My two companions, at least, are content to leave these mysteries of the ether to me. “The wind may change tomorrow; if not we may decide to do something about it.” Waldemer nods, Theodor silently studies the penciled sworl I have drawn on the chart. It is getting somewhat colder now. The thermometer on the instrument ring reads minus four degrees centigrade. Perhaps this is due to our altitude, perhaps to the disturbance approaching from the east. I put up the hood of my reindeer-skin coat and remove my arms from its sleeves, hugging them over my chest. The coat is roomy enough that, taking out the arms in this way, it is possible to turn around inside it as though it were a small tent. Waldemer has pulled down the flaps of his hunting cap and buttoned them under his chin. I can see that he is cold but resolved to say nothing about it even if his nose and ears fall off. The end of this first organ has already turned a faint violet, the colour of the wax used to seal hermetic instruments in laboratories. Theodor is impassive. His ivory skin has only assumed a slight grey cast, as though the blood has drained out of it. His military cap has no flaps and it is his ears, I predict, that will be the first to be frostbitten. It is curious that the sun gives so little heat. It has now risen almost to its maximum altitude. But it has not seemed to rise very much; instead, it only gives the impression of trotting around the horizon from east to south, as though it were following us at a distance and trying to get a glimpse of what we are doing. It is absolutely disk-like, giving no impression of sphericity at all. It has another quality I have noticed all morning and which seems to me significant. Perhaps through some kind of physiological reaction, an irritation of the retina, its surface gives an impression of crawling slightly, the areas of deeper red shifting slowly to this or that part of the disk. I am deeply attached to the sun. I regard it as divine, life-giving, and ominous. That I am deliberately fleeing from it now, I the sun-devout Scandinavian-that in the middle of summer I should be fleeing northward to hide from its warmth around the bulge of the earth-is in itself significant. Does the sun know what I am doing? Undoubtedly. There it is, crawling redly, immobile, watching.
13 July 1897
An hour or two past midnight. In the polar twilight, a hazy and indistinct grey with tinges of pink, I am asleep or am I? it doesn’t matter, I am aware perhaps of the creaking of ropes and the gentle breathing of my companions and yet at the same time another part of me moves in other places, unreal and yet far more solid in their myriad form and texture than this insubstantial particle of reality in which I am suspended half-asleep from a globe of hydrogen in a sea of frozen air. In this other consciousness into which I slip deeper now and then as one might descend lazily into a bath of tepid water, a bath that calls and attracts with its warmth and yet to which one cannot surrender totally and immerse one’s being for more than a few instants since breathing is not possible in that violet and soporific fluid, in this deeper consciousness the objects are hard, vivid, piercing, all the more hard and vivid for their very unreality. The word sleep is greatly too simple to describe this state. At one end, toward the surface, it merges into daydreaming; at the deeper extreme, if one were to sink to the bottom, it is death. But the soul knows how to preserve itself. It drifts at a nice depth, now descending a little and now rising to touch the surface, in the manner of those sea creatures who must breathe air and yet whose nourishment lies deep. I hope I shall not snag myself on a telegraph cable down there. Inside the skin coat, when I awaken and only drowse a little, there is a smell of reindeer hair and tar, a comforting pungence, I am quite warm in this tent I have made by pulling my arms inside the coat. Doubled until the knees approach my chest, the hood over my face, I am enclosed in animal content. In the moments when I sink lower, toward full sleep, a curious phenomenon takes place. A part of my body, mistaken about the circumstances or perhaps responding to some private reality of its own, awakens and stirs toward a goal. In the vividness of its imagination this part of me thinks of, invents, or conjectures its mirror image in another similar and yet importantly different organism, a concavity to match its convexity. The stupid brutal thing is not a whit discouraged at not finding this concavity; it goes on yearning in its stiff and mindless way, exciting itself with its own thumping heart. In my moments of half wakefulness I am inclined to be ironic about this delusion this fifth limb of mine seems to have fallen into. And yet is it not strange and curious that a part of me, a part of my consciousness even though a lower and coarser part, should mistake a