Robert Musil - Posthumous Papers of a Living Author

The men who do this crouch two by two on knees and heels, with mighty, bony backs, long, kindly faces, and pipes in their mouths. They exchange incomprehensible words that flow forth as softly as the motion of their hands. One of them takes up a fat earthworm with two fingers, tears it into three pieces with the same two fingers of the other hand, as easily and exactly as a shoemaker snips off the paper band after he’s taken the measurement; the other one then presses these squirming pieces calmly and carefully onto each hook. This having been accomplished, the worms are then doused with water and laid in neat little beds, one next to the other, in the drawer with the soft sand, where they can die without immediately losing their freshness.

It is a quiet, delicate activity, whereby the coarse fishermen’s fingers step softly as on tiptoes. You have to pay close attention. In fair weather the dark blue sky arches above and the seagulls circle high over the land like white swallows.

Inflation

Once there was a better time, when you rode a wood-stiff pony pedantically ever returning around the same circle, and with a short rod poked for copper rings held still by a wooden arm. That time is gone. These days the fishermen’s boys drink champagne mixed with cognac. And little swings hang in a circle on four times thirty little iron chains, one circle on the inside and one outside, so that as you fly side by side, you grab each other by the hand, leg, or apron, and shriek fiendishly. This carousel stands on the little square with the memorial for the fallen soldiers, next to the linden tree where the geese like to roost. It has a motor that revs up at the right time, and chalk-white spotlights over many little warm lights. If in the darkness you happen to grope your way closer, the wind’ll fling shreds of music, lights, girls’ voices and laughter at you. The orchestrion cries with a sob. The iron chains screech. You fly round in a circle, but also, if you wish, upward or downward, outward or inward, back to back or between the legs. The boys spur on their swings and pinch the girls where they can feel it, or tear the shrieking damsels along with them; and the girls also grab each other in flight, and then in pairs they scream just as loud as if one of them were a boy. So they all swing through the cone of light into the darkness and are suddenly thrust back into the light; paired off anew, with foreshortened limbs and black mouths, whizzing, bedazzled bundles of clothing, they fly on their backs or on their bellies or obliquely toward heaven or hell. After a very short while of this wild gallop, the orchestrion quickly falls back into a trot, like an old circus horse, then it paces and soon stands still. The man with the pewter plate makes the rounds but you stay seated or maybe switch girls. And unlike in the city, no ever-changing crowd frequents the carousel the few days it’s around; because here always the same ones fly from the advent of darkness on, for two to three hours, all eight or fourteen days, up until the man with the pewter plate grows tired of it all and one morning has moved on.

Can a Horse Laugh?

An acclaimed psychologist wrote: “. . for animals don’t know how to laugh or smile.”

This emboldens me to admit that I once saw a horse laugh. Till now I assumed that this was nothing special and I didn’t dare make a big deal of it; but if it is such a rarity, I will gladly elaborate.

Well, it was before the war; it could be that since then horses no longer laugh. The horse was tied to a sedge fence that surrounded a little yard. The sky was dark blue. The air was particularly mild, even though it was February. And in contrast to this heavenly calm, there was no human presence. To make a long story short, I found myself near Rome, on a country road just outside the city limits, on the border between the city’s humble outskirts and the first fringe of the peasant Campagna.

The horse also was a Campagna horse: young and graceful, of that shapely, tiny breed with nothing pony-like about it, on the back of which, however, a big rider looks like a grown-up on a little doll’s stool. It was being brushed by a fun-loving stable boy, the sun shone on its hide, and it was ticklish under the shoulders. Now a horse has, so to speak, four shoulders, and perhaps for that reason, is twice as ticklish as a man; besides which, this horse also seemed to have a particularly sensitive spot on the inside of each of its haunches and every time it was touched there, it could hardly keep from laughing.

As soon as the currycomb came close, it drew back its ears, became uneasy, wanted to edge over with its mouth, and when it couldn’t do this, bared its teeth. But the comb marched merrily on, stroke after stroke, and the lips revealed ever more of the teeth, while the ears lay themselves farther and farther back, and the horse tipped from one leg to the other.

And suddenly it started to laugh. It flashed its teeth. With its muzzle it tried as hard as it could to push away the boy who was tickling it — just like a peasant girl would do with her hand, and without trying to bite him. It also attempted to turn itself around and to shove him away with its entire body. But the stable boy held the advantage. And when with the currycomb he arrived in the vicinity of its shoulders, the horse could no longer control itself; it shifted from leg to leg, shivered all over and pulled back the gums of its teeth as far as it could. For a few seconds then, it behaved just as a man tickled so much that he can’t even laugh anymore.

The learned skeptic will object here that a horse couldn’t laugh after all. One must admit to the validity of his objection, insofar as, of the two, the one who whinnied with laughter was the stable boy. The ability to whinny with laughter seems in fact to be exclusively a human talent. But nonetheless, the two of them were obviously playing together, and as soon as they started it all over again from the beginning, there could be no doubt that the horse wanted to laugh and was already anticipating the sequence of sensations.

So learned doubt defines the limitations of the beast’s ability, that it cannot laugh at jokes.

This, however, should not always be held against the horse.

Awakening

I shoved the curtain aside — the soft night! A gentle darkness lies in the window cutout of the hard room darkness like the water surface in a square basin. I don’t really see it at all, but it’s like in the summer when the water’s as warm as the air and your hand hangs out of the boat. It’s going on six o’clock, November 1.

God woke me up. I shot up out of sleep. I had absolutely no other reason to wake up. I was torn out like a page from a book. The moon’s crescent lies delicate as a golden eyebrow on the blue page of night.

But on the morning side at the other window it’s getting green. Parrot-feathery. The pale reddish stripes of sunrise, they too are already streaking the sky, but everything’s still green, blue and silent. I jump back to the other window: Is the moon still there? She’s there, as though in the deepest hour of night’s secret. So convinced is she of the effectiveness of her magic, like an actress on stage. (There’s nothing stranger than to step out of the morning streets into the illusion of a theater rehearsal.) The street’s already pulsing to the left, and to the right the moon is in rehearsal.

I discover strange fellows, the smokestacks. In groups of three, five, seven and sometimes alone, they stand up on the rooftops; like trees in a landscape. Space winds like a river around them and into the deep. An owl slips past them on its way home; it was probably a crow or a pigeon. The houses stand helter-skelter; curious contours, steep sloping walls; not at all arranged by the streets. The rod on the roof with the thirty-six porcelain heads and the twelve stretched wires, which I count without comprehension, stands as a completely inexplicable secret structure up against the early morning sky. I’m wide awake now, but wherever I look, my eyes glide over pentagons, heptagons and steep prisms: So who am I? The amphora on the roof with its cast-iron flame, ridiculous pineapple by day, vulgar, disgusting thing — now, in this solitude, it soothes the heart like a fresh trace of humanity.