The Man Without Qualities

  He had said to her: You are virginal and heroic.

  She reiterated: Virginal and heroic! A glow came into her cheeks. She felt called upon to do something, but she didn’t know what.

  Her thoughts were driving in two directions, as in a hand-to-hand struggle. She felt attracted and repelled, without knowing toward or by what. This ended in a faint feeling of tenderness that was somehow left over from the struggle and that moved her to go looking for Walter. She stood up and put the apple down.

  She was sorry that she was always tormenting Walter. She was only fifteen when she first noticed that she had the power to torment him. All she had to do was to say loudly and firmly that something he had said was not so, and he would flinch, no matter how right what he had said was. She knew he was afraid of her. He was afraid she might go crazy. He had let it slip once and then quickly tried to cover up; but she had known ever since that it was in his mind. She thought it was really lovely. Nietzsche says: “Is there a pessimism of the strong? An intellectual leaning toward what is hard, horrifying, evil? A deep instinct against morality? A craving for the terrible as the worthy enemy?” When such words came to mind they gave her a sensual thrill in her mouth, gentle and strong as milk, so that she could hardly swallow.

  She thought of the child Walter wanted from her. He was afraid of that too. Made sense, if he thought she might one day go mad. It made a tenderness rise up for him, though she violently fought it down. She had forgotten that she meant to go looking for Walter. There was something going on in her body. Her breasts were filling up, the blood flowed thickly through the veins in her arms and legs, there was a vague pressure on her bladder and bowels. Her slim body deepened inside, grew sensitive, alive, strange, step by step; a child lay bright and smiling in her arms; from her shoulders the Mother of God’s golden cloak fell in radiant folds to the floor, and the congregation was singing. It was out of her hands: the Lord had been born unto the world!

  But no sooner had this happened than her body snapped shut, closing the gap over the image, like a split log ejecting the entering wedge; she was her own slim self again, feeling disgust and a cruel merriment. She was not going to make it so easy for Walter. “Let it be thy victory and thy freedom that long for offspring”: she recited Nietzsche to herself. “Thou shalt build living memorials to thyself. But before that, thou must build up thine own body and soul.” Clarisse smiled; it was her special smile, licking upward like a slender flame from a fire under a great stone.

  Then she remembered that her father had been afraid of Walter. Her mind went back to years ago. It was something she was in the habit of doing; she and Walter would ask each other: “Do you remember . . . ?” and the light of the past flowed magically from the far distance into the present. It was fun, they enjoyed it. It was perhaps like turning around, after having doggedly trudged along a road for hours, to see all the empty distance one has covered transformed into a grand vista, to one’s genuine satisfaction; but they never saw it in that light; they took their reminiscing very seriously. And so it seemed to her incredibly titillating and curious that her father, the aging painter, at that time an authority figure in her life, had been afraid of Walter, who had brought a new era into his house, while Walter was afraid of her. It was like putting her arm around her friend Lucy Pachhofen and having to say “Papa” to him, while knowing that Papa was Lucy’s lover, for that was going on during that same period.

