Heaven Has No Favorites: A Novel (32 page)

An hour later, Clerfayt had worked forward to second place. Now he was coldly and mercilessly chasing Marchetti. He did not want to pass him yet—there was time enough for that until the eightieth round, even until the ninetieth. He only wanted to chase him until Marchetti became nervous, and keep a few yards behind him, always at the same distance. He did not want to take the chance of overrevving his motor again; he wanted to make Marchetti do that, and Marchetti did it once, without harming the machine. But Clerfayt sensed that he was growing nervous when he accomplished nothing by it. Now Marchetti began blocking the road and the curves; he did not want to let Clerfayt pass. Several times Clerfayt
maneuvered as if he wanted to pass, without really trying it; he succeeded in making Marchetti transfer his attention to him rather than to his own driving, and so become less careful.

They had lapped the field once, and some drivers several times. The manager was sweating and holding out blackboards and flags. He signaled Clerfayt not to attack. Marchetti had belonged to their stable only for a few weeks, and it had been bad enough that he and Frigerio had battled one another; Frigerio had developed tire trouble as a result, and was now almost a minute behind Clerfayt and five other cars. Clerfayt was being chased by Monti, but Monti was not yet clinging to his wheels. He could easily shake him off on the hairpin turns, which he was taking faster than Monti.

They passed the pits again. Clerfayt saw the manager pleading with all the saints and simultaneously shaking his fist at him, commanding him not to close in on Marchetti. Marchetti had signaled furiously to him to restrain Clerfayt. Clerfayt nodded and fell back a car’s length, but no more. He wanted to win this race, with or without the manager. He wanted first prize, and besides he had placed bets on himself. I need the money, he thought. For the future. The house. Life with Lillian. The bad start had delayed him, but he knew he would win; he felt very calm, in that strange state of equilibrium between concentration and relaxation in which you are confident that nothing can go wrong. It was a kind of clairvoyance which excluded all doubts, all waverings and uncertainties. He had often had it in the past, but in recent years he had often missed it. It was a rare moment of pure happiness.

He saw Marchetti’s car suddenly dance, swerve diagonally, and crash with a shriek of tearing metal; he saw the black pool of oil that had run in a wide splash across the road, and the two other cars that had already smashed into one another as they hurtled drunkenly
over the oil; he saw, as if in a slow-motion movie, Marchetti’s car very slowly turning over and Marchetti sailing through the air and striking the ground. A hundred eyes inside him searched for a gap in the road through which he could hurl his car, but there was none; the road expanded gigantically and at the same time shrank; he felt no fear, only tried to stride sidewise rather than at right angles. At the last moment, he realized that he must release the steering wheel, but his arms were too slow; everything was already lifting; he suddenly no longer had weight, and then came the blow on his chest and the blow in his face, and from all sides the splintered world plunged down upon him; for a split second, he still saw the horrified face of the track attendant, and then an enormously powerful fist struck him from behind and there was only the dark roaring and then nothing at all.

The car that had run into him ripped a gap in the tangle, so that the others who followed were just able to pass. One after the other, they shot by, some dancing and reeling, wrenching their cars just past the wrecks, so that metal screeched against metal as though the smashed machines were groaning. The track attendant, armed with a shovel, clambered over the sandbags and strewed sand over the pool of oil, leaping back when the howl of a motor neared. Ambulance men appeared with stretchers. They pulled Marchetti to safety, lifted him, and handed him over the sandbag barricades to others. A few officials came running up with danger signals to warn the drivers; but the field had already made a round; all had passed the site of the accident and were now coming again, some throwing a quick glance at the wreckage, the others with their eyes rigidly fixed on the road.

