Auto-da-fé (56 page)
Authors: Elias Canetti
Tags: #Fiction, #General, #Literary, #Literary Criticism, #German, #Novel, #European, #German fiction
Fischerle waited for the Capitalist, whether she was going out or coming in. An observant person, he would know her by the way she held her match, straight up in the air, because she was more gone on cigarettes than any other whore in the house. He would prefer her to be going out. Then he would creep upstairs, fetch the pocket diary from under the bed, take his leave of that cradle of rest, his home, his idyll, when he was still only a little cripple, run downstairs and drive on to the station in a taxi. Up there he would find his street-door key, which he had recently thrown down in a corner in a rage at her silly bitch way of talking, and been too lazy to pick up again. If she was coming in instead of going out, she would be bringing a client in. It was to be hoped he wouldn't stay long. At the very worst Dr. Fischer could slink into the little room as Fischerle had done of old. If his wife heard him, she wouldn't say a word or her gentleman would get mad. Before she could say anything, he'd be off again. What does a woman like that do with herself all day? Either she lies in bed with someone, or she lies in bed with no one. Either she's cheating someone of his money, or she's giving the money back to someone else. Either she's old and no one has any use for her, or she's young, in which case she's even sillier. If she gives you a meal she expects to half eat you in return, if she's not earning she expects you to go steal pocket combs for her. What a life! What room is there for artistry in it? A properly grown man would stake his all on chess. While he waited, Fiscnerle puffed out his chest. Because you never knew how the back of his coat and suit would look in the morning, the hump might stretch them.
For an eternity no one came. The gutters dripped into the courtyard. Every drop flowed towards the ocean. On an ocean liner Dr. Fischer would ship himself to America. New York has a population of ten million. The entire population is mad with joy. In the streets, people embrace each other and shout: 'Long Live Dr. Fischer.' A hundred million handkerchiefs flutter a greeting, each inhabitant has one on. every finger. The emigration officer evaporates. Why should they ask so many questions? A deputation of New York whores place their Heavens at his disposal. They have them there too. He thanks them. He is a man of learning. Aeroplanes write Dr. Fischer in the sky. Why should he not be advertised too? He's more worth while than Persil. Thousands fall into the water on his account. They must be rescued, he commands, he has a soft heart. Capablanca throws himself on his neck. 'Save me!' he whispers. But in the din even Fischerle's heart is fortunately deaf. 'Off with you!' he shouts, and gives him a push. Capablanca is torn in pieces by the furious multitude. From the top of a skyscraper cannons fire a salute. The President of the United States offers him his hand. His future bride shows him her dowry in black and white. He takes her. Subscription lists for Baboon Palace are opened. On every skyscraper. The issue is over subscribed. He founds a school for young talent. They get uppish. He strikes them out. On the first floor eleven o'clock strikes. An eighty-year-old woman lives there with a grandmother clock. In two hours and five minutes the sleeping car leaves for Paris.
On tiptoe Fischerle climbed up the stairs. His wife never stayed out so late. Sure enough, she must be in bed with a client. Outside the little room on the third floor he stood still and listened to voices. No light showed through the chinks. As he despised his wife, he understood nothing that she said. He took off his new shoes and placed them on the first step of the staircase, nearer to America. He laid his new hat on top of them, and admired it, for it was even blacker than the darkness. From his English phrase-book he would not be separated, he hid it in his coat pocket. Softly he opened the door, he had had practice. The voices talked on, loudly, about insults. Both were sitting on the bed. He left the door open and crept to the crack. First he poked his nose in: the pocket diary was there, smelling of the petrol into which it had been dropped some months previously. Your humble servant!' thought Fischerle, and bowed to so many artists in the game. Then he shoved the diary with his index finger to the top of the crack and pushed it up on end; he had it. With his left hand he kept his mouth shut, for he longed to laugh outright. The client above him had a voice exactly like the blind button-man. He knew precisely, by the way the diary lay, which was back and which was front, and by sense of touch alone found his way to the last blank pages. He found it much harder than usual to write small. On one page he put Doctor, on the next Fischer, on the third New, and on the fourth York. He would put in the exact address later, when he found out where Baboon Palace, his bride's place, is situated. Really he had troubled himself so little about this'marriage. All his troubles with money, passports, suit and railway ticket had robbed him of valuable days. There was the smell of petrol in his nose. 'Darling!' said the millionairess and pinched it, she loved long* noses, she couldn't stand short ones; what's that man done with his nose, she said, when they went for a walk in the streets together, all noses were too short for her, she was beautiful and American, she was a blonde, like in the films, she was gigantically tall and had blue eyes, she only travelled in her own car, she was afraid of trams, because there you met cripples and pickpockets, who would steal your millions out of your pocket, a crying shame; what did she know of his former crippledom in Europe?