  Again Clarisse’s cheeks flushed. She was intensely absorbed in trying to bring to mind that peculiar whimpering sound, that strange whimpering she had told Ulrich about. She picked up her mirror and tried to make the face, with lips pressed together in fear, that she must have made the night her father came to her bed. She couldn’t manage to imitate the sound that had escaped from her breast in that state of temptation. She thought that the same sound must still be there, inside her chest, as it was then. It was a sound without restraint or scruple, but it had never surfaced again. She put down the mirror and looked around warily, touching everything with her eyes to assure herself that she was alone. Then she felt with her fingertips through her robe, searching for that velvety-black birthmark that had so strange a power. There it was, in the hollow of her groin, half hidden on the inside of the thigh and close to where the pubic hairs somewhat raggedly made room for it; she let her hand rest on it, made her mind a blank, and waited for the sensation she remembered. She felt it at once. It was not the gentle streaming of lust, but her arm grew stiff and taut like a man’s arm; she felt that if she could just lift it high enough she would be able to smash everything with it! She called this spot on her body the Devil’s Eye. It was the spot at which her father had stopped and turned back. The Devil’s Eye had a gaze that pierced through any clothing and “caught” men’s eyes and drew them to her, spellbound but unable to move as long as Clarisse willed it. Clarisse thought certain words in quotation marks, with special emphasis, just as she heavily underlined them in writing; the words thus emphasized tensed up with meaning, just as her arm was tensed up now; who would even have supposed that one could really “catch” something, someone, with the eye? Well, she was the first person who held this word in her hand like a stone to be flung at a target. It was all part of the smashing force in her arm. All this had made her forget the whimpering sound she had started out to consider; instead, she thought about her younger sister, Marion. When she was four years old, Marion’s hands had to be tied up at night, to keep them from slipping, in all innocence, under the covers, only because they were drawn toward a pleasing sensation like two baby bears drawn to a honeycomb in a hollow tree. And some time later Clarisse had once had to tear Walter away from Marion. Her family was possessed by sensuality as vintners are by wine. It was fated, a heavy burden she had to bear. Just the same, her thoughts went on wandering in the past, the tension in her arm relaxed, and her hand rested obliviously in her lap. In those days she had still been on terms of formality with Walter. Actually, she owed him a lot. It was he who had brought the news that there were modern people who insisted on plain, cool furniture and hung pictures on their walls that showed the truth. He read new things to her, Peter Altenberg, little stories of young girls who rolled their hoops in the love-crazed tulip beds and had eyes that shone with sweet innocence like glazed chestnuts. From that time on Clarisse knew that her slender legs, still a child’s legs, she had thought, were quite as important as a scherzo by “someone or other.”

  At the time, they were all staying in a summer place together, a large group; several families of their acquaintance had rented cottages by a lake, and all the bedrooms were filled up with invited friends, male and female. Clarisse had to double up with Marion, and around eleven Dr. Meingast sometimes dropped by on his secret moonlight rounds, for a chat. He—who was now a famous man in Switzerland—had then been the life of the party and the idol of all the mothers. How old was she then?—between fifteen and sixteen, or maybe fourteen and fifteen?—when he had brought his student George Gröschl along, who was only a little older than Marion and Clarisse. Dr. Meingast had been somewhat absentminded that evening, rambling a little about moonbeams, parents who slept through everything and didn’t care, and people with a modern outlook; suddenly he was gone, as if he had come only to leave stocky little George, his great admirer, behind with the girls. George was silent, probably too shy to talk, and the girls, who had been talking to Meingast, also kept quiet. But George must have clenched his teeth in the dark and stepped over to Marion’s bed. A little light fell into the room from outside, but in the corners, where the bed stood, impenetrable masses of shadow loomed, so Clarisse could not make out what was going on, except that George seemed to be standing upright beside the bed, looking down at Marion; but he had his back to Clarisse, and there was not a sound from Marion, as though she were not in the room at all. A long time went by. But in the end, while Marion remained motionless, George detached himself from the shadows like a murderer; for a moment his shoulder and side showed pale in the bright
patch of moonlight in the middle of the room, as he moved toward Clarisse, who had quickly lain down again and pulled the covers up to her chin. She knew that the secret thing that had been going on at Marion’s bed would now happen again and was rigid with suspense as George stood silently by her bedside. His lips seemed pressed unnaturally tight together. Finally his hand came, like a snake, and busied itself with Clarisse. What else he was doing she had no idea, and could make no sense of the little she perceived of his movements, despite her excitement. She herself did not feel aroused—that came later—but at the moment felt only a strong, indefinable, anxious excitement; she kept still like a trembling stone in a bridge over which a heavy vehicle is passing so slowly there seems no end to it; she felt unable to speak, and let it all be done to her. After George had let her go he disappeared without a word, and neither of the two sisters could be sure that the other had experienced the same thing as herself; they had not called to each other for help or asked for sympathy, and years went by before they exchanged a word about the incident.

