The full-length portrait was not altogether a success, or rather contained an element of levity not improper to mirrors and medieval pictures of exotic beasts. My face was brown, my torso and arms caramel, a carmine equatorial belt undermargined the caramel, then came a white, more or less triangular, southward pointed space edged with the redundant carmine on both sides, and (owing to my wearing shorts all day) my legs were as brown as my face. Apically, the white of the abdomen, brought out in frightening repoussи, with an ugliness never noticed before, a man’s portable zoo, a symmetrical mass of animal attributes, the elephant proboscis, the twin sea urchins, the baby gorilla, clinging to my underbelly with its back to the public.
A warning spasm shot through my nervous system. The fiends of my incurable ailment, «flayed consciousness,» were shoving aside my harlequins. I sought first-aid distraction in the baubles of my love’s lavender-scented bedroom: a Teddy bear dyed violet, a curious French novel (Du cтtи de chez Swann) that I had bought for her, a trim pile of freshly laundered linen in a Moоse basket, a color photograph of two girls in a fancy frame, obliquely inscribed as «The Lady Cressida and thy sweet Nell, Cambridge 1919»; I mistook the former for Iris herself in a golden wig and a pink make-up; a closer inspection, however, showed it to be Ivor in the part of that highly irritating girl bobbing in and out of Shakespeare’s flawed farce. But, then, Mnemosyne’s chromodiascope can also become a bore.
In the music room the boy was now cacophonically dusting the keys of the Bechstein as with less zest I resumed my nudist rambles. He asked me what sounded like «Hora?,» and I demonstrated my wrist turning it this way and that to reveal only a pale ghost of watch and watch bracelet. He completely misinterpreted my gesture and turned away shaking his stupid head. It was a morning of errors and failures.
I made my way to the pantry for a glass or two of wine, the best breakfast in times of distress. In the passage I trod on a shard of crockery (we had heard the crash on the eve) and danced on one foot with a curse as I tried to examine the imaginary gash in the middle of my pale sole.
The litre of rouge I had visualized was there all right, but I could not find a corkscrew in any of the drawers. Between bangs the macaw could be heard crying out something crude and dreary. The postman had come and gone. The editor of The New Aurora (Novaya Zarya) was afraid (dreadful poltroons, those editors) that his «modest émigré venture (nachinanie)» could not etc.—a crumpled «etc.» that flew into the garbage pail. Wineless, wrathful, with Ivor’s Times under my arm, I slapped up the back stairs to my stuffy room. The rioting in my brain had now started.
It was then that I resolved, sobbing horribly into my pillow, to preface tomorrow’s proposal of marriage with a confession that might make it unacceptable to my Iris.
7
If one looked from our garden gate down the asphalted avenue leading through leopard shade to the village some two hundred paces east, one saw the pink cube of the little post office, its green bench in front, its flag above, all this limned with the numb brightness of a color transparency, between the last two plane trees of the twin files marching on both sides of the road.
On the right (south) side of the avenue, across a marginal ditch, overhung with brambles, the intervals between the mottled trunks disclosed patches of lavender or lucerne and, farther away, the low white wall of a cemetery running parallel to our lane as those things are apt to do. On the left (north) side, through analogous intervals, one glimpsed an expanse of rising ground, a vineyard, a distant farm, pine groves, and the outline of mountains. On the penult tree trunk of that side somebody had pasted, and somebody else partly scraped off, an incoherent notice.
We walked down that avenue nearly every morning, Iris and I, on our way to the village square and—from there by lovely shortcuts—to Cannice and the sea. Now and then she liked to return on foot, being one of those small but strong lassies who can hurdle, and play hockey, and climb rocks, and then shimmy till any pale mad hour («do bezзmnogo blиdnogo chаsa»—to
quote from my first direct poem to her). She usually wore her «Indian» frock, a kind of translucent wrap, over her skimpy swimsuit, and as I followed close behind, and sensed the solitude, the security, the all-permitting dream, I had trouble walking in my bestial state. Fortunately it was not the none-so-very-secure solitude that held me back but a moral decision to confess something very grave before I made love to her.
