by Robert Musil
Leo Tolstoy: Consciousness is the greatest moral misfortune that a man can attain.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky: “All consciousness is a disease.”
From Gorky’s diary.
Clarisse immediately made a further discovery. The vanished forests of the carboniferous era, bubbling, rampant, gigantic, fantastic, are being freed again today under the influence of the sun as psychic forces, and it is through the exploitation of the energy that perished in that earlier time that die enormous spiritual energy of the present age arises.
She says: Before, it was only a game, now it has to get serious; here she becomes uncanny to him.
It was evening. To cool off she and Ulrich went for a walk in the dark. Hundreds of frogs were drumming in a small pond, and the crickets were rasping shrilly, so that the night was as animated as an African village starting a ritual dance. Clarisse asked Ulrich to go into the pond with her and kill himself so that their consciousness would gradually become swamp, coal, and pure energy.
Kill him!
This was a little too much. Ulrich was in danger, if her ideas ran on in this fashion, of having Clarisse slit his throat one of these nights.
Another chapter: she really tries it!
He telegraphed Walter to come immediately, since his attempts to calm Clarisse had failed and he could no longer assume the responsibility.
A kind of settling of accounts takes place between Walter and Ulrich.
Walter reproaches him: You fell in with this “redemption”; do you want to be a redeemer? (Instead of subjecting Clarisse to being cured by means of society.) Ulrich to this: If I myself really had the redeeming ideas, no one would believe them. If Christ were to return, he wouldn’t get through today.
Rather paunchy belly, profound solidarity with Clarisse.
Ulrich: Aren’t you jealous?
Walter: If I were, it would be a serious mistake (crime). I can’t have that to complain about too; there are deeper values between people (husband and wife) than faithfulness.
Ulrich—who was thinking of Agathe—is depressed, seems ordinary to himself. But sensitive personal reactions while conforming to public norms belong to the uncreative person. Tells himself with a venomous clarity.
Walter sees him lying on the ground. Wrecked person. Takes revenge.
***
A weak person who sees a strong person on the ground loves him. Not because he now has him in his power. Nor because the envied person is now just as weak as he is. But loving himself in the other. He feels through him an enhancement of his self-love and tortures him from a kind of masochism.
This weak egotist, who has pushed his life hither and yon in trivial arrangements, is in this instance, where everything is the way he wants it to be and has often dreamed it, filled with soft beauty.
It was decided to bring Clarisse back to a new sanatorium; she accepted this without resistance and almost in silence. She was terribly disappointed in Ulrich and realized that she would have to go back into a clinic—”in order to try to get the circulation working once more”; it was so sluggish that even she had not been able to do it the first time.
She settled into her new abode with the confidence of a person returning to a hotel where he is a familiar guest. Walter stayed with her for four days. He felt the blessing of Ulrich’s not being along and of being able to control Clarisse alone, but did not admit this to himself. The manner he had adopted toward Ulrich had, he thought, great loftiness, and he also believed he had succeeded in that; but now that it was over, something quite unpleasant made its presence known: that he had been afraid of Ulrich the whole time. His body desired manly satisfaction. He ignored Clarisse’s condition and convinced himself that she was not sick but would recover most quickly if, aside from the physical care, she were treated psychologically as an ordinary woman as much as possible. But still he knew that he was only telling himself this. To his astonishment, he found less resistance in Clarisse than he was accustomed to. He suffered. He felt disgusted with himself. In the first night he had got a small cut that hurt: in his pain, and shuddering at his brutality, he thought he was scourging both her and himself. Then his leave was over. It did not occur to him to desert his office. He had to pack his soul with watch in hand.
Clarisse underwent a diet cure that had been prescribed for her, since her nervous overexcitement was regarded as die consequence of her physical deterioration. She was emaciated and as unkempt as a dog that has been wandering around free for weeks. The unaccustomed nourishment, whose effect she began to feel, impressed her. She even put up with Walter, gently, as she did with the cure that forced strange bodies on her and compelled her to gulp down coarse things. Dejectedly she put up with everything in order to acquire in her own mind the attestation of health. “I’m only living on my own credit,” she told herself, “no one believes in me. Perhaps it’s only a prejudice that I’m alive?” It calmed her, while Walter was there, to fill herself up with matter and take on earthly ballast, as she called it.
