Homo Faber

by Max Frisch

  (At a hundred pesos a day.)

  It was Sunday when we packed, a hot night with a slimy moon, and the queer noise that had woken me every morning turned out to be music, the clatter of an antiquated marimba, hammer taps without resonance, a ghastly kind of music, positively epileptic. It was some festival connected with the full moon. They had practised every morning before going to work in the fields, so that now they could play for dancing, five Indians who struck their instrument with whirling hammers, a kind of wooden xylophone, as long as a table. I overhauled the engine to avoid a breakdown in the jungle and had no time to watch the dancing; I was lying underneath our Land Rover. The girls were sitting in rows round the market place, most of them with a baby at their brown breasts; the dancers sweated and drank coconut milk. As the night passed, more and more seemed to arrive, whole tribes; the girls were not wearing their everyday clothes, but American frocks in honour of their moon, a fact that agitated Marcel, our artist, for several hours. I had other worries. We had no arms, no compass, nothing. I’m not interested in folklore. I packed our Land Rover, after all someone had to, and I was glad to do it in order to get out of here.

  *

  Hanna had to leave Germany and came to study art history with Professor Wölfflin, a subject in which I took no interest, but apart from this we understood one another immediately, without thinking about marriage. Hanna didn’t think about marriage either. We were too young, as I have already said, quite apart from my parents, who found Hanna a very pleasant person, but were worried about what would happen to my career if I married a girl who was half Jewish, a worry that angered, indeed infuriated, me. I was quite ready to marry Hanna, I felt under an obligation to do so because of the times we were living in. Her father, a professor at Munich, was taken into custody just then, those were the days of what people referred to at the time as ‘atrocity stories’, and of course I wouldn’t leave Hanna in the lurch. I wasn’t a coward, quite apart from the fact that we really loved each other. I remember those days clearly, there was a party rally at Nuremberg, we sat by the radio, the race laws were promulgated. It was really Hanna who didn’t want to get married then; I was perfectly willing. When I heard from Hanna that she had to leave Switzerland in fourteen days I was an officer in the army at Thun; I at once travelled to Zurich and went with Hanna to the aliens office, where my uniform made no difference, but at least we saw the head of the department. I can still remember how he looked at the letter Hanna showed him and then sent for her dossier; Hanna was sitting, I was standing. Then his well-meaning question as to whether the young lady was my fiancée, and our embarrassment. We must understand that Switzerland was a small country, no room for countless refugees, right of asylum, but Hanna had had time enough to make arrangements for her emigration. Then finally the dossier arrived and it turned out that it didn’t concern Hanna at all, but a refugee with the same name who had already emigrated overseas. Everyone felt relieved. In the anteroom I was picking up my officer’s gloves and my officer’s cap, when Hanna was called back to the counter. Hanna went white in the face. She had to pay ten centimes, postage for the letter wrongly sent to her address. She was wildly indignant. I thought it a joke. Unfortunately I had to go back the same evening to my recruits at Thun. During that journey I made up my mind to marry Hanna, if ever her residence permit were withdrawn. Soon afterwards (if I remember rightly) her old father died in prison. I had made up my mind, as I have said, but I never got round to it. I don’t really know why. Hanna was always very sensitive and moody, an unpredictable temperament – manic-depressive, as Joachim said. Though Joachim had only seen her once or twice; Hanna didn’t want to have anything