Pascal Mercier - Perlmann's Silence

‘It’s just for this short journey,’ von Levetzov said behind him, as Millar was about to rest on his knee to take a better look.

Before Perlmann turned the corner, he cast one last glance in the rear-view mirror at the hated hotel, and the crooked pine that loomed out over the road. Then he drove past the two women, who had chosen to go on foot. Evelyn Mistral was wearing a white pleated skirt that swung with each step she took, and a red jacket whose collar she had turned up, making her blonde hair curve outwards. When she waved to him with a radiant smile, Perlmann closed his eyes and almost knocked down a cyclist who had suddenly darted from the pavement on to the road. In the few minutes since the gas station all his detachment and clarity, which had seemed so stable, so definitive, had fled, and he felt claustrophobic in the full car, his body convulsed, and he drove as awkwardly as a learner.

Millar and Ruge talked about the safety standards of cars, about crumple zones, yielding steering-columns that broke in a head-on collision, and about the airbag system. Ruge drove a Volvo, Millar a Saab.

‘I’ve just been reading a report on this car,’ said Millar, giving Perlmann a sideways look. ‘It seems to be the safest Italian thing on the market.’

‘Really?’ Perlmann murmured hoarsely, and returned Millar’s glance slightly too late.

Outside the town house he drove past several parking spaces that the others pointed out, because he was afraid they might be just too tight for the Lancia. He didn’t want to embarrass himself when parking this unusually large car. As if that still mattered. Amidst the baffled silence of the others, he turned into a side street, where all the parking spaces were free. He had already got out when von Levetzov looked again through the half-closed car door.

‘That’s odd,’ he said, ‘the box for the belt is all scratched.’ Then he pushed the door shut.

Millar, who had jauntily slammed the door already, and was walking towards a shop window, turned round. But before his hand reached the handle, Perlmann had already activated the central locking and slipped the key into his trouser pocket.

In the square in front of the town hall, Angelini, who had picked up the two women on the way, was just getting out of his red Alfa Romeo. He was wearing a respectable grey suit with wide lapels and a little badge, and a pink shirt with a blue tie. He took the cigarette out of the corner of his mouth and said something about the figure on the ivy-covered monument, a man with folded arms, his head thoughtfully inclined and a scroll in his hand. Perlmann didn’t hear a single word that was said. He just glanced towards Angelini when he noticed the Italian repeatedly trying to catch his eye.

He had thought he knew everything there was to know about the torment of the lack of presence. Now he noticed that it had intensified still further. While Angelini’s voice reached him as if from a long way away, the present withdrew from everything that surrounded him. It fled from things, leaving behind a world that seemed to him like a lifeless papier mâché backdrop in which all movements seemed as aimless and artificial as those of figures on a church tower clock. He was glad at last to walk towards the building with the faded yellow facade, the green shutters and the two palm trees outside the door, and regain a little reality by virtue of his own movements.

There was no one there to welcome them. The doors to the council hall and the mayor’s office were locked. In the first-floor corridor, from which one could look down into the dusty stairwell and the hall with the flaking plaster, clerks walked past, smoking and chatting, paying the waiting group not the slightest attention, and disappeared into various rooms.

While the others rocked embarrassedly on their heels, or walked over to the glass display case, Laura Sand enjoyed the situation. Her face bore an expression of mocking contentment. She strolled along the corridor in her black corduroy trousers and elegant light-grey jacket, and at last said with amusement to Perlmann that they were all slightly too elegantly dressed. Angelini, who had looked as if he were sitting on hot coals the whole time, jerked his head round when he heard her remark. With the icy face of a superior, he stubbed out the cigarette that he had just lit on the tiled floor, and stepped into the nearest office without knocking.

When he came out, he was followed by a slim, pale man with black horn-rimmed glasses, who looked and behaved like the caricature of a subservient office worker in a film. After trying out two wrong keys, he finally opened the door of the mayor’s office and let them in.

The room was dominated by a black, carved desk and a chair which, with its decorations and high back, looked like a church pew. Behind it, stretched between two engraved silver staffs, was the flag of Santa Margherita, two yellow lions on a green-and-white background. Beside the Italian flag in the corner was the picture of the President of the Republic. With a tortured smile that couldn’t conceal his annoyance, Perlmann made a host’s gesture and invited them to sit down on the red leather benches with the gold knobs. Then he went outside.

Everyone was laughing at a remark that Ruge had made about the thick layer of dust on the desk, when the Mayor came bursting in. With his belly, his greasy hair and his moustache, he reminded Perlmann of the landlord in Portofino. Puffing, he apologized for his lateness and darted Angelini, who was closing the door, an embarrassed glance. Then he set down the shallow box and a roll of paper on the desk, and as the swirled-up dust settled, he awkwardly pulled some sheets of paper from his jacket pocket.

It was a great honor and a special joy, he began, to welcome Professore Philipp Peremann and his group to the town.

‘Per l mann,’ hissed Angelini from the bench, ‘ con l .’

‘ Scusi ,’ said the Mayor and shook his head as he looked at his text, which plainly contained a typo. He asked Perlmann to join him by the desk, shook hands with him and then went on reading out the prepared English text, his free hand repeatedly pulling up his trousers, which constantly threatened to slip beneath his belly.

Perlmann looked sideways at the Mayor’s sweaty face, his badly shaven throat and his dirty shirt collar. Before, when he had entered the hall and accidentally touched Evelyn Mistral’s hand as she held the door out to him, he had thought he would need all his remaining strength of will to resist the overwhelming urge to flee from one second to the next. Meanwhile, the odd, even grotesque course of the reception had put him in a state of cheerful, almost exuberant indifference, which he wanted to maintain for as long as possible, even though it felt unpleasantly artificial, as if a drug were responsible for it. He had to be careful, he thought, not to do anything impossible right now, like this, for example: walking right up to the Mayor and, with a loud ‘ Permesso! ’, straightening his crooked tie.

He kept his eyes lowered to the desk, on which, as in a church, beams of dusty sunlight fell through the high windows. Only once did he raise his head. Then his eye fell on Millar, who had turned away slightly and was looking out of the window. At first Perlmann couldn’t believe it. He examined his feelings again, but his hatred of Brian Millar had vanished. It was simply no longer there. It had vanished like a nightmare. And when he followed his eye-line and saw that Millar was looking at a huge balloon painted with a pouting woman’s mouth in gaudy purple, which was drifting sluggishly over the monument, he thought of Sheila’s kiss, and all of a sudden he liked the handsome American with his naive self-confidence and the unusual red shimmer in his dark hair.