  Clarisse had recovered her apple, gnawed off a little piece, and chewed on it. George had never given himself away or made any acknowledgment of what had happened, except perhaps at first to make stonily portentous eyes now and then. By this time he had turned into a smart rising young lawyer in government service, and Marion was married. Much more, however, had happened with Dr. Meingast. On going abroad, he had shed his cynicism and become what is called, outside the universities, a famous philosopher, always surrounded by a throng of students of both sexes. Walter and Clarisse had recently received a letter from him to the effect that he was about to visit his native land in order to get some work done, undisturbed by his followers. Would they be able to put him up? He had heard that they were living “on the border between nature and the big city.”

  This news might in fact have been what had triggered Clarisse’s line of thought that day. “Oh Lord, what a weird time it was!” she thought, and realized, too, that it had been the summer before the summer with Lucy. Meingast had taken to kissing her whenever he felt like it. “If you please, I shall kiss you now,” he said politely before he did it, and he also kissed every one of her girlfriends; there was one of them whose skirt Clarisse had never again been able to look at without having to think of eyelids lowered in false modesty. Meingast had told her about it himself, and Clarisse, who was only fifteen, after all, had said to the fully adult Dr. Meingast, when he told her of his exploits with her young friends: “You’re a pig!” She got a kick out of calling him such a crude name to his face—it felt like being booted and spurred—though it did not prevent her from being afraid that she would not be able to resist him either, in the end, and when he asked her for a kiss she did not dare refuse, for fear of seeming silly.

  But when Walter kissed her for the first time, she said gravely: “I promised Mama never to do this kind of thing.” And that was the difference in a nutshell. Walter talked like an angel and he talked a lot, he was swathed in art and philosophy like the moon swathed in a broad bank of clouds. He read aloud to her. But what he mostly did was look at her constantly, only at her among all her friends, that was all there was between them at first; it was just like having the moon look down on you: all you do is fold your hands. Actually, holding hands was the next step, quietly clasping hands without a word spoken, and what an amazingly strong bond it was! Clarisse felt her whole body purified by the touch of his hand; if he happened to seem absentminded and cool in taking her hand, she felt destroyed. “You can’t imagine what it means to me!” she said pleadingly. By that time they were very close, in secret. He taught her a new appreciation of mountains and beetles; all she had ever seen in nature before was a landscape that Papa or one of his colleagues would paint and sell. Now all of a sudden she began to regard her family with a critical eye; she felt all new and different.

  Suddenly she had a clear recollection of that business with the scherzo. “Your legs, Miss Clarisse,” Walter had said, “have more to do with real art than all of your papa’s paintings.” There was a piano in the house where they were staying that summer, on which they used to play duets. Clarisse was learning things from him; she wanted to rise above her girlfriends and her family; none of them understood how anyone could spend such lovely summer days playing the piano instead of going out boating or swimming; but she had pinned her hopes on Walter, she had already, even then, decided she would be “his mate,” she would marry him, and when he snapped at her for playing a wrong note, she would be boiling inwardly, but her pleasure outweighed the hurt. Walter did snap at her sometimes, in fact, because the spirit is uncompromising; but only at the piano. Music apart, it still happened sometimes that Meingast kissed her, and on one moonlight expedition, when Walter was rowing, she nestled her head on Meingast’s chest quite of her own accord as they sat in the stern together. Meingast had such a way with him in these matters, she had no way of knowing what would come of it, while Walter, the second time he grabbed her, right after their piano lesson, at the very last moment when they had already reached the doorway and he pounced on her from behind and kissed her hard, had only given her the unpleasant feeling that she had to struggle for air, to tear herself away from him. Nevertheless, her mind was made up; no matter what happened between her and the other one, she must never let go of this one.