to do with Germans. I swore to her that Joachim, my friend, was no Nazi; but it was no use. I understood her mistrust, but she didn’t make things easy for me, apart from the fact that our interests weren’t always the same. I called her a sentimentalist and arty crafty. She called me Homo Faber. Sometimes we had out-and-out rows, for example when we came out of the theatre, which Hanna was always making me go to; on the one hand Hanna had Communist leanings, which I couldn’t bear, and on the other a tendency to mysticism, or to put it less kindly, hysteria. Now, I am a man who has both feet on the ground. Nevertheless, we were very happy together, it seems to me, and I really don’t know why we didn’t marry. We just didn’t get around to it. Unlike my father, I wasn’t anti-semitic, as far as I can remember; I was simply so young, like most men under thirty, too immature to become a father, I was still working on my dissertation, as I have said, and living with my parents, which Hanna couldn’t understand at all. We always used to meet in her room. Then came the offer from Escher-Wyss, a chance in a million for a young engineer, and what worried me about it was not the climate in Baghdad, but Hanna in Zurich. She was expecting a child at that time. I heard her revelation on the very day on which I came from my first interview with Escher-Wyss, having made up my mind to take the job in Baghdad as soon as possible. I still contest her assertion that I was scared to death. I merely asked: Are you sure? A perfectly matter-of-fact and reasonable question. It was only her certainty that made me feel duped. I asked: Have you been to a doctor? Also a reasonable and permissible question. She knew for sure! I said: Let’s wait another fortnight. She laughed because she was perfectly certain, and I couldn’t help assuming that she had known for a long time and hadn’t told me; that was the only reason I felt duped. I put my hand on her hand, at the moment I couldn’t think of anything much to say, that’s true; I drank coffee and smoked. Her disappointment! I didn’t dance with joy at the prospect of becoming a father, it’s true, the political situation was far too serious for that. I asked: Do you know a doctor you can go to? Of course I only meant, to have an examination. Hanna nodded. That’s no problem, she said, that can be arranged. I asked: What do you mean? Later, Hanna asserted that I was relieved she wasn’t going to have the child, positively delighted, and that’s why I put my arm round her shoulder when she cried. She was the one who didn’t want to talk about it any more, and then I told her about Escher-Wyss, about the job in Baghdad, about an engineer’s professional prospects in general. This wasn’t aimed at her child at all. I even told her how much I should be earning in Baghdad. My very words were: If you want to have your child, then of course we must get married. Later she reproached me for having said ‘must’. I asked her frankly: Do you want to get married or don’t you? She shook her head, and I didn’t know where I stood. I discussed the matter at length with Joachim, while we were playing chess; Joachim told me about the medical side of it, which of course was no problem, then about the legal side, which was no problem either if you knew how to get hold of the necessary certificate; then he filled his pipe and stared at the chessboard, for Joachim was fundamentally opposed to giving advice. He promised his help (he was a medical student in the middle of his finals) in case we, the girl and I, should need his help. I was very grateful, rather embarrassed, but glad he didn’t make a great fuss about it. He merely said: It’s your move. I told Hanna the whole thing was no problem. It was Hanna who suddenly broke it all off; she packed her bag, suddenly seized with the crazy idea of going back to Munich. I planted myself in front of her and tried to make her see sense. All she said was: It’s all over. I had said ‘your child’, instead of ‘our child’. That was what Hanna could not forgive me.

