8

arriving mont roux bellevue sunday

dinnertime adoration sorrow rainbows


Van got this bold cable with his breakfast on Saturday, October 10, 1905, at the Manhattan Palace in Geneva, and that same day moved to Mont Roux at the opposite end of the lake. He put up there at his usual hotel, Les Trois Cygnes. Its small, frail, but almost mythically ancient concierge had died during Van’s stay four years earlier, and instead of wizened Julien’s discreet smile of mysterious complicity that used to shine like a lamp through parchment, the round rosy face of a recent bellboy, who now wore a frockcoat, greeted fat old Van.

‘Lucien,’ said Dr Veen, peering over his spectacles, ‘I may have — as your predecessor would know — all kinds of queer visitors, magicians, masked ladies, madmen — que sais-je? and I expect miracles of secrecy from all three mute swans. Here’s a prefatory bonus.’

‘Merci infiniment,’ said the concierge, and, as usual, Van felt infinitely touched by the courteous hyperbole provoking no dearth of philosophical thought.

He engaged two spacious rooms, 509 and 510: an Old World salon with golden-green furniture, and a charming bed chamber joined to a square bathroom, evidently converted from an ordinary room (around 1875, when the hotel was renovated and splendified). With thrilling anticipation, he read the octagonal cardboard sign on its dainty red string: Do not disturb. Prière de ne pas déranger. Hang this notice on the doorhandle outside. Inform Telephone Exchange. Avisez en particulier la téléphoniste (no emphasis, no limpid-voiced girl in the English version).

He ordered an orgy of orchids from the rez-de-chaussée flower shop, and one ham sandwich from Room Service. He survived a long night (with Alpine Choughs heckling a cloudless dawn) in a bed hardly two-thirds the size of the tremendous one at their unforgettable flat twelve years ago. He breakfasted on the balcony — and ignored a reconnoitering gull. He allowed himself an opulent siesta after a late lunch; took a second bath to drown time; and with stops at every other bench on the promenade spent a couple of hours strolling over to the new Bellevue Palace, just half a mile southeast.

One red boat marred the blue mirror (in Casanova’s days there would have been hundreds!). The grebes were there for the winter but the coots had not yet returned.

Ardis, Manhattan, Mont Roux, our little rousse is dead. Vrubel’s wonderful picture of Father, those demented diamonds staring at me, painted into me.

Mount Russet, the forested hill behind the town, lived up to its name and autumnal reputation, with a warm glow of curly chestnut trees; and on the opposite shore of Leman, Leman meaning Lover, loomed the crest of Sex Noir, Black Rock.

He felt hot and uncomfortable in silk shirt and gray flannels — one of his older suits that he had chosen because it happened to make him look slimmer; but he should have omitted its tightish waistcoat. Nervous as a boy at his first rendezvous! He wondered what better to hope for — that her presence should be diluted at once by that of other people or that she should manage to be alone, for the first minutes, at least? Did his glasses and short black mustache really make him look younger, as polite whores affirmed?

When he reached at long last the whitewashed and blue-shaded Bellevue (patronized by wealthy Estotilanders, Rheinlanders, and Vinelanders, but not placed in the same superclass as the old, tawny and gilt, huge, sprawling, lovable Trois Cygnes), Van saw with dismay that his watch still lagged far behind 7:00 p.m., the earliest dinner hour in local hotels. So he recrossed the lane and had a double kirsch, with a lump of sugar, in a pub. A dead and dry hummingbird moth lay on the window ledge of the lavatory. Thank goodness, symbols did not exist either in dreams or in the life in between.

He pushed through the revolving door of the Bellevue, tripped over a gaudy suitcase, and made his entrée at a ridiculous run. The concierge snapped at the unfortunate green-aproned cameriere, who had left the bag there. Yes, they were expecting him in the lounge. A German tourist caught up with him, to apologize, effusively, and not without humor, for the offending object, which, he said, was his.

‘If so,’ remarked Van, ‘you should not allow spas to slap their stickers on your private appendages.’

His reply was inept, and the whole episode had a faint paramnesic tang — and next instant Van was shot dead from behind (such things happen, some tourists are very unbalanced) and stepped into his next phase of existence.

He stopped on the threshold of the main lounge, but hardly had he begun to scan the distribution of its scattered human contents, than an abrupt flurry occurred in a distant group. Ada, spurning decorum, was hurrying toward him. Her solitary and precipitate advance consumed in reverse all the years of their separation as she changed from a dark-glittering stranger with the high hair-do in fashion to the pale-armed girl in black who had always belonged to him. At that particular twist of time they happened to be the only people conspicuously erect and active in the huge room, and heads turned and eyes peered when the two met in the middle of it as on a stage; but what should have been, in culmination of her headlong motion, of the ecstasy in her eyes and fiery jewels, a great explosion of voluble love, was marked by incongruous silence; he raised to his unbending lips and kissed her cygneous hand, and then they stood still, staring at each other, he playing with coins in his trouser pockets under his ‘humped’ jacket, she fingering her necklace, each reflecting, as it were, the uncertain light to which all that radiance of mutual welcome had catastrophically decreased. She was more Ada than ever, but a dash of new elegancy had been added to her shy, wild charm. Her still blacker hair was drawn back and up into a glossy chignon, and the Lucette line of her exposed neck, slender and straight, came as a heartrending surprise. He was trying to form a succinct sentence (to warn her about the device he planned for securing a rendezvous), but she interrupted his throat clearing with a muttered injunction: Sbrit’ usï! (that mustache must go) and turned away to lead him to the far corner from which she had taken so many years to reach him.

