Old Acquaintance

by David Stacton

  He reached his own conclusions. We are public entertainers. That is why the rich won’t take us in. They prefer their own amateurs, or someone like Tom Moore, who never groveled, only because his life was one affable kowtow. Lord Byron, we must remember, came down out of Scotland by accident, and all the other scribbling peers, Platen, Raglan, Acton, to name a few, were recusant, including Berners (Charlie had had his Paris period, too).

  Come to think of it, Byron had not been in Venice in Charlie’s favorite era, which was a good twenty years before Napoleon.

  “I wish we were in Venice,” said Charlie.

  We are on the square before St. Mark’s. The first thing we notice is the silence. This is long before the vaporetto, Harry’s Bar, and Peggy Guggenheim. We are watching an opera at the Fenice. This means, of course, that, except during the arias, we are chiefly watching each other.

  I am the mysterious, rich, and enviable stranger, an English milord probably, who suffers from a secret sorrow and so sees nobody but Consul Smith. Among other things I am a Rosicrucian, and one of the few people ever to have slept with Cagliostro’s wife for free. This is not because she liked me, or even because I liked her, but because he liked me. The setting is one half Berman and one half James Pryde, but the music is better, and there is no orange peel in the Grand Canal. The air smells of eau de Bengale and meat sauce. The young man beside me, though he looks like Paul, is actually as good company as Thomas Gray, and I have not quarreled with him yet. He writes sestinas, so he may be Alfieri instead.

  Into the square flounces a woman known as La Gazza Ladra. She has stepped from a gondola. Her maid holds a parasol over her head. Both maid and mistress wear white masks, but the parasols have a black lace fringe. If you really want to see what they are like, look at a sketch by Domenico. He is not so good as Gianbattista, but he has his points. Or do I mean Gian Lorenzo?

  Or do I mean Longhi?

  No, I do not think so, Longhi’s women are not this robust. She is more like a Crespi, or a Piazzetta slimmed down.

  At any rate it is only an operetta, so who did the scenery doesn’t matter. La Gazza Ladra is the celebrated singer. She has made even the castrati look to their laurels, and not to their laurels alone. She is a little past her prime now, but not much. Dr. Burney, who was through here last year, admired her shakes, and she is great friends with Michael Kelly, and other people like that. They admire her professionalism. What most of the world, including me, admires, is her.

  Ten or twelve years ago, when we were in the full springtime of life, or at any rate, when I was only forty and she had not yet gotten immortal about our ages, we had a brief affair in Rome; continued it in Naples; followed it up in Vienna; had it talked about in London; heard with pleasure that it had been spoken of favorably in Madrid, and was considered le tonnerre in Lisbon. Neither one of us has ever found anybody else with whom we were ever able to repeat those few golden moments.

  Now, at last, we are together again.

  “Là ci darem la mano,” she sings (it was a flop in Vienna, but a big success in Prague. It is Prague that counts). “How are you, darling?”

  I get up, narrowly avoiding Hemingway’s Major, who does not belong here yet, but is here anyway and trying to get back to his hotel.

  “Mimi,” I cry.

  We are together again. We allow those golden moments to steep in the teapot of our affections, until I am greatly afraid they are much too strong. Never mind: before sending off Thomas Gray, a long-distance gondolier I retain in my employ, to tiddle her maid in an alley, I made sure the tea was sent up with lemon. So we have lemonade instead.

  “There was never anybody else but you,” she cries in my arms, while down below we hear the plaintive cries of the friendly neighborhood pistachio seller. “Of course there have been other men, but they were never real.”

  From our separate beds we admire each other, dreaming together of a warmth we never had, but not making the mistake of bumping into the night table in our pajamas, either.

  La Femme aura Gomorrhe et l’Homme aura Sodome,

  Et‚ se jetant de loin un regard irrité,

  Les deux sexes mourront chacun de son côté,

  as Alfred de Vigny put it.

  “But, oh, darling, I have an engagement in Vienna on Thursday, and the communications are vile,” says she. “Do you suppose I should change horses at the border, or can I just ride Miss Campendonck?”

