Pascal Mercier - Perlmann's Silence

Now, in Leskov’s paper, came the pages in which the memory of sensory experience was interpreted as analogous to the memory of emotions. The rich vocabulary for nuances of smell and taste, but also for qualities of sound, was like a thicket that one had to fight one’s way through, one step at a time, and once again Perlmann became aware how many nooks there were in English into which he had never yet shone a light. Often he had to pick up his English-German dictionary to know what was being talked about, and a good two dozen points remained where he wrote down an English word without knowing what it meant. Millar would know . Then he felt like a machine arranging signs purely according to syntactical rules, without knowing anything about the correspondence of the meanings. That didn’t only produce a sense of blindness and helplessness, but also kept him from really entering the slipstream of translation, which could have protected him against the panic that was – now that the numbness of night had faded – forcing its way ever more powerfully into his consciousness.

When he became aware that anxiety could spill over and drag him away at any moment, he stretched out his arm and reached for the Russian-Italian dictionary in the back corner of his desk, as if for an anchor. He was lucky, a series of the words he had failed to understand were made clear to him via this indirect route, and now he threw himself with all his might into the attempt to translate the next few paragraphs directly into Italian.

He deleted the first few lines that he had written right after an English paragraph, and took fresh sheets of paper for the Italian text. The prickly feeling that he always had when he jumped back and forth between two foreign languages slowly appeared. The passages that followed dealt with memories in color, and now he discovered how inexperienced he was in Italian when it came to unusual words for colors. Cheerfully excited, he picked up the red dictionary, in which he found many of the words that Laura Sand had explained to him the previous afternoon. He assembled an English-Italian list of these words, and was irritated that the Russian-Italian dictionary was too limited to fill in all the gaps.

When he looked in his suitcase for new writing paper, he came across the black moleskin notebook with his notes in it. The only text of my own that I have with me . In a mixture of curiosity and dread he sat down in the red armchair and began to read:

It cannot be stressed often enough: one grows into the world by repeating words parrot-fashion. These words don’t come by themselves; we hear them as parts of judgments, mottos, sentences. For a long time these judgments behave in a similar fashion: we simply parrot them as well. Not unlike the refrain of a children’s song. And one must almost describe it as a stroke of luck if one later manages to recognize these insistent, numbing sequences of words for what they are: blind habits.

mestre is ugly, says the father whenever the topic turns to Venice. venice is a dream. mestre, on the other hand, is ugly. We hear the sentence over and over again; it comes with the regularity of a machine. It’s sheer repetition, the click of an automatism, nothing else. And then one repeats the sentence. One has not checked it, not a trace of appropriation. All that’s really happening is this: one repeats it; one says it again with increasing routine. That’s all. One understands the sentence; it’s a sentence in one’s mother tongue. Nonetheless, it doesn’t express anything that one could call a thought. It is a blindly understood, literally thoughtless sentence.

the po valley is boring is another of these sentences, this time one from the mother. One says in future: ‘If it’s night when you’re travelling through the Po Valley it doesn’t matter; the Po Valley is boring anyway,’ and so on. The sentence is no longer available. It’s an internal fixed point, a constant, a load-bearer in the construction. It represents a set of points. It makes a track impassable. It obstructs a possibility. It steals a landscape from one, a piece of earth, because it directs one around this area and thus turns them into a white, blind patch on the map of experiences. How many of our familiar sentences behave like the sentences about Mestre and the Po Valley – without our noticing?

The memory of the bare hotel room with the high walls and the ancient fittings in the bathroom forced its way into his consciousness; a memory that Perlmann hadn’t touched for years. Even today he wanted nothing to do with it. He turned the page, determined to chase away, by doing so, the distant echo of his former feelings.

And then he was baffled to see that the paper continued in English, with smaller letters and a thinner ballpoint nib. First there came sections in which the theme was picked up from the beginning and modified. The parroted sentences were now described as frozen elements which, in their treacherous inconspicuousness, kept experiences from being made, and, by being experienced, from changing anything. They had a hypnotic effect, he had noted, and then added that this applied not only to statements like the ones about Mestre and the Po Valley, but also to questions that came like a refrain in every conversation about the future: and then? what do you want to do after that? when will you be finished? what’s the point of all this?

Linguistic waste was what he had called everything that blocked experience like this, and robbed one of the chance of getting involved in anything new and surprising. Linguistic waste , Perlmann repeated to himself, and as he murmured the German word he was pulled into the slipstream of memory and saw himself lying on the bed in the bare room in Mestre, furious about all the linguistic waste that he had discovered far too late within himself, and also furious about himself because he had undertaken that senseless journey for a single sentence.

He had taken a night train to Milan, and then travelled through the Po Valley one grey morning in early October, even though it was a detour. He couldn’t remember now what it had looked like. But he very clearly remembered the defiant feeling with which he had pressed his face against the train window so that his fellow-passengers asked several times what he was looking at that was so interesting.

In Mestre he had gone into a hotel opposite the station, where the bellboy had opened up the dance hall of a room. After a few hours of sleep he had gone trotting down insignificant streets in the breaking dawn, until he was completely drenched. Afterwards, in the bathtub, he had felt nothing but emptiness. It was grotesque and bordered on madness: the whole journey, this whole exercise, just to come to terms with that one sentence of his father’s. As if he wanted to set up an example to stand in for all the other linguistic waste. Set up for whom? No one saw it; no one was aware of it. On the contrary: he would never be able to tell anyone. He would be laughed at or looked at as if he were out of his mind. Why, then? Would an indifferent shrug not have been much more effective? The worst thing was Agnes wasn’t an internal companion. She thought his journey was madness and was furious about his fanaticism. Even the film on television, with his favorite actors, didn’t help with his knowledge.

He called home later and was glad that Kirsten answered. Her voice awakened the absurd hope that he might be better understood by her, a sixteen year old.

‘What are you actually doing in this… what’s its name… Mestre?’ she asked.

After a pause, filled fortunately with hisses and clicks, he asked her how one managed to live in the present.

‘What? I can’t hear you properly.’

He repeated the question, this time fully aware of how ridiculous it sounded.