An Inventory of Losses

by Judith Schalansky

  There are plenty of lovely places to sit and relax all over the site. Above the cold buffet there’s a water feature, a little gully made using the traditional drystone wall method. Two grottoes that supply the site with water all year round, an open-air cinema, a fire pit, and a bathing spot. I went to great trouble to set it all up. I layered hundreds of stones on top of each other, dragged tree trunks and branches uphill to make it a nice place, a place of beauty. Because beauty is important. Everything—life, progress—depends on beauty. Those who make light of beauty don’t realize how much our lives depend on it. When I met my first wife, I was wearing a coat from Paris, a beautiful piece. That’s why she married me. She was already pregnant at that point. Misshapen by the bulge on her front. First the money dried up, then so did our relationship. We had a child. But before long it was dead.

  The niche in the wall there might make a nice little spot in the summer. There are still some fireclay plates in decent condition at the dump. I’d just need to bring them over here, and they’d make a good cooking spot in the culinary arts department. You’ll learn how to barbecue food. There’s a griddle pan with a lid you can use. Or you can wrap the food in tin foil to cook it. At a Mexican barbecue they actually roast a whole animal that way. There’s a large library of books on a culinary theme, including the popular titles Second Only to Love and What Men Like to Eat, lots of barbecue recipes and marinades, as well as books on cultivating a community or kitchen garden and a volume on the language of flowers in French. When you come, it’ll be summer. You’ll enjoy the cool shade. You’ll hold on to the old iron bars, climb down the rock face on the little ladder, balance across the narrow bridge over the ravine and arrive at Casa Virginie, a single-room building with a flat roof and no terrace, measuring four meters by four. I built it myself, a year before I embarked on my second life, my actual life, the dream of self-sufficiency. That was in 1950. You can see the plans for it on a board at the house. If you live like me, it’s free. I don’t rent it out. You have to earn the right to stay there. It’s called the Cottage or else Casa Virginie, after the state in the Wild West, after a female person, after a physiological state. That’s also why the front door is bricked up. There’s a bell at Casa Virginie that rings through to the bedroom in the main house. Everything’s there: nice wallpaper, nice curtains, a lampshade, even benches to sit on, and brackets for window boxes of geraniums. You can live in it if the separate little room gets too small for you. It’ll only take a night to unbrick the door. By the light of the moon is best. It’s light enough then. And nearby you’ve got the big windmill I designed myself, along with its generator, and the components for the water pump, which is nearly ready. Power generation is a problem in itself when you want to be self-sufficient. Chickens would be good. They lay eggs. They’re very useful. It would be easy enough to build a henhouse out of windshields. The chickens need a ladder, a hierarchy, a system. The whole plot is on sloping ground. So the gradient’s already there. I had goats once. But they were stupid. I put down a mattress for them in Casa Virginie, got them settled on it for the night and even covered them with blankets. But they kept getting up again and went and slept on the floor. Three or four goats, it was. Later I tied them to the trees with a rope. They went round and round and kept on walking in circles until they got all tangled up. Then one day they were dead. They were nice animals, a nice breed, sadly just very stupid.

  If you carry on along the footpath, you’ll arrive back at the house and see the big celestial disc on the east gable showing all the constellations of the zodiac. The skies interest me, human destinies, blind chance and the connection between all things, the mechanics of life-threatening events, events that cause premature death. You’d really need to collect specific case histories with dates of birth and dates of ill fate, analyze them and work out rules from them. The more cases you studied, the more accurate the results. You’d need to write up the horoscopes for certain days: the day Swedenborg was born, the day of the break-in at the house of Erich Maria Remarque, the day the pop singer Alexandra died in a car accident. About twenty cases of people dying out of the blue like that. You’re bound to find something in common. But, alas, almost nobody knows their exact time of birth. Goethe said: As the clock struck twelve, I came into the world. That gives you something to work with, at least. The timing of one’s birth isn’t random. Not many of those born on the same day as Mussolini survived. You see, every day of one’s life corresponds to a year of one’s life, and if a crisis occurs in early infancy, which is indicated if the planets Mars, Saturn, Uranus, and Pluto are positioned at zero, ninety, and one hundred and eighty degrees to one another, it is repeated in the corresponding year of one’s life and signals death. You can find all the calculations for this in the astrological folders at the house. And there are plenty of examples available of skies associated with birth deformities. My calculations are precise. The biological recurrences form an obvious pattern: certain events occur on these nodes, giving rise to highs and lows. Longevity and length of life are age-old preoccupations. But everyone has to die. That’s a fact. That’s a comfort.