'Cripples and scum are the same!' says the man on the bed. Fischerle laughs because he isn't one any more, and contemplates the trousered legs of the creature. His shoes press on the floor. If he didn't know that the button man had nothing but twenty groschen and not a ha'penny more, he'd swear it was him. Of course there are doubles. Now he's talking about buttons. Why not? He's just asking the woman to sew a button on for him. No, he's mad, he says: 'There, eat it!' 'Give it to
him
to eat,' says the woman. The man gets up and goes to the open door. 'He's in the house somewhere, I say!' 'Have a look see, what can
I
do about it?' The double slams the door and paces up and down. Fischerle isn't afraid. But in any case he begins to crawl towards the door.
'He's under the bed!' screams the woman. 'What!' bellows the double. Four hands drag the dwarf out; two clutch him by the nose and throat. 'Johann Schwer is my name!' someone introduces himself out of the darkness, lets go of his nose, not of his throat, and bellows: 'There, eat that!' Fischerle takes the button into his mouth and tries to swallow. For a single breath the hand lets go of his throat, until the button has gone down. In the same breath Fischcrlc's mouth attempts a grin, and lie gasps innocently: 'But that's my button!' Then the hand has him again and strangles him. A fist shatters his skull.
The blind man hurled him to the ground and fetched from the table in the corner of the little room a bread knife. With this he slit coat and suit to shreds and cut off Fischerle's hump. He panted over the laborious work, the knife was too blunt for him and he wouldn't strike a light. The woman watched him, undressing meanwhile. She lay down on the bed and said: 'Ready!' But he wasn't yet ready. He wrapped the hump in the strips of the coat, spat on it once or twice and left the parcel where it was. The corpse he shoved under the bed. Then he threw himself on the woman. Not a soul heard anything,' he said and laughed. He was tired, but the woman was fat. He loved her all night long.
PART THREE
THE WORLD IN THE HEAD
CHAPTER I
THE KIND FATHER
The dwelling of the caretaker Benedikt Pfaff consisted of a middle-sized dark kitchen and a small white closet which gave on to the entrance hall of the house. Originally the family, which numbered five members, slept in the larger room; there were his wife, his daughter and three times over himself; himself as policeman, himself as husband, himself as father. The twin beds were, to his frequent indignation, the same size. For that reason he forced his daughter and wife to sleep together in one, the other belonged to him alone. Under himself he put a horsehair mattress, not because he was soft —he hated sluggards and women —but on principle. He it was who brought the money home. Washing all the stairs was his wife's duty, opening the street door at nights when anyone rang had since her tenth year been his daughter's, so that she should get over her timidity. Whatever return either of them received for their services he kept, for he was the caretaker. Now and again he permitted them to earn a little something on the side, by cleaning or washing. Thus they learned by their own experience how hard a father has to work when he has a family to support. At meals he proclaimed himself in favour of family life, at night he derided his enfeebled wife. He exercised his rights of discipline as soon as he came home from work. He polished his red-haired fists on his daughter with real pleasure, he made less use of his wife. He left all his money at home; the sum was always perfectly correct, even without his checking it over, for the only time he had found an error his wife and daughter had had to spend the night in the street. Taken for all in all he was a happy man.
In those times the cooking was done in the white closet which was intended to serve for kitchen. Owing to his strenuous profession, which called for continuous muscular practice, a practice which he exercised by day and by night in his dreams, Benedikt Pfaff required a plentiful, nourishing, well cooked and well served diet. In this respect he would stand no nonsense, and if it came to blows with his wife that was her own fault, a thing which he would never have asserted in the case of his daughter. With the years his hunger grew. He found the little closet too small for generous cooking and commanded the transference of the kitchen to the back room. For once he came up against opposition, but his will was unconquerable. Since that time all three lived and slept in the closet, where there was just room for one bed, and the larger room was reserved for cooking and eating, for discipline and for the rare visits of his colleagues who, in spite of the plentiful food, never felt quite at home. Soon after this change his wife died, of overstrain. She could not keep up with the new kitchen; she cooked three times as much as before and grew thinner from day to day. She seemed very old, people thought she was in her sixties. The tenants who hated and feared the caretaker pitied him for one thing: they found it cruel that a man bursting with energy should have to live with such an old woman. In reality she was eight years younger than he, and nobody knew it. Often she had taken on so much to cook that she had not nearly finished when he got home. Sometimes he had to wait a full five minutes for his food. Then his patience would break down and he would beat her even before he had finished eating. She died under his hands. But all the same she would certainly have pegged out of her own accord in the next few days. A murderer he was not. On her death-bed, which he made ready for her in the larger room, she seemed so shrivelled that he didn't know how to look nis condolence callers in the face.
