The Loser (9 page)

my
Glenn Gould is incomparably greater, more deserving of worship, I thought, than theirs. When we learned that we had moved into the house of a famous Nazi sculptor Glenn burst out laughing. Wertheimer joined in this resounding laughter, I thought, the two of them laughed to the point of total exhaustion and in the end they went down to the cellar to get a bottle of champagne. Glenn popped the cork right in the face of a six-meter-high Carrara angel and squirted the champagne at the faces of the other monsters standing about, leaving only a little bit which we drank from the bottle. Finally Glenn hurled the bottle at the emperor head in the corner with such fury that we had to duck for cover. Not one of these Glenn worshipers is capable of imagining Glenn Gould laughing the way he always laughed, I thought. Our Glenn Gould was capable of unbridled laughter like no other, I thought, and for that reason must be taken most seriously. Whoever can’t laugh doesn’t deserve to be taken seriously, I thought, and whoever can’t laugh like Glenn doesn’t deserve to be taken as seriously as Glenn. At around three in the morning he draped himself over the emperor’s feet, completely exhausted, he with his Goldberg Variations, I thought. Again and again this image: Glenn pressed against the emperor’s calf, staring at the floor. One couldn’t speak to him. In the morning he was
born anew
, in his words. Every day I put on a new head, so he said, whereas the world thinks it’s still the old one, so he said. Every other day Wertheimer ran to the Untersberg at five in the morning, luckily he had discovered an asphalt road that went to the foot of the Untersberg, then he ran back, I myself simply walked once around the house before breakfast, although in all weather and completely undressed before washing. Glenn only left the house to go to Horowitz and come back. Basically I hate nature, he said again and again. I myself appropriated this sentence and still repeat it to myself today, will always repeat it, as I believe, I thought.
Nature is against me
, said Glenn, adopting my own philosophical perspective, for I also always say this sentence, I thought. Our existence consists in always being against nature and setting to work against nature, said Glenn, setting to work against nature until we give up, for nature is stronger than we are, we who in arrogance have turned ourselves into
art products
. We aren’t people after all,
we are art products, the piano player is an art product, a disgusting one
, he said in conclusion. We are the ones who continually want to escape from nature, but we can’t do it, naturally, he said, I thought, we get stuck halfway. Basically we want to be the piano, he said, not human beings but the piano, all our lives we want to be the piano and not a human being, flee from the human beings we are in order to completely become the piano, an effort which must fail, although we don’t want to believe it, he said. The ideal piano player (he never
said pianist!)
is the one who wants to be the piano, and I say to myself every day when I wake up, I want to be the Steinway, not the person playing the Steinway, I want to be the Steinway itself. Sometimes we get close to this ideal, he said, very close, at which point we think we’ve already gone crazy, think we’re on the highroad to madness, which we fear like nothing else. All his life Glenn had wanted to be the Steinway itself, he hated the notion of being
between
Bach and his Steinway as a mere musical middleman and of one day being ground to bits between Bach on one side and his Steinway on the other, he said, I thought. All my life I have dreaded being ground to bits between Bach and Steinway and it requires the greatest effort on my part to escape this dread, he said. My ideal would be, I
would be the Steinway, I wouldn’t need Glenn Gould
, he said, I could, by being the Steinway, make Glenn Gould totally superfluous. But not a single piano player has ever managed to make himself superfluous by
being
Steinway, as Glenn said. To wake up one day
and be Steinway and Glenn in one
, he said, I thought,
Glenn Steinway, Steinway Glenn, all for Bach
. It’s possible that Wertheimer hated Glenn, it’s possible he hated me as well, I thought; this thought is based on thousands, if not tens of thousands, of observations concerning Wertheimer, as well as Glenn, as well as me. And I myself wasn’t free of Glenn hatred, I thought, I hated Glenn every moment, loved him at the same time with the utmost consistency. For there’s nothing more terrible than to see a person so magnificent that his magnificence destroys us and we must observe this process and put up with it and finally and ultimately also accept it, whereas we actually don’t believe such a process is happening, far from it, until it becomes an irrefutable fact, I thought, when it’s too late. Wertheimer and I had been necessary for Glenn’s development, like everything else in his life, Glenn misused us, I thought in the inn. The arrogance with which Glenn set about everything, Wertheimer’s fearful hesitation on the other hand, my reservations about everything and anything, I thought. Suddenly Glenn was