  The best thing in school was giving a talk. You could pick a topic and find out everything about it. Because it’s important to know what’s what, to be well informed, whether from a historical, geographic or fashion perspective. You can deliberate over the way things are and will be. One school of philosophy after another has done just that, and each of them has come to some conclusion. In the East, you reap what you sow. That’s what is meant by karma. You’ll find plenty about that in the books of theosophy. Questions concerning the soul are all addressed in the theology books. Our impulses, perceptions, inhibitions, memories and so on are dealt with in the psychology books. You see, the Ego, the innermost core of our being, shouldn’t necessarily be regarded as merely a reflection of our body. You can find out more about that in the books of anthroposophy. A lot stays in our subconscious. It can cause inhibitions and neuroses. Psychoanalysis brings it out into the open and provides release. Infants’ perceptions are still completely undifferentiated. Then, very slowly, they become polarized. Sigmund Freud discovered that many of the errors we make stem from the repression of our sexual drive. Someone else demonstrated how the desire for superiority is all-determining. And individual psychology is the result. Professor Jung is the one who discovered the archetypes—the universal, inborn patterns that reside in our collective unconscious. Coué of the Nancy School demonstrated the power of suggestion. Parapsychology examines phenomena that cannot be explained by our everyday senses, while astrology collects past evidence and considers whether the celestial configuration on the day of one’s birth has a bearing on what follows. Darwin demonstrated the evolution of and relationship between all living beings, whereas Genesis describes how the spirit breathed life into matter. Some say spiritual beings exist on as yet inhospitable planets. The problem with spiritualists’ professed contacts with the dead is that nothing positive ever emerges. One mustn’t forget, though, that the fourth dimension is outside of space and time. Perhaps everything really will grind to a halt. There are still quite a few unanswered questions: the problem of divining rods, of death rays, and of whether Eusepia Palladino’s séances were a matter of pure trickery or only occasional trickery.

  I used to arrange everything very precisely by field. Physics here, bones there, and parapsychology over there. Today, though, it’s all a big mess. Knowledge proliferates. The trees just get bigger, they spread out, they reach up towards the sky until the writing peels, the wires come undone and the plates drop off. At first I used to repair them, but then it happened to more and more of them. It’s not possible to work in the wood when it’s dark or raining. That just leaves the house. It’s old and, like most houses in Ticino, has granite walls. It has a stone roof and a lot of rooms, just no heating. You don’t really need it anyway. In winter you can cover the floor with cork tiles, newspapers, and linoleum and insulate the walls with jute and battens. Plas
tic bottles work too. When it’s cold, you can put them in sacks and use them as a quilt. The Valvoline engine oil canisters work best. Those should never be thrown away. But people are forever throwing stuff away without a second thought. Especially the visitors. The dumps are real treasure troves. The things that end up there! Dolls, magazines, stilettos. There’s a use for all of it. Once there was a radio lying there which still worked. In the evenings, after work, I listen to Radio Monte Carlo between 9:00 p.m. and 2:30 a.m. We’ll be able to listen together. There’s not just one radio, but three, as well as three bathtubs, two boilers, two refrigerators, seven electric mixers, but one doesn’t need anything really, not even a toilet. One doesn’t even need other people. At most a wife. A dog would be good. I’ve got a dog harness, and a brochure on breeding dogs.

  Sometimes the front door won’t open. It’s because of the folding grille, which often gets jammed, and all the chestnuts blocking the entrance. There are newspapers, slips of paper, and photographs everywhere. I always used to copy out the newspaper articles and file them in their correct place. Now there are so many of them I no longer even find time to read them. But I make lists of keywords, which I keep. For later, when I happen to have time, or in case people come looking for something.

  My guiding principles are: read everything that can be read. Put like with like, and keep everything you’ve read. Only write down facts, knowledge that can be verified. Wherever possible, keep phenomena separate from established rules and always start with the general and work towards the individual. Because what’s on the outside always points to what’s on the inside. You can deduce more about my essence from my room than from my lung or my heart. That’s because the external and the internal go together, just as the external sexual organs of the man and the internal ones of the woman are two variants of the same thing. And just as the garden is my domain, so the house will become yours. You’ll see that sometimes the interior and exterior are out of balance. But in summer the shade of the chestnut trees and the findings of science can help with the heat, while in winter philosophy can help with the cold. Sometimes in winter I have to go outdoors to warm myself in the snow. A hot-water bottle can be a lifesaver. If you put it on the stove it saves you having to add hot water. I used to have a flat, curved metal water bottle to put by my feet. Nowadays I use a proper bottle and hold it to the sensitive place between my legs, as that’s the best way to get the heat circulating.

  There is a lot of equipment. Each item is inventoried: AS1, AS2, AS3 and so on. I have the AS6, the film projector, the AS2, a video camera—a massive drum duplicator, a Rajah photographic enlarger, a beaded screen that makes the projection appear brighter and more lustrous, a reducer that allows you to make images so small they fit on a tiny bead, a low-frequency amplifier, a Thorens wax-disc cutter, the AS7, as well as books describing the physical processes involved in engraving your own 33- or 78-rpm gramophone records. I used the AS7 to record a serenade by Enrico Toselli on the clarinet, which I’m going to play you by way of welcome. Now, too, the buttons are pressed, the stylus is cutting, the turntable is turning constantly, recording everything I say. The microphone is older. For very short-distance experiments there is also a minitransmitter and a shortwave adapter, plus a crank telephone and a device used to produce stereo images. I wanted to try it out once. But the female just ran away. You really have to keep an eye on women.

