For a while I stared at the game with no energy for anything; the light hurt my eyes and the hum of the hotel was lulling me to sleep. With no little effort I managed to go out in search of a pharmacy. Under the terrible sun I wandered the old streets in the center of town. I don’t remember seeing tourists. Actually, I don’t remember seeing anyone. A couple of sleeping dogs; the girl who waited on me at the pharmacy; an old man sitting in the shadow of a doorway. Meanwhile, the Paseo Marítimo was so crowded that it was impossible to walk without elbowing and pushing. Near the port a little amusement park had been built and that’s where everyone was, hypnotized. It was insanity. There were all kinds of tiny stalls that the human torrent threatened to crush at any moment. As best I could, I lost myself again in the streets of the old town and returned to the hotel the long way around.
I got undressed, closed the shutters, and smeared my body with salve. I was burning up.
Lying in bed, in the dark but with my eyes open, I tried to think about the events of the last few days before I fell asleep. Then I dreamed that I didn’t have a fever anymore and I was with Ingeborg in this same room, in bed, each of us reading a book, but at the same time there was something very intimate about it. I mean, each of us felt close to the other even though we were absorbed in our respective books; each of us felt love for the other. Then someone scratched at the door and after a while we heard a voice on the other side saying: “It’s Florian Linden, get out now, your life is in great danger.” Immediately, Ingeborg let go of her book (the book dropped splayed on the rug) and fixed her eyes on the door. I hardly moved. Frankly, I was so comfortable there, my skin so cool, that I thought it wasn’t worth being frightened. “Your life is in danger,” repeated Florian Linden’s voice, farther and farther away, as if from the end of the hallway. And in fact, just then we heard the sound of the elevator, the doors opening with a metallic click and then closing, carrying Florian Linden down to the ground floor. “He’s gone to the beach or the amusement park,” said Ingeborg, dressing quickly. “I have to find him. Wait here, I have to talk to him.” I didn’t object, of course. But left alone, I couldn’t keep reading. “How can anyone be in danger in this room?” I asked aloud. “What’s he scheming, that third-rate detective?” Getting more and more worked up, I went over to the window and looked out at the beach, expecting to see Ingeborg and Florian Linden. The sun was setting and only El Quemado was there, arranging his pedal boats under red clouds and a moon the color of a plate of boiling lentils, dressed only in shorts and remote from everything around him, that is, from the sea and the beach, the sea wall of the Paseo, and the shadows of the hotels. For a moment I was overcome by fear; I knew that danger and death lay out there. I woke up sweating. The fever was gone.
AUGUST 27
This morning, after I planned and wrote out the two first turns, obliterating essays by Benjamin Clark (Waterloo, #14) and Jack Corso (The General, #3, vol. 17) in which each advises against the creation of more than one front in the first year, I went down to the hotel in excellent spirits, bursting with the desire to read, write, swim, drink, laugh—all the visible signs of health and animal happiness. In the morning the bar usually isn’t very full, so I brought along a novel and a folder of photocopies of the articles I need for my work. The novel was Wally, die Zweifl erin, by K. G., but perhaps due to my inner exultation, to the thrill of a productive morning, it was impossible for me to concentrate on reading or on studying the articles, which— it must be said— I plan to refute. So I settled down to watch the people shuttling between the restaurant and the terrace, and to enjoy my beer. Just as I was getting ready to go back to the room, where with a little luck I’d be able to sketch out the third turn (spring of ’40, unquestionably of crucial importance), Frau Else appeared. When she saw me, she smiled. It was a strange smile. Then she stepped away from a few guests—leaving them in midsentence, or so it seemed—and came to sit at my table.
She looked tired, though her expression was as composed as ever and her gaze as luminous.
“I’ve never read him,” she said, examining the book. “I don’t even know who he is. Modern?”
I shook my head with a smile. He was an author from the previous century, I said. A dead man. For a second we stared at each other without looking away or muting the effect with words.
“What’s it about? Tell me.” She pointed at the novel by G.
“If you like, I’ll lend it to you.”
“I don’t have time to read. Not in the summer. But you can tell me what happens.” Her voice, while still soft, began to take on a commanding tone.
“It’s the diary of a girl. Wally. At the end she kills herself.”
“That’s all? It sounds awful.”
I laughed:
“You asked me to tell you what it was about. Take it, you can give it back later.”
She took the book with a thoughtful expression.
“Girls like to write in their diaries… I hate that kind of drama… No, I won’t read it. Don’t you have anything a little more cheerful?” She opened the folder and glanced at the photocopied articles.
“That’s something else,” I hastened to explain. “Nothing worth looking at!”
“I see. You read English?”
“Yes.”
She nodded as if in approval. Then she closed the folder and for a while we sat there in silence. The situation was rather embarrassing, at least for me. The most incredible thing was that she didn’t seem to be in a hurry to leave. I searched mentally for a topic of conversation but I couldn’t come up with anything.
Suddenly I remembered a scene from ten or eleven years ago: in the middle of a party, the occasion of which I can’t recall, Frau Else left everyone, crossing the Paseo Marítimo and vanishing onto the beach. Back then there were no streetlights on the Paseo and you didn’t have to go far in order to step into complete darkness. I can’t remember whether anyone else noticed her flight. I don’t think so. The party was noisy and everyone was drinking and dancing on the terrace, even people who had just been walking by and had no connection to the hotel. The point is, I don’t think anyone missed her except me. I don’t know how long it was before she turned up again; I suppose it was quite a while. When she did, she wasn’t alone. Walking hand in hand with her was a tall man, very thin, with a white shirt that fluttered in the breeze as if it hung on nothing but bones, or rather, a single bone, as long as a flagpole. When they crossed the Paseo I recognized him. It was the owner of the hotel, Frau Else’s husband. When Frau Else passed me, she said hello to me in German. I’d never seen such a sad smile.
Now, ten years later, she was smiling in the same way.
Without thinking twice, I told her I thought she was a very beautiful woman.
Frau Else looked at me as if she didn’t quite understand what I’d said and then she laughed, but so softly that someone at the next table could barely have heard it.
“It’s the truth,” I said. The fear I generally felt when I was with her of making a fool of myself had disappeared.
Suddenly serious, perhaps realizing that I was serious myself, she said:
“You’re not the only one who thinks so, Udo. I guess you must be right.”
“You always have been,” I said, unable to stop now, “although I wasn’t just talking about your physical beauty, which is certainly undeniable, but about your… aura, the indefinable air that emanates from your most insignificant actions… Your silences…”