killed by it. For me the fact that I played the piano for fifteen years day and night and because of this practice finally achieved a thoroughly extraordinary degree of perfection was always a weapon not only against my surroundings but also against myself, but Wertheimer always suffered from this fact. In everything and anything the fact of my piano study has always been useful for me, I mean it has been crucial, and precisely because no one knows anything about it, precisely because it’s forgotten and because I keep it secret. For Wertheimer however this same fact has always been the root of his unhappiness, of his uninterrupted existential depression, I thought. I was much better than most of the others in the Academy, I thought, I stopped from one moment to the next, that strengthened me, made me stronger than those, I thought, who didn’t stop and who weren’t better than me and who took lifelong refuge in their amateurishness, call themselves professors and let themselves be decorated with titles and medals, I thought. All these musical idiots who graduated from our conservatories and went into the concert business, as they say, I thought. I never went into the concert business, I thought, something inside me wouldn’t allow it, but I didn’t go into the concert business for a completely other reason than Wertheimer, who, as mentioned, didn’t go into it because of Glenn Gould or at least broke it off immediately, as they say, because of Glenn Gould, something inside me wouldn’t let me go into the concert business, whereas Wertheimer’s path was blocked by Glenn Gould. A concertistic life is the most horrible imaginable, no matter whose, it’s awful to play the piano before an audience, not to mention the awfulness of having to sing before an audience, I thought. It’s our greatest fortune to be able to say we studied at a famous conservatory and graduated from this famous conservatory, as they say, and do nothing with it and keep the whole thing a secret, I thought. Don’t piss away this fortune by performing in public for years and decades, etc., I thought, but consider the whole thing a closed book in order to keep it a secret. But I’ve always been a genius of secrecy, I thought, quite unlike Wertheimer who basically couldn’t keep anything a secret, had to talk about everything, had to get everything out in the open as long as he lived. But naturally unlike most others we were lucky not to have to earn a cent because we had enough from the very beginning. Whereas Wertheimer was always ashamed of this money, I myself was never ashamed of this money, I thought, for it would have been crazy to be ashamed of the money one was born into, at least I think it would have been perverse, in any case disgustingly hypocritical, I thought. Everywhere we look we find hypocrites claiming to be ashamed of the money they have and that others don’t have, whereas it’s in the nature of things that some people have money and the others have none, and sometimes they have no money and the others have some and vice versa, nothing will change there, and there’s no reason to feel guilty about having money, just as there’s none to feel guilty about not having it, etc., I thought, a fact which nobody understands however, neither the haves nor the have-nots, because in the end the only thing they understand is hypocrisy and nothing else. I never reproached myself for having money, I thought, Wertheimer constantly reproached himself for it, I never said I suffered from being wealthy, unlike Wertheimer, who said it very often and who didn’t shy away from the most inane spending maneuvers, which in the end didn’t help him at all, the millions he sent for example to the Sahel region in Africa and that, as he later learned, never arrived because they were gobbled up by the Catholic organizations he entrusted the money to. The uncertainty of man is his nature, is his desperation, as Wertheimer very often and very correctly put it, it’s just that he never managed to hold himself to his own observations, to hold fast to them, he always had monstrous, truly monstrous theories spinning around in his head (and in his aphorisms!), I thought, actually a redemptive philosophy for life and human existence, but he was incapable of applying it to himself. In theory he mastered all the unpleasantness of life, all degrees of desperation, the evil in the world that grinds us down, but in practice he was never up to it. And so he went to pot, completely at odds with his own theories, went all the way to suicide, I thought, all the way to Zizers, his ridiculous end of the line, I thought. In theory he had always spoken out against suicide, deemed me capable of it however without a second thought, always went to my funeral, in practice he killed himself and I went to his funeral. In theory he became one of the greatest piano virtuosos in the world, one of the most famous artists of all time (even if not as famous as Glenn Gould!), in practice he accomplished nothing at the piano, I thought, and fled in the most pitiful manner into his so-called human sciences. In theory he was a master of existence, in practice he not only didn’t master his existence but was destroyed by it, I