The Play of the Eyes, page 31
She held the flowers over her face like a mask, and I had the impression that her features grew larger and stronger. She trusted me as before, she had dismissed her doubts, she knew who I was, but not a hostile word crossed her lips. She didn’t say: “You’ve had a long trip. Is that what you’ve come for?” But I remembered something she had often told me. Before climbing the mulberry tree where she went to read, she would stop for a moment under the rosebush. The roses presided over her reading, their scent stayed with her, and whatever she might be reading was impregnated with it. Then she could bear the worst horrors; even if she was scared out of her wits, she did not feel threatened.
In our bad period I had held this up to her. I told her I could attach no importance to anything she had read while thus anesthetized. Horror that had been subjected to such fragrance was no horror. I had never withdrawn those hard words. And that may have put me in mind of my stratagem.
Then after all she said: “Aren’t you tired from your journey? Rest awhile.” She meant my trip to Ruschuk, not just to Paris. I assured her that I was not at all tired, and had no intention of parting with her so soon. She may have thought that I had come only to bring her the message from Ruschuk and that I would leave at once. It might have been better if I had. It hadn’t occurred to me that once she recognized me and accepted my presence something about me might upset her and that in her condition she couldn’t stand having anyone with her for long. After a while she said: “Sit farther away.” I moved the chair I had just sat down on. But she said: “Farther! Farther!” I moved again, but it still wasn’t far enough for her. I moved into the corner of the small room, realizing that she wanted to lie there in silence. When Georg came in, the position of the roses told him that she had accepted them, and he saw by her features that she felt better. But then, seeing me in the corner, he was surprised that I should be sitting, and sitting just there. “Wouldn’t you rather stand?” he asked, but she shook her head emphatically. “Why don’t you sit closer?” he added, but she answered in my stead: “Leave him where he is.”
She kept him close to her; there he stayed and embarked on a series of operations, the purpose of which was not always clear to me. These were things she expected him to do, in a fixed order. She forgot everything else; she no longer knew I was there, and she wouldn’t have minded if I had left. Helpless as she seemed, she anticipated certain of his operations, as though to remind him of the proper order. He moistened her hands and forehead, and moved her up a little higher on her pillows. He set a glass to her lips and she willingly took a sip. He smoothed the bedclothes and tried to take the roses out of her hands. Perhaps he wanted to relieve her of them, perhaps he meant to put them in water, but she wouldn’t let go of them and gave him a sharp look, as in the old days. He felt the violence of her reaction and was glad of her energy. For weeks he had been watching and dreading the decline of her powers. He left the flowers in her hand on the bedspread; they took up a good deal of room and were as important as he was. I, on the other hand, had been relegated to the corner and doubted whether she was aware of my presence.
Suddenly I heard her say to Georg: “Your big brother is here. He has come from Ruschuk. Why don’t you say something to each other?” Georg looked into my corner as if he hadn’t noticed me before. He came over to me. I stood up. We embraced. We really embraced, not mechanically as when I had first come into the apartment. But he didn’t say a word, and I heard her say: “Why don’t you ask him any questions?” She was expecting a conversation about my journey, about my visit to the garden. “He hadn’t been there for a long time,” she said, and Georg, who hated lies, went along with my story reluctantly: “Twenty-two years ago. During the First World War.” He meant that I hadn’t been in Ruschuk since the visit in 1915. Then our mother had once again shown me the garden of her childhood. Her father was dead, but the mulberry tree was still there, and the apricots were ripening in the orchard just behind it.
Her eyes closed, and as we stood there together she dozed off. When it seemed certain that she would go on sleeping, we withdrew to the living room. Then he spoke of her condition and told me she was past saving. Long ago, when we were children, she had thought her lungs were affected. Later, her fears had come true. Then a young doctor, aged twenty-six, he had become a lung specialist for her sake. Day and night he had spent all his free time near his mother. During his studies, he had come down with tuberculosis. His friends thought he had caught it from her. He had spent a few months in a sanatorium in the mountains near Grenoble. There he had worked as a doctor. When discharged as cured, he had resumed the care of his mother.
She had difficulty in breathing, she had suffered from asthma for years. In the last months she had declined so rapidly that he made up his mind to call me, reluctantly, because he feared the consequences of a confrontation; but the possibility of a reconciliation seemed to carry more weight. At the moment we seemed to be reconciled. Though he knew her sudden shifts of feeling and a violent outburst was still conceivable, he felt relieved at the good start. To my surprise he did not, when we were alone, reproach me for deceiving her with Paris roses and not going to her father’s garden. “She still believes you,” he said. “You’ve always believed her in the same way. That’s the bond between you. You have the power to kill each other. You must have known why you protected Veza from her. I understand. But I’ve had to live with the effect all that has had on her. I can’t forgive you for that. But that’s of no importance now. She thinks you’ve come from the place that she never stops thinking about.”
