The Balloonist (17 page)

Whether or not I was correct about all this, it was clear that the mother had found a way of life only moderately damaging to the health and not requiring complicated sentences. A certain mythology existed about her in the household, according to which she was supposed to have no opinions and was not to be told anything shocking. Her soul was supposed to be covered with a neat and shiny coat of varnish, which nothing could penetrate. Yet occasionally a spark of personality asserted itself in unexpected ways. She was never actively drawn to anything, except food; her days of passion were behind her. But her organ of repulsion was still vigorous. She “took dislikes,” as Luisa said. Sometimes a ray of
sunlight striking her in the eye, or an unfortunate remark of a guest, would produce an embarrassing reaction. There was the bluff English consular official, for example, who was pleased to be amused at her caste mark. “I see you've got your sealing wax on,” he told her with British joviality. “Ready to be posted.” She smiled at him timidly. She was holding a teacup, and in an odd gesture, almost as though she were offering a toast, she raised it to the maximum height she could reach in the sari she was wearing, about the level of her head. Since she was short and he about six feet tall, this brought the cup to the level of his chest. He observed it with perplexity, and she told him rather anxiously, “Moment,” as a sign that he should not go away but remain exactly where he was. Going to the sideboard, she set down the teacup and bent over the ottoman from a nearby sofa. Struggling under this weight, she brought the ottoman to the Englishman and set it before him, a little to one side. Then she returned to the sideboard for the teacup, mounted with it onto the ottoman which raised her almost to the same level as the Englishman, lifted the cup with the gesture as before, and poured the contents over his head. Then, getting down from the ottoman, she turned to the spectators and remarked quite calmly and more or less apropos de rien, “I hate a fool.” It became necessary to lead her out of the room. “Mother is singular,” Luisa would say smoothly at such moments. It was an accurate Dickensian adjective and the more patient observer perceived what he ought to have seen long before, that the mother was thoroughly in command of her behavior and that very little happened to her in the world that she had not chosen to happen. This life of hers was singular, from the simple syllables she pronounced only after some thought to the systematic manner in which she ate toast, afterward moistening her ten fingers at her lips in exact order, then wiping them on the napkin one after the other in the same sequence. If it were contrary to all likelihood that her emotions were so violent, it was even more extraordinary that she controlled them with such precision. Regarded in this light her abduction or seduction by the frontiersman turned in the mind's eye into a positive act and one that she had willed herself, and even Luisa herself became more plausible. All members of the family, I was beginning to see, shared certain traits; tempered in Luisa's case by the laconic and graceful recklessness of the cowboy.

“The wind
is veering. South-southwest now. It's come around more than a point.”

Theodor, the scarf still bound around his head, is standing by the theodolite watching me with his dark bedouin eyes. For a fraction of a second I fail to grasp what he is talking about. Then I sight into the instrument, check the compass, and see that he is correct. Had I been asleep? No, my eyes were only closed for the five minutes or so I had allowed myself to rest them briefly from this whiteness.

“A little woolgathering, eh, Major? Looked as though you were in the Land of Nod.”

Not feeling in the mood for bluff repartee, I ignore Waldemer and address myself to the meteorological question.

“More wind now too. Must be thirty knots. A gust from the east would be helpful. We're already off course to the right. But the wind will back as the cyclonic system passes over us. And then come around to the north, in a day or two.”

With the cold stiffening my lips this is about as long a speech as I care to make, at least on technical subjects. The temperature is steady at minus ten centigrade. The wind scours along the pack below us, sending streamers of cake flour sliding along its surface and making a sound like a dull hum. That slightly sharper grumble is the noise of the ice grinding and splitting against itself. Strange that in this cutting gale we feel no wind at all and have the impression of floating in a calm. We are even sheltered from the snow by the swelling girth of silk overhead; it is as though we were suspended under an immense umbrella. In the well-equipped gondola there is a feeling of safety, a coziness, as though in this tempest, in this most inhospitable part of the world, we are somehow immune to all the worst that nature can contrive. This immunity is an illusion; the weight of snow is accumulating on precisely that upper hemisphere of the silk we can't see, and down here below, a thin and crystalline rime is slowly forming on everything, the ropes, the wicker of the gondola, the balloon itself. This sugar candy will eventually weigh tons and destroy us, if something isn't done about it. Yet for some reason I am unable to feel any sense of peril, and probably my companions are the same. We are conscious only of cold, and of an immense and absolute isolation.

While I was
resting, curled up in a corner of the gondola with the hood drawn over my face, Waldemer has busied himself by making lunch. It is four o'clock in Greenwich, but we pay heed to the clock only for navigation purposes and eat whenever we have the chance. The fragrance of beef stew rises from below us. If it were quiet we might hear the hiss of these large snowflakes falling into the hot pan on the stove, but it is not quiet; constantly in our ears is the vague and muffled rumble from the pack below.

Theodor is still watching me reflectively, with the same expression on his face that I saw when I opened my eyes only a few minutes before. It isn't at all an anxious expression and there is even, it seems to me, a trace of irony in it.

“And the weight of this snow on the balloon. What will we do about it?”

“This is only a squall. It will pass quickly.”

“And the rime is forming on the rigging.”

“Knock it off with a mallet if you want something to do.”

But his mood isn't active, only observant and reflective, with tendencies even to the metaphysical.

