Free A Smile in the Mind's Eye by Lawrence Durrell Page A

had not jumped its banks as yet, and when I crossed it despite the flailing wind and rain (not to mention the invisible mountain snows melting into its sources and tributaries) it had not yet swallowed the islands, while the new bridge rode high and clear into town. But the town itself was sodden as a wet mattress, spectral, winter-locked. I don’t know what put the Vaucluse fountain into my mind – but yes, I do. I saw an advertisement for some article of domestic ware called Vega – and my thoughts turned to a girl I had known under that starry name. The star on the advertisement reminded me of the intense bright blue – almost sapphire – of her eyes. Vega, pole star of the ancients, had always been my favourite fixed star. How often have I lain on the deck of a caique or a liner in the Aegean watching that marvellous gem-like stare, unwinking, unmoving, all-seeing. The girl had some of this in her own steady regard – the uncompromising brightness of a cat’s eyes, a Persian kitten, say. When she was interested in something or someone she sat so still that she didn’t seem to be breathing, she could have been dead, fixing you with these ‘blue lamps of heaven’ – let us indulge her memory with a seventeenth-century conceit from Darley. But here in Avignon on that rainy afternoon I suddenly thought of her and wondered if I should not lay that night in the little hotel we knew once by the roaring waters of Petrarchian Vaucluse. She too had been a Taoist with the requisite look of melting mischief as required by the recipe of Chang. I had first come under this disquieting gaze in Geneva. A little group of psychiatrists – all Jungians – had asked if they could meet me and ask a few questions. I think they were just curious to size me up and see if I was quite right in the head. It was not the first time that such a thing had come about. They were friends of other friends, and so I agreed and we met in the rather pleasant brasserie and beer-hall – a chop-house, really – called Bovard which should have been ‘classé’ and which has now been swept away and turned into a bank. Anyway in the background there sat Vega staring at me – looking right through me, as if she could count all the small change in my pocket. And the conversation was lively and full of pith. I gathered that she was the wife or mistress of one of the doctors present though I could not decide which one. Nevertheless, the evening came to an end and off we all went home. A fortnight later I ran into her in Bounyon where I was trying to buy a cheese called Vacherin. I had forgotten her, actually, and she had to jog my memory by references to this pleasant but unmemorable evening. We went to have a coffee together and it was here in a shady cafeé that I started to get to know Vega. To cut a long story short in the midst of a thousand trivia she said that she was a real old-fashioned reader. Every year she chose one author and read everything about him. She added that this year the lucky author was Nietzsche and she was in mid-channel. Why did this remark make an instant impression on me? Because I myself had been doing more or less the same sort of thing – an echo of it, so to speak. I had been collecting and sifting information about Lou Andrée Salome with the vague notion of writing an essay on this remarkable and gifted enchantress, who as a young girl bewitched Nietzsche, then had a child by Rilke and ended up in old age as Freud’s most deeply cherished pupil and friend. How extraordinary that none of her many books, including the capital essays on Nietzsche and Rilke, were available in English! Actually my project was hopeless, I knew, because of my lack of German. Nevertheless this strange frieze of characters gave me food for thought; I had planned to press the story of their lives forward as far as the lake of Orta, which I was then proposing to visit. It was