by Robert Musil
Agathe was aware of her brother’s watching her, but she did not let him know it. During the pauses, when she felt his eyes following her movements while the interval between a response and the next remark was not so much a complete stop as like a car coasting over some deep and risky patch of road with its motor switched off, she, too, enjoyed the supercharged air and the calm intensity that surrounded their reunion. When they had finished unpacking and putting things away and Agathe was alone in her bath, an adventure threatened to break into these peaceful pastures like a wolf, for she had undressed down to her underclothes in the room where Ulrich, smoking a cigarette, was now keeping watch over her abandoned things. Soaking in the water, she wondered what she should do. There was no maid, so ringing was as pointless as calling out; there was evidently nothing to be done but to wrap herself in Ulrich’s bathrobe, which was hanging on the wall, knock on the door, and send him out of the room. But considering the serious intimacy that, if not already flourishing, had just been born between them, Agathe cheerfully doubted whether it was appropriate to play the young lady and beg Ulrich to withdraw, so she decided to ignore the ambivalence of femininity and simply appear before him as the natural, familiar companion he should see in her, dressed or not.
Yet when she resolutely entered the room again, both felt an unexpected quickening of the heart. They each tried not to feel embarrassed. For an instant they could not shake off the conventional inconsistency that permits virtual nakedness on the beach while indoors the hem of a chemise or a panty becomes the smugglers path to romantic intimacy. Ulrich smiled awkwardly as Agathe, with the light of the anteroom behind her, stood in the open door like a silver statue lightly veiled in a haze of batiste and, in a voice much too emphatically casual, asked for her dress and stockings, which turned out to be in the next room. Ulrich showed her the way, and saw to his secret delight that she strode off in a manner that was a little too boyish, taking a sort of defiant pleasure in it, as women tend to do when they don’t feel themselves protected by their skirts. Then something new came up, when a little later Agathe found herself stuck midway getting into her dress and had to call Ulrich for help. While he was busy at her back she sensed, without sisterly jealousy but rather, if anything, with pleasure, that he clearly knew his way around women’s clothing, and she moved with agility to make it easier for him when the nature of the procedure made it necessary.
Bending over close to the moving, delicate, yet full and fresh skin of her shoulders, intent upon the unaccustomed task, which raised a flush on his brow, Ulrich felt himself lapped by a pleasing sensation not easily put into words, unless one might say that his body was equally affected by having a woman and yet not having a woman so close to him; or one could just as easily have said that though he was unquestionably standing there in his own shoes, he nevertheless felt drawn out of himself and over to her as though he had been given a second, far more beautiful, body for his own.
This was why the first thing he said to his sister when he had straightened up again was: “Now I know what you are: you are my self-love!” It may have sounded odd, but it really expressed what it was that moved him so. “In a sense,” he explained, “I’ve always lacked the right sort of love for myself that others seem to have in abundance. And now,” he added, “by some mistake or by fate, it has been embodied in you instead of myself!”
It was his first attempt that evening to pass a verdict on the meaning of his sisters arrival.
25
THE SIAMESE TWINS
Later that evening he came back to this.
“You should know,” he started to tell his sister, “that there’s a kind of self-love that’s foreign to me, a certain tenderness toward oneself that seems to come naturally to most other people. I don’t know how best to describe it. I could say, for instance, that I’ve always had lovers with whom I’ve had a skewed relationship. They’ve been illustrations of some sudden idea, caricatures of my mood—in effect, just instances of my inability to be on easy terms with other people. That in itself reveals something about one’s relationship to oneself. Basically, lovers I have chosen were always women I didn’t like….”
“There’s nothing wrong with that!” Agathe interrupted. “If I were a man, I wouldn’t have any qualms about trifling with women in the most irresponsible way. And I’d desire them only out of absentmindedness and wonder.”
“Oh? Would you really? How nice of you!”
“They’re such absurd parasites. Women share a man’s life on the same level as his dog!” There was no hint of moral indignation in Agathe’s statement. She was pleasantly tired and kept her eyes closed, for she had gone to bed early and Ulrich, who had come to say good night, saw her lying in his place in his bed. But it was also the bed in which Bonadea had lain thirty-six hours earlier, which was probably why Ulrich reverted to the subject of his mistresses.