Clerfayt’s car had not only crashed into the others, but had been crashed into from behind by Monti. Monti was almost uninjured. He limped aside. Clerfayt was caught in his car, which had been squeezed up and then hurled against the sandbags. His face was
smashed, and the steering wheel had crushed his chest. He was bleeding from the mouth and was unconscious. Like flies around a piece of bloody meat, the crowd gathered at the edge of the track and avidly watched the ambulance men and the mechanics, who began frantically sawing Clerfayt free. In front of him, a car was burning. Men with fire extinguishers had managed to pull the wreck away from the other cars, and were now trying to put out the blaze. Luckily, the gasoline tank had been ripped open, so that there was no explosion; but the gasoline burned and the heat grew unbearable, and there was still the chance that the fire might leap the gap. Every two minutes, the cars came tearing by again. The growl of the motors hung like a dark requiem over the city, and swelled to a deafening howl when the cars passed Clerfayt, who dangled bloodily over the scene of the accident, as if impaled on a stake, in his upended car, illuminated by the pale light of the dying fire in the bright afternoon. The race went on; it was not called off.

Lillian did not grasp it at once. The loud-speaker was not clear; the voice in it seemed smothered and incomprehensible because of its own echoes. In his excitement, the announcer was standing too close to the microphone. She heard something about cars that had gone off the track and crashed because another car had lost its oil on the road. Then she saw the pack passing the stand. It could not be so bad, she thought, or the race would not be continuing. She looked for Clerfayt’s number. She did not find it, but he might already have passed; she had not been paying too close attention. The loud-speaker was now saying rather more clearly that an accident had taken place on the quai de Plaisance; several cars had collided and some drivers had been injured, none killed; there would be more news shortly. The positions now were: Frigerio, with fifteen seconds lead, Conti, Duval, Meyer III.…

Lillian strained to listen. Nothing about Clerfayt; he had been second. Nothing about Clerfayt, she thought, and heard the cars coming and leaned forward to see the Twelve, the red car with the number Twelve.

It did not come, and into the barren stillness of horror that spread through her rolled the announcer’s bland voice: “Among the injured is Clerfayt; he is being taken to the hospital. It appears that he is unconscious. Monti has injuries to his knee and foot, Sacchetti—”

It cannot be, something inside Lillian thought. Not in this toy race, not in this toy city with its toy harbor and its pretty toy panorama! It must be a mistake. His car will come shooting out of the distance from somewhere in a moment, as it did that time at the Targa Florio, perhaps delayed slightly, gouged and battered, but otherwise safe and sound. But even as she thought this, she felt the hope growing hollow, collapsing, before it had become established. Unconscious, she thought, and clung to the word. What does that mean?

It could mean anything. She became aware that she had unknowingly left the stands. She was on the way to the pit; perhaps he had been taken there. He would lie on a stretcher, having done something to his shoulder as in the Targa Florio, or to his arm, and would laugh at his hard luck.

“He’s been taken to the hospital,” the manager said, sweating. “Holy Mother of God, holy Christopher, why should this happen to us? Why not to the others or—what? One moment!”

He rushed away to signal. The cars shot past; so close, they looked bigger and more dangerous than from the stands, and their thunder excluded everything else. “What has happened?” Lillian cried. “Forget your damned race and tell me what has happened.”

She looked around. No one met her eyes. The mechanics busied themselves with spare parts and tires, and avoided looking up.
When she approached one of them, he moved away. It was as though she had the plague.

The manager came back at last. “It wouldn’t help Clerfayt any for me to let the race go to the devil,” he said hoarsely. “He wouldn’t want that, either. He’d want—”

Lillian interrupted him. “Where is he? I don’t want any sermons on racing drivers’ code of honor.”

“In the hospital. They took him straight to the hospital.”

“Why isn’t anyone with him, to help him? Why not you? Why are you here?”

The manager looked at her uncomprehendingly. “How could I help him? Or anyone here? That’s a job for the doctors.”

Lillian swallowed. “What happened to him?” she asked softly.

“I don’t know. I haven’t seen him. We were all right here. We have to stay here, you know.”

“Yes,” Lillian said. “So that the race can go on.”

“That’s the way it is,” the manager replied forlornly. “We’re all only employees.”

A mechanic came hurrying up to them. The growl of the cars was swelling. “Signorina—” the manager spread his hands and looked toward the track. “I must—”

“Is he dead?” Lillian asked.

