42
PARTISAN REVIEW
The Oreanda is situated on Shoreline Road, directly above the
sea. Having stashed my suitcase in the room, off I went to accli–
matize myself in the way creative types have traditionally "accli–
matized themselves" in Pompeii. You sit on the pebbles three meters
from the Mediterranean Sea with a manuscript of your cherished
opus in hand, gaze at a page on which something has been inscribed,
like "one can also reach this conclusion, based on the theory of dis–
turbances, from yet another point of view once focus has been cen–
tered upon the collapse of the system which takes place under the
influence of certain disturbances , when the system's energy level is
expressed as
Eo
and there is a total disregard of any possibility of the
system's collapse." You repeat these expressive , carefully coined
lines and, at the same time, attune yourself to your primeval and
primordial homeland as you listen to the waves reshuffling the peb–
bles and deeply inhale the smells of boundless courage and joy.
Try to steer clear of Shoreline Road with its idle crowd of vaca–
tioning barbarians, the facade of the hotel covered with a scaffolding
where devil-may-care painters are idling about. Don ' t be tempted to
drop in at the cafe, either, where that familiar company of Romans
convenes by the window on the second floor.
It went without saying that there were two or three Georgians
in this company, too , who oversaw and paid for everyone , proposing
toast after toast to Arabella .
"Ara-bella!" one Georgian would say, holding his wineglass
high above the table .
And everyone gazed at the glass as if it were a fortune teller' s
hypnotic crystal ball and repeated: "Ara-bella! "
It's funny that in the Georgian tongue
ara
is a negative particle
and that Georgians, in toasting our famous Arabella, almost seemed
to be consecrating their drinks to a sort of mysterious Non-Bella.
Arabella rose up from one of the small cafe tables and extended
her glass of wine to me. She and I had been slightly acquainted, so
;;
she was holding this beverage out to me, the one luxury that she pos–
sessed, in a kind of mute gesture of welcome. Her hand had
stretched through the glass and, exposed to the wrist, was now offer-
ing me something pleasant.
Should any speculative talk arise as a consequence of this, I will
certainly explain that at that moment it was simply impossible for
me to have had either Arabella or, what's more , the wineglass in my
