The Diaries of Franz Kafka (65 page)

Tuesday, 29 August. This beautiful room with a balcony. The friendliness. Too much hemmed in by mountains. A man and two girls, in raincoats, one behind the other, walked through the hall in the evening carrying alpenstocks; when all of them were already on the steps they were stopped by a question from the chambermaid. They thanked her, they knew about it. In reply to a further question about their mountain excursion: ‘And it wasn’t so easy either, I can tell you that.’ In the hall they seemed to me to be out of
Miss Dudelsack
; on the staircase they seem to Max to be out of Ibsen, then to me too. Forgotten binoculars. Boys with Swiss flags. Bathing in Lake Lucerne. Married couple. Life preserver. People walking on Axenstrasse. Fisherwoman in light yellow dress.

Boarding the Gotthard train, Reuss. Milky water of our rivers. The Hungarian flower. Thick lips. Exotic curve from the back to the buttocks.
The handsome man among the Hungarians. Jesuit general in the railway station at Göschenen. Italy suddenly, tables placed haphazardly in front of taverns; an excited young man dressed in all colours who couldn’t contain himself; the women with high-piled black hair waving their hands in good-bye (a kind of pinching motion) beside a station; bright pink houses, blurred signs. Later the landscape lost its Italian aspect, or the underlying Swiss quality emerged. Ticino Falls, off and on we saw waterfalls everywhere. German Lugano. Noisy palestra. Post office recently built. Hotel Belvedere. Concert in the assembly room. No fruit.

30 August. From four in the evening to eleven at the same table with Max;
¹⁴⁰
first in the garden, then in the reading-room, then in my room. Bath in the morning and mail.

31 August. The snowcaps on the Rigi rose up into view like the hands of a clock.

Friday, 1 September. Left at 10.05 from Place Guglielmo Tell -Awning frames on the boats like on milk wagons – Every debarkation an attack.

No luggage on the trip, hand free to prop up my head.

Gandria [near Lugano]: one house stuck behind the other; loggias hung with coloured cloths; no bird’s-eye view; streets, then no streets. St Margarita, a fountain on the landing-stage. Villa in Oria with twelve cypresses. You cannot, dare not imagine a house in Oria that has a porch in front with Greek pillars. Mamette: medieval magician’s cap on a belfry. Earlier, a donkey in the arboured walk, along one side of the harbour. Osteno. The clergyman among the ladies. The shouting more than ordinarily incomprehensible. Child in the window behind the passage to the
pissoir
. Shivery feeling at the sight of lizards wriggling on a wall. Psyche’s falling hair. Soldiers riding by on bicycles and hotel employees dressed up as sailors.

Children on the landing-stage at Menaggio; their father; the pride in her children expressed in the woman’s body.

Passers-by in a carriage pointed out the Italian boys to one another.

Statesman with half-opened mouth (Villa Carlotta).

Frenchwoman with my aunt’s voice and a straw parasol with a thick fibre edge was writing something down about
montagne
, etc., in a
small notebook. Dark man framed by the arching ribs of his boat, bent over the oars. Customs official rapidly examined a little basket, rummaging through it as if it all had been a present for him. Italian on the Porlezza–Menaggio train. Every word of Italian spoken to one penetrates the great void of one’s own ignorance and, whether understood or not, lengthily engages one’s attention; one’s own uncertain Italian cannot prevail against the speaker’s fluency and, whether understood or not, is easily disregarded – Joke about the train going backward at Menaggio, nice matter for a conversation – On the other side of the street, in front of the villas, decorated stone boat-houses. Thriving business in antiques. Boatman:
Peu de commerce
– Revenue cutter (‘Story of Captain Nemo’ and
A Journey through Planetary Space
).

2 September, Saturday. My face was twitching on board the small steamer. Draped curtains (brown, edged in white) in front of the stores (Cadenabbia). Bees in the honey. Lonely, peevish, short-waisted woman, a language teacher. The punctiliously dressed gentleman in high-drawn trousers. His forearms were suspended over the table as though he were clasping not the handles of a knife and fork but the end of an arm rest. Children watching the weak rockets:
Encore un
– hiss – arms stretched up.

