by Anne Serre
I found nothing. While I was taking tea with these people in the living room, Dr. Mars didn’t once ring at the door, nor did Pierre Peloup’s courageous mug appear at the window. Marjorie Higgins had long since gone mad.
Why is it that so many people in my life have wound up insane? Couldn’t they cling, like me, to the marvelous shining disc of the table, where our whole story is reflected? Couldn’t they consult the table, make it speak and dance? Why did they neglect it? Wasn’t it obvious to them, as it was to me, that this dark lake and its black waters would save us, so long as we kept peering down into it? Was it a bottomless well for all those who later lost their way? Did I love what I saw reflected there more than all the others did?
The visit put my mind at rest. It was a good thing, I told myself, that no trace remained of our past. But I couldn’t help thinking about the table, I wanted to find it again. If there’s one piece of furniture I would like to own, it’s that enormous table, which was much too big to fit into my life. It was clearly a magic table, like the one in the Grimms’ fairy tale where it says: “And when the time came for him to start on his travels, the carpenter gave him a little table. It was made of ordinary wood and there was nothing special about its appearance, but it had one excellent quality. If you put it down and said: ‘Table, set yourself,’ instantly a tablecloth would appear on the good little table, and on the tablecloth there would be a plate with a knife and fork beside it, and as many platters of roast meat and stewed meat as there was room for, and a big glass of the kind of red wine that rejoices the heart.”
V
When I was twenty, I set out for Pallanza, on Lake Maggiore. Here, there’s another gap in my memory: how did I end up choosing that destination? True, there was a lake, but it wasn’t dark and shining like the one in our dining room, although, if I look closely, there was that boat gliding across the black water at night, silently, almost like a ghost ship. It was sailing toward me, as if bringing me news. Would I have known how to interpret that news? I don’t think so. I could see that the boat was laden with a revelation meant for me, but for a long time I made no attempt to climb on board or go belowdecks, and whenever I went on a day trip to the Borromean Isles or crossed over to the opposite shore of the lake, I did so only to make sure that the hotel I was staying at in Pallanza, which I had found without the help of a travel guide, without making a reservation or even considering the alternatives, was indeed the most agreeable in the entire region. A godsend.
The hotel in Pallanza looked like a ship itself — like a white steamship. It stood on the shore of the lake, its somewhat dilapidated white facade lit up by the sun. You came in through an enormous hallway covered with threadbare rugs, then you looked up, and the four or five stories of the hotel climbed all the way to a dome ringed by a gallery, leaving a large empty space in the middle. Naturally, I took the least expensive room, which was on the top floor. It cost a hundred and twenty francs, I think. I had told them I’d be spending a few weeks there, so when I went to pay my first bill after ten days, they turned me away. I could settle up later, when I checked out. They trusted me. Nevertheless, I remember paying out those first twelve hundred francs so as to keep my own affairs in order.
The room was small and sparse, with a single bed and a pinewood cupboard. There was a washstand with a mirror above it where I wrote Ciao Luna! Ciao Rosa! for the maids to find when I left. There was also a window leading onto a balcony where I would sit out with a chair and table to read and write. The balcony overlooked the lake.
So I saw it again at last, that shimmering dark surface! A surface you could lean across to examine the reflections that came from the sky, yet seemed to come from the depths of the lake itself. I spent a lot of time on that balcony, gazing out over the lake, especially in the evening when the sun began to set. I also spent a lot of time on boats, going from one island or one side of the lake to another, as if trying to encompass and contain, to examine from every conceivable point of view, this enormous table that was much too big for my life.
VI
I no longer remember what prompted me to leave Pallanza. Probably I’d simply run out of money. Yet I seem to have left for Rome, since I can still see myself on an overnight train, seated opposite a matronly Italian woman eating a sausage, and a fat and very ugly French girl with her legs spread wide apart, pretending to sleep when she was manifestly trying to recruit the stranger seated across from her as a lover. I spread a scarf over my bare legs and began to fall asleep in turn. The matronly Italian woman gave me an approving smile.
