«I’m ready for a dip,» said Iris.
She took out of the beach bag (kept for her by the Victoria concierge) her yellow swim bonnet, and we transferred our towels and things to the comparative quiet of an obsolete wharf of sorts upon which she liked to dry afterwards.
Already twice in my young life a fit of total cramp—the physical counterpart of lightning insanity—had all but overpowered me in the panic and blackness of bottomless water. I see myself as a lad of fifteen swimming at dusk across a narrow but deep river with an athletic cousin. He is beginning to leave me behind when a special effort I make results in a sense of ineffable euphoria which promises miracles of propulsion, dream prizes on dream shelves—but which, at its satanic climax, is replaced by an intolerable spasm first in one leg, then in the other, then in the ribs and both arms. I have often attempted to explain, in later years, to learned and ironical doctors, the strange, hideous, segmental quality of those pulsating pangs that made a huge worm of me with limbs transformed into successive coils of agony. By some fantastic fluke a third swimmer, a stranger, was right behind me and helped to pull me out of an abysmal tangle of water-lily stems.
The second time was a year later, on the West-Caucasian coast. I had been drinking with a dozen older companions at the birthday party of the district governor’s son and, around midnight, a dashing young Englishman, Allan Andoverton (who was to be, around 1939, my first British publisher!) had suggested a moonlight swim. As long as I did not venture too far in the sea, the experience seemed quite enjoyable. The water was warm; the moon shone benevolently on the starched shirt of my first evening clothes spread on the shingly shore. I could hear merry voices around me; Allan, I remember, had not bothered to strip and was fooling with a champagne bottle in the dappled swell; but presently a cloud engulfed everything, a great wave lifted and rolled me, and soon I was too upset in all senses to tell whether I was heading for Yalta or Tuapse. Abject fear set loose instantly the pain I already knew, and I would have drowned there and then had not the next billow given me a boost and deposited me near my own trousers.
The shadow of those repellent and rather colorless recolections (mortal peril is colorless) remained always present in my «dips» and «splashes» (another word of hers) with Iris. She got used to my habit of staying in comfortable contact with the bed of shallows, while she executed «crawls» (if that is what those overarm strokes were called in the Nineteen-Twenties) at quite a distance away; but that morning I nearly did a very stupid thing. I was gently floating to and fro in line with the shore and sinking a probing toe every now and then to ascertain if I could still feel the oozy bottom with its unappetizing to the touch, but on the whole friendly, vegetables, when I noticed that the seascape had changed. In the middle distance a brown motorboat manned by a young fellow in whom I recognized L.P. had described a foamy half-circle and stopped beside Iris. She clung to the bright brim, and he spoke to her, and then made as if to drag her into his boat, but she flipped free, and he sped away, laughing.
It all must have lasted a couple of minutes, but had the rascal with his hawkish profile and white cable-stitched sweater stayed a few seconds longer or had my girl been abducted by her new beau in the thunder and spray, I would have perished; for while the scene endured, some virile instinct rather than one of self-preservation had caused me to swim toward
them a few insensible yards, and now when I assumed a perpendicular position to regain my breath I found underfoot nothing but water. I turned and started swimming landward—and already felt the ominous foreglow, the strange, never yet described aura of total cramp creeping over me and forming its deadly pact with gravity. Suddenly my knee struck blessed sand, and in a mild undertow I crawled on all fours onto the beach.
8
«I have a confession to make, Iris, concerning my mental health.»
«Wait a minute. Must peel this horrid thing off—as far down—as far down as it can decently go.»
We were lying, I supine, she prone, on the wharf. She had torn off her cap and was struggling to shrug off the shoulder straps of her wet swimsuit, so as to expose her entire back to the sun; a secondary struggle was taking place on the near side, in the vicinity of her sable armpit, in her unsuccessful efforts not to show the white of a small breast at its tender juncture with her ribs. As soon as she had wriggled into a satisfactory state of decorum, she half-reared, holding her black bodice to her bosom, while her other hand conducted that delightful rapid monkey-scratching search a girl performs when groping for something in her bag—in this instance a mauve package of cheap Salammbтs and an expensive lighter; whereupon she again pressed her bosom to the spread towel. Her earlobe burned red through her black liberated «Medusa,» as that type of bob was called in the young twenties. The moldings of her brown back, with a patch-size beauty spot below the left shoulder blade and a long spinal hollow, which redeemed all the errors of animal evolution, distracted me painfully from the decision I had taken to preface my proposal with a special, tremendously important confession. A few aquamarines of water still glistened on the underside of her brown thighs and on her strong brown calves, and a few grains of wet gravel had stuck to her rose-brown ankles. If I have described so often in my American novels (A Kingdom by the Sea, Ardis) the unbearable magic of a girl’s back, it is mainly because of my having loved Iris. Her compact little nates, the most agonizing, the fullest, and sweetest bloom of her puerile prettiness, were as yet unwrapped surprises under the Christmas tree.
Upon resettling in the waiting sun after this little flurry, Iris protruded her fat underlip as she exhaled smoke and presently remarked: «Your mental health is jolly good, I think. You are sometimes strange and somber, and often silly, but that’s in character with ce qu’on appelle genius.»
«What do you call genius'?" "Well, seeing things others don't see. Or rather the invisible links between things." "I am speaking, then, of a humble morbid condition which has nothing to do with genius. We shall start with a specific example and an authentic decor. Please close your eyes for a moment. Now visualize the avenue that goes from the post office to your villa. You see the plane trees converging in perspective and the garden gate between the last two?" "No," said Iris, "the last one on the right is replaced by a lamppost--you can't make it out very clearly from the village square--but it is really a lamppost in a coat of ivy." "Well, no matter. The main thing is to imagine we're looking from the village here toward the garden gate there. We must be very careful about our here's and there's in this problem. For the presentthere’ is the quadrangle of green sunlight in the half-opened gate. We now start to walk up the avenue. On the second tree trunk of the right-side file we notice traces of some local proclamation—«
«It was Ivor’s proclamation. He proclaimed that things had changed and Aunt Betty’s protиgиs should stop making their weekly calls.»
«Splendid. We continue to walk toward the garden gate. Intervals of landscape can be made out between the plane trees on both sides. On your right—please, close your eyes, you will see better—on your right there’s a vineyard; on your left, a churchyard—you can distinguish its long, low,
very low, wall—«
«You make it sound rather creepy. And I want to add something. Among the blackberries, Ivor and I discovered a crooked old tombstone with the inscription Dors, Mиdor! and only the date of death, 1889; a found dog, no doubt. It’s just before the last tree on the left side.»
«So now we reach the garden gate. We are about to enter—but you stop all of a sudden: you’ve forgotten to buy those nice new stamps for your album. We decide to go back to the post office.»
«Can I open my eyes? Because I’m afraid I’m going to fall asleep.»
«On the contrary: now is the moment to shut your eyes tight and concentrate. I want you to imagine yourself turning on your heel so that right' instantly becomesleft,’ and you instantly see the here' as athere,’ with the lamppost now on your left and dead Mиdor now on your right, and the plane trees converging toward the post office. Can you do that?»
«Done,» said Iris. «About-face executed. I now stand facing a sunny hole with a little pink house inside it and a bit of blue sky. Shall we start walking back?»
«You may, I can’t! This is the point of the experiment. In actual, physical life I can turn as simply and swiftly as anyone. But mentally, with my eyes closed and my body immobile, I am unable to switch from one direction
