I went into the house and without turning the light on anywhere, either at the entrance or in my apartment, went straight to bed. I lay with my eyes shut and began to feel warm. The mountain that goes by my name appeared to me. (It’s known to me only from a picture.) Mount Loser stood detached under a spacious sky, as though in a sphere of its own; and yet it seemed only a few steps away. From a rounded hilltop, which formed the pedestal, rose the naked cliffs of its gigantic upper story. Its flat roof was covered by a deep layer of snow, overarched by transparent gray air. The snow lay in wavelike dunes, and on the side of the mountain a white fountain surged into the gray air — a sign that a storm was raging up there. It must have been a severe storm, because the snow cloud was long and almost horizontal; indeed, it had a slight upward tilt. At the same time, the scene, beheld from a distance, seemed perfectly still; even the white of the fountain was motionless. In the sheer wall below it, there were dark spots, almost like gates or niches. Open, O gate in the rock. Take palpable form, 0 Aeolian Mount Loser.
Yet no peace came. Something was missing, something without which any appeal to any object whatsoever was premature. And premature meant pointless. The object ceased to be a thing of this world. “Something is missing” meant: there was room within me, but it remained empty. I did not expect the missing thing, I couldn’t — I had no reason to expect it. There was simply an unfilled space within me — and its emptiness was sorrow.
“But what is this thing that is not to be expected? The rustling of a tree that becomes a voice? A fountain rising from a cliff? A burning bush? Why not admit for once that what you lack is love!”
At this point, I finally lost my temper. “What kind of love are you people driving at? Love between the sexes? Love for another person? Love of nature? Love for what one has created? I, in any case, am homesick just now for a body, and not for its sex, but for beloved shoulders, a beloved cheek, a beloved glance, a beloved presence. Love? Incapacity for love? Lover’s sorrow? The sorrow is present only now that I am without love. You have only invented ‘incapacity’ as a pretext for your loveless argument. And when love sets in, I won’t have to appeal to the distant mountain anymore; of its own accord, it will move into our sphere, a salt dome, confirmation of thy, my presence. With the onset of love, I shall be safe. Or it will not have been love.”
The Viewer Seeks a Witness
In the days that followed, I didn’t leave the house. Most of the time I lay prone on my bed, my head in the crook of my arm. This arm was a kind of bulwark, behind which I felt sheltered. Now and then I’d pick up a daddy longlegs and let it run about in the palm of my hand, which tickled pleasantly. Occasionally I’d lie on my back, looking at the wall, where a flashlight and a shoehorn were hanging on a hook.
Outside the window, two thick ropes hung down; the housefront was being renovated and they served to pull a basket filled with mortar up and to lower one that had been emptied. In the dawning light, the ropes seemed strikingly massive and dark. At night, they made themselves noticed now and then by slapping against the windowpanes. In the moonlight, they glistened like glass; the melting snow had run over them during the day and then frozen.
The phone rang fairly often; but it was only someone who had dialed a wrong number — as if Salzburg were the city not only of disorderly pedestrians but also of disorderly telephoners. Finally, after calls for the “parish office,” for a man called Siegfried, for the “customs office for overseas shipments” and Part-Time, Inc., I shouted into the phone: “Shut up!” After that, I stopped answering.
In the morning, my mail fell through the door slot: advertisements, and one solitary letter, consisting of a printed form titled “News Flash,” with a check mark in the margin.
During the day, the sounds from the supermarket provided distraction. When it was closed for lunch hour, I waited almost impatiently for the beep of the cash registers to resume.
