She was telling him how she had lost a pair of gloves on the train coming from Paris. He asked if he might accompany her into the shop. She hesitated. He assured her there was no other shop in the town and he would be glad to interpret for her.
This morning she saw yesterday’s incident differently. What had happened (mysteriously) had happened; but it was without consequence thanks to the order and routine of her normal life. She was in Domodossola with her husband. In four or five days she would return to Paris and her children. This man (with whom she was in a glove shop explaining that she wanted long white gloves) had taken advantage of one moment at a dinner party such as could not occur again. The incident had been finished before it began.
The woman who served them in the shop spoke at length about the heroism of Chavez. Geo Chavez, he translated to Camille, was a victor over the mountains, a conqueror, to whose present pains the woman behind the counter would gladly minister all night and to the least of whose wishes she would be proud to be a slave. She spoke as a mother although to her great regret she never had a son. One of her daughters worked in Milan, a second helped her with the shop.
The gloves which Camille wished to try on were of the thinnest white leather and tight-fitting. The woman, who was proud to live in the town which would nurse Chavez back to health, brought one of the gloves to her mouth and breathed into it before handing it across the counter to Camille. If it was still difficult to put on, she explained, she would sprinkle some talc
When memory connects one experience with another, the nature of the connection may vary considerably. There are connections by contrast, connections by similitude, connections by way of sensuous metaphor, connections of logical sequence, etc, etc The relation between the two experiences may sometimes be one of mutual comment. In this case the connection is multiform and complex. Yet the comment, although extremely precise, cannot be verbalized any more than a chord in music can be. The experience of watching the Italian shopkeeper breathing into a glove summoned up and commented upon his memory of the mysterious warmth he once found in the clothes of Miss Helen, his last governess. Likewise his memory commented upon his present experience. The comments, however, remain unwritable.
The Italian woman blew into the second glove before passing it to Camille. Filled with her breath, the glove took on the form of a hand which suddenly and deeply frightened Camille. It was a languid boneless hand, a hand without will, a hand floating in the air like a dead fish with its white stomach uppermost. It was a hand she did not want. It was a hand that could not clench itself. It was a hand which in caressing would in no way be a hand and would not caress; it would lead away. At that moment she knew what he was offering her. He was offering her the possibility of being what she pretended to be. He was proposing that she turn Mallarmé’s words into lived mornings and afternoons. But she immediately put her knowledge out of her mind by dismissing the self which recognized it, as unserious. All she had to do to remain safe, she told herself, was to be wary of being unrealistic.
The gloves fitted her perfectly. The leather across her tiny bony knuckles was so tight that it shone as if it were wet.
Take one hand in the other, he told her.
She did so.
You see, he said, you take your left hand in your right.
Is it strange? she asked.
No, he said, but it means you are confident, you are the mistress of your own fate.
She laughed, reassured that he recognized this. I am quite content, she said.
You can be content and a slave. Contentment has little to do with it. Why do you say content?
She thought it best not to answer. I am easily startled though, she said, like I was in the street just now.
Startled! You turned upon me with the fury of a virago defending her honour, and when you recognized it was me you extended me an utterly confident welcome.
Camille pulled off the gloves angrily, lay them on the counter and turned towards the door. He asked the shopkeeper how much they were.
I don’t want them, said Camille.
He paid for them. The shopkeeper folded them in mauve tissue paper. Camille stood facing the door. From behind he took both of her elbows in his hands.
(What can I foresee her elbow doing? Nothing of significance. Yet I perceive it in the same way as her hand. I receive from it the same promise and in the same way it fulfils its promise. Her elbows are in his hands.)
Trust me, he said. Nobody else knows why you take your left hand in your right. It doesn’t compromise you.
I don’t want the gloves, she said.
They won’t compromise you either, he said, it is certain that you would have bought them. And I offer them to you only as a modest homage to your elegance, Madame Hennequin, this morning.
The formality with which he spoke confused her. It was impossible to decide whether its falseness was deliberate or the result of his far from perfect grasp of the language. Either way it emphasized how by showing her anger she had been indiscreet.
It is too early for us to disagree, he said, and he held out the gloves to her and bowed.
She took them.
Je t’aime, Camille, he said, opening the shop door.
The hospital is near the centre of the town. A square yellow building, it looks like a classical early-nineteenth-century villa in its own garden. The main door is flanked by camellia trees. In the doorway is a table with a book open upon it. The book is for passers-by or visitors who do not wish to disturb the flyer, to write messages or tributes in. For some, however, it seems a sinister omen, for in certain parts of the Mediterranean a book is placed by the front door when there has been a death in the house; and in this book neighbours and acquaintances sign their names as an expression of condolence.
Weymann is waiting for him at the top of the stairs.
He says he remembers nothing after the Gondo, Weymann whispers.
How does he seem?
Very shaken and erratic.
What do the doctors really think?
His injuries are not serious. He has no concussion. There’s nothing to prevent him making a complete recovery.
Except?
I didn’t say except.
But except?
He’s too nervous, says Weymann.
They enter the room in which there are already half a dozen men, including Christiaens and Chavez’ close friend Duray. On the wall opposite the bed are pinned telegrams from all over the world: enough to cover the entire wall.
To the wounded man the wall might have represented a vast transparent window on to the world’s view of his achievement; but it does not, it remains a wall with confused meaningless rectangles of paper pinned to it, some of which stir slightly when the door is opened. His temperature is only slightly above normal. His brain is lucid. Time and again his imagination approaches the irreversibility of the events since he announced ‘I’m going now’. Their irreversibility confronts him like a rock face which moves with him as he turns his head or shifts his gaze. However high he climbs, however daringly he breaks through the wall of the wind westwards, it is still there, in front of his eyes and above his swollen lips. He repeatedly makes the approach but the geology of the events never changes. Meanwhile these silent endlessly recurring private approaches make everything else said or seen in his room seem as far away as the words he cannot read on the telegrams.