Obabakoak (27 page)

A BACK STAIRWAY
connected the two floors of my uncle’s house and at a quarter to ten, well showered and even better shaved, my friend and I came down it. My uncle had not yet returned from buying the fresh croissants that formed part of the program and the air was full of that sloth peculiar to Sunday mornings. “It will be extremely hot today, especially along the coast, with temperatures reaching eighty-five to ninety-five degrees Fahrenheit,” said the radio in the kitchen, its murmurings a further invitation to remain in that state of semiconsciousness.

After a brief visit to the library, we went and sat down on the porch at the rear of the house.

“It’s a 1928 edition of
Nana,
” my friend said, opening the book he’d just taken from my uncle’s “Zola shelf.” But I paid no attention to his remark. “What are you looking at?” he added when I failed to respond.

“Sorry,” I said. “Have you seen what’s over here?”

“Something your uncle’s written?”

“I think they’re translations he’s made, and you can bet he’s up to no good with them. If I’m not mistaken, he’s discovered yet another example of plagiarism, carried out, needless to say, in this ridiculous twentieth century of ours!”

I passed my friend the two sheets of paper I’d picked up.

“Shall I read what it says or would that be flouting the rules of the program?”

“Of course it would. However, since he’s not back yet, it’s a luxury we can allow ourselves. But be careful, if you hear him come in, stop reading at once and look studiously out the window.”

“I’ll do better than that. I’ll point to that apple tree over there and say: ‘An apple a day keeps the doctor away.’ It’ll seem perfectly natural to your uncle. He won’t suspect a thing.”

“Perfect. You can begin.”

“Well, the title on the first page is ‘Odin, or a brief story by a writer currently much in vogue, in a translation by the uncle from Montevideo.’”

And this is what follows:

“King Olaf Tryggvason had embraced the new religion.

One night an old man arrived at his court, wrapped in a dark cloak and wearing a wide-brimmed hat that hid his eyes. The king asked what the stranger could do. The stranger replied that he knew how to tell tales and to play the violin. He played old tunes on the violin and told the story of Gudrun and Gunnar; finally, he touched on the birth of the old god Odin. He told of the arrival of three sorceresses and how the first two had wished him happiness… while the third, full of wrath, announced: ‘The boy will live no longer than the time it takes for the candle at his side to burn down.’ And his parents blew out the candle so that Odin would not die. Olaf Tryggvason did not want to believe the story. The stranger again assured him that it was true and, taking out a candle, he lit it. While everyone watched the candle flame burning, the old man announced that it was getting late and he must be going. When the candle had burned down, they went out to look for him. Not far from the king’s palace, Odin lay dead.”

My friend lay the first sheet down on the table and was about to read the second. I suggested he do so quickly. According to the radio in the kitchen it was already ten o’clock.

“He’ll be here soon,” I said, remembering my uncle’s punctuality.

“Right, the title on the second sheet is: ‘Passages taken from certain dictionaries learned by heart by that same fashionable author.’”

“He’s obviously keen on long titles.”

“The three paragraphs are about the hunter Meleager… ‘There was a rumor,’ says the first one, ‘that Meleager was not the son of King Aeneas but of the god Ares. Seven days after the birth of the boy, the Moerae appeared to his mother Althaea and told her that the fate of her son was closely linked with that of the brand burning in the hearth. They said that once the brand was burned up and had become ashes, Meleager would die. Althaea removed the brand from the hearth and, having extinguished it, put it away in a box’…”

“Now read the second paragraph,” I told my friend.

“The second one says… ‘And the Moerae, who are the godmothers of fate, went in search of her and predicted that if the brand from the hearth was ever consumed completely and became ashes, her son would also be consumed and die. Then Althaea removed the brand and, having extinguished it, put it away in a box. But it happened that Meleager, who was out hunting in Calydon, killed his uncles, Althaea’s brothers. Learning this, Althaea grew angry and threw the brand that had been linked with her own son’s life into the fire. Meleager died instantly’…”

“I think he’s coming,” I said.

