The Loser (3 page)

self-discipline
, he said it over and over, even in class with Horowitz, as I remember. He loved best to run out on the street shortly after midnight, or at least out of the house, I’d already noticed that in Leopoldskron. We must always fill our lungs with a good dose of fresh air, he said, otherwise we won’t go forward, we’ll be paralyzed in our efforts to reach the highest. He was the most ruthless person toward himself. He never allowed himself to be imprecise. He spoke only after thinking his way through a problem. He abhorred people who said things that hadn’t been thought through, thus he abhorred almost all mankind. And more than twenty years ago he finally withdrew from this abhorred mankind. He was the only world-famous piano virtuoso who abhorred his public and also actually withdrew definitively from this abhorred public. He didn’t need them. He bought himself a house in the woods and settled into this house and went about perfecting himself. He and Bach lived in this house in America until his death. He was a fanatic about order. Everything in his house was order. When I first walked through the door with Wertheimer, I had to think of his
concept of self-discipline
. After we were inside he didn’t ask us, for example, if we were thirsty but sat down at his Steinway and played for us those passages from the Goldberg Variations that he had played in Leopoldskron the day before his departure for Canada. His technique was as perfect as it was then. At that moment I realized that no one else in the world could play like that. He sank into himself and started in. Started low and played upwards, so to speak, not like all the others, who played from the top down. That was his secret. For years I tormented myself with the question whether it was right to visit him in America. A pitiful question. At first Wertheimer didn’t want to, I finally talked him into it. Wertheimer’s sister was against her brother visiting the world-famous Glenn Gould, whom she considered dangerous for him. Wertheimer finally prevailed over his sister and came with me to America and to Glenn. Over and over I kept telling myself, this is our last chance to see Glenn. I actually was expecting his death and I had absolutely wanted to see him again, hear him play, I thought as I stood in the inn and inhaled the inn’s fetid aroma, which was all too familiar. I knew Wankham. I always stayed in this inn when I was in Wankham, when I visited Wertheimer, since I couldn’t stay with Wertheimer, he couldn’t tolerate overnight guests. I looked for the innkeeper, but everything was still. Wertheimer hated having guests stay overnight, abhorred them. Guests in general, of any kind, he received them and paid them compliments, they were barely in the door before they were out again, not that he would have complimented me out the door, I knew him too well for that, but after a few hours he preferred me to disappear rather than stay and spend the night. I’ve never spent the night at his house, it never would have occurred to me, I thought, keeping a sharp lookout for the innkeeper. Glenn was a big-city person, like me incidentally, like Wertheimer, at bottom we loved everything about big cities and hated the country, which however we exploited to the hilt (as we did the city, incidentally, in its own way). Wertheimer and Glenn had finally moved to the country because of their sick lungs, Wertheimer more reluctantly than Glenn, Glenn on principle, since he finally could no longer put up with people in general, Wertheimer because of his continuous coughing fits in the city and because his internist told him he had no chance of surviving in the big city. For over two decades Wertheimer found refuge with his sister at the Kohlmarkt, in one of the biggest and most luxurious apartments in Vienna. But finally his sister married a so-called industrialist from Switzerland and moved in with her husband in Zizers bei Chur. Of all places Switzerland and of all people a chemical-plant owner, as Wertheimer expressed it to me. A horrendous match. She left me in the lurch, blubbered Wertheimer over and over. In his suddenly empty apartment he appeared paralyzed, after his sister moved out he would sit for days in a chair without moving, then start running from room to room like the proverbial chicken, back and forth, until he finally holed himself up in his father’s hunting lodge in Traich. After his parents’ death he nonetheless lived with his sister and tyrannized this sister for twenty years, as I know, for years he kept her from having any contact with men and with society in general, umbrellaed her off so to speak, chained her to herself. But she broke loose and ditched him along with the old, rickety furniture they had inherited together. How could she do this to me, he said to me, I thought. I’ve done everything for her, sacrificed myself for her, and now she’s left me behind, just ditched me, runs after this nouveau-riche character in Switzerland, Wertheimer said, I thought in the inn. In Chur of all places, that ghastly region where the Catholic church literally stinks to high heaven. Zizers, what a godawful name for a town! he exploded, asking me if I’d ever been in Zizers, and I recalled having passed through Zizers several times on my way to St. Moritz, I thought. Provincial cretins, cloisters and chemical plants, nothing else, he said. He worked himself up several times to the claim that he had given up his piano virtuosity for love of his sister,
I called it quits because of her
, sacrificed my career, he said, gave away everything that had meant anything to me. This was how he tried to lie his way out of his own desperation, I thought. His apartment at the Kohlmarkt extended over three floors and was stuffed full of every conceivable artwork, which always oppressed me when I visited my friend. He himself confessed to hating these artworks, his sister hoarded them, he hated them, couldn’t care less about them, blamed his entire misfortune on his sister, who had ditched him for a Swiss megalomaniac. He once told me quite seriously that he had dreamed of growing old with his sister in the Kohlmarkt apartment,
