“Don’t you like it?”
“I do not like motors of any kind. They remind me too much of the noise of bombers during the war.”
The sensitive, corpulent man placed a Chopin piano concerto on the record player. Lillian looked at him thoughtfully. Odd, she thought, how one-sidedly we are always bound by our own experience and our own danger. I wonder whether this esthete and connoisseur of the arts ever thinks of what the tuna may feel when it is swung up on the deck of one of his fishing boats to be slaughtered?
Shortly before the race, Levalli gave a party. He had invited nearly a hundred guests. The garden was lit with candles and hurricane lamps; the night was warm and sparkling with stars, the sea smooth, making a vast mirror for the huge moon which floated low and red on the horizon, like a balloon from another planet.
Lillian was enchanted. “You like it?” Levalli asked.
“It’s everything I’ve desired.”
“Everything?”
“Almost everything. For four years, I dreamed of this sort of thing, when I was a captive between walls of snow in the mountains. This is the very opposite of snow—and absolutely the opposite of mountains—”
“I’m glad,” Levalli said. “I give parties rarely these days.”
“Why? Because otherwise they would become a habit?”
“It’s not that. It’s that they make me—how should I put it?—melancholy. When we give parties, it’s usually because we want to forget something—but we don’t forget it. The others don’t forget it either.”
“There’s nothing I want to forget.”
“Really?” Levalli asked politely.
“Not any more,” Lillian replied.
Levalli smiled. “An old Roman villa is supposed to have stood on this spot,” he said, “and they had glorious festivals by torchlight and the glow of fire-spewing Aetna. Do you think that the ancient Romans came any nearer the secret?”
“What secret?”
“Of why we live.”
“Do we live?”
“Perhaps not, since we ask. Forgive my talking about it. Italians are melancholics; they look the opposite, but are not.”
“Who isn’t?” Lillian said. “Not even stable hands are cheerful all the time.”
She heard Clerfayt’s car approaching, and smiled. “It is said,” Levalli remarked, “that the last Roman lady to own this villa used to have her lovers killed in the mornings. She was a romantic and could not endure the disenchantment after the illusion of the night.”
“What a lot of trouble to go to,” Lillian replied. “Couldn’t she simply send him away before dawn? Or go away herself?”
Levalli offered his arm. “Going away is not always so simple—when one takes oneself along.”
“It is always terribly simple when one knows that there are limits to the desire for possession—and that one cannot hold on to anything, not even oneself—”
They walked toward the music. “Is there nothing you want to possess?” Levalli asked.
“There’s too much I want to possess,” Lillian replied. “And so, nothing.”
He kissed her hand. “Let’s stroll over there to the cypresses. A little beyond them, we’ve set up a glass dance floor lighted from within. I’ve seen that done in garden restaurants on the Riviera, and thought it would be a nice idea for our party. And there come your dancing partners—from Naples, Palermo, and Rome.”
———
“One can be either a spectator or a participant,” Levalli said to Clerfayt. “I prefer being a spectator. Anyone who tries to do both does both imperfectly.”
They were sitting on the terrace, watching the couples dancing on the irradiated glass floor against the background of the cypresses. Lillian was dancing with Prince Fiola.
“A flame,” Levalli said to Clerfayt. “Look how she dances! Do you know the women in the Pompeian paintings? The exquisiteness of women in art is that the elements of accident have been sheered away and beauty alone has remained. Have you seen the paintings in the Minoan palace in Crete? The Egyptians of the time of Ikhnaton? The women with elliptical eyes and thin faces, the corrupt dancing girls and the sensual young queens? The flame burns in all of them. Look at this dance floor. Over gentle fires of hell ignited by glass, electricity, and technology, the women appear to be gliding—that’s why I had it set up. The flares of the artificial hell below, which appears to be burning them from beneath and illuminating the folds of their skirts, and the cold light of the moon mingling with the rays of the stars illuminating their temples and shoulders—isn’t it an allegory to make one laugh or dream for a few minutes? They are beautiful, these women who capture us by persuading us that they will make us into gods, and then make us into fathers, citizens, breadwinners. Aren’t they beautiful?”
“They are beautiful, Levalli.”
“In every one of them there is a Circe. The irony is that they themselves have no notion of it. They are still lovely in their youth as they dance there, but behind them, almost invisible, there already dances the shadow of respectability, with the twenty pounds of weight they will gain, with the boredom of family, the preoccupation with petty ambitions, petty desires and goals, the tedium, the confinement, the eternal recurrence, the slow attrition. All this is present already except in that one girl who is dancing with Fiola over there, the one you have brought here. How have you done it?”
Clerfayt shrugged.
“Where did you find her?”
Clerfayt hesitated. “To remain in your style, Levalli—at the gates of Hades. This is the first time in years I’ve known you to be so lyrical.”
