We walked towards the tower, unhurriedly, each man caught up in his own thoughts, everything that could happen had already happened, terribly and irrevocably happened, and this certainty, together with the beauty of the place and the moonlight, seemed to imbue each of us with a total sense of oneness with the landscape, an utter acceptance of what is, as it is.
Even the tone of the younger officer had become more tranquil and distant, he was walking forward with hands deep in his pockets and his eyes fixed on the grass, “We plunged into a cloud,” he was saying, “and we never emerged again, there was no chance of understanding anything, the only thing I could understand was that you were determined to keep climbing higher and higher, to break through the clouds as though you were piloting a jet, to give it more power and get clear, while I was anxious to descend and pick up speed, as you would do with a propeller plane. Who would have guessed that we would have gone back to propeller-driven planes in the run-up to the year Two Thousand? And yet we did everything by the book, never deviating one iota, we followed the manual to the letter, so there must have been a mistake or something missing,” said the young man, staring me straight in the eyes. The captain answered for me, “What’s the point of going over it?” he asked in tones of ritual consolation, “with that ice we could never have made it, whatever we did, severe ice conditions, ice crystals, believe me, no one could ever have pulled out of it.”
(“Do you know,” said the younger man, “I’ve often wondered what they think when they listen to the voices of dead pilots in the voice recorder, the one of the two black boxes which picks up what is said in the cockpit.” “I used to know someone who did that job,” said the captain, “he was an old flight engineer who had retired but carried on working with investigation teams who looked into airline accidents, I once asked him if it didn’t upset him to listen to those voices, and he said, ‘No, why?’ ‘But what do you expect to find that’s not already in the flight recorder, in the record of the various flight manoeuvres?’ ‘I’m interested in the tone of the voices,’ he said, ‘that’s what matters, the tones of voice.’”)
In the buoyed approach channel, a passenger ship festooned with coloured lights shining brightly in the night was gliding, slowly and noiselessly, out from the harbour towards the open sea. All three of us stopped to stare at this majestic, imperturbable moving shadow framed by its own lights. “Did you hear the passengers behind us?” asked the younger man. The captain, with his eyes still fixed on the ship, nodded, “During the last moments,” he said, “in the dying moments, I became aware of what they really were, those noises, those voices coming through our closed doors, and not only the voices. But only at the very last . . .”
At the foot of the control tower, feeling guilty at not being able to allow them into the hangar, I turned back and invited them to come up, but the captain, after a moment’s hesitation, said “No, I’m very grateful, but better not.”
“I understand,” I said, “just give me a minute and I’ll be back down,” I looked at the older man in his uniform and, raising his shoulders ever so slightly, he said, “Of course.” A second later I bounded up the stairs four at a time, went into the darkened room, located the switch by the light of the moon which came flooding in through the great windows, bathing the small, circular room and instrument panels in its light, I pulled down the lever and the two rows of blue lights in the grass disappeared into the night, a road dissolving into the darkness, I thought, even the runway goes to sleep, and one instant later I was rushing down the steps, another second and I was out on the path. I looked around, with no idea of what second it was, but they were nowhere to be seen. I raced over the grass, towards the trees, towards the hangar, towards the terrace, and finally I caught sight of them making their way along the unlighted runway, slowly, in the distance, their backs to me, one of them debating with himself, cutting the air with his hand, or turning the palms of his hands upwards, while the other, the older of the two, seemed to be keeping him company, but his face was turned away, towards the moon and the liner out at sea. I stood watching them until they faded into the dawn, the sea, the sky.
THREE
And Everything Else?
