It didn’t seem an easy question to me. I said I was suddenly getting a little cool and just wanted to get my jacket from the car, if he would excuse me for a moment. “ ‘To be free of hunger, thirst, and cold,’ ” Loos said, “on that we are united. Perhaps something further will occur to you.” He looked at me expectantly when I got back and asked, “And?” I saw myself as a high school student standing at the blackboard, with the eyes of the class on me, and reacting blankly to the teacher’s expectant “And?” Loos asked if I was all right. Yes, I said, but for a few seconds I felt the way I used to when I was being quizzed by a teacher. “For God’s sake,” cried Loos, “I’m sorry. Nothing is further from my mind than playing the teacher. I asked out of genuine curiosity. You’re a young man with a different horizon, different conceptions, while I’m a senior citizen prone to rigidity. I have to make a hellish effort to stay flexible.” He stopped. I was considering what I would answer. “But in my heart of hearts,” he said in a muted voice, “I am not open-minded—that is the curse of fidelity.” He had just given me my cue, I said. It was quite possible that our nature required both: the solid and the liquid, repetition and change, structure and freedom. Loos said he would endorse my diagnosis, if it didn’t sound so convincing. I was quite aware, I said, that everything was more complex. That too stood to reason, he said.
The waiter changed the ashtrays. We could hear thundering in the distance. I raised my head and saw only stars. Loos’s stubbed-out cigarette still glowed, a ribbon of smoke rose up from it, and I thought again of Valerie who never succeeded in stubbing out a cigarette on the first try. He could be deceiving himself, Loos now said, but he thought he had seen from the way I cleaned my spectacles how much I took my place in life for granted—was his suspicion correct? He really is a bit of a crackpot, I thought and asked in return if he could be a little more specific about the way I cleaned my spectacles. “Just taking it for granted,” he said, “completely by the bye—no anxiety that they might fall out of your hands and break.” “From that anxiety I am indeed free,” I said, “and if I weren’t, it would be all the more likely that what I feared would occur. It’s like stumbling. A person who goes along in constant fear of stumbling is guaranteed to stumble. In short, it’s completely foreign to me to make things in life more difficult than they have to be. So to that extent you are not deceived.” That sounded quite plausible, Loos said, and yet he was convinced that people stumbled far more often from lack of attentiveness than from anxiety about stumbling. I begged him not to take me so literally about the stumbling—I had simply meant that people could, as it were, worry an accident into happening, which didn’t mean at all that there wasn’t the other kind of accident that strikes us like a bolt out of the blue.
Loos rummaged in his jacket pocket and pulled out a small black spiral notebook and a small black pencil. He leafed through it, obviously looking for a blank page. Although he tried to shield it a little with his left hand, I saw that it was full of jottings and tiny sketches. He noted something down—it couldn’t have been more than a word—and stuck the notebook back in his pocket. Then he said more to himself than to me, “There’s something in that. I was always anxious about losing my wife, and one day I did lose her. And yet despite that, it was a bolt out of the blue.” “I’m sorry,” I said. He nodded and drank. After a while I asked when she had died. For the moment, he said, he couldn’t talk about it, perhaps later. I should talk a bit about myself, for example about whether bachelorhood was to my liking. I said that as already mentioned I was not a bachelor against my will; my status was both willed and agreeable. It was unthinkable for me to give up independence and self-determination, and hardly necessary, since a person without ties could enjoy the pleasures that life has to offer with much more abandon. The reproach that I was afraid of accepting responsibility I had to reject, if only because those making it were always those who were groaning under the burden of responsibility themselves. “You’re not standing before a court here,” Loos said, “but go on with your account.” Naturally it sometimes came to tears, I said, if I was honest and suggested to a woman who expected more from me than I was capable of investing that we should separate. But such tears were trifles compared with every kind of marriage-misery. Mostly too the pain of the break-up was very quickly gotten over. For example, I was remembering today, on this terrace, a girlfriend I was here with for the last time some while back, and for her too there was no world collapse. And that was the way it usually went. Looser relationships prevented tragedies and in addition offered protection from the mournful fate that seldom spared traditional couples. Here I paused briefly to take a sip of wine, and Loos, who was following closely, asked, “Namely?” “I’ve already hinted at it,” I said. “I’m talking about the marriage ladder, where you climb down from desire to liking, to pleasant habit, to listlessness, all the way to aversion and possibly hatred. Then comes the hour of professional or non-professional counselors, and maybe a see-through negligee or a desperate tanga provides a few last sparks, and then it’s the lawyer’s turn.”
