by Nizon, Paul.
I got a foretaste of that at the beginning of a course of treatment at a health resort in Abano Terme. My doctor had wanted to send me to a mud-bath spa on many occasions because of sporadically occurring problems with a slipped disc. And since my health insurance, which was about to run out, would still pay for such a treatment, it was high time, and I took advantage of it.
In order to sort out the matter with the insurance company, I first had to travel to Zürich. I spent the afternoon and evening before my departure in my wife’s apartment, she was out of the country, I still had the key, and I rashly decided I would stay there, of all places. I lay on the bed in my clothes with the drapes pulled, they were beautiful white drapes that reduced the light in an almost clinically considerate manner, the effect was created by the material, a sort of satin weave, and the drapes fell to the floor from old-fashioned brass rods with round knobs on the ends. As I lay on the wide bed in this subdued daylight and stared at the furniture, I felt more out of place than in a hotel. I had no business there anymore, I had broken in, I couldn’t sleep, just pass the time, and as I did so, I saw myself as an unauthorized intruder, a squatter. I dozed until about midnight, then I drove off. I drove in my old car in the direction of the San Bernardino Tunnel and after that across the plain of the Po River into Veneto, arriving late at Abano and my hotel. The next day I got my first fango pack. I was awakened by telephone before daybreak, that was part of the routine—they start in the night and work through until about noon; they? well, the male nurses who work in this subkingdom reminiscent of a laundry, because of course these hotels are all erected over thermal springs. The phone call prompted me to put on the hooded bathrobe made of thick toweling provided by the hotel and ride the elevator down into this underworld, the elevator smelled nauseatingly of the acidic earth. Downstairs, first they packed me in the scalding-hot clay, then laid white towels on top of me, it’s a form of being buried alive and of course comes complete with shortness of breath and fear of suffocation. I remained in that burning, then sudorific sarcophagus for twenty minutes or more, after which the worn-out male nurse came running to free me, the person commended to his care, from the terracotta coffin that had in the meantime become almost as solid as a baking pan; then the cleaning, and after that the thermal bath; the bubbling hot water, sparkling mineral water has a noticeably exhausting effect. After that I got a massage, and then, weak in the knees, I took the elevator back to my room and fell into bed.
People say the cure makes the patient listless and soft like putty at first, inside and out; I hadn’t expected that, I immediately sank into a deep despondency.
That’s quite normal, people told me. Herr Saurer said, people get emotional down here. At age seventy-eight, he was taking the cure for the thirteenth time. But there was also a corresponding aftereffect, later on, you leave as if born anew, the ancient Romans had known that too, those inveterate gourmands; they didn’t come to Abano for nothing, said Herr Saurer, a fellow countryman from Bern whom I knew from my time at the museum, from the days of my youth, for in those days, when I was serving as an assistant, he’d held an important cultural office, a high-up senior position, and in the military he’d held the rank of colonel. I hadn’t seen him again in the intervening decades, now we had met up here as fango brothers and lifetime reservists as though on a weekend training exercise. The Romans, he said, had sought out Abano because of its Fountain of Youth effect, without Abano they couldn’t have begun to cope with their wild way of life. Herr Saurer sat at the table next to mine in the hotel dining room.
It was an ugly but happy dining room. At those meals, I always had a Genoese man in my line of vision, in the context of Abano he was still a young man, about fifty, a dark-haired fellow with very hairy arms and darkly glowing eyes behind glasses, shyly glowing eyes. Do they look malicious or menacing, or what’s wrong with the man? I asked myself at my table for one, where the bottle of wine had a little chain around its neck with a sort of license plate on it, the plate bore my room number; I always looked at the Genoese, he couldn’t be overlooked, because he always came in late, when the first course had already been served. He carried his head to one side, tucked against his shoulder, which made him seem rather affected. When he had finally seated himself, he looked around with those glowing eyes, taking in everything, myself included. He reminded me of someone, and I kept wondering who it was, until I came to the conclusion that he reminded me of the old Latin teacher in the building with the hunchbacked Fräulein Murz and poor Florian, the teacher who had always splashed water around in my bathroom, the two of them had the same pasty complexion and the same five o’clock shadow, they had at least that in common, and something in their expression as well.
The other people I saw from my table were three Austrian grandmothers who always came marching in, a unified front, with their angular hips and short, rounded arms that seemed to have been added to their bodies as afterthoughts, and which they placed on the table after they had taken their seats. It was obvious that there was something like a hierarchy among them, a hierarchy that might have been determined by minimal differences in social standing, and in addition all three of them seemed to be teetotalers, or their leader had given an order to that effect, in any case, during the entire length of their stay, they always chose fruit juice with their hors d’oeuvres, carefully making it last by diluting it with water so that they’d have it to the end of the meal, absolving them from ordering any drinks. One of them seemed a tiny bit more luxurious than the other two, but she was also the one who tended most to comply with their leader, and that one in turn distinguished herself by a humorous curtness, both in dealing with the waiter, she gave the orders, and in deciding when the three of them would march out at her command.
