Waldemer stops chewing and puts down his pocket knife. “Ah.”
“Ah?”
“The bubbly!” With a smile.
He is an incurable sentimentalist in spite of his conviction that he is a practical man, and he gets up with enthusiasm, hugging his sides against the cold, and goes to the gondola for the champagne. He is quite right in doing so, since the champagne has been brought along for exactly this moment. It is packed in its own narrow basket, padded in straw, under the floor of the gondola. He returns, holding the wire-wrapped bottle by the neck and a look of insufficiently suppressed satisfaction on his face.
“Ha! Almost forgot.”
The wine is Veuve Clicquot of the best quality. “And properly chilled too, you can be sure of that.” Waldemer sets the bottle down on the snow. We look at each other. Waldemer looks at us.
“The glasses, drat it.”
He goes back for them, and Theodor says, “I’ll bet we forgot them.”
“Everything has been checked by Alvarez. There is a list as long as your arm. The glasses are aboard, and Waldemer will find them.”
He finds them in the provision case, packed carefully in excelsior, and comes back carrying one in one hand and two in the other, and this is not easy to do when one is wearing double mittens. Sets them in the snow by the bottle, in a neat row. Twists the cork deftly like a man accustomed all his life to opening champagne, his expression set with the effort of doing this precisely, and exhaling a good deal of steam.
“Have to watch out—ha ha!—pesky cork may pop out and hit you in the eye—this stuff has a way, you know.”
“If you are blinded by a champagne cork, old fellow, never fear, we’ll guide you back to New York.”
“Ha! Just takes a knack, that’s all.”
The upshot is that the cork comes out in perfect silence; even an ominous silence.
“H’mm.”
The hollow-stemmed glasses are arranged in a row in the snow. With jovial ceremony he tilts the bottle’s mouth over the first. Nothing. Increases the angle. Shakes bottle lightly. Inverts it totally over the glass. But even upside down it declines to give forth its contents.
“Well, I’ll be dratted. What do you suppose? The stuff is defective.”
Theodor takes the bottle from him and examines it for a moment. Then, abruptly and with considerable force, he breaks it against the ice anchor. The bottle comes apart quite easily; the middle third shatters, the bottom and the top can be removed like hats from the molded form of substance contained within. Theodor patiently picks off the few remaining crumbs of glass.
“Ha! Well, there’s a predicament. Did you ever hear of the like? What should we do now, d’you suppose?”
“Eat it, I imagine.”
The steak is a succulent meal, even though the morsels, as we cut them with our pocket knives, get cold before we can bring them to our mouths and will freeze if we don’t work quickly. As for the champagne, we divide this up too with our pocket knives and eat it with our mittened fingers. It consists of clusters of sharp needle-like crystals, pale white, with the taste of a sherbet made of apples. As it melts under the tongue a faint tingle sinks downward into the palate, merges into the substances of man. It’s quite good, really.
Having melted the wine in our metabolism, and begun at least to digest the steak, we gather up the paraphernalia of our picnic and put everything back in the gondola. The tarpaulin we spread over the instrument ring to keep out the light, and as much of the frozen mist as possible. We are snug in our miniature habitation, a remorseless nature outside held back by wicker and canvas. Before we throw the Ice Men out onto the snow to make room for ourselves, I go outside one last time to be sure the Prinzess is well secured and that everything is as before. The wind has died completely. In the absolute calm the Prinzess stretches precisely upward, the hoarfrost beginning to whiten the red silk of her stripes. Before my face the particles of frozen mist hang fixed like tiny needle points. In the silence I can hear a muffled complaining and grinding from the pack ice under my feet: pushing, slowly buckling, its edges chafing and crumbling.
“What does it mean?”
Theodor has come out of the gondola behind me. He stands with the shawl tied over the top of his peaked cap, almost enclosing his cheeks and face.
“The calm? It means there is no wind.”
“And will there be wind again?”
“In time. Perhaps tomorrow. Perhaps in a month.”
His glance studies me, and he smiles faintly.
“Did you know that before we came?”
