The Eternal Philistine (11 page)

And shortly after leaving Milano, Kobler began dreaming of his poor brother, Alois, who had been blown to pieces by an enemy grenade during the World War. Alois appears as a dead soldier in a metropolitan cabaret and reenacts to an exclusive audience the grenade blowing him to pieces back then. Then he goes and scrapes himself back together again like a good little boy. This is done very gracefully. And the audience sings along with the chorus:

“Limbs get tossed,

But the war’s not lost!”

IT WAS AROUND NOON WHEN THE TWO GENTLEMEN awoke. They had slept through Genoa entirely and were now approaching San Remo.

Outside was the sea, our primordial mother. That is, the sea is supposed to have been the place where life originated hundreds and hundreds of millions of years ago, only later to crawl forth onto land where, being forced to either adapt or perish, it continued to evolve in that marvelously complicated way.

Schmitz realized that Kobler was looking at the sea for the first time. “So what do you think of the sea?” he asked him.

“I didn’t think it would be any different,” Kobler answered apathetically. He was still lying down, looking very haggard.

“Calm down, my dear sir!” Schmitz consoled him. “My
skull is hurting me just as much as yours, but I’m restraining myself. We shouldn’t have gotten so drunk in Milano.”

“We should’ve restrained ourselves in Milano,” lamented Kobler.

“Vintage 1902,” muttered Schmitz.

They were now riding alongside the sea but they did not actually see anything of it, even though they passed first the Italian Riviera di Ponente and then the French Côte d’Azur, no less. They had to submit themselves to another official customs control and passport inspection in Ventimiglia, a border town between these two coasts. It was here that Kobler felt the most nauseous. Even Schmitz was mucking around on the toilet for nearly an hour. They had to pay a bitter price for their Milanese Chianti. And the bitterness of this price was, as is so often the case in life, vastly out of proportion with the sweetness of the pleasure enjoyed. Kobler in particular could not enjoy this world-famous landscape. He also could not eat anything, vomited at every sharp turn, and looked into the future with gloomy eyes. “I haven’t even achieved the goal of my trip yet and I’m already dead,” he thought dejectedly. “Why am I even going?”

Schmitz kept trying to get him to think about something else. “Look,” he said in Monte Carlo, “here the palm trees grow on the very platforms! I can’t shake the feeling that Western Europe is significantly more bourgeois for having won the World War. I don’t want to know what’ll happen when the Western Europeans finally figure out that, ultimately, they lost the World War! Know what’ll happen then? Then Social Democrats will become ministers here too.”

“Here in Nice,” Schmitz stated, all the while smiling sarcastically, “the clocks ought to be turned back not just by an hour, but by a whole forty years.” When he was alone,
however, he did sometimes feel right as rain in the atmosphere of 1890, even though this meant he was contradicting himself.

Antibes made Schmitz think, among other things, of Bernhard Shaw. He thought: that was one witty Irishman. Or he thought of old Nobel, who made the very noble gesture of founding the Nobel Prize after watching people blow each other up with his dynamite.

Now the train was leaving the sea and would return to it again in Toulon. “We’re almost in Marseille now,” said Schmitz. It was already late in the afternoon; the sky was dark blue.

Outside was Toulon, the naval base of the French Republic. The sight of the gray torpedo boats and armored cruisers roused all sorts of childhood memories in Schmitz. And so he remembered how, back when he was a child, he had been allowed to look around one of the armored cruisers of the Imperial and Royal Austro-Hungarian fleet in Pola with his posh aunt Natalia. But his aunt soon went down below with a deck officer, leaving him alone up above. He had to wait for her for nearly half an hour. And he was terribly afraid because the gun barrels started moving all by themselves.

“I just don’t understand the French democracy,” he now thought melancholically in Toulon. “This armament madness is only natural to the Fascists, so long as you take their criminal egoism into consideration, but the French democracy, with its European mission? So you’ll say,
La France
has got to prepare itself for war against Mussolini because, after all, he’s got his eye on Nice and Corsica and even wants to annex the great Napoleon for himself. And sadly, dear Mariann, what you’re saying there is just logical!”

They finally reached Marseille.

