G. (23 page)

He stares at her without shame or insolence. In his imagination he has not laid a finger upon her. His purpose is to present himself as he is. Everything else can follow. It is as though he imagines himself naked before her. And she is aware of this. She recognizes that the man looking at her is utterly confident that he has no need to hide anything, no need of any deception or covering. How is she to respond to such imprudence? This time the choice is not between encouragement or discouragement. If she lowers her eyes or looks away, it will be tantamount to admitting that she has appreciated
his temerity: to turn away will be to admit that she has seen him as he is. (She will guard for herself, she will preserve the memory of his magnificent imprudence.) The more modest response is to hold his gaze, to stare blatantly back at him in the pretence that she has noticed nothing. This is what she does. Yet the longer they look at each other, the more conscious she is of him addressing himself unreservedly and exclusively to her. Although surrounded by observers, and although he is several metres away and she does not yet know his name, the mere act of their looking at each other has been transformed into their first secret encounter.

What were those extraordinary lines of Mallarmé you quoted to me this morning? Monsieur Hennequin asks his wife.

A woman dancer, she recites slowly and distinctly, is not a woman who dances for she is in no way a woman and she does not dance.

The Belgian gently rolls the wine in his glass.

It is beautiful, says the Contessa, and it is true. A great artist is more than a man or a woman, a great artist is a god.

In my opinion Mallarmé was trying to destroy language, says Monsieur Hennequin, he wanted to deny words the meaning they have, and I suppose it was a long-drawn out act of revenge.

Revenge? I don’t follow, says the host, looking at the palm trees silhouetted against the lake and in the back of his mind playing with the idea of installing an electrical generator so that the house and gardens may be lit with electric light.

A revenge against his public, the public who didn’t appreciate him as he wanted to be appreciated.

It is beautiful, repeats the Contessa, a dancer is not a dancer, a singer is not a singer. How true it is. Sometimes I myself wonder who I am.

I have one or two acquaintances in Brussels, says the Belgian, who wouldn’t agree with you there. They have, if I may so put it, they have first-hand experience of a number of women dancers. Only Mathilde laughs and the Belgian bows his head to her in pretended gratitude. (He wields power. He sits with his big arse on everything that might give him cause to doubt anything he does or says.) You don’t accept, Maurice, the genius of your Mallarmé? asks the host. In this house above this garden he likes to encourage talk about poetry.

Mallarmé may or may not have been a genius. I am not in a position to judge. But he was an obscurantist, and I believe in clarity. As an
engineer it’s almost a professional article of faith. Confused machines just aren’t possible.

Mallarmé was a genius, he was immortal, said Madame Hennequin, far ahead of his time.

If we could all live a thousand years, says G., we would each, at least once during that period, be considered a genius. Not because of our great age, but because one of our gifts or aptitudes, however slight in itself, would coincide with what people at that particular moment took to be the mark of genius.

You don’t believe in genius! says the Contessa, shocked.

No, I think it’s an invention.

Several guests have left the table to look over the parapet at the moonlit gardens below. He sees a statue, white, sinuous and indistinct at its edges. Yet the way it is placed makes it part of the geometry of the garden with its straight paths, stone steps and polygonal fountains. The lights on the islands across the lake flicker, but otherwise everything is as still as the past.

Such an historical silence cannot last.

G. turns round to address Monsieur Hennequin: I know little about Mallarmé: I do not read poetry, but is the thought of Mallarmé’s which Madame was so good as to quote to us really so confused? Some experiences are indescribable but they are nonetheless real. Can you, for example, Monsieur Hennequin, describe the tone and quality of your wife’s voice? But I am sure that you would recognize it anywhere, as I would too, Madame Hennequin.

Madame Hennequin watches her husband to see how he will respond to the strange young man who has singled her out.

We talk of the mysterious tragedy of Chavez’ crash, says G., hundreds of people witnessed it, yet nobody can describe what he saw. Why? Because it was too unexpected. The unexpected is often indescribable.

