by Robert Musil
She felt it stirring something up in her, like when you walk by the seashore, unable to fully fathom the roar of every action and every thought torn in the fabric of the moment, and little by little she was gripped by a mounting uncertainty and a slowly growing inability to denote and sense the boundaries of self, a self dissolution – an urge to cry out, a longing for immeasurable movements, the rootless desire to do something unending, just to force yourself to feel; there was a sucking, lip smacking, devastating delight in getting lost, every second pulsing like a wild, irresponsible lonesome lust, devoid of memory, foolish and free. And it wrenched words and gestures from somewhere inside that flew by and yet remained a part of her, and seated there beside her, listening, the undersecretary was forced to fathom that what she said and did, all the words coming at him bore hidden traces of her beloved, and soon she saw nothing but the neverending rise and fall of his beard, the bobbing beard of a repulsive billy goat ceaselessly chewing, spitting out a whispered soporific stream of words.
She felt so sorry for herself, all the while weighed down by a humming dread that all this could be happening again. The undersecretary said: “I can tell by looking at you that you are one of those women destined to be swept away by a storm of emotions. You are proud and want to hide it; but believe me, a connoisseur of the female soul can see right through your façade of resistance.” It was as if without skipping a heartbeat she sank back into her past. But when she looked around her she felt a certain randomness in this sinking into the sea of the soul, like currents of time stacked one on top of another, a randomness not in the appearance of the things around her, but rather in that this appearance held fast, as if inseparable from the thing itself, unnaturally clawed into the skin of the moment, like a fleeting feeling that refuses to let go of a face. And strange as it may seem, it was as if, a link having broken in the quiet course of occurrence, disturbing the ordinary succession of things and sending them flying out of lock step, little by little all faces and things congealed into a sudden, haphazard composite expression that cut obliquely across the apparent chaos, imposing a new order. And she alone slipped with faltering unfurled senses between these faces and things – downwards – into the deep.
For a moment, the great painstakingly plated emotional braid of her being became apparent, fluttering in the distance, like a pallid, practically worthless backdrop to reality. She thought to herself, you draw a line in the sand, any old unbroken line, just to have something to hold onto in the swarm of silently looming things; that is the stuff of our life; like when you keep speaking nonstop, pretending that each word is somehow ineluctably linked to the one before and automatically generates the next, because you fear the moment you allow silence to strip off the pretense of continuity the flimsy construct of self will falter in some unimaginable way and be dissolved by silence; but it is only your fear, your frailty before the terrible, gaping randomness of it all.
Then the undersecretary said: “It is a matter of destiny, there are some men whose destiny it is to stir unrest, you’ve got to open your heart, there’s nothing you can do to stop it…” But she hardly heard his words. Her thoughts, meanwhile, contradicted each other. She wanted with one great, unguarded gesture to break the grip of desire and fling herself at the feet of her beloved; she felt that it was still possible. But something compelled her to submit to that screaming frenzy; to face the flow so as not to dissolve in it, to hold her life tightly pressed against her so as not to lose it, to sing out so as not to suddenly fall silent without a clue. She didn’t want to. A pensive, muttered hesitation hovered before her. Not to scream like all the others, so as not to fathom the silence. Not to sing out either. Just a whisper, falling silent,…nothing more, nothing but emptiness…
And then came a slow, soundless, sliding forward, a bending over, the undersecretary said: “Don’t you just love the theater? What I love in art is the finesse of the happy ending that consoles us for the dreariness of the mundane. Life disappoints, it so often falls flat in the final act. But wouldn’t that just be a dull display of naturalism…?”
She suddenly heard it close-up and clear. And then somewhere there was that hand, a tenuous, intrusive warmth, a consciousness: You, – but then she let go of herself, filled with a certainty, still to serve as the last link to each other, without a word, unbelieving, intertwined like a gossamer web of deathly sweetness, like a fantastic foretaste of an as yet undiscovered flavor, each of them a tone that only rings true in the soul of the other, nowhere if the soul’s not listening.
