Fragrant mornings in Sanary by the Latin sea! Monsieur Duparc, your fencing master, is already going down the rugged path among the fig trees: you’ve just had your morning lesson on a platform of greenery, beneath pines creaking in the wind like so many brigantine masts. Still with mask and foil, you contemplate from above the little universe of forms singing for the sun. To your left is the estate house; on the terrace, Badi, Morera, and Raquel are painting with eyes turned to the sea. Behind the building, hidden in the tangled vegetation, Butler15 sets up his easel, already absorbed by a colour, the enigmatic green suggested by the olive groves. Further off, the round threshing floor can be seen. Madame Fine, the villa owner, is seated at its edge. She counts, chooses, and adores her narcissus bulbs. Around you, sunny hillsides, vineyards, and olive trees bathed in radiance extend to the horizon. In front lies the Bay of Sanary: purple-coloured sea, backdrop of mountains. Houses – white, sky-blue, pink – are perched along its shoreline like a flock of sleeping doves. You begin to feel a euphoria purer than wine, and something like the prelude to a song flutters in your being as you follow the path through the fig trees down to the sea. Beetles black and blue flee from between your feet. Pebbles roll, seashells crunch beneath your sandals. Snails draw their shiny trails across steep, mossy rock faces. High in the sky now, the sun arouses all vital juices, and a resinous fragrance descends, as do you, from earth to sea. And suddenly, a great indigo revelation among the cypresses: the Mediterranean. There, as usual, Yvonne is waiting for you. No bond exists between you and this subtle adolescent girl, only curiosity and amazement, the exchange between two strange worlds that meet by chance. You do not know how you appear in her eyes, in what measure or form; but in yours, this grave creature is no more than an object of contemplation, and your spirit is tranquil as you look at her now, as you might regard a palm tree shimmering in the noonday sun. She is stretched out on the sand, friend of the sun, blood-relative of the water; her nudity has that taut, contained aspect of the bud before it can be called a rose; the sun plays on the golden down that covers her; and as you look at her, a memory comes to mind – in the orchard in Maipú at siesta time, a colour of velvety quince. Yvonne’s eyes are green and childlike, eyes of a mountain falcon, like those of Queen Guinevere; but through the infancy of those eyes emerges a deep light, as though many buried eyes were yet peering out from them. The voice of your companion is sylvan and childlike, but it has a refined quality of delicately wrought music, as if through her voice myriad other voices, long dead, were still singing. She speaks to you of her château, in Avignon, and of a solitude established amid old smells, cold suits of armour, and the eternal gaze of portraits. Or she talks about her grandfather, the commodore, adrift in a dream of Asian springtimes, of which he retains withered memories and evergreen melancholy. You respond by evoking the pampas of your country, or by offering fragments of an inchoate song thrumming within you, which now becomes a hymn of praise for the glades of Provence, in whose shade you might have conversed with a centaur. Or your praise is for this sea, its murmur perhaps resonant of the ancient voices of Jason or Ulysses; the same sea where, on a bed of coral and sponge, still lies the cranium of old Palinurus, who one night fell asleep at the helm of Aenaeus’s ship. And as you talk on, Lieutenant Blanchard, almost a child, watches you from afar in silent desperation. Then you enter the sea, with Yvonne’s hand in yours, the warm surf roiling and curling round your knees, and you have the impression of making your way now, as in Maipú, through a hot, dense flock of lambs.
You might have prolonged that beautiful time and used the best of those summery hours to build an eternity. But the sun has entered Libra, and the grapevines are turning red with the approach of autumn. In the morning and afternoon, you and your friends have been picking grapes in Madame Fine’s vineyard. Bunches of dust-covered grapes have enriched wicker baskets, and now they’re in the winepress, awaiting their Dionysian transformation. At night there will be a rustic dance on the hill. Badi, Morera, and Butler are busy preparing the house, while Madame Fine methodically explores the nooks and crannies of her wine cellar. It is the eve of your departure, and in the appearance of things you seem to divine a gesture of farewell. Hours later, in the middle of the night, you guide the guests along the path to the house. Darkness, silence, and remoteness have moved Madame Aubert to tell a somber ghost story, and the imagination of your companions is already aroused when you all arrive at the hill. The big iron gate opens, creaking lugubriously . . . Well creaked, gate! One by one, the guests cross the threshold, their eyes adjusting uncertainly to the dark. Suddenly the women shriek: they’ve just bumped up against the dangling legs of a hanged man. Then they laugh, knocking down the two or three rag dolls that Badi has hung from the fig trees. And then a Bengal light sputters suddenly in the olive grove, hurts the eyes, flickers mercurially in the shadows, and illuminates the dance of two phantoms that cavort on the threshing floor, while someone, human or demon, howls among the still pines. When silence and darkness have been restored, all the lights of the house come on, and music breaks out. Madame Fine, on the terrace, offers the arriving guests the first wine of the evening. Couples spin on the terrace: Lieutenant Blanchard, almost a child, dances with Yvonne, who looks distant and alone in his arms. In the right corner of the terrace, the elderly dames, glass in hand, reminisce about their bygone glory days. In the left corner, three adolescent girls from Nîmes bring their golden heads together to exchange anxious impressions about a world not yet accessible to them, as their long fingers pick at the black grapes in a serving dish set out on the railing of the terrace, placed there by Butler with the intention of painting a still life. When the music stops, a chorus of voices can be heard in the pine grove singing an old harvest song, as well as the excited whispers of children assailing the fig trees under cover of dark. Later, as the moon rises over the hills, the dance continues on the wheat-threshing