Pascal Mercier - Perlmann's Silence

It wasn’t really true to say that he was only marginally interested in language, but he wasn’t interested in it in this way. Dissecting, measuring, formalizing language: that basically didn’t interest him any more than chemistry. If languages constantly cast their spell over him, it was as a medium of experience, and above all as a means of feeling his way towards the present, which eluded his grasp with such diabolical dexterity. At the time it had seemed, when he was on the student secretariat, so natural, so logical, to enrol on the linguistics course. Many of the other things, like law or physics, ruled themselves out from the outset, so he didn’t even have to think about them. And medicine was out of the question, too: it meant far too much physical proximity to other people.

He liked languages. And you have such a facilité, his mother said, seeking with her sprinkling of such words to conceal her complete lack of talent for foreign languages, not least from herself. And besides, there wasn’t a word of truth in it. As with so many other things, the only thing that he possessed was hard work, endurance and an often blind constancy of will.

Achim Ruge had taken off his jacket and hung it on the back of the chair. The two carved claws of the seat-back were wider than the armpits of the jacket, and stuck so far into the sleeves that they created the impression of a scarecrow that towered above Ruge’s big, bald head. But Perlmann didn’t want to be distracted either by that or by the ludicrous rubber bands on Ruge’s upper arms. For the first time he thought he understood his own choice of academia. It was a misunderstanding, nothing more. And this misunderstanding was fundamentally so simple, he thought, that it took one’s breath away: by leaving the Conservatoire he had said farewell to the hope of outwitting the present by playing the piano, and bending it to his will. Because the mere hearing of music would never extend further than to an intensified yearning for the present. And now he threw himself into a preoccupation with language as a medium that was supposed to take the place of music and replace the unfulfilled hopes for the present. These hopes had been so powerful, and so breathless the switch, that he had overlooked one simple fact: language created presence when one allowed oneself to fall into it, when one swam in it and played with it, and not when one dissected it and considered it with the eyes of one seeking for laws, for explanations, systematizations and theories. It was laughably simple, every child knew that. And yet he had confused the two things and had – in love with the impressionist, sensual density of language – devoted himself to an analytical effort that must systematically lead him away from what he was looking for, because it was quite simply defined in a different way.

While Silvestri was reporting on experiments into aphasia and thus provoking a heated debate, Perlmann was in the Auditorium Maximum of Hamburg University, accepting his record of study from the hands of the dean. Whether he really felt, when he saw beneath the photograph and his name the entry linguistics , that something was wrong, or whether he had retrospectively read his warning unease into that distant moment, was something that could not be decided. And if one believed Leskov, it was a meaningless question. At any rate it now seemed to him that he had been separated from the crowd of the others in the hall by a fine and unnameable gap that had something to do with the fact that those others had experienced their self-selected membership of a subject with greater enthusiasm. And the longer Perlmann reflected upon this insidious little gap, the more the suspicion germinated within him that his action had even then sprung from a vagueness and a lack of internal definition, on the basis of which indifference towards the whole idea of study and research lay an indifference that it had taken him thirty years to discover and acknowledge.

The departure of the others made him jump; he had been so far away. Didn’t he have anything to add? Ruge asked him on the way out. Perlmann was still filled with the insight that he had just gained into the logic of his misunderstanding, and managed a relaxed smile. He had just enjoyed listening for once, he said offhandedly. Otherwise one has to do so much talking.

‘Erm… well, yes, you’re right there,’ Ruge laughed, and it seemed to Perlmann as if his laughter was a touch less confident than usual.

Millar was leaning against the reception desk, playing with his room key. Now he walked up to Perlmann. What was happening about their meeting? ‘About that question, I mean.’

Perlmann asked Signora Morelli for the key and sought her eyes as if she could help him. The protection given him by his insight of a moment ago seemed to have been blown away.

‘I’ll give you a call,’ he said at last and disappeared so quickly into Maria’s office that it bordered on effrontery.

The many bracelets on Maria’s wrists clattered with every movement that she made at the computer. Today she had chewing gum in her mouth and, as usual, she breathed out the smoke as she spoke. Perlmann asked her to phone Rapallo about the CD. Laughing, she made the people at the other end look it up, in spite of the fact that it was the beginning of the siesta. Neither of the two music shops there had the CD, but the second offered to order it from Genoa, it would take between one and two days. Perlmann shook his head when she passed on the information, so she ended the phone call, puzzled by his haste. She showed no impatience when Perlmann asked her to try in Genoa. The chewing gum snapped from time to time between her teeth. She knew the big music shop in the city; she had, she said, grown up there. At first they said they didn’t have the CD, and judging by Maria’s face they doubted whether it existed at all. But then Maria said a few indistinct words, slurred to the point of incomprehensibility, which must have been Genoese dialect, and then she asked them to take a look in the storeroom and amongst the new acquisitions. It took a long time. Perlmann felt uneasy, and he was grateful to Maria when she jokingly said that there must be some really lovely music on it. She was visibly relieved when she was finally able to tell Perlmann that the CD was there. It had come in the last delivery and hadn’t yet been properly unpacked. He asked her to see to it that it was set aside for him, and that it should on no account be sold. He would drop by in the course of the afternoon. As he left he would have liked to give Maria an explanatory word, but apart from a repeated Mille grazie! nothing came to mind.

He fetched money and credit cards from the room and then walked to the station. There was no point hurrying. He didn’t want to find himself, yet again, standing outside a shop closed for siesta. On the platform, where he had to wait for almost an hour, at regular intervals that remained inexplicable, one was assailed by a shrill ringing sound that penetrated one to the marrow. Luckily, the train was almost empty. Perlmann drew the grubby curtain over the window of his compartment and tried to sleep. A week had passed. A fifth. Was that a lot or not much? He wished Silvestri would make up his mind soon about whether he was going to deliver his lecture in the fourth or fifth week. If it was the fifth, Perlmann had only another fifteen days to write a paper. Otherwise it was eighteen days; nineteen, if he postponed the copying until Saturday. Sometimes Maria didn’t work on Saturday. Was copying possible anyway? Might she leave him alone with the machine?

Genoa was crammed with cars. All over the place trucks parked in the middle of the street to be unloaded. You sat at a green light, not moving an inch; a concert of car horns, it was hopeless. It was always like this, the taxi driver said calmly, looking at his flustered passenger in the rear-view mirror. Siesta? Yes, sure, but not for delivery men. At least not on Mondays. When they stopped outside the music shop after an eternity, the shop was still in darkness, even though the lunch break had been over for ten minutes, according to the sign on the door. Perlmann dispatched the taxi. Why didn’t people stick to what was written down? Why?