Winfried Sebald: Vertigo

Beyle drew Mme Gherardi's attention to an old boat, its mainmast fractured two-thirds of the way up, its buff-coloured sails hanging in folds. It appeared to have made fast only a short time ago, and two men in dark silver-buttoned tunics were at that moment carrying a bier ashore on which, under a large, frayed, flower-patterned silk cloth, lay what was evidently a human form. The scene affected Mme Gherardi so adversely that she insisted on quitting Riva without delay.

The further they penetrated into the mountains, the cooler and greener the landscape became, much to the delight of Mme Gherardi, for whom the dust-laden summers of her native city were so often an ordeal. That sombre moment in Riva, which crossed her memory like a shadow several times, was presently forgotten, and gave way to such high spirits that in Innsbruck, for the sheer pleasure of it, she bought a broad-brimmed Tyrolean hat of the kind familiar to us from pictures showing Andreas Hofer's rebellion, and persuaded Beyle, who had been meaning to turn back at this point, to continue further down the Inn valley with her, past Schwaz and Kufstein and onwards to Salzburg. There they stayed for several days, visiting the famed underground galleries of the Hallein salt mines, where one of the miners made Mme Gherardi a present of a twig which was encrusted with thousands of crystals. When they returned to the surface of the earth once again, Beyle writes, the rays of the sun set off in it a manifold glittering such as he had only seen flashing from diamonds as ladies revolved with their partners in a ballroom blazing with light.

The protracted crystallisation process, which had transformed the dead twig into a truly miraculous object, appeared to Beyle, by his own account, as an allegory for the growth of love in the salt mines of the soul. He expounded this idea at length to Mme Gherardi. She for her part, however, was not prepared to sacrifice the childish bliss that filled her that day in order to explore with Beyle the deeper meaning of what was doubtless a very pretty allegory, as she sardonically put it. Beyle took this as another example of the obstacles that so often appeared in his path as he continued his quest for a woman who might accord with his intellectual life, and he remarks that it was then he realised how even his most extravagant efforts would never be able to overcome those obstacles. In noting this, he broached a subject that was to occupy him as a writer for years to come. And so now, in 1826, approaching forty, he sat alone on a bench in the shade of two fine trees, enclosed by a low wall in the garden of the monastery of the Minori Osservanti high above Lake Albano and, with the cane he

now generally carried with him, slowly inscribed the initials of his former lovers in the dust, like the enigmatic runes of his life. The initials stand for Virginie Kubly, Angela

Pietragrua, Adèle Rebuffel, Mélanie Guilbert, Mina de Griesheim, Alexandrine Petit, Angéline {qui je n’ ai jamais aimé) Bereyter, Métilde Dembowski, and for Clémentine, Giulia, and Mme Azur, whose first name he no longer remembered. Just as he no longer understood the names of these stars now unfamiliar to him, as he phrases it, so too it seemed ultimately incomprehensible to him, when he wrote De l'Amour, that whenever he tried to persuade Mme Gherardi to believe in love, she made him replies now of a melancholy sort, and now quite tart. It especially pained Beyle, however, at a time when he was beginning to accept with some reluctance the foundations of her philosophy, to find Mme Gherardi, as occurred often enough, according a certain value after all to the illusions of love he associated with the crystallisation of salt. At such moments he was horrified by a sudden awareness of his own insufficiency and a profound sense of failure. Beyle distinctly recalls that this horror came upon him on one occasion in the autumn of the year in which they had made their journey to the Alps together, when they were riding on the Cascata del Reno and discussing the torments the painter Oldofredi underwent in the name of love, which were then the talk of the town. Beyle had still not abandoned hope of winning the favour of Mme Gherardi, who was usually well disposed to his quick-witted conversation, and when she began to speak of a divine happiness beyond comparison with anything else in life, quite to herself as it seemed to him, a feeling of dread overcame him, and he described Oldofredi, doubtless thinking more of himself than of the painter, as a wretched foreigner. Thereupon he fell back, allowing the gap between his horse and that of Mme Gherardi — who, as has been remarked, may have existed only in his imagination — to widen steadily, and they rode the remaining three miles to Bologna without exchanging another word.

