One day, then, Klee comes to Minusio, near Locarno. To put his affairs in order, they send him to a teacher, a father of many children, a local historian, and quartermaster in the army. A quartermaster has to see to the troop’s lodgings, its sustenance. Even when he’s not in uniform, the quartermaster is still a quartermaster: he’s competent like no other, and active in over thirty units or associations of public interest. He knows everything about the institutions of the “Rechtsstaat”: he knows it in theory and practice. He always brings theory down to reality, and vice versa. Even if, given his many children, the conversation were to touch on a theme presumably quite beyond his interests—that is, love—he wouldn’t diverge from his methods. Paternally, addressing Scribe O/17360, he confers order upon the world: – You want to know, my friend, what love is? Love is: A . . . B . . . C . . . With his right index finger he counts off the elements of his Logos on the outspread fingers of his left. His right hand always knows what his left is doing. Another fascinating thing about him is the fact that he looks like the twin, face- and build-wise, of Doctor Clitterhouse (The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse, by Anatole Litvak, also from 1938), i.e., Edward G. Robinson.
When Klee went to see him, the quartermaster Dr. Clitterhouse helped Klee just as he would have helped any other child of God. Artists are always in need of help. Artists always have their heads up in the clouds. He, on the other hand, was a regular guy with his feet on the ground. One day Klee opened a folder containing several drawings in black and white and in color and in watercolors in front of his patron Edward G. Robinson, and humbly, simply said: – Help yourself!
– Help myself? No, thank you—that stuff? No!
Klee, unruffled, closed the folder and, like Manfredi in Purgatory, presuming that Dante should recognize him, said smiling: – You, sir, are a great and wonderful man, but when it comes to art . . .
Today the quartermaster could calculate the value in francs, dollars, yen, of that madman’s drawings, his watercolors, that he refused at the time. Someone more provident, more shrewd (Arthur’s—Arthur Schopenhauer’s—ears perked up, intrigued by this detail), turned out to be the mail woman from the neighboring town. There was always some “artist” from the North in that area, and not just in Ascona among the loonies at the Monte Verità commune. If she delivered an express letter, a telegram, or some money, and a person started to give her a tip, she would stop him, kind but firm. And she would pull a little album out of her mailbag.
– If it’s not too much trouble, just put a sketch, just a scribble, in here.
The painter, amused and flattered, would leave a “scribble.” As if a little girl had asked a Walaschek to do a half-dribble right there in her front yard. That’s it? But she sure got herself a collection that today . . .
– What does Walaschek think of Paul Klee? —the quartermaster asked.
– What do you expect him to think? Is he a soccer player or isn’t he? Arthur burst out vehemently, as he happened to do quite often. This time even Snoozy raised an eyebrow at the philosopher. Are athletes not allowed to think? But yes, Walaschek probably didn’t think anything of Klee. Maybe he knew a little more about him than he did about Pontormo (about whom he knew zilch), since Klee’s name came up in the paper every now and then . . .
But is this knowledge? Let’s try reversing the question: What did Klee think of Walaschek? Between 1938 and 1940, they were two “constellations” that hadn’t met. It’s not outside the realm of possibility that Klee’s rapacious eye had come across, by chance, the letters constituting the name “Walaschek”—although not when composing Alphabet I: there the erasure of half the name is the product of Wille. One could presume that on April 19, 1938 Klee didn’t read the story on the final between the Grasshoppers and Servette—he was only aware of having in front of him a page from the newspaper concerning sports. Or the question might be: What do people, more than half a century later, think of Walaschek? To anyone under the age of sixty, the name means nothing. Zero. Here’s where the O comes back in. The thirteenth letter of our alphabet? Omega? The end, or zero, null, the ultimate stop sign?
