by Nizon, Paul.
To myself I think: it’s impossible to know about things like sexuality, let alone to speak about them. If I knew about it, then I wouldn’t have to do it anymore, or at least not as often. One either talks about it or one does it. I have to do it, because I still don’t understand it. Go there yourself, do it yourself, leave me alone, I imagine myself saying to Beat.
I turn the radio on.
ACCEPT ME, CREATE ME! I cried out to the city, I cried out because the city was either deaf or was giving me the cold shoulder. The city now seemed to be of an often glacial beauty, cold to the point of freezing me to death; it probably seemed like that to me because I was projecting my panic onto it, rigidity and coldness were the reflection of my own state of mind: this feeling of being a foreigner.
And yet I had often come to Paris, even as a young boy, when my aunt, who had lived here through the war, sent for us in her euphoria at having survived; later on I came again and again, for brief visits, and also to work here for short periods of time. I had always come here to recharge my batteries, to bathe in the waters. But now I had come to Paris to stay: I had given up my home in Switzerland, my wife, my relatives, my homeland, now I was sitting in this gigantic city as if caught in a trap. Paris was now my day-to-day reality, but what was I supposed to do in a stony reality of such vastness, where I myself still had no daily routine, no daily world of work that shielded me by keeping me occupied; that would have shrunk Paris down to my size.
I also couldn’t take refuge anymore with this or that acquaintance, I had the sea of houses, but I didn’t have a single friend, just the concierge, and because I no longer felt the urge to explore Paris, Paris no longer meant anything to me. I didn’t stroll around anymore, I hid myself away, I went to a café that I called The Sad Café, where there was a bird, I think it was a jackdaw, that hopped around on the bar or the counter, and an English couple sat next to me at dinner, studying the street map, and somewhere in the background the owner and his relatives were watching television, and I thought of the fact that I would soon be going home again, and that absolutely nothing awaited me there but my loneliness.
I also couldn’t write during these early days in Paris, I had a warped relationship to the past and felt paralyzed about the future, I no longer had access to anything I was used to, and I would soon run out of money, my fears came creeping forth like vermin from every crack and corner.
I felt unable to do even the simplest thing, to undertake anything, it was an almost physical paralysis. And my inaction began to torment me, then set off panic attacks. Suddenly my background knowledge moved into the foreground and I was faced with the reality of my insecurity, the reality of my apathy. This isn’t a bad mood, it’s not transient indisposition, it’s your current reality, I thought, and now the fact that I had emigrated took on an entirely different appearance: what will I do, I thought, if I can’t shake off this apathy, or if it becomes morbid; what if it turns out to be what psychiatrists call an endogenous depression? This thought bit me like a snake, sinking its teeth firmly into me, and now I was afraid that something might just shut down in my head. I remained fixated on this fear that I was still just able to suppress; and I felt the walls around me start to freeze.
What if this endogenous depression had already taken hold of me? First the thought occurs to me, and then, when it falls on fertile soil, that is, when it finds an unarmed, permeable state of mind, a superstitious fear arises: now the thought is circulating, the poison is circulating through my veins, now I can no longer be sure what was there first, my toying with the idea, or the symptom, now I wait spellbound for other symptoms to appear.
What if I had to lose contact with people, what if it were all according to plan, if this losing contact was a function, an emanation of this endogenous depression or illness that had been festering in me for quite some time; what if I had burned my bridges and emigrated because of some compulsion. And my last visits in Zürich, where nothing of consequence had been said, hadn’t they been stubbornly, deliberately missed and wasted opportunities to save myself? Hadn’t I simply refused to clutch at straws?
