Peter Camenzind (17 page)

Next morning I went to see a doctor. It was a clear, ice-cold day and my anxiety lessened as I walked. I even thought of Christmas and what I might get Boppi. I found the doctor at home and he came at once. We drove to my place in his comfortable carriage, walked up the stairs, entered Boppi's room, and the doctor began his soundings and auscultations. As his voice became more serious and kinder, all my optimism left me.

Gout, a weak heart, a serious case. I listened and wrote everything down and was surprised to find myself making no objection when the doctor ordered Boppi's transfer to the hospital.

The ambulance came in the afternoon. When I returned from the hospital, I felt ghastly in the apartment, with the poodle pressing against me, the invalid's big chair set to one side, and the next room empty.

That's the way it is when you love. It makes you suffer, and I have suffered much in the years since. But it matters little that you suffer, so long as you feel alive with a sense of the close bond that connects all living things, so long as love does not die! I would gladly exchange every happy day of my life, all my infatuations and great plans, provided I could exchange them for gazing deeply once more into this most sacred experience. It bitterly hurts your eyes and heart, and your pride and self-esteem don't get off scot-free either, but afterwards you feel so calm and serene, so much wiser and alive.

Little fair-haired Aggie had taken one part of my old self with her into the grave. Now I saw my dear hunchback, whom I had given all my love and with whom I had shared my whole life, suffer and die bit by bit. I suffered with him and partook of all the terror and sanctity of death. I was still an apprentice in the
ars amandi
and now I had one of my first sad lessons in the
ars moriendi.
I will not be silent about this period of my life, as I was about my days in Paris. I want to speak loud and clear about it—like a woman about her honeymoon or an old man about his boyhood.

I watched a man die whose entire life had consisted of love and pain. I listened to him make jokes like a child, while death was at work in him. I saw his pained eyes seek out mine, not to beg for pity but to strengthen me and to show me that his pain and agonies had not touched the best in him. At those moments his eyes grew wide. You no longer saw his withered face, only the glow in his eyes.

“Is there anything I can do for you, Boppi?”

“Tell me something. Talk about the tapir.”

So I talked about the tapir. He closed his eyes and I found it difficult to speak normally, because I was so close to tears. And when I thought he was no longer listening or had fallen asleep, I would stop. Then he would open his eyes again.

“And what happened then…?”

And I went on telling him about the tapir, the poodle, my father, about wicked little Matteo Spinelli, or about Elizabeth.

“Yes, she married the wrong man. That's the way it goes, Peter.”

Often, he would suddenly start talking about dying.

“It's no fun, Peter. Nothing in the world is as difficult as dying. But still you manage it.”

Or: “I'll actually have reason to laugh, once this torture is over. Dying is really worth it in my case. I'll be getting rid of a hunched back, a clubfoot, and a stiff hip. It'll be a pity when
you
die—with your broad shoulders and fine, strong legs.”

And once, in his last days, he woke from a brief sleep and said, quite loudly: “The priests' heaven doesn't exist. Heaven is far more beautiful than that. Far more.”

The carpenter's wife visited him often and was kind and helpful in a sensible way. To my deep regret, the carpenter himself did not come even once.

“What do you think, Boppi?” I would ask him. “Will there be a tapir in heaven, too?”

“Oh, definitely,” he said, and nodded. “There's every kind of animal there, even the chamois!”

Christmas came and we had a little celebration at his bedside. A cold wave set in, then a thaw, then fresh snow covered the slippery streets, but I did not really see any of it. I heard, and immediately forgot, that Elizabeth had given birth to a son. An amusing letter from Signora Nardini arrived; I read it quickly and put it aside. I finished my work in brief, frantic bursts, always aware that each hour I worked was that much less time spent with Boppi. Then I rushed to the hospital, where I would find an atmosphere of serene calm. And I would sit for half a day by Boppi's bed, enveloped in a deep, dreamlike peace.

