“Yet we didn’t dance then,” said Loos. “We only danced once with each other at our wedding party, then never again. I took a dance course when I was seventeen, and that first evening a girl who smelled of lavender soap told me that I shouldn’t hop around so much. At the end of the third evening came the so-called ladies’ choice. I waited in vain to be chosen, remaining superfluously in my seat. I felt like a stunted calf at a cattle market. It was out of the question that I would ever find a girlfriend, let alone a wife. I didn’t finish the dance course and didn’t dance again till my wedding, and even then only very briefly and self-ironically, so to speak. She could go dancing anytime she felt like it, I used to tell her later sometimes, but she always said that dancing didn’t matter to her. And yet when I met her, I had even thought she might possibly be a ballerina, because she looked like one with her graceful figure. A ballerina with a dog, who was walking toward me on a dirt path through a field. I too, exceptionally, had a dog with me, the dachshund of my landlady, who had asked me to take care of it for two days because she wanted to travel to Alsace. The dog was actually a bitch, named Lara, and in heat. For that reason the landlady had also given me a special deterrent spray as well as instructions to spray a cloud of it over her hinterparts before going out on walks. This seemed exaggerated to me, as well as disagreeable, and so I avoided doing it, an avoidance that proved fateful. It was a bright evening in March, and Lara trotted on ahead of me—I had freed her from the leash. So then, a young woman was approaching from the opposite direction with a Labrador retriever. When we were still about twenty yards apart, Lara stopped still. The Labrador, who was on the leash, likewise stopped still. And then everything happened very fast. The Labrador tore himself loose with a jerk and stormed over to Lara. ‘Leo, Leo!’ called my future wife, but Leo was no longer accessible to address, he was already intensely sniffing, and Lara signaled her consent by laying her tail to the side, whereupon he mounted her immediately. It was too late for any intervention. Confused and embarrassed—united in shame, I might say—we both stood to the side and, apart from a few commonplace apologies, didn’t know what to say to each other. But now there was a complication which, as I’ve been told, is not all that rare: the male, after the successful copulation, was trying vainly to dismount, but remained stuck in Lara as if in a vise. For a short while the two wedged-together animals turned noiselessly in a circle. Then Leo put one of his hind legs up on Lara’s back and twisted his body off and around, so that the two, still welded together, now stood hinterpart to hinterpart. Then each of them, yelping with pain, started to pull in the opposite direction. In vain—they couldn’t pry themselves loose from each other. It was an unsettling drama. The young woman blushed in waves, and I could find no words to release the tension. After a quarter of an hour, the longest of my life, my wife-to-be declared that we had to do something, or the drama would never end. “Yes, but what?” I asked, and instead of answering she approached Leo from the front—he wasn’t big or heavy—grabbed him around the flanks with both hands, lifted him up a little bit, and pulled on him with a slight twisting motion. The grip seemed to loosen, the separation succeeded, and both animals began licking their genitals. And that’s how we made our acquaintance. Unthinkable what might have happened if I had reached for the spray as I should have done before the walk—namely, nothing. We would have walked by and greeted each other on the dirt path, and Leo would have sniffed at Lara briefly if at all, turned away with a shudder, and then, yanking energetically at the leash, pulled the woman of my life out of my field of vision forever. Thank God it happened otherwise. Thank God the young woman didn’t simply leave after the incident, but was concerned about the outcome. ‘We can only hope now,’ she said, ‘that the act of nature has no consequences.’ ‘Act of nature!’—that’s what she really said, that sticks in the memory, and it was immediately clear to me: ‘If a young women of this sort calls the generative process an act of nature, she must be a special person.’ I asked her whether I should let her know about the possible consequences. She begged me to do so and gave me her telephone number. She told me her name, I told her mine, her handshake was pleasant. I can’t speak of love at first sight—I’ve never been easily inflammable. We began to meet regularly, once we started, and only gradually fell in love—and it would now be time for me to keep quiet for a while and give myself the chance to prove myself as good a listener as you, Mr. Clarin. Talk! Tell me about yourself. For heavens sake, reveal something about yourself too for a change!”
