this was and is the only inn in the area. Glenn, I thought, never played Chopin. Refused all the invitations, all the highest fees. He always talked people out of the idea that he was an unhappy person, he claimed he was the happiest, the most blessed by happiness. Music/obsession/ambition/Glenn, I had once noted in my first Madrid notebook. Those people in the Puerta del Sol that I described to Glenn in nineteen sixty-three after discovering Hardy. Description of a bullfight, Retiro Park speculations, I thought, that Glenn never acknowledged. Wertheimer often invited Glenn to Traich, the hunting lodge would surely be to his liking, Wertheimer thought, Glenn had never accepted the invitation, not even Wertheimer was a hunting-lodge person, never mind Glenn Gould. Horowitz was never the mathematician that Glenn Gould was. Was. We say he is, then suddenly he was, this terrible was, I thought. Wertheimer would lecture at me when I was working on, for example, Schönberg, Glenn never would. He couldn’t accept that someone knew more than he did, couldn’t tolerate someone explaining something he didn’t know about. Embarrassed by his ignorance, I thought, standing in the inn and waiting for the innkeeper. On the other hand Wertheimer was the reader, not Glenn, not I, I didn’t read a great deal and when I did it was always the same thing, the same books by the same authors, the same philosophers over and over as if they were always completely new. I had developed the art of perceiving the same thing over and over as something new, developed it to a high, absurdly high skill, neither Wertheimer nor Glenn had that skill. Glenn read almost nothing, he avoided literature, which was just like him. Only what really serves my own purposes, he once said, my art. He had all of Bach in his head, the same with Handel, a good deal of Mozart, all of Bartók as well, he could sit down and interpret for hours, that was his word for it, naturally without a mistake and brilliantly, inglenniously, as Wertheimer used to say. Basically I realized from the moment I met Glenn on Monk’s Mountain that he was one of the most extraordinary people I had ever met in my life, I thought. The physiognomist in me isn’t wrong. Years later the world confirmed my judgment, but this only pained me, like everything confirmed by the newspapers. We exist, we don’t have any other choice, Glenn once said. It’s total nonsense what we have to go through, even he, I thought. Even Wertheimer’s death could have been predicted, I thought. Curiously Wertheimer always maintained that I would commit suicide, hang myself in the woods, in your beloved Retiro Park, he once said, I thought. He never forgave me for having just got up and left for Madrid, without saying a word to anyone, abandoning everything. He’d grown used to my walking through Vienna with him, for years, a whole decade, of course they were his walks, not mine, I thought. He always walked faster than me, I had trouble keeping up with him although he was the sick one, not I, precisely because he was the sick one he always walked ahead of me, I thought, left me behind as soon as we started out. The loser is one of Glenn Gould’s brilliant inventions, I thought, Glenn just saw through Wertheimer the moment they met, he completely saw through everyone he met for the first time. Wertheimer got up at five in the morning, I got up at five-thirty, Glenn never before nine-thirty because he went to bed around four in the morning, not to sleep, said Glenn, but to let the sound of my exhaustion die out. Kill myself, I thought, now that Glenn is dead, that Wertheimer has committed suicide, as I looked around the restaurant. Glenn was always afraid of the dampness of Austrian restaurants, he feared death would claim him in these Austrian restaurants, where the air hardly circulates or not at all. Actually death claims many people in our restaurants, the innkeepers refuse to open the windows, not even in summer, and so the moisture seeps into the walls for eternity. And everywhere this gaudy new tastelessness, I thought, the complete proletarianization of even our most beautiful inns, I thought, continues unabated. No word has turned my stomach more than the word socialism when I think what people have done to this term. Everywhere this dog-do socialism spouted by our dog-do socialists who exploit the people with their socialism, eventually dragging it down to their own dog-do level. Today everywhere we look we see this deadly dog-do-level socialism, we smell it, it’s penetrated everything. I know the rooms in this inn, I thought, they’re deadly. The thought that I had come to Wankham merely to see Wertheimer’s hunting lodge struck me at that moment as base. On the other hand, I told myself immediately, I owe it to Wertheimer, I repeated precisely this sentence, I owe it to Wertheimer, I said to myself out loud. One lie followed another. Curiosity, which has always been my most prominent character trait, had taken a firm grip on me. Perhaps the heirs have already moved everything out of the hunting lodge, I thought, changed it from top to bottom, heirs have an unscrupulous way of taking over that we can barely imagine. Clear out everything within hours of the deceased’s final breath, as they say, cart it all away and won’t let anyone in the door. No one ever cast a more damaging light on his relatives than Wertheimer, described them into the dirt. Hated his father, mother, sister, reproached them all with his unhappiness. That he had to continue existing, constantly reminding them that they had thrown him up into that awful existence machine so that he would be spewed out below, a mangled pulp. His mother threw her child into this existence machine, all his life his father kept this existence machine running, which accurately hacked his son to pieces. Parents know very well that they perpetuate their own unhappiness in their children, they go about it cruelly by having children and throwing them into the existence machine, he said, I thought, contemplating the restaurant. I first saw Wertheimer in the Nussdorferstrasse, in front of the Markthalle. He should have become a businessman like his father, but in fact he didn’t even become a musician as he, Wertheimer, wanted but