Thomas Bernhard - Woodcutters

shatout their houses into the landscape — not just here, but throughout Austria — because they have never been told how to build properly: the blame lay with the Auersbergers lurking in the background, who every year persuade their obliging uncle to sell off one or two of the remaining plots so that they can go on leading their more or less futile social life without having to lift a finger, I thought as I sat in the wing chair. Perfidious society masturbators —what an apt description! I thought, sitting in the wing chair and recalling how Fritz the tapestry artist had once used it to their faces. Auersberger wanted to be a composer, yet this successor of Webern has become nothing but a degenerate society ape who’s grown stupid on the proceeds of his wife’s fortune. Seldom have I been so enraged by the Auersbergers as I was that evening. People like Joana kill themselves, I thought, sitting in the wing chair, while parasites and society apes like the Auersbergers live on and on and on, getting older and older and older, boring themselves out of their minds all their lives and remaining utterly futile. People like Joana end up with self-tied nooses around their necks and are stuffed into plastic bags and dumped in the ground as cheaply as possible, while people like the Auersbergers don’t know how many dinner parties to give for how many Burgtheater actors in order to survive their sickening boredom and their mindless world-weariness, I thought, sitting in the wing chair. People like Joana have to be content for years with the bare necessities of life and finally kill themselves, while people like the Auersbergers have everything in abundance and reach a ripe old age to no purpose, I thought. A person like Joana is finally abandoned by all these people, because they can no longer be bothered with her, yet they continue to flock around people like the Auersbergers just as they did twenty years ago. These dinners given by the Auersbergers are just part of a perverse routine, I told myself, sitting in the wing chair. This couple has a house in the country and throws it open to all this artistic riffraff from the capital who are eager for a breath of country air, not out of philanthropy — naturally not — but out of sickening boredom and crass self-interest. They use all these people, who continue to turn up under the guise of old friendship, for their own purposes, offending, abusing and demoralizing them, just as for years they offended, abused and demoralized me, and all this Viennese artistic riffraff, as I chose to call the people who were standing or sitting around in the music room, actually come to the Gentzgasse to show their gratitude. Like me, all these people standing or sitting around in the music room were guests of the Auersbergers at Maria Zaal for years, letting themselves be used by their hosts, helping them cope with their rural boredom, and joining in their rural extravagances for days, weeks, months and years, without realizing that they were being violated, exploited and abused by the Auersbergers. They were invited in order to be abused, they weren’t invited out of friendship or affection or whatever other absurd motive the Auersbergers alleged, I thought, sitting in the wing chair. The Auersbergers invited me to Maria Zaal to paper over the cracks of their ramshackle marriage, not, as they pretended, to give me a holiday. They thought I would be able to disentangle the knots in their marriage — though of course they didn’t say anything about this. They made out that they wanted to spoil me for a few weeks or months, even for a whole year or for twoyears ,but this was by no means all they wanted. The first time they invited me to Maria Zaal I may have seemed run down, neglected and half starved, but they did not invite me there to nurse me back to health: they quite unscrupulously lured me into their trap at Maria Zaal to make their matrimonial hell endurable — not because I was an undernourished youth in need of care and affection, but because they saw me as a means to an end, a Salzburg clown they had discovered who would rescue them from the hell of their marriage. And I was too naive to recognize the trap they set for me, and so I groped my way into it and at once started playing the Salzburg fool for them in their frightful Styrian retreat — and I went on playing the fool more and more, I now reflected as I sat in the wing chair. I remember how, when I left the Mozarteum, I screwed up my diploma into a sticky ball with both hands and stuffed it in my trouser pocket, and then at Fritz’s birthday party in the Sebastiansplatz they invited me to Maria Zaal, I recalled in the wing chair, and I accepted their invitation because I did not know I was being invited to their matrimonial hell. They pounced unscrupulously on the naive youth from Salzburg and invited him to their residence at Maria Zaal. And I accepted their invitation, only later realizing that it had been madness to do so. People like the Auersbergers tell us that they have money and a beautiful big estate, an enormous estate with a beautiful big house on it, an enormous house, and as we ourselves have none of these things, we walk into their trap, I thought. We let ourselves be impressed by their wealth and walk into their trap. Seeing only the facade and taking all they say at its face value, we walk into their trap, I thought, sitting in the wing chair. They tell us about a big, old house with fine vaulting, about long walks in grounds that all belong to them, about delicious meals in their garden and daily car trips from one castle to another, and, being impressed, we walk into their trap. They describe a rustic life of absolute luxury, and, being impressed, we walk into their luxurious rustic trap, I thought, sitting in the wing chair. Again and again they talk about the things they own, about their endless wealth ,though not in so many words, and we let ourselves be impressed and walk into their trap. They talk about their well-furnished kitchens and their well-stocked cellars and the thousands of volumes in their libraries, and, letting ourselves be impressed, we walk into their trap. They tell us about their stock ponds and their water mills and their sawmills, but not about their beds, and we are impressed by them and fall into their trap — and into their beds, I thought. And if we have more or less come to the end of the road, as I had in the early fifties, and don’t know where to go next, we allow ourselves to be profoundlyimpressed by them and are only too glad to walk into their trap. I had been at a loss to know what to do when I left the Mozarteum, and so I went to Vienna, but Vienna offered me no escape — only cold, brutal hopelessness — and so naturally I walked into the Auersbergers’ trap, and it proved almost fatal, I thought, sitting in the wing chair. Their instinct was unerring, I thought, in the early fifties: I was the best possible bet for the Auersbergers, whom I first met at that time, though suddenly I don’t know how or where I met them. I know I met Joana in the Sebastiansplatz through Jeannie Billroth, I now recalled, but I no longer know where I met the Auersbergers. I suddenly asked myself, Where did I meet them? But I no longer knew — I had forgotten. I kept trying to remember, but it was no good. I’ve often had such momentary spells of debility recently, spells of mental debility, I thought, sitting in the wing chair, and it was hardly surprising in view of all my illnesses, all my nervous illnesses — and after what I had been through that day, I thought. And I told myself that this year alone, which was not a very long time, I had attended the funerals of five of my friends. They’re all dying off one after the other, I thought, most of them by taking their own lives. They rush out of a coffeehouse in a state of sudden agitation, and are run over in the street, or else they hang themselves, or suffer a fatal stroke. When we’re over fifty we’re constantly going to funerals, I thought. I’ll soon have more friends in the cemetery than in the rest of the city, I thought. People who were born in the country go back to the country to kill themselves, I thought. They choose to commit suicide in their parents’ home, I thought. All of them, without exception, are basically sick. If they don’t kill themselves they die of some illness that they’ve brought on through their own negligence. I repeated the wordЧитать дальше