Perlmann's Silence

by Pascal Mercier

  the po valley is boring is another of these sentences, this time one from the mother. One says in future: ‘If it’s night when you’re travelling through the Po Valley it doesn’t matter; the Po Valley is boring anyway,’ and so on. The sentence is no longer available. It’s an internal fixed point, a constant, a load-bearer in the construction. It represents a set of points. It makes a track impassable. It obstructs a possibility. It steals a landscape from one, a piece of earth, because it directs one around this area and thus turns them into a white, blind patch on the map of experiences. How many of our familiar sentences behave like the sentences about Mestre and the Po Valley – without our noticing?

  The memory of the bare hotel room with the high walls and the ancient fittings in the bathroom forced its way into his consciousness; a memory that Perlmann hadn’t touched for years. Even today he wanted nothing to do with it. He turned the page, determined to chase away, by doing so, the distant echo of his former feelings.

  And then he was baffled to see that the paper continued in English, with smaller letters and a thinner ballpoint nib. First there came sections in which the theme was picked up from the beginning and modified. The parroted sentences were now described as frozen elements which, in their treacherous inconspicuousness, kept experiences from being made, and, by being experienced, from changing anything. They had a hypnotic effect, he had noted, and then added that this applied not only to statements like the ones about Mestre and the Po Valley, but also to questions that came like a refrain in every conversation about the future: and then? what do you want to do after that? when will you be finished? what’s the point of all this?

  Linguistic waste was what he had called everything that blocked experience like this, and robbed one of the chance of getting involved in anything new and surprising. Linguistic waste, Perlmann repeated to himself, and as he murmured the German word he was pulled into the slipstream of memory and saw himself lying on the bed in the bare room in Mestre, furious about all the linguistic waste that he had discovered far too late within himself, and also furious about himself because he had undertaken that senseless journey for a single sentence.

  He had taken a night train to Milan, and then travelled through the Po Valley one grey morning in early October, even though it was a detour. He couldn’t remember now what it had looked like. But he very clearly remembered the defiant feeling with which he had pressed his face against the train window so that his fellow-passengers asked several times what he was looking at that was so interesting.

  In Mestre he had gone into a hotel opposite the station, where the bellboy had opened up the dance hall of a room. After a few hours of sleep he had gone trotting down insignificant streets in the breaking dawn, until he was completely drenched. Afterwards, in the bathtub, he had felt nothing but emptiness. It was grotesque and bordered on madness: the whole journey, this whole exercise, just to come to terms with that one sentence of his father’s. As if he wanted to set up an example to stand in for all the other linguistic waste. Set up for whom? No one saw it; no one was aware of it. On the contrary: he would never be able to tell anyone. He would be laughed at or looked at as if he were out of his mind. Why, then? Would an indifferent shrug not have been much more effective? The worst thing was Agnes wasn’t an internal companion. She thought his journey was madness and was furious about his fanaticism. Even the film on television, with his favorite actors, didn’t help with his knowledge.

  He called home later and was glad that Kirsten answered. Her voice awakened the absurd hope that he might be better understood by her, a sixteen year old.

  ‘What are you actually doing in this . . . what’s its name . . . Mestre?’ she asked.

  After a pause, filled fortunately with hisses and clicks, he asked her how one managed to live in the present.

  ‘What? I can’t hear you properly.’

  He repeated the question, this time fully aware of how ridiculous it sounded.

  ‘Dad, are you drunk?’

  No, there was no need to call Mum, he said: she should just tell her that he had arrived safely.

  He no longer had to prove the wrongness of the sentence to himself. It hadn’t got in his way for ages. He was ready, without further ado, to imagine Mestre as a flourishing city, something like Kyoto in cherry blossom. He had already thought that at the station in Frankfurt, and for a moment he had considered turning round. But by now he felt it was a question of loss of face, and at the same time he had flinched at the thought that such a thing might suddenly be an issue between them.

  Did he still have to prove it to his father? Or was the journey a weird way of working off his fury at mountains of linguistic waste? Standing in for all the sentences? Why was no one else furious about the stifling power of linguistic waste? He had looked round at the station and also in the train – as if you could tell such a thing by looking at someone.

  Would he have taken this ludicrous journey if he hadn’t had to assert himself against anyone with his lonely rage? Was it, in the end, a journey against Agnes more than anything else?

  The question had pursued him when he had trudged across Mestre the following day. It was ridiculous, walking through a town – any town – and constantly asking oneself whether it was beautiful or ugly. Absurd didn’t cover it, he had thought. And then he suddenly landed in the Piazza Erminio Ferretto, an elongated square with lots of cafés and a great crowd of people smoking and chatting as they enjoyed their holiday. He had liked it there in spite of all the people. He had liked it, Agnes or no Agnes. Then, not far from the square, he found the Galleria Matteotti, a small-town echo of the famous Galleria in Milan. He didn’t know whether it was despair or self-irony, but he had paced it out, that insignificant passage, fifty-three comfortable paces it had been. He still remembered that.

