The Last Weynfeldt

by Martin Suter

  Agustoni’s had been there for over forty years, and throughout this time the menu had remained unchanged. It served the Italian standards—antipasti, vitello tonnato, homemade pasta, manzo, ossobucco, picata Milanese, bistecca fiorentina, pizza, saltimbocca, tiramisu, zabaione and mascarpone—at a consistent quality. The prices had been adjusted to fit the changing clientele, which had shifted over the years from workers, students and artists to a business, theatre and gallery-opening crowd who felt like eating somewhere frequented by workers, students and artists.

  Adrian Weynfeldt ate there every Thursday lunch-time with a few friends. Always at the same table, always the same thing: insalata mista and scaloppini al limone with risotto. He washed it down with San Pellegrino and a little Brunello di Montalcino, because the house wine, which everyone else drank, gave him a headache.

  Like most Thursdays, Weynfeldt was the first person at the table, laid for ten, five on each side. He sat at his usual seat, the last on the left, at the end. He would have been embarrassed to claim one of the center seats. It would have looked like he was playing the host. Of course he always paid the check, but not as the host; simply as the one with the most money at his disposal. Weynfeldt joined his own Thursday lunch club like a guest he and everyone else was generous enough to tolerate.

  In his circle of younger friends he often found his financial situation embarrassing. He had absolutely no problem playing paymaster, but he worried it could be interpreted as showy or condescending. So he showed his generosity very discreetly. For years he had visited the bathroom toward the end of the meal, intercepting the waiter on the way back and dealing with the bill swiftly and without checking it. In this way no one would be put in the awkward situation of having to thank him. Weynfeldt’s idea of good manners included making it easy for his friends to profit from him.

  The surrounding tables began to fill up; now he was the only one sitting alone. Sometimes Weynfeldt suspected his friends always came late because no one wanted to be the first, and to have to sit next to him.

  He didn’t think they didn’t like him. He didn’t have an inferiority complex; it seemed more likely that his friends didn’t want to give each other the impression they were sucking up to him because they wanted something from him.

  Not that none of them ever wanted anything from him, of course. But such matters were not brought to the Thursday lunch club. In that situation they would arrange to meet discreetly at another establishment, or in Weynfeldt’s apartment.

  This time is was Hausmann who arrived first: Claudio Hausmann, filmmaker. Weynfeldt could see he would have preferred to turn right around when he saw him alone at the table; he averted his gaze, pretended not to have seen him, to give him the chance to disappear again and wait for the others outside Agustoni’s. To save him from having to talk about Working Title: Hemingway’s Suitcase.

  Working Title: Hemingway’s Suitcase was a film project Claudio Hausmann was developing. Hemingway had spent four months of 1922 in the Pension de la Forêt in Chamby sur Montreux, a cheap guesthouse. Hadley Richardson came to visit, his first wife, bringing a suitcase containing his complete unpublished fiction, which she lost on the way.

  Hausmann had been given the brush-off by all the film funding bodies and had eventually persuaded Weynfeldt to fund the script development. Hausmann was an auteur, which meant that Weynfeldt’s private script funding was transferred straight to his account. So far there had been a short synopsis and—after a further transfer—a more detailed treatment, which the film funding bodies had not deemed worthy of support. Adrian was not in a position to say whether they were right or not; film was not his field. And his suggestion of placing more emphasis on the fate of the suitcase, and less on the incident’s effect on Hemingway’s first marriage, was rejected by Hausmann as “too Hollywood.”

  The project had now grown to include the document “Four Sample Scenes” along with several folders of research Hausmann had done, and continued to do, on location in Paris and Montreux, also at Weynfeldt’s expense.

  Weynfeldt would never dream of alluding to the fact that his script development funding had represented Claudio Hausmann’s sole source of income for nearly two years. In fact he avoided the subject of Working Title: Hemingway’s Suitcase altogether where possible. It was Hausmann who was sometimes forced to broach it. Four weeks ago it was with the promise, unprompted, that he would have a first draft finished within three weeks. Weynfeldt had never got to see the initial two or three unfinished versions. Hausmann claimed they would have given a false impression.

