Young Torless

by Robert Musil

  Basini wept. “You're tormenting me. .

  “Yes, I'm tormenting you. But that's not what I'm after. There's just one thing I want to know: when I drive all that into you like knives, what goes on in you? What happens inside you? Does something burst in you? Tell me! Does it smash like a glass that suddenly flies into thousands of splinters before there's been even a little crack in it? Doesn't the picture you've made of yourself go out like a candle? Doesn't something else leap into its place, the way the pictures in the magic-lantern leap out of the darkness? Don't you understand what I mean? I can't explain it for you any better. You must tell me yourself!”

  Basini wept without stopping. His girlish shoulders jerked. All he could get out was to the same effect: “I don't know what you're after, I can't explain anything to you, it happens just in a moment, and then nothing different can happen, you'd do just the same as me.”

  Törless was silent. He remained leaning against the wall, exhausted, motionless, blankly staring straight in front of him.

  'If you were in my situation, you would do just the same,' Basini had said. Seen thus, what had happened appeared a simple necessity, straightforward and uncomplicated.

  Törless's self-awareness rebelled in blazing contempt against the mere suggestion. And yet this rebellion on the part of his whole being seemed to offer him no satisfactory guarantee … 'yes, I should have more character than he has, I shouldn't put up with such outrageous demands-but does it really matter? Does it matter that I should act differently, from firmness, from decency, from-oh, for all sorts of reasons that at the moment don't interest me in the least? No, what counts is not how I should act, but the fact that if I were ever really to act as Basini has done, I should have just as little sense of anything extraordinary about it as he has. This is the heart of the matter: my feeling about myself would be exactly as simple and clear of ambiguity as his feeling about himself. .'

  This thought-flashing through his mind in half-coherent snatches of sentences that ran over into each other and kept beginning all over again-added to his contempt for Basini a very private, quiet pain that touched his inmost balance at a much deeper point than any moral consideration could. It came from his awareness of a sensation he had briefly had before and which he could not get rid of. The fact was that when Basini's words revealed to him the danger potentially menacing him from Reiting and Beineberg, he had simply been startled. He had been startled as by a sudden assault, and without stopping to think had in a flash looked round for cover and a way of parrying the attack. That had been in the moment of a real danger; and the sensation it had caused him-those swift, unthinking impulses-exasperated and stimulated him. He tried, all in vain, to set them off again. But he knew they had immediately deprived the danger of all its peculiarity and ambiguity.

  And yet it had been the same danger that he had had a foreboding of only some weeks previously, in this same place-that time when he had felt so oddly startled by the lair itself, which was like some forgotten scrap of the Middle Ages lying remote from the warm, bright-lit life of the class-rooms, and by Beineberg and Reiting, because they seemed to have changed from the people they were down there, suddenly turning into something else, something sinister, blood-thirsty, figures in some quite different sort of life. That had been a transformation, a leap, for Törless, as though the picture of his surroundings had suddenly loomed up before other eyes-eyes just awakened out of a hundred years of sleep.

  And yet it had been the same danger.... He kept on repeating this to himself. And ever and again he tried to compare the memories of the two different sensations. . .

  Meanwhile Basini had got up. Observing his companion's blank, absent gaze, he quietly took his clothes and slipped away.

  Törless saw it happening-as though through a mist-but he uttered no word and let it go at that.

  His attention was wholly concentrated on this straining to rediscover the point in himself where the change of inner perspective had suddenly occurred.

  But every time he came anywhere near it the same thing happened to him as happens to someone trying to compare the close-at-hand with the remote: he could never seize the memory images of the two feelings together. For each time something came in between. It was like a faint click in the mind, corresponding more or less to something that occurs in the physical realm-that scarcely perceptible muscular sensation which is associated with the focusing of the gaze. And each time, precisely in the decisive moment, this would claim all his attention: the activity of making the comparison thrust itself before the objects to be compared, there was an almost unnoticeable jerk-and everything stopped.

