Look at the Harlequins! (5 page)

Suddenly there came from somewhere within the natural jumble of our surroundings a roar of unearthly ecstasy.

“Goodness,” said Iris, “I do hope that’s not a happy escapee from Kanner’s Circus.” (No relation—at least, so it seemed—to the pianist.)

We walked on, now side by side: after the first of the half-dozen times it crossed the looping main road, our path grew wider. That day as usual I argued with Iris about the English names of the few plants I could identify—rock roses and griselda in bloom, agaves (which she called “centuries”), broom and spurge, myrtle and arbutus. Speckled butterflies came and went like quick sun flecks in the occasional tunnels of foliage, and once a tremendous olive-green fellow, with a rosy flush somewhere beneath, settled on a thistlehead for an instant. I know nothing about butterflies, and indeed do not care for the fluffier night-flying ones, and would hate any of them to touch me: even the prettiest gives me a nasty shiver like some floating spider web or that bathroom pest on the Riviera, the silver louse.

On the day now in focus, memorable for a more important matter but carrying all kinds of synchronous trivia
attached to it like burrs or incrustated like marine parasites, we noticed a butterfly net moving among the beflowered rocks, and presently old Kanner appeared, his panama swinging on its vest-button string, his white locks flying around his scarlet brow, and the whole of his person still radiating ecstasy, an echo of which we no doubt had heard a minute ago.

Upon Iris immediately describing to him the spectacular green thing, Kanner dismissed it as
eine
“Pandora” (at least that’s what I find jotted down), a common southern
Falter
(butterfly). “
Aber
(but),” he thundered, raising his index, “when you wish to look at a real rarity, never before observed west of Nieder-Österreich, then I will show what I have just caught.”

He leant his net against a rock (it fell at once, Iris picked it up reverently) and, with profuse thanks (to Psyche? Baalzebub? Iris?) that trailed away accompanimentally, produced from a compartment in his satchel a little stamp envelope and shook out of it very gently a folded butterfly onto the palm of his hand.

After one glance Iris told him it was merely a tiny, very young Cabbage White. (She had a theory that houseflies, for instance,
grow
.)

“Now look with attention,” said Kanner ignoring her quaint remark and pointing with compressed tweezers at the triangular insect. “What you see is the inferior side—the under white of the left
Vorderflügel
(‘fore wing’) and the under yellow of the left
Hinterflügel
(‘hind wing’). I will not open the wings but I think you can believe what I’m going to tell you. On the upper side, which you can’t see, this species shares with its nearest allies—the Small White and Mann’s White, both common here—the typical little spots of the fore wing, namely a black full stop in the male and a black
Doppelpunkt
(‘colon’) in the female. In those allies the punctuation is reproduced on the underside, and only in the species of which you see
a folded specimen on the flat of my hand is the wing blank beneath—a typographical caprice of Nature!
Ergo
it is an Ergane.”

One of the legs of the reclining butterfly twitched.

“Oh, it’s alive!” cried Iris.

“No, it can’t fly away—one pinch was enough,” rejoined Kanner soothingly, as he slipped the specimen back into its pellucid hell; and presently, brandishing his arms and net in triumphant farewells, he was continuing his climb.

“The brute!” wailed Iris. She brooded over the thousand little creatures he had tortured, but a few days later, when Ivor took us to the man’s concert (a most poetical rendition of Grünberg’s suite
Les Châteaux
) she derived some consolation from her brother’s contemptuous remark: “All that butterfly business is only a publicity stunt.” Alas, as a fellow madman I knew better.

All I had to do when we reached our stretch of
plage
in order to absorb the sun was to shed shirt, shorts, and sneakers. Iris shrugged off her wrap and lay down, bare limbed, on the towel next to mine. I was rehearsing in my head the speech I had prepared. The pianist’s dog was today in the company of a handsome old lady, his fourth wife. The nymphet was being buried in hot sand by two young oafs. The Russian lady was reading an
émigré
newspaper. Her husband was contemplating the horizon. The two English women were bobbing in the dazzling sea. A large French family of slightly flushed albinos was trying to inflate a rubber dolphin.

“I’m ready for a dip,” said Iris.

