I let her feel them and ordered a mineral water. “Did you ever meet him, I mean Felix Bendel?” I then asked. “Not actually meet,” she said, “but I saw him briefly by chance, back then, after his short visit to Valerie’s room.” “He visited her here?” “That he did, at the end of her first week here. I remember, because she told me later.” “Did he stay overnight?” “Oh, the gentleman is jealous—who would have thought that! But I can reassure you. She was all too true to you, I should say ‘unfortunately.’ ” “All too true? What is that supposed to mean?” “It means that Felix’s last desperate attempt to win her back completely failed. She rejected him, for good, apparently. It must have been horrible for each of them. And when Valerie told me about it—in hints, as always—I realised immediately that it must have been Felix I met briefly in the elevator that evening. I was waiting on the ground floor, and when it came and I opened the door—it doesn’t work automatically—there was a man facing me, looking pale, who stared at me with a haggard expression. I greeted him and stepped in, and since he had come down from an upper floor and wasn’t getting out there, I assumed that like me he wanted the basement. But he didn’t get out there either, so I asked him if he was looking for something particular. ‘The exit,’ he said in a hoarse voice. I said he had to go back up one floor, then go left along the corridor, and he’d come to the exit. That was my meeting with Bendel. But I see that it doesn’t seem to interest you, you keep drumming with your fingers. So let’s come out with it: why did you come here?”
I hadn’t been conscious of the drumming, and I apologised for it and asked Eva without further ado whether the name Bettina Loos said anything to her. She reflected, then shook her head and said, “Never heard of her. Who is she?” “Well, she was possibly a patient here at the same time as Valerie. You would have crossed paths with her.” Eva narrowed her eyes and gave me a searching look. “Uh-huh,” she said, “I get it. So you were active in a threefold sense! Did you think she’d be here? Or hope I could tell you where she is now?” “Total nonsense,” I said, “I had nothing going with her. And she was here with her husband.” “I sense that you’re here about her.” “That could be,” I said, “but not the way you think. First of all, I’ve never met her, and secondly, she’s dead.” “It’s beginning to dawn on me,” Eva said. “You’re a lawyer. Is this about a criminal case?” “Maybe.” “And why didn’t you tell me right off what you wanted to see me for? You listen politely to stories about Valerie and you have something completely different on your mind.” “Yes, no—I mean, I don’t really know, Eva, I’m sorry. I’m a little confused, and I feel somehow ridiculous.” “The first sympathetic thing you’ve said,” said Eva. “So then, what’s it about?”
“Let me say in advance that my interest is purely private—I’m not here as a lawyer. I’d just like to ask you whether there was an accident in June last year at the indoor pool here, and I mean one that resulted in death. The victim, a woman of about forty, is supposed to have slipped on the edge of the pool and died of her injuries hours later in a hospital in Lugano. Did you hear about it?” “No,” said Eva, “no, I know nothing of such an accident.” “Could it be that it happened without coming to your attention?” “That seems very unlikely to me. Certainly they would have handled it very discreetly; nevertheless something would have leaked out. Does this woman have something to do with the woman you mentioned—what’s her name again?” “Bettina Loos,” I said. “Perhaps Bettina Loos, but perhaps that isn’t her name.” “How mysterious!” Eva said. “It seems so,” I said, “and yet a lot would be explained if you could find out two things: Was a woman of this name a guest here last year? And second, did a woman, perhaps with another name, have an accident at the pool then, or otherwise die?” To my surprise, Eva said, “You’ll know both in five minutes. The director’s here—I just saw him—he would know about the accident, and the computer will spit out the guest list from last June in three seconds. Be back soon.”
My stomach was still nervous, so I ordered another Fernet. I let my gaze wander over the Gulf of Agno to the Collina d’oro, which rose up a weak glaucous colour in the haze that wreathed it. Montagnola was only a blurred patch, and I cleaned my spectacles with impatient fingers. When Eva returned—her face betrayed nothing—she asked where I had gotten my information. “So it’s right then”? I asked. “It’s not right,” she said. “There was never a guest with the name Bettina Loos at this hotel, nor did a woman of any other name die of an accident here last June.” “Not killed either? Or jumped from a balcony?” “Not that either, Commissioner,” she said laughing. “I checked everything. But on the other hand, I just now remembered that there was indeed an accident at the pool last June, though only a small one that turned out all right, as you know.” “Don’t play with my sanity! I don’t have an inkling of what you’re talking about!” “You seem to be forgetting,” Eva said, “didn’t you meet a woman with a broken ring finger?” “Ah, of course,” I said. “But that didn’t happen at the pool, it was in the woods. She didn’t see a branch, or maybe it was a root, and tripped over it.” “That’s what she told people,” Eva said. “It seemed less embarrassing to her than a slip on the edge of the pool.” “Very strange,” I said. “And because the finger swelled up,” Eva went on, “the doctor had to clip the wedding ring off with a small pair of wire cutters. Did she mention that?” “Of course not. She never wore a ring when we were together.” “I can understand that,” Eva said. “And now you owe me a quid pro quo. Where did you get that fairy tale, and what are you looking for here? What are you so intensely preoccupied with that you seem so completely immersed in it?”
