I told him it had to do with his doubt about the existence of the English friend or, more exactly, about his wife’s fidelity. And that in passing he had also hinted that her kind of fidelity should have made him feel anxious. How he had meant that remained rather obscure to me, but I was interested to hear the answer. After a certain amount of reflection, Loos said that the problem with natural fidelity, as his wife understood it—namely as a mandatory component of love that accompanied it as long as it lasted—the problem with this kind of fidelity was that it was in truth none at all, or in any case, only a virtual fidelity. It was like courage. If you never put yourself in danger, your courage remained untested and unproven, and therefore unrealised. So too with fidelity: to be real and valuable it required temptation, or better, it required an accomplished act of infidelity. Yes, the person who was faithful in the strictest sense was one who had been unfaithful but kept faith with the affected partner. Which, of course, I as a divorce lawyer must certainly know was as rare as the large, forgiving heart on the other side.
I asked Loos, as he paused for a while and took a sip of wine, “Would you yourself have had it if it had come to that?” “What?” he asked. “The large heart,” I said. “You seem to be missing my point entirely,” Loos answered. “In that purely hypothetical case I would not have been able to use my heart at all. If a woman tells me she is faithful to me as long as she loves me, then I would have to interpret an infidelity willy-nilly as a sign of extinguished love, and an extinguished love doesn’t give a damn for a forgiving heart, do you understand?” “Thoroughly,” I said. “And I also understand now why a natural fidelity, as you call it, would in fact have to cause anxieties. Would you have rather had a wife whose fidelity had been proven by an infidelity?” “She was as she was, Mr. Clarin, and you would have to live three lives to find a woman of such character, of such delicacy, inner and outer.” “Wonderful for you,” I said, “that you struck it rich in your very first life. Not so wonderful for me that you think so little of me.” “I didn’t mean you personally, I’m sorry. I mean men generally, including myself. I wasn’t much more than a blind sow—although I don’t like the comparison because my wife should be compared with something nobler than a mere acorn.” “How about a truffle?” I asked. “That would be much better, but according to what I know of them, pigs have no problem finding truffles by scent, even if they’re blind. The figure of speech would lose its meaning even if we made the truffle substitution. And I take the comparison back in any case, even as regards me. After all, if I may say so, didn’t my wife for her part often characterise me as a gift to her? And now, what am I now?”
Although I saw from looking at him that Loos had directed this question more to himself than to me, I said that he was like a package that was too tightly tied and seemed not to belong to anyone, so that there was no reason for anyone to find and open it. Loos replied that he had in fact mentioned, just ten minutes previously, that he had been ready at times during the last six months to untie himself a bit or to let someone else do it. For example—and this would astonish me—he had answered a personal ad. It had been poetically, not to say schmaltzily, phrased: there was talk of the “velvet cover of the starry sky” under which she, the woman who placed the ad, hoped “to meet a mature man.—Your Penelope.” That was how the ad was undersigned, and the pseudonym had spoken to the classical philologist in him and made him so curious that it came—with the help of a bottle of red wine—to a reply letter, which however, not to awaken undue expectations, he did not sign “Odysseus.” He did, in any case, work two or three subtle classical references into it. After a few days the woman answered, by telephone. Her voice was a little abrasive, but on the other hand, she was to his astonishment actually named Penelope, Penelope Knödler of all things, which dampened his enthusiasm somewhat, as did the answer she gave when he asked how he would recognise her in the wine bar they had agreed to meet in. She said, to be exact, that her special distinguishing feature consisted in the fact that she had only one ear on the right side. He had laughed dutifully, she practically hooting. But he could see he was going into too much detail, now he’d get to the point. So they met. She was in her mid-forties, a sales office administrator, and attractive as far as looks go. But she had the irritating habit of constantly defining herself, constantly saying what it was her habit to do or not to do. It was not her habit, she said for instance, to place personal ads—she didn’t have to do that, since it was an easy thing for her to “peel a man away” from the counter of any bar she chose, which, however, was not her habit. In short, although he, Loos, suffered a bit under Penelope’s habits, he was not disinclined when she invited him home for another small drink. He was an exceptional case, she told him when they entered her apartment. She wasn’t one of those women who bring a man home with them after the first date. The bedroom door stood open. He saw an enormous bed and on it an enormous down coverlet with a starry sky pattern. But he would abbreviate: Penelope disappeared into the bathroom at some point and, after a long shower, came out all fragrant. All she had on now was a striped sleepshirt with side-slits. She sat down next to him on the sofa, snuggled up to him and said that she was someone who always acted on her instinct. Then she called him her cuddly bear. “Cuddly bear must also shower first,” she whispered in his ear—her exact words—and instead of immediately taking his leave, he let himself be steered by light pushes of her hands into the bathroom, where she forced on him a poison-green facecloth of a type he had never seen before. Once alone, he felt sober, regathered his will-power, and decided to make a break for it. When he came out of the bathroom, Penelope was already lying expectantly under the starry sky. He went over to the bed and explained in a friendly voice that he would rather not stay, that it didn’t feel right to him. She began to whimper like a small child and dug her fingers into him, or rather the leg of his pants. And then, after he managed as gently as he could to free himself from her grip, she lost all composure and all decency, saying among other things that the world had lost a great prudish old bitch in him. But the most vulgar thing was what she said to him as he was going out the door: “You rusty jerk-off!” So pitifully, or brutally, had his foray miscarried, his effort to open himself up.
