by Will Self
gg.Joyce had set out from Oerlikon at lunch-time, intending only to take her usual walk, up along the snaking paths of the Zürichberg to the Fluntern Cemetery. But, on reaching the far side of the woods, she could see ant-people milling across the Quaibrücke, and the flash of the Umzug’s penants, as the guildsmen, together with their floats, processed through the streets of the old town.
Gravity dragged her down the hill. With all this exercise Joyce’s knees no longer creaked or groaned; she had bought some ski pants at Globus, and the foot straps transformed her legs into exo-tendons, giving extra snap to every stride, as Joyce marched down the Rämistrasse into town, barely breaking sweat.
She ate an apple fritter — hot and sugar-dusted — that she bought from a stall, then wandered among the guildsmen in their cod-medieval costumes. It was somehow predictable that Ueli Weiss would be in quartered hose, half of each leg yellow, half green. His yellow-green belly could be glimpsed between the sides of his leather jerkin, from the slashed sleeves of which escaped puffs of yellow cotton.
Weiss stood, together with a handful of others similarly attired, at the base of the bonfire. These paperbag manufacturers and loss adjusters were fooling nobody with their embroidered banners and velveteen cowpat hats; burst blood vessels, liver-spotted hands, bifocals pinching pitted noses — in the fifteenth century this lot would be long gone. All apart from Weiss, who, as ever, managed to carry it off. His aquatic head bobbed in the surly-burly of civic gaiety, his manicured hands gripped the varnished haft of a fake halberd, and the moustache bristled with martial pride.
Spotting Joyce in the crowd, he saluted her with his ceremonial weapon. They would, she thought, have sex; there would be no breathy tenderness, only fat slug push and stubble rasp, but so what? The axe head of the halberd chopped at spring air, Weiss grinned, and then his brown eyes rounded: he had spotted someone in the crowd behind Joyce. She turned, expecting to see Marianne Kreutzer leading the miraculous Erich; instead, there was Isobel, being dragged away by the police. Their white-gloved hands were under her armpits, yanking up her short leather jacket. The pale slab of her back was exposed, and the near-legible notelet of her underwear label.
Joyce was disconcerted — she hadn’t thought that Weiss knew what Isobel looked like. But then he resumed his historical mummery — posing legs apart, the halberd sloped — and Joyce realized that he’d made no connection between her and the drunken beggar; it was only the disruption that had drawn his attention.
One of the policemen was now pushing Isobel down by her head into the back seat of a Volvo estate, his white glove grabbing her scrappy dyed hair. Joyce searched the crowd for the Tamil boyfriend, but he was nowhere to be seen. However, here and there, idling among the children rabbiting on toffee apples and their gassing parents, were the town drunks; it was they who were the festival’s cosmopolitan element — some with brown or black faces reddened by wine — leavening the heavy Swiss-German homogeneity.
When Joyce looked back the police car had gone, and Marianne Kreutzer was standing in front of her, with Erich Weiss tethered by her arm. Marianne bestowed her cheek on Joyce — this had been the way of it since their spa break. To Joyce, giving her a peck felt less like further intimacy than being fended off by a shield of foundation.
‘It is your date with Ueli this night,’ Marianne said, while Erich spluttered, ‘Sch-sch-schwess!’ A leakage of breath and spit that was surely parodic of the tongue he couldn’t twist his own around. He was so smart, Erich, and so handsome. At St Anton’s, Joyce had been taken by this mad fancy: that Erich was no more handicapped than anyone else, that his tics, spasms, barks and yelps had been carefully rehearsed and his spasms blocked out. The English apparel — toff ’s canary-tan corduroys, the waxed jacket, the brogues — these, she felt sure, were Ueli’s doing, although could anyone be stylish and subnormal?
‘He will take you for supper at Casa Ferlin after the concert,’ Marianne said. By this alone Joyce understood that she was not the first other woman to be so entertained, and nor would she be the last. ‘Be making sure to have baby cow meat — the veal?’
‘The veal,’ Joyce concurred.
‘It was the dinners for the Umzug last night — Ueli was with his Schneider Zunft until late times. He was ve-ery drunk.’ She laughed.
