“At this hour of the morning, in America, everybody has left for work. Men and women were bustling about, people were running to their place of employment, the suburban trains were hurtling over the points bringing businessmen to more business meetings. I was shocked to see this man, on his own, lying motionless in an armchair in the empty lounge of a club.
‘I’m sorry I’m late,’ I ventured.
‘You’re actually early.’
‘Are you sure that I shouldn’t have waited and that the commodore will still be able to see me?’
‘Doctor Regencrantz,’ he said, ‘the commodore has nothing to do. I am the commodore.’
He held out the empty palms of his enormous hands, useless machine tools. He also pointed to his inactive feet, hanging in the air as though on pedals.
‘Lousy climate, it really is,’ he sighed.
I looked at him in astonishment, so amazed that I could not utter a word.
‘Does it surprise you that I should have nothing to do? All winter, I’ve been tuning up Fireflash. In the wind-tunnel workshop I had to alter the rear compression tanks which were producing too much resistance, reduce the heavy tubing of the radiator, because Fireflash was nose-diving, then rebuild it in light metal because the water was boiling too quickly. The car’s ready now and all I can do is wait.’
‘And what are you waiting for, commodore?’ I asked with interest.
‘A favourable day, and during that day, a propitious hour, and during that hour, the few necessary seconds.’
‘What!’ I exclaimed, ‘Is it possible that since the winter…’
‘That’s right. What do you expect, adverse winds were blowing up until April; in May the ground became clayey; at the beginning of July the first tornadoes arrived. In short, I’ve been waiting for the right moment for four months, for one hundred and seventeen days exactly,’ he groaned angrily.
I risked a joke:
‘Is there a great deal of slack season in a racing driver’s job?’ I said.
‘Yes. I can say that for eight months I haven’t progressed an inch.’
Commodore Swift crossed his legs wearily; he sucked at his tobacco-less pipe. He sighed and looked around him like a paralysed man waiting for the nurse to come by so that he could have his vegetable broth. His innocent face, covered with patches of red, turned towards me, imploring, gentle and without hope. He stood up slowly, somewhat unsure of his movements, his muscles limp, his centre of gravity unsteady, uncertain in his gait and in the future of all progress on foot.
‘We can always go to the garage,’ he said to me, ‘that will keep us busy for a while. You’ll see Fireflash. Fireflash has been around a long time, but she’s a beautiful piece of machinery all the same.’
Once the car had been found and the tarpaulin removed, I caught sight of a mass of crimson-red curved sheet metal which, due to it having been designed for speed, no longer had any shape. The eye slipped over her like the wind. She was not slender like the petrel or spindly like a torpedo; from a forty-five-degree angle, she resembled a plate, in profile a pear, and from the front a large soup tureen. She lay heavily on the sand, plump, pot-bellied and dormant.
‘What!’ I thought, ‘Can this be the machine that the fastest things have difficulty grasping hold of and whose striated, elongated and egg-shaped image is transmitted to us by belinograph all over the globe?’
The commodore started her up and, through a narrow neck, slid down into the single seat. It was as if the flesh of a lobster were returning with difficulty into the shell of the claw. He pumped the throttle, switched on the ignition, released the compressed air and obtained a few splutters.
‘Is this for a test run?’ I asked, delighted already.
‘I’d be surprised. What’s the wind speed this morning?’
‘Thirty-two metres per second,’ replied an assistant.
‘What did we have yesterday? At the same time?’
‘Twenty-seven metres per second.’
‘Above eighteen metres per second, there’s no point in attempting anything,’ the commodore sighed resignedly. ‘I’m not starting up just to amuse you, doctor.’
The American’s head disappeared into the sheet metal and his voice was drowned out by the thunder of quadruple exhaust pipes. The mechanics were bustling about already, but with a motion of his hand he indicated to them not to move. Installed like a worm inside his pear, the record-breaker sat motionless in the midst of his 600 horsepower, his machine that was unable to take off, the sixty-four cylinders that strove to no purpose, his sixteen carburettors which, through the static, exuded petrol that at any moment could be transformed into energy.”
“It’s fascinating,” Pierre broke in. “And then?”
“That was all,” Regencrantz continued. “The commodore switched off the ignition and remained there, absolutely unwilling to move, sitting there solemnly, affected in turn by the lethargy that Fireflash seemed to have communicated to him; an eternal silence fell over the salty beach.
“The powder must be wet, that’s why Fireflash hasn’t set off,” I thought. “Speed must be a strange sort of fairy for everything to be sacrificed because of it, even time! Here is a great man who, in one hundred and seventeen consecutive days, has not managed to travel one mile. He’s really a saint, a patient hero, a victim of slowness. The commodore deserves fame, but not of the kind he’s searching for. It would be better for him to be famous under another name: that of the man who spent four and a half months travelling one thousand six hundred and nine metres.”
“And what about you?” said Pierre, “how many hours have you spent learning this edifying apologia by heart?”
CHAPTER XIX
EVER SINCE HEDWIGE’S pregnancy had prevented him from playing tennis, Pierre had replaced that sport with swimming and every morning he would go to the pool, where he met Vincent Amyot. These meetings, accidental initially, had become daily encounters and the two brothers-in-law became friends; they got changed together; that is to say that normally, while Amyot was unknotting his tie, Pierre was already putting on his swimming costume. But that morning, instead of rushing to plunge into the water, Pierre was lounging about in the sunshine with his towel round his neck, his back to the cabins.
Amyot was gazing at him.
“You’ve got thinner,” he said.
“Unlike you,” said Pierre. “That’s the belly of a happy man!”
“Does that mean that you’re not a happy man?”
Amyot lit a cigarette and sat on the ground; to his surprise, Pierre did likewise.
“Me, unhappy!” he said. “Don’t you realize what Hedwige means to me…”
He stopped talking and stared at the murky bottom of the pool, streaked with three black lines intended for racing.
“Explain yourself,” said Amyot.
“Well… to begin with, I’m only warm when I’m with her. Yes, I don’t know why, but spring hasn’t started for me this year. The thermometer shows over fifteen degrees and I’m living at zero…”