‘No, no, wait,’ Perlmann said quickly and closed the door to get rid of the chain.
She had learned of his new room number from Signora Morelli after ringing and knocking in vain. Now, with her hands in the pockets of her rust-red jeans, she let her eye wander around the whole of the room and then pounced on the wing chair, into which she proceeded to slump.
The bed was the reason for the change, Perlmann said. He had the usual problem with his back.
‘And you like to be on your own,’ she said with a quiet twitch at the corners of her mouth, and sank cross-legged slightly deeper into the chair.
Perlmann didn’t know whether he was startled by her accuracy or delighted.
‘You know,’ she said, after asking him for a cigarette, which she then just puffed on, ‘I have an eye for these things. My father spent his whole life suffering from claustrophobia, which he kept strictly secret. In the cinema, for example, he always sat on the end seat of an empty row, even if he had to keep standing up to let people past, and he often disappeared through the emergency exit when the cinema got too full. If people were jostling each other on the pavement, he was quite capable of walking out into the traffic. And, of course, he avoided elevators like the plague; he only made an exception for those old ones where you can look through the glass doors and the elevator shaft into the stairwell. The worst thing was that when he was operating he always had the other doctors and nurses around him. On more than one occasion he came close to giving up. But I only understood the full extent of his problem when I found him one night in our huge kitchen, sitting like a pile of misery over a glass of brandy, which he never normally drank. A very good friend, perhaps his best friend, whom he spoke to on the phone at least once a week and who was a great support to him when my mother fell seriously ill, had announced that he was moving from Seville to Salamanca, where our house was. “I felt as if I was petrified,” my father said. “I felt as if I was suffocating. I hope José Antonio didn’t notice.” And then, this a man who wasn’t used to alcohol, and who, coming from Valladolid, spoke the most pin-sharp Spanish that you can imagine, started talking in a clumsy, blurred pronunciation, about how we had to move away, possibly to the Far East, to Barcelona, perhaps, or Zaragoza; he didn’t even need a job as a surgeon. “You see, otherwise I’m going to lose José Antonio,” he said with tears in his eyes. At the same time, he was a very affectionate father. I’ve never understood how that worked. But since then I’ve been able to recognize people who need a lot of empty space around them very quickly, and I’m seldom mistaken. Of course, I don’t mean you suffer from claustrophobia,’ she concluded with a smile.
He could tell her. He could spill all his desperation straight from his soul into her – as if they were sitting together in the big kitchen. Perlmann lit a cigarette and walked to the window for a moment to collect his words.
‘But I came about something quite different,’ she said, when he turned towards her to speak. ‘First of all I wanted to say how impressed I was by the inner freedom with which you talked about your work this morning. I didn’t, as you will have noticed afterwards, have the impression that Brian really refuted everything you had to say. But the peace, the delight, in fact, with which you summed up the possibility of general error! How do you do that?’
‘Perhaps it’s a matter of age,’ Perlmann said with a lump in his throat, and could have sunk into the ground over the stupidity of his answer.
‘Well, I don’t know,’ she smiled, unsure how seriously he had meant it. ‘At any rate I thought it was great. And the other thing was: I’d like to talk to you about your new topic. I was really excited by what you hinted at yesterday morning, because the influence that linguistic articulation has on memory must be very closely connected with the process of linguistic refinement of the imagination which is the subject of my research. ¿Verdad?’
Perlmann apologized and went to the bathroom, where he ran warm water over his cold hands for several minutes. He had to gain time above all, and then make sure that she did most of the talking. Back in the room he suggested having a coffee at the marina. He liked the light and the smell when the sun broke through after a rain shower, as it was doing now.
She found the idea of remembered scenes into which, even if it wasn’t done explicitly, one projected an image of oneself, illuminating, and was beginning to consider how this might relate to scenes from dreams and fantasies. Sometimes she leaned back, arms folded over her head, her eyes gazing through half-closed lids at the sea, and thought out loud about examples. She was so keyed up that she gave a start when the waiter appeared, and knocked a coffee cup out of his hand as her arm came down. Then, when the waiter flirted with her and forgave her everything, Perlmann heard her speaking Italian for the second time. She spoke it as effortlessly as she did Spanish, only the harsh vowels were unusual. Her mother had been Italian, she explained, and both were spoken casually at home.
