My father’s fine friends are also collectors. When they invited us to dinner, the wife would sit at the head of the table toward the wall, beneath a picture. She joins her hands, eyelids lowered, murmuring. Johannes’s daughter does not pray. I do not thank the Lord for the food that he and she give us. I do not thank you, she says to herself. Before the repast of the righteous begins, the woman’s face glazes over, vacuous. This is her prayer. The wife thanks the Lord with a bleak and rigid expression. As she draws nearer the Lord, her blood freezes, pallor flows into her face. As if the grace were a request for forgiveness, mea culpa if there is something to eat.

  Every time, I would wait for the moment in which she offered thanks with her hands contracted in prayer. I savor all her gestures. And after dessert I would wait for her to thank the Lord again. Then one went into the lounge. More pictures. Collectors have pictures everywhere. They do not let the walls breathe. Armchairs. View over the lake. View over the lawn. The two friends talk. One laughs, the other less. When the Spanish maid passes, Johannes gives her a tip. That was the custom. And pralines for the lady. “Take her nothing,” I say to Johannes. The friend, when he speaks to my father, uses a name that sounds Hungarian. When I went to call my father by that name he asked me not to. Perhaps only his friend has the right to call him that. Since they were students. A thing between initiates. His friend had a name too, but it was to do with the goods produced by his factory. Johannes no longer had a factory and therefore he had only a nickname. Of one who no longer possesses anything. Save for a daughter, which is not an asset. Johannes and I no longer have anything. His best friend knows this. His wife: the Lord has given, the Lord has taken away. Not from them. I knew this with a certain precision since they put me in the care of a lady who agreed to take me in.

  ‌

  House with garden, view over the lake. In the garden the children play. The children said: “You have lost everything.” They sang it to the sound of a march. Happy, exhilarated, exultant. The pure ferocity of the joy that manifests itself in annunciation. In the annunciation of financial ruin. Broke, broke, broke, they chanted. Johannes’s parents have lost their fortune, consequently Johannes and his daughter have too. The children know the economic situation of their schoolmates, especially that of Johannes’s daughter. Broke, broke, broke, they sound like frogs croaking, louder and louder. They were the little relatives, the children of relatives, cousins; they were part of the family. So they know everything. Broke, broke, broke, their mothers must have sung in the kitchens as, radiant, they baked the cakes. A chorus of general satisfaction.

  The war was not long over, although the war that was elsewhere had not caused them any hardship. But they had filled the cellars with provisions.

  You enter the garden through an iron gate with sharp spikes. There were roses, camellias, fruit trees, magnolias, trimmed hedges, and a greenhouse with lemon trees. And palms. The mistress of the house would cut the camellias and, still warm from the spring sunshine, she would lay them in a cardboard box. “Gently,” she would say. I had to wrap them up in tissue paper. Like living creatures, those flowers with the rosy petals, barely bruised, sometimes white, or streaked with red, were laid down for departure. Closed beneath a label and an address. Perhaps they were crying out with pain, but no one heard them. They were sent to her lady friends. With the passing years, the lady ran out of those. She survived. She took roses and camellias to the cemetery. I used to look at the stones with the names of unknown people engraved upon them. I would fantasize about those names, the portraits in the corridor and in the rooms of the house. Sometimes I would sit in a room beside a large mirror with a gilt frame. After having opened the window, I would look for a long time at the finest portrait in the house: the reflection of the garden. The plants drew nearer in the mirror, while the green of the leaves moved by the breeze and by the brilliance of the light formed a primitive landscape, the very essence of nature. As if the truth let itself be filtered by a mirror. By a reflection. In winter the camellias rested beneath a pyramid of dry leaves and twigs. As soon as the season grew milder, the mistress of the house would go to visit them to see if they had reawakened. I was her assistant gardener. Her name is Orsola. She is my mistress. She is the mother of my mother, of her who had been Johannes’s wife. Johannes has to ask her permission if he wants to visit me. We do not want visitors. Sometimes Orsola says: “Johannes has my permission to visit his daughter.” They use the polite form of address. And the term of the visit is final.

