The Balloonist (40 page)

This is not
to say that I am at peace with myself. Far from it! There are too many things in my head for that, too many burdens. Others have trusted in me, and I have betrayed that trust. If I did it because it was best for them, this in no way diminishes what I must take on myself. There is that betrayal, and there is this final crime of mine—and a crime it is, murder pure and simple, and what is worst of all, against persons very dear to me, not the least of whom is myself. But I have to bear these things lightly and not regard them in a sentimental way. It is a shabby Götterdämmerung in the odour of kerosene, and I am only an eccentric Swede whose hair stands on end, perhaps not even a genius, only a minor clairvoyant. What egotism! The Mental Diary has degenerated totally into these first-person pronouns. This childishness is the best argument there is against the immortality of the soul.

Something is changed. Everything is suffused with a swimming pink. My mathematical powers at least have not been impaired. I am aware of what is signified by this subtle changing of light. The sun, curving in its wolf-like lope around the horizon, has reached the point where it shines once more into our cove. I am glad that the others are asleep and not aware of this. The comfortable shadow is gone; the white stripes take the light gradually, the dark ones crawl at the edges and grow red. Midnight: altitude at the minimum, azimuth angle zero. Like a cathedral facing north our tent is aligned exactly with the meridian. This Great Window of Chartres commemorates a Passion, but it is not a holy one. The blood-glow is the sun of Stresa, it forces its way through the shutters of the closed eyelids and will allow no peace. The brocade falls, the curve of surface is a mathematical witchery of shadows. Luisa, det war synd! If this half and that half are brought together into One, it makes a fire that hurts. But she only smiles and glances downward at this most precise and unanswerable geometric theorem of her body. I float toward it and am lost in shadows, I am both the enclosedness and the enclosed, a warmth shudders somewhere at the centre of everything. This Finnish night is terribly cold. Thank God for the featherbed!