Lodovico, the chub fisherman, spoke with increasing difficulty, as if he had dough in his mouth or were still recovering from his second heart attack. He made a gesture as if tossing aside, albeit gently, a deck of cards—I’m done playing.
Due to professional instruction and destruction, Mr. Window, who couldn’t stand the prolonged silences in the inquiry, bestowed upon them a few kernels of poetry.
– Like the sorceress Alcina, you mean, in Ariosto:
Alcina drew the fishes to the shore,
With nought but simple words and magic power.
But it’s difficult to interrupt a teacher who sees the world as a classroom. Luckily, the bank teller said:
– Klee’s O isn’t Giotto’s O—this is an indisputable fact. His O is merely a letter of the alphabet, and I think that in all our talk we seem to have forgotten that the work is called Alphabet I. As far as the O, perhaps precisely because of its position in the alphabet, and in the painting it’s next to H, to P, it forms the cheer from 1938: Hop Suisse, hop Walaschek, hop what? Hop old tired Europa, tempted by the lusty bull god who tempts the old ones too, the Moloch who can’t be eliminated from the face of the earth, from the heart of the individual? But Klee’s O looks quite like one of Saturn’s rings, or, better yet, coral, limey and hard, arboreal, of a color varying from pinkish white to red, composed of the skeletons . . .
Christ, listening to all this crap made Vincent want to cut off his other ear:
– But tell me, he pleaded, under his breath, black and white, can we use them or not, are they perhaps forbidden fruit?
– Sssssh, Mr. Window is talking, someone in the second-to-last row said. He’s my daughter’s teacher, he’s excellent.
– If you’d let me talk, Mr. Window said roundly. That’s not exactly what I meant: I meant that the O over the name of, what’s his name, Walaschek, is a navel, it’s the link to our primal nourishment, to memory. But your sports, on the other hand—what is it connected to that lasts? Your sports is the moment, it’s the ephemeral, it’s oblivion. What does it leave behind, like a trail of snail slime, besides a few statistics, trophies, press reports like the one in the April 19th National Zeitung: a trivial heap of petty talk. It’s the herbarium, the museum of the banal, it’s death. Klee wanted to paint death.
– Bravo, well said, cried out the man who’d had the two heart attacks. Others, however, kept yapping, like untrained puppies.
– Doesn’t he speak like a poet? said the man in the second-to-last row to his left-hand neighbor. The orator-teacher waved his hands downwards to request patience and order.
– If I were the curator of an exhibit of the work of the esteemed painter Paul Klee, I would put his crimson Creator high up, in the center, like Michelangelo’s Christ in the Sistine Chapel. He too comes down from the sky, all bulky and muscular yet with the appearance of a squat sparrowhawk that has just flown a little ways away to spend a moment contemplating what he has created . . .
– By the hundreds, the thousands! exclaimed a young art history scholar, who still wore braids and looked like a little girl—who knows how she would have been able to control a classroom full of rowdy kids. He made cats with yarn, she said, dogs-with-without-leashes, angels, housewives, people about town, masks, fights, wonders, floating cities and flags without swastikas, flags of no nation, just to make children happy the world over and adults too, who have a bit of the child they once were conserved inside themselves: everyone who loves to be made happy by the beauties of creation—little girls too, of course, lots of them, and women . . .
Van Gogh, his head bowed, was perhaps thinking about the potential of an osteria’s shadows. But at the word “women” it was no longer possible to restrain the red-bearded painter with the missing ear. Turning to his brother Theo, he said:
– It is the same everywhere, in the country as much as in the city—one has to take women into account if one wants to be up to date. If I paint peasant women I want them to be peasant women—so I want to get a whore’s expression when I paint whores. That is precisely why a whore’s head by Rembrandt struck me so forcefully. Because he had caught that mysterious smile in such an infinitely beautiful way, with a gravity of his very own—the magician of magicians. This is something new for me, and I want to achieve it at all costs. Manet has done it and Courbet—well, sacrebleu, I’ve the same ambition too, the more so as I’ve felt the infinite beauty of the study of women . . .
