Thomas Bernhard: The Loser

deadly blow, he pronounced deadly with extraordinary precision. We don’t have to be with a person in order to feel bound to him as to no other, he said. Glenn’s death had hit him very hard , he said, I thought while standing in the inn. Although one could have predicted this death more certainly than any other, that goes without saying, so he said. Nonetheless we still can’t grasp it, we can’t comprehend, can’t grasp it. Glenn had had the greatest affection for the word and the concept of loser, I remember exactly how the word loser came to him on the Sigmund Haffnergasse. We look at people and see only cripples, Glenn once said to us, physical or mental or mental and physical, there are no others, I thought. The longer we look at someone, the more crippled he appears to us, because he is as crippled as we are unwilling to admit but as he actually is. The world is full of cripples. We go out on the street and meet only cripples. We invite someone into our house and we have a cripple for a guest, so Glenn said, I thought. I have actually noticed the same thing over and over and have only been able to confirm Glenn’s point. Wertheimer, Glenn, myself, all cripples, I thought. Friendship, artistry! I thought, my God, what madness! I’m the survivor! Now I’m alone, I thought, since, to tell the truth, I only had two people in my life who gave it any meaning: Glenn and Wertheimer. Now Glenn and Wertheimer are dead and I have to come to terms with this fact. The inn struck me as rather shabby, like all inns in this region everything in it was dirty and the air, as they say, was so thick you could cut it with a knife. Everything about it was unappetizing. I could have long since called for the innkeeper, I knew her personally, but I didn’t call. Wertheimer is reported to have slept with the innkeeper several times, naturally in her inn, not in his hunting lodge, I thought. At bottom Glenn played only the Goldberg Variations and the Art of the Fugue , even when he was playing other pieces, such as by Brahms and Mozart, or Schönberg and Webern; he held the latter two in the highest regard, but he placed Schönberg above Webern, not the other way around, as people claim. Wertheimer invited Glenn to Traich several times, but Glenn never returned to Europe after his concert at the Salzburg Festival. We didn’t correspond either, for the few cards we sent each other in all those years can’t be called a correspondence. Glenn regularly sent us his records and we thanked him for them, that was all. Basically we were bound by the unsentimental nature of our friendship, even Wertheimer was completely unsentimental, although the contrary seemed to be true. When he blubbered it wasn’t sentimentality but self-interest, calculation. The idea of wanting to see Wertheimer’s hunting lodge after his death suddenly struck me as absurd, I smacked my forehead, although without actually doing it. But my way of doing things is not at all sentimental, I thought while looking about the inn. At first I only wanted to visit the Kohlmarkt apartment in Vienna, then I decided to take the train to Traich in order to contemplate, one last time, the hunting lodge where Wertheimer spent the last two years, as I know, in the most awful circumstances. After his sister’s marriage he had trouble staying in Vienna for three months, went wandering through the city, as I can imagine, spewing insults against his sister until he simply had to get out of Vienna, to hide himself in Traich. The last card he sent to Madrid had horrified me. His handwriting was the handwriting of an old man, one couldn’t help noticing signs of madness in that card, of disconnected thoughts. But I had no intention of going to Austria, in my apartment in the Calle del Prado I had become too absorbed by my work About Glenn Gould , under no circumstances would I have interrupted this work, for then I would have botched it and I didn’t want to risk that, so I didn’t answer Wertheimer’s card, which struck me as curious even as I was reading it. Wertheimer got the idea of flying to America to attend Glenn’s funeral, I however refused, and he wouldn’t fly alone. It took me three days after Wertheimer hanged himself to figure out that, like Glenn, he had just turned fifty-one. When we cross the threshold of our fiftieth year we see ourselves as base and spineless, I thought, the question is how long we can stand this condition. Lots of people kill themselves in their fifty-first year, I thought. Lots in their fifty-second, but more in their fifty-first. It doesn’t matter whether they kill themselves in their fifty-first year or whether they die, as people say, a natural death, it doesn’t matter whether they die like Glenn or whether they die like Wertheimer. The reason is that they’re often ashamed of having reached the limit that a fifty-year-old crosses when he puts his fiftieth year behind him. For fifty years are absolutely enough, I thought. We become contemptible when we go past fifty and are still living, continue our