Page 11 of Sports Play


  Too late. The teacher was there and has already gone away again.

  Now I’ve quickly bought myself these new shoes that are ideal for running and jumping, for this walking of the great. But even these shoes that are touted round the whole world because a sportsman can’t be everywhere at the same time, they won’t transform me. At the most they’ll simply represent me. What did I just say? Muscles always indicate effort, not nature? That’s not quite right, because I don’t simply owe my muscles to effort. I walked a few hundred steps beyond myself, then I returned back to myself, but I could no longer find the entrance. Something must have been dumped in front of it in the meantime.

  I call up from below in my best public announcement voice: I’m me! I’m still dear Andi with the blonde curls so admired by relatives! Andi is called Arnie, when he’s not Arnie. Me me me. Or, to put it another way, it’s me. No. It was me. Listen! I always took care of my health, in particular my food, as a sportsman you always live healthily, but as a bodybuilder it’s the other way round. Whatever you ingest damages you. You stand still and build everything up yourself, and then you enter yourself and notice that you’ve already dismantled everything, any extensions you’d saved up for: mansards, balconies, pediments, stucco. I’d love to grant myself that final message from the Terminator, the donated wreath on my grave. Oh, if I only could go up one more time. But I have to wait until the garland trickles down into the earth behind me, into my collars of flesh, oh dear, surely they won’t throw it away, my sire’s garland!

  Yes, my Arnie was allowed to lose weight so he could fit into his dinner jacket. And I’d not even got as far as being allowed to put clothes on at all. The unruly Doctor Publicity had not even said the magic words “You can get dressed now”. I always grew out of my clothes instead of into them.

  I was and remain a poor farmer’s lad. I bravely opposed affluence with my deprivation. Should anyone care. And yet this deprivation will gather momentum at some stage, just wait and see what might become of me once I’ve drowned completely in myself. That takes a while. And you can’t train for it either. I always admire nature, well, now I’ve plenty of opportunity to. I’m looking at her so to speak from the inside, from her best side, the one she only shows to the dead. The maggots are getting the cutlery out. Today they’re running rings round me. It used to be different. There was something of myself that was alive, even if it was a photo. Help! I’m holding great scraps of myself in my hand. You try with all your strength to get away until, just like a nest of young snakes, you’ve wriggled right out of yourself. Turned into a body of water. Liver dissolved, kidneys gone, the muscles still there, but underneath everything is liquid. Liquefied. Mama!

  If the body’s exterior no longer holds together, then it simply bursts its banks. Why didn’t you give me another one, mama? Unfortunately I flooded! Instead of getting older, I just got bigger! Getting to this gigantic appearance is something I prided myself on.

  I am Andreas from Pack, hello. Now that I’m dead, I feel a bit sorry for myself. I’d improved myself so strongly and so carefully, and now this! Look, it always embarrassed me somewhat that I had to reveal myself in front of so many people who looked up at me and then looked down on me. In some of them the reaction was affection. Which is not what I wanted either. My embarrassment in front of so many...it’s as if you always had to hold yourself open as your own coat, ready to slip into it. But you never find the arm holes. How did I get to that point? You’re suddenly in the position of a woman because you have to take your clothes off for your job. It can even prevent you from being a man. It sits in your stomach like a land mine that you’ve swallowed like a plate which you should have licked clean and handed to mama to wash up. I certainly swallowed enough stuff. All that Testoviron, Parabolan, Halotestin makes you childlike, docile. There is a secret room between father and the women, which is for the son. That’s where I come into the game, an eternal son crying for his mother. But she was never there. She watched my career from afar, bitter in her sullenness, her hurt. She shouts at me from afar.

  Arnie doesn’t have to shout. He much prefers to speak, he always has something to say in his modish voice, emphasising the Styrian man. He surely means me and no other! He takes me up on the shovel and then he sweeps me back again, under the Loden cloth of the Austrian soil, under the felt of an Austrian hat. Arnie gave me this lovely building kit as a present and now I’m meant to do something with it! I was to be opened after my death, that’s what it said in the instructions. Our little business back home never brought in enough to live on, but why did I throw my entire wellbeing at it? It was stupid of me.

