TRANSLATED FROM HUNGARIAN BY GEORGE SZIRTES
[GERMANY]
INGO SCHULZE
Oranges and Angel
Last weekend, the third Sunday in Advent, I finally unpacked the angel. We spent almost two hours picking it out in Naples last year. That is, we hadn’t actually wanted an angel. We wanted a couple of those figurines you find in a presepe, the manger scene set up at this time of year in almost every Italian church, where they then grow into whole cities and landscapes, like the ones we build for model trains. During a previous visit to Naples I had bought a figurine of that sort, a market peddler with her fruit stand. Holding the woman in the palm of my hand, I thought she looked lovely and lost, like the sole inhabitant of some planet. In the girls’ room, however, first her melons and oranges turned up missing, then her head. We had told Ralf what had happened, and he reminded us about it when we got to Naples. Ralf was not to be deterred from presenting us with a large angel—the good ones cost around two hundred euros—as a thank you for our hospitality, as he put it.
Ralf visited us in Rome twice last year, and both times he vanished again with no warning. In retrospect the angel seemed like a kind of security deposit. He had hailed a taxi in Naples to take off in pursuit of a car full of women, and the first sign of life we’d gotten from him then was the Christmas card I received yesterday, asking if there was an angel hovering above us.
At that point I would have been hard-pressed to describe the angel: large, a good fifteen inches high, baroqueish. Removed from the soft wrapping paper, it appeared to have shrunk remarkably—until I discovered the two wings packed with it.
Now I saw before me the wrenched face of the vendor as he strained to remove the angel’s wings, while his wife explained that we needn’t worry about transporting it. They sent entire manger scenes to Canada, Australia, and Japan every year. Urging her husband on, she spread her arms wide to demonstrate how easy it was to pull out the invisible angel wings and then reinsert them. “Si fa accussì!”—that’s how it’s done, she cried, “Si fa accussì.”
It’s amazing to me now that we ever took the angel once its wings had been ripped off and screwed back in again. But Ralf insisted—just look at those hands, so lifelike, as if they were playing a harp.
Determined to treat the angel better than its vendor had, I first sought out the holes in its red bib apron and long robe of bright, shimmering olive green, then threaded the nail carefully through—and immediately lost my place. Wielding the wing like a hunting knife, I poked around again with the nail in search of the hole, which couldn’t have disappeared. I went at it more vigorously, and the fabric tore. That is, I heard it rip, but could see no sign of the tear. I had almost given up when the nail slipped into place. I now held the angel up by the eye screw between its shoulders, and the first wing did a marionette’s flap on one side. The second was also reddish blue and just as much trouble. Maybe Ralf’s card and my difficulties with the angel have nothing whatever to do with this story. But it’s not really a story either, more a postponed diary entry from our three-day excursion to Naples. Because time and space are the only things that connect what happened. I believe, however, that the first experience made me more receptive to the second, so that suddenly everything took on a meaning that, from a more sober perspective, probably isn’t there, at least not for other people.
It was purely by chance that Ralf came with us to Naples. Ralf is a friend or acquaintance—depending. In September 1988, as a graduate of the Ernst Busch Acting Academy, he joined the theater in Altenburg, landed a couple of good-size roles, and kept out of politics. But then, in the spring of 1990—I was already working at the newspaper—he started drinking. He was fired a year later, went into rehab, returned to Altenburg, and supplemented his unemployment checks by delivering our free paper. His new passion was computers, the Macs in our office. Ralf made friends with our two typesetters and evidently learned the trade simply by watching. When we decided to add a third typesetter, the two women wanted Ralf. He stayed on until our bankruptcy in 2001, set out on his own designing websites, and has muddled through ever since. Although we no longer had much to do with each other—I left the paper shortly after he was hired—he was the only person from those days that I still heard from with any regularity.
Last year Ralf asked if he and his new girlfriend could spend two nights with us at the Villa Massimo. I agreed, although in Berlin we hadn’t seen much of each other except when he just happened to drop by.
His visit at the end of June—when he showed up all alone—proved a blessing at first. A few days previous I had torn an Achilles tendon, and surgery had left me with a cast on my right leg, so that I could walk only on crutches. On his first day with us, Ralf managed to locate a wheelchair and pushed me wherever I wanted to go. He quickly made friends with the kids, including those of other fellows at the Villa. They adored him, even though he did little to court their favor. But Ralf could yodel and draw and do headstands, and he knew magic tricks. He could snatch his self-rolled cigarettes apparently out of thin air, sometimes already lit, and make them disappear just as suddenly, so that the kids assumed he was capable of any miracle. He was also more relaxed around them. With us he thought he had to talk about books or art, which proved fairly strenuous.
Since Tanya didn’t like to drive in Italy, ten days later Ralf was our chauffeur for a jaunt to the shore. It turned out to be a beautiful day. Where the real beach began, he grabbed me around the hips, I threw an arm over his shoulder, and we made our way across the sand. At first it didn’t bother me to talk about the women standing along a stretch of the road right before it entered a pine forest; almost all were women of color wearing short gaudy dresses or snug-fitting pants and keeping their backs turned to the road. Ralf interpreted this as modesty, I guessed it came from a different tradition—the courtesans of antiquity are said to have also enticed their clients with buttocks rather than breasts.
But they were all Ralf could talk about the day after as well. Did I know where these women came from, where and how they lived, if they had documentation, how much they charged, how much their pimps deducted, if they ever washed themselves nearby, and did they ever actually get to see the sea, and plenty more along those lines.
