View all notes
My poor Romantovski! And I who believed with them that you were indeed someone exceptional. I believed, let me confess, that you were a remarkable poet whom poverty obliged to dwell in that sinister district. I believed, on the strength of certain indices, that every night, by working on a line of verse or nursing a growing idea, you celebrated an invulnerable victory over the brothers. My poor Romantovski! It is all over now. Alas, the objects I had assembled wander away. The young poplar dims and takes off—to return where it had been fetched from. The brick wall dissolves. The house draws in its little balconies one by one, then turns, and floats away. Everything floats away. Harmony and meaning vanish. The world irks me again with its variegated void.
My landlord at the time, an athletic Berliner, suffered permanently from furunculosis: the back of his neck showed a square of disgustingly pink sticking plaster with three neat apertures—for ventilation, maybe, or for the release of the pus. I worked in an émigré publishing house for a couple of languid-looking individuals who in reality were such cunning crooks that plain people upon observing them got spasms in the chest, as when one steps onto a cloud-piercing summit. As I began coming late (“systematically late” as they called it) and missing work, or arriving in such condition that it was necessary to send me home, our relationship became unbearable, and finally, thanks to a joint effort—with the enthusiastic collaboration of the bookkeeper and of some stranger who had come in with a manuscript—I was thrown out.
My poor, my pitiful youth! I vividly visualize the ghastly little room that I rented for five dollars a month, the ghastly flowerets of the wallpaper, the ghastly lamp hanging from its cord, with a naked bulb whose manic light glowed sometimes till morn. I was so miserable there, so indecently, luxuriously miserable, that the walls to this day must be saturated with misfortune and fever, and it is unthinkable that some happy chap could have lived there after me, whistling, humming. Ten years have elapsed, and even now I can still imagine myself then, a pale youth seated in front of the shimmery mirror, with his livid forehead and black beard, dressed only in a torn shirt, guzzling cheap booze and clinking glasses with his reflection. What times those were! Not only was I of no use to anyone in the world, but I could not even imagine a set of circumstances in which someone might care a whit about me.
lmao
“Let me see, where did we last meet,” I began (addressing the Fialta version of Nina) in order to bring to her small face with prominent cheekbones and dark-red lips a certain expression I knew; and sure enough, the shake of her head and the puckered brow seemed less to imply forgetfulness than to deplore the flatness of an old joke; or to be more exact, it was as if all those cities where fate had fixed our various rendezvous without ever attending them personally, all those platforms and stairs and three-walled rooms and dark back alleys, were trite settings remaining after some other lives all brought to a close long before and were so little related to the acting out of our own aimless destiny that it was almost bad taste to mention them.
We wandered by a café where the tables were now almost dry but still empty; the waiter was examining (I hope he adopted it later) a horrible foundling, the absurd inkstand affair, stowed by Ferdinand on the banisters in passing. At the next corner we were attracted by an old stone stairway, and we climbed up, and I kept looking at the sharp angle of Nina’s step as she ascended, raising her skirt, its narrowness requiring the same gesture as formerly length had done; she diffused a familiar warmth, and going up beside her, I recalled the last time we had come together. It had been in a Paris house, with many people around, and my dear friend Jules Darboux, wishing to do me a refined aesthetic favor, had touched my sleeve and said, “I want you to meet—” and led me to Nina, who sat in the corner of a couch, her body folded Z-wise, with an ashtray at her heel, and she took a long turquoise cigarette holder from her lips and joyfully, slowly exclaimed, “Well, of all people—” and then all evening my heart felt like breaking, as I passed from group to group with a sticky glass in my fist, now and then looking at her from a distance (she did not look …), and listened to scraps of conversation, and overheard one man saying to another, “Funny, how they all smell alike, burnt leaf through whatever perfume they use, those angular dark-haired girls,” and as it often happens, a trivial remark related to some unknown topic coiled and clung to one’s own intimate recollection, a parasite of its sadness.