As seen from those escarpments, the sea far below spread in majestic wrinkles, and, owing to distance and height, the recurrent line of foam arrived in rather droll slow motion because we knew it was sure, as we had been sure, of its strapping pace, and now that restraint, that stateliness…
Suddenly there came from somewhere within the natural jumble of our surroundings a roar of unearthly ecstasy.
«Goodness,» said Iris, «I do hope that’s not a happy escapee from Kanner’s Circus.» (No relation—at least, so it seemed—to the pianist.)
We walked on, now side by side: after the first of the half-dozen times it crossed the looping main road, our path grew wider. That day as usual I argued with Iris about the English names of the few plants I could identify—rock roses and griselda in bloom, agaves (which she called «centuries»), broom and spurge, myrtle and arbutus. Speckled butterflies came and went like quick sun flecks in the occasional tunnels of foliage, and once a tremendous olive-green fellow, with a rosy flush somewhere beneath, settled on a thistlehead for an instant. I know nothing about butterflies, and indeed do not care for the fluffier night-flying ones, and would hate any of them to touch me: even the prettiest gives me a nasty shiver like some floating spider web or that bathroom pest on the Riviera, the silver louse.
On the day now in focus, memorable for a more important matter but carrying all kinds of synchronous trivia attached to it like burrs or incrustated like marine parasites, we noticed a butterfly net moving among the beflowered rocks, and presently old Kanner appeared, his panama swinging on its vest-button string, his white locks flying around his scarlet brow, and the whole of his person still radiating ecstasy, an echo of which we no doubt had heard a minute ago.
Upon Iris immediately describing to him the spectacular green thing, Kanner dismissed it as eine «Pandora» (at least that’s what I find jotted down), a common southern Falter (butterfly). «Aber (but),» he thundered, raising his index, «when you wish to look at a real rarity, never before observed west of Nieder-Жsterreich, then I will show what I have just caught.»
He leant his net against a rock (it fell at once, Iris picked it up reverently) and, with profuse thanks (to Psyche? Baalzebub? Iris?) that trailed away accompanimentally, produced from a compartment in his satchel a little stamp envelope and shook out of it very gently a folded butterfly onto the palm of his hand.
After one glance Iris told him it was merely a tiny, very young Cabbage White. (She had a theory that houseflies, for instance, grow.)
«Now look with attention,» said Kanner ignoring her quaint remark and pointing with compressed tweezers at the triangular insect. «What you see is the inferior side—the under white of the left Vorderflэgel (fore wing') and the under yellow of the left Hinterflэgel (hind wing’). I will not open the wings but I think you can believe what I’m going to tell you. On the upper side, which you can’t see, this species shares with its nearest allies—the Small White and Mann’s White, both common here—the typical little spots of the fore wing, namely a black full stop in the male and a black Doppelpunkt (`colon’) in the female. In those allies the punctuation is reproduced on the underside, and only in the species of which you see a folded specimen on the flat of my hand is the wing blank beneath—a typographical caprice of Nature! Ergo it is an Ergane.»
One of the legs of the reclining butterfly twitched. «Oh, it’s alive!» cried Iris.
«No, it can’t fly away—one pinch was enough,» rejoined Kanner soothingly, as he slipped the specimen back into its pellucid hell; and presently, brandishing his arms and net in triumphant farewells, he was continuing his climb.
«The brute!» wailed Iris. She brooded over the thousand little creatures he had tortured, but a few days later, when Ivor took us to the man’s concert (a most poetical rendition of Grэnberg’s suite Les Chбteaux) she derived some consolation from her brother’s contemptuous remark: «All that butterfly business is only a publicity stunt.» Alas, as a fellow madman I knew better.
All I had to do when we reached our stretch of plage in order to absorb the sun was to shed shirt, shorts, and sneakers. Iris shrugged off her wrap and lay down, bare limbed, on the towel next to mine. I was rehearsing in my head the speech I had prepared. The pianist’s dog was today in the company of a handsome old lady, his fourth wife. The nymphet was being buried in hot sand by two young oafs. The Russian lady was reading
