G. (21 page)

At the very last moment, yes, a couple of metres above the landing
field, he didn’t level out, he just dived into the ground at about a hundred kilometres an hour.

Is he dead?

No. He has broken both his legs, but they said on the telephone he isn’t badly hurt otherwise. He’s been taken to hospital.

All right. Thank you for telling me.

Are you coming down?

I’ll see you later. He turned to Leonie. You see, he said, they weren’t looking for you. And he began to laugh.

How can you laugh, she asked, when your friend must be suffering so much.

I’m laughing at us.

At me because I was frightened?

No, at the two of us here whilst he was crossing the Alps.

He may die.

And one day I’ll die and you too, with your beautiful brown eyes and your white teeth. There is never any time to lose.

Don’t you have any feelings for him at all?

I had no time.

I don’t understand what you say.

No chance ever comes twice.

They just told you he crashed.

Then I will try to console his fiancée.

Who are you? She said this fiercely but in a whisper as though she were frightened that he might answer in a voice loud enough for the whole hotel to hear. She believed that he might be the Devil. Abruptly she turned her back on him and buried her face in the pillow. Why me? she asked.

You are like you are, that’s why.

Why me out of all the others? There are so many.

You as well as many others.

Am I—she raised her head to look at him and then changed her mind about what to say: I must go, she said, they’ll be looking for me. Let me go.

Yes, he said.

Don’t you really care about your friend who is hurt?

You talk about him but you don’t mean him.

I don’t understand what you say.

When you ask about him, you are thinking of yourself.

No—when I saw him flying off—

—but by then I had already come to find you.

He placed his hand on her shoulder. Her whole body turned towards him and she lay on her back looking up at him. She could see in his face what had happened to them both after he had come to find her; his face was different; but it was not the face of the Devil.

She knew that he could not take her with him when he left. It was not worth her asking. It was not even worth asking whether he would be leaving tomorrow or the day after. That much she could discover from the hall porter. She might ask whether he would return to Brig. But she already knew the answer. Chavez had crossed the Alps. No aviator would try from here again. He would not come back. Everything she had ever noticed in the world stood between his life and hers.

Will I see you tomorrow?

Yes, I will find you.

She recognized that he was lying. The total unexpectedness of what had happened did not mean that it was likely to happen again. A more sophisticated and privileged woman would have found it hard to accept that the encounter was unrepeatable, and so would probably have needed the lie and have failed to recognize it as such. For Leonie it was not hard to accept. The choices open to her had always been limited; she thought of most of the conditions of living as unchangeable; and so the idea of the extraordinary was central to her life. She was superstitious.

She shivered. He pulled up the sheet to cover her. As he did so, he saw her body stretched almost straight, save that one hip was slightly raised. There are women—often they are wide-hipped and plump—whose bodies become unforeseeably beautiful when recumbent. Their natural formation, like a landscape’s, seems to be horizontal. And just as landscapes are for ever continuous, the horizon receding as the eye of the traveller advances, so, to the sense of touch, these bodies seem borderless and infinitely extended, quite regardless of their actual size. His hand set out. The large dark triangle of hair on her pale skin announced unequivocally the mystery which it hid.

She would have liked to have said before washing, whilst they were still extraordinary, lying on the bed, that if he asked her to go away
with him, she would go. It would have been a way of telling him how she felt: all he had supposed about her had been right: he had known more about her than anybody else had: so now he must know—because she did not believe that she would see him again—that she loved him, loved him like her own child. Yet if she spoke of going away with him, he would lie and misunderstand what she said. She must find another way to tell him. She feared that if she did not tell him, Eduard might kill himself or her. She believed that her telling him would protect them all later.

And so it happened that the young peasant bride who, an hour and a half earlier, had been shy to undress in front of him, suddenly threw off the sheet and kneeling on the bed seized hold of his head, pressed his face against her stomach, and, with her own head thrown back, so that she saw blue light in the pear-shaped blobs of glass hanging from the candelabra in the centre of the ceiling, repeatedly called out his name, whilst tears ran down her face.

Later, in the evening, G. saw Weymann. Weymann, normally so imperturbable, was distinctly nervous. During the afternoon, after the news of Chavez’ crash, Weymann took off in his plane and tried to climb towards the Simplon; the prize for reaching Milan still remained to be won. But the wind proved too strong and he turned back to land again in the field with the canvas hangars.

What time did you take off?

At 3.43, about two hours after Geo.

Was the wind much stronger?

Not appreciably on the ground. But when I climbed to about a thousand metres, just after the Napoleon bridge, there I hit it full force. It’s always been there, about the same spot. Suddenly it comes at you, and it knocks you sideways, like the slipstream of an express train. It couldn’t have been much less when he went through. But I don’t believe in taking unreasonable risks, and he did.

He succeeded though. So didn’t the risks seem less? He’d proved the risks weren’t that great.

He’s proving it in hospital I’m afraid.

But he crossed!

You don’t think like that when you hit that wind. You can feel it straining every strut and joint of the kite.

Supposing he crossed and landed safely but then had engine trouble on the ground, would you have turned back then? Supposing he proved it without mishap, would you have turned back?

Yes, I study my plane and the weather conditions, nothing else. You have to stay very sober in the air, my friend. You have to be quite sure of what you can or you can’t do. And if you’re in doubt, don’t do it. Geo wanted to be a hero. And that’s fatal in the air.