He was a comrade of my brother Gregory, who had a feverish, poetic passion for extreme forms of organized society (forms that had long been alarming the meek constitution we then had) in the final years of his short life: he drowned at twenty-three, bathing one summer evening in a wide, very wide river, so that when I now recall my brother the first thing that comes to my mind is a shiny spread of water, an islet overgrown with alder (that he never reached but toward which he always swims through the trembling haze of my memory), and a long, black cloud crossing another, opulently fluffed-up and orange-colored one, all that is left of a Saturday-morning thunderstorm in the clear, turquoise Sunday’s-eve sky, where a star will shine through in a moment, where there will never be any star. At any time I was much too engrossed in the history of painting and in my dissertation on its cave origins to frequent watchfully the group of young people that had inveigled my brother; for that matter, as I recall, there was no definite group, but simply several youths who had drifted together, different in many respects but, for the time being, loosely bound by a common attraction to rebellious adventure. The present, however, always exercises such a perverse influence on reminiscence that now I involuntarily single him out against the indistinct background, awarding him (neither the closest nor the most vociferous of Gregory’s companions) the kind of somber, concentrated will deeply conscious of its sullen self, which in the end molds a giftless person into a triumphant monster.
[...] and when they did happen to invite him somewhere, it was always in a vaguely interrogative manner (“Coming with us, or …?”)—a manner particularly painful to one who is yearning to be persuaded to come. He understood little of the jokes, allusions, and nicknames that the others bandied about with cryptic gaiety. He almost wished some of the joking were at his expense, but even this failed to happen. [...]
He passed his days in a quest for shade and a longing for coolness. There was something infernal in the glimpses of sea and beach, where bronzed demons basked on the torrid shingle. The sunny side of the narrow streets was so strictly forbidden to him that he would have had to solve intricate route-finding problems if there had been purpose in his wanderings. He had, however, nowhere to go. He strolled aimlessly along the shop fronts, which displayed, among other objects, some rather amusing bracelets of what looked like pink amber, as well as decidedly attractive leather bookmarks and wallets tooled with gilt. He would sink into a chair beneath the orange awning of a café, then go home and lie on his bed—stark naked, dreadfully thin and white—and think about the same things he thought about incessantly.
He reflected that he had been condemned to live on the outskirts of life, that it had always been thus and always would be, and that, therefore, if death did not present him with an exit into true reality, he would simply never come to know life. He also reflected that if his parents were alive instead of having died at the dawn of émigré existence, the fifteen years of his adult life might have passed in the warmth of a family; that, had his destiny been less mobile, he would have finished one of the three gymnasiums he had happened to attend at random points of middle, median, mediocre Europe, and would now have a good, solid job among good, solid people. But, strain his imagination as he might, he could not picture either that job or those people, just as he could not explain to himself why he had studied as a youth at a screen-acting school, instead of taking up music or numismatics, window-washing or bookkeeping. And, as always, from each point of its circumference his thought would follow a radius back to the dark center, to the presentiment of nearing death, for which he, who had accumulated no spiritual treasures, was hardly an interesting prey. Nonetheless, she had apparently determined to give him precedence.
I HAVE often noticed that after I had bestowed on the characters of my novels some treasured item of my past, it would pine away in the artificial world where I had so abruptly placed it. Although it lingered on in my mind, its personal warmth, its retrospective appeal had gone and, presently, it became more closely identified with my novel than with my former self, where it had seemed to be so safe from the intrusion of the artist. Houses have crumbled in my memory as soundlessly as they did in the mute films of yore; and the portrait of my old French governess, whom I once lent to a boy in one of my books, is fading fast, now that it is engulfed in the description of a childhood entirely unrelated to my own. The man in me revolts against the fictionist and here is my desperate attempt to save what is left of poor Mademoiselle.
<3
“And your Parliament, Sir, how is it getting along?” she would suddenly burst out brightly from her end of the table, challenging my father, who, after a harassing day, was not exactly eager to discuss troubles of the State with a singularly unreal person who neither knew nor cared anything about them. Thinking that someone had referred to music, “But Silence, too, may be beautiful,” she would bubble. “Why, one evening, in a desolate valley of the Alps, I actually heard Silence.” Sallies like these, especially when growing deafness led her to answer questions none had put, resulted in a painful hush, instead of touching off the rockets of a sprightly causerie.
[...] My angel, oh my angel, perhaps our whole earthly existence is now but a pun to you, or a grotesque rhyme, something like “dental” and “transcendental” (remember?), and the true meaning of reality, of that piercing term, purged of all our strange, dreamy, masquerade interpretations, now sounds so pure and sweet that you, angel, find it amusing that we could have taken the dream seriously (although you and I did have an inkling of why everything disintegrated at one furtive touch—words, conventions of everyday life, systems, persons—so, you know, I think laughter is some chance little ape of truth astray in our world).
made me smile