‘Schneider?’
‘The men who do the’ — she mimed sewing — ‘making of clothes.’
‘Tailors? I had no idea Ueli was a tailor, I understood he owned a Mercedes dealership.’
Erich cavorted over to his father, who was chatting with his fellow Schneiders; from a hundred feet away their hungover hilarity was still salient: shoulders shook, banners quivered. Erich fitted in, Joyce thought; his country squire’s costume was more mummery. St Vitus was Erich’s patron — he zigged and zagged and boogied beside his dad, who, together with his friends, seemed oblivious.
Marianne laughed again, sourly. ‘Aha, no, you see this is only the guild for the ceremony — they are not real tailors.’
Any more than this was the medieval era, with an abbess installed in the abbey church, although, as the big bells of the Fraumünster began to two-tone toll ‘Bing-bong, bing-bong, bing-bong’, a local government official in fancy dress stepped forward and fiddled with a lighter, until the brand he held licked into life. The tots in baseball caps cried out, as worshipful of fire as anyone, ever. The brand sent flames hopping and skipping up the flanks of the pyre. It was, Joyce judged, a cleverly constructed and very Swiss pyre: a giant inverted fir cone of precisely stacked logs. The B
gg himself, far from being a grotesque Guy, was an elegant wooden bodyform that would have sat well in the Kunsthaus. One of the vanquished Winter Spirit’s arms was raised, and as the two women watched this was slit by fire and puffed yellow smoke.‘I hear nothing now from Father Grappelli,’ Joyce said. ‘Now Monsignor Reiter has returned to Rome, it’s as if I. well, don’t exist.’ She fell silent, appalled by her own self-piteous tone. The B
gg was swaying in a fiery soutane, then the first of the fireworks packed into the effigy’s shapely chest shot up through the linden boughs and arced over the river. ‘I mean,’ she resumed, ‘what’s happening with the political side of things — this business of a referendum? Father Grappelli seemed to think it would be easy to get the necessary signatures — fifty thousand, is it?’Again the tightened face and the acerbic laugh; whatever creaminess Marianne Kreutzer had exuded in Baden had now gone off. ‘You — you, well you are not understanding, Joyce. The referendums — no one is giving their votes. No one cares, you see. No one cares.’
More rockets launched from the burning manikin, as the crowd sighed with pleasure; a flight of pigeons lifted off from the Badean-stalt — the open-air swimming pool out in the river. The B
gg half crumpled, embers bleeding from his cracked ribs. It was a creepily human motion — as if the figure were a suicidal monk, who had doused himself in petrol, then sparked a match.Marianne Kreutzer urbanely lit a mentholated cigarette. ‘I was, you know, twenty-one when the Federal Constitution was changed to make the women do the voting — to give me the vote. By then. well, I was making my money already three years. There are some cantons — Appenzell Innerrhoden — where there was no women voting until 1990.’ She took a pull on the cigarette and exhaled; her expression said it had lost its minty savour. She dropped it and ground it out with a patent leather toe; then she picked up the butt and clicked to a steel bin, where she discarded it. By the time she returned to Joyce’s side, the B
gg was no longer humanoid — was no longer anything, and the Sechseläuten was only another bonfire.‘The churches, the state, the banks also — in Switzerland, Joyce, to have any of these — these Grossfirmen. ’ She cast about, almost wildly, having reached the limits of her English.
‘Do you mean institutions?’
‘Exactly so. To have any of these big institutions pay any attention to a woman — an older woman — well, this is, I think, also the miracle.’
Joyce only half listened to his lecture on Zürich’s musical politics; she sensed that Weiss was giving it not because he thought it of interest to either of them but simply to fill time: a verbal intermezzo.
Other couples, the vast majority in late middle or old age, stood having their drinks. The wealthy and cultured Zürichers were dressed in their habitual navy blues and shades of black — with, here and there, a youngster in her fifties who dared brown. Jewels sparkled at plump wrists and plumper throats; these women’s bodies were display cushions, scattered in this gilded cabinet.
