Swann (30 page)

“Poetry?” His eyebrows went up.

She shrugged. “An attempt.” It had been years since they’d spoken French at home.

Her poems, he saw with sadness, had no edges, no hardness. The words themselves were pleasing enough, melodious and rather dreamlike, but there was also a quality in some of the lines that he identified as kittenish—and that surprised him. He was reminded of the year Hildë had leaped into oil painting and how her curious, wild abstractions whirled without regard for line or composition; these canvases, relics of a lapsed enthusiasm, were stacked now in the basement, keeping company with the summer screens and garden tools. He wondered if some natural amiability in his wife’s nature blocked the imaginative vision. (He
knew
poets, their ever-expanding egos, their righteousness.)

“Well, what do you think then?” Hildë asked him. She was sitting tensely on a footstool inches from his chair. “I want you to be very, very severe.”

“They’re quite moving,” he said. “Some of them.”

She was not fooled. “Do you think the Peregrine might …” She let the suggestion drift off. One of her hands smoothed her skirt over a round knee.

He looked at her with amazed pity. A mingling of tenderness and caution dictated his reply. “You remember,” he said slowly, “that we decided in the beginning that we would avoid —”

“They’re not much good,” Hildë said, more baffled than heartbroken. She gave one of her steep, explosive laughs. “I was just trying to express—well, I don’t know what exactly. Maybe that’s the problem.” She got up with an awkward little jerk to make coffee, a gesture so self-protective that it lingered in Cruzzi’s mind far longer than her words. “You’re right,” she said firmly. “We did make that decision, and we must stick to it.”

By 1977 Hildë was engaged in the anti-nuclear movement, and the Peregrine Press began to languish. Then she died.

Twenty years, Cruzzi has since learned, is the usual life of a small literary press. The vital juices get used up, energy or a willingness to take risks. The manuscripts—they still arrive from time to time—begin to look creased and not very clean. The corners curl. Some of them bear coffee rings.

It’s been quite some time since Cruzzi has seen anything that suggested “fire along the frontier.” Every once in a while his conscience gets the better of him, and then he gathers up the accumulated manuscripts, attaches to each one a little printed fiche declaring that the Peregrine Press is no more, and mails them back to their owners. “Good luck elsewhere,” he always adds, just as Hildë used to do when she was alive.

*  *  *

In his life Frederic Cruzzi has had two loves: the written word and his wife, Hildë. The two loves are compatible but differently ordered, occupying separate berths in his brain and defying explanation or description, something that bothers him not at all.

His own father once told him—and this conversation he now lovingly reviews as he walks in the woods behind his house—the trees bare of leaves, the low junipers underfoot snapping with cold—that love would not exist if the word
love
were taken from the language. At the time he had nodded agreement, happy to be included in his father’s solemn abstractions, but destined to outgrow them.

Once in a while, walking like this in shadowed woodland at three o’clock on a winter afternoon, or hearing perhaps a particular phrase of music, or approaching a wave of sexual ecstasy, Cruzzi has felt a force so resistant to the power of syntax, description or definition, so savage and primitive in its form, that he has been tempted to shed his long years of language and howl monosyllables of delight and outrage.

Outrage because these are moments of humility, of dressing down, of rebuke to those, like Cruzzi, who perceive reality through print, the moments when those who are proudly articulate confess their speechlessness. It is as though some enormous noisy motor of which they had not ever been conscious, were suddenly switched off. These moments, and their ability to spring leaks at the edges of language, tend to be exceedingly brief, and Cruzzi has noticed, too, that they are shattered by the least effort to analyse them or extend their duration. Only this morning
he stood naked in front of a mirror and regarded the body that both pleased and disgusted him. “Knackers,” he pronounced aloud, cupping his balls in a mothy hand, and heard the word slip from its encasement of meaning, and fly, ludicrously, into the air.

Go back to love, he instructs himself, bending stiffly to examine the scars on a young birch. Rodents.

