Transparent Things (10 page)

He now had to find Villa Nastia, which still retained a dead old woman’s absurd Russian diminutive. She had sold it just before her last illness to a childless English couple. He would glance at the porch, as one uses a glazed envelope to slip in an image of the past.

Hugh hesitated at a street corner. Just beyond it a woman was selling vegetables from a stall.
Est-ce que vous savez, Madame
—Yes, she did, it was up that lane. As she spoke, a large, white, shivering dog crawled from behind a crate and with a shock of futile recognition Hugh remembered that eight years ago he had stopped right here and had noticed that dog, which was pretty old even then and had now braved fabulous age only to serve his blind memory.

The surroundings were unrecognizable—except for the white wall. His heart was beating as after an arduous climb. A blond little girl with a badminton racket crouched and picked up her shuttlecock from the sidewalk. Farther up he located Villa Nastia, now painted a celestial blue. All its windows were shuttered.

Choosing one of the marked trails leading into the mountains, Hugh recognized another detail of the past, namely the venerable inspector of benches—bird-defiled benches as old as he—that were rotting in shady nooks here and there, brown leaves below, green leaves above, by the side of a resolutely idyllic footpath ascending toward a waterfall. He remembered the inspector’s pipe studded with Bohemian gems (in harmony with its owner’s furuncular nose) and also the habit Armande had of exchanging ribald comments in Swiss-German with the old fellow while he was examining the rubbish under a cracked seat.

The region now offered tourists a number of additional climbs and cableways as well as a new motorcar road from Witt to the gondola station which Armande and her friends used to reach on foot. In his day Hugh had carefully studied the public map, a great Carte du Tendre or Chart of Torture, spread out on a billboard near the post office. Had he wished now to travel in comfort to the glacier slopes he could have taken the new bus which connected Witt with the Drakonita cable car. He wanted, however, to do it the old hard way and to pass through the unforgettable forest on his way up. He hoped the Drakonita gondola would be the remembered one—a small cabin with two benches facing
each other. It rode up keeping some twenty yards above a strip of turfy slope in a cutting between fir trees and alder bushes. Every thirty seconds or so it negotiated a pylon with a sudden rattle and shake but otherwise it glided with dignity.

Hugh’s memory had bunched into one path the several wood trails and logging roads that led to the first difficult stage of the ascent—namely, a jumble of boulders and a jungle of rhododendrons, through which one struck upward to reach the cable car. No wonder he soon lost his way.

His memory, in the meantime, kept following its private path. Again he was panting in her merciless wake. Again she was teasing Jacques, the handsome Swiss boy with fox-red body hair and dreamy eyes. Again she flirted with the eclectic English twins, who called gullies Cool Wars and ridges Ah Rates. Hugh, despite his tremendous physique, had neither the legs nor the lungs to keep up with them even in memory. And when the foursome had accelerated their climbing pace and vanished with their cruel ice axes and coils of rope and other instruments of torture (equipment exaggerated by ignorance), he rested on a rock, and, looking down, seemed to see through the moving mists the making of the very mountains that his tormentors trod, the crystalline crust heaving up with his heart from the bottom of an immemorial
more
(sea). Generally, however, he would be urged not to straggle after them even before they were out of the forest, a dismal group of old firs, with steep muddy paths and thickets of wet willow herb.

He now ascended through that wood, panting as painfully as he had in the past when following Armande’s golden nape or a huge knapsack on a naked male back. As then the pressure of the shoecap upon his right foot had soon scraped off a round of skin at the joint of the third toe, resulting in a red eye burning there through every
threadbare thought. He finally shook the forest off and reached a rock-strewn field and a barn that he thought he recalled, but the stream where he had once washed his feet and the broken bridge which suddenly spanned the gap of time in his mind were nowhere to be seen. He walked on. The day seemed a little brighter but presently a cloud palmed the sun again. The path had reached the pastures. He noticed a large white butterfly drop outspread on a stone. Its papery wings, blotched with black and maculated with faded crimson, had transparent margins of an unpleasant crimped texture, which shivered slightly in the cheerless wind. Hugh disliked insects; this one looked particularly gross. Nevertheless, a mood of unusual kindliness made him surmount the impulse to crush it under a blind boot. With the vague idea that it must be tired and hungry and would appreciate being transferred to a nearby pincushion of little pink flowers, he stooped over the creature but with a great shuffle and rustle it evaded his handkerchief, sloppily flapped to overcome gravity, and vigorously sailed away.

