The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

by Rainer Maria Rilke

  You do not know what a poet is? – Verlaine… Nothing? No memory of him? No. For you, he did not stand out among those you knew? You make no distinctions, I know. But it is another poet I am reading, one who does not live in Paris, quite another poet. One who has a quiet house in the mountains. He rings like a bell in clear air. A happy poet, who tells of his window and of the glass doors of his bookcase, which offer a pensive reflection of the solitary, dearly loved distance. Of all poets, this is the one I should have wanted to become; for he knows so very much about girls and I too would have known a lot about them. He knows about girls who lived a hundred years ago; it does not matter that they are dead, for he knows everything. And that is the main thing. He utters their names, those soft names written in a fine hand with old-fashioned loops in the long letters, and the grown-up names of their older girl friends, in which a little of their fate sounds through, a little disillusionment and death. Perhaps in some pigeonhole of his mahogany bureau he has their faded letters and leaves from their diaries, noting birthdays, summer outings, birthdays. Or it may be that in the pot-bellied chest of drawers to the rear of his bedroom there is a drawer where their spring clothes are kept: white dresses that were worn at Easter for the first time, dresses of tufted tulle which were really meant for summer, but they couldn't wait. Oh, what a happy fate, to sit in the silent room of an ancestral house among the quiet things in their abiding places, and to hear the tits sounding their first notes outside in the green and sun-shot garden, and away in the distance the village clock. To sit and gaze upon a warm strip of afternoon sunlight and to know a great deal about girls from the past and to be a poet. And to think that I too might have become such a poet if I had been able to live somewhere, anywhere on earth, in one of the many closed-up country houses that no one looks after. I would have required only one room (the sunny room under the gables). There I would have lived with my old things, my family portraits, my books. And I would have had an armchair and flowers and dogs and a stout stick for the stony paths. And nothing else. Nothing but a book bound in yellowish, ivory-coloured leather with old-style floral endpapers: in this I would have written. I would have written a great deal, for I would have had a great many thoughts and memories of a great many people.

  But things turned out differently, and God no doubt knows why. My old furniture is rotting in a barn where I was permitted to store it, and as for myself, dear God, I don't have a roof over my head and it is raining into my eyes.

  [17] Occasionally I stroll by little shops, in the rue de Seine, for instance. The shops of antiques dealers, or small antiquarian booksellers, or dealers in engravings, the windows overcrowded. Not a soul ever enters these shops. Plainly they do no business. But if you look in, there they sit, reading, without a care; they take no thought for tomorrow, they are unconcerned about success, they have a dog sitting contentedly at their feet or a cat that makes the stillness all the profounder as it slinks along the rows of books as if wiping the names from the spines.

  Ah, if that were only enough: at times I could wish to buy a crowded window like that for myself and to sit behind it with a dog for twenty years.

  [18] It is good to say it out loud: ‘Nothing happened.’ Once more: ‘Nothing happened.’ Does that help at all?

  The fact that my stove was filling the room with smoke again, and I had to go out, is really no catastrophe. If I feel cold and weary now, it is of no consequence. If I spent the whole day wandering the streets, it is nobody's fault but mine. I could just as well have sat in the Louvre. Or rather, no, I couldn't. There are people who go there to warm up. They sit on the velvet benches, and their feet are like big empty boots side by side on the heating vents. They are inordinately modest men, grateful if the attendants in their dark uniforms hung with numerous medals tolerate their presence. But when I go in, they grin. They grin and nod a little. And then, when I walk to and fro before the pictures, they keep their eyes on me, those eyes, always those bleared and runny eyes. So it was just as well that I did not go to the Louvre. I kept walking, on and on. Heaven only knows through how many cities, districts, cemeteries, bridges and alleyways. Somewhere I saw a man pushing a barrow of vegetables. He was calling out: ‘Chou-fleur, chou-fleur!’ giving a markedly flat pronunciation to the eu of fleur. Beside him walked an ugly, angular woman who nudged him every so often. And whenever she nudged him, he made his call. At times he called out of his own accord, too, but those times didn't count, and he was promptly required to call out again because they had reached a building where there were regular customers. Have I already mentioned that he was blind? No? Well, he was blind. He was blind and he was calling out. If I put it like that, I am falsifying it, I am omitting the barrow he was pushing, I'm affecting not to have noticed that he was calling out ‘Cauliflower’. But is that of the essence? And even if it were, doesn't the point of it lie in what the whole thing meant to me? I saw an old man who was blind and who was calling out. That was what I saw. Saw.

