Heaven Has No Favorites: A Novel (22 page)

One round before the end, Torriani’s car rolled up to the pit. Torriani was slumped over the steering wheel. “What’s the matter?” the manager bellowed. “Can’t you go on? What’s the matter? Lift him out. Clerfayt! Holy Mother of God, Mother of Sorrows—he
has heat stroke. It isn’t that hot yet! In the spring. Can’t you go on? The car …”

The mechanics were already at work. “Clerfayt!” the manager implored him. “Just bring the car back. Weber is two rounds ahead; it won’t matter, even if we lose a few minutes. You’ll still be fourth. Get in! God in Heaven, what a race!”

Clerfayt was already seated in the car. Torriani had collapsed. “Just bring the car back!” the manager begged him. “And fourth prize. Third for Weber, of course. And a little hole in Bordoni’s tank. And besides, in your kindness, Holy Virgin, a few flat tires for the rest of the field. Sweet blood of Jesus—”

One round, Clerfayt thought. It passes. It’s a bearable pain. It’s less than hanging on the cross in a concentration camp. I’ve seen a boy whose sound teeth were drilled right down to the roots by the
Sicherheitsdienst
in Berlin, to make him squeal on his friends. He did not squeal on them. Weber is ahead. It doesn’t matter what I do. It does matter. How it whirls! This jalopy isn’t a plane. Down with the damned gas pedal. Fear is halfway to an accident.

The mechanical voice of the announcer droned: “Clerfayt is in the race again. Torriani has dropped out.”

Lillian saw the car shoot past. She saw the bandaged shoulder. That fool, she thought, that child who has never grown up! Thoughtlessness isn’t courage. He’ll crash again. What do they know about death, all these healthy fools? Up in the mountains, they know, they who have had to fight for every breath like a reward.

A hand beside her thrust a calling card into her fingers. She tossed it away and stood up. She wanted to leave. A hundred eyes were fixed upon her. It was as though a hundred blank lenses, reflecting the sunlight, were following her. For a second they followed her attentively. Blank eyes, she thought. Eyes that see and
do not see. Had it not always been like that? Everywhere? Where not? In the sanatorium, she thought again. There it had been different. The eyes there had been knowing.

She descended the steps of the stands. What am I doing here among these alien people? she thought, and stopped as if she had been struck. Yes, what am I doing here? she thought. I wanted to come back here, but can one go back? I wanted to go back with all the strength of my heart; but do I belong here now? Have I become like the others? She looked around. No, she thought, she did not belong. You could not come back into the warmth of not-knowing. You could not undo what was done. The dark secret, which she knew and which the others seemed to ignore, could not be forgotten. It remained with her, no matter where she fled. She felt as if the gay and gilded set of a play had suddenly fallen down, and she could see the bare scaffolding behind. It was not disenchantment, only a moment of intense clarity of vision. She could not turn back. She knew it now. There was no help to be had from outside. But there was one compensation; the last fountain that remained to her would leap all the higher. Her strength would no longer have to be distributed among a dozen springs, but would be confined to a single one, to herself, and with it alone she had to try to reach the clouds and God. She would never reach them—but was not the attempt already fulfillment, and the falling back of the dancing waters upon themselves already a symbol? Upon yourself, she thought. How far you fled and how high you had to aim, to attain that!

She moved on. It was as if a nameless burden had all at once been taken from her. Something like a dull, outworn responsibility dropped from her shoulders upon the wooden stairs of the stand, and she stepped out of it as if it were an old dress. Even though the theater set had collapsed, the scaffolding remained, and anyone who was not afraid of its bareness was independent and could play
with it and before it as he pleased, and as his fear or courage permitted. He could stage his own solitude in a thousand variations, even in the variation of love. The play never ceased. It was only transformed. You became your own sole actor and audience simultaneously.

The applause of the crowd began to chatter like a machine-gun salvo. The drivers were coming in. Small, parti-colored, they shot through the finish line. Lillian stood still on the steps until she saw Clerfayt’s car. Then she slowly descended, the alien applause roaring around her, into the coolness of a new, precious knowledge which might as easily bear the name of Freedom as of Solitude, and into the warmth of a love already murmuring the word Abandonment, and both came upon her like a summer night with leaping fountains.

