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.
So the time came to part and I made my slow way home across the midriff of Italy, camping a night on the way in order to savour the delight and simplicity of this prime event. It was not the last; whenever I got a telegram signed Vega it offered me a landfall somewhere in Europe which concerned her steady search for the essence of Nietzsche’s thought. I got used to crossing Europe, slithering back and forth across the map, with the delightful knowledge that just for a few hours or a few days I would see her again. Meanwhile we exchanged books and documents and photos of our two subjects, Wagner and Cosima. And she introduced me to the marvellously sensitive trilogy of musical studies by Guy De Portalès — why isn’t his Nietzsche en Italie still available among the paperbacks? It’s a shame! And so at last we came to the end of our search and to say farewell we came here, to the Fontaine De Vaucluse. The years passed. We still met in this strange unbroken intimacy in far-away places — Salzburg, Silz Maria, Eze. But Orta had marked us both and it would be long before we managed to disentangle Nietzsche from our mental lives. Vega visited Russia, and then Greece, and though I was not there to show her round, friend Nietzsche was, and he did her the honours. The visit opened up another magic casement in the pre-Socratics, notably on Heraclitus and Empedocles about whom he had projected a book. Alas! only the notes he made for it remain for us, with here and there a typical thunderflash of thought which shows us in which direction it might have gone. Of Empedocles he says: ‘He looked for Art and only found science. Science creates Fausts!’ She now fully understood and approved my interpretation of Zarathustra’s struggle as well as the pity of his failure to grasp the Heraclitean quiddity; he saw it, he reached out his hand to grasp it, but … His art remained. But art is a second-best, however great, and he knew this now when it was too late! With him a whole epoch nose-dives into the bottomless pit of matter and is lost. It was in Orta that despite Lou’s kind and tender refusal, Nietzsche was able to swallow his mortification and go on to outline his coming work to her — including the theory of ‘eternal recurrence’ which he claimed to have developed upon an ancient Greek basis. What he sought however was much more like an eternal simultaneity — the continuous eternal and simultaneous presence of everything mortal or material or in essence, wrapped into a package with all Time included in it — and the whole of it present in every thought, in every drawn breath, an incandescent Now!