It was a somewhat embarrassing moment, so to distract the assembly, Scribe O/17360 said:
– Listen to this: just yesterday I come out of one of the thousand banks around here where I’d cashed a check for half a million lire from one of my little scribblings, and who do I see? You’ll never guess, so I’ll tell you. I see Selmoni, Pierino Selmoni, he’s standing there like an undercover agent observing the public’s reaction to the column in front of the main entrance that the bank commissioned him to sculpt. Maybe it’s not Trajan’s Column, or the one in Place Vendôme, but it’s a nice, honest column that goes from a square base to a cylindrical peak, with a progressive increase in the number of sides on each section—from four to infinity. A beautiful play of geometric rupture and continuity, past and future, tradition and innovation, Anchises and Palinurus—it’s by restoring tradition that art shows itself to be revolutionary, as Gide says about Poussin. Then Selmoni starts laughing like only he, round and good and clever, knows how, because, as he says, verbatim: “I’ve been here for three hours watching these good people, and it’s like my column has always been there, for centuries. As if everyone has always known it was there. Or as if it weren’t there at all, a mirage. They don’t see it, they haven’t seen it, they pass right by. If fifty years from now someone were to convince people—whether he himself believes it or not, that doesn’t matter—convince people that it’s a masterpiece, is able to get it into some travel guide with a star or two, there’ll immediately be ten tourists from the North who come looking for it, then twenty, then a hundred, then everyone will stop at it and take videos and pictures of themselves in front of the column. Just like they go to the Pisa baptistry to hear the ‘famous echo,’ they’ll come here to be able to say they stood next to ‘Selmoni’s column’ . . . ”
A perfumed lady who seemed to have only just freed herself from the coiffeur of her blonde tresses called us to order:
– We were talking about Mr. Paul Klee, about his O!
– Right, our friend at the bar said. Is it the frame of a mirror without the mirror? The rim of a well with no well? A dark well? Or the black hole, the commencement, the coronation of the “gouffre”—the vortex, the “immense horrible abyss”—of the unfathomable?
– A dark well? Oh, come on! Let’s keep out of the gutter, let’s not compete with toilet maids and lavatory lackeys.
Klee smiled for a moment, a bit Tartarlike, and his eyes darted around like Mephisto’s on the lookout. The mouth of a well? That might be true for journalists who, in keeping with their journalistic superficiality as butchers of language, which our friends Schopenhauer and Nietzsche (Schopenhauer and Nietzsche each gave a brief, deferential nod) tirelessly denounced, especially if writing about someone like Walaschek—without a second thought. They would say that he played 28 (or 26?) games on the national team, that he made 103 goals, that the game against England was the ninth in his career, that he played for the first time on the national team in 1937, the last in ’45; and some of those journalists, those plagues of language (with Nietzsche as witness) would go so far as to extrapolate—and would think in so doing that they’d reached the bottom of the well—that since he was active in those years, in terms of presences in the nationals, or rather, “presence fees,” the war had disadvantaged someone like Walaschek, just as it hadn’t favored other “exponents” of sport, Coppi and Bartali for example. But never would it cross the mind of a single one of those bloodsuckers to include among the deductions in the account of someone like Walaschek anything like the death of an unknown brother or a lonely, faraway city, Moscow; in Hanover, what kind of hearts they, the relatives of his grandmother Jenny Morel, have beating in their chests, what they think of the great Führer who calls up schoolchildren and sends them to the slaughter. He sells their still-living flesh. Those journalists who
journal about sports don’t even hit the epidermis: they don’t even reach the opening of the well. If we still want to talk about them.
– No, shouted a woman in the second-to-last row, now that they have computers and can play on them like my grandson does, they’ll do a full profile on him, they won’t even leave out his shoe size, and how many assists he made, how many fouls he had, the number of times he even touched the ball. Madamina! Il catalogo è questo. If Don Giovanni came back to tour the sheets of Europe, what a treat it would be for computers. How many ejaculations here, how many there; they’d even calculate the hourly speed (of ejaculation). Pelé got up to 1003 too. The record. They claim to count, to calculate everything.