But the day Walter left, the Greek was there. He was staying at the sanatorium, perhaps he had been there longer than Clarisse, but now he crossed her path. As Clarisse passed by he was saying to a lady: “A person who has traveled as much as I have finds it absolutely impossible to love a woman.” It might even be that he had said: “A person who comes from as far away as I do…”; Clarisse immediately understood it as a sign meant for her that this man had been led onto her path. The same evening she wrote him a letter. Its contents ran: I am the only woman you will love. She went into detail. You are a good height for a man—she wrote—but you have a figure like a woman’s and feminine hands. You have a “vulture’s beak,” an aquiline nose from which the useless excess of energy has been drained; it is more beautiful than an aquiline nose. You have large, dark, deep eye sockets, painful caves of vice. You know the world, the overworld, and the underworld. I noticed right away that you wanted to hypnotize me, although your glance was really tired and timid. You guessed that I am your destiny.
I am not here because I am ill. But because, instinctively, I always choose the right means. My blood courses slowly. No one has ever been able to find a fever in me. At worst, some undetectable local contamination; no organically caused stomach illness, however much I suffer the greatest weakness as the result of complete exhaustion of my gastric system. Whatever our doctor may tell you, moreover, I am on the whole healthy, even though I myself might be ill in part. Proof: precisely that energy for absolute isolation and detachment that brought me here. I guessed with unerring accuracy what is needed at the moment, while a typically sick creature cannot become healthy at all, much less make itself healthy. Pay attention to me. This has also made me guess with unerring accuracy what it is you need.
You are the great hermaphrodite everyone is waiting for. Upon you the gods have bestowed male and female in equal measure. You will redeem the radiant world from the dark, unutterable schism of love. Oh, how I understood when you exclaimed that no woman was able to claim you! But I am the great feminine hermaphrodite. Whom no man can satisfy. In solitude I bear being split into two. Which you possess only in your mind, and therefore still only as a longing that we must overcome. With a black shield before it. A divine encounter has brought us here. We cannot evade our destiny and make the world wait a hundred years …!
The next day the Greek brought her letter back. Out of discretion he brought it himself. He told her he did not want to give her any occasion to write such things to him. His rejection was noble but firm. His hypnotist’s face, cinematically demonic, masculine, would, placed in any random crowd of people, immediately have become the center of attention. But his hands were weak like a woman’s; the skin of his head twitched involuntarily at times beneath his thick, carefully parted blue-black hair, and his eyes trembled slightly while Clarisse observed them. Under the influence of the diet cure and new moods, Clarisse had indeed changed physically in the last few days; she had become heavier and coarser, and her piano hands
, rough from work, which she was clenching and unclenching in her excitement, aroused in the Levantine a peculiar fear; he was constantly drawn to look at them, felt the impulse to flee, but could not stand up.
Clarisse repeated to him that he could not evade his destiny, and reached out to grab him. He saw the horrible hand coming at him and could not stir. Only when her mouth slid past his eyes to his own did he find the strength to jump up and flee. Clarisse held on to his pants and tried to embrace him. He uttered a soft cry of disgust and fear and reached the door.
Clarisse was overjoyed. She was left with the feeling that this was a man of incredible, rare, and absolutely demonic purity; but the indecencies that she herself had committed also seemed to her tinged with this feeling. Her breathing became broad and free; the satisfaction at following the command of her inner voice past the ultimate constraints stretched her breasts like metal springs. For twenty-four hours she actually forgot everything that had brought her here, mission and suffering; her heart no longer shot arrows at the sky; all those she had fired off previously came back one after the other and drilled through it. Proudly she suffered horrible pains of desire. For the space of twenty-four hours. This frigid young woman, who as long as she had been healthy had never learned the frenzy of sex, received this delirium like an agony that raged through her body with such force that it could not hold still for an instant, but was driven back and forth by the terrible hunger of her nerves, while her delighted mind determined by this violence that the boundless power of all sexual desire, from which she had to redeem the world, had entered into her. The sweetness of this torture, the restless impotence, a need to throw herself in front of this man and weep with gratitude, the happiness she could not forbid herself, were for her a demonstration of how monstrous the demon was with whom she had to take up the struggle. This mentally ill woman who had not yet loved now loved with everything that had been spared in her, like a healthy woman but with desperate intensity, as if, with the utmost possible strength of which this emotion was capable, she wanted to tear it away from the shadows that surrounded and irresistibly reinterpreted it.
