Kora & Ka Read online

  Damn the damn packet. She tied her dress round her square bag, stuffed the two into her hat, weighed down the hat, either side, with shoes. This, she carefully perched on the flat top of the rock. If anyone tried to get at the packet (though who would?) the dress would flutter like a signal. She visualised herself far out. She would leave Christian and his silly inhibitions and get to that rock. The roué in green waist belt had smiled at her, their favourite had deigned yesterday to see that she was there. She had given a hand up to the tall adolescent girl, who talked what seemed to her, might be a Sardinian variant on Italian. She wasn’t going to stay back because of Christian and his inhibitions of being too thin. She waded out to tell him.

  Christian, naked to the waist, was tea-party talking to what, at the moment, could not be distinguished, save as false teeth in a yellow mask. Shoulders naked as a screen beauty, rose from new Derry & Toms saxe-blue. Saxe-blue had gone duck-egg where the sun got it. Those variants of blue, made Parthenon frieze carving of wet folds across a torso, no Phidias yet carved. The two Miss Thistlethwaites bathed twice daily. This one, the elder, was telling Christian, in a church social accent, “but you should go to the ‘plage’ just once to see it. They dance, they have cocktails, champagne, everything. They throw money away. It costs eight francs to get in and then you must pay for a bathing tent.” Christian said the usual right thing, “O” or “no” with inflection and she went on, “and the waiters bring out yellow mattresses for you to lie on.” Alex knew that Christian had turned his flawless manner on her, like a searchlight. She splashed to let him know she was there. The other Miss Thistlethwaite emerged. Alex saw Chris bow to another set of teeth in another yellow mask, “my sister.”

  She swam slowly out from them, forgetting.

  Forgetting-remembering . . . she remembered Atlantic breakers on miles of virgin sand and sand dimes and behind dunes, American sea-grass. She remembered the European scene, old, old remembrance, steel blue within lotus-blue of lilies. She remembered, as passing from blue-lit to blue-lit window, one places candles on altars, in a cathedral where all is already too-bright. The flame of the sun was so many million candles, burning to its own glory. In it, she was submerged, rising, dropping to straddle the middle of the three land marks. Seated astride, her back to Christian and the Miss Thistlethwaites, she remembered Paestum. Then she remembered Philae. She could not remember further.

  Her wide eyes stared, hypnotist eyes, past the final goal, the slippery “last” rock, as she and Christian called it. Christian, who always pretended not to see her, would tell her, three days later, just what she had been doing, how at a given moment, she had risen from sea-water, how at a given instant, she had sunk back, had turned her face to the sun, or had parted sea from sea with arms, so much more adept at this than, he confessed, he would have credited. Christian would pilot Christian around his given boulder; he still took orders from this Christian. She herself had walked out of herself, simply kicking garter belt and Deauville sandals to one side and with Deauville sandals and somewhat weathered satin garter belt, the odd thing that went with them, trappings, the double sluice gate that had let her slide past; the twin barred double gate was open.

  Remembering in that grand sense, she had found, had nothing to do with those platinum gates of shining intellect. Mnemoseyne, the Mother of the Muses . . . was this sort of thing; remembering.

  Christian said the great coral branched cactus trees in the Casino garden were sub-conscious plant life. She had said, “sub-aqueous.” The things she thought, were under the water, for all she sat so perched there. Flippantly turning over the pages of the hotel guide book, she had chanced to read to Christian, “Eze. The Phoenicians set up their first temple here, to Isis.” Blue. She gathered the blue-impression, like a cloak, about her.

  II.

  By that the so much happier, by that the so much wiser, she let impression sway, rather than jolt, she let voices slip through and past. In the coral-hued gown that was Christian’s favourite, she let voice mingle, indistinguishable from flutter of paper vine and rose, the slip-slop of the wine-waiter and the soft glide of that boy, another picked “favourite” among the tribe of waiters. Christian had said, “I think on a whole, I vote for the bawdy little wine-waiter.” Alex said, “the tall boy—” “the hors-d’œuvres?” “No,” she said, “the one with those eyes.” Then Christian agreed. “You mean,” he said “the one whose eyes God put in, as the Irish say, with dirty fingers?’ Yes, God put in his eyes with sooty fingers. The boy’s eye-lashes were smudged in, chimney-sweep black, about grey-green reedy water.