In Rome, I met an old man, a composer. Strolling through the gardens of the Villa Borghese, he stopped in front of the bench I was seated on and invited me to come and have tea with him at his home. Marino Studi lived at the foot of the Palatine Hill. You had to climb the flight of steps to the Capitol, take a right through the alley leading down toward the Forum, and just below this was the four-story house where he lived, with a knocker on the door to announce your arrival. You knocked, the door opened, and his maid, mad Bruna, welcomed you in. “She says some funny things sometimes,” Studi warned me. One day when we were talking about Socrates with a friend, she shouted: “It wasn’t Socrates who said that! It was Aristotle!” Bruna would smile at you with a knowing, conspiratorial air as she plonked down onto the table the unfailingly inedible dishes she had cooked. I don’t know how, but with Bruna I almost managed to chat in Italian, though I’d never learned the language. I remember the day she unpacked my bags, after Studi had invited me to stay there for a while. My suite, consisting of a bedroom with a vaulted ceiling and a green velvet bedspread, and a living room that overlooked the street, had once belonged to his sister. We weren’t permitted to speak to him or to go upstairs to his rooms to say hello before three in the afternoon. Until then he practiced the yoga of sound, and of light, too, making the light circulate inside him. At three o’clock, I would go up and we’d set off for the beach together. On the beach I once saw him speak in Italian, French, and English with an old and very distinguished-looking woman. In the car, Studi, who would ride in the back with me, casually put a hand on my thigh. I didn’t like that. I brushed it away. Before leaving the beach, he would salute the sun, joining his hands together and making a deep bow from the waist.
He would try repeatedly to force my modesty and my modesty would resist, but I rather liked living in his home. During the day, I explored Rome; in the evening, I dined alone with him in his salon. I was always taking issue with him and his ideas, or mocking him for his presumptuousness. But I felt comfortable with him, and more than comfortable with mad Bruna.
I wandered about Rome as I wandered everywhere during that blessed period of my life. I say blessed because it was then that I stored up the resources that would prove crucial in the years to come. It was as though I’d just been released from prison, everything was an event to me, and in certain respects I was so alone that nothing stood between me and the spectacle of the world. I was free to think, free to come and go as I pleased. I came upon people the way you come upon signs; I bound myself to none of them, yet each of them engraved themselves and their attributes in my memory, as though I was assembling a collection of gods. I remember a tiny, ancient man who lived on the outskirts of Rome, a happy soul with whom I ate cheese in the kitchen of a housing project. And another, well-to-do and also elderly, who invited me to dine with him on the terrace of a restaurant and whom I drank wine with for the first time in my life. And a third who, on a coach home from the Villa d’Este, slid an arm behind the shoulders of his girlfriend to stroke the back of my neck. I didn’t have a penny, and still I lived like a queen, going from one pensione to another after I’d moved out of Studi’s. Everything I saw filled me with an intense, piercing pleasure, everywhere I went I found meaningful phenomena on the march: a tree in bloom and birds screeching outside the window of my boardinghouse on the Aventino in May; in another part of Rome, a boardinghouse with a dark, frozen corrid
or like the hallway in my childhood home.
