A Moveable Feast Page 18

  Then you have the rich and nothing is ever as it was again. The pilot fish leaves of course. He is always going somewhere, or coming from somewhere, and he is never around for very long. He enters and leaves politics or the theater in the same way he enters and leaves countries and people's lives in his early days. He is never caught and he is not caught by the rich. Nothing ever catches him and it is only those who trust him who are caught and killed. He has the irreplaceable early training of the bastard and a latent and long denied love of money. He ends up rich himself, having moved one dollar's width to the right with every dollar that he made.

  These rich loved and trusted him because he was shy, comic, elusive, already in production, and because he was an unerring pilot fish they could tell that through all the then true sincerity of his politics it was a passing sham and that he was one of them although he did not know it then.

  When you have two people who love each other, are happy and gay and really good work is being done by one or both of them, people are drawn to them as surely as migrating birds are drawn at night to a powerful beacon. If the two people were as experienced or as solidly constructed as the beacon there would be little damage except to the birds. The people who attract people by their happiness and their performance are usually inexperienced but they learn quite rapidly how not to be overrun and they learn how to go away. But they have not learned about the good, the attractive, the charming, the soon-beloved, the generous, the understanding rich who have no bad qualities and who give each day the quality of a festival and who, when they have passed and taken the nourishment they needed, leave everything deader than the roots of any grass Attila's horses' hooves have ever scoured.

  That year the rich came led by the pilot fish. A year before they would never have come. There was no certainty then. The work was as good and the happiness was greater but no novel had been written, so they could not be sure. They never wasted their time nor their charm on something that was not sure. Why should they? Picasso was sure and of course had been before they had ever heard of painting. They were very sure of another painter. Many others. But this was the one they had taken up. He was a good enough painter too if you liked it and no one's fool. But this year they were sure and they had the word from the pilot fish who turned up too so we would not feel that they were outlanders and that I would not be difficult. The pilot fish was our friend of course.

  It gives me the horrors now to remember it. In those days I trusted the pilot fish as I would trust, in those days, the Corrected Hydrographic Sailing Directions for the Mediterranean, say, or the tables in Brown's Nautical Almanac. Under the charm of these rich I was as trusting and as stupid as a bird dog who wants to go out with any man with a gun, or a trained pig in a circus who has finally found someone who loves and appreciates him for himself alone. That every day should be a fiesta seemed to me a wonderful discovery. I even read aloud the part of the novel that I had rewritten, which is about as low as a writer can get and much more dangerous for him as a writer than glacier skiing unroped before the full winter snowfall has set over the crevices.

  When they said, "It's great, Ernest. Truly it's great. You cannot know the thing it has," I wagged my tail in pleasure and plunged into the every day a fiesta concept of life to see if I could not bring some fine attractive stick back, instead of thinking, "If these bastards like it what is wrong with it?" That was what I would think if I had been functioning as a professional although, if I had been functioning as a professional, I would never have read it to them.

  That was a horror winter. Before these rich had come we had already been infiltrated by another rich using the oldest trick probably that there is. This is when an unmarried young woman becomes the temporary best friend of another young woman who is married, comes to live with the husband and wife and then unknowingly, innocently and unrelentingly sets out to marry the husband. When the husband is a writer and doing difficult work on a book so that he is occupied much of the time and is not a good companion or partner to his wife for a big part of the day, the arrangement has advantages until you know how it works out. The husband has two attractive girls around when he has finished work. One is new and strange and if he has bad luck he gets to love them both. Then the one who is relentless wins.

  It sounds very silly. But to really love two women at the same time, truly love them, is the most destructive and terrible thing that can happen to a man when the unmarried one decides to marry. The wife does not know about it and trusts the husband. They have been through really difficult times and share those times and have loved each other and she finally trusts the husband truly and completely. The new one says you cannot really love her if you love your wife too. She does not say that at the start. That comes later when the murder's done. That comes when you lie to everyone all around and all you know is that you truly love two women. There is all that time when you do things that are impossible and when you are with one you love her and with the other you love her and together you love them both. You break all promises and you do everything you knew that you could never do nor would want to do. The one who is relentless wins. But finally it is the one who loses that wins and that is the luckiest thing that ever happened for me. So that was the sort of winter the last one was. These are the things I remember about it.

  They have shared in everything, they are never bored together and they have something that is unbreakable. They love their child and they love Paris, Spain, parts of Switzerland, the Dolomites, and the Vorarlberg. They love their work and she has sacrificed hers to his and never mentioned it.