portion of reindeer skin in this way for the embrace of a yearned-for and beloved companion! And stranger still that only a single scrap of membrane, of all the animal substance in the universe, should be the one this fine nerve of mine should desire to touch—that it should be so exigent, so obsessedly selective, and yet so easily deluded. It is only in the wakened state that the body makes fine distinctions. Asleep or half-asleep it is ready to settle for the shabbiest simulacrum. Fold of reindeer hide or whatever, beloved one, this blind snake tightened in an arc is your adorer! What twaddle, a plague take it. It would be better to stay awake and put an end to such foolishness. I am not very sleepy anyhow. I turn over inside the warm skin bag, settle my limbs into place, and doze off or half-doze again, but this time with a difference. Through a trick I learned long ago as a boy, and practice now and then as other men practice with dumbbells or playing cards, I enter fully conscious into the storehouse of my dream matter and select exactly those pictures that I choose rather than those that blind seeking of the blood happens to stumble over, so that sleep becomes something like one of those stereopticon viewers that fasten on your nose and enable you to see with a vivid roundness, more powerful than life, whichever of those cardboard images you choose from the box on the table. In short, it is possible to dream what one will, although it requires some effort, just as it is possible to remember what one will, a street number or the formula for saltpeter.
But it is necessary to be hard, as hard as an angel. Steely, gripping the memory in my will’s fingers, I pierce downward through layers that shimmer as they part and close again behind me, their soft torn edges clinging to my limbs. In a stratum not far from the surface I encounter a yellow room in a villa, Stresa. Then a carriage on rue de Rivoli, a balloon flight over Suomi, an angry white face in the twilight in the Bois. Finally, deeper than all these and a good deal more vague and evanescent, there comes into focus the hall of the Musée Carnavalet on the occasion of the Fifth Congress of the Paraphysical Society in 1895, where I was lecturing on electromagnetic phenomena in the atmosphere. I had just embarked on the possibility of extraterrestrial sources of the waves when I caught sight of an extraordinary face in the audience. A rather long, pale, and absolutely motionless visage with eyes fixed intently on me, a lofty brow, a mouth that gave the impression of being held in place only by a conscious effort of the will so that two little creases formed below it on the chin. Immaculately groomed, gown from Worth’s, soft hair gathered into a knot at the back. Incredibly enough, at that time she was only nineteen. Following the lecture she presented herself at the podium and engaged me in a discussion of the Female Question.
“Captain” (I was a captain in those days), “these matters, emanations or whatever you call them, do you believe they are susceptible of investigation by women?”
I looked up from my notes and hardly knew what to answer. Was this an attack or some kind of an overture of friendship, of admiration? “Why? On the other hand, why not?”
“It seems—I mean—I gather from what you say that they are an ethereal kind of thing.” Did she always speak this rapidly, and not quite looking at the person she was addressing? “C’est à dire, subtle, and perhaps women, being creatures of intuition and especially good at invisible things, might be particularly fitted to investigate them. Also they can be studied in one’s own home with very little apparatus, and they don’t get one’s hands dirty.”
Or she said something like this, I don’t remember exactly. I do remember that she spoke with a great assurance and even a challenging air, a fai
nt touch of contempt, and yet that she blushed as she did so, a kind of pink spider forming on her throat and moving upward into the paleness under her chin. The little speech on feminism evidently came from one part of her being, the vascular reaction from another.
“In fact, a good deal of apparatus is required,” I countered as moderately as I could, “electrostatic generators, coils of wire, Leyden jars, and things of this sort, many of which are expensive. Not only do they get your hands dirty, but frequently there is danger involved; for example, a good many observations can be made only from airships. I hardly think you would like that. As for the tasks men and women are adapted for, you make too much of the difference. The parts of the human body that distinguish the sexes”—(second appearance of the pink spider; I plunged on)—”are the most ephemeral. In skeletons they are hardly discernible except to an expert. Whereas, comparing man with ape, the skeletal difference is apparent even to a layman. I wonder where you get your opinions about intuitions and such things?”
