Pascal Mercier - Perlmann's Silence

With a movement of violent resolution he got up and as he walked slowly to the hotel, he silently battled his inner adversary, who was trying once again to make his sentence about Mestre ridiculous with bloody images from Peking. When the crooked pines of the hotel, the flags and lanterns came into view, he began to sense that if he admitted to that crazy journey, this also had to do with his struggle for self-assertion, which he was tirelessly fighting for over there at the hotel. And as he climbed the steps, that sense turned into a hot, palpitating defiance.

He had crossed the lobby and was on the first flight of stairs when he heard the voices of his colleagues coming from the dining room.

‘We’ll find out tomorrow!’ Millar was saying, and this was followed by Adrian von Levetzov’s laughter, accompanied by Evelyn Mistral’s bright voice.

Perlmann involuntarily took a step towards the wall, took another two steps and disappeared out of eyeshot. After that he hurried on, and was out of breath by the time he turned into his corridor. The whole corridor was pitch-black; the two lightbulbs must have blown. As he felt around for the lock with his key he was startled at how insecure that harmless darkness made him. Afterwards he stood by the window with his heart thumping, and looked down at an elegant couple who, coming from the restaurant, moved towards the steps with a hint of a tango step, before hopping down, laughing, and disappearing in an Oldtimer with chauffeur.

It was a long time before he had recovered his comforting defiance. At last he took the black notebook out from under the cover and went on reading.

The next few paragraphs described how concise sentences, apparently drawn from a wide overview, could become a prison by cutting off contradictory feelings, and thus causing the internal world to shrink still further. The particularly treacherous thing about this, he noted, was that such sentences had the deceptive sound of superior insight, against which even the author of the sentences was hardly able to defend himself. i need a lot of anonymity, was one of the examples, and another: i like listening best. And a little later: i have developed a dread of people.

Perlmann vaguely remembered: he had written those lines after a convivial evening with some of Agnes’s friends. Because time had seemed too slow and sticky to him, he had talked far too much, not least about himself. Afterwards, in the dark, everything he had said had struck him as entirely wrong, and he had got to his feet again to become clear about his feelings.

He was glad that the next paragraph was about sentences which, rather than adding something, could point the way towards a freedom that had hitherto only been guessed at, by creating a new state within one’s inner world, capturing it in words and thus keeping it from slipping away again. being able to say no without inner effort: that’s what matters. And a paragraph further on: the others are really others. others. even the ones one loves.

The air that came streaming in when he opened the window suddenly seemed much less warm than before. Over in Sestri Levante a fire raged, looking quite large even from here. Distorted by individual gusts of wind that made the pines down on the terrace bob, the sirens of the fire department echoed across.

All these example sentences, which he had with one exception written down in German, so that they now effectively leapt out at him from the middle of the English text with the intrusive familiarity of the mother tongue – were they actually sentences that applied to him?

He felt as if his inner contours blurred when he tried to look them straight in the eye for an answer to this question, and it passed through his mind that that feeling was like the impression that one had of things when one swam towards them under water. Uncertainly, almost fearfully, he turned the page and found a few very carefully written pages about the connection between language and presence. In a first attempt he had outlined – in different variations – how linguistic expression could give experiences presence and depth by wresting things experienced from fleetingness. And to his surprise he found, placed in parentheses, a digression in which he compared the linguistic and photographic fixing of the present.

Perlmann was amazed at how stubborn and precise his thinking had been in this respect, and at the same time it hurt to feel how clearly he had had Agnes’s photographs before his eyes as he wrote. He took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose.

The young Sicilian in the frayed army coat who had dropped his battered suitcase and coat on the platform, and the bride he was now whirling around in the air. Agnes had shot about twenty pictures of the scene. One was published, in which the young woman, battling dizziness, held her hand in front of her laughing face, which appeared over her husband’s shoulder, half of her chin hidden by his raised coat collar. This photograph had earned Agnes a great deal of praise. But at home she had hung another one, which she thought was much better: it captured the swirl at exactly the moment when the spin, supported by flying hair, concealed both faces so that the viewer felt challenged to invent them. That’s what I thought! Agnes laughed when he expressed his disappointment at the real, very peasant-like face of the bride and invented a different one.

And then that other picture: the gaunt Chinaman, with one hand on the saddle of his bicycle, bending down to his son and offering him his cheek to kiss. The child, a nipper with a baker’s boy cap that came down over his ears, held his face up to him and pursed his lips while his eyes, half-covered by the brim of his cap, were caught by something entirely different that must have been somewhere in the direction of the photographer. Agnes had taken the picture in Shanghai, on the trip on which that fellow André Fischer from the agency had accompanied her, about whom she had been so expressively silent.

Perlmann’s thoughts sluggishly returned to the present of the hotel room. The fire beyond the bay was now clearly under control. He tore open a new pack of cigarettes and read diametrically opposite views on the next page: the present as something essentially fleeting that could be artificially deep-frozen by linguistic description. This did not establish presence, but created the mere illusion of presence. Real presence, he had noted, arose out of the readiness to yield utterly to the fleetingness of experience. And then, emphasized by their insertion, two German lines that took him completely by surprise him once again: presence: a perfume, a light, a smile, a relief, a successful sentence, a shimmer under olives.

That in this way – experimenting with words, images and rhythm – he had occupied himself with his vain search for present, had escaped him entirely. For the duration of two cigarettes he tried in vain to summon up the scene in which these lines had been produced. Suddenly, he took a piece of paper and wrote: sunk in white oblivion . As he slowly stubbed out the cigarette until the rest of the tobacco was completely crumbled and the naked filter scoured along the glass of the ashtray, he stared at the words. Then he scrunched up the paper and threw it flatly into the waste-paper basket.

Another one-and-a-half pages; the rest of the notebook was empty pages from which, when he shook them, the wing of a dead fly fell on Leskov’s text. A long paragraph and, finally, quite a short one. The long one, written with the same pen as the one before, set out an observation that moved Perlmann as if he were reading it for the very first time: experimenting with sentences was a way of finding out what experiences one really had. Because just having experiences, by experiencing something, did not mean that one had any idea what they were. Speechlessness as blindness to experience , he had written in German: Sprachlosigkeit als Erlebnisblindheit. Glum because it sounded bombastic, he read on and found an observation that struck him even more: it could happen that one went on thinking in the medium of old and outdated sentences and thus see oneself as someone who still had the old experiences, even though quite new experiences had in the meantime seeped into the old structure, and they would only be able to unfold their transforming power when they were also poured into new sentences.