floor. You dance with Yvonne, and once again Lieutenant Blanchard, after giving you an anxious look, goes off among the olive trees in the orchard. You must speak to him tonight and tell him what the woman means to you. But when you go out to find him in the olive grove, you tell him only that you’re about to go away. You read surprise, pleasure, confusion in his childlike face. And hearing the fervour in his words, you feel you’re already far away, as if you’d left hours ago. But Lieutenant Blanchard doesn’t want to say goodbye yet; he wants to see you off tomorrow from his battleship. And so the next day you cross the waters of Toulon in a canoe that flies among the grey ships of war. You clamber up the ladder onto the deck of the Bretagne, where Blanchard leads you among the shadows of big cannons. To be sure, many vague toasts were then drunk in the officers’ canteen. Later, in his cabin of iron, Blanchard read you a few of his poems, in the tone of Rimbaud. Now it’s the final afternoon in Sanary, and you are alongside the Phoenician tower that still rises from the tip of the promontory: the sea laps at the rocks covered with black barnacles, and although there’s no wind, the pine trees lean in a combative posture, as if bent by an invisible mistral. Two shadows, Yvonne’s and yours, grow longer in parallel. You haven’t known what shape you assume in her eyes, but those eyes weep at the moment of truth. And finally you go back, solitary in body and soul. “Could have been! Could have been!” howls a demon from the distant hills.
After that period of joyous dissipation in Sanary, when your being answered the thousand calls of beauty, you were now beginning to turn inward, to fold back into yourself. You already knew well the four seasons of your spirit. And its two ineluctable movements: one of mad expansion and the other of reflexive concentration; and this time, you knew well, the coming autumn of your soul would correspond to the already visible autumn of the earth. You were in Rome, alone and in soliloquy: you were walking one morning along the Via Appia, among despondent monuments. You had just left the Catacombs of San Callisto, where dried blood and tears, terrestrial stench and celestial aromas, canticles and sobs eternalized their invisible presence. And your heart had
set out on the road of anguish that you still walk and whose end is perhaps not of this world. Outside, the sun was shining high over the countryside. In the distance loomed the austere stonework of the aqueduct. From a nearby aerodrome came a sudden purr of motors, so you no longer heard that other hum of Virgil’s thrifty bees among the flowers. Before continuing on your way, you had inhaled the bitter aroma of cypresses and stroked the tombstones, at that hour as warm to the touch as a sleeping animal. Then you went back up the way of the Caesars, in whose solitude and ruin your imagination evoked much military finery, with so much music in the air, so many bronze carriages and proud-necked steeds. Over and above that world’s dissolution, your soul, as on so many other occasions since childhood, heard time’s lesson and retorted with its old cry of rebellion, issuing – you now know – from your soul’s immortal essence. Afterward, you were on your way back to your Roman lodgings, amid the suburban demolition where archaeological workers were digging and examining the earth. And suddenly excited voices led you to a poor ruined bedroom: the light coming in through the demolished roof cruelly exposed the wallpaper’s vulgar colours, the grease stains, and the human traces in the squalid little room, rented many times over. But in the centre of the room they had excavated and laid bare a column. The workers had already cleared away its shroud of clay, and once again the column revealed its grace beneath the sun, immutable as the truth, whether it be manifest or hidden, depending on time and place, but which in any case, be it buried or exposed to the light of day, is unique, eternal, and always faithful to itself.
Along mountain paths and goat trails, you have climbed up to the old monastery built in the midst of solitude. An interest in art, not piety, has guided you in that morning ascent. Upon entering the deserted chapel, your eyes are dazzled: frescos and panels in the colours of paradise, charming bas-reliefs, wooden carvings, bronzes, and crystal-work enjoy the undying springtime of beauty. And just as you are wondering who has gathered, and for whom, so much beauty in that deserted spot on the mountain, a row of black monks appears beside the altar, silently sitting down on carved wooden seats in the choir stall. And you are startled, for you have come here only for artistic reasons. As soon as the Celebrant begins to sprinkle the holy water, those in the choir begin to intone the Asperges. The red chasuble, with its cross embroidered in gold, is resplendent against the alb of purest white worn by the mute sacrificer. From his left forearm now hangs the maniple, blood red like the chasuble. And when the Celebrant goes up the steps of the altar bedecked in little red flowers, the monks, standing, chant the Introit. Next, the sorrowful Kyrie, the triumphant Gloria, the severe Epistle, the Gospel of love, and the ardent Credo all resonate in the solitary nave. And you listen from your hiding place, like a thief caught in the act, because you have come here only for aesthetic reasons. The wine and bread have been offered. Now smoke curls up from the silver censer. The Celebrant incenses the offerings, the Crucifix, the two wings of the altar. Returning the censer to the acolyte, the Celebrant in turn receives its incense and inclines his body in thanks. Then the acolyte goes to the monks and incenses them, one by one. And you attentively follow those multiple studied gestures whose meaning is beyond you. Not without anxiety, you think now that such a solemn liturgy is being carried out with no spectator whatsoever, in a deserted spot on the mountain – a sublime comedy performed by mad actors in an empty theatre. But all of a sudden, when the white Form arises above the Celebrant’s head, you seem to divine an invisible presence that fills the space and silently receives the tribute of adoration; you sense the presence of an immutable Spectator, without beginning or end, much more real than these transient actors and this perishable theatre. And a divine terror dampens your skin, and you tremble in your thief’s hiding place, for you have been guided here only by artistic concerns.
