The Balloonist (21 page)

And what is the fantastic fellow doing now? Up there in the gondola with only the Ice Men for company he has found one of those bits of tissue paper we use for pigeon messages, and for five minutes now he has been covering it with endless sentences in a script as minute and meticulous as fine needlepoint. The task warms him up; the pink comes back into his face, the rime on his mustache disappears. The ink freezing, he continues with a pencil sharpened to a needle point with a bit of sandpaper. At this distance I can't read his dispatch and probably couldn't read it even if I held it to my eye, but I can imagine what it says. Alert!
Herald
and
Aftonbladet
! Stop presses! Valorous polarnauts report from the earth's axle bearing! An impressive triumph for mankind and the rubberized-silk industry. The heroes tired and cold but in good spirits as they stand on the peak of our planet. Thinking of loved ones. Report some difficulty in going to the bathroom and in keeping fingers warm but otherwise in good health. Could not have made it without help from Divine Providence. And so on. Oh, he is covering that tissue with a lot! Can the pigeon carry it all? I climb up into the gondola to see if he has really turned it over and is writing on the back now.

“Major, you know, I have here …”

“Yes, I know.”

“Just a few words. Later, of course, I thought …”

You will write
a book and stand on platforms from Durban to Ketchikan, recalling this moment. The photographs will be projected by a magic lantern. Here are my two companions, Major Crispin and young Theodor. And here are the three of us together. Perhaps you wonder who is operating the shutter. A polar bear? No. Ha, ha! As it happens, the photographic apparatus we had with us was fitted …

The slip of tissue in his fingers, he is bending now over the wicker aviary.

“Allow me, Waldemer. I've anticipated you.”

With some difficulty due to double mittens, I have removed the quilt, opened the wicker case, and extracted a pigeon. He is already perched on my wrist. A little dull and stiff he looks, poor fellow, he probably didn't expect it would be this cold at latitude ninety. And besides, all the pigeons are off their feed for some reason; the Indian corn is hardly touched. Waldemer rolls the small square of paper and passes it to me. I insert it into the aluminum tube on the pigeon's leg and in removing my hand I surreptitiously extract it again with my fingernail and slip it into my mouth. The thin tissue dissolves like a sacramental wafer and it is hardly necessary to swallow it. The tossed pigeon flutters indecisively, recovers himself, and begins to flap his wings more efficiently just as he is about to settle on the ice. He circles the Prinzess once or twice and then flies off in the wrong direction, but it is not a serious error. Waldemer is not aware of it, the pigeon is not aware of it, and only I know there is no dispatch in the aluminum tube. Another little dishonesty, one of my typical crimes. I hide Waldemer's shaving mirror, I extract his prose from the pigeon tube and eat it, and so on. Why do I behave in this way? Perhaps because of this perverse impulse I have, a totally indefensible quirk of my makeup, to withhold whatever I know from the common and vulgar fund of information, my secretiveness of a medieval alchemist. And perhaps too because I am anxious that the world down there below should not become too infatuated with progress. Our coming to this place was at least in part an accident, a whim of the winds, but mankind would only believe it was done with its machines and become even more puffed with pride than it already is. But won't the secret be known, won't my companions talk when they come back again to the World of Cities? Perhaps they will, or won't. Perhaps we won't come back.

In any case,
the pigeon flew off in the wrong direction. What is this talk of directions anyhow, since at this mathematically peculiar place where we are, there are only two directions, pole-hither and pole-hence? It is impossible to go farther north, there is no east or west, everything is south. I walk pole-hence a few steps to contemplate the scene. My two companions are working efficiently. They have got the tarpaulin out of the gondola and stretched it up on a pair of bamboo poles to protect us from this frozen drift mist, and Waldemer has lighted the primus. Theodor is unwrapping from butcher paper the chateaubriand we have brought along to celebrate the occasion. And in fact we are hungry! Great God, in our excitement we haven't eaten for twenty-four hours! A few metres from them, as they crouch behind their canvas, the gondola is wedged at a slight angle against a ridge in the ice. From it, diverging upward, the skein of rigging rises until it embraces finally the gigantic mass of the gas bag, its higher curves—latitudes I almost said—beginning to soften in the mist. And in truth there is a curious symmetry here. I stand on the very peak of the globe, mottled in its way with continents and other features, and on top of it, bolt upright, stands the balloon—this other soft planet with its own markings, the tapering red and white stripes that correspond to the meridians of the larger sphere. The thought of man has unwittingly contrived a metaphor of the planet on which he whirls through space. And powerfully I feel that just as I am a passenger on this balloon so am I on earth, a black speck in the immensity of space; and whoever is guiding it, the Great Nobody, is not very sure of his navigation.

