Ahead of All Parting (20 page)

Only don’t ask the women anything when you see them feeding the birds. You could even follow them; they do it just in passing; it would be easy. But leave them alone. They don’t know how it happens. All at once they have a whole purseful of bread, and they hold out large pieces from under their flimsy shawls, pieces that are a bit chewed and soggy. It does them good to think that their saliva is getting out into the world a little, that the small birds will fly off with the taste of it in their mouths, even though a moment later they naturally forget it again.

There I sat before your books, obstinate man, trying to understand them as the others do, who don’t leave you in one piece but chip off their little portion and go away satisfied. For I still didn’t understand fame, that public demolition of someone who is in the process of becoming, whose building-site the mob breaks into, knocking down his stones.

Young man anywhere, in whom something is welling up that makes you shiver, be grateful that no one knows you. And if those who think you are worthless contradict you, and if those whom you call your friends abandon you, and if they want to destroy you because of your precious ideas: what is this obvious danger, which concentrates you inside yourself, compared with the cunning enmity of fame, later, which makes you innocuous by scattering you all around?

Don’t ask anyone to speak about you, not even contemptuously. And when time passes and you notice that your name is circulating among men, don’t take this more seriously than anything else you might find in their mouths. Think rather that it has become cheapened, and throw it away. Take another name,
any
other, so that God can call you in the night. And hide it from everyone.

Loneliest of men, holding aloof from them all, how quickly they have caught up with you because of your fame. A little while ago they were against you body and soul; and now they treat you as their equal. And they pull your words around with them in the cages of their presumption, and exhibit them in the streets, and tease them a little, from a safe distance. All your terrifying wild beasts.

When I first read you, these words broke loose and fell upon me in my wilderness, in all their desperation. As desperate as you yourself became in the end, you whose course is drawn incorrectly on every chart. Like a crack it crosses the heavens, this hopeless hyperbola of your path, which curves toward us only once, then recedes again in terror. What did you care if a woman stayed or left, if this man was seized by vertigo and that one by madness, if the dead were alive and the living seemed dead: what did you care? It was all so natural for you; you passed through it the way someone might walk through a vestibule, and didn’t stop. But you lingered, bent over, where our life
boils and precipitates and changes color: inside. Farther in than anyone has ever been; a door had sprung open before you, and now you were among the alembics in the firelight. In there, where, mistrustful, you wouldn’t take anyone with you, in there you sat and discerned transitions. And there, since your blood drove you not to form or to speak, but to reveal, there you made the enormous decision to so magnify these tiny events, which you yourself first perceived only in test tubes, that they would be seen by thousands of people, immense before them all. Your theater came into being. You couldn’t wait until this life almost without spatial reality, this life which had been condensed by the weight of the centuries into a few small drops, could be discovered by the other arts: until it could gradually be made visible to a few connoisseurs who, little by little, acquire insight and finally demand to see these august rumors confirmed in the parable of the scene opened in front of them. You couldn’t wait for that; you were there, and everything that is barely measurable—an emotion that rises by half a degree, the angle of deflection, read off from up close, of a will burdened by an almost infinitesimal weight, the slight cloudiness in a drop of longing, and that barely perceptible color-change in an atom of confidence—all this you had to determine and record. For it is in such reactions that life existed,
our
life, which had slipped into us, had drawn back inside us so deeply that it was hardly possible even to make conjectures about it any more.

Because you were a revealer, a timelessly tragic poet, you had to transform this capillary action all at once into the most convincing gestures, into the most available forms. So you began that unprecedented act of violence in your work, which, more and more impatiently, desperately, sought equivalents in the visible world for what you had seen inside. There was a rabbit there, an attic, a room where someone was pacing back and forth; there was a clatter of glass in a nearby bedroom, a fire outside the windows; there was the sun. There was a church, and a rock-strewn valley that was like a church. But this wasn’t enough: finally towers had to come in and whole mountain-ranges; and the avalanches that bury landscapes spilled onto a stage overwhelmed with what is tangible, for the sake of what cannot be grasped. Then you could do no more. The two ends, which you had bent together until they touched, sprang apart; your demented strength escaped from the flexible wand, and your work was as if it had never existed.