Beyle wrote his great novels between 1829 and 1842, plagued constantly by the symptoms of syphilis. Difficulties in swallowing, swellings in his armpits, and pains in his atrophying testicles troubled him especially. Having now become a meticulous observer, he kept a minute record of the fluctuating state of his health and in due course noted

that his sleeplessness, his giddiness, the roaring in his ears, his palpitating pulse, and the shaking that was at times so bad that he could not use a knife and fork, were related not so much to the disease itself as to the extremely toxic substances with which he had dosed himself for years. His condition improved as little by little he stopped taking quicksilver and iodide of potassium; but he realised that his heart was gradually failing. As had long been his habit, Beyle calculated, with growing frequency, the age to which he might expect to live in cryptographic forms which, in their scrawled, ominous abstraction, seem like harbingers of death. Six years

of arduous work still remained to him when he jotted down this impenetrable note. On the evening of the 22nd of March, 1842, with the approach of spring already in the air, he fell to the pavement in rue Neuve-des-Capucines in an apoplectic fit. He was taken to his apartments in what is now rue Danielle-Casanova, and there, in the early hours of the following morning, without regaining consciousness, he died.

In October 1980 I travelled from England, where I had then been living for nearly twenty-five years in a county which was almost always under grey skies, to Vienna, hoping that a change of place would help me get over a particularly difficult period in my life. In Vienna, however, I found that the days proved inordinately long, now they were not taken up by my customary routine of writing and gardening tasks, and I literally did not know where to turn. Early every morning I would set out and walk without aim or purpose through the streets of the inner city, through the Leopoldstadt and the Josefstadt. Later, when I looked at the map, I saw to my astonishment that none of my journeys had taken me beyond a precisely defined sickle-or crescent-shaped area, the outermost points of which were the Venediger Au by the Praterstern and the great hospital precincts of the Alsergrund. If the paths I had followed had been inked in, it would have seemed as though a man had kept trying out new tracks and connections over and over, only to be thwarted each time by the limitations of his reason, imagination or will-power, and obliged to turn back again. My traversing of the city, often continuing for hours, thus had very clear bounds, and yet at no point did my incomprehensible behaviour become apparent to me: that is to say, my continual walking and my reluctance to cross certain lines which were both invisible and, I presume, wholly arbitrary. All I know is that I found it impossible even to use public transport and, say, simply take the 41 tram out to Potzleinsdorf or the 58 to Schònbrunn and take a stroll in the Potzleinsdorf Park, the Dorotheerwald or the Fasangarten, as I had frequently done in the past. Turning in to a coffee house or bar, on the other hand, presented no particular problem. Indeed, whenever I was somewhat fortified and refreshed I regained a sense of normality for a while and, buoyed up by a touch of confidence, there were moments when I supposed that I could put an end to the muted condition I had been in for days, and make a telephone call. As it happened, however, the three or four people I might have cared to talk to were never there, and could not be induced to pick up the receiver no matter how long I let the phone ring. There is something peculiarly dispiriting about the emptiness that wells up when, in a strange city, one dials the same telephone numbers in vain. If no one answers, it is a disappointment of huge significance, quite as if these few random ciphers were a matter of life or death. So what else could I do, when I had put the coins that jingled out of the box back into my pocket, but wander aimlessly around until well into the night. Often, probably because I was so very tired, I believed I saw someone I knew walking ahead of me. Those who appeared in these hallucinations, for that is what they were, were always people I had not thought of for years, or who had long since departed, such as Mathild Seelos or the one-armed village clerk Fürgut. On one occasion, in Gonzagagasse, I even thought I recognised the poet Dante, banished from his home town on pain of being burned at the stake. For some considerable time he walked a short distance ahead of me, with the familiar cowl on his head, distinctly taller than the people in the street, yet he passed by them unnoticed. When I walked faster in order to catch him up he went down Heinrichsgasse, but when I reached the corner he was nowhere to be seen. After one or two turns of this kind I began to sense in me a vague apprehension, which manifested itself as a feeling of vertigo.