A Smile in the Mind's Eye Page 6

  There was a very heavy frost and the milky light offered no promise of sun. Moreover trouble lay ahead for me – engine trouble. In cleaning up my little car, scraping off the ice and checking the heater, I realized that a vital part had worked loose and would have to be replaced or the thread would bite off. It was most vexatious; but if I left her there to freeze away to death I might have to wait for spring before I could move her! And the old chateau was miles from Autun where I might presume upon a technical sophistication to supply the missing part. I thought then that towards evening I would limp back along the road to Autun in the hope of mending the breech. It gave me the day for contacts and studies, and I used it to the full. The library was good and much in demand. There were a number of good lectures listed and almost continuous Tibetan classes with professors of whose proficiency one could have no doubt. The whole thing was organized effortlessly and well and clearly there was some master-brain behind the enterprise. But by late afternoon I felt it wiser to take advantage of the light and stalk back in all precariousness to Autun. This I did, and arrived only to find everything closed against the approaching weekend and the only decent garage in the place out of spares. They would have to be sent down from Paris, which would take a night; but with the coming strike on the railways … So went my Tibetan New Year. A draughty night in a cold hotel in Autun did nothing to assuage my irritation. Yet, in another sense, I felt that I had seen what I had come to see – the functioning of the abbey and the general state of instruction prevailing in it. The thing was serious. Tibet was here to stay, so to speak. I wondered if perhaps instead of going back to Kagu Ling as I had intended I should not head away down south; the weather reports were so uncompromisingly gloomy that my concern was pardonable. Snow, ice, floods … The spare did not arrive till late on Monday, and the car was not put right until Tuesday morn – by now the Tibetan dignitaries would have taken to the air like swans, heading back to India where the founder seminaries were situated. Yes, I would sneak home.

