The Man Without Qualities, Volume 2

by Robert Musil

  On an excursion through Rome’s palaces she encountered the marvelous, totally red portrait of Innocent X by Velazquez; the sight shot through her like a bolt of lightning. Now she saw clearly that this burning color of life, red, was at the same time the color of Christianity, which, in Nietzsche’s phrase, had given classical Eros poison to drink, the color of ascesis and inculpation of the senses. —Oh my friends— Clarisse thought—you will not catch me! Her heart beat as if she had recognized a mortal danger at the last moment. She had discovered the ambivalent countenance of this city. It was the city of the Pope, and she remembered that Nietzsche had attempted to live here and had fled. She went to the house where he had lived. She took in nothing. The house was “spiritually closed.” She walked home smiling, outwitting this city at every step. It was a double city. Here the dark pessimism of Christianity flared up to cardinal red, and here the blackness of insanity had flowed into Nietzsche’s red blood. But what she thought was not so important to Clarisse; the main thing was the smiling ambivalence in everything she saw. She went past palaces, excavations, and museums; she had still seen only the least part of them, and her impressions had not sunk to the measure of reality; she had assumed that the most marvelous treasures of the world were here set up side by side, but they were laid out like a bait; she had to remove this beauty from its hook very, very carefully. And everything that is beautiful in youth depends on the things around which people circle having one aspect that is known only to oneself.

  In some way or other, the idea had seized Clarisse that she had to take up the mission at which Nietzsche had failed here in a different way, by beginning with the north. Evening had come. Once more she looked out the window of her small room: in the bar below, the first guests were already beginning to shout and sing, and if you leaned your body way out—above their heads, like a northern gargoyle—and craned your neck, you could see the round serrated shape of a gray church standing like a tiara before the still-darker gray of the night.

  From what remained of her money she bought a ticket that took her back to one of the small towns through which she had passed on her way down. An unerring feeling told her at the railway station that it was not the right place. She went on by the next train. In this way Clarisse traveled for three days and four nights. On the fourth morning she was traveling along a seacoast and found a place that held her fast. With no money, she went into the hotels. This fact, that she had no money, was quite sudden and very peculiar; she made a rather long speech to the people in the hotels, in order to get them to serve her, and they listened politely but without understanding; then she hit upon the idea, because Walter was not to know where she was staying, of appealing to Ulrich. she sent him a long telegram in German.

  Clarisse—Island

  That Clarisse appealed to Ulrich was not only due to her needing money and wanting to keep her whereabouts concealed from Walter. Involved as well was an “I mean you,” a grasping with rays of feeling across mountains and far distances. Clarisse had come to the conviction that she was in love with Ulrich. That was not quite so simple as such a thing can be. She explained the horrible scene between the two of them that had upset her so, and everything that preceded it, by saying that at the time it had been too soon for Ulrich; it was only now that he was in the right spot in the system of her imaginings (but that is love, when a person finds himself in the right spot in the system of our imaginings), and the energy of the whole was streaming toward him in a way that was unheard of. Wherever his name fell, the earth melted. When she uttered it her tongue was like a wisp of sun in a mild rain. Clarisse explored her new surroundings. They consisted of a small island pitched close to the mainland, bearing an old fort left half open, and a gigantic sandbank that pushed out from this island farther into the sea and that with its trees and bushes formed a large empty second island, belonging to Clarisse alone when she had herself rowed over there. It seemed people did not have much confidence in its stability, for although there was an old hut on it in which to store nets and other fishing gear, this hut, too, was abandoned and decayed, and there were no other signs of settlement or division of possessions. Wind, waves, white sand, sharp grasses, and all sorts of small animals lived here freely together; the resonance of water, earth, and sky was as empty and loud as tin banging on tin.

