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He wanted to build a colossus, he said. A Wonder of the World. I reminded him that his tower was already so. His Tour Eiffel on the Champ-de-Mars. No, he said. Bigger. More lasting. It was more lasting fame he wanted now in his seventy-eighth year, and only a tower that would prove perpetual could ensure it. Iron, no matter how cunningly wrought, and masonry, no matter how expert, are not eternal. Especially here (he made a sweeping Gallic gesture that embraced Africa, the whole of it), where conditions conspire to frustrate the work of the hand. To thwart man's progress and bring down his monuments.
 I poured him a tumbler of Bombay Gin -- the Queen's own. He refused it, in his desperate resolve to create.
"You are too ambitious, Alexandre," I reproached him.
(I had no ambition, as you well know. Have none now. I downed the Bombay and wiped my mustache with the back of my hand, theatrically; for this was theater, after all, and I had a part to play, even if a minor one.)
"Ambition in a man your age is ridiculous," I continued, enjoying his discomfiture.
"One can be only what one is," he shrugged. "From first to last." He took a notebook from his vest pocket and began to sketch. "I am an engineer."
Finished, he showed me his project. I stared at the page a moment -- at the fine blue-veined graph paper (reminding me, strangely, of women's breasts), which was otherwise empty, his writing instrument having left no
mark that I could see.
Reading my mind, he scoffed: "You can see nothing because you are a sot -- a drunken oaf without imagination."
I was about to rise up in my indignation and beat him, but his twinkling eye forestalled me.
"It will be an invisible tower!" he cried triumphantly so that the other customers in the Mombasa Hotel Bar looked up from their plates of roasted fowl. "I shall begin at once!"
*
"Not since Caruso have I encountered such an interesting case," said Freud, stroking his beard.
"It's all too obvious," I said.
"Nothing is obvious in psychiatry!" he chided.
"Nonsense, Sigmund!" I replied, meeting the gaze that flashed angrily round the edges of his wire-rims. "Eiffel is driven to erect a phallic symbol in subconscious protest against his approaching death. Death takes no serious interest in life; but sex represents a shameless challenge to its sovereignty," I hissed (because of the damned alliteration!). "Once sex is finished, life is easily extinguished. Intuiting this, Alexandre heroically raises the flag."
(Years on Freud's couch had made me fluent in psychoanalytical flimflam.)
Freud grunted.
"But why should it be an invisible tower?" he asked.
"Because for an old man, sex is all in the head."
Freud laughed, appreciating a good joke.
At that moment, T. R. made an extraordinary entrance. His cowboy
spurs clattered. The toy zebra ("Souvenir of Nairobi") whinnied. It was the former president throwing his voice from behind his heavy mustache. His flashing teeth and custom-tailored safari costume were splendid. (He, too, had a part to play.) He hated Freud and ignored him, introducing me to Colonel Goethals, who supervised the building of the Panama Canal. Out of office, Teddy had come to Africa with the Colonel to build a canal across the continent -- "from the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic, a bully piece of engineering!"
Goethals laid his Panama hat on the bar and asked for a pitcher of water and a bucket of sand.
"To illustrate a fundamental principle of hydrology."
"Bully!"
I was surrounded by madmen.
*
Eiffel stood in a clearing a day's walk from Mombasa. He stood erect with his legs wide apart: a great, inverted V of determination. It moved me. It was as if he were standing on the Champ-de-Mars, transmogrified into the tower. I could almost see the tourists swarming under his hat, peering out at Paris through tiny holes in his hatband. Golden weaver birds flew twittering about him. I was, as I said, moved by the sight: an old man, dreaming himself into the future, rooted in his past, indifferent to Africa's hot, cobalt sky.
"How goes it?" I said, taking his arm in friendship.
"It rises," he said happily. "Each day another flight. Soon dirigibles will moor at the top -- dirigibles sailing over the oceans to Africa."
"Yes," I said to humor him.
