The Balloonist (9 page)

In addition
to the aunt there was an uncle in Pondicherry, another aunt in Palma de Mallorca, and a female cousin in Poland with whom Luisa exchanged violet-scented letters. The house on Quai d'Orléans remained something of a mystery to me for a long time. There it was in the middle of the Seine, neither on the Left Bank nor on the Right. It was ambiguous. It may have been true that the family “belonged to the best society of the Île Saint-Louis,” although such judgments are of course a matter of taste. Certainly they had nothing to do with those old Bourbons and Bonapartists who hated each other so cordially in their seventeenth century town houses on Quai d'Anjou and rue Saint-Louis-en-l'Île. The aunt's teas were frequented by a coterie that ranged from the fringes of Faubourg Saint-Germain to the more dubious elements of Montmartre. There was a young professor of art history from the College de France, a pederastic English poet, a Brazilian naval doctor of impeccable credentials. I was introduced to M. Lugné-Poe, the director of the Théàtre de I'Oeuvre, which impressed me only negligibly since I had never heard of the place. The inhabitants of the house were all women, the guests all men. Except for a lady physician, a friend of the aunt's, who had a frame like a stevedore and specialised in nervous afflictions. Perhaps it was she who treated the aunt's trembling. There were other ornaments: a fashionable photographer, a teacher of geology from the École Normale, and once the Greek poet Jean Moréas came to sip tea and recite his verses from under his soft mustache. I will say that the principles of the place were thoroughly democratic. On one occasion I was introduced to a street paver, on another to a retired customs inspector who painted in his spare time, a rather stupid fellow he seemed, named Rousseau although he was no relation to the philosopher. I went there a score of times perhaps, and in addition escorted Luisa occasionally to places like the Café Royal or an exhibition of Etruscan artifacts. It was perfectly proper, since we were accompanied at all times by her dog and sometimes by the footman from Quai d'Orléans, a gloomy and
red-faced young Breton with pimples. In fashionable afternoon attire Luisa made a remarkable effect. Her dark hair in medium length with a simple knot at the back was not the fashion just then but it suited her admirably. Her gown of black moire was cut to the level of the breastbone, and the coat she wore over it she had a way of throwing back over one hip with her hand. It was clear to the spectator that she was an extraordinary young woman, that she was thoroughly at home in this city, and also that she was not French. If her complexion were not enough, there was the shape of her face: in her case the genetic Silva e Costa elongation, instead of assuming equine form as it did in the aunt, gave a long-nosed, patrician, even-eyed, ruminant, self-contained, faintly supercilious expression; she looked something like a llama. Her dog was a pug, naturally, and she carried too many things in her purse. She was one of those marsupial women whose security lies not in a home but in this little portable womb they carry about with them, filled with pocket combs, handkerchiefs, vials of cologne, foreign coins, hair ribbons, smelling salts, unread novels, stubs of pencils, dinner mints, scent, tweezers, ends of theatre tickets, mascara, tiny powder boxes that play Swiss waltzes when opened, even a china egg. Her favourite of her bags was a kind of reticule made of Bayeux tapestry, exquisitely beautiful, I have to admit. When we went to an exhibition or musical event she would comment on things in her controlled, slightly artificial voice, a little disconnectedly perhaps but frequently with considerable insight. There was no question that she was intelligent and even that in her way she took the things of the mind seriously and was capable of applying herself to them assiduously when she chose. Once, simply to play a joke on her when she asked what I was reading, I lent her an abstruse philosophical treatise in German (it was on the theory of irreducibility in irrational numbers) and contrary to all expectation she understood something of it. Her scent was one I have never encountered elsewhere: a thin, barely perceptible violet like the fragrance that plays round the poles of electrical apparatus. She preferred Gérard de Nerval to Goethe, Schumann to Bach.

