Roberto Calasso - K.

The women are presented quite differently. What we quickly come to know about them converges toward a single point: sex. Gardena lives in the memory of her three amorous encounters with Klamm. Frieda is first of all Klamm’s lover en titre and then becomes K.’s lover a few minutes after meeting him. Pepi flirts with the customers at the Gentlemen’s Inn. Olga regularly gives herself for money to the gentlemen’s servants. Amalia’s life is entirely the consequence of having refused the outrageous erotic propositions of one of the Castle gentlemen, tearing up the letter that contained them. To speak of these women is to speak of their sexual vicissitudes. And theirs are the stories that energize village life, which is otherwise amorphous and inert, and expose the exacerbated tension between the village and the Castle. K., then, must inevitably become intimate with these women if he wants to gain any degree of familiarity with those places. Sex for him is the only lingua franca.

The effectiveness of the way of women , K.’s chosen path, is confirmed when at last the Castle, in the person of secretary Erlanger, must ask a favor of K. And the favor in question regards Frieda. The Castle wants her to return to her post in the barroom, since even an insignificant alteration in Klamm’s routine might in some way disturb him. Or more precisely: the possibility that Klamm might be disturbed might itself disturb the other officials who “watch over Klamm’s well-being.” Erlanger likens the favor asked of K. to reversing the “slightest alteration of a desk, the removal of a stain that had been there forever”—in this comparison the “stain” corresponds to Frieda herself. And the more he insists on the favor’s smallness, even its irrelevance, the more suspect it seems, as if Erlanger wanted to conceal the fact that its importance is actually enormous, so enormous that “peace” among the officials, and therefore within the entire apparatus of the Castle, hangs in the balance. Erlanger lowers himself to the point of telling K.: “If you acquit yourself well in this little matter, it might turn out to be useful for you sometime down the road.” Here, for a moment, K. witnesses the humiliation of the Castle, which is normally the source of every humiliation. As in a dialogue between diplomats or merchants or criminals, Erlanger hints that K.’s friendly little gesture might be answered one day, in turn, by another friendly gesture, maybe even a more substantial one.

But K. has by now developed too fine an ear for Castle-speak not to detect Erlanger’s undertone of “derision.” In fact, even if K. wanted to prove himself eager to bring about Erlanger’s desired result, he couldn’t, simply because that result has already been achieved. Frieda has already reached an agreement with the landlord to resume her service behind the bar. They merely agreed to postpone her return by twenty-four hours so as not to inflict on Pepi “the shame of having to leave the barroom right away.” K. was informed of all this only after it was a done deal. And where is Frieda in that moment? A few steps away, in bed with the assistant Jeremias. How could Frieda have resisted her “childhood playmate”? And besides, she’s taking care of him, since he’s a bit of a wreck after the hardships of the preceding days.

Thus even the one instance when K. is called on to intervene confirms the rule of the place: that, whatever the Castle’s orders might be — and they could be “unfavorable or favorable, and even the favorable ones always had a final unfavorable core”—they always, for K., “passed over his head.” Why? Evidently, reflects K., because “his position was too lowly for him to be able to intervene or even to silence them so that his own voice would be heard.”

Is Erlanger, then, simply making fun of him, asking his help in resolving a matter that has already been resolved? One can’t be sure. Perhaps Erlanger, with the unerring perspicacity typical of Castle officials, is using Frieda’s return to the barroom as a simple pretext, when all he really wants is for K. to agree to behave in a certain way toward her: to declare his own willingness to make her return to her place in the village order. Leading her back to the barroom would be the same as handing her back over to Klamm.

It’s true that, minutes earlier, Frieda told K.: “I’ll never, ever come back to you, I shudder to think of such a thing.” But she was referring to a life with K. in the village. And just before that, Frieda had admitted that she still daydreamed about what would have happened had they “gone away at once that very night,” the first night. By now they would be “safe somewhere.” But “safe” from what? The threat that underlies each moment of life around the Castle is on the verge of surfacing. Is that, perhaps, what Erlanger feared? And perhaps he also feared the sentiment that Frieda now confesses to K.: “To be close to you is, believe me, the only dream I dream; there is no other.” If this is the case, then the favor Erlanger asked of K. is to smother his fiancée’s only dream. Such a deed would certainly redound to K.’s credit. It is the only deed for which the Castle seems willing to reward him.

When K. reaches the village beneath the Castle, he repeats with the women whom he encounters the gestures and reactions of Josef K. at the beginning of his trial. Josef K., like K., is made to feel like “the first foreigner to come along,” as soon as a woman lays eyes on him. In his case it’s the washerwoman, the wife of the court usher, and Josef K. immediately wonders whether she’s looking at him that way because she’s “had her fill of court officials.” It’s the same sort of disenchantment with a high-level official that K. attributes to Frieda. As for Josef K., he immediately begins to investigate the possible “relationships” between the washerwoman and the high-level officials, in order to use them to his advantage — just as K., according to Pepi, has become engaged to Frieda only because he’s attracted to her “connections that no one else knows about” with Castle officials.

Josef K. elicits the same kind of reactions from women that K. does. The washerwoman, Frieda, Pepi: these women who seem at times to be at the disposition of the officials, as in a garrison brothel, all dream immediately of being carried off by the ignorant stranger — Josef K. or K. They want to emigrate, run away forever. At the end of their first conversation, the washerwoman, already moving off toward another man, whispers to Josef K.: “If you take me with you, I’ll go wherever you like, you can do with me as you like, I’ll be happy just to be far away from here for as long as possible, even better forever.”

Of course, there’s a big difference between Frieda’s lover and the washerwoman’s. Klamm is a high-level official, whose name suffices to inspire reverence in servants and gentlemen alike. Many doubt that K. will ever succeed in speaking a single word to him. But Bertold is merely a student: small, bowlegged, with a short, reddish beard. He summons the washerwoman, his erotic slave, “with just a finger.” The washerwoman considers him “a repellent person” and in his presence calls him a “little monster.” It’s said of him, however, that he “would in all likelihood one day attain a high-level official position.” This looming future is what enables him to exert his “tyranny” over the washerwoman. As soon as he sees her, he touches her, kisses her, strips her, and throws her to the ground, regardless of who might be present, whether it’s the entire crowd gathered in the hearing room or Josef K. alone. Her body, to Josef K., looks “luxuriant, supple, and warm in her dark dress of coarse, heavy material,” and the student presses against it wherever he can: up against a wall or window, on the floor. The washerwoman seems to detest the student, but Josef K. suspects she loves him, and he is therefore jealous of him — as he is of the examining magistrate who merely saw the washerwoman asleep and told her that “he’d never forget that vision.” Later he sent her, “via the student, whom he trusts a great deal and with whom he collaborates,” a pair of silk stockings that the washerwoman finds “beautiful but really too nice and not suitable” for her.