Heaven Has No Favorites: A Novel (21 page)

In the next round, the car began to dance. Clerfayt caught it, but the rear wheels skidded on him again; he fought it with the steering wheel, then a curve appeared ahead of him, dotted with people like a country baker’s cake with flies. The car was still out of control, skidding and thumping. Clerfayt shifted on the short stretch that still remained before the curve. He stepped on the gas, but the car jerked his arms around. He felt a tearing at his shoulder; the curve swelled gigantically into the glistening sky; the number of people tripled, and they, too, swelled, they, too, became giants, till it seemed impossible to avoid them. Blackness rushed down from the sky. He bit into something, and someone seemed to be pulling his arm out of its socket. But he held on tightly, while hot lava shot into his shoulder. In the tumbling landscape, there was only one remaining patch of blue, sharp and blinding; he held on to it with his eyes, while the car bucked beneath him; and then he saw the opening, the only one not crawling with gigantic two-legged flies; he wrenched the wheel around again, stepped hard on the accelerator and—miracle—the car obeyed him, shot through the gap, up the slope, was caught between shrubbery and stones; the tattered casing of the rear tire cracked like a whip, and the car stood still.

He saw the people rushing toward him. They had splashed apart like water struck by a stone; now they came back shouting, faces distorted, arms outstretched, shaking their fists, with their mouths open black holes. He did not know whether they wanted to kill him or congratulate him, and he did not care. There was only one thing that mattered: they must not touch the car, must not help him, or he would be disqualified. “Go away! Go away! Don’t touch
it!” he shouted, standing up and again feeling the pain, feeling warmth, seeing blood dropping from his nose on his blue overalls. He could raise only one arm; but he used it to threaten, to fend them off. “Don’t touch! Don’t help!” Then he staggered out of the car and stood in front of the radiator. “Don’t help! Not allowed!”

They stood still. They saw that he could walk. The blood was not dangerous; he had only cut open his face. He ran around and looked at the tire. The casing was flapping loosely. He cursed. It was the new tire. Quickly, he cut off the loose strip of casing; then he felt the tire. It still had enough air to cushion the bumps in the road if he did not take the curves too fast. His shoulder was not broken; the arm was only sprained. He must try to drive on with his right arm alone. He had to reach the pit; Torriani was there to relieve him, and mechanics were there, and a doctor.

“Off the road!” he shouted. “Cars are coming!”

He had no need to say more. The bellowing song of the next car approached from behind the slopes, mounted; the people crawled up the hill, the howling filled the world, tires screeched, and the car shot like a low projectile, a grenade of dust, around the curve.

Clerfayt was already back in the seat of his car. The howl of the other vehicle had been better than any injection. “Back!” he shouted. “I’m coming!”

The car slid backward. The motor caught as he jerked the wheel around and steered it forward. He clutched, shifted, gripped the steering wheel again, reached the road, holding the wheel tightly, driving slowly, and with only one thought in his mind: the car must reach the pit; it isn’t far to the straight stretch, and from there on I can hold it; there aren’t many more curves.

The next car howled up behind him. Clerfayt held the road as long as he could. He clenched his teeth, knowing that he was blocking the other man, knowing that it was forbidden, that it was unfair; but he could not help himself. He held the center of the
road until the car behind him overtook him on the right as they entered a curve. The driver, face white with dust behind his glasses, raised his hand in salute as he passed. He had seen Clerfayt’s face and the tire. For a moment, Clerfayt felt a surge of comradeship; then he heard the next car behind him and the comradeship was transformed into rage, into a rage that was the worst kind of all: without reason, and impotent.

That’s what comes of it, thought he. I should have paid attention instead of dreaming. Driving cars is a romantic affair only for amateurs. There should only be the car and the driver; everything else is a danger or brings danger—to hell with flamingos, to hell with emotions; I could have held the car, I should have cut the curves easier, I should have spared the tires: now it’s too late, I’m losing too much time; here’s another damned car passing me, and there comes the next; the straight stretch is my enemy; they’re swarming over me like hornets and I have to let them pass; to hell with Lillian, what business has she being here, and to hell with me, what have I to do with her?

