THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK
PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS
435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014
www.nyrb.com
Copyright © 2013 Markus Werner
Originally published as “Am Hang”
© S. Fischer Verlag GmbH, Frankfurt am Main 2004
All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitute unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher.
Cover design: Ian Durovic Stewart
eISBN: 978-1-59017-652-8
The NYRB Lit e-book On the Edge published in the United States in 2013
For a complete list of books in the NYRB Lit series, visit www.nyrb.com
v3.1
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Part I
Part II
Part III
About the Author
PART I
Everything’s turning. And everything’s turning round him. It’s insane, but I’m even tempted to think that he’s sneaking around the house right now—with or without a dagger. Although he’s supposed to have left, and I’m just hearing crickets and the distant barking of dogs in the night.
I drive down to Ticino over Pentecost, planning to use the quiet to immerse myself in the history of divorce law, and then this stranger crosses my path, this Loos, and manages to churn me up to such a degree that all my composure is shot. Eva dealt me the final blow over in Cademario today. I drove back here with my head spinning and called the law journal, or rather the editor’s private phone since this is Pentecost Sunday, to tell him I can’t make the deadline with the article. I told him I had an acute sinus infection along with a fever, pinching my nose as I spoke. He said he could certainly hear how bad it was.
Yes, it’s bad all right. Oh the sinuses are fine, and I have no temperature, but I could certainly describe what’s ailing me as a fever. My temples at any rate, which I press with my fingers to dampen the tumult behind them, are so hot, it’s as if my thoughts were generating frictional heat as they circle frantically around the same point.
It would be nice to sleep now, shake Loos off, brush Loos’s words out of my brain, where they stick like lint. He said to me himself, “Don’t forget to forget, or you’ll go mad.” He must know. But he also said, admittedly in another context, that of all plagues in our present time forgetfulness is the most insidious.
All right, I can see that I’m not going to get rid of this man just by commanding myself to stop thinking about him. He’d only become more diffuse and squeeze my consciousness into a rawer state than it’s already in. I know the phenomenon from the time Andrea—it was fifteen years ago, when I was twenty—left me behind like a forgotten umbrella. In the meantime I’ve learned how to stop the machine and proceed methodically with the tangled threads. Go back to the beginning. Carefully undo the knots and snarls. Unravel the yarn, without haste, and at the same time rewind it neatly and tautly on a spool.
Easily said, is it not, my dear Loos? Something you’ve completely failed to do in any case, if you’ve ever even tried it. Have you? Or have you always handled your tangle, your yarn, so—how shall I say—fantastically as on the Bellevue terrace?
On the Friday before Pentecost, the congestion at the Gotthard Tunnel kept itself within limits, and I made it here a little before six. I opened the water valve, as usual, flicked off the security switch, turned the water heater and the refrigerator on, and took a cold shower. I then disposed of the empty bottles my lawyer colleague and co-owner of the house had left here over Easter. No need for a fire in the fireplace, since it was a mild June evening, so mild that I got back into the car around eight, drove from Agra to Montagnola, and parked in front of the Hotel Bellevue or Bellavista. I was disappointed to see that there was no table free on the terrace, but since I didn’t want to sit in the glassed-in annex, I stood there undecided, hoping to catch sight of diners moving their chairs back from a table. That’s when I discovered him. He was sitting alone at a table for four in the left corner of the terrace, so I pulled myself together, went over to him—he was studying the menu—and asked him in Italian if he minded. He looked up for a second and said nothing. I repeated the question in German and, when he nodded absently, sat down across from him at the table.
I noticed, while I waited for a menu, that he looked up from his from time to time and turned his head a little, letting his eyes rest on the hills and slopes on the other side of the valley. His head was a large, strong-boned skull, hairless except for a thick but trimmed half-crown that went from temple to temple and a just as thick three-day beard flecked with gray. The head appeared heavy, the whole man heavy and massive, but the mass gave no impression of flab; it was all compact. I judged him a good fifty years old. When the waiter brought me the menu, I heard him order his meal with a deep, slightly nasal voice. A carafe filled with white wine was already on the table, and he now reached for his glass and slowly drained it, with his gaze again on the hills. Of me he took no notice at all. As I leafed through the menu, my finger rested on the filetto di coniglio, and I startled slightly. Up to this moment I had not for an instant thought of Valerie. We had both sat here some while ago eating filet of rabbit, she still full of cheer, I rather taciturn, feeling a knot in my throat, as I rehearsed considerate ways of telling her I wanted to end the relationship.
The sun sank, and, as the lake below began to lose colour, the wine sparkled in the stranger’s carafe. “What a golden yellow,” I heard myself say; “may I ask what you’re drinking?” He turned to me, after a delay, and looked at me as if he were only now aware of my presence. He gave me a look that was not dismissive, not unfriendly, merely surprised. I immediately noticed the shadows under his light grey eyes. They weren’t bags from fatigue or tear sacs, but slight discolourations of the skin that I’d only observed before on people of Indian descent. “Excuse me,” said the stranger, “what did you ask?” “I don’t mean to bother you,” I said. “I was asking about the wine you’re drinking.” “It’s a white wine,” he said. Although I didn’t necessarily take this as a put-on, I felt defensive and said, “I can see that in any case.” “Excuse me, what?” he asked. I bit my lips and asked whether he could recommend his wine. He considered this for a moment and then said, “We always found it congenial.”
