Extreme Magic (2 page)

New Year’s Eve was my last night in Paris. I had planned to fly to London to start the new year with telephones, parties, the wireless, conversation, in a wild blaze of unrestricted communication. But the airport had informed me that no planes were flying the Channel, or perhaps anywhere, for the next twenty-four hours, New Year’s Eve being the one night on which the pilots were traditionally “allowed” to get drunk. At least, it
seemed
to me that I had been so informed, but perhaps I libel, for by now my passion for accurately understanding what was said to me was dead. All my pockets and purses were full of paper scraps of decoding, set down in vowel-hallucinated corners while my lips moved grotesquely, and it seemed to me that, if left alone here any longer, I would end by having composed at random a phonetic variorum for France.

In a small, family-run café around the corner from my hotel, where I had often eaten alone, I ordered dinner, successive
cafés filtres,
and repeated doses of marc. Tonight, at the elegiac opening of the new year, it was “allowed”—for pilots and the warped failures of educational snobbism—to get drunk. Outside, it was raining, or weeping; in my heart, it was doing both.

Presently, I was the only customer at any of the zinc tables. Opposite, in a corner, the
grand-père
of the family of owners lit a Gauloise and regarded me with the privileged stare of the elderly. He was the only one there who seemed aware that I existed; for the others I had the invisibility of the foreigner who cannot “speak”—next door to that of a child, I mused, except for the adult password of money in the pocket. The old man’s daughter, or daughter-in-law, a dark woman with a gall-bladder complexion and temperament, had served me obliquely and retired to the kitchen, from which she emerged now and then to speak sourly to her husband, a capped man, better-looking than she, who ignored her, lounging at the bar like a customer. I should have liked to know whether her sourness was in her words as well as her manner, and whether his lordliness was something personal between them or only the authority of the French male, but their harsh gutturals, so far from the sugarplum sounds I had been trained to that they did not even dissolve into phonetics, went by me like the crude blue smoke of the Gauloise. A girl of about fourteen—their daughter, I thought—was tending bar and deflecting the remarks of the customers with a petted, precocious insouciance. Now and then, her parents addressed remarks, either to her or to the men at the bar, that seemed to have the sharpness of reprimand, but I could not be sure; to my eye the gaiety of the men toward the young girl had a certain avuncular decorum that made the scene pleasant and tender to watch. In my own country, I loved to listen at bars, where the human scene was often arrested as it is in those genre paintings whose deceptively simple contours must be approached with all one’s knowledge of the period, and it saddened me not to be able to savor those nuances here.

I lit a Gauloise, too, with a flourish that the old man, who nodded stiffly, must have taken for a salute. And why not? Pantomime was all that was left to me. Or money. To hell with my perfectionist urge to understand; I must resign myself to being no different from those summer thousands who jammed the ocean every June, to whom Europe was merely a montage of their own sensations, a glamorous old phoenix that rose seasonally, just for them. On impulse, I mimed an invitation to the old man to join me in a marc. On second thought, I signaled for marc for everybody in the house.

“To the new year!” I said, in French, waving my glass at the old man. Inside my brain, my monitor tapped his worried finger—did
“nouvelle”
come before or after
“année”
in such cases, and wasn’t the accent a little “ice cream”? I drowned him, in another marc.

Across the room from me, the old man’s smile faded in and out like the Cheshire cat’s; I was not at all surprised when it spoke, in words I seemed to understand, inquiring politely as to my purpose in Paris. I was here on a scholarship, I replied. I was a writer.
(“Ecrivain? Romancier?”
asked my monitor faintly.)

“Ah,” said the old man. “I am familiar with one of your writers. Père Le Buc.”

“Père Le Buc?” I shook my head sadly. “I regret, but it is not known to me, the work of the Father Le Buc.”

“Pas un homme!”
he said.
“Une femme! Une femme qui s’appelle Père Le Buc!”

My monitor raised his head for one last time. “Pɛrləbyk!” he chirped desperately. “Pɛrləbyk!”

I listened. “Oh, my God,” I said then. “Of course. That is how it would be. Pearl Buck!”

“Mais oui,”
said the old man, beaming and raising his glass. “Pɛrləbyk!”

At the bar, the loungers, thinking we were exchanging some toast; raised their own glasses in courteous imitation. “Pɛrləbyk!” they said, politely. “Pɛrləbyk!”

