I'm Not Stiller (3 page)

'Herr Doktor,' I interrupted him today. 'I've just come from Mexico—'

'That's what you say, I know.'

'I've just come from Mexico,' I repeated, 'and you can take it from me, the famous human sacrifices of the Aztecs, who cut human hearts out of the living body as offerings to the gods, were child's play compared with the treatment you receive on the Swiss frontier if you come without papers—or with forged papers—child's play.'

He only smiled.

'So you admit, Herr Stiller, that your American passport was a fake?'

'My name's not Stiller!'

'I have been informed,' he said quietly, as though I had not shouted, 'that you are presumed—I say presumed—to be none other than Anatol Ludwig Stiller, born in Zürich, sculptor, married to Frau Julika Stiller-Tschudy, disappeared six years ago, last address 11 Steingartengasse, Zürich. I have been appointed—'

'—to defend Herr Stiller.'

'Yes.'

'My name is White.'

But I cannot make him understand, however often I repeat it. Our conversation runs like a gramophone record with the needle stuck in the same groove.

'Why aren't you Stiller?' he asked.

'Because I'm not.'

'Why aren't you?' he said. 'That's what they told me.'

In the end I kept my mouth shut. His time is limited; that's my only salvation from this thoroughly decent fellow who considers himself my defence counsel and is therefore offended because I don't do as he asks, after he has read the whole dossier. Finally he puts it back in the brief-case, presses the catch without a word until at last it clicks, stands up, makes sure he has got everything, his fountain pen, his glasses, and shakes hands with me as though he had just lost a game of tennis, telling me what time he'll be back tomorrow.

 

P.S. He's 'convinced of my innocence'. What does he mean by that? Suddenly the idea enters my head that there is some suspicion hanging over Stiller; that is why the authorities here are so keen to lay hands on their vanished citizen—some affair has to be cleared up.

***

Knobel (that's my warder's name) is a real gem, the only person who believes what I say. While he is cleaning the cell, I lie on the bed, and he goes on cleaning until the water he wrings out of the floorcloth is clear enough to drink. It seems they take a lot of trouble over outward appearances. Even the window-bars get dusted in this country.

'Well, if you tell me yourself you murdered your wife—' said my warder.

Fourteen years ago he was a greengrocer with a cart and a horse called Rossli, of which he speaks very affectionately. At first I thought he was talking about his wife. He has worked as a warder ever since he became a widower, and he tells me I'm the first in all this time who didn't protest his innocence every time he cleaned his cell. He says he simply can't bear to listen to the twaddle talked by all those honest men. It must be nauseating. I hear the next cell is occupied by a banker, who weeps for hours at a time, and the next cell but one by a ponce, who likewise talks about honour. My warder is pleased with me, I think. While he was a greengrocer, and still under his wife's thumb, he obviously imagined a remand prison very differently. The things you'd hear there! he thought to himself. But not a bit of it. If he wants to hear criminals, he has to go to the cinema (he says) like everyone else...

He quite understood that I didn't want to talk about my first murder, since it was my wife.

'But your second?' he asked.

'My second,' I said, skinning the sausage, 'oh that was nothing, I already knew I was a murderer, so I didn't have to get into a particular frame of mind first—it was in the jungle.'

'You've been in the jungle, Mr White?'

'Indeed I have.'

'Well I'm blowed,' he said, 'well I'm blowed.'

'Do you know what the jungle's like?'

'Only from the films, Mr White.'

'Well that's just how it is,' I said and made quite a pause before coming to the point. 'I knew this Schmitz was knocking about in Jamaica and I went around for months with a dagger in my left boot.'

'Who's Schmitz?'

'Director Schmitz,' I said.

'Never heard of him.'

'The hair-oil gangster,' I said. 'A millionaire, you know, the sort you can't get at in a civilized country.'

'And you took a dagger and—?'

'That's right.'

'Well I'm blowed,' he said.

'An Indian dagger.'

Unfortunately, since he has eight cells to look after, his time is short. Nevertheless, he always stays longer with me than with the others, the honest men. He's a real gem, whenever they feed the prisoners their over-ripe Swiss cheese, he always brings me a saveloy bought with his own money. True, saveloy (beer-sausage) isn't exactly my favourite dish, especially if I've no beer to go with it—it's a rather garlicky sausage you can still smell hours afterwards, when you're thinking of something else; but I'm touched by the thought behind it.