VII
In Rome, I met someone who was to play a crucial role in my life. I passed a woman one morning on the Piazza del Popolo, and at the sight of her I immediately felt a surge of lust, for the first time in years. She was tall and blond, with her hair swept up in a high bun. She stood very straight, wore a white coat, and had slim legs and voluptuous breasts. My quotidian existence evaporated the moment I set eyes on her, and for three days I did nothing but track her across the city. I had no desire to know who she was, her name or her situation; I wanted to know how she went about her life, whether she was solitary or not, talkative or reserved, cheerful or gloomy. I wanted to know what she did with her days. She never took a bus or a taxi and would walk long distances toward a destination I was never able to identify. The first day, she walked up the Via del Corso without stopping in front of a single boutique, without peering into a single shop window, and went into a building at 72 Via Vittorio Emanuele II. I thought it must have been her home and waited on the nearest corner. But barely ten minutes later she reemerged, lost in thought, walking swiftly on without once turning round. She was heading in the direction of the Vatican, but instead of crossing the Tiber at the Castel Sant’Angelo, she veered off suddenly, continuing to walk at a brisk pace, never once glancing round or stopping. She reminded me of those flies that trace geometric patterns around a light bulb at high speed, weaving an invisible web, laying invisible threads, linking and meshing together parallelograms, trapezoids, triangles, like so many mathematical exercises or turns in a mental kaleidoscope. I could barely keep up.
She would vanish at nightfall. Not in some fantastical way like a ghost, but just as the sun was about to set, at the moment the street lamps were starting to come on, I would suddenly lose sight of her. The first evening, I put it down to some absentmindedness on my part. The second, I cursed myself for having let my concentration slip. On the third I understood that she simply vanished at that twilight hour when the world turns abruptly on its axis, and that there was nothing to be done about it. I came home disappointed, annoyed that I hadn’t been able to follow my quest to its end. But one morning, when I had gone to Cinecittà to make some money working as an extra, I found her again.
VIII
She was appearing in the same film. That’s how I managed to approach her and speak to her. She was half-French and cocked her head at me, obviously amused, smoking cigarette after cigarette, though it must be said in a very elegant manner, as if each of her cigarettes just happened to be there, by chance, in her pocket. Her name was Leonella. “You’re alone?” she said. “A pretty girl like you!” And she laughed.
She wasn’t much of a conversationalist, but I loved her. Maybe because she was more mature than I was: she told me one day that she was thirty-two. She seemed to be perfectly at home in her body, treating it with a familiarity and friendliness that I found captivating. I can see her now, waiting for the call that would summon her to the set, dangling her long tanned legs over a little wall on the backlot and dragging on her nth cigarette. She’d exhale and arch her back to tug at her dress where it stuck to her thighs and waist, taking another greedy drag with her head thrown back. Then she’d look up at the sky, and groan:
“Christ, it’s taking forever! If there’s one thing I really hate, it’s the movies! I could never be an actress!”
“Then why are you here?” I asked, squatting on the ground in front of her like a child watching a puppet show.
She shrugged. “You have to make a living somehow!” she said, exactly like the heroine of a B movie.
“Leonella,” I said, “you’re so beautiful, you could be an incredible actress. A star! Like Anita Ekberg in La Dolce Vita.”
She looked at me, laughing behind the curtain of smoke from her cigarette.
“And what about you? You want to be an actress?”
“Oh no, I’m just trying to make enough money to stay alive.”
“Then what do you want to be?” she asked. “You’re such a queer little fish.”
“A writer, perhaps,” I said, something I’d never confessed to anyone except Chloe. “But I’m not sure I really have what it takes; I mean, sometimes I’m sure that I do, and sometimes I’m terrified that I could ever have bought into such a pipe dream.”
We wound up living together. And when I say “wound up,” it all happened quite fast. The second day of the shoot she invited me to move in with her.
“I’m alone and bored, and you’re sweet and you make me laugh. Come and stay for a while and then we’ll see how it goes.”
I wanted Leonella but I didn’t know if she wanted me, or if she even knew how I felt about her. There was something about her that was so dreamy and haphazard and unintentional, and so totally unlike me, that it was hard for me to understand her.
“You should dress differently,” she told me, “you don’t show yourself to your best advantage. And you’re a bit on the plump side, too — you should lose a little weight.”
In a fortnight I became slim and almost pretty. In the room where Leonella lived on Via Boncompagni, I said to her, still in awe, “You’re such a mystery. Have you ever been married? I’d swear you have a child hidden away somewhere. To me, you’re like a character in a novel.”