  The autoroute was lashed with wind and rain, and the traffic on it – many heavy trailers, few private cars – set up chains of spray as if they had been heavy motor boats in a choppy sea. One good souse from their back wheels and one had to slow down and set the wipers to work at speed. And the wind swung me about like a pendulum. It was really hard and disagreeable driving and I felt half dead with fatigue. I thought I would climb off the autoroute and down into a valley but I did not want to land myself in a flood area so I waited until I saw the turn-off for Orange signalled; this part of the land I knew well, and it is rarely flooded. So it proved to be, and I felt I might manage to rest my weary limbs in Avignon for a night before rolling back home across the garrigues. I knew that the Rhone was danger-high but had not jumped its banks as yet, and when I crossed it despite the flailing wind and rain (not to mention the invisible mountain snows melting into its sources and tributaries) it had not yet swallowed the islands, while the new bridge rode high and clear into town. But the town itself was sodden as a wet mattress, spectral, winter-locked. I don’t know what put the Vaucluse fountain into my mind – but yes, I do. I saw an advertisement for some article of domestic ware called Vega – and my thoughts turned to a girl I had known under that starry name. The star on the advertisement reminded me of the intense bright blue – almost sapphire – of her eyes. Vega, pole star of the ancients, had always been my favourite fixed star. How often have I lain on the deck of a caique or a liner in the Aegean watching that marvellous gem-like stare, unwinking, unmoving, all-seeing. The girl had some of this in her own steady regard – the uncompromising brightness of a cat’s eyes, a Persian kitten, say. When she was interested in something or someone she sat so still that she didn’t seem to be breathing, she could have been dead, fixing you with these ‘blue lamps of heaven’ – let us indulge her memory with a seventeenth-century conceit from Darley. But here in Avignon on that rainy afternoon I suddenly thought of her and wondered if I should not lay that night in the little hotel we knew once by the roaring waters of Petrarchian Vaucluse. She too had been a Taoist with the requisite look of melting mischief as required by the recipe of Chang. I had first come under this disquieting gaze in Geneva. A little group of psychiatrists – all Jungians – had asked if they could meet me and ask a few questions. I think they were just curious to size me up and see if I was quite right in the head. It was not the first time that such a thing had come about. They were friends of other friends, and so I agreed and we met in the rather pleasant brasserie and beer-hall – a chop-house, really – called Bovard which should have been ‘classé’ and which has now been swept away and turned into a bank. Anyway in the background there sat Vega staring at me – looking right through me, as if she could count all the small change in my pocket. And the conversation was lively and full of pith. I gathered that she was the wife or mistress of one of the doctors present though I could not decide which one. Nevertheless, the evening came to an end and off we all went home. A fortnight later I ran into her in Bounyon where I was trying to buy a cheese called Vacherin. I had forgotten her, actually, and she had to jog my memory by references to this pleasant but unmemorable evening. We went to have a coffee together and it was here in a shady cafeé that I started to get to know Vega. To cut a long story short in the midst of a thousand trivia she said that she was a real old-fashioned reader. Every year she chose one author and read everything about him. She added that this year the lucky author was Nietzsche and she was in mid-channel. Why did this remark make an instant impression on me? Because I myself had been doing more or less the same sort of thing – an echo of it, so to speak. I had been collecting and sifting information about Lou Andrée Salome with the vague notion of writing an essay on this remarkable and gifted enchantress, who as a young girl bewitched Nietzsche, then had a child by Rilke and ended up in old age as Freud’s most deeply cherished pupil and friend. How extraordinary that none of her many books, including the capital essays on Nietzsche and Rilke, were available in English! Actually my project was hopeless, I knew, because of my lack of German. Nevertheless this strange frieze of characters gave me food for thought; I had planned to press the story of their lives forward as far as the lake of Orta, which I was then proposing to visit. It was here that the thirty-year-old philosopher proposed to the eighteen-year-old girl, it was here that he outlined the whole scenario of Zarathustra! Once one has read of the notebooks in which they played question-and-answer games and riddles based on philosophic questions it seems quite possible that passages of the great classic could actually have been written by her. The idea, however far-fetched, intrigued me. And with this end in mind I obtained a commission from an American paper to write a vignette on the Borromean Islands which lay hard by on the the larger lake, Maggiori. ‘How odd!’ I said, and she echoed me, ‘Why odd?’ I said that I was doing the same sort of thing and added, ‘I am going down to Orta next Sunday for a week. I want to see the little lake where they were so happy when they were young. I have some notions about her making a contribution to Zarathustra – which I shall never be able to check because I have no German.’

  ‘Orta?’ She was looking at me very strangely indeed; then she started to laugh. ‘Look,’ she said. ‘I have just come from the station.’ And extracting from her bag a railway reservation she placed it before me on the table. I saw it was a return ticket to Stresa which I knew was, so to speak, the railhead for the lake of Orta. The date was for the following weekend! The coincidence was unbelievable and we both laughed.

  ‘I want to visit the little sacred hill with all the chapels to try and see which was the one in which he proposed to her only to be rejected – quite properly; he was not fit to be married to a woman and she would have made a wretched wife, always on the move, always disappearing.’

  ‘The Monte Sacro?’

  ‘Yes. I have never been.’

  ‘Nor have I.’

  I produced a travel brochure with some pictures of the lake, and she produced an identical one.
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  ‘But your ticket is a single – are you alone?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then can we meet? Shall we meet?’

  ‘Of course. I will bring the books I have.’

  ‘Yes, so shall I.’

  It was one of these strange encounters which are all too rare in life and which make it echo. We shook hands rather awkwardly as we said goodbye; the blue regard set up a memory in me of some half-forgotten poem which mentioned the ‘vernal twinkling of butterflies’ in Coleridge – I had tried in vain to trace the quotation; nor could I now remember who had written the poem. All I remembered of the blonde girl now was the blue regard of a fixed star, staring down from mid-heaven upon the smooth lake. In my absent-minded way I had forgotten even to write down her name and phone number – in case of any change of plan. It was better perhaps. It gave her a kind of anonymity. I motored back to Provence during the night to collect my affairs and make my dispositions for Italy. I did not intend to rush it, and in my little camper I could easily make Novarra in one day; I would dawdle, I thought, round Maggiori and landfall at The Dragon in Orta well before Saturday. Then I would meet her train at Stresa – though she did not know this as yet!