Is there a woman behind every soldier? How many behind a soccer player? We shouldn’t completely rule out the possibility that one half of Walaschek (the top half?) was dead even before Klee divided him with his O in April 1938. One evening in autumn, or winter, they had gotten back to Geneva late after a brutal game in the rain, too late to catch a bus home, so the coach, who was gruff as always but incapable of leaving a kid in the lurch, proposed to his inside forward, that promising boy with the eastern name, that he stay at his place. Two minutes to set up the sofa, no big deal. A young man can even sleep on the floor. Even the coach could have slept on the floor. At the end of the game they—players and managers—had nearly come to blows. Now the sleep of good health. After having a bite to eat, drumming his fingers a little on the oilcloth and remembering that useless bastard referee, chaos in midfield, he slowly sipped his last glass: don’t take the pearls away from the swine, he had picked up and left without ceremony, thank you and good night. For eight hours he wouldn’t be available to anyone. Meanwhile, the coach’s daughter had prepared the makeshift bed as well as some compresses for the blow Walaschek had taken straight on. The black hole comes later. A man’s life, and a woman’s life even more so, is full of black holes. Years later, that’s when a wind rushes through that rustles all the leaves in the tree of memory, and the birds who sought refuge from the hurricane fly far away as if four thousand hunters had arrived with rifles aimed. What words, what gazes, what gestures, what father-coach is there between the coach’s daughter and this kid who needs a compress? From nowhere in her throat could the coach’s daughter find a saint’s simple words to say: You called, you shouted, you shattered my deafness!
Why are many young women, barely more than girls, led to consider, like the coach’s daughter, the Sunday alternative as the only alternative? Why didn’t that young half-winger inside forward take flight and swoop her out of the paternal tempest, take her away from the unhealthy desire—on a spiteful impulse—for tranquility? What to add? Is there anything to add? That love, as one of the Church Fathers says, is only an “accident in substance”? But a coach doesn’t know, and nobody puts the blame on him, neither Church Fathers nor Roman ones. He’s busy with coaching, that’s all.
Could one conjecture that Walaschek hadn’t read as assiduously as he should have in the book-of-hours-eyes of the coach’s daughter? One could. Without placing a hint of blame on him. If he is guilty, it’s only of being young, and tired, and naïve. His eyes were slightly rimmed with red—a little bunny, a pink ermine, a baby bird outside its nest. Did he perhaps have a touch of fever? Dear dear boy!
And as he waited for the thermometer reading (in his groin!), Walaschek, like a gawky confirmand, his head with its little tuft of hair, tried to break away: no, Miss, he was fine, really, he didn’t want to be a bother, it was embarrassing, she was doing too, too much for someone like him . . .
In the ’30s, if someone had taken a poll—though at that time they weren’t yet in vogue, ecumenical sociology was still in its infancy—it would have unequivocally shown that the majority of the Swiss people, much as they had persisted in the use of the Swiss dialect over “proper” German from Germany, had likewise upheld the tradition of placing thermometers under the armpit, the left, and not in the groin or the mouth. Therefore, as she waited, serious, for the mercury to respond, something happened inside the coach’s daughter: the coach’s daughter saw, telepathically—“like in a dream,” she would have said—her cou
sin Silvia of Silenen, who was her spitting image. Of their two fathers—brothers—one had gone to work for the railroad (now on the verge of retirement, in Silenen), the other was a storekeeper for department stores and also a coach. A coach’s daughter may come to find herself surrounded by straight- or knock-kneed boys almost always sore with bruises, like seedlings in a lovely field trampled and poked at by a herd of hogs, in the same way that Silvia of Silenen, the daughter of Silenen’s stationmaster, living right above the two station offices, says the air she breathes in that “heart of Switzerland” is nothing but the air of a waiting room, and her eyes and ears are completely filled with trains heading north and south, to the ends of the world. If she opens her eyes, her eyes fall on the station name, Silenen—it’s the sign that, at night, white and blue, bangs against her eyelids.
But one day, she’d get on a train and . . .
