James Salter - Burning the Days

The Colliers belonged to a small beach club — there were many of them — to the west of Cannes, where Picasso sometimes came; the owners possessed a napkin on which he had once sketched a fish. We swam there and farther along where there was nothing, only a lengthy strip of bare sand. The sea was our chief pleasure. Fleeing from the waves or dashing into them, lying up by the rocks, wind-sheltered, there was the sense that time and events had stopped. We drove back, wearied by the sun, at day’s end to the immemorial house where the goat waited, a sentry on the roof.

The mail, when it came, was laid by the postman on a table in the entrance hall. The telephone, with its shrill, disquieting sound, rarely rang. I sat on the balcony at a worn wooden table and wrote. Racers breaking their legs on icy runs seemed far away, but page by page I assembled lines to be typed by a woman in Grasse. I cannot recall if the Mediterranean was visible from where I sat, but from the floor above it was, in the afternoon, blinding and white.

The sea remains, the dense fragrance on the road past the perfume factories, the daily Nice-Matin with its glaring stories of crime and car accidents. Otéro, penniless and aged, the Venus of the century before, died in Nice that year. She is mentioned in Isak Dinesen’s Out of Africa: old Mr. Bulpett announces that he appears in La Belle Otéro’s memoirs, as a young man who went through a hundred thousand for her sake within six months — this was pounds, when the pound was tremendous.

“And do you consider,” he was asked, “that you did have full value?”

After a moment’s thought, he replied, “Yes. Yes, I had.”

One night in May I had a dream of intense power — my daughter had become ill. I could not believe the seriousness, it was so sudden. In the dream she died. I was numb with sorrow. I told her brother and sisters. I went into the room where she lay, her beautiful face now closed, her long hair. Suddenly I was felled by it, brought to my knees. Tears poured down my cheeks. She was dead.

You cannot believe in dreams and yet, at some level, you must. The pharaoh dreamed. Macbeth.

The next morning there was a boil, like a stigma, in her left nostril. By nightfall she was desperately sick. The doctor pronounced it serious, an infection. The danger was that it could go to the brain. There was a vein that ran here, by the nose, he said. An infection on the face was not bad, but here … Above all, it should be energetically treated.

By the next day, pus was running. The nurse who was to give an injection didn’t come. We drove to town. My daughter was eleven, the age of perfection. By now her lip was swollen, as thick as my thumb.

In the hospital they placed a lead shield over her eyes. She lay inert on a white table, two small pillows on either side of her head. My hand was held tightly by hers, I wanted to pull her back, to this world, to my desperate embrace. A square of light from an ominous machine was being moved onto her face with a shadowed + in the center of it.

“Don’t move,” the doctor said in French. “You must remain perfectly still for two or three minutes.”

Behind the lead shield I could see her very blue, open eyes. The doctor left the room. A sound began, a low, persistent sound of voltage. She was motionless. The muzzle of the machine was only inches above her face. The square of light was the size of one’s palm. We were helpless. I was sure she was going to die.

At one time in my journals, beneath the date I had written, Every year seems the most terrible, but that was self-pity. Anyone might have written that. The most terrible thing is the death of a child, for whom you would do so much, for whom you can do nothing. I had heard of the death of children and seen them lying helpless, but it was an arrow that would never be aimed your way.

Nina, my daughter, lived, but twelve years afterwards her older sister, Allan, died tragically. I have never been able to write the story. I reach a certain point and cannot go on. The death of kings can be recited, but not of one’s child. It was an electrical accident. It happened in the shower. I found her lying naked on the floor, the water running. I felt for her heartbeat and hurriedly carried her, legs across one arm, limp head along the other, outside. Thinking she had drowned, I gave her artificial respiration desperately, pressing down hard on her chest and then breathing into her mouth time after time. Nothing. I kept at it. An ambulance came. Someone pronounced her dead. I could not believe it.

I did not know what to do. In the house I laid my head on the edge of the bed and began reciting over and over the only recollected psalm.

Even if the rest get through, there is always the thought of that one.

—

“There has been an accident at Cape Canaveral.” These words were repeated endlessly one night — it was in 1967, too — like the news of a great disaster, like war. Grissom and White had both been killed. Something lodged in my chest, a feeling I could not swallow. “There has been an accident …”

I had flown with them, each of them, in Korea with Grissom, in the war. I saw the two of them moving now, along the walkway, slow as divers, clad in the same cloth mail. Over the threshold they stepped, into their sepulcher.

The capsule had become a reliquary, a furnace. They had inhaled fire, their lungs had turned to ash.

A month after White died I wrote to his widow, from afar, in the silence of the afternoon. Dear Pat.

I had dreamed of him many times, I wrote. He was precious to me. I believed in him. In him I saw myself, what I might have been. More, I felt the pride one has when intimate with greatness. He was on his way to greatness, needing only, as Matthew Arnold said in a different context, that two things concur: the power of the man and the power of the moment. It seemed the procession of heaven would stop for him, that it already had. We were convinced he was going to make his mark in history, not the history of his country or even of flight, but the history of mankind.

He was great, I wrote, in his ability, his strength, his character. He was great in achievement and great in his goals. But the moment did not occur.

Sometimes — I never knew when to expect it — the image of it all would return, the disaster with which I had some vague connection. At those times all else became trivial. It could translate itself into a genuine despair. It had managed to enter my soul.

I remember lying in bed in Paris, late at night. The hotel was silent. I was thinking of White. I put one finger to my temple. I was practicing shooting myself. It was very hard to pull the trigger. I waited, I began to count, one, two, three … A tremendous explosion! Then utter relief. What would I look like, I wondered? One side, the dark side, completely gone, splashed onto the walls and door. Who would care? On three, then. Ready …

Slowly the illness passed and came back less and less often. It was like some unhappiness in childhood, annealed by time. The road was leading elsewhere, to what seemed a counterlife, if not in importance then in its distance from the commonplace — a life of freedom, style, and art, or the semblance of art.

—

In some mysterious way which I accepted without wonder, the films I had been writing with little more behind them than undamaged belief all went into production within a year.

The one in Rome — it was called The Appointment —was badly miscast and had the wrong director. Because of his ability and reputation he had the unquestioning confidence of everyone, though he later told me he had agreed to make the movie mainly because he wanted the chance to learn something about color from the experienced Italian cameraman. Whatever the reason, he was ill adapted to the script which, like a poor garment, should have been ripped at the seams and completely refashioned to make it fit.