Homo Faber

by Max Frisch

  9 June. Flew to Caracas.

  This time I flew via Miami and Merida, Yucatan, where there is a plane to Caracas almost every day. I broke my journey at Merida (with stomach trouble).

  Then to Campeche again.

  (Six and a half hours by bus from Merida.)

  Back to the little railway station with the narrow-gauge track and cacti between the sleepers, where I waited for a train with Herbert Hencke two months ago.

  I leaned my head against the wall with my eyes shut and my arms and legs stretched out; everything that had happened since the last time I waited for this train seemed to me like a hallucination – everything here was just the same.

  The clammy air.

  The smell of fish and pineapples.

  The scrawny dogs.

  The dead dogs nobody buried, the zopilotes on the roofs above the market place, the heat, the faint odour of the sea, the felty sun over the sea, over the land the bluish-white lightning flashing out of black clouds like the flickering light of a quartz lamp.

  Once more the train journey.

  Seeing Palenque again made me feel quite gay, everything was just the same: the verandah with our hammocks, our beer, our tavern with the parrot, they still remembered me, even the children recognized me. I bought and distributed Mexican sweets, once I even went out to the ruins, where in any case nothing ever changed, there was no one about, just the whirring birds as before, it was just the same as two months ago – the night too, after Palenque’s diesel engine had fallen silent: the turkey in the enclosure outside the verandah, its squawking, because it didn’t like the lightning, the deer, the black sow tied to a peg, the cotton-wool moon, the horse grazing in the darkness…

  Over everything my idle thought:

  If only it was that time, if only it was two months ago, two months during which nothing had changed here! Why can’t it be April and everything else simply a hallucination on my part?

  Then I drove alone in the Land Rover.

  I talked to Herbert.

  I talked to Marcel.

  I bathed in the Rio Usumancinta, which had changed; it had more water and no bubbles on the surface, because it was flowing faster, and it was doubtful whether I could get the Land Rover across without being drowned.

  I managed it.

  Herbert had changed, I could see that at the first glance, he had a beard, but quite apart from that – his suspicious question:

  ‘Man, what are you doing here?’

  Herbert thought I had made the journey on behalf of his family, or the firm, to take him back to Düsseldorf; he couldn’t believe I had simply come to see him, but it was true; I hadn’t all that many friends.

  He had broken his glasses.

  ‘Why don’t you mend them?’ I asked.

  I mended his glasses.

  During the downpours we sat in the hut as though in a Noah’s ark, without light, because the battery that in Joachim’s day had also supplied the radio had long since run down, and news from the world didn’t interest him in the least, not even news from Germany, the appeal of the Göttingen professors; I didn’t discuss personal matters.

  I inquired about his Nash.

  Herbert had never been back to Palenque!

  I had brought petrol, five cans for Herbert, so that he could drive away at any time; but he hadn’t the slightest wish to.

  He grinned into his beard.

  We didn’t understand one another at all.

  He grinned when he saw me shaving with an old razor, because there was no electricity here and because I didn’t want to grow a beard, because I had to move on.

  For his part he had no plans.

  His Nash 55 stood under the roof of dry leaves as before, even the ignition key was still inserted; obviously the Indians didn’t even know how to start a car, nothing was damaged but it all looked like something out of a fairy story, so I got down to work at once.

  ‘If you feel like it,’ he said, ‘then go ahead.’

  Herbert went hunting iguanas.

  I found the engine completely silted up by the heavy rains, everything had to be cleaned, everything was matted and slimy, there was a smell of pollen adhering to lubricating oil and putrefying, but I enjoyed the work.

  The Maya children stood around.

  They watched day after day as I took the engine to pieces and spread the pieces out on banana leaves on the ground.

  There was lightning but no rain.

  The mothers stared too, they never seemed to stop bearing, they stood there holding their last baby at their brown breasts, supported on their new pregnancy, gaping as I cleaned the engine, not saying a word, because I couldn’t understand them.

  Herbert came back with a bundle of iguanas.

  They were alive, they were completely motionless until you touched them, their lizard’s jaws tied together with straw, because they bite, when boiled they taste like chicken.

  Evenings in the hammocks.

  No beer, only this coconut milk.

  Flashes of lightning.

  My concern lest something should be stolen that was irreplaceable didn’t affect Herbert; he was convinced they wouldn’t touch any part of a machine. Not another word about an uprising! They’re actually quite good workers, said Herbert, they do what they’re told, although they are convinced it’s quite useless.

  He grinned into his beard.

  The future of the German cigar!

  I asked Herbert what he really proposed to do; did he intend to stay here or go back to Düsseldorf; what were his plans?

  ‘Nadal’

  Once I told him I had met Hanna, that I was going to marry Hanna; but I don’t even know whether Herbert heard me.

  Herbert was like an Indian.

  The heat…

  The glowworms…

  We dripped as though in a Turkish bath.