Another of my vices: abstract thought. Twenty more steps backward, incidentally, and I will be permanently lost in this directionless mist and my ruminations will become even more metaphysical, since they will no longer be hampered with a body. The danger always lurks for the transcendentalist that he will achieve his goal, to be united with nature, and so cease to exist. Back the other way, then, polehither, to rejoin my companions.

Waldemer has got the cooking machine working with great efficiency. A blue flame hisses from the burner, the warmth is perceptible on the face even at a distance. Theodor ceremoniously produces the chateaubriand, a thick piece of Norwegian flesh from the tenderest part of the ox. This is soon crackling in the pan, but because it is frozen solid it will be some time before it is edible. I had expected a delicious savor to arise from this cooking, after our long hours of fasting, but for whatever reason the steak gives forth almost no odour.

“That pigeon—ha!” conjectures
Waldemer, bending to adjust the primus to an even hotter flame, “is probably well on his way to Trondheim now. What part of the way would you say, Major?”

“Oh, well on his way. Not halfway perhaps, but well on his way.”

Turning the steak with a pocket knife and not looking up, Theodor says simply, “The pigeon is dead.”

“Ha! Theodor. You're revealing yourself for a pessimist just like the Major. Here we have arrived, haven't we? Where no man before us has set foot—even though the Major was full of gloom and doom and talked about the pack ice drifting, difficulty of navigation, and so on. So let us look on the bright side of things and imagine the pigeon well on his way.” Waldemer in his mind's eye sees not only the pigeon flying through the air toward Trondheim but all those printing presses, gigantic, waiting for that little slip of tissue paper to fall into them, whereupon they will begin spewing out extra editions like Niagara.

“Gustav, I think this piece of meat might be done now.”

He removes it from the pan and cuts it into three pieces. In fact, it is crisply carbonized on the outside and a pale pink in the interior, a perfect steak in the American manner.

“Named after a poet. Did you know that, Waldemer?”

“No,” jovially. “I thought it meant, ‘Your hat's on fire.'”

“That's chapeau brûlant.” Theodor and Waldemer have at least one thing in common, they like to make bad jokes together. “The poet was Francois René de Chateaubriand. Who came to America and observed the redskins singeing buffalo flesh over their campfires.”

“Did he?” Waldemer considers all information valuable, even when it doesn't interest him personally. “H'mm.”

“Did you see that on the prairies, Gustav?” “I've already told you, I never went west of Philadelphia.”

Waldemer stops chewing and puts down his pocket knife. “Ah.”

“Ah?”

“The bubbly!” With a smile.

He is an incurable sentimentalist in spite of his conviction that he is a practical man, and he gets up with enthusiasm, hugging his sides against the cold, and goes to the gondola for the champagne. He is quite right in doing so, since the champagne has been brought along for exactly this moment. It is packed in its own narrow basket, padded in straw, under the floor of the gondola. He returns, holding the wire-wrapped bottle by the neck and a look of insufficiently suppressed satisfaction on his face.

“Ha! Almost
forgot.”

The wine is Veuve Clicquot of the best quality. “And properly chilled too, you can be sure of that.” Waldemer sets the bottle down on the snow. We look at each other. Waldemer looks at us.

“The glasses, drat it.”

He goes back for them, and Theodor says, “I'll bet we forgot them.”

“Everything has been checked by Alvarez. There is a list as long as your arm. The glasses are aboard, and Waldemer will find them.”

He finds them in the provision case, packed carefully in excelsior, and comes back carrying one in one hand and two in the other, and this is not easy to do when one is wearing double mittens. Sets them in the snow by the bottle, in a neat row. Twists the cork deftly like a man accustomed all his life to opening champagne, his expression set with the effort of doing this precisely, and exhaling a good deal of steam.

“Have to watch out—ha ha!—pesky cork may pop out and hit you in the eye—this stuff has a way, you know.”

“If you are blinded by a champagne cork, old fellow, never fear, we'll guide you back to New York.”