He looks at Camille. He will call her, he decides, Camomille.

Mallarmé, G. continues, is saying that when a woman dances she can become transformed. Words which applied to her before, will
no longer apply. It may even be necessary to call her by a different name.

Monsieur Hennequin places himself between the young man and his wife. Monsieur Hennequin is slim for his age but he has large heavy thighs. Women are women, he says, putting his hands up to bar entry, whether they are dancing, dressing, entertaining our guests, looking after our children or making us happy. And let us be grateful for that.

Our beautiful ladies, says the host, must be beginning to feel the cold night air rising from the lake. Let us go indoors.

They talk of attraction and magnetism; these notions suggest a force acting between two given bodies; what is left out of account is how utterly the bodies appear to change in themselves; they are no longer the given bodies. The fact of being given has changed them.

It is not that you see her so differently; it is that she frames a different world. The shape of her nose doesn’t change much. In outline she is the same. But within her unchanged contours everything you perceive is different. She is like an island whose coastline still corresponds to what was shown on the map, but on which, and surrounded by which, you now live. The sound of the sea on all her beaches—unless you accept the dictatorship of your intelligence—ultimately that is the only thing you can oppose to death.

For bruises sand is cool and like silk to the touch. For wounds it is inflaming and harsh, each particle contributing its degree of pain.

But by abstract metaphor I distance myself from my unique perception of her.

The tip of each of her fingers, with its bitten nail, is as expressive as an eye looking at me. I follow from the tip of each finger past the two knuckles to where it joins her hand. Her hand looks curiously
thin and ineffective. As an object her hand looks as though it has been discarded. I can imagine or foresee it being different. It might caress me. It might hammer against my back. It might present itself as a five-teated udder to my mouth for me to suck each finger. None of this, however, is of any importance. My attention happened to fall upon her hand. It might just as well have been another part of her. Her elbow. Sharp with her bone pressing against her skin and making it white and bloodless. What can I foresee her elbow doing? Nothing of significance. Yet I perceive it in the same way as her hand. I receive from it the same promise and in the same way it fulfils its promise. I isolate parts in order to follow my eyes, instant by instant, faithfully. But my eyes move, reading her, at incredible speed. The fresh evidence of each part, of each new sight of her, contributes to my perception of her as a whole, and makes this whole continually move and pulsate like a heart, like my own heart.

What is her promise? Of her love in the future? But that is not yet fulfilled. If I made love with her it would be to complete, to put an end to, something that had already happened to us. When you describe something, when you name it, you separate it from yourself. Or to some degree. To fuck is like naming what has happened in the only language adequate to expressing it. (Only when nothing has happened is it possible to separate sex from love.) All acts of physical love are anticipatory and retrospective. Hence their unique significance.

My eyes touch her almost but not quite in the same way as my hands might. If I touched her, her skin, the surface of her body, a contradictory sensation would accompany my sense of touch. I would have the feeling that what I was touching also enclosed me: that this exterior surface (which is her skin with its variegated pores, its degrees of softness and heat and its different smells) that this exterior surface was at the same time, according to another mode of experience, an interior surface. I do not speak symbolically: I am referring to sensation itself. Touching her from the outside would make me aware of being inside.

I look at her fingers as though I were on the point of inhabiting each one, as though I might become the content of its form. I and her phalanxes. Absurd. Yet what is the absurd? Only a moment of
incongruity between two different systems of thinking. I am speaking of her fingers, the flesh and bones of another person, and I am speaking too of my imagination. Yet my imagination is not separable from my own body; nor is hers.

The light which, falling upon her, discloses her, is like the light that falls upon and discloses cities and oceans. The facts of her physical being are the events of the world, the space in which she moves is the space of the universe, not because I am unmindful of everything except her, but because I am prepared to risk all that is not her for the sake of all that she is.

