Transparent Things (2 page)

Now let us not lose our precious bit of lead while we prepare the wood. Here’s the tree!
This
particular pine! It is cut down. Only the trunk is used, stripped of its bark. We hear the whine of a newly invented power saw, we see logs being dried and planed. Here’s the board that will yield the integument of the pencil in the shallow drawer (still not closed). We recognize its presence in the log as
we recognized the log in the tree and the tree in the forest and the forest in the world that Jack built. We recognize that presence by something that is perfectly clear to us but nameless, and as impossible to describe as a smile to somebody who has never seen smiling eyes.

Thus the entire little drama, from crystallized carbon and felled pine to this humble implement, to this transparent thing, unfolds in a twinkle. Alas, the solid pencil itself as fingered briefly by Hugh Person still somehow eludes us! But
he
won’t, oh no.

This was his fourth visit to Switzerland. The first one had been eighteen years before when he had stayed for a few days at Trux with his father. Ten years later, at thirty-two, he had revisited that old lakeside town and had successfully courted a sentimental thrill, half wonder and half remorse, by going to see their hotel. A steep lane and a flight of old stairs led to it from lake level where the local train had brought him to a featureless station. He had retained the hotel’s name, Locquet, because it resembled the maiden name of his mother, a French Canadian, whom Person Senior was to survive by less than a year. He also remembered that it was drab and cheap, and abjectly stood next to another, much better hotel, through the
rez-de-chaussée
windows of which you could make out the phantoms of pale tables and underwater waiters. Both hotels had gone now, and in their stead there rose the Banque Bleue, a steely edifice, all polished surfaces, plate glass, and potted plants.

He had slept in a kind of halfhearted alcove, separated by an archway and a clothes tree from his father’s bed. Night is always a giant but this one was especially terrible. Hugh had always had his own room at home, he hated this common grave of sleep, he grimly hoped that the promise of separate bedchambers would be kept at subsequent stops
of their Swiss tour shimmering ahead in a painted mist. His father, a man of sixty, shorter than Hugh and also pudgier, had aged unappetizingly during his recent widowhood; his things let off a characteristic foresmell, faint but unmistakable, and he grunted and sighed in his sleep, dreaming of large unwieldy blocks of blackness, which had to be sorted out and removed from one’s path or over which one had to clamber in agonizing attitudes of debility and despair. We cannot find in the annals of European tours, recommended by the family doctors of retired old parties to allay lone grief, even one trip which achieved that purpose.

Person Senior had always had clumsy hands but of late the way he fumbled for things in the bathwater of space, groping for the transparent soap of evasive matter, or vainly endeavored to tie or untie such parts of manufactured articles as had to be fastened or unfastened, was growing positively comic. Hugh had inherited some of that clumsiness; its present exaggeration annoyed him as a repetitious parody. On the morning of the widower’s last day in so-called Switzerland (i.e., very shortly before the event that for him would cause everything to become “so-called”) the old duffer wrestled with the Venetian blind in order to examine the weather, just managed to catch a glimpse of wet pavement before the blind redescended in a rattling avalanche, and decided to take his umbrella. It was badly folded, and he began to improve its condition. At first Hugh watched in disgusted silence, nostrils flaring and twitching. The scorn was unmerited since lots of things exist, from live cells to dead stars, that undergo now and then accidental little mishaps at the not always able or careful hands of anonymous shapers. The black laps flipped over untidily and had to be redone, and by the time the eye of the ribbon was ready for use (a tiny tangible circle between finger and thumb), its button had disappeared among the folds and furrows of space. After watching for
a while these inept gropings, Hugh wrenched the umbrella out of his father’s hands so abruptly that the old man kept kneading the air for another moment before responding with a gentle apologetic smile to the sudden discourtesy. Still not saying a word, Hugh fiercely folded and buttoned up the umbrella—which, to tell the truth, hardly acquired a better shape than his father would have finally given it.