“How should I know?” I finally protested.
That afternoon Ralf asked me for the car. He didn’t return until early the next morning, slept till noon, clowned around with the kids, wolfed down a couple of jelly sandwiches, and borrowed the car again early that evening. This went on for several days. I found his behavior embarrassing and puerile and rude—if only because of the kids. Tanya, however, suggested that the women probably found Ralf more pleasant than the sorts of guy we had spotted moving in packs along the shoulder of the road. “Main thing is, nothing happens to him.”
“I find him disgusting,” I said, putting words to what had only become clear to me at that moment. Just seeing his toothbrush next to mine revolted me, and suddenly it was a real effort to use the same toilet he did.
Ralf must have sensed this. One morning, there he was, sitting on his suitcase. He said good-bye to the girls, told us thanks, and left. The car was standing in the parking lot, tanked full and sparkling clean, inside and out.
When I heard from him four months later in November, he sounded embarrassed by his escapades, or at least he apologized on the phone, without saying what for. By then I had admitted to myself how cranky and unfair I had been during my crutches-and-wheelchair phase, and didn’t want to refuse him a second visit. It was sort of a mutual making of amends.
When Ralf arrived in Rome on December 6th, the girls were thrilled. The first two evenings he gave to us entirely. One of Ralf’s new quirks was an inordinate consumption of oranges. I was suspicious at first; he had read Seume’s A Stroll to Syracuse, and I remarked that I found it comforting that Seume could at least fill his belly with oranges for a few weeks. But Ralf’s appetite showed no sign of abating. He would schlep several kilos of ora
nges from the market every day, doling some out like advertising freebies and stuffing himself with the rest. You ran across orange peels almost any time and anywhere, and he always peeled them in a spiral, leaving shapes you could balance on your fingertip or on top of a bottle, something I hadn’t seen since childhood, when oranges were still a rarity—we called it “making monkeys.”
Ralf made himself as useful as he knew how, worked on my website, showed Tanya how to edit and cut digital video, and downloaded a lot of children’s cartoons. Our orange man never said a word about his summer excursions. When we asked him if he wanted to drive us to Naples, he was raring to go.
I was happily anticipating Naples, even though I had reluctantly agreed to write something about the Tadema exhibition at the National Museum. Even the girls, who had had enough of our excursions and were no longer impressed by our promises, could hardly fall asleep the evening before we left.
On the morning of December 12th, however, it looked as if an escalating truckers’ strike would spoil our lovely plans. I dialed one taxi number after another, to no avail. Gas stations were running out of gas, supermarket shelves were emptying fast, fruit and milk had already vanished from many of them. With suitcase, shoulder bags, and two girls, we hurried to the Piazza Bologna. The metro, usually crammed full at this hour in any case, was pure hell—or perhaps what people like us call hell. Without Ralf we would have missed our train with reserved seats. Tanya and I had our hands full just keeping the girls from being squashed, so Ralf took charge of our baggage, but didn’t make it onto our metro car. He showed up at Termini just before our train pulled out—with our suitcase balanced atop his head, bags slung over his shoulders, and a blue plastic bag of oranges dangling from his right wrist.
I’m always fascinated by the fact that it takes only two hours to get from Rome to Naples, and another two, in the opposite direction, to Florence. For me it’s always as if Rome lies at the equator, and Florence and Naples are overarched by two entirely different skies.
It may sound like wild enthusiasm or at least an exaggeration when I claim that I had already wholly experienced the uniqueness of Naples two years before, when for the first time I climbed out of a taxi on the Piazza San Domenico Maggiore. This city has its own peculiar density—I know no other word for it than density. The volume of its squares, streets, alleys, courtyards is so supercharged that Neapolitans seem to me more mature than other city-dwellers. And warmer, and maybe a little nastier too, depending on who you run into. They have neither energy nor time for illusions.
Naples is a city that squanders its beauty, and not just in criminality and decay. All of a sudden the most splendid church emerges, but you can barely see the façade, let alone get a sense of it in its entirety. Its real splendor is often first visible from a back courtyard. Nowhere is the air so saturated with smells, and the air changes with every step you take. You are given the once-over, patted and jostled, silence doesn’t exist. The rattle of motorini demands a continual glance over the shoulder. But this density would be nothing without the vastness that accompanies it. All it takes is to climb a couple flights of stairs or to move from one side of the street to the other, or simply to turn around, and you’re dizzy from the vista sul mare, which I experienced the first time from the windows of the Hotel Britannique, where we were staying this trip too. With its ’70s décor, it looks pretty rundown. Only the high ceilings hint of its old grandezza. Even now a shiver passes over me when I recall my first visit—pulling open the casements in the darkened room, pushing the wooden shutters out, and closing my eyes as the light crashes in. Despite all the descriptions I’d heard or read, despite all the paintings, photographs, and films, I thought I’d be prepared for that moment. In those few dazzled seconds of trying to orient yourself, it’s as if you have wandered into a painting or movie—it’s all so familiar, nothing is familiar. It’s never a repeat view, if only because the light and the color of the water generate a different space each time. Each time I’m terrified by how close Vesuvius is, each time it seems unreal that Sorrento and Amalfi are located on that peninsula, that that island out there is Capri. The vastness is the other side of the coin, the counterpart to the density so surprisingly and intimately related to it. The view across the Gulf of Naples embraces all that we are: from Virgil to Nietzsche and Wagner, from Benjamin to Malaparte to Saviano—seemingly random names chosen from so great a number.
Best European Fiction 2011 Page 30