Roberto Calasso - K.

When the landlord and landlady, the night before, rushed in to reproach K. for having remained in the hallway during the distribution of records, K. noticed at once that the landlady was strangely attired, in a “dark dress, with a full skirt that rustled like silk, poorly buttoned and laced.” And he wondered: “Where could she have possibly found it in the rush?” Now the landlady shows him. Right there in the office, next to the iron strongbox, she slides open the doors of a vast, deep wardrobe. Like a satrap, she unveils her treasure: numberless dresses, these too in a range of dark shades, pressed one against the other. And then she adds: “Upstairs I have two more wardrobes full of dresses, two wardrobes, each nearly as large as this one.” After this revelation, the dialogue becomes clenched. K. has the nerve to say: “I expected something like this, it’s as I said, you’re not merely a landlady, you have other goals.” And the landlady replies: “My only goal is to dress well.” Here the expression “to dress well” seems to belong to the figurative language of the arcana imperii . One can imagine Plato and the tyrant Dionysius, in Syracuse, exchanging similar words. Each remark could be said by either of them. And maybe Plato was told at some point what the landlady now tells K.: “You’re either a fool or a child, or else a very malicious and dangerous man. Get out of here, now!”

The role of landlady — whether played by Gardena, who oversees the more modest Bridge Inn, or by the landlady of the Gentlemen’s Inn — presupposes a hidden relationship with the Castle. And K. immediately feels its pull. Thus the astute Pepi can hint that K. is less interested in Frieda than in Gardena, since “when one speaks of Frieda one is really speaking of the landlady, whose creature Frieda is.”

Gardena is the chief hierodule of Klamm’s cult. Frieda is in line to succeed her, but she is ready to abjure. The dresses that the landlady of the Gentlemen’s Inn keeps shut away in her vast wardrobe are the temple vestments. Just as lo’s brief visits from Zeus gave way to a long life of wandering, remembrance, and despair, so Gardena survives by contemplating the little mementos she was able to pilfer from Klamm. And her devotion has grown in the absence of her beloved. She’s now the guardian of the inviolable space that surrounds him wherever he goes. That explains why Gardena has become K.’s most tenacious, most “powerful enemy.” She spotted him immediately, just as the high-level agents of the Ochrana could spot a young terrorist in a shapeless mass of students.

Massive and solemn, the only bearer of gravitas in the dense air of the inn she rules over, Gardena is heir to countless generations who, even before being devoted to the brahman or to Yahweh, were devoted to certain sharp-eyed Brahmins or sons of Aaron who concerned themselves above all with keeping the locus and liturgy of authority as separate as possible from that surging, shapeless, impure expanse that was the rest of the world. For Gardena, K. is the grain of sand in the gears. She is his great, unrelenting adversary; she clashes with him more than anyone else — and understands him better than anyone else. Or understands, at least, how dangerous he can be.

The landlady of the Gentlemen’s Inn is profoundly akin to Gardena, but on a level of higher formality: she is a devotee of an office, which by its nature she doesn’t consider to be in the service of anything else. Indeed, the office is the goal toward which all else converges. The true officials are those who protect the officials. Such is the landlady.

K.’s stay in the village rests upon two pillars: his conversations with the two landladies. Both instruct him, rebuke him, and restrain him. Gardena, the landlady of the Bridge Inn, is lower in rank and more exposed to contact with ordinary villagers. Also more vulnerable and pathetic. The other, the landlady of the Gentlemen’s Inn, is occupied exclusively with the worship and service of the officials. She is harsher and crueler than Gardena. But they share the same knowledge. What K. at one point thinks about Gardena could be said about either: “An intriguing nature, which seems to operate like the wind, senselessly, following strange remote orders that could never be fathomed.”

The higher circle, to which K. would like to gain access, where indeed he would like to take up residence, since he has “come here to stay,” is certainly not the home of good, as benevolent interpreters say, nor is it the home of evil, as malevolent interpreters say; rather it is the site where good and evil arrange themselves into shapes that can’t be recognized or distinguished by those who have encountered them only in other circles. The ancient Chinese would not be surprised by this; they would say that they are the two elements united in the Holy Place. But who nowadays is able to reason like the ancient Chinese? The landlady of the Gentlemen’s Inn is the only one capable of adoring and venerating the Holy Place as such , without requiring any further explanations. Everyone else — not just the foreigner K., but the villagers too — seems divided between memories of blessings enjoyed and curses suffered. They agree on one point only: they would rather remain silent, like the survivors of a patrol that has escaped an ambush. They don’t feel like talking and absentmindedly run their fingers over their scars.

The landlady of the Gentlemen’s Inn is the true guardian of the orthodoxy. For her the distances separating the parties — that is, everyone — and the Castle are never large enough. Her argument is first of all an aesthetic one, and derives from her “pathological striving for refinement.” Simply put, it wasn’t pretty when the parties thronged the same spaces frequented by officials. “If it’s really necessary and they actually must come,” she would say, “at least, for heaven’s sake, let them come single file.” For the landlady the parties, whoever they are and whatever they want to discuss, are merely varieties of postulants, and scarcely more dignified. Essentially, they are all weak-natured, incapable of getting by on their own — hindrances, some worse than others, to the running of the Castle. That’s why the landlady, little by little, drove the parties out: first into a hallway, then onto the stairs, then onto the landing, then into the barroom — and finally out into the street. “But even that wasn’t enough for her. She found it unbearable to be constantly ‘under siege,’ that’s how she put it, in her own house.” How pretty it would all be, if only it weren’t for the traffic of parties. Ultimately, she can’t see what the point of it is. “To get the front steps dirty,” an official once told her, in an angry tone. But the landlady was careful not to ask herself whether his sarcasm might have been directed at the question she had asked. Indeed, “she took pleasure in quoting that phrase.” Her latest idea is to have a building constructed, facing the Gentlemen’s Inn, expressly for the waiting parties. She speaks of it often. But even that project would be nothing but a stopgap. The ideal solution would be to prohibit the parties from ever setting foot in the Gentlemen’s Inn. Unfortunately, the officials themselves are against that.

The Castle gentlemen — at least those officials who occasionally make appearances in the village — often behave more like artists or eccentrics than employees of a vast administration. They always regard themselves as just passing through. Something impels them, makes them appear to be thinking about something other than what’s in front of them. Even at the lowest level, that of the secretaries, they are easily irritated, because they lead “an uneasy life, not fit for everyone.” But even if it’s true that “the job is hard on the nerves,” they won’t give it up for anything, for they can “no longer do without this kind of work.” Any other job “would seem insipid” to them. Like all artists, they don’t know the “difference between ordinary time and work time.” Even when sleeping, they keep a notebook under the covers. They deal with business-related matters seated in the barroom or in bed, letting it be understood that these are the best, most fitting moments for doing so. At times, they take those matters up just before falling asleep, as if they can’t disengage from them and want to carry them even into slumber. Some — like Bürgel — admit that they slip directly from office conversations into sleep, and vice versa. They are loath to move “with all their papers” to another location, as if a swirling wake of words adheres to them, has by now become part of their bodies. Some obscure, unending toil seems to be taking place within them. And it must be exhaustion that sometimes leads them — in order to distract themselves, redirect their energies, exercise their limbs, and above all “recover from the constant intellectual exertion”—to take up “carpentry, fine mechanics, and the like.” In this they are much like Kafka, who at various times sought refuge from the obsessive nature of his thoughts in carpentry and gardening. Certainly the Castle characters are more persistent, since even at night hammering can be heard coming from their windowless rooms in the Gentlemen’s Inn.