  Then, instead of the two of them and their child, there are three of them. First it is wonderful and fun and it goes on that way for a while. All things to be truly wicked must start from an innocence. So you live day by day and enjoy what you have and do not worry. You love both and you lie and hate it and it destroys you and every day is more dangerous and you work harder and when you come out from your work you know what is happening is impossible, but you live day to day as in a war. Everyone is still happy except you when you wake in the middle of the night. You love them both now and you are gone. Everything is split inside of you and you love two people now instead of one.

  When you are with the one you love her and the one who is away. When you are with the other you love her and the other who is away. When you are with them both you love them both and the strange part is that you are happy. But as it goes on the new one is not happy then because she can see you love them both although she is still settling for that. When you are alone with her she knows you love her and she believes that if someone loves someone they cannot love anyone else and you never speak about the other to help her and to help yourself although you are past help. You never know and maybe she did not know when she made her decision but sometime in the middle of the winter she began to move steadily and relentlessly toward marriage; never breaking her friendship with your wife, never losing any advantage of position, always preserving an appearance of complete innocence, going away elaborately but only being away at any time long enough so that you would miss her too badly.

  The winter of the avalanches was like a happy day in childhood compared to this last winter.

  The new and strange girl that now owned half of you, once she had decided to marry, you could not say decided to break up the marriage because that was only a necessary step, a regrettable step, not an end, probably passed over or avoided in thinking, made only one grave mistake. She undervalued the power of remorse.

  It was necessary that I leave Schruns and go to New York to straighten out who I was publishing with after the first book of stories. It was a bitter winter on the North Atlantic and there was snow knee deep in New York and when I got back to Paris I should have caught the first train from the Gare de l'Est that would take me down to Austria. But the girl I was in love with was in Paris now, still writing to my wife, and where we went and what we did and the unbelievable wrenching, kicking happiness, selfishness and treachery of everything
we did, gave me such happiness and un-killable dreadful happiness so that the black remorse came and hatred of the sin and no contrition, only a terrible remorse.

  When I saw my wife again standing by the tracks as the train came in by the piled logs at the station, I wished I had died before I ever loved anyone but her. She was smiling, the sun on her lovely face tanned by the snow and sun, beautifully built, her hair red gold in the sun, grown out all winter awkwardly and beautifully, and Mr. Bumby standing with her, blond and chunky and with winter cheeks looking like a good Vorarlberg boy.

  "Oh Tatie," she said, when I was holding her in my arms, "you're back and you made such a wonderful successful trip. I love you and we've missed you so."

  I loved her and I loved no one else and we had a lovely magic time while we were alone. I worked well and we made great trips, and it wasn't until we were out of the mountains in late spring, and back in Paris that the other thing started again. Remorse was a fine good thing and with a little luck and if I'd been a better man it might have saved me for something worse probably instead of being my true and constant companion for the next three years.

  Maybe the rich were fine and good and the pilot fish was a friend. Certainly the rich never did anything for their own ends. They collected people then as some collect pictures and others breed horses and they only backed me in every ruthless and evil decision that I made and all of the decisions seemed so inevitable and logical and fine and all had been brought about by deceit. It wasn't that the decisions were wrong although they all turned out badly finally from the same fault of character that made them. If you deceive and lie with one person against another you will eventually do it again. If some person is able to do it to you once another person will do it again. I had hated these rich because they had backed me and encouraged me when I was doing wrong. But how could they know it was wrong and had to turn out badly when they had never known all the circumstances? It was not their fault. It was only their fault for coming into other people's lives. They were bad luck for people but they were worse luck to themselves and they lived to have all of their bad luck finally to the very worst end that all bad lucks could go.

  For the girl to deceive her friend was a terrible thing but it was my fault and blindness that this did not repel me. Having become involved in it and being in love I accepted all the blame for it myself and lived with the remorse.

  The remorse was never away day or night until my wife had married a much finer man than I ever was or ever could be and I knew that she was happy.

  But that winter before I knew that I would ever get back into the badness we had a lovely time at Schruns and I remember all of it and the coming of that spring in the mountains and how much my wife and I loved and trusted each other truly and how happy we were that all the rich were gone and how I thought we were invulnerable again. But we were not invulnerable and that was the end of the first part of Paris, and Paris was never to be the same again although it was always Paris and you changed as it changed. We never went back to the Vorarlberg and neither did the rich. I do not think even the pilot fish ever went back. He had new places to pilot the rich to and finally he became a rich himself. But he had his bad luck first and it was worse than anyone's.

  Nobody climbs on skis now and almost everybody breaks their legs but maybe it is easier in the end to break your legs than to break your heart although they say that everything breaks now and that sometimes, afterwards, many are stronger at the broken places. I do not know about that now but this is how Paris was in the early days when we were very poor and very happy.