  5

  So it fell out. I crossed the wide plain of Novarra one late afternoon; all the corn had caught alight on both sides of the road and a racing fire seemed to stretch away to the horizon on either side of me. It was a dramatic vision of destruction! But it was so very hot that I did not linger but raced through, fearing an exploding petrol tank or some such mishap. After a very few more kilometres the green Alpine meadows and foothills started to rise ahead of me and suddenly it was there – a modest green signpost directing me to the tiny kidney-shaped lake I was hunting for: Nietzsche’s Orta. (‘Our Orta’ he had written in a love letter to Lou.) The approaches grew narrower, more sinuous, and densely wooded – nightingales sang everywhere, just as they do in Provence. The lake came up, as if presented upon the palm of an invisible conjuror’s hand, and upon it the sacred island with its monastery and tall trees, all so toy-like and so calm and so small and homely in scale. The green lake edge was Irish green. As for Orta, Balzac described it once with a simile that I had thought suspect, as altogether too plump, ‘a pearl in a green jewel case’… Quite the contrary. It is not. He was stirred by the strange opalescent quality of the light and the translucent shifts of colour on the mountains which cradled and framed the island. This hazy misty feeling throws everything in and out of focus and gives a feeling of unreality, or iridescence, to the whole waterscape. Moreover, the whole thing is double for when the water is calm the mountains repeat themselves in it and one does not know which side up one is; you have the feeling sometimes of walking on the sky. No, Balzac’s image is very exact, and cannot be bettered.

  I rolled down these shadowy inclines, round a dozen curves, and came to rest in the tiny square with its two inns, its pleasant arcades and small cafes. The Dragon was a pleasant little auberge as well with its rooms opening on the lake. Vega was to lodge at the Catello opposite, twenty yards away. We would be able to wave from our respective balconies over the water! I would have liked to send flowers to her room but I did not have her name, like the fool I was. I went however and consulted the visitor’s book – a very vague document kept in pencil by a near-analphabetic – in the hope of discovering it, since she said she had booked there. I supposed that she was German by marriage though I knew her to be French by birth. Which name then? There was only one person expected for the next evening and she was called Chantal De Legume. My heart sank. Just the thought that she might be called Chantal De Legume made me burst into a sweat of apprehension. It would spoil everything – such a name comprised everything! I know it is irrational but I hoped desperately that she was not called Chantal De Legume. (She is not called Chantal De Legume!)

  I renounced the flowers, and took a boat to drift on that quiet water for an hour or so before dinner time, reflecting idly on that long-lost philosopher whose name nobody in Orta would know today – except perhaps the curé (and then only as an anti-Christ). The old man who rowed me was calm and polite but not voluble; his father would have been of an age to ferry Nietzsche and Lou out upon the waters of Orta, to take them to the island of San Julio; or perhaps his grandfather? But no, for Lou lived on until the beginning of the Nazi epoch in Germany. I could actually have met her. The water was so warm that I knew I should be tempted to take a silent night-swim in it later on. I had brought my own little Zodiac dinghy with its motor, but Orta is too small a lake to poison with outboard motors. It is made for the slow sweep of oars, the slow creak of wood not properly imbibed by a winter of submersion. The little awnings and the gay frills of the boat were rather dusty and damp. Summer was not yet here. High above me as I lay in the sheets of the boat rose the Monte Sacro – I could see St Francis hanging off a wooded balcony and waving to me. I waved back but I wanted to save him until Vega came. The twenty little chapels – each as big as a Swiss chalet – house twenty tableaux – scenes from the life of St Francis – enacted by life-size statues in gutta percha, appropriately dressed and painted, each different, and all grandiose. Vega was sure that Nietzsche, being a man, would have sought the aid of one such shrine when he proposed to Lou! (For a great man he was extraordinarily timid.) The problem was which one – she had come here to find that out. But I had other fish to fry – for I had been reading Nietzsche and discovering what had really been ailing him here in Orta, the gestation of his critical books in which he declared war on Christianity in the name of Heraclitus and the ancient Greeks. His target was no less than the Christian god, God the Father.