I’ll grow old with her here, in these rooms
, he once told me. Things turned out differently, his sister slipped away from him, turned her back on him, perhaps at the very last possible moment, I thought. He didn’t leave the apartment until months after his sister’s marriage, transforming himself as it were from a sitter into a walker. In his best moments he would walk from the Kohlmarkt to the Twentieth District and from there to the Twenty-first through Leopoldstadt and back to the First, strolling for hours back and forth in the First until he couldn’t walk any farther. In the country he was virtually paralyzed. There he would barely walk a few steps to the woods. The country bores me, he said again and again. Glenn is right to call me the
pavement walker
, said Wertheimer,
I only walk on pavement, I don’t walk in the country, it’s awfully boring and I stay in the hut
. What he called a hut was the hunting lodge he inherited from his parents and which had fourteen rooms. The fact is that in this hunting lodge he would get dressed as if he were going on a fifty- or sixty-kilometer hike—leather hiking boots, thick woolen garments, a felt cap on his head. But he would step outside only to discover that he didn’t want to go hiking and would get undressed and sit down in the room downstairs and stare at the wall in front of him. My internist says I don’t have a chance in the city, he said, but here I have absolutely no chance. I hate the country. On the other hand I want to follow my internist’s instructions so that I’ll have nothing to reproach myself for. But to go hiking or even to go for a walk in the country—that I can’t do. It makes no sense to me at all, I can’t commit this sort of nonsense, I won’t commit the crime of this nonsense. I regularly get dressed, he said, and walk out the door and turn around and get undressed again, no matter what the season, it’s always the same. At least nobody sees my craziness, he said, I thought in the inn. Like Glenn Wertheimer couldn’t tolerate anybody around him. Thus in time he became impossible. But I too, I thought, standing in the inn, would never have been able to live in the country, that’s why I live in Madrid and wouldn’t even consider leaving Madrid, this most magnificent of all cities where I have everything the world has to offer. Those who live in the country get idiotic in time, without noticing it, for a while they think it’s original and good for their health, but life in the country is not original at all, for anyone who wasn’t born in and for the country it shows a lack of taste and is only harmful to their health. The people who go walking in the country walk right into their own funeral in the country and at the very least they lead a grotesque existence which leads them first into idiocy, then into an absurd death. To recommend country life to a city person so that he can stay alive is a dirty internist’s trick, I thought. All these people who leave the city for the country so they can live longer and healthier lives are only horrible specimens of human beings, I thought. But in the end Wertheimer was not just the victim of his internist but even more the victim of his conviction that his sister lived only to serve him. He actually said several times that his sister was born for him, to stay with him, to protect him so to speak. No one has disappointed me like my sister! he once exclaimed, I thought. He grew fatally accustomed to his sister, I thought. On the day his sister left him he swore to her his eternal hatred and drew all the curtains in the Kohlmarkt apartment, never to open them again. Still he managed to keep his oath for fourteen days, on the fourteenth day he opened the curtains in the Kohlmarkt apartment and raced down to the street, half crazed and starved for food and people. But the loser collapsed on the Graben, as I know. He was brought back to his apartment only because a relative fortunately happened to be passing by at that instant, otherwise they probably would’ve carted him off to the mental ward at Steinhof, for he had the look of a wild man. Glenn wasn’t the most difficult person among us, Wertheimer was. Glenn was strong, Wertheimer was our weakest. Glenn wasn’t crazy, as people have always claimed and still claim, but Wertheimer was, as I claim. For twenty years he was able to chain his sister to him, with thousands, yes, hundreds of thousands of chains, then she broke loose from him and, as I believe, even married well, as they say. The already rich sister found herself a
stinking
rich Swiss husband. He could no longer tolerate the word sister or the word Chur, Wertheimer told me the last time I saw him. She didn’t even send me a card, he said, I thought in the inn, looking around. She stole away from him in the night and left everything lying in the apartment, she didn’t take a single thing with her, he said over and over. Although she promised she’d never leave me, never, he said, I thought. On top of that my sister
converted
, as he expressed himself, she is deeply Catholic, hopelessly Catholic, he said. But that’s how these deeply religious, deeply Catholic converts are, he said, they’re not afraid of anything, not even of the most heinous crime, they abandon their own brother and throw themselves in the arms of some dubious upstart, who has come into money unscrupulously and completely by accident, as Wertheimer said during my last visit, I thought. I can see him in front of me, hear his voice with the utmost clarity, those chopped sentences he always used and which fitted him to a T.