  *

  The trouble with that kind of nonsense is that one never wakes up from it. One always believes it just remotely to be possible. So Charlie sensibly went to sleep, where nothing is possible. He had never so much as kissed Lotte, except in public, for the photographers. He hated that kind of insincere affection.

  But the last thing he remembered, before he went to sleep, was the lovely light in that Venetian bedroom (it was the bedroom from Carpaccio’s Dream of St. Ursula, but with a tousled, intimate bed). It was a pity that it did not and could not now exist.

  They were completely compatible. They had never had even the whim to touch.

  The only truthful autobiography, perhaps, would be an accurate description of the life we hoped to live.

  XIX

  “YOU like Charlie very much, don’t you?” asked Unne.

  “He’s an old friend.”

  “He’s married, isn’t he?”

  “He has his illusions,” Lotte said wearily, “like the rest of us.”

  Unne looked at her from rather far away, and was as rapidly whirling away even farther. Either I’ve had too much to drink, thought Lotte, which is unlike me, or else she really is whirling away, which is unlike her, but decided, all the same, not to ask questions. Sometimes it is better not to ask, particularly when you do not want to know.

  “Paul says he’s very nice,” said Unne, obviously wanting to work the name in.

  Lotte sat up and stared at her. “He’s probably just a little overawed by the Ephesians,” she said. “They’re not like the Corinthians, you know. They’ve been around longer, no matter what the archaeologists say.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “One can’t help feeling sorry for him, in a way,” said Unne, and went off to her own room with a gentle and quite unreal smile.

  “Oh dear, has it come to that?” wondered Lotte, and pondered for a while on the infinite understanding of the truly ignorant. Still, if we are entirely too knowledgeable ourselves, sometimes it helps.

  She turned out the light. The clock by her bed said three.

  XX

  CHARLIE was playing badminton, a game he doted on, not only because he found the shuttlecock so pretty, but also because privately he had always considered it a symbolic thing. He gave it a censorial whack.

  Paul, who was making a good show out of being beaten, looked contrite. It was Tuesday morning. Unne had gone to Luxembourg City to look for a hat, perhaps for a cocked hat, and Lotte was doing absolutely nothing.

  In the afternoon they went to see the American entry, a comedy set in Beverly Hills. Lotte enjoyed it. When we tire of the complexities of life, what we long for is the utter simplicity of American sophistication, Hollywood style, where even the vice has a certain tight-fisted innocence, as indeed vice usually does. It is the very good, in this world, who are the wicked and wily.

  Though she was seldom there these days, she still kept on a house in Beverly Hills. For one thing, that gave Miss Campendonck a permanent mailing address. For another, she liked to.

  The audience seemed to enjoy the film. America isn’t the promised land any more, Russia makes much better promises than we do, but we still give a better handout, so though we never win the prize, we do get the laughs. Russia has nothing to offer but modified Marxism and the Bolshoi Ballet, an extinct art form. We, on the other hand, provide Coca-Cola, bourbon, Mahalia Jackson, and tight blue jeans. So though we may lose on the economic front and in outer space, culturally we have the world sewed up. The only thing that could possibly shake
our dominance is the revelation that Jelly Roll Morton was in actuality the son of Rosa Luxemburg.

  She forgot sometimes, it meant so little to her to be there and she was so glad to be away from it, how much she liked Beverly Hills. It is not something we willingly confess to strangers, but there is much to be said for the place. It is orderly. It is quiet. And if it is not serene, at least it is sedate. One forgets, so ugly is Los Angeles in every way, how lovely southern California is, and, though constrained now, how ample still. Besides, though she didn’t have one, it was as close to a home as she had ever had. It was at least where she had lived while she discovered she didn’t belong anywhere. And so, in a way, she did belong there. She looked at Beverly Hills, just visible behind the actors, with interest. It looked far away, like a farm one’s family had once owned somewhere, before one’s own time.

