“Hubert.”
The boy pointed to a wooden signboard that hung between the pumps: H. GÖRING, SERVICE STATION AND GARAGE.
“That sign’s new, isn’t it?” Clerfayt asked.
“Brand new.”
“Why only the first initial?”
“More practical that way. Lots of people think the name’s Hermann.”
“With a family name like that, I should think you’d want to change it, not have it painted big as life.”
“We’d be dopes to do that,” the boy explained. “Now that the German cars are coming again! You ought to see the tips I get. No, sir, that name is worth a mint of money.”
Clerfayt looked at the leather jacket. “Has that already come from your tips?”
“Half. But before the season is over, I’ll have a pair of ski boots and a coat out of them, that’s for sure.”
“Maybe you’ve miscalculated. A lot of people won’t give you a tip just because of your name.”
The boy grinned, and tossed the chains into the car. “Those who can afford to come for winter sports will, sir. Besides, I get it coming or going—some give because they’re glad he’s gone, and others because they have pleasant memories, but the tips keep coming. Some funny things have happened since the sign’s been hanging there. Gas, sir?”
“I can use seventeen gallons,” Clerfayt said. “But I’ll not take them from you. I’d rather buy my gas from somebody who’s not as good a businessman as you are, Hubert. It’s time your views were given a bit of a shake, boy.”
An hour later, the snow was behind them. Cataracts leaped from the sides of the slopes along the road; water dripped from the roofs of houses, and the trunks of the trees gleamed with moisture. The sunset was reflected redly from the windows. In the streets of villages, children were playing. The fields were black and wet, and last year’s grass lay yellow and gray-green upon the meadows. “Shall we stop off somewhere?” Clerfayt asked.
“Not yet.”
“Are you afraid that the snow will catch up to us?”
Lillian nodded. “I never want to see it again.”
“Not before next winter.”
Lillian did not answer. Next winter, she thought—that was as far as Sirius or the Pleiades. She would never see it.
“How about something to drink?” Clerfayt asked. “Coffee with kirsch? We still have a good way to drive.”
“That sounds good,” Lillian said. “When will we be at Lake Maggiore?”
“In a few hours. Late this evening.”
Clerfayt stopped the car in front of a restaurant. They went in. A waitress turned on the lights. On the walls hung prints of stags and heath cocks. “Are you hungry?” Clerfayt asked. “What did you have for lunch?”
“Nothing.”
“I thought as much.” He turned to the waitress. “What do you have in the way of food?”
“Salami, Landjäger, Schüblig. The Schüblig are hot.”
“Two Schüblig and some of that dark bread there. With butter and open wine. Do you have Fendant?”
“Fendant and Valpolicella.”
“Fendant. And what would you like for yourself?”
“A pflümli, if it’s all right with you,” the waitress said.
“It’s all right.”
Lillian sat in the corner next to the window. She listened to the talk between Clerfayt and the waitress. The light of the lamp caught on the bottles of the little bar. Outside the window, the village trees towered blackly into the high, green-tinted evening sky, and the first lights were on in the houses. Everything was intensely peaceful and normal; here was an evening without fear and rebellion, and she belonged to it, with the same normality and peacefulness. She had escaped into life. The feeling of it almost choked her.
“Schüblig are fatty peasant sausages,” Clerfayt said. “They’re very good, but perhaps you don’t like them.”
“I like everything,” Lillian said. “Everything down here!”
Clerfayt regarded her thoughtfully. “I’m afraid that’s true.”
“Why are you afraid?”
He laughed. “Nothing is more dangerous than a woman who likes everything. How is a man to arrange matters so that she likes him alone?”
“By doing nothing.”
“Right.”
The waitress brought the clear, white wine. She poured it into small water glasses. Then she raised her own glass of plum brandy. “Your health!”
They drank. Clerfayt looked around the shabby restaurant.
“This is not yet Paris,” he said, smiling.