  After a few months, Johannes’s daughter was in primary one. She learns to sing. The father of one of the children dies. The most unrelenting member of the chorus, the boy was seven years old. “Du hast deinen Vater verloren,” chants Johannes’s daughter. You have lost your father. The boy has a melancholy look. The vision of his father darkens his iris. The words pass before his eyes as if on a screen, without touching him. “Yes, yes,” says the boy absently, distantly. “You’ve lost your father.” It is a sing-song. The rigidity of the boy’s look has something remote about it. This egged Johannes’s daughter on. The boy does not react. He replies calmly, monotonous and sorrowful: “Yes, yes.” Almost as if grief were made of patience, wisdom, confirmation of the irremediable. “You’ve lost your father.” “Yes,” repeats the boy, like an automaton. An atonal, bleak yes. The boy shifts his gaze elsewhere. Not to see the words anymore. He replies no longer. In that moment I sensed a wound, a painful spasm. The perception of what it means to hurt. To inflict pain deliberately. The cognition of pain. I was illuminated by the boy’s wordless suffering. I take his hand. An inert hand, which accepts mine. I try to apologize, I do not succeed. Awareness is the only forgiveness, I think, which can be attained.

  Orsola is a widow. Always has been, it seems. In the house and garden, the past. The past in the rooms, in the objects. The rooms facing the interior, almost on the road to darkness. In the turret that, half asleep, overlooks the lake. Every evening I obey Orsola. I must close all the shutters. I close the eyelids of the house. The turret has no shutters. It is a reliquary of physiognomies. The portraits of Johannes’s parents are stacked up on the floor. In costume. This is how I met them. The woman with the bonnet. A starched, tight bodice, meticulous pleats that look like cannulae made of glass. Of glass the whites of her eyes. A patina of ebony over her complexion. She would get darker still, I thought, like something unfinished that must manifest itself. Even her eyes have become darker. She is a woman from the North. Watchful eyes. She is posing for her son who will look at her when she is no more. Her smile is pensive. The smile of farewell. She has decided to abandon her little city whose river ran red at sunset, they say, with the tears of the glacier. They sold the factory. For their sick son. To offer him a temperate, mild place, a house and the vegetation of the South where the invalid could stay in the garden for long periods. And have the impression of living. Where his face could float through the palms, the magnolias, and the eucalyptus trees, not like the reflection of a dead thing.

  In a short time they lost everything. The creditors called in. And the bank people. Johannes’s parents wait together with their portraits for everything to end. She in the Tracht. He in the black suit, the starched shirt front, his eyes vacuous and severe. A tenuous sky blue. They seem to return to antiquity. Centuries distant in the gaze of a little girl. They await the end. Dispossession. The place in the South, the one that was to be the salvation of the invalid son, is ruin. Calm ruin. As if calm were imposed by violence. Johannes’s twin brother’s wheelchair stands motionless in front of the house, his gaze is trained on his parents as they prepare the inventory for the sale of the furniture, the paintings, the carpets. A gaze that is fixed as long as he manages to keep his eyes open. Now, he thinks, his parents are doing what he would have wished. They are taking the furniture out of the lounge, and thus he will no longer have barriers. Away too with the divan, on which he has never sat. Those two sat on it, dressed as in the portraits, and spoke in low, soft voices. They are suffering. They have no comfort. He is merely cold. They are suffering, he is cold. What more can one wish for. Stagnation and the will of the Lord.

  Very little is left. Almost everything has been packed up. The big black mantel clock with the columns still marks the hour. Apparently immobile. This is what the twin liked, the hands that love neither the past nor the future. The hands point at the numbers as if out of caprice. In the end, even the clock falls silent. Carried off like a mummy. Others would look at the face of the black clock with the columns and listen to the chimes, which spoke to the twin with an oriental sound, almost a voice.

  The nurse coddled the twin, treating him like an infant. This is not good. It is offensive. “The gentleman is not to worry,” she used to say. “It’s nothing. He will start talking and laughing again like before.” The twin grows ever calmer. Like the things that allow themselves to be carried off. He tries to get up from the wheelchair. The house in the South will be removed from the earth by a thrust of the spade.

