2

I had not the slightest desire to reimburse Louise for being forced to shed me; and I hesitated to embarrass her by supplying my lawyer with the list of her betrayals. They were stupid and sordid, and went back to the days when I still was reasonably faithful to her. The “divorce dialogue,” as Horace Peppermill, Junior, horribly called it, dragged on during the entire spring: You and I spent part of it in London and the rest in Taormina, and I kept putting off talks of our marriage (a delay you regarded with royal indifference). What really bothered me was having also to postpone the tedious statement (to be repeated for the fourth time in my life) that would have to precede any such talks. I fumed. It was a shame to leave you in the dark regarding my derangement.

Coincidence, the angel with the eyed wings mentioned before, spared me the humiliating rigmarole that I had found necessary to go through before proposing to each of my former wives. On June 15, at Gandora, in the Tessin, I received a letter from young Horace giving me excellent news: Louise had discovered (how does not matter) that at various periods of our marriage I had had her shadowed, in all sorts of fascinating old cities, by a private detective (Dick Cockburn, a staunch friend of mine); that the tapes of love calls and other documents were in my lawyer’s hands; and that she was ready to make every possible concession to speed up matters, being anxious to marry again—this time the son of an Earl. And on the same fatidic day, at a quarter past five in the afternoon, I finished transcribing on 733 medium-sized Bristol cards (each holding about 100 words), with a fine-nibbed pen and in my smallest fair-copy hand, Ardis, a stylized memoir dealing with the arbored boyhood and ardent youth of a great thinker who by the end of the book tackles the itchiest of all noumenal mysteries. One of the early chapters contained an account (couched in an overtly personal, intolerably tortured tone) of my own tussles with the Specter of Space and the myth of Cardinal Points.

By 5:30 I had consumed, in a fit of private celebration, most of the caviar and all the champagne in the friendly fridge of our bungalow on the green grounds of the Gandora Palace Hotel. I found you on the veranda and told you I would like you to devote the next hour to reading attentively—

“I read everything attentively.”

“—this batch of thirty cards from Ardis.” After which I thought you might meet me somewhere on my way back from my late-afternoon stroll: always the same—to the spartitraffico fountain (ten minutes) and thence to the edge of a pine plantation (another ten minutes). I left you reclining in a lounge chair with the sun reproducing the amethyst lozenges of the veranda windows on the floor, and barring your bare shins and the insteps of your crossed feet (right toe twitching now and then in some obscure connection with the tempo of assimilation or a twist in the text). In a matter of minutes you would have learned (as only Iris had learned before you—the others were no eaglesses) what I wished you to be aware of when consenting to be my wife.

“Careful, please, when you cross,” you said, without raising your eyes but then looking up and tenderly pursing your lips before going back to Ardis.

Ha! Weaving a little! Was that really I, Prince Vadim Blonsky, who in 1815 could have outdrunk Pushkin’s mentor, Kaverin? In the golden light of a mere quart of the stuff all the trees in the hotel park looked like araucarias. I congratulated myself on the neatness of my stratagem though not quite knowing whether it concerned my third wife’s recorded frolics or the disclosure of my infirmity through a bloke in a book. Little by little the soft spicy air did me good: my soles clung more firmly to gravel and sand, clay and stone. I became aware that I had gone out wearing morocco slippers and a torn, bleached denim trousers-and-top with, paradoxically, my passport in one nipple pocket and a wad of Swiss bank notes in the other. Local people in Gandino or Gandora, or whatever the town was called, knew the face of the author of Un regno sul mare or Ein Königreich an der See or Un Royaume au Bord de la Mer, so it would have been really fatuous on my part to prepare the cue and the cud for the reader in case a car was really to hit me.

Soon I was feeling so happy and bright that when I passed by the sidewalk café just before reaching the square, it seemed a good idea to stabilize the fizz still ascending in me by means of a jigger of something—and yet I demurred, and passed by, cold-eyed, knowing how sweetly, yet firmly, you disapproved of the most innocent tippling.

One of the streets projecting west beyond the traffic island traversed the Corso Orsini and immediately afterwards, as if having achieved an exhausting feat, degenerated into a soft dusty old road with traces of gramineous growth on both sides, but none of pavement.

I could say what I do not remember having been moved to say in years, namely: My happiness was complete. As I walked, I read those cards with you, at your pace, your diaphanous index at my rough peeling temple, my wrinkled finger at your turquoise temple-vein. I caressed the facets of the Blackwing pencil you kept gently twirling, I felt against my raised knees the fifty-year-old folded chessboard, Nikifor Starov’s gift (most of the noblemen were badly chipped in their baize-lined mahogany box!), propped on your skirt with its pattern of irises. My eyes moved with yours, my pencil queried with your own faint little cross in the narrow margin a solecism I could not distinguish through the tears of space. Happy tears, radiant, shamelessly happy tears!