  Will anyone believe that there are buildings such as these? No; they will say I am falsifying things again. This time it is the truth, with nothing omitted and of course nothing added. Where would I get anything to add? It's no secret that I am poor. People know. Buildings? Rather, to be exact, they were buildings that were no longer there. Buildings that had been torn down, top to bottom. What remained was the buildings that had stood next to them, the tall neighbouring structures. Evidently they were in danger of collapsing, now that nothing was left beside them; a complex scaffolding of long, tarred poles had been driven in at an angle between the rubble-covered waste ground and the exposed wall. I do not know if I have already said that it is that wall that is in my thoughts. It was not, as it were, the first wall of the existing buildings (as one would have supposed) but the last of those that were no longer there. You could see the inner side. You could see the walls of rooms on the various floors, with wallpaper still adhering, and here and there a fragment of the floor or ceiling. Next to the walls of the rooms, a dirty-white space ran down the entire wall, and through it, describing an inexpressibly disgusting, worm-like twist like that of the digestive tract, crept the wide-open, rust-speckled channel of the toilet plumbing. The course of the gas pipes for the lighting was visible in grey, dusty traces along the edge of the ceiling, and in places they had unexpectedly doubled round and run down the colourful walls and into some black hole that had been gashed uncaringly. Most unforgettable of all, though, were the walls themselves. The stubborn life of those rooms had refused to be stamped out. It was still there, it clung to the nails that were left, it stood on the remaining hand's-breadths of floor, it had crept under the corner joists where there was still a little of the interior. You could see it was in the paint, which it had gradually changed, from year to year: blue into mouldy green, green into grey, and grey into an old, stale, putrescent white. But it was also in the fresher spots that had survived behind mirrors, pictures and wardrobes; for it had traced the outlines of these things, over and over, and had been with its spiders and dust even in these hidden-away places, now exposed to view. It was in every flayed strip, it was in the damp blisters at the lower edges of wallpaper, it flapped in the torn-off shreds, and it sweated out of nasty stains made long ago. And from these walls that had once been blue, green or yellow, walls framed by the lines that showed where partition walls had now been demolished, there issued the air of those lives, a stale, idle, fuggy air, not yet dispersed by any breeze. There they all hung, the midday mealtimes and the illnesses and the breath exhaled and the smoke of years and the sweat from armpits that makes clothing heavy and the flat reek of mouths and the clammy odour of perspiring feet. There they hung, the acrid tang of urine and the smell of burning soot and the steamy greyness of potatoes and the slick, heavy stink of old lard. The sweet, lingering smell of neglected infants hung there, and the whiff of children frightened of going to school, and the stuffiness of pubescent boys' beds. And a good deal more was admixed – vapours from down below in the street or trickle
s brought from above by the rain, which is not clean over cities. And still more had been wafted in by the weak, tame, domesticated breezes that always stay in the same street. And there was a lot more besides of unknown origin. I did say, did I not, that all the walls had been demolished but for the last –? It is that last wall that I have been talking of all along. You might assume I stood looking at it for a long time, but I swear I broke into a run the moment I recognized that wall. For that is the terrible thing: I recognized it. I recognize everything here, and that is why it enters into me so readily: it is at home in me.7

  After all this I was feeling quite wearied, I might even say weakened, and it was too much for me to find him waiting for me, too. He was waiting in the little dairy shop where I was meaning to have a couple of fried eggs; I hadn't got round to eating all day, and was hungry. But I wasn't able to eat now, either; before the eggs were ready, I felt compelled to go back out into the streets, where a viscous tide of humanity flowed towards me. It was carnival time, and evening, and everyone was at leisure, out and about, rubbing up against each other. And their faces were filled with the light that fell from the stands, and the laughter oozed from their mouths like pus from open wounds. The more impatiently I tried to make my way through, the more they laughed and thronged closer together. Somehow a woman's shawl got caught on me; I dragged her behind me, and people stopped me and laughed, and I felt I ought to laugh as well but I couldn't. Someone threw a handful of confetti in my eyes, and it stung like a whip. The people were wedged together at the street corners, jammed tight, with no way of moving on, merely swaying gently to and fro as if they were coupling as they stood. But although they were standing still while I raced about like a lunatic at the roadside, wherever there were gaps in the crowd, the truth of it was that they were moving and I never budged an inch. For nothing changed; whenever I looked up, I saw the selfsame buildings on the one side and the carnival stands on the other. Perhaps everyone really was stuck in one place, and it was only because I and they were giddy that everything seemed to be in a whirl. I had no time to think about it, I was heavy with perspiration, and a numbing pain was coursing through me, as if something too large were being borne upon my blood, distending the veins wherever it went. And all the while, I felt that the air had long since been exhausted and I was merely breathing in exhalations, which my lungs refused.

