G. (31 page)

Madame Hennequin was in a state of collapse, if it gives you any satisfaction to know that.

And Monsieur?

He had to be constrained from coming to find you in hospital. The second time he wouldn’t miss, he said.

You should have let him come. I should have liked to have seen him again.

Suddenly Weymann was angry. His thin face became red and his eyes protruded as he stared at the figure in the bed: Yes, I think we should have let him come. What are you doing? What are you playing at? Let me tell you something. This town is full of men. Tomorrow it will be fuller—men coming from all over the world to pay their homage to the magnificent contribution, the historic courage of Geo. Do you know there are peasants who have walked from the mountain villages into town today to line up and pay their last tributes to the man they loved. You should look at their faces. You might learn a little modesty. You might see what it means to be offered hope for your children after a lifetime of toil and sacrifice. You might understand what achievement is. And amongst these men, these men who fill the town like pilgrims and lend it their own dignity, there is a little—there is a little runt!

He banged the door and was gone.

The crowd made the town look like a village. Figures in black pressed against the walls of the narrow streets. In an open doorway several children were barred and held back by women with straight rigid arms, lest they run out into the street as the procession passed and by this single act diminish the long-lasting gravity of the moment. From first-floor windows and from the balconies above hung improvised flags of black crêpe and tricolours with black upon them. It was sunny. The streets through which the cortège would not pass were deserted. All shops and offices were shut. The bells in the campanile tolled very slowly. The last note of each peal seeped almost completely away before the next refilled the silence. The sound was such that even in the arcade from where you could see neither sky nor mountains you were reminded of solitude. In the precincts of the Piazza Mercato there was an unusually strong smell of horses and leather, for carriages and carts had brought mourners from all over the countryside and many had been left there, unattended, while the mourners followed the coffin on foot.

The Stationmaster, wearing a gold-braided cap and a long coat,
glanced once more at his own reflection in the glass doors of the waiting-room. It was not a question of vanity at this moment but of vocation; in the same spirit an actor may glance in a mirror before going on stage. Within the waiting-room journalists from all over Europe jostled to book their telephone lines to their capitals.

Assembled outside the hospital the town band began to play a funeral march. The cortège moved off, shuffling at first. In front of the four horses of the hearse, girls in white veils strewed tuberoses on the cobbles and dust. Boys darted back and forth between the main street-corners and the head of the procession to keep the girls supplied with baskets of flowers. The Mayor had announced that the cost of the funeral would be met by the municipality. When they were standing upright, one girl might timidly smile at another; but when they were strewing the flowers on the road, bending forward as if trying to cast a net in a fast-flowing stream, they did so with grave, concentrated expressions, one with her teeth biting her lower lip.

Close behind the hearse walked the hero’s grandmother, brother, fiancée and family friends. The fiancée held her head high with the air of a wife following a cart which is taking her husband, a heretic, to his execution; she defied the occasion; she defied the forces which had killed him. Geo’s brother, a rich young banker, walked with his head down, looking at the flowers on the road, many as yet untrampled. The grandmother walked with a stick, jabbing the ground. Sometimes her stick skewered a flower.

Behind the family came the diplomats, the senators, Chavez’ fellow pilots, the Mayor, the journalists, the representatives of aircraft-engine firms, the local rich. And after a discrete gap there was the straggling procession of thousands, most of whom had seen Chavez when he first appeared, triumphant, on their side of the mountain, when he was coming down to land in the field where Duray had pegged out the white cross in calico. At this sight of a victory being apparently so easily gained, in face of the impossible being so quickly transformed into the possible, they had felt elated. In the newspapers they had read, or had heard others read, sentences like: The great utopia of yesterday has become reality. And so some had asked themselves: Why should we too not achieve what we wish? Those who were in the habit of answering such speculative questions
had given their usual answers. The rich must be overthrown. Private property must be destroyed. Others had maintained that Italy must be united, must be given Trieste, must have more colonies; only then would all Italians fulfil their destiny. To those who asked, all the answers seemed theoretical. But the question had remained.

Now with the unexpected death of Chavez, the question was closed. It was as they had always been taught. Achievements are never easy. There is a price to pay for daring. The true heroes are dead ones. When what is desired is immoderate, it lies beyond death. The choice is between accepting life as it is and dying a hero’s death.

Outside the Duomo the speeches began. The crowd listened in a mood of acknowledgement and acceptance. The young, faced with the familiar choice, chose once again in their imagination heroic death. Their elders looked back on their lives, gently, tenderly, as they might look at their own children, trying to find in them proof that a certain kind of cunning and a certain kind of modesty offer the best means for tricking and coaxing the best out of life: life which, when all is said and done, is better than being dead, although the naive courage of the dead hero touches them profoundly because they too were naive like him, and they know full well that the lessons which rid them of their naivety were not ideal, were not what they once wished. The young among the crowd celebrated the heroism of early death; their elders recalled the price of survival.

The Peruvian Ambassador: I am proud to be your compatriot, O Chavez, and I have come to place on your coffin your own country’s homage. We leave to your dear ones the sad duty of tears: strong nations must neither complain nor weep: they can only exalt and glorify their sons who, like you, Chavez, sacrifice their life for the bright light of an ideal …

There was a commotion in the front ranks of the crowd drawn up in a semi-circle round the hearse and the steps of the Duomo. A dozen men pushed their way forward and mounted the steps. They were dressed like Alpine guides and each pair of them carried an object like a stretcher. On these stretchers were arranged massed patterns of wild flowers—edelweiss, arnica, forget-me-nots and red rhododendrons. They placed the stretchers on either side of the church
door. As they came down, one of the men shouted out: Above four thousand metres we’ll see you in the air! Then he slapped his own cheek several times.

