Peter Camenzind (4 page)

Yet I felt no wish to be noticed by her. I would gladly have done something unheard of, performed some feat in her behalf, or presented her with a gift without her ever knowing who had given it. In fact, I did do great things in her behalf. During a short vacation I went home and performed any number of feats of prowess every day, all of them, I felt, in Rösi's honor and glory: I climbed a difficult peak from its steepest side; I took extended trips with the skiff, covering great distances in a short time. Returning burnt out and famished from one of these excursions, it occurred to me to go without food and drink until evening, all for the sake of Rösi Girtanner. I carried her name and praise to out-of-the-way summits and ravines where no human had ever set foot.

I was also making up for the time my youthful body had spent squatting in stuffy schoolrooms. My shoulders broadened, my face and neck became tanned, and my muscles swelled and became taut.

On the next to last day of vacation, I went to extreme pains to gather my love a floral sacrifice. I knew of several dangerous slopes covered with edelweiss, but this odorless, colorless, sickly silver flower had always seemed to me lacking in soul and beauty. Instead, I decided on some bushes of rhododendron, the “Alpine rose,” which had been blown by the wind into a secluded cleft on a steep precipice. They had blossomed late and could not be more difficult to reach. But I had to find a way and, since nothing is unattainable to youth and love, I finally did reach my goal—with sore hands and feet. Shouting for joy was out of the question in the position I was in, but my heart yodeled and leaped deliriously as I snipped the tough stems and held the booty in my hand. The descent had to be accomplished by climbing backwards, the flowers between my teeth, and heaven only knows how I reached the foot of the precipice in one piece. Since all other rhododendron on the mountain had withered long before, I held the season's last in my hand, just budding and breaking into delicate bloom.

Next day I did not put down the flowers even for a moment throughout the entire five-hour trip. As I approached my sweetheart's city, my heart at first beat with excitement. Yet the farther the Alps receded, the more my inborn love drew me back to them. The Sennalpstock had long faded from view when the jagged foothills disappeared, sinking away one after another, each one detaching itself with a delicate woe from my heart. Now all the hills of my homeland had vanished and a broad, undulating, light-green lowland-scape thrust itself into view. This sight had not affected me on my first trip away from home. Today uneasiness, fear, and sadness overcame me—as though I were destined to travel into flatter and flatter lands, to lose the mountains and citizenship of my native land forever. Simultaneously I beheld the beautiful face of my Rösi, so delicate, alien, cool, and unconcerned that the bitterness and anguish of it took my breath away. The glad, spotless villages with slender spires and white gables slipped past the window; people mounted and dismounted, jabbered, laughed, smoked, made jokes—all of them cheerful lowlanders, clever, open-minded, smart people—and I, a stolid mountain youth, sat morose and silent among them. I felt not at home here, I felt permanently kidnapped from my mountain region and certain that I would never be as cheerful, smooth, and self-assured as anyone from the lowland. They would always be able to make fun of me, one of them would marry the Girtanner girl, and one of them would always stand in my way, be a step ahead of me.

Such were the thoughts that were with me on my way into town. There, after a brief look around, I climbed to my room in the attic, opened my foot locker, and took out a large sheet of wrapping paper. When I had wrapped my flowers in it and tied the package together with a string I had brought with me for that purpose, the parcel did not look at all like a gift of love. I solemnly carried it to the street where lawyer Girtanner lived and at the first opportune moment I stepped through the open door, glanced briefly into the dimly lit hallway, and deposited the ill-shaped bundle on the wide staircase.

No one saw me and I never found out if Rösi received my greeting. But I had the satisfaction of having climbed a steep precipice, of having risked my life to place a spray of rhododendron on a staircase. This knowledge contained something sweet, melancholy, and poetic, which made me feel very good; I can feel it even today. Only in times of complete despair does it occur to me that this “adventure with the Alpine roses” might have been as quixotic as all my other love affairs.

This, my first love, never came to any conclusion—its echo receded gradually and enigmatically. Unrelieved throughout my adolescence, it always accompanied me whenever I fell in love later on, like a quiet elder sister. Nor have I ever been able to imagine anything purer, lovelier, or more beautiful than that well-born, calm-eyed patrician's daughter. Many years later, when I happened to see the anonymous, enigmatic portrait of the Fugger daughter at an exhibition in Munich, it seemed to me that my whole enthusiastic, melancholy youth stood before me, gazing forlornly from the depths of its unfathomable eyes.