Maybe I had simply been assailed by the thought of my insecurity at my most vulnerable moment; but I kept thinking about it, what if I now, here, were to succumb entirely to this melancholy passivity. I have to pull myself together, I have to watch out, I can’t let myself go to this extent, I said to myself, but by then I was having a full-fledged panic attack. Am I sick? Has melancholy always been my prevailing mood, was my old fear of boredom, my fear of emptiness, and my corresponding desire to live life to the fullest perhaps always symptomatic of it? And my ability to get enthusiastic about things, the infectious élan vital that people attributed to me, have I always had to act that way to counteract a lethargy and depression festering inside me? Had I basically always been in solitary confinement, in a state of dangerous interior isolation? And the women, had that possibly been an obsessive-compulsive neurosis: to escape from this deep-seated isolation; was my élan, my occasional love of life, my exuberance nothing more than a crazed rampage against the disease that held hidden in it the threat of death? And now all that was finally forcing its way to the surface in the trap I had set for myself, according to plan, the trap called Paris—
I was confronted by the two terribly dilapidated rooms that hadn’t been tidied up in a long time, and confronted by the thought that I would be incapable, in a clinical sense incapable of doing anything about it. And outside, there was the city—the further wall around me, of my own choosing.
Now I’m like Florian, I thought, if not worse. And now I also saw my previous books in a new light, as having been an enormous effort, for my capabilities a well-nigh Herculean effort. They were superhuman achievements insofar as they represented desperate attempts to escape my creeping depression, if not mental derangement, this feeling that my life was running out, or could never, never ever be restored, this feeling of dying, a form of lethargy—and my books were nothing but the persistent fight against that, a self-defense, an attempt to revive myself. That’s how I saw it. Against the background of this illness, my books seemed to me to be the work of Titans. How had I ever been able to pull myself together, how had I always managed to do it?
Accept me, create me, I whispered to the city when I could finally pluck up my courage and break loose, when I hastily left my boxroom and ran to the nearby Metro station to get away from myself and go for a ride. I got off at Station Cité and walked along Notre-Dame to Île Saint-Louis. Everything was familiar to me, the beautiful narrow streets that followed the natural contours of the island, the bridges, the Seine, the monuments that can be seen upstream and downstream from the bridges, the wharfs, the walls along the wharfs, the trees standing against the walls, everything was there and I knew it, as my brain wanted to inform me, but now everything loomed motionless, the Seine seemed to be made of theatrical metal foil, driven along as part of a stage set accompanied by artificial sounds, the buildings like backdrops.
I wept dry tears on that walk, couldn’t breathe life into anything, I was the one who had gone so numb, I was the culprit. I crept around like a thief, concerned only that no one should figure out that I’d already died, because otherwise I’d be caught and arrested. My feet walked through a glass world, then again through a lunar landscape, and I knew that nothing else awaited me now anywhere in the world.
I’ll freeze to death, I’ll die in this cold; and then, as I went home, I thought: I’ll just let it happen. This icy city will either kill you or recreate you anew. You can’t go anywhere, at most you can go further and further into it.
Where, for God’s sake, should I go? I asked. Into the forest, said a voice. And I thought of poor Stolz, my youthful doppelgänger who had frozen to death one winter in Spessart Forest. He had always gone just to the edge of the forest, and the first time he went into the forest, he hadn’t found his way out again. This young man, whose life really never got started, had gone to a lonely, unfamiliar farm in Spessart
to write his thesis, thinking he would benefit from the quiet and isolation. But it didn’t come to that, he got sleepier and sleepier at the farm. There was little possibility of contact with others there, and his freely chosen exile turned out to be a trap. He’d never had many interests, and here, the lethargy to which he had always been inclined broke out in him pathologically until he slept it all away. His later freezing to death, after getting lost in the woods in winter and walking until he was exhausted, was just the physical reenactment of a process to which he had long since inwardly succumbed. He had always been surrounded by this silent forest that threw him back onto his own resources, but he had gone neither into the forest nor into himself.
And now a voice had whispered to me that I too had to go into the forest. Into which forest? Into the forest where this lethargy dwelt. I’ll write my way in, I told myself, I have to stride right into the fear. I’ll make it my daily exercise to find out about it, I’ll use this exercise against the city, I have no other option. I’ll spin a cocoon around myself and then free myself from it.
Accept me, create me. If I overcame the fear, if I entered the forest by writing, if I clung to my writing and didn’t let up, if in this way I came to myself, came back to life, then it wouldn’t just be a survival, but a new life. From this test that the city set for me, I would emerge a different person. This city is a hard school, it can destroy you as well as work wonders. It will be your teacher.