He doesn’t let me get a word in, I might have thought, he talks himself to a fever pitch and then reproaches me for being silent. But I didn’t think that, I didn’t feel it that way. I recalled my mother who often read to me when I was a child from Grimms’ fairy tales. I used to listen—all caught up in them, enraptured. How terribly, I now realised, this capacity is impaired in the course of time. I realised this, because the capacity was suddenly there again as if newly awakened by the powerful presence of Loos telling his stories. I hadn’t had the desire to take the initiative, although I otherwise like to talk and don’t feel at all uncomfortable, in groups of people like myself, taking the role of the alpha male who dominates the conversation. But now, as I said, I felt no need to talk, probably also because I was afraid of disappointing Loos’s unexpected interest. He seemed to have brought me to the point of finding myself and my life almost insipid. He was looking at me. “In your place I would have lost patience with myself long ago,” he said. Someone who’s gripped, I responded, needed no patience. What did demand my patience somewhat was the fact that he hardly ever told a story to the end and so even with Lara he left me uncertain whether she got pregnant or not. “It’s true, I never conclude things,” said Loos, “and Lara unfortunately did not get pregnant.” “Why unfortunately?” I asked. “That I don’t want to say right now,” he said. “You have the floor.” It wasn’t easy to speak on demand, I said, and besides I didn’t know what he wanted to hear from me. Loos filled our glasses. “I would also like to suggest we drop the formalities,” he said. “It isn’t necessary anymore for us to keep to a distance with Mister and the like.” Loos’s proposal came so unexpectedly that I couldn’t react immediately. “We don’t have to,” he said, “it was just an impulse.” “No, I’m very glad of it,” I said quickly, although it wasn’t quite true. In truth I was happy with the distance he now wanted to remove. His gravitational field, if I can use that term, already exercised a strong enough pull on me. “I’m Thomas,” I said. Loos started for a second and then said, “I suspected that.” “Suspected? But why?” “Well,” he said, “last night I saw the nameplate on your door: T. Clarin, and on the way back I was trying to come up with all the first names that begin with a T. I only found eight, and Thomas seemed to me to fit you the best. Incidentally, something binds us: my name is the same as yours.” “Thomas?” “Thomas, yes.”
Before I could say anything about this coincidence, Loos said that something else had struck him on the way home. My nameplate, together with a second, was located on the left doorframe. And on the right frame he had seen a third plate, made of brass and discoloured with verdigris, but still legible. As I knew, it read Tasso, and this celebrated name had very much surprised him. “You are a riddle to me, Mr.—I mean, Thomas,” I said. “How can you drink as much as you did yesterday and yet be so sharp-sighted?” His size allowed him much, he said, but did I not want to tell him who this Tasso was? “He was my best friend,” I said. “As students we lived in rooms that shared a common wall. He’s not alive anymore. The house in Agra belonged to him, he died there at age twenty-six.”
“In contrast to me, you know how to say things concisely,” said Loos, “only there’s no meat on the bone. More meat, Thomas, if I may ask! Was this Tasso possibly a relative of the famous mad poet?” “He was often asked that,” I said, “and he used to say modestly that he didn’t know. He came from the area around Naples, and when he was five years old, he lost both parents in a car accident.
