I'm Not Stiller (25 page)

Sibylle had also said: 'I'd rather you didn't ask me any more questions now. He's a man, that's all I'll tell you, and he's very different from you. I can't say any more. Perhaps I really love him, I don't know yet. All I ask now is that you should leave me in peace.'

...Rolf finished his trip round the harbour with the look of a man who has been hit on the head by a falling plank, and paid what the rogue demanded of him. Wine was now his only wish, a great deal of wine. The story about the cloth—of course my public prosecutor told it far more graphically than I can—began outside the restaurant, when an American sailor asked him the way to a certain street. How was Rolf to know? But the sailor trotted along beside him. His American sounded genuine, and therefore almost incomprehensible to Rolf. But this much he did grasp: At two o'clock, in other words pretty soon, the sailor had to leave port—there actually was a ship lying with steam up—and the parcel was a present for a wartime Italian comrade. Rolf had his own troubles, God knows, but the despondent sailor clung to him like a leech with his extremely confused story and the parcel tied with string, which, since he could not find his wartime Italian comrade, he now had to sell before his ship, which was indisputably under steam, left port; for there was no sense in taking this magnificent piece of cloth back to America with him.

Rolf wasn't interested. To rid himself of the fellow and get to his wine, he beckoned to a passer-by, a youngish and quite ordinary-looking Genoese, who might perhaps know the street the sailor was looking for, or want the cloth. And so
bastal
Only the Genoese, visibly annoyed at being delayed in his purposeful walk, knew no American and the sailor no Italian. Rolf had to act as interpreter. It didn't suit him at all; that wasn't what he had travelled through the whole night to Genoa for, and naturally the suspicion that he had fallen for some sort of racket also crossed his mind. But where was the catch? His Italian was just as inadequate as his American, and since the young Genoese had no more desire for cloth than Rolf and was very reluctant to have anything more to do with the matter at all, there seemed no prospect that the two of them would ever strike a bargain. Rolf had already started walking away twice, but he had been fetched back by the excited sailor, who was simply lost without an interpreter. After a great deal of haggling (while this was going on, Rolf at least forgot his wife), the Genoese led them with a wink—a sign that one is willing to engage in an illegal transaction—through ever narrower alleyways full of steps and children, through crooked chasms filled with multi-coloured washing and hullabaloo, until in the half-light of a passageway between two houses he was ready to inspect the cloth that was for sale.

Rolf smoked a cigarette, temporarily relieved of his duties as interpreter; no words were exchanged at this stage. The Genoese, a less sympathetic character than the sailor because of his air of contemptuous superiority, pulled two or three threads out of the parcel, licked them and held them up against the dim light of shady backyards, while the sailor kept glancing at his watch. It wasn't wool, he said. Anyway, not pure wool—half and half, perhaps. Rolf returned to his interpreting, toning down the Genoese's remarks a trifle. All right, thirty thousand lire, that was his last word!

When it came at last to paying, the Genoese unfortunately had only ten thousand lire on him, the rest was at home of course, while the sailor couldn't wait a minute longer. What now? Perhaps the interpreter could help out. Now they had come to the point, Rolf knew this in spite of all his abstraction; and despite his suspicions he put his hand into his not particularly well-filled wallet—not out of pity for the supposed sailor, but (so he says) merely out of a fear of seeming narrow-minded. The sailor, half grateful and half angry at having been beaten down so far, bundled together the thirty thousand lire, of which twenty thousand were Rolf's, and hurried off with a curt farewell. It was one-thirty! Notwithstanding the objectionable way in which he had behaved towards the sailor, the Genoese acted like a gentleman as far as Rolf was concerned. He refused to take the cloth, insisting that Rolf should keep it until he had the lire. As security—he could feel Rolf's distrust. Again they passed through the back streets of poverty, Rolf with the parcel tied with string under his arm, until the Genoese—too offended to speak as they were walking along—finally said,
'Mia casa, attenda qui, vengo subito.
"