  On the floor, in the turret, a small picture. A black man standing in front of a cornfield. He is smoking a pipe. He looks straight ahead. He has watched the invalid son of the white gentlefolk grow up. He is part of the family. An inexorable, bewitched melancholy links the portraits to Johannes’s twin brother. Orsola was reluctant to take in the three pictures that had escaped the auction. Genealogy spoke to me, I was looking for something that might have lingered on in my father’s features. What remains in him of his twin brother? Perhaps the twin lives on in Johannes. And perhaps he makes him limp, in order to put limits on Johannes’s vital mechanisms. To re-establish a kind of divine justice.

  I manage to decipher the quasi-glacial affection that Orsola felt for me. I do not know if I felt affection for her. Certainly it was the most intense relationship I had ever had. I would sit on her right at the table in the frescoed dining room. French windows gave onto the pergola of wild grape. Facing her was her portrait with the children. With whom did I sit at table before? It was another gap. I had no memories of the period before when I learned to write. Sometimes a person’s existence starts late. An absent life, or a nonexistence, can last a long time. Is it an anomaly? Perhaps a lack of images. I can describe Orsola’s dining-room table, I cannot describe previous tables or rooms. A few names linger on, the feel of certain objects, wood, the contours of a room. Orsola is the guide to the images. The portraits, my partners in conversation. She gives me orders. I would obey. She bids me goodnight in the corridor and goes up the stairs. To the top floor. My room is downstairs.

  I have a wooden bed, a bedside table, a wardrobe, a mirror that can accommodate at least five people, a desk for my homework. Sometimes I would stay awake, to convince myself that I was sleeping in my room. I would draw Orsola. And I took possession of her. Her effigy is mine. I wondered when she would turn me out. By day she gave nothing away. I was distant from her, as she was from me. In a certain sense, a perfect union. In the cellar, her gardening tools. And mine. The present. Every day the flowers have to be looked after. In the turret, the past. Some cupboards and rooms in the attic have padlocks. They are the places where the dead leave their things. And perhaps come to take them back. Where do the crates come from? From Buenos Aires, says Orsola. She had no further wish to open them since they arrived by sea in Genoa. As a young woman, Orsola lived in Buenos Aires. Her children were born there. My mother and her two sisters as well. We have scant news of them. They are grasping and diffident. When the mail came, I would check it; if there were letters from the two sisters, I would throw them away. I think Orsola knew that. Besides, she too would make Johannes’s letters disappear, the ones with the pro Juventute stamps. And the parcels with presents. It would happen in the corridor, where the mail was laid on a tallboy. Where the black telephone, an antiquated rectangular box, was attached to the wall. It was almost never used. One does not make telephone calls. Johannes used to call once a week, always at the same time, seven-forty p.m. Orsola asked him not to call, if it was not strictly necessary. Now she has my company. When she talks to me, she reflects. She reflects on my future. I ask nothing. I do not want to know. Johannes arrives. We have an appointment in a hotel. Johannes leaves again. Orsola and I are alone. She asks if I was glad to see my father. Yes, thank you.

  Orsola had a son who wrote letters from a sanatorium in Davos. It seemed as if it was the tuberculosis that kept him alive. He would spend hours on the veranda of the sanatorium, daydreaming. Before him, the mountains. Silent shadows run across virgin snow. And crows. One flies very close to the window. They look at each other. The crow promises to return the following day. The doctors give orders that the boy who dreams must not be disturbed. As he slowly died, he dreamed he had his twentieth birthday.

  The weather was almost always fair. The winters terse. Sometimes I can go up to Orsola’s room. A woman brushes her long white hair. Then she gathers it up. In Buenos Aires a dueña used to dress her. She would pull her corsets tight. While her husband sought his fortune. She is my Argentinean mistress. I think she comes from afar. From unknown worlds, whence perhaps she would like to return. A part of her eyes has remained in Tierra del Fuego. She cannot know that the girl she took in would like to return there where she is now. In the house with the garden and her. The girl who has no past. Orsola treats me like an adult. Like a peer. Obedience does not mean subordination. I close all the shutters. I do not open them in the mornings. A continuous closing. I close the days. Closing is order. It is a form of detachment. An ephemeral preparation for death. An exercise. It was entirely natural that that woman and the garden corresponded to the vision of a happy land. How much time did I still have at my disposal? The curtains at the windows are fragile, almost dust. And she, the mistress, looks like a white plaster bust.