He and Hildë, from the beginning—that convivial evening in the city of Gap, seated around a supper table that was lit by an overhead gas lamp—had felt themselves separated from the others by a narrow arc of privilege. Each, it seemed, at once measured the other’s need, though each had been grave, correct, addressing the other with a respectful
vous
, and shaking hands briskly when the party ended. But Cruzzi had not neglected to write down her address in a small notebook he carried, sealing in print that promise he could not have described. He asked if he might see her the following day; a long walk was what he suggested, a walk followed by tea in a café. He determined to take up as much of her day as possible. The cruder stratagems of the
célibataire
wearied him, but he would delight all his life in the miniature theatre of courtship, its gifts and entrances and phrases frozen out of meaning—all this Hildë seemed to grasp. Her response as she stood in the dim foyer had the quality of instinct. By all means a long walk, she told him directly, by all means tea in a café.

Already a brisk adjustment had been made, an understanding reached.

The hold most married people have on each other tends to dwindle fairly quickly, but occasionally accident and temperament, so strangely mingled, keep it buoyant. It might be suggested, in the case of the Cruzzis’ marriage, that a curious, possibly shameful need to ameliorate the
effects of their foreignness, first in England and later in Canada, was a further bond. Or that the death of their son had the effect of isolating them in their incoherence. Or that the health of the Peregrine Press, in its good years especially, imbued them with a spirit that even close friends judged to be a rebirth of love. Not one of these speculations, however, held much truth.

Their simplicity, their little routines, would always escape others, especially those who thought of passion in terms of appetite and rich, sad sighs of impatience. That even in midlife, and after, Hildë’s face was often foolish with affection, that Cruzzi’s hand rested frequently on the back of her chair at Kingston concerts or theatricals—these actions falsely signalled to others the devotion of habit that arrives after love’s final retreat.

All these supposed mutations and gradations of love Cruzzi would have denied if the question were put to him (it never was), arguing that the regard he and Hildë had for each other was a simple, uncomplicated element like the air he took into his body or the print that swam into his head. Its force, fluctuation, and flavour were not even to be thought of, much less given expression.
They take each other for granted
—that curse hurled at those who embrace their good fortune wordlessly—has always seemed to Cruzzi an unfair challenging of fate. Furthermore, he would have considered it an act of arrogance to believe that he and Hildë had been served with something finer, stronger, and more enduring than the love he has observed between other married people. (A remnant of innocence convinces him that even those who practise public cruelties on each other, are tender in their private moments.)

He did not love Hildë because of her black-currant sherbet or her generous hospitality or her early morning
cheerfulness or the way her rounded features took the light, or the graceful, energetic way she leaned over a bed and pounded the air back into a pillow, as though she were doing it a kindness and doing it with the whole of her heart. His range of response did not coalesce around such lists. He was not one to produce an informed rationale about a bond so simple and natural. Such dissection, such
counting of ways
, was frivolous and ignoble. He was, some might think, almost careless of his good fortune.

But just as everyday articles—preserving jars, teaspoons, loaves of bread—take on the look of sacred objects when seen in exceptional light, so he sometimes looked at his wife and saw her freshly and with the full force of vision. One of these “seizures of the heart,” as Cruzzi might describe it (but never did), occurred early in the afternoon of December 15, 1965.

He awakened on that particular morning with a sore throat. Both he and Hildë had long since surrendered their first language, but maladies of the body continued to speak to them with their French names.
Mal à la gorge. Le rhume
. He had gone to bed in good health and wakened like this!

He decided he would spend the morning, at least, in bed. He was still several years from retirement, but not averse to letting the
Banner
run itself occasionally.