“The third paragraph is very short,” my friend replied.

“Well get on with it then. Come on.”

“‘Among Celtic people, the figure of Odin goes by the name of Arthus or Arthur, as can be seen in the Norman
chasses du roi.
According to Dontenville, the myth underlying all of them is that of Meleager.’

Then we heard a voice say: “The reading session begins at ten.”

One of the nineteenth-century novelists he so admired might have described my uncle as follows: a plump, heavily built man of about sixty, with dark skin and a fine bald head, who usually dressed in blue and yellow. The caricature of him that hung in his library depicted him as half bon vivant and half Roman senator, but omitted his most marked characteristic: the vivacity of his small, dark eyes. For my uncle never had the resigned, sceptical look of a man who has lived a lot and has no further interest in seeing more of life, but of a man in whose eyes there still shines the enthusiastic, mischievous, joyful spirit of someone off to their first party. That—the spirit so evident in his eyes—was at the root of his literary gatherings, his ceremonies, his illuminated palm tree, at the root of his struggle against the banal way of life the world otherwise offered him.

“What do you think programs are for?” asked my uncle, coming over to us, smiling.

But the question was purely rhetorical and we embraced and greeted each other, laughing.

“And I’ll tell you something else,” he went on. “What you’ve just read is water under the bridge. I certainly wouldn’t make fun now of anyone capable of plagiarizing that well.”

“Yes, we’ve noticed your new attitude toward plagiarism. And to be honest we find it very odd,” I said.

“But how did you find out?”

“From the note you left us in the mailbox, Uncle.”

“Oh, of course! I’m so pleased with my change of mind that I can’t keep it to myself and I take every opportunity to let others know about it. But we’ll talk about that later. Now I’m going to give you breakfast.” And, saying that, my uncle laughed to himself.

“He’s up to something,” I said when he’d slipped away to the kitchen.

“Plagiarism is the goose that laid the golden egg! You bet it is!” we heard him say.

During breakfast we spoke only of everyday things. And when there wasn’t a single croissant, pancake, or bun left on the tray, we each picked up our second or third cup of coffee and began the reading session.

I read the first four stories: “Hans Menscher,” “How to Write a Story in Five Minutes,” “Klaus Hanhn,” and “Margarete and Heinrich, Twins.” Then it was my friend’s turn. He read “I, Jean Baptiste Hargous.” And finally my uncle set forth his new theory with a text entitled “How to Plagiarize.”

Once again, the last word will have to wait. It would be inappropriate to continue the search without first setting down the above-mentioned stories.

IN HAMBURG
, not far from the Binnenalster Lake, there is a house whose neglected state stands in contrast with every other house in that part of the city and which would appear to be utterly dead were it not for the roses that still bloom in the garden even today, doing their best to overflow the railings that separate them from Vertriebstrasse, the street linking the lake and Eichendorf Square.

Any passerby chancing to pause outside the house will notice the peeling plaster of its walls, the faded paint on both front door and window frames, and recognize the air of desolation that clings to all abandoned houses, a desolation that speaks to his own heart, perhaps itself an abandoned place. But he sees no statue there, no plaque, no sign to excite his curiosity, so the passerby lingers a little longer, thinking how lovely the rose gardens must have been and then continues along the road. He reaches the shore of the lake, sits down on the jetty, and looks out at the fragile sailboats, watching them slip along, bobbing up and down each time a motorboat passes, making rings in the water; and barely has he begun his contemplation than he has forgotten all about the abandoned house he stopped to look at in Vertriebstrasse. He has thus missed the opportunity of knowing that the painter Hans Menscher lived there, and was found dead in that very garden on 27 July 1923.

Had the passerby shown more curiosity and, prompted by the need to know why the house had been abandoned, asked for more details, perhaps—as happened with me—someone would have delved into their memory to recall that July morning and then, with the expression of one trying but failing to remember something, directed him instead to the city’s central library.

“If you want to know what happened to Menscher, look in the newspapers of the time. They’re bound to have something about him.”