So Loos spoke, with great seriousness and a doleful voice. I didn’t want to hurt his feelings or irritate him, so I had to stifle my laugher a number of times, but by the end I lost control. Loos didn’t laugh with me, but he didn’t seem injured or angry either. He just looked at me with surprise. I got hold of myself quickly and said that in his place I would not have had to be asked twice. “I know, I know,” Loos said. “We’re hardly alike, despite the common wisdom that all men are equal where the sixth commandment is concerned.” “But don’t forget,” I said, “it’s the women who take this view, and they must know.” “Women have gown up with this old wives’ tale,” said Loos. “I know mothers whose own husbands don’t fit this image at all, but despite knowing better they still tell their daughters that men only want one thing, and that as indiscriminately and immediately as possible. One might almost be ungallant enough to assume that women only pretend to be horrified by the image of men as randy goats.” “Bugaboo or secret longing, absurd it is not, Mr. Loos. Do you know how often a man thinks of sex each day on average?” “I’ve never counted.” “Maybe you haven’t, but a research team has, and they came up with two hundred and six. You’re amazed at that, aren’t you?” “Yes,” he said, “it would be a disturbing finding, if we could take it seriously. If a research team were to require me make a check in my notebook every time I thought of sex on a given day, I wouldn’t be able to think of anything else—the notebook would be full before noon.” “I assume,” I said, “that the experiment is not set up on such a simple basis, but however that may be, how can you speak of old wives’ tales when the vast majority of men have had experience with prostitutes, which as everyone knows is only about that one quick thing?” “In contrast to you,” said Loos, “I don’t see the data
as evidence of a male’s natural constitution, that is, of his true instinctual nature.” “What else is it, then?” “A sign of an uncivilised Eros and sexual barbarity. In all spheres of life, in my opinion, a hasty getting to the point and execution without concern for details signifies a coarsening. Only hesitation is human. What I really mean, then, is that what you take for a natural drive, I see rather as a perversion—what is natural for dogs is not necessarily natural for human beings too.” “How can a person be so blind, or at least so naïve?” I said. “May I ask you whether you’ve ever seen a porn-film?” “Yes,” said Loos, “inadvertently. Once, in a hotel room, I inadvertently came upon a pay-TV channel.” “All right, then,” I said. “You probably know that it’s a matter here of a blooming branch of the economy, with billions in profit, and that legions of men watch these films, and simply and precisely because they serve a need and show what they want to see, what they instinctively dream of—to whit, a quick, direct, and completely uninhibited gratification. If there were no genuine desire for that and no demand for such films, there wouldn’t be the gigantic supply of them that there is. Do you really believe that all men who consume these things are perverse?”
Loos looked at the clock, drank, puffed on his cigarette. Then he said, “Not the slightest thing speaks against it. I already explained yesterday evening—though in vain, as I now see—that what the mass of people think and do gradually becomes the norm, and indeed counts as natural, no matter how pathological, warped, or primitive it is. I’d like to quote a sentence that’s stuck with me because it horrified me when I first heard it. It comes from the film in the hotel room I just mentioned, comes from the mouth of a woman, and is or was directed at her performing partner. ‘You fuck like a machine!’ she shouted out to him, and she meant it as praise to spur him on. If those are the dreams men and women are really supposed to have, if their real wish is to dispatch each other in such a crude way—then don’t we have to call such dreams and wishes perverse?” “You’re a master at finding extreme examples,” I said. “But, if I may repeat myself, to me it’s a matter of the principle. The drive is called a drive because it drives us to couple with the object of desire without delay. And without delay means also without moral brakes, without inhibition, without shame. It is a pure desire of nature. In a porn-film it breaks forth triumphant; that’s what makes it so stimulating.”
“I have a desire of nature too,” said Loos. “My glass is empty. Shall we order another carafe?” “Without delay,” I said. “Only it’s going to be critical again for my use of the car.” “If necessary we’ll walk again,” he said. And continued suddenly, “When I was an adolescent it only took a plain bra ad in a black-and-white magazine to make my ears burn and to nurse my fantasy. I didn’t ask for stronger stimuli or go looking for them. But over the years more and more was shown. More suggestive images were supplied, whether there was a demand for them or not—and of course people looked at them. And then they got used to the sight, which in turn increased the appetite of many of them for more explicit fare. And at the culmination stands pornography as the supposed maximal stimulus. At the culmination of the subtle process of directing our needs and training our eyes and taste, the suppliers boldly claim they have been guided solely by the demand and genuine desires of their customers. The tabloid owners and television bosses justify the monstrous garbage they feed the masses with in the same mendaciously criminal way. First they mould people’s tastes to tastelessness and promote simple-mindedness, then they appeal to the result and the needs of their supposedly adult customers. Am I right or am I right?”