  *

  The distance from Palenque to the plantation was barely seventy miles as the crow flies, which meant about a hundred miles by car – a negligible journey if there had been anything approaching a road, which of course there wasn’t; the only road going in that direction stopped at the ruins, simply disappearing into moss and ferns.

  Nevertheless, we made progress.

  Thirty-seven miles the first day.

  We took turns driving.

  Nineteen miles the second day.

  We simply kept heading south-east, but of course moving in a zig-zag, cutting through any gaps in the undergrowth, which is actually not so dense and impenetrable a
s it looks from a distance; there were clearings everywhere, and even herds, but without herdsmen, and fortunately no large swamps.

  Flashes of lightning.

  Rain never fell.

  What set my nerves on edge was the rattle of our petrol tins; I stopped several times and tightened the ropes, but after half an hour of driving over roots and rotting tree trunks they were rattling again.

  Marcel kept whistling.

  Although he was sitting at the back, where he was bounced from side to side all the time, he whistled like a kid on a school spree. When he wasn’t whistling, he sang a French children’s song for hours on end.

  Il Etait Un Petit Navire…

  Herbert kept rather quiet.

  We spoke very little about Joachim.

  What Herbert couldn’t stand were the zopilotes; yet they do us no harm at all as long as we are alive, they merely stink, as is only to be expected of vultures, they are ugly and you always come across them in flocks, it’s almost impossible to frighten them away once they get to work, it’s no use blowing your horn, they just flap their wings and hop round the carcass they have ripped open, refusing to give it up…. On one occasion, when Herbert was at the wheel, he was seized by an absolute fury; he suddenly put his foot down and drove straight into the black pack, into the middle and right through, so that black feathers rained down on all sides.

  Afterwards it was all over the wheels.

  The sweetish stench kept us company for hours, until we dealt with it. The stuff stuck in the treads of the tyres and there was nothing for it but to scrape it laboriously out by hand, groove by groove. Fortunately we had rum! Without rum I think we should have turned back – on the third day – not out of fear, but out of common sense.

  We had no idea where we were.

  Somewhere on the eighteenth parallel.

  Marcel either sang Il Etait Un Petit Navire or chattered all night long – about Cortez and Montezuma (I didn’t mind that, after all, it’s historical) or about the decline of the white race (it was too hot and too humid to argue), about the disastrous pseudo-victory of the western technologist (he called Cortez a technologist, because he possessed gunpowder!), about the Indian soul and a lot of other rubbish, a whole lecture about the return of the old gods (after the H-bomb had been dropped!) and about death becoming extinct (his very words!) thanks to penicillin, about the retreat of the soul from all the civilized regions of the earth, the soul in the maquis and so on. Herbert woke up at the word maquis, which he understood, and asked: ‘What’s he talking about?’ – ‘Highbrow tripe,’ I said, and we let him go on about his theory of America, which he said had no future, ‘The American Way of Life was an attempt to cosmeticize life, but you couldn’t cosmeticize life…’

  I tried to sleep.

  I only lost my temper when Marcel started to talk about my work, that is to say about UNESCO, saying the technologist was the final guise of the white missionary, industrialization the last gospel of a dying race and living standards a substitute for a purpose in living…

  I asked him if he was a Communist.

  Marcel denied it.

  On the third day, when we were once more driving through the bush with no track to follow, simply heading in the direction of Guatemala, I had had enough.

  I was for turning back.

  ‘Because it’s idiotic,’ I said, ‘just to drive on at random until we’ve no petrol left.’

  Herbert took out his map.

  What got on my nerves were the newts in every pool, a seething mass of newts in every one-day puddle – all this procreation, this stench of fertility, of blossoming decay.

  Wherever you spat it germinated!

  I knew this 1: 500,000 map that didn’t show a thing, even under the magnifying glass, nothing but white paper – a blue river, a dead-straight frontier, a line of latitude in the empty white… I was for turning back. I wasn’t afraid (what of?), but there was no point. We went on simply to please Herbert; unfortunately, for soon afterwards we did indeed come to a river, or rather a river bed, which could only be the Usumancinta, the border between Mexico and Guatemala, dry in some places and in others full of water that didn’t seem to be flowing; we couldn’t cross at this point, but there must be places where you could get across without a bridge, and Herbert wouldn’t wait, although I wanted to bathe, he drove along the bank until we came to a point where we could cross, and Joachim (as we learned later) had also crossed.

  I had a bathe.

  Marcel bathed too, and we floated on our backs in the water with our mouths shut to avoid swallowing any; the water was warm and murky and stank, every movement left bubbles behind, but still it was water; the irritating things were the innumerable dragonflies and Herbert, who kept wanting to move on, and the thought that there might be snakes.

  Herbert stayed on land.

  Our Land Rover stood up to its axles in the slippery marl (or whatever it was), Herbert was filling the petrol tank.

  There were swarms of butterflies.

  When I saw a rusty petrol tin in the water, which suggested that Joachim (who else?) had also once filled his tank here, I said nothing, but went on bathing, while Herbert tried to get our Land Rover out of the slippery marl…

  I was for turning back.