I had come to Paris that spring with the idea of working in the Bibliothèque Nationale, but for one reason or another I rarely got around to it. At Quai d'Orléans at five o'clock I would find myself mesmerized into conversations with Luisa which I had not chosen and which surely
had not been organized by her, since she was scarcely capable of organizing the contents of her handbag. Did I care for Rilke? He and I were almost perfect strangers. She informed me that he had invented “la poésie des choses.” Bully for him. She wondered if I liked riding. She rode every morning in the Bois, very early when the world was asleep (by “le monde” she meant six hundred people out of a population of two and a half million, and probably she was speaking of nine o'clock in the morning). And: she would drop casually that it was this very evening that a diva only rarely heard was to appear in recital at the Salle Meyer, and she was curious if I planned to attend. I would reply that I never went to such things, and she would say “Ah!” in her most interested and yet distant manner. There would be a silence, which I would have been wise to leave alone, but deuce take it all! In spite of myself I would end by inquiring politely, “Are you?” Oh no, she would explain in a kind of dreamy sarcasm, you see it wasn't considered fashionable for young ladies to make their way about a large city alone, it might subject them to insults or other embarrassments, a stupid prejudice but for the present at least society was organized in this way, que voulez-vous? Naturally I would end by offering to protect her from ruffians, amorous cabmen, etc., and find myself presently sitting in the Salle Meyer listening to a plump Milanese soprano trill her way through the Mad Song from Lucia. It was not long until she was clearly taking me for granted, a thing I abominate. “À demain, n'est-ce pas?” she would remind me mellifluously as we parted. “Chez ma tante.”

At the aunt's the next day a hungry Balkan violinist played czardas, the conversation was of Rodin, the gloomy footman served loukoumi and tea. I learned quite by accident that Luisa was engaged. Her fiancé was a young Spanish officer of artillery who, it seemed, was considered a family joke. His name was Alberto but for some reason he was called the Peninsula. Perhaps it was because he was Spanish, or because he was only semi-attached to the family. I never actually encountered him at Quai d'Orléans, although there was a photograph of him on the piano: a self-satisfied young man with a strong jaw, something like a bulldog, and a meaty nose. His eyebrows met over the nose, so that he really only had one of them. I cannot say why I found this last detail repugnant, or amusing. I don't know what I expected eyebrows to do. The aunt's sloped outward and I found this eccentric too. The aunt never did ask me about my emanations,
as Luisa had promised she would, but on my final visit to Quai d'Orléans she did interrogate me about my position in life. I told her that I was attached to the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm and had every expectation of becoming its librarian in due time, and in the meanwhile I was devoting myself to my researches, which had won me a modest recognition along with membership in an international society or two. This crass little speech was pompous but so, I felt, was the question.

“Luisa tells me you are interested in spiritualism.”

“Not at all.”

“Well then, in electricity or something. It's much the same thing.”

“It's the furthest thing possible from the same thing.”

“Is it true that, with electricity, one can tell what people are doing in the next room?”

“Only if they are sending out waves with a coulomb apparatus.”

“What is it exactly that you are discovering then? I am sorry that I am such a stupid old woman.” The head vibrated back and forth, denying all, as she smiled and made this apology.

By this time I was feeling quite arrogant, not to say hilarious. “I believe that intelligences on the stars may be attempting to send us telegraph messages. If so, it is a question of the greatest importance. Are you interested in such matters?”

But, like her niece, she countered all questions by changing the subject. “Do you know, I wonder if you have noticed that Luisa is a remarkable young person. We expect extraordinary things from her. Extraordinary. Do you know that she reads Dante?”

I agreed that she was educated beyond the common sphere of woman, but my phraseology here was unfortunate and evoked a blank stare.

“These spheres of which you speak, my dear Captain,” she informed me, “are of a bygone era. Persons of advanced thought, these days, no longer believe that half the human race is confined in one sphere and the other half in another, or rather free to wander around and do exactly as it pleases. Apropos, tell me something, dites donc, why is it that you are a military man and yet you don't wear a uniform?”

“Primo,” I explained,
“I am on detached duty; secundo, the container ought to indicate the contents, and taken apart from or inside my clothes, I am not very uniform.”

“Inside your clothes you are not the same?”

“Profoundly different.”

“Ah.” A skeptical look came into her eye, but she said nothing, only waggled her head.