  So Törless kept on beginning all over again.

  This mechanically regular operation lulled him into a rigid, waking, ice-cold sleep, holding him transfixed where he was-and for an indefinite period.

  Then an idea wakened him like the light touch of a warm hand. It was an idea apparently so obvious and natural that he marvelled at its not having occurred to him long ago.

  It was an idea that did nothing at all beyond generalising the experience he had just had: what in the distance seems so great and mysterious comes up to us always as something plain and undistorted, in natural, everyday proportions. It is as if there were an invisible frontier round every man . . . What originates outside and approaches from a long way off is like a misty sea full of gigantic, ever-changing forms; what comes right up to any man, and becomes action, and collides with his life, is clear and small, human in its dimensions and human in its outlines. And between the life one lives and the life one feels, the life one only has inklings and glimpses of, seeing it only from afar, there lies that invisible frontier, and in it the narrow gateway where all that ever happens, the images of things, must throng together and shrink so that they can enter into a .......

  And yet, closely though this corresponded to his experience, Törless let his head sink, deep in thought.

  It seemed a queer idea…

  At last he was back in bed. He was not thinking of anything at all any more, for thinking came so hard and was so futile. What he had discovered about the secret contrivings of his friends did, it was true, go through his mind, but now as indifferently and lifelessly as an item of foreign news read in a newspaper.

  There was nothing more to be hoped from Basini. Oh, there was still his problem! But that was so dubious, and he was so tired and mangled. An illusion perhaps-the whole thing.

  Only the vision of Basini, of his bare, glimmering skin, left a fragrance, as of lilac, in that twilight of the sensations which comes just before sleep. Even the moral revulsion faded away. And at last Törless fell asleep.

  * * *

  No dream disturbed him. There was only an infinitely pleasant warmth spreading soft carpets under his body. After a while he woke out of it. And then he almost screamed. There, sitting on his bed, was Basini! And in the next instant, with crazy speed, Basini had flung off his night-clothes and slid under the blankets and was pressing his naked, trembling body against Törless.

  As soon as Törless recovered from the shock, he pushed Basini away from him.

  “What do you think you're doing-?”

  But Basini pleaded. “Oh, don't start being like that again! Nobody's the way you are! They don't despise me the way you do. They only pretend they do, so as to be different then afterwards. But you-you of all people! You're even younger than me, even if you are stronger. We're both younger than the others. You don't boast and bully the way they do... You're gentle... I love you...

  “Here, I say! I don't know what you're talking about! I don't know what you want! Go away! Oh, go away!” And in anguish Törless pushed his arm against Basini's shoulder, holding him off. But the hot proximity of the soft skin, this other person's skin, haunted him, enclosing him, suffocating him. And Basini kept on whispering: “Oh yes... oh yes... please... oh, I should so gladly do whatever you want!”

  * * *

  Törless could find nothing to say to this. While Basini w
ent on whispering and he himself was lost in doubt and consideration, something had sunk over his senses again like a deep green sea. Only Basini's flickering words shone out on it like the glint of little silvery fishes.

  He was still holding Basini off with his arms. But something made them heavy, like a moist, torpid warmth; the muscles in them were slackening.. . he forgot them.... Only when another of those darting words touched him did he start awake again, all at once feeling this very instant, as in a dream, his hands had drawn Basini closer.

  Then he wanted to shake himself into wakefulness, wanted to shout at himself: Basini's tricking you, he's just trying to drag you down to where he is, so that you can't despise him any more! But the cry was never uttered, nor was there any sound anywhere in the whole huge building; throughout the corridors the dark tides of silence seemed to lie motionless in sleep.

  He struggled to get back to himself. But those tides were like black sentinels at all the doors.

  Then Törless abandoned his search for words. Lust, which had been slowly seeping into him, emanating from every single moment of desperation, had now grown to its full stature. It lay naked at his side and covered his head with its soft black cloak. And into his ear it whispered sweet words of resignation, while its warm fingers thrust all questionings and obligations aside as futile. And it whispered: In solitude you can do what you will.