Our loser is a fanatic
, Glenn once said,
he’s practically choking on self-pity all the time
, I can still see Glenn saying this, hear him saying it, we were on Monk’s Mountain, at the so-called Judge’s Peak, where I often went with Glenn but without Wertheimer when Wertheimer wanted to be by himself, without us, for whatever reason, very often in a huff. I always called him
the offended one
. After his sister moved out he withdrew to Traich with increasingly frequent regularity; because I hate Traich I go to Traich, as he said. The Kohlmarkt apartment started gathering dust because he wouldn’t let anyone in in his absence. In Traich he often spent the whole day inside, had one of his woodsmen bring him a pot of milk, butter, bread, some smoked sausage. And would read his philosophers, Schopenhauer, Kant, Spinoza. In Traich he also kept the curtains drawn most of the time. Once I thought I’ll buy myself another Bösendorfer, he said, but then I gave up the idea, that would be madness. By the way, I haven’t touched the piano for the last fifteen years, he said, I thought in the inn, uncertain whether I should call out or not. It was the greatest folly to believe I could be an artist, lead an artist’s existence. But I couldn’t just flee right into the human sciences, I had to take this detour through art, he said. Do you think I could have become a great piano player? he asked me, naturally without waiting for an answer and laughing a dreadful
Never!
from deep inside. You yes, he said, but not me. You had what it takes, he said, I could see that, you played a few bars and I realized it, you yes, but not me. And with Glenn it was clear from the very start that he was a genius. Our American-Canadian genius. We both failed for the opposite reasons, Wertheimer said, I thought. I had nothing to prove, only everything to lose, he said, I thought. Our wealth was probably our undoing, he said, but then immediately: Glenn’s wealth didn’t kill him, it allowed him to exploit his genius. Yes, if only we hadn’t run into Glenn, Wertheimer said. If only the name Horowitz had meant nothing to us. If only we had never even gone to Salzburg! he said. We caught up with death in that city by studying with Horowitz and meeting Glenn. Our friend meant our death. Of course we were better than all the others who studied with Horowitz, but Glenn was better than Horowitz himself, Wertheimer said, I can still hear him, I thought. On the other hand, he said, we’re still alive, he isn’t. So many in his circle had already died, he said, so many relatives, friends, acquaintances, none of these deaths ever shocked him, but Glenn’s death dealt him a
deadly
blow, he pronounced
deadly
with extraordinary precision. We don’t have to be with a person in order to feel bound to him as to no other, he said. Glenn’s death had hit him
very hard
, he said, I thought while standing in the inn. Although one could have predicted this death more certainly than any other, that goes without saying, so he said. Nonetheless we still can’t grasp it, we can’t comprehend, can’t grasp it. Glenn had had the greatest affection for the word and the concept of loser, I remember exactly how the word loser came to him on the Sigmund Haffnergasse. We look at people and see only cripples, Glenn once said to us, physical or mental or mental