  But now it is over; I have survived. I am sitting in my room, by the lamp; it is on the cold side, as I do not dare try the stove; what if it smoked and drove me out again? I sit here and think: if I were not poor, I would rent another room, a room with furniture not quite so worn, not so redolent of former tenants as this furniture is. At first I really found it hard to lay back my head on this armchair; there is a particular greasy, grey depression in the green upholstery, which looks as if any and every head would fit it. For a long time, I took the precaution of spreading a handkerchief under my hair, but now I am too tired to do it; I find it is all right as it is, and the slight hollow exactly fits the back of my head, as if made to measure. However, if I were not poor I would make a point of buying a good stove, and I would burn good clean wood from the mountains and not these wretched têtes-de-moineau,8 the fumes of which inhibit the breathing and dizzy the head. And then I would need someone to keep the place tidy and tend the stove, as I require it, without making an uncouth racket; for often, when I have to kneel at the stove for a quarter of an hour, poking it, the skin of my forehead taut with the glow of the coals, the heat full in my eyes, it costs me all the strength I have for the day, and, if I go out afterwards, of course people easily get the better of me. At times, when the street is crowded, I would take a hackney carriage and ride past; I would eat in a Duval9 every day… I would not creep into the dairy shops any more… Would he have been in a Duval, I wonder? No. They wouldn't have let him wait for me there. They don't allow the dying in. The dying? Now I am sitting in my room, I can try to reflect calmly on what happened. It is good not to leave anything uncertain. So, I went in, and at first all I saw was that somebody else had taken the table I frequently occupied. I said a good-day in the direction of the little food bar, gave my order and sat at the next table. There I could sense him, though, even though he did not move. It was his very immobility that I sensed, and all of a sudden I knew what it meant. A link had been forged between us, and I realized that he was rigid with terror. I knew that he had been paralysed by terror – terror at something that was occurring within him. Perhaps a blood vessel was bursting, perhaps some poison he had long dreaded was at that very moment entering his heart, perhaps a great canker had burgeoned in his brain like a sun, changing the whole world for him. Making an indescribable effort, I forced myself to look over his way, still hoping it was all in my imagination. But then I was on my feet and rushing outside; for I had not been mistaken. There he sat in a thick, black winter coat, and his grey, strained face was buried deep in a woollen scarf. His mouth was closed as if it had fallen heavily shut, but it was impossible to tell whether his eyes still saw anything; they were behind misted, smoke-grey glasses that trembled slightly. His nostrils were flared, and the long hair over his wasted temples looked wilted as if subjected to too great a heat. His ears were long and sallow, with big shadows behind them. Yes, he knew he was now making his withdrawal from everything: not only from humankind. One moment more and all of it would have lost its meaning, and this table and the cup and the chair he clung hold of, all the everyday things, the familiar things, would have become incomprehensible, strange to him, and difficult. And so he sat, waiting for it to have happened, no longer offering any resistance.

  While I do still offer resistance. I offer resistance, although I know that my heart has already been ripped out and I could not go on living even if my torturers were to leave me alone now. I say to myself: ‘Nothing happened.’ And yet I was only able to understand that man because something is happening within me as well, something that is starting to withdraw me and part me from everything. How horrified I always used to be when people said that somebody dying could no longer recognize anyone. At such times, I would picture a lonely face upraised from the pillows, searching, searching for something familiar, searching for something already seen, but finding nothing at all. If my fear were not so great, I would console myself with the thought that it is not impossible to see everything differently and still be alive. But I am afraid; I have a nameless fear of that transformation. I have not yet grown accustomed to this world, which seems a goodly one. Why should I move on to another one? I should dearly like to remain among the meanings I have grown fond of, and if something really does have to change, I should at least like to be able to live among dogs, whose world is related to this one, and who have the same things.

