Torriani laughed. “And day after tomorrow, we’ll paste it together again.”
The manager came by, and the mechanics pushed the car into the pit. It stank of burned oil and gasoline. “Are you coming tonight, Clerfayt?” the manager asked.
Clerfayt nodded. “We’re in the way here, Lillian,” he said. “Let’s get away from this filthy stable.” He saw her expression. It still held the same curious gravity. “What’s the matter?” he asked. “Do you still want me not to drive any more?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
She hesitated. “I don’t know how to put it—but somehow it’s terribly immoral.”
“Ye gods!” Torriani said.
“Be quiet, Alfredo,” Clerfayt replied.
“It sounds silly, I know,” Lillian said. “I don’t mean it that way. It’s something else. A few minutes ago, I knew perfectly well what I meant—now I don’t quite.”
Torriani took a long swallow. “After a race, drivers are as sensitive as crabs when they’ve shed their shells. Don’t give Clerfayt any complexes.”
Clerfayt laughed. “You mean we shouldn’t tempt God, Lillian?”
She nodded. “Only if there’s no other choice. Not out of frivolity.”
“Ye gods!” Torriani repeated disgustedly. “Frivolity!” He got up and went over to Gabrielli.
“I’m talking nonsense,” Lillian said in despair. “Don’t listen to me.”
“You’re not talking nonsense,” Clerfayt replied. “Only it’s surprising to hear this from you.”
“Why?”
“Do I ever ask you to go back to the sanatorium?” he said quietly.
She looked at him. She had imagined until now that he knew nothing, or that he had assumed there was not much wrong with her. “I don’t need to go back to the sanatorium,” she said quietly.
“I know that. But I don’t ask you to either.”
She saw the irony. “I suppose I shouldn’t talk that way, is that it?”
“Of course you should,” he said. “Always.”
She laughed. “I love you very much, Clerfayt. Are all women as silly as I’ve been after a race?”
“I don’t remember. Is that a Balenciaga dress?”
“I don’t remember that either.”
He felt his cheekbones and his shoulder. “Tonight, I’ll have a face like a streaky pudding. Shall we drive out to Levalli’s while I can still steer?”
“Don’t you have to go to see your manager?”
“No. That’s only a victory celebration in the hotel.”
“Don’t you like to celebrate victories?”
He laughed. “Every win is one less.”
Lillian looked at him.
“One less to win,” he said. His face was already beginning to swell. “Will you make wet compresses for my face this evening and read aloud to me a chapter from the Critique of Pure Reason?”
“Yes,” Lillian said. “And some day I’d like to go to Venice.”
“Why?”
“There are no mountains there, and no automobiles.”
Chapter Fourteen
THEY STAYED IN SICILY another two weeks. Clerfayt’s shoulder mended. They lived in Levalli’s neglected garden, and by the sea. The villa was a cabin overhanging the sea and time, which whispered and rushed away beneath it without beginning and without end.
Clerfayt had a few weeks free until the next race. “Shall we stay here?” he asked. “Or go back?”
“Where to?”
“To Paris. Or anywhere. When you’re at home nowhere, you can go anywhere. It is getting hot here now.”
“Is the spring over already?”
“Down here it is. But we can take Giuseppe and follow it. In Rome it is just beginning.”
“And when it is past there?”
Clerfayt laughed. “We’ll follow it again, if you like. Then it will be beginning in Lombardy and by the lakes. After that we can follow it into Switzerland, up the Rhine, until we see it by the sea in all the colors of the Dutch tulip fields. It’s as though time were standing still.”
“Have you ever done that?”
“Yes, a hundred years ago. Before the war.”
“With a woman?”
“Yes, but it was different.”
“It is always different. Even with the same woman. I’m not jealous.”
“I wish you were.”
“I would think it terrible if you had experienced nothing and were to tell me that I was the first woman in your life.”
“You are.”
“I’m not; but if for my sake you forget the names of the others for a while, that is enough.”
“Shall we go?”
