G. (43 page)

When Nuša ran down the stairs towards the entrance with Marika in pursuit, G. closed with her to seize hold of the whip. The two figures struggled and Marika fell. Several men advanced upon G. Brandishing the whip in their faces, he broke free and ran down the stairs to join Nuša who by this time was in the street.

With her skirt and train held high up above her knees she was running fast. She had lost or flung off her turban. G. caught up with her. Behind them they could hear shouts and screams. A few of the younger men in evening dress gave chase.

G. took hold of Nuša’s hand in case she fell, and they ran together out of the small piazza, away from the sea towards the Exchange. Nuša knew where she wanted to make for—the narrow dark streets by the end of the canal. As they ran hand in hand, panting, without saying a word because they needed all their breath, G. remembered the Roman girl in Milan who had pulled him from under the rearing horse and run with him to the Giardini Pubblici. And you will buy me, she said in Italian, some white stockings and a hat with chiffon tied round it. Yet it was scarcely like a memory. The two moments were continuous; he was still running the same run and in the course of it the Roman girl had grown into the woman, all of whose clothes he had bought, now running fast but heavily beside him.

They took the first street out of the large piazza on the far side of the Exchange. Nuša was beginning to flag. Her hand was wet in his. Her face was red and contorted with effort and pain. They saw a patrol of Austrian police coming down the narrow street towards them. Their pursuers, running more slowly, had turned the corner by the Exchange. He pushed Nuša into a doorway and tried to hide her but they had already been noticed.

At police headquarters they were separated. Left alone, G. remembered Nuša’s face as it was just before she was led away. And again he found it impossible to make a distinct separation between her face and the face of the Roman girl in the courtyard in Milan when she splashed water on him and told him to drink. Their features were entirely different. It was in their expression that the mysterious continuity resided. To break this continuity so as to make room for all his adult life between the first and the second face, he had to forget their smeared foreheads, their mouths and intense, silent eyes and remember only the meaning of their expression for him. What mattered the first time was what her expression confirmed and what until that moment had been wordless: what mattered then was not being dead. Now, the second time, what mattered was what her expression confirmed and what until now had been wordless: why not be dead?

Nuša was released by the police the following afternoon. Most of the questions put to her were about G. When she said she knew nothing about him, they asked her why he took her to the ball. She shrugged her shoulders. Are you his mistress? She stopped herself answering No. Please ask him, she said. Did he speak to you about his other Italian friends here? He is not like an Italian, she replied.

They treated her as a half-wit, and this seemed to be justified when they told her she could go. Have you old brown paper, she asked, which you do not want? One guard winked at another. I must be covered, she said, pointing to the muslin top of her dress bordered with pearls. They found her a piece of sacking.

When she got to the quarter near the arsenal, she stopped at the corner of each street to see whether there was anyone she knew; in mid-afternoon the streets were mostly empty. She hurried along close to the walls of the buildings with the sacking over her shoulders. In her room she undressed and sitting on the edge of her bed she bathed her shoulders and her feet from a basin of cool water. She was trembling. If he was released, she asked herself, would he still bring her the passport?

The cross-questioning to which G. was subjected was close and
repetitive. The reports sent to the Chief of Police suggested that his original impression of G. at the ball had been the correct one. After briefly interrogating the prisoner himself, he was satisfied. G. was released on Sunday morning on condition he left the country within thirty-six hours.

I went to a friend’s house to look at the photographs he had brought back from North Africa. When I came in I said hello to his eldest son, aged ten. A little while later I was concentrating on the photographs and had completely forgotten about the son.

Suddenly I felt a tap on my arm, a rather urgent tap. I turned round quickly and there, the size of a child, was an old man, bald, large-nosed with spectacles. He stood there holding out a piece of paper to me. (Let there be no mystery: the ten-year-old son had put on a mask. But for the duration of perhaps half a second I did not realize this. I started. When the boy saw me start, he burst out laughing and I realized the truth.)

I was surprised and shocked by the old man’s presence. How had he arrived so suddenly and silently? Who was he? And from where? Why was it me he had chosen to approach? There was no satisfactory answer to any of these questions, and it was precisely the lack of any answer which startled and frightened me. This was an inexplicable event. Therefore it suggested that anything was possible. I was no longer protected by causality. Probably this was why his size—the most improbable thing about him—did not surprise me. I accepted his size as part of the chaos his very presence proposed.

I do not retrospectively exaggerate either the complexity or the density of the content of that half-second; when profoundly provoked, one’s memory and imagination reproduce one’s whole life in an instant.

No sooner had he frightened me, no sooner had he pulled away
causality from under my feet, than I recognized him. I do not mean I recognized him as the ten-year-old son of my friend. I recognized the bald old man. This recognition of him as a familiar in no way diminished my fear. But a change had taken place. The fear was familiar too now. I had known both man and fear since my earliest childhood. I had the sensation of not being able to remember his name. A small socially conditioned part of me had a reflex of embarrassment. For this part it was no longer a question of how and why he had found me, but a question of what I could say to him.

