Pascal Mercier - Perlmann's Silence

The sky over the glass roof was almost black by now, and the ships’ lanterns on the walls had been lit for a long time when Perlmann left. On a momentary whim he asked the proprietor to keep the chronicle for him; he would come back to go on reading. As he walked through the quiet alleys to the port, Perlmann had the feeling of having found a place or refuge to which he could retreat when the world of the hotel, of the group, threatened to crush him. And he felt a furtive joy at the thought that none of the others would ever find out about this refuge. But as he was walking along the harbor jetty and turned into the shore road on which the hotel stood, those feelings quickly seeped away, even though he paused several times and tried, eyes closed, to stop them. And when he stood by the front steps and looked up at the name of the hotel, written in white neon letters on a gleaming blue background, his bad conscience at having frittered away half a day superimposed itself over everything else.

The two texts by Millar which Signora Morelli handed him were a shock. The one that Perlmann had stuffed into the offprints cupboard at home was fifty-nine pages long; the other one sixty-five, with seven pages of notes. When he was flicking through it in the elevator, the last remainder of freedom that he had experienced in the trattoria fled. What remained was a leaden weariness and the sense that it would take him hours to read so much as a single page.

In his room he set the papers aside. There wasn’t much time left before dinner. He picked up Leskov’s text and wrote down the unfamiliar words that he had looked up so far in his vocabulary book. Several times he paused and stared in cheerful amazement at his Russian handwriting. It was a little clumsy, but correct, and it was Russian without a doubt. The annoying thing was that words appeared in the subsequent sentences that weren’t in his pocket dictionary. Nonetheless, he was by and large able to follow Leskov’s next step. Self-images, the text argued, were something quite different from the experienced contours of an internal world. Making an image of oneself was a process that required far more articulation than the inner perception, the inner exploration of contours of experience could provide on their own.

He had a nose for striking examples, this Vassily Leskov, and gradually Perlmann developed a feeling for the text. He liked its blunt, unembellished style and its laconic tone. As an author, he thought, Leskov was quite different, much more congenial than usual, and Perlmann noticed how the shapeless, pipe-smoking figure of his memory retreated behind another person who had no appearance, but a voice, and thus a clear and strong identity.

It was twenty to nine when he remembered dinner. He quickly changed, grabbed the shirt with the torn-off button and chose a wide tie to hide the spot. Giovanni at reception grinned when he saw him hurrying down the stairs. It was the grin of someone seeing a late school pupil dashing down an empty corridor to the classroom. Perlmann wanted to slap him, this clueless Italian with his bushy eyebrows and ridiculously long sideburns. The glance Perlmann gave him was so poisonous that Giovanni’s grin vanished for a moment.

He didn’t want a starter, he told the waiter before sitting down next to Silvestri who, plainly involved in a heated exchange with Brian Millar, had set his knife and fork down in a cross on his plate and lit a cigarette in the middle of the meal. Yes, he was saying, and absently blowing the smoke into Millar’s face, Franco Basaglia’s experiment in Görz must be deemed a failure. But that was still no proof that the traditional psychiatry of grilles and bolted doors could not be changed; and a malicious tone was entirely inappropriate. At any rate, Basaglia had displayed more sensitivity, commitment and courage than the whole psychiatric establishment, whose inertia was directly proportional to its lack of imagination.

‘Have you ever experienced what it’s like when someone bolts the door in front of your nose, even though you haven’t done anything, as if you’re in prison? Have you seen the big keys that are turned in the lock by the wardens with a noise that never seems to stop echoing?’ Silvestri’s white hand with the cigarette trembled, and a bit of ash fell on the Swiss roll.

‘They aren’t wardens,’ Millar said, struggling to maintain his self-control, ‘they’re nurses.’

‘Wardens is what they called them in Oakland,’ Silvestri said urgently. ‘The same word that you use for prisons.’

‘They’re nurses,’ Millar repeated, trying to stay calm, and then turned, wine bottle in hand, with a forced smile to Perlmann. ‘There are happier subjects. How did you enjoy my new paper?’

Perlmann felt Silvestri’s excitement vibrating within himself. He shoved a second piece of meat, far too big, into his mouth and made a gesture of apology as he chewed. ‘It’s OK,’ he said at last and attempted a smile that was supposed to express the fact that he didn’t take Millar’s criticism of him amiss.

‘I understand,’ Millar grinned when Perlmann failed to say anything more. ‘You can save your reply till tomorrow. I’ll look forward to it.’

Back in his room, Perlmann worked out his revulsion with particularly forceful movements and sat down at the desk with forced brio. Millar’s papers were, as usually, shatteringly brilliant; one could tell that as soon as one started flicking through them. His subheadings almost always took the form of a question, and his original questions, which had prompted so much research, had made him famous. There was also the fact that his vocabulary was unusually large for an academic author, and he had developed an unmistakeable style, juggling skilfully with the vividness of idiomatic phrases, and didn’t shy away from putting a slang expression in the middle of a dry sentence summing up data of some kind, and making it explode like a bomb. There were also people who found Millar’s style shrill and vain, but they had always been in a minority, and by now no one dared to say it out loud. Only Achim Ruge, who wrote in a desiccated, legalistic style, had made a remark to that effect at a conference some time before, and it had been passed on in whispers.

Perlmann had no reservations; not a single one. He had started with the newer of the two papers, to put Millar’s criticism behind him. He couldn’t think of a response. As he sat in front of his empty notepad, pen brandished, a fortissimo sounded from Millar’s room every now and again. Millar’s criticism was harsh, actually devastating. Perlmann was baffled that it didn’t touch him. It was a bit like having a local anaesthetic, and after reading Millar’s critical passages he felt almost cheerful.

But then, when he had finished the paper, he was shocked by his indifference. To express reservations, to be able to react to a criticism, you have to have opinions, opinions that can be formulated and stated. And that was exactly what he didn’t have. For some time he had been a man without opinions, at least as far as his subject was concerned. He agreed with everything, as long as it wasn’t obvious nonsense. It had never been so clear to him as now.

He stepped to the open window. The strip of light at Sestri Levante was now quite regular and still. What had it been like when he still had opinions? Where had they come from? And why had the source dried up? Can you decide to believe something? Or do opinions just happen to you?

Ruge’s room had been in darkness before, and now the light from Millar’s window went out as well. But it was better to wait another half hour before moving. Two days out of thirty-three. So one sixteenth had already gone. It was a sum like the ones he had done at school. And like then it felt peculiar: all of a sudden it seemed like a huge amount. In fact, he thought, it had all gone fairly quickly, and if it went on like that it would soon be over. That there was still fifteen times the same amount of time to come seemed almost trivial. A moment later it seemed like an eternity: once and again and again… You had to think of the whole thing like a long-distance runner. You had to concentrate on it and overcome the next, manageable segment.