The Balloonist (16 page)

“When lovely woman stoops to folly

And finds too late that men betray
,

What charm can soothe her melancholy
,

What art can wash her guilt away?”

Well, it was a question. What art indeed? If there was an art she had it; she had been very well educated by somebody or other. There were actually tears in her eyes as she embarked on the second and even more pathetic stanza.

“The only art her guilt to cover
,

To hide her shame from every eye
,

To give repentance to her lover.

And wring his bosom—is to die.”

There was
a tinkle of applause, and from the corner the sari-clad mother sighed, “Oh, la pauvre.” Luisa soon brightened up and spoke no more of suicide, and indeed it was not necessary for her to take such radical and irreversible steps to wring my bosom; she could do it simply by reciting a poem while concealing a piece of onion in her handkerchief. Who had coached her in this playlet? I began to see that in order to grasp Luisa, in any sense in which the verb might be taken, it was first necessary to understand something of the functioning principles of this household, and it was a study almost as formidable as that of aeromagnetism. The aunt dominated all. Yet like all tyrants she herself understood only a part of what she dominated. As for my understanding of her, it consisted of a chasm in which two great mysteries yawned: primo, how she regarded me, and secundo, what it was exactly that she intended for Luisa. On my first encounter with her, when she had interrogated me about my military rank and suchlike, she had seemed only an amusing if faintly ominous doll, her head vibrating while she pronounced her thinly veiled hostilities. But as I studied her more she acquired complexity and I understood her less. I began to compile a stock of information, mostly from conversations with other guests, in the hope that this would lead me to the clue that would eventually enable me to understand the aunt and the others in the family, especially the aunt. She had been born in Goa but brought to Europe as a tiny infant, it seemed. Somehow she had inherited the family fortune, acquired the seventeenth-century hôtel particulier on the Île, and assembled this menagerie of Peruvian ambassadors, poètes manqués, and unattached young officers who rotated around her like a planetary system. One had the impression that there were invisible forces supporting this household that had not yet been detected, that the aunt lay under the protection of an eminent political figure, or that the economics of the house rested on hidden and lucrative vice that was revealed only to initiates. One thing was certain, and that was that there was a powerful sexual element in the energy that the aunt radiated to the external world. Never mind that she was a spinster! That this part of her nature had never been conventionally fulfilled was the centre and secret of her power. She was an allegorical personage, one of those virgin-goddesses from mythology who punish infractions against their will by excruciating and picturesque torments, like being trampled by stags. “How is it, Captain,” she asked me once, “that we never see you any more in the house?” (I had come only once that day.) “No doubt there are things more fascinating that keep you in your rented room.” I could not seriously convince myself she was referring to a bifilar magnetometer. “We know what men are, overgrown boys who must have their toys. Be careful, Captain, that some toy or other does not break in your hand. They are expensive, I am sure.”

What in the
collected works of Aeschylus did she mean by that! Did she have a Roentgen-ray telescope, this vibrating matriarch, or did she wring confessions out of Luisa with thumbscrews? This second was not likely, since Luisa herself seemed to have forgotten about Finland almost as soon as it happened. Perhaps, in spite of all probability, she was referring to a bifilar magnetometer. And the mother! She was another study that grew more profound as one attempted to penetrate it. I also learned something of her biography, but it threw less light on the matter than one might have hoped. She had remained in Goa, it transpired, when the infant-aunt had been brought to Europe—the why of all this was an unfathomable mystery, whether the imperious father had decreed this out of whim, or whether some economic or other consideration determined the separation of the sisters—and she had spent her girlhood there in that heap of ruined churches and monasteries on the Indian coast, inhabited for the most part by priests banished from Portugal for misconduct, a town looking back with comatose nostalgia to the days of its glory in the seventeenth century—a steamy odorous backwater, cut off from India by the river Terakhul and from all civilization and hope of culture by the sea. There, eating curry and attended by ill-humoured servants, she had spent the seven thousand hot and identical days between her birth and her adulthood, and longing in her secret thoughts for heaven knows what, although hardly a cabbage could have been satisfied with the existence she led, and she must have grasped some hint of what life was like from the servants. Was she really an imbecile or was this the role that life had taught her to play? Perhaps the sun had scrambled her wits like eggs, or perhaps the aunt had been quicker from the beginning and this was why she had been taken off to Europe and the younger sister left to stew in those odorous miasmas where nothing ever happened.

