Seiobo There Below (36 page)

sublime: the aria for alto, beginning “Bereite dich, Zion,” from the Christmas Oratorio; the aria for soprano from the Magnificat, “Quia respexit humilitatem,” BWV 243; as well as, from the much-mentioned Matthäus-Passion, the aria, similarly for alto, “Erbarme dich, mein Gott,” but then he purses his lips, he could do it but he isn’t going to, so accordingly he renounces the evocation of the “Bereite dich, Zion” and the “Quia respexit humilitatem” as well as the “Erbarme dich, mein Gott” and, seeing and perceiving that he has gone a little over the time, and exhorting his audience to listen only to the music of the Baroque, he now bids them farewell with the most fitting words for this time and place, that is he now cites the very greatest masterpiece of the cathedral of pain closest to his heart, saying thus:

O selige Gebeine,
Seht, wie ich euch mit Buß und Reu beweine,
Daß euch mein Fall in solche Not gebracht!
Mein Jesu, gute Nacht!

he cites it; the guest inclined his head a little, as it were, in farewell: he cites it and leaves its spirit here; he then reached for his coat thrown on to the chair, picked it up, and as slowly as he began to button it, he reached the door of the room, and to the greatest shock of the still incredulous, long-faced gathering, he looked back with tears in his eyes, then he waved once, adjusted his enormous glasses, went out, closing the door behind himself, and finally they could still hear from outside as he walked away, how he still yet shouts back to them a few times, saying mein Jesu, gute Nacht! Mein Jesu, gute Nacht!

610

JUST A DRY STRIP IN THE BLUE

He stands in line: there are still five people in front of him, but that’s not what is making him nervous; he will catch his train, it isn’t because of that, and actually, to say that he is nervous does not even accurately describe his frame of mind, because instead he cuts the figure of someone who has lost his mind: his eyes are burning, they shine dementedly yet are completely still, like those of a wild animal ready to pounce in the last moment before the attack, it is much better if no one looks into them, and no one does look into them, and whoever by some misfortune does happen to catch the gaze of the celebrated painter — those standing in front of him don’t dare turn around even once, and those behind him try to turn their heads in the other direction — this gaze cannot be endured, as it is completely apparent that Monsieur Kienzl is beside himself, it is evident that just a little harmless nothing will be enough and Monsieur Kienzl will immediately explode, will attack anyone at all, really like an animal infinitely roused, like a feral beast surrounded, one clearly facing a stronger power, when any resistance is as hopeless as could be, that is why he is the way he is, and that is what everyone observes in him, on this early morning of November 17, 1909, everyone in line to get a ticket for the number one express.

•

He has no idea why they are looking at him so much, he would be only too happy to knock them all down, to smash all those curious figures into many pieces with one single blow of his fist, how could they even imagine they could do this, that they could assault him like this, with this aggressive moronic gaping again and again, just what are they thinking, he clenches his teeth now, for how long will he be able to withstand such a brutal intrusion into his mourning, because no one can claim that they don’t know, since yesterday the entire city has spoken only of that — from the last bakery to the first salon, from Eaux-Vives to the Rue de Grand — the news traveled everywhere, and now this insolence, he presses his fist into his palm, in the face of his mourning, a completely unforgivable, intolerable, treacherous intrusion, and this damned line is moving so slowly, why the hell is that ticket clerk taking so long with those dammed tickets, and there are still five people in front of him, let the sky rot over their heads, how long will he have to stand around here, the train is leaving soon, and in general he’s not even sure if he should go, really, wouldn’t it be better to turn away from this accursed line and go home instead, and leave the whole thing as it is?! — because then at least he wouldn’t have to see these shifty faces, because then at least he wouldn’t have to be incessantly afraid that in the end some idiot, thinking things over, would feel obliged to approach him, and then turning to him would express his condolences, well, no, not that, Kienzl says to himself, if someone here among these people even dares to try that, then he will not hesitate for a moment, but grab him and without a word strike him dead, anyone who gives even the slightest hint of anything like that, with one blow, he won’t hesitate even for a second to do it — really.