  Now I can no longer be changed. On the other hand for me health was a programme. As it is for every sportsperson. The main thing is not to eat anything bad or dirty. And so it happened that I, a huge child, wanted to stick Arnie in my pocket and only noticed right at the end that I didn’t have any pockets. I don’t even have my last shirt. I am naked and dead! A secure castle, I stand all alone. Me, poor Andi, I martyred myself just so that I could have a measly wayside cross over my head. Normality did not satisfy me. I became massif only so that I could climb up myself. It never got so far that I, like my role model, was allowed to put on a really beautiful suit, not even once. I was my own suit, my only suit, my only coat, my shelter and my umbrella. I made my body myself and then, once it fitted finally, I put it on.

  I’m trying – but am simply not succeeding – to describe myself like an article of clothing, from close up. I myself am so far away. The whole sense and purpose of myself existed in the fact that I cut off my own way back. One should only get out of hand if you can hand yourself back to yourself, back to mama. If I just think about it: this chemistry set that I supplied myself was meant to re-build me. Yet it did the opposite, the nutrition utterly de-constructed me. I must have done something wrong. No wonder, mama had always been responsible for the cooking and baking. She battered my poor bones. Too many puddings perhaps? For the eternal baby boy? I could never get enough of mama’s nut cake. Rage grabbed hold of me like a storm. Drove me away. Me with my curly then shorn hair that never really got soft. The farmer boy’s hair. My cheeks were summery-red, the cheeks of a child upon which a figure falls through the foliage of the trees. And the child took this figure to its heart as if it was from a real person. A man needs role models that don’t come from his terrible parents but from him himself. Or from a phantom of him that took on human contours for so long that one began to fear it.

  I just kept on staring at this ghost, this colossus, that rose up gingerly from within me, only to sit down again immediately afterwards, afraid of people. There was no way I could keep the World Championship date that I’d set for myself. Something always came in between, in fact two others came in between, namely first and second place. And so I prematurely ended myself. Me, son. Now they think about me every day at home in Pack. Why does a musician play his instrument, he doesn’t have to? That’s how I had to play every day on my body. And then one I had to consume myself, because the packaging had been broken open. I squandered myself on myself, too stupid. I blew myself up like my own rubbish bag. Nothing but hot air! Although firm from the outside. A child who was successful too young to be able to grow up. The eyes always turned imploringly to the reporter who was to say something good about me. No one sees me now, here underneath the earth.

  I was grateful and good, yes I can say that about myself. It’s a pity that I died, don’t you think? A quiet lad, a tree that did not quite make it to an oak, but my crown had a few nice spikes that in the end pricked only me. Like oats. Please, help yourselves! It’s a well-cemented body mass. Now others are eating me in my grave. Once I made it together with my flesh, no, through my flesh, onto a front page. For me that was more valuable than a world championship gold medal would’ve been. Could’ve been. Get away from me! Go away. My picture exerts a strong pull. Brace yourselves! This country immediately occupies every available position that a sportsman has not kept occupied with
himself. That’s so greedy! First they put the sportsmen on a balcony and then they forget them there. Which is why so many people try to get away from Austria. So that there’ll be more vacancies here. And yet they stay standing there, these sportsmen, I don’t know, they just don’t find a way out of this country. They stay, stiffly on sufferance, in order to stand opposite their own pictures that have long since belonged to their sponsors. Why are there always others apart from oneself on these pictures? We many wish we had wings and yet still remain docile. At home. I, firm and true, the lovely muscle mountain. I’m sat firm on the alpine saddle whose bags I packed in order to carry me away. The initial fun of the sport turned for me into a distorted passion to distort myself, and then built up my exterior like those enormous alpine window baskets set in front of our award-winning jails. Give every sportsman his own little house and garden, in which he can recuperate from the exertion of solidly slept-through nights.