I raised mine.
“Il pleure,”
I began,
“il pleure dans mon coeur comme il pleut…”

Before the evening was over, I had given them quite a selection: from Verlaine, from Heredia’s “Les Trophées,” from Baudelaire’s poem on a painting by Delacroix, from de Musset’s “R-r-ra-ppelle-toi!” As a final tribute, I gave them certain stanzas from Hugo’s “L’Expiation”—the ones that begin
“Waterloo! Waterloo! Waterloo! Morne plaine!”
And in between, raised or lowered by a new faith that was not all brandy, into an air freed of cuneiform at last—I spoke French.

Making my way home afterward, along the dark stretches of the Rue du Bac, I reflected that to learn a language outside its native habitat you must really believe that the other country exists—in its humdrum, its winter self. Could I remember to stay there now—down in that lower-case world in which stairs creaked, cops yelled, in which women bought brassieres and sometimes made the false couch?

The door of my hotel was locked. I rang, and M. Lampacher admitted me. He snapped on the stair light, economically timed to go out again in a matter of seconds, and watched me as I mounted the stairs with the aid of the banister.

“Off bright and early, hmm?” he said sleepily, in French. “Well, good night, Madame. Hope you had a good time here.”

I turned, wanting to answer him properly, to answer them all. At that moment, the light went off, perhaps to reinforce forever my faith in the mundanity of France.

“Ah, ça va, ça va!”
I said strongly, into the dark. “Couci-couça. Schpuh.”

W
HEN YOUNG ALASTAIR PINES
came out from Leeds, England, to teach on an exchange fellowship at Pitt, a small college about a hundred miles from Detroit, Michigan, he was the second foreign teacher ever to be in residence there. Pitt, founded in the Eighteen-sixties by a Presbyterian divine, and still under a synod of that church, had kept its missionary flavor well up to the Second World War. Set in Pittston—a bland village of white and cream-colored houses whose green roofs matched, even in summer, dark lawns compelled by lamasery effort (and perhaps a cautious hint of divine favor) from the dry Michigan plain—the school had kept a surface calm even during the war. It was the centripetal calm of those who, living in the sacred framework of morning, noon and evening service and a perfect round of dedicatory suppers, could not help feeling ever so slightly chosen—of people whose plain living and high thinking was not that of poverty, but of ample funds conserved. Some of the college halls had been built as recently as the Thirties (when labor was so cheap) and the organ (though not baroque to the point of Episcopalianism) was first-rate. Salaries had lagged well behind. Since, however, the non-smoking rule was still in effect on campus, and no teacher was supposed to have wine or spirits in his larder, he was officially helped to escape the extravagances of the age, as well as some of its anxieties. True, the table set by most of the younger faculty was somewhat farinaceous, but this might be less Franciscan than Middle Western, since most of the teachers and students came from that region. A glance at the roster showed a global scattering of names which were American, not international; the Kowalskis and Swobodas were Poles and Czechs from Hamtramck in Detroit, the Ragnhilds and Solveigs from Minnesota, and so on. Alone in the catalogue until the advent of Mr. Pines, the name of Hans Weil—philologist and onetime professor of
Linguistik
at Bonn—represented a Europe not once, twice, or further removed.

With Hans Weil’s arrival in 1945, there had also come to Pittston the first of certain changes brought by the war. Like so many other scholars in the days of Hitler, Weil had been passed from hand to libertarian hand like a florin stamped “Freedom”—whisked, in his case, to London, via Holland, in 1939, and from London to Rochester, New York, in 1942, after which he was presumed to be on his own. In 1945, at his own behest, or rather at that of his wife, whose sister and brother-in-law, helped by the Weils to America, now had a flourishing but immovable dry-goods shop in Lansing, he had come to nearby Pitt as provisional candidate for a newly established chair in the humanities, and had remained there ever since. There was small need for philology at Pitt, most of whose students were on their way to being music teachers, social workers or ministers, and Weil, lacking new-world versatility, did not find it easy to “double” in related courses. Nevertheless, he had no fears for his job.