  In the afternoon, when he was standing outside the albergo in Venice where Agnes had washed his hair, it hurt again. The sun broke through when he sat down in that café where she had uttered her mysterious ‘Yeeess’. The tourists were taking off their coats and jackets. It didn’t keep him there. In the middle of giving his order he apologized to the waiter and walked quickly to the vaporetto, which took him to the station. In Mestre he paid the outrageous hotel bill and travelled direct to Milan, where he changed to the night train for Germany.

  When he washed his worn-out, unshaven face in the train toilet just before Frankfurt, he was surprised to notice that he was pleased and contented to have made the journey.

  ‘Mestre is beautiful,’ he said when Agnes looked at him. ‘You should see the Piazza Ferretto! And the Galleria!’

  He said it ironically, but she didn’t like that shade of irony. She sensed that it concealed an endured loneliness, and that that same loneliness gave him an unpleasant, reckless strength, a strength that could, because it was drenched in pain, drive him to a cruel act of revenge.

  Perlmann showered for a long time, and then went on reading. The ballpoint nib changed again, and the handwriting became agitated, as if he had been in a hurry or irritated. Language as an enemy of imagination. He couldn’t remember this at all. He read it like something written by a stranger, astonished, uncertain and also a bit proud plainly to have had more thoughts over the course of time than he would have imagined himself capable of.

  Thinking in sentences – he read – always meant a diminution of possibilities. Not only in the simple sense that the actually thought sentence by both logic and attentiveness ruled out other sentences that could have been thought instead. It was more important that linguistic thought took its initial bearings from the repertoire of familiar, tried-and-tested sentences which expressed a familiar picture of things, which seemed in their familiarity to lack alternatives. This impression, that things could not be seen differently, was the natural enemy of the imagination as the ability to envisage everything quite differently. And now example followed example. At first Perlmann was only full of amazement at the diversity of examples; but insofar as the outlined alternative
s to the really existing world became increasingly radical, he recognized the text more and more clearly as his own, because his hatred of empty conventions was expressed more and more flagrantly.

  In the next paragraph came observations running in precisely the opposite direction. Sentences as a medium that drove the narrator to more and more new images that could come as a complete surprise to him. Language and imagination. Wasn’t that Evelyn Mistral’s theme, too? Or was it an illusion, prompted by the mere connection between the two words? Perlmann felt his thoughts crumbling, and that slipping sensation merged with a feeling of weakness that came from his empty stomach. He slipped into his jacket and was already in the corridor when he opened the door again and pushed the moleskine notebook under the bed cover. Then he walked a secret path to the trattoria.

  Sandra had plainly kicked the duvet on to the floor, and she herself lay fully clothed on the bed, with one knee-sock pulled down to the ankle and her cheek pressed deep into the pillow. He absolutely had to check on her, her parents said as soon as he stepped inside the restaurant. They were more laconic than usual. He had only learned that she had a maths test the next day, and her mother’s face revealed that there had been an argument that she now regretted.

  Sandra’s shining head hung over the edge of the bed and swung slightly with each breath she took. Perlmann looked at her twitching eyelids and the dangling hand with its cheap ring and chewed thumbnail. Once her calm breathing was interrupted by a faint groan. He walked over to the little desk that her father had made and picked up the exercise book that Sandra had set defiantly face down on it. The last two pages were full of furiously crossed-out calculations. He snapped the exercise book shut, and the landlady gave a start when she noticed her anxious expression bouncing off his closed face.

  ‘I just thought . . .’ she said faintly as she brought him the chronicle.

  The chronicle listed nothing for the days of his senseless, lonely journey to Mestre. Perlmann flicked back: bloodbath in the Square of Heavenly Peace in Peking. He didn’t read the column to the end. Against his true emotions, when he paid, and this time the proprietor didn’t dare to protest, he managed a conciliatory smile. Then he walked through the unusually warm evening to the harbor and sat down right on the edge of the embankment on a rock, against which the light waves broke.

  Thousands of people had been shot, and he had wasted three days of his life on a harmless, ridiculous sentence, that anyone else would have forgotten long ago. He had the feeling of making himself very small and paying for this loss of any sense of proportion by staring, completely motionless, at the fine strips of spume that broke twitching from the night. It was not until he started shivering that he took off his glasses and wiped away the blurring layer of salt.

  It was that movement that made him aware that resistance had been stirring in him for some time against his incipient feeling of guilt. It had not been a completely random sentence that he had fought against, but a sentence, my sentence, that stood in for all the linguistic waste that could bind and stifle someone’s experience. Sentences as a source of unfreedom. And the business about proportion, the sense of scale that had to be preserved – that wasn’t right either. Not here at any rate. Perlmann would have liked to know where the error was if one thought that the broadening of one’s perspective automatically produced the complete unimportance of all things in the forlorn limitedness. But the explanation didn’t come. He just knew: it wasn’t like that, even when expansion beyond the purely geographical encompass the magnitude of suffering.