He was transplanted to Switzerland, to Bern, where his father’s sister lived. She was married without children to a Swiss engineer named Engel, who when Tasso was thirteen fell into an elevator shaft. He left his wife a considerable fortune as well as a cottage in Agra, where she moved when Tasso started at the university. Two years later, she also died, with cancer of the lymph nodes I believe, and the cottage passed into Tasso’s possession. Is that all right, Thomas, or shall I rein in more?” “There’s too much dying,” said Loos, “otherwise it’s fine. Tell on!” “Good, then. When I started at the university, I found a small, cheap room in the loft of a stately old house that belonged to a baker’s widow. I had to share the bathroom with the tenants of two other rooms, and one of them was the still unknown to me Tasso. He had already been living there for some time—he was in his fourth semester, studying history and English—and the fact that we became close friends borders on a miracle. He was the exact opposite of me, outwardly certainly, but I’m talking about our respective natures. Everything that’s associated with the south—lightheartedness, nonchalance, gregariousness, loquacity, perhaps even superficiality—all of this was really my trademark, whereas Tasso was serious and phlegmatic, conscientious and thorough. He had what I lacked and vice versa. You can imagine how interesting, but also how full of tensions, our friendship was. We were so intimate that we could admit to each other our occasional feelings of antipathy for each other. For instance, I was always planning to get up earlier in the morning than he did for once, but I never managed it and resented him for my defeat. Only much later did I become an early riser and learn to discipline myself. Giovanni’s antipathy—that was his name—was related to my lovelife or rather, as he put it, my compulsory ‘consumption of women,’ which naturally affected him since we shared a wall. But it wasn’t the noises, he said, that sparked resentment in him, nor was it envy, but rather the fact that my fickle behaviour made him feel sorry for the women. In his opinion they didn’t deserve, nor could they handle, being treated so dismissively, and he meant dismissively literally, he said. But in spite of all differences our friendship was never endangered. One time he knocked on my door long after midnight and called in a low voice asking if I was still awake. “Somewhat,” I said, “come in.” He held a book in his hands and said shyly that he had found a sentence in it that related to us, and it was this: ‘Be to your friend an uncomfortable pillow.’ At that I leapt out of bed and uncorked a Chianti, and our friendship was now defined, so to speak.”
“Wrong,” said Loos. “Nietzsche said ‘a hard field-cot’ and not ‘an uncomfortable pillow.’ ” “I thank you humbly for the correction,” I said, “but the sense is exactly the same.” “Excuse me,” he said, “the philologist in me has taken over.” “Never mind,” I said. “However that may be, a little later Tasso fell in love, for the first time actually, and as hopelessly hard as only late starters can. In any case, he spoke now only of marriage, although he confided to me at the same time that he found kissing a lot less easy than it looked in the movies. He also told me that the only reason he hadn’t yet introduced Magdalena to me was his anxiety about the mockingly evaluative look I gave women. I promised him I would look at her as if she were a flower. But then the first time I saw her, I forgot about the flower and saw only the woman, and understood why Tasso was so entranced. And as much as I saw that there was something about her that my girlfriends didn’t have, that something remained obscure to me. I only sensed that I would never have gotten anywhere with Magdalena even if she had been free. Nevertheless, I found her immediately congenial, and since I also thought I saw how well they suited each other, I gave up on the idea of putting the breaks on Tasso and rubbing his nose in everything he’d be missing if he married his first love. He had never wanted to hear it and once explained with embarrassment that the only thing that occasionally put the brakes on him was his worry that he might not be equal to Magdalena’s physical desires. As I certainly knew, yet couldn’t understand—he said—he was, despite his more than twenty-five years, virtually clueless in this regard, whereas Magdalena had already had experience. And so he was afraid that she would find him wanting and possibly even regard him as a bungler, which, he said, he certainly was. Did that mean he hadn’t yet slept with her, I asked. He said that for him kissing was miracle enough, he didn’t want to rush the rest. ‘My God,’ I said, ‘you rush into marriage, but the screwing can wait?!’ ‘It’s true,’ he said.
“That was in the spring, and the wedding took place in the summer. They travelled down to Ticino and spent two weeks in his house. Then Magdalena went back—she worked as a speech therapist—while Giovanni stayed, in order to write his degree papers without distraction. They called each other daily, and she visited him on the weekends. At the end of August she called me, on a Wednesday. She said she had left Agra on Sunday evening and since then had heard nothing more from Tasso and couldn’t reach him herself. She asked whether he had called me. No, I said and reassured her. I even laughed at her: it seemed to me really overdoing it to be alarmed after just two and a half days of telephone silence. But she was alarmed, and when she heard nothing from Giovanni on Thursday either, she got on the train on Friday. What she discovered in Tasso’s house is beyond the bounds of imagination. It was so unspeakably horrible that she lost consciousness for a little while. He lay curled up on the sofa, with ants and swarms of flies all over him.”