thought. In theory he was our friend, that is my friend and Glenn’s, in practice he never was, I thought, for he lacked everything necessary for actual friendship, as he did for musical virtuosity, as his suicide indicates, I thought. The so-called bottom line is he killed himself, not I, I thought, I was just picking up my suitcase from the floor to put it on the bench, when the innkeeper walked in. She was surprised, she said, hadn’t heard me, I thought, she’s lying to me. She surely saw me enter the inn, has been spying on me the whole time, hasn’t come into the restaurant on purpose, that disgusting, repulsive and yet seductive creature, who’s left her blouse open to the waist. The vulgarity of these people who don’t even try to hide it, I thought, who put their vulgarity on display, I thought. Who don’t need to hide their vulgarity, their commonness, I said to myself. The room I always stayed in, she said, wasn’t heated, but it probably wouldn’t be necessary to turn on the heat since it was warm outside, she would open the windows in the room and let in the warm spring air, she said, while starting to button up her blouse without actually buttoning up the blouse. Wertheimer had been with her, she said, before he left for Zizers. That he had killed himself she learned from the transporter, the transporter had heard it from one of the woodsmen who looked after and guarded Wertheimer’s property, from Kohlroser (Franz). It wasn’t clear who would take over Traich, she said, Wertheimer’s sister surely wouldn’t, she thought, she was in Switzerland for good. She had seen her only twice in the last ten years, an unapproachable woman, completely different from her brother who was approachable, she even used the word affable, which surprised me, since I had never connected the word affable with Wertheimer. Wertheimer had been good to everyone, she said, she actually said good, but in the same breath said he had abandoned Traich. Recently outsiders had often shown up in Traich, stayed for days and even weeks, without Wertheimer himself putting in an appearance in Traich, people who had gotten the key to Traich from Wertheimer, as she said, artists, musicians, her tone of voice in saying the words artists and musicians was contemptuous. These people, she said, had only exploited Wertheimer and his house in Traich, drank and ate for days and weeks at his expense, lolled around in bed until noon, traipsed through town laughing loudly and in crazy clothes, all of them disheveled, in her opinion they had made the worst impression. One could see that Wertheimer himself, she claimed, was getting more and more disheveled, she drew out the word disheveled, she got that from Wertheimer, I thought. In the night she would hear Wertheimer play the piano, she said, often half the night until morning, finally he would walk through town with bags under his eyes, his clothing wrinkled and torn, would come into her inn for no other purpose than to have a good sleep. In the last months he stopped going to Vienna, wasn’t even interested in the mail waiting for him there, hadn’t had this mail forwarded. For four months he was alone in Traich without leaving the house, the woodsmen brought him supplies, as she said while picking up my suitcase and going up to my room. Immediately she opened the window and said that no one else had spent the night in this room for the whole winter, everything was dirty, she said, if I didn’t mind she would get a rag and clean things up, at least the soot on the windowsill, she said, but I refused, I couldn’t care less about the dirt. She turned down the covers and claimed the sheets were clean, the air would dry them. Every guest always wants the same room, she said. Wertheimer never used to let anyone spend the night in Traich, all at once his house was teeming with people, the innkeeper said. For thirty years no one besides Wertheimer had spent the night in Traich, in the last weeks before his death dozens of city people, as she put it, had stopped in Traich, spent the night in Traich, turned the whole house upside down, she said. These artists, she said, were peculiar types, the word peculiar wasn’t hers either, she got it from Wertheimer who was fond of the word peculiar, as I thought. For a long time people like Wertheimer (and me!) put up with their isolation, I thought, then they have to have company, for twenty years Wertheimer held out without company, then he filled his house with all sorts of people. And killed himself, I thought. Like my house in Desselbrunn, Traich is meant for solitude, I thought, for someone like me, like Wertheimer, I thought, for an artist type, a so-called intellectual type, but if we push a house like this one beyond a very specific limit it kills us, it’s absolutely lethal. At first we equip a house like this one for our artistic and intellectual purposes, and once we’ve equipped it, it kills us, I thought, the way the innkeeper wipes the dirt from the wardrobe door with her bare fingers, completely without embarrassment, on the contrary she enjoyed the fact that I watched her do it, that I kept my eyes on her so to speak. Now I suddenly understood why Wertheimer had slept with her.