Thomas Bernhard - Woodcutters

Her outfits did her no good, I thought, sitting in the wing chair, nor did her husband’s do him any good. His attempts at upward mobility into the aristocracy came to grief even more pitifully and calamitously than hers. It was, as I know, his life’s ambition to be an aristocrat, nothing less: the sad truth is that he would rather have been a witless aristocrat than a respectable composer. As long as I have known him he has always dressed like a Styrian count, and of course he would never be seen without the ostentatious signet ring on his left hand. He has always cut a ludicrous figure; though not lacking in wit, as people always remarked, he was a hopeless figure of fun. Auersberger isn’t stupid — anything but, I thought, sitting in the wing chair — but in this one respect, his desire to be an aristocrat, a count at the very least, he was always the most idiotic of social climbers, I thought as I sat in the wing chair. At Kilb he made himself look vulgar and ridiculous by screaming This food ’ s abominable , in the same way, it now occurred to me, as he’s made himself look vulgar and ridiculous hundreds and thousands of times in my presence. Whenever he straightened his neck and pursed his little lips to pass sentence of death on food or drink or some other trifling matter, what came out was not witty, but pathetic — merely foolish and distasteful. And the most distasteful thing of all about him is that, although officially he is called Auersberger — which is naturally what I have always called him — he once decided, in an access of folie de grandeur , to call himself Auersberg : on first meeting his future wife, the daughter of the country gentry, in the Gentzgasse (where, as I happen to know, she started off as his landlady), he decided to chop off his tail — in other words the last syllable of his surname — and proceeded to call himself Auersberg , in order to give the impression that he belonged to the ancient princely family of that name. Were revolting not the proper term to describe this perverse castration of his own name, one would have to ignore all the rules of the game and call it simply pathetic, I thought, sitting in the wing chair. Auersberger’s conduct at Kilb was no different from what I was accustomed to when we knew each other in the fifties. He hasn’t changed in the least, I thought, sitting in the wing chair. In the Iron Hand , after two or three glasses of wine, he began to play the clown for the benefit of all the people at his table, I thought, putting on his infantile circus act as he once more became conscious of his central role, and upstaging everyone else , as they say. And when he said, This food ’ s abominable , I went to sit with John and the woman from the general store, because I found both the Auersbergers, in their different ways, quite insufferable. Hardly had I set eyes on them in their tasteless clothes — her in her blue print Styrian dirndl and him in his Styrian linen jacket — than I felt sick, realizing at once that neither had changed since we had last known one another — that the last twenty years, which had wrought such enormous changes in the world, had passed these people by without leaving so much as a trace. How pathetic and repellent the Auersbergers were, sitting at their table in the Iron Hand , I thought as I sat in the wing chair, yet they were still surrounded by all their friends from the old days, as though they were the center of some magic circle. No matter how ridiculous and how worthless this couple may be, I thought, sitting in the wing chair, they still have the same hangers-on as they had in the fifties, twenty or thirty years ago. It was as though nothing had changed in the last twenty years: the Auersbergers were once more surrounded by the same artistic coterie that had surrounded them thirty years ago. What can the reason be? I wondered, sitting in the wing chair. But I could find no answer. I was suddenly intrigued by the question of how this couple, neither of whom earned any money, could still continue to exist, and it struck me how inexhaustible their wealth must originally have been, for after thirty-five years of marriage it still not only protected them and kept them alive, but enabled them to lead a life of self-indulgence. Auersberger himself had nothing but his original genius, I thought, sitting in the wing chair, a quite remarkable musical gift, as well as an immense verbal talent, and a quite extraordinary intelligence bordering on insanity, yet he hadn’t a penny to his name, except for the pittance he had earned for years as a teacher at the Vienna Conservatory before his marriage. His wife, by contrast, whose maiden name was von Reyer ,came from a family I had always assumed to be fairly affluent, but now know to have been really rich. One of the sources of her wealth was a number of plots of land around Maria Zaal which her father had bought for a song between the wars, among them the so-called manor house ,a five-hundred-year-old building that had once belonged to the provincial government of Salzburg. It was here that the couple spent the whole of the summer when the Gentzgasse became too stifling and oppressive; like all affluent Viennese, they would escape to the country for the summer, though unlike most they did not wait until late July, but left the capital at the end of May. Their property is all situated around Maria Zaal, which used to be one of the most beautiful villages in Styria, famous especially for its large church, formerly a place of pilgrimage, an architectural jewel, part Romanesque, part Gothic, which the local people respectfully call the minster. The Auersbergers have been living off their property for almost thirty-five years by gradually selling it off, I thought, sitting in the wing chair. An uncle of hers, a well-known Styrian lawyer, has been parceling it off and disposing of it for them by degrees. It’s heartbreaking to see what’s become of Maria Zaal through the sale of the Auersbergers’ property, I thought, sitting in the wing chair. Where twenty years ago there were the most beautiful fields and meadows there are now dozens of detached houses, each as ugly as the next and mostly prefabricated, which purchasers can order direct from various warehouses in the vicinity, horrid little concrete cubes with roofs made of cheap corrugated asbestos concrete and nailed to the main structure by incompetent local contractors. Where there was once a copse or a thicket, where a garden once blossomed in spring and its glorious colors faded in the fall, there is now a rank growth of the concrete tumors beloved of our modern age, which no longer has any thought for landscape or nature, but is consumed by politically motivated greed and by the base proletarian mania for concrete, I thought, sitting in the wing chair. Every year one or more of the Auersbergers’ properties are sold off to people who are gradually ruining Maria Zaal. In fact it is ruined already, as I saw for myself when I passed through two or three years ago — incognito as it were — on my way back from Italy to Vienna. I could hardly believe my eyes, I recalled in the wing chair, when I saw the extent to which Maria Zaal had been destroyed simply through the sale of the Auersbergers’ land. Each time a plot of land is sold by the Auersbergers — who do not earn any money, doubtless because they think they have no need to — a bit of the natural landscape around Maria Zaal is destroyed. Maria Zaal is actually destroyed already, for the truth is that, having been one of the most beautiful villages in Styria twenty years ago, it is now one of the ugliest, thanks to the gross irresponsibility of the Auersbergers, I thought, sitting in the wing chair. They have this Styrian jewel on their consciences, I thought, and it suddenly occurred to me that the blame for the spoliation of the countryside around Maria Zaal lay not with the little people of the region, whom our revolting age has infected with building hysteria, but with the Auersbergers — not with the people who are usually blamed, whose repulsive houses have wreaked havoc throughout almost the whole area around this once unique village, who have simply