What were their plans for the day? They would have breakfast in the same place where they had dined on the eve, and would then do some shopping and a lot of sightseeing. A local miracle of nature, the Tara cataract, was painted on the watercloset door in the passage, as well as reproduced in a huge photograph on the wall of the vestibule. Dr. Person stopped at the desk to inquire with his habitual fussiness if there was any mail for him (not that he expected any). After a short search a telegram for a Mrs. Parson turned up, but nothing for him (save the muffled shock of an incomplete coincidence). A rolled-up measuring tape happened to be lying near his elbow, and he started to wind it around his thick waist, losing the end several times and explaining the while to the somber concierge that he intended to purchase in town a pair of summer trousers and wished to go about it lucidly. That rigmarole was so hateful to Hugh that he started to move toward the exit even before the gray tape had been rewound again.

After breakfast they found a suitable-looking shop.
Confections. Notre vente triomphale de soldes
. Our windfall triumphantly sold, translated his father, and was corrected by Hugh with tired contempt. A basket with folded shirts stood on an iron tripod outside the window, unprotected from the rain that had now increased. There came a roll of thunder. Let’s pop in here, nervously said Dr. Person, whose fear of electric storms was yet another source of irritation to his son.

That morning, Irma, a weary and worried shopgirl, happened to be alone in charge of the shabby garment store into which Hugh reluctantly followed his father. Her two co-workers, a married couple, had just been hospitalized after a fire in their little apartment, the boss was away on business, and more people were dropping in than habitually would on a Thursday. At present she was in the act of helping three elderly women (part of a busload from London) to make up their minds and at the same time directing another person, a German blonde in black, to a place for passport pictures. Each old woman in turn spread the same flower-patterned dress against her bosom, and Dr. Person eagerly translated their cockney cackle into bad French.
The girl in mourning came back for a parcel she had forgotten. More dresses were spread-eagled, more price tags squinted at. Yet another customer entered with two little girls. In between Dr. Person asked for a pair of slacks. He was given a few pairs to try on in an adjacent cubicle; and Hugh slipped out of the shop.

He strolled aimlessly, keeping in the shelter of various architectural projections, for it was in vain that the daily paper of that rainy town kept clamoring for arcades to be built in its shopping district. Hugh examined the items in a souvenir store. He found rather fetching the green figurine of a female skier made of a substance he could not identify through the show glass (it was “alabasterette,” imitation aragonite, carved and colored in the Grumbel jail by a homosexual convict, rugged Armand Rave, who had strangled his boyfriend’s incestuous sister). And what about that comb in a real-leather etui, what about, what about it—oh, it would get fouled up in no time and it would take an hour of work to remove the grime from between its tight teeth by using one of the smaller blades of that penknife there, bristling in a display of insolent innards. Cute wrist watch, with picture of doggy adorning its face, for only twenty-two francs. Or should one buy (for one’s college roommate) that wooden plate with a central white cross surrounded by all twenty-two cantons? Hugh, too, was twenty-two and had always been harrowed by coincident symbols.

A dingdong bell and a blinking red light at the grade crossing announced an impending event: inexorably the slow barrier came down.

Its brown curtain was only half drawn, disclosing the elegant legs, clad in transparent black, of a female seated inside. We are in a terrific hurry to recapture that moment! The curtain of a sidewalk booth with a kind of piano
stool, for the short or tall, and a slot machine enabling one to take one’s own snapshot for passport or sport. Hugh eyed the legs and then the sign on the booth. The masculine ending and the absence of an acute accent flawed the unintentional pun:

As he, still a virgin, imagined those daring attitudes a double event happened: the thunder of a nonstop train crashed by, and magnesium lightning flashed from the booth. The blonde in black, far from being electrocuted, came out closing her handbag. Whatever funeral she had wished to commemorate with the image of fair beauty craped for the occasion, it had nothing to do with a third simultaneous event next door.

One should follow her, it would be a good lesson—follow her instead of going to gape at a waterfall: good lesson for the old man. With an oath and a sigh Hugh retraced his steps, which was once a trim metaphor, and went back to the shop. Irma told neighbors later that she had been sure the gentleman had left with his son for at first she could not make out what the latter was saying despite his fluent French. When she did, she laughed at her stupidity, swiftly led Hugh to the fitting room and, still laughing heartily, drew the green, not brown, curtain open with what became in retrospect a dramatic gesture. Spatial disarrangement and dislocation have always their droll side, and few things are funnier than three pairs of trousers tangling in a frozen dance on the floor—brown slacks, blue jeans, old pants of gray flannel. Awkward Person Senior had been struggling to push a shod foot through the zigzag of a narrow trouser leg when he felt a roaring redness fill
his head. He died before reaching the floor, as if falling from some great height, and now lay on his back, one arm outstretched, umbrella and hat out of reach in the tall looking glass.

