A Smile in the Mind's Eye (8 page)

‘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.

‘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 anti-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.

How eerie her arrival was; a light and wholly irrational snowstorm of light flakes had started. The snow melted as it touched ground. You could hear the train far away in the darkness somewhere, the mesh of wheels and its little apologetic foghorn. An answering bell somewhere in the station started to echo, started to throb. Then in the further darkness of the hinterland, upon the velvety screen of night, as if in response I saw a sudden line of yellow lights moving slowly across the skyline, softly tinkling as the whole chaplet came slowly and sinuously down to the level of the plain. The little station bell went mad now. It throbbed as if it had a high temperature. I waited on the dark platform with this very light snow – a mere swish-like spray – caressing my neck. The train arrived with a clamour and a final sprint, a rush. It came to rest in the station; it was apparently empty. There was not even a guard on board. In my disappointment I was about to turn away and set off back to Orta when at the very end a carriage door opened, a bar of light fell on the snowy platform, and Vega stepped out. She stood there smiling with the snow on her furs, on her blonde head, a little hesitant and questioning, but with the firm blue regard of happiness. Enfin! I ran forward, seized her bag and led her back to the car. She had not expected to be met and so was a little pleased and confused.

The memory of those few days – the smooth lake at night, the polished mountains and the vernal hills where the nightingales sang night and day – has become a fused up continuum where the details have all melted into one overwhelming impression of divine attachment and friendship. The little chapels we explored were so extraordinary and so various, the hills so green, the wine so good, our hosts so tender and welcoming. There was nothing to mar the felicity of this intellectual adventure – not a false note or a false sentiment to break or bruise this calm and content, as of brother and sister meeting by the lake of Zarathustra. We recognized each other through Nietzsche and Lou, sharing like them an attachment which was as ardent as it was limpid. When it was time to part she said, somewhat maliciously, ‘Shall I sign all my letters Chantal De Legume so that you can identify me?' But I had already mentally allocated to her the name of my protecting star, for her eyes were of the same fine colour. Vega it should be. All this came suddenly back to me now as I negotiated the green fields and sodden meadows of Montfavet and l'Isle-sur-Sorgue. I compiled those ancient memories with happiness and reserve, remembering also the long silences we shared, swimming at night in the lake. Once she went for a long walk alone. Our documents littered the floor of her room. I had brought photostats of the thunderous handwriting of Nietzsche's letter to Strindberg, the mad declarations of his Godship. At night, late at night, the smoke of candles which had long expired drifted over our arguments and filled the room, with its high ceilings decorated by plaster nymphs and scrolls. She slept with her face on her arm and I watched her sleep, so contentedly, so thoroughly. She had found the chapel that she sought – but who would ever be able to prove her contention that it was here in Number 14 that Nietzsche had taken Lou's hand in his and asked her to live with him? And why did Lou refuse? We will, I presume, never know the truth, for she has not deigned to tell us. But she was a fiery Slav and he was, after all, a timid German professor condemned by his health to premature retirement. And he lacked humour. What he sought for himself – he had recognized full well that Heraclitus and the early Greeks held the key he so frantically sought – was simply The Look, the equable look of the Tao which contains the salt of humour and complicity and irony in its depths. ‘Nobody trusts art any more,' said Vega sadly.