  It was at least a place to go back to, whereas Charlie, she suspected, merely had somewhere to go next. And even that had to be planned in advance, rather carefully.

  It is difficult to go on traveling without somewhere to go back to. It is even more difficult to have nowhere to go but on. But that is the way life is. We have to move. We cannot allow ourselves to be caught napping.

  XXI

  CHARLIE proposed a walk. The walks and sights of Mondorf were not extensive. There were the main street, the French border, the empty fields, and their fellow guests. Charlie chose the main street. Though he professed himself to be charmed by out-of-the-way places, it was their one fashionable quarter, if any, that he headed for when he got there. If they had no fashionable quarter, then he made do with the main street.

  Halfway down the street was the sort of smart gift shop that specializes in Icelandic sweaters, bedwarmers from Trinidad, and sari scarves, but still, you could see that Mondorf was catching up.

  “La Gazza Ladra Import Company,” said Charlie informatively. “It’s an international cartel.” It was his name for all those establishments run by young men who have revolutionized simple peasant crafts in countries that by and large don’t have any. If it comes from Manchester or Paris they wouldn’t be caught dead selling it. But if it is bright and sparkles, they bring it home. Thus the name.

  Beyond this cultural beachhead (Kashmiri wastepaper baskets seemed to be moving well), the landscape to the right became bucolic, though more in the manner of Maurice de Guérin than of Theocritus. Luxembourg had never had a famous poet. What it had had, they were about to see.

  “Sometimes I come here to meditate upon the nature of things, amid the family tombs,” said Charlie appreciatively.

  “What’s that?”

  “Ah, you’ve caught a glimpse of it. That’s fine.”

  To their left a shallow brook not so much flowed as crawled beneath adolescent trees. Down this stream white swans serenely glided, their feet dragging the bottom, only to run out of water and have to waddle across to the next patch with the irritated look of fishwives hiking their skirts up to cross a muddy lane. Then down they went again, serenely gliding. It was as much a part of etiquette not to watch the waddle as it was to admire the glide. Nature has much to teach.

  Beyond the swans, who avoided it, was a cement monolith decorated with bronze plaques. The local great man, no doubt, but he seemed unusually muscular.

  “Come,” said Charlie.

  An Art Nouveau young man with heavy features peeped out from behind his own flexed arm, as though from behind a boa. Lotte went round to the left. The plaque there showed merely a thigh. “What’s on the other side?”

  “His right bicep,” said Charlie. “He was European Champion Weightlifter about 1906. He’s the national hero.”

  “Oh.”

  “Well, you wanted to see the sights. You should go round the back. On the back he is holding a quadriga in his teeth. You know what I’ve taken to doing in the afternoons?”

  “What?”

  “I go to the river. It’s the Moselle, on the Trier road. It’s rather pretty.”

  So they went. It was something to do.

  Charlie seemed to be looking for one particular place. After a while he found it, though it looked no different to her than any other place they had passed. She had to grant the woods here looked hospitable, thin, with low shrubs at different heights so that the light came from everywhere, and varied green with green, into intangible surf.

  She’d never seen Charlie anywhere but indoors until after dark in her life, but he led the way as though he knew the place. They came out of the surf onto a broad green shelf that sloped to the river, which was placid and shallow here.

  Charlie sat down with his hands across his knees and said nothing for all of five minutes, a silence unique in her experience.

  On the other side of the river the ground had the same low bank, with a broad field, a spinney of poplars, and a hillside beyond. There was no house visible. The river was about a hundred meters wide. Opposite her a rowboat tugged to get away from a ramshackle wharf, if you could call four uprights and some board and batten work a wharf. It was like sitting down to watch the nineteenth century.

  “When I was a child I went to stay with my aunt in Thüringia,” said Charlie, after a while. “I stayed for two weeks. There must have been some sort of crisis at home. I never went back there again, but I’ve never forgotten it. Now they tell me it’s in the Russian Zone, along with the rest of the world. That was a long time ago.”

  He stood up and dusted off his pants.