I had these two tables before my eyes, but was soon familiar with many of the other guests as well, including Germans, Italians, Canadians, Swiss, French, Belgians, and most of them looked very rich; almost all were old or ancient and thus quite frail. They were people who had most of their lives behind them, one might be tempted to describe them as a moribund company. It occurred to me that “outside” no one took any notice of them, or simply ignored them, but here in the hotel, and twice a day in the dining room, I was forced not just to see them, but to look at them continuously, now I too belonged on this ghost train, and it soon seemed to me as if no other group of people existed at all, as if this was the quintessential society.
They sat like flies on the wicker chairs in front of the hotel, or in the hallway, waiting for the meal, or they sat outside on the patio of a café in the small town, silently waiting there, hundreds of them sitting around, Abano must have a hundred such hotels, all with a fango underworld, baths, and spas. And at mealtimes, the same people came into all these hotels, pattering, creeping, hobbling, crawling along, most of them seemed rich, if not filthy rich, they were very carefully dressed for dinner in formal, ceremonial wear, an evening gown, tuxedo, and dark trousers, for lunch in elegant sportswear, with different outfits from time to time, these elderly people seemed to change their clothes at every opportunity.
I couldn’t see what good it did them to go to all that effort, but then I said to myself: they probably don’t see themselves as they are, they see themselves differently; and now I began to ask myself if I too was the victim of a similar delusion. Was I perhaps, in my own way, just like they were, except that I saw myself differently?
The worst were the still somewhat presentable women who acted as if they were on a pleasure yacht on the Mediterranean Sea.
Twice a week, there was a ball, and then all these visitors to the spa, these people who were essentially finished, danced with each other, and, along with them, etched in their faces, horrors of the most diverse origins. For the ladies who were still a little younger, young men had been specially brought in who could really dance and looked really good, they acted as if they found their female partners particularly attractive, they courted them. During those activities I always got the fee
ling that everyone felt the same way I did, that everyone saw through everyone else. What had happened to my sense of self-esteem, to the way I used to see myself? it seemed to me as if I were now facing up to the fact of some incurable illness or an even worse sort of damnation. I was distraught in this Fountain of Youth milieu; I explained to a married Italian couple, both of them physicians, who had invited me to go for a walk with them into the hills and to a rustic, out-of-the-way trattoria, that I found myself in a state of mind not unlike a victim of brainwashing, as if my personality had been entirely rewritten, and if things went on this way, I’d have to get admitted to a psychiatric clinic as soon as I got out of the spa. The couple laughed as if I’d just told them a good joke about foreigners.
I remained unsure of myself, outwardly apathetic. Since I nevertheless kept an eye on the other hotel guests with apprehensive curiosity, mainly observing the divergence between their miserable appearances and the way they wanted to look, in other words, the phenomenon of self-deception, and in doing so detected nothing but tragicomic absurdity, it seemed a natural conclusion that I was also doing a good job of fooling myself. Had I, without knowing it, become a ridiculous figure? Was I one of those “has-beens” that one instinctively spots in a crowd?
And now I tried desperately to make contact with the self-image I’d still been carrying around with me just before being “admitted” here, that I’d still possessed a short while ago, and had even shown off, parading around with complete confidence in myself. I thought my way back to those experiences I’d had that were possibly the most “full of life,” most worldly, for example to Madame Julie’s maison de rendez-vous, to Dorothée and other purely physical relationships, I did it to arm myself against these attacks of tabula rasa. I tried to think of people who, in my youth, had been the same age I was now, and in general I began to think of people among my friends and acquaintances who were my age and older, in order to be able to assess if they were on the bright side or the dark side, did they know what life is all about or were they deceiving themselves. Should that artist, that academic, that alcoholic, that energetic businessman from my age group already be relegated to the debit side of the ledger, or should I still enter him on the side of the living? I collected counter-arguments. A Prime Minister Trudeau, I called out inwardly, no, he certainly doesn’t belong here yet; I developed into a saver of lives and souls, attempting to rescue one after the other from Hades, but less for their sake than for my own. And despite all that, I could still so easily see myself as the inmate of an institution.
But, I tried to console myself, God knows my problems differ from those of my fellow inmates. All of them are retired, most of them are made of money, as one can tell from afar, or are at least armed with solid pensions, each like the other protected against all eventualities, these are people with backgrounds, their defect is of a definitive nature, so to speak, whereas I, now, temporarily unproductive and short of cash, am plagued with uncertainty, am therefore somewhat frightened, but for all that I’m still a long way off from being like them, from being retired; and right away I thought: if they knew that I, who possibly stand out a bit in this company—after all, I have no visible affliction, am by far the youngest person at the spa, and just from my appearance and manner am made of sterner stuff than anyone else here—if they knew that right now I’m broke and without anything to look forward to, but rather am for better or for worse staying here and vegetating, enjoying the swimming pool and hotel park simply on account of a gracious concession on the part of my old insurance company; if they knew that I, although not an invalid, am nevertheless a sort of charity case, a man experiencing an existential crisis, a parasite and con man, in other words; I only walk among you because of an act of mercy, my dear ladies and gentlemen, I murmured.