  Only in the moment when he was swept away he woke fleetingly, frantically clutching at the one thought: This is not myself! It's not me! ... But tomorrow it will be me again! ... Tomorrow...

  On Tuesday evening the first of the other boys returned. The rest were arriving only by the night trains. There was unceasing bustle in the building.

  Törless met his friends curtly and sullenly; he had not forgotten. And then, too, they came back bringing from outside such a whiff of vigour and man-of-the-world confidence. It shamed him, who now cared only for the stuffy air between four narrow walls.

  He was, indeed, often ashamed now. But it was not actually so much because of what he had let himself be seduced into doing-for that was nothing so very rare at boarding-school-as because he now found he could not quite help having a kind of tenderness for Basini, while on the other hand he felt more intensely than ever how despised and humiliated this creature was.

  He quite often had secret meetings with him. He took him to all the hiding-places he had learnt of from Beineberg, and since he himself was not good at such furtive adventurings, Basini soon knew the way everywhere better than he did and became the leader.

  But at night he could not rest for jealousy, keeping watch on Beineberg and Reiting.

  These two, however, held aloof from Basini. Perhaps they were already bored with him. At any rate, some change seemed to have taken place in them. Beineberg had become gloomy and reserved; when he spoke, it was only to throw out mysterious hints of something that was imminent. Reiting seemed to have diverted his interest to other things; with his usual deftness he was again weaving the web for some plot or other, trying to win over some by doing them little favours and frightening others by showing them that-by some obscure cunning of his own-he knew their secrets.

  However, when the three of them were at last alone together, the other two urged that Basini should very soon be given orders to appear once more in the cubbyhole or the attic.

  Törless tried, on all sorts of pretexts, to postpone this, and at the same time suffered ceaselessly because of this secret sympathy for Basini.

  Even a few weeks earlier such a state of mind would have been utterly alien to him; for he came of sturdy, sound, and natural stock.

  But it would be entirely wrong to believe that Basini had aroused in Törless a desire that was-however fleetingly and perplexedly-a thorough-going and real one. True, something like passion had been aroused in him, but 'love' was quite certainly only a casual, haphazard term for it, and the boy Basini himself was no more than a substitute, a provisional object of this longing. For although Törless did debase himself with him, his desire was never satisfied by him; on the contrary, it went on growing out beyond Basini, growing out into some new and aimless craving.

  * *

  At first it had been purely and simply the nakedness of the boy's slim body that dazzled him.

  The feeling it had given him was no different from what he would have felt had he been confronted with the naked body of a little girl, a body still utterly sexless, merely beautiful. It had been an overwhelming shock. . . a state of marvel . .. And the inevitable purity of this feeling was what lent the appearance of affection-this new and wonderfully uneasy emotion-to his relationship with Basini. Everything else had little to do with it. All the other feelings-the erotic desire itself-had been there long before; it had all been there much earlier, indeed even before he had come to know Bozena. It was the secret, aimless, melancholy sensuality of adolescence, a sensuality attaching itself to no person, and like the moist, black, sprouting earth in early spring, or like dark, subterranean waters that some chance event will cause to rise, sweeping the walls away.

  The experience that Törless had gone through turned out to be this event. Surprise, misunderstanding, confusion about his own feelings, all combined to smash open the hushed hiding-places where all that was secret, taboo, torrid, vague and solitary in his soul was accumulated, and to send the flood of dark stirrings moving out in Basini's direction. And here it was that for the first time they encountered something warm, something that breathed and was fragrant, was flesh, in which these vaguely roving dreams took on form and had their share in the beauty of the flesh, instead of in squalor such as they had been blighted with, in the depths of his loneliness, by his experience with Bozena. This now all at once flung open a gate, a way ahead into life, and in the half-light of this condition everything now mingled-wishes and reality, debauched fantasies and instant impressions that still bore the warm traces of life itself, stimuli from without, and flames that came flaring up from within, mantling the sensations in such a glare that they were unrecognisable.