  The following day it rained, suddenly, only for a quarter of an hour, like the Flood, then the sun shone again; but the water stood in brown pools, and I had to push the Nash out of the hut so that I could work in the fresh air, I couldn’t foresee that a pool would form at just this spot. Unlike Herbert, I couldn’t see it as funny. The water came up above the axles, not to mention the parts of the engine I had taken to pieces and spread out on the ground. I was horrified when I saw it. Herbert gave me twenty Indians to mollify me and acted as though it was nothing to do with him, when I ordered trees to be cut down and the car jacked up so that I could get at it from underneath. I lost a whole day collecting the component parts, wading around in the murky puddle, feeling about in the warm mud; I had to do everything myself, since Herbert wasn’t interested.

  ‘Give it up!’ was all he said. ‘What’s the use?’

  I set the twenty Indians to work digging trenches to drain the water off; this was the only way of finding all the parts, and even so it was hard enough, since many of them had already sunk into the mud, or had been simply swallowed up.

  His every other word was ‘nada’.

  I let him talk nonsense, without answering. Without the Nash, Herbert was done for. I didn’t allow myself to be infected and went on working.

  ‘What would you do without a car?’ I said.

  When I had finally put the engine together so that it went, he grinned and said ‘Bravo,’ nothing else. He slapped me on the back and said I could have his Nash, he was making me a present of it.

  ‘What use is it to me?’ he said.

  There was no stopping Herbert’s fooling. He pretended to be a traffic policeman when I sat at the wheel of the jacked-up car to give everything a final test, while the Maya children stood all around, the mothers in their white shirts, all of them with nursing babies, and later the men too, standing in the undergrowth, all of them carrying curved knives, they hadn’t heard an engine for months, I switched on and revved up, the wheels spun round in mid-air, Herbert signed to me to halt and I halted, I hooted and Herbert waved me on. The Indians (more and more of them all the time) stared at us without la
ughing as we fooled around, all of them quite mute, positively reverent, while we (for no good reason) played at rush-hour traffic in Düsseldorf.

  Discussion with Hanna – about technology (according to Hanna) as the knack of so arranging the world that we don’t have to experience it. The technologist’s mania for putting the Creation to a use, because he can’t tolerate it as a partner, can’t do anything with it; technology as the knack of eliminating the world as resistance, for example, of diluting it by speed, so that we don’t have to experience it. (I don’t know what Hanna means by this.) The technologist’s worldliness. (I don’t know what Hanna means by this.) Hanna utters no reproaches, Hanna doesn’t find the way I behaved towards Sabeth incomprehensible; in Hanna’s opinion I experienced a kind of relationship I was unfamiliar with and therefore misinterpreted, persuading myself I was in love. It was no chance mistake, but a mistake that is part of me(?), like my profession, like the rest of my life. My mistake lay in the fact that we technologists try to live without death. Her own words: ‘You don’t treat life as form, but as a mere addition sum, hence you have no relationship to time, because you have no relationship to death.’ Life is form in time. Hanna admits that she can’t explain what she means. Life is not matter and cannot be mastered by technology. My mistake with Sabeth lay in repetition. I behaved as though age did not exist, and hence contrary to nature. We cannot do away with age by continuing to add up, by marrying our children.

  20 June. Arrived in Caracas.

  At last everything worked out: the turbines were on the spot together with the necessary labour force. I kept going as long as I could, and the fact that now, when the assembly took place at last, I had to drop out because of stomach trouble was bad luck but unavoidable; on the occasion of my previous visit (15 and 16 April) I was fit, but nothing else was ready. It was hardly my fault I couldn’t supervise the assembly; I had to lie in bed at the hotel, which is no fun, for more than a fortnight. I had hoped to receive a letter from Hanna in Caracas. A telegram which I then sent to Athens also went unanswered. I wanted to write to Hanna and started several letters; but I had no idea where Hanna was staying and there was nothing left for me to do (I had to do something in that hotel!) but to draw up a report, without sending it off.

  The assembly went off without a hitch – and without me.

  Eventually the deaconess brought me a mirror – I got a shock. I’ve always been gaunt, but not emaciated as I was now; not like the old Indian at Palenque, who showed us the damp burial chambers. I really got a bit of a shock. Except while shaving, I rarely look in the mirror; I comb my hair without a mirror; nevertheless I know what I look like, or used to look like. My nose has always been too long, but I have never noticed my ears before. I’m wearing a pyjama jacket without a collar, that makes my back look too long and shows up the tendons of my throat when I turn my head, and the pits between the tendons, cavities I had never noticed before. My ears stick out like those of a shaven-headed convict. I can’t seriously imagine that my skull has shrunk. I wonder whether my nose is pleasanter and come to the conclusion that noses are never pleasant, they’re rather absurd, downright obscene. I can’t possibly have looked like this in Paris (two months ago!), otherwise Sabeth would never have gone to the Opéra with me. And yet my skin is still quite bronzed, only the throat is rather whitish. With pores like a plucked chicken’s neck. I still like my mouth, I don’t know why, my mouth and my eyes, which, incidentally, are not brown, as I have always supposed, because it says so in my passport, but greyish-green; all the rest might belong to anyone who has been overworking. I have always cursed my teeth. As soon as I’m up and about again I must go to the dentist. Because of the tartar, perhaps also because of granuloma; I don’t feel any pain, just a pulsation in my jaw. I have always worn my hair very short, because it’s more practical, and it hadn’t become any thinner at the sides, nor at the back. As a matter of fact I’ve had grey hair for a long time, silvery blond, that doesn’t worry me in the least. When I lie on my back and hold the mirror above me I still look as I used to look; only a bit thinner, which is the result of the diet and not surprising. Perhaps it is the whitish light coming through the curtains that makes me look, as it were, pale under my tan; not white, but yellow. The only bad thing is my teeth. I have always been afraid of it; no matter what you do you can’t stop them ‘weathering’. It’s the same with the whole of man – the construction is passable, but the material is no good: flesh is not a material, but a curse!