“The opportunity doesn’t offer very often. So. At the gates of Hades. I’ll ask no further. It is enough to let the imagination play. Out of the gray twilight of hopelessness which Orpheus alone escaped. But even he had to pay the price: double solitude—paradoxical as that sounds—because he tried to lead a woman out of Hades. Are you prepared to pay, Clerfayt?”
Clerfayt smiled. “I’m superstitious. I don’t answer such questions shortly before a race.”
It is Oberon’s night, Lillian thought, as she danced with Fiola and Torriani. Everything is enchanted, with lights, with blue shadows, with life and unreality at the same time. No footsteps can be heard, only gliding and music. This is what I imagined when I sat in my room amid the snow, with the fever chart by the bed, and the radio tuned to music from Naples and Paris. It is as though dying were impossible on such a night of moon and sea and the soft breeze carrying the perfume of mimosa and orange blossoms. You meet and hold each other for a while, and lose each other, and find yourself in another man’s arms again; the faces change but the hands are the same.
Are they the same? she thought. There sits my lover, with the melancholy man who for a brief time on earth is the owner of this dream of a garden, and I can see that they are talking about me. It is the melancholy man who is talking now, and no doubt he wants to know the answer to the same question he asked me. The secret! Isn’t there an old fairy tale in which a dwarf rejoices because no one knows his secret, his name?
She smiled. “What are you thinking of?” asked Fiola, observing the smile.
“Of a fairy tale in which a person’s secret was that no one knew his name.”
Fiola flashed his teeth. They seemed twice as white in his dark brown face as the teeth did in the face of the others.
“Isn’t that your secret, too?” he asked.
She shook her head. “What does a name matter?”
Fiola looked at the row of mothers who sat under the palms beside the dance floor. “Everything to some people,” he said.
Dancing by, she saw that Clerfayt was looking thoughtfully at her. He holds me, she thought, and I love him because he is there and does not question. When will he begin to question? I hope never. Perhaps never. We will have no time for that. “You are smiling as if you were very happy,” Fiola said. “Is that your secret?”
What foolish questions he asks, too, Lillian tho
ught. He should have learned that a man ought never to ask a woman whether she is happy.
“What is your secret?” Fiola asked. “A great future?”
She shook her head again. “None,” she said cheerfully. “No future at all. You have no idea how easy that can make so many things.”
“Look at Fiola,” said old Contessa Vitelleschi, seated in the mothers’ corner. “He seems to think there are no young women here besides that foreigner.”
“That’s natural enough,” Teresa Marchetti replied. “If he danced so often with one of our girls, he would be virtually engaged and her brothers would take it as an affront if he did not marry her.”
The contessa peered at Lillian through her lorgnette. “Where does that female come from?”
“Not from Italy.”
“I can see that. Probably some mongrel—”
“Like me,” Teresa Marchetti said sharply. “American, Indian, Spanish—but useful enough to bring some of Papa’s dollars to Ugo Marchetti, to clear the rats out of his tumble-down palazzo, install bathrooms, and keep his mistresses in style.”
Contessa Vitelleschi pretended not to have heard. “It is easy for you to talk. You have a son and a bank account. I have four daughters and debts. Fiola ought to marry. It’s a fine state of affairs when the few well-to-do bachelors we have left marry English models, as they’ve taken to doing lately. The country is being stripped bare.”
“There ought to be a law against it,” Teresa Marchetti said sarcastically. “Also a law against impoverished younger sons marrying rich American girls who do not know that after the fiery courtship they are going to be banished to the feudal dungeon of Italian marriage.”
Again the contessa did not listen. She was keeping her eye on two of her daughters. Fiola had stopped at one of the tables set out under the trees. Lillian took her leave of him and had Torriani escort her to Clerfayt. “Why don’t you dance with me?” she asked Clerfayt.
“I am dancing with you,” he replied. “Without getting up.”
Torriani laughed. “He doesn’t like to dance. He’s vain.”
“That’s true,” Clerfayt said to Lillian. “I dance miserably. You ought to know that from the time in the Palace bar.”
She shook her head. “I forgot that ages ago.”
She returned to the dance floor with Torriani. Levalli sat down beside Clerfayt again. “A flame,” he said. “Or a dagger.” He sat for a while in silence, then burst out: “Don’t you think these lights under the floor are tasteless? The moon is bright enough. Luigi!” he called. “Turn out the lights under the dance floor. And bring some of the old grappa. She makes me sad,” he said abruptly to Clerfayt, and in the darkness his face looked stricken, with deep-sunken hollows. “Beauty in a woman makes me sad. Why?”
“Because one knows it will pass and wishes it could remain.”
“Is it as simple as that?”
“I don’t know. That reason satisfies me.”
“Does it make you sad, too?”
“No,” Clerfayt said. “Quite different things make me sad.”
“I understand.” Levalli sipped his grappa. “I know them, too. But I run away from them. I want to be a fat Pierrot, and nothing else. Try some of this grappa.”