Of course, all this could be told in a different way. When I looked in the mirror, there were no eyes. I felt as if I had no body left; that is, I no longer had any share in the light and wind, in the cold or heat; and this was a privation. As I lay there without dignity, I was a painful husk; a husk with nothing inside. In the absence of a viewer, there was nothing left to view. Once, in the dusk, I confused the gigantic Untersberg with a wooded knoll. Another time, I saw a cliff as a flashing guillotine. A volcano had erupted in the Staufen; great gray-violet clouds of smoke drifted from its pyramidal summit; and when again I looked westward, the whole mountain had collapsed into a rubble heap only half its height. (In reality, the main peak was hidden by rain clouds, so only the much smaller front peak could be seen.) And what did “west” mean? The cardinal points had become meaningless, as they do for one cast adrift on the open sea; in the place of direction, confusion reigned. When once I made an attempt to dress, I missed all the openings and stood there like a twisted malefactor (funny, I have to admit). I heard sounds as when the Föhn is blowing; they seemed to come not from my field of vision but from around the corner, so to speak, from behind my back, taking me unawares, without the corresponding visual images. The everyday cries of the jackdaws rang out like bursts of gunfire; I suddenly heard the clip-clop of a horse’s hoofs as though a stopped clock had started (it would stop again in an instant); cocks crowed as though sounding the alarm, or taps. And whenever the bus wires struck together in the woods outside, a crashing and a crackling were heard as when a big building is on fire.
Often there was something to laugh about: once, some horses actually turned up at the bus terminus, hitched to cabs that seemed to have come to this wilderness by mistake. Inside them sat exotic tourists, aiming their cameras without conviction at the Colony. But I didn’t laugh.
Yet I didn’t think there was anything wrong with me. In fact, I felt a strange satisfaction at “exposing” myself, just as there can be a certain satisfaction in exposing oneself to total darkness or a glacial wind — in laying oneself open to the worst sort of adversity. Satisfaction? No, pleasure. Pleasure? No, determination. Determination? No, acquiescence in the conditions of existence.
In all those days, I never once felt anything akin to guilt. What I felt was something worse. I had thrust a long knitting needle so accurately into someone’s heart that there was not so much as a cut to be seen in the outer skin, and everybody was congratulating me over it. But I saw myself from then on as living in — the word cannot be avoided — perdition. (And there were no hands with which to cover the face of him who had seen it; if anyone had shouted “Hands up!” I’d have left them dangling at my side, and not out of contempt for death.) When people come home from work in the evening, don’t they sometimes sigh while settling into a chair: “How good it feels to finally be able to sit down!” But, with me, sitting had the opposite effect. Nothing made me feel good. Only perhaps I should avoid the word “perdition” and say instead: “The bouncing bird, the cat washing itself, were lacking in the center of my field of vision.” In the center there was nothing, neither a playing dog nor a swaying daddy longlegs (or, if there was, it fled instantly). Or there was something in the center, but nothing pleasant. Once a freshly shot pair of chamois were hanging in the open garage of a villa, still dripping blood, hanging by their horns from two hooks, face to face. Even a bird and a cat appeared, but they were corpses drifting in the canal. Or the center was a place of staggering illusions: the light-colored logs lying crosswise at the end of the meadow looked like a dead ox; a seesawing brimstone butterfly appeared to me repeatedly as a scrap of yellowish paper. Or the center was a place of disillusionment; when I looked for it, it was hidden by billboards or by exotic shrubs with their unreal colors. Or the center itself was falsified: the house next door, raised by an artificially filled-in terrace, had a bell tower on the ridge of its roof in the manner of old farmhouses — but the area below the terrace seemed eroded, the shrine over the door of the house meant only: “You are not welcome here”—and the little bell tower, taken as a center, framed a mere hole: because the bell belonging to it, or the clapper, or the bellpull, was missing. By day, this hole often suggested a whirl of clotted milk, and by night, at best, an artificial satellite broadcasting the latest news of wars and disasters. The worst of these falsifications in those days were the so-called natural centers, occupied by the church towers, at least one of which “naturally” catches the eye at every turn of the head. Not only did these steeples, whether bulbiform, conical, or cylindrical, strike me as pretentious; I also regarded them as petrified delusions, making a mockery of our — all men’s — forlornness. Nobody needed them, but they set themselves up as friends in need. Even in misery, didn’t the horizon sometimes send us light and air, which wanted to be let in and seen? And these steeples cut off the view.