The Balloonist by MacDonald Harris Page A

extraordinary young woman, that she was thoroughly at home in this city, and also that she was not French. If her complexion were not enough, there was the shape of her face: in her case the genetic Silva e Costa elongation, instead of assuming equine form as it did in the aunt, gave a long-nosed, patrician, even-eyed, ruminant, self-contained, faintly supercilious expression; she looked something like a llama. Her dog was a pug, naturally, and she carried too many things in her purse. She was one of those marsupial women whose security lies not in a home but in this little portable womb they carry about with them, filled with pocket combs, handkerchiefs, vials of cologne, foreign coins, hair ribbons, smelling salts, unread novels, stubs of pencils, dinner mints, scent, tweezers, ends of theatre tickets, mascara, tiny powder boxes that play Swiss waltzes when opened, even a china egg. Her favourite of her bags was a kind of reticule made of Bayeux tapestry, exquisitely beautiful, I have to admit. When we went to an exhibition or musical event she would comment on things in her controlled, slightly artificial voice, a little disconnectedly perhaps but frequently with considerable insight. There was no question that she was intelligent and even that in her way she took the things of the mind seriously and was capable of applying herself to them assiduously when she chose. Once, simply to play a joke on her when she asked what I was reading, I lent her an abstruse philosophical treatise in German (it was on the theory of irreducibility in irrational numbers) and contrary to all expectation she understood something of it. Her scent was one I have never encountered elsewhere: a thin, barely perceptible violet like the fragrance that plays round the poles of electrical apparatus. She preferred Gérard de Nerval to Goethe, Schumann to Bach.
    I had come to Paris that spring with the idea of working in the Bibliothèque Nationale, but for one reason or another I rarely got around to it. At Quai d’Orléans at five o’clock I would find myself mesmerized into conversations with Luisa which I had not chosen and which surelyhad not been organized by her, since she was scarcely capable of organizing the contents of her handbag. Did I care for Rilke? He and I were almost perfect strangers. She informed me that he had invented “la poésie des choses.” Bully for him. She wondered if I liked riding. She rode every morning in the Bois, very early when the world was asleep (by “le monde” she meant six hundred people out of a population of two and a half million, and probably she was speaking of nine o’clock in the morning). And: she would drop casually that it was this very evening that a diva only rarely heard was to appear in recital at the Salle Meyer, and she was curious if I planned to attend. I would reply that I never went to such things, and she would say “Ah!” in her most interested and yet distant manner. There would be a silence, which I would have been wise to leave alone, but deuce take it all! In spite of myself I would end by inquiring politely, “Are you?” Oh no, she would explain in a kind of dreamy sarcasm, you see it wasn’t considered fashionable for young ladies to make their way about a large city alone, it might subject them to insults or other embarrassments, a stupid prejudice but for the present at least society was organized in this way, que voulez-vous? Naturally I would end by offering to protect her from ruffians, amorous cabmen, etc., and find myself presently sitting in the Salle Meyer listening to a plump Milanese soprano trill her way through the Mad Song from Lucia. It was not long until she was clearly taking me for granted, a thing I abominate. “À demain, n’est-ce pas?” she would remind me mellifluously as we parted. “Chez ma tante.”
    At the aunt’s the next day a hungry Balkan violinist played czardas, the