Extinction (18 page)

destroying
it, by virtually
annihilating
it, and then restoring it in a form that I find tolerable, as a completely new world—though I can’t say how this is to be done, only that the world must be annihilated before it’s restored, since it’s impossible to renew it without first annihilating it. Listening to my views, he becomes much more attentive and fascinated than when I hand him a copy
of Siebenkäs
and tell him to read it and then ask me questions about it. Gambetti’s mind has already absorbed a great deal from mine, I thought. It will soon contain more of my ideas than his own. His parents are uneasy about what they see happening, I thought. And they’re not as pleased to see me as Gambetti makes out. True, they invite me home for dinner, but basically they wish I’d go to hell, because for years they’ve considered me a bad influence on their child, who has meanwhile
become an adult and outgrown them. They’re alarmed at having brought a budding philosopher and revolutionary into the world, which is not what they intended, someone who’s out to destroy them instead of evincing a lifelong, unquestioning attachment to them. They now blame me not only for possibly being the
seducer
of their naturally much loved son but for being his destroyer, and consequently their own, whom they have invited into their house and to whom they pay a great deal of money. For Gambetti’s tuition is not cheap. I charge higher fees than any other tutor, but the Gambettis are rich people, I tell myself, and I don’t have to have a bad conscience about relieving them of so much money, which in any case I don’t need, as I have plenty of my own. But the Gambettis have only an inkling of this, no precise knowledge. Gambetti of course knows about my financial position. He once said to me, If my parents knew how rich you were they wouldn’t pay you anything and wouldn’t allow me to be taught by you. As it is, they think they’re making a generous gesture and see themselves as patrons. For them this is an important element in my tuition arrangements, which they’ve found rather worrying for some time. They take refuge in their role as patrons in order to distract themselves from the idea that by paying you to teach me they might be conniving at something discreditable or destructive. Gambetti himself finds it quite in order for his parents to throw their money out the window, as it were, so that I can alienate him from them and implant in him ideas that will one day shoot up and pose a terrible threat to them and their world. Yet it was never possible for them to see me just as a harmless German teacher from Austria, I thought—it’s so obvious what I am and what I’m about. So I don’t reproach myself for the function I perform, which is to inculcate a knowledge of German literature in their son’s mind, along with my own ideas about changing, and hence annihilating, the world. After all, I didn’t
insinuate
or
force
myself into this role, I thought. Gambetti came to me at Zacchi’s instigation, and his parents expressly
asked
me to be their son’s tutor, telling me that I would be an ideal teacher. I too feel that I am the ideal teacher for Gambetti, and he shares this feeling. What his parents have come to regard as sinister strikes him as necessary and entirely natural. Gambetti has repeatedly told me that my teaching is
consistent and logical
, and that he regards German literature, which was a
fortuitous
choice on his part, simply as a pretext for everything else I teach him—meaning my ideas, which he has meanwhile made his own. Little by little we must reject everything, I told Gambetti on the Pincio, little by little we must oppose everything, so that we can play our part in the annihilation we envisage, putting an end to the old and finally destroying it in order to make way for the new. The old must be discarded and destroyed so that the new can emerge, even though we don’t know what the new will be. All we know is that it has to come, Gambetti—there’s no going back. Thinking in this way, we naturally have the old against us, Gambetti, which means that we have everything against us. But this mustn’t deflect us from our goal, which is to replace the old by the new that we long for. Ultimately we have to abandon everything, I told him, discard everything, extinguish everything. Looking down on the Piazza Minerva, I remembered telling Gambetti of a dream I once had, in which I was in a transverse valley of the Grödnertal with my college friend Eisenberg, Maria, and Zacchi. I first had this dream at least four or five years ago, I told him. In it I was still a young man, perhaps twenty. Eisenberg was the same age and Maria not much older. We’d taken rooms in a small inn called
The Hermitage
. I can still see the inn sign quite clearly. I had often recalled this dream and tried to fathom its meaning, but now I wanted at all costs to distract myself from thinking about the dreadful telegram I still held in my hand, and the dream seemed to provide the most effective distraction. I cannot say what made me recall the dream. Perhaps it was a remark that Gambetti had made two or three hours before I received the telegram, a passing remark containing the word
Alps
. Gambetti had mentioned that next summer he intended to go to the Alps with his parents,
and of course with you
, he had added emphatically. He loved the Alps, he said, and we could stay in a narrow valley that he had known since childhood and spend an extremely pleasant and profitable time pursuing our studies, away from the distractions that usually interfere with them.