Rolf saw a dilapidated Renaissance gateway; he had no idea where he was—somewhere in Genoa. In the nearby harbour a ship's siren droned dully. Overcome by the noonday heat even in this shady alley with its damp and mouldy walls, by the silence, for it was far from the traffic, his fatigue after the night in the train—and that wasn't all: twenty-four hours ago Rolf had still been in London taking part in an international conference of lawyers, and then (yesterday) the rather bumpy flight, the supper with his strangely elated wife, then the closed door of her bedroom, then its opening, and so on—then daybreak at Milan with crowing cocks (all this in twenty-four hours—it was rather much) and now to find himself in this back street of mildewed poverty where slops trickled down the walls—and back came the knowledge that a fact does not cease to be a fact because you forget it for a time, no, it kept returning again and again, her face full of happiness with another man, it wasn't a bad dream, but more real than this Genoa with its alleys and children and these tangible walls, and on top of it this heat that made you tear off your tie, and this parcel that Rolf had to carry—overcome by it all Rolf simply couldn't help falling into a heavy sleep, in spite of the danger that the Genoese might do the dirty on him...

It was almost four o'clock when Rolf, my public prosecutor, woke up again sitting with his back to a wall and on his knees the damned parcel that had served him as a pillow. Naturally there was no trace of the Genoese waking him up with lire. Children were playing in a courtyard, mothers were shouting, 'Ettore, Ettore,' and in between, a tone higher, 'Giuseppina, Giuseppina,' and there below in the alley-way sat a strange gentleman with gold wrist-watch waiting in vain for his twenty thousand lire. Rolf stood up. On closer inspection, the rather mossy Renaissance gateway, through which the Genoese had disappeared, did not lead to a house at all, but simply to the next street. And there stood Rolf as though only now grasping for the first time the fact that Sibylle was in another man's arms. And during the haggling over the cloth, he had half-consciously looked at this young Genoese from time to time and asked himself whether Sibylle could have loved hair like his, ears like his, lips like his, hands like his; anyone might be the other man. Rolf only knew, 'He's very different from you,' and this might apply to several million men. As he stood in front of the empty Renaissance gateway, Rolf was really almost glad not to see the slick young Genoese again. But he had lost pretty well all his ready cash. Worse still, it was a discomfiture, just when he would have liked to cut a dash because of his wife; the blow to his pride was incomparably more serious than the loss of twenty thousand lire, irreparable. He dared not look at the parcel tied with string and supposed to contains gent's suiting cloth, which was his security. In any case he could only go to a cheap hotel, where the fact that this bundle was his sole luggage would not arouse too much comment. He stood in a hotel room with flowered wallpaper, bathed in sweat and at a loss what to do next in this city of Genoa. He threw the parcel into the wardrobe, picked up the jug, filled the basin and tried to wash without soap, without a toothbrush, without a sponge[[[mdash.gif]]]

He stayed in Genoa four days.

Rolf (so he says himself) had never foreseen that his marriage, his own, might go on the rocks like so many other marriages around him. He saw no reason why it should. He loved Sibylle and lived in the belief that he had found his own solution to the marriage problem. It had long since ceased to be a marriage in the classical sense of monogamy. But that was how it was, and to make up for it Sibylle had the child, a boy named Hannes, who made up for a great deal during the first few years of his" life. It wasn't the life Sibylle had dreamed of, but it wasn't hell either—just a marriage like so many others, and every year they went for a fine trip together, to Egypt for example. The idea of separating had never occurred to them, and in all the troubles they had passed through up to now both parties had obviously felt at bottom absolutely sure of one another. A fancy-dress ball flirtation, of which Sibylle made a demonstration, he granted his dear wife with magnanimity. He had other worries just then: the problem was whether to become a public prosecutor or not, a crucial decision, and it occupied his mind a good deal more than the fact that Sibylle was going for walks with her fancy-dress pierrot. Rolf didn't even ask his name. And then he had always been of the opinion that one shouldn't be narrow-minded about marriage; he evidently had a very serious theory as to how much freedom should be introduced into a marriage — a man's theory, Sibylle called it. She couldn't stand this theory, it seems; and yet it was based on the knowledge afforded by various sciences. And naturally this theory presupposed complete equality of the sexes. It wasn't simply a clever male excuse, as Sibylle frequently said—not merely a clever excuse. Rolf was really perfectly serious about it: his profession had shown him the misery, the hypocrisy, that springs from a view of marriage which has nothing to do with reality, and what he cared about was the idea of a viable marriage and avoiding the indignity of a life of self-deception. Rolf had a great deal to say on this subject; Sibylle called these talks his 'lectures', but when asked for her opinion—and she was asked very often, because Rolf didn't want to entrench himself in a private doctrine—she merely answered with the feminine argument that life couldn't be solved with theories...

