Our visit to the country of Petrarch was more fortuitous though Vega was after all an Avignon girl with relations in the town whom she wished to see before going on a long journey which would take her far from France for several years. Happily, I lived so close by that I was able to profit from this descent into the Vaucluse, and we spent some time travelling together to the smaller villages, the more evocative corners of Provence. I personally would not have risked such a tourist spot as the fountain of Vaucluse but she insisted, and the trip as it turned out was delightful; it was in mid-winter. There was not a soul — not even the ghost of Laura rising from the foam. Was it Vega’s local patriotism that made her put up such an effective plaidoyer for Petrarch? I had been rather inclined to see in him one of the cry-babies of love-poetry. But thanks to her I now saw beneath the trappings of romance and realized him as the great and deeply responsible humanist, fully aware that he had stirred a whole culture to its roots and struck chords deeper than any poet before him. She rounded out the portrait in some detail — the courtier, the diplomat, the dispirited lover of another’s wife. Then all the sudden excursions into the neighbouring countries, followed always by a retreat to this sunless ravine where he could polish his verses to the rushing of the waters. The great poem on Africa, and the essay on solitude, the passion for St Augustine … I had no idea he was an artist of such stature — I owe the knowledge to Vega. Moreover, it was due to her that I hunted down texts of his little autobiographical dialogues entitled Secretum Meum as well as the touching and poetic statements in De Vita Solitaria in which he deals with the heralidic solitude of the artist. This last document was sent to me some months later from Geneva as a Christmas present. It was beautifully bound in scarlet vellum — a fitting setting for a great poet’s confession.
Well, all this was in the past now, but my memories of these episodes were still fresh, and the time of day I had chosen to descend on the sacred fountain was appropriate to the theme of my reflections. Moreover it was snowing, and heavily snowing at that. Ice crunched under my wheels. The villagers were shuttered and huddled upon themselves with only plumes of smoke from cottage chimneys to suggest human habitation. I could hear the roar of the distant fountain as it crashed out of the rock-face into the great circular pool where it lashed and writhed, for all the world as if it were boiling hot. The town was in darkness save for a glim here and there; one point of light shone from the little hotel where we had once stayed. I laid the car up in the snowy park and with my nose well tucked into my scarf ran down the pathways by the racing river to the glassfronted door of the place where I knocked once or twice rather sharply, in order to be heard above the roaring water. The madam of the establishment who was busy somewhere in the depths came short-sightedly towards me with a torch. Who could it be at such a time, on such a night? She did not at first recognize me but, good trusting soul, came towards me to parley through the glass door. It did not take long to recall who I was and she let me into the bar where I drank a welcome hot grog while she sat and kept me company. The place had not yet opened for the tourist season but she had come over for the weekend to test the heating and water systems; and indeed the heating was on and the whole place cosy. She offered to lodge me for the night but I preferred to sleep high up by the fountain in my little camper; but I would not say no to a sandwich. ‘A sandwich!’ she cried indignantly. ‘You shall dine properly in my hotel.’ It did not take long to prepare; she served me a trout with almonds — the trout grows à domicile here — followed by a good cheese with a bottle of Côte de Ventoux. And while I ate she came to talk to me in her kind and desultory fashion. Where was the blonde lady, she wanted to know? She was in Africa. ‘Once after your visit she came back here alone.’ I knew this for Vega had written to me from here, and in the same sort of season, for she described the heavy snow falling and being smoothed away in the racing water — and then an unusual touch which I had just come upon myself; the great trout were rising to the snowflakes and taking them as if they were bait! ‘A strange place to bring an unhealed love-affair.’ That was how she had once put it, referring to Petrarch. After dinner I ploughed my way up into the ravine as far as the macadam goes, and then turned off with my nose to the cliff to doss down. The intense white glare of the snow reflected so much light that one had the illusion that there was still a lingering twilight. The roar of the water was deafening; it was like being in the engine-room of some great ship, sleeping between the pulsing sweating turbines as they drove one rushing through the sea. What a lapidary’s wheel on which to polish the first elegaic poems of an entire epoch! One’s whole consciousness was quite engulfed in this steady drumming — as if upon a heavy vellum drumhead. The snow was falling in great meshes and wreaths and chaplets, and the water was swirling and polishing the black cliffs as it streaked for the sea. The river hereabouts is too fast for the fish, but a little lower down it is dark and pithy with trout. I made up my bed, heated up and then switched prudently off before turning in. It was wonderfully healing, the boom of the river — the dense cocoon of sound swaddled every nerve. Old conversations came back to mind, lazily, as if projected upon the darkness, wrestling with the desire to sleep.
‘And Laura, was she real?’
‘Does it matter?’
‘Yes and no.’
‘If invented she was still as real as any of his readers — as you or I are.’
‘And if real she was only the ghost of an echo of a mood. In the book she dies, remember?’
‘Africa! Sitting here in this roaring nautilus of sound he dreamed of Africa and read St Augustine.’
‘And so for Laura there were many candidates for the part.’