My Year of Love

by Nizon, Paul.

  Oila lay there like an Olympia, or a nude by Modigliani, with her entire young body beautifully spread out, she lay there with her arms folded behind her head and with her budding breasts tilting to the right or left and with her frizzy triangle and with her supervising eyes continuously encouraging me and spurring me on, and then again signaling that it was time to stop.

  I was blissful and serious and devoted to our play and I suspected that something indescribably more intense lay waiting for me there, an entranceway, and I whispered, I’ll go in search of it, I’ll gain entrance, I’ll seek it, cost what it may, I will find it.

  I am often irresistibly aware of this allure of a woman, but there’s a reverent veneration of beauty, even an adoration in this feeling of equating beauty with a woman’s body, with the line of her back, this indentation leading down to her splendidly spreading bottom and the smooth casting of her legs—an ancient, an archaic veneration. And immediately afterward the maddest desire: to dive into these splendors. Then comes the obsession with getting closer to each other until our limbs are joined, until we put aside our fear and are conversing with nothing but “our hands on the other person’s body” and carrying on until we are intertwined, until our senses disappear and fade away. Hallucinations, obsessions. And sometimes it seemed to be the only promise of comfort, the only means of clinging to life when I feared I would become desolate in the seclusion of my boxroom, in my horror vacui, that was it: the thought of the female continent and of conquering it were one and the same, one with the hope of being saved from a fear that was boring itself into my brain from somewhere down below, and I measured the degree of my isolation, of my longing for lost protection, of my anxiety, by the intensity of my wishful thinking. But sometimes I feel as if I could sculpt bread out of stone, I feel something effervescent, like omnipotence. And then again something like writing poetry and praying.

  Writing poetry. I think that in my case the erotic awareness of life, or, rather, its awakening coincided with the awakening of my urge to write; the two occurred simultaneously in a wave of sensuality, in a corresponding confusion of my senses. I was in my boyhood, going through puberty, and sometimes I skipped school just to escape all the talking there, to be able to be alone with myself. Every few weeks I had the irresistible urge to be alone like that, then I let down the green Venetian blinds at the window and lay down to dream. Especially in the spring, the summer, or Indian summer, green filtered light flowed in through the gaps in the Venetian blinds, I lay as if in a greenhouse, lay there and let myself drift away in erotic fantasies. My erotic fantasizing was not simply in my head or imagination, it was a general surge of pleasure, it was a tugging and buildup, I played with my penis, I masturbated, and then I fell into a sort of unconsciousness in which images or inchoate images, images that had not yet taken final shape began to appear in outline, and were then accentuated, I floated through corridors of images, they weren’t erotic images, they were images of states of happiness, and these states of happiness were always related to the happiness of gardens or in gardens, with the filtered green sunlight, small arcs of light, with perceptions, perceptions of beauty, beauty, with paradise? And once, when I was in this state, sentences crossed my vision for the first time, or I saw myself lying there and heard something talking in me, something breathless, but not confused, just sentence after sentence, it ran on for pages, out of me, or in front of me, I could hear it, even read it, it all came to me with the greatest clarity and lucidity, and I lay there and listened with breathless attention to the sentences that ran out of me and flowed away before my eyes, I listened to them and saw them, and could do nothing for or against it, just lie there, listen, see. That went on until I was exhausted and fell asleep. Afterward I had only a vague memory of it, as of a dream. Although I knew for sure that I had heard myself speak and had seen myself speak, for a long time, and as if it were being dictated to me, I could not reproduce what had overcome me after I woke up. I could only awaken the entire state in me again.