“Do you know, I think I used to dream of this place as a child. You've brought me to a strange part of the world, Gustav. This whiteness … this space with no walls, no horizon, as though we were floating in a universe without matter and only white space around us … and this kind of white thunder coming from a distance. Do you think it's possible to dream of a place—a real place—you've never seen, and then later find that your dream was real?”

“When I was a child I used to dream about America.”

“And what did you dream of?”

“Buffalo, and prairies.”

“And when you came to America, did you find the buffalo and the prairies?”

“No, when I came it was to Philadelphia. All I saw were horse cars.”

Waldemer looks up curiously when I mention his native land, but returns his attention to the stew as soon as he realises our conversation is metaphysical.

“And what do you dream of here in the gondola when you sleep?”

“Paris, at times. At times, other places.”

“So much? But
you've hardly been asleep.”

This is true; it strikes me too as a little curious. But if this whiteness continues, this sphere of milky ether that surrounds us on all sides including above and below, it won't be necessary to sleep in order to dream; the mind itself will fix on its own images for lack of anything outside it to grasp. I open my eyes: whiteness. I close them: blood veins and sparks, symptoms of mild irritation from cold and white light. It is important to fix on something, in order for the consciousness not to be spread out, dissolved, lost in this dimensionless milk. I try to recall in my mind the exact dimensions, the plan, the furniture of my lodgings in rue de Rennes, the salon with its dusty brocade hangings and its window that looked out on a white enameled sign across the street saying BOULANGERIE PÂTISSERIE and next door to it VILLE DE PARIS SERVICE MUNICIPAL DES POMPES FUNÈBRES in gold letters on black, the little hall that led to the bedroom one way and to the W.C. the other, the parquet floor that became as familiar to me as my own hand as I pondered there, staring at it for hours, at grips with the baffling enigma of constructing a wave detector for aeromagnetic emanations which would produce an audible signal for the operator. That white waste of the unknown, filled with invisible mathematical formulae, was as formless and frustrating as a storm in the arctic. The crux of the problem, I grasped finally, was the rectification or filtering of these electrical tremblings in the air, so that what remained of them would move in only one direction and thus have the capability of activating a magnetophone. I had rejected Signor Marconi's “coherer,” filled with metal filings, as too delicate and too easily disturbed by joggings for the use I had in mind for it. Instead, my attention was caught by several papers of Krobenius in which he described the properties of certain mineral crystals which allowed an electrical flux to pass through them in one direction but not in another. These papers—unpublished and existing only in manuscript form in the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève—I studied with some care, although they were less enlightening than I had hoped. In them Krobenius was reticent about the identity of the minerals used in his investigations, describing them only as “certains sels cohésifs de la famille plombière.” I then wrote for and obtained an appointment to visit him in his studio in Neuilly, but this interview was somewhat unproductive. Krobenius, an eccentric octogenarian in a long grey smock, denied having worked with crystals and pretended to be deaf when I referred to the manuscripts I had found in the library. As I was being ushered out of the studio with a rather perfunctory courtesy, however, I did catch a glimpse of an envelope on the table: a bill from a well-known dealer in gems and minerals in Place Saint-André-des-Arts. It was a simple matter to go to this dealer and request, “I have just come from Professor Krobenius, and would like samples of the same cohesive salts of the lead family which you sold to him, I am sorry, the name slips my mind.”

The crystal
in question proved to be galena. Provided with a dozen small grey and gleaming chips of this substance, I hastened feverishly back to my lodgings. The antenna wire I had draped out the window, to the great disapproval of the concierge. The filter or wave sieve of Signor Marconi, which allowed only waves of a predetermined length to pass, I was already familiar with and had built several. It consisted of a coil of fine wire wound around a cylinder and operating in conjunction with a spark condenser of tinfoil and paper. The coil was provided with a sliding contact that enabled me to vary the wavelength at will. To one of these contrivances I now hastily connected a crystal from the dozen in the envelope. The only remaining step was to wire the Bell magnetophone to this arrangement in such a way that the rectified pulses would activate its diaphragm; I was not sure how to go about this and a good deal of trial and error would be necessary. Unrolling a length of high-quality silver solder, I had just begun to heat the soldering iron over a spirit lamp when the pest of a concièrge knocked on the door. Under ordinary circumstances this individual left me alone, having learned that I was a person of solitary habits with a tendency to ferocity, and she ventured as far as my lair on the fifth floor only when she had something of importance to communicate, like a telegram.

The door being unlocked, I called for her to enter, still preoccupied with the task of heating the iron.

“Pardon. A monsieur to see you.”

“What kind of a monsieur?”

“A foreigner.”

“Well, I am a foreigner myself. What else?”

“A military person, young, of good manners.”

“Well, show
the infernal nuisance in.” I still wasn't paying complete attention. I tried the heat of the iron with a wet forefinger.

There presently appeared in the doorway a very young man, hardly more than a youth to judge from his smooth cheek, with a long-faced and dark-eyed sort of handsomeness, improbably clad in the uniform of a German military academy. The cap seemed almost too heavy for his slight neck to support, but he did not take it off.

“Monsieur Crispin?”

I nodded, undecided whether to put the iron down or to go on with my work.

“I have the honour to present myself. I am Luisa's brother.” Definitely, although reluctantly, I put the iron down. “Ah, you are Teddy!”

But he was cool, nodded only faintly, and evidently would have preferred a more formal mode of address. I picked up the iron again, examined it, and wondered again if I might not go on heating it as he talked. “And so—to what do I owe the honour?”