Elfriede Jelinek - Greed

Earlier it was quite a different day wasn't it, could I have got the date wrong? Gabi's boyfriend washed his car, while Gabi watched him. She was not allowed for example to get up and go away or do something else, after all one doesn't see something so interesting every day, today is an opportunity for a whole car to be soaped and then get a decent shower. Usually it's something reserved for living people. If I sit next to you, I'm very close to you, thinks Gabi's boyfriend about her, who knows her much more closely than that, but otherwise always likes to have her close, and dips in the sponge once again, tirelessly. Only he who knows longing, knows what we suffer, when we see a faster car. But at least ours has to glitter and flash, even without wanting to take a turn. The Governor of Carinthia, Mr. Haider, has a real Porsche, but unfortunately it's not here in Styria, where feelings have to put in an appearance in person in order to overwhelm one. People don't keep their feelings to themselves, but importune others with them.

The mountain does something quite similar. If a person is hollowed out inside, one often doesn't notice it right away, with the mountain one also only notices when ton-weight bits of debris are buzzing about one's ears like flies, or one starts to fly oneself, when one's hardly learned to walk. One's feet slip out from under one, together with every good ground, which is why the mountain should have remained where it was. It stood perfectly well there. It didn't bother anyone, at least not me. More silent than silence, the mountain didn't say a word, except when the tourists fluttered around its slopes, but now it seems to want company and comes right into our dreary house, immediately going off with it as its new chum. Whoever wants to, can leave, I already said so, but not to the mountain. It can leave, too, as it pleases, or did we give it cause to? We would never have suspected it beforehand, otherwise we would have left it in peace. But where has Gabi gone today, who, in principle, likes to go out, not always with her steady boyfriend, but usually nevertheless, and if not with him, then he feels second best. Admittedly then he's got his car, which is neat and tidy, but he has to sit in it alone. Where did Gabi always get to, when no one saw her? Quite an amount of time, if we add it all up. She can't have disappeared into another dimension and have returned to us unrecognizable, our Gabi, no, she can't have. She has disappeared, trust me on this point at least, even if I once claimed something else. The disco is a temptation, and outside, in the dark, one has to watch out, in case someone grabs the crack between one's legs, someone who is so drunk that he can no longer tell top from bottom, never mind. The woman wants to be free to dispose of herself, so she doesn't let him. And yet, even on the borders of consciousness, the drunk does find a certain spot, always, he whacks the woman on the head, at the same time ridding her of itchy vermin, that's his calling. Him of all people. He's the best thing that could happen to her, he thinks, if he examines himself and her without prejudice. If he's already on the spot, he might as well kill her, because she could have recognized him, who, apart from her, would begrudge him the pleasure. Everything is pleasure, says the television, and this woman in any case loved her figure and her hairstyle more than any human being. But ultimately she was made and nourished for just one man, whom by chance she has already found. Am I not right? This boyfriend is exactly right for her. In future her mother will forbid Gabi to go out without saying where she's going, she must tell her or her boyfriend, that's what she resolves in the course of this very nervously eaten breakfast, in which she pays attention not only to her stomach but also to her inner mother's voice. Later she'll cycle to her shift, sew brassieres in a factory, which lies in no-man's land, or already on enemy territory (the conflicting emotions of women: child or work, enmity or servitude, fried eggs or scrambled eggs. It is certainly hard to decide. Fried or scrambled, one wouldn't like to be either, but that's something for the television, where people pour out their being and then don't want to wipe it up afterwards. They wouldn't even have any time to do so, because someone is already sobbing and throwing their arms around one's neck and begging for forgiveness in front of millions of people for something or nothing at all. Well. We're already in the picture. It isn't reality, in it we would still feel the hand that tears us from this life, whereas on TV one just sees everything, it doesn't hurt) between two small towns, a small town and a village to be precise. In the latter there's only a bus stop, nothing else that could attract people, who in turn should attract other people with foundation garments, corsets, and bras. Things like that always come in handy so that humankind doesn't die out, because that's what women have their bodies for, usually square-built like a honeycomb, and the bees have finally gone. How does one put a shape into a body again? The last but one model can be had at giveaway prices and so already sold out. No, we don't have your cup size. Perhaps you can roll around the floor until you're flat, then cup B will fit you. But this line is also finished, I've just noticed. Ask again in half an hour. So now women are supposed to worry about the underfloor protection, no, the floor protection, as well, so that their body parts can be decently presented. We've got several sizes on offer and recently even in-between sizes. Until the very new sizes arrive and the cutting out machines have been converted. Throughout Europe people are now to be remeasured, because their bodies have changed in recent years. That encourages me, like many writers I'm all too hasty in considering the business of creation as settled, and wanted to devote myself to it in peace and quiet. And now I have to look at it anew again! What a bore. The women working here aren't the dregs, on the contrary, this is sought after, well paid work, plenty of overtime. Mommy is a business and looks at her children. Why are her children so beautiful? Because they are who they've always been, only earlier they didn't know that one can make oneself beautiful, they believed that beauty is not something made but something one receives from nature. That would be fine, we would then only have to persuade nature to come over here as well and do its work on us. But it doesn't do it. No wonder that its stones smash us to pieces, if we give it such insoluble tasks: Making people and then making them beautiful on top of that. Everyone else has to go to the perfume department, so why do we make such a fuss. In every small-town self-service drugstore you can find more beauty than a film star can use up in a lifetime. Nature tries to settle down, but it can't always be the setting for a diamond ring of at least half a karat.