A former coach, then masseur, and finally bookkeeper for the local team was thinking his own thoughts; his head was in his hands, his elbows firm on the table. – God, they called them “presence fees.” For those games against Hitler’s Germany they earned 130 francs each, and that because an anonymous donor came forward. Today they would get, or expect, a thousand, ten thousand times more. One hun-dred and thir-ty francs! A gesture void of any form of elegance or respect whatsoever. Or style! But can Switzerland have style?
The baker jumped to his feet, red in the face, Swissly flushed.
– Did you say a thousand times more? Did you say ten thousand? That’s an insult to those of us who work for a living. But those idiot workers who have to walk the streets like whores to feed their children, they get all excited when they find out that their sports stars are paid what they’re paid. The more they get paid the happier they are. This is something we’ve learned from America—we copy all the idiotic things they do. There, people show off how much money they make like monkeys show off their penises to compare size.
The blacksmith, who used a bellows from Shakespeare & Company, declared the moment he set foot in the osteria that ninety-nine percent of people have more wax in their ears than brains in their heads.
The ex-masseur wanted to specify:
– Walaschek was right within the average: he handled the ball well, he was hardy, too—they’d sent him out to get a thicker skin, to learn to give and take hits, down to the part of town where people play rough. He was good with assists, but he wasn’t a record-breaker who’d make it onto any computer-assembled rosters. He was elected to oblivion, he can’t survive—that’s the destiny of 99.9% of Swiss soccer players, if not 100%. Switzerland is not, in football, a nation of geniuses.
– True, true, Mr. Window blurted out, who at the ex-masseur’s words felt like a scrambled egg, a piece of blotting paper that, if a drop of ink fell on it, would be consumed entirely.
– True, true, Scribe O/17360 hastened to add. And wait till you hear this: on March 10th, I wrote to the Servette Football Club of Geneva, and not even five days later they responded with a card that was all nice with a garnet-colored header, like the Servette jerseys. The top left corner listed their complete information: when the club was founded, when they had won the championship, the Cup, the Alpine Cup, the League Cup. The letter, in a literal translation, went like this:
Dear Sir,
We acknowledge receipt of your letter from 10 March to which we paid our utmost attention. Unfortunately, in searching our records, we found no trace of any documents concerning Mr. Walaschek in our archives. We’re very sorry for this. Please trust, dear Sir, in the expression of our best sentiments.
***
General Secretary
“We found no trace”: incompetents! with all their Servette laundries to erase everything, annihilate, eradicate, bleach whiter than white. Erase it all, like the tree inside Berkeley’s mind (1685–1753) when his mind thinks of something other than a tree, because for Berkeley as well material objects exist only when they are perceived. Esse est percipi. And when a soccer player has finished being perceived by the crowds filling the stands, that player is erased from the face of the earth. Total eclipse.
A compatriot of the monumental center forward John Charles, Sir Bertrand of Wales, began to recite:
There was a young man who said “God
Must think it exceedingly odd
If he finds that this tree
Continues to be
When there’s no one about in the Quad.”
The tree of the philosopher and bishop Berkeley was none other than Eugene Walaschek, and more than a few Swiss then showed a sudden interest in the philosophy of perception. But Sir Bertrand didn’t want to cause anxiety or shock, thus he resumed his recitation, responding thus, for everyone’s benefit, to the young man:
“Dear Sir:
Your astonishment’s odd;
I am always about in the Quad.
And that’s why the tree
Will continue to be
Since observed by,
Yours faithfully,
God.”
God allowed himself a hearty laugh. Then, to demonstrate his godly gratitude (or as Jupiter omnipotens, or Wille—but the horseshoer raised a point of order: this was not the time to split hairs, call him God and not another word!), because Walaschek too, perceived by God, became proof of God’s existence! Imperceptibly, he stirred the hand of a degenerate painter, moved him to take a sheet of newspaper (page 13 from the April 19, 1938 National Zeitung), to take black ink, a regular brush, and paint an O over Walaschek’s name. Which in turn became proof of God’s existence, and therefore much more than the top of a well from which one can draw water. Because there was a baker who insisted:
– A player who quits playing is a well without a drop of water. Done. Dry for all eternity.