Meanwhile I slowly and cautiously sloughed off the skin of childhood and gradually turned into a youth. The photograph taken of me at that time shows a bony, overgrown farm boy in shabby clothes, somewhat dull-eyed, with ill-proportioned, loutish limbs. Only the head reveals a certain precocity and firmness. With a kind of astonishment, I watched myself discard my boyhood ways. I looked forward to the university with somber anticipation.

I was to study in Zurich and, in the event of my doing particularly well, my patrons held out the possibility of an extended educational tour through Europe. All this appeared to me as a beautiful classical picture: I visualized myself sitting in a friendly grove solemnly appointed with the busts of Plato and Homer, bent over learned tomes, and on all sides an unhampered view over the town, the lake and mountains, enchanting vistas. I had become a little less confused, yet livelier too, and looked forward to the good fortune awaiting me with the firm conviction that I would prove worthy of it.

During my last year at school I took up the study of Italian and made my first acquaintance with the old novelists of Italy. I promised myself a more thorough acquaintance with them as a bonus for my first year at the university. Then the day came when I said goodbye to my teachers and my housemaster, packed and secured my little foot locker, and, with pleasurably melancholy feelings, spent some time lounging about in the vicinity of Rösi's house.

The vacation that now followed gave me a bitter foretaste of life and made a mockery of my high-flown dreams. The first shock was finding my mother ill. She was bedridden, hardly spoke at all, and even my arrival did not bestir her. I did not exactly feel sorry for myself, but it hurt to find that my happiness and young pride elicited no response. Thereupon my father informed me that although he had no objections to my studying, he was in no position to help financially. If my small scholarship did not suffice, I would have to try to earn the rest myself. By the time he was my age he had eaten bread earned with his own two hands, and so forth …

Neither did I have much chance to go hiking, boating, or mountain-climbing, for I had to help out in the house and in the fields. During my half-days off, I did not feel like doing anything at all, not even reading. It enraged and exhausted me to observe how the common daily life callously demanded its due and devoured the abundance of optimism I had brought with me. My father, once he had settled the question of money, was as curt and harsh as ever, but not actually unfriendly. Yet this did not make me any happier. The silent, half-contemptuous respect my education and bookishness elicited from him irked me, and I felt sorry that it did. Moreover, I often thought of Rösi and was again overcome by the evil, indignant realization of my peasant inability to turn myself into a self-assured man of the world. For days I would ponder whether it might not be better to stay home and forget about Latin, burying all my hopes in the depressing regimentation of my miserable life at home. I went about tormented and wretched; I found no solace at the bedside of my sick mother. The picture of that imaginary grove with the busts of Plato and Homer rose up to mock me, and I destroyed it, heaping upon it all the scorn and venom of my tortured being. The weeks became unbearably drawn out, as though I were destined to lose my entire youth to this period of anger and frustration.

If the rashness and thoroughness with which life destroyed my blissful dreams stunned and outraged me, I was now amazed how suddenly even such agonies as these could be overcome. Life had shown me its gray work-a-day side; it now suddenly opened its infinite depths to my riveted eye and laid the burden of experience with sobering effect upon my young heart.

While still in bed, early one hot summer morning, I felt thirsty. As I passed through my parents' bedroom on my way to the kitchen, I heard my mother groaning. I went up to her bed. She neither noticed nor answered me and continued to make the same dry, frightening moans. Her eyelids quivered and her face had a bluish pallor. Though anxious, I was not frightened until I noticed her hands lying on the sheet as motionless as sleeping twins. These hands told me that my mother was dying: they seemed so sapped of all life, so deathly weary as no living persons. I forgot my thirst and, kneeling down beside her, placed one hand on her forehead and tried to catch her eyes. When our gaze met, hers was steadfast and untroubled but nearly extinct. It did not occur to me to wake my father, who lay nearby, breathing heavily. I knelt there for nearly two hours and watched my mother die. Her death took place with calm gravity and with courage, as befitted her kind. She set me a noble example.