And I thought of the many people who had arrived here before me with the very same hope, and whom the city had delivered from something. I thought of George Orwell, who had gone through the school of hunger here, of misery; I thought of the young Hemingway, who faced his wartime trauma while writing here, writing about his alter ego Nick Adams, who had trembled with fear at the Piave front, and on long nights had mentally fished the river for fear his soul would leave him if he fell asleep; I thought of Henry Miller, who had freed himself here from his American nightmare and from his writer’s block; and how he wrote! I thought of those who were robbed of their homeland, the refugees Joseph Roth and Walter Benjamin. Admittedly, they had taken their lives at the end, the one with absinthe, the other with poison while fleeing the Nazis—but with what contempt for fear, with what style had they dared to ignore the “city” at that time, the threat at that time.
I thought of poor Vincent van Gogh, who had arrived here as a backwoodsman who painted in somber earth tones, and in Paris he literally found his way to the light—to his light, to his ecstasy of color. I thought of his ability to stay the course, no, his ability to struggle through, and of his disposition, that people found hard to tolerate in Paris, this fanaticism, the mania to convert people; I thought of him, and when I first discovered the building, 56 Rue Lepic, where he had lived together with his brother Theo, I saw him before my eyes going through these very streets with a still-wet canvas under his arm, coming from Place Blanche or from Butte.
But now I thought of Sandro Thieme, the German painter I met at the end of the 1950s. He was several years older, he had been through the war, and after a short apprenticeship with Baumeister in Stuttgart he had moved directly to Paris. We met because he lived with a dancer who was my then-wife’s sister, and when the two of them dropped in on us in Bern, then it seemed to me that, in comparison to them, I wasn’t living a real life yet, instead, I lived and worked in a sandbox; to my eyes, they were, without putting on airs, world class, they breathed the air of freedom. Back then I regularly wrote art reviews, and in that capacity I was sometimes sent to Paris, and when I arrived at Gare de l’Est in the early morning, I took a taxi right out to Sandro’s place in Montparnasse; he lived, specifically, on Rue de la Tombe-Issoire, in a little summerhouse in an inner courtyard, and he had lovingly improved it, in this little house there was not only a studio, but also a living room, even a kitchen and shower with hot and cold water—to acquire such comforts Sandro had tapped into the city mains. There was also a sleeping compartment on a second floor built into the studio, to which one could climb up, if one had a head for heights and felt courageous, on a spiral staircase with small steps; there was everything, just in miniature, the shower took up at most half a square meter of floor space, the kitchen not much more, the living room reminded me of a cabin on a boat, with the furniture interlocking as in a puzzle, it took the skill of a contortionist to wind one’s way through, but once one was sitting down, the seating was solid and even comfortable.
Only the studio had the feeling of space, because it had a high ceiling, and because of its large windows it was also light, even if it was crammed full to overflowing with paintings and painting utensils, with equipment, with all the things accumulated by his having painted there for years. There was a fence around the summerhouse, and with a narrow path in between, it bordered on another fence that enclosed a somewhat more modern hut. This is where Sandro’s neighbor lived with his Creole girlfriend and his dog, he was an American who had come over as a pianist, and indeed had arrived with a gigantic American car and with money, of course a grand piano too, but in the meantime, due to ever greater consumption of drugs and alcohol, he had gone to rack and ruin. He was still able to maintain his conspicuous car for a while as a status symbol, but in the end the car was nothing more than a monument, since the motor had been taken out and sold. In my time, the car no longer existed, although he apparently still had the grand piano, which he hardly ever played, and he still had the beautiful Creole, who sometimes chatted from fence to fence with Sandro’s girlfriend. It looked a little like a painting by Gauguin that shows a similar-looking woman at a fence and is called Bonjour Monsieur Gauguin.