Glenn Gould
, everybody overlooked the moment of the Glenn Gould transformation, as I have to call it, even Wertheimer and I. For months Glenn had drawn us into the same diet, I thought, into his Horowitz fixation, for it actually was possible that I (not to mention Wertheimer) wouldn’t have lasted through those two and a half Salzburg months with Horowitz on my own, that I would have given up without Glenn. Even Horowitz wouldn’t have been Horowitz if Glenn had been missing, the one made the other possible and vice versa. It was a Horowitz course for Glenn, I thought, standing in the inn, nothing else. Glenn had made Horowitz into a genial teacher, not Horowitz Glenn into a genius, I thought. In those months in Salzburg Glenn made Horowitz into the ideal teacher for his genius and through his genius, I thought. We get inside music completely or not at all, Glenn often said, to Horowitz as well. But he alone knew what that meant, I thought. A Glenn has to come upon a Horowitz, I thought, and precisely at the single right moment. If this moment isn’t the right one, what Glenn and Horowitz accomplished won’t be accomplished. The teacher who isn’t a genius is made into a teacher of genius by the student of genius at this precise moment for a very precise time period, I thought. But the real victim of this Horowitz course wasn’t me, it was Wertheimer, who certainly would have become an exceptional, perhaps world-famous piano virtuoso without Glenn, I thought. Who made the mistake of going to Salzburg that year to study with Horowitz and be destroyed by Glenn, not by Horowitz. Of course Wertheimer had
wanted
to become a piano virtuoso, I didn’t want it at all, I thought, my virtuosity at the piano had only been a way out for me, a procrastination maneuver for something that I’ve never been able to put my finger on, not even today; Wertheimer wanted it, I didn’t want it, I thought, Glenn has him on his conscience, I thought. Glenn had played only a few bars and Wertheimer was already thinking about giving up, I remember it precisely, Wertheimer had entered the first-floor room in the Mozarteum assigned to Horowitz and had heard and seen Glenn, had stood still at the door, incapable of sitting down, had to be invited by Horowitz to sit down, couldn’t sit down as long as Glenn was playing, only when Glenn stopped playing did Wertheimer sit down, he closed his eyes, I can still see it in every detail, I thought, couldn’t utter a word. To put it sentimentally, that was the end, the end of the Wertheimerian virtuoso career. For a decade we study the instrument we have chosen for ourselves and then, after this arduous, more or less depressing decade, we hear a genius play a few bars and are washed up, I thought. Wertheimer wouldn’t admit it, not for years. But those few bars of Glenn’s playing meant his end, I thought. Not for me, since even before meeting Glenn I had thought of giving up, pondered the senselessness of my efforts, wherever I went I had always been the best, being accustomed to this fact didn’t prevent me from thinking of giving up, of breaking off something senseless, against all those who affirmed that I belonged to the best, but to belong to the best wasn’t enough for me, I wanted
to be the best or not at all
, and so I gave it up, gave my Steinway to the schoolteacher’s child in Altmünster, I thought. Wertheimer had put all his eggs in his piano virtuoso career, as I have to call it, I hadn’t put any eggs in such a piano virtuoso career, that was the difference. For that reason
he
was
fatally
wounded by Glenn’s Goldberg bars,
not I
. To be the best or not at all has always been my motto, in every respect. And so I finally wound up in the Calle del Prado in total anonymity, occupied with a writer’s inanities. Wertheimer’s goal was to be the piano virtuoso who proves his mastery to the musical world year in, year out, until he keels over, until, if I know Wertheimer, he turns into a doddering octogenarian. Glenn wrenched this goal away from him, I thought, when Glenn sat down and played the first bars of the Goldberg Variations. Wertheimer had
had
to hear him, I thought, he had
had