  I stayed in the water, although it suddenly disgusted me, the insects, the bubbles on the brown water, the lazy flicker of the sunlight, a sky full of vegetation when you lay on your back and looked up, fronds with yard-long leaves, motionless, in between them the filigree of acacia, lichen, aerial roots, motionless, every now and then a red bird that flew across the river; apart from this, deathly silence (when Herbert wasn’t revving up) beneath a whitish sky, the sun as though bedded in cotton wool, clammy and hot, hazy with a circular rainbow.

  I was for turning back.

  ‘Because it’s crazy,’ I said, ‘because we’ll never find this plantation.’

  I was for taking a vote.

  Marcel was also in favour of turning back, because his vacation was drawing to an end; when Herbert had finally succeeded in getting the Land Rover across to the other bank, it was only a question of convincing him of the stupidity of going on when there was absolutely no trail to follow. At first he cursed me, because he couldn’t contradict my arguments, then he fell silent and listened and I had just about won him round – when Marcel suddenly put a spoke in the wheel.

  ‘Voilà,’ he shouted, ‘les traces d’une Nash.’

  We thought he was joking.

  ‘Mais regardez,’ he cried, ‘sans blague…’

  In places the crusty tracks had been partially washed away, so that they might have been cart tracks; at other places, according to the nature of the soil, we could clearly recognize the tyre pattern.

  Now we had our trail.

  Otherwise I shouldn’t have gone on and everything would have turned out differently – this is a thought I cannot get out of my mind.

  Now there was no turning back.

  (Unfortunately!)

  On the morning of the fourth day we saw two Indians crossing a field with curved sabres in their hands, just like the two Herbert had seen in Palenque and taken for murderers; their curved sabres were nothing but sickles.

  Then came the first tobacco fields.

  The hope of arriving before nightfall made us more on edge than ever, on top of this heat, tobacco on all sides with ditches in between, human handiwork, dead straight, but no human being anywhere.

  We had lost the trail again.

  Again we searched for the tread pattern.

  Soon the sun went down; we stood on our Land Rover and whistled with our fingers in our mouths, as loudly as we could. We couldn’t be far away. We whistled and hooted, while the sun was already sinking into the green tobacco – as though bloated, looking in the haze like a blister filled with blood, repulsive, like a kidney or something of that sort.

  The moon was just the same.

  It would have been the last straw if we had now lost one a
nother in the dusk, as each of us trudged off in a different direction looking for tyre marks. We divided the ground up into areas and examined one each. Whichever of us found something looking like a tyre track was to whistle.

  Only the birds whistled.

  We went on searching by moonlight, until Herbert stumbled on the zopilotes, zopilotes on a dead donkey – he let out a yell and fled and threw stones at the black birds, uncontrollable in his rage. It was horrible. The donkey’s eyes had been pecked out, leaving two red holes, so had the tongue; now they were trying, as Herbert threw his stones, to drag the entrails out through the anus.

  This was our fourth night.

  We had nothing left to drink.

  I was exhausted, the earth felt as though it were heated, I sat there with my head in my hands, sweating in the bluish moonlight. There were glow-worms everywhere.

  Herbert paced up and down.

  Only Marcel slept.

  At one point I suddenly heard no more footsteps and looked over to Herbert – he was standing by the dead donkey, he wasn’t throwing stones at the rustling birds, just standing watching.

  They gorged themselves all night long.

  When the moon sank at last into the tobacco, so that the damp mist over the field ceased to look like milk, I finally slept; but not for long.

  There was the sun again!

  The donkey lay gaping open, the zopilotes had eaten their fill and were perched on the trees round about, as though stuffed, when we set off again with no path to follow; Herbert, as the representative and nephew of Hencke-Bosch & Co. Ltd, to whom these fields belonged, assumed responsibility and the steering wheel, still without a word, and drove straight through the tobacco; it was absurd, we left a trail of broken tobacco plants behind us, but we had no alternative, since our repeated hooting and whistling brought no answer.