She took out of the beach bag (kept for her by the Victoria concierge) her yellow swim bonnet, and we transferred our towels and things to the comparative quiet of an obsolete wharf of sorts upon which she liked to dry afterwards.

Already twice in my young life a fit of
total
cramp—the physical counterpart of lightning insanity—had all but
overpowered me in the panic and blackness of bottomless water. I see myself as a lad of fifteen swimming at dusk across a narrow but deep river with an athletic cousin. He is beginning to leave me behind when a special effort I make results in a sense of ineffable euphoria which promises miracles of propulsion, dream prizes on dream shelves—but which, at its satanic climax, is replaced by an intolerable spasm first in one leg, then in the other, then in the ribs and both arms. I have often attempted to explain, in later years, to learned and ironical doctors, the strange, hideous,
segmental
quality of those pulsating pangs that made a huge worm of me with limbs transformed into successive coils of agony. By some fantastic fluke a third swimmer, a stranger, was right behind me and helped to pull me out of an abysmal tangle of water-lily stems.

The second time was a year later, on the West-Caucasian coast. I had been drinking with a dozen older companions at the birthday party of the district governor’s son and, around midnight, a dashing young Englishman, Allan Andoverton (who was to be, around 1939, my first British publisher!) had suggested a moonlight swim. As long as I did not venture too far in the sea, the experience seemed quite enjoyable. The water was warm; the moon shone benevolently on the starched shirt of my first evening clothes spread on the shingly shore. I could hear merry voices around me; Allan, I remember, had not bothered to strip and was fooling with a champagne bottle in the dappled swell; but presently a cloud engulfed everything, a great wave lifted and rolled me, and soon I was too upset in all senses to tell whether I was heading for Yalta or Tuapse. Abject fear set loose instantly the pain I already knew, and I would have drowned there and then had not the next billow given me a boost and deposited me near my own trousers.

The shadow of those repellent and rather colorless recollections (mortal peril is colorless) remained always present
in my “dips” and “splashes” (another word of hers) with Iris. She got used to my habit of staying in comfortable contact with the bed of shallows, while she executed “crawls” (if that is what those overarm strokes were called in the Nineteen-Twenties) at quite a distance away; but that morning I nearly did a very stupid thing.

I was gently floating to and fro in line with the shore and sinking a probing toe every now and then to ascertain if I could still feel the oozy bottom with its unappetizing to the touch, but on the whole friendly, vegetables, when I noticed that the seascape had changed. In the middle distance a brown motorboat manned by a young fellow in whom I recognized L.P. had described a foamy half-circle and stopped beside Iris. She clung to the bright brim, and he spoke to her, and then made as if to drag her into his boat, but she flipped free, and he sped away, laughing.

It all must have lasted a couple of minutes, but had the rascal with his hawkish profile and white cable-stitched sweater stayed a few seconds longer or had my girl been abducted by her new beau in the thunder and spray, I would have perished; for while the scene endured, some virile instinct rather than one of self-preservation had caused me to swim toward them a few insensible yards, and now when I assumed a perpendicular position to regain my breath I found underfoot nothing but water. I turned and started swimming landward—and already felt the ominous foreglow, the strange, never yet described aura of total cramp creeping over me and forming its deadly pact with gravity. Suddenly my knee struck blessed sand, and in a mild undertow I crawled on all fours onto the beach.

“I have a confession to make, Iris, concerning my mental health.”

“Wait a minute. Must peel this horrid thing off—as far down—as far down as it can decently go.”