On the day after the funeral his honeymoon began. More undisturbed than before, he treated his daughter as he pleased. Before going off on his beat he locked her into the back room, so that she could devote herself more exclusively to the cooking. This way she was pleased, too, when he came home. 'What's my prisoner doing?' he would bellow as he turned the key round in the lock. She laughed all over her pale face because now she could go out shopping for the next day. This pleased him. Before going shopping she should laugh, then she would be given better pieces of meat. A bad piece of meat is nothing more nor less than a crime. If she stayed out longer than half an hour he went mad with hunger and received her on her home-coming with kicks. As he got nothing out of this his rage at the bad beginning of their evening increased. If she cried a great deal he would grow kind again and his programme would follow its normal course. But he preferred it when she came back punctually. Of her half hour he would steal five minutes. Hardly had she gone when he would put the clock five minutes forward, set it down on the bed in the closet and seat himself in the new kitchen by the fire where he could sniff at the coming meal without lifting a finger to prepare it. His huge thick ears were pricked up for the brittle footstep of his daughter. She walked silently out of fear lest the half hour should be over, and from the door threw a despairing glance at the clock. Sometimes she succeeded in creeping up to the bed in spite of the fear which this piece of furniture instilled into her and putting back the clock a few moments with a quick frightened movement. But usually he heard her at the first step — she breathed too loud — and would surprise her half-way, for from door to bed her steps were two.
She would attempt to slip by him and busy herself with dexterous haste round the oven. She was thinking of a sickly, lanky salesman at the grocer's who said to her, more softly than to the other women: 'Goodevening, Miss,' and evaded her timid glance. So as to stay longer in the same place as him, she would let women who were behind her in the queue get in front. He had black hair and once when nobody else was left in the shop he had given her a cigarette. Round this she folded a piece of red tissue paper on which she wrote in almost invisible letters the date and hour of the gift, and she carried this shining litde parcel at the one place in her body which her father never cared about, under her left breast, over her heart. She was more afraid of blows than of kicks: for the latter she lay stubbornly on her front and nothing happened to the cigarette; but at other times his fists hit out everywhere and, under the cigarette, her heart quivered. If he destroyed that she would kill herself. In the meantime she had long since loved the cigarette away to dust, because in the day-long hours of her confinement she would take out the little packet, gaze at it, stroke it and kiss it. All that was left was a little heap of tobacco, of which not one grain was lost.
At meals her father's mouth steamed. His chewing mandibles were as insatiable as his arms. She stood, so as to be able to refill his plate quickly; her own remained empty. All of a sudden she was terrified, he might ask: why don't I eat. His words were more fearful to her even than his actions. What he said she only understood since she was grown up; his actions had affected her from the earliest moments of her ife. I've eaten already father she would say. You eat now. But he never asked her, not once in all the long years of their marriage. While he chewed, he was busy. His eyes were fixed on his plate, glazed and spell-bound. As die heap diminished, their lustre faded. His masticatory muscles grew angry, they had been given too little to do; soon they would let loose a bellow. Woe to the plate when it was empty! His knife would have cut it, his fork transfixed it, his spoon battered it, his voice blown it to pieces. But that was why his daughter was standing by. Tensely she observed the signs on his forehead. As soon as the first trace of a vertical line appeared between his eyebrows, she filled up his plate, regardless of what might already be on it. For, later or sooner, according to his mood, die line appeared. She had learnt to do this; at first, after the death of her mother, she had done as her mother had done before her, and judged by the state of his plate. But this worked out badly; more was expected of a daughter. Soon she knew him in and out and read his moods straight from his forehead. There were days when he ate to a finish without a word. When he had finished, he would chew a little longer. She listened carefully — if he chewed violendy and for a long time, she began to tremble; a bad night lay ahead, and she would tempt him with the softest words to another helping. Usually he only chewed contentedly and said:
'Man has his offspring. Who is my offspring? The prisoner!'
At this he pointed at her; instead of his index finger he used his clenched fist. Her lips had to form the word 'prisoner , smiling, at the same time as his. She moved furdier away. His heavy boot came after her.