Bad trip on the steamer, too much a part of the rocking of the boat. Not high enough to smell the fresh air and have an unobstructed view around, somewhat like the situation of the stokers. A passing group: man, cow, and woman. She was saying something. Black turban, loose dress – The heartbeat of lizards – Host’s little boy, without my having spoken to him previously, under the urging of his mother held his mouth up to me for a good-night kiss. I enjoyed it.

Gandria: instead of streets, cellar steps and cellar passageways. A boy was being whipped; the hollow sound of beds being beaten. House overgrown with ivy. Seamstress in Gandria at the window without shutters, curtains, or panes. We were so tired we had to hold one another up on the way from the bathing place to Gandria. Solemn procession of boats behind a small black steamer. Young men looking at pictures, kneeling, lounging about on the wharf in Gandria, one of them a rather pale person well known to us as a ladies’ man and buffoon.

On the quay in the evening in Porlezza. At the William Tell monument a full-bearded Frenchman we had already forgotten reminded us again of what had been memorable about him.

3 September, Sunday. A German with a gold tooth who because of it would have stuck in the memory of anyone describing him, though the impression he made was otherwise an indeterminate one, bought a ticket for the swimming-pool as late as a quarter to twelve, despite its closing at twelve; the swimming master inside immediately called this to his attention in an incomprehensible Italian which for this reason sounded rather stern. Flustered by it even in his own language, the German stammeringly asked why in that case they had sold him a ticket at the entrance booth, complained that they should have sold him a ticket, and protested at its having been sold to him so late. From the Italian reply you could make out that he still had almost a quarter of an hour in which to swim and get dressed, didn’t he? Tears – Sat on the barrel in the lake. Hotel Belvedere: ‘With all due respect to the manager, the food is miserable.’

4 September. Cholera reports: travel bureau,
Corriere della Sera
, North German Lloyd,
Berliner Tageblatt
, chambermaid brought us reports from a Berlin doctor; the general character of the reports varied according to the group and one’s physical condition; when we left Lugano for Porto Ceresio, at 1.05, they were fairly favourable – Felt a passing enthusiasm for Paris in the wind blowing on the third of September
Excelsior
, which we held open in front of us and ran off to a bench to read. There was still some advertising space to let on the bridge across Lake Lugano.

Friday. Three crew members chased us away from the ship’s bow on the pretext that the helmsman had to have an unobstructed view forward of the light, and then pushed a bench over and sat down themselves. I should have liked to have sung.

Under the eyes of the Italian who advised us to make the trip to Turin (
exposition
) and to whom we nodded agreement, we shook hands in confirmation of our common decision not to go to Turin at any price. Praised the cut-rate tickets. Cyclist circling about on the lake terrace of a house in Porto Ceresio. Whip that had only a little tail of horse-hair instead of a strap. A cyclist pedalling along with a rope in his hand, leading a horse that trotted beside him.

Milan: Forgot guidebook in a store. Went back and stole it. Ate apple strudel in the courtyard of the Mercanti. Health cake. Teatro Fossati. Every hat and fan in motion. A child laughing up above. An elderly lady in the male orchestra.
Poltrone – Ingresso
– Pit on a level with the orchestra. All the windows in the back wall open. Tall, vigorous actor with delicately painted nostrils; the black of the nostrils continued to stand out even when the outline of his upturned face was lost in the light. Girl with a long slender neck ran off-stage with short steps and rigid elbows – you could guess at the high heels that went with the long neck. The importance of the laughter exaggerated, for there is a greater gap between laughter and uncomprehending gravity than between it and the gravity of an initiated spectator. Significance of every piece of furniture. Five doors in each of the two plays for any emergency. Nose and mouth of a girl shadowed by her painted eyes. Man in a box opened his mouth when he laughed until a gold molar became visible, then kept it open like that for a while. That kind of unity of stage and audience which is created for and against the spectator does not understand the language, a unity impossible to achieve in any other way.

Young Italian woman whose otherwise Jewish face became non-Jewish in profile. How she stood up, leaned forward with her hands on the ledge so that only her narrow body could be seen, her arms and shoulders being concealed; how she extended her arms to either side of the window; how she clung in the breeze with both hands to one side of the window, as though to a tree. She was reading a paper-bound detective story that her little brother had been vainly begging from her for some time. Her father, near by, had a hooked nose whereas hers, at the same place, curved gently, was therefore more Jewish. She looked at me often, curious to see whether I shouldn’t finally stop my annoying staring. Her dress of raw silk. Tall, stout, perfumed woman near me scattering her scent into the air with her fan. I felt myself shrivel up next to her – In the baggage room the tin plate over the gas flame was shaped like a girl’s flat-brimmed hat. Pleasant variety of lattice-work on the houses. We had been looking for the Scala right under the arch of its entrance; when we came out on the square and saw its simple, worn façade we were not surprised at the error we had made.