In the middle of the golden age of tachisme, Sandro painted figuratively, he painted pictures with an element of surrealism, for example a woman-tree, with the woman’s limbs thorny, in positions ranging from monstrous to obscene. He worked on these images over a long period of time, using the techniques and patience of the old masters, and with an attitude that seemed removed and philosophical despite the potentially offensive subject matter. Later on, under the relaxing, warming influence of his partner, as he had to admit, because she insisted on it, he did still lifes that made a less thorny impression, they seemed Italian, in contrast to his earlier works, which resembled those of Hieronymus Bosch.
She addressed him as “my sunshine,” or other such names; she made him more pleasant; to her, he looked like a cherub. He was a tall, sinewy fellow with wide shoulders, who could look really good, especially when he had thrown on a jacket; tall, thin, with a long head—his girlfriend liked to say it looked like a figure from an Egyptian mural. Sandro had a hard, high forehead, almost like a vertical cliff face, with very deep-set eyes under long lashes. And he looked out from under the vault of his eyebrows with a rather surly, almost nasty expression, hard and angry like someone distraught yet unable to speak. But his face could warm up, it started in his eyes and softened his cheeks and mouth, then this shy smile materialized, he seemed to drag it all the way up to his frontal sinus cavities, so that one thought, now he’s even laughing up there. He had this laugh that went up to his forehead, he drove it up into his forehead with a marabou-like nodding of his head, so he didn’t have to listen to it himself. His sweetheart was determined to mold him into shape according to her own ideas, she found fault with him a lot, he wasn’t just her baby, but also her life’s work, maybe she thought she could become his muse. When he got furious, she called him “my sunshine,” “my Egyptian” right away again to calm him down. It was embarrassing for anyone else present.
Sandro’s shyness also expressed itself in his way of walking. If one walked down the street with him, one got the impression that he was making his way noiselessly along the edge of an abyss. He didn’t often talk about the war, but I knew he had experienced the Battle of Britain as a radio operator, and when the air force was reduced due to lack of fuel and many members of the air force had to be assigned to the infantry, he had in the end experienced and survived the Battle of Monte Ca
ssino. He had told me of soldiers who lay with a leg stuck up out of their foxhole, their fortification, for hours, in the hope it would be hit or ripped off and so allow them to escape from that hell via the military hospital. He also described how they had gotten rid of a particularly mean officer. This officer, who’d harassed the soldiers in every way imaginable, used to inspect the men on night-watch without any advance notice, appearing like a shadow, hoping to catch them doing something against regulations; so without further ado they had gunned him down, when they called out “who’s there” they had all fired together, it couldn’t be determined later whose bullet had killed him, the guy was riddled with them. Sandro had deserted from Monte Cassino, he had set himself adrift in a barrel on the ocean, then made his way through occupied Northern Italy and through Germany. He was sitting in his mother’s cellar in a small town in Baden-Württemberg when the war came to an end.
To a modest extent, he was also considered an up-and-comer, there were two eminent French critics who had praised him, now and then he took their reviews out of his wallet and held them in his hand as if he were holding a psalm book. I asked myself what tied him to Paris, he didn’t really leave his studio, didn’t take part. I couldn’t get close to Sandro, in human, social, emotional terms he was a sort of invalid, but he impressed me. In him, I saw something like a spider crouching in its web, but lying in wait not so much for victims as for proofs, proofs that would support his pessimistic take on life. He collected these, evidence contributing to his inverse faith, so to speak. He told me about an elderly married couple he’d been observing for some time from the window of an acquaintance’s apartment. The way the two old people withdrew to take their afternoon tea, seeming to steel themselves as if for some ritual rite, had awakened his curiosity. What he finally discovered with his binoculars seemed to belong in his gallery of absurdities: the old people didn’t sit at a table, they sat down beside the bed of a laid out, life-size, naked doll whose face and genitalia were garishly made-up, they drank their tea with the most noble airs and graces, if not directly from the body parts, then at least at the head and feet of their specimen. Sandro didn’t have it easy in Paris, it’s true, it seemed unlikely that he would make his way. Also, his girlfriend’s admiration seemed to be on the wane, her propagandistic enthusiasm had visibly lost its vigor.