He walked up to a signpost. Forty-five minutes to Lammerspitz, two hours and a half to Rimperstein. This was not the way to the glacier gondola. The distances indicated seemed as dull as delirium.

Round-browed gray rocks with patches of black moss and pale-green lichen lined the trail beyond the signpost. He looked at the clouds blurring the distant peaks or sagging like blubber between them. It was not worthwhile continuing that lone climb. Had she passed here, had her soles once imprinted their elaborate pattern in that clay? He considered the remnants of a solitary picnic, bits of eggshell broken off by the fingers of another solitary hiker who had sat here a few minutes ago, and a crumpled plastic bag into which a succession of rapid feminine hands had once conveyed with tiny tongs white apple roundlets, black
prunes, nuts, raisins, the sticky mummy of a banana—all this digested by now. The grayness of rain would soon engulf everything. He felt a first kiss on his bald spot and walked back to the woods and widowhood.

Days like this give sight a rest and allow other senses to function more freely. Earth and sky were drained of all color. It was either raining or pretending to rain or not raining at all, yet still appearing to rain in a sense that only certain old Northern dialects can either express verbally or not express, but
versionize
, as it were, through the ghost of a sound produced by a drizzle in a haze of grateful rose shrubs. “Raining in Wittenberg, but not in Wittgenstein.” An obscure joke in
Tralatitions
.

Direct interference in a person’s life does not enter our scope of activity, nor, on the other, tralatitiously speaking, hand, is his destiny a chain of predeterminate links: some “future” events may be likelier than others, O.K., but all are chimeric, and every cause-and-effect sequence is always a hit-and-miss affair, even if the lunette has actually closed around your neck, and the cretinous crowd holds its breath.

Only chaos would result if some of us championed Mr. X, while another group backed Miss Julia Moore, whose interests, such as distant dictatorships, turned out to clash with those of her ailing old suitor Mr. (now Lord) X. The most we can do when steering a favorite in the best direction, in circumstances not involving injury to others, is to act as a breath of wind and to apply the lightest, the most indirect pressure such as
trying
to induce a dream that we
hope
our favorite will recall as prophetic if a likely event does actually happen. On the printed page the words “likely” and “actually” should be italicized too, at least
slightly
, to indicate a
slight
breath of wind inclining those characters (in the sense of both signs and personae). In fact, we depend on italics to an even greater degree than do, in their arch quaintness, writers of children’s books.

Human life can be compared to a person dancing in a
variety of forms around his own self: thus the vegetables of our first picture book encircled a boy in his dream—green cucumber, blue eggplant, red beet, Potato
père
, Potato
fils
, a girly asparagus, and, oh, many more, their spinning
ronde
going faster and faster and gradually forming a transparent ring of banded colors around a dead person or planet.

Another thing we are not supposed to do is to explain the inexplicable. Men have learned to live with a black burden, a huge aching hump: the supposition that “reality” may be only a “dream.” How much more dreadful it would be if the very awareness of your being aware of reality’s dreamlike nature were also a dream, a built-in hallucination! One should bear in mind, however, that there is no mirage without a vanishing point, just as there is no lake without a closed circle of reliable land.

We have shown our need for quotation marks (“reality,” “dream”). Decidedly, the signs with which Hugh Person still peppers the margins of galleys have a metaphysical or zodiacal import! “Dust to dust” (the dead are good mixers, that’s quite certain, at least). A patient in one of Hugh’s mental hospitals, a bad man but a good philosopher, who was at that time terminally ill (hideous phrase that no quotes can cure) wrote for Hugh in the latter’s Album of Asylums and Jails (a kind of diary he kept in those dreadful years):

We shall close the subject on this bizarre note.

