Thomas Bernhard: Concrete

Again I got up, went to the desk and made an appropriate note. When we meet somebody like Anna Härdtl, I thought, who is so unfortunate, we tell ourselves at once that we are by no means as unfortunate as we think we are: after all, we have our intellectual work. But what does this young woman have apart from a child by a husband who died on her at the age of twenty-three, in whatever circumstances? The fact is that we immediately use someone who is still more unfortunate than we are in order to get ourselves back on our feet. And our illness, even though it may be deadly, is of almost no consequence. Instead of writing about Mendelssohn, I reflect, I’m writing these notes. And it occurs to me that I must ring up Elisabeth, my sister in Vienna. At half past two in the morning I am still awake, thinking about my work, which had been put off and delayed for ten years , about how I was going to start on it next morning and what the opening sentence would be. And suddenly I had a number of opening sentences in mind. At the same time I thought about Anna Härdtl. Her misfortune, I told myself, is that she forced her husband to give up his career as an engineer and go into a business for which he was quite unsuited, and then persuaded him, for whatever reason, to go on holiday to Mallorca. What a dreadful idea, I thought, to go to Palma in late August! The town and the island are beautiful only in winter, but then they are more beautiful than anything else in the world. I slept for only two hours, waking up at half past five with the thought: I’m now forty-eight years old and I’ve had enough. In the end we don’t have to justify ourselves or anything else. We didn’t make ourselves. And instead of starting work on Mendelssohn, as I had been fully determined to do, having believed at half past three that I had in fact suddenly got the ideal conditions, all I could think of when I woke was Anna Härdtl. The case of this young woman gave me no peace, and at a quarter to six, not wanting to lay myself open to the depression that was bound to assail me between lying in bed and getting up, I got up with a headache which possibly had something to do with an impending change in the weather. Anna Härdtl gave me no peace, and so naturally I was quite incapable of starting to write my Mendelssohn study that morning. I must go to the cemetery as quickly as possible, I told myself with a sudden and terrible resolve which I cannot explain. Before seven o’clock I ordered a taxi and went to the cemetery. I had no difficulty in finding the last resting place of the young Härdtl. It took me only a few minutes. But to my astonishment I found that the marble plaque set in the concrete no longer bore the names Isabella Fernandez and Hanspeter Härdtl: instead it bore, already engraved in the marble, the names Anna and Hanspeter Härdtl. I turned at once and quickly went to the porter on duty in his lodge next to the mortuary cold store. In answer to my question, which I put quite clearly and, as I could see, comprehensibly, even though I put it in Spanish, he simply repeated several times the word suicido. I ran over to the lunatic asylum to order a taxi, since this could not be done from the cemetery, and drove straight back to the hotel. I drew the curtains in my room, writes Rudolf, took several sleeping tablets, and woke up twenty-six hours later in a state of extreme anxiety.