Concrete

  Palma, where I am writing these notes, the thermometer showed eighteen degrees above. However, this naturally did not improve my condition — quite the contrary. I was afraid I shouldn’t survive the first night in the hotel. Anyone familiar with this disease will know what I am talking about. I did well after my arrival to spend the whole day in bed with the curtains drawn. There was no question of my unpacking my suitcases. Naturally I knew in advance what such an abrupt change of climate entailed, but I hadn’t expected to be in such a parlous state. I confined myself to staying all day in bed and drinking a glass of water on two occasions, but I only drank the water because I had to take my tablets. They probably saw immediately at the reception desk how ill I was and gave me the room I asked for without any fuss. I’ll unpack my cases very slowly, I told myself as I lay flat out on the bed, gazing at the ceiling and able to resume my fantasies where I’d broken them off in Peiskam. The flight, like’all previous ones I’d survived, had been absolutely terrible. However, at about three o’clock on the second night, rather as though I were doing something I shouldn’t, I got up and began unpacking my cases. As I did so I discovered that I wasn’t as weak as I’d thought. I love these large rooms, which are normally intended for two people and have a large bathroom and an anteroom equally large, and from which one has a view not only of the old town, but also of the sea. And which are absolutely quiet. In the morning all I hear are the cocks crowing, a few dull thuds coming from the wharf, dogs barking, and perhaps a mother scolding a naughty child. I don’t have the impression here of being isolated from the local people, although in fact almost everything separates me from them, since I am living in luxury in a spacious room, while the people in the old town beneath me live in anything but luxury. Yet this luxury, I reflect, is excused by my sickness. But in fact I no longer have any scruples, I tell myself. To have scruples at the end of one’s life is quite ludicrous. After my first breakfast I began unpacking my cases. First the one with the clothes and underclothes in it. I’d hardly taken out one or two things and put them in the wardrobe when I was once more prostrate on the bed. An attack of breathlessness more severe than any I’d had for a long time caused me extreme distress. I put this down to the abrupt change of climate, which at first has a devastating effect even on a healthy person, let alone someone like me. However, having finally unpacked the first case, I set about unpacking the second, the one containing all the books and articles I’d brought with me for my work on Mendelssohn Bartholdy. At first I didn’t know where to put them, and I considered various places; finally I decided to put some of them on the table and others in the wardrobe, and this was the procedure I followed while unpacking. I wondered meanwhile whether it still made any sense to begin a project like this one on Mendelssohn Bartholdy. On the one hand I told myself it was senseless, on the other I told myself, You must begin this project, whatever the cost. But do ten years of preparation — for I really had been preparing for it for so long — justify one in embarking on a task like this when one is totally worn out, as I am now? I said alternately nothing justifies it and everything justifies it. It was best to give up questioning the wisdom or unwisdom of such a task, and so I gave it up and pretended that I was in fact determined to embark upon the task as soon as possible. Was I now, when I was so close to my goal, to throw everything away, to destroy everything on which ultimately my whole existence hung, the tenuous hope that I might yet bring my work to fruition? I’ll write my study, even if I can’t start it straight away. After all, I had foreseen this and I had never believed that I should be able to start at once: I’m not so mad as to fall for what is patently absurd. If not today, then tomorrow; if not tomorrow, then the day after, and so on. It was only because of my work that I made this journey, I told myself. I took myself to task and arranged everything on the desk so that I could start work at any time. Then I went and sat on the balcony, in the white-painted metal chair, only to return to the bed and lie down again. For several hours I alternated between sitting on the balcony and lying on the bed until the day had come to an end. Towards evening I went into the town. Though I had originally intended to walk only as far as the Molo, or perhaps as far as the fish restaurant on the Molo, which was known to me from earlier visits and where I had always eaten exceptionally well, I nevertheless went past the Lonja as far as the so-called Borne, which during Franco’s lifetime — from the victory of the Fascists until their overthrow — was called the Paseo del Generalissimo. There, because it was so warm, I went and sat — most incautiously, as I had to admit — on the terrace of the café facing the Cañellas’ palace. It was here that I had for years, indeed almost for decades, taken my lunch, consisting invariably of ham, cheese, olives and a glass of water. Sitting with my eyes closed in one of those ancient, white-painted wicker chairs and drinking a large espresso, while the sun glinted through the still leafless plane trees, I suddenly found myself thinking about the name of the young woman from Munich whom I had spoken to here on the Borne on my last visit to Palma and who had told me her terrible story after I had invited her to have coffee on this very terrace where I now sat with my eyes closed. The young woman’s name was Anna Härdtl. And it was not I who had spoken to her on the Borne, but she who had spoken to me. Be that as it may. I had been walking with one of the Cañellas’ daughters, whom I knew from