The Balloonist (8 page)

“The linear velocity at which we approach the Pole is constant and we must inevitably reach it in time. But what you have neglected is that the
angular
motion—the rate at which we are whirling about the spiral—becomes infinite as the airship approaches the Pole, so that the centrifugal forces involved will either destroy the airship or the laws of physics, one or the other.”

Congratulations, Theodor. You are correct and have beaten your teacher in an open demonstration, even though the audience may not appreciate it.

“H'mm.”

Waldemer regards all these hieroglyphics and insect tracks with increasing sheepishness, suspecting now that both his legs are being pulled in different ways and feeling that it is hardly fair ganging up on a fellow in this way.

“D'you know
what I think, Theodor? I think the Major's paradoxes of Zeno are catching. You're as big a wag as he is. I would never have suspected it of you. I thought you were a more serious young fellow.”

Waldemer's American and pragmatic head is screwed squarely on his shoulders. Now that he has caught the expressions on our faces, he isn't going to buy either of these theories. He grins a little himself. Actually, of course, the spiral isn't a paradox of Zeno but a chimaera, a mythical beast existing only in the world of abstract mathematics. This wind if it continues to blow will bring us to somewhere in the neighborhood of Wrangel Island on the eastern coast of Siberia, an unattractive itinerary. But I know too that the cyclonic system to the east will very likely deepen and pass south of us, so that in a day or two this deflection in our course will be self-correcting. Still, I will leave Waldemer to wrestle in his mind with the spiral, even if he suspects—knows now—that it is only a joke. I have to confess that another of my vices (the first one is thinking) is that I am not candid by nature. In order for me to feel quite myself there must be something in me that I have not confided to my fellow human beings, even one I am as fond of as I am of Waldemer. For my
self
, to me, is simply—what I know and the others do not. Waldemer is afraid that if he can't see himself in a mirror he will cease to exist, and I fear that if I tell all I know, I will cease to exist. I am aware of course that such a stance is petty and insincere, and also leaves me open to a charge of being unscientific. For a scientist—is he not?—is one who seeks selflessly for the truth in order to share it with his fellow men. If you discover secrets in your alembics and don't publish them in the accepted journals, instead hug them to yourself and use them to carry out the schemes of your private will, then you are not a scientist but a sorcerer. Give us the truth! they clamour, like children pestering for candy. Well, probably they are happier without it. And what would they do with it if I shared it with them, this poetic and intoxicating thing I have discovered? Make a toy out of it, or a weapon.

My two companions, at least, are content to leave these mysteries of the ether to me. “The wind may change tomorrow; if not we may decide to do something about it.” Waldemer nods, Theodor silently studies the penciled sworl I have drawn on the chart. It is getting somewhat colder now. The thermometer on the instrument ring reads minus four degrees centigrade. Perhaps this is due to our altitude, perhaps to the disturbance approaching from the east.
I put up the hood of my reindeer-skin coat and remove my arms from its sleeves, hugging them over my chest. The coat is roomy enough that, taking out the arms in this way, it is possible to turn around inside it as though it were a small tent. Waldemer has pulled down the flaps of his hunting cap and buttoned them under his chin. I can see that he is cold but resolved to say nothing about it even if his nose and ears fall off. The end of this first organ has already turned a faint violet, the colour of the wax used to seal hermetic instruments in laboratories. Theodor is impassive. His ivory skin has only assumed a slight grey cast, as though the blood has drained out of it. His military cap has no flaps and it is his ears, I predict, that will be the first to be frostbitten. It is curious that the sun gives so little heat. It has now risen almost to its maximum altitude. But it has not seemed to rise very much; instead, it only gives the impression of trotting around the horizon from east to south, as though it were following us at a distance and trying to get a glimpse of what we are doing. It is absolutely disk-like, giving no impression of sphericity at all. It has another quality I have noticed all morning and which seems to me significant. Perhaps through some kind of physiological reaction, an irritation of the retina, its surface gives an impression of crawling slightly, the areas of deeper red shifting slowly to this or that part of the disk. I am deeply attached to the sun. I regard it as divine, life-giving, and ominous. That I am deliberately fleeing from it now, I the sun-devout Scandinavian-that in the middle of summer I should be fleeing northward to hide from its warmth around the bulge of the earth-is in itself significant. Does the sun know what I am doing? Undoubtedly. There it is, crawling redly, immobile, watching.