  Weynfeldt reached for his wineglass and took a sip, making a concerted effort to avert his gaze so Hausmann had more time.

  Then a woman’s voice said, “Been here long?”

  So Hausmann had sent Alice Waldner on ahead, the sculptor. Weynfeldt got up, buttoned up his jacket, shook Alice’s tiny hand, blackened as ever, and greeted her with three kisses, on alternate cheeks. He waited till she had sat down opposite him, sat back down himself and waved the waiter over.

  He asked what she wanted to drink, although he knew it would be Punt e Mes, then ordered a Punt e Mes.

  Out of all his friends from the Thursday lunch club, his relationship with Alice was the least awkward. She made sculptures of steel so huge there was no risk he would feel obliged to buy one. Her métier was art for architectural spaces; her target patrons were public bodies, banks, insurance companies and the owners of villas with huge grounds. The material costs of her works greatly exceeded its market value and unsurprisingly she rarely sold.

  With Alice Waldner it seemed to be less about selling work than about the discrepancy between her appearance and her art. She was not much over five foot, delicate, frail almost, and spoke with a cute, childlike voice. Her somewhat ungainly works, made of steel girders, railroad rails, caterpillar tracks and turbine parts, were a challenge to her and the few others who got to see them. She lived in reasonable comfort from a small inheritance and the alimony her first husband paid her, a manager in German heavy industry. She made no demands of Adrian Weynfeldt, although he had been known to cover the catering costs, unasked, for her exhibition openings at the former factory which served as her studio.

  No sooner had Alice received her drink, than Kaspar Casutt and Kando arrived at the table, with Hausmann in tow. Casutt had “come down from the Grison Alps,” as he reminded people at every opportunity, one of the economic migrants who had descended from the mountains to the valley. He maintained his Grison dialect as assiduously as Agustoni, the restaurant’s proprietor, maintained his Italianate German. He was a pretty good architect. Too good, he felt, to waste his life designing vacation homes for dentists.

  And so he spent his life falling out with one architectural practice after another, mostly when they demanded things of him he couldn’t reconcile with his architectural conscience. This point was reached sooner each time, leaving him forced to earn a living as an architectural draftsman. The private clients willing to work directly with him were few and far between. And he fell out with the few who did commission him—mainly introduced by Weynfeldt—over irresoluble differences of opinion on architectural rigor. His last major private commission was several years ago: the refurbishment of Weynfeldt’s apartment. There had been differences of opinion here too, but they were each decided in Casutt’s favor.

  Kando was Hausmann’s girlfriend; her parents were among the thousands of Tibetans Switzerland had taken in as refugees in 1963. Alongside Adrian Weynfeldt she was one of the few people who believed in Claudio Hausmann and Working Title: Hemingway’s Suitcase, and together with Adrian formed the rest of his small collective of sponsors, by paying the rent on their shared apartment and covering the majority of their living expenses. Kando was a lawyer for a large bank and earned enough for two. She also avoided being seen alone with Weynfeldt at the Thursday lunch club, but this was because she had the reputation for being a tireless fund-raiser for Hausmann’s projects.

  With witnesses p
resent, there was no reason not to sit next to Adrian, now standing again, buttons done up, both hands on the back of the chair next to him ready to adjust it for her.

  The three sat down and continued the conversation they had been having as they entered Agustoni’s. Weynfeldt took care of the drinks.

  Now Karin Winter arrived, accompanied by Luc Neri. Karin, a head higher than Luc, with cropped blond hair, looked exhausted from a morning of sluggish business and the prospect of a similar afternoon. She owned an art bookstore in a bad location in the historic city center with a name she realized was unfortunate only after she had registered the company.