Pleased by the connexion a pair of folding doors affords between the
two rooms. Each of us can open a door. A good arrangement for married people too, Max thinks.

First write down a thought, then recite it aloud; don’t write as you recite, for in that case only the beginning already inwardly pondered will succeed, while what is still to be written will be lost. A discussion of asphyxia and [lethal] heart injection at a little table in a coffee house on the Cathedral Square. Mahler asked for a heart injection too. As the discussion went on, I felt the time that we had planned to spend in Milan rapidly dwindling away, in spite of some resistance on my part – The Cathedral with its many spires is a little tiresome.

Genesis of our decision to go to Paris: the moment in Lugano with the
Excelsior;
trip to Milan in consequence of our not altogether voluntary purchase of the Porto Ceresia-Milan tickets; from Milan to Paris out of fear of the cholera and the desire to be compensated for this fear. In addition, our calculation of the time and money this trip would save us.

1. Rimini–Genoa–Nervi (Prague).

2. Upper Italian lakes, Milan–Genoa (wavering between Locarno and Lugano).

3. Omit Lago Maggiore, Lugano, Milan, trip through the cities as far as Bologna.

4. Lugano–Paris.

5. Lugano–Milan (several days)–Maggiore.

6. In Milan: directly to Paris (possibly Fontainebleau).

7. Got off at Stresa. Here, for the first time, we were at a point in our trip where it was possible to look backwards and forwards along it; it had passed out of its infant stages and there was something there to take by the waist.

I have never yet seen people looking so small as they did in the Galleria in Milan. Max thought the Galleria was only as high as the other houses you saw outside; I denied it with some objection I have since forgotten, for I will always come to the defence of the Galleria. It had almost no superfluous ornamentation, there was nothing to arrest the sweep of the eye, seemed little because of this, as well as because of its height, but could afford that too. It was shaped like a cross, through which the air blew freely. From the roof of the Cathedral the people seemed to have grown bigger as against the Galleria. The Galleria
consoled me completely for the fact that I did not see the ancient Roman ruins.

Transparent inscription deep in the tiles over the brothel:
Al vero Eden
. Heavy traffic between there and the street, mostly single persons. Up and down the narrow streets of the neighbourhood. They were clean, some had pavements in spite of their narrow width; once we looked from one narrow street down another that ran into it at right angles and saw a woman leaning against the window-grating on the top floor of a house. I was lighthearted and unhesitating in everything at the time, and, as always in such moods, felt my body grow heavier. The girls spoke their French like virgins. Milanese beer smells like beer, tastes like wine. Max regrets what he writes only during the writing of it, never afterwards. Somewhat apprehensively, Max took a cat for a walk in the reading-room.

A girl with a belly that had undoubtedly spread shapelessly over and between her outspread legs under her transparent dress while she had been sitting down; but when she stood up it was pulled in, and her body at last looked something like what a girl’s body should. The Frenchwoman whose sweetness, to an analytical eye, chiefly showed in her round, talkative, and devoted knees. An imperious and monumental figure that thrust the money she had just earned into her stocking – The old man who lay one hand atop the other on one knee – The woman by the door, whose sinister face was Spanish, whose manner of putting her hands on her hips was Spanish and who stretched herself in her close-fitting dress of prophylactic silk – At home it was with the German bordello girls that one lost a sense of one’s nationality for a moment, here it was with the French girls. Perhaps insufficiently acquainted with the conditions here.

My passion for iced drinks punished: one grenadine, two aranciatas in the theatre, one in the bar on the Corso Emmanuele, one sherbet in the coffee-house in the Galleria, one French Thierry mineral water that all at once disclosed what had been the effect of everything that I had had before. Sadly went to bed, looking out from it on a sweeping, very Italianate prospect framed in the shallow bay window of a side-wall. Miserably awoke with a dry pressure against the walls of my mouth – The very unofficial elegance of the police who make their rounds carrying their knit gloves in one hand and their canes in the other.