, perhaps, or the One-Round Revolver. In wiser ages they had burned old women who were too prescient. And was the Peninsular Campaign likely to continue? “Don’t be crude. I have already told you he was a nonentity.” How, crude? It was I who was crude? It was too feminine for me.

  In this whole expedition through tunnels and over Alps and culminating in the villa and its yellow room, I had been aware of a vague feeling of apprehension, or restiveness, that I was gradually able to identify as a suspicion that I was on my honeymoon. Of all the roles that fate in its malice might set in my path the character of bridegroom, I felt, was the one that suited me least. Now another thought struck me, or a variation or subtlety, and an even more disquieting one: that I was on my honeymoon and she was not. She had chosen to accompany me, perhaps, to tell me amusing stories. There were invisible and probably sinister forces working here against which it was necessary to be on one’s guard. To this caution the vigorous sap of life in me responded that what had happened had made me rapturously happy. But this was just the point. On this joy, to strangle it, I leaped deftly like a wild beast. My very being and what it called me to do were in peril here. Because, if matters continued this way, I knew for a certainty that the day would come when she, the plucky adventuress who had accompanied me on the Finnish flight and pulled the wrong ballast string in the wicker car, would end by begging me with tears in her eyes not to risk myself and instead to remain by her side here, there, in the yellow room or some other place, in the bliss of domestic intimacy. And that every fibre of my being opposed; it was precisely because it tempted me, this happiness, that I struggled against it so fiercely.

  It was not really she, I knew now in a kind of prescience, but those two witches in Quai d’Orléans who had spun this spell about me in their war against an enemy who was not even properly aware he was being attacked. It would be necessary to oppose them with all the power of my own being. The trouble was that such a defence required technique and skill, and my understanding of woman, I now began to see, was imperfect. My vanity of a healthy male had led me to the delusion that, from a dozen or so adventures in my native city, I was adept enough at dealing with a sex which (I believed) was either hopelessly disarmed by its innocence or rendered accessible by its very lack of this quality. But those well-bred Ingrids and Kristins whose hands one clasped in their wealthy fathers’ orangeries, those ineptly rouged wenches in dockside taverns, were mechanisms of a misleading simplicity. With sighs to one, and small sums of money to the other, one might do as he wished. What one wished to do, of course, was not the same with the one as with the other. But with the one and the other, from time to time, it passed the hours when one was not busy in the library. Then in recent years my scientific investigations had demanded more and more of my attention. For months at a time I fo
rgot to visit the dockside, and the maidens gave up and married law students. I had reached the age when one’s illusions are at least partly behind one, and my prickly short hair, my mustache with its wiry points, and the tuft under my lip were grey at the edges. Now, in my full and ironic manhood, I had somehow fallen into the clutches of this pack of maenads who had begun by clouding my wits and would end by destroying me as they had destroyed Orpheus. I was an autumn crocus, a subject for satire. “Crispin in Love,” or better “Crispin Furioso,” mad for ardour. This belle sauvage—and I had expected to entertain her with my superior wisdom! And it was not only she, the long-lipped, pale, and faintly contemptuous focus of this delirium that periled me (it was still a mystery how on the one hand she could resemble a llama and on the other hand exert such a powerful spell of desire, when llamas were not considered beautiful and conventional beauty was arranged along quite other lines) but the aunt and mother as well, the wistful Stockholm virgins and the waterfront strumpets, the whole race of cloven tetrapods who inspired man to his most powerful and exalted dreams and then stifled him to earth when he attempted to carry them out. Beware, Crispin! It is your five limbs they envy, and they will not rest until they have made you like themselves.

  And yet how cunningly this peril was made! These pale fragilities and corals, these darknesses that drew one’s being like a magnet, were the creation of gods who were powerful even though malevolent and must be sacrificed to, else they would destroy. Tomorrow I will leave; no, tomorrow and tomorrow. Wednesday, Thursday. The climate still being mild, and we better acquainted now, the brocaded gown had given way to a mauve peignoir fastened in the front only with a pair of ribbons. Luisa in the baroque doorway, the mimosa in the background, was Delphic against the marble balustrade. The knee appearing in the garment’s opening as she turned, leading the eye inevitably upward to the shadow faintly visible in its translucence, was probably only an accident. It was time for tea, the sibyl pronounced. So it was.