“The night is over. If we were to draw the curtains at the windows, the pale morning would turn us all into ghosts. Good night, Fiola. Go on playing.”
When she stepped out with Clerfayt, she saw the Riviera as it must have been before the tourists had discovered it. The sky gleamed a brassy yellow and blue while it waited for the sun; the sea was white on the horizon, and translucent as aquamarine. A few fishing boats stood out at sea with yellow and red sails. The beach was quiet; no cars were moving on any of the streets. The wind smelled of lobster and of sea.
Lillian did not understand where the quarrel had blown up from. She heard Clerfayt, but it was some time before she understood what he was so worked up about. “What can I do?” she heard him saying. “I have to fight against a shadow, against someone I can’t grasp, someone who isn’t here and is therefore all the more here, who is transfigured because he isn’t here, who has the great advantage of being absent, which gives him a thousand points to his credit, while I’m here and you see me as I am, as I am now, beside myself, unjust if you will, petty, silly, and against all that, stands the glorious ideal image which can’t do anything wrong because it does nothing, and I can’t do anything against it, any more than I could do anything against the memory of someone dead!”
Exhausted, Lillian leaned her head back.
“Isn’t it so?” Clerfayt demanded, pounding his fist on the steering wheel. “Tell me whether it isn’t so! I’ve sensed it all along. That’s why you’ve been evading me. That’s the reason you won’t marry me. You want to go back. That’s it! You want to go back!”
Lillian raised her head. What was this? She looked at Clerfayt. “What’s that you’re saying?”
“Isn’t it true? Haven’t you been thinking that, even now?”
“I was only thinking how awfully stupid the cleverest people can be. Don’t drive me away by force.”
“I drive you away? I’m doing everything I can to hold you.”
“Do you think this is the way to hold me? Good Lord!”
Lillian let her head sink back again. “You don’t have to be jealous. Boris would not even want me if I went back.”
“That hasn’t anything to do with it. You’d like to go back.”
“Don’t drive me back. Oh God, have you been struck blind?”
“Yes,” Clerfayt said, “probably. Probably,” he repeated. “But I can’t do anything about it, now. That’s how it is.”
They drove in silence along the Corniche toward Antibes. A donkey cart was coming toward them. On its seat sat a teenage girl, singing. Lillian looked at the girl with searing envy. She thought of the old tortoise-woman at the casino who had years of life ahead of her, and she saw the laughing girl, and then she thought of herself, and suddenly there came again one of those moments in which everything became incomprehensible and no tricks helped at all; the misery overwhelmed her and everything within her cried out in impotent rebellion: Why? Why me? What have I done that I am the one to be struck down?
With blinded eyes, she looked out into the magical landscape. The strong fragrance of flowers wafted across the road. “Why are you crying?” Clerfayt demanded irritably. “You don’t have any reason to cry.”
“I suppose I don’t.”
“You’re unfaithful to me with a shadow,” he said bitterly. “And you cry.”
Yes, she thought, but the shadow’s name is not Boris. Shall I let him know what its name is? But then he will lock me up in a hospital and put guards in front of the door, so that I am tended to death behind frosted-glass windows, surrounded by the smell of disinfectants, good will, and the insipid stench of human refuse.
She looked at Clerfayt’s face. No, she thought, not the prison of this love. Protest against it is useless. There’s only flight. The fireworks are over; there is no sense poking around in the ashes.
The car drove into the hotel yard. An Englishman in a terry robe was already going down to the beach to swim. Clerfayt helped Lillian out of the car without looking at her. “You won’t be seeing much more of me,” he said. “Tomorrow, training starts.”
He was exaggerating. The race was through the city, and training for it was virtually impossible. The streets could only be blocked off for the race itself; otherwise the drivers had to limit themselves chiefly to driving the route and memorizing the way they planned to shift.