It seems that the fancy-dress pierrot was still on his mind, even if this preoccupation was unexpressed and perhaps even unconscious. Rolf had suddenly decided to build his own house — a house of their own had been Sibylle's fondest wish from the beginning, and Rolf, a man of action, had already bought the land. Sibylle was strange. She knew the land, they'd been after it for years; now he had bought it, and Sibylle showed no sign of jubilation. A week later he brought the young architect to black coffee, a certain Sturzenegger, who raved about consistent modernism and called upon Rolf's obviously abstracted wife for an exact statement of her requirements. A double bedroom or two single bedrooms, for example, and everything was now extremely urgent. In the middle of the discussion (says my public prosecutor) came a telephone call, Sibylle answered it as usual, fell silent, said No and Yes and No, quickly hung up again, asserted it was a wrong number, and was very jumpy. Well, well, thought Rolf, the fancy-dress pierrot; and the discussion of sketches proceeded. Sibylle took refuge in a studied interest, and everything seemed all right to her, whether like this or like that, as though she were never going to live in the projected house at all.

At the end of the black coffee (my public prosecutor cannot remember how the subject cropped up) the young architect talked about an Eskimo who offered a white stranger his wife, in order to be hospitable, and was so offended when the stranger did not make use of her that he seized his guest by the throat and banged his head against the wall of the igloo until he was dead. Everyone laughed, of course. Thereupon the young architect came out with another funny story of something that had happened to a friend of his called Stiller during the Spanish Civil War. This was the first time my public prosecutor had ever heard Stiller's name. He remembered little of the story from the Spanish Civil War—only something about a Russian gun that failed to go off. On the other hand he clearly recalls that his wife, who had previously been so abstracted, showed a boundless interest in this Russian gun. And when the architect had gone, she went humming through all the rooms. Rolf imagined her joy was connected with the new house, but could not refrain from remarking, 'It sounds as though you're in love.' And as she didn't deny it, he added, 'You like the young architect, eh?' It was a joke. 'Do you think so?' she asked, 'Admit it!' said he. 'You're hurting me!' said she. 'I admit it, but let go of me!' It was a joke, as I said, and Rolf had to get back to work; Sibylle put the three coffee cups on the tray, and that was that...

The four days in Genoa:

This (so my public prosecutor says) was the most ludicrous ordeal of his life, but not the most useless. He learnt a number of things about himself: First, an unsuspected amount of sentimentality, of which he had previously had no inkling—he drank and drank, until he had to leave the restaurant because he was crying; then the primitive nature of his reactions—he stared after every reasonably clean skirt and took refuge for hours at a time in thoughts of the cheapest sort of revenge; then the shallowness of his emotions—in four days and four nights (so he says) he only achieved a few minutes of real suffering that threw him to his knees in the flowery hotel bedroom, without it being a pose or the effect of alcohol, and consumed the last residue of reproach and the last residue of self-pity; but above all, his inability to love a woman if he was not her idol, to love her without claiming gratitude, consideration, admiration, and so forth. It was an ordeal.

Lying fully dressed on his iron bed smoking, he tormented himself with shamelessly precise imaginings of his wife giving herself to the other man. This was not the ordeal, but the relaxation he allowed himself. The ordeal was the realization, the involuntary admission, that up till then he had been very much mistaken about the level of his emotions, about his maturity. Not even his will (so he says) stood up to this test: he had gone off without a word, but was later unable to restrain himself from sending his secretary a sealed letter to be handed to his wife if she asked for news of him, a letter with his address in case of need. For four days no such case of need seemed to have arisen. He wasn't missed! Day after day, always half an hour after the arrival of the northern trains, he asked for
posta restante,
in vain. In between there were hours of solemn dignity, certainly: he managed to read Churchill's memoirs in English, he sat in the guise of a neatly shaved man of leisure in the morning sunshine, drank his red campari and learnt what went on behind the scenes during the Second World War—and without looking at the clock; but at bottom he was only waiting to be missed and sought with every possible means, indeed, he wouldn't have been surprised to meet the ruefully searching Sibylle somewhere in the streets of Genoa. Her 'contemptuous' silence, which presented itself to him in the shape of the marble hall of an Italian main post office, made him turn pale every time. How often did this woman force him to the same discovery—how incapable he was of living according to his own theories.