Pascal Mercier - Perlmann's Silence

But that didn’t last for long. There was – and there was no getting around it – something in the structure of his own thoughts and feelings that had activated this quite particular sequence of movements, and not another. On the ship yesterday it had looked like a balance of reasons. The three possibilities of action had balanced one another out precisely; all three seemed equally inconceivable, and that was where the agony had lain. During his troubled sleep it must have been working away inside him, a power play must have taken place, and in the end something, perhaps just a tiny preponderance or sensation, must have tipped the scales.

Although the sun shone directly down on him, Perlmann buttoned up his jacket. The thought that he was someone in whom – without his noticing it or being able to do anything about it – fraud had taken the upper hand, chilled him. The only thing he had with which to counter this fact, so that it did not crush him entirely, was an explanation for those internal events. His fear of personal revelation – of standing there without any means of distancing himself from other people – must have been far greater than he had previously assumed, greater even than his conscious awareness. Plainly it was so powerful that the two other possibilities must – somewhere deep within him, and without his assistance – have vanished, and no option remained but to hide behind Leskov’s text, which was to protect him against the other two alternatives. In this way, without his being aware of it, the paradoxical will had arisen in him to achieve his delineation, his defense against others, through an instrument that did not belong to him, something that was not his.

That explanation couldn’t mitigate anything, or prettify it. But it did represent an insight that gave him back a scrap of inner freedom, the freedom of the perceiver.

Over the mirror-smooth, dazzling water lay a film of delicate mist, just like yesterday, when he had stood at the front of the ship and tried to open up his senses to this gleaming present. But eons lay between yesterday and today. Yesterday his gaze upon the surfaces of the purest brilliance had still been a gaze into an open future. Its openness had tormented him, because each of the possible paths upon which he could enter it had seemed threatening. But in spite of everything it had been an open future, there had been ramifications of action and, consequently, there had still been hope, or at least the freedom of uncertainty. Now everything, uncertainty and hope, was destroyed, the future was no longer a space of possibilities, but just a cramped, undeviating stretch of time on which he would have to live through the unalterable consequences of his deception. In that all-deciding moment, when he handed Leskov’s text across the counter and uttered those doom-laden words, he had robbed himself for ever of an open future and thus, perhaps, of any hope that he might find his way back to his present.

The gleaming surface of the water, the white depth of the horizon, the vault of translucent azure, cut through by the silver trail of a rising aeroplane – it had all retreated to an unattainable distance, inaccessible to his experience. When one had done the kind of thing that he had done, one could no longer look outside. Joy and beauty, even a moment of happiness, were no longer possible. The price of deception was blindness. What you were left with was the option of huddling up inside and letting the maelstrom of guilt and lack of present wash over you. The outside world was nothing now but a backdrop, a backdrop tormenting in its beauty, a torture.

Perlmann was glad that it was a long way to Portofino. He had found a rhythm of walking through which pain and despair held one another in suspension. It was an unstable equilibrium, and when he had at one point to stop and let a group of scouts pass him in single file, the sensations tumbled in upon him; he was defenselessly delivered over to them, and only after a few minutes of renewed walking had he managed to detach himself from them to any extent. The rhythmical movement and the after-effect of the sleeping pills merged into a state in which, with half-closed eyes directed at the tarmac, he occasionally managed to think nothing at all.

Into such a phase of inner emptiness fell the sudden suspicion that his earlier explanation for his nocturnal action was not at all true. The truth is that I wanted to put it behind me as quickly as possible, whatever it might be, so that I could go on sleeping. Waking at ten, he hadn’t so much as thought about the possibility of handing in nothing at all and standing there empty-handed in front of everyone, and that was, of course, no accident. To that extent there was a degree of truth in the explanation that assumed a decision-making process, however unconscious it might be. But there could be no question of making a decision between his own notes and Leskov’s paper. What had happened was something far simpler, more banal: he had picked up Leskov’s text because it was to hand, because all he had to do was open the suitcase. Finding out whether Maria, contrary to expectation, had finished typing out his own paper had been too much for him at that point. He had wanted nothing else but to lie down as soon as possible and yield to the persistent effect of the pills. There might also have been the fact, he thought, biting his lip, that he had avoided a question concerning Maria, because a childish sense of hurt at her businesslike remark on the phone still lingered. At any rate, he said to himself with embittered, self-destructive violence, he had basically been quite glad that the arrival of the people from Fiat had effectively removed that possibility.

Perlmann was startled by the banality of this explanation; by the fact that in a matter upon which so much depended he had allowed himself to be motivated by something so primitive as a need for sleep – and self-induced sleep at that. The pills. They made the decision. He wasn’t sure whether that wasn’t, in the end, even worse than if it had been an unconscious but still genuine decision to commit fraud. Because what struck him now, while he blindly walked, as the truth, meant only that he had in that unhappy moment lost himself as a decision-maker, as a subject of his actions.

Perlmann only became aware that he had arrived in Portofino when he found himself in the square where the buses turned to make the journey back. He was puzzled to be here now. He had no business here in Portofino, where he was stuck as if in a cul-de-sac. He wanted above all to stay in motion, to hold his inner misery in check, he was afraid of coming to a standstill and being delivered over to his tormenting sensations with no possibility of defending himself. He took the street along which the tourists would stream down to the water during the holiday season. At this time of year most of the shops were closed. The radiant weather and the dead impression that the place created did not suit one another. Most of the restaurants around the little marina were shut as well. Outside the last café down at the quay he sat down at a bistro table and ordered coffee and cigarettes from an old and sulky waiter who didn’t deign to look at him.

It was his first coffee that morning, and he greedily drank two cups. Again he became aware of his stomach and choked down two dried-up rolls that he had fetched from the counter inside. With his eyes closed, he listened to the quiet sound of the boats bumping gently against one another. For a few minutes, in a state between half-sleep and voluntary activity of the imagination, he managed to create the illusion of being on holiday: a man who could afford to drink coffee on a beautiful November morning in the famous town of Portofino; unattached, a free man who was able to go off travelling while others had to work; someone who could make his own choices and wasn’t accountable to anyone. But then he suddenly became aware once more of his actual situation. He was a fraud – an undiscovered fraud, admittedly, but a fraud nonetheless. And now Portofino seemed like a trap.