I ordered saltimbocca with rice, like my table companion, and a half white. My companion smoked with his face averted. I didn’t exclude the idea that we had only half understood each other, since you could hardly speak of quiet in this place. We were not only surrounded by clatter and the babble of voices, there was the typical drone of occasional planes taking off and landing from the airport down in Agno, and even at this height we could still hear the distant noise of the traffic in the valley as a muffled roar strengthened and reflected by the lake. When my wine came I used the opportunity to break the ice again—I’m an outgoing person and find it unnatural to sit at a table with somebody else in silence—so I lifted my glass and said, “Your health! My name is Clarin.” He winced, so that the cigarette ash that he had forgotten to tip fell on his napkin. He reached with his left hand for his glass and said, “Glad to meet you.” But on his part, he seemed to have no intention of introducing himself. I saw that he wore two rings on his finger, plain wedding rings, and inferred that he was probably a widower. A clue anyway, I said to myself, in case he doesn’t otherwise reveal himself. Most people you can classify in a basic way after fifteen m
inutes, even if they don’t say a word; you can at least rank them as sympathetic or unsympathetic. But with him I couldn’t determine even this much. I only knew that he interested me. He made me think of Valerie, her opaqueness, which fascinated me at the beginning, but ended up putting me off. “How do you find it?” he suddenly asked me. Now I was the one who winced. “The wine?” I asked. “No,” he said, “the prospect, the view.” I said I found it beautiful, especially just then, with the sun just gone down and the panorama opposite consisting only of dark blue tones—and besides I had been acquainted with the landscape for years. He nodded with satisfaction and said, “ ‘Acquainted with it for years’—that’s an interesting way of putting it. And those blue tones: might you be a painter?” “No,” I said, “I’m a jurist, a lawyer, and you?” “So,” he said with a slight and, I thought, almost contemptuous inflection. My question to him he ignored, but he could well not have heard it, since the waiter had just brought the food.
Before reaching for knife and fork he bent his head and closed his eyes for a few seconds. Of course, I thought, he’s a priest, black pants, black jacket. I should have thought of that earlier. He ate slowly, self-preoccupied, but in spite of that I spoke to him again. “Today while I was stalled in traffic at the Gotthard, it suddenly dawned on me that I’ve forgotten the meaning of Pentecost, I mean what it celebrates. Isn’t that embarrassing?” He stopped chewing, swallowed, and said, “I’m always inordinately pleased to hear the traffic reports, but as to Pentecost, it’s the licking tongues of flame.” He continued eating, while I paused, remembering that you have to humour crackpots, and asked, “Where do they lick, then, these flames?” He took his time, poured himself another glass of wine, drank. “They lick,” he said, “over the heads of the twelve apostles, and they symbolise the Holy Spirit, who came over and into them fifty days after Easter, literally to raise their spirits for the effectiveness of their mission.” “Bravo!” I said. “One might take you for a theologian.” “So,” he said, “you’ve revised your notion that I’m a crackpot.” I was startled and asked him where he had got that idea. “Eyes are very revealing, Mr. Clarin,” He said. “Sometimes I can even hear a sentence spoken only in the mind. It takes no effort at all, as long as eye and ear have not been trained to avoid lingering.” I was surprised that he had been able to remember my name and pronounce it with the right accent, on the second syllable. I thought it was finally time to learn his. He acted as if he had to reflect when I asked him, and then said, “Loos, Loos with two o’s, but we’re sitting high and dry. Are you with me if I order another?”
The table was cleared, the merlot bianco brought, and an alphorn sounded in the distance. Loos listened with a rather pained expression. I asked if it irritated him. In principle, he said, he had nothing against the alphorn as such, it was so to speak even the ideal instrument for dwarfs, and besides it was far from him to criticise a bumbling ardour; the only thing that bothered him was the introduction of the alphorn into Ticino. “The wonderful local glockenspiels are enough for me too,” I said. “You like them too?—I’m delighted,” he said. “They’re one reason I come here. You won’t find more melancholy sounds anywhere.” I asked whether he was staying in the Bellevue. “Yes,” he said and looked up at the façade. “Way up there on the left, that’s my watchtower. From there I can see across, over the trees, over the valley. And you? Are you staying here too?” “In Agra,” I said. “I have a small vacation house in Agra.” “To recuperate there over Pentecost from your stresses and strains as a lawyer?” “Not really,” I said. “It’s a work vacation. I want to write here undisturbed.” “A nice hobby,” said Loos. “Is it going to be a novel?” “You misunderstand,” I said. “It’s professional work, a legal-historical article for a law journal on the subject of marriage law, divorce law primarily. I do a lot of work with that in my practice, and I’ve developed a historical interest in the subject.”