But one of her qualities that I learned immediately was that she never answered questions. To frame a remark to her in the form of a question was to distract her instantly into another subject, as though by an invisible system of switches. “Do you know the dramas of Strindberg?”
“I have never been to a play in my life.”
“So much the worse for you. You talk as though you had read him. He is mad of course. I can assure you I am perfectly able to afford Leyden jars and coils of wire, and I would adore ascending in an airship. I have a book of engravings about the frères Montgolfier. It’s a pity you haven’t read Strindberg. It might have armed you against me. As it is, you are my victim. Captain, please come to tea at my aunt’s. It is perfectly proper, she belongs to the best society of the Île Saint-Louis. You can explain your emanations to her, and perhaps you might give me a list of the apparatus I ought to buy.”
I said that I would or I wouldn’t, I don’t know what I said, but the outcome was that I actually presented myself at the house on Quai d’Orléans on the following day, dressed like an idiot in a white shirt and patent-leather pumps. The aunt maintained a curious establishment. It was hard to say whether it was respectable or not. Luisa in stressing its propriety had perhaps slightly overemphasized the point, since what was the purpose of mentioning this if there wasn’t some slight doubt about it? The whole family had a characteristic quality of raffishness combined with the greatest kind of dignity, a juxtaposition that reappeared in the various members in various disguises but was always recognizable once you were familiar with it. Perhaps it owed this to its ancestry, which tended toward the mongrelish, although in a highly aristocratic way. The American father by this time was of course not on the scene, since he had gone back to his own country through some complicated circumstances that I didn’t quite follow and had died in an attack on an Apache camp in New Mexico in 1875. This exotic demise was evidently not considered comme il faut in the family, since he was never spoken of. In addition to his debts he left to his family only the quintessentially transatlantic name of Hickman, which everyone concealed as though it were an unfortunate secret. His widow, Luisa’s mother, evidently lived as a kind of dependent and companion of the aunt, wore saris and even a caste mark on her brow, although she was three quarters of European blood, and did nothing in particular except drink tea and eat sticky Levantine pastries. She was not held in very high regard among the Silva e Costas, perhaps because of her marriage to the handsome but penniless American frontiersman. The aunt was a spinster. Her long face tended slightly to the equine and her eyebrows sloped a little outward, like the eaves of a house. She shared the ivory family complexion, although in her case it had been marred by a childhood smallpox that had lent it a kind of lunar and irregular texture like weathered alabaster, or satin from an old wardrobe. She also suffered slightly from a chorea-like affliction that caused slight and almost imperceptible movements of her face: the chin, fixed as it were by effort, nevertheless tremored to the left a fraction of a millimeter or less, once or so a second, returning immediately to its former position, in a movement so subtle and so faint that it was to an ordinary twitch as the pulsing of a tiny insect’s heart is to the beating of a clock. The beholder, in fact, did not necessarily notice this movement upon first meeting the aunt, it was so slight. Once you had become aware of it, however, it lent a faint negative quality to everything the aunt said and did; whether she praised your poem, invited you again to tea, agreed with your politics, the imperceptible vibration of her head seemed to reiterate constantly, “Nay, nay. It is all nothing, I deny all.” She dressed in long gowns of the Empire period and wore her hair in ringlets, although the effect was somewhat marred by the gold-rimmed spectacles that gave her a kind of Voltairean air. It was said she was very wealthy. I believe she disliked men on principle, and perhaps this is where Luisa got her suffragism, although the connection was a little tenuous. In any case she was very polite to me. She spoke French in an accent of her own that involved distinguishing sharply between the vowels, with a different shape of mouth to go with each. “On voit,” she told me calmly and not unkindly, “que vous z-êtes un vr-rai é-rudit.” I forgot to record that one of her breasts had been removed in an operation and she wore a padded appliance in its place.
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.
The Balloonist Page 6