The Peruvian Ambassador: From your earliest childhood you were a master of energy, and for us your death is a glorious lesson. You were strong, you were great; above the eternal snows, amid the sublime peaks, you flew upon your fragile machine, a token of the audacity and genius of man.

The Mayor announced that a piazza would be named after the dead aviator.

Inside the Duomo there was a short service for Chavez’ family and the distinguished foreign visitors. They remained standing, staring straight ahead of them into the half-light from which gold objects emerged without glitter. They felt the cold air rising from the stones. It is here, not in the streets strewn with flowers outside, that the devout try to relinquish the blind will to live.

The canon: Chavez, the bold and audacious youth who had the fabulous vision of the Alps conquered and fleeing under his glance; the proud, courageous youth whom we saw soaring through the air above us, crossing our valleys more swiftly than an eagle: Chavez, who made us tremble with enthusiasm in anticipation of the imminent triumph—Chavez is no more.

Among the congregation in the cathedral, G. stood near Monsieur Schuwey and Mathilde Le Diraison. His thoughts drifted towards the Hennequins in Paris. Camille was waiting to become his mistress. He doubted whether Monsieur Hennequin would shoot again; he had failed to prevent his wife from cuckolding him and he had failed to avenge himself: after the first time the number of subsequent times made little difference. Taking note of Camille’s determination in the matter, he would concede his wife’s right to a lover provided he suffered no inconvenience and provided she realized that his tolerance was conditional upon her curbing her more extravagant tastes, and upon her never questioning his own arrangements. Camille, in an access of gratitude, would find it in herself to love both husband and lover—in different ways. She would submit to Monsieur Hennequin’s occasional conjugal demands with the
reservation in her own mind that she could only truly belong to her lover. She would lend herself to her husband for her lover’s sake.

A mass of candles had been lit for Chavez. The flames created their own air currents so that when a group of them flickered and leaned in one direction, this disturbed another group, making them blow inwards together as if in panic to confer, and then this agitation provoked other flames to burn a little higher, which caused yet others to flatten themselves and circle, unsteadily, round their wicks as if searching for air.

For her husband’s sake she would demand from her lover discretion, punctuality and a certain financial arrangement. She would no longer read Mallarmé for it might remind her too vividly of her approach to that moment when, for the first and only time, she made herself alone, as he was alone. Perhaps one day she would become enthusiastic about another, more sober poet. Time would pass. Everybody would be accommodated. Through boredom or on a sentimental impulse, Camille would give herself, without her accustomed reserve, to Monsieur Hennequin and afterwards she would feel that it was to her husband that she really belonged. But no sooner would she feel this than she would rush to her lover begging him to re-take her and insisting that she wanted to belong to him and to nobody else. Once convinced that she had become her lover’s, she would await an opportunity—which might take months during which time she would occupy herself with the lives of her children and friends—an opportunity to test her attachment by once more offering herself to her husband. And so she would traffic to and fro, each oscillation marked by apparently inexplicable excitability. At first she would await re-possession by her lover far more impatiently than by Monsieur Hennequin. But gradually, so that she might feel, as she would on peaceful days, that she belonged to them both and to her almost grown-up children more than to either, she would commend to her lover more wit and less passion. Ten years later, if she were fortunate, she might acquire a second lover and the first would be cast, with certain minor variations, in the role of the original husband. If she were less fortunate, she would arrange occasional meetings between Monsieur Hennequin, who by then would have a place on the managing board of Peugeot, and her lover, so that by talk and reminiscence she might belong to them both. In old age she would catch sight of herself in a
mirror, unawares, solitary, unowned, but then she would think of death: death before whom you have no choice but to make yourself alone.

The canon: He ascended to heaven and he came down having achieved the most dramatic victory yet on the long road of civilization’s conquest. A pioneer, he has advanced the progress of man. Imagine the future that his glorious achievement has opened to us—nation will no longer be separated from nation, the advantages of civilization will reach the furthest corners of the earth …

Mathilde Le Diraison noticed him standing a few pews away. His arm was in a black sling. She had spoken briefly with Camille before her departure for Paris. Together they had decided that he was a Don Juan, that already in his life there must have been hundreds of women. But it makes no difference, Camille had cried, it makes no difference to know that.

Mathilde Le Diraison asked herself two questions. What was his secret, why had Camille succumbed so quickly? The second question concerned herself. What would it mean if, after loving hundreds of women, he made no attempt to approach her? The two questions were intertwined like the strands of the red silk rope which hung across the end of the pew and which she continually flicked with her fingers so that it kept swinging.

She had a face which might be considered stupid. It was the face of a person, slow to go beyond the immediate, who had no particular wish or talent for abandoning herself to flights of fantasy or of deep emotion. At any moment her face declared:
WHAT IS HAPPENING IS HAPPENING TO ME, TO ME, TO ME
.

The swinging red silk rope caught G.’s eye. He made his plans quickly. He would go to Paris, visit the Hennequins, make a point of ignoring Camille, reassure the husband and would quickly begin an obvious, public affair with Mathilde Le Diraison. In this way he would avenge himself on Hennequin by making the whole shooting incident appear ridiculous, a question of a doubtful flirtation on the part of his wife which, unfortunately for Hennequin, she was incapable of sustaining; and he would disabuse Camille of her fond illusion that passion can be regulated and that a lover can be something
different from a second husband. He would see to it that the affair was as brief as possible and afterwards he would disappear from their circle. He regretted that between Monsieur Schuwey and Mathilde Le Diraison there was scarcely more than a purely contractual relationship. But he supposed that even Schuwey must have some pride invested in the woman he paid to be with him. He would discover where.