I paused and drank. “Gruesome,” murmured Loos. “Murder or suicide?” “Neither,” I said. “He died a natural death, as was conclusively established: heart attack, sudden cardiac death, probably already on Monday and probably caused by a genetic defect of the cardiac valve. It is certain that he did not suffer, that was the only consolation. Magdalena weathered it all, but then, weeks after Tasso was buried, she had to experience something that made her collapse altogether. Tasso had the habit of almost always carrying a camera with him, a small compact one that he called his little notebook. I seldom saw the photos he took. They were distinguished for their lack of anything distinctive about them. He had a weakness and an eye for the nondescript. To get to the point: there was still film in his camera and Magdalena had it developed in order to know, as she said, what had caught Tasso’s eye in the last days or hours of his life. The exposure counter indicated that seven pictures had been taken, and seven developed pictures came back. They all showed a naked woman, some from the front, some from the back, lying on the sofa with the bright blue throw-cloth, the same one on which Tasso had lain when Magdalena found him.”
Loos stared at me. I was quiet. “Go on,” he said with a strangely hoarse voice. “How go on?” I said. “I’ve told the whole story.” “No,” said Loos, “there’s never a whole story, never a conclusion, just arbitrary breaking off where one likes. Who was this woman?” “We don’t know. Magdalena cut out just the head from one the photos that showed her face and showed it to everyone who was close to Tasso. No one had ever seen the woman, and no one could believe that Tasso was capable of leading a double life. Magdalena looked through his things in vain for some indication, trying to come to some certainty, but there wasn’t the least scrap. But I forgot to mention that the date the photos were taken was printed on the back—it was three days before Magdalena’s last visit, I mean the last weekend they spent together. I have no other explanation than that my friend, once he was sexually awakened, lost control of his drives—he couldn’t contain himself and paid a prostitute to make a house visit. Of course that doesn’t fit the person we knew, but I have no other interpretation, because one thing for me is dead certain: Tasso as lover had no mistress.”
“What did she look like, this woman?” Loos asked. “Hard to say. I didn’t see the pictures, only the cutout of the face, which had something Slavic about it, prominent cheekbones, reddish blonde hair, features on the rough side and showing a mature woman—she had to be at least ten years older than Tasso. Why do you ask?” “No particular reason, Mr. Clarin,” said Loos. “Go on.” “I can only add,” I s
aid, with added irritation because Loos had used my last name again, “I can only add that Magdalena, with the help of therapy, gradually emerged from the crippling depression that overtook her after the double trauma. She never wanted to enter the house in Agra again and sold it four years ago to a colleague, my partner in the law practice, and me. And that’s it.”
“Naturally it’s not easy to live with an abyss,” Loos said, “and there’s a great temptation to try to sound it to its depths. We shouldn’t—it leads only to angry grief. If we look down into it, straining our ears, we hear the sound of our own gnashing teeth or their echo, nothing more. ‘Who are you? What does it look like in your inmost self?’ Futile questions, vain importunity. And in spite of this, in spite of this, I know Tasso, even if I was not his best friend, as you were.” “I don’t follow,” I said. “Are you bent on confusing me? Did you know Tasso?” “You make it easy for me to listen to you,” he said. “The tragic suits me—only, it’s embarrassing—my bladder. Mind if I ask for another short intermission?” I watched him go and resolved never to become so cranky and eccentric.
When he came back, he said, “The fog is pulling back, and the sky is clearing. I can see the lights. Maybe we can hope for a bright Pentecost Sunday. And as I mentioned earlier, even the minds of the people closest to us are sealed with seven seals. What I know about Tasso, I know from you, and yet, in the matter of this mysterious woman, I get a different picture than you, because I assess the details differently. Forget the breech in the dam. Forget the excess of impatience and sexual hunger. Connect Tasso’s great love with his inexperience in the physical domain, and recall his touching anxiety about disappointing his beloved and lacking expertise as a man with her. Imagine him reading a newspaper and coming on an ad that says something like ‘Mature, affectionate woman makes house and hotel-room visits.’ It’s a temptation for Tasso, but specifically the temptation of paying for a short course in love. He has the woman come, and now I have to speculate: He realises, when she arrives, that he had misjudged himself for a second. He doesn’t want another woman, not even for practice—he can’t do that. She takes her clothes off unasked, lies on the sofa, and whispers ‘Come here’ in Italian. He stands there awkwardly for a while, until an idea strikes him. He doesn’t want anything more, he says, than to take a few pictures. ‘One of those, are you?’ she says. And that he can cheerfully manage.”
On the Edge Page 9