Lillian shook her head. “Not yet. I don’t want to pretend to myself that time is standing still. I want to feel it and not deceive myself. It stood still all those endless winters in the sanatorium; but I did not stand still. I was dragged back and forth along it as if it were a wall of ice.”
“Are you standing still now?”
She kissed him. “I am turning in a circle. For a while. Like a dancer.”
Then she became impatient and wanted to leave. From one day to the next it seemed to her that she had been in Sicily for months. They had been months, she thought, months for her. Her calendar differed from that of the people around her. Between day and day there stretched each time the night, like a gorge weeks in length; the night and her ordeal. She never let Clerfayt spend the whole night with her. She saw to it that he was never beside her in the mornings when she awoke. He thought it was a whim of hers; but she did not want him to hear her coughing.
She flew to Rome, intending to fly on from there to Paris. Clerfayt was to drive the car back, with Torriani, and they were going to meet in Paris.
For a day, she wandered around among the ruins of Rome. Next day she sat at the outdoor tables of the café on the Via Veneto. She was supposed to take the evening plane, but she hesitated. A groundless melancholia had taken possession of her, a feeling of great sweetness, with no other component of sadness except, perhaps, the one last cause which stands, silver and gray, on the horizon of every life that is not lived on the level of simple bookkeeping. She spent the night in the hotel, and did not go to the airline office until next morning. In the show window she saw a poster of Venice. What she had said to Clerfayt suddenly came to her. Without further thought, she went in and had her ticket changed for one to Venice. It seemed to her that she must go there before she went to Paris. She had to get something clear in her mind; she did not know precisely what it was, but she had to do it before she saw Clerfayt again.
“When is the plane leaving?” she asked.
“In two hours.”
She returned to the hotel and packed. She assumed that Clerfayt must already be in Paris, but she was reluctant to telephone or write him that she was not coming. She could do that from Venice, she thought, and knew that she would not do it. She wanted to be alone, she felt—alone and unattainable, uninfluenceable, before she returned. Returned? she thought. Where to? Had she not thought that once before, at the race? Where to? Had she not flown away, and was she not flying now like one of those legendary birds that are born without feet and must fly until they die? But wasn’t that what she’d wanted? And wasn’t the question now whether she oughtn’t to leave Clerfayt also?
———
The plane dropped down into the pink late afternoon of the lagoon. Lillian was given a corner room in the Hotel Danieli. As they rode up in the elevator, the man who ran it informed her that this hotel had been the scene of the stormy romance between the aging George Sand and the young Alfred de Musset.
“And what happened? With whom did he deceive her?”
“With no one, Mademoiselle. The young man was in despair. Madame Sand deceived him.” The man smiled. “With an Italian doctor. Monsieur de Musset was a poet.”
Lillian saw the spark of irony and amusement in the man’s eyes. Probably she deceived herself, she thou
ght, and loved the one man while she was with the other.
The elevator operator opened the door. “She left him,” he recounted. “She went away without telling Monsieur de Musset that she was going.”
Like me, Lillian thought. Do I want to deceive myself also?
She entered her room, and abruptly stood still. The whole room was filled with the hovering, rose-colored evening light that exists only in Venice. She went to the window and looked out. The canal was blue and still, but it rhythmically lifted and lowered the rows of gondolas whenever a vaporetto churned up to San Zaccaria and stopped. The first lights were flaring, intensely white and all but lost in the wealth of pinks and blues, except for the orange warning lights along the shallows. These hung tenderly like a glowing chain around the neck of San Giorgio Maggiore. There seemed to be no heaviness in this city, Lillian thought; it was as far away as anything could possibly be from all mountains. Further, it was not possible to flee. Nothing ground and crushed you here; everything caressed. And everything was strange and magical. No one knows me here, she thought. And no one knows that I am here. She felt this anonymity as a queer, tempestuous joy, the joy of having escaped a joy, for a short time or forever.
