came to give a lecture on the Battle of Jutland. The lantern slides showed the movements
of the two battle fleets and the naval officer used a billiard cue for a pointer when he
pointed out the cowardice of Jellicoe, and sometimes he became so angry that his voice
broke. The schoolmaster was afraid that he would stab the billiard cue through the screen.
Afterwards the former naval officer could not quiet himself down and everyone was ill at
ease in the Weinstube. Only the public prosecutor and the banker drank with him, and
they were at a separate table. Herr Lent, who was a Rhinelander, would not attend the
lecture. There was a couple from Vienna who had come for the skiing but who did not
want to go to the high mountains and so were leaving for Zurs where, I heard, they were
killed in an avalanche. The man said the lecturer was the type of swine who had ruined
Germany and in twenty years they would do it again. The woman with him told him to
shut up in French and said this is a small place and you never know.
That was the year that so many people were killed in avalanches. The first big loss
was over the mountains from our valley in Lech in the Arlberg. A party of Germans
wanted to come and ski with Herr Lent on their Christmas vacations. Snow was late that
year and the hills and mountain slopes were still warm from the sun when a great
snowfall came. The snow was deep and powdery and it was not bound to the earth at all.
Conditions for skiing could not be more dangerous and Herr Lent had wired the Berliners
not to come. But it was their vacation time and they were ignorant and had no fear of
avalanches. They arrived at Lech and Herr Lent refused to take them out. One man called
him a coward and they said they would ski by themselves. Finally he took them to the
safest slope he could find. He crossed it himself and then they followed and the whole
hillside came down in a rush, rising over them as a tidal wave rises. Thirteen were dug
out and nine of them were dead. The Alpine ski school had not prospered before this, and
afterwards we were almost the only members. We became great students of avalanches,
the different types of avalanches, how to avoid them and how to behave if you were
caught in one. Most of the writing that I did that year was in avalanche time.
The worst thing I remember of that avalanche winter was one man who was dug out.
He had squatted down and made a box with his arms in front of his head, as we had been
taught to do, so that there would be air to breathe as the snow rose up over you. It was a
huge avalanche and it took a long time to dig everyone out, and this man was the last to
be found. He had not been dead long and his neck was worn through so that the tendons
and the bone were visible. He had been turning his head from side to side against the
pressure of the snow. In this avalanche there must have been some old, packed snow
mixed in with the new light snow that had slipped. We could not decide whether he had
done it on purpose or if he had been out of his head. He was refused burial in consecrated
ground by the local priest anyway, since there was no proof he was a Catholic.
When we lived in Schruns we used to make a long trip up the valley to the inn where
we slept before setting out on the climb to the Madlener-Haus. It was a very beautiful old
inn and the wood of the walls of the room where we ate and drank were silky with the
years of polishing. So were the table and chairs. We slept close together in the big bed
under the feather quilt with the window open and the stars close and very bright. In the
morning after breakfast we all loaded to go up the road and started the climb in the dark
with the stars close and very bright, carrying our skis on our shoulders. The porters' skis
were short and they carried heavy loads. We competed among ourselves as to who could
climb with the heaviest loads, but no one could compete with the porters, squat sullen
peasants who spoke only Montafon dialect, climbed steadily like pack-horses and at the
top, where the Alpine Club hut was built on a shelf beside the snow-covered glacier, shed
their loads against the stone wall of the hut, asked for more money than the agreed price,
and, when they had obtained a compromise, shot down and away on their short skis like
gnomes.
One of our friends was a German girl who skied with us. She was a great mountain
skier, small and beautifully built, who could carry as heavy a rucksack as I could and
carry it longer.
'Those porters always look at us as though they looked forward to bringing us down
as bodies,' she said. 'They set the price for the climb and I've never known them not to
ask for more.'