“All I was trying to describe was my own incapacity for a reasonably forgiving relationship to myself,” he repeated, smiling. “For me to take a real interest in something it must be part of some context, it must be controlled by an idea. The experience itself I’d really prefer to have behind me, as a memory; the emotional effort it exacts strikes me as unpleasant and absurdly beside the point. That’s how it is with me, to describe myself to you bluntly. Now, the simplest, most instinctive idea one can have, at least when one is young, is that one’s a hell of a fellow, the new man the world’s been waiting for. But that doesn’t last beyond thirty!” He reflected for a moment and then said: “That’s not it. It’s so hard to talk about oneself. What I would have to say is that I have never subjected myself to an idea with staying power. One never turned up. One should love an idea like a woman; be overjoyed to get back to it. And one always has it inside oneself! And always looks for it in everything outside! I never formed such ideas. My relationship to the so-called great ideas, and perhaps even to those that really are great, has always been man-to-man: I never felt I was born to submit to them; they always provoked me to overthrow them and put others in their place. Perhaps it was precisely this jealousy that drove me to science, whose laws are established by teamwork and never regarded as immutable!” Again he paused and laughed, at either himself or his argument. “But however that may be,” he went on seriously, “by connecting no idea or every idea with myself, I got out of the habit of taking life seriously. I get much more out of it when I read about it in a novel, where it’s wrapped up in some point of view, but when I’m supposed to experience it in all its fullness it always seems already obsolete, overdone in an old-fashioned way, and intellectually outdated. And I don’t think that’s peculiar to me. Most people today feel much the same. Lots of people feign an urgent love of life, the way schoolchildren are taught to hop about merrily among the daisies, but there’s always a certain premeditation about it, and they feel it. Actually, they’re as capable of killing each other in cold blood as they are of being the best of friends. Our time certainly does not take all the adventures and goings-on it’s full of at all seriously. When they happen, there’s a fuss. They immediately set off more happenings, a land of vendetta of happenings, a whole compulsive alphabet of sequels, from B to Z, and all because someone said A. But these happenings in our lives have less life than a book, because they have no coherent meaning.”
So Ulrich talked, loosely, his moods changing. Agathe offered no response; she still had her eyes closed but was smiling.
Ulrich said: “Now I’ve forgotten what I’m telling you. I don’t think I know my way back to the beginning.”
They were silent for a while. He was able to scrutinize his sister’s face at leisure, since it was not defended by the gaze of her eyes. It lay there, a piece of naked body, the way women are when they’re together in a women’s public bath. The feminine, unguarded, natural cynicism of this sight, not intended for men’s eyes, still had an unusual effect on Ulrich, though no longer quite as powerful as in their first days together, when Agathe had from the start claimed her right
as a sister to talk to him without any mental beating around the bush, since for her he was not a man like others. He remembered the mixture of surprise and horror he had experienced as a boy when he saw a pregnant woman on the street, or a woman nursing her child; secrets from which the boy had been carefully shielded suddenly bulged out full-blown and unembarrassed in the light of day. Perhaps he had long been carrying vestiges of such reactions about with him, for all at once he seemed to feel entirely free of them. That Agathe was a woman with many experiences behind her was a pleasant and comfortable thought; there was no need to be on his guard in talking with her, as he would be with a young girl; indeed, it was touchingly natural that everything was morally relaxed with a mature woman. It also made him feel protective toward her, to make up to her for something by being good to her in some way. He decided to do all he could for her. He even decided to look for another husband for her. This need to be kind restored to him, although he barely noticed, the lost thread of his discourse.
“Our self-love probably undergoes a change during adolescence,” he said without transition. “That’s when a whole meadow of tenderness in which one had been playing gets mowed down to provide the fodder for one particular instinct.”
“So that the cow can give milk!” Agathe added, after the slightest pause, pertly and with dignity but without opening her eyes.
“Yes, it’s all connected, I suppose,” Ulrich agreed, and went on: “So there’s a moment when the tenderness goes out of our lives and concentrates on that one particular operation, which then remains overcharged with it. It’s as though there were a terrible drought everywhere on earth except for one place where it never stops raining, don’t you think?”
Agathe said: “I think that as a child I loved my dolls more fiercely than I have ever loved a man. After you’d gone I found a whole trunkful of my old dolls in the attic.”
“What did you do with them?” Ulrich asked. “Did you give them away?”
“Who was there to give them to? I gave them a funeral in the kitchen stove,” she said.
