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I’d always wanted to be around clever people, to be playful with other clever people. My first husband had been involved with a radical theater group that was quite important in Melbourne, and I’d been involved in the feminist arm of it, although I was always a bit of a tourist in that world. But then he was out at night a lot, and I was home holding down the fort with my daughter, and I started to get lonely and sad.
My mother’s life, the life of a married woman with children, had never really appealed to me. It had dawned on me when I was quite young that my mother could never go out for more than about three hours at a time. She always had to be there at lunchtime, at dinnertime. I’d grown up as the eldest child in a family of five girls and one boy, and everybody was always squabbling and looking at the others to see if they were getting more—counting the strawberries in one another’s bowls. I remember it hitting me when I was about fourteen that our mother was in a sort of cage.
INTERVIEWER
The ending of the novel—that list of paragraphs all beginning with “And … ”—is strikingly beautiful.
GARNER
I suppose it’s the book thinking about itself—about what is going to happen in the world after it stops being a book. I didn’t want the book to fade out. I wanted it to feel like the way Glenn Gould plays Bach’s Two-and Three-Part Inventions—the way he flings the final notes away with force.
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So I had to go to Zurich again for a few days. My mother wished to see me. And because of my nerves about it, I’d felt so unwell over the whole long weekend that I suffered from severe constipation. On top of this, I should say that I’d written a novel a quarter century ago which I’d titled, for some reason I regrettably no longer recall, Faserland. It ends in Zurich, out in the middle of the lake, so to speak, somewhat traumatically.
That chapter of my life came back to me for the first time in years when, in Zurich as I said, down on Bahnhofstrasse, I purchased a dark brown, rather chunky wool sweater at a little stall hammered together from wooden beams, not far from Paradeplatz. It was already evening, I’d taken some valerian, and the effect of the pills and the despair of the Swiss autumn and the twenty-five preceding years weighed, leaden beyond measure, on my mood.
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My mother’s situation—and now I’ll get to the point—often forced me to visit Zurich, this city of posers and braggarts and debasement, and had completely paralyzed me for years. It had become vile, altogether heinous, it had become more than I was able to bear, than one should have to bear. My mother, in short, was very sick, which is to say sick in the head, too—not just there, but primarily there. In order not to lose touch with her, I’d decided at some point to accept the misery in which she had been wasting away for decades, surrounded by empty vodka bottles, unopened bills from various Zurich sable-fur warehouses, and the crinkling foils of her pain medication. Not to mention all those still shrink-wrapped articles of clothing she had bought, out of some compulsion stemming from the war and the postwar years—the sweaters and cardigans and pleated slacks, which had wandered into the armoires in her apartment, stacked and stowed away and archived, as it were, next to the dozens of Hermès handbags and the quite literally hundreds of Ferragamo shoes that were never worn.
She had neither an email address nor a mobile phone, and spurned the internet altogether. Too complicated, she’d always said, and the computer keys? Too small. I guessed, however, that she refused it all out of arrogance. She made a performance of liking to read the newspapers and Stendhal. Her skin had the texture of dry silk, and she was always slightly sunburned despite never sitting outside on the terrace, among the hydrangeas.
So, instead of returning straight to my hotel in the Old Town, I did in fact go to the bar in Kronenhalle, where the door always did exactly the opposite of what one expected. If you wanted to pull it, it could be opened only with a push, and vice versa. I took my seat there in the back, down at the farthest end of the bar, right by the toilets; the tables at the front were always reserved for money-grubbing Zurich middle management and their mostly Ukrainian female retinue. People visiting the city tended to think that the spirit of Joyce or of the Cabaret Voltaire would waft about them, but in reality they found merely an array of depressing hustlers. It had been a very long time since I’d given up hoping for a better seat. At the bar in the back, by the toilets, you have it just as good, I thought; at least you’re served the same white saucers of salted almonds, paprika chips, and little pretzel sticks with your drink as at the tables up front, and even if one day that were no longer the case, one could presumably still go to the bar, and for all intents and purposes the effect would be the same.
Sometimes, often, I’d told myself that it wouldn’t have been an indication of mental health to be able to adapt to such a deeply disturbed family. And how I had ever succeeded, how it’d even been possible to succeed in extricating myself from these unfathomable abysses and becoming a halfway normal human being—this I was incapable of puzzling out as I lay on the hotel bed staring at the ceiling, while outside, beneath my window, intoxicated Zurich youths caterwauled and celebrated their depressing intoxication.
In Switzerland one has the right to die, she had always said, and that’s what the doctors kept telling me as well. Even the clinic’s ethics committee told me that, advising that I give consent for them to cease further treatment, to just turn the plastic valve of the morphine tube up a little, because how was she to recover from this, what kind of life would that be in the end? And really, life—what was that?
But I found myself unable to give the desired consent, for I saw my mother in her Pucci bikini at the pool in Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat whenever I closed my eyes, and not there on the gurney with that obscene tube dangling from the incision in her larynx, beneath her wrinkled chin. And naturally she rallied, woke one morning as though nothing had happened, and a few weeks later rode home again in a taxi.
Why did my father always buy houses in such places, hoping for some connection to a society that would never otherwise have welcomed him? I was fond of recalling that château on Lake Geneva in which he died, a somewhat abashed variation on the Rothschilds’ Château de Pregny. I could picture the faded Baroque of the Van Dyck in the entrance hall, which in the time between two of my visits had been removed from the paneling, likely cut out, rolled up, and sent off to Sotheby’s. There was always a direct link between art and money—never the slightest doubt that they were as one. In my mind’s eye I saw the sofas upholstered with golden silk in the grand salon and, perched on the edge of one of them, my father, Christian, in his pale gray English flannel suit and narrow shoes. I saw his wily, icy-bright eyes. His gaze traveled out over the park, past Lake Geneva to Évian and on to the French Alps, orange red and yielding in the dusk. I saw his dressing room, lined floor to ceiling in fawn and orange leathers by Hermès, with hundreds of shallow teak drawers, one for each bespoke dress shirt from Harvie & Hudson. The collection of hundreds of diaphanous Chinese teacups he’d amassed over decades, like Chatwin’s Kaspar Utz, who suffered from that incurable porcelain sickness. My father’s fear of provinciality, of his own humble origins, emanated from him even after his death, a decade ago now. His own father had been a taxi driver in Hamburg, with everything that entails: the nightly barhopping the small boy had to tag along for, his father’s dull, inebriated blows. That was a place he never wanted to go back to, whatever the cost.
My mother had not been invited to the memorial service, which concluded with a family dinner at Hotel Vier Jahreszeiten. We sat in a private back room, in neckties and in silence, the latter awkward but expressly desired by my stepmother, and disturbed only by the bevy of liveried waiters who announced and described the courses in advance, in a gimmicky roundelay. It was abysmally, depressingly bourgeois, these loudly and proudly proclaimed lobster tails on pea essence, these Chateaubriands, these basil sorbets.
I reflected on the fact that Tiffany lamps would never again be appealing; they had ruined themselves for all time, these aberrant lamps, like Belle Epoque paintings and tapered Coca-Cola bottles and ballet dancers by Degas and handblown Murano glass figurines and those Toulouse-Lautrec absinthe bottles. This foppery would never come back in, and I was glad that my mother had nothing quite so repulsive in her apartment, except of course for the Tiffany lamps, a pair my father had given her so that he wouldn’t have to hand over the Nolde Flower Garden painting he had promised for her fiftieth birthday.