It was not the death of some wretch dying of a dropsy; it was the evil, regal death the Chamberlain had borne with him his whole life long, nurturing it from within himself. All those vast resources of pride and will and mastery that he had been unable to use up himself in his calmer days had passed over now into his death, into that death which now presided at Ulsgaard, throwing it all away.
Chamberlain Brigge would have given short shrift to anyone who had suggested he die some other death rather than this one. He died his terrible death.
[9] And if I think of others whose deaths I have witnessed or heard of, it is always the same: they have all died their own deaths. Those men who carried their death inside their armour, like a prisoner; those women who grew very old, and tiny, and then departed this life discreetly and magisterially, in an immense bed, as if on a stage, in the presence of their whole family, the servants and the dogs. Even the children, the very young ones too, did not die simply any child's death, but summoned up all their command and gave death to what they already were and what they would have been.
And what a rueful beauty was lent the women at times when they were pregnant and stood, hands involuntarily resting on their large bellies, in which there was a twofold fruit: a child, and a death. Did not the replete, almost nourishing smile on their faces, free of all else, come from their intermittent notion that both were growing?
[10] I have been doing something to ward off fear. I have sat up all night writing, and now I am as tired out as if I had taken a long walk through the Ulsgaard fields. The thought that all of that is no more and that strangers are living in the rambling old manor house is difficult to grasp. Perhaps at this very moment the maids are asleep in the white room under the gable, sleeping their heavy, moist slumbers from evening till morn.
And one has no one and nothing oneself, and one travels the world with a suitcase and a box of books and, when all's said and done, no curiosity at all. What kind of life is it, with neither house nor inherited things nor dogs? If only one had one's memories, at least. But then, who does? If only one had one's childhood – but it is as if it were buried deep. Perhaps one has to be old to have access to all of this. I suspect it may be good to be old.
[11] Today's was a fine autumn morning. I strolled through the Tuileries. Everything to the east, before the sun, was dazzling; but where the sunlight fell, the mist still hung like a grey curtain of light. Grey amid the grey, the statues took the sun in gardens still draped. Solitary flowers in the long beds rose up and said ‘Red’ in a timorous voice. Then a very tall, slim man came around the corner from the Champs-Elysées; he was carrying a crutch, not jammed in under his shoulder but lightly outstretched before him, and now and then he held it firmly upright, like a herald's staff. He could not repress a smile of pleasure, and smiled upon everything as he went, the sun, the trees. He walked as shyly as a child, but unusually light of step, brimful of memories of walking in younger days.
[12] What such a small moon can achieve. There are days when everything about one is luminous, light, scarcely defined in the bright air, and nonetheless distinct. Even the nearest of things have the shades of distance upon them; they are remote, merely sketched in rather than bodied forth; and all things that do indeed partake of distance – the river, the bridges, the long streets and the prodigal squares – have absorbed the distance within themselves and are painted on to it as upon silk. Who can say what a light green vehicle on the Pont Neuf might be at such times, or some red bursting forth, or even a mere poster on the fire wall of a pearly-grey group of buildings. Everything is simplified, rendered into a few exact, bright planes like the face in a portrait by Manet. And nothing is of slight importance or irrelevance. The booksellers along the Quai open up their stalls, and the fresh or faded yellow of the books, the violet brown of the bindings, the more commanding green of an album: all of it is just right and has its worth and is a part of the whole and adds up into a fullness where nothing is lacking.
[13] Down below is the following group: a small hand-cart pushed by a woman; across the front of it, lengthwise, a barrel-organ. Behind it a child's wicker cot and a very young infant standing up in it on firm legs, contented in its bonnet, simply refusing to be sat down. From time to time, the woman turns the handle of the organ, at which the infant stands up straight in its cot once again, stamping, and a little girl in a green Sunday frock dances and shakes a tambourine up at the windows.