If this hadn’t happened, who could understand why in the end you refused to go away from the window, obstinate as you always were? You wanted to see the people passing by; for the thought had occurred to you that someday you might make something out of them, if you decided to begin.

When I think about it now, I can’t help being astonished that I always managed to completely return from the world of these fevers and was able to adjust to that social existence where everyone wanted to be reassured that they were among familiar objects and people, where they all conspired to remain in the realm of the intelligible. If you looked forward to something, it either came or didn’t come, there was no third possibility. There were Things that were sad, once and for all, and there were pleasant Things, and a great number of incidental ones. And if a joy was arranged for you, it was in fact a joy, and you had to behave accordingly. All this was basically very simple, and once you got the knack of it, it took care of itself. For everything entered into these appointed boundaries: the long, monotonous school hours, when it was summer outside; the walks that afterward you had to describe in French; the visitors into whose presence you were summoned and who thought you were amusing, just when you were feeling sad, and laughed at you the way people laugh at the melancholy expression of certain birds, who don’t have any other face. And of course the birthday parties, to which children were invited whom you hardly knew, embarrassed little girls who made
you
embarrassed, or rude little boys who scratched your face, and broke the presents you had just received, and then suddenly left when all the toys had been pulled out of their boxes and wrappings and were lying piled up on the floor. But when you played by yourself, as always, it could happen that you inadvertently stepped out of this agreed-upon, generally harmless world, and found yourself in circumstances that were completely different, and unimaginable.

At times Mademoiselle had her migraine, which was extremely violent, and these were the days when I was hard to find. I know that on these occasions the coachman was sent to look for me in the park when Father happened to ask for me and I wasn’t there. From one of the upper guest-rooms I could see him running out and calling my name at the entrance to the long tree-lined driveway. These rooms were situated, side by side, in the gable of Ulsgaard and, since we very seldom had house-guests in those days, were almost always empty. But adjoining them was that large corner room that attracted me to it
so powerfully. There was nothing in it except an old bust of Admiral Juel, I think, but all around, the walls were paneled with deep, gray wardrobes, so that the window had had to be installed in the bare, whitewashed space above them. In one of the wardrobe doors I had found a key, and it opened all the others. So in a short time I had examined everything: eighteenth-century chamberlains’ coats, cold with their inwoven silver threads, and the beautiful embroidered vests that went with them; official costumes of the Order of Danneborg and the Order of the Elephant, so rich and ceremonious, with linings so soft when you touched them, that at first you thought they were women’s dresses. Then real gowns which, held out by their panniers, hung stiffly like marionettes from some too-large puppet show, now so completely outmoded that their heads had been taken off and used for some other purpose. But alongside these, there were wardrobes that were dark when you opened them, dark with high-buttoned uniforms that seemed much more worn than all the others and that wished they had never been preserved.

No one will find it surprising that I pulled all these clothes out and took them into the light; that I held one of them up to my chest or wrapped another one around me; that I hastily tried on some costume that might fit me and, curious and excited, ran to the nearest guest-room, in front of the tall, narrow mirror, which was made up of irregular pieces of green glass. Ah, how I trembled to be there, and how thrilling when I was: when something approached out of the cloudy depths, more slowly than myself, for the mirror hardly believed it and, sleepy as it was, didn’t want to promptly repeat what I had recited to it. But in the end it had to, of course. And now it was something very astonishing, strange, totally different from what I had expected, something sudden, independent, which I glanced over quickly, only to recognize myself a moment later, not without a certain irony, which came within a hairsbreadth of spoiling all the fun. But if I immediately began to talk, to bow, to nod at myself, if I walked away, looking around at the mirror all the while, and walked back, brisk and determined, I had imagination on my side, as long as I wanted.