A goggled imbecile on a motorcycle who I thought had seen me and would slow down to let me cross Corso Orsini in peace swerved so clumsily to avoid killing me that he skidded and ended up facing me some way off after an ignominious wobble. I ignored his roar of hate and continued my steady stroll westward in the changed surroundings I have already mentioned. The practically rural old road crept between modest villas, each in its nest of tall flowers and spreading trees. A rectangle of cardboard on one of the west-side wickets said “Rooms” in German; on the opposite side an old pine supported a sign “For Sale” in Italian. Again on the left, a more sophisticated houseowner offered “Lunchings.” Still fairly far was the green vista of the pineta.

My thoughts reverted to Ardis. I knew that the bizarre mental flaw you were now reading about would pain you; I also knew that its display was a mere formality on my part and could not obstruct the natural flow of our common fate. A gentlemanly gesture. In fact, it might compensate for what you did not yet know, what I would have to tell you too, what I suspected you would call the not quite savory little method (gnusnovaten’kiy sposob) of my “getting even” with Louise. All right—but what about Ardis? Apart from my warped mind, did you like it or loathe it?

Composing, as I do, whole books in my mind before releasing the inner word and taking it down in pencil or pen, I find that the final text remains for a while committed to memory, as distinct and perfect as the floating imprint that a light bulb leaves on the retina. I was able therefore to rerun the actual images of those cards you read: they were projected on the screen of my fancy together with the gleam of your topaz ring and the beat of your eyelashes, and I could calculate how far you had read not simply by consulting my watch but by actually following one line after the other to the right-hand brink of each card. The lucidity of the image was correlated with the quality of the writing. You knew my work too well to be ruffled by a too robust erotic detail, or annoyed by a too recondite literary allusion. It was bliss reading Ardis with you that way, triumphing that way over the stretch of colored space separating my lane from your lounge chair. Was I an excellent writer? I was an excellent writer. That avenue of statues and lilacs where Ada and I drew our first circles on the dappled sand was visualized and re-created by an artist of lasting worth. The hideous suspicion that even Ardis, my most private book, soaked in reality, saturated with sun flecks, might be an unconscious imitation of another’s unearthly art, that suspicion might come later; at the moment—6:18 P.M. on June 15, 1970, in the Tessin—nothing could scratch the rich humid gloss of my happiness.

I was now reaching the end of my usual preprandial walk. The ra-ta-ta, ta-ta, tac of a typist’s finishing a last page came from a window through motionless foliage, reminding me pleasantly that I had long since eschewed the long labor of having my immaculate manuscripts typed when they could be reproduced photographically in one hum. It was now the publisher who bore the brunt of having my hand transformed directly into printed characters; and I know he disliked the procedure as a well-bred entomologist may find revolting an irregular insect’s skipping some generally accepted stage of metamorphosis.

Only a few steps—twelve, eleven—remained before I would start to walk back: I felt you were thinking of this in a reversal of distant perception, just as I felt a kind of mental loosening, which told me you had finished reading those thirty cards, placed them in their proper order, tidied the stack by knocking its base slightly against the table, found the elastic lying there in the assumed shape of a heart, banded the batch, carried it to the safety of my desk, and were now preparing to meet me on my way back to Gandora Palace.

A low wall of gray stone, waist-high, paunch-thick, built in the general shape of a transversal parapet, put an end to whatever life the road still had as a town street. A narrow passage for pedestrians and cyclists divided the parapet in the middle, and the width of that gap was preserved beyond it in a path which after a flick or two slithered into a fairly dense young pinewood. You and I had rambled there many times on gray mornings, when lakeside or poolside lost all attraction; but that evening, as usual, I terminated my stroll at the parapet, and stood in perfect repose, facing the low sun, my spread hands enjoying the smoothness of its top edge on both sides of the passage. A tactile something, or the recent ra-ta-tac, brought back and completed the image of my 733, twelve centimeters by ten-and-a-half Bristol cards, which you would read chapter by chapter whereupon a great pleasure, a parapet of pleasure, would perfect my task: in my mind there arose, endowed with the clean-cut compactness of some great solid—an altar! a mesa!—the image of the shiny photocopier in one of the offices of our hotel. My trustful hands were still spread, but my soles no longer sensed the soft soil. I wished to go back to you, to life, to the amethyst lozenges, to the pencil lying on the veranda table, and I could not. What used to happen so often in thought, now had happened for keeps: I could not turn. To make that movement would mean rolling the world around on its axis and that was as impossible as traveling back physically from the present moment to the previous one. Maybe I should not have panicked, should have waited quietly for the stone of my limbs to regain some tingle of flesh. Instead, I performed, or imagined performing, a wild wrenching movement—and the globe did not bulge. I must have hung in a spread-eagle position for a little while longer before ending supine on the intangible soil.