It is well known that all the larger harbor cities distinguish themselves with a colorful life, but Marseille is particularly distinguished.

The center of Marseille’s colorful life is the old harbor. And the center of this old harbor is the brothel district. We shall return to this later.

As the two gentlemen descended the wide stairs of the Gare Saint-Charles, Schmitz already felt considerably better while Kobler was still feeling rather faint. He also still felt like he could not think properly.

“ ‘The Marseillaise’ originated here in Marseille,” Schmitz instructed him.

“Just keep it to yourself,” Kobler rebuffed him in a weak voice.

Night had fallen right after they left Toulon, and now the two gentlemen had no greater desire than to be able to fall asleep as soon as possible in a wide, soft French bed.

They checked into a small hotel on the Boulevard Dugommier, which had been recommended to Schmitz as being extremely tasteful and reasonably priced. Whoever made this recommendation must have been exceedingly malicious because the hotel was not tasteful but rather a sleazy hot-sheet hotel and thus not reasonably priced. Upon arrival, though, the two gentlemen failed to realize this—they were, after all, already half asleep when they walked into the reception. They went silently up to their rooms and undressed automatically.

“Hopefully you’re not a sleepwalker,” wailed Schmitz.

“That should be the least of your worries,” joked Kobler, and then fell into his bed.

THE NIGHT DID THE TWO GENTLEMEN THE WORLD of good. This time they did not have any dreams after having been freed of the monotony of the train tracks and wheels.

“I feel like a newborn baby today!” warbled Schmitz the next morning, and gleefully tied his tie.

Kobler was also cheerful. “I’m really looking forward to Marseille,” he said.

After getting dressed, the two gentlemen went for a stroll along the Canebière, that world-famous thoroughfare. Then they rode the bus past the Prado and out to the Corniche, a peaceful street permitted to hug the coast, and thereupon they took a motorboat out to the islet of the romantic Count of Monte Cristo, riding past old, useless fortifications. Thereupon they took an audacious elevator up to those uncannily steep rocks upon which the Notre-Dame de la Garde rests. Thereupon an all-encompassing panorama presented itself to them.

“Down there is Marseille,” Schmitz explained the situation.

Thereupon they took a ride in the transporter bridge’s iron spider, namely once there and once back. Thereupon they went into one of the popular restaurants in the old harbor, namely the restaurant The Comet.

There were all sorts of things to eat there, and everything was cheaper than in Germany or Austria. Consequently, the two gentlemen nearly overindulged. The all-you-can-eat appetizers particularly appealed to them, and the soft white bread too. This time they went a little easier on the wine, but Schmitz got rather talkative again all the same. He reminded
Kobler of that fitting German proverb about living like God in France, and then he asked him whether it had ever occurred to him that in numerous establishments, often even truly luxurious cafés, there weren’t any toilets, this being like some sort of Southern French specialty. Thereupon he enumerated to Kobler the culinary specialties of Marseille and ordered himself a sort of fish soup.

“Well, that’s one peculiar dish,” said Kobler warily, and sniffed it. “I’d say there are a lot of exotic ingredients in there.”

“Do you remember the colonial monument on the Corniche?” inquired Schmitz with his mouth full. “That was that monumental monument for Frenchmen who died fighting against the French colonial peoples. And of course, lots of stuff here comes from the colonies, but it’s like that everywhere! Even our famous Viennese black coffee is grown by the blacks. If we didn’t have any colonial goods, we wouldn’t, my dear sir, be able to satisfy even our most primitive needs. And believe me, that’d be the case too if somebody didn’t so shamelessly exploit those poor negroes. And then of course all the colonial goods would be prohibitively expensive because plantation owners would also want to earn a thousand times more money. Just believe me, my esteemed colleague, we whites are the biggest beasts!”

He suddenly had to cough violently after tossing down his throat a morsel that was too large. Once he was finished coughing, he resumed:

“If we white beasts were honorable people, we would have to build our civilization upon people without any needs, people whose needs could be satisfied without negro products, forest people as it were. Then we’d have states hardly capable of satisfying a need. But then what would be left of our occidental culture?”

“I’m not sure,” answered Kobler, shooting a bored glance at his watch. “When are we going to the brothel district?” he asked anxiously.