AS AN AVIATOR, I came from the street, I had behind me a long career as a walker, I had always walked a lot, almost always with my eyes fixed on the ground. I was hypnotised by movement, by the flow of the landscape in miniature. Since boyhood, it had always seemed to me that walking and staring at the ground reproduced the impressions available from an aeroplane: everything was in the correct proportion, even the speed seemed right, while the joins between paving stones could be roads surrounding housing estates, puddles could be volcanic lakes, and trickles of water in the gutter rivers in full spate with their tributaries. At an earlier stage, as a younger child, I imagined I was a tram and as I walked along a street, I would pull up at every stop, open and shut the doors with a puff of breath from between clenched teeth. When I was not engaged on urban rail transport, I felt like an aeroplane; not a pilot, I must insist, but an aeroplane. As an adult, I would make an even bigger aeroplane, a four-engined job, with an increase in wingspan and horsepower. As an aeroplane I was born from a tram, like a butterfly from a caterpillar, and as an aeroplane, even if I loved to skim my cheek along the ground in long, muddy swoops, I flew over the streets at a fixed altitude, the altitude of a child’s eyes. As an aeroplane, I felt full responsibility for everything I was transporting, be they pilots, passengers, mail or poultry, and this sense of responsibility, for one like me who felt himself substantially a thing, belonging to the family of things, made me feel, as a thing, on a par with the living beings I had on board. Childhood is, among other things, a certain altitude, a certain relationship with the earth, a question of dimensions which will never again be experienced in life, a point of view held with tenacity which, once lost, will fade from the memory leaving no trace. Nothing, except perhaps the wild extremes of violence or madness, will ever be able to restore to me that intimacy with gusts of dust, with blowing paper and insects, with the berries, roots and clay from which I come. It may be that in transforming myself into an aeroplane, I merely wished to be an adult, because only an illusion of continuity allows us to believe that the child and the adult who emerges from the child are one and the same, two stages of an identical unity; childhood does not develop, it simply falls away like milk teeth, to be replaced by a blend of a new substance, a compound of enamel and ivory, similar but never identical. The child and the adult are two divergent breeds in nature, different in species and classification (if in nothing else than in that underdeveloped determination to survive which leaves the child exposed to any risk, and that pig-headed determination to survive which leaves the adult exposed to any ridicule). So the tram that was in me died away to be replaced by a reconnaissance or transport child, formed from a bicycle prone to crazy tilts to one side, to breakneck descents and falls: a fighter-bomber of a child who forged relations with friends based on their knowledge of the various makes of aeroplane and of their functions, a knowledge culled from a book of aircraft outlines as seen from earth. The book, not dissimilar from many such manuals once used in ornithology for the identification of birds in flight, was presumably a left-over from the War which I had picked up somewhere or other. The successive moment, when I had to transmogrify from plane to pilot, coincided with a painful phase of my life caused in part by that metamorphosis itself, as well as by the transition from being a bystander to being a participant. I had learned from the open-air cinema we attended in summer that there was a dignity to being bystander. At an early stage, I realized that heroes died and theirs was the glory, but their friends and peers preserved the memory, transmitted news of their deeds, and theirs was the more serviceable part. I found myself nurturing greater and greater sympathy for these secondary, ever-present figures who took part in the tragic action, knowing from the outset that it would all finish badly, and whose actions made the film possible: in their supporting role they gave
a certain solidity to the whole affair. In the course of one of those summer seasons, I decided that when I was grown up, I would take the part of the bystander, even if I found it difficult to say in exactly which field of life. But there, in the same cinema, my aeroplane vocation was consolidated, and these were the only two paths that opened before me – aeroplane or bystander.
Becoming a pilot, then, meant abandoning a dual nature to which I owed allegiance, my aeroplane nature and my bystander nature; but there must be some lingering trace of my previous metallic stage, if even today I would prefer to attempt a crash landing rather than eject, and could never abandon an aeroplane to its fate. In any case, a mania is a mania, with time it is possible to see it at work, to decipher its continuity, to recognise how it operated underground, when it made its appearance, how it was hidden, justified, re-formed and transformed into something else, silenced only to speak out in a different idiom; in self-defence, if self-defence is needed, I can only say that mind and mania have a common derivation.