“Why so heated?” Loos asked. “No one’s claiming the opposite. Marriage suits only a few, it overburdens the majority. I’d only like to ask you not to use the word ‘invest’ when you talk about relationships, because look,”—here Loos pulled up the sleeve of his jacket and showed me his forearm, on which I saw a few red spots—“look, I’m allergic.” I laughed at what I took for a joke, but he remained serious and said that he often liked to read personal ads, because he wanted to stay abreast of the times, and wherever else the times reflected their character they certainly did so in the personals. There he had recently come upon the ad of a thirty-year-old male who described himself as “world-compatible” and then under the “Requirements Profile” enumerated the necessary characteristics of his desired partner, when suddenly he, Loos, became aware of red bumps erupting on his left forearm. I said, half laughing, half disgruntled, that I would try to take his allergy into consideration, even if it went against my grain to weigh every word. “Every word, no, not every word,” said Loos, “and actually I’m envious of you for being a cautious investor where your feelings are concerned. That way your losses stay manageable. On the other hand, of course, we have to consider that the lower risk minimises the prospects of gain. What does a savings account yield? Enough for a few trips from Zurich to Oerlikon. Whereas a more adventurous outlay of capital might bring such a windfall that you could sail around the world on it, don’t you think?” “Tease me all you like,” I said, “I’m not very sensitive. Besides, I understand what you mean. But your analogy has a hitch and takes me too literally. We don’t have the power of disposal over our feelings—I too realise that. It isn’t fair to use it against me that I haven’t yet experienced the so-called great love. Do I have to renounce excursions to the countryside simply because for the time being no opportunity of sailing round the world seems to beckon?” “Ah, see?” Loos said, “Before this, virtually everything you said has sounded very premeditated, as if you had everything under control; now you sound more human. But it’s not my place in any case way to judge the way you live your life. Nor will I ask whether it would remain just a matter of a few tears if a woman loved you blindly and compulsively, whether your—how should I put it?—tragedy-prevention measures would still work then. But as I said—and you can believe me in this—there’s also a little envy speaking out of me: something in me feels sympathetic to the fleeting Eros, the playful form of love. Only I hardly know it, I’m too heavy for it, and not even now that I’m alone and apparently free, do I feel myself capable of it. When I asked you whether bachelorhood was to your liking, I wanted to hear you praise it, because it’s not to my liking, because I can see little of its positive side. What I do see, by contrast, to mention just one or two things, is this: How mournful a toothbrush looks standing in the glass by itself, and how often I lack a reason to fall asleep at night, an embrace for instance, a kiss, an argument for all I care, in short anything tha
t would allow me to turn to the wall and settle, fractious or contented, into the fetal posture of sleep—I’m sorry! I’m feeling the wine. I think it’s time.” “You’re leaving already?” “Time for the Zeitgeist,” Loos said, “but first I have to take a quick trip to my room, be right back.” While he was still getting up I said that we had certainly already said one or two things about the Zeitgeist. “Too tame,” Loos murmured, went a few steps—he walked like a bear—stopped, turned around, and called out so loud that the other guests went quiet, “Too tame!”
I too felt the wine, but no fatigue at all. Something isn’t right about this man, I thought. He’s hardly a pleasant companion, and yet when I thought he was leaving I was prepared to hold him back with claws if necessary. What in the world is going on?
