Escape is still a popular pastime in Vienna today.
Consider the conversation I had with an attractive young woman at a cocktail party.
“What do you do?” I asked.
“Oh nothing really, nothing at all,” she smiled a strangely absent smile, “I’m married, you see.” Which response would have perfectly sufficed anywhere else, but being Viennese, she felt the need to elaborate. “When I was a child,” she said, “my mother took me away on a vacation, I can’t remember where. And I liked it so much I decided that that was all I ever wanted to do, to be on a permanent vacation.”
Restraint skewed the same tendency in another young woman, turning her escape hatch inwards.
She was seated stiffly erect a few rows in front of me on the No. 71 Streetcar to the Central Cemetery, a novice nun in stern black habit without the slightest worldly allure. I was on my way to visit my deceased grandmother, the only member of the family who still maintains a local address. I looked up to check for my stop and a stray hair caught my eye, a chestnut brown strand that broke out of the prison of the young nun’s hood fluttering in the wind of a half open window, sparkling in the Sunday morning sunlight. There was something so seductive about that one wild hair dancing about lewdly in contrast to the sobriety of the cloth that I felt a sudden overwhelming desire to see her face.
Eagerly I pushed my way forward through the crowd, convinced that I was about to discover a rare bird whose plumage the common world had never noticed. All else was a blur to me except for that single hair and the mystery it betokened. And when at last I arrived at my destination and turned to look, she turned her face away.
Did she sense that someone was watching her? Did her piety compel her to try to hide?
The sunlight served me well, and in the streaked reflection in the glass I saw it—Dear God!—a horseshoe of repressed passion nailed to her brow, clutching in its vice grip any flicker of illicit feeling, any crude diversion from the sacred path.
Though I admit I am a mere novice escape artist, hardly a Houdini, still my experience may, nevertheless, shed light on the general phenomenon. Is Vienna’s elusive heritage not buried in my heart?
I was standing waiting for a tram at the southeast edge of the Burggarten, on the Ringstrasse (Vienna’s grand boulevard), a corner dominated by the seated statue of the poet Goethe exhibiting himself with magisterial disdain, his bronze impassive gaze oblivious to the petty concerns of the slaves of time.
(I had passed him once before, my mind on other matters ostensibly gathering material for a play, noticing nothing but the pigeons perched on his tarnished head. Thus I was somewhat surprised, to say the least, to be roused in my sleep by the hotel telephone and to find that it was Goethe on the line, the monument not the man—I’m quite sure of this, since the voice had a hollow metallic tone common to statues and operators and the operator had no cause to call me. The poet introduced himself, said he’d known my mother as a young woman, and might he be of some assistance to her son? It was true, my mother had adored him, having taken all his words to heart, many of which she could recall on cue and recite with little prompting; she had carried his collected works with her into exile from Vienna to London to New York.)
Standing face to face with her idol, I smiled at the comedy of dreams, and a curious thing happened.
There was a certain woman I had been avoiding, a painter pushing sixty who clung desperately to the images of her unhappy youth. We had met at her opening: macabre charcoal sketches, shrunken faces with bulging eyes, not very cheery stuff. We got to talking. I reminded her, she said, of a boy she’d known in Budapest before the War who’d disappeared in a transport. Would I, she asked, pose for a pietà in his memory in the buff? Politely, firmly, repelled by the idea, I declined, but the painter kept calling to press me to change my mind until finally I changed my number.
I spotted her now on the Ringstrasse advancing toward me from the opera among the matinée mob. She hadn’t yet seen me but the angle of her gaze was set such that it was bound to meet mine in a matter of seconds.
No streetcar in sight, no kiosk to duck behind, no newspaper to cover my face. I wanted to run but my feet froze beneath me. I wanted to turn my head away but the muscles in my neck tightened, locking my chin in place.
No way to deflect the inevitable.
And then it happened. The poet came to my rescue by sheer example.
