Concrete (5 page)

because
I wanted her out of the house,
because
I wanted to start work on Mendelssohn Bartholdy the following morning. Only a fool would have believed that he could actually begin work just a few hours after she’d left, just like that, and it was I who was the fool. It’s always taken me several days to free myself from my sister after her departure. On this one occasion I’d hoped for exceptional luck. But I didn’t get it. I’ve never had this sort of luck. And isn’t she right, perhaps, to say that my work on Mendelssohn Bartholdy is just a pretence to justify my absurd way of life, which is entirely without any justification unless it produces something written, something completed? I fall upon Schönberg in order to justify myself, upon Reger, upon Joachim, even upon Bach, simply to justify myself, just as I am now, for the very same reason, falling upon Mendelssohn. Basically I have no right whatever to lead the life I do, which is as unparalleled - and as terrible - as it is expensive.

Yet to whom am I accountable apart from myself? If only I could succeed, at least in the next few days, in starting my work on Mendelssohn Bartholdy!
Have
I got the best conditions? I have and I haven’t. On the one hand I’ve got them, on the other I haven’t, I told myself. I should have them if my sister hadn’t come to Peiskam, but I haven’t because she did. We must commit ourselves one hundred per cent to everything we do, my father always said. He said it to everybody — to my mother, to my sisters, to me. If we don’t commit ourselves one hundred per cent we fail even before we’ve begun. But what is one hundred per cent in this case? Haven’t I prepared for this work one hundred per cent? Perhaps I’ve prepared for it two hundred per cent, or even three hundred. That would be calamitous. The idea was of course absurd. Your mistake, my sister had said, is to isolate yourself completely in your house. You don’t go and visit friends any longer, though we have so many. What she said was true. But what does one mean by friends? We know a number of people, perhaps even a lot of people; there are a few whom we’ve known since we were children and who have not yet died or moved away for good. Every year we used to visit them frequently and they used to come to our house. But that doesn’t make them friends, not by a long chalk. My sister is quick to call somebody a friend, even somebody she hardly knows, if it suits her book. Come to think of it, I haven’t any friends at all. Since I grew up I haven’t had a single friend. Friendship — what a leprous word! People use it every day ad nauseam, so that it’s become utterly devalued, at least as much so as the word Love, which has been trampled to death. Your biggest mistake is that you no longer go for walks. You used to leave the house for hours and go for walks through the woods, across the fields and down to the lake. At least you used to get pleasure from your own estates. Now you never leave the house. That’s the worst thing possible for you, she said — she of all people, who never walks if she can help it, as everybody knows, and who never once went for a walk in the three weeks she was here. But of course, I reflect, she hasn’t got the illness I have. I ought to go for walks. But nothing bores me more, there’s nothing I find drearier than walking, nothing is a greater torment to my heart and lungs.
I’m not a nature-lover,
I never was, and I never let myself be forced into being one. Then your lungs will dilate, she said scornfully, whereupon she finished off a whole glass of sherry —
Agustin Blasquez
of course, the only one expensive enough for her. For decades she’s got her lovers to bring it for her from Spain — one can’t get it in Vienna, let alone in this god-forsaken place. Not being a Catholic, she said with a laugh, you don’t go to church any longer. So you never get into the fresh air at all. If you go on like this you’ll go to pieces and die. She had recently taken a liking to saying to me over and over again,
You’ll die.