* * *
There was no room for me in the noisy little apartment on the rue de la Convention. I slept somewhere else and came to see her several times a day. She couldn’t stand my presence for long, but then she couldn’t stand any prolonged visits. Time and again, I had to leave the room and wait outside.
I didn’t go too near her bed. Her eyes grew larger and more brilliant. Each morning when I came in, those eyes took possession of me. Her breathing grew weaker, but the power of her eyes grew stronger. She did not avert them; when she didn’t want to see, she closed them. She looked at me until she hated me. Then she said: “Go!” Every day she said that several times, and each time it was to punish me. It hit me hard, though I was aware of her condition and knew I was there to be punished and humiliated; that was what she wanted of me now. Then I would wait in the next room until the nurse came in and nodded to let me know my mother had asked for me. When I went in to her, her gaze would seize hold of me with such force that I feared it would exhaust her, her eyes grew wider and brighter, she said nothing. Then suddenly would gasp: “Go!” and I felt as if I had been banished forever from her sight. I sagged a little, a convicted criminal conscious of my guilt, and left. Though I knew she would ask for me again, I took my dismissal seriously, I did not get used to it, each time I took it as a new punishment.
All the weight had gone out of her. Everything that was still alive had gone into her eyes, which were heavy with the wrong I had done her. She looked at me to tell me so, I held her gaze fast, I bore it, I wanted to bear it. There was no anger in that gaze, only the torment of all the years in which I had not let her out of my sight. To break away from me she had felt sick, she had gone to doctors, traveled to distant places, to the mountains, the seashore, any old place as long as I was not there. There she had led her life and hidden it from me in letters, because of me she had believed herself to be sick, and years later she had fallen sick in earnest. Now she was holding it up to me; all that was in her eyes. Then she tired and said: “Go.” And while waiting in the next room, a false penitent, I wrote to the woman whose name never crossed her lips, I gave Veza the trust I owed my mother.
Then she dozed and then she asked for me, as though I had just come back from a journey, and her gaze, which in sleep had taken on a new charge of the past, was fixed on me again. Wordlessly it said that I had forsaken, deceived and offended her for the sake of another woman.
And when Georg was there, all his movements showed how it should have been. He had formed no ties. He had lived only for her. In every one of his movements he served her, he could do nothing that was not good, for everything he did was done for her. When he went out, he thought of his return. For her sake he had studied medicine, for her sake he had worked in a hospital to gain the experience he needed to care for her illness. And he condemned me as she did, but of his own accord; she had not put him up to it. The youngest brother had renounced all life of his own as the eldest should have done; he had devoted himself exclusively to the service of his mother, and when it exceeded his strength, he too had fallen sick. He had gone to the mountains for the breath of life, but only in order to return to her and care for her. He had less to thank her for than I, because I was born entirely of her spirit, but I had failed her, for the sake of some chimeras I had let myself be talked into staying in Vienna, I had sold my soul to Vienna, and then, when I finally produced something worthwhile, it turned out that this something was by her, that she and not the chimeras had dictated it to me. So the whole tragedy had been unnecessary, I could have gone my way with her and arrived at the same result.
Such is the power of the dying who defend themselves against survivors, and it is well that the right of the weaker should be vindicated. Those whom we have not been able to protect are entitled to blame us for doing nothing to save them. Their reproach incorporates defiance which they pass on to us: the divine illusion that we may succeed in defeating death. He who sent out the serpent, the tempter, calls them back. There has been punishment enough. The tree of life is yours. Ye shall not die.
* * *
I seem to remember that we followed the coffin on foot, across the whole city to Père Lachaise.
I felt enormous defiance, and I wanted to communicate it to all those who were going about in that city that day. I felt proud, as though interceding for her against the whole world. No one was as good as she. I thought “good,” but my meaning was not what she had never been, to my mind she was good because, though dead, she would live on. My two brothers walked to my right and left. I felt no difference between them and me. As long as we were walking, we were one, excluding everyone else. As for the others, they were too few for my liking. I wanted the procession to stretch through the whole city, to be as long as our itinerary. I cursed the blindness of those who didn’t know who was being laid to rest. The traffic stopped only long enough to let the cortege through and started up again as soon as we had passed, as though no one’s coffin were being driven by. It was a long march, and my feeling of defiance lasted all the way—as if I were having to fight my way through those enormous crowds. As though victims were falling to the right and left in her honor, but not enough of them to meet her claims: The more ground covered, the greater the funeral. “Look. There she is. Did you know? Do you know who is shut up in that coffin? She is life. Without her there’s nothing. Without her your houses will cave in and your bodies shrivel.”