And who knows where she ended up, well beyond Arth-Goldau, Olten. One lazy day, already distant in the memory of her cousin from Geneva, Silvia of Silenen stood with parted legs on a little street near the station, already in open countryside; making a perfect isosceles triangle, holding her dainty little blonde head high, in a pose that would have made even St. Bonaventure’s blood tingle, so frenzied was he at the triangle formed by the trinity that he saw triangles everywhere—and then Klee, all catlike and triangular too, smiles, because he could have drawn in three strokes the girl’s supreme oracular triangle, with a circle at each of the three points: A, head; B, left foot; C, right foot, let’s go ahead and call these circles little Os (every one a little Klee O), and in each of those three circles put the three forces that press upon man and also, and violently, on that slender plume called Silvia of Silenen: greed, lust for domination, sex; and then, by each one, three little cherry-balls (as Klee goes on drawing and painting a sprig of mistletoe with its cluster of little berries and a web of covalent branch-segments holding them together). One could add other berries, other ganglia, other nuclei, other atoms in a dense molecule—from sex, for example, comes ferocity, masochism, a “spiteful impulse” for escape, and Sade; sublimated into the army, the stadiums, the desire to conceive a child, and a hundred other desires, ad infinitum. From the sprig of berries of the libido dominandi mistletoe, Klee could have deduced—for himself, for his art—another sub-triangle, with three distinct points, as an attempt at sovereign domination, through the act of creation, over the interaction of Physis (his Greco-Roman heritage), Psyche (Christian introspection, Augustine’s cornerstone: his metaphysics in first person, in the vocative), and the eye of his I: Klee’s.
Silvia of Silenen had not placed philosophy in any of the three points of her triangle, but rather what she saw, in her colorless eighteen years of life (a diagnosis that looked like a facsimile of the appraisal her cousin from Geneva, the coach’s daughter, might have given herself, in her colorless twenty-six years of life). She put: 1) that a father is almost always a constraining constraint, the Old Testament against the New; 2) he’s someone who sometimes treats his daughter’s heart like a blacksmith treats a mare’s hoof that needs to be reshod, or acts like an underpaid boy who reciprocates his meager pay with a sideways kick to the belly-sac of the she-goat suffering from scabies on her udders just because she’d made him spill a full pail of milk; and 3) (though the third was said more with Silvia’s fair hands than with words, thus Scribe O/17360 has decreed with his cloddish paw): a father considers it normal for there to be one person with the only right to speak (him), against another who’s all body (the daughter), fragile, soft, and earthy, filled with urges, feelings, fits of anger. For example: for Silvia of Silenen, who knows? For the coach’s daughter: a young man, that boy with the thermometer in his groin, with the foreign name, who plays soccer—she can feel it—like a god.
Something happened to the coach’s daughter, something similar to what happened to Virginia of Ronco, who would stand at the window of her osteria every day in winter watching the snow fall, the expanse of white: Bedoleto buried in snow, La Villa buried in snow, Ossasco buried in snow (and perhaps Eliseo was staring at his glass without thinking of the snow because when he was concentrating he didn’t like to be distracted) and La Fontana buried in the snow (and maybe Franku ’t Zan; idem for Eliseo)—and the world, for Virginia, with her white, thin hair, could be concentrated and reduced to Eliseo and Franku ’t Zan, to their two glasses, but then one April day, Virginia, parting the curtains, saw two people coming down the path dug out of the snow and called out excitedly: – So many people in the world, and here’s two more coming to Le Sacche, because for Virginia at least half the world was concentrated in those two walking through the snow: and so it was for the coach’s daughter, a virgin of overripe virginity, twenty-six!, for whom humanity came down to:
a coach/father;
a boy who must be the inside forward: Walaschek . . .
And because he’s one of the hundred thousand fathers who can be terrible fathers, the coach’s daughter won’t even wait to hear his hand on the handle, the door opening, the words old as the Old Testament: I have to talk to you . . .
So the coach’s daughter will embark on a short long journey. Not having been able to choose the day she was born, she would choose the day she’ll die. Ite missa est.