For whatever
reason—death of the father, total decline of the family fortunes in Goa—this deprived creature found herself at the age of twenty suddenly commanded to transfer herself to Paris by order of the aunt. And there, after only a few short weeks, she encountered the dashing and laconic American, Mr. Hickman, whose father had just died and who had chosen, rather foolishly, to spend his patrimony on a Grand Tour of Europe in the eighteenth century fashion, rather than on improving the small New Mexico cattle ranch that was already mortgaged to the hilt. Why in the name of Thomas Jefferson the slim-hipped, long-jawed cowboy ever fell in love with and married this sloe-eyed Oriental moron was beyond me to say. Something in his soul lacked and yearned for exactly that languor, perhaps; it was the attraction of opposites. What was certain was that the aunt received this news with a maenadic fury, turning from the messenger speechless and white-faced and retiring to plan her counterattack. Nothing could be done, the cowboy had galloped off with her on his pony or otherwise abstracted her, and the marriage was solemnized in Bougival. Shortly afterward they sailed on the Cymric for New York. For what was there for them to do in Paris? Both of them were out of place there, whereas on the cactus-strewn mesas of the Far West she would at least be a rare object standing out against the landscape, an exotic flower. (And indeed this was perhaps precisely why he had come to Paris, to seek out and marry a Goan of Portuguese ancestry who spoke no English and would be the only bride in New Mexico to wear a sari.) The marriage lasted only a few weeks or a few months, but here I am only guessing. Why did she come back afterward? Probably, I imagine, because the bridegroom had left her entirely penniless after he galloped off to be slain in the attack on the Apache chief Victorio near Blanco, New Mexico, an event which is referred to in footnotes in the more complete histories but which was eclipsed by the more spectacular demise of General Custer at the Little Bighorn the following year—a year in which, as it happened, I was working as a janitor in the Swedish exhibit at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia and saving my money to study natural philosophy at Johns Hopkins.

At any rate the return of the young widow to Quai d'Orléans is not hard to imagine—the sloe-eyed beauty contrite but seraphic, the aunt slashing at her with little chops of her head: “Miscreant! Betrayer of your proud
race! Debased plaything and slave of the five-limbed! Put on your sari, dab the vermilion of purdah on your forehead, and henceforth eat my bread in sorrow! You will leave the house only accompanied by servants. And woe to you if the pentapod has implanted a child in your womb!” Crushed by this curse, and yet perhaps with a faint demi-smile something like Luisa's at the corner of her mouth, the sloe-eyed one retired to her room to spend the rest of her life as a kind of heirloom, a grandfather's clock or an old family retainer. And when her abdomen swelled, the aunt's wrath (I could imagine) turned to sarcasm, tempered only slightly by the eventual revelation that the cause and consequence of the swelling was a female child. There she stood, the aunt—in my mind's eye—with her own sideways and merciless smile of derision, remarking with faint judders of her head to the servants or perhaps to the sloe-eyed one herself, “I know how to prevent conception with an ordinary five-franc coin. Grip it between your knees and hold it there constantly in the presence of the opposite sex.”

