Concrete (13 page)
anywhere
— in Sicily, on Lake Garda, in Warsaw, in Lisbon or in Mondsee. In all these places and many others I’d repeatedly tried to start work on Mendelssohn Bartholdy; I’d gone to these places for this purpose only and stayed as long as possible, but always in vain. The thought of this depressed me as I walked back to the hotel. A sudden oppressive stench in the air brought on an attack of breathlessness as I was walking through the little park in front of the yacht club. I had to stop and was even forced to sit down on one of the stone seats in order to calm myself. These attacks of breathlessness always come on suddenly; I never know the immediate cause. When they do I swallow two or three glycerine pills from the small phial I always have on me wherever I go. But it always takes five or ten minutes for them to work. How much worse my condition has become since my last visit, I thought. If the Cañellas see me they’ll have a fright. On the other hand, I thought, people can’t see my
real condition
, which can hardly get any worse, or so I imagine at least. Take everything slowly, take everything carefully, I told myself. Carefully, that was the word the specialist had stressed most of all. But I’m not giving up, I thought. Certainly not now. At first the air is wonderfully fresh and spicy and I am completely revived; then from one moment to the next it changes and has me cringing like a dog. I’m used to that. But of all the climatic conditions I know, those in Palma are the best. And the island is still the most beautiful in Europe. Even the hundreds of millions of Germans and Swedes and Dutch who come here and throw their weight about so abominably haven’t managed to destroy it. It’s more beautiful now than it’s ever been. And where in the world is there any place or any region that doesn’t have its unpleasant side? It’s a good thing I’ve left Peiskam and made a fresh start in Palma. It’s a new beginning, I thought, and I got up from the stone seat and walked on. The palm trees, which I remembered as being so tall, were now much taller, about sixty feet, and they all had a slight bend just under a quarter of the way from the top. How splendid was the sight of the gleaming lights on the cruise ships in the great harbour! I saw the sign
Hotel Victoria.
I’d stayed there too on one occasion, but in recent years the whole repulsive pack of so-called new rich had fallen upon it and made it unendurable.
No, not the Victoria again,
I told myself. Now, about fifteen minutes after my attack of breathlessness, I was suddenly walking light-footedly along the Molo and indulging in my old habit of counting the masts of the sailing boats and yachts that were anchored there in their thousands. Most of them belonged to English people wanting to sell. On almost every other boat there was a
For Sale
notice. England has abdicated at last, I said to myself. This remark amused me, though it might easily have made me sadder than I already was. When I reached my hotel I didn’t go straight to my room, but sat in the lobby for a while. If we see a complete stranger, I told myself, from a good vantage point in the lobby, we immediately want to know what he is and where he comes from. I can indulge this curiosity of mine best in hotel lobbies, and when I stay in an hotel it always becomes my favourite pastime. Perhaps that one’s an engineer? Or more precisely a builder of power stations? Perhaps this one’s a doctor, a consultant physician or a surgeon? Is that one an important merchant? And the other a bankrupt? Or a prince perhaps? At any rate he looks seedy. I can spend hours sitting in the hotel lobby and speculating about this or that person, and in the end about all who enter the lobby. When I’m tired I go to my room. On this evening I was completely exhausted simply by my walk to the Borne and back and above all by the tragedy of Anna Härdtl, who was on my mind all the time. At one time I had taken a glass of whisky to my room. This time it was a glass of mineral water. I thought I should sleep, but I didn’t. It was a good thing I’d put my fur coat round my shoulders, I thought. Otherwise I’d have been sure to catch cold sitting on the Borne. When we have sentences in our heads we still can’t be certain of being able to get them down on paper, I thought. The sentences frighten us; first the idea frightens us, then the sentence, then the thought that we may no longer have the idea in our heads when we want to write it down. Very often we write down a sentence
too early,
then another
too late
; what we have to do is to write it down at the proper time, otherwise it’s lost. My work of Mendelssohn Bartholdy is of course a
literary
work, I told myself, not a
musical
one, yet at the same time it’s a musical work through and through. We allow ourselves to be captivated by a subject, and we remain captivated for years, even for decades, and it can happen that we let ourselves be crushed by it. This is because we have not gone to work on it early enough, or because we have gone to work on it too early. Time destroys everything we do, whatever it is. I arranged the articles and books I needed for my work on the desk, which had been specially provided by the hotel, in such a way that I could rely on the correctness of their arrangement. Perhaps the only reason why I was again and again unable to begin my work was that the books and articles were never properly arranged on my desk, I told myself. Before taking my room I had given everybody what I thought was a very generous tip; and I had the impression that they too thought it was very generous. They’ve always done everything for me and are as obliging as ever. I’ve been coming to Palma for thirty years, and for over ten years I’ve stayed