Shortly before he died, he had a few days when he felt better. It was remarkable how the immediate past seemed to have been blotted out in his memory: he lived entirely in his early years. For two days he spoke only of his mother. He could not talk for long at a time, but it was obvious even in the hour-long pauses that he was thinking of her.

“I've told you far too little about her,” he said sadly. “You mustn't forget what I tell you about her; otherwise there'll soon be no one left to remember her and be grateful to her. You see, Peter, it would be a wonderful thing if everyone had a mother like that. She did not have me put in an institution when I couldn't work any longer.”

He lay there, breathing with difficulty. An hour passed, then he continued.

“She loved me best of all her children and kept me with her until she died. My brothers emigrated and my sister married the carpenter, but I stayed at home. As poor as my mother was, she never held it against me. You mustn't forget my mother, Peter. She was very tiny, even smaller than I perhaps. When she put her hand in mine, it was just as if a tiny bird had perched on it. ‘A child's coffin will be large enough for her,' that's what neighbor Rütiman said when she died.”

He would fit in a child's coffin too. He lay small and shrunken in his clean hospital bed, and his hands now looked like those of a languishing woman, long, slender, white, and a little gnarled. When he stopped daydreaming of his mother, he became preoccupied with me. He talked about me as if I were not there beside him.

“He's not had much luck, of course, but it didn't really do him any harm. His mother died too early.”

“Don't you recognize me any longer, Boppi?”

“Yes, Herr Camenzind,” he said jokingly, and laughed very softly.

The last day, he asked: “Listen, is it very expensive to be in the hospital? It could get to be too expensive.”

But he did not expect a reply. A delicate blush spread over his wan face, he closed his eyes and for a while looked supremely happy.

“He is approaching the end,” said the nurse.

But he opened his eyes once more, gave me a roguish look, and moved his eyebrows as if trying to reassure me. I stood up, placed my hand under his left shoulder, and lifted him a little, which always afforded him some relief. Leaning against my hand, he let his lips twist once more briefly in pain, then he turned his head a little and shuddered, as though suddenly cold. That was his deliverance.

“Is it all right this way?” I asked him still. But he was free of all suffering. It was one o'clock in the afternoon of the seventh of January. Toward evening we made everything ready. The tiny misshapen body lay peaceful and clean, without further distortion, until it came time for him to be taken away to be buried. During the next two days I was amazed to find myself neither particularly sad nor distressed. I did not weep once. I had experienced parting and separation so deeply during his illness that I had little feeling left now. My grief subsided slowly as I regained my balance.

Still, it seemed a good moment to leave town quietly and find a place somewhere, if possible in the south, to rest and take up the loosely woven threads of my long poem and tighten them on the loom. I still had a little money, so I was able to put off my various literary commitments. I prepared to pack and leave with the first signs of spring. First I would go to Assisi, where Signora Nardini was expecting me. Then I intended to retreat to a quiet mountain hamlet for a stint of good, hard work. It seemed to me that I'd seen enough of life and death now to allow me to presume that people would listen to me if I decided to hold forth on these subjects. Impatiently I waited for March and in anticipation my ears hummed with earthy Italian expressions, and my nose tingled with the aroma of risotto, oranges and Chianti. My plan seemed flawless; the more I thought about it, the better I liked it. However, I did well to savor the Chianti in my imagination, for everything turned out differently.

*   *   *

In February a troubled, fantastically phrased letter from innkeeper Nydegger announced that there had been a heavy snowfall and that something was wrong in the village, with animals as well as people. My father's condition being particularly doubtful, all in all it would be a good thing if I could send some money, or best of all could come myself. Because sending money was not convenient for me and because I was worried about the old man, I had no choice but to go home. I arrived on a thoroughly unpleasant day. On account of the snow and wind, I could make out neither mountains nor houses. I was lucky that I knew my way about so well I could have found my house blindfolded.

Old Camenzind was not bedridden, as I had expected. He sat miserable and meek by the stove, besieged by a neighbor woman who had brought him milk and took the opportunity to lecture him thoroughly and at length on his evil ways, something my arrival did not interrupt.

