Peter Camenzind (13 page)

Frequently I would just sit alone with Signora Nardini, listen to her edifying discourses, and take an unholy pleasure in the multitude of her very human weaknesses. None of her neighbors' faults or vices escaped her vigilance; to each of them she judiciously assigned an appropriate place in purgatory well in advance. But I had found a place in her heart, and she confided the most trivial experiences and observations to me in great detail and at great length. She inquired how much I paid for every purchase I made, so that I would not be taken advantage of. She had me tell her the lives of the saints, and in return acquainted me with the secrets of the fruit and vegetable trade and the kitchen.

One evening, as we were sitting in the ramshackle loggetta, I sang one of my Swiss songs, to the shrieking delight of the children and girls, and then gave forth with a few brief bursts of yodeling. The children wriggled with pleasure, imitated the sound of the foreign tongue, and showed me how amusingly my Adam's apple jigged up and down when I yodeled. All at once, everybody began speaking of love. The girls giggled, Signora Nardini rolled her eyes imploringly and sighed sentimentally. Finally I was besieged to tell of my own experiences. I made no mention of Elizabeth, but told them about my boat trip with Erminia and my ill-fated proposal of love. It seemed odd to recount this story, of which I had not breathed a word to anyone except Richard, to my inquisitive Umbrian audience in full view of the narrow southern streets and the hills bathed in the golden-red evening light. I told my story without commenting on it as I went along, in the manner of the old novellas, yet my heart was in the telling and I was secretly afraid that my listeners would laugh at me.

But when my tale was told, all eyes looked at me sadly and full of sympathy.

“Such a handsome man,” one of the girls exclaimed. “Such a handsome man to be unhappy in love!”

Signora Nardini, however, gently stroked my hair and said:
“Poverino.”

Another girl made me a present of a pear and when I asked her to take the first bite she did so, looking seriously at me. Yet, when I was going to let the others have a bite too, she would not allow it, saying: “No, eat it yourself! I gave it to you because you told us of your bad luck.”

“You're bound to fall in love again,” said a deeply tanned farmer.

“No,” I replied.

“Then you're still in love with this Erminia?”

“Now I only love St. Francis, and he has taught me to love all mankind. You, and all the people of Perugia, and all these children here, and even Erminia's lover.”

My idyllic existence became somewhat complicated, even endangered, when I discovered that the good Signora Nardini wished for me to prolong my stay indefinitely by marrying her. This little problem made a cunning diplomat of me, since destroying her dreams without ruining our relationship was no easy matter. I had to think about my return home. If it had not been for what I hoped to write one day, and an imminent financial crisis, I would have remained. I might even have married Signora Nardini thanks to that “financial crisis.” But no, what really made me decide to leave was my desire to see Elizabeth again—my sorrow had not healed.

My plump widow acquiesced to the inevitable with surprising graciousness and did not make me suffer for her disappointment. My departure, in fact, became more difficult for me than for her. I was leaving much more behind than I had ever left before. Never had my hand been pressed so affectionately by so many people. They provided me with fruit, wine, cordials, bread, and sausages for the journey. I had the unusual feeling of leaving friends to whom it really mattered whether I went or stayed. Signora Annunziata Nardini kissed me on both cheeks and her eyes filled with tears.

I used to believe it would be delightful to be loved without loving back. Now I discovered how painful love can be when you cannot return it. Still, I felt flattered that a woman loved me and wanted me for a husband.

Even this touch of vanity meant that I was recovering. I felt sorry for the signora but I would not have wanted to miss that experience. Gradually I began to realize how little happiness has to do with the fulfillment of outward wishes. The agonies young men suffer when they are in love, however painful, have nothing in common with tragedy. It hurt not to possess Elizabeth, but my life, my freedom, my work, and my thoughts were unimpaired, and I could still love her as much as I wanted from afar. Such thoughts as these and the free and easy life I had led in Umbria were very good for me. I had always had an eye for the comic and ridiculous in life, but my ironic turn of mind kept me from enjoying what I perceived. Now I began to appreciate these humorous things. It began to appear more and more possible to become reconciled to my destiny and not begrudge myself some of the small joys of life.