  Inwardly, indistinguishable, by that the so much happier, she knew outwardly her coral gown had given the dame they called the “carnival queen” a jolt. That English lady in the doorway, gathered balance, tried in vain to recapture her usual Duse entrance. Christian muttered over turbot, “now she’ll think, after all, you are a smart demi-mondaine.” Alex smiled across, into eyes whose usual agate was smoke-blue now, in the new near-bronze. Only now, she realised that he had always outwardly been too white, that she had been inwardly too incandescent. She was cool with flutter of paper vine and roses making tremor in that air, through which passed the bawdy wine-waiter, through which trod Ganymede. She said she would have ice in her white wine, apologetically to Christian, for she knew he thought it was wrong.

  A moon, three sizes too large, came up. It could be seen to have come, because of a lane that led from beyond the palm-trees, irrational silver, on off into irrational space. The broad clusters of the date palms hid the moon, that must be three sizes too large to-night, as it had been three sizes too large last night. The moon seemed not to have changed, though Christian said, last night, it looked as if it had fallen off the table. She saw, then, that the moon was squashed a little sideways, was still, she persisted, the same size. The moon was hidden by the date leaves and the swaying fringe that, this afternoon, she had bent head back to draw into her perspective. “That powder tassel,” she had said to Christian, “is the date-blossom.” She had not known that. She had said, “in Egypt—” the unformed sentence was in its whole implication, a lie. She had not seen date-palms in blossom in Egypt, neither did Egypt mean to her what she meant to imply to him, it did mean. She could not say, she would not say, blatantly and baldly, “I never so loved Egypt; that winter there was not the shock that this is.” She could not say that. He would think it a stilted, graceless compliment. He would not know that she loved this frivolous beauty-patch, this corner, more than she loved Egypt, more than she loved Greece. She would not let him know how much she loved it, lest the very mouthing of the words should let bars down. To speak, requires an intellectual effort. If she spoke, who knows? Platinum might snap back. If she thought, who knew?

  Platinum had wired in, had set beautifully her impression of the Luxor temple, carved out of mountain, set against blue dome. Too great a beauty for so small a setting, platinum intellect still held it. In a box, in a brain, she held that beauty perfect, her beauty, a lawful heritage. In a box there were a sprinkled smattering of islands, gems, too beautiful but never over-ornate. In the whole box now there was nothing over-ornate. For one moment she would look at those gems, Sorrento, jade-green, Capri, Rhodes, the coast of Cyprus. She would look deep, deep, let hands lift perfection, let fall perfection. She said, “Monte Carlo is a vulgarian’s paradise.”

  Elbows leant on the ledge beside her. They were smooth grey elbows, summer-cut smooth jacket, no dead dining-out black. The coat was the colour of the stone parapet they leant on. For a moment, she dreamt she grew to it, coral against stone ledge. She repeated, “a vulgarian’s paradise.”

  He would not catch the song in her throat. He could not. He could not catch the c and the d and the minor trembling of a string; he could not hear the music. She listened to a voice, her own voice, that went on, meticulous in detail, “but the people in the casino are like the things you turn up under an old rug, left all winter in a garden.” He would not catch her song, he coul
d not. She said, “you ought just for ten minutes, to go in there, Christian.”

  A small yacht fluttered pennants, there were arches of tricolour, there were shields, tacked up to lamp-posts. The arc-lights shed incandescence down and into a hollow that was the famous basin of Monte Carlo, into which other yachts rode, fluttering in the over-illumination, gay July 14th streamers and ribbons of the tricolour. Beyond, the Condamine, (rock cut with careless scissors, crudely from black card-board) apparently cast no shadow but served as a double reflector for the moon that now rode high. The moon, she now saw, had been adequately sat on. It was a squashed orange garden cushion, bulged to one side, sat on. Across the road of the moon, occasional steam launch puffed its little protest, child toy boat into a Japanese lantern strung on a wire across a pond in a birthday-party garden. Behind them, strains of Vienna, from the famous but provincial orchestra, sounded too slowly. She said, “how was I to know that it isn’t like—this?”