“That there might be no wind? Of course.”
He says nothing more. His mittened hands in the pocket of his greatcoat, he contemplates the place where the horizon would be if it were not obscured in this white atmosphere. The sun can barely force its rays through it. It—the sun—has crept around in another direction now, moving imperceptibly sideways with no inclination whatsoever to rise as the sun does below in the Cities of Men. It looks more like a moon than a sun, a moon of red liquid metal, but totally cold. We are conscious only of cold, and of an immense and absolute isolation. The gondola fifty metres away is barely visible. It is clear that, to all purposes, the two of us are alone in the universe, and under such circumstances convention can be dispensed with. This being so, I am free to concede at least to a Mental Diary that what I feel for Theodor is love. I admire the recalcitrance of his flesh and the keen, faintly contemptuous profile of his face folded in the enwrapping shawl, his soft and almost baby-like skin spotted with frostbite, but sufficient in himself and making no complaint. I think, for some reason in French: Il sait se défendre. We are perhaps a metre and a half apart and remain so. Neither of us speaks. What separates us is only the ten thousand years of complication in which we have hopelessly enmeshed the naturalness and simplicity of our actions, that is to say, everything that humanity calls civilization. Is it possible after the ten thousand years to feel a natural sentiment? And how to tell the natural from the perverse? And yet, half-frozen as I am, I feel myself capable of leaping like an armed warrior into this abyss God has dug with His hands between man and the animal. Perhaps this is a delirium, a malicious and nonexistent notion playing on the brain fibers as false images sometimes play on the inside of the retina. Malicious and nonexistent? Malicious because nonexistent. We are both tired; we are all three tired. We go back into the gondola and the Ice Men are politely evicted from their places; they seem content lying in a row on the snow outside. Then we unroll our sacks of reindeer hide and I lie down chastely with my two companions.
It is cold and only partly dark. I slip downward and am no longer aware of my body, then rise a little toward the surface again. I am very comfortable and at peace with myself, with the world, with everything. Some sun warms me, a sun that is probably inside me, since the real sun could hardly pierce through the shutters. And also because, since the hillside on which the villa is built faces north, toward the lake, the sun is rather late in making its appearance in the morning. Even at seven o’clock the light that comes into the room is a faint greyish blue, the light of pre-dawn. Luisa sleeps soundly with a pillow over her head and only a portion of her white shoulder showing. I, face downward with one knee drawn up, hover somewhere in a region where the body is asleep and the soul only conscious enough to be aware of the fact. What my half consciousness ponders about, in a way far too imprecise to be described as thought, is the mysterious dynamic that draws my body toward that other one I can sense only thirty centimeters away from me now in the canopied Empire bed, but only at certain times and in certain ways. And it is she who chooses, it is clear to me even nine tenths asleep, not only the ways but the times. Usually it is at sunset with the faint reddish reflections from the lake coming through the shutters. Just as the time we live in is called the fin de siècle, so our lovemaking belongs to the fin de jour; there is something crepuscular about it. Never late at night; at night she talks. In the daytime also she talks. At other times
even when not talking she is quite distant, at the dressing table brushing her hair or standing by the crumbling marble balustrade with her back to me idly adjusting a flower at her shoulder, and the power that is still there somewhere inside her is directed elsewhere or not energized at all. At such times, even if she should happen to turn so that our glances meet, her intense consciousness and the quick irony of her intelligence, the wordy flow of conversation that comes out of her at the slightest impulse, are chilling to ardour if there should be a question of any. At other times (it’s sunset now, blood shimmers on the lake) she might turn, speaking quite casually of indifferent matters or not speaking at all, and a hesitation as her glance or voice lingers an instant longer than necessary, some magnetism she seems to be able to focus at will, radiates toward me and permeates instantly every last nerve and vein, so that the calm glance fixed on me and the whole power of her body say quite simply: you. And obediently my desire responds with a dumb and animal urgency, I have no power over what I might do or even say, the aching clench in me is pulled to that elusive darkness as by a magnet. It is as though (I muse, still to all purposes asleep although aware of the dawn trying to come in through the shutters) the power of her femininity radiates from the frontal aspects of her body, and when she rotates this mechanism only a quarter turn away from me the effect ceases or is wasted on an empty wall. I imagine that she might call me—in fantasy—from a distant room and through many walls, simply by directing toward me this mysterious electrical emanation she was able to focus, when she chose, toward any given goal. Her power was directional; it was important (if you wished not to be rendered powerless and foolish) not to stand in its path. Then I was all at once awake, with a tingle running up and down my epidermis and culminating in my scalp.