***

Frau Julika Stiller-Tschudy, wife of the missing man, had asked for better photos, in order to avoid a fruitless trip from Paris. For three-quarters of an hour they surrounded me with their lamps, so that I couldn't help sweating. And on top of that they kept saying:

'Relax. Be quite natural.'

***

I'm sitting in my cell, staring at the wall, and I see the desert. For example the desert of Chihuahua. I see its vast arid expanse full of blossoming colours, where nothing else blossoms any more, colours of blazing noon, colours of dusk, colours of the indescribable night. I love the desert. Not a bird in the air, no trickling water, no insect, nothing all around but silence, nothing all around but sand and sand and again sand that isn't smooth, but combed and waved by the wind, like dull gold in the sun or like bone meal, in between hollows filled with shadow that is bluish like this ink, yes, as though filled with ink, and never a cloud, never even a trailer of vapour, never the sound pf a fleeing animal, only here and there the isolated cactuses, vertical, something like organ pipes or seven-branched candlesticks, but as high as a house, plants, but as rigid and motionless as architecture, not really green, more brownish like amber, as long as the sun is shining, and black like scissor-cuts against the blue night—I see all this with open eyes, even though I shall never be able to describe it, dreamless and wide-awake and, as every time I see it, struck by the improbability of our existence. How much desert there is on this planet whose guests we are; I never knew before, I'd only read about it; I had never experienced how very much everything we live from is the gift of a small oasis, as improbable as grace. Once, somewhere under the murderous blaze of a noon without a breath of wind, we stopped; it was the first cistern for days, the first oasis on that journey. A few Indians came up to look at our vehicle, wordless and shy. Again cactuses along with a few dried-up agaves, a few withering palms, that was the oasis. You wonder what people do here. You wonder what man is doing on this earth at all, and you're glad to have to bother about an overheated engine. A donkey was standing in the shadow under a sheet of rusty corrugated iron, the garbage of a distant and almost unimaginable civilization, and of course there were swarms of children round the five adobe huts, windowless as a thousand or two thousand years ago. When we were ready we drove on. In the distance we saw the red mountains, but they came no closer and often, even though I could hear the boiling engine, I could hardly distinguish whether we were moving or stationary. It was as if space no longer existed; only the changing times of day showed us that we were still alive. Towards evening the shadows of the house-high cactuses lengthened and so did our shadows; they flitted along beside us hundreds of yards long on the sand, which was now the colour of honey, and the daylight grew thinner and thinner, a transparent veil in front of the empty cosmos. But the sun was still shining, and the over-large moon, the same colour as the sandhills touched by the last rays of the sun, appeared out of a violet dusk without haze. We drove as fast as our jeep would go and at the same time not without the solemn knowledge that our eyes were absolutely the only ones to be seeing all this; without them, without our mortal human eyes travelling through the desert, there was no sun, only a vast sum of blind energy, without them no moon; without them no earth, no world at all, no consciousness of creation. We were filled, I remember, with a solemn arrogance; soon afterwards our back tyre burst.

I shall never forget the desert!