(Why not? He was no threat to me. Besides, I may have loved him at
that moment.)
I gave him a sandwich. He sat on the grass and unwrapped the oiled paper. The sun glistened in its crinkles. The sandwich paper was as minutely lined as his face. I felt a tenderness for him. I remembered my father, who had never left Cincinnati. I tried to compose in my mind a tribute to my father but could not; the words would not come to me. I left my father to his earth in Cincinnati and sat with Alexandre, on into the gathering African dusk, silent, feeling a migration of earthworms beneath me as a new Eiffel Tower ascended above the African plain, and also descended; for even imaginary towers must be grounded in bedrock.
It was, as I remember at this remove in time and space (myself become an old man retired to a room in Cincinnati) -- it was a poetic moment. I was glad Freud was not with me: for him, poetry was merely another aspect of the unconscious mind, susceptible to analysis; and I was in no mood for disillusionment -- so rare were moments of exultation, so rare rapture.
"I met Apollinaire once," said Eiffel as we watched a pink string of flamingos stretch across the wide, setting sun. "He was sitting in a cafe, looking at my tower. He had made a drawing of it on a piece of paper. I invited to show him the original -- point out the secrets of its construction. He shook his head. 'No thank you, monsieur,' he said. 'I have comprehended it.' Then he showed me his drawing. This."
Eiffel took a piece of paper from his wallet and carefully unfolded it.
"A calligram, he called it."
There on the paper an Eiffel Tower dissolved before my eyes into a black drizzle of letters of the alphabet. Rogue punctuation marks. As I stared in bewilderment, a comma hopped off the page.
"A flea," Eiffel smiled and folded up the paper. "Apollinaire was right. The poet is the true engineer, and he does not have to see the original to comprehend its secrets -- only to imagine it."
Madness!
*
In the Mombasa Hotel, Wilbur and Orville were looking for Eiffel.
"We've read his essay on aeronautics: 'The Resistance of Air.' It interests us profoundly. There are one or two points we would like him to clarify," they said as one, for they were not only inseparable but indistinguishable.
"He is sleeping," I told them.
"Ah!" they said, taking off their derbies in respect. The brothers knew that in sleep, in dreams, the mathematics of flight is, little by little, elaborated.
They glanced reverentially upwards where, in a second-floor bedroom, Eiffel lay sleeping and, beyond, toward the beckoning sky.
"We will come back later," Wilbur and Orville said, putting on their derbies as one in a gesture of perfect fraternity.
Outside in the dusty street, the brothers got into their aeroplane, started the motor, and jumped into the sky, which opened to receive them. The machine became a dot in the blue Mombasa air before vanishing altogether to an adagio for strings..
In the room over my head, Eiffel had risen from his bed and hovered close to the ceiling -- or so the pretty femme de chambre swore to me later when I took her in my arms to attempt a flight of another sort entirely.
*
Teddy and the Colonel labored long at their canal under the terrible African sun. I thought it was an impossible scheme although it caused Mrs. Willoughby's husband, who managed the Uganda railroad, many sleepless nights -- nights when I was unable to join Mrs. Willoughby under her mosquito net. I consorted with the femme de chambre instead; and while she may have lacked the complete charms of Mrs. Willoughby, whose geology was known to me from hill to dale, the femme de chambre was young (Mrs. Willoughby no longer so) and content (in the way of young girls) simply to play the shepherd's game by the moonlit Indian Ocean. She needed neither soirees nor De Beers to make her happy.
The Wright brothers did not return, having -- it was rumored -- crashed into the sea because of an accumulation of comet dust on the fragile wings of their machine.
It turned out to be otherwise. They had flown to Paris and let their heads be turned by the Folies-Bergères. But only for a brief time -- outside of history so to speak, inside a history of the imagination where Apollinaire and Jarry, Rousseau and Satie are always strolling the streets of Montmartre. Before war came and killed everything.
*
"You are imagining things," Freud muttered from a shadowy corner of his darkened consulting room.