Hector brought the news in September, but then there was already nothing to be done: there was nothing that could be done in the entire God-given world, because there is no cure for this; everyone dies: his father died, his mother died, all his siblings and relations died, and now Augustine had died as well and now he had no one from the past, only Hector from Augustine, because Augustine was dead, and with that the past was dead, she too lay recumbent, since yesterday; everyone lay recumbent, everyone lies down one day, and nothing remains of them, just a dry strip in the blue; the person who remains does not want to acquiesce to this, cannot even do so, it’s all arranged so that that the person who remains cannot bear it, he knows, he is aware, that, well, Augustine is dead, his old lover, who knew everything, who knew who he was at one time, and who at the end bestowed to him dear Hector, and this Augustine, his one-time Augustine is already being eaten up by worms, she is no more, and already is just a horizontal strip in the blue, and so too were they all here, in essence, all those here with him — he cast a glance around — all dead, here stands a pile of the dead in the blue, Kienzl thinks to himself, but what is even worse is that these five people keep standing in front of him and there behind the ticket window is that decrepit turd who is incapable of issuing a single ticket, this much is already obvious, there will be no tickets here, the train is leaving and they will remain here, this pile of the dead, here in the Geneva Station, finally perishing in a matter that seemed simple, on November 17, 1909, when already in the very first minutes they had entered a hopeless situation by wishing to buy a ticket for the train from Geneva to Lausanne.

The landscape painter is confronted not with the landscape, but with the blank canvas, namely that it is not the landscape he has to paint, but the picture, and he has stated this already many times, he begins to chew his moustache in rage, but well, he stated it already many times before, completely in vain, however; people think he paints so many landscapes because this is a
rewarding subject
for the canvas, they think that what they see is beautiful, but they are just blind, and they don’t see that it isn’t beautiful, but that it is — everything, but he repeats this over and over in vain, and chiefly he paints in vain, no one who looks at one of his pictures sees that he is not simply a painter but much more than that: a landscape painter, the kind who cannot do otherwise than paint landscapes: meaning this is so if there is some kind of landscape on the canvas, but also — and to the same degree — if there is a figure, so, well, what can be painted by the landscape painter is always, in this sense, a landscape, and nothing else, exclusively a landscape, even if there is a figure, he could never repeat this often enough, and he could never paint enough, but now he doesn’t say anything, he just paints, because why say anything, no one understands anyway, better to be quiet and paint, without expecting the wealthy clients to follow him, as they had never done so before — only in Paris and Vienna maybe, yes maybe there; here however, no, and this is not even surprising, if a person looks around — this world never ever changes — in Geneva and Bern and Solothurn and Zurich, this entire spiritual torpidity proved once and for all that it was incapable of comprehending anything at all, because they never bothered to think about anything at all, and never could, not here; he could paint well, among these figures, ever more awe-inspiring canvases toward the final, the great, the cosmic end, here, however, it was completely hopeless; before, until now, they didn’t understand and they didn’t buy the paintings, now they still don’t understand and they buy the paintings, so that, well, only that has changed, now he is not poor but rich; unchangingly, and in full measure, he was, however — alone, exactly when he might have believed that this barren misapprehension might have come to an end, because no, there would be no end, they would never understand even what it means to paint a landscape, to stand before a scene, and then it doesn’t matter if the scenery is that of Grammont or Augustine on the deathbed, to stand there, to look at this life withdrawing for all eternity into death in the human and natural landscape, and to depict what is before him when he looks up from the blank canvas: that is everything — who should he explain this to?! maybe to these people in the station, who are only capable of trampling upon his mourning?! to affront him yet again?! for if there is anyone at all, well, he really cannot rely upon them to show some respect, now in this mourning he must be silent, he must be silent and continue to paint all that Augustine was and what Augustine will be, and what remains of Augustine.

She lay recumbent and he pulled the sheet off her, so he could see the whole of what Augustine had become, when his heart, shattered by the pain, nearly stopped in his chest; he pulled off the sheet, because he is used to doing this in other cases as well: when he sits outside on the slope of the Grammont, or at Chexbres in the heights of Saint-Prex, and his brain, his soul utterly tautened, he pulls the sheet down from the landscape, and he sets to looking above the blank canvas, then to take up evenly, from left to right, with a thick brush or ever more frequently with the painting knife itself, the blue, the violet, the green, and the yellow, namely, when he begins to work on a canvas, or to make it even more plain; for years now he has been painting a single picture where only the canvas is exchanged, but the picture is almost always the same, where the colors too, and the parallel planes, and the proportions of sky and water and earth, too, in the picture are, in their essence, the same — he pulled the sheet off, and he saw what remained, what there was, and this lasted for a long while, as he watched with his tautened brain; until he can smooth the sheet back into place; and he feels not only his heart but his mind is shattering from the loss, because he must think, and his mind very nearly shattered in the thinking, during the entire previous evening, which he spent next to the dead woman, and it will shatter again, he determines with his clattering brain here before the ticket desk, for as much as he knows that he is really within the proximity of what he sees, he still does not however see it in its final form in that picture — its essence constructed according to already inviolable principles — he knows that he still has to modify something, maybe the yellow has to be a little more dirty, maybe the blue a little harsher, something somehow has to be modified from what it has been until now, with Lake Geneva he’s headed in the right direction, but to know exactly where to now, what is to be the next step, for that he needs that brain in his head, and he would need the ticket already, which he can’t manage to get to as he is still standing here in front of the ticket counter and there are still four people in front of him.