They drank in silence. Lillian danced past them again. I have no future, she thought. That is almost like having no gravity. She looked at Clerfayt. That makes us alike, she thought. His future extends from one race to the next. She formed a soundless sentence with her lips. Clerfayt was sitting in darkness now. She could scarcely discern his face. But that, too, seemed unnecessary. You did not have to look life in the face. You needed only to feel it.
Chapter Thirteen
“WHAT IS MY POSITION?” Clerfayt shouted through the noise, when he stopped at the pit.
“Seventh,” Torriani shouted. “How is the road?”
“Stinking. In this heat it just eats the rubber. Have you seen Lillian?”
“Yes. She’s in the stand.”
“Thank God she isn’t sitting here in the pit with a stop watch!”
Torriani held a jug of lemonade to Clerfayt’s lips. The manager came over. “Ready?” he shouted. “Get going!”
“We’re not magicians,” the chief mechanic shouted back. “The devil himself can’t change wheels in thirty seconds.”
“Come on! Snap into it!”
The gasoline spurted into the tank. “Clerfayt,” the manager said. “Duval is ahead of you. Harry him. Harry him till he’s boiling mad. Then keep him behind you. We don’t need more than that. We’re holding the first two places.”
“Go ahead! Ready!” the chief mechanic shouted.
The car roared off. Careful, Clerfayt thought, don’t strain the motor! The stands were flashes of color and whiteness and light; then there was only the road, the blazing blue sky, and the sot on the horizon that must be dust and Duval with his car.
The stretch climbed for four hundred yards. The mountain range of the Madonie, citrus orchards, the flickering silver of olive groves, curves, serpentines, hairpin turns, flying road gravel, the hot breath of the motor, burning feet, an insect that slammed like a bullet into his glasses, cactus hedges, rising and descending curves, cliffs, rubble, mile after mile; then, gray and brown, the old fortress city of Caltavuturo, dust, more dust, and suddenly a spiderlike insect: a car.
Clerfayt was faster on the curves. Bit by bit, he gained ground. Ten minutes later, he recognized the car; it had to be Duval. Clerfayt hung on behind him, but Duval would not yield the road. He blocked Clerfayt’s every attempt to pass. It was impossible that he had not seen him. Twice the cars had taken a very sharp curve so close together that the drivers could look into each other’s faces, Duval past and Clerfayt just entering the curve. Duval was obstructing Clerfayt on purpose.
The cars raced along close together. Clerfayt waited tensely until the road began climbing in sweeping curves, where he could see ahead. He knew that a broad curve was coming along soon. Duval took it wide on the outside, to prevent Clerfayt from passing him on the right and to cut across the middle of the curve. Clerfayt had counted on that; he cut the curve in front of Duval, shooting past him on the inside. The car skidded, but he caught it; surprised, Duval slowed for just a second, and Clerfayt was past. The dust was behind him now; he could see Etna with a puff of light smoke above it poised majestically against the simmering sky, and they rocketed on, Clerfayt in the van, up toward Polizzi, the highest point of the course.
It was this brief interval, the moment of passing after having ridden for miles through thick dust, and then the blue sky, the pure air, which struck into his dust-crusted face like wine, the heat of the churning motor, the sunlight, the volcano in the distance, the world which was present once more, simple, grand, tranquil, unconcerned with races and with men; it was this, and the Promethean moment when the car reached the top, that carried Clerfayt away, out of himself, beyond himself. He thought of nothing, but he was simultaneously everything; he was the car that he held in his hands, the volcano whose cone funneled down to hell, and the sky of blue, hot metal toward which he was hurtling. Seconds later, the road plunged down once more from the height of Polizzi, dropped in curve upon curve, and the car with it. Shifting, shifting—on this course, the one who shifted best would win. Down it went into the valley of the Fiume Grande, and immediately thereafter up again into a lunar landscape, then down again, like a giant swing, until near Collesano the palms began anew, and the agaves, the flowers, the greenness, and the sea. At Campofelice came the only straight stretch of the race—five miles of it along the beach.
Clerfayt did not think of Lillian again until he stopped to change tires. He saw the stands vaguely, like a window box full of bright-colored flowers; the roaring of the motor had ceased, and in the silence that was hardly such but seemed so to him, he had the feeling that a while before he had been blown high by an eruption, out of the crater of the mountain, and was now hovering like Icarus, floating slowly down to ear
th on wide asbestos wings into the waiting arms of an infinite emotion that was broader than love and had become personified, somewhere in the stands, by a woman, a name, and a mouth.
“Go!” the manager shouted.
The car raced off again; but Clerfayt was no longer driving alone. Like the shadow of a high-flying flamingo, that emotion flew along with him, sometimes behind him like a tail wind and sometimes ahead of him like a transparent banner, but at all times close to him.
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!”