  He was flicking cigarette ash. He was flicking ash down an area; a black wedge of dark was the steep drop across a few straggling inadequate peaks of Arizona spike tree. She couldn’t think of the name of that tree. It worried her for a moment. For a moment, she wanted bars ever so gently to cast, at least, a shadow. She wanted a shadow of intellect to inform her that she was there. She would fight a little, call up some word to claim her. She had told him about date-palms, she would tell him about this thing. “Did you know this spike tree sort of thing that sticks up all the coast?” He was looking out, listening to the music. She repeated—“this funny spike thing like burnt matches, stuck up in a child’s sand heap is the Arizona—is the Arizona—” but she couldn’t get it. He wasn’t, anyhow, listening to what she said. He said, “it’s actually Strauss they’re playing.”

  She said, though she knew it was Strauss, played half again too slowly, half-heartedly to shock him, “it’s some sort of Mozart.” He said, “it’s Strauss— listen.” The place was doing its best to be what the place always had been. But how was she to have known (Christian really should have warned her) that the place was not a bit like what it seemed to be like, like what she had believed it would be like, to what presumably it was like? She said, “the funniest thing about it is, it’s so exactly what I thought it would be.”

  Aloe. The word dropped like a pebble into a pool, set up ripple, recalled more distant ripple. “Those aloe trees” (he hadn’t even noticed) “remind me of Arizona.” They did not. Nothing reminded her of anything, things served to let slip out, or served slightly to bar or served to seem to hurry along, to show the rate at which she moved; that simply. Aloe did nothing to her. It was a straw thrown down, that showed simply that she was moving. The word “aloe” showed that the blue surface of the water heaved up, sank, but it did not really matter. The word “aloe” had nothing to do with that sub-aqueous memory, though the tree had. Spiked up into midnight blue, the skeleton shapes stirred, like those Casino garden cactus branches, other-memory. Christian said, “what was that blue thing called, under the wall, where we sat before tea?”

  She had seen him sitting on a wall. But he was alone then. She had come alone to the café to meet him, then finding it was too early, had swept resolutely past the amber-fringed sunshades, toward the Casino steps. She considered it her duty to go in there. She mustn’t go back and not have been in. Of course, it was easy to see from the conducted tribe of Americans-off-boats, what it was like. Provincial. She had formulated in her mind the term “provincial.” What else could it be? When she found herself inside, she realized a dank unearthed element really did exist here. As she had said to Christian, “it’s like the things you turn up under an old strip of carpet, or a rotten log, in sunlight.” “The abstract idea of the Casino, at Monte Carlo, was familiar to her from childhood, from meretricious “shockers.” But how could she know that the Casino would be as true as that yacht, now anchored in mid-harbour, as that stage-moon, as these trees? Aloes were painted upright on old-fashioned scenery, yachts lay at painted anchor, the moon moved with mechanical wheeze of rusty wires, the sea heaved like the race-track, in the old stage Ben Hur, the very leaves dropped in the open square, before the Café de Paris, by the exact dozen. Yes, Christian should have warned her. But Christian had said, “it was never really like this, in the season.”

  Christian asked her now what that flower was. It was a jasmine shaped thing with fern-like, conservatory leaves, a fragile sky-blown thing, another blue. She would always remember that flower, she had no name to give it. “Aloe” dropped unexpectedly into the blue pool of her being, setting up counter ripple. But she knew she had never seen this flower, had no memory-in-forgetting. She had no name to give it. She would remember, always, Christian sitting on a wall between maypole uprights that held shield and clustered French flags. She had seen Christian there, from the Casino window.

  She said, “I don’t know what that flower is . . . you’d have been amazed. There were six, no, eight croupiers to a table. They were dressed like undertakers. There was one at each end, two in the middle, opposite the spinning wheel, and back of the two, each side in the middle, two separate ones, sitting on the sort of tennis-umpire chairs. They were like dining-room tables with hungry faces, faces just out of an underworld novel. I thought the Casino was a sort of tradition and, like that sort of tradition, just hollow. It wasn’t hollow. It was full of maggots. I was there ten minutes.”

  Christian, only half-aware, listening to the second movement of some pot-pourri of de-jazzed Strauss, said, “you seemed to see a lot in ten minutes.”