  Just as I can recall the speaking and speaking in sentences, speaking in pages running through me at the onset of puberty, I experienced the same sensation later when I was making love, when immediately after the orgasm I would dive away into a wholly visual reality, I would slip into pictures, into scenes I could observe. Once I saw myself sneaking through undergrowth, I forced my way through undergrowth that was wet from the rain and into a forest, I saw and felt the heavy wet branches against my face, my cheeks, I smelled the slightly bitter scent of the wet branches, the pungency of this scent, the harshness of their cold, hard touch, I thrashed my way deeper into the woods, and then I saw a tree in front of me, it stood in a clearing, alone, and it started to twitch and shake itself, as if it wanted to double up with laughter, as if it enjoyed shaking itself, it looked as if it were dancing. I saw that and thought, a twitching tree shaking itself when there’s no wind at all? I didn’t even know that a tree could move of its own will, let alone dance, I thought, as I lay beside the woman and our relaxed limbs were touching and we drew light breaths together. It was the clearest form of seeing or, better, visualizing, as no word can ever conjure it up, express it, or make it perceptible, it was the unattainable vision, it was overwhelming, and I lay in a great state of innocence, watching the image.

  I think it was the erotic sense of simply being alive that enticed and directed me into daydreaming. It’s a preliminary stage of visualization, imagination, and has to do with the creation of another, second reality, another life—and yet, early on, I was more than a little ashamed of the inwardness that gave rise to this other reality.

  When I was still quite young, I had my own bicycle, a so-called semi-racer, to which I was really attached. On this bicycle, I liked to whiz and speed down through Bremgartenwald, through the forest to the lake, Wolensee, where for fifty centimes I could rent a boat, a flat-bottomed punt, a fishing boat, in which I could drift around on the lake all afternoon when I had the day off. On the lake there were always several real fishing boats with real fishermen, they were motionless on the usually calm water as if rooted to the bottom, now and then one of the fishermen reeled in one of his lines, now and then he threw a line out, I could see the bobber bouncing around, and in the evenings they beat the fish to death, the ones they had caught, to me it sounded like the threshing of reapers, it didn’t sound like killing at all, it was a sound of peace, like church bells ringing in the evening, a sound from olden times. I did nothing of the sort, I actually did nothing whatever in or with my boat, I dreamed, that is, I imagined that I wasn’t on Wolensee, but rather in a Norwegian fjord or up in Michigan, a trapper. The lake wasn’t a real lake, just a wider section of the Aare, although it has the German word for lake in its name. There were whole fields of reeds in the middle of it, real sandbars, and along the shore there were huts on posts that belonged to the fishermen, and all around the forest came down right to the water’s edge, making the lake dark, it was a forest lake, I rowed through the patches of reeds, upstream, and sometimes I let myself drift for a long time; or I landed, acted out difficult landings for myself and real scenes of going ashore, that was breaking new ground, adventurous, full of promise, I secretly re-experienced other lives, lives I had read about or imagined to myself, they always involved hard, real, adventurous living, never idle hours, sports, or relaxation. Wolensee was my place for thoughts, wishes, and longings in which I anticipated life, life that wasn’t taking place on the street where I lived, Berner Länggasse, that street which descended on me regularly with its deadly dreariness. What I was playacting there was an alternative life, and this life took place in my imagination in the big wide world I so longed to see, just as I constantly yearned for love, for amorous adventures. On that lake, I composed my first and only poem, I composed it “in the presence of nature,” and I was very astonished and really overwhelmed that it had arisen in me as if by itself. When I had maneuvered the punt to the dock in the evening and tied it up securely and got on my bicycle to ride hom
e, then it was as if I was returning home from work, from a day’s labor, I was carrying a sort of booty or harvest home with me. At least I was carrying the smell of brackish water and of reeds, the smell of earth and rain on my clothes. The lake was a place of anticipation and waiting, I waited there for my life to begin, the life that would welcome me once I had finished school. It should be a life as large as possible, full of the power of the real world.

  For a while, for several years, I was always on my bicycle, or so it seems to me now, I could even stand up while riding it, which was done by continually turning the front wheel from left to right, twisting it, keeping it in motion, and at the same time balancing like an acrobat over the seat, I remember standing together with other schoolboys in the same manner and getting pointers from them, each of us twisting and turning on his bicycle like a contortionist. The bicycle also served as a vehicle for getting to school, and several times I took part in longer bicycle trips, but that’s not important, for our purposes, what counts here is just the bicycle trip I went on with Lara.