She shrugged. “Enough of your nonsense. And come on you, you need to spend more time in your body! You’re so . . . so . . . abstract!”
And for months we laughed at that “abstract,” the term she had used the first night I came to her place. “Ab Stracht, not a bad name for a writer,” she said. “You should use it.” Together we imagined my novels to come: Leonella in Love by Ab Stracht. Leonella and Her Friend by Ab Stracht.
She lived poorly enough but she certainly hadn’t always been poor: she had well-cut clothes and some antique jewelry, a pretty handbag, and a few other things in very good taste.
“You’ve had a tidy, bourgeois existence,” I said, “then there was some unspeakable drama, and now you suffer this reversal of fortune nobly. That’s how I see you.”
Leonella laughed.
“You really are nuts, but I love you.”
IX
We never had enough money and needed desperately to earn some, so we seldom left Rome. But one day we went to the gardens of the Villa d’Este, and that was where Leonella revealed herself to me at last. Not her body, which I’d embraced and held tight against my own through so many nights, nor the spectacular vision of her naked form, of which I’d had my fill over the past three months, while she stood soaping herself at the washbasin, or slept pressed against me, while I caressed her, as if I’d become a man. None of that had stirred a thing in me.
At the Villa d’Este, she climbed up the stone steps and I followed behind her. I was sad to have brought her to those gardens, sad to have spent more than three hours there without finding anything new in either her or me, when all of a sudden I saw her white coat replaced by a white dress, her blond hair changed to someone else’s, and I was transported at a stroke to the mirrored hall, and from there onto the black, shining table, and felt then, to my great surprise, a despair so violent that it was like an earthquake in my heart, as if its two halves had been pulled apart, shredded and torn asunder, as if that was what had really happened in our house on the rue Alban-Berg without my ever realizing it, as if that table, instead of being a thing of joy and of frenzied, passionate delight, had been a sacrificial altar, as if I’d been amputated there, tortured and dismembered, but back then had somehow dreamed my way through it all.
.
When I arrived back from Rome, I discovered that my older sister Ingrid had gotten married. For the first time, her life was no longer spent wandering back and forth, somber and secretive, as it had been ever since she’d left home.
I remember the visit I paid her, one day in early spring. At the sound of the bell at the front gate she appeared on the porch,
so pretty and fresh in a short, orange summer frock that it was like experiencing spring twice over. Her arms were sleek and tan, her smile was peaceful. She was holding an infant who was chewing gently on the fabric of her dress. It was the first baby in our family, the first success.
“How are you?” Ingrid asked, walking toward me through the timidly flowering garden. She was almost worldly, affable, freed from the nets that for so long had held her captive. And we sat ourselves down in the garden, next to the wall of the house, while behind us in the wide-open ground-floor windows the pink cotton curtains billowed and flapped in the breeze.
I had a nephew, then, whom I scrutinized with interest. Nearby, a long garden hose made of bright green rubber snaked across the gravel. Further on, the sides of a metal basin reflected the blinding light of the sun. There were small children running here and there, because Ingrid made her living as a babysitter. Her husband was working in the garden behind the house.
“You’ll see him at lunch,” she said.
Was our life going to become simple, peaceful and happy at last? Finding myself next to a married Ingrid was like being presented with a map, a landscape I could smooth out on a table with the flat of my hand. All the bumpy, tortuous roads that the folds of the crumpled paper had partially or completely obscured now appeared plainly traced out, winding peacefully through the countryside. And it was the same for the lakes and mountains, the coastal regions and the cities: everything was clearly pinpointed, clearly named, so that you could see exactly how to get from one village to another, or from this plain to that shore. You could calculate the precise distance and how much time you would need to make the journey, and each name on the map corresponded to a shape or symbol, each shape or symbol to a name. You knew where you were.