G. (24 page)

Whilst she spoke Monsieur Hennequin leaned back in his chair and smiled at the ceiling, painted with garlands. It was her spirituality, he congratulated himself, which made her such a good mother, although it also explained her reticence, her excessive modesty towards him. His heavy thighs and stomach pressed against his clothes and creased them. She lacked heat, he concluded, but on the other hand she would always be innocent.

G. refrained from glancing at her.

You have a poet’s voice, said the host, and then repeated the last
two words in Italian to make them sound more appropriately poetic.

The Contessa quickly started her own conversation with those around her.

G. leant forward and pushed the glass swan quite forcefully so that its silver turntable began to revolve. It ceased to look like a swan and resembled a tall-necked, many-sided carafe of rosé wine.

The swan is drunk, said a young man.

G. turned towards Monsieur Hennequin and said: There is something I have often noticed which I do not fully understand and which I believe, Monsieur, you may be able to inform me about.

I will do my best.

Perhaps you do not often have the opportunity of visiting fairs?

You mean trade fairs?

Fairs in the street where there are shooting stalls and moving pictures and performing fleas and roundabouts and switchbacks …

I have seen them from a distance, yes.

I am an habitué of such fairs. They fascinate me.

Why do they fascinate you? interrupted Madame Hennequin.

They are full of games for adults and there are very few places where you can watch adults playing.

Simple-minded adults, said Monsieur Hennequin, those who patronize these fairs are of very low calibre.

You are entirely right, Monsieur Hennequin. You must surely have visited one once to understand them so well? Now, to come to my question. Do you think that flying round repeatedly in a circle, as happens on a certain kind of roundabout, do you think this might have a temporary effect—for purely physiological reasons—on the brain?

It can induce a sense of giddiness …

I mean more. Could character be temporarily changed by it?

Please explain, said Monsieur Hennequin, what you have in mind.

At these fairs there is a special kind of roundabout, a combination of a roundabout and a series of swings. The seats are suspended on chains and when they turn—

A centrifugal force comes into play, said Monsieur Hennequin, and
they are thrown outwards. I have seen the kind of which you are speaking. We call them
les petites chaises
.

Good. Now you can control—up to a point—how you swing outwards and in what direction. It’s all a question of how far you lean back, how high you push your feet up, how you swing with your shoulders and how you pull with your arms on the chains either side. It’s not very different from what every girl learns on an ordinary swing.

I know, said Madame Hennequin.

The game which most of the riders play as soon as the roundabout starts to turn, is to try to swing themselves near enough to whoever is behind or in front of them so as to join hands with them and then to swing together, as a pair, holding on to each other’s chains. It’s quite difficult to do this, often only their fingertips touch—The seats are spaced in such a way, interrupted Monsieur Hennequin, to ensure that they never come into contact. Otherwise it could be dangerous.

Exactly. But everyone who rides on this kind of roundabout is transformed. As soon as it begins to turn and they begin to gain height as they swing out, their faces and expressions are changed. They leave the earth behind them, they throw back their heads and their feet go up towards the sky. I doubt whether they even hear the music which is playing. Each tries to take hold of the arm trailing in front of him, they cry out in delight as they gather speed, and the faster they go, the freer they play, as they rise and fall, separate and converge. The pairs who succeed in holding on to one another fly straighter and higher than the rest. I have watched this many times and nobody escapes the transformation. The shy become bold. The awkward become graceful. Then when it stops most of them revert to their old selves. As soon as their feet touch the ground, their expressions again become suspicious or closed or resigned. And when they walk away from the roundabout, it is almost impossible to believe that they are the same beings, men and women, who a moment ago were so free and abandoned in the air.

Madame Hennequin set the swan turning as he had done earlier.

Now what I want to ask you, Monsieur Hennequin, is whether you think this transformation might arise from the effect on the nervous
system of gravity being modified by a centrifugal force? Is that possible?

It is more likely the result of the very low mental capacity of the class of people who go to such places. For the most part they are little better than children.

You don’t think it would have the same effect on us?

I doubt it very much.

Hasn’t it always been man’s dream to fly? Is that so childish? asked Madame Hennequin.

I fear, my dear, your imagination takes too much for granted, said Monsieur Hennequin. A fairground stunt like this has got nothing to do with flying. You should ask Monsieur Weymann.

The conversation changed. Somebody remarked on the painting of Giolitti. The host laughed and said the painter must have been a political opponent. Do you know what Giolitti’s enemies call him? They call him a Bologna sausage, because, they say, he is half ass and half pig!

I understood you admired him, said the Belgian.

In Bologna pig may be a pet name, said Mathilde Le Diraison.

Yes, I do admire him, said the host. He is the creator of modern Italy. He has often been here, in this room, and it was he himself who said that about his own portrait, and he added that the painter was from Bologna! And this is exactly how he is a great man. He knows how unimportant personal opinions are. What matters is organization. Organization and persuasion.

The conversation turned to politics and then to Germany and the news of the continuing riots in Berlin. Monsieur Hennequin feared that a revolution breaking out in one country in Europe might quickly spread to the others. Monsieur Hennequin was always oscillating between supreme confidence and sudden fear.