The undersecretary drew himself to his full height, looked her in the eye. She suddenly felt herself standing there before him, and far from her that one beloved person; whatever he might be thinking, it struck her that she could not know what it was; meanwhile an uncharted feeling stirred inside her sheltered by the darkness of her body. At that instant she perceived its physical grip encompassing all that she felt, exerting an obscure restraint like the hold of a homeland. All at once she felt more vividly than anything else his overbearing sense of self closing in around her, like an inescapable treachery intruding between her and her beloved, and like something sinking down upon her, taking her unawares, a thing she had never before experienced, it was as if she were communing with her grasp of last conjugal fidelity – which she preserved inside her – in an uncanny tangle with the innermost recess of contradiction.
Maybe it was nothing but the desire to surrender this body to her beloved, but quavering through and through with the profound uncertainty of right and wrong, it took hold in the form of desire for that stranger, and while she pondered the possibility that even if in her body she were to suffer the self-destructive, through him sounding her own depths, and shuddered at his stealthy knack for sidestepping every moral decision as if before something dark and empty, entrapping its victim in the prison of self, her body clamored with a bitter bliss to shove him away, all the while feeling defenseless in her carnal surrender, held down by a stranger, and as if carved up by knives, longing with dread and disgust and violent involuntary spasms to let herself be filled with it – just to feel it like a trust, open to every last drop of truthfulness about this nothing, this wavering, this amorphous all, imbued with this sickly certainty of the soul like the rim of a divine wound, engaged in a futile search for the other in the gnawing pains of that endlessly renewed desire to meld and merge.
Like a light illuminating delicate blood vessels, this longing for the death of her love arose amidst a tangle of thoughts out of the pending darkness of passing time, gradually engulfing her. And once all of a sudden she heard herself whisper in fulgent unhampered reply, as if only now fathoming what the undersecretary suggested: “I don’t know if he could take it.”
For the first time she spoke of her husband; she was startled, it didn’t seem to be a part of reality; but already she felt the unstoppable force of the word escaping into life. Hastening to reply, the undersecretary said: “Do you really love him?” Full well aware of the ridiculousness of the supposed certainty of his jab, she said: “No, no, I don’t really love him at all.” Trembling and decided.
Once she was back up in her room she hardly still fathomed their interchange, feeling all the while the veiled, incomprehensible allure of her lie. She thought of her husband; occasionally a faint glimmer of him flared up in her, like when from outside in the street you peer into a lighted window; which is what first made her fathom what she was doing. He looked handsome, she wanted to stand by him, then the light also flashed inside herself. But she ducked back into her lie, and then she was standing outside again in the street in the dark. She felt a chill; it hurt to be alive; everything that she saw, every breath she took added to the pain. Enveloped by that feeling for her husband, as if by a warm, luminous sphere she could slip back into at will, it made her feel safe, all the things floating in the sea of night didn’t jab at her like sharp ship’s prows, they were softly intercepted, hemmed in. And she didn’t want to.
&n
bsp; She remembered that she had lied once before. Not back then, because it was never a lie back then, it was just her. But one time, even though it was the truth, just when she said she had gone walking in the evening, for two hours, it was a lie; it suddenly struck her that that was the first time in a long while she had lied. Just like it was before when she had sat among the people in the dining room, that other time she went walking through the streets, wandering aimlessly, jumpy like a lost dog, and looked into the houses; and in some place or other a man opened a door for a woman with an amiable mean, his expression and manner indicating that he was glad; and someplace else a man went on a visit with his wife, a perfectly worthy pair, rock solid couple; and every which way she looked, as in a wide, calm, all-encompassing body of water, there were little whirling eddies with rings around them, an inwards-turned motion that somewhere suddenly, blindly, unframed by windowpane, bordered on indifference; and inside, at every turn, there was this sense of being suspended in the grip of your own echo in a cramped room, every word ensnared and drawled into the next word, so that you don’t hear the unacceptable – the gap, the chasm between the clash of two actions, in which you shrink back from a feeling of self, sinking somewhere into the silence between two words that could just as well be the silence between the words of a completely different person.