  It was a funny thing, all that, anyway; there was something about Meingast’s breath that made all resistance melt away—it was like pure, light air that makes you feel happy for no reason—while Walter, who suffered from a halting digestion, as Clarisse had known for some time, just like the halting way he had of making up his mind about anything, had a stuffy kind of breath, a little too hot, a little musty and paralyzing. Such psychosomatic factors had played a strange part all along, and Clarisse could take it in stride, because nothing seemed more natural to her than Nietzsche’s saying that a person’s body is the soul. Her legs had no more genius than her head, they had exactly as much, they were her genius; her hand, at Walter’s touch, instantly released a stream of intentions and assurances that flowed from head to toe, without a word; and her youth—once it had come to know itself—rebelled against all the convictions and other foolishness of her parents with the simple freshness of a hard young body that despises all the feelings remotely connected with the voluptuous marriage beds and lush Turkish carpets so popular with the morally strict older generation. And so the physical continued to play a part she understood differently from the way others might see it.

  But here Clarisse broke off her reminiscences, or it was rather her reminiscences that on the instant, without the bump of a landing, dropped her back into the present. It was all this, and what was to follow, that she had wanted to tell her friend, the Man Without Qualities. Perhaps there was too much of Meingast in it, who had after all disappeared soon after that exciting summer. He had fled abroad; that incredible inward transformation of his had begun that was to make a famous philosopher out of the frivolous womanizer; and thereafter Clarisse had seen him only in passing, when neither of them had been reminded of the past. But as she saw it, her own part in his transformation was perfectly clear to her. A good deal more had happened between them in the weeks before his disappearance. In Walter’s absence—and in his jealous presence too, cutting Walter out and driving him to outdo himself—she and Meingast went through emotional storms and even crazier times, in those hours before a storm that can drive a man and a woman out of their minds, followed by the hours after the storm, all passion spent, that are like green meadows after a rain, in the pure air of friendship. Clarisse had let a lot of things be done to her, not unwillingly, but, eager as she was to know everything, the child had fought back in her own way afterward, by telling her licentious friend exactly what she thought of him. And because, in that last period before he left, Meingast’s mood had already sobered into friendship and a noble resignation in his rivalry with Walter, she was now convinced that she had drawn onto herself all that had troubled hi
s spirit before he went off to Switzerland, helping him toward that unexpected self-transformation. She was confirmed in this idea by what had happened between Walter and herself immediately afterward. Clarisse could no longer distinguish between those long-gone years and months, but what did it matter just when one thing or another had happened? The point was that when she and Walter had grown close, despite much resistance on her part, there came a dreamy time of long walks and confessions, of taking spiritual possession of one another with countless agonizing yet blissful little orgies of soul-probing to which lovers are tempted when they are still lacking that very amount of resolute courage which they have already lost in chastity. It was just as if Meingast had bequeathed them his sins, to be relived on a higher plane, until their ultimate meaning had been extracted by exhausting it; and they both perceived it thus. And now, when Clarisse cared so little for Walter’s love that she often found herself repelled by it, she saw even more clearly that the ecstatic thirst for love that had driven her out of her mind to such a degree could have been nothing other than an incarnation, that is, she knew, a manifestation in the flesh of something not of the flesh: a meaning, a mission, a destiny, such as is written in the stars for the elect.

  She was not ashamed, she felt more like crying when she compared the Then and Now, but Clarisse could never cry but pressed her lips together hard, and it turned into something that looked rather more like her smile. Her arm, covered with kisses up to the armpit; her leg, guarded by the Devil’s Eye; her pliant body, twisted over and over by her lover’s yearning and twisting back like a rope, all harbored the marvelous feeling that goes with love: the sense that every movement is of mysterious importance. Clarisse sat there feeling like an actress during intermission. To be sure, she did not know what lay ahead, but she felt it was the unremitting duty of lovers to always be to each other what they had been in their finest moments. And here was her arm, here were her legs, her head was poised on her body, in awesome readiness to be the first in recognizing the sign that could not fail to appear.