“So,” he said, “here I am again. Have you too ever noticed that as soon as we step into a bathroom in a hotel room we’re greeted by the so-called hygiene bag for ‘women’s sanitary products’?” “Does that bother you?” I asked. “No,” he said, “it just intimidates me. But what really gets on my nerves is that when I’m back in the room and turn the TV on for a second, the first thing I see is radiant women in the bloom of life romping blissfully on the beach thanks to these women’s sanitary products.” “Maybe you should take such commercials with more humour.” “I’ve tried; it doesn’t work, Mr. Clarin. But actually I was thinking, up there in the bathroom, about the marriage ladder you told me about, that for you leads from heaven to hell. But a really compelling relationship—I have twelve years experience—presents a different picture. Wait, I’ll sketch it for you.” While he brought out his notebook and pencil I asked if he did art work. “Only privately,” he said gruffly and with a few deft strokes drew a ladder whose foot was surrounded by flames, around which two horned devils danced, and whose upper end leaned against a cloud where an angel sat. “It may be,” said Loos, “that a couple begin together on the top rung right under the seventh heaven. Infatuation, passion, drive. It may be too that they end on the lowest rung just above hell-fire. Aversion, disgust, hatred. I say ‘may be,’ since not even that is certain. But your model seems wrong to me above all in the assumption that couples climb down at the same time and with the same feelings, some leisurely, others in a race, but always shoulder to shoulder. It’s not so mechanical—I almost said harmonious—on my ladder: it’s a lively bustle, not an orderly line of one-way traffic bound for hell. Both partners climb up and down, crisscrossing each other in the process, and perhaps sit on the same rung now and then—if possible on a high one, where they experience trust and feelings of closeness—and this enables them to move apart again and wave to each other across the different rungs. If they’re lucky, the dynamic process on the ladder lasts all their lives, and in the extreme case they even make the discovery that hatred doesn’t have to kill—on the contrary—What about some cheese? Are you with me?”
“Gladly,” I said, “but what do you mean ‘on the contrary’?” Loos clapped his notebook shut without answering. Then he flipped it open again to a very simply drawn figure and asked, “What is that?” “It looks like an eight,” I said, “but it could be an hour-glass.” He nodded. “It’s my wife’s figure,” he said and called for the waiter. After he ordered, I said that in my law practice I never came in contact with the lucky and extreme cases he described and apart from that could only rarely catch a glimpse of them. “If you could do it often, they wouldn’t be lucky cases, would they? I was getting at something that you won’t understand—I hardly understand it myself—that we love all the more, and perhaps only really love, what we have hated.” That sounded too extravagant to me. I could think of nothing to say, so we ate our cheese in silence.
I was looking for a re-entry point. So he drew privately, I said; would he also reveal what he did for a living? He taught dead languages, he said, but that had nothing to do with what we were talking about now. We fell silent again, until finally I said that before he went up to his room he had used the expression “too tame,” and in a comparatively loud voice, so that it still rang in my ears. Would he …? “Right,” he interrupted me. “We eat, drink, excrete, turn a blind eye, and shrug our shoulders. Despite my advanced age and the shrug-like tremors that go with it, I’m forced to engage with world and time in a way that’s harsher, more intense, more incisive, and to mistrust every tendency towards mildness. Who’s to sniff out what’s going on in the world, if the young stultify themselves with mere nervous busyness—apathy, in other words—and the old with mere forbearance? In short, I’m grimly determined not to become dull and tame, though I have to admit that my refusal to resign myself is not objectively, but only hygienically grounded, by which I refer to a hygiene of the soul, do you understand me?” “Not very well,” I said, and Loos explained it as a simple matter. If his refusal to resign himself were objectively grounded, it would mean that he thought the lunacy that was part of the universal fabric was reversible and curable, that he believed in salvation, in other words, which was about as fatuous as the hope that the scent of jasmine would suddenly drift up from a sewer. Since he knew he couldn’t change anything about the stink, at least he would call it by its right name and meet it, as it were, with open nostrils. He owed that to his soul. His soul, of course, felt mortified by its impotence, but—worse than that—would feel disgraced, if he shut the window and didn’t give a damn about world and time.