Clerfayt had wiped away the blood, but his lips were still oozing. “I can’t kiss you,” he said. “Were you frightened?”

“No. But you ought not to drive any more.”

“Of course not,” Clerfayt replied patiently. He was familiar with this reaction. “Was I so bad?” he asked, cautiously twisting up his face.

“He was great,” said Torriani, who was sitting on a box, his face the color of cheese, drinking cognac.

Lillian threw a hostile look at him.” It’s over,” Clerfayt said. “Don’t think about it any more, Lillian. It wasn’t dangerous. It only looked that way.”

“You ought not to drive,” she repeated.

“All right, Lillian. Tomorrow we’ll tear up the contract. Are you satisfied?”

Torriani laughed. “And day after tomorrow, we’ll paste it together again.”

The manager came by, and the mechanics pushed the car into the pit. It stank of burned oil and gasoline. “Are you coming tonight, Clerfayt?” the manager asked.

Clerfayt nodded. “We’re in the way here, Lillian,” he said. “Let’s get away from this filthy stable.” He saw her expression. It still held the same curious gravity. “What’s the matter?” he asked. “Do you still want me not to drive any more?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

She hesitated. “I don’t know how to put it—but somehow it’s terribly immoral.”

“Ye gods!” Torriani said.

“Be quiet, Alfredo,” Clerfayt replied.

“It sounds silly, I know,” Lillian said. “I don’t mean it that way. It’s something else. A few minutes ago, I knew perfectly well what I meant—now I don’t quite.”

Torriani took a long swallow. “After a race, drivers are as sensitive as crabs when they’ve shed their shells. Don’t give Clerfayt any complexes.”

Clerfayt laughed. “You mean we shouldn’t tempt God, Lillian?”

She nodded. “Only if there’s no other choice. Not out of frivolity.”

“Ye gods!” Torriani repeated disgustedly. “Frivolity!” He got up and went over to Gabrielli.

“I’m talking nonsense,” Lillian said in despair. “Don’t listen to me.”

“You’re not talking nonsense,” Clerfayt replied. “Only it’s surprising to hear this from you.”

“Why?”

“Do I ever ask you to go back to the sanatorium?” he said quietly.

She looked at him. She had imagined until now that he knew
nothing, or that he had assumed there was not much wrong with her. “I don’t need to go back to the sanatorium,” she said quietly.

“I know that. But I don’t ask you to either.”

She saw the irony. “I suppose I shouldn’t talk that way, is that it?”

“Of course you should,” he said. “Always.”

She laughed. “I love you very much, Clerfayt. Are all women as silly as I’ve been after a race?”

“I don’t remember. Is that a Balenciaga dress?”

“I don’t remember that either.”

He felt his cheekbones and his shoulder. “Tonight, I’ll have a face like a streaky pudding. Shall we drive out to Levalli’s while I can still steer?”

“Don’t you have to go to see your manager?”

“No. That’s only a victory celebration in the hotel.”

“Don’t you like to celebrate victories?”

He laughed. “Every win is one less.”

Lillian looked at him.

“One less to win,” he said. His face was already beginning to swell. “Will you make wet compresses for my face this evening and read aloud to me a chapter from the
Critique of Pure Reason
?”

“Yes,” Lillian said. “And some day I’d like to go to Venice.”

“Why?”

“There are no mountains there, and no automobiles.”

THEY STAYED IN SICILY
another two weeks. Clerfayt’s shoulder mended. They lived in Levalli’s neglected garden, and by the sea. The villa was a cabin overhanging the sea and time, which whispered and rushed away beneath it without beginning and without end.

Clerfayt had a few weeks free until the next race. “Shall we stay here?” he asked. “Or go back?”

“Where to?”

“To Paris. Or anywhere. When you’re at home nowhere, you can go anywhere. It is getting hot here now.”

“Is the spring over already?”

“Down here it is. But we can take Giuseppe and follow it. In Rome it is just beginning.”

“And when it is past there?”

Clerfayt laughed. “We’ll follow it again, if you like. Then it will be beginning in Lombardy and by the lakes. After that we can follow it into Switzerland, up the Rhine, until we see it by the sea in all the colors of the Dutch tulip fields. It’s as though time were standing still.”

“Have you ever done that?”

“Yes, a hundred years ago. Before the war.”