No one having intervened to lift a finger in defense of fathers, Walaschek, years later, lowered his eyelids further. One thing is certain: years later, he doesn’t like to talk about women. He won’t answer questions of that sort. What does all this stuff about painters or women have to do with soccer anyway? In vain, a few journalists had tried to get him to talk (and immediately—as was to be expected—Nietzsche and Schopenhauer started (and not quietly) hurling insults at those vermin of society that are journalists), asking what they had done in Paris between the two games against Hitler’s Germany, and if they’d celebrated their victory, if they’d gone to a club, if, if: because someone said, later, that they were a little wobbly during the game against the Hungarians.
“What about women?” Nothing. Silence. Fortunately, just like in life, a minute of silence lasts much less than a minute. Fortunately, everyone’s attention was already directed elsewhere, due to a jokester who, jeering and making everyone laugh (Walaschek opened his right eye halfway), joined his thumbs and index fingers, to form, approximately, a circle, an oval.
– Pshaw, O, oval. Signore e signori, meine Damen und Herren, Mesdames, Messieurs, don’t be offended, don’t take this the wrong way, I’m not coming from left field (I’m not a leftist, anyway) but that thing that was painted over the glorious name of Eugene Walaschek is something else altogether. It’s the ass of Switzerland, or should I say sphincter? In 1938, the Milanese, both in and out of the Arena, said it was luck when our boys sent Portugal packing. Bare-assed luck, post/crossbar hits, and also Huber, the goalie for the national team, who had every St. Nicholas on his side. Same with England, and, frankly, with Germany too. Switzerland is the most lucky-ass country in the world. Everyone gives us shit for it, in fact. But why aren’t they more like us, those fools? We live in peace. We have for centuries. The Federal Council, luck or no, could forget all about us and pop open a bottle of champagne. And if the nationals were the emblem, the paradigm of the military, Herr Hitler would have to think twice before attacking us. Careful, barber, that’s my face you’re shaving. Don’t touch the high tension wires. We’re not the Maginot line. We don’t have leaders with names like Daladier, Gamelin, Chamberlain, names like . . . Gamelin’s like a scullery boy’s name. And Pétain . . .
But now, following that joker, everyone was all excited to guess what the O, that mysterious object, could be, as if they were on a game show (everyone except for Vincent, who kept on talking, privately, to Theo, maybe thinking about jerseys for the ideal women’s team? “Anyway,” he was saying, “the color range: a flesh color full of tonal values, with more bronze on the neck, jet-black hair—black which I had to do with carmine and Prussian blue—off
-white for the little jacket, light yellow, much lighter than the white, for the background. A touch of flame red in the jet-black hair and again a flame-colored bow in the off-white. She’s a girl from a café chantant and yet the expression I was looking for was somewhat ‘ecce homo-like’”)—in short, they were all trying to guess. Like on the radio when they play a strange noise and people can call in to guess what it is, and whoever gets it right wins a prize. In 1938, even before April 18, before the Servette-Grasshoppers game at the Wankdorf, they could have recorded the sounds of strange instruments and devices and gadgets in Dachau, Auschwitz, Buchenwald, und so weiter, then broadcast them on the radio and no one—even if they perked up on their couch or their chair trying to concentrate so that they could hazard a guess—would have gotten it right. Of course, if they rang the bells of Vienna, all of them, as they did at dusk on March 14 (it was, pardon the insistence and perhaps slightly German pedantry, 1938) to welcome, “amidst the jubilation of the crowd, Chancellor Hitler, direct from Schönbrunn,” well that’s easy, everyone knows that sound: bells. But if they’re bone-breaking, muscle-flattening devices, tools that strip skin down to the bicep, testicle-removers, extractors for nails or teeth or fillings, brass knuckles on the eyebulb or the heart or the solar plexus, expandable devices that stretch beyond measure (a foot and a half? much more than Procustes) delicate parts to be beaten crossways with dull blows of the baton, ox-whips, sacks of sand like punching bags, against the lower belly, und so weiter, no demagogy here—to decode them (but this is third-hand conjecture, purely academic, because they’d never broadcast such sounds, only marches, and “Lili Marleen,” and bells, even Lohengrin too, and whoever guesses right wins!) it would take the scientists from Mauthausen, und so weiter. To avoid misunderstanding, let us repeat: the game is easy, and whoever’s lucky enough to win will win and take home his nice gold napoleons.
B007HXL46C EBOK Page 9