“It’s not worth it just yet—it’s still way too light out,” said Schmitz. “In the meantime we could take a look at a few old churches.
Garçon
, bring me another banana!”

RIGHT BEHIND MARSEILLE’S BEAUTIFUL TOWN hall begins the famous brothel district: dismal and filthy, a true labyrinth that seems to go on forever.

The farther one strays from the city hall, the more unofficial the prostitution gets and the more brutishly it deports itself. The streets keep getting narrower, the tall houses more dilapidated, and even the air seems to be decaying.

The God and the Bayadère
, it suddenly occurred to Schmitz, he being a literary man and all. “Do you see that
bayadère
over there?” he asked Kobler. “That fat yellow thing that’s washing its black feet—oh, how unsavory! My goodness, now she’s about to give herself a pedicure! And that thing calls itself God’s likeness!”

“It’s enough to make you sick,” said Kobler.

“Watch out!” yelled Schmitz. He saw another likeness approaching Kobler. This likeness had a crusty rash all around its mouth and insisted on giving Kobler a kiss. While Kobler was putting up a desperate struggle, a third likeness snatched Schmitz’s hat off his head, acting very coy. A group of Senegalese sailors couldn’t help but laugh at that.

“No matter how you look at it, that’s one interesting
mixture of peoples,” stated Schmitz, who after lengthy negotiations had reclaimed his hat for the price of five cigarettes. “Did you get a look at that Japanese whore too?”

“I even saw the Chinese one!” answered Kobler. “You certainly can see all sorts of stuff here. I just don’t get the men who mess around with it all.”

“Sex drive—nothing more,” said Schmitz, “and sailors are said to have quite exceptional ones.”

“I don’t get these sailors,” interrupted Kobler sullenly, before beginning to curse and complain impatiently about the apparent lack of nice whores in Marseille—“just horrible, abominable ones.” He had envisioned this harbor city as being quite different.

“Just calm down,” Schmitz consoled him. “I’ll take you to an upscale, very official whorehouse. I got the address from a head waiter at the Bristol in Vienna. The women are sure to be well cared for. And supposedly you can see all sorts of stuff there, even if you don’t mess around with it. You shouldn’t do something like that in a harbor city anyways, if only because of the increased risk of infection. Everybody’s diseased around here.”

“I’ve never caught anything,” said Kobler, which was a lie.

“I’ve never caught anything either,” said Schmitz, which was also a lie. Then he grew melancholy once again. “When all’s said and done, this whole prostitution business is really sad stuff, but you just can’t get rid of it.” He smiled wistfully.

“I feel the same way,” concurred Kobler. “I know an attorney whose highest ideal was to look at obscene pictures with the woman he loved, only his own wife refused to do it, claiming that such photographs would make her grow weary of life. So, where was the attorney to turn to? Streetwalkers’ district. And where there’s a demand, there’s pretty
much also a supply. Those are just basic instincts!”

“Unbelievable, the creatures there are in this world!” thought Schmitz, and grew philosophical yet again. “I too regard prostitution from a higher point of view,” he explained. “I’ve just been thinking that, since we humans have been around, we’ve actually only repressed three instincts, namely incest, cannibalism, and bloodlust. And as the recent World War has once again demonstrated to us, we haven’t even fully repressed these either. Those are problems, my dear sir! For instance, just take a look at me! In my youth I sympathized with
The Communist Manifesto
. Without exception, everybody’s got to get through Marx at some point in time. Marx claims, for instance, that prostitution will disappear through the abolition of the bourgeois conditions of production. I just don’t believe it. I think that you can only reform it. And that’s the way it’s got to be.”

“How?”

“Nobody has really got that figured out yet. The only thing we know for sure is that Marxism isn’t the solution. After all, right now we’re experiencing the full scope of communism and its desire to destroy our entire European civilization!”

He jerked to a halt.

“Well, looks like we’ve found it,” he said. “That over there is our whorehouse!”

The head waiter at the
Bristol
really had not been exaggerating when he gave Schmitz his word of honor about
Chez Madelaine
being respectable and honest, run in an exemplary fashion in every respect. “For once he wasn’t lying,” thought Schmitz. “I’ll write him a postcard today.”