A
n hour or
two past midnight. In the polar twilight, a hazy and indistinct grey with tinges of pink, I am asleep or am I? it doesn't matter, I am aware perhaps of the creaking of ropes and the gentle breathing of my companions and yet at the same time another part of me moves in other places, unreal and yet far more solid in their myriad form and texture than this insubstantial particle of reality in which I am suspended half-asleep from a globe of hydrogen in a sea of frozen air. In this other consciousness into which I slip deeper now and then as one might descend lazily into a bath of tepid water, a bath that calls and attracts with its warmth and yet to which one cannot surrender totally and immerse one's being for more than a few instants since breathing is not possible in that violet and soporific fluid, in this deeper consciousness the objects are hard, vivid, piercing, all the more hard and vivid for their very unreality. The word
sleep
is greatly too simple to describe this state. At one end, toward the surface, it merges into daydreaming; at the deeper extreme, if one were to sink to the bottom, it is death. But the soul knows how to preserve itself. It drifts at a nice depth, now descending a little and now rising to touch the surface, in the manner of those sea creatures who must breathe air and yet whose nourishment lies deep. I hope I shall not snag myself on a telegraph cable down there. Inside the skin coat, when I awaken and only drowse a little, there is a smell of reindeer hair and tar, a comforting pungence, I am quite warm in this tent I have made by pulling my arms inside the coat. Doubled until the knees approach my chest, the hood over my face, I am enclosed in animal content. In the moments when I sink lower, toward full
sleep, a curious phenomenon takes place. A part of my body, mistaken about the circumstances or perhaps responding to some private reality of its own, awakens and stirs toward a goal. In the vividness of its imagination this part of me thinks of, invents, or conjectures its mirror image in another similar and yet importantly different organism, a concavity to match its convexity. The stupid brutal thing is not a whit discouraged at not finding this concavity; it goes on yearning in its stiff and mindless way, exciting itself with its own thumping heart. In my moments of half wakefulness I am inclined to be ironic about this delusion this fifth limb of mine seems to have fallen into. And yet is it not strange and curious that a part of me, a part of my consciousness even though a lower and coarser part, should mistake a portion of reindeer skin in this way for the embrace of a yearned-for and beloved companion! And stranger still that only a single scrap of membrane, of all the animal substance in the universe, should be the one this fine nerve of mine should desire to touch—that it should be so exigent, so obsessedly selective, and yet so easily deluded. It is only in the wakened state that the body makes fine distinctions. Asleep or half-asleep it is ready to settle for the shabbiest simulacrum. Fold of reindeer hide or whatever, beloved one, this blind snake tightened in an arc is your adorer! What twaddle, a plague take it. It would be better to stay awake and put an end to such foolishness. I am not very sleepy anyhow. I turn over inside the warm skin bag, settle my limbs into place, and doze off or half-doze again, but this time with a difference. Through a trick I learned long ago as a boy, and practice now and then as other men practice with dumbbells or playing cards, I enter fully conscious into the storehouse of my dream matter and select exactly those pictures that I choose rather than those that blind seeking of the blood happens to stumble over, so that sleep becomes something like one of those stereopticon viewers that fasten on your nose and enable you to see with a vivid roundness, more powerful than life, whichever of those cardboard images you choose from the box on the table. In short, it is possible to dream what one will, although it requires some effort, just as it is possible to remember
what one will
, a street number or the formula for saltpeter.

But it is necessary to be hard, as hard as an angel. Steely, gripping the memory in my will's fingers, I pierce downward through layers that shimmer as they part
and close again behind me, their soft torn edges clinging to my limbs. In a stratum not far from the surface I encounter a yellow room in a villa, Stresa. Then a carriage on rue de Rivoli, a balloon flight over Suomi, an angry white face in the twilight in the Bois. Finally, deeper than all these and a good deal more vague and evanescent, there comes into focus the hall of the Musée Carnavalet on the occasion of the Fifth Congress of the Paraphysical Society in 1895, where I was lecturing on electromagnetic phenomena in the atmosphere. I had just embarked on the possibility of extraterrestrial sources of the waves when I caught sight of an extraordinary face in the audience. A rather long, pale, and absolutely motionless visage with eyes fixed intently on me, a lofty brow, a mouth that gave the impression of being held in place only by a conscious effort of the will so that two little creases formed below it on the chin. Immaculately groomed, gown from Worth's, soft hair gathered into a knot at the back. Incredibly enough, at that time she was only nineteen. Following the lecture she presented herself at the podium and engaged me in a discussion of the Female Question.

“Captain” (I was a captain in those days), “these matters, emanations or whatever you call them, do you believe they are susceptible of investigation by women?”

I looked up from my notes and hardly knew what to answer. Was this an attack or some kind of an overture of friendship, of admiration? “Why? On the other hand, why not?”

“It seems—I mean—I gather from what you say that they are an ethereal kind of thing.” Did she always speak this rapidly, and not quite looking at the person she was addressing? “C'est à dire, subtle, and perhaps women, being creatures of intuition and especially good at invisible things, might be particularly fitted to investigate them. Also they can be studied in one's own home with very little apparatus, and they don't get one's hands dirty.”