Quite incidentally
he had said he would be going to the North Italian Alps with his parents, but above all he wanted to take me too, and if I didn’t mind he would invite me to join them on this Alpine study vacation, as he called it. We had just been talking about Schopenhauer, and about Schopenhauer’s dog, which he had placed above his housekeeper in order to be able to think out and
finish writing
The World as Will and Idea
, and about how
the dog and the housekeeper had guided Schopenhauer’s pen
, as Gambetti put it. Then, to my surprise and apropos of nothing, Gambetti had suddenly talked of visiting the Alps next summer and taking with him a notebook with squared paper, though he did not explain the significance of the squared paper and I did not press him, but I can distinctly hear him uttering the words
to the Alps with my parents
and adding
and of course with you
. This, I fancy, is what reminded me of my strange dream, which comes back to haunt me, I may say, several times a year. I think I first had the dream four or five years ago, at Neumarkt in Styria, in a dark twin-bedded room in an old villa belonging to relatives of my mother, where I was to recuperate, they said, from an unidentifiable feverish illness. I lay with the curtains drawn in this house belonging to my relatives, who have a big furniture factory at Neumarkt. I do not know why I was visiting them, probably for no other reason than to catch cold in Neumarkt, which is one of the wettest and gloomiest places I know. I spent two days and nights at Neumarkt, a really ugly town, lying in bed with drawn curtains and no nourishment. I can no longer even vaguely picture the faces of my relatives. All I know is that I had this dream at their house. We had arrived in the rain in this valley in northern Italy, I told Gambetti—Eisenberg, who was my age, Zacchi, the philosopher, who was also my age, and Maria, my first woman poet, my greatest poet at that time. Maria joined us from Paris, not from Rome, where she already had her present apartment. But in those days the apartment looked different: it contained only hundreds of books, not thousands. And no carpets, Gambetti. But even in those days Maria spent most of her time in bed, where she received her guests. Maria joined us from Paris, dressed in a crazy trouser suit. She looked as though she were going to the opera or had just been to the opera. Black velvet trousers, Gambetti, with big silk bows below the knees, and a scarlet jacket with a turquoise collar. She naturally caused something of a stir when she turned up in that Alpine valley wearing this operatic outfit. Eisenberg went to meet her, and I watched from a distance as she walked toward The Hermitage, moving her arms, her legs, and her head in an operatic fashion, Gambetti, as though she were dancing toward the inn. At first, from a distance, her outfit couldn’t be seen so clearly. Naturally I didn’t think it was Maria. It had
never occurred to me that she would come, and certainly not in such an outfit, either from Paris or from Rome. Eisenberg went to meet her, but neither Zacchi nor I did. It was as though Eisenberg knew she would be arriving at that time, while Zacchi and I didn’t. Standing at my window inside the inn, I assumed that Zacchi was in his room, still in bed but not asleep: he usually got up late, unlike Eisenberg and me, who have always been early risers. Eisenberg used to get up even earlier than I did, I told Gambetti, so it was natural that he, not Zacchi or I, should go out to meet Maria. Maria arrived very early, before five in the morning. I had had a sleepless night, as I always do in the Alps, and had spent more or less the whole night looking out of my window for hour after hour, until I had almost collapsed, I told Gambetti, though in fact I didn’t collapse. Then I saw Maria approaching the inn, where we had checked in the evening before in order to discuss Schopenhauer and Maria’s poems. In my dream this was our only reason for going there, and we had chosen what we regarded as an ideal setting, this narrow mountain valley, which is approached by a trail, not by a road, and can therefore be reached only on foot. Maria should have been with us the previous evening, and I can still see myself trying to mollify the landlord by repeatedly telling him he could rest assured that the chief guest, our friend Maria, was definitely coming. The landlord of The Hermitage was afraid that we intended to pay for only three people’s board, for we had booked not only our rooms but
full board
, so that we could pursue our plan totally undisturbed, the plan being to compare Schopenhauer’s
The World as Will and Idea
with Maria’s poems. Eisenberg, Zacchi, and I had agreed in Rome that it was a particularly attractive project. It was Eisenberg’s idea, and Zacchi had embraced it with enthusiasm. I had then booked the rooms at The Hermitage, and Maria had agreed to everything,
so long as it’s not Heidegger
, she said,
so long as it’s Schopenhauer
. She said she was looking forward to our enterprise but had to spend the night in Paris. She wouldn’t tell me why, though I begged her to. In my dream I told Maria that it was rather odd to go to Paris just for one night. There must be an
existential reason
, I said, but she wasn’t listening. She put on her coat and left at once, saying as she went out that she would join our party punctually. And in fact I saw her approaching the inn, dressed in her operatic outfit, at the very moment when we were due to start our discussion.