I was once more in therapy because the old anxiety had returned. I had the power to see the future. Not always, but from time to time it visited me: the truth -- unlike the faked messages from the panders of the otherworld Houdini, dressed as a woman, had unmasked during Mombasa séances. And the future made me anxious, made me shake so that I could scarcely raise the gin glass to my lips! Shall I tell you what I saw in those
awful moments of clairvoyance?
"Shall I tell you what's coming, Sigmund?"
"The Talking Cure is highly efficacious," he nodded.
"What's coming is this: Poison-gas clouds cruelly fragrant with apples and almonds. Night, slowly falling flares, and the light on the wire almost beautiful. Bodies blooming on the wire, in the mangled valley and the flooded trench -- the trench from whose filthy lips men are birthed into history and death. Shell-shocked hysterics dancing to an unstoppable jazz macabre. Men, their pockets full of water, rocking in the fire-swept ocean. Aeroplanes loosed from dreams of desire into the bloody air that strums dirges on their wing-wires. And more -- much more concealed in the terror-struck mind's ellipsis ..."
"You are injuring yourself past fixing," said Freud when I'd finished raving. "This poetry mysteriously afflicting you is a plague, is pathological, is whispered to you from a sick brain -- yours. If you're not careful, you'll end up a victim of your own death wish."
*
Teddy Roosevelt: "It's the fault of Halley's Comet that so many of us have lost our minds."
Colonel Goethals: "We dig so as not to know we are already dead men, though what we dig is our grave."
Freud: "In dreams we fly unassisted because of the strength of our desire to penetrate the sky, the universe, other bodies."
Alexandre Eiffel: "The aerodynamics of dreams is perfect. The dreamer ascends without wings, without any other means of propulsion than his own wish to escape the earth, which is a grave. A mulch-pit."
*
"I want to make a present of my newest principle -- "The Aerodynamics of Dreams" -- to Wilbur and Orville so that they can leave history and become myth."
We were on the building site outside Mombasa. Eiffel assured me that his tower was nearly finished, though I could see it only indistinctly and in some lights. Twilight seemed the most favorable. At that hour the light slashed and shadows made what was least visible, visible. Each blade of grass etched itself onto the field of vision. In the case of an invisible object, however, patience is required. Patience and imagination, which I hoped to inflame with the help of my pocket-flask.
"It would be tragic if aeroplanes were to be exploited by entrepreneurs," Eiffel continued. "They are better left as metaphors."
"Wilbur and Orville have left Africa for good," I said.
"No matter. I will send them my treatise by wire."
"The telegraph wire was brought down by a stampeding herd of giraffes."
"Is the dream-wire still intact?"
I was about to answer when Teddy and Colonel Goethals floated by on a canal barge.
"We are making bully progress!" they shouted.
The gramophone played on deck; and I could not separate in my mind the music that fell, note by note, onto the coppery river and the flakes of light shaken out by the setting sun.
"Is it real?" I asked Eiffel, having learned in Africa to mistrust the evidence of my senses. "The boat, the canal -- T. R. and the Colonel dancing in one another's arms?"
Eiffel was unable to speak, choked by profound emotion.
"Surreal," said Apollinaire, who had just debarked from a dirigible moored by the dream-wire to the top of Eiffel's tower. In the swiftly falling night I saw it clearly now. Because of the lights strung across the observation deck railings. Saw the dirigible, too -- a shining thought.
"It is beautiful," I said, finding myself again moved.
"It is a dream," said Apollinaire.
"It is a dream turned inside out to become life," said Eiffel.
The Eiffel Tower glittered in the blackness of night -- a monument to the imagination, which is lasting. To poetry and engineering. And to Alexandre, who combined both brilliantly in a single invention.
The gramophone played.
The barge rustled among stiff reeds.
The burnished river soughed.
The dirigible mooed.
All was beautiful!
Hand in hand, Eiffel and I ascended the tower.
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