Pascal Mercier - Perlmann's Silence

It was already after half-past eight when he paused, exhausted and trembling. For a while he stood at the window and stared into the streaming rain. Another two days. In fifty hours he was at the airport, waiting for his flight home. And tomorrow he would be travelling for half a day, and time would go much faster. Hitherto he had always been lucky with waiting lists for flights.

He scanned through the last page that he had written. Then he brought all the pages together and threw the whole pile into the waste-paper basket. It wasn’t a general problem of academics, or even of academia generally. It was a problem of his very particular life story. That was all. To turn it into an ideology was mischievous nonsense. Basically, that had always been clear to him. In the end, all his writing that morning had become an extension of the dream. And now he had cheated himself out of his breakfast, to which, he reflected with surprise, he would have liked to go today.

Giorgio Silvestri’s session was sheer chaos. It started with him leaving half of his documents in his room, and having to go back and get them. Then, when he had found his way through the chaos, he began a lecture that had no structure and for a long time also seemed to have no destination. He talked about typical linguistic disturbances among schizophrenics, which were expressive of mental disturbances. His technical vocabulary sounded cobbled-together and eccentric, and he made no effort to introduce it. Admittedly, after some time it was fairly easy to recognize how it could be translated into familiar concepts. But it was irritating that one had to discover them for oneself. There was also the fact that Silvestri’s English pronunciation was much worse than usual that morning; somehow his mouth didn’t really seem to be obeying him. That was particularly unsettling in the case of the example sentences, which Silvestri had only in Italian, and of which he gave impromptu translations. Often one didn’t know how much of their strange sound could really be traced back to the mental patients, what came from Silvestri’s halting delivery, and whether additional distortions were not produced by the translation of difficult linguistic material. Soon his colleagues started drawing decorative doodles in their notebooks, and even Evelyn Mistral, who had at first been smiling with sympathy for Silvestri over the chaotic nature of his lecture, became impatient.

Again the time has come , Perlmann thought: he felt abandoned by someone he had internally clung to. Silvestri – the man with the important and honest profession, which gave him the necessary inner distance to be able to sit on the lounger with a newspaper over his head and rock back and forth on his chair during the sessions; the man who had advised Perlmann not to take the whole thing so seriously; and, in the end, also the man who had been able to get to grips with his notes. And now he was sitting up there at the front, turning over the empty coffee pot for the second time, and darting increasingly insecure glances at the group. All of a sudden his stubble was no longer the expression of independence and incorruptibility; it just looked scruffy. His skin struck Perlmann as even paler than usual, and now for the first time he spotted a small boil on Silvestri’s chin. You do get through your heroes , he heard Agnes saying, and he didn’t know who he should be more annoyed with: her, or this Italian who seemed, once more, to prove her right.

Now Silvestri pushed his papers aside, lit a new cigarette and started explaining the basic points of his investigation. He was no orator, and it wasn’t a fluent, suggestive lecture. Nonetheless, Perlmann noticed with growing relief that the man had something to say. Leskov, who had looked unhappy and had several times sighed quietly, also relaxed, and Laura Sand had begun to take notes. There were many years of work with schizophrenics behind the ideas that Silvestri was developing, and an inexhaustible patience when it came to listening to them. His dark-eyed, white face now showed great concentration, and when he spoke with admiration of Gaetano Benedetti, whom he saw as the most important researcher into schizophrenia, one could tell how much passion he had devoted to his work.

The sounds of tearing paper broke the silence that had fallen when Silvestri looked for a quotation from Benedetti. Millar had torn a page from his notebook. He now wrote something and with a flippant gesture passed it to Ruge, who was today sitting slightly further away from him than usual. At the last moment Millar must have sensed that he was being impolite, because his arm twitched, as if he wanted to undo the gesture, but it was too late: the page slipped to the edge of the table and sailed to the floor, where it stopped in front of Silvestri’s eyes. Perlmann had to crane his neck slightly, and then he could read it: De Benedetti?!

Silvestri, who had found the quotation at last, followed the eyes of the others and read the note. He froze for a moment, his face colored, and he closed his eyes. No one moved. Millar stared at the table top in front of him. In fact, Perlmann thought, it was just chitchat; a piece of schoolboy mischief. But at that particular moment, it must have felt like a slap in the face to Silvestri: recently Carlo De Benedetti, the President of Olivetti, had been in court because of his previous involvement in the bankruptcy of a bank. If one knew that, the reddish sheet of paper on the gleaming parquet called to mind the world of money, power and corruption. It was only a joke, and not remotely malicious. That was certainly apparent to Silvestri as well. But at that moment it was already too much for him that while Gaetano Benedetti’s self-sacrificing labours, his great life’s work, was under discussion, someone else’s thoughts were wandering in another, ugly world, even though the association came about in the simplest, most innocuous way imaginable. Obviously, Silvestri experienced it as practically a personal attack – as if his own commitment were being indirectly disparaged or even ridiculed.

Silvestri hadn’t seen where the piece of paper came from. He must, Perlmann reflected, have recognized Millar’s handwriting, because when he looked up now, Millar was the first person he looked at. He stared at him for a few seconds, and the vertical wrinkles above his nose gave his gaunt, hollow-cheeked face an angry, unforgiving expression. As Silvestri directed his gaze, which now assumed a rather downcast quality, back to the piece of paper, he took out his ballpoint pen and clicked the tip in and out. He did it several times, the rhythm stretching as if on a slow-motion soundtrack, and the individual clicks seemed to whip their apprehensive silence like gunshots. Perlmann involuntarily held his breath. Now Silvestri leaned back, rolled his hands on his head and, as he took a breath, looked Millar full in the face. Although the look was not meant for him, Perlmann shrank from the harshness of his dark stare. Silvestri’s voice would be piercing when it came.

At that moment the door opened, and Signora Morelli stepped inside the veranda with a piece of paper in her hand. The silence in the room must have struck her as strange, because she hesitated and left her hand on the handle before she gave a start, said, ‘ Scusatemi ’ and walked up to Perlmann.

‘I thought you should know this straight away,’ she said as she bent down to him and gave him a note.

She had said it quietly, and yet the Italian sentence had been audible throughout the whole room. Phone call travel agent: flight Frankfurt–Genoa confirmed tomorrow 5 p.m. the note said.

‘ Grazie ,’ Perlmann said hoarsely, folded the note and slipped it into his jacket pocket. He didn’t dare to look at Leskov beside him, so he didn’t know if it was his imagination or whether Leskov turned his head away only now.