The Balloonist (27 page)

“Entrez.”

It was the Breton
footman, the short-legged, swarthy, and sullen one, with the tea service on a tray and the napkin on his shoulder. He set the tea service down on the round pedestal table in the corner of the room, a table provided with two Louis Quinze chairs upholstered in tapestry.

“You may pour, please, Yves. Two lumps for me and only lemon for Madame. And then leave us alone.”

The brute said nothing at all, nor did his face show any expression; probably like the other bovines he was incapable of it. He served the tea with a minimum of clumsiness, dropping a lemon pip into my cup and almost, but not quite, reaching in to pick it out with his fingers. Then he departed. I understood now that the ceremony of ringing for tea was only in order that Yves might be a witness to our little masquerade. And why not? He was probably used to such things.

I drank my tea and then, impelled by a feminine prescience, went back to the wardrobe to look at the things. It was a large structure of polished mahogany, almost a room in itself, and there must have been three hundred garments in it. At the end, a very logical place, was the German military coat with its metal buttons, and the cap hanging next to it. The label inside the cap was authentic: Lindevarius Hutmacher, Wiesbaden. There were several pairs of trousers, not counting the ones worn at the moment by the Persian prince. At the end of the wardrobe there was even a smell of tobacco. I went back and sat again at the little round table.

“And if you had called me out? I might have killed you, damn it.”

“I've taken pistol lessons. It's not very difficult.”

I turned away to the window. Tea was over; the Persian prince stood up impulsively, came around the table, and enclosed my chest from the rear with two arms of velour. “Tu es charmante ce soir. N'est-ce pas?” The adjective with its feminine ending fell naturally from a voice that was now a light tenor, only slightly thin in timbre.

Now even more than before she was charming and ingenious, versatile, Protean, leading me onward like a slightly mocking will-o'-the-wisp in the shadows, and in Paris at least unseizable; the French insaisissable is better, because the sibilants suggest something serpentine and supple slithering out of a grasp. I was busy with the preparations for the long-anticipated polar expedition which was to
take place the following summer; in a few weeks I would go to New York to confer with Waldemer on the details. In the meantime, I defended myself with a certain manly skill; for example, I refused to see her in the daytime and in this way I even managed to get some work done. After six a magnetism—which had become a habit now—drew me inevitably to Quai d'Orléans. I wasn't a fiancé any more (and never had been, that was left to the Peninsula) but an odd kind of family friend, one that no one in the family had anything to do with but Luisa. And she in fact little enough, because she was busy herself. The voice lessons in Passy continued, mornings from nine to eleven. Meanwhile, she must learn Swedish, because one of the rules of this lunatic game we were involved in was that she must master everything that I knew, or attempt to, while there were things that she knew (feminine things) that I was not allowed to know, or was admitted to only in tiny stages. Her attempts to try her Swedish on me, or communicate with me in that language (I never responded to her in it on any occasion) were curious: rather pointless remarks that might have been those of a madwoman, not that they were at all violent, but they seemed to proceed from an internal logic having an insufficient connection with the events outside in the external world; or, more precisely, they seemed to proceed from a mind that lurked quite patiently in its lair until the exact event presented itself that seemed to make a given remark appropriate, and then pounced on it. For example, the menu between her two gloved hands at Maxim's (where, the Baedeker cautioned the English tourist, “Ladies are not admitted”), she pondered with imperial condescension and presently inquired: Vad dricker du för vin? I am sorry, Luisa, I only drink wine in French. And after a moment, when I didn't answer: Hör du mig, Gustav?

Yes, I hear, but I choose not to respond. I gave her an objective glance, silent and quite long, and returned to my own study of the menu. But she persisted, not at all disconcerted by my failure to answer, her chin or the part of it visible over the menu still raised in that slightly imperious way: Jäg försöker lära mig svensk. I could
see
she was trying to learn it, but I remained deaf, out of rudeness perhaps or my own kind of insanity, but also to signal that any effort on her part to turn me into her Swedish tutor was condemned to death in the womb and that I did not intend to allow this or any other language, including that of mathematics, to become a plaything between us which she would then use to entangle me even more firmly into her bonds of knitting wool and embroidery silk, which would eventually lead to my total domestication. Attempts to speak to beasts of the jungle in their own tongue, I sought to imply, are not only futile but might be dangerous.

But she had
learned a great many of these ready-made, paste-themin-your-album sentences (doubtless they were memorized from a phrase book or learned by rote from a Swedish master whose identity and existence were effectively concealed from me), and in fact her accent was passable, one might almost say good. It was several days before the opportunity presented itself for her to use the next one: Jag skulla vilja ha en kopp kaffee. Garçon, en kopp kaffee for Mademoiselle! In time she might even learn to speak the cursed lingo and make up sentences for herself. Var är saxen? Where indeed were the scissors? She must have waited at least a week for this event to come by so that she could address it in Viking. We were in Quai d'Orléans and she had discovered a loose thread in my coat sleeve that wanted cutting off—a thing that I detest people doing, especially women. Or perhaps she had pulled the thread loose when I wasn't looking as the only way of utilizing number eighty-six in the phrase book. O, det var synd! (She had dropped the scissors; it was too bad perhaps but not really a sin.) And, as I remember, it was later that same evening as she poured me a tiny glass of cognac by the piano that she articulated the longest and most complicated of these linguistic Frankenstein monsters, one with relative pronouns, dependent clauses, and even a comma in the middle, and perhaps the only one of them all that had any significance: Vem som helst som har besökt Stockholm vet, att man dricker mycket akvavit i Sverige. Even the intonation was correct, our droll Hyperborean way of lilting a little upward on each syllable, and the irony that is one of our national characteristics even among the thickest-skulled of peasants. Ah, she still remembered that akvavit in Stockholm! It was as though she blamed me and the akvavit for what had happened—twenty-four hours later!—in the cottage in Finland, and by extension for everything that followed, including Stresa, but not Paris, where nothing happened. And why didn't it happen in Paris? Because she was adroit and insaisissable, slipping blithely and with a grave little non-smile out of my grasp each time to speak of theatre tickets or explore in her reticule for a chocolate which she popped into my mouth to keep me temporarily at bay. Ah, Luisa, det war synd!

