Planus by Blaise Cendrars Read Free Book Online Page A

easy in his manners, which in fact he was, but then he was such lively company at the dinner- table, laughing boisterously, as Italians do, unbuttoned and in shirtsleeves, always telling anecdotes about the court and the grand personages he mixed with and, to amuse the girls, acting out all the scenes, gesticulating and waving his arms about — we children, especially Elena and I, who were the youngest and pushed a little to one side (I because Mother was already neurasthenic and weighed down with cares, Elena because her father would have preferred a son, like his master, the King, and his patron, the Crown Prince; the Prince of Naples had already announced that his succession was assured, when the birth of a girl disillusioned him), we children lived in the enchantment of this marvellous garden, whose gates Mother had solemnly forbidden us to pass, for fear of the thieves who, so she said, were lurking everywhere, lying in wait for small children, especially the children of rich foreigners, in order to kidnap them and hold their families up to ransom. I cannot imagine who put these absurd ideas into her head, unless it was Miss Sharp, our English governess, for Lily lived in constant dread of the Black Hand. She collected newspaper cuttings about the Mafia, wrote warning letters to The Times and fled from sight if an errand-boy appeared in the garden. If one wished to cripple a child's spirit, one could hardly choose a better person for the job than this stupid governess, an old maid given to migraines, full of prejudice and ridiculous superstitions and forever quivering like an aspen-leaf.
    Parents commit these errors with the best of intentions and out of snobbery. I do not know who recommended Lily to us; she stayed with us for years.
    'Down, Leone, down! You stupid old thing. You don't understand. This is a serious game. Watch....'
    But Leone made me laugh. And then, to tease him, I set a hundred tops spinning right under his nose, and Leone dashed off, skidding on the marble paving of the corridor of the ante-chamber, as, twenty years later, in 1915, I was to see Guynemer's 'Old Charles' dash off buzzing among the shells and explosions of the front line. To catch what? Nothing at all! Unless Guynemer's little SPAD, unknown to us all, was the ancestor of that premonitory aircraft, the Flying Fortress 'Enola Gay' flown by Captain Paul W. Tibbets, which a quarter of a century later, on 6th August, 1945, at 9.15 a.m. to be exact, was to raise a mushroom of monstrous reality : lightning, clouds, smoke, wind, explosion, deluge, sparks, death by disintegration, radiation, irradiation, long-drawn-out, slow dying, leprosy and chancre, sores, burns, death. Today, fifty years later, that is what my dog makes me think of. I would have called him Bikini if I had known. At a single stroke, 150,000 human beings volatized in the fraction of a second. Not even time to say 'Shit!'.... And all around the point where it dropped, for a circumference of some twenty miles, 150,000 others, lying helpless, like tops on their side. Pompeii, Hiroshima. Splendid progress! Now all you have to do is push a button . . . and for a trial run it was not bad, it was very promising. It seems they will be able to do even better next time. Bravo! But doesn't Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Champion of Peace and Democracy, know that he will be condemned and cursed by the nations for having ordered, encouraged and financed 'that thing'? It is indeed the action of a paralytic who feels the lightning- stroke in his brain and his head lolling forward in his wheelchair in the family tomb, and clutches hold of anything, wanting to drag it all down with him. (Exactly like Hitler, who was a paranoiac, a frenzied madman who felt himself a prisoner of the external world, and who, between bouts of gazing at himself in the mirror with morbid delight, kicked out at the world, dancing with rage and shouting because he could not liberate himself from his own reflection !) But