  The inhabited island behind it boasted high, fortified walls overgrown with green; cannons that did not intimidate but, wrapped in sailcloth, looked astonishingly like prehistoric animals; moats, near which were unbelievably large rats; and in the midst of the rats running around in broad daylight there was a small tavern shaped like a cube, with a four-sided pyramid for a roof, under shaggy trees. There Clarisse had taken a room for herself and Ulrich. The house was also the canteen for the fort, and all day long dark-blue soldiers with yellow stripes on their sleeves stood around nearby. One did not have the feeling of people going about life but rather felt an oppression, which emptied the heart, as if before a deportation or something similar. The young men too, strolling with rifles on their arms in front of the cannons wrapped in sails, reinforced this impression: who had put them there? Where, at what distance, was the brain of this madness that expressed itself in a joyless, pedantic automatism preserved in catatonic rigidity?

  It was the right island for Ulrich and Clarisse, and Ulrich baptized it the “Island of Health,” because every fit of madness seemed bright against its dark background. He had received Clarisse’s telegram in the night when he came home and was crossing his garden. In the light of a lamp on the white wall of his house he had torn open the dispatch and read it, because he thought it came from Agathe. It was already the end of May. But the May night was like a belated March night; the stars looked down sharply, withdrawn to their heights, icily crisp out of the unilluminated, infinitely remote canopy of the sky. The telegram’s sentences were long and confused, but held together by a rhythm of excitement. When Clarisse turned her back on the small military middle of her island, loneliness stretched before her like the desert of the anchorite. Connected with this idea of retiring from the world was an overloud, unchanging emotional tone full of covetous horror, something like the final purification and trial on the path of the “great one.” The adultery to which she had condemned herself would have to be consummated on this island as on a cross, for a cross on which she had to lay herself was what the empty sand over there across the waves, trodden by no one, seemed to her to be. Something of all this came through in the telegram. Ulrich guessed that the great disorder had now really overtaken Clarisse, but that was precisely what suited him.

  In their small inn they had a room that contained barely the most indispensable furniture, but a chandelier of Venetian glass hung from the center of the ceiling, and large mirrors in broad glass frames that were painted with flowers hung on the walls. In the mornings they went over to the Island of Health, which hovered in the air like a mirage, and from there they looked back on the inhabited island, which, with its cannons, embrasures, serrations, and little houses and trees, lay there like a round, perfect, exiled word that has lost the connection to its discourse.

  Island I

  Clarisse arrives while Agathe and Ulrich are still together. Stays 1-3 days in the hotel, during which time she seeks and finds her island. This is when she tells the Moosbrugger story. Invites Ulrich to the island (or Ulrich and Agathe) and Ulrich comes over. Spends half a day with her. Her hut, etc.

  So it apparently goes not as far as intercourse but only to Clarisse’s readiness. This is the way to utilize the material from the old coitus scene.

  Island II

  Something like:

  [I] Agathe has left only a few lines in a note. Contents?

  [II] Shortly thereafter Walter arrives toward evening. Ulrich spontaneously: Did you see Agathe? That did not happen. But that Agathe had been there until just now calms his jealousy. Walter, somewhat paunchy belly.

  Ulrich takes him to Clarisse. Clarisse is sitting somewhere on the beach. Ulrich ha
dn’t been paying attention to her. Walter feels profound solidarity with the ill and abandoned.

  They enter the fishermen’s hut. It looks as if the three of them had lived there. They arrange things for the three of them. Walter doesn’t say anything about it; acts *as if it is a self-explanatory matter of being chaperon.

  [III] How does Clarisse take this? — That also depends on what came before (Island I), which is still undetermined.

  Idea: She confesses. If there had been intercourse with Ulrich, that way; but more probably (because of Agathe’s proximity) coitus is only to be reduced to hints, a half seduction of Ulrich by Clarisse. So nothing took place, and it also makes the scene stronger if she confesses made-up sins and Ulrich listens. Usable as climax: suddenly or by degrees, the powerful sexual arousal turns into the mystic emotion of transfigured union with God, which is almost unimaginable.

  Walter doubtless does not believe, Ulrich makes him a sign, but still there is something credible in it, as if its not being true were merely accidental.

