Homo Faber

by Max Frisch

Myself rocking and watching.

  My delight at being here and now.

  From time to time rain sprays in under the arcade, petal confetti, then the scent of hot foliage and a sudden coolness on the skin, from time to time flashes of lightning, but the waterfall is louder than any thunder, I rock and laugh, wind, the rocking of the empty chair beside me, the Cuban flag…

  I whistle.

  My anger with America!

  I rock and shiver.

  THE AMERICAN WAY OF LIFE!

  My resolve to live differently…

  Flashes of lightning; afterwards it’s as though you were blind. For a split second you see the sulphur-green palm trees in the gale, clouds, violet with the bluish glow of an oxyacetylene torch, the sea, the flapping corrugated iron; the reverberation of this flapping corrugated iron, my childish delight in it, my sensual pleasure – I sing.

  THE AMERICAN WAY OF LIFE.

  Even what they eat and drink, these palefaces who don’t know what wine is, these vitamin-eaters who drink cold tea and chew cotton-wool and don’t know what bread is, this Coca-Cola people I can no longer abide…

  And yet I am living on their money.

  I have my shoes cleaned.

  With their money.

  The seven-year-old, who has polished my shoes once already, now like a drowned cat; I take hold of his fuzzy hair.

  His grin…

  His hair isn’t black, more of an ashen grey, a brownish grey, young, it feels like horse hair, but frizzy and short, you can feel the childish skull underneath, warm, like stroking a shorn poodle.

  He only grins and goes on polishing.

  I love him.

  His teeth…

  His young skin…

  His eyes remind me of Houston, Texas, of the Negro cleaning-woman who knelt beside me in the washroom after I had my attack of sweating and giddiness, the whites of her large eyes that are altogether different, beautiful like animals’ eyes. The whole of her flesh.

  We chat about different makes of car.

  His nimble hands…

  There is nobody else in sight but this boy and myself, all around us the Flood, he squats there shining my shoes with his rag so that it makes a slapping sound.

  THE AMERICAN WAY OF LIFE.

  Their ugliness in comparison with people like these here, their pink sausage skins, horrible, they only live because there is penicillin, that’s all, the fuss they make as though they were happy because they’re Americans, because they have no inhibitions, and yet they’re only gawky and noisy – fellows like Dick, whom I have taken as a model! – the way they stand around, their left hands in their trouser pockets, their shoulders leaning against the wall, their glass in the other hand, easy-going, the protectors of mankind, their backslapping, their optimism until they are drunk and then hysterical weeping, sell-out of the white race, their vacuum between the loins.

  My anger with myself!

  (If only one could live over again.)

  My night letter to Hanna…

  The following day I drove out to the beach, it was cloudless and hot, midday with a gentle surf, the wash of the waves and the chink of the shingle, every beach reminded me of Theodohori.

  I weep.

  The water is clear, you can see the bottom, I swim with my face in the water so that I can see the bottom; my shadow on the bottom – a violet frog.

  Letter to Dick.

  What America has to offer: comfort, the best gadgets in the world, ready for use, the world as an Americanized vacuum wherever they go, everything is turned into a highway with the world as a wall of posters on either side, their cities that aren’t cities at all, lighting, next morning you see the empty scaffolding, humbug, infantile, an advertisement of optimism spread out like a neon carpet in front of the night and death…

  Later I hired a boat.

  In order to be alone.

  Even when they’re in their bathing costumes you can see they’ve got dollars; their voices (as on the Via Appia) are unbearable, wherever you go you hear their rubber voices, the moneyed masses.

  Letter to Marcel.

  Marcel is right. Their fake health, their fake youthfulness, their women who don’t admit to growing older, the way they use cosmetics even on corpses, their whole pornographic attitude to death, their President who has to laugh on every magazine cover like a pink baby, or else they won’t elect him again, their obscene youthfulness…

  I rowed a long way out.

  Heat haze over the sea.

  Very much alone.

  I read my letters to Dick and Marcel and tore them up, because they were not objective; the white scraps on the water; the white hairs on my chest…

  Very much alone.