[14] I suppose I ought to embark on some work or other, now that I am learning to see. I am twenty-eight, and next to nothing has happened in my life. To recapitulate: I have written a study of Carpaccio, which is poor; a play titled Marriage, which deploys ambiguities in the attempt to prove a truthless point; and verses. Ah, but verses are so paltry an achievement if they are written early in life. One should wait, and gather meaning and sweetness a whole life long, a long life if possible, and then, at the very end, one might perhaps be able to write ten good lines. For verses are not feelings, as people imagine – those one has early enough; they are experiences. In order to write a single line, one must see a great many cities, people and things, have an understanding of animals, sense how it is to be a bird in flight, and know the manner in which the little flowers open every morning. In one's mind there must be regions unknown, meetings unexpected and long-anticipated partings, to which one can cast back one's thoughts – childhood days that still retain their mystery, parents inevitably hurt when one failed to grasp the pleasure they offered (and which another would have taken pleasure in), childhood illnesses beginning so strangely with so many profound and intractable transformations, days in peacefully secluded rooms and mornings beside the sea, and the sea itself, seas, nights on journeys that swept by on high and flew past filled with stars – and still it is not enough to be able to bring all this to mind. One must have memories of many nights of love, no two alike; of the screams of women in labour; and of pale, white, sleeping women in childbed, closing again. But one must also have been with the dying, have sat in a room with the dead with the window open and noises coming in at random. And it is not yet enough to have memories. One has to be able to forget them, if there are a great many, and one must have great patience, to wait for their return. For it is not the memories in themselves that are of consequence. Only when they are become the very blood within us, our every look and gesture, nameless and no longer distinguishable from our inmost self, only then, in the rarest of hours, can the first word of a poem arise in their midst and go out from among them.
All of my poems, however, originated in a different manner, and so they are not poems. – And when I wrote my play, what a mistake I made. Was I an imitator, and a fool, that I needed a third person to describe the fate of two people who were making things difficult for each other? How easily I fell into the trap. And I ought to have known that that third person who is present in every life and every literature, that ghost of a third who has never existed, is quite without meaning, and must be disavowed. He is one of the pretexts of Nature, who is always trying to distract humankind's prying attentions from her inmost secrets. He is the screen behind which a drama occurs. He is the noise that precedes the voiceless silence of true conflict. One has the impression that every dramatist to date has found it too difficult to speak of those two who are in fact the crux; the third, precisely because he is so unreal, is the unproblematic part of the task, and they have all been able to deal with him. From the very start of their plays, one senses their impatience to bring on this third person. They can hardly wait. Once he makes his appearance, all is well. But how tedious it is if he is late: nothing whatsoever can happen without him, everything comes to a standstill, drags, hangs fire. And what if this dammed-up stasis were all that there was to the play? How would it be, my dear dramatist, and you, the audience, who know what life is, if he had gone missing, that popular man of the world or that toffee-nosed young man who fits every marriage like a skeleton key? What if, say, the devil had spirited him away? Let's say that is what
happens. All of a sudden, one becomes aware of the unnatural emptiness of the theatres; they are walled up like dangerous holes – only the moths that inhabit the padded coping of the boxes reel on their giddy way through the parlous vacancy. The dramatists are no longer at ease in their smart parts of town. All the public watchdogs are snuffling far and wide on their behalf, seeking that one irreplaceable third person who was the plot.
Yet all the time they are living in the midst of other people, not those ‘third’ persons but the two of whom so incredibly much might be said, of whom nothing has ever yet been said although they suffer and do things and are altogether unable to cope.
It is ridiculous. Here I sit in my little room, I, Brigge, twenty-eight years old now and known to no one. Here I sit, and I am nothing. And yet, this nothing begins to think, and five flights up, on a grey Paris afternoon, thinks this:
Is it possible, it thinks, that we have neither seen nor perceived nor said anything real or of any importance yet? Is it possible that we have had thousands of years to look, ponder and record, and that we have let those thousands of years pass like a break at school, when one eats a sandwich and an apple?
Yes, it is possible.
Is it possible that despite our inventions and progress, despite our culture, religion and knowledge of the world, we have remained on the surface of life? Is it possible that even that surface, which might still have been something, has been covered with an unbelievably boring material, leaving it looking like drawing-room furniture in the summer holidays.
Yes, it is possible.
Is it possible that the entire history of the world has been misunderstood? Is it possible that we have the past all wrong, because we have always spoken of its masses, exactly as if we were describing a great throng of people, rather than speaking of the one man they were all gathered around – because he was a stranger and was dying?
Yes, it is possible.
Is it possible that we imagined we had to retrieve what had happened before we were born? Is it possible that every single one of us had to be reminded that he came from all those who had gone before, and that, knowing this, he would refuse to listen to others possessed of other knowledge?
Yes, it is possible.
Is it possible that all these people have an exact knowledge of a past that never happened? Is it possible that all realities are nothing to them; that their life is winding down, connected to nothing at all, like a clock in an empty room –?
Yes, it is possible.
Is it possible that one knows nothing of girls, who are nonetheless living? Is it possible that one says ‘women’, ‘children’, ‘boys’ without any suspicion (none whatsoever, despite all one's education) that these words have long since had no plural, but only countless singulars?
Yes, it is possible.
Is it possible that there are people who say ‘God’ and suppose they mean something shared by all? – Only consider two schoolboys: one of them buys a knife, and the other buys an identical one on the same day. And a week later, they show each other the two knives, and they turn out to be only remotely similar, so differently have they been shaped by different hands. (Well, comments the mother of one, if you will go wearing everything out right away.) – Ah, yes: is it possible to believe we could have a god without making use of him?