Where had I first met him? Here it is impossible to avoid paradox. But a single glance back to the depths of your childhood will remind you how common paradox was. I recognized him as a figure in the infinite company of the unknowable. I had not once, long ago, summoned him up in the light of my knowledge; it was he who had once sought me out in the darkness of my ignorance.

There was nothing objectively menacing about him now. But he was threatening because he had figured in a contract to which I had agreed. I had forgotten the circumstances which led to this contract. Hence the initial mysteriousness of his presence. Yet I was able to recognize—without being able to remember—one of its principal clauses; hence his familiarity. The old man, the size of a boy, bald, large-nosed and with absurd round spectacles, had come to claim what that clause promised him.

It was a morning of early summer, one of those mornings on which, if one has nothing to do, the evening seems a lifetime away. The sea merged into the sky above Trieste, the same blue hiding them both.

It was fine too in Northern France and Flanders. But those who lay on their backs, dying or wounded, did not stare up at the blue sky with a sense of lucid affirmation as Tolstoy describes Prince Andrey doing on the battlefield of Austerlitz. The finer the day, the greater the confusion death caused on the Western front. Death had been robbed of all significance there; consequently it was easier to accept
it as one more condition, like the mud or the cold, in a world fundamentally inhospitable to man, than in a climate and season so full of promise. It’s a fucking fine day to croak.

G. walked to his apartment and before changing his clothes lay down on his back. The acanthus leaves on the lace curtains reminded him of how twenty days ago he had foreseen seducing Marika. He clenched his jaw. Not because of what he remembered, but because for two days he had done little else but remember. His memories did not in themselves cause him regret. Mostly he had achieved what he wished, and he would wish the same again. What weighed heavily upon him was the suddenly awakened faculty of memory itself. Or, rather, the prodigious capacity of this faculty. It was the sheer number of memories, their mass, which oppressed him.

He found it impossible to separate one memory from another, just as he had found it impossible to separate Nuša’s face from the Roman girl’s. It was as if his mind had been turned into a hall of mirrors in which, although all the reflexions moved together, each represented something different. The effect was the opposite of what memory normally does. For example, instead of bringing his childhood closer, the sheer mass of his memories since childhood made his childhood seem absurdly far away. Memories of Beatrice, such as he did not know he possessed, filled his mind, one after the other, each extremely clear, but each inseparable from memories of other women, so that it seemed to him that he must have last seen Beatrice a century ago. Yet I am not conveying the truth accurately enough. The stream of involuntary, precise but concatenating memories which filled his mind appeared to elongate his past life. This I have indeed suggested. But it was equally true that, because nothing remembered could be isolated and set independently within its own time, his remembered life also appeared excessively hurried and brief. Memory alternately stretched and compressed his life until, under this form of torture, time became meaningless.

Last night I heard a friend had killed himself in London. By putting together the three letters of his name,
JIM
, I do not, even to an infinitesimal degree, begin to reassemble what is now scattered. Nor can I judge his act by invoking the word tragic. It is sufficient for me to receive—receive, not merely register—the news of his death.
G. must leave the city within thirty-six hours. But where must he go? The only place open to him was Italy. From there he could go elsewhere. Perhaps he pictured himself returning to Livorno and living in his father’s house. Doubtless he thought of other possibilities. But each of them was a return of one kind or another and he had no wish to return. Thus he began to forget about the
where
. The question became different: how much further could he go? How far could he still put between himself and his past? It was no longer time in itself that would take him further, for time had become meaningless. It was his realization of this which made him decide to walk to Nuša’s room and give her his passport. By this act he would go further.

In the Piazza Ponterosso there was a stall with a woman selling fruit. The woman, like Nuša, was from the Karst; he could tell by her features. He bought some cherries. On his way eastwards towards the docks, he began eating them, spitting the stones out on to the street as he went.

Just as in the red of cherries there is always a hint of the brown into which they will disintegrate and soften when they rot, a cherry, as soon as it is ripe enough to eat, tastes of its own fermentation.

He passed groups of men talking sombrely in different languages about the imminence of war. The further he went, the more ragged were the clothes of the men he passed, the more closed their faces.

Because of the smallness of a cherry and the lightness of its flesh and its skin—which is scarcely more substantial than the capillary surface of a liquid—you find the cherry stone incongruous. You may know better but you expect a cherry to be a gob. The eating of a cherry in no way prepares you for its stone. The stone feels like a precipitate of your own mouth, mysteriously created through the act of eating a cherry. You spit out the result of your own eating.

Twice he stopped and turned round because he had the impression of being followed. He sat down on a wall near some shops and watched the women queuing for vegetables and bread. In this part of the city everything was in short supply.

Before you bite the cherry in your mouth, its softness and resilience are identical with the softness and resilience of a lip.