49.16-19: *monsieur* should change into
sturdier brogues, but Hugh retorted that in the States one hiked in any old pair
of shoes, even sneakers: Next morning, Hugh changes the
shoes following his advice. Cf. "The climb he contemplated could not be
accomplished in town shoes: the first and only time he had attempted to do so,
he had kept losing his footing on slippery slabs of rock" (Ch. 22).
49.21: tempo turns: Parallel turns (from Brian
Boyd's notes to LoA TT).
50.26: a pearl of sweat: A fairy-tale
element in concert with the last paragraph. Cf. "pearls into a
blindman's cup/cap" (Ch. 12).
50.34: a bench, eyeless but eager, faced an
admirable view: The bench is to give HP a chance to embrace Armande. "'I hate
life. I hate myself. I hate that beastly old bench.' She stopped to look the way
his fierce finger pointed, and he embraced her" (Ch. 15). "eyeless":
suggests HP's or living people's blindness.
50.35-51.01: his party very high above him,
blue, gray, pink, red: Cf. "Armande in a pink parka" (Ch. 12).
51.15-16: weird-looking, reptile-green things:
"Reptile-green" is also the color of ink used for erasures and
insertions on the pages of *Faust in Moscow*. The color suggests
the hidden connection between Giulia and Armande. They will be
one in HP's dream (Ch. 20).
51.16-18: Their elaborate bindings looked like first cousins of
orthopedic devices meant to help a cripple to walk: reflects HP's unconscious
fear of breaking legs? Cf. "their cruel ice axes and coils of rope and other
instruments of torture (equipment exaggerated by ignorance)" (Ch. 23); If we
believe Armande's "boasting," she broke both legs in her childhood (Ch. 17).
Perhaps while she was skiing?
51.18-20: He was allowed to shoulder those
precious skis, which at first felt miraculously light but soon grew as heavy as
great slabs of malachite, under which he staggered: reminds me of the legend of
St. Christopher.
51.24: (four small oranges): Some of them
will be eaten in "a nice mossy spot" hidden by the trees and the peel will mark
the place for Armande's next date (Ch. 15).
51.26-27: A fairy-tale element seemed to imbue
with its Gothic rose water all attempts to scale the battlements of her Dragon:
HP's painful climbing as far as the cable car of Draconita
is, on another level of the novel, a prince's exciting
adventure of freeing a princess from a Dragon. "Gothic" also
directs our notice to some elements of Gothic romances in the
novel--"the dungeon" (Ch. 6), "a sleeping beauty on a great platter," "a choice
of tools on a cushion," (Ch. 16), "Chart of Torture" (Ch. 23), and a
lot of fires as Don Johnson and John Rea have
discussed.
Akiko
Nakata