The first person whom she introduced him to, at that island of fauteuils and androids, now getting up from around a low table with a copper ashbowl for hub, was the promised belle-sœur, a short plumpish lady in governess gray, very oval-faced, with bobbed auburn hair, a sallowish complexion, smoke-blue unsmiling eyes, and a fleshy little excrescence, resembling a ripe maize kernel, at the side of one nostril, added to its hypercritical curve by an afterthought of nature as not seldom happens when a Russian’s face is mass-produced. The next outstretched hand belonged to a handsome, tall, remarkably substantial and cordial nobleman who could be none other than the Prince Gremin of the preposterous libretto, and whose strong honest clasp made Van crave for a disinfecting fluid to wash off contact with any of her husband’s public parts. But as Ada, beaming again, made fluttery introductions with an invisible wand, the person Van had grossly mistaken for Andrey Vinelander was transformed into Yuzlik, the gifted director of the ill-fated Don Juan picture. ‘Vasco de Gama, I presume,’ Yuzlik murmured. Beside him, ignored by him, unknown by name to Ada, and now long dead of dreary anonymous ailments, stood in servile attitudes the two agents of Lemorio, the flamboyant comedian (a bearded boor of exceptional, and now also forgotten, genius, whom Yuzlik passionately wanted for his next picture). Lemorio had stood him up twice before, in Rome and San Remo, each time sending him for ‘preliminary contact’ those two seedy, incompetent, virtually insane, people with whom by now Yuzlik had nothing more to discuss, having exhausted everything, topical gossip, Lemorio’s sex life, Hoole’s hooliganism, as well as the hobbies of his, Yuzlik’s, three sons and those of their, the agents’, adopted child, a lovely Eurasian lad, who had recently been slain in a night-club fracas — which closed that subject. Ada had welcomed Yuzlik’s unexpected reality in the lounge of the Bellevue not only as a counterpoise to the embarrassment and the deceit, but also because she hoped to sidle into What Daisy Knew; however, besides having no spells left in the turmoil of her spirit for business blandishments, she soon understood that if Lemorio were finally engaged, he would want her part for one of his mistresses.

Finally Van reached Ada’s husband.

Van had murdered good Andrey Andreevich Vinelander so often, so thoroughly, at all the dark crossroads of the mind, that now the poor chap, dressed in a hideous, funereal, double-breasted suit, with those dough-soft features slapped together anyhow, and those sad-hound baggy eyes, and the dotted lines of sweat on his brow, presented all the depressing features of an unnecessary resurrection. Through a not-too-odd oversight (or rather ‘undersight’) Ada omitted to introduce the two men. Her husband enunciated his name, patronymic, and surname with the didactic intonations of a Russian educational-film narrator. ‘Obnimemsya, dorogoy’ (let us embrace, old boy), he added in a more vibrant voice but with his mournful expression unchanged (oddly remindful of that of Kosygin, the mayor of Yukonsk, receiving a girl scout’s bouquet or inspecting the damage caused by an earthquake). His breath carried the odor of what Van recognized with astonishment as a strong tranquilizer on a neocodein base, prescribed in the case of psychopathic pseudo bronchitis. As Andrey’s crumpled forlorn face came closer, one could distinguish various wartlets and lumps, none of them, however, placed in the one-sided jaunty position of his kid sister’s naric codicil. He kept his dun-colored hair as short as a soldier’s by means of his own clippers. He had the korrektnïy and neat appearance of the one-bath-per-week Estotian hobereau.

We all flocked to the dining room. Van brushed against the past as he shot an arm out to forestall a door-opening waiter, and the past (still fingering his necklace) recompensed him with a sidelong’ Dolores’ glance.

Chance looked after the seating arrangement.

Lemorio’s agents, an elderly couple, unwed but having lived as man and man for a sufficiently long period to warrant a silver-screen anniversary, remained unsplit at table between Yuzlik, who never once spoke to them, and Van, who was being tortured by Dorothy. As to Andrey (who made a thready ‘sign of the cross’ over his un-unbuttonable abdomen before necking in his napkin), he found himself seated between sister and wife. He demanded the ‘cart de van’ (affording the real Van mild amusement), but, being a hard-liquor man, cast only a stunned look at the ‘Swiss White’ page of the wine list before ‘passing the buck’ to Ada who promptly ordered champagne. He was to inform her early next morning that her ‘Kuzen proizvodit (produces) udivitel’no simpatichnoe vpechatlenie (a remarkably sympathetic, in the sense of "fetching," impression),’ The dear fellow’s verbal apparatus consisted almost exclusively of remarkably sympathetic Russian common-places of language, but — not liking to speak of himself — he spoke little, especially since his sister’s sonorous soliloquy (lapping at Van’s rock) mesmerized and childishly engrossed him. Dorothy preambled her long-delayed report on her pet nightmare with a humble complaint (‘Of course, I know that for your patients to have bad dreams is a zhidovskaya prerogativa’), but her reluctant analyst’s attention every time it returned to her from his plate fixed itself so insistently on the Greek cross of almost ecclesiastical size shining on her otherwise unremarkable chest that she thought fit to interrupt her narrative (which had to do with the eruption of a dream volcano) to say: ‘I gather from your writings that you are a terrible cynic. Oh, I quite agree with Simone Traser that a dash of cynicism adorns a real man; yet I’d like to warn you that I object to anti-Orthodox jokes in case you intend making one.’

By now Van had more than enough of his mad, but not interestingly mad, convive. He just managed to steady his glass, which a gesture he made to attract Ada’s attention had almost knocked down, and said, without further ado, in what Ada termed afterwards a mordant, ominous and altogether inadmissible tone: