Wittgenstein's Mistress

by David Markson

  In any case I am more likely thinking of Taddeo Gaddi, even though Taddeo Gaddi was a painter and not a writer.

  What did I do with those watches, I wonder?

  Wore them.

  Well. But each of them with an alarm of its own, as well.

  What I normally did was set the alarms so that each one of the watches would ring at a different hour.

  I did that for some time. All day long, every hour, a different watch would ring.

  In the evening I would set all fourteen of them all over again. Except that in that case I would set them to ring simultaneously.

  This was before I had learned to depend upon the dawn, doubtless.

  They rarely did that anyway. Ring simultaneously, I mean.

  Even when that appeared to be the case, one learned to wait for those which had not started ringing yet.

  When I say they rang, I mean that they buzzed, more truthfully.

  In a town called Corinth, in Mississippi, which is not near the Mississippi River, parking a car on a small bridge I divested myself of the watches.

  I believe Corinth. I would need an atlas, to reassure myself.

  Actually, there is an atlas in this house. Somewhere. Perhaps in one of the rooms I have stopped going into.

  For an entire day I sat in the car and waited for each watch to ring in its turn.

  And then dropped each as it did so into the water. Whatever body of water that may have been.

  One or two did not ring. What I did was reset them and sleep in the car and then get rid of those when they rang for morning.

  Still ringing like all of the rest when I discarded them.

  To tell the truth, I did that in a town somewhere in Pennsylvania. The name of the town was Lititz, Pennsylvania.

  All of this was some time before I rolled the tennis balls down the Spanish Steps in Rome, by the way.

  I make the connection between getting rid of the watches and rolling the tennis balls down the Spanish Steps because I am positive that getting rid of the watches also occurred before I saw the cat, which was likewise in Rome.

  When I say that I saw a cat I mean that I believed I saw one, naturally.

  And the reason I am positive that this happened in Rome is because it happened at the Colosseum, which is indisputably in that city.

  Where I believed I saw the cat was at one of the archways in the Colosseum, quite far up.

  How I felt. In the midst of all that looking.

  And so went scurrying to a supermarket for canned cat food.

  As quickly as I realized I could not locate the cat again, that would have been.

  And then every morning for a week, opened cans by the carton and went about setting them out on the stone seats.

  As many cans as there must have been Romans watching the Christians, practically.

  But next speculated that the cat might possibly reappear only at night, being frightened, and so rigged up yet another generator and floodlights, even.

  Though of course I had no way of telling if the cat had nibbled at any of the food behind my back, since most of the cans had not seemed quite full to begin with.

  Still, I felt that to be unquestionably worth checking on, several times each day.

  What I named the cat was Nero.

  Here, Nero, I would call.

  Well, I suspect I may have tried Julius Caesar and Herodotus and Pontius Pilate at various moments, also.

  Herodotus may have been a waste of time with a cat in Rome, now that I think about it.

  Doubtless the cans are still there in either case, lined up across all of those seats.

  Rains would have emptied them completely by now, assuredly.

  Doubtless there was no cat at the Colosseum.

  Though I also called the cat Calpurnia, after a time, when it struck me that I should cover all bases.

  Doubtless there was no seagull either.

  It is the seagull which brought me to this beach, that I am speaking about now.

  High, high, against the clouds, little more than a speck, but then swooping in the direction of the sea.

  I will be truthful. In Rome, when I thought I saw the cat, I was undeniably mad. And so I thought I saw the cat.

  Here, when I thought I saw the seagull, I was not mad. So I knew I had not seen the seagull.

  Now and again, things burn. I do not mean only when I have set fire to them myself, but out of natural happenstance. And so bits and pieces of residue will sometimes be wafted great distances, or to astonishing heights.

  I had finally gotten accustomed to those.

  Still, I would have vastly preferred to believe I had seen the seagull.

  As a matter of fact it was much more probably the thought of sunsets, which brought me to this beach.

  Well, or of the sound of the sea.

  After I had finally determined that I may as well stop looking, this is.

  Have I mentioned looking in Damascus, Syria, or in Bethlehem, or in Troy, New York?

  Once, near Lake Como, at a stone stairway that reminded me somewhat of the Spanish Steps, I put several loose coins that had been lying in my Jeep into a public telephone, intending to ask for Giovanni Keats.

  I had no idea if Keats had ever visited Lake Como, actually.

  For some weeks in Mexico I drove a Jeep also. And so was able to maneuver directly up the hillside, instead of taking the road, each time I went to the cemetery.

  How many different vehicles have I made use of, I suddenly wonder, since all of this started?

  Well, more than one could have kept track of just down to Cuernavaca or back, surely. What with having to switch at so many obstacles, even disregarding when one ran out of gas.

  By obstacles I most generally mean other cars, naturally. In whatever nuisance locations they had come to a stop.

  And on top of which I always foolishly troubled to transfer all of my baggage as well, in those days.