existence. We’re border-crossing weaklings, I thought, who have made ourselves twice as pitiful by putting fifty years behind us. Now I’m the shameless one, I thought. I envied the dead. For a moment I hated them for their superiority. I considered it a lapse of judgment on my part to have traveled to Traich out of simple curiosity, the cheapest of all motives, while standing in the inn, disgusted by the inn, I disgusted myself most of all. And who knows, I thought, whether someone in the hunting lodge will even let me in, without a doubt the new owners are already there, as I know, for Wertheimer always described his relatives to me in such a way that I had to assume they hated me as much as they did him and that they considered me now, probably rightly, as the most ill-mannered of busy-bodies, I thought. I should have flown back to Madrid and never undertaken this completely useless trip to Traich, I thought. I’ve got a lot of nerve, I thought. I suddenly felt like a grave-robber with my plan to look at the hunting lodge and enter every room in the hunting lodge, leaving no stone unturned and developing my own theories about it. I’m an awful person, hideous, revolting, I thought when I wanted to call the innkeeper but in the last moment didn’t call her, all at once I was afraid she could come too early, that is appear too early for my purposes, disturb my thinking, wipe out the thoughts I’d suddenly had here, these Glenn- and Wertheimer-digressions which I had suddenly indulged in. I actually had planned and still plan to look over the writings that Wertheimer may have left behind. Wertheimer often spoke of writings he had been working on over the years. A lot of nonsense, as Wertheimer put it, but he was also arrogant, which led me to assume that this nonsense might be rather valuable, would at least contain Wertheimerian thoughts worth preserving, collecting, saving, ordering, I thought, and already I could see an entire stack of notebooks (and notes) containing more or less mathematical, philosophical observations. But his heirs won’t fork over these notebooks (and notes), all these writings (and notes), I thought. They’re not even going to let me in the hunting lodge. They’re going to ask who I am and as soon as I tell them who I am they’ll slam the door in my face. My reputation is so abominable they will slam their doors shut and lock them, I thought. This crazy idea of visiting the hunting lodge had already occurred to me in Madrid. It’s possible that Wertheimer never told anyone but me about his writings (and notes), I thought, and tucked them away somewhere, so I owe it to him to dig out these notebooks and writings (and notes) and preserve them, no matter how difficult it proves to be. Glenn actually left nothing behind, Glenn didn’t keep any kind of written record, I thought, Wertheimer on the contrary never stopped writing, for years, for decades. Above all I’ll find this or that interesting observation about Glenn, I thought, at least something about the three of us, about our student years, about our teachers, about our development and about the development of the entire world, I thought as I stood in the inn and looked out the kitchen window, behind which however I could see nothing, for the windowpanes were black with filth. They cook in this filthy kitchen, I thought, from this filthy kitchen they bring out the food to the customers in the restaurant, I thought. Austrian inns are all filthy and unappetizing, I thought, one can barely get a clean tablecloth in one of these inns, never mind cloth napkins, which in Switzerland for instance are quite standard. Even the tiniest inn in Switzerland is clean and appetizing, even our finest Austrian hotels are filthy and unappetizing. And talk about the rooms! I thought. Often they just iron over sheets that have already been slept in, and it’s not uncommon to find clumps of hair in the sink from the previous guest. Austrian inns have always turned my stomach, I thought. The plates aren’t clean and upon closer inspection the silverware is almost always dirty. But Wertheimer often ate in these inns, at least once a day I want to see people, he said, even if it’s just this decrepit, down-and-out, filthy innkeeper. So I go from one cage to the next, Wertheimer once said, from the Kohlmarkt apartment to Traich and then back again, he said, I thought. From the catastrophic big-city cage into the catastrophic forest cage. Now I hide myself here, now there, now in the Kohlmarkt perversity, now in the country-forest perversity. I slip out of one and back into the other. For life. But this procedure has become such a habit that I can’t imagine doing anything else, he said. Glenn locked himself in his North American cage, I in my Upper Austrian one, Wertheimer said, I thought. He with his megalomania, I with my desperation. All three with our desperation, he said, I thought. I told Glenn about our hunting lodge, Wertheimer said, I’m convinced that that’s what gave him the idea of building his own house in the woods, Читать дальше