Ulrich responded with animation: “When I remember as far back as I can, I’d say that there was hardly any separation between inside and outside. When I crawled toward something, it came on wings to meet me; when something important happened, the excitement was not just in us, but the things themselves came to a boil. I won’t claim that we were happier then than we were later on. After all, we hadn’t yet taken charge of ourselves. In fact, we didn’t really yet exist; our personal condition was not yet separated from the world’s. It sounds strange, but it’s true: our feelings, our desires, our very selves, were not yet quite inside ourselves. What’s even stranger is that I might as easily say: they were not yet quite taken away from us. If you should sometime happen to ask yourself today, when you think you’re entirely in possession of yourself, who you really are, you will discover that you always see yourself from the outside, as an object. You’ll notice that one time you get angry, another time you get sad, just as your coat will sometimes be wet and sometimes too warm. No matter how intensely you try to look at yourself, you may at most find out something about the outside, but you’ll never get inside yourself. Whatever you do, you remain outside yourself, with the possible exception of those rare moments when a friend might say that you’re beside yourself. It’s true that as adults we’ve made up for this by being able to think at any time that ‘I am’—if you think that’s fun. You see a car, and somehow in a shadowy way you also see: ‘I am seeing a car.’ You’re in love, or sad, and see that it’s you. But neither the car, nor your sadness, nor your love, nor even yourself, is quite fully there. Nothing is as completely there as it once was in childhood; everything you touch, including your inmost self, is more or less congealed from the moment you have achieved your ‘personality,’ and what’s left is a ghostly hanging thread of self-awareness and murky self-regard, wrapped up in a wholly external existence. What’s gone wrong? There’s a feeling that something might still be salvaged. Surely you can’t claim that a child’s experience is all that different from a man’s? I don’t know any real answer, even if there may be this or that idea about it. But for a long time I’ve responded by having lost my love for this kind of ‘being myself and for this kind of world.”
Ulrich was glad that Agathe listened to him without interrupting, for he was not expecting an answer from her any more than he was from himself, and was convinced that for the present, nobody could give him the kind of answer he had in mind. Yet he did not fear for an instant that anything he was talking about might be above her head. He did not see it as philosophizing, nor even as an unusual subject for a conversation, any more than a young man—and he was behaving like one, in this situation—will let the difficulty of groping for the right words keep him from finding everything simple when he is exchanging views on the eternal problems of “Who are you? This is who I am” with someone else. He derived the assurance that his sister was able to follow him word for word not from having reflected on it but from her inner being. His eyes rested on her face, and there was something in it that made him happy. This face, its eyes closed, did not thrust back at him. The attraction it held for him was bottomless, even in the sense that it seemed to draw him into never-ending depths. Submerging himself in contemplation of this face, he nowhere found that muddy bottom of dissolved resistances from which the diver into love kicks off, to rebound to the surface and reach dry ground again. But since he was accustomed to experience every inclination toward a woman as a forcibly reversed disinclination against human beings, which—even though he found it regrettable—did offer some guarantee against losing himself in her, the pure inclination as he bent even deeper toward her in curiosity alarmed him almost as if he were losing his balance, so that he soon drew back from this state, and from pure happiness took refuge in a boy s trick for recalling Agathe to everyday reality: with the most delicate touch he could manage, he tried to open her eyes. Agathe opened them wide with a laugh and cried: “Isn’t this pretty rough treatment for someone who’s supposed to be your self-love?”
This response was as boyish as his attack, and their looks collided hard, like two little boys who want to tussle but are laughing too much to begin. Suddenly Agathe dropped this and asked seriously: “You know that myth Plato tells, following some ancient source, that the gods divided the original human being into two halves, male and female?” She had propped herself up on one elbow and unexpectedly blushed, feeling awkward at having asked Ulrich if he knew so familiar a story; then she resolutely charged ahead: “Now those two pathetic halves do all kinds of silly things to come together again. It’s in all the schoolbooks for older children; unfortunately, they never tell you why it doesn’t work!”
“I can tell you that,” Ulrich broke in, glad to see how well she had understood him. “Nobody knows which of so many halves running around in the world is his missing half. He grabs one that seems to be his, vainly trying to become one with her, until the futility of it becomes hopelessly clear. If a child results, both halves believe for a few youthful years that they’ve at least become one in the child. But the child is merely a third half, which soon shows signs of trying to get as far away from the other two as it possibly can and look for a fourth half. In this way human beings keep ‘halving’ themselves physiologically, while the ideal of oneness remains as far away as the moon outside the bedroom window.”
“You’d think that siblings might have succeeded halfway already!” Agathe interjected in a voice that had become husky.
“Twins, possibly.”
“Aren’t we twins?”
“Certainly!” Ulrich suddenly became evasive. “Twins are rare; twins of different gentler especially so. But when, into the bargain, they differ in age and have hardly known each other for the longest time, it’s quite a phenomenon—one really worthy of us!” he declared, struggling to get back into a shallower cheeriness.
“But we met as twins!” Agathe challenged him, ignoring his tone.