Winter had caught up you with in Amsterdam: days and nights came and faded away under skies of slate or coal. Your solitude had become a perfect thing, among men and women who were closed off from you like so many other worlds. And you fell back into yourself, until you became a creature of strange ways who during a whole winter burned his bridges and hunkered down in the redoubt of a Flemish room. Your pattern of sleeping and waking followed no order at all, only the rhythm imposed by those painful readings: they were books of forgotten sciences, hermetic and tempting as forbidden gardens. They had already revealed the notion of a universe whose limits expanded vertiginously in a succession of worlds organized like the turns of an infinite spiral. But your reason stumbled in that grove of symbols that hadn’t been designed for her; and your being diminished in a progressive annihilation, as the notion of a gigantic macrocosm dilated before your eyes. True, a route of liberation was offered you, a means of abandoning the circle of forms; but the ways were so dark and the intineraries so indecipherable that your reason fell faint over the books. At times an unexpected insight flashed up in the vortex of your mind, and it was the delicious pleasure of those intuitions which sustained and encouraged you along the harsh road of your reading. Other times, your eyes fell in defeat before letters hopping about like little demons. Then, deserting your room, you went out to wander the frigid wharves, past the barges dozing in the canals under a sky of slate or coal. You returned to your room at nightfall, only to fall into the same fever, which was later prolonged in sleep in the guise of disturbing dreams: you dreamed that an infinite chain of deaths and births led your steps through worlds where your being took on a thousand absurd forms. Or you found yourself in the Alchemical City, crossing the thresholds of the twenty doors of error and milling about its inaccessible ramparts, without finding the single door that leads to the secret of Gold. Thus were your body and soul consumed in that abstract universe. You were walking one evening through the gardens of Wundel, when the cries of pleasure from passers-by caught your attention: men, women, and children were shouting and pointing skyward where thousands of swallows, north-bound on their return journey, were condensing into a dense cloud of ink up above; thousands of aching wings, little hearts beating, tail feathers polished by many gales, and tiny eyes still reflecting the sun of other latitudes, pressed together at the zenith, hesitating before the decision to plummet earthward. The throng of people, under the influence of the sign of spring, let the ice within them melt, knocked down their walls, rebuilt the broken bridges of language and smiles. Abruptly, something like the neck of a whirlwind stretched down from the cloud, and a column of swallows descended slowly into the bare trees, clothing them in wings and whispers. You did not return to your torture chamber. The next day found you in Leyden, in fields teeming with red, white, and yellow tulips.
At last you are on the island of Madeira, an ancient cone of mountain rising above the waves. You’re on your way back down and have stopped halfway for a rest. Sitting in the shade of a laurel tree, you chew on an enormous loquat that bleeds rivulets of juice. All around you, flowers and fruit display an Eden-like enthusiasm. Green lizards are toasting on the hot rock. The sun beats down on both the island and the sea encircling it in a double embrace of surf. Then you contemplate your boat anchored in the roadstead; around it swarm the canoes of islanders, who dive into the sea after tossed coins. You’ve been reading in Plato’s Critias about the loves of Poseidon and the glory of Atlantis, the submerged continent – perhaps you are now perched on one of its remaining islets. You recall again that phrase: “From the central island they quarried the stone they needed; one kind was white, another black, and a third red.” And when finally you go down to the jetty, you notice that the lumps of rock on the surf-washed shoreline are black, red, and white.16
Home again, you enacted once again the confrontation of two worlds. You came back to your country with a painful exultation, a passionate urge for action, and a desire to make the free strings of your world vibrate in the ambitious style you’d seen overseas. But your message of greatness left your world cold; and in that coldness you did not read, certainly, any lack of vocation for grandeur, but only th
at the hour had not yet arrived. Then night truly fell upon you.
Adam Buenosayres refills his pipe. It’s raining hard again outside his window. He wants to cling yet to the images he has warmed up and relived in memory. But the images flee, disappear in the distance, return to their murky cemeteries. The past is now a dry branch, the present announces nothing to him, and the future is colourless before his eyes. Adam remains empty before a deserted window.
Adam Buenosayres: A Novel Page 40