That feeling intensified when she walked through the piazza. Something of the adventure of all beginnings was in it. She had no destination; she let herself drift and landed in the lower restaurant of Quadri, because she thought it lovely that a small eating establishment whose walls were decorated with eighteenth-century scenes and gold brackets should simply open out on the street. She ordered scampi, drinking a light white wine with it. Beside her, masked figures danced on the walls. She felt like them, as if she had escaped, had her face hidden behind an invisible domino, in the same mild intoxication of irresponsible freedom that every mask granted. A thousand beginnings lay before her in the roseate dusk, like the thousand narrow lanes of this city which was so fond of masks. Where did those beginnings lead? To unknown, unnamed new discoveries, or only to seductive, well-known pleasures from which you emerged with a hangover and an acute regret at having wasted on them the most precious thing there was: time? Yet it has to be wasted, Lillian thought, it has to be wasted thoughtlessly, in spite of everything, or else you are like the man in the fairy tale who wanted so much for his gold piece that he could not decide what it should be, and died before he made up his mind.
“What is going on this evening?” she asked the waiter.
“This evening? Perhaps you would like the theater, Signora.”
“Can seats still be had?”
“Very likely. There are almost always some seats to be had.”
“How do I reach it?”
The waiter began to describe the route. “Can’t I take a gondola?” she asked.
“Certainly. In the old days, people always did. It isn’t done so much any more. The theater has two entrances. It isn’t far to walk.”
Lillian took a gondola at the Palazzo Ducale. The waiter had been right; except for hers, only one other gondola was heading for the theater. It was occupied by an elderly American couple, who were taking flash-bulb photographs. They took a picture of Lillian’s gondola, too. “A woman ought not to be alone in Venice,” the gondolier said as he helped her step out. “A young woman still less. A beautiful woman never.”
Lillian looked at him. He was old and did not give the impression of offering himself as the needed medicine. “Can one ever feel alone here?” she said, gazing at the red twilight above the roofs.
“Here more than anywhere else, Signora. Unless you were born here, of course.”
Lillian arrived just in time, as the curtain was rising. The play was an eighteenth-century comedy. She looked around the theater in the muted illumination from the stage and the wings. It was the most beautiful theater in the world and must, before the introduction of electric light, have been magical with a host of candles lighting the painted balconies. It still was.
She looked at the stage. She did not understand much Italian, and soon gave up trying to listen. The strange feeling of loneliness and melancholy which she had had in Rome overpowered her again. Was the gondolier right? Or did the feeling come from the symbolic situation: that you could arrive at a place, listen to a play of which you understood nothing, and have to leave it just as you were beginning to catch some inkling of its meaning? Nothing serious was taking place on the stage—that much she could see. It was a comedy, seduction, deception, a somewhat cruel joke about a fool, and Lillian did not know what it was that so stirred within her, that developed into a curious sob, so that she had to put her handkerchief to her lips. She did not realize until the feeling came again and she saw the dark spots on her handkerchief.
She remained sitting for a moment, trying to suppress it; but the blood welled up again. She had to go out, but she was not sure she could manage it alone. In French, she asked the man beside her to take her out. He shook his head irritably without looking at her. He was following the action of the play, and did not understand what she wanted. She turned to the woman on her left. Desperately, she searched for the Italian word for “help.” She could not think of it. “Misericordia,” she murmured at last. “Misericordia, per favore!”
The woman looked up in astonishment. “Are you sick?” she asked in English.
Lillian nodded, handkerchief to her lips, and indicated by a gesture that she wanted to leave.
“Too many cocktails,” the blonde, elderly woman said. “Mario, darling, help the lady to get some fresh air. What a mess!”
Mario stood up. He supported Lillian. “Just to the door,” she whispered.
He took her arm and helped her out. Heads turned briefly. On the stage, the self-assured lover was just that very moment enjoying a triumph. Mario opened the door to the foyer, and in the bright light stared at Lillian. Before him stood an extremely pale young woman in a white dress, blood dripping through her fingers on to her clothes. “But, Signora, this is too much of an understatement. You are really sick,” he said in astonishment. “Shall I take you to a hospital?”
Lillian shook her head. “Hotel Danieli. Please—a car,” she choked out. “Taxi—”
“Signora, there are no taxis in Venice. Only a gondola, or a motorboat. You must go to a hospital.”