Yes, it is possible. i
But if all of this is possible, if there is even so much as a glimmer of possibility to it, then something must be done, for pity's sake. Anyone – anyone who has had these disquieting thoughts – must make a start on some of the things that we have omitted to do; anyone at all, no matter if he is not the aptest to the task: the fact is, there is no one else. This young foreigner of no consequence, Brigge, will have to sit himself down, five flights up, and write, day and night: yes, that is what it will come to – he will have to write.
[15] Twelve years old I must have been at the time, or at most thirteen. My father had taken me with him to Urnekloster. I do not know what prompted him to visit his father-in-law. For years, ever since my mother died, the two men had not seen each other, and my father had never himself set foot in the old manor house to which Count Brahe had retired late in life. In later times, I never saw that remarkable house again, for it passed into the possession of strangers after my grandfather's death. In the memories I have of it, shaped as they were by a child's understanding, it is not a building; to my mind, it consists of discrete parts: here a room, there a room, and here a stretch of passageway that does not connect these two rooms but is preserved in isolation, as a fragment. In this way, it is all dispersed within me: the rooms, the staircases that descended with such elaborate ceremony, and other tight, spiral stairs where one passed through the dark as the blood passes through the veins; the rooms in the towers, the balconies hung on high, the unexpected galleries on to which one was thrust by a little door – all of these things are still within me, and will never cease to be in me. It is as though the image of this house had fallen into me from a measureless height and shattered on the bottom-most part of myself.
All that has been preserved in my heart in its entirety, it seems to me, is the dining hall where we met for dinner every evening at seven. I never saw that room by day, and do not even recall whether it had any windows or what they looked out on; every time the family entered, the candles would be burning in the heavy chandeliers and within minutes one no longer knew what time of day it was and forgot everything one had seen outside. That lofty room, which I take to have been vaulted, was altogether overwhelming; with its darkness deepening on high, and its corners never fully lit, it drained one of images without giving any particular recompense in return. One sat there feeling void, utterly bereft of will, thought, desire or resistance. One was like an empty space. I remember that at first this annihilating state almost made me nauseous, bringing on a sort of seasickness which I could only dispel by stretching out a leg till I touched the knee of my father, who was sitting opposite me, with my foot. Only later did it strike me that he seemed to understand, or at least put up with, this odd behaviour, despite the fact that our relationship was almost cool and a gesture of this kind normally had no place in it. At all events, it was that light touch that gave me the strength to get through those long meals. And after a few weeks of tense endurance, I had grown so used to the unsettling atmosphere of those gatherings, with the well-nigh endless adaptability of a child, that it no longer cost me any effort to sit at table for two hours; now, indeed, the time passed relatively quickly, because I kept myself occupied observing the others present.
My grandfather called us all ‘the family’, and I heard the others use this wholly arbitrary term as well. In fact these four people, though distantly related, did not belong together in any way. My uncle, who sat next to me, was an old man on whose tough, tanned face there were a number of black flecks which I learned he had got when a powder charge exploded; a sullen malcontent, he had retired from the army at the rank of major and now conducted alchemical experiments in some room in the manor that was unfamiliar to me, and moreover, as I heard the servants say, was in touch with a prison which supplied him with corpses once or twice a year, whereupon he would lock himself away with them for days and nights, dissecting the bodies and preparing them in some mysterious manner to resist decomposition. Opposite him sat Miss Mathilde Brahe. She was a person of uncertain age, a distant cousin of my mother's, and nothing was known about her except that she maintained an extremely vigorous correspondence with an Austrian spiritualist who called himself Baron Nolde and was completely under his thumb, never doing the smallest thing without first obtaining his approval or, rather, what amounted to his blessing. At that time, she was exceptionally sturdy of build, of a soft and buxom languor that seemed to have been negligently poured, as it were, into her loose, light-coloured dresses; her movements were weary and vague, and her eyes were forever watering. And nonetheless there was something in her that reminded me of my delicate and slender mother. The longer I looked at h
er, the more I perceived in her face all those fine and gentle features which I had never been able to remember clearly since my mother's death; only now, seeing Mathilde Brahe every day, did I know again what my mother had looked like; indeed, it may have been that I knew it for the first time. Only now did the hundreds and hundreds of details come together within me, making an image of my dead mother, the image that accompanies me everywhere. Later I realized that all of the characteristics of my mother's features really were present in Miss Brahe's face – but it was as if some unfamiliar face had been interposed among them, thrusting them apart, distorting them, leaving them unrelated to each other.
The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge Page 4