  In the garden of the house that had belonged to Johannes’s parents, a glacial stillness. One cannot rule out the notion that some places may find new owners hard to bear. Those who came afterward had merely intruded on the suffering that had settled there. Objects rebel sometimes. Objects, like rooms, think. Perhaps nothing can be completely destroyed. Just as nothing is a victory.

  I often heard talk of crimes. Orsola talked at length about the trial of a banker who had killed his son’s wife. She knew him. The owners of villas usually know one another. He was the one who had bought Johannes’s parents’ house. And then, not far from Orsola’s house, lives a man who killed his mother. He moved there only recently. A mild and sweet man. He did not know why he had done it. His mouth was affected by a slight tic. They sentenced him to seven years in prison. He got out early for good behavior. I met him after he had served his sentence.

  Johannes protected that man. He almost seemed grateful to him. With him, he used a tone of voice that was different from the one he used with his friends in the Guild. More indulgent, knowing. Almost loving. Why? I wondered. The man looked younger than his age, about sixty. At least ten years younger. Suave, with a trace of disquietude. Killing his mother must have rejuvenated him. He had strangled her. It had all happened so fast. Before he knew it, his mother was lifeless and he called Johannes. And Johannes had rushed straight over. He took the tram from the Bahnhofstrasse. He looks absently out of the window. It is winter. He did not take off his dark gray hat. In winter his eyes become evanescent. He keeps his stick beside him. After a few stops, he gets off. He does not understand why, but he feels light. Relieved. The city on the lake looks more beautiful to him. He knows the streets near the Kunsthaus, he feels tenderness for those districts where he spent the unhappiest years of his life. With his wife. It had been really nice of her to leave. To leave him. Johannes observes the houses. He passes in front of the house where he used to live. He is vaguely touched, a little, on looking at the windows that conceal the rooms where his solitary life began. Where he no longer heard the voice of his daughter. He looks up toward the terrace on the top floor. The little one had sat there with her rabbit. She said she wanted to throw herself off the terrace with the rabbit, then she let herself be photographed as she hugged the rabbit on the edge of the terrace. She did not lose her balance. She never lost it. Like her father. They have always been able to perceive the exceedingly fine line between equilibrium and desperation. Johannes cannot tear himself away. The murderer is waiting for him, he thinks. Yet he lingers, looking at where adversity had passed through, or perhaps lodged itself in the impeccable shutters and frames of a house occupied by others. His wife took everything: the girl too. Since then, he can have her on loan. Shortly afterward, Johannes would lose his family fortune too. The girl’s mother managed to get away before. Before the ineluctable end of a fortune. Now, in order to see his daughter for a few days more, Johannes has to ask permission, which is denied him. When his daughter grows up, perhaps he will be able to stay with her. But when she grows up, he will be no more. He knows this with precision. With this final thought, he heads off for the murderer’s house.

  He is the only person that Johannes introduced me to outside his circle of friends. A murderer. It was when Orsola gave my father permission to come to visit me. Together we went to the new house with a small garden owned by the man who had killed his mother. I could not stop myself from looking at him with curiosity. I wanted to catch something in his aspect that might reveal him. I found no particular trace. He was a resigned man, of an almost obsessive mildness. The entire room was docile. A docile bunch of flowers, docile and mannered pictures on the walls. Fussy chairs, a table with an ornamental doily in the middle. The man was not at his ease. Not because of Johannes, who had been his defender. But because of the little girl. He avoided my gaze. I wanted to know why one kills. If such a terribly mild man had killed his mother, he must have felt an exasperation so sweet that it triggered the frenzy. Orsola is not sweet. So she cannot be a murderess.

 

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