  Arnie showed me how to do it by giving himself to me without letting go of himself. He must be half made of steel and yet he always trickled through my fingers when I wanted to grab hold of him. Personally I think they should not’ve been allowed to squander me so easily. I didn’t leave, I always turned up until I just could not. I carefully saved the money for any urgent renovation work on my body. But isn’t renovation supposed to mean that everything is new? Even the landscape changes completely a couple of times each year, but it still can’t trade places. It stays there for us. I too stay here for you, under you. Yes, I stay amongst you but not in the way that you think. I will strike every glance in my direction dead. In my direction, me, the friendly farmer’s son, I played tag with myself, chased myself to the bitter end. But you can’t see that from outside. Just be glad! I remain the eternal hope for first place, beyond my death, promising, as they say. Perhaps I’ll be resurrected! If Jesus can do that, then I can do it too! I just have to train even more. My appearance explodes the image of myself yet this explosion does not open up reality to me, it only opens up rooms where there are more pictures hanging. Rigid. In pose. I am the leader and the led in one. As long as I remain dead. I am made of my own stone, of my own human mass which went beyond all other human measure, stepped outside it and now I have stepped back in again. My own statue. A bodybuilder in the pose of a revue dancer and thus the feminine comes to an end.

  A woman cannot allow a picture to speak to her advantage unless someone else apart from her is in the picture. Perhaps that is the case because this contender, and that one there, are not in fact the image of a woman, although they desperately try to resemble one. In despair they hold on to the tape measure, but someone rips it out of their hand. They don’t need one. They are only ever measured against others. Even now I’m dead, I wouldn’t want to be one of them.

  I, on the other hand, was measured against others, but I knew my own measure personally. It was called Arnie and I nearly reached it before I died. Nearly! Men’s competition, Grade A. And now I have left all that behind me, even the grade itself, but I did have class. No one can say otherwise. From me, the human bank into which so much has been invested without paying interest, there’s a great view of death, that is both my victory and my sting. Death, where are you? Ah, here you are. And now that I see your picture, I notice that it’s me. Yoohooo! I am death, at least death looks remarkably similar to me, don’t you think? And now I see: I’ve been waiting for myself the whole time. I can’t pull this sting out of myself or else my whole body will follow. I clearly explained to the storm precisely where it should set itself down, for I’ll no longer be there when it finally comes. But hopefully my body will represent me in a dignified fashion.

  The light in the niche goes out and the Pieta disappears.

  The YOUNG WOMAN from earlier. She’s now got her breasts on her back like a rucksack. A YOUNG SPORTSMAN who his fending off the woman.

  WOMAN:

  You untamed man, may I greet you with a kiss? May I say that you belong to me? I wear my own burden heavily. Well, art I’m still permitted, and the wearing of clothes. But what is that. More gentle women than I master what I intend for you so much better. Their delicate appearance won’t suffer because it’s indestructible. Unlike mine. So here: a cheekily competitive exercise that people can watch by looking over my shoulder and see what I’m sketching in my notebook. No one’s interested in it anyway. Well then, let me address you more formally.

  By the way, you’re looking in the wrong direction and of course the only thing you see there are my breasts, which are no longer the youngest. Earlier on you looked at my sheaf of papers from the front, this year boldly-patterned for a change, but actually it was a sheath belonging to my sword, something I noticed only when I tried to pull it out of me, panting with exertion. Excalibur, in particular the model with the practical handle that fits many other household products, for example this practical floor mop. But you didn’t notice that of course, did you? I get it. This glossy magazine – just look at that beautiful dress, for me it replaces a happy relationship with everyday life, just look over here! You’re looking straight into my heart, into which my fuming hands gouge, a bloody tear, yes, just look at it, I told you how deep that tear goes. I’d like to buy this dress. What I have now is this heart, and that dress would look so good over it. My heart is still young and steamy, even though I myself am now older and running out of steam. I hope the dress will make me younger.