It went through me every time, although I tell myself, or at least try to tell myself, that I’ve nothing against dying. I’ve often told her too; but she says it’s just a childish way of showing off. Of course it would be sensible to breathe some fresh air, but there
is
none here now, only loathsome thick stinking air, which in addition is poisoned by the chemicals from the local paper factory. I sometimes wonder whether the air isn’t so poisoned by the paper factory as to prove lethal to
me
in the long run. Sometimes the fact that I’ve been breathing this poisoned air for decades suddenly gives me pause for thought, as it did on this evening after my sister’s departure. I began to wonder whether my inability to start work, and more generally my illness and imminent death, were not perhaps due to the poisoned air from the paper factory. Someone inherits a property from his parents and then thinks he has to stay put in it until he dies, never realising that he is dying so soon because day and night the local paper factory is poisoning the air he breathes. But I didn’t pursue these speculations and went out into the hall again. At the sight of the corner where we used to keep a dog when we were children, I couldn’t help thinking, If only I kept a dog at least! But since I grew up I’ve always hated dogs. And who would look after the dog, and what should it look like, what kind of dog should it be? I’d have to get somebody in to look after the dog, and I can’t put up with anybody in the house. I can’t put up either with a dog or another person. I’d have had somebody in the house long ago if I could have stood it, but I can’t stand anybody, and naturally I can’t stand a dog. I haven’t gone to the dogs, I told myself, and I won’t. I shall die like a dog, but I won’t go to the dogs. The dog used to sit in this corner just next to the door leading into the yard. We loved the dog, but now I’d be bound to hate such an animal, always lying in wait. The fact of the matter is that I love being alone. I’m not lonely and I don’t suffer from loneliness. I’m happy when I’m alone. I know how fortunate I am to be alone when I observe other people who aren’t alone like me and can’t afford to be, who spend all their lives wishing they were but can’t be. People keep a dog and are ruled by this dog, and even Schopenhauer was ruled in the end not by his head, but by his dog. This fact is more depressing than any other. Fundamentally it was not Schopenhauer’s head that determined his thought, but Schopenhauer’s dog. It was not the head that hated Schopenhauer’s world, but Schopenhauer’s dog. I don’t have to be demented to assert that Schopenhauer had a dog on his shoulders and not a head. People love animals because they are incapable even of loving themselves. Those with the very basest of souls keep dogs, allowing themselves to be tyrannized and finally ruined by their dogs. They give the dog pride of place in their hypocrisy, which in the end becomes a public menace. They would rather save their dog from the guillotine than Voltaire. The masses are in favour of dogs because in their heart of hearts they are not prepared to incur the strenuous effort of being alone with themselves, an effort which in fact calls for greatness of soul. I don’t belong to the masses, I’ve been against the masses all my life, and I’m not in favour of dogs. What we call our love of animals has already wrought such havoc that if we were to think really hard about it we should be positively frightened to death. It isn’t as absurd as it may at first appear when I say that the world owes its most terrible wars to its rulers’ love of animals. It’s all documented, and one ought to be clear about it for once. These people — politicians, dictators - are ruled by a dog, and as a result they plunge millions of human beings into misery and ruin. They
love
a dog and foment a world war in which, because of this one dog, millions of people are killed. Just consider for a moment what the world would be like if this so-called love of animals were at least reduced by a few paltry per cent in favour of love of humanity — which of course is also only a phrase. There can be no question of whether or not I should keep a dog. I am mentally opposed to keeping a dog, which I know would have to be given more care and attention than any human being, more than I demand for myself. But humanity sees nothing wrong in the fact that all over the world dogs get more care and attention than human beings, that in fact it gives more care and attention to all these billions of dogs than it gives to itself. I take leave to describe such a world as perverse, grossly inhumane and totally mad. If I’m here, the dog’s here, if I’m there the dog’s there too. If the dog has to go out, I have to go out too, and so on. I won’t tolerate this dog comedy, which we can see enacted every day if we only open our eyes and haven’t become blinded to it by daily familiarity. In this comedy a dog comes on the stage and makes life a misery for some human being, exploiting him and, in the course of several acts, or just one or two, driving out of him all his harmless humanity. It is said that the tallest, most expensive and most precious tombstone ever set up in the history of the world is one to the memory of a dog. No, not in America, as one inevitably assumes, but in London. Once we get it clear, this fact is enough to show how dog-like humanity really is. In this world the real question to ask about a person has long been, not how humane he is, but how dog-like, yet up to now, instead of asking how dog-like a person is — which is what they really ought to ask out of respect for the truth — people have always asked how humane he is. And that I find disgusting. There is no question of my keeping a dog. If you kept a dog at least! my sister said just before she left. It wasn’t the first time. She’s been saying it for years just to enrage me. A dog at least! I don’t need one of course — I have my lovers, she said. At one time — just to assert herself, I think — she gave up having lovers and got herself a dog. It was so small that — in my imagination at least — it could have crawled underneath her high-heeled shoes. It was the grotesqueness of it that appealed to her; she had a little velvet waistcoat with a gold hem made for this creature, which didn’t even deserve to be called a dog. People stared at it in amazement at the Sacher, and this she found so distasteful that she gave the animal to her housekeeper, who naturally passed it on to somebody else. My sister is always fascinated by anything out of the ordinary, but then, for good reasons and because of her superior intelligence, she never carries it too far, to the point where it might be open to ridicule. Or a holiday, she said. You ought to go away. If you don’t get away soon, you’ll go to pieces and die. I can already see you in one of the corners of your house, first going off your head and then suffering a complete collapse. Travel! It had once been my greatest enjoyment, my only passion. But now I’m too weak to travel anywhere, I told myself, I couldn’t even think of going away. And if I did, where should I go? Possibly, I thought, the sea will be the saving of me. This idea took root in my mind and I couldn’t escape it. I clapped my hands to my head and said,
The sea!