  With Lara, I rode from Bern to Thunersee, Lake Thun, to Oberhofen, we rode through the summer, the summer grew in toward both sides of the road from the yellow cornfields, it hummed in the sleepy air, it hummed in the heat that made the spokes of our wheels flash, we had this entire summer to ourselves, it was all for us, we bent over our bicycles with our hot faces and we bent beaming toward each other, our skin was soft and smelled like calfskin, we were heated up not just by the summer and by the exertion of pedaling, but also by the excitement, we loved each other, and when we lay in the grass for a rest, we tussled, rolled around, hugged, kissed each other in our young summer bodies, whose calfskin smell mixed with the rich, slightly bitter, wonderful smell of grass. Once we were lying in a park and only then noticed that it was a graveyard, a graveyard for fallen soldiers, I think it was an American one, we embraced each other above the dead.

  At that time I wore a special pair of sunglasses that covered the upper half of my face as if to disguise me, so I felt I was incognito, or at least sheltered, when I waited for Lara outside the iron gate of the girls’ school, I waited on my bicycle, supporting myself with one leg, and saw all the girls come swarming out, approaching me in chattering groups, and I kept a lookout for her from behind the mask of my sunglasses, I didn’t even really know if I liked her, I couldn’t ask myself that question, because I was dependent on our being in love, dependent on this atmosphere as if it were a drug, that’s why I was dependent on her, whether I wanted to be or not. I couldn’t be without either. That’s why I wore the sunglasses.

  I remember the asphalt as being very pale, light and pale, the course of my life was not yet clear to me, and perhaps that’s why the asphalt was so pale and light, pale with expectation, light and empty from the pent-up feelings of expectation in me, my expectations of life. But now I was waiting for Lara, and then she came, she separated from a group and came toward me very quickly, perhaps a little coyly, because she had to be aware of how very much the other girls pretended that they didn’t see anything and didn’t know anything and made for the gate with such an exaggerated display of being carefree. Because of that, Lara seemed a little inhibited, but there was also something else that expressed itself in her posture, it showed in the way she separated from the group of girls and came running over to me by herself: a rare dignity, a woman’s dignity. It was the burden of love, I say, this weight, this seriousness. A composure that included the danger of being hurt, of being misused, of pain. In that, she was far ahead of me, she was—she was totally involved, whereas I was holding something back in myself, as if I wanted to keep myself for something greater, something more beautiful, later on.

  Lara came up to me with this composure, this special sense of fulfillment, we greeted each other shyly, and then we took off, out of the range of vision of the other schoolgirls, the witnesses. We walked along side by side, with me pushing my bicycle, and at every opportunity we pressed against each other, lusting insatiably for each other. But there was always this seriousness about her, this wholeness that was so superior to what I had to offer.

  Lara had brown skin, brown eyes, and brown hair, she was seventeen, she could have come from Northern Italy or from South Tyrol. I met her at a party, it was a class of girls from a commercial college who had invited my class for whatever reason. Lara was not the most beautiful, but she was the most mature, she was also the most foreign. She was probably Swiss, like the rest of us, but she had come from another country, from a warzone, to Bern, she had experienced war, and she didn’t live with her parents, but with relatives. She had this different background, this secret; a restraint, that made her seem like an adult among children. After a sort of preliminary round, I was her dancing partner, then her partner for the evening, she had become mine, and we danced without banter and without silly remarks right into this being in love, this drunken, sadly beautiful space. I’d hardly had time to look at her, I didn’t know what she was like or who she was or even if I liked her, and already I was in this giddy state.