“Yes it is,” Lillian replied. “It is the first suburb of Paris. Paris starts from here on.”
At Göschenen they had stars and a clear night sky. Clerfayt drove the car up the ramp to one of the flatcars that stood waiting. Aside from his car, two sedans and a red sports car were taking the tunnel. “Would you rather stay in the car or sit in the train?”
“Won’t we get very dirty if we stay in the car?”
“No. The train is electric. And we’ll close the top.”
The railroad officials placed chocks under the wheels. The other drivers also remained in their cars. In the two sedans, the ceiling lights were turned on. The train went through a switch and entered the Gotthard tunnel.
The walls of the tunnel were damp. Signal lights flew by. After a few moments, Lillian had the feeling that she was riding down a shaft into the center of the earth. The air was stale and old. The noise of the train was re-echoed a thousandfold. In front of her, Lillian saw the two illuminated sedans rocking like two cabins in a boat on the way to Hades. “Will this ever end?” she said.
“In fifteen minutes. The Gotthard is one of the longest tunnels in Europe.” Clerfayt handed her his flask, which he had had refilled in the restaurant. “It’s a good idea to get used to tunnels,” he said. “Judging by the way things are going, we’ll all be living like this soon, in air-raid shelters and underground cities.”
“Where do we come out?”
“At Airolo. There the South begins.”
Lillian had feared the first night. She had expected memories and regrets to come creeping at her out of the darkness like rats. But now the noisy ride through the stone bowels of the earth routed all other thoughts. The remote fear of every creature that lives upon the ground and not in it, the fear of being buried alive, made her wait so passionately for light and sky that everything else was wiped out. The whole thing’s going almost too fast, she thought. A few hours ago, I was stuck on the peaks of the mountains and wanted to come down; now I’m rushing through the earth and want to go up again.
A piece of paper fluttered out of one of the sedans and slapped into the windshield. There it remained stuck, pressed flat, like a crushed pigeon. “There are characters who have to eat always and everywhere,” Clerfayt said. “They would take sandwiches with them to hell itself.” He reached around to the outside of the windshield and pulled the paper away.
A second piece of wax paper flew through the center of the earth. Lillian laughed. A missile followed, slamming into the windshield frame. Lillian laughed. “A roll,” Clerfayt said. “The good people in front of us are now eating only the sandwich meat, not the bread. A small bourgeois pandemonium in the bowels of the earth.”
Lillian stretched. The tunnel seemed to strip her free of all the elements of the past which had been fluttering around her. It seemed as if the sharp bristles of the noise were brushing her clean of everything. The old planet on which the sanatorium stood remained behind her forever; she could not go back, any more than you could cross the Styx twice. She would rise from the depths to a new planet, cast out upon the earth, falling and at the same time hurled forward, clinging only to a single thought: to come out of this and to breathe. It seemed to her that she was being pulled at the last moment through a narrow trench whose walls were collapsing close behind her; she was being dragged toward the light which rose like a milky monstrance in front of her, and raced toward her,
and she was there.
The Acheronian roars became a normal rattling, and then ceased altogether. The train stopped in a soft ambiance of gray and gold and mild air. It was the air of life after the vault-like, cold, dead air of the tunnel. It took Lillian a while before she realized that it was raining. She listened to the drops that pattered gently down upon the top of the car; she breathed the soft air, and held her hand out into the rain. Saved, she thought. Cast across the Styx and saved.
“It ought to be the other way round,” Clerfayt said. “It should have been raining over there, and on this side we should have clear skies. Are you disappointed?”
She shook her head. “I haven’t seen rain since last October.”
“And you haven’t been down below for four years? It must seem almost like being reborn. Reborn with memories.”
Clerfayt drove to the gasoline station by the road, to fill the tank. “I could envy you,” he said. “You’re beginning from the beginning again. With the passionateness of youth, but without the weakness of youth.”