Of course, you always feel like that when you've just returned from Italy. You don't give a hoot about principles and prejudices, you smile indulgently, keep your hands in your pockets, and consider yourself a shrewd man of the world. For a while you let yourself drift with the easy, warm life of people in the south and begin to believe you can go on living like that when you're back home. Each time I returned from Italy, I felt this way, and more so on this occasion than on any other. When I reached Basel, only to find the same old inflexible life unchanged and unchangeable, I meekly and angrily descended from my heights step by step. Yet part of what I had acquired stayed with me. Never after did my little boat sail through clear or troubled waters without sporting at least one brightly colored, defiantly fluttering, confident pennant.

In other ways, too, many of my views had gradually changed. Without much regret I felt myself outgrowing my adolescence and maturing to the point where life appears a short path, yourself a traveler whose peregrinations and final disappearance are of no great consequence to the world. You keep your eyes fixed on your objective, a favorite dream. But you never consider yourself indispensable and you indulge yourself with rest periods every so often, and don't mind losing an entire day lying down in the grass, whistling a tune and enjoying the present without any thought of the future. Although I had never worshipped Zarathustra, I had been what is known as a
Herrenmensch
and until now had never lacked for self-veneration or been sparing with disdain of my inferiors. Now I began to see that there are no hard and fast boundaries; that life among poor, oppressed, humble people is as varied as life among the distinguished and favored few, and on the whole warmer and more genuine and exemplary.

Besides, I returned to Basel just in time to attend the first soiree at Elizabeth's house—she had been married while I was away. I was in good spirits, still fresh and tanned from my trip, and able to tell any number of amusing anecdotes. The lovely woman seemed to take pleasure in singling me out for her trust. Throughout the evening I rejoiced in my luck at having been spared the disgrace of a belated proposal. For despite my Italian experience, I still harbored the suspicion that women take cruel delight in the hopeless agony of men who are in love with them. I had the liveliest illustration of such a humiliating and painful situation in the form of a story told me by a five-year-old boy. In the school he attended, the following remarkable and symbolic custom was practiced. If one of the boys was guilty of a gross misdemeanor and had to be punished, six girls would be ordered to hold the struggling victim in the required position. Holding the boy was considered a great pleasure and privilege, so the sadistic task was reserved for the six best-behaved girls in class—the moment's paragons of virtue. I have often thought about this amusing childhood anecdote and on occasion it has even crept into my dreams. Thus I know, at least from my dream experience, how miserable a man feels in such a situation.

Chapter Seven

I
HAD AS LITTLE RESPECT
for my own writing as ever. I was able to live from the proceeds of my work, save small amounts, and even send my father a little money now and then. He cheerfully took it right to the tavern, where he sang my praises. It even occurred to him to do me a favor in return. I once told him that I earned most of my money writing newspaper articles, so he thought I was an editor or reporter of the kind employed by the provincial papers. Now he dictated three letters to me, reporting what he felt were important events that would supply me with copy and income. The first item concerned a barn fire; there followed a report about two tourists who had a mountain-climbing accident; and last, he sent the results of the election for village mayor. These missives were couched in grotesque journalese but made me genuinely happy, for they were a sign of true friendship between us—they were the first letters I had received from home in years. Moreover, I found them refreshing as a kind of unwitting deprecation of my own scribbling, for month after month I reviewed books the importance and consequence of whose publication were minute compared with what happened in the provinces.