I'm sitting in my cell staring at the wall and I see Mexico, the floating gardens of Mexico, gondolas on brownish water with flashing reflections of the azure, gondolas that glide along almost soundlessly, all decorated with fresh flowers, a corso on canals, all around gardens filled with everlasting spring, Arcadias, but Indian. An old Indian woman, her baby tied to her back, comes paddling along in a narrow canoe whose gunwhales scarcely rise above the brownish water bubbling under the paddles; in a soft, low voice she offers a bouquet, orchids such as I have never seen before, arranged with a masterly good taste handed down from ancient times. The Aztecs never had a festival without flowers. A half-breed is trying to sell pulque, the Mexican popular liquor, distilled from the agave juice; he swirls the cup around in the turbid water and hands me the drink. It tastes of fermentation, of the sticky heat and sweetness of the tropics. And all around in the gondolas sit families with bag and baggage;
it's Sunday (like today), everyone is eating and drinking and having a good time. A couple in the very first phase of their relationship—they're sitting erect side by side and holding hands—have hired a gondola full of musicians, full of guitars and enormous Mexican hats, full ofhoneyed voices coming from dark, bandits' faces. It's a corso of the people, half authentic and half fake, and I think of the desert again. That's what mankind is doing with the earth! A young girl is lying face down on the bow of a gondola, trailing both arms in the slowly flowing water, quiet and blissful, while from somewhere else comes a loud burst of laughter. But most people are quiet, as I said, almost lethargic, or at least drowsy; I see faces like those from a lost paradise, alien, the very last relics of the great city of the Aztecs that was surrounded by a lake, accessible only across two causeways, an Indian Venice as the Spanish chroniclers called it. For the Indians, who were unacquainted with the wheel, water was the best means of travel and the lake must have been a paradise; parts of the banks, it is written, used to break away and float like islands with all their flowers. The Indians, the people of the flowers, used to weave rafts of reeds, piling earth and waterweed on them, even planting small trees on them, and then they rowed these flowering islands about. Hence the name: the Floating Gardens. Later the lake turned into a marsh, dried up apart from this modest puddle, where now the Sunday gondolas, half authentic and half fake, remind us of the downfall of a wonderful people, and modern Mexico, the city with its well-built and its badly-built tower blocks, is literally standing on a morass, you can see its buildings sinking into the ground, ceaselessly, a few inches a year ... And I see the reddish land all around, the pyramids, the lava, the dead snake in the roadway, squashed by a tyre, and the vultures waiting, and I see the luxuriant orchids on the telephone wires, the big mushroom-shaped hats of the Mexican men, their white cotton shirts and their reddish skin. Mexican markets! They remind you of techni-colour films and they're just like that, picturesque, very picturesque and yet, in reality, there are moments when you suddenly feel afraid. There's a smell of dead dog. Children sit with their bare behinds on the garbage, on rotten fruit. The goods lie on the ground, I can still see them today: beans and peas, nuts, fruits
I've never seen before, and in between sweets covered in flies and fish putrefying in the blazing sun. A carpenter nearby is making children's coffins, by the dozen, rough and cheap. And peasant women squatting on the pavement are selling pottery, the shapes reminiscent of Indian ware, but rough and cheap. The multitude of flowers is wonderful, but you can't catch their scent; where it doesn't stink of the horrible meat putrefying in the sun, it stinks oflatrines, and you have to make an effort not to transfer your disgust onto the people. It isn't a slum I'm looking at, but an open-air market and the place, I believe, is called Amecamea, a fine market, not depressing, only eerie. There is something demonic about the decay, as if it were a curse that changes everything that might blossom and give off a perfume into stench, into rottenness and putrefaction. And human beings have given up trying to defend themselves against it; no one clears away the dead dog; the most people do is to shoo away the flies with a weary movement before putting the tortilla in their mouths. Club feet and other deformities are part of the picture, the sun and the blue sky are like a dazzling mockery. I have a strange feeling that something is wrong. What's wrong? But nothing is wrong! It's all very picturesque, the mild amber light under the big awnings and in it the faces of the foreign women; up above the crumbling baroque of a Spanish church, a verdigris cross, orchids everywhere. And between the green leaves of the banana palms that hang down like big, tattered banners I see the eternal snow on Popocatepetl, the Smoking Mountain that no longer smokes, a white tent, marvellous. Where does eeriness come into it? And wherever our car stops to fill up I see a blind man stretching out his hand. In the coffee plantations there is a fly whose sting first causes a suppurating pimple that can be removed; but there's no doctor, no money for a doctor. Then the maggots get into the blood, finally into the eyes which then run like poached eggs, a whitish-yellow mush. So they stand there, old men and boys, blind and empty-handed. One of them is singing to a barrel-organ. And on the roofs perch the zopilotes, the big, stinking birds which, when you're travelling along a lonely road, often rise up in flocks from a corpse, a squashed snake, a putrefying donkey or a murdered man no one has missed yet; you can see these birds everywhere, black and ugly and fat they perch on the roofs above the picturesque market: vultures, the birds of Mexico.