The little room was quiet. Gradually it filled with the light of the new day; house and village lay asleep, and I had ample time to let my thoughts accompany my dying mother's soul over house and village and lake and snow-capped peaks into the cool freedom of a pure, early-morning sky. I felt little grief, for I was overcome with amazement and awe at being allowed to watch the great riddle solve itself and the circle of life close with a gentle tremor. The uncomplaining courage of the departing spirit was so exalted that some of its simple glory fell upon my soul as well, like a cool clear ray. My father asleep beside her, the absence of a priest, the homing soul not consecrated by either prayer or sacrament—none of this bothered me. I felt only an ominous breath of eternity suffuse the dawn-lit room and mingle with my being.

At the very last moment—there was no light left in her eyes—I kissed my mother's wilted cool lips, for the first time in my life. The strange chill of this contact filled me with sudden dread. I sat on the edge of the bed and felt tear after tear glide slowly, hesitantly down my cheeks, chin, and hands.

Then my father awoke, saw me sitting there and, still half asleep, asked me what was wrong. I wanted to reply but was unable to utter a word. I left him and reached my room in a daze. I dressed slowly and mechanically. Soon my father appeared.

“She is dead,” he said. “Did you know?”

I nodded.

“Then why did you let me go on sleeping? And no priest attended her. May you be…” He uttered a grievous curse.

At that point I felt an indefinable jab of pain in my head, as though a vein had burst. I stepped up to him, firmly grasped both his hands—his strength was a boy's compared to mine—and stared him in the face. I could not say anything, but he became still and timid. When we both went to attend to my mother, the presence of death took hold of him too and made his face strange and solemn. Then he bent down over the corpse and began lamenting softly, childlike, in high, feeble tones, almost like a bird.

I left him and went to tell the neighbors. They listened to me, asked no questions, shook my hand, and offered their help to our orphaned household. One of them went off to the monastery to fetch a priest. When I returned, I found a woman in our stable milking the cow.

The reverend father appeared, as did almost all the women of the village, and everything went off punctually and correctly as if of its own accord. Even the coffin materialized without our having to lift a hand, and I could see clearly for the first time in my life how good it is, during difficult times, to be among one's own people and to be one of a small, self-sufficient community. Perhaps I ought to have thought about this more deeply. For the next day, once the coffin had been blessed and lowered and the odd assemblage of woefully old-fashioned, bristly top hats—including my father's—had disappeared each into its own box and cupboard, my father was seized with a fit of weakness. All at once he began feeling sorry for himself, bemoaning his misery in strange, largely Biblical, phrases, complaining to me that now that his wife was buried he would also lose his son. There was no stopping it. Startled, I listened and was on the point of promising him I would stay when—my lips were already parted—something very odd happened.

Everything I had thought and desired and longed for since childhood appeared for a brief second before my mind's eye. I saw great, beautiful tasks awaiting me, books I would read and books I would write. I heard the Föhn sweep by, and saw distant blissful lakes and shores bathed in southern lights and colors. I saw people with intelligent, cultured faces walking past; I saw elegantly beautiful women; I saw streets, mountain passes leading over the Alps, and trains hurrying from one country to the next—all this I beheld simultaneously, yet each part separately and distinctly. Behind all of it was the boundless spread of a clear horizon dotted with clouds. Learning, creating, seeing, voyaging—the abundance of life flared up in a fleeting silver gleam before my eyes. And once again, as in my boyhood, something trembled within me, a mighty, unconscious force straining toward the great distances of the world.

I said nothing and let my father talk on, shaking my head every so often, waiting for his impetuousness to subside. This happened toward evening. Then I explained to him my irrevocable decision to study and to seek my future home in the realm of intellect—without, however, asking any support from him. He stopped cajoling at this point and looked at me pitifully, shaking his head. For he realized that I would go my own way from now on, and would soon be completely estranged from his way of life. As I write this, I can see my father exactly as he sat that evening in the chair by the window: his chiseled, shrewd peasant head motionless on the lean neck, his short hair beginning to turn gray, his severe and simple features betraying the struggle his tough masculinity was waging against grief and the onset of old age.