Vienna (she had studied the piano there under the celebrated Wührer) and who ran a parfumerie with her sister opposite the café. Walking along under the plane trees we had been laughing about something, I can’t remember what, when suddenly I uttered, rather loudly, the name Anna, which happened to be the name of a girl we had met on a visit to Andraitx, one of the many excursions which I had made in recent years with the Cañellas girls and which we always recalled with pleasure. When I called out the name Anna — I no longer know why I was speaking so loudly, ruiso! — my voice carried and a young woman walking in front of us turned round abruptly and said, Yes? Then, extremely embarrassed, she added, My name is Anna. She had turned round spontaneously because she thought somebody was calling to her. The sudden sight of the young woman completely changed my mood and that of my companion. I was appalled by her appearance. She was obviously in mourning and seemed distracted and wretched. It is not my way to begin conversations with strangers from one moment to the next — I lack the necessary temperament — but when I saw the young woman’s face I at once asked her if she would like to join us, the Cañellas girl and me, for a cup of coffee on the terrace. I acted from a momentary feeling, not so much of sympathy as of sudden alarm at the sight of a face so full of despair, but no sooner had I extended my invitation than I began to accuse myself of having addressed her in a tone which she might have felt more hurtful than protective, and I regretted having invited her at all. However, I couldn’t wish her away or take back what I had said, and so I repeated it in a different tone, which at first seemed to me more appropriate, but turned out to be equally inept, as I at once recognized. To my surprise the young woman immediately accepted my invitation and introduced herself as Anna Härdtl. It was nice, she said, to talk to people again after several days, and everything she said subsequently seemed as if it were spoken by one who was inwardly utterly distracted, utterly destroyed. She was staying, she said, in Santa Ponsa, and then she said something about a death, then something about a consulate being closed, then something about an expensive meal and a cold room. Everything she said, as we walked towards the café, sounded as though it was spoken by someone on the verge of madness. Hardly had we sat down on the terrace than I became aware of how embarrassing the situation was, and I no longer knew how to react. The little Cañellas girl was no help at all: she had understood nothing of what had just taken place and simply gazed out of the window. I didn’t understand her behaviour, since it was obvious what kind of person was sitting with us at the table, someone in the grip of the most terrible despair. But to the young Cañellas girl, who, like all Spanish women, was unused to finding herself suddenly sitting at a table with a stranger, t
he whole situation was embarrassing. I felt ashamed, unable to say a word, searching for words but not finding a single one, and reproaching myself for having perhaps forced someone, in a positively brutal manner, into doing something she didn’t want to do: the young woman perhaps didn’t want to sit drinking coffee at the same table with either me or the Cañellas girl, neither of whom could in the least concern her, just because she had been compelled to do so by my invitation, delivered in a tone which, if not callous, had at least been far from sensitive. I was ashamed and unable to start a conversation, even to utter a single word, let alone to take up anything the young woman had already said in her extreme despair and confusion. That’s just how somebody sits who has been compelled to do so, I thought. The young Cañellas girl must have felt as I did, because for a while she didn’t look once in my direction. But my sense of shame gave me no chance of escaping from the situation I had created. Suddenly, out of sheer nervousness, I asked the young woman her name, although she had told me it as soon as I had invited her for coffee. But she willingly repeated it: Anna Härdtl. I was not up to coping with the situation. And so we all remained silent, each of us secretly knowing why; we could not possibly fail to appreciate the embarrassment of it all. Suddenly the young woman began to tell us the following story. At the end of August she and her husband and their three-year-old son had come to Santa Ponsa for two weeks. They had been completely exhausted — and so had the child — after starting up an electrical business in Trudering, an eastern suburb of Munich, especially as a result of the continual persecution to which they had been subjected by the local authorities, who had not given them a moment’s peace over the opening of the shop. I couldn’t imagine, she said, what she had had to go through during the year before and up to the opening of the shop. It was the most terrible thing, wanting to set up on your own account, the most impossible thing in the world, far worse today than ever before. And my husband, she had said right at the beginning, was the most difficult man. Hearing her say was, I suddenly knew that she was in mourning for her husband, a fact which at first I hadn’t grasped. Her husband had been only twenty-three, she said, and came from Niirnberg, from a poor family, whereas she was born near Rosenheim and came from a better-off family, as she put it. Her husband had attended an engineering school in Niirnberg and completed his course there, although they knew each other already, and that had made it very difficult for him to carry on with his course. But he had finally completed it successfully, for if he had given up his studies at the engineering school her father would have immediately stopped the monthly allowance he paid him — naturally a meagre allowance, she said.