The best kind of flight is undoubtedly flight of the mind; it requires no sophisticated means of transport, no licence or training sessions, nothing other than the capability to be one’s own pilot, the pilot of one’s own imagination. For thousands of years, there was no other kind; the skies of antiquity were thick with air traffic, alive with multitudes of flying creatures or aero-objects which, were I to sight them now on the far side of my windscreen, I would be obliged to enter in official documents under the heading, Unidentified Flying Objects – eagles controlled by winches, mechanical doves, or the aerial throne of Ka’us, a king who flew as far as the borders of China on board a four-engined seat, i.e. drawn by four eagles, pursuing four unattainable lambs’ legs. I relished this attention to the minute details of motorisation, as though imagination were not of itself sufficient, but required the underpinning of plausible mechanics; but this was, I imagined, the means by which some premonition of the dawn of the machine, or a longing for it, had lurked inside the dream. Down the centuries, the only pilot was the bard, and later the scribe, when he set himself to recount the flights of Solomon or of Mahomet, or of any of the earlier prophets who set forth astride some aeronautical pack-horse; the title of pilot belonged also to anyone who recounted the tale of Malek commanding the flying chest which descended at the touch of one screw, ascended at the touch of another and turned right or left at the touch of yet others. Better still were the shamans, sufis and all those who took to the air without any visible means of support, trusting their souls to fly for them and to continue searching on their behalf. Hundreds of nameless pilots had flown as best they could, attributing wings to all that they saw in movement in space, to the sun, the moon, the celestial bodies, then to the gods, to animals and men, and then again to griffins, dragons and all manner of nature’s hybrids. Finally there came the period of objects, and at that point everything took to the air – carpets, sofas, hats, boots, capes, rings, beds and all kinds of household implement. Honour and glory to those aviators of the mind and imagination, scarcely a one of whom had to face injury or pain, the only conceivable breakdown being a failure of the imagination. As for me, in the course of my metamorphosis from aeroplane to pilot, I lost my ability to grow excited over the dove of Archytas of Tarentum, over Bellerophon astride Pegasus or over that ship of Lucian of Samosata which was raised up by a gust of wind, hoisted from the sea and hurtled towards the moon. I loved Ovid, but the vision of Perseus soaring through the air with the head of Medusa dripping blood left me aeronautically cold, as did Daedalus and Icarus; Leopardi had raised one devastating objection to the tale of the feathers detaching from the boy as the wax melted, leaving him flapping his wings in mid-air and falling into the sea, and of the father flying low over the waves but seeing nothing but scattered feathers – how could the wax have melted if the greater the altitude, the lower the temperature? There was nothing more typical of Leopardi than that simultaneous attachment to myth and to the vertical thermal gradient. For me, the best of tales remained the tale of Simon Magus, the man who, in his keenness to impress the Roman people and please Nero, accepted the challenge of repeating Icarus’ flight in public; with an apparatus of wings of his own devising, he presented himself to Saint Peter, and said to him, “Look here, Peter, in the sight of all these watching multitudes, I’m off to see the Lord in heaven,” and Peter straightaway withdrew, knelt down on the stones of the Via Sacra and, raising his eyes to the sky where Simon Magus’ prodigious deed was about to unfold, invoked the name of Christ: “Lord, of your grace, show your power to all those who are gathered here, I do not seek his death but merely request that his intestines be churned up a bit, that he fall to the ground and break his tibia in three places.” I was entranced by the precision of the request for the fracture, by the fact that we were dealing with a little incident of black magic practised by the Apostle Peter at the expense of Simon Magus: the fracture may have been on a demonist and simonist, but the real sorcerer was Peter and the victim Simon Magus, who stalled in mid-air, fell to the ground and died a few days later of a broken leg.