  Night fell, the mists closed in and filtered eerily among the mossy vegetation, trailing long tentacles; the lake began to creep about, as it were, for such was the illusion given by moving mists and waters forever rubbing out and correcting images of sky and mountain. The sky full of stars burned furiously in the water, broken up by belfries and cupolas and the slow planetary trails carved by the boats (now lit like fireflies) as they crawled about the lake. Never have I experienced such a sense of peace, suspended upon a narrow balcony between sky, mountain and water – feeling as if I myself had become a trail of vapour slowly drifting about at the behest of a current of wind, of water. The sky turned slowly through its arc as if projected by a stage diorama. Time filled the heart like an hourglass. I had an early dinner and turned in, though for a long moment before sleeping I watched the shifting spectacle offered by the polished water outside the balcony window. I wondered whether Vega would find what she was seeking – the chapel where the timid but brilliant (though neurotic: all those migraines!) professor plucked up his courage to propose not marriage but … concubinage to the slim and graceful Slav whose brilliance he so admired. And then, the tragic enigma posed by his collapse into mania; surely Lou in her old age must have seen the rationale of the whole thing through the lens of Freudian theory – it still holds firm. The old sage Freud considered her one of his most brilliant pupils. He addresses her, in a letter, as ‘My indomitable friend’. He was no Zarathustra either, though he preserved his inquisitorial sanity to the end. As for Nietzsche, it was war to the knife against three fathers – or rather against God the Father (the Christian God), God the Son (his own father and all he stood for in the realm of ideas) – he never forgot hearing his mother hiss at him: ‘You are a reproach to your father’s grave’; the words had bitten deep into his sensibility – and then God the Holy Ghost, was Wagner of course, whom he also had to deny and destroy. Was it not the shock of this tremendous struggle that overturned his reason? Sometimes when he was mad he spoke of Cosima Wagner. ‘My lady Cosima sent me here …’ Of course in the turbulence of his broken mind the wife of the Holy Ghost must have been a highly desirable muse in the Oedipus context! And finally, of course, Mother won out, his own earthly mother; triumphantly she gathered all this human wreckage into her arms, while the sister quietly betrayed him by falsifying the text of his work with ant
i-Jewish interpolations … What a fate, what a man, what a place! I fell asleep thinking of the little chapels on the wooden hill above me. Next day was clear, but by evening a thick mist came down, and this time in a definitive manner – you could not see your hand before your face. My heart sank. Stresa was only a quarter of an hour’s drive – I knew the way by heart. But never have I seen such dense fog. The hotel proprietor told me curtly that it would not lift until morning; I stood no chance of climbing out of the hollow where Orta lies so I had better give up the notion of driving to the station and stay put. It enraged me. I closed my eyes at the dinner table and mentally rememorized every inch of the road round the lake – I had done it several times now. It was extremely foolhardy, I knew, but I thought I would try and get up on to the main road, travelling blind. I got pitying looks from everyone. They said that after a hundred yards I should be forced to leave the car and walk back to the hotel. Nevertheless I set off. It was terrifying, I could not even see my own headlights; I was travelling by memory purely, as if in a dream. I was guided by a strip of cobbling on the side of the road, the vibration it made on my tyres. But the gods heard my prayers. Suddenly, like a veil snatched away, the whole fog was peeled back to reveal a bright pure sky with ardent stars and with Vega overhead giving me the fixed-star look – almost turquoise this time. I shouted with joy and put on speed, to arrive in Stresa with an hour to spare which I happily spent in the empty buffet, reading.