And then it struck her in a secret corner of her heart: somewhere among these people lives a person, someone who doesn’t fit in, someone else, someone to whom the others might have grown accustomed, and no one will ever have an inkling of the self you are today. Since feelings only exist in a long chain of other feelings, linked to each other, all that matters is that one moment in life be linked without a gap to another, and there are a hundred ways this might happen. And then for the first time since falling in love she was struck by the thought: it’s all a matter of happenstance; by some coincidence it became a reality and then you hold on tight. And for the first time she sounded her emotional depths, and felt this last hold, this root, this disturbance of the absolute, this faceless feeling of herself enveloped in her love, a feeling to which she had always in the past lay claim, and that had made her the same as everyone else. And then it was as if she had to let herself sink back into the elemental, into the unrealized, nowhere at home, and she ran through the sadness of the empty streets and peered into the windows of the houses, wanting no other company than the clip clop of her heels on the cobble stones, just to hear herself running, reduced to a mere living entity, the sound sometimes leading, sometimes lagging behind.
But whereas back then she only fathomed the moldering underbelly, the perennially moving backdrop of unrealized shadows of feeling, before which every effort to hold it together was rebuffed, the debasement, life’s unsolved riddles without rhyme or reason, befuddled and fatigued, and almost driven to tears at the fix in which she found herself – now that at this very moment she was reminded of the intimate tie frayed to the root in this gauzy, shimmering, thin vulnerability of those essential conceits: the darkly dreaming constraint of only existing through the other, the isolating solitude of not daring to awaken out of its grip, this intangibility of love like something slipping between two mirrors behind which you can sense the void, and here in this room she felt herself hiding behind her false confession as if behind a mask, awaiting the advances of another, the wondrous, perilous, arousing essence of the lie – furtively unfurling into a heretofore avoided realm the other can no longer reach, the dissolution of solitude, for the sake of absolute honesty, hazarding the void that sometimes, for a fleeting instant, looms behind the ideal.
And all at once she heard furtive steps, a creaking of the stairs, the sound of standing still; a quiet, creaking pause in the hall outside her door.
Her eyes turned to the entrance; it seemed odd to her that a body could be standing behind these thin boards; all she felt was a detached indifference, the randomness of this door on both sides of which tensions mounted, each unfathomable to the other.
She had already undressed. On the chair before the bed lay her skirt and slip exactly as she had just peeled them off. The air in this room, rented one day to one body and the next day to another, was infused with her own scent of self. She noticed a brass lock hanging lopsided from a dresser, her gaze rested on a small, tattered rug trodden by countless feet lying before her bed. She suddenly thought of the odor that emanated from and seeped back into the soles of so many strangers’ feet, a cozy, comforting smell, like that of your parents’ house. It was a curious, double-edged, shimmering impression, both strange and disgusting and yet irresistible, as if the amour-propre of all these people had filled the fibers of that rug leaving room for nothing but receptive notice. And still that person stood outside the door, emitting only little, involuntary sounds.
She was gripped by the sudden urge to fling herself onto that carpet to kiss the disgusting traces of all those feet, and like a snuffling bitch to fire herself up with the scent. It wasn’t a voluptuous whim, but rather simply something in her that howled like a wind or cried like a child. All of a sudden she knelt down, the rug’s stiffly knotted tufts loomed incomprehensibly tall before her eyes, she saw her heavy, female thighs hideously bent over it like something completely senseless and yet infused with an incomprehensible solemnity, her hands faced off on the ground like two five-limbed animals, she suddenly thought of the streetlight outside flinging its awful silent rings of light on the ceiling, of those bare walls, the emptiness, and then she thought again of the person standing there, sometimes budging, creaking like a tree beneath its bark, his surging blood and head of bushy foliage; while she lay here, separated only by a door, nevertheless somehow sensing the full sweetness of her ripe body with what was left of the lingering fortitude of her soul, immovable and perfectly intact, a mainstay of self that survives even the disfiguring scars of serious accident, carried away with that heavy, constant awareness as of a fallen animal.