“I met a man by chance at the Bellevue in Montagnola, a remarkable man, a little over fifty, a classical philologist. We got to be friends of a sort, talked with each other for two evenings long. His name was Loos, Thomas Loos, physically a bear of a man. He had come down here, as he gradually revealed, to commemorate his wife, his dead Bettina, whom he revered like a saint—it came across as crazy to me. He was unquestionably disturbed, from time to time almost unbalanced—then completely normal again and impressively sharp-minded, especially when it came to proving how awful the present age is, how unbearable the world—the only thing he valued was his wife, his happy marriage. He seems to have placed her on a pedestal, and apparently more thoroughly so after her death than before. But the point is, he told me that after an operation—she had a brain tumor—she came to Cademario to recuperate, together with him, and then a couple days after that, the accident happened. She was brought to Lugano, the Ospedale Civico, where she died on the 11th of June. The rest can be stated in a few words. We agreed to meet this morning at the Bellevue, where he was staying, just to see each other quickly one more time. But he didn’t show up, and when I asked for him, the woman at the reception desk said there was no hotel guest named Thomas Loos. I described where the room was situated. All she would say was that the gentleman had checked out and she was not allowed to tell me his name. At first I thought that he had registered under a false name, but I had good reason to abandon that notion, and concluded that this strange bird had lied to me and that his name wasn’t Thomas Loos. The whole thing has roiled me up me so much that I drove over here in the hope of finding some clarity. Do you see now? What do you make of it?”
“I make nothing at all of it yet,” said Eva. “I still know too little. Tell me more. What, for example, do two men talk about for two full evenings?” “Well, first, as I hinted, the discussion was all ‘God and the world,’ but then we gradually got more personal, more intimate, you could say. For example, he asked me about my life as a bachelor and then along the way about my love life.” “Did you tell him about Valerie?” “That was the obvious choice, of course,” I said. “It suggested itself once it came out that he and his wife were here at the spa at the same time briefly.” “Which has since proved false beyond doubt,” said Eva. “Was he very interested in your love life?” “Not terribly,” I said, “he listened p
olitely enough, but yawned now and then too.” “And Loos, what did he tell you about Bettina, I mean in detail—for example, outward appearance, or perhaps idiosyncrasies?” “Different things,” I said. “Why do you ask?” “Woman’s curiosity.” “All right, then,” I said, “he mentioned her blonde hair and her hourglass figure, and that she didn’t eat meat, but loved raspberries. I can’t remember right now—no, wait, she didn’t smoke, and dancing didn’t matter to her, and she loved a certain Schubert song about the beauty of the world, as well as—in contrast to Loos—Hesse’s umbrella and one of his verses.”
“Listen, I’m getting cold,” Eva said, “I’m going to go get a jacket. I’ll be right back.”
She came back and was silent. She looked at me, not coolly—her look was gentle now, almost compassionate, regretful, as if to say, “I’m sorry that I can’t help you.” After a while I asked why she wasn’t saying anything. Probably, she explained, because she was speechless. I said I could understand that, the whole thing was too bizarre. She found it extremely sad, she said and asked immediately if I knew what Felix did professionally. I said Valerie had told me he was a musician and gave cello lessons. “I see,” said Eva. “Why? Isn’t it right?” I asked. “In any case, he plays the cello,” she answered. “You’re really playing the Sybil,” I said. “Thomas,” she said, “I have to go now. I don’t think I can help you. I’m only a respiratory therapist, the blind I can’t heal.” “Now what is that supposed to mean?” I asked. She asked back whether by any chance Loos had told me what the Hesse verse was about that his wife Bettina found so strikingly beautiful. “Yes, roughly,” I said. “Some piece of universal wisdom on the heart and parting.” “Here,” said Eva and took a piece of squared notepaper, folded over, out of her jacket pocket. “I give you this for the trip. Take care,” she said, got up, gave me her hand, and left me sitting there. I stuck the note in my pocket and stared mindlessly out into the landscape. Finally I called the waiter, paid, and left.
I stopped on the way, I don’t remember where now, and took the note out of my pocket. I unfolded it and recognised Valerie’s handwriting and then the two lines from Hesse:
And so the heart at every call from life
Must ready be to part and start anew.