The programme, thus far, had not entranced Joyce. Her thoughts had not been about music — or music itself resounding in her mind, note-for-thought, tone-for-feeling, the organic development of mood — but preoccupied with how very un-musiced she felt. The musicians had clodhopped on to the steeply raked stage, frumpy cellists and tubby percussionists, their evening dress worn as love-lessly as traffic wardens’ uniforms. Had they been this apathetic when they left the City of Industry, or had the pall fallen on them only as their flight descended into Zürich?
And there, in the shape of the local conductor, had been the cliché Joyce dreaded: he was a Francophone Swiss from the hinterland of Geneva, who was yet more Bavarian than a puppet in wooden lederhosen strutting from underneath a clockface. Tick-tock, tick-tock — he gestured from the waist, and hearkening to his Taylorization of sound, the assembled lines of players sawed and hammered and blew. The opening chords of the Overture Egmont, which should have been a Romantic storm surge, were instead a mechanical pumping out of sound.
As the San Franciscans laboured to the Swiss beat, Joyce despaired. There was no dizzying ascent into the orbit of the crystalline chandelier that dripped from the ceiling of the auditorium; instead, she was sent truffling between ankles, where she smelt the shit of toy poodles smeared on expensive shoes.
Back in Birmingham, back in time, on those rare occasions when she had thrust Derry before her to a concert — it wasn’t that he was crass, or that he couldn’t swing to a slower beat, only that he preferred his Laphroaig to hand, and to be able to turn up the volume when Dexter blew hot and mean — Joyce, not liking herself for it, would involuntarily cast her eyes to one side, again and again, gauging his response to what they heard and then, sickeningly, adjusting her own.
After the piano had been brought on for the soloist — with some huffing and puffing — the second piece in the first half of the concert began. The San Franciscans obediently transported him through the choppy waters of the Allegro, if not con brio, then at least with dispatch; then the young man — who, Joyce didn’t need the programme to tell her, was French from the tip of his ascetic nose to the ends of his lily-white fingers — geared himself down for the Largo of Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto.
His forearms and thighs appeared to stretch out from his forward-canted trunk. Still, no fiery embers fell from this Böögg: he might have been typing so far as Joyce was concerned. To her left, Ueli Weiss’s thumb supported his smooth-shaven chin, while his manicured index finger probed the soft barbs on his upper lip. Frozen and tantalized, she watched the white half-moon of his nail trace the wing of his nostril.
At the interval Joyce had been desperate to pee; she rose but Ueli remained solidly seated, until, the applause pounding her ears, she was compelled to clamber over his knees.
In the second half the San Franciscans abandoned their factory and went wandering in the Alpenglow of Strauss’s tone poem. Joyce was too tired to accompany them, as they humped their harps and drums into deceptively pillowy couloirs and across polished blue glaciers. Besides, there was a fat lady, not singing but shouting Domini, Domini, as a Brummie slapper might bawl at an unwanted child, her every ragged warble bracketed by the still louder cries of the bass baritone, Derry, who stood outside the Top Rank Bingo Hall at Five Ways, intoning mournfully, Dom-i-ni, Osanna in excelsis. She ran away from him and found herself beneath the purple sky of Monsignor Reiter’s soutane, with his pale face — where it shouldn’t be! — the sun.
Either Ueli Weiss didn’t deign to wake her, or he cared not that Joyce slept. She was roused by the deadening réclaméof the Zürichers, only to witness the spectacle of the mousy first violinist scuttling into a bouquet. As the clapping scattered, Ueli said invitingly, ‘Und now, supper at Casa Ferlin.’
Joyce hadn’t gone so far as to obtain a full fur, but the saleswoman at Weinberg’s had persuaded her to buy a black leather coat with genuine mink at cuffs and collar. Her old-new coat was abandoned. Beneath the leather was a real dress, plum silk, cut on the bias; and beneath the dress there was an armature of more silk and wire, that, amazingly, provided her with a not unbecoming décolletage. The lank grey crop that the hairdresser in Oerlikon had treated with not much more than professional neglect — shampoo, set, trim, the hedging of old growth — was, at Marianne’s instigation, borne across town to Schwartzkopf ’s on Urianastrasse, where it was artfully dyed, before having completely new topiary.