As if gazing down a long corridor, Lillian saw what remained, what could still possibly happen between them. It was a corridor that narrowed steadily, and did not have an exit. She could not walk along it. Others, who had more time, probably could do it. Not she. And in love, there was no turning back. You could never begin afresh; what had happened remained in your blood. Clerfayt could never again be as he had been with her. He could be that way with any other woman, but not with her. What they had had could no more be recalled than time, and no sacrifice, no readiness, no amount of good will would suffice. That was the sad, the inexorable law. Lillian knew it, and for that reason she wanted to leave. The remnant of her life was her whole life—but in Clerfayt’s life it was only a small part. It therefore depended entirely on her, not on Clerfayt. The scales were too uneven; what would be only an episode in his life, although he did not believe it now, was the end for her. She could not throw it away; she knew that now. She felt no regret; she had too little time even for that. But she felt a clarity that resembled the morning’s clarity. And with this clarity the last mists of misunderstanding vanished. She felt the small, sharp joy of decision. And—strangely—with the decision her tenderness returned—for she was now out of danger.
“Nothing of what you’ve been saying is true, Clerfayt,” she said in a changed voice. “Nothing whatsoever! Forget it. It isn’t true. None of it.”
She saw his face brightening. “You’ll stay with me?” he asked quickly.
“Yes,” she said. She wanted no more quarrels in their last days.
“You finally see what I want.”
“Yes,” she replied, smiling.
“You’ll marry me?”
He did not sense her hesitation. “Yes,” she said. That, too, did not matter now.
He stared at her. “When?”
“Whenever you say. In autumn.”
He was silent for a moment. “At last!” he said then. “At last! You’ll never regret it, Lillian.”
“I know that.”
At one stroke he was transformed. “You’re tired! You must be dead tired. You have to get to bed. Come, I’ll take you up.”
“And what about you?”
“I’ll have myself a morning dip, like the Englishman, then drive over the course until the traffic starts. It’s just a matter of routine; I know the route.” He stood at her door. “What an idiot I am! I lost more than half my winnings. Out of sheer temper.”
“I won.”
Lillian tossed her bag, filled with jettons, on the table. “I haven’t counted them.”
“We’ll win again tomorrow. Are you going to see a doctor?”
“Yes. Now I have to sleep.”
“Of course. Straight through till evening. Then we’ll have something to eat and go to sleep again. I love you beyond anything.”
“And I you, Clerfayt.”
He closed the door gently behind him. As if leaving a sick person, she thought. It was the first time he had done that. She sat down on the bed, without an ounce of strength left.
The window was open. She saw him going down to the beach. After the race, she thought. I must pack and leave after the race, when he has to go to Rome. Just these few days more, she thought. She did not know where she would go. Nor did it matter. But she had to leave.
Chapter Twenty
THE COURSE WAS ONLY about two miles long, but it led through the streets of Monte Carlo, right through the middle of the city, along the shore, over the mountain on which the casino stood, and back. In many places it was barely wide enough for passing, and consisted almost entirely of curves, double turns, hairpin turns, and sharply
angled serpentines. A hundred rounds had to be driven, nearly two hundred miles; that meant shifting, braking, giving gas, shifting, and again braking and giving gas tens of thousands of times.
“A merry-go-round,” Clerfayt said laughingly to Lillian. “A sort of circus act. There isn’t any stretch where you can even half let the buggy out. Where are you sitting?”
“In the stand. Tenth row on the right.”
“It will be hot. Do you have a hat?”
“Yes.” Lillian showed him the small straw hat she held in her hand.
“Good. This evening, we’ll eat lobster and drink chilled wine in the Pavillion d’Or by the sea. And tomorrow we’ll drive over to see someone I know; he’s an architect, and we’ll ask him to make a plan for redoing the house. So it will be bright, with big windows and lots of sunlight.”
The manager called out something to Clerfayt in Italian. “It’s starting,” Clerfayt said, buttoning his white overalls at the neck. He took a piece of wood from his pocket, knocked it against the car and then against his hand.