Animals no longer go to that well to sate their thirst, making those beautiful, concentric geometric waves that break gently against its walls. An ex-soccer player becomes like an ex-bathtub, all chipped, with big stains, rusty fixtures. And yet who knows how many beautiful women have gone and lain in that tub, running their hands over their white bellies and thighs, savoring the warm water and foam. Now the tub sits in the middle of a meadow in mid-autumn, in the November fog, once in a while someone fills it up with a garden hose . . .
Sir Bertrand of Wales, without taking his eyes off the math journal spread open on his knees, which he was reading for pleasure, once again broke the silence:
– When a player stops playing, he becomes a black hole. He becomes the trans-finite, Cantor’s aleph-0 . . .
– A black hole? The baker was in a huff. Would you, please, pretty please, for ignorant old me, get your head out of the clouds and put your feet on the ground?
– My feet on the ground? My friend, you have no idea! My feet on the ground! That’d be quite a stretch. But do you or do you not realize that your Achilles-heart will never catch up to the Walaschek-tortoise? That Walaschek is, like every other common man—like you too—an infinity?
– Oh, that’s a good one. That’s the first time anyone’s told me I’m infinite. I’ll tell that to my wife, who thinks the complete opposite, the numbskull.
– And she thinks wrong, if that’s what she thinks. Go ahead and tell her that Klee and Cantor’s aleph-0, the limit of the infinitely small, have the same property of in-ac-cess-i-bil-i-ty as the Walaschek-infinite. Tell her . . .
The baker suggested, at supersonic speed, in the ear of the horseshoer, standing next to him, that: – If I ruled the world, I’d take that phony who’s blathering on, I’d put him in my oven at three hundred degrees, and if he got cranky I’d tell him he’s no philosopher of the infinite, and I’d let him bake to infinity, till he’s cooked right through. Sir Bertrand gave the baker the look of a teacher keeping an eye on a troublemaker. He raised his voice just slightly:
– So I’m Cantor’s aleph-0, Eugene Walaschek, insofar as we are all “objects,” we are inaccessible, immeasurable? That means—finally, we’ve got it!—that means that Klee’s O on the April 19, 1938 Nati
onal Zeitung is a black hole, a condensed body with a gravitational field so intense that no matter, no light, can come out of it. So Walaschek the star (every man is a star, a stellar micro-mass) will remain invisible.
– Yeah, sure.
– What do you mean yeah, sure? the horseshoer cut in.
– Are people not free to call out “yeah, sure” anymore?
Sir Bertrand, seeing that the crowd wanted to push both him and philosophy offside, out of play, pointed to the math book he was reading and said:
– Yes, it’s true. In other words, we’re part of a grand design, too grand for us to comprehend. We can’t describe it in the way that we can describe external objects or individual character, somehow isolating them from the flow, the flow of history I mean, in which their existence lies, or from their submerged, unexplored positions, to which professional historians have paid so little attention.
The horseshoer tried to stifle a flow of laughter and tears. Into the baker’s right ear, he decanted:
– Make good and sure you don’t say anything to your wife or anyone else in your coop, but we’re smack in the middle of a zoo. Or the looney bin, if you prefer.
Sir Bertrand didn’t notice the interruption.
– There exists a magic circle into which no measurement can take us. As such, for a modern scientist, it is a “unicum” of geometry. That is, space and time. You could, like an astronaut, explore the inside of a black hole, but you wouldn’t be able to come back to report what you saw. All hope of return dashed: it’s like that obscure writing over the gates of hell: Abandon all hope . . . Will you be abandoned to cry in the blackness of that night? Or will you float on the waves of space in a sweet delirium?
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