Then she listened intently as the person departed. And still feeling torn out of herself, she suddenly fathomed that this was infidelity; more pernicious than the lie.
Slowly she rose to her knees. She considered the inconceivable, that it might very well have come to pass just now, and trembled, as you do when it is only a matter of chance that saves you from a peril you are powerless to resist. And she tried to think it through. Picturing her body lying under that of the stranger, with a piercing imaginative clarity like a minuscule blood clot infusing every last little thing, she felt herself growing pale, and the blushing words of voluptuous surrender, and the eyes of the man upon her, standing over her holding her down, his legs spread wide, eyes bristling with the piercing gaze of a bird of prey. And thinking all the while: this is infidelity. And it came to mind that when she returned from this one to her beloved, he would surely say: I can’t feel you deep inside, and she would only be able to reply with an evasive smile, a smile: believe me, it had nothing to do with us, and yet at that very moment she felt her knees pointlessly pressed against the ground, like an extraneous object, and felt herself through it, impenetrable, consumed by that woeful unprotected fragility of her innermost human potential that no word can capture, no return to normal can redress and chalk up to just another one of life’s contingencies. Drained of thoughts, no longer knowing if she had done wrong, she felt consumed by a strange, lonesome ache. An ache that hung like a space around her, a dissolved, floating space, dense like a soft darkness quietly rising around her. Lingering under the ache, fading little by little, a bright, clear, indifferent light shone on everything she did, the most intense and wrenching expression of her overpowering, dredged up and surrendered from that supposed precinct of self called soul…shriveled up, minuscule, cold, disassociated from mind, somewhere far, far below…
And a long while later it seemed as if a cautious finger were once again groping for the latch, and she knew the stranger was standing listening outside her door. She felt dizzy with the desire to crawl to the door and unlock it.
But she remained lying there on the floor in the middle of the room; something again held her back, an ugly feeling about herself, a feeling like before, like the stroke of a knife the thought gutted her longings that it might simply be a relapse into her past practices. And suddenly she raised and folded her hands: Help me, my dearest, please help me! She felt it like the prick of the truth, even though it was nothing really but the soft backstroke of a lingering thought: we came together through time and space, and now I penetrate your trust in painful ways.
And then came the serenity, the distance. The rush of the painfully amassed fortitude once the wall of resistance gave way. Her life lay there before her like a still reflection in a pool of water, past and future side by side on the crest of the moment. There are things you can never do, you don’t know why, maybe they’re the most important; you know your life is burdened with a terrible trepidation, a stiff constraint, like fingers crippled by the frost. And sometime it dissolves, like ice melting on the meadow, your thoughts turned inward, a dark burst of brilliance spreading out in the distance. But oblivious to it all, your life, your brittle life, the life that really matters gets snagged and sidetracked, link by link, and you don’t do a thing.
Suddenly she rose upright, and the compulsion that she had to do it drove her silently forward; her hands released the latch. But all was still, no one knocked. She opened the door and looked out; nobody there, the bare walls gaped back in the dim lamplight. She must not have heard him go.
She lay down, riddled with self-reproach. Already on the edge of sleep, she sensed: I’m hurting you, yet strangely convinced: all that I do, you do. Already lulled into somnolent forgetting, we let go of all there is to let go only to entangle ourselves all the more tightly in the part that no one can touch. And just once torn wide awake for a fleeting instant, she thought: This person is going to defeat us. But what is defeat? And her musings drifted dreamily around the question. Her guilty consciousness lingered like the last attendant tug of tenderness. A great, dark clambering for self fell upon her as upon someone about to die, behind her closed eyelids she saw bushes, clouds and birds flying by, and felt herself like a fleeting nothing, even though it was all only there for her. And then came a moment of closing off and shutting out everything extraneous to herself, and there at the tenuous borderline between wakefulness and sleep came a great, pure, all-embracing intimation of love. A trembling dissolution of all seeming contradictions.