“Ready?” the manager shouted.
“Ready.”
Lillian kissed Clerfayt and performed the necessary spells of racing superstition. She spat lightly at the car and Clerfayt’s racing outfit, and murmured the curse that was supposed to bring about the opposite; then she raised her hands with two fingers outspread toward the track and the other pits—it was the jettatore exorcism of the evil eye. The Italian mechanics looked at her in mute appreciation as she passed them. Behind her, she heard the manager praying: “Oh sweet blood of Jesus and you, Mother of Sorrows, help Clerfayt and Frigerio and—”
She turned around at the door of the pit. The wives of Marchetti and two other drivers had already taken up their stations with stop watches and notebooks. I ought not to leave him, she thought, raising her hand. Clerfayt laughed and saluted. He looked very young. “And all you saints, burn up the others’ tires twice as fast as ours!” the manager prayed, and then shouted: “Ready for the start! Everybody out who doesn’t belong here!”
Twenty cars started. In the first round, Clerfayt stayed in the eighth position; he had not had a favorable place and had been a moment too slow at the start. He hung on behind Micotti, who he knew would attack. Frigerio, Monti, and Sacchetti were ahead of them; Marchetti held the lead.
In the fourth round, Micotti, overrevving his motor, shot out on the straight stretch that rose up to the casino and passed Sacchetti. Clerfayt clung to his rear wheels; he forced the motor likewise and passed Sacchetti barely before entering the tunnel. When he came out of it, he saw Micotti’s car, smoking and slowing down. He passed him and began chasing Monti. Three rounds later, on the hairpin turn by the gas tank he reached him and clung like a terrier to his rear wheels.
Ninety-two rounds and seventeen competitors to go, he thought, and he saw a second car stopping at the pit beside Micotti’s. The manager signaled to him not to attack for the time being. Probably Frigerio and Marchetti, who did not like each other, were battling between themselves at the firm’s expense, instead of keeping team discipline, and the manager wanted to keep Clerfayt and Meyer III in reserve, in case the lead drivers ruined their cars.
Lillian saw the pack racing past the stands at intervals of less than two minutes. You had just seen the cars, and looked aside for a moment, when they were back again, their order differing slightly, but almost as if they had never been away. It was like pushing the glass plate of a magic lantern back and forth, in and out. How can they possibly count the hundred rounds? she thought. Then she recalled the praying, sweating, cursing manager who held out signboards and flags for them to see, waving and changing his signals according to some secret code.
After forty rounds, she wanted to leave. Something told her that she ought to depart now, at once, take the train before the race was over. The prospect of watching the slight shifts in the field another sixty times seemed to her as barren a waste of time as the endless hours spent in the sanatorium, when one did nothing but watch the hands creep round the clock. She had a ticket to Zurich in her bag. She had bought it that morning, while Clerfayt was taking one last practice drive over the course. It was a ticket for the day after tomorrow. Clerfayt would then have to fly to Rome, but only for two days. The plane was leaving in the morning, the train in the evening. Like a thief, she thought, like a traitor, I am sneaking away. Just as I wanted to sneak away from Boris at the sanatorium. Then she had had that last talk with Boris anyhow, but what good had it done? The wrong words were always said; you always lied because the truth was useless cruelty; and the end was always bitterness and despair that you could do nothing about and that always made the last memory one of dispute, misunderstanding and hatred.
She looked in her bag for the ticket. For a moment, she thought she had lost it. That moment sufficed to restore her determination. In spite of the warm sunlight, she shivered. I have fever again, she thought, and listened to the crowd shouting around her. Down below, at the blue toy harbor with its white yachts, on which people stood jammed, the cars raced by, and one of the little toy autos thrust to one side and outdistanced another. “Clerfayt!” a brawny woman beside her shouted jubilantly, pounding her program against plump thighs under a linen skirt. “The son of a gun made it!” she roared in English.
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 a
t 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.