  But all this was beyond Törless's own power of discrimination; for him it was all run together in a single, blurred, undifferentiated emotion, which in his first surprise he might well take for love.

  * * *

  It was not long before he learnt to evaluate it more accurately. From then on he was restlessly driven hither and thither by uneasiness. Every object he picked up he laid down again as soon as he had touched it. He could not talk to any of the other boys without falling inexplicably silent or absent-mindedly changing the subject several times. It would also happen sometimes that while he was speaking a wave of shame flooded through him, so that he grew red, began to stammer, and had to turn away....

  By day he avoided Basini. When he could not help looking at him, it almost always had a sobering effect. Every movement of Basini's filled him with disgust, the vague shadows of his illusions gave way to a cold, blunt lucidity, and his soul seemed to shrivel up until there was nothing left but the memory of a former desire that now seemed unspeakably senseless and repulsive. He would stamp his foot and double up as if thus he could escape from this anguish of shame.

  He wondered what the others would say to him if they knew his secret-what would his parents say?-and the masters?

  But this last turn of the knife always put an end to his torments. A cool weariness would then come over him; the hot, slack skin of his body would then grow taut again in a pleasurable cold shiver. At such times he would be still and let everyone pass him by. But there was in him a certain contempt for them all. Secretly he suspected the very worst of everyone he spoke to.

  And he imagined, into the bargain, that he could see no trace of shame in them. He did not think that they suffered as he knew he did. The crown of thorns that his tormented conscience set on his own brow seemed to be missing from theirs.

  Yet he felt like one who had awakened from the throes of some long agony-like one who had been brushed by the silent and mysterious finger-tips of d
issolution-like one who cannot forget the tranquil wisdom of a long illness.

  This was a state in which he felt happy, and the moments came again and again when he yearned for it.

  They always began with his once more being able to look at Basini with indifference and to face out the loathsome and beastly thing with a smile. Then he knew that he would debase himself, but he supplied it all with a new meaning. The uglier and unworthier everything was that Basini had to offer him, the greater was the contrast with that awareness of suffering sensibility which would afterwards set in.

  Törless would withdraw into some corner from which he could observe without himself being seen. When he shut his eyes, a vague sense of urgency would rise up in him, and when he opened his eyes he could find nothing that corresponded to it. And then suddenly the thought of Basini would loom up and concentrate everything in itself. Soon it would lose all definite outline. It seemed no longer to belong to him, and seemed no longer to refer to Basini. It was something that was encircled by a whirling throng of emotions, as though by lecherous women in high-necked long robes, with masks over their faces.

  Törless knew no name for any of these emotions, nor did he know what any of them portended; but it was precisely in this that the intoxicating fascination lay. He no longer knew himself; and out of this very fact his urge grew into a wild, contemptuous debauchery, as when at some fete galante the lights are suddenly put out and nobody knows who it is he pulls down to the ground and covers with kisses.

  * * *

  Later, when he had got over his adolescent experiences, Törless became a young man whose mind was both subtle and sensitive. By that time he was one of those aesthetically inclined intellectuals who find there is something soothing in a regard for law and indeed-to some extent at least-for public morals too, since it frees them from the necessity of ever thinking about anything coarse, anything that is remote from the finer spiritual processes. And yet the magnificent external correctitude of these people, with its slight touch of irony, at once becomes associated with boredom and callousness if they are expected to show any more personal interest in particular instances of the workings of law and morality. For the only real interest they feel is concentrated on the growth of their own soul, or personality, or whatever one may call the thing within us that every now and then increases by the addition of some idea picked up between the lines of a book, or which speaks to us in the silent language of a painting the thing that every now and then awakens when some solitary, wayward tune floats past us and away, away into the distance, whence with alien movements tugs at the in scarlet thread of our blood-the thing that is never there when we are writing minutes, building machines, going to the circus, or following any of the hundreds of other similar occupations.