“No, no! Unconscious. The doctors—sorry, Signorina, I must—”

The manager snatched a placard from a box and rushed out to give his signals. Lillian heard him crying: “Madonna, Madonna, oh that damned oil; why must this happen to me; damn this life of mine!” He held his placard toward someone, waved, and held one hand high, and remained standing, although the pack was already gone, staring hard at the road, unwilling to return to the pit.

Lillian slowly turned to go. “We’re coming—after the race, Signorina,” one of the mechanics whispered. “Right after the race.”

The black canopy of noise continued to overhang the city as she rode to the hospital. She had found only one of the horse-drawn carriages decorated with flags and colored ribbons, and a funny straw hat for the horse. “It will take longer than usual, Mademoiselle,” the driver explained to her. “We must make a big detour. The streets are blocked off. Because of the race, you understand—”

Lillian nodded. She sat wrapped in grief that seemed not to be grief, rather, a dull ache that had been deadened by a narcotic. Nothing functioned completely inside her, nothing but her ears and eyes, which heard the motors and saw the cars clearly, with excessive sharpness, so that she could scarcely endure it. The driver chattered and tried to point out the sights. She did not hear; she heard only the motors. Someone tried to stop the carriage and have a word with her. She did not understand what he was saying, and had the driver halt. Perhaps, she thought, it was someone with a message from Clerfayt. The man, an Italian in a white suit, with a thin black mustache, invited her to dinner. “What?” she asked uncomprehendingly. “What else?”

The man smiled. “There might be more. That would be up to you.”

She did not reply. She no longer saw the man. Her eyes dropped him; he knew nothing about Clerfayt. “Go on!” she ordered the driver. “Faster.”

“All these sporty types have no money,” the driver opined. “You were right to give him the brush-off. Who knows, you might have had to pay for the dinner yourself in the end. Older men are more reliable.”

“Faster,” Lillian said.

“As you please, Mademoiselle.”

It took an eternity before they stopped in front of the hospital. Lillian had made many vows in the meanwhile, vows she believed
she would keep. She would not leave, she would stay, she would marry Clerfayt, if only he would live! She made these vows and let them drop like stones into a pond, without thinking about them.

“Monsieur Clerfayt is in the operating room,” the nurse at the reception desk said.

“Can you tell me how badly he is hurt?”

“I’m sorry, Madame. Are you Madame Clerfayt?”

“No.”

“Related?”

“What has that to do with it?”

“Nothing, Mademoiselle. Only our rules are such that after the operation only the nearest relations will be allowed to see him for a minute.”

Lillian stared at the nurse. Should she say that she was Clerfayt’s fiancée? How absurd was that. “Must he be operated on?” she asked.

“So it would seem; otherwise he would not be in the operating room.”

Lillian stared at the nurse. The kind that can’t stand me, she thought. She had experience with nurses. “May I wait?” she asked.

The nurse gestured toward a bench. “Don’t you have a waiting room?” Lillian asked.

The nurse pointed to a door. Lillian went into the dreary room in which tired potted plants drooped, old magazines lay beached, and flies hummed around a ribbon of flypaper depending from the ceiling over the center table. The noise of the motors reached even into this place, like frenzied, distant drums, muted but there.

Time became sticky as the flypaper on which the flies died a slow, tortured death. Lillian fretted the worn magazines, opened and
closed them, tried to read and could not, got up and went to the window and sat down again. The room smelled of anxiety, of all the anxiety that had been radiated into it. She tried to open the window, but closed it again because the growl of the motors immediately leaped in upon her. After a while, a woman came in with a baby. The baby began to cry; the woman opened her blouse and nursed it. The child smacked its lips and fell asleep. The woman smiled shyly at Lillian and buttoned her blouse.

A few minutes later, the nurse opened the door. Lillian stood up, but the nurse paid no attention to her; she nodded to the woman with the baby to come with her. Lillian sat down again. Suddenly she listened. Something had changed. She felt it at the nape of her neck. A tension had ceased; something had relaxed. It took a while before she realized that it was the stillness; the roar of the motors had stopped. The race was over.

Fifteen minutes later, she saw an open car, with the manager and two mechanics in it, draw up to the hospital and stop. The reception nurse brought them into the waiting room. They stood around, grim and downcast.

“Have you found out anything?” Lillian asked.