  “You wouldn’t think it was a border, would you? All the man over there has to do when he wants to come across is untie the boat and row. So of course in that case he doesn’t mind rowing back. I know. I’ve watched him.”

  Lotte didn’t know what he was thinking, so she didn’t try to find out. To her, the river looked like the Stanislas in California, a place she had been once and liked, because of the odd name. But if Charlie was feeling homeless, she thought it better not to mention where her own roots were. Besides they flourished hydroponically, in the still waters of her career. They weren’t earth roots.

  “Did you ever think of going back?” he asked.

  “To Berlin? I have to sing there next month.”

  “It isn’t the way it used to be. It looks American.”

  “I’ve been privately,” said Lotte. “I went to look up some friends in ’48. They weren’t there.”

  “Oh.” All he did was to stand and look across the river. She found that sad, somehow. Was there a river in Thüringia? She supposed so. It wasn’t the Sahara, after all. When we get sufficiently old we begin to remember what it was like to be young enough to be impatient to grow up, like a swimmer holding his breath until he’s free of the water weeds.

  “The light isn’t very good, is it?” said Charlie. “We’ll come again Thursday, in the morning. In the morning the lighting is better.”

  That was more like him. He had nothing against nature, that was his usual attitude, but he preferred a good hotel.

  Or did he? She felt flattered. Charlie didn’t usually show you anything he really liked, unless it was just a painting.

  It was odd, that patch of river, she had to admit. It continued to flow through your mind, after you had looked at it, like time.

  XXII

  IN the morning there had been a seminar on the works of Accatone, with Accatone there. Some directors like this sort of thing. It gives them university status. It proves they are part of the curriculum. Others don’t. In the afternoon there was a Distributors’ Lunch. They talked about art, but what they were worrying about was how to distribute Anita Ekberg, a thing by no means easy to do. At four o’clock Lotte gave an interview to the press. It was well attended. In the evening there was a long and depressing Japanese film about the problems of the aged. It was ugly. It was boring. It would probably get the prize. Intellectuals are puritans. They like to be bored for their own good. It makes them feel they have not wasted their efforts. If the thing is ugly, too, that’s just so much lagniappe. It doesn’t matter wheth
er it means anything or not, but if it’s significant it always gets the prize. Paint me warts and all, said Cromwell, but we’ve come a long way since then. Now we just paint the warts.

  I mustn’t be old-fashioned, said Charlie. On the whole he didn’t see much of the other judges between performances. He found their dogged contemporaneity depressing. It made them seem so old.

  Now he, Lotte, Unne, and Paul were on the terrace, after dinner, being jolly together. Charlie didn’t like it. It was too much like the possible permutations of the same two couples meeting once a week for bridge for ten years. Lotte and he played off against Unne and Paul. The women, which is to say Lotte and Unne, played off against the men. The younger generation played the older. The older generation played dead. Then, for a change, Lotte and Paul played against Unne and himself. That was called a mixed double, and was piquant. Were any other combinations possible? He couldn’t think of any. He did have the distinct feeling that he was his partner’s dummy, whoever his partner was.

  “What’s trumps?” he asked abruptly, saw he shouldn’t have spoken at all, and since he felt more like amusing himself than amusing other people, lapsed back into silence and his private games, and let the others do the talking.

  This one was called The Normandie Game.

  Actually the game took place on an idealized Titanic, and had something to do with Leviathan, whom thou hast made to take his pastime therein, but it was called The Normandie Game because the boat looked like the Normandie, he had traveled on the Normandie at least twice and knew the layout, and when it flopped belly-over like a whale in New York harbor, at the beginning of the war, he had been a lot more upset than ever he had been driving out of Paris ahead of the Germans, among the refugees, in a rented Daimler, on the Bayonne road, with a barrel of contraband gasoline beside him in the rear seat. A weird journey that had been, but necessary, since he’d had a price on his head at the time. It may seem an odd place to put a price tag, but there it was. Even though he might not have much to say, at least he had exiled himself in order to be free to say it. The freedom was the important thing. What one did with it afterwards was one’s own affair.