Pascal Mercier - Perlmann's Silence

‘Dad, are you drunk?’

No, there was no need to call Mum, he said: she should just tell her that he had arrived safely.

He no longer had to prove the wrongness of the sentence to himself. It hadn’t got in his way for ages. He was ready, without further ado, to imagine Mestre as a flourishing city, something like Kyoto in cherry blossom. He had already thought that at the station in Frankfurt, and for a moment he had considered turning round. But by now he felt it was a question of loss of face, and at the same time he had flinched at the thought that such a thing might suddenly be an issue between them.

Did he still have to prove it to his father? Or was the journey a weird way of working off his fury at mountains of linguistic waste? Standing in for all the sentences? Why was no one else furious about the stifling power of linguistic waste? He had looked round at the station and also in the train – as if you could tell such a thing by looking at someone.

Would he have taken this ludicrous journey if he hadn’t had to assert himself against anyone with his lonely rage? Was it, in the end, a journey against Agnes more than anything else?

The question had pursued him when he had trudged across Mestre the following day. It was ridiculous, walking through a town – any town – and constantly asking oneself whether it was beautiful or ugly. Absurd didn’t cover it, he had thought. And then he suddenly landed in the Piazza Erminio Ferretto, an elongated square with lots of cafés and a great crowd of people smoking and chatting as they enjoyed their holiday. He had liked it there in spite of all the people. He had liked it, Agnes or no Agnes. Then, not far from the square, he found the Galleria Matteotti, a small-town echo of the famous Galleria in Milan. He didn’t know whether it was despair or self-irony, but he had paced it out, that insignificant passage, fifty-three comfortable paces it had been. He still remembered that.

In the afternoon, when he was standing outside the albergo in Venice where Agnes had washed his hair, it hurt again. The sun broke through when he sat down in that café where she had uttered her mysterious ‘Yeeess’. The tourists were taking off their coats and jackets. It didn’t keep him there. In the middle of giving his order he apologized to the waiter and walked quickly to the vaporetto , which took him to the station. In Mestre he paid the outrageous hotel bill and travelled direct to Milan, where he changed to the night train for Germany.

When he washed his worn-out, unshaven face in the train toilet just before Frankfurt, he was surprised to notice that he was pleased and contented to have made the journey.

‘Mestre is beautiful,’ he said when Agnes looked at him. ‘You should see the Piazza Ferretto! And the Galleria!’

He said it ironically, but she didn’t like that shade of irony. She sensed that it concealed an endured loneliness, and that that same loneliness gave him an unpleasant, reckless strength, a strength that could, because it was drenched in pain, drive him to a cruel act of revenge.

Perlmann showered for a long time, and then went on reading. The ballpoint nib changed again, and the handwriting became agitated, as if he had been in a hurry or irritated. Language as an enemy of imagination. He couldn’t remember this at all. He read it like something written by a stranger, astonished, uncertain and also a bit proud plainly to have had more thoughts over the course of time than he would have imagined himself capable of.

Thinking in sentences – he read – always meant a diminution of possibilities. Not only in the simple sense that the actually thought sentence by both logic and attentiveness ruled out other sentences that could have been thought instead. It was more important that linguistic thought took its initial bearings from the repertoire of familiar, tried-and-tested sentences which expressed a familiar picture of things, which seemed in their familiarity to lack alternatives. This impression, that things could not be seen differently, was the natural enemy of the imagination as the ability to envisage everything quite differently. And now example followed example. At first Perlmann was only full of amazement at the diversity of examples; but insofar as the outlined alternatives to the really existing world became increasingly radical, he recognized the text more and more clearly as his own, because his hatred of empty conventions was expressed more and more flagrantly.

In the next paragraph came observations running in precisely the opposite direction. Sentences as a medium that drove the narrator to more and more new images that could come as a complete surprise to him. Language and imagination . Wasn’t that Evelyn Mistral’s theme, too? Or was it an illusion, prompted by the mere connection between the two words? Perlmann felt his thoughts crumbling, and that slipping sensation merged with a feeling of weakness that came from his empty stomach. He slipped into his jacket and was already in the corridor when he opened the door again and pushed the moleskine notebook under the bed cover. Then he walked a secret path to the trattoria.

Sandra had plainly kicked the duvet on to the floor, and she herself lay fully clothed on the bed, with one knee-sock pulled down to the ankle and her cheek pressed deep into the pillow. He absolutely had to check on her, her parents said as soon as he stepped inside the restaurant. They were more laconic than usual. He had only learned that she had a maths test the next day, and her mother’s face revealed that there had been an argument that she now regretted.

Sandra’s shining head hung over the edge of the bed and swung slightly with each breath she took. Perlmann looked at her twitching eyelids and the dangling hand with its cheap ring and chewed thumbnail. Once her calm breathing was interrupted by a faint groan. He walked over to the little desk that her father had made and picked up the exercise book that Sandra had set defiantly face down on it. The last two pages were full of furiously crossed-out calculations. He snapped the exercise book shut, and the landlady gave a start when she noticed her anxious expression bouncing off his closed face.

‘I just thought…’ she said faintly as she brought him the chronicle.

The chronicle listed nothing for the days of his senseless, lonely journey to Mestre. Perlmann flicked back: bloodbath in the Square of Heavenly Peace in Peking. He didn’t read the column to the end. Against his true emotions, when he paid, and this time the proprietor didn’t dare to protest, he managed a conciliatory smile. Then he walked through the unusually warm evening to the harbor and sat down right on the edge of the embankment on a rock, against which the light waves broke.

Thousands of people had been shot, and he had wasted three days of his life on a harmless, ridiculous sentence, that anyone else would have forgotten long ago. He had the feeling of making himself very small and paying for this loss of any sense of proportion by staring, completely motionless, at the fine strips of spume that broke twitching from the night. It was not until he started shivering that he took off his glasses and wiped away the blurring layer of salt.

It was that movement that made him aware that resistance had been stirring in him for some time against his incipient feeling of guilt. It had not been a completely random sentence that he had fought against, but a sentence, my sentence, that stood in for all the linguistic waste that could bind and stifle someone’s experience. Sentences as a source of unfreedom . And the business about proportion, the sense of scale that had to be preserved – that wasn’t right either. Not here at any rate. Perlmann would have liked to know where the error was if one thought that the broadening of one’s perspective automatically produced the complete unimportance of all things in the forlorn limitedness. But the explanation didn’t come. He just knew: it wasn’t like that, even when expansion beyond the purely geographical encompass the magnitude of suffering.