at the Melia. The staff know the Austrian guest well. Each time I’ve arrived I’ve told them I’m going to write a study of my favourite composer, but I haven’t written it to this day. When I move into my room, room 734, there’s always a stack of paper on the desk. When I leave the stack of paper has gone: I’ve filled it all with writing, but gradually thrown it all away. Perhaps I’ll be lucky this year! I said to myself. I stepped out on to the balcony, but was dazzled by the glare from the floodlit cathedral, and so I withdrew to my room for the night and drew the curtains. As I have said, I thought I should be able to sleep, but of course I couldn’t. When she had flown to Palma from Munich on the first occasion after her husband’s death, she had been alarmed to discover on her return that her shop in Trudering had been robbed of all but a few worthless items. The insurance she had taken out during her husband’s lifetime did not pay out because she had not complied with the security requirements, Anna Härdtl had told us. Thereupon she was sued by an American firm from which she had acquired most of the appliances she stocked. It’s a case involving a tremendous amount of money, she had said. But a person like her just can’t be helped, I thought as I lay in bed, having been unable to get to sleep for three hours. There are actually millions of such luckless creatures who can’t be rescued from their misfortune. As long as they live they fall from one misfortune into another, and nothing can be done about it. Anna Härdtl is just such a person. I got up and moved the book by Moscheles, which had been on the right-hand side of the desk on top of the one by Schubring, to the left-hand side, placing it under the book by Nadson. Then I lay down again. I thought of Peiskam, which was probably completely snowed up and frozen solid. How could I have believed I should be able to spend even a few weeks of this winter in Peiskam. I really am quite pigheaded, I thought. I’ve completely exhausted Peiskam and everything connected with it, I thought.
Don’t forget Jobann Gustav Droysen,
I thought.
1874, completion of the Violin Concerto in E minor,
I thought. I got up and made a note of this, and went straight back to bed.
First performance of Elijah in Birmingham on 26 August 1846
occurred to me.
Again I got up, went to the desk and made an appropriate note. When we meet somebody like Anna Härdtl, I thought, who is
so
unfortunate, we tell ourselves at once that we are by no means as unfortunate as we think we are: after all, we have our intellectual work. But what does this young woman have apart from a child by a husband who died on her at the age of twenty-three, in whatever circumstances? The fact is that we immediately use someone who is
still more
unfortunate than we are in order to get ourselves back on our feet. And our illness, even though it may be deadly, is of almost no consequence. Instead of writing about Mendelssohn, I reflect, I’m writing these notes. And it occurs to me that I must ring up Elisabeth, my sister in Vienna. At half past two in the morning I am still awake, thinking about my work, which had been
put off and delayed for ten years
, about how I was going to start on it next morning and what the opening sentence would be. And suddenly I had a number of opening sentences in mind. At the same time I thought about Anna Härdtl. Her misfortune, I told myself, is that she forced her husband to give up his career as an engineer and go into a business for which he was quite unsuited, and then persuaded him, for whatever reason, to go on holiday to Mallorca. What a dreadful idea, I thought, to go to Palma in late August! The town and the island are beautiful only in winter, but then they are more beautiful than anything else in the world. I slept for only two hours, waking up at half past five with the thought: I’m now forty-eight years old and I’ve had enough. In the end we don’t have to justify ourselves or anything else. We didn’t make ourselves. And instead of starting work on Mendelssohn, as I had been fully determined to do, having believed at half past three that I had in fact suddenly got the ideal conditions, all I could think of when I woke was Anna Härdtl. The case of this young woman gave me no peace, and at a quarter to six, not wanting to lay myself open to the depression that was bound to assail me between lying in bed and getting up, I got up with a headache which possibly had something to do with an impending change in the weather. Anna Härdtl gave me no peace, and so naturally I was quite incapable of starting to write my Mendelssohn study that morning. I must go to the cemetery as quickly as possible, I told myself with a sudden and terrible resolve which I cannot explain. Before seven o’clock I ordered a taxi and went to the cemetery. I had no difficulty in finding the last resting place of the young Härdtl. It took me only a few minutes. But to my astonishment I found that the marble plaque set in the concrete no longer bore the names
Isabella Fernandez
and
Hanspeter Härdtl:
instead it bore, already engraved in the marble, the names
Anna and Hanspeter Härdtl.
I turned at once and quickly went to the porter on duty in his lodge next to the mortuary cold store. In answer to my question, which I put quite clearly and, as I could see, comprehensibly, even though I put it in Spanish, he simply repeated several times the word
suicido.
I ran over to the lunatic asylum to order a taxi, since this could not be done from the cemetery, and drove straight back to the hotel. I drew the curtains in my room, writes Rudolf, took several sleeping tablets, and woke up twenty-six hours later in a state of extreme anxiety.
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