  Later, like a schoolboy, I draw a woman in the hot sand and lie down inside this woman, who is nothing but sand, and talk aloud to her.

  ‘You wild girl!’

  I didn’t know what to do with this day, with myself, it was a queer day, I didn’t recognize myself, I had no idea how it had passed, an afternoon that looked absolutely like eternity, blue, unbearable, but beautiful, but endless – until I am once more sitting on the Prado wall (in the evening) with closed eyes; I try to imagine that I am in Havana, that I am sitting on the Prado wall. I can’t imagine it, terror.

  Everybody wants to clean my shoes.

  Nothing but beautiful people, I gaze at them admiringly as at strange animals, their white teeth in the dusk, their brown shoulders and arms – their laughter, because they’re glad to be alive, because it is a holiday evening, because they are beautiful.

  My lust for looking.

  My desire.

  Vacuum between the loins.

  I exist now only for shoeshine boys!

  The pimps.

  The ice-cream vendors.

  Their vehicle: a combination of old pram and mobile canteen added to half a bicycle, a baldachin with rusty curtains; a carbide lamp; all around, the green twilight dotted with their flared skirts.

  The lilac moon.

  Then the business with the taxi. It was still early in the evening, but I couldn’t bear to wander along any more like a corpse in the parade of the living, I wanted to get back to my hotel and take a sleeping powder; I beckoned a taxi, but when I pull the door open the two ladies are already inside, a black one and a blonde. I say ‘Sorry!’ and shut the door; but the driver jumps out and calls me back, ‘Yes, sir!’ he cries and pulls the door open again, ‘For you, sir!’ I have to laugh at so much service and climb in.

  Our delicious supper.

  Then the fiasco.

  I knew it would happen sooner or later, afterwards I lie in my hotel – sleepless but relaxed, it is a hot night, from time to time I shower my body that is leaving me, but I don’t take a sleeping powder, my body is still just good enough to enjoy the wind from the electric fan that sways this way and that, wind on my chest, wind on my legs, wind on my legs.

  My haunting fear: cancer of the stomach.

  Apart from this I am happy.

  The din of birds at daybreak, I take out my Baby Hermes and at last type my UNESCO report on the erection of the turbines in Venezuela, which has been completed.

  Then sleep till midday.

  I eat oysters because I don’t know what to do, my work is finished. I am smoking far too many cigars.

  (Hence the pains in my stomach.)

  The way I simply sit down on the Prado wall and get into conversation with a strange girl, in my opinion the same one who stuck her pink tongue out at me the day before yesterday. She doesn’t remember. Her laughter when I tell her I’m not an American.

  My Spanish too slow.

  ‘Say it in English!’

  Her long thin hands…

  My Spanish is just enough for negotiations connected with my work. It’s funny: I don’t say what I want to say, but what the language wants. Her laughter at this. I am the victim of my limited vocabulary. Her astonishment, her positively kindly eyes when I myself feel astonished – at my own
life, which seems, when put like that, so insignificant.

  Juana is eighteen.

  (Even younger than our child.)

  Suiza – all the time she thinks it means Sweden.

  Her brown arms stretched out backwards as a support, her head against the cast-iron street lamp, her white headscarf and black hair, her unbelievably beautiful feet; we are smoking; my two white hands interlaced over my right knee.

  Her unaffectedness.

  She has never left Cuba.

  This is only my third evening here, but everything is already familiar – the green dusk with the neon signs, the ice-cream vendors, the checked bark of the plane trees, the birds with their twittering and the net of shadows on the ground, the red flowers of their mouths.

  Her life’s goal: New York!

  The bird droppings from above.

  Her unaffectedness.

  Juana is a packer, a fille de joie only at week-ends, she has a child, she doesn’t live in Havana itself.

  Again the young sailors sauntering past.

  I tell her about my daughter who has died, about the honeymoon with my daughter, about Corinth, about the viper that bit her over the left breast, about her funeral, about my future.

  ‘I’m going to marry her.’

  She misunderstands me.

  ‘I thought she was dead.’

  I explain.

  ‘Oh,’ she laughs, ‘you’re going to marry the girl’s mother, I see.’

  ‘As soon as possible.’