  She said, “you couldn’t help it. I just walked past the door-keepers. O yes, first, I had to show them my passport in the outer office. You know I made a mistake. They said, ‘what is your profession.’ I said ‘I am écrivan’ (I almost said écrevisse) I almost said, ‘I am a crawfish.’ They said, ‘what do you want here?’ I said, ‘I am a writer. I don’t want to play. I only want to watch.’ Now, why did I say that? They made me wait twice as long, made out more papers. Now they have me on their black list. I was there ten minutes. It was dark, an underworld cellar. A girl was standing waiting for a table. She loomed out of cinema smoke, hair shining, cinema face pallid. There were old, old women, all types. They waited for the play, then scraped up everything. I don’t know the rules. I don’t know how they did it. But I was sure they just scraped up everything. There were men crouched down. Where do these people come from? There were old, yellow, out-at-heels Corsican-looking fellows, and old, old ladies. There were other old ladies who seemed to be sort of under-studies for those principal old ladies. I am certain they are were-slugs or something. They turn, I am certain, into worms and crawl under the carpet at night. The place was simply crawling.”

  Staring into meretricious imitation of stage-scenery, across the track of an unconvincing slightly battered stage-moon, just three times as big as life and twice as natural, she said, “there were gilt mirrors like a railway station. There were plush benches—but crowded—and a spittoon, filled, with white sawdust (clean enough) at the corner. I got a place perched on the very edge of a plush seat and tried to keep my feet out of the spittoon that was as big—as big as that moon there. When I looked right, left, there were lifted faces looking right, left at me. Are people, then, really desperate? I thought Monte Carlo was a sort of property, a weather-worn property, set up nights when they expected the Lithuania, in at Nice. I thought it was an exploded fallacy like—like—like patriotism, like anything you fancy. I thought it was the American dollar that kept it going, but as old missionary looking dame, who couldn’t even find a corner to sit down in, said in a respectable Minneapolis little sad voice, across the dead plush heaviness of the undertaker silence, ‘but you know, Katie, you couldn’t play even if you did want to. There’s no room anywhere.’ Even if you did want to. She obviously did want to. I got up and made room for her by the spittoon. I got over to the window. Just then, the orchestra outside struck up the opening bars of the Marseillaise, as if for my benefi
t and I began to giggle.”

  “Yes,” he said, quite seriously, as if the concert were the only thing that mattered, “that was the beginning. They played their own national hymn first, or something that sounded, as if it couldn’t have been anything but it. Anyhow the policemen stood at attention.” Christian turned his back to the stage moon. His thin face, in the downpour of electricity, looking like a Basque made-up for a Chelsea Ball. She said, “you ought to paint on a little moustache and wind a handkerchief around your head and be a Spanish gipsy. They all wear fancy-dress here.” He did not listen to her. He said, “you see, it is Strauss.”

  She couldn’t giggle any more. She could giggle at the Marseillaise, struck up with fantastic aptness, the very second she had reached that window, to view (outside) a painting of some uncatalogued post-Cézanne period. Little spot and dash of colour, no blur, all put on with exact thumb smear, yet all looking almost natural. Her eyes, squinting a little toward that heady sunlight, had perhaps been responsible for its looking natural, for it certainly was not. It was the sort of painting you could pull to pieces, grand-stand in the middle, extravagance of bunting, pennants, flags on separate sticks and flags clustered in little bouquets, yet all somewhat niggling, put in here, there with a fantastic modernistic attempt at pseudo-Victorianism. It was the sort of painting you see across the room at a French impressionistic gallery and wonder how it got there. The sort of thing you pass clustered pears for, and mellow exquisite Cézanne-gardens and bundles of cumulous cherry. It was all wrong certainly. She said, “it was the funniest thing. I waded, simply waded through that room. I had to turn and look once at the ceiling and then a sort of flunkey spied me. The place seemed full of flunkies, apart from the eight undertakers at each table. The minute I bent my head back to look at the ceiling, there was a flunkey saying, ‘madame?’ with the sort of interrogation that simply shouted ‘what are you a mere écrivan or écrevisse lobster doing in here?’ I was a very clean fish. At least, I felt so, not crusted but transparent. He looked right through me. I was the only body in a world of ghosts or the only ghost in a world of bodies. Anyhow, I was different. He said ‘madame’ with a curling question mark . . . when I stared up at the ceiling. He said ‘madame.’”