I’d found the magic formula. However dead we are, we come alive when we travel. But am I in a fit state to travel, never mind where? All the journeys I had ever made had worked miracles. Our parents had taken us with them on journeys at a very early age, so that by the time we were twelve or thirteen we had already seen a great deal of the world. We had been to Italy and France, we had been to England and Holland, we had seen Poland, Bohemia and Moravia, and by the time we were thirteen had actually spent some time in North America. Later I travelled extensively on my own account, visiting Persia, Egypt, Israel and the Lebanon. I had toured Sicily with my sister and spent weeks in Taormina, in the famous Hotel Timeo below the Greek theatre. I had lived in Palermo for a time, and in Agrigento, not far from the house in which Pirandello lived and worked. I had been to Calabria several times, and of course every time I went to Italy I visited Rome and Naples, and every spring I went with my parents and my sister to Trieste and Abbazia. We had relatives everywhere, though of course we only ever paid them the shortest of visits, for, like me, my parents infinitely preferred staying in hotels. My mother had a passion for hotels equal to my father’s: they felt more at home, just as I did, in the best and finest hotels than they did in our own house. I mustn’t think about all these splendid palaces we stayed in. Not even the war prevented us from travelling and
putting up in the best houses,
as my father often used to say. Of all these hotels, those I recall with the greatest pleasure are the Setteais in Sintra and of course the Timeo. Not long ago I had asked the specialist if I could contemplate travelling.
Naturally, anytime,
he had said, but the
way
he said
naturally
struck me as sinister. On the other hand, whatever condition we are in, we must always do what we want to do, and if we want to go on a journey, then we must do so and not worry about our condition, even if it’s the worst possible condition, because, if it is, we’re finished anyway, whether we go on the journey or not, and it’s better to die having made the journey we’ve been longing for than to be stifled by our longing. It was eighteen months since I’d been away anywhere. The last time had been to Palma, because I always regarded it as the most perfect place. In November, when the fog so cruelly oppresses and depresses us in Austria, I had run through the streets of Palma with an open-necked shirt and drunk my coffee every day in the shade of the plane trees on the famous Borne. And in Palma I’d been able to make my definitive notes on Reger. True, I later lost them, to this day I don’t know where, thus managing to destroy the fruits of two months’ intellectual effort through a piece of gross carelessness. Quite unforgivable! Just to think that I might now be sitting on the terrace of the Nixe Palace, eating my olives and drinking my glass of water, not just absorbed, but utterly captivated by the sight of the others on the terrace, who would be just as taken up with their own fancies and fantasies as I was with mine! We often fail to realise that if we want to go on existing we need to summon up all our strength in order to wrench ourselves off the spot where we’re stuck. My sister’s right to keep on using the word
travel
in my presence, wielding it over me like a whip all the time, I tell myself. She doesn’t just use the word casually every moment, but with a definite aim in mind, the preservation of my very existence. Naturally the observer can see through the person he is observing more ruthlessly and realistically than the person observed, I said. There are so many wonderful towns in the world, so many landscapes and coastlines I’ve seen in my life, but for me none has ever been as perfect as Palma. But what if one of my dreaded attacks comes on when I’m in Palma and I’m lying in bed in my hotel room with no
proper
medical attention and in a state of mortal fear? We have to envisage the most terrible eventualities and make the journey
nonetheless,
I told myself, yet at the same time I said, I can’t take all my piles of notes with me; they’ll hardly go into two suitcases, and to take more than two suitcases to Palma is madness. I was driven almost to distraction by the thought of having to go to the station, get on the train, go from the train to the airport, board the plane and all the rest with two or even three suitcases. But I didn’t abandon the idea of Palma or the Melia — the Mediterraneo having closed for good years ago. I had taken a firm hold on the idea, and it had taken a firm hold on me. I walked about the house, to and fro, backwards and forwards, upstairs and downstairs, unable to rid myself of the thought of leaving Peiskam behind me; in fact I made not the slightest attempt to rid myself of the thought of Palma, but went on fuelling it, until in the end I got so far as to take my two large suitcases out of the hall chest and place them beside it on the floor as though I really was going to leave. On the other hand, I said to myself, we mustn’t give way at once to a sudden whim. Where would that land us? But the idea