  This company’s tacit shareholder, without voting rights, was Adrian Weynfeldt, who bought every art book he personally needed there and most of what he needed for work. This wasn’t simply nepotism; Karin was an undisputed expert on art publications.

  Weynfeldt got up to welcome her and ushered her to a chair, which she fell into with a deep sigh.

  Luc sat opposite Karin: far from constant companion, they had a volatile relationship with separate apartments and incompatible lifestyles. His fine, thinning hair looked electrically charged, and judging by his eyes, he had probably just woken up. Luc was a web designer and mostly worked at night. Anyone hiring him to create their web presence could be sure of getting the most radical design currently available, but only if they had as much patience as Karin Winter or Adrian Weynfeldt, who was so clueless about computers he found his slick weynfeldt.com a little embarrassing.

  The group got louder; everyone talked over one another and studied the menu as if it hadn’t remained the same for decades.

  Weynfeldt sat there in silence, in a mixture of polite interest and paternal pride. There were still three seats unclaimed, but only one more guest was expected. The two other places were for unexpected guests—an old Weynfeldt tradition which Adrian had introduced to the Thursday lunch club. The last unexpected guest had been a shy young man Karin had brought and introduced to everyone—including Luc—as “my new boyfriend.” One of countless episodes in the Winter versus Neri relationship war.

  The only person missing now was Rolf Strasser, professional artist. “Professional artist, as in professional circus artist, or professional bullshit artist,” as he himself was wont to say. He had years of classical art education under his belt, had studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, where he won an award among his fellow master students. He was a virtuoso painter of every possible technique and style, adept at copying Old Masters and an astounding photo-realist. But one of his professors in Vienna had once said, “Strasser, you are highly skilled, but unfortunately you aren’t an artist.”

  Whenever he was drunk—often, in other words—Rolf Strasser would repeat these words, laughing and putting on a nasal Viennese accent. But there was no doubt that he had been scarred by them.

  He could claim some impressive achievements: successful exhibitions, prizes, grants, reviews in the art press. But he had never found his style; a perpetual victim of his skills.

  For a painfully long period he had put his entire energy into losing these skills. His work had acquired a fake dilettantism, like an adult trying to imitate children’s drawings. Then he went conceptual, constructed painting machines, left puddles of paint on quiet streets and stretched canvases over the asphalt so that the cars would leave tire marks on them.

  Some while ago he had returned to straight figurative painting, and was working away wildly in the hope that an individual style would emerge all by itself: a look that would make even someone uninterested in art say, “Ah, a Strasser.”

  When he wasn’t painting he was drawing. Wherever he was, he drew on whatever came to hand. At Agustoni’s it was the tablecloths. Throughout the meal he would make sketches and studies on the paper surface, document the ever changing still lives on the table, draw portraits of the others or embellish stains with ornamentations. He was like a nervous office worker who decorates everything in reach with doodles, except that he was a virtuoso. For his part Nunzio Agustino forbade his staff from trashing any paper Strasser had drawn on. When the tables were cleared, the drawings had to be carefully detached and handed to Agustino, who added them to his collection, which he was convinced would one day be worth a fortune.

  Weynfeldt and Strasser were united and divided by their shared passion: their love of art. Rolf was the only one of his friends who could hold down a proper conversation about Adrian’s area of expertise. But there were no Strassers in Weynfeldt’s private collection. Friendship notwithstanding, art meant too much to Weynfeldt for that.

  But he supported Strasser’s career in other ways: by editing a catalogue raisonné, published by a press Karin Winter founded for this sole purpose, or—killing two birds with one stone—by financing a website designed by Luc Neri.

  The waiter was already bringing the starters as the professional artist rolled up and grabbed the bottle of Brunello to fill his glass, before he’d even sat down. As always, he wore a suit with a shirt and tie. As a concession to his identity as an artist—if he was an artist—every item was black.

  He nodded once to the whole group, ignoring Weynfeldt. No one would have realized that he had arranged to meet him that night for a tête-à-tête.