“Look, Peter's back,” announced the hoary sinner, winking at me with his left eye.

But she went right on with her sermon. I sat down on a chair, waiting for her attack of excessive neighborliness to subside, though she made several points in her harangue which it would have done me no harm to pursue. But I just sat there, watching the snow melt on my coat and boots, and form a moist patch, then a little pool, around my chair. Not until the woman was done did we celebrate our reunion officially. The woman joined in amiably and with surprising good grace.

My father had grown much weaker. I thought back on my previous attempt to care for him. Apparently it was no help to leave him alone as I had done; the problem of caring for him had now become more serious and urgent than ever.

After all, you can't expect a gnarled old farmer who was no model of virtue even during his best days to become meek in his dotage or be deeply moved by the sudden spectacle of filial love. And that, of course, was about the last thing my father was going to let happen. Yet the feebler he became, the more loathsome he was. He paid me back for all I ever made him suffer, if not with interest at least in full and equal measure. He was sparing and cautious with remarks addressed to me, but he had access to numerous more drastic measures when disgruntled or bitter—he did not need to say a single word. There were moments when I wondered whether I, too, would turn into such a grouchy crank in my old age. My father's drinking days, however, were virtually over. The glass of good southern wine I poured for him twice a day he enjoyed with ill grace, because I always took the bottle right back down to the cellar and never entrusted him with the key.

Not until the end of February did we have those luminous weeks that make winter in the high Alps such a marvelous spectacle. The high, snow-covered mountains stood out clearly against the cornflower-blue sky and seemed improbably close in the clear air. Meadows and slopes lay covered with that winter mountain snow which is white, grainy, and dry as no snow ever is in the lowland valleys. The sun glistened at noon on swells in the ground. In the hollows and along the slopes lay rich blue shadows. After weeks of snowstorms the air was so clean that each breath was exhilarating. Children were sledding down some of the less formidable slopes, and between noon and one o'clock you could see the old people standing in the street treating themselves to some sun. At night the rafters creaked with the frost. Amid the snowfields lay the tranquil blue lake that never freezes, looking lovelier than it ever did in summer.

Each day before lunch I would help my father out of the house and watch him stretch his brown, gnarled hands in the sun. After a while he would begin to cough and complain that he felt chilly. This was one of his harmless tricks for getting me to fetch him a glass of schnapps, for neither cough nor chill could be taken seriously. Thus he received a small glass of gentian schnapps or absinthe. In artfully graduated steps he ceased coughing as he secretly congratulated himself on having outwitted me once again. After lunch I would leave him, strap on my leggings, and climb up into the mountains for a few hours, going as high as the time allowed, then return by way of a fruit sack I'd taken along, sitting on it and tobogganing home across sloping fields of snow.

By the time I had intended to set out for Assisi, the snow was still several feet deep. In April, spring finally began to make itself felt, bringing with it a thaw as swift and dangerous as any our village had experienced for years. Day and night you could hear the Föhn howl, distant avalanches crash, and the embittered roar of torrents carrying boulders and splintered trees, hurling them on our narrow strips of land and orchards. The Föhn fever would not let me sleep. Night after night, rapt and fearful I heard the storm moan, the avalanches thunder, the raging water of the lake burst against the shore.

During this period of feverish springtime battles, I was once more overcome by my old love sickness, so impetuously this time that I got up at night, leaned out the window, and bellowed words of love out into the storm to Elizabeth. Since that warm night when I had gone mad with love on the hill above Erminia's house, passion had not possessed me as horribly and irresistibly as this. It seemed to me often as if the beautiful woman were standing very close, smiling at me, yet withdrawing with each step I took in her direction. All my thoughts invariably returned to this image. Like an infected man, I could not help scratching the itching sore. I was ashamed of myself, but this was as agonizing as it was futile. I damned the Föhn, but all my agonies were accompanied secretly by the half-hidden warmth of lust, as I had felt it during my boyhood longing for Rösi Girtanner. The dark warm wave of passion flooded over me.