Unable to escape, I had no other recourse but to stand my ground and become a statue. Every joint and muscle in my body stiffened, the blood congealed in my veins and for an instant, the time it took her to pass, I am convinced that my heart stopped beating. And I became an effigy of myself, as still and invisible as a monument and vanished in contemporary disregard.
Other family members have found themselves immortalized in like manner. I think of the salt pillars of the Bible, how seeing too much can turn a body to stone.
“What do you think of it?” a woman asked my opinion of the memorial to the victims of the War recently erected on a prominent site just behind the opera. Its centerpiece is a bearded old man on hands and knees obliged to scrub the sidewalk (a posture adopted by my maternal great uncle shortly before his disappearance). “It’s a shame!” the woman said, not waiting for my response. “What’s done is done,” she shook her head, “and such things happened, of course. Put up a monument if you must, but must you put it here? Why not put it someplace else where it’s less visible?”
Monuments capture the nostalgic spirit of the city. The Viennese have learned to transcend the flux of time by simply standing still and looking backwards.
Stalwart ancients pose in imitation of their beloved emperor Franz Joseph, sporting his famous white mutton chop whiskers.
Indomitable widows permanently occupy streetcar positions clutching their precious poodles in the seat beside them: snarling blinders, bulwarks against age.
Even Viennese punks have something static, ever so faintly Fin de Siècle about them, as if the leather of their impeccably tattered jackets came from an ancestor’s recycled Lederhosen and their safety pin earrings were filched from an aging dowager’s pincushion.
Everyone, young and old, hovers in a somnambulist trance, like photographs escaped from an album.
The effect can be unsettling.
A sleeping beauty perfectly preserved in her century long repose, Vienna waits for prince charming to come and wake her, only the prince is long since dead, the monarchy itself has fallen, the beloved emperor with his mutton chop whiskers has been replaced by a scowling corporal with a toothbrush mustache and, thereafter, by clean shaven civilians given to selective memory loss, while beauty lies resplendent, a silent movie queen in her outmoded finery, oblivious to time, puckering her lips in anticipation of a kiss.
How rude it would be to wake her!
I was just getting settled in a new apartment (a cold water flat in a pre-War building). Having not as yet had any guests, I did not know the sound of my doorbell.
And so it was that I awoke one night in near total darkness to a persistent ringing and reached automatically for my alarm clock. The glowing hour hand pointed to a phosphorescent number three, but the clock itself was silent. Must be the church bells, I thought, and pressed the pillow over my ears—Vienna has almost as many sanctuaries per square inch as Rome. Then I became aware of a pounding at my door and a muffled command: “Aufmachen! Polizei!”
Adrenal terror flooded my veins. I threw off the blanket, jumped into my pants and shuffled barefoot to the door, trembling with historical recall.
“Open up! We know you’re home!”
I did as I was told.
My visitors, two faceless men in trench coats, did not wait to be invited in.
The one inspected my belongings, the clothes and books I hadn’t yet gotten around to unpacking. The other approached my table that doubled as a desk, sat himself down and examined the scattered pages of a work in progress. Then he rolled a sheet of clean white bond into my
Olivetti portable and typed as he talked.
“Name?”
“Peter W.”
“Nationality?”
“American.”
“Occupation?”
“Writer.” I shivered, feeling naked without a pen in hand and minus my shirt and shoes.
“Now then, Peter W,” he inquired, “where is Peter R?”
“Don’t know,” I said, “I just sublet the place from him, I’ve never met him.”
“Where do you send your rent check?”
“To a numbered bank account.”
“A curious coincidence, wouldn’t you say, that you and he should share the same first name!?”
“A coincidence, yes. Peter is a popular name.”
“It seems,” said the man at my typewriter, “that Peter R has disappeared.”
A silent pause.
“What are you doing in Vienna, Mr. W?”
“Researching a play.”
“What kind of play?”
“An hysterical—uh, historical play.”
“Let me give you a word of advice,” he said, fingering my manuscript pages.
I listened intently, curling my icy toes. Every writer dreads the verdict of critics.