Joyce waited on the steps of the Opernhaus while the Schneider went to get his little clothes iron of a Mercedes. When he returned, and hustled round to open the door for her, Ueli Weiss gaped at Joyce — but was this because of the makeover, or the veil of night and the rouge of street lamps? He kept darting looks at her as he pressed the tarmac around the town to Stampfenbachstrasse. In the restaurant’s vestibule Ueli uttered a small, animalistic grunt of appreciation when she disrobed; or perhaps, since there was a strong smell of pasta and baby cow meat, this was only coincidental.
Beside a slim golden pillar, with a tapestry-covered banquette scratching between her shoulder blades, Joyce scanned first the menu and then the room. The latter was nothing special, with its off-white walls, undistinguished oil paintings and fireplace stripped of paint in emulation of a rusticism that had never existed. Joyce might have wondered why Ueli Weiss’s chosen women found such an ambience seductive, were it not that she already knew that seduction — in her case as much as in theirs — was not an issue.
The discussion of menu selections, and then, when the entrées arrived, of the music they had just heard, was as much a formality as these events themselves. The ear-worm of Scoresby’s semiprofessional Requiem bored into Joyce as she bent to scallops caught in a chicory basket. Benedictus qui venit in nomine Dom-i-ni. The quiff-flicking in the Arts Centre canteen — did it all lead, ineluctably, to this? And had the others — who, she was sure, whether young or old, had been lacking in self-esteem, seeking the stiffest, and shortest-lived, acceptance — been as numb as she? Drained of melody, what remained of anyone’s life? A narrative trajectory as straight and dull, as discordant and crowded, as the M1. Benedictus qui venit.
Bread and wine were needed for a benediction. Joyce ordered tagliatelle, with an amatriciana sauce, and drank deep of the Gama-ret, a bloody red that Weiss regally called for — first one bottle, then a second.
He talked, if at all, of his first wife and their damaged child. Her virtues, it seemed, were many — although they were lost in the retelling: a loyal wife, a doting mother, a superb homemaker — the very ideal of a hausfrau; lovely to gaze upon as well. The trauma of Erich’s birth, the severity of his disability, these had been, well, there was no need for him to say this — the implication was as weightily present as he himself — but were it not for their faith.
Weiss had dealt with his own dish — some meatiness swimming in a jus — in double-quick time, and now his hands were free to flop in the orangey light flung down by the
fake oil lamp on their table. They were hands, Joyce mused, that always seemed gloved — sheathed in their own tanned hide. She steeled herself, imagining what they would feel like flayed, then dug down between her buttocks and a mattress.
Joyce saw herself reflected in Ueli Weiss’s brown eyes: the two tiny miracles of her birth and her resurrection. He said, ‘She died of pancreatic cancer, you know.’
She hadn’t. The waiter arrived, his hips epicene below his short white jacket, and asked if they would like cream with their coffee. Weiss declined, then said, ‘Here in Switzerland we have the highest levels of pancreatic cancer — you are not knowing this, also?’ His tone verged on the hectoring. ‘It is the creams, the milk and the butter — the fats, you say, we are eating them all the times. We think, maybe, we are still up on the Alps, looking after the goats and the cows — like Heidi, you know?’
And this, she did know.
There could be no question of them going to the apartment that Ueli shared with Marianne in Seefeld — this was how Joyce thought of it, not, despite the evidence of the rings, as a marital home. She knew it was close to St Anton’s, and, while they were at Baden together, Marianne had explained in some detail how she had renovated the top-floor flat where Ueli’s parents had lived, bought a second flat in the adjoining building, then knocked through the walls to create a defiantly contemporary space.
Joyce placed Marianne in this chic penthouse as Ueli Weiss skimmed the rainy streets with the Mercedes. Marianne in black silk pyjamas on a black leather divan. Lobby music welled from concealed speakers while she turned the pages of a fashion magazine. Her abstraction — it was more integral to her than her faith.