‘Like with Giorgio, except that it was the other way round. We often laughed, because we didn’t know which we should apologize for. His suggestion is: until twenty-three minutes past two Spanish, after that Italian,’ she laughed.
This interlude had not, as Perlmann had hoped, distracted her from the subject, and now she asked him whether, in the case of memory, he knew a reason why the differentiation of the introduced self-image had to occur in the medium of language. She herself had long been in search of a corresponding explanation for the case of fantasy and will. It wasn’t enough for her, she said with a face on which Perlmann suddenly thought he was seeing her matte-silver glasses for the first time, that there was a clear connection between the development of the abilities in question. She wanted something that could make visible a closer, a deeper, connection, so to speak, between the phenomena. Could he help her with that?
Perlmann thought about the four recalcitrant sentences in Leskov’s paper. Yes, that was an important question, he said, and turned towards the water. Countless times he had wished he could fall silent for a moment in response to such a question – let it work on him all by itself for a while, without perceiving it as a threat that left one with no other chance but to come up with an answer straight away, or to apologize for being unable to do so. Now, sitting beside this woman, whom he would almost not have dared approach until an hour before, he managed: no, he was obliged to do something that seemed, seen from outside, deceptively similar to the fulfilment of his desire; her question struck him as so threatening that he not only felt a void of ignorance, but also a paralysing horror at the thought that his answer might further contribute to the tissue of lies of his false identity; so he fell silent, in the pose of the thinker. Ashamed, and yet once again with a hint of the gallows humor with which he resisted the horror, he then discovered that it had worked; as if the silence of an unanswered question were the most natural thing in the world, Evelyn Mistral herself began trying out answers to her own question.
Just as the moment approached when he himself would have to speak, von Levetzov and Millar walked past on the other side of the street. Von Levetzov waved and said something to Millar, and before they reached the corner, they both turned round. Evelyn Mistral brushed the hair from her face and smiled wryly when the two men had disappeared. Then she looked at her watch and said she had some more work to do; it was only another two-and-a-half weeks until her seminar, and until then she wanted to work on the two chapters of the book that it would be dealing with.
‘Do you think it would be enough if I handed the papers in for copying the Friday before?’
Perlmann nodded.
She was bound to be terribly nervous at the seminar, she said. ‘In such illustrious circles!’
Later, almost at the same time as the previous day, when Perlmann parted the glass-bead curtain and stepped into the trattoria, the rain started hammering on the glass roof. The proprietor and his family greeted him like an old friend, brought him bean soup followed by chicken, and when Sandra later set the coffee down in front of him, the proprietor came ov
er and placed the chronicle down in front of him as if it were a ritual that had been practiced for years.
As he ate, Perlmann imagined Evelyn Mistral and Giorgio Silvestri talking, playfully switching languages and joking, and it had given him a stitch. Now he brushed that idea aside, and opened the book at the year when he had broken off his training as a pianist.
In the first days of that year Albert Camus had died in an accident. Perlmann grimly remembered the incomprehension that his own excitement had met with at home. Only years later, when he read La Peste all the way through for the first time, did he realize how much incomprehension there had been in his own excitement, and the extent to which the book had also been trendy.
He went on flicking through the pages. With the dropping of the first plutonium bomb in the Sahara, France had joined the nuclear powers. Leonid Brezhnev was the new Soviet president. The success of Fellini’s La dolce vita in Cannes. Anita Ekberg in the Trevi Fountain. The Israelis abducted Eichmann. That was quite illegal, his father had said. Caryl Chessman was executed in St Quentin’s, after the death sentence had been postponed eight times. The Olympic Games in Rome; but it wasn’t there that Armin Hary had run the 100 meters, but some time before in Zurich.
