Aurorarama - Jean-Christophe Valtat [16]
But since the Great Crash had not been avoided that way, the tide, of both means and conviction, was turning, and even if the citizens did not quite realize it, the city was now skating on very thin ice, drawing figures that were increasingly less figure eights than plain zeros. That was how Brentford had come, in spite of his own tendency to despise hoarding and to value sacrificial spending as the most sacred human activity, to fight on the side of autarky, and that was how, consequently, he had begun to regard the Inuit and the way they negotiated with their surroundings with more than the usual amused or amazed curiosity.
It wasn’t that they were thrifty or miserly—far from it—or that they were “one with nature” in any namby-pamby way: they were in a good position to know what a bloody mess it is, breathing in and out through endless sacrifices, in the frenzy of self-laceration that lies at the bottom of all things. No, they were well aware that nature had not been made to please them, and that it would only make things worse if they added to its, and their, necessary cruelty the luxury puerilities of greed and domination. It was not simply accumulation, sweet as it was, that would get them through the night, but the exacting duty of sticking together no matter what, and the wealth of memories, dreams, stories, rituals, and visions that are the true fortune of our unfortunate species.
To Brentford, the idea was not to turn New Venetians into Inuit but to develop a system, or at least a mentality, loosely adapted from theirs (“as nearly as possible socialism carried into practice,” as Nansen had written) that could get the city going forward, instead of selling everything piece by piece, including the future, as the Council of Seven was doing. But convincing the authorities to think along the lines of Eskimo economics was certainly no easy task: the Councillors were, after all, descendants of the men who had had their sleighs drawn by other men instead of by dogs, who had suffered from scurvy and died of cold in wet woollen uniforms because they were not going to eat seal or wear fur like those “savages.” The True Community that Brentford had described in the Hotspur pamphlet was still, seductive as it was, one of those fata morgana mirages, a projection that seemed within reach but was still a long, dangerous, frustrating way down the road …
His metaphor crystallized in a memory not quite his own, but rather that of his Italian ancestor Felice Rossini, a faithful servant of the Duke dei Abruzzi and a member of his Mount St-Elias and Stella Polare expeditions. While they had been in Icy Bay, their party had suddenly seen rising from the mist the famous Silent City of Alaska, which appears on a certain glacier, all streets and spires, every year between June and July. It was there and then that Felice had fallen in love at first sight with the idea of a New Venice, and had striven, with thousands of others, to make it a dream come true.
It was a love that Brentford felt as well, and felt indeed to be older than himself. But what Felice could not have known, and Brentford did, was that even as you came closer to it, as he was doing now, reaching the Lotus Eaters suburbs under a lazy fall of snowflakes and soot specks, the city lost nothing of its illusory nature—a dream come true that remained a dream, as if you woke up each morning a prisoner in Slumberland. These musings, idle as they were, still gave him an idea, or even an urge, and bending toward the chauffeur, he asked to be dropped not at the Botanical Building, where he now resided, but almost a mile away from it, on the Beaufort Embankment.
They were now entering the centre of the city, an off-white grid of frozen canals and deserted avenues, lined with impressive Neoclassical and Art Nouveau buildings. In the twilight, their incongruous stuccoed, statue-haunted silhouettes, rising darker against the darkening horizon, gave the eerie impression