“No, no. A boat. To the hotel. There must be a doctor there. Please—just take me to a boat—you have to go back.…”
“Oh,” Mario said, “Mary can wait. She doesn’t understand a word of Italian anyhow. And the play is very dull.”
The pale Pompeian red of the foyer after the dark red of the curtains. The white of the stucco reliefs. Doors. Steps and wind; then a square, noises of plates and forks, a restaurant on the street, laughter and the bustle of diners. Past that to a dark, ill-smelling, narrow canal, out of which a gondolier and a boat appeared, like a ferry for crossing the Styx. “Gondola, Signora, gondola?”
“Yes. Quick, quick! The Signora is sick.”
The gondolier stared. “Shot?”
“Don’t ask questions. Draw up. Quick.”
The narrow canal. A small bridge. Walls of houses. The slap of water. The long-drawn-out cry of the gondolier at intersections. Moldering steps, rusted doors, tiny gardens with geraniums, rooms with radios and bare yellow light bulbs, washing hung out to dry, a rat balancing like a trapeze artist on the side of a house, the sharp voices of women, smells of onions and garlic and oil, and the heavy, dead smell of the water.
“We’ll be there in a moment,” Mario said.
A second canal, broader. Then the stronger waves and the breadth of the Canal Grande. “Shall we stop a motorboat?”
She lay on the rear seats, athwart them, just as she had fallen there. “No,” she whispered. “Go on. Better not change …”
The hotels, illuminated; the terraces, vaporetti, chugging, smoking, filled with passengers, motorboats with men in white uniforms—how terribly alone you were in the midst of the sweet tumult of life when you were fighting for it and when everything was
transformed into a nightmare in which you struggled for breath. The rows of gondolas at their stands swayed on the reflecting water like black coffins, like black, huge water vultures striving to hack at her with their metallic beaks—past all this, and then the piazzetta, a mist of light, spaciousness and stars, an area of brightness with the sky for ceiling, and under the Bridge of Sighs an unbearably sweet tenor singing “Santa Lucia” for a boatload of tourists. Suppose this were dying now, Lillian thought—lying this way, her head back, the rush of the water close to her ears, the scrap of song ahead, and an unknown man beside her asking again and again in English: “How are you feeling? Hold on another two minutes. We’re almost there.” But no, she knew that this was not dying.
Mario helped her out of the boat. “Pay for me,” she whispered to the doorman at the canal entrance of the Hotel Danieli. “And get a doctor. Right away.”
Mario supported her across the lobby. There were not many people in it. A group of Americans at one table stared at her. Dimly, she saw a face she knew, but she could not recall who it was.
The elevator operator was still on duty. With an effort, Lillian smiled at him. “All kinds of things happen in this hotel,” she whispered. “Didn’t you say so?”
“Don’t try to talk, Signora,” Mario said. He was a courtly guardian angel with a velvety voice. “The doctor is coming. Doctor Pisani. He’s very good. Don’t talk. Bring ice cubes,” he said to the elevator operator.
She lay in her room for a week. The windows stayed open—it was already that warm. She had not informed Clerfayt. She did not want him to see that she was sick. Nor did she want to see him at her bedside. This was her affair, hers alone. She slept and half slept through the days, heard the hoarse cries of the gondoliers until late at night, and the slapping sounds made by the tied-up gondolas on the Riva degli Schiavoni. The doctor came now and then, and Mario came also. It was only a small hemorrhage, nothing very dangerous; the doctor understood her, and Mario brought her flowers and told her about his difficult life with elderly ladies. If only he could find a rich young one who would understand him. He did not mean Lillian. In a single day, he had seen through her and grasped her point of view. He was completely open with her and spoke with her as if she were a fellow-worker in the same vineyards as he. “You live on death the way I do on women who see their time running out,” he said, laughing. “Or to put it another way: You also see your time running out, but you have your gigolo who always stands by you. His name is Death. The difference is that he remains faithful to you. On the other hand, you play him false whenever you can.”
Heaven Has No Favorites Page 18