Pascal Mercier - Perlmann's Silence

Perlmann closed his eyes and tried to retain that image: the gleaming water and her radiant smile; her wet blonde hair. Even now it was no different: he could never experience the present as it was taking place; he always woke up too late, and then there was only the substitute, the visualization, a field in which he had, out of pure desperation, become a virtuoso.

As unexpectedly as before, when he had given him a light, the waiter was suddenly standing over him, passing him Leskov’s text, the dictionary and the cigarettes.

‘Someone else would like to sit there,’ he said, pointing to the columns. Then he looked in the pocket of his smoking jacket and handed Perlmann a book of matches with the inscription Grand Hotel Miramare .

Perlmann set the things down on the floor next to him and looked across to Evelyn Mistral, who was now on her back, letting herself drift with her arms spread wide. Her long hair, which looked brown in the blue water, lay like a chaotic fan around her face. She had closed her eyes, drops of water shimmered on her bright lashes, and when she glided back from a strip of shadow into the sun, her eyelids twitched. As before, when wanting to record an impression, Perlmann lit a cigarette. The inhalation and the sensation of heightened, slightly hurried vividness thus produced created the illusion that he could obtain the impossible through sheer obstinacy: hold the moment until he had managed to open it up and thus give it depth. Again he felt dizzy, but the sensation no longer crossed the boundary into nausea, and when the cigarette was finished he lit another one.

When Evelyn Mistral came out of the water and dried herself, her eye fell on Leskov’s text on the ground. ‘Oh, you speak Russian,’ she said. Then she narrowed her eyes. ‘That is Russian, isn’t it? I’d love to be able to do that. When did you learn? And how?’

Afterwards, Perlmann couldn’t explain why he flinched at that moment, as if he’d been caught doing something forbidden.

‘I can’t, in fact,’ he said, and set down both text and dictionary on the other side of the lounger to make room for her. ‘Just a few words. This text here – it’s more of a prank that someone took the liberty of playing on me.’ The dictionary was lying with its back to her. She couldn’t have seen the dark smudges from all that flicking.

What other foreign languages did he speak? she asked as she puffed on one of his cigarettes later on.

‘I can speak a bit of yours,’ he said in Spanish.

‘Then you should be more familiar with me,’ she laughed. ‘ Usted is far too formal. Colleagues don’t say that to each other. And in Spain since Franco as a rule we tend to say tú .’

After that they stuck with Spanish. Perlmann liked her Spanish voice, particularly the gutturals and the way she turned the d at the end of the word into a voiceless sound like the English th . It was a long time since he had last spoken Spanish, and he made a lot of mistakes. But he was glad of the language. He hadn’t learned anything new in English for years, nothing liberatingly strange in its newness. English no longer gave him the chance to recast himself in a foreign language.

He lost her when he talked about this subject. Her relationship with foreign languages was more serious, more practical. Yes, she enjoyed them, too; but when he talked about the possibility of becoming someone else in a foreign language, even though one was essentially saying the same thing as one said in one’s own, she was only a polite listener, and Perlmann felt like a mystic. And when he reflected out loud about whether the Spanish tú was more intimate than the English you in connection with the first name, or the same, and how both compared to the German Du in terms of intimacy, she looked at him with curiosity, but the smile that accompanied her gaze revealed that for her this was more of a game than a serious question. His monologue suddenly struck him as ridiculous, even kitsch, and he abruptly interrupted it to ask her about her work.

What someone can imagine is dependent on what they can say, and the same is true of what they want, she said. In her work with children she concentrated increasingly on this connection between imagination, will and language; on the way in which the internal play with possibilities became more refined and influential as the capacity for linguistic expression developed; and how this refinement of the imagination through language led to an increasingly rich organization of the will.

As she spoke she gripped her tucked-up knees with both hands. Only sometimes, when the wet strands slipped into her face, did she release her interlocking fingers. Her face was very serious and concentrated as she tried to find appropriate words, precise sentences. Perlmann liked her face now, too. But the more she got into her stride, the further away it became. And then when she talked about the chapters of a book that she wanted to present for discussion here, it struck him as very remote and alien. He thought of his shabby, black oilcloth notebook, which he hadn’t opened for so long, and it was only with difficulty that he managed to shake off the image of squared pages, yellowed to the point of illegibility. He dreaded the moment when she would ask him about his own work, and for that reason kept asking, apprehensive about the mendaciousness of his zeal, and yet pleased every time she began to respond to yet another question.

When Adrian von Levetzov’s name was mentioned, Perlmann gave a start. ‘I’d completely forgotten him,’ he murmured tonelessly, and he could see from Evelyn Mistral’s expression that his face revealed an anxiety that he would gladly have concealed at any cost. He hastily got up from the lounger, went over on one ankle and started hobbling to the entrance. As he passed the waiter, who was clearing a table, he forced himself to walk more calmly, unsure whether it was because of the pain in his ankle or whether it sprang from the desire to battle against anxiety and solicitude.

Von Levetzov was standing at the reception desk talking insistently, and in terrible tourist Italian, to Signora Morelli, who replied to him with a motionless face and in perfect English.

‘If the sun disturbs you, sir,’ she was just saying with a coolness that Perlmann envied, ‘you need only draw the curtains. We cannot easily alter the location of the hotel, now, can we? We do not, I fear, have a larger desk. But I’m sure we can find an additional side table.’

Von Levetzov’s face was pinched and slightly reddened when he looked over at the door. ‘Ah, Perlmann, at last,’ he said, struggling to rein in his irritation. ‘I thought you weren’t going to welcome me at all.’

‘Please do forgive me,’ Perlmann said breathlessly. ‘I was at the pool with Evelyn Mistral, and completely forgot the time.’ Why am I constantly apologizing? And to cap it all that sounded almost like a budding romance. One should meet such a man in a quite different way. One should be much more, obliging, but cool. I’ll never learn.

‘Well, you’re here now,’ said von Levetzov, and it sounded as if Perlmann were a pupil who had turned up late or a tardy assistant who was being forgiven. ‘I’m just trying to explain to these people that I need more room to work, more surface area. Above all, I need a table for my calculator alone. And then the sun. I tried it out just after I got here. There are problems with the screen. You must have noticed that yourself.’

Perlmann didn’t look at him as he nodded. Consequently, his lie felt more like an insignificant movement. He turned to Signora Morelli, whom he hadn’t liked at all at first when he had arrived the day before, but whose brittleness had made her more congenial to him each time he had seen her since. An additional table would, as she had said, be found for the signore, and, if he insisted, his room would be rearranged: the desk could be put against the back wall, which the sun didn’t reach. He could even be offered a different room, facing the rear and very shady, but perhaps a bit small for such a long stay.