  ‘Fine!’ she says.

  ‘My wife lives in Athens.’

  Her earrings, her skin…

  She is waiting here for her brother.

  My question whether Juana believes in mortal sin, or in gods; her white laugh; my question whether Juana believes that snakes (speaking quite generally) are guided by gods, or by demons.

  ‘What’s your opinion, sir?’

  Later the fellow with the striped Hollywood shirt, the youthful pimp, who has already accosted me, her brother. He shakes my hand: ‘Hello, camarada!’

  It doesn’t mean anything, we are all good friends, Juana puts her cigarette under her heel and treads it out, her brown hand on my shoulder:

  ‘He’s going to marry his wife – he’s a gentleman!’

  Juana disappeared.

  ‘Wait here,’ he says and looks back over his shoulder to keep me where I am. ‘Just a moment, sir, just a moment!’

  My last night in Havana.

  No time on earth in which to sleep!

  I had no particular cause to feel happy, but I did. I knew that I am going to leave everything I am seeing, but that I shall not forget it: the arcade by night, where I rock and look, or listen as the case may be, a cab-horse whinnies, the Spanish house-front with the yellow curtains flapping out of black windows, then the corrugated iron again from somewhere, its reverberation going through my marrow, my pleasure at all this, my sensual delight, wind, nothing but wind shaking the palms, wind without clouds, I rock and sweat, the green palm tree is as pliant as a willow wand, the wind in its fronds makes a sound like knives being sharpened, dust, then the cast-iron street lamps that begin to whistle, I rock and laugh, their flickering and dying light, there must be a considerable draught, the whinnying horse can scarcely hold the cab, everything is trying to fly away, the sign on a barber’s shop, brass, its tinkling in the darkness, and the invisible sea sending its spray over the wall, then every time thunder in its depths, over the top of this it hisses like an Espresso machine, my thirst, salt on my lips, a gale without rain, not a drop will fall, it can’t because there are no clouds, nothing but stars, nothing but the hot, dry dust in the air, air like an oven, I rock to and fro and drink my Scotch, one only, I can’t take any more, I rock and sing. For hours on end. I sing! I can’t sing, but nobody hears me, the cab-horse on the empty tarmac, the last girls in their flying skirts, their brown legs when their skirts fly up, their black hair that also flies out behind them, and the green Venetian blind that has torn itself free, their white laughter in the dust and the way it skids over the surface of the street out towards the sea, the raspberry light in the dust above the white town in the night, the heat, the Cuban flag – I rock and sing, nothing else, the rocking of the empty chair beside me, the whistling cast iron, the eddy of petals. I sing the praises of life!

  Saturday, 13 July. Flew on.

  Morning in the Prado, after I have been to the bank to change money, the empty avenue, slippery with bird droppings and white petals…

  The sun…

  Everything at work.

  The birds…

  Then a man who asks me for a light for his cigar, he is in a hurry but nevertheless he walks along with me and asks me:

  ‘How do you like Havana?’

  ‘I love it,’ I say.

  Another pimp, his personal interest in me.

  ‘You’re happy, aren’t you?’

  He admires my camera.

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

  When I tell him I’m travelling on, he wants to know when I have to be at the airport.

  ‘Ten o’clock, my friend, ten o’clock.’

  A glance at his watch.

  ‘Well,’ he says, ‘it’s nine o’clock now, sir, that’s plenty of time!’

  I saunter down to the sea again.

  Far out to sea the fishing-boats…

  Parting.

  I sit on one of the concrete breakwaters again and smoke another cigar – I’m not filming anything any more. What’s the use! Hanna is right: afterwards you have to look at it as a film, when it’s all no longer there, and everything passes away…

  Parting.

  Hanna has been here. I told her she looked like a bride. Hanna in white! She has suddenly stopped wearing mourning when she comes to see me; her excuse is that it is too hot outside. I’ve talked to her so much about zopilotes, now she doesn’t want to sit by my bed like a black vulture – she thinks I don’t notice her charming thoughtfulness, because in the past (a few weeks ago) I failed to notice so much. Hanna has told me a lot.

  PS.