“Now the lights are going on over there,” Loos said. I cleaned my spectacles in a disgruntled silence. “Retrospection is always good,” he said. “Really. Retrospection is important, though not in keeping with the time, but I hardly open my mouth any more to address the present time, because the present time always cuts me short. And even though I only say to it, ‘You have a past, and I measure you first by that past and second by those few dreams that I haven’t been able to banish,’ it has already taken umbrage and refuses to listen.” “I’m not sure I really understand you,” I said. “You mean that people who devote themselves to the present, who go with the time, as one says, react with irritation to criticism?” “Yes, more or less,” said Loos, “but it’s still too early.” “Too early for what?” “Too early to talk about the Zeitgeist and the brood that snuggle up to it. I need a few more glasses first. You can measure the level of my intimidation both by that need and by the fact that I haven’t knit my brow even once since we’ve been sitting on this lovely terrace, though during this time a mobile phone has peeped or chirped no less than fourteen times by my count. And so on. But to get back to the point, it must be disillusioning for you to be constantly confronted with divorce cases. Doesn’t it tempt you to regard marriage as impracticable?” Tempt, I said, wasn’t the word; the right one was convince. I was positively compelled by the constant torment I saw couples in to regard marriage as a mistake, or at least a simple overburdening of human nature, which seems too wayward to allow itself to be permanently tamed or to be able to accept the few rules that might make marriage possible, if they were followed. It defied all description, I said, what couples did to each other once they got divorced, whether by continuing to act the same way they had acted during the marriage or by denigrating their former happiness. But the craziest thing was that people couldn’t keep from marrying, despite the fact one of every two marriages already ended in divorce, and it was even crazier that more than twenty percent of divorced couples get remarried.
Loos, who had listened so attentively that I would gladly have gone into more detail, interrupted me and said, “You’re a bachelor, then.” “A confirmed one, as you have possibly deduced.” “Then your human nature is not overburdened; I’m glad of that,” he said. And while I was still considering whether he meant that seriously or ironically, he said quietly, “For me it was home.” I tried to catch his eye, but he was looking across the valley. “What was?” I asked. “Marriage,” he said. “Was?” He nodded. “Are you—widowed?” He drank. “You know,” he said, “I’m not unfamiliar with your statistics. I even know that there are two million dust mites rioting in every marriage bed, and I’ve learned from an even more disturbing study that after six years of marriage German couples speak to each other an average of nine minutes a day, and Americans four point two.” “Exactly, exactly,” I said. “And now I ask you,” he continued, “whether this finding permits conclusions about human nature or perhaps not rather about the nightly TV ritual, among other things.” “Both, presumably,” I said, “for if we accept that couples’ increasing reticence depends on increasing TV consumption, the question remains why the TV screen is preferred to an hour of conversation. It isn’t true—I hear this often as a lawyer—that people don’t talk because they’re watching television. No, people watch television because there’s nothing more to talk about, at least nothing new or interesting. ‘It’s gone dead’—that’s the expression I hear most often; and from that I conclude that human nature craves diversion and colour, and can’t really get used to habit.” “You’re all too right to be right,” Loos said, “and, as I said, my experience is different. Your health!”
“Your health, Mr. Loos. I didn’t mean to offend you. I know of course that there are happy marriages.” “That doesn’t interest me,” he said. “Sorry, I thought that was our subject.” “It’s really curious,” he said, “the more the Zeitgeist seeps into our souls and dictates our behaviour, the more stubbornly we appeal to human nature. One might think it was a question of nostalgia—since our nature has so long been stunted—rather than a t
rick to absolve ourselves of guilt: everything genetically determined, everything excused: ‘Just look at the chimps, they don’t get married, they rove and stay mobile.’ ”
Loos seemed not to notice that, while he was speaking, two flies were copulating on his scalp. He’s unusually worked up, I concluded, I need to soften the tone. He probably found it hard to believe, I said, that I would have become a jurist, if I called accountability, and therefore guilt, into question. But it was simply that I couldn’t seal myself off from scientific knowledge, which showed beyond doubt how little scope for freedom our genes leave us. Loos drank and shook his head, and said that twenty-five years ago science had proven, also without doubt, that even dementia was possibly learned and that the individual was formed, normed, and, as a rule, deformed, to the very marrow, by influences from the environment. I said that science was not in the habit of standing still, but that I admitted the truth might lie in the middle. He begged me to spare him the middle, he was too old for it. In any case, he had no intention, he said, of nodding politely to both sides to the end of his days, and he had just now thought of an addendum to what we had touched on earlier in our discussion. He asked how it happened that people sat happily in front of the TV, evening after evening, craving the same thing over and over, their series, for example, their quiz shows and so forth, whose popularity obviously consisted in their constant and unremitting repetition of the familiar. How did it happen that hundreds of thousands of people were fixated on a moderator’s or talkshow host’s moustache and that a howl would sweep through the nation when he suddenly appeared without it? How could it be explained that the desire for the most inane uniformity was felt only in front of the television screen and not in the rest of everyday married life? But no sooner did people get up from their chairs than they started thinking about divorce, just because their partners were brushing their teeth and gargling the same way they did the day before. “What, Mr. Clarin, is our nature really after?”
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