“Never” he said, “mix fact and fiction!”
I nodded, wondering if anyone will believe that this really happened.
“That will be all,” he said, tearing the sheet out of my typewriter, rising from my chair, waving his colleague to the door. “We wish you a pleasant stay in Vienna!”
It was just a mistake, I later learned, an administrative mix-up at the local precinct. Still, word of my nocturnal visitors spread. The widow next door, whom I had often helped with her groceries, refused to talk to me after that. The super and his wife, whom I’d tipped well at Christmas, likewise shunned me. My entrances and exits were henceforth accompanied by a chorus of creaking doors pulled open and slammed shut. My actual departure several months later must have seemed redundant to my neighbors for whom I had in any case long since ceased to exist.
Peter Wortsman’s restless musings have appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, the Washington Post, the German newspapers The Atlantic Times, Die Welt, and Die Zeit, and the popular website World Hum, among other print and electronic outlets, and in the last five volumes of The Best Travel Writing. He is the author of a book of short fiction, A Modern Way to Die; two plays, The Tattooed Man Tells All, and Burning Words; and the travelogue/memoir Ghost Dance in Berlin: A Rhapsody in Gray, Travelers’ Tales. His numerous translations from the German (a verbal form of border crossing) include the German travel classic Travel Pictures, by Heinrich Heine; Tales of the German Imagination, from The Brothers Grim to Ingeborg Bachmann, and Selected Tales of the Brothers Grim.
BRUCE BERGER
Mysterious Fast Mumble
The search for the Tower of Babel leads unexpectedly to Baja California.
A plunge into Spanish at its worst proved, in retrospect, an odd stroke of luck. The year was 1965 and I arrived in Spain ignorant of the language, though fluent in French from six years of study. It was the beginning of Generalísimo Franco’s last decade as dictator as well as the beginning of an adulthood I didn’t know what to do with, and while passing through Andalucia I wound up taking a job as a nightclub pianist. One gig led to another, I moved in with the drummer of a band I played with and, in a glorious cacophony, I was swamped by new sounds.
One wouldn’t choose to learn Spanish from Andalusians any more than one would choose to learn English from Cockneys, Mississippians or Valley Girls. Though Spanish is spoken from the front of the mouth, Andalusians speak it half-gutterally from the back of the throat. They don’t pronounce the endings of most words, their singulars and plurals sound alike, their l’s sometimes come out like r’s, and they spray these sounds as if from an AK-47. To make sense of what I was hearing, I bought the only grammar book in all of Cádiz, a second-year primer for English speakers. I don’t know what I missed in year one, for the book had the basics I needed, including the declensions of the infamous Spanish verb. I studied and talked, trying to correlate the two, often visualizing the spelling of the words my friends didn’t finish. French only helped by freeing me from English word order. When Andalusians eventually told me I spoke “better” than they did, I didn’t take it for a compliment, for I knew what they meant: I pronounced words entire because I imagined them in print, and I was structurally incapable of speaking simultaneously from the front of my mouth and the back of my throat. I spoke “correct” Spanish because it was so much easier than Andalusian, whose distortions I would never master.
In my failure to sound like my friends, what I didn’t appreciate was that three years of immersion in Andalucia paid off, for it enabled me to penetrate the language in its wildest distortions. Andalusian was not a dialect, merely a regional variant, and I couldn’t—and still can’t—make sense of such actual dialects as Galician and Catalán. On the other hand, through similarities among Romance languages, I am able to hold conversations with speakers of Italian and Portuguese as long as they, minding the gap, speak clearly and correctly—just as they can grasp my all-purpose Castillian. This linguistic baggage was put to the test when I left Spain in 1967 and made my first trip to Baja California, my verbal first step in Mexico, the following year.
