Peter Camenzind (2 page)

As a child, I was afraid of the Föhn, even hated it. But with the awakening of boyhood wildness, I was glad to welcome this insurgent, eternally youthful, insolent harbinger of spring. It was marvelous as the Föhn embarked on its ferocious struggle, full of life and exuberance, storming, laughing, groaning, bending the rough old pines with brutal hands so that they moaned. Later my love of the Föhn deepened as I welcomed it for bringing the beauty of the sweet, superbly rich south, from which emanated streams of joy, warmth, and beauty that were hurled against the mountains in our flat, cool northlands. Nothing could be stranger or more delicious than the sweet Föhn fever that overcomes the people in the mountain regions, especially the women, whom it robs of sleep, tantalizing their senses. It is the south, hurling itself with all its heat and violence against the breast of the coarser, poorer north, informing the snowed-in Alpine villages that the primrose, the narcissus, and the almond trees are in flower again on the shores of Italian lakes.

Once the Föhn subsided and the last grimy avalanches melted, the most beautiful season began. Then yellowish meadows blossomed mountainward on all sides; snow-capped peaks and glaciers led a contented existence in their pure reaches; the lake turned warm blue and mirrored the sun, the procession of clouds.

All this was certainly enough to round out childhood, and even a lifetime. For all these events spoke the loud and unbroken language of God, which never crossed the lips of man. If you have heard God's words proclaimed in this fashion during childhood, you will be able to hear them echo within you for the rest of your days, sweet, strong, terrible; you will never escape their spell. A native of the mountains can study philosophy and natural history, and even dispense with God altogether, but when he experiences the Föhn or hears an avalanche crash through the forest, his heart trembles and he thinks of God and death.

My father's cottage had a tiny, fenced-in garden where bitter lettuce, beets, and cabbage grew and where my mother had laid out a touchingly narrow, barely sufficient flower bed: two China rose bushes, dahlia, and a handful of mignonette languished hopefully but miserably. The garden bordered an even narrower graveled area that reached as far as the lake. There stood two defunct barrels, a few planks and some fence posts to which we moored our boat, which at that time was still patched and caulked every few years. The days on which this operation was carried out are affixed in my memory: warm afternoons in early summer, butterflies tumbling over the little garden in the sunlight, the lake as smooth as oil, blue and still and softly iridescent, the mountain peaks thinly veiled in mist; the gravel nearby smelling strongly of pitch and oil paint. The boat would smell of tar all summer, and whenever in later life I came upon the peculiarly distinctive odor of tar and water I instantly visualized our graveled landing area, with my father, in shirtsleeves, plying the paint brush, bluish smoke curling from his pipe into the summer air, brilliant sulphur butterflies unsteadily performing their hesitating flights. On those days my father was always in a high good humor: he whistled (which he could do superbly) and he might even give forth with one brief yodel—this, however, mezzo-forte. Then my mother would cook something good for dinner. I now think she did it in the secret hope that Camenzind would not go off to the tavern that evening. But he went all the same.

I cannot claim that when I was young my parents either noticeably hampered or furthered my mental development. Mother always had her hands full of work, and nothing in the world interested my father less than questions of child-rearing. He had plenty to do tending his few fruit trees, cultivating the little potato patch, and seeing to his crop of hay. But every few weeks, on the way home in the evening, he would take me by the hand and proceed to the hayloft without a word. There a strange rite of chastisement and atonement was enacted: I was given a thrashing, and neither my father nor I ever quite knew why. These were mute sacrifices at the altar of Nemesis, offered up as a guilty tribute to an ineffable power, without scolding on his part or crying on mine. Any mention of “blind fate” later in my life reminded me of these mystic scenes; they seemed to me a graphic representation of this concept. Unknowingly, my father was obeying a simple pedagogic precept that life practices on all of us when it lets lightning strike, leaving us to ponder what misdeeds provoked the powers above. Unfortunately, such reflection rarely if ever occupied me; for the most part I accepted each installment of punishment passively, perhaps even stubbornly, always without the desirable self-examination and always glad, on those evenings, that once again I had done my share, that I had a few weeks' respite ahead of me. I was far less passive, however, when it came to my father's efforts to get me to work. Incomprehensible, bountiful nature had combined within me two diametrically opposed talents: unusual physical strength and an equally strong disinclination to work. My father exerted every effort to make a useful son and helper out of me, and I resorted to every possible ruse to evade the tasks imposed; no hero of antiquity, when I attended school, commanded my sympathy more than Hercules, who was compelled to perform those renowned, irksome labors.