Yet there were dislocations of fact here, mysteries surrounding mysteries and others inside them. For instance: I learned quite by accident that there was a brother in the family whose existence I had not suspected, un nommé Theodor. Luisa referred to him quite casually one day, apropos of her plans, rather vague ones, to spend a few days on the Italian lakes, either alone or with persons unnamed. “Possibly Teddy will be there,” she remarked abstractedly. At this point I had not put things together sufficiently to realise that Theodor's existence was inconsistent with my whole theory or web of conjecture about the marriage of the mother with the cowboy and his almost immediate massacre by the Apaches, and it merely seemed to me a wonder that she had a brother who had never been referred to before. “Why is he never around?” “Oh, he comes and goes. He is attending a military school. He is studying to be an officer.” “Like me?” I suggested, faintly jealous perhaps and also a little amused. “Oh no, not at all, he is going to be a real officer, who will fight in wars and kill people, and be decorated for bravery.” Bravo for him. Back in my lodgings, of course, it soon penetrated to me that the existence of Theodor required a much longer conjectural marriage of the mother and the cowboy, a pair of years at the minimum, it seemed to me in my male obtusity about such matters, or else a second and quite inconceivable escapade of the mother (with another person? With the ghost of the demised cowboy?) some months after the first. By the principle of economy this last was a poor story; one elopement was an adventure, two verged on the farcical. Perhaps then the two children were twins; but Luisa had implied she was the older, or had she? Once when I was talking to the aunt about something quite different, I found my attention wandering because a part of my mind, as I discovered, was still pondering over this enigma. Realizing I had lost track of what the aunt was talking about anyhow, I asked her impulsively, “And your nephew—is he older or younger than Luisa? I am sorry that it is so stupid of me to forget.”

“Who?”

“Theodor.”

Her eyes narrowed
on me keenly. “And who told you of this?” Like an eagle she fixed me;
nay, nay, nay
quivered her chin.

“Luisa.”

“Pay no attention to her. It is only her vapours. What nonsense!”

And that was the end of it. Luisa might be vapourous, this I was willing to concede and perhaps even had evidence for it that was not at the disposal of the aunt, but surely this did not affect the fact that she was either older or younger than her brother? Or a twin; I had forgotten this alternative. The plague take these sibyls and their dithyrambs! Yet that mysterious and improbable wedlock of a generation ago still held my attention and puzzled me, for reasons I could identify only obscurely. For example: in those brief weeks, months, or pair of years of their idyll, however long it had lasted, what language did the newlyweds speak? The sloe-eyed one was reared in Portuguese, with a substratum from the servants of whatever the indigenous language is in that part of the world, Urdu, I imagine, and received no education at all. The cowboy spoke American and no doubt some twangy French. But what use was this in abducting a Goan beauty from a seraglio? Sign language goes well up to a point, but in the long evenings alone there are serious matters to be discussed. I imagined her articulating to the ardent bridegroom, timidly, “You know mifeuya?” And in a flash of insight, probably erroneous, I saw in this business of language the key to her secret existence; the mother I mean. Suppose for the purpose of argument we have a person of normal intelligence, reared by bad-tempered servants in no language
at all or in baby talk, and suppose we imagine this person flung at an age of twenty into a multilingual society of bewildering complexity—a society which commonly substitutes speech for action—this person, struggling to express herself in three words of Urdu and badly pronounced French, might well be regarded by universal agreement as lacking in wit; a term which, especially in its French version esprit, is frequently confused with the ability to express oneself in well-constructed epigrams. An individual widely regarded as an imbecile will end by sharing the opinion. And so the mother, no doubt, totally withdrew herself from this world of salon intellectualism where the play of minds was rigorously verbal and the failure to recognize an allusion to Henri de Régnier a disgrace, and limited her satisfactions to the realm where language was superfluous, i.e., the world of the senses. She operated so successfully in this sphere that she was able to capture the slim-hipped and legendary if somewhat impecunious hero of the Far West—simply, no doubt, by keeping her mouth shut and directing her sloe eyes to advantage—and thus accomplished what the aunt was probably incapable of even if she had not regarded it as beneath her contempt; that is, reproducing herself in the normal female way. As for the frontiersman, we can believe he died happy, content with his own reckless courage and knowing his progeny assured, even though in an odd kind of household. The mother then retreated to the only other kind of sensualism available to her, gluttony, and who can blame her? She might have taken up drugs, or young footmen. Judgments of one's fellow human beings are very complex. Perhaps in time I would come to understand the aunt too, and forgive her for being what God had made her.