was there. I placed the suitcases between the chest and the door and contemplated them from a favourable angle. How long it is since I last took these cases out of the chest! I said to myself. Far too long. In fact the cases were dusty, even though they had been in the chest ever since my last trip, that is my last trip to Palma. I got a duster and wiped them. At once I felt very sick. I hadn’t even finished dusting one case when I was obliged to support myself on the chest, overcome by a sudden fit of breathlessness. And in this condition you’re thinking of flying to Palma — in the midst of all the dreadful difficulties that are inevitably attendant upon such a journey, a journey which would be nothing to a healthy person, but which is far too much for a sick man and could even lead to his death? After a while, however, I dusted the second case, proceeding more cautiously this time, and then I sat down in the iron chair in the hall, my favourite chair. The articles about Mendelssohn Bartholdy can go in one of the cases, I told myself, my clothes and underclothes and so on in the other — the Mendelssohn papers in the larger one, the clothes and underclothes in the smaller one. What’s the point of having such elegant luggage, I said to myself, at least sixty years old and going back to the latter years of my maternal grandmother? She had good taste, as these suitcases of hers testify. The Tuscans have good taste, I told myself, as is borne out time and again. If I go away, I said to myself, sitting in the iron chair, I shall simply be leaving a country whose absolute futility utterly depresses me every single day, whose imbecilities daily threaten to stifle me, and whose idiocies will sooner or later be the end of me, even without my illnesses. Whose political and cultural conditions have of late become so chaotic that they tuqi my stomach when I wake up every morning, even before I am out of bed. Whose indifference to the intellect has long since ceased to cause the likes of me to despair, but if I am to be truthful only to vomit. I shall be going away from a country, I told myself, sitting in my iron chair, in which everything that once gave pleasure to so-called thinking people, or at least made it possible for them to go on existing, has been expelled, expunged and extinguished, in which only the most primitive instinct for survival prevails and the slightest pretension to thought is stifled at birth. In which a corrupt state and a corrupt church join forces to pull at the endless rope which, with the utmost ruthlessness and callousness, they have for centuries wound round the neck of a blind and stupid people, a people imprisoned in its stupidity by its rulers. In which truth is trodden underfoot, and lies are sanctified by all official organs as the only means to any end. I shall be leaving a country, I told myself, sitting in the iron chair, in which truth is not understood or quite simply not accepted, and falsehood is the only legal tender in all transactions. I shall be leaving a country in which the church practises hypocrisy and in which socialism, having come to power, practises exploitation, and in which art says whatever is acceptable to these two. I shall be leaving a country in which a people educated to stupidity allows its ears to be stopped by the church and its mouth by the state, and in which everything I hold sacred has for centuries ended up in the slop pails of the rulers. If I go away, I told myself, sitting in the iron chair, I shall only be going away from a country in which I no longer have any place and in which I have never found happiness. If I go away, I shall be going away from a country in which the towns stink and the inhabitants of the towns have become coarsened. I shall be going away from a country in which the language has become vulgar and the minds of those who speak this vulgar language have for the most part become deranged. I shall be going away from a country, I told myself, sitting in the iron chair, in which the only model of behaviour is set by the so-called wild animals. I shall be going away from a country in which darkest night prevails at noonday, and in which virtually the only people in power are blustering illiterates. If I go away, I told myself, sitting in the iron chair, I shall be leaving the disgusting, depressing and unconscionably filthy public lavatory of Europe. To go away, I told myself, sitting in the iron chair, means leaving behind me a country which for years has done nothing but afflict me with the most damaging depression and has taken every opportunity, no matter where or when, of insidiously and malignantly urinating on my head. But isn’t it madness to think of going to Palma when I’m in such a state, and when my general physical condition doesn’t even permit me to walk two hundred yards out of the door? I asked myself as I sat in the iron chain As I sat there I thought first about Taormina and the Timeo, with Christina and her Fiat, then about Palma and the Melia, with the Cañellas, their three-storey palace and their Mercedes. And suddenly, as I sat in the iron chair, I saw myself running through the narrow streets of Palma.