I knew of nothing more wonderful than roaming idly about the mountains and meadows or along the lake. Mountains, lake, storm, and sun were my companions. They told me stories, molded me, and were dearer to me for many years than any person or any person's fate. But what I loved above all else, even more than the glistening lake, the mournful pines, and the sunny rocks, were the clouds.

Show me a man anywhere in the whole wide world who knows and loves clouds more than I! Or show me anything more beautiful. They are a plaything and comfort to the eye, a blessing and a gift of God; they also contain wrath and the power of death. They are as delicate, soft, and gentle as the souls of newborn babes, as beautiful, rich, and prodigal as good angels, yet somber, inescapable, and merciless as the emissaries of death. They hover as a silvery film, and sail past smiling and gold-edged; they hang poised, tinged yellow, red, and blue. Darkly, slowly they slink past like murderers, roaring head-over-heels like mad horsemen, drooping sadly and dreamily in the pale heights like melancholy hermits. They assume the shapes of blessed isles and guardian angels, resemble threatening hands, fluttering sails, migrating cranes. They hover between God's heaven and the poor earth like beautiful likenesses of man's every yearning and partake of both realms—dreams of the earth in which the sullied soul cleaves to the pure heaven above. They are the eternal symbol of all voyaging, of every quest and yearning for home. And as the clouds are suspended faintheartedly and longingly and stubbornly between heaven and earth, the souls of men are suspended faintheartedly and longingly and stubbornly between time and eternity.

O lovely, floating, restless clouds! I was an ignorant child and loved them, watched them, little knowing that I would drift through life like a cloud—voyaging, everywhere a stranger, hovering between time and eternity. Ever since childhood they have been my dear friends and sisters. There is not a street I cross without our nodding and greeting each other. Nor did I ever forget what they taught me then: their shapes, their features, their games, their roundelays and dances, their repose, and their strange stories in which elements of heaven and earth mingled.

Particularly the tale of the Snow Princess, which has the middle mountain ranges for a setting, early in winter, as warm air flows in from the lower reaches. The Snow Princess, coming down from immense heights, appears on this stage in the company of a small retinue and looks for a place of repose in the broad mountain hollows or on a summit. The false North Wind enviously watches the trusting maiden lie down to rest and inches voraciously up the mountain, to fall upon her suddenly with a furious roar, tossing black-cloud rags at the beautiful Princess, mocking her, intent on chasing her away. Momentarily the Princess is disconcerted, but she waits and patiently suffers her adversary; sometimes she retreats unhappily, in quiet scorn, to her former height. At other times she gathers her frightened entourage about her, unveils her dazzlingly regal countenance, and motions the ogre to stand back. He temporizes, howls, then flees. And she beds down quietly and shrouds her throne in white mists as far as the eye can see. When the mist has withdrawn, the peaks and hollows lie clear, glistening with pure soft new snow.

This story has something in it so noble, of such soulfulness, has in it so much of beauty's triumph that I was enthralled by it; my heart stirred as with a happy secret.

Soon the time came when I was allowed to approach the clouds, walk among them, and gaze down upon their host from above. I was ten years old when I climbed my first mountain, the Sennalpstock, at whose foot lies our hamlet, Nimikon. That was the first time I beheld both the terror and beauty of the mountains. Gaping ravines, filled with ice and half-melted snow, glass-green glaciers, moraines ugly beyond belief, and suspended above all this, like a bell, the dome of heaven. When you have lived for ten years surrounded by mountains and hemmed in between mountain and lake, you can never forget the day you see your first wide sky above you, and the first boundless horizon. Even on the ascent I was amazed at how huge the familiar crags and cliffs really were. And now, quite overcome, I saw with fear and joy in my heart the immense distances bearing down upon me. So that was how fabulously wide the world was! And our village, lost in the depth below, was merely a tiny, light-colored speck. Pinnacles that had seemed to be within walking distance lay days apart.