  [IV] In order to leave Clarisse alone while she gets undressed, they go outside, then toward the beach. Walter says, because he is jealous: it is madness to doubt a person’s faithfulness. There are situations in which one is quite properly uncertain. In the half-light he looks at Ulrich from the side. But you must have the courage to let yourself be deceived. That is the way a bullet must sometimes heal over without being removed. Out of this deception that you encapsulate within yourself something great can arise. It’s a matter not only of faithfulness between man and wife but also of other values.

  He did not say: greatness, but that’s what he was probably thinking. He seemed important to himself, and above all manly, because he wasn’t making a scene and forcing Ulrich to confess the truth. Somehow he was grateful to fate for this great trial. Transitionally or combined with:

  [V] They sit down by the edge of the melancholy of the evening sea.

  She was the star of my life! Walter said.

  But Ulrich starts at contact with the word faithfulness. He’s not nearly as magnanimous as Walter.

  [VI] Walter now picks up on star of my life, develops it.

  Now it is sinking into night; what is to become of me? At this moment he has this sense of self-importance they had when they were young. He steps outside himself: I am at a critical juncture. You have no idea what I’ve had to fight through and suffer this past year. In the last analysis my whole life has been a battle. Fought like a madman / fought day and night with a dagger in my fist. But does it mean anything? I think I have now come so far as really to be the man I wanted to be; but is there any sense in it? Do you believe that the way things are today, we could really carry out anything at all of what we desired as young people?

  Ulrich sat there in a dark-blue wool fisherman’s sweater; he had lost weight, which only emphasized the breadth of his shoulders and the muscular power of his arms, which, leaning forward, he had rested on his knees—and he wanted most of all to howl at this crepuscular comradeship. He replied gloomily: Don’t talk to me about your victories. You were beaten and finally you want to throw up without being embarrassed. You’re now in your early thirties, and at forty everyone is through. At fifty everyone sees himself contented in life and soon after that will have all his troubles behind him. The only people who have it good are the ones who seek refuge in conformity! That’s the wisdom of life! The best part is reserved for those who are defeated! And nothing is worse than being alone!

  He was dejected. His crassness did not prevent Walter from noticing it.

  [Visit to the Madhouse]

  What met her eyes was, in any event, peculiar enough: a game of cards.

  Moosbrugger, in dark everyday clothes, was sitting at a table with three men, one of whom was wearing a doctors white smock, the second a business suit, and the third the rather threadbare cassock of a priest; aside from these four figures around the table, and their wooden chairs, the room was empty, except for the three high windows that looked out over the garden. The four men looked up as Clarisse came toward them, and Friedenthal performed the introductions. Clarisse made the acquaintance of a young intern at the clinic, his mentor, and a doctor who had come to visit, from whom she found out that he had been one of the experts who had declared Moosbrugger sane at his court hearings. The four were playing three-man games, so that one was always sitting watching the others play. The sight of a cozy, ordinary game of cards dashed, for the moment, all Clarisse’s ideas. She had been prepared for something horrifying, even if only that she would have been led endlessly farther through such half-empty rooms in order finally to be mysteriously informed that Moosbrugger was once again not to be seen; and after everything she had been through in the last few weeks, and especially today, all she could feel now was an extraordinary sense of oppression. She did not grasp that this card game had been arranged with the others by Dr. Friedenthal in order that Moosbrugger could be observed at leisure; it seemed to her like devils playing with a soul in an ignoble fashion, and she thought she was in empty, icy tracts of hell. To her horror, Moosbrugger stood up straight and gallantly came up to her; Friedenthal introduced him too, and Moosbrugger took her unsteady hand in his paw and made a quick, silent bow, like a big adolescent.

  After that was done, Friedenthal asked that they please not disturb themselves and explained that the lady had come from Chicago to study the organization of the clinic and would certainly find that there was no other place in the world where the guests were treated so well.