We were lying, I supine, she prone, on the wharf. She had torn off her cap and was struggling to shrug off the shoulder straps of her wet swimsuit, so as to expose her entire back to the sun; a secondary struggle was taking place on the near side, in the vicinity of her sable armpit, in her unsuccessful efforts not to show the white of a small breast at its tender juncture with her ribs. As soon as she had wriggled into a satisfactory state of decorum, she half-reared, holding her black bodice to her bosom, while her other hand conducted that delightful rapid monkey-scratching search a girl performs when groping for something in her bag—in this instance a mauve package of cheap Salammbôs and an expensive lighter; whereupon she again pressed her bosom to the spread towel. Her earlobe burned red through her black liberated “Medusa,” as that type of bob was called in the young twenties. The moldings of her brown back, with a patch-size beauty spot below the left shoulder blade and a long spinal hollow, which redeemed all the errors of animal evolution, distracted me painfully
from the decision I had taken to preface my proposal with a special, tremendously important confession. A few aquamarines of water still glistened on the underside of her brown thighs and on her strong brown calves, and a few grains of wet gravel had stuck to her rose-brown ankles. If I have described so often in my American novels (
A Kingdom by the Sea, Ardis
) the unbearable magic of a girl’s back, it is mainly because of my having loved Iris. Her compact little nates, the most agonizing, the fullest, and sweetest bloom of her puerile prettiness, were as yet unwrapped surprises under the Christmas tree.

Upon resettling in the waiting sun after this little flurry, Iris protruded her fat underlip as she exhaled smoke and presently remarked: “Your mental health is jolly good, I think. You are sometimes strange and somber, and often silly, but that’s in character with
ce qu’on appelle
genius.”

“What do
you
call ‘genius’?”

“Well, seeing things others don’t see. Or rather the invisible links between things.”

“I am speaking, then, of a humble morbid condition which has nothing to do with genius. We shall start with a specific example and an authentic decor. Please close your eyes for a moment. Now visualize the avenue that goes from the post office to your villa. You see the plane trees converging in perspective and the garden gate between the last two?”

“No,” said Iris, “the last one on the right is replaced by a lamppost—you can’t make it out very clearly from the village square—but it is really a lamppost in a coat of ivy.”

“Well, no matter. The main thing is to imagine we’re looking from the village
here
toward the garden gate
there
. We must be very careful about our here’s and there’s in this problem. For the present ‘there’ is the quadrangle of green sunlight in the half-opened gate. We now start to walk up the avenue. On the second tree trunk of the right-side file we notice traces of some local proclamation—”

“It was Ivor’s proclamation. He proclaimed that things had changed and Aunt Betty’s protégés should stop making their weekly calls.”

“Splendid. We continue to walk toward the garden gate. Intervals of landscape can be made out between the plane trees on both sides. On your right—please, close your eyes, you will see better—on your right there’s a vineyard; on your left, a churchyard—you can distinguish its long, low, very low, wall—”

“You make it sound rather creepy. And I want to add something. Among the blackberries, Ivor and I discovered a crooked old tombstone with the inscription
Dors, Médor
! and only the date of death, 1889; a found dog, no doubt. It’s just before the last tree on the left side.”

“So now we reach the garden gate. We are about to enter—but you stop all of a sudden: you’ve forgotten to buy those nice new stamps for your album. We decide to go back to the post office.”

“Can I open my eyes? Because I’m afraid I’m going to fall asleep.”

“On the contrary: now is the moment to shut your eyes tight and concentrate. I want you to imagine yourself turning on your heel so that ‘right’ instantly becomes ‘left,’ and you instantly see the ‘here’ as a ‘there,’ with the lamppost now on your left and dead Médor now on your right, and the plane trees converging toward the post office. Can you do that?”

“Done,” said Iris. “About-face executed. I now stand facing a sunny hole with a little pink house inside it and a bit of blue sky. Shall we start walking back?”

“
You
may, I can’t! This is the point of the experiment. In actual, physical life I can turn as simply and swiftly as anyone. But mentally, with my eyes closed and my body immobile, I am unable to switch from one direction to the other. Some swivel cell in my brain does not work. I can cheat, of course, by setting aside the mental snapshot of
one vista and leisurely selecting the opposite view for my walk back to my starting point. But if I do not cheat, some kind of atrocious obstacle, which would drive me mad if I persevered, prevents me from imagining the twist which transforms one direction into another, directly opposite. I am crushed, I am carrying the whole world on my back in the process of trying to visualize my turning around and making myself see in terms of ‘right’ what I saw in terms of ‘left’ and vice versa.”

I thought she had fallen asleep, but before I could entertain the thought that she had not heard, not understood anything of what was destroying me, she moved, rearranged her shoulder straps, and sat up.