For September, the chronicle barely mentioned anything but the Italian medals table. It was in that month that Perlmann had made his decision; on one of the last days, he couldn’t remember the exact date. He saw the bare room of the Conservatoire in front of him, and that momentous moment was still very much alive, a good thirty years later, present in all its details, as if it had been stamped in his memory with very great force.
It had been early afternoon on a rainy day, with a light in which time seemed to stand still and yet had no present, or only a dead present. He had been working once again on Chopin’s Polonaise in A flat major. It was one of the first piano compositions that he had discovered, and for a long time it had been his favorite piece. By then, however, it was his most hated piece, because it had a terrifying passage that he had never mastered. He had gone through it countless times, finger by finger, but it was as if for some inexplicable reason his motor memory was blocked at that point, so that the orders from the brain to the fingers were not resolute and unambiguous, but hesitant and blurred.
That afternoon, to his surprise, that passage had gone smoothly for the first time ever. He had been glad, but from experience he had also remained sceptical at first. He hurried to repeat his success, and finally to memorize the correct fingering once and for all. It was fine the second and third times, and the fourth time it almost felt like a firmly fixed routine. He had the feeling that he had finally managed it, and went down to the foyer to allow himself a cigarette.
Then, sitting back down at the grand piano, when he tried to put his new-won confidence to the test, he immediately stumbled. He tried it a few more times, but it wouldn’t work at all. Then, still sitting at the keyboard, he lit another cigarette, which was completely forbidden, and smoked it calmly to the end, using the box as an ashtray. Then he carefully closed the lid and opened the window. Before he went outside, he looked at the little painting by Paul Klee, which, because it was the only painting, merely served to emphasize the bareness of the room. It was right in the player’s eye-line. He would miss it.
It wasn’t, Perlmann thought, as if he had simply run out of patience that time. Quite calmly, with no inner turmoil, he had walked along the corridor to Bela Szabo’s room, and later up the stairs to the Director. It would also have been misleading to say, he thought, that he had given up his training because of his defeat with the A flat major Polonaise. What happened to him that afternoon was simply that a complicated internal play of forces, which had been under way for many months – determined by very different experiences that he had had of himself as a pianist, and by doubts of very different kinds – reached a standstill in his definitive and irrevocable clarity about the boundaries of his talent. If he said to himself that the decision had been made at that moment, it could only, it seemed to him, mean the arrival of that standstill, the end of his internal uncertainty. Apart from that, there had been no further supplementary internal decision that might have communicated between his inner state and the subsequent external actions.
Bela Szabo had seen his decision as a mistake, or at least as premature. In this he had shared the opinion of Perlmann’s parents, who thought it was a shame, and ungrateful of him, too, simply to throw away his artistic future, in which they had invested so much. But he was completely certain and his mind would not be changed. He felt it in his hands, in his arms, and sometimes even as a certainty within his whole body: he would never be anything more than a piano teacher. He was proud of being capable of such a sober insight, and did everything he could not to turn his decision into a drama. Still, a wound had remained, which had never quite healed, and which he perceived as a source of personal insecurity.
For several years after his decision, he had not played a single note or set foot in a concert hall. It was Agnes who had persuaded him to start playing again. They bought a grand piano, and he gradually found his way back into Chopin, who had originally awoken his desire to learn the piano. But he never again attempted the Polonaise in A flat major. After Agnes’s death he had avoided the piano altogether. He was afraid that the notes would break through all the dams and he would start playing sentimentally. That was something he couldn’t have borne, not even when he was alone.
Perlmann gave Sandra a big tip when she brought him the cigarettes that she had bought in the Piazza Veneto. Then he went on flicking through the book. Khrushchev banging his shoe on the table at the United Nations. Perlmann greedily read the article about Khrushchev’s demands and the failure of his trip. And the next two pages, entirely devoted to John F. Kennedy’s election as president, he read as if they contained revelations about his own life.
When the restaurant began filling up, he barely noticed, but just changed irritably to the other side of the table, so that he had the wall in front of him. With great attention he read every single name on the list of Kennedy’s cabinet, and then it continued into the next year: Gagarin in space; Cuban invasion of the Bay of Pigs; building the Berlin Wall.