On this fine fall morning of the new term, as Weil walked across campus at his short, duck-footed pace, the beret that he wore for his baldness emphasizing Raphael curves of cheek which softened the fact that he was almost as old as the century, and—as he would blithely have admitted—as profane, he well knew that his value to Pitt went subtly beyond its being able to mutter behind him that he had recently refused an offer from Yale. Thirty years ago, he was thinking, if by some unlikely chance he had landed at Pittston, he might at least have had to grow a beard, and, under the old tradition that all German professors were a kind of nursery-uncle emissary from the land of sugared postcards and cuckoo clocks, might also have had to submit to being called “Dr. Hans,” or “Papa Weil.” But as things were, he was not even under any particular necessity of writing those little monographs that sometimes brought him an Eastern offer. For, since the war, the GI Bill, and an engineering endowment from one of the big labor unions in Detroit, although Pitt’s lawns were still clear of cigarette butts and its brains still Protestantly clear of fumes, a complexity had entered its air. Through the windows of the music department’s practice rooms, once so liturgically pure with Bach and Buxtehude, he could now hear Bartók, Khatchaturian and even Sauter-Finnegan squawking under official sanction. Opposite, in Knox Hall, although there were still two strong classes in scriptural exegesis and one on missions, called “The Protestant Evangel,” a visiting divine from Union Theological was treating of Kierkegaard, Niebuhr and Buber in a course called “Quest”—and all four of these classes were embarrassingly near a group of acolytes studying guided missiles, on the grant from the C.I.O.

For “comparative” thinking—the modern disease, the modern burden—had come to Pittston. And as Hans Weil walked down the main street, on his way for a word with Mrs. Mabie, the wife of the art historian in whose house Mr. Pines, the exchange fellow, was to be quartered, he knew that he owed his tenure to it. He had begun by being Pitt’s “refugee professor,” and, with certain accretions of prestige and affection, he would end that way. He had merely to wear his beret, pay attention in his own classes in Anglo-Saxon, stubbornly drink his forbidden wines at dinner in full sight of whatever of the faculty, and on their insufflated bosoms abide. He was their prideful little exercise in comparative humanity—he had merely to
be.

A passing car slowed, and the driver, unknown to him, called out, “Lift?”

“Walking, thanks,” said Weil, thinking of how often he would have to say this until the new students got used to his intransigence, born of a youth spent with alpenstocks. For here, this near the automotive Rome, driving a car on the shortest haul had nothing to do with economy or abstinence. Even the poorest student might have his secondhand leviathan; Weil himself had his Pontiac at home.

Passing under McFarland’s open windows, he waved up at the president’s housekeeper, who was airing the living room against a background of teal-dark wall. A good many of the Pittston parlors had taken on this color in the three years since the president’s mother had chosen it for hers. And at the curb, McFarland’s new two-tone Buick shone in silver-blu beauty, Rhadamanthine sign that by next year or so, other two-tone jobs, less violent in color of course than some that were floating the highways like zooming banana splits, would be chosen by those of the faculty who were “turning theirs in.” He would keep his old one as long as he could. Whether from age, or from that creeping anti-Americanism which so often flawed the recipients of American bounty, he had begun to have a horror of turning things in.

And now, just ahead of him, was Mrs. Mabie’s. As Mr. Pines, presently riding undreaming through Pennsylvania or Ohio, might well say, once he got to know her—now he was for it. Professor Weil’s affectionate remembrance of London and the English went deep, deeper than the language lilt and the old gray streets, down to that sudden rest of the heart when he had stepped off the Dutch plane into a ring of their steady, un-Wagnerian faces. Its compound would already have been working in him, at the good thought of young Pines, had he not been all too sure of what was already working in Mrs. Mabie.

Portia-Lou Mabie, a quondam painter known at her own insistence by her maiden-professional name of Potter (and therefore a constant twinge of explanation in the salons of Pittston and in poor old Mabie-Potter), was an unsuccessful faculty wife who was the more annoying because she gave no sign of knowing it. She was not, however, of that familiar sort, objects of pity, who were always twenty-three sour diapers too late for the Inter-Faith Tea. Dr. Mabie had met and been married by her while he was on a field trip to Mexico City, where—in common with others from St. Louis, Stroudsburg, Orlando—she had been leading the stridulant life of Greenwich Village when it hits the
corrida.
A bony
princesse lointaine
of about thirty-five, who wore her hair in a weak-lemonade waterfall down the small of her back, she was to Weil a confirmation of his private opinion that art historians ought never to come that close to art. She had a talent for endorsing the worthiest convictions in a way that made their very holders wish immediately to disavow them. Openly lamenting that she had been born too late to join the Left Bank expatriates of the Twenties, her shrill disparagements of the crass standardization of life in the United States brought a sudden flush of
amor patriae
to the most disaffected cheek. And ever since the Mabies’ recent Fulbright year at Oxford, her conversation, fresh with Anglophiliac sighs and knowing locutions, was likely to become especially matey in the presence of Hans Weil—climaxing on the occasion of the Weils’ yearly dinner for the McFarlands, when he had had to explain to the elderly wife of a Kansas divine what Mrs. Mabie had meant when she had left the table with a bright look at Weil, and the remark that she had to go and spend a penny.