Like all women, she waited for the return of the man who had spurned her. Twenty-four hours passed, and then—approximately at the same hour as previously—the Greek actually did knock at Clarisse’s door. A power he could not understand led this weak-willed man with the feminine sensibility to return to the situation in which the brutal attack on him had been inconclusively broken off. He came impeccably attired and coiffed, pleading carefully rehearsed excuses, and inwardly reinforced by the reflection that one had to fully enjoy this interesting woman; but when he looked at Clarisse his pupils trembled like the breasts of a girl being fondled for the first time. Clarisse did not beat around the bush. She repeated to him that he was not allowed to duck out, God too had suffered on the Mount of Olives, and went for him. His knees trembled and his hands went up against hers as helplessly as handkerchiefs to fend her off, but Clarisse slung her legs and arms around him and sealed his mouth with the hot phosphate breath of her own. In the extremity of his fear the Greek defended himself by confessing that he was homosexual. The unfortunate man had no idea what to do when she declared that that was precisely why he had to love her.
He was one of those half-sick, half-sociable people who wander through sanatoriums like hotels in which one meets more interesting people than in the ordinary kind. He spoke several languages and had read the books that were on everyone’s tongue. A southeastern European elegance, black hair, and indolent dark eyes made him the focus of admiration of all those women who love intellect and the demonic in a man. The story of his life was like a lottery of the numbers of the hotel rooms to which he had been invited. He had never worked in his life, had been set up by his wealthy merchant family, and was in accord with the idea that after the death of his father his younger brother would take charge of their affairs. He did not love women but became their prey out of vanity, and was not resolute enough to follow his preference for men other than occasionally in the circles of big-city prostitution, where they disgusted him. He was really a big fat boy in whom the predilection of that indeterminate age for all vices had never given way to anything subsequent, and who had merely wrapped himself in the protection of a melancholy indolence and irresolution.
This wretched man had never experienced from a woman an attack of the kind Clarisse was now subjecting him to. Without his being able to grasp it from anything specific, she addressed herself to his vanity. “Great hermaphrodite,” she said again and again, and there shone from her eyes something that was like the King of the Mountain, for him playful and yet frenzied. —Remarkable woman, the Greek said. —You are the great hermaphrodite—she said—who is not able to love either women or men! And that’s just why you’ve been called to redeem them from the original sin that weakens them!
Of the three men who influenced Clarisse’s life, Walter, Meingast, and Ulrich, Meingast, without its ever having become clear to her, was the one who had through his manner made the greatest impression on her by most powerfully stimulating her ambition—if one may so characterize the desire for wings of the uncreative mind banished to an ordinary life. His league of men, from which she was excluded, clanking in her imagination like archangels, had transformed themselves into the idea that the strong and redeemed person (and along with this: redeemed from marriage and love) was homosexual. “God himself is homosexual,” she told the Greek. “He penetrates the believer, overpowers him, impregnates him, weakens him, rapes him, treats him like a woman, and demands submission from him, while excluding women from the Church. Impregnated by his God, the believer walks among women as among petty, silly elements he doesn’t notice. Love is unfaithfulness to God, adultery; it robs the spirit of its human dignity. The madness of sin and the madness of bliss entice human action into the marriage bed (bed of adultery). O my female king, assume along with me the sins of humanity in order to redeem it by committing them, although we already see through them.”