Our Gabi doesn't rely on nature, she has seen too many mean tricks played by nature in this district, without much sweat, but costing us a great deal of sweat. Gabi has accumulated a whole collection of eye shadows, mascaras, foundations, and lipsticks, nowadays it's pure stupidity and ignorance if four-year-olds don't paint their fingernails, but they do it because there's always someone else who has started, and so they do it, too: keeping pace with us and our relaxed behavior. There's always someone else, but one doesn't like to acknowledge them. After all, that's why we go to nursery, to remain forever young and still look the same later on. Until the undeferrable duties come, which take up so much time that we don't have time when we need it. So they don't do like the swallows, who instead industriously build their homes against old stable walls. So they really have not stolen their homes, the poor industrious little birds. The work they have to put in. Children can go where they want, madame, and your child is already almost sweet sixteen, for the Country Police a case like any other, in fact not a case at all yet, just wait another one or two days, we know all about it, a young runaway, an item in the local edition of the newspaper, of interest only to the inhabitants of this village or the neighboring villages. Even in the county town not everyone knows the sweet name of your little place, and you really want to know for certain? Where your daughter is? For the rest of us a quite different caliber of person evades the cameras, photographic agencies, and educational institutions, for example Princess Caroline with her newborn daughter from Vocklabruck Hospital. They escape just like that, a source of concern or of fun, depending on what's in demand at the time: No, I'm mistaken, it's always for fun, yes, we do something, and we do it properly from the start, two or more together at a time. It's well known where they all come from, they are children of the country, of the country disco, where around midnight the sons of the carpenters (and joiners) and the daughters who are at last going to see some drilling, get undressed and show each other their juicy organic pork fillets (hand-reared! No need to stand on the grill and fall through, it's better on the new beige fitted carpet!), because they know what they want: big city life, without having to go there. There are no distinctions at all anymore, as far as entertainments are concerned, it's big and beautiful everywhere where we are, wherever we are. It would be a great help to us, if we could be everywhere at the same time. And here it is already, your entertainment! They nevertheless feel, I don't know why, constrained and want to get away from here as quickly as possible, and wherever they end up, they get nothing for themselves, the children of the villages, nothing, that someone else hasn't got already. And there's even a legitimate claim on nothing, and it is inevitably made, when even just the first pink nipple flares up in the stroboscopic techno light and immediately fades away in a wet mouth. Chunk chunk chunk hammer the bass lines. And the sons of the Alps carefully filled up to the permitted measure pull their height of fashion trousers, which have already penetrated the most remote mountain valley, but not by themselves, they were too slack for that, there always had to be someone inside them, whom one doesn't know, down below the hips, open, belt buckle! Open up! Where is thy sting, I mean: your tongue? Show what you've got under there! and they show cocks and tits as God made them, mostly not very carefully, once again there were too many people working in the shop who wanted to grab some for themselves, in the branch of a gigantic megastore. Right, God, you won't get any thanks for this fourteen-year-old already having droopy tits like full vacuum cleaner bags, to make up for that everything else about her is rounded and bulging, oh no, now she's puking at my feet, and now someone's falling down right into the puke, in a moment he's going to drive off again in his car, relieved. My opinion is, it would have been better if God had put in some overtime and created something better. Something beautiful like a mountain, a valley, a lion, and a Jaguar car and a lake and the like and so much music besides, rather too much than too little, always, no, not this lake, don't claim someone else's glory for yourself, someone else made the lake, but as far as I'm concerned, you, God, could have done it much more often. But the lake was made by humans, but I don't like them either anymore, says God, after all these years they're no longer up to date. They're not the right size anymore, and they don't look right either. I'll go and get the new magazine, so that I can do it better. The difference is really not so great, I do believe that on this point I really am right this time. The people in town and country are becoming more alike at terrific speed, in some countries there is no country anymore, people read the same magazines, and they all wear the same things, there are just two companies that make all the stuff, and soon there'll just be one, which will assume so many names. It is human fate, I've now forgotten what, and some wear it earlier than others, so then it's also over and done with earlier or out of fashion. What counts ultimately is always only all the fine, good flesh, which, since one can't eat it, is again and again and then once more thrown onto the counters in the bars and is downgraded and dressed down, if it doesn't measure up to our ideas. Even the lingerie factory is more generous to us women, who need something different from a man. The bodies have been puffed up in various places by a sensation-seeking press, which shows no consideration for feelings, and feelings are just the spice of bodies. Afterwards at any rate one should take the taxi home, that's healthier for everyone, particularly for the taxi driver.