I slipped out of bed and went into the salon. But there was nothing to write on and I had to go back into the yellow room, cautiously and with one eye on the bed, to steal some sheets of Luisa’s mauve and scented notepaper from the writing desk. Likewise a pen, a frivolous and feminine one with a long plume on it, but no more suitable one could be found. At the great table in the salon I drew various diamonds and spirals on the mauve paper and tried to recall Stone’s experiments on directive emanation of aeromagnetism. These two elusive and invisible forces, the power of Luisa’s body and the shimmer of Hertzian waves, had intersected somewhere in my half-sleeping mind to form a kind of metaphor. I saw or half guessed now that there might be an apparatus that would be sensitive frontally to the oncoming waves, so to speak, but not laterally. But Stone’s antenna wire, like the form I had left under the bedclothes in the yellow room, was concerned with the sending out of power. It was for the receiving apparatus I had already built—the coil, condenser, and crystal that rested neglected in my rented room in Paris—that I now cogitated feverishly to devise a directional aerial wire. The pesky ostrich plume tickling my chin, I covered several pieces of paper with sketches. I quickly grasped that, if my theories about the conversion of aeromagnetism were correct, a simple pair of horizontal wires would suffice. But in order to intercept a suitable amount of energy they would have to be several hundred metres long. In short, impractical to carry aloft. Yet might not the length of antenna wire be coiled around on itself into a flat shape like a bedspring? And this, mounted on a pivot, could be rotated easily by hand. Yet, if it rotated, how could wires be connected to it? Bah! it was a simple mechanical problem, one for a first-year engineering student. I drew bedsprings, rug beaters, and fly swatters, and settled on a kind of loop in the shape of a flat diamond with two wire leads coming out of it at the bottom, where it swiveled. The hearing ear would be sensitive to the waves only when facing flatly toward them; turned on edge it would hear nothing. It would work!
Blast and a thousand thunders! By bad luck the idea had come to me in this bucolic Piedmontese backwater with no apparatus at hand and no place within a hundred leagues to procure any. What time was it? Impossible to determine, because I was still in my nightshirt. Creeping back into the yellow room again (the form under the covers stirred very faintly, then stretched back into quiescence), I lifted my clothes in a single bundle from the chair and carried them, sleeves and trouser legs dangling, into the salon. The watch when extracted from the trousers showed it was nine o’clock. I had been squiggling with this ridiculous plume for two hours. The serving woman, Garofana, had left some hot water on the hob, which I hastily made into coffee and drank. Then I got dressed and bolted out into the piercingly clear morning.