  PS.

  There have never been so many deaths, it seems to me, as during this last quarter of a year. Now Professor O., whom I spoke to personally in Zurich only a week ago, is also dead.

  PS.

  I have just shaved and then massaged my skin. It’s ridiculous the ideas you get into your head from sheer idleness! There’s nothing to get upset about, I simply need fresh air and exercise, that’s all.

  9–13 July, in Cuba.

  My reason for going to Havana: to change planes, because I want at all costs to avoid flying via New York, KLM from Caracas, Cubana to Lisbon, I stay four days.

  Four days doing nothing but look.

  EL PRADO.

  The old street with the old plane trees, like the Ramblas in Barcelona, the town out for its evening stroll, an avenue of beautiful people, incredible, I walk and walk, I have nothing else to do.

  The yellow birds, their uproar at dusk.

  Everyone wants to clean my shoes.

  The Spanish Negress, who sticks her tongue out at me because I am admiring her, her pink tongue in her brown face, I laugh and say hello – she laughs too, showing her white teeth in the red flower of her lips (if one may put it like that) and her eyes, I don’t want anything from her.

  ‘How do you like Havana?’

  My anger because they keeping taking me for an American, merely because I am white; the pimps walking along in step with me:

  ‘Something very beautiful! D’you know what I mean? Something very young!’

  Everyone strolling, everyone laughing.

  Everything like a dream.

  The white policemen smoking cigars; the sailors smoking cigars – lads with narrow hips in white trousers.

  CASTELLO MORRO (founded by Philip II).

  I have my shoes cleaned.

  My resolve to live differently.

  My joy.

  I buy cigars; two boxes.

  Sunset.

  The naked boys in the sea, their skin, the sun on their wet skin, the heat, I sit and smoke a cigar, storm clouds over the white town, dark purple clouds, the last rays of sunshine lighting up the tall buildings.

  EL PRADO

  The green dusk, the ice-cream vendors; the girls sit (in groups) on the wall under the street-lamps laughing.

  TAMALES.

  This is maize wrapped in banana leaves, a snack which they sell in the street – you eat it as you walk along to save time.

  My restlessness. Why do I feel restless?

  There was nothing whatever for me to do in Havana.

  My rest in the hotel – again and again – with showers, then unclothed on the bed, the draught from the electric fan, I lie smoking cigars. I don’t lock my door; outside in the corridor a girl is singing as she does the cleaning, another Spanish Negress, I smoke incessantly.

  My desire.

  Why doesn’t she come in?

  My fatigue. I am too tired to fetch an ashtray, I lie on my back and smoke my cigar so that its whitish ash doesn’t fall off, vertically.

  PARTAGAS.

  When I walk in the Prado again it is like a hallucination again – crowds of beautiful girls, the men very handsome too. Splendid-looking people, a mixture of Negro and Spanish, I can’t stop staring. Their erect and flowing walk, the girls in flared blue skirts, their white head-scarves, their Negresses’ heels, their bare backs are precisely as dark as the shadows under the plane trees, consequently at first glance you see only their blue or lilac dresses, their white headscarves, their white
teeth when they laugh and the whites of their eyes; their earrings flash.

  THE CARIBBEAN BAR.

  I am smoking again.

  ROMEO Y JULIETA.

  A young man, whom I first take for a pimp, insists on paying for my whisky, because he has become a father.

  ‘For the first time!’

  He embraces me, keeps repeating:

  ‘Isn’t it a wonderful thing?’

  He introduces himself and wants to know my name and how many children I have, especially sons, I say:

  ‘Five.’

  He immediately insists on ordering five whiskies.

  ‘Walter,’ he says, ‘you’re my brother.’

  We have hardly clinked glasses when he is off to buy the others a whisky, to ask them how many children they have, especially sons.

  It’s all like crazy.

  At last the storm. As I sit alone under the arcades in a yellow rocking chair there is a rush of water on all sides, a sudden cloudburst with a gale, the avenue is suddenly empty of people, as though an alarm had sounded, the flapping of blinds, outside the rain spraying up from the pavement: a sudden bed of narcissi (especially under the street lamps), white.