Then I plunged into a text in the style of Jonathan Swift’s Resolutions When I Come to Be Old. I barely diverged from the originaclass="underline" “Not to marry a young woman. Not to be peevish or morose or suspicious. Not to be too free with advice, nor to trouble any but those who desire it. Not to be too severe with the young, but make allowances for their youthful follies. Not to be categorical or stubborn. Not to insist on keeping so many rules for fear you should keep none of them.”
I preferred to attribute these Resolutions to Autre too. As well as preparing everything so that, if any reader-spy were to appear, the writing I showed wouldn’t be mine but my double’s (that is, poor Autre’s), I dumped the whole drama of the extreme proximity of old age onto him.
Of the two women, only Pim came back, but not until almost an hour later. I wouldn’t see Alka again for the rest of that day. During the hour spent alone, with the girls smoking outside, I had more than enough time to lament, a thousand times over, not having brought Romanticism or Journey to the Alcarria with me. As I had nothing to read, I devoted myself to remembering something I’d read: a letter from Kafka to his girlfriend Felice Bauer, in which he expressed his fear that, when they married, she would spy on everything he wrote. (Indeed, Bauer had affectionately written to him of her desire to sit beside him in the future while he was writing.)
Perhaps my terror of being spied on in the Dschingis Khan was humbly and distantly related to Kafka’s panic at the mere possibility that Felice Bauer wouldn’t let him write in solitude. I had the feeling that part of my problem with the invitation to Documenta had been just that fear of mine. If I remembered correctly, Kafka’s panic was mixed with some Chinese business in a January 1913 letter, in which he wrote something along these lines to Bauer: “You once said you would like to sit beside me while I write. Listen. In that case I could not write at all. One can never be alone enough when one writes, there can never be enough silence when one writes, even night is not night enough.” And these words mingled with far-off China because, in the same letter, Kafka used the anecdote of a poem to mark a separation between himself and Felice, and in passing he showed her that even in that distant Oriental land, working at night was the exclusive preserve of men. The poem sketched the lovely image of the scholar bent over his book who’d completely forgotten to go to bed; the Chinese man’s companion, who had made a huge effort to keep her anger under control up to that point, snatched the lamp away and asked him whether he knew what time it was. But he was absorbed, engrossed in his fascinating task. . With this in mind, I also became engrossed and missed all the things I was used to having around me. When I was able to react, I once again felt ridiculous grasping my true situation: waiting for some very absentminded customer to come into my disastrous business. Business? Yes, the business of a man of letters, seated at his own gallows.
28
As the hour approached when Germany has lunch, the Dschingis Khan started to liven up, as you might expect, and customers began coming in: people chose tables near mine. I was so alone there (in theory Alka and Pim were still smoking outside, although I’d soon discover Alka had taken the bus back). For a while, I entertained myself by pretending everyone in the place was an acquaintance or a friend, a really surprising gathering of people linked to different periods of my life.
As everyone asked for the menu, so did I, though in my case it was just to have something to read. They might be old acquaintances or friends, but none of them spoke to me, which never ceased to be a relief. I was worried they might all want to head for me at once and I’d have to choose between friends or acquaintances from one period or another; the truth is, I’ve always hated favoritism.
I’m not sure how it came about that I bent down and started looking for a hole under the table. Knowing that Marie Darrieussecq knew that I, too, liked those jail scenes in which prisoners leave useful messages for their successors in their cells, I was trying to find a cranny into which she might have slipped some instructions about how to survive in those tricky Chinese circumstances. As you might guess, I didn’t find anything, but I did spend quite a while pleasantly entertained, mostly by imagining I did find a scrap of paper, which turned out to be a message for Holly Pester, not for me. She was another of the writers who’d passed through here. I’d been able to read some of her poetry on the Internet and enjoyed it a lot.
On deciding the fruitless search was over, and also purely to fill the time, I turned to doing something else. I devoted myself to listening to the conversations in German and Chinese that I could hear in the restaurant, as well as those between customers and waiters that mixed the two languages together. They might be acquaintances or friends, but they all spoke in German and Chinese. Supposing our paths had crossed over the years, my friends certainly seemed to have changed a good deal, at the very least to have changed languages.
I rang a friend in Barcelona to ask if he could possibly imagine the idea of a Catalan taking up the Chinese language and renouncing his own forever. Luckily for my friend, he wasn’t at home. I didn’t feel like calling anyone else after that.
Soon the whole restaurant had turned itself into a new Galway Bay as I began to use my fantastical “Synge method”: that special technique that allowed me to believe I understood everything everyone was saying so perfectly that I could even draw conclusions about what was going on there.
For a moment I went so far as to believe that, if the circumstances were right, I could someday work as an interpreter in meetings between Chinese and German entrepreneurs. I heard, for example, a German customer telling his wife that her face, usually washed out and tending toward a sort of eggish hue, had acquired an incandescent tone. And I heard the wife replying that he was a dead man. I heard a Chinese cook tell a waiter he wanted to get over his sexual extravaganzas and that he was fed up with his horrible girdle. What girdle was he talking about? Did I really know what a girdle was? I heard another waiter tell a customer he understood his desire to stand out when there were ladies around and I heard the customer promise him a big tip if he managed to make him stand out even more. I heard one of the Chinese cooks tell a German kitchen boy he was a greaseball and that they’d end up finding him in a sewer and have to scrape a layer of filth off in order to identify him. I heard the kitchen boy tell the cook she had a lovely big ass. He congratulated her on having such a large one but said that every day she wasted half her time stuck in the doorway, as it was so hard for her to get into the kitchen.
From everything I heard and translated using the Synge method, I came to the conclusion that there was an undercurrent of violence about the place. A tension between the German and Chinese citizens — both countries stars on their own continents — ran almost covertly in every corner. It was as if all the immense tension between the Chinese and the Germans over dividing up the world as soon as the United States lost it was concentrated there in the limited space of that establishment.
You could feel that tension, and the dialogue somehow reproduced it with a hefty emotional charge. It ended up leading to my notable physical exhaustion, and only that morning’s excellent mental state saved me from a weariness and anguish premature at that time of day. It was obvious I couldn’t bear being in that absurd place any longer, where perhaps the worst thing of all was that I wasn’t doing anything. Nobody came to see me, despite how ghastly that would have been. Maybe because of this, when I saw Pim reappear I actually felt happy. At first, I thought Alka had got left behind. But I soon discovered that not only was Alka no longer there, but she was perhaps several miles away. It was obvious Pim had sent Alka off to laugh elsewhere; but I didn’t inquire, I didn’t want to know. I preferred to remain ignorant of what had become of the marvelous Croatian woman who laughed because she thought her job obliged her to. I was more concerned with things of a different order, most particularly my weird situation waiting at that table with its monstrous vase.