This Henry Emery Person, our Person’s father, might be described as a well-meaning, earnest, dear little man, or as a wretched fraud, depending on the angle of light and the position of the observer. A lot of handwringing goes about in the dark of remorse, in the dungeon of the irreparable. A schoolboy, be he as strong as the Boston strangler—show your hands, Hugh—cannot cope with all his fellows when all keep making cruel remarks about his father. After two or three clumsy fights with the most detestable among them, he had adopted a smarter and meaner attitude of taciturn semiacquiescence which horrified him when he remembered those times; but by a curious twist of conscience the awareness of his own horror comforted him as proving he was not altogether a monster. He now had to do something about a number of recollected unkindnesses of which he had been guilty up to that very day; they were to be as painfully disposed of as had been the dentures and glasses which the authorities left with him in a paper bag. The only kinsman he could turn up, an uncle in Scranton, advised him over the ocean to have the body cremated abroad rather than shipped home; actually, the less recommended course proved to be the easier one in many respects, and
mainly because it allowed Hugh to get rid of the dreadful object practically at once.

Everybody was very helpful. One would like in particular to express one’s gratitude to Harold Hall, the American consul in Switzerland, who was instrumental in extending all possible assistance to our poor friend.

Of the two thrills young Hugh experienced, one was general, the other specific. The general sense of liberation came first, as a great breeze, ecstatic and clean, blowing away a lot of life’s rot. Specifically, he was delighted to discover three thousand dollars in his father’s battered, but plump, wallet. Like many a young man of dark genius who feels in a wad of bills all the tangible thickness of immediate delights, he had no practical sense, no ambition to make more money, and no qualms about his future means of subsistence (these proved negligible when it transpired that the cash had been more than a tenth of the actual inheritance). That same day he moved to much finer lodgings in Geneva, had
homard à l’américaine
for dinner, and went to find his first whore in a lane right behind his hotel.

For optical and animal reasons sexual love is less transparent than many other much more complicated things. One knows, however, that in his home town Hugh had courted a thirty-eight-year-old mother and her sixteen-year-old daughter but had been impotent with the first and not audacious enough with the second. We have here a banal case of protracted erotic itch, of lone practice for its habitual satisfaction, and of memorable dreams. The girl he accosted was stumpy but had a lovely, pale, vulgar face with Italian eyes. She took him to one of the better beds in a hideous old roominghouse—to the precise “number,” in fact, where ninety-one, ninety-two, nearly ninety-three years ago a Russian novelist had sojourned on his way to Italy. The bed—a different one, with brass knobs—was
made, unmade, covered with a frock coat, made again; upon it stood a half-open green-checkered grip, and the frock coat was thrown over the shoulders of the nightshirted, bare-necked, dark-tousled traveler whom we catch in the act of deciding what to take out of the valise (which he will send by mail coach ahead) and transfer to the knapsack (which he will carry himself across the mountains to the Italian frontier). He expects his friend Kandidatov, the painter, to join him here any moment for the outing, one of those lighthearted hikes that romantics would undertake even during a drizzly spell in August; it rained even more in those uncomfortable times; his boots are still wet from a ten-mile ramble to the nearest casino. They stand outside the door in the attitude of expulsion, and he has wrapped his feet in several layers of German-language newspaper, a language which incidentally he finds easier to read than French. The main problem now is whether to confide to his knapsack or mail in his grip his manuscripts: rough drafts of letters, an unfinished short story in a Russian copybook bound in black cloth, parts of a philosophical essay in a blue cahier acquired in Geneva, and the loose sheets of a rudimentary novel under the provisional title of
Faust in Moscow
. As he sits at that deal table, the very same upon which our Person’s whore has plunked her voluminous handbag, there shows through that bag, as it were, the first page of the
Faust
affair with energetic erasures and untidy insertions in purple, black, reptile-green ink. The sight of his handwriting fascinates him; the chaos on the page is to him order, the blots are pictures, the marginal jottings are wings. Instead of sorting his papers, he uncorks his portable ink and moves nearer to the table, pen in hand. But at that minute there comes a joyful banging on the door. The door flies open and closes again.