  I have the Encyclopaedia Britannica. I have numerous books about problems to do with love and marriage. I have books on the problems of existence and books about death. If you copy out keywords that interest you from your Brockhaus encyclopedia and bring them with you, then I can copy out the same ones for you from my Encyclopédie Larousse. They complement each other, you see. The largest flower is the corpse lily from the Philippines, the largest den that of the grizzly bear, and the largest bird is unable to fly. Milk stays in one’s stomach for two to three hours. The navel divides the human body roughly according to the golden ratio. One’s arm span is roughly the same as one’s body length. All living tissue is made of carbon compounds. The male is an accident: the female would have sufficed, writes Gourmont. She always has the principal role. This is evident if only from the fact that, in civilized humanity, more females are born the closer civilization comes to a state of plenitude. The egg, recent research has shown, is by no means passive: it actively sends out a crude extension in the direction of the approaching sperm cell. Something grows on the ovary, something resembling a wart. When it bursts and drops off you get a rise in body temperature. It’s called ovulation. And that’s when you need to take care! I once had a girlfriend in Paris; she was from Mexico. And we had sexual intercourse. One time Aunt Flo didn’t come. So we went to the pharmacy and the pharmacist gave her something to take, I think it was called Algos. And then the blood came, and in amongst all the blood was a tiny something. I’ve never seen anything like it. On holiday in the Tyrol I once had intercourse with the chambermaid. But I was still afraid after the last time. So we drove straight to Innsbruck to see a doctor, to check if anything had happened. But he just laughed.

  The first on the right is my bedroom. It’s always dark in there. The light bulbs have blown, and the window is insulated with books. Only in the morning does a little bit of light filter through the gaps. It’s like an alarm clock, a reminder to get up. And there are the women gazing out from the Lux soap advertisement and the magazines. They look straight at you. You can walk around the room, but they’re everywhere, looking at you. Never averting their gaze. One of them is hanging on a coat hanger looking out from the top of a jacket. I dressed her in it. But her face is still naked. So much skin. Even when I’m lying in bed she sees me, looks down on me from above. Watches everything I do. Sometimes lust gets the better of one. Then one needs to find an outlet, especially if one’s sex drive is very strong. Apart from masturbatory release, there are only three forms of sexual activity, the context and acceptability of which depend on the prevailing social climate at the time: there is prostitution; there is the free bond of love; and there is the officially governed and recognized contractual sexual relationship of civil marriage based on Article 4 of the Civil Code, section 1, paragraph 1353. In biological terms all three involve the same thing. I’ve been married twice. Both marriages ended in divorce. We weren’t a good fit. Not even in the place where we should have fitted. Plenty of people have written about it. It’s in all the books. There is, says La Rochefoucauld, only one kind of love, but there are a thousand imitations. One has to question one’s own inclinations. Do they stem from an inner urge, or from the lure of the forbidden? Perverse sexual inclinations mostly develop at an age when the sex drive has not yet erupted. The person may well have a certain innate predisposition, but in the vast majority of cases, these preferences develop when one is experiencing the heights of ecstasy for the first time. The actor can portray nothing that is not already latent within him in some albeit rudimentary form: king, beggar, patriarch. As for the urge to dress up, there is a distinction to be drawn between transvestites, who like new clothes that don’t come with memories attached, and fetishists, who like clothing that carries the hint of another person, in other words who love worn items.

  You know what’s cruel? Rousing a man into a passion with kisses, with all kinds of exposures and disclosures, touches, looks, by the way you read to him, talk to him, unreservedly inflaming his desire, but then, contrary to all the promises made, not being willing to go all the way—apparently solely in order to heighten his agony and allow you to revel in the sight of this suffering.

  There is no denying the superiority of female beauty. Its source, its secret lies entirely in the unity of the female figure. What makes the woman more beautiful is that her genitalia are out of sight. The male sexual organ, which offers no advantage whatsoever except when it comes to answering the call of nature, is a constant burden and badge of shame. Our upright posture, especially, makes it the most vulnerable place in combat and an eyeso
re to behold since it is a bump in a flat surface, a blip in a smooth line.

  The harmony of the female form is far more complete, if only in terms of geometry, particularly if you think of man and woman in the heat of desire, at the moment when they are engaging in the most intense, most natural manifestation of life there is. The woman, whose stirrings all occur internally and are expressed only in the undulating motions of her body, preserves her full aesthetic value, whereas the man sinks, as it were, to the lowest animallike state, appears humiliated, forfeits all beauty the moment he exposes his genitals. In terms of technical ability to achieve coitus, too, the woman is superior to the man since she does not, for example, need an erect member to accomplish the act. As far as the mechanical process is concerned, a woman is capable of uninterrupted intercourse.

  The size of the clitoris can vary greatly. However, a relatively undeveloped clitoris can, as indeed can the entire genital apparatus, grow in size over the years if the woman engages in plenty of sexual activity. No one has yet studied the effects of practice and experience. In most cases, the larger labia are close together in women who have not given birth. They need to become engorged and the clitoris must start to become erect prior to any act if the woman is not to be left unsatisfied. Most married women submit passively to sexual activities and thereby miss out on the chance to ease and enhance the experience by getting involved themselves and controlling the relevant muscles.