He has shown that something was possible which people thought impossible. Isn’t that an achievement?

I pay my respects to his courage, but it’s a dangerous example.

That’s why there’s a prize offered. If there wasn’t any danger—

No. No. I don’t mean the natural hazards of flying. I mean the danger of encouraging foolhardiness and the taking of unnecessary risks. In the end flying’s like everything else, the secret of success is a healthy respect for what you’re up against. If you want to get on, you don’t pee into the wind. I’m not a coward, but I’m not an idiot either.

You’re saying he is an idiot.

He’s a hero. But I’ll lay you whatever odds you want that at this moment he’s cursing himself for an idiot. They say it’s not at all sure that he’ll ever have the proper use of his legs again.

You feel bad about turning back.

Come with me. I’m driving to Domodossolo tomorrow to go and see him. I’ve borrowed a Fiat. Or are you still waiting for a reply to your letters to that maid? What’s her name?

She’s called Leonie.

The same as the mountain over there? Leone.

It’s spelt differently.

I wouldn’t trust either of them! joked Weymann.

I’ll come to Domodossola.

This morning as I was shaving I thought of a friend of mine who lives in Madrid and whom I haven’t seen for fifteen years. Looking at my own image in the mirror I asked myself whether, after so long, we would recognize each other immediately if we met by accident in the street. I pictured to myself our meeting in Madrid and I began to imagine his feelings. He is a friend to whom I am deeply attached, but I hear from him only once or twice a year and he does not occupy a constant place in my thoughts. After I had shaved, I went down to my letterbox and there found a ten-page letter from him.

Such ‘coincidences’ are not uncommon and everyone is more or less familiar with them. They offer us an insight into how approximate and arbitrary is our normal reading of time. Calendars and clocks are our inadequate inventions. The structure of our minds is such that the true nature of time usually escapes us. Yet we know there is a mystery. Like a never-seen object in the dark, we can feel our way over some of its surfaces. But we have not identified it.

The way my imagination forces me to write this story is determined by its intimations about those aspects of time which I have touched but never identified. I am writing this book in the same dark.

Up to then the social presence of a woman was different in kind from
that of a man. A man’s presence was dependent upon the promise of power which he embodied. If the promise was large and credible, his presence was striking. If it was small or incredible, he was found to have little presence. There were men, even many men, who were devoid of presence altogether. The promised power may have been moral, physical, temperamental, economic, social, sexual—but its object was always exterior to the man. A man’s presence suggested what he was capable of doing to you or for you.

By contrast, a woman’s presence expressed her own attitude to herself, and defined what could and could not be done to her. No woman lacked presence altogether. Her presence was manifest in her gestures, voice, opinions, expressions, clothes, chosen surroundings, taste—indeed there was nothing she could do which did not contribute to her presence.

To be born woman was to be born within an allotted and confined space, into the keeping of man. A woman’s presence developed as the precipitate of her ingenuity in living under such tutelage within such a limited cell. She furnished her cell, as it were, with her presence; not primarily in order to make it more agreeable to herself, but in the hope of persuading others to enter it.

A woman’s presence was the result of herself being split into two, and of her energy being inturned. A woman was always accompanied—except when quite alone—by her own image of herself. Whilst she was walking across a room or whilst she was weeping at the death of her father, she could not avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping. From earliest childhood she had been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually. And so she came to consider the surveyor and the surveyed within her as the two constituent yet always distinct elements of her identity as a woman.

A woman had to survey everything she was and everything she did because how she appeared to others, and ultimately how she appeared to men, was of crucial importance for her self-realization. Her own sense of being
in herself
was supplanted by a sense of being appreciated
as herself
by another. Only when she was the content of another’s experience did her own life and experience
seem meaningful to her. In order to live she had to install herself in another’s life.

Men surveyed women before treating them. Consequently how a woman appeared to a man might determine how she would be treated. To acquire some control over this process, women had to contain it, and so they interiorized it. That part of a woman’s self which was the surveyor treated the part which was the surveyed, so as to demonstrate to others how her whole self should be treated. And this exemplary treatment of herself by herself constituted her presence. Every one of her actions, whatever its direct purpose, was also simultaneously an indication of how she should be treated.

If a woman threw a glass on the floor, this was an example of how she treated her own emotion of anger and so of how she would wish it to be treated by others. If a man had done the same, his action would only have been an expression of his anger. If a woman made good bread, this was an example of how she treated the cook in herself and accordingly of how she as a cook-woman should be treated by others. Only a man could make good bread for its own sake.

This subjunctive world of the woman, this realm of her presence, guaranteed that no action undertaken within it could ever possess full integrity; in each action there was an ambiguity which corresponded to an ambiguity in the self, divided between surveyor and surveyed. The so-called duplicity of woman was the result of the monolithic dominance of man.

A woman’s presence offered an example to others of how she would like to be treated—of how she would wish others to follow her in the way, or along the way, she treated herself. She could never cease offering this example, for it was the function of her presence. When, however, social convention or the logic of events demanded that she behave in a manner which contradicted the example she wished to give, she was said to be coquettish. Social convention insists that she should appear to reject something just said to her by a man. She turns away in apparent anger, but at the same time she fingers her necklace and repeatedly lets it drop as tenderly as her own glance upon her breast.