The train rode off, its red lights vanishing in the rain. The gas-station attendant brought back the car key. The car rolled backward onto the road. Clerfayt stopped it, to turn. For a moment, by the quiet light of the instrument board, he saw Lillian in the small compartment under the top, while outside the rain shimmered and chattered. There was something different about her; he had never before seen her looking quite like this. Her face was illuminated by the glow of the speedometer, the clock and the other instruments for measuring times and speeds. In contrast to these, her face seemed, for the span of a heartbeat, utterly timeless and untouched by all that—timeless, Clerfayt felt, as Death, with whom that face was beginning a race beside which all automobile races were childish sports. I will set her down in Paris and lose her, he thought. No, I must try to hold her. I would be an idiot if I did not try.
“Have you any idea what you will do in Paris?” he asked.
“I have an uncle there. He’s in charge of my money. Up to now, he has sent it to me in monthly installments. I’m going to get it all away from him. It will be something of a drama. He still thinks I’m fourteen years old.”
“And how old are you really?”
“Twenty-four and eighty.”
Clerfayt laughed. “A good combination. I was once thirty-six and eighty—when I came back from the war.”
“And what happened?”
“I became forty,” Clerfayt said, shifting into first gear. “It was very sad.”
The car climbed the ascent from the railroad to the highway, and began the long downhill stretch. At the same moment, another motor howled behind them. It was the red sports car that had been hurtled through the tunnel with them. The driver had been lying in wait behind a shed. Now he roared up behind them with his four cylinders as if there were sixteen of them.
“You always run into that kind,” Clerfayt said. “He wants to race us. Shall we give him a lesson? Or let him keep his illusion that he has the fastest car in the world?”
“Let’s let everyone keep his illusions today.”
“All right.”
Clerfayt stopped Giuseppe. The red sports car behind him also stopped, and the driver began to blow his horn. He had plenty of room to pass; but he insisted on his race.
“That’s the way it is,” Clerfayt said, sighing, and started again. “He’s a human being; he seeks his own destruction.”
The red car badgered them as far as Faido. The driver repeatedly tried to catch up. “He’ll end up killing himself,” Clerfayt said finally. “The last time, he almost failed to make the curve. We’d better let him pass.”
He braked, but immediately stepped on the gas again. “That ham! Instead of passing, he almost crashed into our rear. He’s just as dangerous behind us as ahead of us.”
Clerfayt pulled the car to the right edge of the road. The smell of wood wafted toward them from a lumberyard. He stopped Giuseppe in front of some stacked lumber. This time, the red car did not pause. It roared by. The man inside waved contemptuously and laughed.
It became very still. Only the rushing of a brook and the soft patter of the rain could be heard. This was happiness, Lillian felt. This minute of stillness, full of dark, damp, fertile expectation. She would never forget it—the night, the gentle pattering, and the wet road glinting in the headlights.
A quarter of an hour later, they ran into fog. Clerfayt switched to the dim headlights. He drove very slowly. After a while, they were able to make out the edge of the road again. For a few hundred yards, the mist was swept away by the rain; then they again entered a cloud which was rising from the depths below.
Clerfayt braked the car very sharply. They had just emerged from the fog again. In front of them, wrapped around a milestone, hung the red sports car, one wheel over the edge of the abyss. Beside it stood the driver, seemingly unhurt.
“I call that luck,” Clerfayt said.
“Luck?” the man replied furiously. “And what about the car? Look at it! I don’t have collision insurance. And what about my arm?”
“Your arm is sprained, at worst. After all, you’re able to move it. Man, be glad you’re still standing on the road.”
Clerfayt got out and inspected the wreck. “Sometimes milestones are good for something.”
“It’s your fault!” the man bellowed. “You got me into driving so fast. I’m making you responsible. If you had let me pass and not started to race with me—”
Lillian laughed.
“What does the lady think is so funny?” the man demanded angrily.