Or she said something like this, I don't remember exactly. I do remember that she spoke with a great assurance and even a challenging air, a faint touch of contempt, and yet that she blushed as she did so, a kind of pink spider forming on her throat and moving upward into the paleness under her chin. The little speech on feminism evidently came from one part of her being, the vascular reaction from another.

“In fact,
a good deal of apparatus is required,” I countered as moderately as I could, “electrostatic generators, coils of wire, Leyden jars, and things of this sort, many of which are expensive. Not only do they get your hands dirty, but frequently there is danger involved; for example, a good many observations can be made only from airships. I hardly think you would like that. As for the tasks men and women are adapted for, you make too much of the difference. The parts of the human body that distinguish the sexes”—(second appearance of the pink spider; I plunged on)—”are the most ephemeral. In skeletons they are hardly discernible except to an expert. Whereas, comparing man with ape, the skeletal difference is apparent even to a layman. I wonder where you get your opinions about intuitions and such things?”

But one of her qualities that I learned immediately was that she never answered questions. To frame a remark to her in the form of a question was to distract her instantly into another subject, as though by an invisible system of switches. “Do you know the dramas of Strindberg?”

“I have never been to a play in my life.”

“So much the worse for you. You talk as though you had read him. He is mad of course. I can assure you I am perfectly able to afford Leyden jars and coils of wire, and I would adore ascending in an airship. I have a book of engravings about the frères Montgolfier. It's a pity you haven't read Strindberg. It might have armed you against me. As it is, you are my victim. Captain, please come to tea at my aunt's. It is perfectly proper, she belongs to the best society of the Île Saint-Louis. You can explain your emanations to her, and perhaps you might give me a list of the apparatus I ought to buy.”

I said that I would or I wouldn't, I don't know what I said, but the outcome was that I actually presented myself at the house on Quai d'Orléans on the following day, dressed like an idiot in a white shirt and patent-leather pumps. The aunt maintained a curious establishment. It was hard to say whether it was respectable or not. Luisa in stressing its propriety had perhaps slightly overemphasized the point, since what was the purpose of mentioning this if there wasn't some slight doubt about it? The whole family had a characteristic quality of raffishness combined with the greatest kind of dignity, a juxtaposition that reappeared in the various members in various disguises but was always recognizable once you were familiar with it. Perhaps it owed this to its ancestry, which tended
toward the mongrelish, although in a highly aristocratic way. The American father by this time was of course not on the scene, since he had gone back to his own country through some complicated circumstances that I didn't quite follow and had died in an attack on an Apache camp in New Mexico in 1875. This exotic demise was evidently not considered comme il faut in the family, since he was never spoken of. In addition to his debts he left to his family only the quintessentially transatlantic name of Hickman, which everyone concealed as though it were an unfortunate secret. His widow, Luisa's mother, evidently lived as a kind of dependent and companion of the aunt, wore saris and even a caste mark on her brow, although she was three quarters of European blood, and did nothing in particular except drink tea and eat sticky Levantine pastries. She was not held in very high regard among the Silva e Costas, perhaps because of her marriage to the handsome but penniless American frontiersman. The aunt was a spinster. Her long face tended slightly to the equine and her eyebrows sloped a little outward, like the eaves of a house. She shared the ivory family complexion, although in her case it had been marred by a childhood smallpox that had lent it a kind of lunar and irregular texture like weathered alabaster, or satin from an old wardrobe. She also suffered slightly from a chorea-like affliction that caused slight and almost imperceptible movements of her face: the chin, fixed as it were by effort, nevertheless tremored to the left a fraction of a millimeter or less, once or so a second, returning immediately to its former position, in a movement so subtle and so faint that it was to an ordinary twitch as the pulsing of a tiny insect's heart is to the beating of a clock. The beholder, in fact, did not necessarily notice this movement upon first meeting the aunt, it was so slight. Once you had become aware of it, however, it lent a faint negative quality to everything the aunt said and did; whether she praised your poem, invited you again to tea, agreed with your politics, the imperceptible vibration of her head seemed to reiterate constantly, “Nay, nay. It is all nothing, I deny all.” She dressed in long gowns of the Empire period and wore her hair in ringlets, although the effect was somewhat marred by the gold-rimmed spectacles that gave her a kind of Voltairean air. It was said she was very wealthy. I believe she disliked men on principle, and perhaps this is where Luisa got her suffragism, although the connection was a little tenuous. In any case she was very polite to me. She spoke French in an accent of her own that involved distinguishing sharply between the vowels, with a different shape of mouth to go with each. “On voit,” she told me calmly and not unkindly, “que vous z-êtes un vr-rai é-rudit.” I forgot to record that one of her breasts had been removed in an operation and she wore a padded appliance in its place.