  Excepting when I was forced to walk too considerable a distance between one vehicle and the next, of course.

  But even then, would repeatedly burden myself with more of the same in no time.

  Here, I have three denim skirts that wrap around, and some cotton jerseys.

  Most of which at the moment are lying across bushes, drying in the sun.

  I drive only rarely now, as well.

  As a matter of fact the clothing out at the spring has been dry for some days.

  In autumn, after the leaves have fallen, I would be able to see it from exactly where I am sitting at this moment, possibly.

  The cat at the Colosseum was russet colored, incidentally.

  The gull was your ordinary gull.

  Actually it was ash, carried astonishingly high and rocked by breezes.

  Every last one of those skirts and jerseys has gotten faded, because I almost always forget about them out there like this.

  I am wearing underpants, but only because the seat of this chair has no cushion.

  I have also just brought blueberries in from the kitchen.

  Was it really some other person I was so anxious to discover, when I did all of that looking, or was it only my own solitude that I could not abide?

  Wandering through this endless nothingness. Once in a while, when I was not mad, I would turn poetic instead. I honestly did let myself think about things in such ways.

  The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me. For instance I thought about them like that, also.

  In a manner of speaking, I thought about them like that.

  Actually I underlined that sentence in a book, named the Pensees, when I was in college.

  Doubtless I underlined the sentence about wandering through an endless nothingness in somebody else's book, as well.

  The cat that Pintoricchio put into the painting of Penelope weaving may have been gray, I have a feeling.

  Once, I had a dream of fame.

  Generally, even then, I was lonely.

  Later today I will possi
bly masturbate.

  I do not mean today, since it is already tomorrow.

  Well, it is already tomorrow insofar as that I have watched a sunset and had a night's sleep since I began typing these pages. Which I began yesterday.

  Perhaps I ought to have noted that.

  When the woods started to fill up with shadows, and this corner darkened, I went into the kitchen and ate more of the blueberries, and then I went upstairs.

  Yesterday's sunset was an abstract expressionist sunset. It is about a week since the last time I had a Turner.

  I do not masturbate often. Though at times I do so almost without being aware of it, actually.

  At the dunes, perhaps. Just sitting, being lulled by the surf.

  There is an ebb, is all.

  I suspect I have done it while driving too, however.

  I am quite certain that I masturbated on a road in La Mancha once, near a castle that I kept on seeing and seeing, but that I never appeared to get any closer to.

  There was an explanation for not getting any closer to the castle.

  The explanation being that the castle was built on a hill, and that the road went in a flat circle around the bottom of the hill that the castle was built on.

  Very likely one could have driven around that castle eternally, never actually arriving at it.

  Before I ever saw one, I would have supposed that castles in Spain was just a phrase.

  There are castles.

  Near someplace called Savona, which is not in Spain but in Italy, I went off the road, once.

  Part of the embankment had fallen away. This is on the seacoast, that I am talking about, so that if one goes off an embankment one has gone into water.

  Instead of watching a castle I had been watching the water, doubtless.

  As a matter of fact the car turned over.

  Only my shoulder hurt, some moments afterward.

  Well, the very shoulder that is now arthritic, come to think about it. I had never made that connection before.

  Perhaps there is no connection.

  In either case the car also began to fill up with water.

  Interestingly, I did not feel frightened in the least. Or perhaps it was the realization that I had not badly injured myself, which reassured me.

  Still, I understood that opening my door and getting out would be a sensible notion under the circumstances.

  I was not able to open my door.

  During all of this time I was on the roof of the car, by the way.

  I mean on the inside of the roof, obviously. And with the rubber mat from the floor having fallen on top of me.

  I do not remember what kind of a car I was driving at the time.

  Well, one was scarcely driving it any longer in either case.

  What I was doing was trying to crawl across to the opposite door.

  The water came up only to the tops of my sandal straps.

  Still, the entire experience terrified me.

  I am aware that I have just said it had not frightened me in the least.

  As a matter of fact what happened was that it did not frighten me until it was over.

  Once I had climbed back onto the embankment, and could see the car upside down in the water, it frightened me rather impressively.

  I cannot say with any certainty that I had been masturbating when I failed to notice the collapsed embankment.

  Or whether I had been driving toward Savona, or had already passed Savona.

  What is fairly certain is that I was driving into Italy, and not out, since in driving into Italy along that coast one would have the sea at one's right hand, which is the side I went into it from.

  Even if I have no recollection whatsoever of ever having driven into Italy from the direction I am talking about.

  Doubtless it is partly age, which blurs such distinctions.

  When one comes down to it, I could actually be well past fifty.

  Again, the mirror is of no real help. One would need some kind of yardstick, or a field of comparison.

  There was a tiny, pocket sort of mirror on that same table beside my mother's bed, those final weeks.

  You will never know how much it has meant to me that you are an artist, Kate, she said, one evening.

  There are no painting materials in this house.

  Actually there was one canvas on a wall, when I came. Directly above and to the side of where this typewriter is, in fact.