Was I struggling with writer’s block at the same time as having a mid-life crisis? I scrutinized myself in the mirror of my plush bathroom, and looked away again immediately. And if I can’t make it back with my old car, if the car breaks down, it’ll soon be ready for the scrap heap, I said to myself, and caught myself thinking of a premature departure from the spa; but if I got a flat tire while fleeing, I wouldn’t even be in a position to pay for the cost of the repair, let alone the cost of towing the car anywhere; and in any case, where should I flee to? There was a paying guest sitting in my Parisian apartment.
This Abano is hell, and now my rage was directed at the seventyeight-year-old Herr Saurer, my fellow countryman, because he had confided in me, talking down to me, or so it seemed, that he was in the process of writing his memoirs. Oh yes, beautiful memoirs, I thought furiously, I’ll show them beautiful memoirs, pure boredom, a fairy tale, pedantic, I thought, and envied him the writing of his memoirs, above all the peace he felt while writing, the considerable arrogance, the courage, the confidence.
If only this subject matter that I’ve been carrying around with me for so long now had finished its fermentation process; if only I had this state of inner turmoil behind me; if I could see the thing in front of me; if I had received my marching orders together with a map of my route; if only I could write again. Instead, I’m sitting around with this bunch of moribund old people and accepting the administration of daily fango packs as part of this “paid holiday.”
And then I thought of several of my recurrent ideas of beauty; there was the radiance of gardens at dawn, walking along a narrow passageway between gardens, that feeling of intimacy; there was the feeling of happiness that came from being alone in a garden, when you catch your breath from sheer bliss.
And there was the continual colorful clanging of a port city, walking down to the harbor below the crooked walls of buildings that cast sharp, jagged shadows; I’m walking down deep in the rock, past the openings into the stores, past the caverns of the taverns, the taste of seaweed on my tongue and the sharp smell of the sea and the fish market in my nostrils; I’m walking down the pungent street with its sharp turns—where am I going? Into the adventure of a new horizon. Doors banging, bars, a young hooker standing in a dark doorway, departure in every sense of the word, with only the clothes on my back and otherwise nothing that belongs to me.
I tried to write that down at the small table in my hotel room with the curtains drawn to keep out the heat; I was writing in a dark, hot hotel cubicle where everything was varnished smooth with unfamiliarity. And in the adjacent bathroom I could contemplate my face, which now also seemed unfamiliar to me.
That Genoese with his pasty complexion and five o’clock shadow, whose skin always seems sweaty and unclean, with his dark, glowing eyes behind his glasses, and his arms with their thick covering of black hair; this Genoese preoccupied me, there was always a sort of young girl’s smile affectedly engraved on his face, he pushed through the swinging door as if he wanted to make himself invisible, thereby achieving the exact opposite. He breathed a greeting at me, he studied the menu, he poured himself a glass of water, he ate, occasionally glancing up at the others from his usually downcast eyes. He didn’t drink, didn’t smoke, didn’t talk.
And the sturdy Austrian women came in, plunked down in their chairs, put their arms on the table, and then they got their fruit juice, which they carefully, economically made last over the entire course of the meal; they took a little sip, then they waited for the main course, waited while the waiter raced here and there and sometimes let huge platters fall to the floor; they waited and waited while the others noisily ate their hors d’oeuvres, waited until the waiter had cleared away that course and raced in for the following act; they looked at the others with deliberate indifference, but it had a different effect, with all their feigned indifference, they were asking to be excused for their presence. One of them pretended to be engrossed in the menu, she was, as I noticed, the one who had the habit of crumbling the usually hard rolls into her meat and vegetables. Two of them always had sweets or ice cream for dessert, the third ate fruit and always packed up all the leftovers. When the bar pianist played during the candle-lit dinners
the three of them clapped the loudest. But their leader, the one with the mania about the rolls, did so in a particular manner. She waited impassively until the piece came to an end, then she lifted her rounded lower arms and clapped like a jackhammer, continuing on after everyone else had stopped, she kept it up to the very end, she had the last word, that was her number, and now she had let everyone see that.
The masseur Antonio often spoke of fare l’amore; once he said, after the sexual act was completed, he always felt the urge to run away, he had to get away from the bed, even if just for as long as it took to smoke a cigarette. Why, I said, if it’s beautiful, one can never have enough of it, why run off right away? Afterward, he said, he turned away, because a man, after completing the sexual act, did not cut a good figure; the women never went limp, they wanted to keep on going, in that, they were superior to the man, that was their strength. Antonio seemed to know everything about everyone. He started work at four in the morning and worked through until noon. He also massaged most of the women. He said the old ones, and especially the very old ones among them, sometimes bit him with their false teeth, they got quite wild from the massage. He said it goodnaturedly. He was married and had two children. At the first ball, a handsome young man was present, he was a masseur in another hotel, the dancing, his business as a taxi dancer, was additional income. He danced imaginatively and at the same time with discipline, with his arm around a brazen woman in her mid-fifties who was behaving like a maenad. The pianist had made fun of the people who were dancing, as he sang, he wove insults and oaths into the texts of his torch songs. At one table, the female Austrian soldiers had sat at the ready; a fat Italian had fondled a compatriot oleaginously.