What had you expected of your pilgrimage, Person? A mere mirror rerun of hoary torments? Sympathy from an old stone? Enforced re-creation of irrecoverable trivia? A search for lost time in an utterly distinct sense from Good-grief’s dreadful
“Je me souviens, je me souviens de la maison où je suis né”
or, indeed, Proust’s quest? He had never experienced here (save once at the end of his last ascent) anything but boredom and bitterness. Something else had made him revisit dreary drab Witt.

Not a belief in ghosts. Who would care to haunt half-remembered lumps of matter (he did not know that Jacques lay buried under six feet of snow in Chute, Colorado), uncertain itineraries, a club hut which some spell prevented him from reaching and whose name anyway had got hopelessly mixed with “Draconite,” a stimulant no longer in production but still advertised on fences and even cliff walls? Yet something connected with spectral visitations had impelled him to come all the way from another continent. Let us make this a little clearer.

Practically all the dreams in which she had appeared to him after her death had been staged not in the settings of an American winter but in those of Swiss mountains and Italian lakes. He had not even found the spot in the woods
where a gay band of little hikers had interrupted an unforgettable kiss. The desideratum was a moment of contact with her essential image in exactly remembered surroundings.

Upon returning to the Ascot Hotel he devoured an apple, pulled off his clay-smeared boots with a snarl of rejection, and, ignoring his sores and dampish socks, changed to the comfort of his town shoes. Back now to the torturing task!

Thinking that some small visual jog might make him recall the number of the room that he had occupied eight years ago, he walked the whole length of the third-floor corridor—and after getting only blank stares from one number after another, halted: the expedient had worked. He saw a very black 313 on a very white door and recalled instantly how he had told Armande (who had promised to visit him and did not wish to be announced): “Mnemonically it should be imagined as three little figures in profile, a prisoner passing by with one guard in front of him and another behind.” Armande had rejoined that this was too fanciful for her, and that she would simply write it down in the little agenda she kept in her bag.

A dog yapped on the inner side of the door: the mark, he told himself, of substantial occupancy. Nevertheless, he carried away a feeling of satisfaction, the sense of having recovered an important morsel of that particular past.

Next, he proceeded downstairs and asked the fair receptionist to ring up the hotel in Stresa and find out if they could let him have for a couple of days the room where Mr. and Mrs. Hugh Person had stayed eight years ago. Its name, he said, sounded like “Beau Romeo.” She repeated it in its correct form but said it might take a few minutes. He would wait in the lounge.

There were only two people there, a woman eating a snack in a far corner (the restaurant was unavailable, not
yet having been cleaned after a farcical fight) and a Swiss businessman flipping through an ancient number of an American magazine (which had actually been left there by Hugh eight years ago, but this line of life nobody followed up). A table next to the Swiss gentleman was littered with hotel pamphlets and fairly recent periodicals. His elbow rested on the
Transatlantic
. Hugh tugged at the magazine and the Swiss gentleman fairly sprang up in his chair. Apologies and counter-apologies blossomed into conversation. Monsieur Wilde’s English resembled in many ways that of Armande, both in grammar and intonation. He had been shocked beyond measure by an article in Hugh’s
Transatlantic
(borrowing it for a moment, wetting his thumb, finding the place and slapping the page with the back of his fingers as he returned the thing opened on the offensive article).

“One talks here of a man who murdered his spouse eight years ago and——”

The receptionist, whose desk and bust he could distinguish in miniature from where he sat, was signaling to him from afar. She burst out of her enclosure and advanced toward him:

“One does not reply,” she said, “do you want me to keep trying?”

“Yes, oh yes,” said Hugh, getting up, bumping into somebody (the woman who had enveloped the fat that remained of her ham in a paper napkin and was leaving the lounge). “Yes. Oh, excuse me. Yes, by all means. Do call Information or something.”