“Neither right nor wrong, I’m afraid,” I said. “The argument over the chicken and the egg is of course as fascinating as ever, but we’re hardly likely to settle it. I do wonder about one thing, though. If people are as easily moulded and directed as you regard them to be, why only to the negative, why only in the direction of bad taste, indiscriminateness, primitiveness on all levels? If the masses are so happy to have their minds made up for them, we should be able to bring them to recognise garbage as garbage and to become receptive to more refined fare, which—if desired on a broad scale—would be just as profitable. Of course, this will never happen. It remains the case that the more primitive the newspaper, the higher the circulation, the dumber the broadcast, the higher the ratings. The only question is why it is so, and with all due respect, your answer doesn’t convince me.” “Nor me, entirely,” said Loos, “yet it’s still better than yours, in any case more pleasant. For you, man comes into the world already a moron, or at least with an instinctive inclination to the moronic. As a pedagogue, I can’t afford that view, not before retirement. No, let me correct myself. It’s not a matter of not being able to afford it: I would also have little right to adopt it on the basis of my experience. As a teacher, that is, it has now and then struck me how strong a will we have to make ourselves smarter, how much of an interest in things new and challenging. The appetite for thinking and knowing is there, even if you can’t always count on it. I’m talking about the students, of course, and less about the rest.” “I assume the ‘rest’ are your colleagues?” Loos nodded and paused for a while.
He was in the bloom of youth when he started teaching, he then said, and the older, and old, colleagues of that time were meanwhile either dead or in nursing homes and other institutions, where they presumably sat in diapers vegetating their lives away with Alzheimer’s disease or strokes. And yet it seemed only yesterday that these same colleagues, with few exceptions, had been acting like gods, delivering cutting remarks in those interminable conferences that had to do, among other things, with the question of promoting or holding students back, or with the review of the grades the teachers had turned in. “My grades cannot be altered!” most of the queried teachers had more bellowed than said—they had entered them in the transcript up to three places after the decimal point and therefore regarded them as extremely precise and irrevocable. And all these narrow-minded bigots, these fate-impersonating, course-of-life-determining judges, if they were still alive, were now dozing their lives away in dementia, just as the politicians and the other erstwhile agitators and loudmouths were today either dead or gone to ruin. Just a short while ago, he, Loos, had witnessed a chilling sight with his own eyes, right in the long corridor of the nursing home where his mother lived. A dwarfish little man came shuffling toward him, pulling a pine cone behind him attached to a three-yard length of string, and this old greybeard was in fact none other than his former English teacher, a petulant and repulsive swine, whom everyone hated and feared. In short, it must be a consolation and satisfaction to the victims of these high and mighty scandals-to-their-profession to learn about their deaths or reduction to idiocy, though the wounds did not thereby heal any faster. Besides, he, Loos, was not without guilt, he had occasionally hurt students’ feelings and failed to do them justice, but since his offences were not intentional, his former charges would possibly be satisfied with his dripping nose and hearing aid and not want to see him suffering harsher punishments when they met him on the street. “But now, Mr. Clarin, I notice once again how erratic and undisciplined my talk has become—once more I’ve drifted off the point, from Penelope for example, about whom I’d still like to add a short word.
“Naturally you think that I fled from her because the ghost of my wife wanted it so, and perhaps too because you think I have a weak sexual drive. I don’t think either one is accurate—the latter, at best, only if you want to characterise as weak a drive that demands something more than a fragrant body. It was a question of this more—it was missing, and that lack would have turned coitus into rape, that is, into a mechanical performance, even though Penelope would have welcomed it. I know that people can reduce each other, mutually and in the lack of emotional ties, to their mere sex, but that only brings more sadness than bliss. Therefore I would also have sexually abused myself if I had heeded Penelope’s appeal to join her under the starry coverlet. Don’t misunderstand me, I felt like doi
ng it, but I felt something else too, something that proved stronger and accordingly determined what I did—this was the feeling of a missing togetherness, of an incompatible chemistry of souls. And so on and so forth—I resent your nodding! It makes me orate all the more. I’m going up to my room for a minute.”
I was glad for the pause, glad to be released for a few minutes from the oppressive presence of this man. But I never for a second wished he would stay upstairs and leave me sitting there. I wondered whether my interest in other people had always in truth been lukewarm or only appeared lukewarm now, measured against the powerful interest that Loos aroused in me. I couldn’t tell. I wondered how his wife had been able to stand this in every respect difficult man. I tried to stop wondering and relax. When Loos still wasn’t back after ten minutes, I noticed that my fingers were restless, as if I were going through withdrawal. Loos took upon himself the right to make me wait. I cursed him inwardly as a blustering half-geezer. It was now five past ten. If he wasn’t back in three minutes, I would just leave. When the three minutes went by, I gave him another three. He came just before ten thirty. I felt relieved.
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