  With a movement of violent resolution he got up and as he walked slowly to the hotel, he silently battled his inner adversary, who was trying once again to make his sentence about Mestre ridiculous with bloody images from Peking. When the crooked pines of the hotel, the flags and lanterns came into view, he began to sense that if he admitted to that crazy journey, this also had to do with his struggle for self-assertion, which he was tirelessly fighting for over there at the hotel. And as he climbed the steps, that sense turned into a hot, palpitating defiance.

  He had crossed the lobby and was on the first flight of stairs when he heard the voices of his colleagues coming from the dining room.

  ‘We’ll find out tomorrow!’ Millar was saying, and this was followed by Adrian von Levetzov’s laughter, accompanied by Evelyn Mistral’s bright voice.

  Perlmann involuntarily took a step towards the wall, took another two steps and disappeared out of eyeshot. After that he hurried on, and was out of breath by the time he turned into his corridor. The whole corridor was pitch-black; the two lightbulbs must have blown. As he felt around for the lock with his key he was startled at how insecure that harmless darkness made him. Afterwards he stood by the window with his heart thumping, and looked down at an elegant couple who, coming from the restaurant, moved towards the steps with a hint of a tango step, before hopping down, laughing, and disappearing in an Oldtimer with chauffeur.

  It was a long time before he had recovered his comforting defiance. At last he took the black notebook out from under the cover and went on reading.

  The next few paragraphs described how concise sentences, apparently drawn from a wide overview, could become a prison by cutting off contradictory feelings, and thus causing the internal world to shrink still further. The particularly treacherous thing about this, he noted, was that such sentences had the deceptive sound of superior insight, against which even the author of the sentences was hardly able to defend himself. i need a lot of anonymity, was one of the examples, and another: i like listening best. And a little later: i have developed a dread of people.

  Perlmann vaguely remembered: he had written those lines after a convivial evening with some of Agnes’s friends. Because time had seemed too slow and sticky to him, he had talked far too much, not least about himself. Afterwards, in the dark, everything he had said had struck him as entirely wrong, and he had got to his feet again to become clear about his feelings.

  He was glad that the next paragraph was about sentences which, rather than adding something, could point the way towards a freedom that had hitherto only been guessed at, by creating a new state within one’s inner world, capturing it in words and thus keeping it from slipping away again. being able to say no without inner effort: that’s what matters. And a paragraph further on: the others are really others. others. even the ones one loves.

  The air that came streaming in when he opened the window suddenly seemed much less warm than before. Over in Sestri Levante a fire raged, looking quite large even from here. Distorted by individual gusts of wind that made the pines down on the terrace bob, the sirens of the fire department echoed across.

  All these example sentences, which he had with one exception written down in German, so that they now effectively leapt out at him from the middle of the English text with the intrusive familiarity of the mother tongue – were they actually sentences that applied to him?

  He felt as if his inner contours blurred when he tried to look them straight in the eye for an answer to this question, and it passed through his mind that that feeling was like the impression that one had of things when one swam towards them under water. Uncertainly, almost fearfully, he turned the page and found a few very carefully written pages about the connection between language and presence. In a first attempt he had outlined – in different variations – how linguistic expression could give experiences presence and depth by wresting things experienced from fleetingness. And to his surprise he found, placed in parentheses, a digression in which he compared the linguistic and photographic fixing of the present.

  Perlmann was amazed at how stubborn and precise his thinking had been in this respect, and at the same time it hurt to feel how clearly he had had Agnes’s photographs before his eyes as he wrote. He took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose.

  The young Sicilian in the frayed army coat who had dropped his battered suitcase and coat on the platform, and the bride he was now whirling around in the air. Ag
nes had shot about twenty pictures of the scene. One was published, in which the young woman, battling dizziness, held her hand in front of her laughing face, which appeared over her husband’s shoulder, half of her chin hidden by his raised coat collar. This photograph had earned Agnes a great deal of praise. But at home she had hung another one, which she thought was much better: it captured the swirl at exactly the moment when the spin, supported by flying hair, concealed both faces so that the viewer felt challenged to invent them. That’s what I thought! Agnes laughed when he expressed his disappointment at the real, very peasant-like face of the bride and invented a different one.

  And then that other picture: the gaunt Chinaman, with one hand on the saddle of his bicycle, bending down to his son and offering him his cheek to kiss. The child, a nipper with a baker’s boy cap that came down over his ears, held his face up to him and pursed his lips while his eyes, half-covered by the brim of his cap, were caught by something entirely different that must have been somewhere in the direction of the photographer. Agnes had taken the picture in Shanghai, on the trip on which that fellow André Fischer from the agency had accompanied her, about whom she had been so expressively silent.

  Perlmann’s thoughts sluggishly returned to the present of the hotel room. The fire beyond the bay was now clearly under control. He tore open a new pack of cigarettes and read diametrically opposite views on the next page: the present as something essentially fleeting that could be artificially deep-frozen by linguistic description. This did not establish presence, but created the mere illusion of presence. Real presence, he had noted, arose out of the readiness to yield utterly to the fleetingness of experience. And then, emphasized by their insertion, two German lines that took him completely by surprise him once again: presence: a perfume, a light, a smile, a relief, a successful sentence, a shimmer under olives.