Anxiety vanished with the first exchanges, for the speech was quite comprehensible. There was no th lisp on the z’s and soft c’s but the sounds were otherwise familiar, and the unexpected difference was in the vocabulary. Eyeglasses were lentes, not gafas; luggage racks were parrillas, not bacas—changes learned one at a time, easy to incorporate. The shocker was to be told to stop saying coger. I couldn’t understand it. Coger simply meant “to take” or “to hold”, and it was used in dozens of expressions—to turn right or left, to find someone at home, to catch a cold: it was one of the commonest, most nondescript and useful connectors in the language. But it turned out that in Mexico it meant only one thing. It meant fuck. It was not semi-respectable, like copulate; it was the f-word itself. So built was coger into my every second sentence that I had to learn dozens of dodges, a different substitute for each occasion. I told people that Mexican Spanish was in-coger-ent, pronouncing it “incoherent” while rolling the r, but no one in either language ever got it.
As I spent more time in Baja California Sur, making a social transition from American travel companions to local friends, I found there was a regional speech called choyero, after cholla, the most common and annoying local cactus, also spelled choya. Unlike the engulfing verbal universe that was Andalusian, choyero was a set of slang words and country pronunciations made fun of in the city: muncho for mucho, noshi for noche, ’orrasho for borracho (a drunken slurring of “drunk”). After a couple of decades of exploring the state, traveling into the mountains by burro and mule, skimming the coasts with fishermen, socializing with various strata in La Paz, I thought that I had experienced the verbal gamut. It wasn’t until 1990, twenty-two years after I had first set foot in the peninsula, that I started spending time in a mountain range called La Giganta, and there I heard something new.
I was attracted to La Giganta because it contained the peninsula’s last unroaded coast, over one hundred kilometers of soaring volcanics, secret recesses, isolated fishing communities and sporadic oases, a stronghold that fended off vehicles with an escarpment that fell, in many stretches, straight from the sky to the sea. Behind the continuous eight hundred meter cliff were isolated drainages peopled by a scattering of ranches accessible from the interior by an hour of careening on crumbling back roads. It was in La Giganta that I became friends with a rancher I called by his nickname, Lico, and I spent increasing time in a pair of ranches founded by his family, one on the coast and one up top, beyond the escarpment. Life led Lico from one ranch to the other, and at the ranch of the moment I got to know his extended family and, up top, his neighbors. Because these were working operations with nonstop chor
es, I was not a guest to be entertained but a companion and observer of what would have been the same without me. When the word “embedded” was used for reporters who lived with the troops in Iraq, it occurred to me that I was embedded with La Giganta ranchers.
What I heard were two kinds of speech, one of them ordinary choyero. The other, delivered only at close range, was nasal, higher in pitch, nearly lacking in consonants, and might be described as a “fast mumble.” I was, to be sure, never addressed in this manner myself, but others spoke it freely around me, at mealtime, around the campfire, when they crossed paths at close quarters. When Lico and I took off to visit other ranches, or to camp and explore in La Giganta, I noticed that people who knew each other well sometimes spoke in this manner, while those in the area who presumably knew both manners of speech but were meeting for the first time addressed each other in choyero. Vertical terrain cut off contact by cellphone, but when Lico called accessible relatives from my apartment during visits to La Paz, he stuck to choyero because of the cellphoner’s incessant need to project.
I had thought that an ear trained to penetrate Spanish at its most twisted, flexible enough to pry meaning out of other languages, would not be balked by a variant in a pocket between La Paz and Loreto, but such was not the case. I let the sounds flood the whorls of my inner ear, wielded my Andalusian chops—and did, in fact, pick up occasional Spanish words and even topics of conversation, if not what was actually being said. As an experiment, when I felt that I understood enough to suggest that they were discussing, say, where the cattle had wandered, I would remark in an equally soft voice that I had seen three cows in arroyo San Felipe—mainly to see if it startled anyone that I had caught the thread. Such interjections, no doubt irrelevant, were ignored. Year after year I fought for purchase, my ears on point, but never made headway. None of my outside friends were familiar with the area, and I didn’t ask Lico himself about it so as not to seem intrusive, or make him self-conscious about how he spoke, or scare his family off from speaking normally in my presence.
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