  For some time yet, I shall still be able to write all of these things down or say them. But a day will come when my hand will be far away from me, and, when I command it to write, the words it writes will be ones I do not intend. The time of that other interpretation will come, and not one word will be left upon another,10 and all the meanings will dissolve like clouds and fall like rain. Though I am full of fear, I am yet like a man in the presence of greatness, and I recall that I often used to have this sensation within me before I began to write. But this time it is I who shall be written. I am the impression that will be transformed. Ah, it would take so very little for me to understand it all and assent. Only one step, and my bottomless misery would be bliss. But I cannot take that step; I have fallen and, being broken, cannot rise again. I did still suppose that help might be to hand. There they are before me, in my own hand, the words I have prayed, every evening that came. I copied them from the books in which I found them, that they might be very near to me, issued from my hand as if they were my own. And I shall write them out once again now, kneeling here at my table I want to write them down; if I do this, I have them for longer than if I read them, and every word lasts and has time to die away.

  Mécontent de tous et mécontent de moi, je voudrais b
ien me racheter et m'enorgueillir un peu dans le silence et la solitude de la nuit. Ames de ceux que j'ai aimés, âmes de ceux que j'ai chantés, fortifiez-moi, soutenez-moi, éloignez de moi le mensonge et les vapeurs corruptrices du monde; et vous, Seigneur mon Dieu! accordez-moi la grâce de produire quelques beaux vers qui me prouvent à moi-même que je ne suis pas le dernier des hommes, que je ne suis pas inférieur à ceux que je méprise.11

  They were children of fools, yea, children of base men: they were viler than the earth.

  And now I am their song, yea, I am their byword…

  … they raise up against me the ways of their destruction… they set forward my calamity, they have no helper…

  And now my soul is poured out upon me; the days of affliction have taken hold upon me.

  My bones are pierced in me in the night seasons: and my sinews take no rest.

  By the great force of my disease is my garment changed: it bindeth me about as the collar of my coat…

  My bowels boiled and rested not: the days of affliction prevented me…

  My harp also is turned to mourning, and my organ into the voice of them that weep.12