Keep calm! I told myself, but my body wouldn’t obey. I drove on in a state of distraction. A coincidence is far from being proof. How many women love Hesse? How many speak these lines, precisely these, from the heart, despite the embarrassingly artificial word order? Probably thousands! All right then. Bettina loved them, and Valerie too, apparently, although she kept them from me. Two women who like the same motto don’t for that reason metamorphose into one. And Eva had put on airs, kept her ostensible knowledge to herself, to keep me on tenterhooks, and then handed me this note: apparently the only piece of evidence leading her to her absurd suspicion. No grounds for tenterhooks, I thought and then nevertheless—hardly back in Agra—knocked my freshly filled wine glass over.
I made a short call to the editor of the legal journal to tell him that, due to illness, I saw myself in no position to have my article ready by the deadline. Then I made a fire in the fireplace. I sat down in the chair in front of it and closed my eyes to collect myself.
For a few moments my sober nature seemed to take control again. I marveled over the halfwit in me who had almost driven himself mad with wild speculation. I told myself that the further I entered into the labyrinth of improbabilities the more likely I was to lose the thread.
After the third glass of wine I fell to brooding again, and thus into vacillation. Words occurred to me, Loos’s words, that all at once seemed suspect, ambiguous, or sly. I tried to determine, with as much amused dispassion as I could muster, at what point he—if he was indeed Bendel—might have realised who was sitting across from him. At the latest, I thought, when I mentioned Valerie’s name, maybe even earlier, when I mentioned that his wife and my girlfriend must have been at the spa at the same time. But as I clearly recalled, that hadn’t really interested him. I thought of other junctures in the conversation that could have signaled my identity to him—and finally the one occasion that with a single stroke put a stop to all my hopping around. Right at the beginning I had introduced myself by name—Clarin, a name you don’t hear every day, with the accent on the second syllable. Assuming that he knew of our affair and had once asked Valerie what this guy’s name was, and assuming that she told him—then Loos, no, Bendel, would have had the picture from the outset. And therefore, then, the whole masquerade, the false name, and his outlandish webs of fabrication?
I only believed in this version of things for a short while, then I thought that I was the one weaving webs. Would Bendel have befriended me? Would he have invented a tumor just for me? Would he have had Valerie die just to deceive me? That was all just too farfetched. And then the lightning bolt in Hyde Park! Valerie would certainly have told me about such an unforgettable and unheard-of experience. And Bendel wouldn’t have mentioned it, he would have betrayed himself in so doing. He would have to have assumed that I knew about it from her. But what if the lightning story was totally invented? Or simply plucked out of some newspaper? But what for? Loos might have been a bit unhinged from time to time, but mentally ill he was not.
I cooked up some noodles and fried a couple of eggs, which I ate distractedly and without pleasure. And back at the fireplace, the speculations started again, the brooding, the unbearable back-and-forth. I started feeling dizzy, and the flickering of the flames, which I usually found soothing, only made it worse. I stared into the fire and saw there the image of Loos, how he had stared into the flames. And then for the first time it struck me that if Bendel had sat here, then I was assured of his hatred, then I had a deadly enemy.
I commanded myself to pull myself together. I had to do something to quell the turmoil in me, to unravel the threads and take stock of myself. I wasn’t really looking for certitude at that moment, just order and an overview.
I went into the next room and sat in front of the laptop. I heard knocking, and my heart immediately started knocking too. I felt: Loos is here, Loos has come to explain why he wasn’t there this morning, he’s come to say goodbye. I opened the front door: there was no one to be seen. I seemed to be hearing things. The floorboards get warped sometimes and then make a cracking sound.
I shut the door and sat down again. Then I typed two sentences: “Everything’s turning. And everything’s turning round him.” I couldn’t go further. I couldn’t peck what was plaguing me out onto the keys. I walked around in the room. The photograph of Tasso on the bookshelf reminded me of his fountain pen, that Magdalena gave me as a memento. Of course, I thought and took it, with the bottle of ink, from the lowest drawer of the desk. It smelled a little the way my grandmother sometimes smelled, of camphor, I think. I cleaned its inner parts and the reservoir with water and filled it with the old blue ink. When I began to write, it very quickly took on the temperature of my hand.
MARKUS WERNER was born in Switzerland in 1944. He studied at the University of Zurich, then taught at a school in Schaffhausen until 1990 when he became a freelance writer. His prestigious literary awards include the Jürgen Ponto Stiftung prize (1984), the Prix littéraire Lipp (1995), and the SWF Bestenliste prize in 1997. He has published seven novels, including the bestselling Zündel’s Departure.
ROBERT E. GOODWIN is a member of the faculty at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, NY. He is the author of The Playworld of Sanskrit Drama and translator of Rüdiger Safranski’s Romanticism: A German Affair, forthcoming from Northwestern University Press. He currently lives in upstate New York.
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On the Edge Page 14