She having at
length found the tickets, we left the house on the Île, crossed the Pont-Marie on foot to rue Saint-Antoine, and went off in a cab to the Théâtre de l'Oeuvre, rue Blanche, not far from Place Pigalle. It was not a very savoury neighborhood in my estimation, but Luisa was drawn as though by a secret vice to any curious and outré event that took place in the general region of Montmartre. For this occasion she was dressed in a new manner, her fifth or sixth, I had lost count: tailored skirt, mannish jacket, and knee-length Russian leather boots. Even a tiny riding crop, which she carried inconspicuously in her left hand like a marshal's baton. For a miracle, this time she left the reticule behind. Perhaps she felt she was defended by the little whip.

In the darkness of the cab she passed me the tickets. They were fleetingly illuminated by a street lamp.
Ubu Roi
, what was that? A play, it seemed, by some ragamuffin who frequented Boulevard Saint-Germain. (I remembered explaining to her at our first meeting that I never went to plays.) There was a crush in rue Blanche in front of the theatre, and another one after we got inside. She also knew that I disliked crowds.

Finally we were seated somehow, in our own seats or perhaps in someone else's, it didn't seem to matter. There was really no need for a spectacle on the stage; the audience was enough. Men in trailing capes or long velvet cloaks with silver clasps, girls in the costume of Botticelli's Printemps, with hair to match. A woman in coarse worsted tights intended to be flesh-coloured but actually a pale orange, a purple tunic open in the front, and dirty ballet slippers; a gypsy cloak around her shoulders. In front of us was a muscular individual who seemed to be a bicycle racer: tight sweater, short coat, and old trousers tucked into his socks. Farther along in the same row a horse-faced Irish poet, and beyond him an individual wearing a headdress of Indian feathers which he refused to take off, to the indignation of the spectators behind him.

“Do you know these people?”

“Some of them.”

“They are your friends?”

“No, silly.”

“Then why
have we come here?”

“You remember M. Lugné-Poe, the young man who comes sometimes to Quai d'Orléans?”

I supposed I did.

“Well, this is his theatre.”

“Ah.”

Luisa was pleased with herself. If M. Lugné-Poe came to her house, which almost belonged to the best society of the Île Saint-Louis, then that guaranteed not only the respectability but the importance of his theatre, in her eyes. (Or leave out respectability, that had nothing to do with the matter, and the importance compensated for it in any case.) As evidence that we were present at a significant event, she pointed out the eminent critic Sarcey, the theatre reviewer of
Le Temps
, a massive and impeccably clad gentleman who seemed too large for the seat he was sitting in. M. Sarcey seemed unhappy already; he took out his watch and glanced at it frequently, and unfurled a newspaper and read it while waiting for the performance to begin.

After some delay a crude deal table was brought out before the curtain, then a chair, then a carafe and drinking glass. Finally the author himself, M. Jarry, appeared before the curtain and sat down at the table. He began reading from a paper in front of him with a monotonous voice. He was a small man in a black suit too large for him, his face made up in the flat and blank white of a clown. He sipped nervously from the glass. It was impossible to tell what his discourse was about. Something about the tradition of the Guignol, masks, the plausibility of revolvers being shot off in the year 1000. He implied that his play took place in “Poland … that is to say, nowhere.” At the end he bowed like a doll breaking in two and disappeared. Next a young man came out and played the overture along with his wife, four-handed, on the piano. Between the two of them they made quite a din. I was not a musician and had no opinion of this.

Finally the curtain went up. Some rather childishly painted scenery. Trees, a bed, a fireplace with a skeleton hanging by it, a window in the sky. Out came King Ubu in a pear-shaped costume. He looked around him. Finally discovered the audience. And bellowed a monosyllabic obscenity, a rather amusing one I felt, if only for the way it was mispronounced. I glanced at Luisa. She was sitting looking straight at the stage with her chin raised, receptive but imperial, in exactly the same way as though she were listening to Chopin.

There was
a second of silence, then bedlam. It was fifteen minutes or more before the play could go on. There were whistles, jeers, catcalls. Several members of the audience got up and walked out, including a gentleman who trod on our toes on his way down the row. A few objects soared up out of the pit and onto the stage; probably they were only wadded-up balls of paper. Those remaining in the audience were divided into two camps, the whistlers and the clappers. Several fist fights started in the orchestra. I began looking for a suitable exit, but Luisa was gazing upon it all placidly, her mouth fixed not in a smile exactly but in a little line of satisfaction, the riding crop lying across her knees. The Irish poet hadn't understood the obscene word and his friend was explaining it to him, of necessity raising his voice almost to a shout. In the row ahead of us the bicycle racer had climbed up onto his seat. “You wouldn't understand Shakespeare either!” he yelled at the objectors. Another voice behind us was chanting, with the repeated monotony of a machine, “It's Lugné-Pot-de-Chambre! Lugné-Pot-de-Chambre!” Some people were undecided which camp to join and were clapping and whistling in alternation; the bicycle racer was doing both at once.