  [19] The doctor did not understand me. Not a thing. True, it was difficult to describe. They proposed to try electrotherapy. Very well. I was given a note of my appointment: one o'clock at the Salpêtrière. I was there. I had to walk quite a way past a number of low buildings and across several courtyards where people in white caps, looking like convicts, stood here and there below the leafless trees. At length I entered a long, dark room like a passageway, with four windows of greenish, translucent glass on the one side, separated one from another by a broad black expanse of wall. Before these windows was a wooden bench, along the whole length, and on this bench they sat, the people who knew me, waiting. Yes, they were all there. Once I had grown accustomed to the dim light in the room, I saw that among those sitting there shoulder to shoulder in that never-ending row there could be others too, of a lower class, working people, maids and carters. Down at the narrow end of the passage, on chairs apart from the rest, two fat women, probably concierges, had spread themselves out and were talking. I glanced at the clock; it was five to one. It would be my turn in five or ten minutes, so it was not so bad. The air was poor, stuffy, full of clothing and breath. In one place the strong, bracing coolness of ether blew in through a door left ajar. I started to pace to and fro. It occurred to me that I had been directed here, among these people, in this overcrowded public waiting room. This was the first official confirmation, as it were, that I was one of the untouchables; had the doctor known by my appearance? But I had gone to see him wearing a passable suit, and had sent in my card. Even so, he must have worked it out somehow or other; perhaps I gave myself away. At all events, now that that was how it was, I did not find it so very dreadful; the people were sitting there placidly and took no notice of me. Some of them were in pain, and to make it more bearable were lolling one leg a little. A number of the men had their heads in their hands, while others were fast asleep, their faces heavy, deeply submerged. One fat man with a red, swollen neck was sitting bent forward, staring at the floor, and from time to time he spat out smack at a spot he appeared to find suitable for the purpose. A child was sobbing in a corner; it had drawn up its long thin legs, up on the bench, and held them tight to its body as though it had to say farewell to them. A small, pale woman, wearing a crêpe hat with round, black flowers at an angle on her head, wore the grimace of a smile on her meagre lips, but from under her sore eyelids the tears were forever running. Not far from her they had sat a girl with a round, smooth face and protuberant eyes without any expression; her mouth hung open, so that her white, slimy gums and old, decayed teeth were visible. And there were bandages everywhere – bandages wrapped layer upon layer around a whole head till only one single eye was to be seen, belonging to no one; bandages that concealed and bandages that exposed what lay beneath them; bandages that had been undone and in which, as in a soiled bed, a hand that was no longer a hand now lay; and a bandaged leg that stuck out from the row of people, big as a man. I paced to and fro and tried hard to stay calm. I gave a good deal of attention to the wall that faced me. I noticed that there were a number of single doors in it, and that the wall did not extend right up to the ceiling, so that the passage was not entirely separated from the rooms off it. I checked the clock; I had been pacing to and fro for an hour. A while later, the doctors arrived. First a couple of young men who passed by with indifferent expressions, then at last the one I had been to see, wearing light gloves, a chapeau à huit reflets and an immaculate topcoat. When he saw me, he raised his top hat a little and smiled absently. I now hoped I would be called in right away, but another hour went by. I cannot remember how I passed it; it went by. An old man in a smirched apron, some kind of attendant, came up and tapped me on the shoulder. I went into one of the adjoining rooms. The doctor and the young men were sitting around a table, and looked at me. I was given a chair. Very good. And now I was expected to describe what was the matter with me. As briefly as possible, s'il vous plaît; these gentlemen did not have much time. I felt most disconcerted. The young men sat there looking at me with that superior, professional curiosity they had learned. The doctor I knew stroked his black goatee beard and smiled absently. I thought I was going to burst into tears, but instead I heard myself saying in French: ‘Sir, I have already had the honour of telling you all I can. If you consider it necessary that these gentlemen be privy to the matter, you will doubtless be in a position, from our conversation, to describe it in a few words, whereas I find it difficult to do so.’ The doctor rose with a courteous smile, crossed to the window with his assistants, and said a few words, waving his hand levelly to and fro for emphasis. Three minutes later, one of the young men, a short-sighted, nervous fellow, came back to the table and, attempting a severe look, said: ‘Do you sleep well, sir?’ ‘No, badly.’ Whereupon he leaped back to rejoin the others. When the group had deliberated together for a time, the doctor turned to me and informed me that I would be called. I reminded him that my appointment had been for one o'clock. He smiled and rapidly flapped his small white hands a couple of times, to indicate that he was exceptionally busy. So I returned to my passageway, where the air was now far more oppressive, and began to pace to and fro again, although I felt dead tired. At length I grew giddy from the stale, humid odours; I went to stand by the front door and opened it a little. I could see that it was still afternoon and there was sunshine outside, and this made me feel inexpressibly better. But I had hardly been standing there a minute when I heard my name called. Some female sitting at a small table a couple of paces from me was hissing across at me. Who had told me to open the door? I said I could not stand the air inside. All right, that was my business, she said, but the door had to be kept shut. In that case, might it not be possible to open a window? No, that was not permitted. I decided to go back to pacing to and fro, since it did have a calming effect, after all, and hurt no one. But now the woman at the small table took exception to that as well. Didn't I have anywhere to sit? No, I didn't. Walking about was not allowed; I would have to find myself a seat; there must be one still free. The woman was right. I did find a seat, right away, beside the girl with protuberant eyes. So there I sat, feeling that the situation must surely be the preliminary to something terrible. To my left, then, was the girl with the rotting gums; it was some time before I could make out what was to my right. It was someimmense, immovable mass, with a face and a large, heavy, inert hand. The side of the face that I could see was vacant, wholly innocent of features or memories, and it was unsettling to see that the clothes were like those of a corpse dressed to lie out in a coffin. The narrow black cravat had been tied at the collar in the selfsame slack, impersonal way, and the jacket had plainly been pulled on to this unresisting body by others. The hand had been placed on the trousers where it lay, and even the hair looked as if it had been combed by the women who lay out bodies, and was stiff like the hair of stuffed animals.
I observed all of this attentively, and it came to me that this must be the place I was destined for; this at last was the place in my life in which I would remain, or so I believed. Fate does indeed move in mysterious ways.