“Crazy—crazy,” the Greek murmured, but at the same time Clarisse’s ideas made unresisting sense to him and touched a point in his life that had never been treated with such seriousness or such passion. Clarisse roused his indolent soul like a dream raging in deepest darkness but, in doing so, treated him the way an older boy in puberty gets hold of a younger one and fondles him in order to carry out on him the most insane sacrifices of the cult of first love. The Greek’s dignity as an interesting man was most violently compromised by this role being forced upon him, but at the same time this role hit upon fantasies buried deep within him, and Clarisse’s ruthless visits aroused in him a trembling condition of bondage. Nowhere did he any longer feel safe from her; she invited him on outings in a carriage, during which she molested him behind the drivers back, and his greatest fear was that one day she would do it in the sanatorium in front of everybody, without his being able to defend himself. Finally, he began to tremble as soon as she came near him, but let her do whatever she wanted. Cette femme est folle—he said this sentence softly, plaintively, incessantly, in three languages, like a magic charm.
But at last—this peculiar, half-transparent relationship was attracting attention, and he imagined people were already making fun of him—his vanity tore him out of it; weeping almost from weakness, he gathered all his strength to shake this woman off. When they got into the carriage he said, averting his face, that it was the last time. As they were riding, he pointed out a policeman to her, claimed that he was having a relationship with him and that the policeman wanted him to have nothing more to do with Clarisse; he slung his glances around this massive man standing in the street as if he were a rock, but was torn away by the rolling carriage, feeling nevertheless strengthened by his He, as if someone had sent him some kind of help. But it had the opposite effect on Clarisse. To see the lover of her “female king” affected her as a surprising concretization. In poems she had already characterized herself as a hermaphrodite, and now thought she could
distinguish hermaphroditic qualities in her body for the first time. She could hardly expect them to break through to the surface. It’s a divine constellation of love, she said.
The Greek was concerned about the coachman and pushed her away. He breathed into her face that this was their last trip. Without looking around, the coachman, apparently sensing that something was going on behind him, whipped the horses on. Suddenly a thunderstorm came up from three sides and surprised them. The air was heavy and filled with an uncanny tension; lightning flashed and thunder came crashing down. “This evening I’m receiving a visit from my lover,” the Greek said. “You may not come to me!” “We’re leaving tonight!” Clarisse answered. “For Berlin, the city of tremendous energies!” Just then, with a shattering crash, a bolt struck the fields not far from them, and the horses strained in a gallop against the traces. “No!” the Greek shouted, and involuntarily hid himself against Clarisse, who embraced him. “I deem myself a Thessalian witch!” she screamed into the uproar that now broke loose from all sides. Lightning blazes roared, mingled water and earth flew up from the ground, terror shook the air. The Greek was trembling like some poor animal body jolted by an electric charge. Clarisse was jubilant, embraced him with “lightning arms,” and enveloped him. That was when he jumped out of the carriage.
When Clarisse got back, long after he did—she had forced the coachman to drive slowly through the storm, and slowly on after the sun had come out again and fields, horses, and the leather of the coach were steaming, while she sang mysterious things—she found in her room a note from the Greek informing her once again that the policeman was in his room, forbidding her to visit, and declaring that he was leaving in the morning. At dinner, Clarisse discovered that his departure was the truth. She wanted to rush to him, but became aware that all the women were observing her. The restlessness in the corridors seemed never to end. Women were passing by every time Clarisse stuck her head out of the door in order to scurry to the Greek’s room. These stupid people looked mockingly at Clarisse, instead of comprehending that the policeman was scorning all of them. And for some reason Clarisse suddenly no longer trusted herself to walk upright and innocently to the Greek’s door. Finally, it was quiet, and she slipped out barefoot. She scratched softly at the door, but no one answered, although light was coming through the keyhole. Clarisse pressed her lips to die wood and whispered. It remained quiet inside; someone was listening but not answering. The Greek was lying in bed with his “protector” and despised her. Or: a strange man angrily opens the door. The Greek already gone? Then she, who had never loved, was overcome by the nameless torment of submissive jealousy. —I am not worthy of him—she whispered—he thinks I’m sick, and, whispering, her lips slid down the door to the dust. She was befuddled by a heartrending rapture; moaning softly, she pushed against the door in order to crawl to him and kiss his hand, and did not understand that her rapture had been thwarted.