In the winter in Schruns I wore a beard against the sun that burned my face so badly
on the high snow, and did not bother having a haircut. Late one evening running on skis
down the logging trails Herr Lent told me that peasants I passed on those roads above
Shruns called me 'the Black Christ'. He said some, when they came to the Weinstube,
called me 'the Black Kirsch-drinking Christ'. But to the peasants at the far upper end of
the Montafon where we hired porters to go up to the Madlener-Haus, we were all foreign
devils who went into the high mountains when people should stay out of them. That we
started before daylight in order not to pass avalanche places when the sun could make
them dangerous was not to our credit. It only proved we were tricky as all foreign devils
are.
I remember the smell of the pines and the sleeping on the mattresses of beech leaves
in the woodcutters' huts and the skiing through the forest following the tracks of hares
and of foxes. In the high mountains above the tree line I remember following the track of
a fox until I came in sight of him and watching him stand with his right forefoot raised
and then go carefully to stop and then pounce, and the whiteness and the clutter of a
ptarmigan bursting out of the snow and flying away and over the ridge.
I remember all the kinds of snow that the wind could make and their different
treacheries when you were on skis. Then there were the blizzards when you were in the
high Alpine hut and the strange world that they would make where we had to make our
route as carefully as though we had never seen the country. We had not, either, as it all
was new. Finally towards spring there was the great glacier run, smooth and straight,
forever straight if our legs could hold it, our ankles locked, we running so low, leaning
into the speed, dropping forever and forever in the silent hiss of the crisp powder. It was
better than any flying or anything else, and we built the ability to do it and to have it with
the long climbs carrying the heavy rucksacks. We could not buy the trip up nor take a
ticket to the top. It was the end we worked for all winter, and all the winter built to make
it possible.
During our last year in the mountains new people came deep into our lives and
nothing was ever the same again. The winter of the avalanches was like a happy and
innocent winter in childhood compared to the next winter, a nightmare winter disguised
as the greatest fun of all, and the murderous summer that was to follow. It was that year
that the rich showed up.
The rich have a sort of pilot fish who goes ahead of them, sometimes a little deaf,
sometimes a little blind, but always smelling affable and hesitant ahead of them. The pilot
fish talks like this: 'Well I dont know. No of course not really. But I like them. I like them
both. Yes, by God, Hem; I do like them. I see what you mean but I do like them truly and
there's something damned fine about her.' (He gives her name and pronounces it lovingly.)
'No, Hem, don't be silly and don't be difficult. I like them truly. Both of them I swear it.
You'll like him' (using his baby-talk nickname) 'when you know him. I like them both,
truly.'
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 theatre in the same way as 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.
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 solidly
constructed as the beacon there would be little damage except to the birds. Those who
attract people by their happiness and their performance are usually inexperienced. They
do not know how not to be overrun and how to go away. They do not always learn 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.
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 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.
In those days I trusted the pilot fish as I would trust the Corrected Hydrographic
Office 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 marvellous 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 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.
Before these rich had come we had already been infiltrated by another rich using the
oldest trick there is. It is that an unmarried young woman becomes the temporary best
friend of another young woman who is married, goes 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 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, instead of the two of them and their child, there are three of them. First it is
stimulating and fun and it goes on that way for a while. All things truly wicked start from
an innocence. So you live day by day and enjoy what you have and do not worry. You lie
and hate it and it destroys you and every day is more dangerous, but you live day to day
as in a war.
It was necessary that I leave Schruns and go to New York to rearrange publishers. I
did my business in New York and when I got back to Paris I should have caught the first
train from the Gare de 1'Est that would take me down to Austria. But the girl I was in
love with was in Paris then, and I did not take the first train, or the second or the third.
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 fine 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 I thought we were invulnerable again,
and it wasn't until we were out of the mountains in late spring, and back in Paris, that the
other thing started again.
That was the end of the first part of Paris. 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.
There is never any ending to Paris and the memory of each person who has lived in it
differs from that of any other. We always returned to it no matter who we were or how it
was changed or with what difficulties, or ease, it could be reached. Paris was always