This is what I remember of that funeral cortege. I see myself walking, defying Paris with her defiance. I’m pretty sure my two brothers are by my sides. I don’t know how Georg made it all that way. Did he lean on me? Whom did he lean on? Was he sustained by some pride? Among the others in the cortege I don’t see a single face. I don’t know who was there. In the apartment I looked on with hatred as the coffin lid was screwed on. As long as she was in the apartment, I felt that violence was being done her. On the long way to the cemetery, I felt none of this; now the coffin was she, and nothing came between me and my admiration for her. That’s how a person like her must be carried to the grave if one’s admiration for her is to be free from dross. That feeling lasted, losing none of its intensity; it must have persisted for two or three hours. There wasn’t a trace of resignation in it, perhaps not even of grief, for how could grief have been reconciled with my raging defiance? I could have fought for her, I could have killed. I was ready for anything. Far from feeling numb, I challenged the world. With her forehead I plowed a way for her through the city—people were reeling on all sides—waiting for the insult that would oblige me to fight.
* * *
He wanted to be alone so he could speak to her. For several days I stayed with Georg for fear he would do himself harm. Then he begged me to leave him alone for two or three days, so he could be with her, that was what he wanted and nothing else. I trusted him and came back on the third day. He didn’t want to leave the apartment where she had been ill. He sat on the chair where he had sat beside her bed in the evening and went on talking. As long as he was saying the old words, she was alive for him. He wouldn’t admit to himself that she couldn’t hear him anymore. Her voice had grown feeble, less audible than a breath, but he heard it and went on talking. He talked, for she always wanted to know everything, about his day, about the people he had seen, about teachers and friends and passersby. He talked as he had before, when he came home from work; at present he went nowhere, but he still had things to talk about. He didn’t feel guilt about making things up for her, for all his invention was a lament, a soft, monotonous, long-lasting lament, because soon she might cease to hear him. He wanted nothing to end; his ministrations continued in words. His words awakened her, and she who had suffocated breathed again. His voice was soft and full of feeling, as it had been when he entreated her to breathe. He did not weep, he was afraid of losing a single one of her moments; when he sat facing her on this chair, he granted himself no relief that might have resulted in a loss for her. His entreaty did not cease, I heard a voice I had not known, pure and high like an evangelist’s. I wasn’t supposed to hear it, for he wished to be alone, but I did hear it because I was worried: Should I leave him alone as he wished? And I tested that voice a long time before making up my mind, it has rung in my ears ever since. How does one test a voice, what does one measure, what can one rely on? I hear him speaking softly to the dead woman whom he will never leave until it comes time to follow her; to whom he speaks as if he still had the power to hold her, and this power belongs to her, he gives it to her and she must feel it. It sounds as if he were singing softly to her, not about himself, no complaint, only of her, she alone has suffered, she alone has the right to complain, but he comforts her and entreats her, and assures her again and again that she is there, she alone, with him alone, no one else, everyone else upsets her, and that’s why he wants me to leave him alone with her for two or three days, and although she is in her grave, there she lies where she lay ill, and in words he seizes hold of her, so that she cannot leave him.
Notes
Trophies
1. A hill on the outskirts of Vienna. (Trans.)
2. Diminishing because Annerl is a Viennese diminutive. (Trans.)
3. Firemouth. (Trans.)
The Spanish Civil War
1. A German Jew. (Trans.)
ALSO BY ELIAS CANETTI
Auto-da-Fé
The Conscience of Words
Crowds and Power
Earwitness: Fifty Characters
The Human Province
The Plays of Elias Canetti
The Tongue Set Free: Remembrance of a European Childhood
The Torch in My Ear
The Voices of Marrakesh: A Record of a Visit
About the Author
Elias Canetti (1905-94) was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1981. His writings include a monumental work of social theory, Crowds and Power, and three volumes of memoirs, The Tongue Set Free, The Torch in My Ear, and The Play of the Eyes. You can sign up for email updates here.
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
I • THE WEDDING
Büchner in the Desert
Eye and Breath
The Beginning of a Conflict
The Conductor
Trophies
Strasbourg 1933
Anna
II • DR. SONNE
A Twin Is Bestowed on Me
The “Black Statue”
Silence at the Café Museum
Comedy in Hietzing
I Discover a Good Man
Sonne
Operngasse
III • CHANCE
Musil
Joyce without a Mirror
The Benefactor
An Audience
The Funeral of an Angel
High Authority
IV • GRINZING
Himmelstrasse
The Final Version
Alban Berg
Meeting in the Liliput Bar
The Exorcism
The Fragility of the Spirit
Invitation to the Benedikts’
“I am looking for my peers”
A Letter from Thomas Mann
Ras Kassa. The Bellowers
The No. 38 Streetcar