  “Spades were played, not diamonds, Herr Moosbrugger!” said the physician, who had been observing his prot6g6 reflectively. In truth, Moosbrugger had enjoyed Friedenthal’s referring to him, in the presence of these strangers, as a guest of the clinic and not as a patient. Savoring this made him misread the cards, but because of the game he overlooked the reproach with a magnanimous smile. Ordinarily he played more carefully than a hawk. It was his ambition to lose to his learned opponents only through the luck of the cards, never by playing worse than they did. But this time he also, after a while, allowed himself to count his tricks in English, which he could do up to thirty even if it interfered with his game, and he had understood that Clarisse came from America. Indeed, a little later he put his cards down entirely, pressed his fists against the table, leaned his strong back so broadly backward that the wood embracing it creaked, and began an involved story about his time in prison. “Take my word for it, gentlemen—” he began, because he knew from experience: if you want to get anywhere with women you have to act as if you aren’t even aware of their existence, at least in the beginning; that had brought him success with them every time.

  The young asylum physician listened to Moosbrugger’s bombastic story with a smile; in the priest’s face regret struggled with cheerfulness, while the visiting doctor, who was playing, and who had almost brought Moosbrugger to the gallows, encouraged him from time to time with sarcastic interruptions. The giant’s proud but ordinarily basically decent manner of conducting himself had made him a comfortable presence to them. What he said made sense, even if not always in exactly the right places; the spiritual counselor in particular had come to like him sinfully well. When he reminded himself of the brutal crimes of which this man of lamblike piety was capable, he mentally crossed himself in fright, as if he had surprised himself in some reprehensible negligence, humbled himself before the inscrutability of God, and said to himself that such a vexed and complicated affair was best left to God’s will. That this will was being manipulated by the two doctors like two levers working against each other, without its being for the moment apparent which was the stronger, was not unbeknownst to the man of the cloth.

  A cheerful antagonism prevailed between the two doctors. When Moosbrugger lost the thread of his story for a moment he was interrupted by the older man, the visitor, Dr. Pfeifer, with the words: “Enough talking, Moosbrugger, back to the cards, otherwise the Herr Intern will arrive at his diagnosis too soon!” Moosbrugger imm
ediately replied with subservient eagerness: “If you want to play, Doctor, we can play again!” Clarisse heard this with astonishment. But the younger of the two doctors smiled, unmoved. It was an open secret that he was trying to arrive at an unassailable clinical picture of Moosbrugger’s inability to be held accountable for his actions. This doctor was blond and looked ordinary and unsentimental, and the traces of fraternity dueling scars did not exactly make his face any more cultured; but the self-confidence of youth made him advocate the clinical view of Moosbrugger’s guilt, and his requisite punishment, with a zeal that scorned the customary detachment. He would not have been able to say precisely in what this clinical view consisted. It was just different. In this view, for example, an ordinary bout of intoxication is a genuine mental disorder that heals by itself; and that Moosbrugger was in part an honorable man, in part a sex murderer, signified, as this view had it, competing drives, for which it was a matter of course that he had to reach a decision according to whether the stronger or the more sustained drive was uppermost at the moment. If others wanted to call that free will or a good or evil moral decision, that was their affair. “Whose deal?” he asked.

  It developed that it was his turn to cut and deal the cards. While he was doing this, Dr. Pfeifer turned to Clarisse to ask what interest had brought his “esteemed colleague” here. Dr. Friedenthal raised his hand to ward off the question and advised: “For heaven’s sake, don’t mention anything about psychiatry: there’s no word in the German language this doctor wants to hear less!” This was true, and had the advantage of allowing the unauthorized visitor to appear to the others to be a doctor without Friedenthal having to say so expressly. He smiled contentedly. Dr. Pfeifer left off the banter with a flattered grin. He was a somewhat older little man, whose skull was flat on top and sloped out and down at the back and was festooned with wisps of unkempt hair and beard. The nails on his fingers were oily from cigarettes and cigars, and retained around the edges a narrow rim of dirt, although in medical fashion they appeared to be cut quite short. This could now be clearly seen because in the meantime the players had picked up their cards and were carefully sorting them. “I pass,” Moosbrugger declared; “I play,” Dr. Pfeifer; “Good,” the young doctor; this time the cleric was looking on. The game was languid and ran its uneventful course.