  Once as a child, Hanna wrestled with her brother and swore never to love a man, because her younger brother succeeded in throwing Hanna on her back. She was furious with God for having made boys stronger than girls, she thought him unfair, not her brother, but God. Hanna made up her mind to be cleverer than all the boys of Munich-Schwabing and founded a secret girls’ club to do away with Jehovah. Whatever happened, they were only prepared to consider a heaven in which there were also goddesses. Hanna turned first to the Mother of God, as the result of seeing religious pictures in which Mary reigned in the centre; she knelt down like her Catholic girl friends and crossed herself, which had to be kept secret from Papa. The only man she trusted was an old man named Armin, who played a certain part in Hanna’s childhood. I didn’t know Hanna had a brother. Hanna tells me he lives in Canada and is very capable, I believe he puts them all on their backs. I asked how she lived with Joachim in those days, where and for how long. I asked a great many questions; Hanna always answered: ‘But you know that!’ She told me most about Armin. He was a blind man. Hanna still loves him, although he died, or disappeared, long ago. Hanna was still a schoolgirl in long socks, she used to meet him regularly in the Englische Garten, where he always sat on the same bench, and then guided him through Munich. He loved Munich. He was old, downright ancient by her standards at the time – between fifty and sixty. They were always short of time, every Tuesday and Friday, when Hanna had her violin lessons, and they met in all weathers, she guided him and showed him the shop windows. Armin was totally blind, but he could picture everything that was described to him. Hanna said: ‘It was simply wonderful to walk through the world with him.’ I also asked how the birth of our child went. I wasn’t there: how could I picture it? Of course Joachim was there. He knew he wasn’t the father; but he was like a real father. An easy birth, according to Hanna; she remembered only tha
t she was very happy to be a mother. One thing I didn’t know: my mother knew the child was by me, no one else in Zurich, my father had no idea. I asked why my mother never mentioned in any of her letters that she knew. A pact between women? They simply don’t mention things we shouldn’t understand and treat us like children. According to Hanna my parents were in every way different from what I imagined; at any rate towards Hanna. When Hanna talks about my mother I can only listen. Like a blind man! They kept up a correspondence for years, Hanna and my mother, who incidentally didn’t die of an embolism, as I thought. Hanna was surprised to find how much I didn’t know. Hanna went to her funeral in 1937. Her love of the ancient Greeks, says Hanna, also began in the Englische Garten; Armin knew Greek and the girl had to read to him out of her school books, so that he could learn it by heart. This was, so to speak, his way of raping her. He never took Hanna to his home. She doesn’t know where he lived or how. Hanna used to meet him in the Englische Garten and left him in the Englische Garten, and no one in the world knew of their plan to go to Greece together, Armin and she, as soon as she was grown-up and free; Hanna was going to show him the Greek temples. Whether the old man was in earnest is uncertain; Hanna was in earnest. Hanna in long socks! At one time, I remember, there used to sit in the Café Odéon, Zurich, an old gentleman whom Hanna regularly had to fetch and take to the tram. As a matter of fact I used to hate this Café Odéon, it was full of emigrants and intellectuals-bohemians. Professors and the old tarts who catered for businessmen up from the country. I only went into this café to please Hanna. He lived in the Pension Fontana, I used to wait concealed in a little shelter in the Goriastrasse until Hanna had delivered her old uncle. So that was Armin! I never really noticed him. ‘But he noticed you,’ said Hanna. Hanna continues to talk of Armin as though he were still alive, as though he saw everything. I asked why Hanna never went with him to Greece. Hanna laughed in my face, as if it had all been a childish game. In Paris (1937 to 1940) Hanna lived with a French writer who is supposed to be quite well known; I’ve forgotten his name. What I didn’t know was that Hanna went to Moscow (1948) with her second husband. She once passed through Zurich again (1953) without our daughter; she liked Zurich, as though nothing had ever happened there; she also visited the Café Odéon. I asked how Armin died. Hanna met him again in London (1942). Armin was planning to emigrate and Hanna actually took him aboard the ship, which he couldn’t see and which was probably sunk by a German U-boat; anyhow, it never reached port.