  Nada y Pues Nada

  This will give you some account of the people and the places when Hadley and I believed we were invulnerable. But we were not invulnerable and that was the end of the first part of Paris all right. Nobody ever climbs on seal skins now. They do not have to. There have been different bindings, good and bad, and maybe in the end it is easier to break your legs than to break your heart although they say whatever breaks that many are stronger at the broken places. I do not know about that now today on this morning but I know who said it and I back it.

  They ski much better now, are better taught and the good ones do it beautifully. They come down faster and they drop like birds, strange birds that know many secrets, and it is only the new deep snow that makes the extra danger for those who need the packed tracks.

  They all know many secrets now as we knew other secrets when we ran the glaciers un-roped and there were no ski patrols. They are better ski-ers than we ever were and they would have done the high mountains too if there had been no lifts and that was what they had to do. A different problem has been set.

  If they start early enough and have the new secrets and the talent nothing may break even in racing the way it went this year at Sun Valley and no one should ever be killed as things are organized everywhere. They even fire canon now and use mortars to start the avalanches.

  No one can ever say they will not break a leg now under certain conditions. Breaking a heart is different. Some people say there is no such thing. Certainly you can not break it if you do not have it and many things unite to take it away from those who started with it. Perhaps there is nothing there. Nada. You can take this or not. And it can be true or not. There are philosophers who explain it very well.

  In writing there are many secrets too. Nothing is ever lost no matter how it seems at the time and what is left out will always show and make the strength of what is left in. Some say that in writing you can never possess anything until you have given it away or, if you are in a hurry, you may have to throw it away. In much later times than these stories of Paris you may not have it ever until you state it in fiction and then you may have to throw it away or it will be stolen again. They say other things too but do not pay them too much attention. They are the secrets that we have that are made by alchemy and much is written about them by people who do not know the secrets or the alchemy. There are many more explainers now than there are good writers. You need much luck in addition to all other things and you do not always have it. This is regrettable but nothing to complain about as you should not complain of those explainers who tell you how you do it and why, if you do not agree with them. Let them explain it all but it must be difficult to reconcile the nothingness you know and the part where you live in other people. Some wish you luck and others do not. Good writing does not destroy easily but you must be careful making jokes.

  Then you remember Evan the last time in Cuba when he came over with the pancreas cancer still draining. He was dressing it himself and covering the horses at the Gulfstream Park for the morning Telegraph. He was ahead on his work and he flew over. He had not brought the morphine he needed nor a prescription because they said it was so easy to get in Cuba and it wasn't. There had been a crackdown. He had come to say goodbye. But naturally he would not say it. You could smell the discharge from the cancer draining.

  "The doctor will certainly bring it," he said. "There's something holding him up. I'm so sorry about the pain, Hem, and being a nuisance."

  "He should be here by now."

  "Let's remember all the funny parts about the old days and the great people. Remember Desnos? That was a wonderful book he sent you."

  "Remember the time you turned up in Madrid from the hospital at Murcia in alpargatas in the snow when you were on convalescent leave after you'd been wounded and you slept under the covers across the foot of the bed and John Tsanakas slept on the floor and John cooked for us?"

  "Good John. Remember the wolf when he was a herd boy? I was self conscious about coughing so much. It never means a thing when I cough blood but it's embarrassing. You know Paris was a happy time and Key West was quite wonderful too. But Spain was much the best."

  "And the other war. How did you ever get in really?"

  "They'll always take you if you really want to go. I took it very seriously and I made master sergeant. It was so easy after Spain. It was rather like being back in school and quite a lot like being
with the horses. Combat was interesting as a problem."

  "I have all the poems stashed away."

  The pain was very bad now and we had remembered so many truly funny things and great people.

  "You were very thoughtful about them, Hem. It is not that things should be published. But I believe now that it is important that they exist. We've both existed quite a lot haven't we Hem? And you wrote awfully well about Nada."

  "Nada y pues Nada," I said. But I remembered the Gulf Stream and the sea and other things.

  "You don't mind if I'm serious, Hem. It's been so good to talk about Monsieur Dunning and le fou dans le cabanon on that wonderful voyage on the old Paris and the disappearance of Mr. Vosper and Andre and Jean. The two of them. The waiters. And Andre Masson and Joan Miro and what happened to them. Remember when you had me on the allowance from the bank and the paintings I bought then? But you must keep on because you write for all of us."

  "Who's all of us?"

  "Please don't be difficult. I mean us of the early days and the best parts and the bad parts and Spain. Then this other one and everything since and the times now. You have to put in the fun and the other that only we know who have been at some strange places in some strange times. Please do it even when you want to never think about it. And you have to put in now. I am so busy with the horses that I don't know about now. Only my now."

  "I'm sorry he's late with that stuff, Evan. That stuff is our now for today."

  "It's only pain," he said. "There must be some good reason for the delay."

  "We'll go in and find some. Isn't it operable Evan?"