“Ha! Just takes a knack, that's all.”

The upshot is that the cork comes out in perfect silence; even an ominous silence.

“H'mm.”

The hollow-stemmed glasses are arranged in a row in the snow. With jovial ceremony he tilts the bottle's mouth over the first. Nothing. Increases the angle. Shakes bottle lightly. Inverts it totally over the glass. But even upside down it declines to give forth its contents.

“Well, I'll be dratted. What do you suppose? The stuff is defective.”

Theodor takes the bottle from him and examines it for a moment. Then, abruptly and with considerable force, he breaks it against the ice anchor. The bottle comes apart quite easily; the middle third shatters, the bottom and the top can be removed like hats from the molded form of substance contained within. Theodor patiently picks off the few remaining crumbs of glass.

“Ha! Well,
there's a predicament. Did you ever hear of the like? What should we do now, d'you suppose?”

“Eat it, I imagine.”

The steak is a succulent meal, even though the morsels, as we cut them with our pocket knives, get cold before we can bring them to our mouths and will freeze if we don't work quickly. As for the champagne, we divide this up too with our pocket knives and eat it with our mittened fingers. It consists of clusters of sharp needle-like crystals, pale white, with the taste of a sherbet made of apples. As it melts under the tongue a faint tingle sinks downward into the palate, merges into the substances of man. It's quite good, really.

Having melted the wine in our metabolism, and begun at least to digest the steak, we gather up the paraphernalia of our picnic and put everything back in the gondola. The tarpaulin we spread over the instrument ring to keep out the light, and as much of the frozen mist as possible. We are snug in our miniature habitation, a remorseless nature outside held back by wicker and canvas. Before we throw the Ice Men out onto the snow to make room for ourselves, I go outside one last time to be sure the Prinzess is well secured and that everything is as before. The wind has died completely. In the absolute calm the Prinzess stretches precisely upward, the hoarfrost beginning to whiten the red silk of her stripes. Before my face the particles of frozen mist hang fixed like tiny needle points. In the silence I can hear a muffled complaining and grinding from the pack ice under my feet: pushing, slowly buckling, its edges chafing and crumbling.

“What does it mean?”

Theodor has come out of the gondola behind me. He stands with the shawl tied over the top of his peaked cap, almost enclosing his cheeks and face.

“The calm? It means there is no wind.”

“And will there be wind again?”

“In time. Perhaps tomorrow. Perhaps in a month.”

His glance studies me, and he smiles faintly.

“Did you know that before we came?”

“That there might be no wind? Of course.”

He says nothing
more. His mittened hands in the pocket of his greatcoat, he contemplates the place where the horizon would be if it were not obscured in this white atmosphere. The sun can barely force its rays through it. It—the sun—has crept around in another direction now, moving imperceptibly sideways with no inclination whatsoever to rise as the sun does below in the Cities of Men. It looks more like a moon than a sun, a moon of red liquid metal, but totally cold. We are conscious only of cold, and of an immense and absolute isolation. The gondola fifty metres away is barely visible. It is clear that, to all purposes, the two of us are alone in the universe, and under such circumstances convention can be dispensed with. This being so, I am free to concede at least to a Mental Diary that what I feel for Theodor is love. I admire the recalcitrance of his flesh and the keen, faintly contemptuous profile of his face folded in the enwrapping shawl, his soft and almost baby-like skin spotted with frostbite, but sufficient in himself and making no complaint. I think, for some reason in French: Il sait se défendre. We are perhaps a metre and a half apart and remain so. Neither of us speaks. What separates us is only the ten thousand years of complication in which we have hopelessly enmeshed the naturalness and simplicity of our actions, that is to say, everything that humanity calls civilization. Is it possible after the ten thousand years to feel a natural sentiment? And how to tell the natural from the perverse? And yet, half-frozen as I am, I feel myself capable of leaping like an armed warrior into this abyss God has dug with His hands between man and the animal. Perhaps this is a delirium, a malicious and nonexistent notion playing on the brain fibers as false images sometimes play on the inside of the retina. Malicious and nonexistent? Malicious because nonexistent. We are both tired; we are all three tired. We go back into the gondola and the Ice Men are politely evicted from their places; they seem content lying in a row on the snow outside. Then we unroll our sacks of reindeer hide and I lie down chastely with my two companions.