  A painting of this very house, although it took me some days to recognize that.

  Not because it was not a satisfactory representation, but because I had not happened to look at the house from that perspective, as yet.

  I had already removed the painting into another room by the time I did so.

  Still, I believed it was a painting of this house.

  After I had concluded that it was, or that it appeared to be, I did not go back into the other room to verify my conclusion.

  I go into those rooms infrequently, and have closed those doors.

  There was nothing extraordinary in the fact of my closing them. Possibly I closed them only because I did not feel like sweeping.

  Leaves blow in, and fluffy cottonwood seeds.

  This room is quite large. There is a deck outside, constructed on two sides of the house so that it faces both the forest and the dunes.

  Two of the five closed doors are upstairs.

  None of this is counting the bathroom, where the mirror is.

  In fact there could well be additional paintings in those other rooms. I could look.

  There are no paintings in the closed rooms. Or at least not in the three closed rooms that are downstairs.

  Though I have just replaced the painting of the house.

  It is agreeable to have some art about.

  In my mother's living room, in Bayonne, New Jersey, there were several of my own paintings. Two of those were portraits, of her and my father.

  Never was I able to find the courage to ask her if she wished me to remove that mirror.

  One afternoon the mirror was no longer there, however.

  To tell the truth, I rarely did portraits.

  Those of my mother and father are now at the Metropolitan Museum, in one of the main painting galleries on the second floor.

  Well, all of my paintings are now in those galleries in the Metropolitan Museum.

  What I did was stand them between various canvases in the permanent collection, wherever there was sufficient wall space.

  Some few overlapped those others, but only at their lower corners, generally.

  Very likely a certain amount of warp has occurred in mine since, however.

  From having been leaning for so many years rather than being hung, that would be.

  Well, and a number of them had never been framed, either.

  Then again, when I say all of my paintings I am speaking only about the paintings I had not sold, naturally.

  Though in fact some few were in group shows, or out on loan, also.

  One of those I saw by sheer chance when I was in Rome, as a matter of fact.

  Actually I had almost forgotten about it. And then in the window of a municipal gallery on a street near the Via Vittorio Veneto, there was my name on a poster.

  To tell the truth, it was Louise Nevelson's name that caught my eye first. But still.

  Sitting in an automobile with English license plates and a right-hand drive, only a day after that, I watched the Piazza Navona fill up with snow, which must surely be rare.

  Early in the Renaissance, although also in Rome, Brunelleschi and Donatello went about measuring ruins with such industry that people believed they were mad.

  But after that Brunelleschi returned home to Florence and put up the largest dome since antiquity.

  Well, this being one of the reasons they named it the Renaissance, obviously.

  It was Giotto who built the beautiful campanile next door to that same cathedral.

  Once, being asked to submit a sampl
e of his work, what Giotto submitted was a circle.

  Well, the point being that it was a perfect circle.

  And that Giotto had painted it freehand.

  When my father died, less than a year after my mother, I came upon that same tiny mirror in a drawer full of old snapshots.

  An authentic snow falls in Rome no more than once every seventy years or so, as a matter of fact.

  Which is approximately how often the Arno overflows its banks too, at Florence. Though perhaps there is no connection there.

  Yet it is not impossible that people like Leonardo da Vinci or Andrea del Sarto or Taddeo Gaddi went through their entire lives without ever watching boys throw snowballs.

  Had they been born somewhat later they could have seen Bruegel's paintings of youngsters doing that, at least.

  I happen to believe the story about Giotto and the circle, by the way. Certain stories being gratifying to believe.

  I also believe I met William Gaddis once. He did not look Italian.

  Conversely I do not believe one word of what I wrote, a few lines ago, about Leonardo da Vinci and Andrea del Sarto and Taddeo Gaddi never seeing snow, which was ridiculous.

  Nor can I remember, any longer, if I happened onto the poster with my name on it before or after I saw the cat at the Colosseum.

  The cat at the Colosseum was orange, if I have not indicated, and had lost an eye.

  In fact it was hardly your most appealing cat, for all that I was so anxious to see it again.

  Simon had a cat, once. Which we could never seem to decide on a name for.

  Cat, being all we ever called it.

  Here, when the snows come, the trees write a strange calligraphy against the whiteness. The sky itself is often white, and the dunes are hidden, and the beach is white down to the water's edge, as well.

  In a manner of speaking almost everything I am able to see, then, is like that nine-foot canvas of mine, with its opaque four white coats of gesso.

  Now and again I build fires along the beach, however.

  Well, autumns, or in early spring, I am most apt to do that.

  Once, after doing that, I tore the pages out of a book and lighted those too, tossing each page into the breeze to see if the breeze might make it fly.

  Most of the pages fell right next to me.

  The book was a life of Brahms, which had been standing askew on one of the shelves here and which the dampness had left permanently misshapen. Although it had been printed on extraordinarily cheap paper to begin with.