I tossed the slippers into their basket, looked out at the garden through the graph of the windowpanes and saw that the sun was shining again over the lake and its ducks. Here was the beautiful backdrop to another mise en scène, the brief appearance of a character who would play an extremely important role in my initiation.
I. From the far end of the set, emerging from the depths of the park, I saw the white blur of a summer dress approaching. I quickly abandoned the foyer and went into the garden to intercept her at the little duck house. Sixteen or seventeen years old, to judge by her schoolgirl air. She wore a pair of comfortable leather sandals and let me accompany her without giving an instant’s thought to the emptiness of the park, the clumps of shrubbery, the humidity of the hour. Intrepidity, vigor, a walk that placed all her weight on the sole of the foot. By the time we reached the road that led back to the train station we’d already talked quite a bit and she’d allowed me to run my hand over her hair which was the color of burnished bronze. At that moment, standing there at the crossroads, I discovered that she wasn’t wearing a dress, as I’d thought, but a skirt and blouse in the same color.
Our train departed from N**, only two stops farther in the opposite direction, at 6:35. It would arrive in fifty minutes. In the station restaurant, we asked for mushroom soup and toast. We ignored the kebab platter that, I now realize, cost almost nothing. The soup turned out to be wonderful; there was excellent cooking to be had in Muscovy in those days. Then we spent a long time talking. She showed me a notebook full of writing. She had jotted down the family names of the Italian architects, the cost of the restoration, the time it would take to complete. Minutes before the train arrived, we each paid our own check, a ruble and some kopecks, without the slightest embarrassment. We continued our chat onboard: a marvel of a woman (I’m trying to paint her portrait here). I’d admired the sheen of her hair. We had conversed. It was an experience. We said good-bye without exchanging addresses or arranging to meet again. It would have been a mistake on my part to consider her anything more than a sign, easy on the eyes, muse-worthy. I’d succeeded in becoming a lad equipped for something more than reading books.
PANIS ORIS INTUS ANIMAE MEAE (P.O.A. or BREAD FOR THE MOUTH OF MY SOUL). Yes, I wanted to write a great novel, but one that was based on insignificant feelings, the dot matrix of my existence, the pettiness of consumerism and OCCIDENTAL flotsam and jetsam, the indispensable bauble of each new day. I dreamed of repeating the success of those composers of RADIO hits who move us to tears with a melody that is cheap and cloying but deeply felt. I yearned to capture an era, that summer, all that was destined to vanish without leaving a trace, to be forgotten, just as we lost the Philadelphia rhythms of my teenage years. Who would write about that? This was my primordial goaclass="underline" to freeze the vertiginous shifts in the external attributes of human life, that great immobile organism, inalterable in its gross corpulence, which takes childish delight in transforming its attire, like a mime who, during a single performance, quick-changes between Harlequin, Polichinelle, and Cantonese Mandarin costumes. For that’s what we do: betray the old fashions to make a show or pretense that we are living. Or rather, in fact, to live precisely that fatuity. I had decided to return to Saint Petersburg to live BREAD FOR THE MOUTH OF MY SOUL, to model my discovery about frivolity onto the surface of the real world and study the influence of FLUORIDE on a young soul (a Russian soul). That the girl I would finally select played the FLUTE fit miraculously into my plan due to the widespread stereotype about Russians and classical music et cetera. I’d come up with the title years earlier, a phrase from Saint Augustine’s Confessions, PAN DE LA BOCA DE MI ALMA, which explained the sensation similar to hunger that I felt on seeing certain shades of red. I visualized this inner MOUTH OF MY SOUL as a moist purple hole opening crosswise in the region of the solar plexus, ravenous as a baby bird in its nest. To sate it, I had to shovel in all the tactile, visual, and auditory stimuli available: a woman friend’s clean skin, K**’s delicate shoulders and deep anatomical hollows, the perfect design of my fountain pen, THELONIOUS’S vertiginous fingers on BRILLIANT CORNERS, that perfect piece of music, warm and pliant.
I. The name of THELONIOUS would remain in the memory of generations to come, like that of Casanova de Seingalt5 who visited Saint Petersburg in 1764. A fragment of his Memoirs, which I consulted before undertaking my own journey, struck me as premonitory. Casanova says: M’étant ecarté de la maison impériale d’une centaine de pas, je découvris une jeune paysanne dont la beauté était surprenante. L’ayant fait remarquer au jeune officier, nous nous acheminàmes vers elle; mais, leste et svelte comme une biche, elle s’enfuit jusqu’à une chaumière peu éloignée, où elle entra. Nous l’y suivons. .Sa gorge n’était pas encore parfaitement développée, car elle avait à peine quatorze ans. Blanche comme la neige, elle avait des cheveux d’ébène d’une longueur et d’une épaisseur prodigieuses. Deux arcs d’une extrême perfection et d’une grande finesse recouvraient deux yeux admirablement fendus, qu’on aurait pu désirer un peu plus grands peut-être, mais qu’on ne saurait imaginer ni plus brillants, ni plus expressifs.Cette jeune fille, que je baptisai [Zizi], monta en voiture et nous suivit à Pétersbourg vêtue de gros drap et sans chemise. Je m’enfermai quatre jours, sans la quitter un instant, jusqu’à ce que je la vis habillée à la française, sans luxe, mais très proprement.Or: I was about a hundred paces from the imperial residence when I saw an enchanting young peasant girl. I pointed her out to my friend and we walked toward her, but she ran away, light and graceful as a gazelle, into a sad little hut. We followed her inside. .Her breasts were not yet completely formed; she had just turned fourteen. Her snow-white skin contrasted with her thick ebony hair. Her fine black eyebrows rose over a pair of magnificently shaped eyes that I would have preferred a little larger, but that seemed to shoot out flames. I must also mention her teeth, made for kisses. . I christened her [ZIZI] and she got into the carriage and returned with us to St. Petersburg dressed in coarse clothes, without a chemise of any kind. . For four days I stayed home, never leaving her until I had dressed her modestly in the French style.
II. A few notes for P.O.A.
1At the end of the summer we’ll take a trip to YALTA. It was the old dream of a vacation in Hawaii. Yes, some readjustment of scale was required, but that couldn’t change the significance of the journey or of the sea in our lives. The Crimean coastline, the antique resonance of its city’s names — Feodosiya, Livadia, Yevpatoria — suited my project perfectly. The beaches, the sea, symbolized freedom in the abstract, connoted laxity, luminosity, the diaphanous air filling our lungs. Then, if my experiment turned out to be successful, we would travel to the real Riviera, which, for me, was also Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night.