  Strasser was happy to go without a first course, but not without the Chesterfield he smoked while the others ate their antipasti and salads. Soon he had a pen in his hand and had begun adding something to Agustoni’s collection.

  Strasser didn’t participate in the conversation, which had now turned to Working Title: Hemingway’s Suitcase. Casutt had raised the subject with the remark: “I once knew someone who was working on a novel for years. Whenever you met him he was either nearly finished, or working on a redraft. He always had to get back home in a hurry because his text was waiting, or he’d arrive late because he couldn’t make the text wait. And one day it was all gone. His wife had wiped the hard disk after an argument.”

  “Didn’t he have backup?” asked Luc, who knew about information technology.

  “Apparently not.”

  “Then it’s his fault.”

  “That’s not the point. I reckon he had never written a line.”

  “And why are you telling us this?” Kando asked suspiciously.

  “In relation to Claudio’s project.”

  “Working Title: Hemingway’s Suitcase will soon be ready to shoot,” she snapped.

  “That’s not what I meant. I’m wondering if Hemingway had really put his entire unpublished works in the suitcase his wife lost.”

  Hausmann chewed on his marinated eggplant with the face of a highly musical person forced to listen to an amateur orchestra rehearsing. Karin Winter tried to involve him in the conversation. “An interesting angle, Claudio, don’t you think? The lost suitcase never contained a single manuscript. Just as an idea to investigate.”

  Hausmann sighed. “That’s not what I’m interested in. The fact that his wife believed they were in there is all that matters.”

  Alice Waldner, the sculptor, chimed in. “I’m sure she knew exactly what was in that suitcase. I don’t think Hemingway was the kind of man who packed his own bags.”

  Unnoticed by the group, the waiter had approached Adrian. “A call for you, Herr Weynfeldt,” he murmured.

  It took a moment for Adrian to realize: the waiter was asking him to come along because someone had called him on the telephone. It could only be Véronique. She was the only person who knew where he was. She would only bother him at the Thursday lunch club in an emergency.

  He was led behind the bar to a black, wall-mounted phone of the kind he hadn’t seen since the cell phone era began, a rectangular device with a round dial, the numbers faded and barely legible. The receiver had been removed from the phone and hung on a hook below. Servers pushed past him carrying steaming plates. What with the racket from the kitchen and the noise from the bar, shouts in Italian as food was ordered and served, it was hard to understand the voice on the othe
r end of the line. It wasn’t Véronique. It was a soft, female voice he recognized from somewhere. “Hello darling,” the woman said, sounding blasé, “could you come by Spotlight as soon as you can and clear up an awkward misunderstanding? That would be lovely of you. They seem to think I’m some kind of … shoplifter.” She laughed as she said the word “shoplifter,” and when he heard the laugh he recognized the voice: Lorena!

  “A shoplifter?” Now he laughed too. “Spotlight? The boutique? I’ll be there in ten minutes.” He replaced the receiver with a beating heart, asked Agustoni to send him the bill later and returned to the table.

  There they sat, his younger friends, immersed in conversation, all approaching forty and unable to hide their fear of this frightening birthday which would mark the end of the last new lease on life.

  “An urgent phone call,” he explained. “I’m afraid I have to …”

  No one heard him. No one looked up.

  “Well, see you next Thursday,” he muttered, and walked off through the smoke, voices and aromas filling the restaurant, out onto the busy street.

  It was unnaturally warm for the time of year. City center office workers took advantage of their lunch breaks for a stroll. Some of them were clearly unable to receive the gift of a premature spring without reservations. The media had recently decided that climate change was no longer the bugbear of a few scaremongering hippies, and had finally become a serious global issue.

  Weynfeldt took big strides along the sidewalk, stepping into the street whenever he needed to avoid large groups meandering toward him. Spotlight wasn’t far, but if he really hoped to get there in ten minutes, he would have to hurry; three had already passed.