Hildë brought him a steaming infusion of thyme. She swore by it, especially for the throat. He drank it, then dozed. He heard her in various parts of the house as she moved about, talking on the telephone, playing the piano, concocting something in the kitchen—he knew before he saw it that it would be a thick soup made with cauliflower, milk, and butter. In times of illness she always made this soup. He ate a bowl of it for lunch, by now dressed and sitting at the kitchen table, and began to feel a little better.
He fished in his pocket for a pencil and wrote down the first paragraph of an editorial that was to be a defence of a new piece of public sculpture. It was an exceptionally cold day. The wind blew hard against the old window frames of the house and, hearing it, he resolved to spend the afternoon, too, at home, sipping his hot tea and working on his column, which was going surprisingly well.

He looked up, slowly, and saw Hildë standing beside him. She was dressed in her warmest clothing—sheepskin boots, woollen ski pants, a bulky parka, her heavy fur-lined mittens, a knitted scarf, and a hat from which wisps of white hair poignantly escaped. “I’m going ice-fishing,” she told him, smiling broadly.

She loved to fish at any time of the year, but ice-fishing in particular gave her pleasure, its clumsy paraphernalia and intrinsic paradox—the flashing bitter cold and the calm wait in a warmed hut. Sometimes she went with friends and sometimes alone. Usually she was lucky, bringing home fresh whitefish, which she expertly boned and grilled for dinner; fish never seemed so fresh to her as when pulled miraculously through an opening in the thick ice.

How he had loved her at that moment! More it seemed than at any time in their life together, her strength and imagination and, beneath the impossibly coarse outdoor clothing, her body, all polished wood and knowable clefts. She had removed one mitten, which she held between her teeth, and was bending over, checking the contents of her tackle box, mumbling a little to herself—utterly, endearingly, preoccupied—and the next minute she was gone, the heavy storm door shut behind her, leaving him alone in the house.

It was mostly for this abandonment that he loved her, the unlooked-for gift of an empty afternoon.

The living-room smelled of cold fireplace ashes and (very faintly) of cooked cauliflower. Outside it was dark for so early in the afternoon, a storm coming up, the first big one of the season, but the large, many-paned windows let in enough light to read by. From a bookcase Cruzzi took down his dilapidated copy of Rashid’s
Persian Songs
and allowed his eyes to travel over a familiar page.

He thought to himself, as he had thought many times before, how little he demanded of eastern poetry. The poets of the East lacked western rigour, that ability to build up a universe with the nib of a pen. He conceded that much. The ironies were too slack, the music too rhythmically obvious. But, reading it, he felt himself connected to ancient rhythms that some less ordered part of his brain welcomed. Most of what he knew of love he found amplified in eastern poetry, not its application but its brief transports. Reverberations, he knew, were an aspect of love, which was why, when he picked up a volume of the great Rashid, he asked only for the affirmation of a single moment and no more. The moment stretched; he turned over a page, yawned, glanced out the window at the blown trees and heavy sky, and wondered if Hildë would return home early; he hoped so. After that he may have slept a little in his chair, because when he looked at the clock again it was after three.

The room felt more than usually drafty, and he stirred
himself to organize a heap of kindling and dry wood in the fireplace. He had just got a blaze flickering when he heard the front doorbell. One faint ring, then the stutter of the door knocker, something of entreaty about it that sent him hurrying into the chilly vestibule.

Standing on the stone porch was Mary Swann, though of course he didn’t ask her name or even what she wanted. It was far too cold for such preliminaries; later he discovered that the temperature had fallen twenty degrees since noon. He took her arm, murmuring a stream of comforting words, and drew her into the hall, then into the living-room, steering her firmly in the direction of the fireplace.

In those first moments, bewilderment gave her the look of an imbecile. She wore a shapeless black coat, hideous thick fawn stockings and rubber overshoes with buckles. She had no gloves. Around her face was tied a man’s plaid muffler. Her face was small, purplish, the mouth working, the eyes squeezed shut as though the room were unbearably bright.

What was the mouth saying, those shrunken lips like rows of stitching? Something grotesquely apologetic. She was so sorry. Sorry to be bothering him. To just drop in like this. To arrive without, without —