Valentine, too, is going to die, the thought lacerates through him suddenly as he stands in line, Valentine will also lay recumbent, the dreaded thought slashes through him, and he will not be able to bear that either, then so it shall be, Valentine as well, that inconceivably beautiful, immeasurably alluring, maddeningly sensual, exquisite woman, his current lover, to whom he is rushing with this loss and with his mind tautened in pain; she too will end up like everyone and everything, recumbent in the blue strip, falling into bed, becoming gaunt, her skin drying up, her face falling in, her chest caving in, and that marvelous flesh will come off her down to the bones, just as it did with Augustine, just as with his mother and his father and his siblings and his relatives in his beloved Bern, exactly the same, exactly the same as every dead person here and there and everywhere, but first, the news will come, if it indeed happens like that, and finds one in the midst of this atrocious life, and he will start to go to her again and again, maybe with the number one express every afternoon, just as he did with Augustine since September, to always be there, so as to be there beside her bed, day in and day out, just so that she would not have to die alone; if the time comes maybe everything will be exactly the same as with Augustine — he just stands in line, there are still four people in front of him, and he tries to brush off the thought, but it doesn’t work — Augustine and Valentine — it throbs in his brain, and he sees them already, the two of them dead, one atop the other, stretched out at length, like the strips of color on his canvases, like the beginning and end of existence in the Cosmic Whole, two bodies emaciated to skeletons with sunken-in eyes, tapering noses, lying stretched out above each other as the water lies above the ground, the mighty sky lies above the water, swimming in the blue of death.

Maybe everything truly does happen exactly in the same way — Kienzl finally steps forward one place in line — because every story repeats itself, life unto life, and at the end of course: death unto death, he thinks with a clouded countenance, well he is not the painter of death, he says, but of life, and now he even speaks the words aloud, nearly comprehensibly for those who are standing in close proximity to him, he doesn’t know, nor is he even interested, if they hear what he is mumbling, the painter of life, he repeats it several times, of life, which he loves unspeakably, he loved it in Augustine and he loves it in Valentine, that is why he has painted even its tiniest vibration for these long years now, that is why it is so important, finally a matter of life and death, to place the most decisive emphasis on this vibration, in Augustine and in Lake Geneva, to give it emphasis, if he sees it in the local death, this is his task and so he does it, because it is right, he cannot do otherwise, he must be the painter of oneness, thus, well, he must give himself over to death, but nothing can compel him not to find a place for that mere wisp of a fact, the presence of life, its eternal rebirth, in the green and gold — not to put it up there where it flashes, he will search for a place for it, and he will put it up there, thinks Kienzl, and now in his horrifically tautened brain, a picture appears from the Geneva material, painted not long ago, in which the gray-blue of the water extends toward a strong, earthy yellow strip below, in layers of color that follow and distance themselves from each other, giving depth and majesty to the scene; then there is the opposite shore of the lake, depicted with a thin green, a pale violet, and a more poisonous green: all of this is below, enclosed in the lower third of the canvas, so that then he can paint the sky into the gigantic space, into the two-thirds of the canvas extending above it, above the horizon of the far shore, some kind of weak, paler than pale sunlight, declining in gold with its swirling fog, then high above, just the pure blue of the pure sky, repeating clusters of white clouds following upon each other, accordingly, then, roughly twelve layers placed above each other: and with these roughly twelve layers placed above each other, with these crude twelve deathly parallels, is flung down there, as coarsely as possible: This is your Cosmos, this is Complete, the Whole, in roughly twelve colors: EVERYTHING, from Kienzl — and now — he stands shifting from one leg to the other in the line — it is yours.