Loos drank. I was amazed how much he could handle. He spoke with self-control, hardly ever raised the glass in toast, and sat like a rock. He did, however, sweat a lot and wiped his gleaming scalp with a handkerchief from time to time. “You despise the world, don’t you?,” I asked. “With all my heart,” he replied, without the least hesitation. “I’m relieved, then,” I said, which ruffled his composure a bit. He scratched his neck and searched all his pockets for the lighter which lay in front of him on the table. “You know,” I said, “someone recently explained to me that hatred was the precondition of love.” Loos turned red, and just as I was beginning to worry that he would reach for the cheese knife again, he gave short burst of laughter followed by a fit of giggling that he had to fight to control. His laughter lightened my mood and released the cramped tension his stony earnestness had made me feel. I felt I could risk treading a little more boldly. I asked him whether he might not be one of those failed idealists, so notorious in his generation, who resent the world for ignoring their dreams. Wasn’t it perhaps easier to despise reality than to revise the wishful ideas he had of it as a youth? Was he upset because I was annoyed when he condemned the world without having much more to bring against it than the fact that he was disturbed by the presence of mobile phones and hygiene bags or at least the advertising for what the bags held? Loos was silent. “Where should I begin?” he finally asked and fell silent again. Then he said, “This would be the place for some thunderclap of an utterance that would silence all objections with its originality and universal application. Isn’t that what you expect? Unfortunately, I can’t think of one. And I’m not going to revert to the bags and the exploitation of bodily fluids. We all know that everything gets marketed. In the midst of this furious marketplace, where by now practically every male and female presents him- or herself as a market product that others have to outperform and displace—in the midst of this battlefield, I’m saying, the individual person feels, to the extent he feels at all, a little empty, a little overburdened, and very, very isolated. But now comes the godsend! The market doesn’t leave its victims in the lurch. If you feel empty, it offers you entertainment, not of course gratis; if you’re overburdened, you get an anti-stress programme plus ginseng capsules; and the isolated get mobile phones. Isn’t that touching? Where do you get the idea that I hate the world because of mobile phones? Not that your insinuation is entirely false, Mr. Clarin. It’s true that some years ago, before the aforementioned boom in mobile phones began, I found them a nightmare, an intrusive example of the exhibitionism that was also just beginning to create a furor on the T
V screen. I shared my aversion for them with many people I respected, and whom I still respect, despite the doodling that now emanates from their jacket pockets. But there’s no longer any point in criticism, unless one wants to acquire the reputation of having an inflexible mind. But I’m boring you, aren’t I?”
I said I asked him questions to hear answers. “Thank you,” he said. “I don’t talk to people much since I lost my wife about a year ago. And when I do, I sense that people only listen to me out of politeness. So then. The moment some trend takes hold, no matter what lunatic features it has, it’s already in the right. What many people do and approve of cannot be wrong: this is the logic, isn’t it, the logic of idiocy, which itself declares every critic an idiot, doesn’t it?—But I’m losing the point. What I originally wanted to say is that mobile phones repel me because they obliterate privacy and intimacy, and along the way raise the level of noise in the world. But I find it more repellent that you are not permitted to have reservations about them. If the virus—any virus—has infected everyone, then you can no longer call it a virus. In the beginning, yes, in the beginning you have any number of allies. But the more the current rises—and the more self-assured, hare-brained, and dictatorial it behaves—the more your allies topple over and fall into it. And while I stand dumbfounded on the bank, the last words they bellow out to me, in chorus, are: ‘Only those who change stay true!’ Yes, people like me stand like fossilised geezers on the shore. So it is, Mr. Clarin, and so it has ever been, which is why nostalgia is out of the question. I have learned early on, and from repeated experience, how friends who once wanted to jam the spokes of the wheel have become its suppliers of axle grease. Yet the dominant spirit of that time, which we in our spring days rightly felt to be dehumanising, still bore stronger trace of humanity than the one these same friends later not only accommodated themselves to, but in various capacities helped push through. To give one example, when the relatively controlled market began to throw off the fetters—went hog-wild, in fact, and showed with shameless honesty that it no longer needed morality even as a cover, and that it understood the concept of human dignity as a quaint relic of the dying left—many of my former comrades were already sitting in their executive chairs and joining right in, telling themselves that ‘only those who change stay true.’ And yet, Mr. Clarin, there’s recent cause for hope. I recently read in a business publication that a ‘lived humanity’ was a good idea in the marketplace and in general. So, there’s a new humanity in the offing, I thought. Then I read further and got a rash on my forearm. Humanity pays, it said, it has competitive advantages, it raises productivity. And you, Mr. Clarin”—here Loos lost control and banged on the table with his fist—“you insinuate that I hate the world because of hygiene bags and mobile phones!”
On the Edge Page 2