“That’s none of your business. But since today is Wednesday, I’ll explain it to you. The lady comes from another planet and doesn’t know our customs down here. She’s laughing because she sees you bewailing your car instead of giving thanks that you’re still alive. The lady cannot understand that I, on the other hand, admire you for it, so I’ll send a tow car up here for you from the next village.”
“Stop! You can’t get away that easily! If you hadn’t dared me to race, I would have driven slowly and not—”
“Too many conditions contrary to fact,” Clerfayt said. “You’d better blame it all on the lost war.”
The man looked at Clerfayt’s license plate. “French! I’ll have a devil of a time collecting my money.” He fumbled with a pencil and a piece of paper in his left hand. “Give me your number. Write it down for me. Don’t you see that I can’t write with my arm like this?”
“Learn to. I’ve had to learn harder things in your country.”
Clerfayt got in again. The man followed him. “Are you trying to duck out of this by running away?”
“Exactly. However, I’ll send you a tow car.”
“What? You mean to leave me standing here on the road in this rain?”
“Yes. This car of mine is a two-seater. Take a deep breath, look at the mountains, give thanks to God that you’re still alive, and remember that better people than you have had to die.”
They found a garage in Biasca. The owner was at his supper. He left his family and took a bottle of Barbera wine with him. “He’ll need some alcohol,” he said. “Maybe I will, too.”
The car glided on down the mountain, curve upon curve, serpentine after serpentine. “This is a monotonous stretch,” Clerfayt said. “It goes on to Locarno. Then comes the lake. Are you tired?”
Lillian shook her head. Tired! she thought. Monotonous! Can’t this healthy specimen of life see that I am quivering all over? Doesn’t he understand what’s going on in me? Can’t he feel that my frozen picture of the world has suddenly thawed and is moving and talking, that the rain is talking, the wet rocks are talking and the valley with its shadows and lights, and the road? Doesn’t he have any idea that I shall never again be so at one with them as I am now—as if I were lying in the cradle and in the arms of an unknown god, frightened and still as trustful as a young bird, and yet already knowing that all this will exist for me only this one time, that I am losing it ev
en as I possess it and it possesses me, this road and these villages, these dark trucks in front of the roadside inns, this singing behind lighted windows, the guitars, the gray-and-silver sky, and these names—Osogna, Cresciano, Claro, Castione, and Bellinzona—scarcely read and already subsiding behind me like shadows, as if they had never been? Doesn’t he see that I am a sieve losing what it receives, not a basket that collects what is put into it? Doesn’t he notice that I can scarcely speak because my heart is swelling so, and that among the few names it feels, his is one too, but that all of them really mean only one thing again and again: life?
“How did you like your first encounter down here?” Clerfayt asked. “A fellow who wails over his property and takes his life for granted. You will get to know many more such people.”
“It’s a change. Up above, everyone thinks his life frightfully important. So did I.”
“We’ll arrive in ten minutes,” Clerfayt said. “Here is Locarno already.”
Streets were leaping into being before them, lights, houses, blueness, and a broad square with arcades.
A streetcar rattled up and at the last moment blocked their way. Clerfayt laughed when he saw that Lillian was staring at it as if it were a cathedral. For four years, she had not seen one. There were no streetcars in the mountains.
Now the lake lay before them, broad, silvery, and restless. The rain had stopped. The clouds were moving fast and low across the moon. Ascona, with its piazza by the shore, lay still.
“Where are we going to stay?” Lillian asked.
“By the lake. In the Hotel Tamaro.”
“How is it you know this place?”
“I lived here for a year after the war,” Clerfayt replied. “Tomorrow morning, you’ll understand why.”
He stopped in front of the small hotel and unloaded the bags. “The owner of this place has a magnificent library,” he said. “He’s something of a scholar. And another man farther up on the mountain has a hotel that has Cézannes, Utrillos, and Lautrecs on the walls. That’s the sort of thing you run into here. But how would it be if we drove a bit farther to eat?”