The way she plants her feet, the exact length of her back, the tone of her rasping voice (which he said he would recognize anywhere)—each of these and every other quality I see in her, appears as significant as a miracle. There is no end to what she can offer: it is infinite. And I am not deluding myself. I desire her single-mindedly. The value of everything about her, the significance of her smallest movement, the power of what differentiates her from every other woman—this may be determined for both of us by what I am prepared to risk for her. And that is the world. And so she will acquire the value of the world: she will contain, so far as she and I are concerned, all that is outside her, myself included. She will enclose me. Yet I will be free, for I will have chosen to be there, as I never chose to be here in the world and the life which I am ready to abandon for her.

Je t’aime, Camomille, comment je t’aime
. That is what he must say.

The guests entered the large room where the furnishings were dark and heavy and the lamps cast bright distinct circles of light—like those lit arenas on conference tables in which it was traditional to depict statesmen signing treaties. The arrangement of the room suggested its principal use as a place where Milanese politicians and businessmen came to work out their plans undisturbed: it offered comfort but not distraction: it was a male room, like a minister’s private reception room in a parliament building. There
was nothing in it (except now the women’s bare arms) which was equivalent to the flamingoes in the garden. As the guests entered this sober but comfortable room through the large double door beneath a portrait painting of Giolitti, he noticed Madame Hennequin talking with her friend Mathilde Le Diraison and there was something in the relationship between the two women which intrigued him. They had an air of scarcely disguised conspiracy, such as sometimes sisters preserve between them even after they have become adults and their parents are dead.

In a corridor Madame Hennequin had passed a huge mirror in the shape of the sun and in this mirror she had found herself trying to see the mantle over her shoulders and the fringe over her forehead as he might see them. Through his eyes she found herself pleasing.

Now in the room she compared him with her husband. They were unequally matched. Monsieur Hennequin was stronger and had greater authority. He was like a father; with her two children at home she often referred to her husband as Papa; he was a man who understood the world. His discretion about his mistress—even this—was an example of how well he understood it. Whereas the other, who spoke French badly, did not read poetry but could explain Mallarmé: Mallarmé whose poetry she loved so much because it was inexplicable: the other was imprudent and careless. But since they were so unequally matched she could allow herself to smile at him. Circumspectly, in her own rather distant manner and always in reference to her husband who could at any moment rescue her from the consequences of her own childishness, she was willing, for the duration of the evening, to flirt with this friend of the American aviator: to pretend that a relation existed where in fact there was none.

She asked him what kind of man Chavez was. He replied that he had only met him once or twice, but that Chavez was a nervous man and perhaps also a desperate one. He addressed his reply, however, as much to Monsieur Hennequin as to Madame Hennequin. It was as if he were aware of the comparison she had made and the conclusions she had reached. Having alerted her to his interest, he was now content for them both to concentrate on her husband, the owner.

On a low table near which they sat was a large glass statue of a
swan, rose-coloured, and mounted on a silver turntable which revolved. It was neither art nor toy, but an ornament denoting wealth. Madame Hennequin, looking directly at him, put her hand on the swan’s neck and murmured the famous line of Mallarmé:

The harsh rose-coloured glass made the skin of her thin hand seem milkily translucent.

No more? asked Monsieur Hennequin encouragingly. He was aware that the American aviator’s friend had roused his wife’s interest and he hated Mallarmé, but he wanted to demonstrate his tolerance in such matters.

It goes on like this, said Madame Hennequin, but don’t try to understand it, just listen to the sound of what I’m saying.

She recited the whole four-line stanza and the following one, allowing her voice to transform the nostalgia of the poem into a kind of longing. The poem is about opportunities missed, but, by the very act of saying it out loud, she seized an opportunity. By reciting some lines from it she took the opportunity of letting the sound of the words express all that she felt to be independent to herself, all that was outside the reckoning but not the protection of her husband. She was like a tree, she considered, that grew in the soil of her husband’s garden but the leaves of which moved independently in the wind.