“With a woman?”

“Yes, but it was different.”

“It is always different. Even with the same woman. I’m not jealous.”

“I wish you were.”

“I would think it terrible if you had experienced nothing and were to tell me that I was the first woman in your life.”

“You are.”

“I’m not; but if for my sake you forget the names of the others for a while, that is enough.”

“Shall we go?”

Lillian shook her head. “Not yet. I don’t want to pretend to myself that time is standing still. I want to feel it and not deceive myself. It stood still all those endless winters in the sanatorium; but I did not stand still. I was dragged back and forth along it as if it were a wall of ice.”

“Are you standing still now?”

She kissed him. “I am turning in a circle. For a while. Like a dancer.”

Then she became impatient and wanted to leave. From one day to the next it seemed to her that she had been in Sicily for months. They had been months, she thought, months for her. Her calendar differed from that of the people around her. Between day and day there stretched each time the night, like a gorge weeks in length; the night and her ordeal. She never let Clerfayt spend the whole night with her. She saw to it that he was never beside her in the mornings when she awoke. He thought it was a whim of hers; but she did not want him to hear her coughing.

She flew to Rome, intending to fly on from there to Paris. Clerfayt was to drive the car back, with Torriani, and they were going to meet in Paris.

For a day, she wandered around among the ruins of Rome. Next day she sat at the outdoor tables of the café on the Via Veneto. She was supposed to take the evening plane, but she hesitated. A groundless melancholia had taken possession of her, a feeling of great sweetness, with no other component of sadness except, perhaps, the one last cause which stands, silver and gray, on the horizon of every life that is not lived on the level of simple bookkeeping. She spent the night in the hotel, and did not go to the airline office until next morning. In the show window she saw a poster of Venice. What she had said to Clerfayt suddenly came to her. Without further thought, she went in and had her ticket changed for one to Venice. It seemed to her that she must go there before she went to Paris. She had to get something clear in her mind; she did not know precisely what it was, but she had to do it before she saw Clerfayt again.

“When is the plane leaving?” she asked.

“In two hours.”

She returned to the hotel and packed. She assumed that Clerfayt must already be in Paris, but she was reluctant to telephone or write him that she was not coming. She could do that from Venice, she thought, and knew that she would not do it. She wanted to be alone, she felt—alone and unattainable, uninfluenceable, before she returned. Returned? she thought. Where to? Had she not thought that once before, at the race? Where to? Had she not flown away, and was she not flying now like one of those legendary birds that are born without feet and must fly until they die? But wasn’t that what she’d wanted? And wasn’t the question now whether she oughtn’t to leave Clerfayt also?

———

The plane dropped down into the pink late afternoon of the lagoon. Lillian was given a corner room in the Hotel Danieli. As they rode up in the elevator, the man who ran it informed her that this hotel had been the scene of the stormy romance between the aging George Sand and the young Alfred de Musset.

“And what happened? With whom did he deceive her?”

“With no one, Mademoiselle. The young man was in despair. Madame Sand deceived him.” The man smiled. “With an Italian doctor. Monsieur de Musset was a poet.”

Lillian saw the spark of irony and amusement in the man’s eyes. Probably she deceived herself, she thought, and loved the one man while she was with the other.

The elevator operator opened the door. “She left him,” he recounted. “She went away without telling Monsieur de Musset that she was going.”

Like me, Lillian thought. Do I want to deceive myself also?

She entered her room, and abruptly stood still. The whole room was filled with the hovering, rose-colored evening light that exists only in Venice. She went to the window and looked out. The canal was blue and still, but it rhythmically lifted and lowered the rows of gondolas whenever a
vaporetto
churned up to San Zaccaria and stopped. The first lights were flaring, intensely white and all but lost in the wealth of pinks and blues, except for the orange warning lights along the shallows. These hung tenderly like a glowing chain around the neck of San Giorgio Maggiore. There seemed to be no heaviness in this city, Lillian thought; it was as far away as anything could possibly be from all mountains. Further, it was not possible to flee. Nothing ground and crushed you here; everything caressed. And everything was strange and magical. No one knows
me here, she thought. And no one knows that I am here. She felt this anonymity as a queer, tempestuous joy, the joy of having escaped a joy, for a short time or forever.