  Don’t worry, I might constantly be opening up my breasts, but only to myself, not to you. Why are you flinching? You don’t need to be afraid of me.

  SPORTSMAN:

  Your image is as firmly engraved on me as cuts in a diamond. Here you go, I’ll just open this notebook because you really want me to, yet I always see someone other than you, someone who you don’t even vaguely resemble, and who also dresses completely differently. Really I should be seeing you in every picture! Well, I prefer to wait until you show me your breast disrobed in murder, otherwise I wouldn’t be able to recognise it at all, and woe, woe betide me, if you throw down your womb. Where does this all take place? I’m just asking. Because I can’t quite see it yet. I wait for you to carry by your hair, no, let’s forget the hair, you’re not courageous enough to carry your hair on a pike across the street... I myself am open to anything that comes along, but I don’t see you coming, very sorry about that! And why are you coming from behind, sneaking up. Doesn’t matter. Your image is already blurring because you don’t resemble any of those who leap by, rave up, high-five or stuff their evenings inside television screens. And when they pull them out again, they look as if they themselves had come from there. As stars, however, not as consumer goods.

  You’ve no alternative but to bow to yourself again and again hungrily. I on the other hand will not be watching, and I’ll never love you either, even though you appear to consider this a possibility. You’ll never get it together to place your hand on my chin, as my dear mama used to, and wail: my child, mercy, have mercy on me! You’re far too arrogant to ask me for anything.

  WOMAN:

  Please don’t keep looking elsewhere. This is where the party is. You are here. So am I. I still compete with the daughters of the nation in joyful exercise. They pass us by in their youthful finery, in tops and leggings, in string tangas and extra-wide pullovers with nothing on underneath. I look coy, I don’t have anything else to entice you with, whilst you’re the only one I’m not looking right now. You don’t notice that I’ve just not looked at you, as you’re looking at the box in front of which you alone can stand. And if I twinkle once from the sidelines, stumbling towards you through the mascaraed eyelash forest, you’re long gone, over to another broadcast of another game. You yank open the window to the world, even though it’s only the next screen that’s not reflecting your face now, but always someone else’s. Balls smash through the meadows when morning glimmers, I sink onto your chest, just as I’d imagined, and fall into nothingness, because in my tenderness I leant too far out of the window. Please could you tell me w
here the bus stop is, where is the remote control? The stop is right in the middle of the slaughter, no, the middle of the shaft I’ve dug into my breast so I can fall into it at the end. And I find you there! So you’re the young man that I selected, even though you never even saw me in this picture, which is hard as steel and saturated to satiation with a couple of kilos of youth all wrapped – without ever breathing – in five grams of stretch jersey.

  Listen: I too recently fell prey to the illness named viscose, although you can’t see it in this picture, or can you? I will rid myself of this illness by means of premium offerings of cotton or virgin wool vitamins. But the means is nothing, the purpose is all. Here my pure silken, caressing needs collapse in a crackling heap to the floor. Because you don’t notice straightaway, I grab your arm with my icy claws that were once hands. When I was still a woman. My soft bosom has slipped to the back, they’re laughing at me, laughing at me. Even you laugh now in spite of yourself, and then again out of spite. Who am I. Here is a machine, a dagger I think, I hand over my breast that is no longer constricted by artificial fibres, why doesn’t he just take me captive himself? But I don’t get there because my breasts have wandered round to the back. There are no bars and it doesn’t say exit on the sign. So they have to stay a while with me, my hot breasts, in which I could warm myself for some time to come, and you too, if you’d let me. Could you please help me? So! So! So! And again! Now everything is okay.

  SPORTSMAN:

  Can’t you just be quiet for once? Out of you gushes repetitively a law, like some sort of endless puke-sausage, without interruption, it’s tedious, no wonder I went away without even noticing you! Unfeminine! So unnatural, you stupid old cow! Alien to the rest of the human race! Not unambiguous like a film, but ambiguous. Info without receiver. News, served up without being arranged for the picture beforehand. Different different different!