Letting his life roll out again, along the history of the world: it was, Perlmann thought, like waking up. With every page the need grew to be sure of all the things that had happened throughout all the years in which he had been chiefly preoccupied with himself – trying to use work to banish his fear of failure in life. In the midst of the chatter and laughter from the other tables he felt as if he had, so to speak, been a prisoner of that effort, and as if he were only now coming back. It was like joining the real world. It could have been a liberating, cheering experience, had it not been for the hotel, less than two kilometers away, with the steps, the painted window frames and the crooked pine trees.
Perlmann looked in horror at his watch: ten past nine. He couldn’t turn up to dinner as late as that. Nonetheless, he hurried to pay, and walked quickly back to the hotel, which he entered by the back door for the first time. He had just quietly closed it behind him, when Giovanni came round the corner with a big cardboard box under his arm. ‘Buona sera,’ he said genially, and bowed slightly before setting off again. Today Giovanni had his face under control. There was not a hint of yesterday’s grin. But Perlmann thought he sensed behind Giovanni’s expression the laughter of the servant who has caught his master in some unseemly act.
Perlmann had looked forward to turning into the dimly lit corridor upstairs, and in the middle of it, under the unlit lamp, feeling around for the keyhole. So he had been unpleasantly surprised when all the lamps were lit unusually brightly. With his key in his hand, he paced back and forth, before creeping to the cupboard at the end of the corridor and fetching a ladder. With his handkerchief wrapped around his fingers, he half-unscrewed all nine bulbs so that the lighting was just as it had been before.
Tomorrow would be even more about Millar’s first paper than today.
Perlmann reluctantly bent down to the round table and flicked through some pages. Then he went to the bathroom and took a sleeping pill from the packet. He broke it in two and, after some hesitation, washed down the biggest part.
When he had given up the Conservatoire, emergency laws had been in place, he thought as he lay in the darkness and listened to the unabated traffic. He had watched the demonstrations from the other side of the street. He felt he should have crossed over. But there were all those people there, and the noisy megaphones, and the rhythmical movement of the crowd, which made one feel one was losing one’s own will. And so, till now, he had never made a political commitment, even though on his internal stage he always advocated very clear and often radical positions. Not even Agnes had known that for a while he had been almost as at home in Spanish anarcho-syndicalism as a historian.
That night he woke up three times, and still he couldn’t escape the leaden power of that accursed word. It was the word masterclass, a word that made both his parents freeze with respect as if it were the name of God. Being accepted into the masterclass run by a big name: in their eyes that was the highest attainment possible, and they had no dearer wish for their own son than such a consecration. In the dream that stayed with him even after he was awake, Perlmann didn’t see his parents, and he didn’t hear them utter the word either. It was more as if his parents were there, and the word as well, and the word was carved into their devout silence in huge letters of trepidation.
Only when he had spent several minutes under the shower did he feel the scorn that was finally able to break the power of the word.
7
The awkward question that Perlmann posed in the seminar when he could no longer withstand Millar’s challenging looks was so hair-raisingly naive that Ruge, von Levetzov and Evelyn Mistral all turned their heads towards him with a jerk. Millar blinked like someone who thinks he has misheard, and tried to gain some time by writing the question down with slow, painterly movements. Then – as if looking through a long contract a final time before signing – he stared for ages at what he had written, before turning to Perlmann. It was the first time that Perlmann had seen Millar looking uncertain – not uncertain about his subject, but in his attitude towards a question which, first of all, came from a man like Perlmann, but which on the other seemed to be of almost idiotic simplicity. He opted for an emphatically modest, emphatically thoughtful tone, and explained once again to Perlmann what must have been clear to anyone who had read his paper attentively. He was visibly uneasy as he did so. He basically couldn’t believe that Perlmann had really asked that question, and he was afraid of insulting him by taking the question literally. Twice he seemed to have finished. He looked quizzically at Perlmann, and when Perlmann nodded stiffly and said simply, ‘Thank you’, Millar added something to his explanation.
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