Roberto Calasso - K.

The confraternity of girls, as Pepi tells it, is drastically opposed to everything that takes place outside. Founded on complete promiscuity and interchangeability, it is ready to receive K. as if he were a new girl, there to give a hand with the work, though exactly how is never clear. At the same time, K. would retain the ancient attributes of the male. Because of him, the three girls “would no longer be afraid at night.” They would be “happy” to have “a man to help and protect them.” And each — Pepi lets this be understood without saying it, since she always retains a certain shyness when speaking of sex — would offer herself in turn as his lover. But with K. it is enough that she, like a wise courtesan, drops the hint: “You’ll like Emilie too, but you’ll especially like Henriette.” In that tiny room, charm and pleasure reign. The girls may know that theirs is a “miserable life,” but they don’t by any means want out. As Pepi says, “We make our life there as charming as possible,” so that “even with just three of us we never get bored.” And she sighs, thinking of K.’s arrival: “Oh, it will be fun.”

The girls’ complicity has a solid foundation: “That’s precisely what kept us together, knowing that all three of us were equally denied a future.” The maid’s room must be enough in itself, because there will never be anything outside of it. Occasions for rancor or resentment don’t ever arise. And even when Pepi gets promoted to barmaid and for four days leaves the room, the other girls do not feel betrayed. In fact they help her get her new clothes ready. One selflessly offers Pepi “some expensive fabric, her treasure,” which so many times she had let the others admire and which so many times she had dreamed of someday wearing. Yet now, “since Pepi needed it, she offered it up.” Then, sitting in their beds, one above the other, they begin to sew, while singing. At the same time, when Pepi returns, “they probably won’t be astonished and, just to please her, they’ll cry a little and lament her fate.” So K. has nothing to worry about either: “You’re not obligated in any way, you won’t be tied forever to our room, as we are.” Words of profound psychological insight. The maid’s room is the only paradise where K. can come and go without incurring obligations or violating prohibitions. As long as he keeps their secret.

With the tone of a country girl who knows a thing or two about life and speaks plainly, Pepi at each turn suggests to K. the most radical and extreme solutions. A little earlier, she insinuated that the act that would make him her “chosen” would be the burning down of the Gentlemen’s Inn, “so that not a trace is left.” Now she lets him glimpse another possibility: a tiny erotic paradise, stashed covertly within that same Gentlemen’s Inn, and founded — in the way of the ancient Mysteries — on a secret. Like so many other hierodules of forbidden cults, the three girls are “enchanted by the fact that all this must remain a secret.” As a result, they will be “bound together even more closely than before.” K. need do nothing else but join them. And here Pepi’s appeal to K. resounds in all its pathos: “Come, oh please, come stay with us!”

Should we believe Pepi? Certainly her immediacy, her enthusiasm, even her eloquence tempt us to go along with her. But on the other hand there are certain conflicting, confusing elements to her story. Pepi concludes her torrential outpouring to K., after she has abandoned her post as barmaid, by describing her life with Henriette and Emilie — and by inviting K. to join them. By the end of her peroration, the maid’s room has emerged as a place of happiness, a caesura with respect to everything around it. But as we float in this mist, we might recall that Pepi has already spoken in a completely different way about that room — in the course of the same monologue. She has described it as a “tiny, dark room” where the girls work “as if in a mine,” convinced that they will spend “years, or even worse their whole lives, without being noticed by anyone,” often in the grip of terror, as when they hear something or someone creeping outside their room, which is continually ransacked by brutal “commissions” that rummage through their paltry things in search of lost or purloined records and subject them to “insults and threats.” And no peace: “Racket for half the night and racket starting at dawn.” How can they make room for K. in that slave’s life? How can Pepi make him see that room as a place of hidden delight? And how can they keep their secret?

Which of the two versions is true? This time we cannot evade the question with the usual contrivances (different point of view, different mood). The point of view is the same: Pepi’s. Her entire monologue has the same tonality — and the two opposing descriptions come a few minutes apart, one after the other.

Here we must look backward. As Kafka found his narrative substance in something that preceded even the division of gods and demons, indeed of the powers in general, so the narration itself seems to have gone back with him to the origin of the variants, to that most mysterious of points where every story begins to branch and proliferate, while still remaining the same story. Such branching is the lifeblood of every mythology. But Kafka had no rites or rhapsodists, which might have varied and recombined his gestures and meanings for him, at his disposal. He had to act with no help from the world. Alone before a sheet of paper — and using the latest form the times allowed stories to take, that of the novel — Kafka wove Pepi’s monologue. After having listened quietly to it, K. says to her: “What a wild imagination you have, Pepi.” And then: “These are nothing more than dreams born in your dark, narrow maid’s room down below, which is the proper place for them, but here in the middle of the barroom they sound very strange.” These stories, like Pepi’s clothes and her hairstyle, are “the offspring of that darkness and of those beds in your room.”

K.’s reaction to Pepi’s barroom monologue — he shakes his head — isn’t so different from the way the world would react to Kafka’s writings, which were also full of dreams born in a dark subterranean room. Kafka in fact once made this explicit: “We each have our own way of climbing back out of the subterranean world; I do it by writing.” That world that presented itself as a cellar is where Kafka saw himself:

It has already occurred to me many times that for me the best way to live would be to stay, with my writing materials and a lamp, in the innermost room of a vast, closed cellar. Food would be brought for me and would always be left far from my room, on the other side of the cellar’s outermost door. The journey to reach the food, in my dressing gown, beneath the cellar’s vaulted ceiling, would be my one stroll. Then I would return to my table, I would eat slowly and carefully, and I would immediately begin writing again.

Kafka wrote that way about his cellar to Felice, to frighten her. Pepi spoke that way to K. about her maid’s room, to attract him. The chambermaids’ tiny room, crowded with bows and petticoats, and the bare cellar with the table and the writing materials are analogous sites. Carved with difficulty into the solid surface of the world, they are nooks that host hidden life, imperceptible from without, life that can be both paradise and hell at once.

Pepi desperately loves K., loves him “as she has never loved anyone before,” loves him like a little girl who reads romances and dreams of a foreigner who will carry her off: “a hero, a rescuer of maidens.” Through her speaks a numberless female population: princesses and slaves, bourgeois ladies and peasant girls, office workers and waitresses. Whatever their social position, their words are the same, their devotion is the same — and their dreams are always “wild.”