  I picked her up every day from school, we went for a walk, and once she went with me to my attic room, and now I remember that she asked me not to go too far, that she asked me to be careful. I lay with her on the couch, we were all aglow, but it wasn’t the same as with Oila, who instructed me and simultaneously supervised me, in fact it was much more appealing: Lara asked me with hesitation and whispering to act for her, left to herself she wouldn’t have been able to exercise restraint, she would have had to give her all right away, she was passionate to go all the way, to put her soul into it, she was ready for love. I was attracted by her skin, I surrendered myself to her skin, her proximity made me drunk, and I dwelt on this drunkenness, this blissful state, behind my sunglasses and also at school, I just wanted to foster and preserve this state, aside from that, I dreamed of the time soon approaching when I would graduate from school. I also spoke frequently about my future, and accordingly of years of travel, campaigns of conquest, the daring intentions I had, the paths I would take, all of which had to lead into the wide world. The future stood large before me, like a forcibly opened barn door, and now it occurs to me that the reason why the bicycle trip we took together to Lake Thun is so ethereal in my memory, why I see it before a gleaming gold background in my mind’s eye, and why it has remained like that, is because even at that time, when we undertook it, it was already too beautiful and probably in some way elegiac and not entirely real. It was the last trip through childhood, the wide world of summer still belonged to us, just as back then the whole landscape had belonged to us like an endless garden, but we were in the process of leaving this land, the summer seemed so great to me because it was also created by this feeling of love, by this heartbeat, it pulsated with that feeling of intoxication. I rode my bicycle from Bern to Lake Thun, but at the same time I was being propelled along, driven by this hunger for life and blinded by thoughts of a future that took place in a novel, a romantic novel, in my mind.

  By the way, I also didn’t know exactly who we were riding to meet. Lara had spoken about visiting an uncle, and I had some unclear notion of a poor refugee or emigrant, of someone who had found a hiding place, and now we stopped in front of a huge hotel of the noblest design, in which people like Tolstoy might have stayed, and her uncle introduced himself as the owner. We drank tea by the billowing drapes on one of the countless balconies, we sat in this humming orange-filtered summer light, in this warm partial shade, her uncle was a tall, cultured, middle-aged man, and his speech was very quietly tired, polite, and discreet, he might as well have been part of the scenery, and a waiter dressed in white, a servant, came and went all the while, no less a bit of set dressing.

  Shortly afterward, I traveled to Paris to spend the holidays with my aunt, at that time she lived below Pigalle, and when I took the dog out for his evening walk, the dog at that time was called Tobe, I breathed in the smell of the trash cans in the courtyard with the conspiratorial consent of
this accomplice, with an inappropriate exuberance, the garbage smelled different here than it did in Bern, it smelled a little of the Metro, just as the courtyard smelled a little like Javel water or Javex, the trash cans and the courtyard smelled of Paris, I was in Paris, I could take the dog out for a walk, just like all the others took their dogs out for walks, I was one of them, I was part of Paris, and on Avenue Trudaine, in the shadow of its long walls with the few bistros and cafés built out onto the wide sidewalk, I formulated little descriptive phrases that were still without any real context and therefore probably didn’t make sense, from every meter of asphalt I sensed and absorbed the entire magnificence of this city, and when my aunt set the table for our late dinner and put the long loaf of bread beside the cutlery, I gazed in wonder at this staff as if it were a relic or a covenant. I pledged allegiance to the bread and the smell of the trash cans and to the gurgling of the water in the gutter, I clung to these common things that for me were Paris or stood for Paris, my love of the world clung to this pledge, my dream kept a firm hold on it.

  I was in Paris and reveling in new impressions, but under the surface I began to worry about my Lara, whom I had left behind, I felt my confidence crumbling, didn’t know why, and when I got back from my holidays and phoned her home, a stranger’s voice asked me not to call again, and when I finally saw Lara again, she was short with me and asked me to leave her alone. I had always spoken of my future, of plans that did not include her in any way. I only wanted to experience LOVE with her and excluded her as a person. She had been far ahead of me with her readiness, she must have seen through my conflict, my selfishness, she had finally made her decision during the time I was in Paris, she had sorted things out in her own mind, and now she held firmly to her decision.