As an aeroplane, I belonged to the century of the switch to things, the most realistic century there has ever been, a century which has solidified fantasies into objects, (and which later still, surpassing itself, would become the century of the disappearance of things and their replacement by images). For every myth unrealized by history, for every dream or simple fantasy narrative, this century would sooner or later set about constructing the physical object which was its perfect material incarnation, even if the means have been more wearisome, mechanical and graceless. What is going on? Up there, twenty metres above ground level, a man imprisoned in a wooden cage is defending himself against an invisible danger to which he has voluntarily exposed himself, I used to read this surprising sentence, here we have an airman of the mind taking the first photograph of an aircraft in the sky, an event imagined for thousands of years, predicted down to the details of the wood of the chest or cage, and which was no sooner made possible than distorted into a mechanical, inexplicable and absurd shape; the “imprisoned” pilot was Blériot, the “photographer” Franz Kafka. It was the first time Kafka had seen a man actually fly, and also the first time he had seen Gabriele D’Annunzio, while for D’Annunzio that afternoon in 1909 in Brescia was the first time someone had taken him flying. An afternoon of remarkable firsts. And an afternoon of non-encounters. Kafka saw and described D’Annunzio – a waddling, little man – but D’Annunzio paid no heed to Kafka, nor would he have had any reason for so doing, since Kafka was at the time merely a young man from Prague, unpublished and unknown.
The crowds rushed to see the first aeronautical demonstrations, and yet, I used to think, flight had already been possible for more than a century, from the age of the aerostatic balloon, but the aerostat never seems to have satisfied people’s expectations of flight, perhaps on account of its immobility; a balloon in equilibrium in the sky is anchored in the most complete inertia, possessing no movement of its own, the balloon itself does not move, but is moved by the mass of air to which it belongs. Everything around the aeronaut is static, his cape does not billow, he does not feel the action of the wind, not even when the gusts which surround him drag him forwards at high speed. If he were to place some soap bubbles on a table in front of him, they would remain in a state of absolute rest, a candle flame would not flicker. A creature of an interregnum, the aerostat was destined to remain suspended between the end of flight as myth and the birth of flight as technical achievement; the curious anchor which hung over the side of the basket indicated another of its amphibian, intermediate vocations, as though, deriving from nautical associations with the domain of fluids, there still existed some link with the sea, with the liquid element; but unlike ships, the aerostat could never take advantage of the dualism, of the air/water contradiction which permitted the mobility of ships and sails. The balloon was entirely a creature of the air, an air/air creature, forced to have its being inside one element
only. It belonged more to the family of cloud than to the realm of flight.
That absence of wings in a flying object was intolerable to me. I had always linked flight with the winged form, probably because the winged creature is nature’s model, it is the flying animal. Coming from a childhood as an aeroplane, I was well aware that machines concealed a secret rapport with the animal world, a contradictory relationship of assertiveness and power on the one hand but of imitation and nostalgia on the other, because although we had, through technology, liberated ourselves from that world once and for all, we had also separated ourselves from it once and for all. Names of models, of aeroplanes and of various other devices, often borrowed from the animal world or relating to it, could be produced in evidence: as a pilot, I would have occasion to fly in “falcons,” “kites,” and “storks,” while the English term “cockpit,” the pilot’s cabin, retains an association with “poultry.”
As an aeroplane, I had no idea why an aeroplane stayed airborne, nor indeed did I ever give it a second thought. Later, as a pilot, I was forced to recognise that although no one could explain why an aeroplane flies, and that it was easier to explain why it crashes, there were excellent rules which described the phenomenon, and precise laws detailing construction practice. I made an effort to attain some familiarity with these, and to acquaint myself with the speed which, bisecting the airflow, creates a depression on the upperside of the wing and builds up pressure on the underside, or those tiny air particles of the same flow line which divide on contact and wash round the wing, affording it both lift and support. Strangely, the lift and support are two thirds produced by the depression on the upper part and only one third by the pressure on the lower side, so that the plane is two thirds lifted into the skies by suction and one third supported – the only case in which depression, being stronger than all other forces, gives uplift. This is as much as can be said with certainty regarding flight.
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