Just about that time, books were published by two writers whom I had known as outrageously lyrical youths during my days in Zurich. One of them lived in Berlin now and knew lots of pornographic stories about café society and the brothels of the capital. The second had built himself a luxurious hermitage outside Munich, and teetered despicably and hopelessly between neurotic introspection and spiritist stimulants. I had to review their books and of course I made harmless fun of both of them. The neurotic's sole reply was a contemptuous letter—written, however, in a truly princely style. The Berliner made my review the occasion for a scandal in a literary journal, claiming I had misunderstood his real intent. He invoked Zola's literary principles and used my unsympathetic review as a basis for an attack not just on me personally but on the conceited and prosaic nature of the Swiss people as a whole. As it happens, the man had spent the only healthy and comparatively dignified period of his literary life in Zurich. I had never been noted for excessive patriotism, but this overdose of Berlin snottiness was a little too much for me and I sent the malcontent a letter that did not disguise my contempt for his overblown metropolitan modernism.

The quarrel made me feel better and forced me once more to reevaluate my opinions of modern culture. This proved tedious and difficult and had few if any pleasant results. My book will hardly suffer if I omit them. Yet these observations also compelled me to think more deeply about my long-planned life's work.

As you know, it had been my hope to write a work of some length in which I intended to bring closer to people the grandiose and mute life of nature, that they might love it. I wanted to teach people to listen to the pulse of nature, to partake of the wholeness of life and not forget, under the pressure of their petty destinies, that we are not gods and have not created ourselves but are children of the earth, part of the cosmos. I wanted to remind them that night, rivers, oceans, drifting clouds, storms, like creatures of the poet's imagination and of our dreams, are symbols and bearers of our yearning that spread their wings between heaven and earth, their objectives being the indubitable right to life and the immortality of all living things. Each being's innermost core is certain of these rights as a child of God, and reposes without fear in the lap of eternity. Everything evil, sick, and diseased that we carry in us contradicts life and proclaims death. But I also wanted to teach men to find the sources of joy and life in the love of nature. I wanted to preach the pleasures of looking at nature, of wandering in it, and of taking delight in the present.

I wanted to let mountains, oceans, and green islands speak to you convincingly with their enticing tongues, and wanted to compel you to see the immeasurably varied and exuberant life blossoming and overflowing outside your houses and cities each and every day. I wanted you to feel ashamed of knowing more about foreign wars, fashions, gossip, literature, and art than of the springs bursting forth outside your towns, than of the rivers flowing under your bridges, than of the forests and marvelous meadows through which your railroads speed. I wanted to let you know what a golden chain of unforgettable pleasures I, a melancholy recluse, had found in this world and I desired that you, who are perhaps happier and more cheerful than I, should discover even greater joy in it.

Above all, I wanted to implant the secret of love in your hearts. I hoped to teach you to be brothers to all living things, and become so full of love that you will not fear even sorrow and death and receive them like brothers and sisters when they come to you.

All this I hoped to convey not in hymns but truthfully, simply, and factually—with the same combination of seriousness and humor with which a returning traveler tells his friends what he has experienced.

I wanted, I wished, I hoped: I know it sounds odd, but I am still waiting for the day when all this wanting will resolve itself in a form and a plan. I had collected much material, in my head and in the small notebooks I carried with me on my trips and hikes, filling one every few weeks. In these I made brief notations of everything I saw in the world, without reflection or transitions. They are more like painters' sketchbooks and in few words capture concrete, real things: country lanes and well-traveled roads, aspects of mountains and cities, conversations overheard among farmers, artisans, market women, rules by which to forecast the weather, notes on light effects, winds, rain, rocks, plants, animals, the flight of birds, the shapes of waves and clouds, the colors of the sea. Occasionally I constructed short stories around these observations and published them as nature and travel studies, but without relating them to man. The story of a tree, an animal, or the course of a cloud was interesting enough without human scaffolding.

It occurred to me, of course, that a work of such scope without any human figures would be grotesque. Yet for years I strove after this ideal, cherishing the hope that some great inspiration would help me overcome the impossible. I finally realized that I would have to put people in my beautiful landscapes, but I knew I was not able to represent them as they are. I had much ground to make up, and I am making up that lost ground even today. I had always thought of mankind as a mass, as something alien; now I learned the great worth of the individual—not “abstract humanity”—and my notebooks and my memory began to fill up with entirely new sketches.