Lillian sat in the stand. She felt the mass hypnosis of the tightly pressed crowd, and tried to fight it off; but it was impossible to escape it. The noise of the many motors was as stupefying as a thousandfold anesthetic which traveled directly from ears to brain, paralyzing and strait-jacketing it, and delivering it over to the mass frenzy.

After a while, she became accustomed to it, and suddenly the reaction followed. The noise seemed to separate itself from what was going on down below. The din hung independently over the landscape, while underneath it the little colored cars swished by. It was like a child’s game: little people in white and colored overalls trundled wheels and automobile jacks around; managers held up
flags and shields; and, in between, the unreal voice of the announcer came over the loud-speaker, reciting times in minutes and seconds, which only gradually acquired a meaning. A horse race was like this, and a bullfight also—because the danger was voluntary, it became like play, something you did not really take seriously unless you were right in it.

Lillian felt something within her protest against this shallow intoxication. She herself had been close to death for too long for this playing with death not to strike her as frivolous. It seemed to her similar to the conduct of street urchins who dash across the street just in front of approaching automobiles. That children did this, and were killed, she knew; it was not admirable for men to behave in the same way. Life was something too great, and death also had something too great about it; they were not to be played with. Having courage was a different thing from having no fear; courage was consciousness of danger, fearlessness mere ignorance.

“Clerfayt!” someone beside her said. “Where is he?”

She was instantly alert. “What has happened to him?”

“He should have passed long ago.”

People in the stands were growing restive. Lillian saw Torriani looking up at her, waving, then pointing to the road and again looking up at her and signaling her to be calm, that nothing had happened. That frightened her more than anything else. He’s crashed, she thought, and sat very still. Fate had struck while she sat unsuspecting, had struck somewhere on one of the many curves of this cursed course. The seconds became leaden, the minutes hours. The carrousel on the white ribbon existed now only like a bad dream; her chest became a black cavity, hollowed out with waiting. Then came the loudspeaker’s mechanical voice: “Clerfayt’s car, Number Twelve, has overshot a curve. We have no further news as yet.”

Slowly, Lillian raised her head. Everything was the same as it
had been before—the sky, the blue brightness, the window box of gay garments, the white lava of the Sicilian spring—but somewhere now there was a point without color, a mist in which Clerfayt was struggling or had already ceased to struggle. The frightful incredibility of dying reached out for her again with wet hands, and the breathlessness that was followed by a silence never to be understood: the silence of non-existence. Slowly, she looked down along her own body, and then around. Was she alone infected by the invisible leprosy of this knowledge? Did she alone feel it so intensely, as if all the cells within her were disintegrating, as if every cell were without breath and every one suffocating in its own single death? She looked at the faces of the people around her. She saw nothing in them but avidity for sensation, that frightful avidity that enjoyed death as stimulation. The avidity was not open, but concealed, clothed in false concern, false fright, and in the satisfaction of themselves not being affected: avidity that for a moment thrilled the sluggish sense of life like a shot of digitalis stimulating a phlegmatic heart.

“Clerfayt is all right,” the announcer stated. “He has not been seriously injured and has brought the car back onto the course himself. He is driving; he is back in the race.”

Lillian heard the murmur that passed through the stands. She saw the change of expressions. There was relief now in those faces, and disappointment, and admiration. Someone had escaped, had displayed courage; he had not weakened; he was continuing to drive. Everyone in the stands now felt that same courage in himself, as if he were the man who were driving on after a crack-up; and for a few moments, even the most despicable gigolo felt like a man, the most hen-pecked of husbands became an intrepid, death-defying hero. Sex, accompaniment of every danger to others, not to oneself, shot adrenalin into the spectators’ blood from a thousand glands. This was what they had bought their tickets for!

Lillian felt rage like a flickering curtain before her eyes. She suddenly hated these people around her, hated every one of them, hated the men who pulled themselves up straighter and the women who played up to them with veiled looks. She hated the wave of sympathy that now spread out, the cheap generosity of the crowd, who, having had their sacrifice snatched from them, now decided to take him to their heart; and then she hated Clerfayt and knew that this was only a reaction to her fear, and she hated him nevertheless because he, too, played along in this childish game with death.