to be destroyed by Glenn. If I hadn’t gone to Salzburg back then and hadn’t wanted to study with Horowitz at all costs, I would have continued playing and I would have accomplished what I wanted, Wertheimer often said. But Wertheimer had to go to Salzburg and enroll in Horowitz’s course, as they say. We are already destroyed and still we don’t give up, I thought, Wertheimer is a good example of this fact, for years after having been destroyed by Glenn he didn’t give up, I thought. And it wasn’t even he who had the idea of parting with his Bösendorfer, I thought, first I had to give away my Steinway so that he could auction off his Bösendorfer, he would never have given away his Bösendorfer, he had to auction it off at the Dorotheum, that is just like him, I thought. I gave my Steinway away, he auctioned off his Bösendorfer, I thought, and that says everything. Everything about Wertheimer didn’t come from Wertheimer himself, I said to myself now, everything about Wertheimer was always taken from somebody else, copied, he took everything from me, he copied me in everything, and so he even took my failure from me and copied it, I thought. Only his suicide was his own decision and came completely from him, I thought, and so he may have experienced, as they say, a sense of triumph in the end. And perhaps thus, by committing suicide on his own so to speak, he had outstripped me in everything, I thought. Weak characters never turn into anything more than weak artists, I said to myself, Wertheimer confirms that theory absolutely, I thought. Wertheimer’s nature was completely opposed to Glenn’s nature, I thought, he had a so-called
artistic attitude
, Glenn Gould didn’t need one. Whereas Wertheimer continually asked questions, Glenn didn’t ask any questions at all, I never heard him ask a question, I thought. Wertheimer was always afraid of overtaxing his strength, it didn’t even occur to Glenn that he could overtax his strength, Wertheimer was constantly apologizing for something that didn’t even need an apology, whereas Glenn wasn’t even familiar with the concept of apology, Glenn never apologized, although by conventional standards he constantly needed to apologize. Wertheimer always had to know what people thought of him, Glenn couldn’t have cared less, as I also couldn’t care less, Glenn and I were always indifferent to the opinions of our so-called peers. Wertheimer talked even when he had nothing to say, simply because being silent had become dangerous for him, Glenn was silent for the longest periods, as was I, I who like Glenn could be silent for days at a time, if not for weeks, like Glenn. The simple fear of not being taken seriously made our loser prattle on, I thought. And it probably was also due to his being left completely to his own devices in Vienna as well as in Traich, of walking through Vienna and, as he always said, not talking to his sister about anything, since
he never even once had a conversation
with his sister. He had shameless administrators, as he called them, who took care of his properties, and dealt with them only by correspondence. Thus Wertheimer was also perfectly capable of being silent and perhaps could even be silent longer than Glenn and myself, but in our midst he had to talk, I thought. The person who resided at one of the best addresses in the center of town loved nothing better than to hang out in Floridsdorf, in a blue-collar neighborhood that has become famous for its locomotive factory, in Kagran, in Kaisermühlen where the poorest of the poor are housed, in the so-called Alsergrund, or in Ottakring, such perversity, I thought. Out the back door in grubby clothes, in proletarian disguise, so as not to be detected on his information hunts, I thought. Standing for hours on the Floridsdorf bridge, he would observe the passersby, would stare into the brown water of the Danube, long since destroyed by chemicals, stare at Russian and Yugoslavian freighters heading toward the Black Sea. There he often wondered, he said, whether it hadn’t been his greatest misfortune to have been born into a wealthy family, I thought, for he always said he felt more at ease in Floridsdorf and in Kagran than in the First District, more at ease with the people in Floridsdorf and Kagran than with the people in the First District, whom he basically had always hated. He frequented bars in the Pragerstrasse and the Brünnerstrasse where he ordered beer and cheap sausage, sat for hours listening to people, observing them, until he was out of air as it were, until he had to get out, go home, naturally by foot, I thought. But over and over he also said it would be a mistake to think he’d be happier living in Floridsdorf, in Kagran, in the Alsergrund, I thought, it would be a mistake to assume these people had a better character than the people in the First District. Upon closer inspection, so he said, the so-called disadvantaged, the so-called poor and so-called retarded, were equally without character, had an equally repulsive nature, and should be rejected just as categorically as those in the social group we belong to and whom we judge to be repulsive only for this reason. The lower classes are just as much a public menace as the upper classes, he said, they commit the same hideous acts, should be rejected just as categorically as the others, they’re different but they’re equally hideous, he said, I thought. The so-called intellectual hates his so-called intellectualism and thinks he can find an answer with the so-called poor and disadvantaged, who used to be called the