In the village of Stresa (for it was really little more than a village) there was naturally no dealer in electromagnetic supplies of the rather special kind I required, or even an ironmongery. Wire above all. It was wire that I must have! If needed it could be wound around an embroidery frame or any pair of sticks. At the Caffè Garibaldi, where a lazy boy was sweeping out last night’s sawdust, I learned of a blacksmith in the nearby town of Pallanza. It was not easy to procure a carriage in that sleepy lakeside town at nine o’clock in the morning, but with bribes and a few shouted threats I achieved it. Along the lakeshore we went, on a pleasant stone-paved road, past the most charming scenery in the world, which I could have wished at the bottom of the Atlantic. The coachman pointed out the Isola Bella to me, the idiot. Presto, presto! A Pallanza! Don’t bother me with your stupid bellezza! He muttered something like “Pazzo,” grumbling to his horse or to himself. Yes, I am, you blockhead, but there are all kinds of madmen and I’m the kind that’s looking for some wire. We arrived in Pallanza, but the blacksmith was not in Pallanza and instead in its outskirts. Finally we found him. He was already at work, the gods be thanked, thumping dumbly at a red-hot horseshoe. Wire, wire! It was with difficulty that he could be persuaded to let that scrap of metal get cold and turn to listen to what I was saying. Che tipo di filo, dunque? Some heavyish wire for an antenna, and if he had some very thin and hairlike copper wire, I would take that too. Copper no, but he had some heavyish wire of iron which he would show me. Exploring massively and with exasperating slowness in a junk heap he kept in the back of his hut, he produced a tangled bundle of rusty filament the size of a small haystack. It was American, he said, and of the finest quality. It was of a new sort invented for making fences, and at intervals it was fitted with little daggers of sharpened wire that were intended to keep the cows from breaking it. Bah! it was Hertzian waves I wanted to catch, imbecile, and not cows! It was of the latest design, was all he argued, and he would not charge any more for the barbs. I turned away in disgust. The coachman had gone down to the lake front, perhaps to answer a call of nature, and I had to retrieve him before I could go back to where I came from.
Copper wire! Copper wire! Well, there was none to be had in Stresa and environs. In the villa I found Luisa up and putting pins in her hair, in a dressing gown that fell to her feet in Roman dignity.
“Have a nice walk?” She said this absently, hardly looking at me. “Be a dear and bring me my coffee, will you?”
“You wouldn’t know, I imagine, where one could obtain fine or heavy copper wire in this rustic place of exile?”
“Please don’t ask me difficult questions. I haven’t had my breakfast.” It was almost eleven o’clock. Having arranged her coiffure in at least a provisional way (it curved to one side and fell along her throat, charming), she moved gracefully into the salon and found the floor littered with my notes.
“You might have mentioned it, dear heart, if you wanted to use my paper. It’s from Laurrison’s and quite expensive. What on earth have you been scratching and scribbling about anyhow?”
I wasn’t in the mood to explain to her the whole thing. “I must have some copper wire, because an idea has just come to me which can be held down and made captive only if copper wire is wrapped around it. Also some condenser foil and waxed paper.” There was probably not to be found such a thing as a piece of galena even in Milan! And the soldering iron! And the spirit lamp to heat it!
“What’s the idea about?”
“Her
tzian waves, aeromagnetic rectifiers, antennae, and directionality.”
But it was too early in the morning for her to assume or even simulate, with any degree of enthusiasm, her role of femme savante. “Can’t it wait?”
‘No.”
“Why not?”
“Because my brain won’t wait. It’s like that. I make no apologies for it.”
“I wish you had brought me my coffee. The fact that I have not had my coffee is making us both cross. It was not really to concern ourselves with aero-Hertzian antennae that we came here, you know.”
“What we came here for would surely take, at the most, only a half an hour of each day.”
“Don’t be crude.”
“The rest of which, it seems, you devote to your hair. And to your gowns, which are charming.”
“Now we are quarreling. Why can’t you send for your apparatus from Paris?”
“It would take months.”
Her manner changed abruptly. You could see her working the little wires that changed the look on her face. She became placid, knowing, regret in her eyes, a promise in her smile, with a little crease under it almost like a pout. “It isn’t true I spend all day on my hair and my gowns. We can have a nice breakfast à l’anglaise, and then we can go for a carriage ride along the lake.” (I had already done that.) “You can telegraph to Paris for your apparatus, or you can go to Milan for some copper wire. You can be back in the afternoon.” Both hands on the soft coil of hair lying along her throat, making some final nuance of adjustment to it, she turned to me with a hopeful, a significant smile. The dressing gown, which she had put on carelessly, was hardly fastened at all in front. “Tu veux? But you must hurry, because I miss you.”
“Primo, there is no galena in Milan, and secundo, there is probably not any condenser foil either. Tertio, the conditions are not right here for one to think of any serious matter consecutively for more than five minutes. And don’t point that body at me! It isn’t sunset! It’s only eleven o’clock in the morning!”
The Balloonist Page 16