The passerby will then endeavor to follow his informant’s advice for, like all passersby, he too has gone out into the street in search of something to relieve the monotony of his life, without knowing quite what that something might be, and following the trail of the painter Menscher seems as good a way as any of spending the afternoon. Continuing with our hypothesis, it would not be long before the passerby was sitting down in front of one of the many newspapers that, the day after Menscher’s death, described what happened in the house on Vertriebstrasse.

Were he to choose the same newspaper I chose, the
Bild Zeitung,
the passerby would read: “Hans Menscher, the painter and close friend of Munch, never really fulfilled the promise of his early work. It would not, we believe, be an exaggeration to say that Menscher was lost to painting the day he went mad, rapidly becoming the laughing stock of all who observed him painting in the garden of his house.”

The first reaction of the passerby, who is now the reader, would be one of surprise. He would probably remember the names of painters whose genius verged on madness without having any ill effects on their work—quite the contrary—and he would want to know the details of the madness from which, according to the journalist, Menscher suffered; a madness that brought about not only his failure as a painter, but also made him a public laughingstock, a figure of fun.

Needless to say, there will be no shortage of such details in the article. Indeed, the passerby, who is well aware of the vileness of life but does not care to dwell too much upon it, will find himself obliged to skip most of the anecdotes that the journalist—with the malice ordinary people reserve for those different from them—poured into his work. And when, at last, the passerby comes across the concrete fact on which the idea of Menscher’s madness was based, the fact will strike him as banal, because it will turn out that Menscher’s madness consisted in a view of pictorial art that is taken absolutely for granted today: the idea of painting according to the dictates of the imagination.

“As many Hamburg citizens who walked down his street will know,” the journalist writes, “the painter seemed incapable of seeing what was right in front of his eyes. After looking hard at his rosebushes, he would take up his brush and with just a few strokes produce, for example, a Mediterranean landscape, a field of almond trees. And if he turned his gaze on Vertriebstrasse, a Greek square or some other exotic landscape would appear. But that was not the worst of it…”

Indeed, it wasn’t, the worst thing was that people—the bored citizens of Hamburg—would stand on the pavement and keep plying him with questions and the unfortunate Hans—“unfortunate” being the correct epithet for someone blind to the evil intentions of others—would reply as if
“he really was, body and soul, in the midst of a Mediterranean landscape or in a Greek city, even speaking in some sort of Italian or Greek.…”
The italics are, of course, the journalist’s.

That was the worst thing, the fact that Menscher slowly became what the English call a “village idiot” and because of that—again I yield the floor to the journalist—“no one considered what the consequences of that alienation from reality might be.” The consequences were his tragic death one July morning.

The
Bild Zeitung
journalist relates the circumstances surrounding the incident with a certain glee:

“As many of us who stopped in Vertriebstrasse had the opportunity to observe, for the whole of this past year Menscher painted only one subject. A Moorish city, always the same Moorish city… White streets, mosques, medersas, men wearing long robes, women with their faces veiled.… That was what appeared in the paintings. And along with that mania, there arose in him a rare joy, a joy many considered pathological. When questioned about it, the painter explained the reason for his state of mind as if it were the most natural thing in the world. He said that he was having a love affair with Nabilah, a woman he had met in the city of Jaddig that appeared in his paintings. For those of you unfamiliar with the name, Jaddig is a city situated on the coast of Arabia.”

I imagine Menscher speaking from behind the railings around his garden and I imagine the faces of those who listened to him. I cannot bear that image, it wounds me. On reflection, though, perhaps Menscher really was mad, because only madmen can bear the mocking smiles of the people who address them.

“It seems,” writes the journalist, and it is not hard to imagine a mocking smile on his lips too, “that the relationship between Menscher and Nabilah was a most passionate one. An old friend of the painter, whose name must remain secret, explained to me that Menscher had spoken to him of that passion in lurid and intimate detail, the kind of detail that, for obvious reasons, we cannot go into here.”