It was then that I first came to know the influence that can emanate from a particular costume. Hardly had I put on one of them when I had to admit to myself that it had me in its power; that it dictated my movements, my facial expression, even my thoughts. My hand, over
which the lace cuff fell and fell again, was in no way my ordinary hand; it moved like an actor; I might even say that it watched itself move, however exaggerated that sounds. These disguises, though, never went so far as to make me feel a stranger to myself; on the contrary, the more complete my transformation, the more convinced I was of my own identity. I grew bolder and bolder; flung myself higher and higher; for my skill at catching myself again was beyond all doubt. I didn’t notice the temptation in this quickly growing security. My undoing came when the last wardrobe, which I hadn’t been able to open before, yielded one day, furnishing me with, not specific costumes, but all kinds of random paraphernalia for masquerades, whose fantastic possibilities made my head spin. There is no way to describe everything I found there. In addition to a
bautta
that I remember, there were dominos in various colors, women’s skirts which tinkled brightly with the coins that were sewn into them; there were Pierrot costumes, which I thought looked ridiculous, and pleated Turkish pants, and Persian fezzes, from which little sacks of camphor slipped out, and coronets with stupid, expressionless stones. All these I rather despised; they were so shabbily unreal, and hung there so stripped and wretched, and collapsed so helplessly when they were dragged out into the light. But what transported me into a kind of intoxication were the spacious cloaks, the scarves, the shawls, the veils, all those yielding, wide, unused fabrics that were so soft and caressing, or so smooth that I could hardly keep hold of them, or so light that they flew by me like a wind, or simply heavy with all their own weight. It was in them that I first saw possibilities that were free and infinitely varied: I could be a slave-girl who was about to be sold, or Joan of Arc or an old king or a wizard; all this was possible now, especially since there were also masks, enormous menacing or astonished faces with real beards and thick or upraised eyebrows. I had never seen any masks before, but I immediately understood that masks ought to exist. I had to laugh when it occurred to me that we had a dog who looked as if he wore one. I remembered his affectionate eyes, which always seemed to be looking out from behind two holes in his hairy face. I was still laughing as I put on the clothes, and in the process I completely forgot what I had intended to dress up as. All right, it was new and exciting not to decide until I was in front of the mirror. The face I tied on had a peculiarly hollow smell; it fitted closely over my own face, but I was able to see
through it comfortably, and only after the mask was on did I choose all kinds of materials, which I wound around my head like a turban, in such a way that the edge of the mask, which extended downward into a gigantic yellow cloak, was almost completely hidden on top also and on the sides. Finally, when there was nothing more to add, I considered myself adequately disguised. To complete the costume, I picked up a large staff and walked it along beside me at arm’s length, and in this way, not without difficulty but, as it seemed to me, full of dignity, I trailed into the guest-room toward the mirror.

It was really magnificent, beyond all expectation. And the mirror repeated it instantly: it was too convincing. It wouldn’t have been at all necessary to move; this apparition was perfect, even though it didn’t do a thing. But I wanted to find out what I actually was, so I turned around slightly and lifted both arms: large gestures, as if I were a sorcerer, were (as I saw immediately) the only appropriate ones. But just at this solemn moment I heard quite near me, muffled by my disguise, a multiple, complicated noise. Very frightened, I lost sight of the creature in the mirror and, to my great dismay, saw that I had knocked over a small round table with heaven knows what on it, probably very fragile objects. I bent down as well as I could and found my worst fears confirmed: everything seemed to be in pieces. The two useless, green-violet porcelain parrots were of course shattered, each in a different, malign way. A small bowl had spilled out its pieces of candy, which looked like insects in their silk cocoons, and had tossed its cover far away—only half of it was visible, the other half had completely disappeared. But the most annoying sight of all was a perfume bottle that had broken into a thousand tiny fragments, from which the remnant of some ancient essence had spurted out, that now formed a stain with a very repulsive physiognomy on the light rug. I quickly tried to wipe it up with some of the material that was hanging all over me, but it only got darker and more unpleasant. I was truly desperate now. I got up and looked for some object I could repair the damage with. But there was nothing. Besides, I was so hampered, in my vision and in every movement, that a violent rage flared up against my absurd situation, which I no longer understood. I began to pull at the knots of my costume, but that only made them tighter. The strings of the cloak were strangling me, and the material on my head was pressing down as if
more and more were being added to it. In addition, the air had grown thick and misty with the vapor of the spilled liquid.