For the first time since she had left the sanatorium, she thought of Volkov. Then she saw Clerfayt approaching down below. She saw his bloody face, and she saw him slowly climbing out of the car.

The mechanics were checking the car. They changed the tires. Torriani stood beside Clerfayt. “It’s that damned tire,” Clerfayt said. “I could only hold the wheel with one hand. The car is all right. You must take it.”

“Of course!” the manager called out. “Get going, Torriani!”

Torriani leaped into the seat. “Ready!” the first mechanic shouted. The car shot away.

“What’s wrong with your arm?” the manager asked Clerfayt. “Broken?”

“No. Sprained or dislocated. In the shoulder. The devil only knows how it happened.”

The doctor came. Clerfayt had a moment of mad pain. He sat down on a box. “Am I out?” he asked. “I hope Torriani can make it.”

“You can’t go on driving,” the doctor said.

“Leucoplast,” the manager replied. “Wide strips of it around the shoulder. Patch him up, just in case.”

The doctor shook his head. “It won’t do much good. He’ll feel it right away if he starts driving again.”

The manager laughed. “Last year, he burned the soles of both his feet. Went on driving anyway. And I mean burned, not just singed.”

Clerfayt sat drooping on his box. He felt limp and empty. The doctor bound his shoulder tightly with bandages. I should have watched out, Clerfayt thought. Being faster than yourself doesn’t mean you’re God—not quite. It isn’t true that only man can use his brain to invent aids that make him faster than his natural speed. Isn’t a louse faster than itself when it sits in an eagle’s feathers?

“What happened?” the manager asked.

“The damn tire. I overshot the curve. Took a small tree along. Banged into the steering wheel. Stinking luck!”

“It would have been stinking luck if the brakes, the motor, and the steering wheel were wrecked. The buggy is still running. Who knows who else will drop out before the end? The race isn’t over yet by a long shot. This is Torriani’s first Targa. I hope he can make it.”

Clerfayt stared at the pieces of metal that the mechanics had pinched off. I’m too old, he thought. What am I doing here? But what else can I do?

“There he is!” the manager bellowed, binoculars at his eyes. “Holy Mary, there he is. What a boy! But he’ll never make it. We’re too far behind.”

“Who’s still in the race on our team?”

“Weber. In fifth place.”

Torriani hurtled past. He waved and vanished. The manager executed a snake dance. “Duval has dropped out. And Torriani has made up four minutes. Four minutes! Holy Mother of God, protect him!”

He looked as if he were about to fall to his knees and pray.

Torriani continued to catch up. “In that beat-up coffee grinder!” the manager bawled. “I could kiss the boy, the darling! He’s driven an average of almost sixty. Record for the round! Holy Anthony, protect him!”

Torriani made up time in every round. Clerfayt did not want to begrudge him the pleasure, but he could feel his own bitterness growing. A sixteen-year advantage in age was showing up. He knew that that was not always true. Caracciola with a broken hip and suffering infernal pain had won races over much younger drivers and champions; Nuvolari and Lang after the war had driven as if they were ten years younger. But sooner or later, everyone had to leave the stage, and he knew that his time was coming close.

“Valente has frozen pistons. Monti is lagging. We’re holding third and fourth places!” the manager screeched. “Clerfayt, can you relieve Torriani if anything happens?”

Clerfayt saw the doubt in the manager’s eyes. They still ask me, he thought. Soon they will no longer ask. “Let him go on as long as he can,” he replied. “He’s young; he can stand the gaff.”

“He’s too nervous.”

“He’s driving beautifully.”

The manager nodded. “Anyhow, it would be suicide for you, with your shoulder, on those curves,” he said without conviction.

“It wouldn’t be suicide. But I’d have to drive slower.”

“Holy Mother of God!” the manager resumed his prayers. “Make Torelli’s brakes freeze. Not so he’ll crash, but enough to stop him. Protect Weber and Torriani! Give Bordoni a hole in his gas tank!” The manager became devout, after his fashion, during every race; the moment it was over, he would begin swearing again with relief.