I guessed that I had had only a glimpse of the world, not a full view at all. I realized that mountains could rise and crumble out there in the world, and great events transpire, without the slightest whisper reaching our isolated hamlet. Yet something quivered within me, like a compass needle striving with great energy, unconsciously, toward those great distances. And as I gazed into the infinite distances into which the clouds were voyaging, I grasped something of their beauty and melancholy.

My two adult companions praised my climbing as we rested briefly on the ice-cold summit. They were amused by my enthusiasm. Once recovered from my initial astonishment, I bellowed like a bull with joy and excitement, into the clear mountain air. This was my first inarticulate hymn to beauty. I expected a loud echo, but my voice died away in the peaceful heights like the faint cry of a bird. Then I felt abashed and was silent.

That day was the beginning. One momentous event now succeeded another. For one thing, the men took me along on mountaineering trips more often, even on the more difficult climbs, and with a strange and uneasy ecstasy I penetrated the great secret of the heights. Then I was made village goatherd. On one of the slopes where I usually drove my beasts was a sheltered nook overgrown with cobalt-blue gentians and bright-red saxifrage. In all the world this was my favorite spot. I could not see the village from there, and only a narrow, gleaming strip of lake was visible across the rocks, but the flowers glowed in fresh, laughing colors, the blue sky hung like a canopy over needle-sharp peaks, and the tinkling goat bells mingled with the incessant roar of a nearby waterfall. There I sprawled in the warmth, gazed in wonderment at the hurrying white cloudlets, and yodeled softly to myself until the goats noticed my laxness and took advantage of it, indulging in all sorts of forbidden games and tricks. This idyllic existence suffered a rude interruption during the first weeks, when I fell into a gully with a goat that had strayed from the flock. The goat died, my head ached, and I received an unmerciful hiding. I ran away from home, and was recaptured amid curses and lamentations.

These adventures might well have been my first and last. In which case this little book would not have seen the light of day and quite a number of other efforts and foolish acts would not have been perpetrated. Presumably I would have married one of my cousins and might even lie frozen in some glacier now. That would not have been the end of the world either. However, everything turned out differently and it would be presumptuous to compare what happened with what might have been.

Occasionally my father would do a little work for the monastery in Welsdorf. One day he fell ill and ordered me to notify the monastery that he was unable to come. Instead of traipsing to the monastery myself, I borrowed pen and paper from a neighbor, wrote a courteous letter to the friars, handed it to the woman who regularly took messages there, and set off into the mountains on my own.

The following week I came home to find a priest sitting there, waiting for the person who had written the letter. I was afraid, but then the priest praised me and tried to persuade my father to let me become a student. Uncle Konrad was in good graces at the time and was consulted. He was inflamed by the idea that I should study and eventually attend the university and become a scholar and a gentleman. My father allowed himself to be convinced, and thus my future took its place alongside my uncle's other risky ventures—the fireproof oven, the sailboat, and his similarly fantastic schemes.

I entered then upon a period of intense study, especially in Latin, Biblical history, botany, and geography. At that time I thoroughly enjoyed my studies; it never occurred to me that I might be buying all this foreign matter at the cost of my home and many years of happiness. Nor was Latin solely to blame. My father would have liked to make a farmer of me even if I had known all the
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by heart. But the shrewd man penetrated to my innermost being and discovered there, as its center of gravity, my cardinal virtue: lassitude. I dodged work whenever possible and would run off to the mountains or the lake or lie hidden on a slope, reading and dreaming and lazing away the time. Realizing this, my father finally gave up on me.

This then is a good moment to say a few words about my parents. My mother, who had been beautiful, retained only her firm, straight frame and lively, dark eyes. She was tall, vigorous, industrious, and quiet. Though she was certainly as intelligent as my father, and stronger, she did not rule the house, leaving the reins in his hands. He was of average height, with thin, almost delicate limbs, and a stubborn, sly head, a light-complexioned face lined with tiny, exceptionally expressive wrinkles. His forehead was marked by a deep vertical fold that darkened whenever he moved his brows, lending him a doleful, ailing expression. At those times he looked as if he were trying to recollect something very important but lacked all hope of ever finding out what it was. You could detect a certain strain of melancholy in him, but no one paid this any heed. For almost all people in our region were victims of a slightly dour turn of mind, caused by the long winters, the dangers, the harsh and wearying struggle for survival, and the isolation from the world outside.