Pascal Mercier - Perlmann's Silence

The other was an invitation to give a guest lecture. He was to open a series of lectures, and it was very important to the organizer that Perlmann should be the first speaker. The letter talked about works that he had finished three years ago, but which had only appeared in print at the beginning of the year. Back then, he thought, everything had still seemed all right. Except that he had been getting increasingly bored with his things. And every now and again he had woken up in the middle of the night and hadn’t known where to go from here. He hadn’t had long conversations with himself when that had happened; few thoughts came to him on such occasions. He listened to music, and he usually stood at the big window as he did so. Then Agnes was surprised to find him at his desk so early.

In the other envelope there was a note from Angelini. Unfortunately, he had to go back to Ivrea that afternoon. He wished Perlmann a speedy recovery, and hoped it was nothing serious. He would try to come to the last dinner on Friday, although he couldn’t yet promise anything. At the end was his private telephone number.

The words were friendly, if conventional. Perlmann read them several times. He thought back to their first meeting and the enthusiastic phone calls that had followed. You couldn’t say that these words gave off a sense of disappointment. Not at all. And not detachment or coldness. But he sensed them. He, Philipp Perlmann, had revealed himself to be a bad investment.

He turned on the six o’clock news. But on that channel they only had a schematic weather map that was no use to him. No big change to be expected tomorrow. A little while before, the roads had been almost dry again. He walked over to the window. There was no point now in staring up into the starless night sky.

He took a long shower and then lay down in bed. The pillow smelled of Leskov’s tobacco. He fetched another one from the wardrobe. The sheets and the wool blanket smelled too. He pulled off the sheet and covered himself with replacement blankets from the wardrobe. The heating intensified the smell. He turned it off and opened the window. His body was vibrating with exhaustion, but sleep wouldn’t come. He didn’t take any pills. On the seven o’clock news the clouds around Genoa looked denser than they had done two hours before. Outside it was still dry. He was shivering, and fetched the last blanket from the wardrobe. It was too noisy on the coast road, and he closed the window. If he set off at half-past five, he would be there by first light. He set his alarm for five. He went to sleep at about eight.

He saw no bulldozer, no tunnel walls. In fact, he saw nothing at all. No seeing took place. It was simply the case that he hadn’t the strength to take his hands off the wheel. He held it tightly and turned it to the left, further and further to the left. It could be that he was the one who turned it. Or else it was something inside him, a force, a will, but it was alien to him and not really his. And perhaps the wheel had gained its autonomy, and was guiding his hand against his will. He no longer knew what was going on; the impressions piled up on top of each other and he didn’t know what – of all of it – he was most afraid of. He was completely paralyzed by fear, and he had the feeling of losing control of his bodily functions, particularly his abdomen. That took half an eternity, in which he expected a collision at every moment, and then he woke up with a twitch of his whole body that had something terrible about it, something uncanny, because it too completely escaped his control; it was an animal, a biological twitch that seemed to come from a very deep region of his brain.

Perlmann leapt up and examined the mattress. It was clean. Then he sat down on the edge of the bed and smoked. From time to time he felt the physical echo of a turn to the left. Later he took off his wet pyjamas and went into the shower. It was just after midnight. The coast road was wet. But now it wasn’t raining any more.

Over the next few hours he kept waking from the same dream at brief intervals, before dozing off again. This time it wasn’t a nightmare, but a bothersome and ridiculous combination of things that were completely unconnected as far as the dreamer was concerned. There was the name Pian dei Ratti , which returned with such frequency that it was like a constant background noise, an incessant echo that filled every last corner. And the name smelled. It was enveloped in a smell of sickly tobacco and mist; it was as if that smell stuck to the name, so that without the smell the name had no meaning whatsoever. The fact that the name was always there, ringing out, made one shiver and, sniffing, look for coins, which kept slipping with a painful rub through your fingers. Your shoes tipped over, and women laughed. Then everything was full of yellow sheets, and there was no point making yourself very small in the trunk.

Perlmann changed the bandage on his finger. The inflammation was beginning to ease. Every time he woke up he opened the widow. Only a few drops were falling outside. The dream had the dependability and monotony of a record that always sticks at the same place. At half-past four he showered, shaved and dressed.

‘ Buon giorno ,’ said Giovanni, rubbing his eyes and looking at his watch.

Perlmann turned round again in the doorway. ‘That equalizer that led to the penalty shoot-out. Who scored it?’

Giovanni was almost struck dumb. ‘Baggio,’ he said at last, with a grin.

‘From which club?’

Giovanni looked at him as if he had asked him what country Rome was the capital of.

‘Juve. Juventus Turin.’

‘ Grazie ,’ said Perlmann. He felt Giovanni’s startled eyes watching after him.

He had become a weirdo.

The coast road was so quiet and deserted that Perlmann instantly forgot the three or four cars that came towards him, in their brief, eerie presence. Rapallo was a night-time silhouette with motionless lights that called to mind paper cuts and engravings. The flashing traffic lights in the dead streets of Recco gave him the feeling of driving through a ghost town, and the two old men who were creeping along close to the houses further intensified that impression. Lots of lights were on already in the farmhouses along the road to Uscio. The crowing of the omnipresent cocks drowned out the quiet sound of the engine. Perlmann tried not to think back to Monday. The main thing was that it plainly hadn’t rained here in the past few hours. Past Lumarzo, however, the gear stick was suddenly damp with sweat, and he had to swallow more and more often. On the climb towards the tunnel he drove with his arms outstretched on the wheel, and decided not to look and to think about nothing.

He braked. Over on the light-grey crash barrier: dark strips. He put his foot down – only to put the car out of gear again straight away. Here, exactly here is where I took my hands off the wheel. He sat up. There was nothing to see. It was idiotic. He furiously screeched his tires and then stepped hard on the brake as if to prevent a pile-up in the empty tunnel.

Most of the pale mud had been covered up with a tarpaulin, which had been weighed down with bricks. By the wall there stood an empty wheelbarrow, with an untidily rolled-up rope underneath it. He had never worked out what happened at this passing-place, and this latest change made no sense to him at all. He knew it was nonsense, bordering on paranoia, but he couldn’t shake off the impression that he – he in particular, he alone – was being played for a fool – that someone was constantly rearranging things at this spot, with the sole intention of confusing him, goading his useless thoughts and stoking his apprehension. He bit his lips and drove out of the tunnel. The toothless old woman’s shop was in darkness, and looked like a discarded dream backdrop. It was a quarter past six, and still the darkest night.