Throughout the previous evening I had been preoccupied with Schopenhauer and Maria’s poems, even though I spent all my time standing at the window, comparing the one with the other and trying to establish a philosophical relationship between the two mentalities, between Maria’s poems and Schopenhauer’s philosophy, repeatedly subordinating the one to the other, contrasting them and trying to bring out the philosophical element in Maria’s poems and the poetic element in Schopenhauer’s work. The fact that I didn’t sleep at all that night was a great boon, I told Gambetti. We must be grateful for all the sleepless nights of our lives, Gambetti, as they enable us to
progress philosophically
. Gambetti listened attentively as I went on with my dream narrative, not letting myself be distracted by the noises on the Pincio. Not even the twittering of the birds, which has always seemed to me the most mind-deadening noise, could interfere with my narration. I had stood all night at my window in The Hermitage, Gambetti, reflecting on Maria and Schopenhauer. The previous evening I had decided to pursue these reflections as long as I could, which was probably why I didn’t sleep. Seeing this grotesque figure, at first completely black and quite unrecognizable as Maria, approaching The Hermitage and advancing out of a snow flurry to a distance of more than forty or fifty yards, I eventually realized that this grotesque apparition, with its marionette-like movements, could only be Maria, and I now knew the reason for her nocturnal visit to Paris: she’d gone there quite simply to see an opera, Gambetti, and of course in this outfit, which I knew from Rome. She’d bought this trouser suit in Rome when we were out shopping together one afternoon, one desperate afternoon, as she always puts it, and by making this purchase we’d turned a desperate afternoon into an enjoyable one. Shopping can sometimes be our salvation, if we brace ourselves and don’t shy away from the greatest luxury, from the most exquisite and expensive goods, the very costliest goods, no matter how grotesque, like this suit of Maria’s. Rather than die of despair it’s better to go into a luxury shop and fit ourselves out in the most grotesque fashion; it’s better to turn ourselves into a luxury creation for a kitsch production of
Don Giovanni
than to take to our beds and resort to a treble dose of sleeping pills, not knowing whether we’ll ever wake up, even though it’s always been worthwhile to waken. At this moment it was clear to me, as Maria
walked toward The Hermitage in her grotesque outfit, that she’d been to Paris to see her favorite opera,
Pelléas et Mélisande
. Maria thinks nothing of coming straight from the Paris Opera to our Alpine valley in order to keep her promise, I thought as I stood at the window and watched her walk toward The Hermitage while Eisenberg went to meet her, I told Gambetti. Eisenberg hasn’t slept either, I thought as I watched him, so naturally he was the first to see Maria and go out to meet her. That’s typical of Eisenberg, I thought, standing at the window. Maria and Eisenberg always had not only a good understanding but the best understanding: they were
intellectual equals
. Eisenberg loves the same philosophy as Maria, and they share each other’s ideas about poetry. I’ve learned as much from her as I have from him, I thought. Maria wasn’t carrying anything, I told Gambetti. Emerging from the snow flurry, she looked radiantly happy as she walked toward The Hermitage. How relieved the landlord will be! I said to myself on seeing her. Zacchi had been the only one to doubt that Maria would come. How can she go to Paris in the evening instead of coming with us to the Alps, he had said, and yet be with us first thing in the morning at The Hermitage, where we’ve booked her a room? Zacchi was always the distrustful one, I told Gambetti. We used to call him