I forget what else happened at this last tea. A good many idiocies. I talked for a little while to the mother, or attempted to, but it was thick going. For one thing she stood slightly too close to me for the conversation to be comfortable. It was about an arm's length, or three quarters of a metre. As inconspicuously as I could I would back away about a hand's breadth, she would follow me by the same distance, and so on. This has happened to me before and it is a futile exercise at best. Such a ballet can describe large circles around a fashionable salon. Perhaps, I thought, I ought to get over this nineteenth-century aversion toward the mere propinquity of other flesh. On the other hand, perhaps there was something deep in my blood too Lutheran and Nordic for these tropical birds. At any rate, the mother, Madame Hickman née Silva e Costa, stood too close to me in a sari and caste mark and holding a saucer with a pastry on it, conversing with me in a thin timid voice slightly below the threshold of audibility, glancing about her now and then rather apprehensively as though to see whether anybody was observing. It was only with the greatest attention that I could make out what she was saying. I had the impression that at any moment she might whisper, “I have been abducted by these people. Please rescue me.” She smelled of musk and nervousness, like a small animal. She spoke a mixture of French and what she imagined to be English, so that understanding her, in addition to a physical feat, was an exercise in comparative philology.

“Do you like Paris?” I at length detected.

“Very much.”

“Have you had many new experiences?” Or perhaps she said, “Have you made very many new experiments,” since the French word is ambiguous, even at normal loudness.

“Experiences? How?”

Glancing around
again, she hazarded, “Do you know Mifeuya?” or so it sounded to me. I was not sure how to respond. Who or what? A Japanese painter? A seaport in Turkey?

“How?”

“Millefeuille, a pastry.”

Ah. “Certainly, madame,” I told her with as much respect as I could muster for the subject, “I know it very well.”

While waiting for me to answer she had taken a tiny bite of the confection on her saucer, and now she chewed it with a timid rotary motion of her jaw while she tried to speak at the same time. “C'est ra-vi-ssant,” I finally caught. It was not clear whether she meant the millefeuille or what she was now enjoying. For her it was probably the same; her mouth was full, of the word, of the thing, and it was ravissant. Talking to her was very simple now that I had caught the trick of it; you had only to pretend that you were talking to a very small child, perhaps three, who had just discovered bonbons and wanted to know if you had heard about them too. You had only to assure her, with a gravity proper to the subject, “I do indeed, and they are very good.”

The mother melted, evaporated into the collection of guests, or perhaps merged into the Astrakhan carpet. I found myself in a bay window looking out over the river with the fashionable photographer from rue de la Paix, whom I hoped to interrogate about the possibilities of using photography in an airship to record meteorological phenomena. But it was difficult to talk to him when he was continually glancing around and over my head, probably in search of someone who was wealthier than I and more likely to pay a large sum to have his visage recorded on a glass plate. These swervings of his nose were held in place by a tense jockey, a pair of gold-rimmed spectacles. Finally he noticed me. “You are an artist?” he inquired.

“Hardly.”

“Not an artist?”

“I am a natural philosopher, more or less.”

“Odd, you profoundly resemble an artist. Believe me, in my profession it is necessary to make a study of physiognomy and I know what I am talking about.”

“Perhaps a naturalist is not very different from an artist, physiognomistically speaking.”

“Profoundly different.
Profoundly different.” The gold spectacles controlled the nose now and held it exactly in my direction. “Art is permanent; nature is in flux. Nature is dust and vapors, noxious. What we see about us, these fair prospects”—the nose bolted briefly toward the decolletage of a lady a little distance away—are in reality a constantly degenerating panorama of corruption.”

“How long will a photograph last?”

“With good care, fifty years or even a century.”

I was about to comment that the same was true of a man, but we were interrupted by the aunt, who took him away to waggle her head at him in a corner.

The whole collection, for some reason, affected me that afternoon as a nest of madfolk; I could hope for little better from the pederastic English poet or the professor of art history. I found myself filled with a powerful desire to escape, but in the vestibule I encountered Luisa, who was looking bright, wistful, and a little flushed from the stimulation of society. “Ah … then …” she articulated tentatively.