His host shook his head reassuringly. There will be no revolution in Europe, the danger is past, and the reason is simple. The leaders of the working masses do not want power. They only want improvements. They have learnt the techniques of bargaining. They have to pretend to ask for more than they want to receive what they do want. From time to time they bring out the word Socialism. This word is the equivalent of temporarily breaking off negotiations, but always with the intention of re-starting them. If we educate people properly, if we use the benefits of modern science, if we curb the power of monarchy and rely upon parliamentary government, there is no reason at all why the present social order should ever change violently.

The host came over, stood behind Monsieur Hennequin and put his hand on his shoulder. You are sceptical, he continued, come, let me show you a recent photograph of Turati and the Socialist Deputies in Rome. It is a curious picture. And very reassuring.

Monsieur Hennequin got up. Madame Hennequin began to say something but was interrupted—

You are beautiful. You have eyes which say everything. And you have the voice of a corn-crake.

She laughs. A corn-crake! Is that a compliment?

I love you. How I love you. I must see you tomorrow.

In the year 1910, which in this respect was in no way exceptional, over half a million Italians emigrated abroad in order to find work and avoid starvation.

In writing about Camille I cannot get close enough to her.

Domodossola, like Brig, was crowded with journalists and flying enthusiasts. It is a small town of narrow cobbled streets. Its roofs are covered with clumsy irregular tiles of blackish-red stone, similar in colour to the rocks of the Gondo. When seen from the air the overhanging eaves hide the small streets and the whole town looks like a scattered pile of blackish-red slivers of shale, the deposit of a landslide.

In the Piazza Mercato the Mayor had ordered a large blackboard to be put up. On it, with white chalk in copperplate script, was written the latest medical bulletin concerning Chavez.

Being Sunday morning, there was a market and the square and streets were crowded. During the night the weather had changed and it was hard to believe that they had dined, twenty kilometres away, on the open platform of the tower above Lake Maggiore. He was slowly making his way towards the hospital. When he saw Camille walking in front he was not surprised.

She was wearing a
trotteur
of pale lilac grey. Its cut and its colour made her look more enterprising than she had in evening dress. Her walk was light and decided. On her head she wore a low-crowned hat with white flowers, tilted forwards. Her brown hair was swept up at the back into a chignon. He guessed that her trim
elegance early in the morning in this provincial town meant that she had slept little or badly.

The temperature of hair to the touch varies considerably from person to person, regardless of the surrounding temperature. There are heads of hair which always tend to be cool; others which seem to generate their own heat in the coldest conditions. In the cold air, whilst she remained quite oblivious of his presence a few metres behind her, he could foresee that Camille’s hair would be unusually warm.

She stopped to look into a shop window of gloves and furs. Abruptly he took her arm from behind. She wheeled round with a little cry and with her fists clenched in anger. When she saw that it was he and not a stranger, she could not prevent the relief from showing on her face. She continued to frown, but a smile wavered along her mouth.

He asked after her husband and said that he wanted to propose to him that if the weather were not worse this afternoon, they, with Monsieur Schuwey and Madame Le Diraison, might accompany him on a motor trip to Santa Maria Maggiore.

During the night she had asked herself many times about his absurd declaration of love. Why had she not turned her back on him? Why had she not protested? She told herself it was because she was too surprised. Yet she might have been forewarned. She had after all consciously encouraged his evident interest in her. But what she could never have foreseen, what still confused her, was the way in which, suddenly, and clearly by an act of will, he was addressing her in the room as though they were alone, as though he had dropped from the sky, or come up from the earth, exactly beside her, without having to interrupt or cross the territory of those who surrounded her. She did not protest because there seemed to be nobody to protest to; nobody could have seen him. Had she made a scene, it would have been about something which had already ceased to exist. At one moment during the night she woke up convinced he was standing by the window. For the same reason she could not cry out.

She was telling him how she had lost a pair of gloves on the train coming from Paris. He asked if he might accompany her into the
shop. She hesitated. He assured her there was no other shop in the town and he would be glad to interpret for her.

This morning she saw yesterday’s incident differently. What had happened (mysteriously) had happened; but it was without consequence thanks to the order and routine of her normal life. She was in Domodossola with her husband. In four or five days she would return to Paris and her children. This man (with whom she was in a glove shop explaining that she wanted long white gloves) had taken advantage of one moment at a dinner party such as could not occur again. The incident had been finished before it began.

The woman who served them in the shop spoke at length about the heroism of Chavez. Geo Chavez, he translated to Camille, was a victor over the mountains, a conqueror, to whose present pains the woman behind the counter would gladly minister all night and to the least of whose wishes she would be proud to be a slave. She spoke as a mother although to her great regret she never had a son. One of her daughters worked in Milan, a second helped her with the shop.

The gloves which Camille wished to try on were of the thinnest white leather and tight-fitting. The woman, who was proud to live in the town which would nurse Chavez back to health, brought one of the gloves to her mouth and breathed into it before handing it across the counter to Camille. If it was still difficult to put on, she explained, she would sprinkle some talc

When memory connects one experience with another, the nature of the connection may vary considerably. There are connections by contrast, connections by similitude, connections by way of sensuous metaphor, connections of logical sequence, etc, etc The relation between the two experiences may sometimes be one of mutual comment. In this case the connection is multiform and complex. Yet the comment, although extremely precise, cannot be verbalized any more than a chord in music can be. The experience of watching the Italian shopkeeper breathing into a glove summoned up and commented upon his memory of the mysterious warmth he once found in the clothes of Miss Helen, his last governess. Likewise his memory commented upon his present experience. The comments, however, remain unwritable.