But when I tried at this point to summarize what I did and didn't know about this mysterious and beautiful youth who over Dryope's shoulders was looking out of the picture, gazing longingly at someone, while Salmakis was watching him, filled with the same longing, and when it also became clear to me that neither of them would ever possess the object of their longing, then all I could ask was: Ye gods, what's the point of it all? if such a foolish question may be put to you, I felt as lost about my own feelings as the figures in the painting seemed to be confused about each other and themselves; stripped of my usual artful deceptions, I had no choice but to recognize in Salmakis' gaze, plain and direct, the gaze of Helene, my fiancée, as she tried with great longing, sadness, and understanding to absorb and make her own my every thought and gesture, while I, accursed and doomed, incapable of love no matter how much I loved her and, like the youth in the picture — alas, my beauty no match for his — not looking at her, not only was I not grateful for her love, but it downright irritated and disgusted me, and I was looking at someone else, of course someone else! and that someone, I might as well risk the highfalutin claim, excited me more than Helene's palpable love, because that someone promised to lead me not into a cozy family nest but into the murkiest depths of my instincts, into a jungle, into hell, among wild beasts, into the unknown, which always seems more important to us than the known, the reasonable, and the comprehensible; yet, while observing this emotional chaos within me, I could have thought of another story, no less plainly and directly out of my own life — to hell with these ancient tales and legends! I could have thought of a sweet-smelling woman whose name I must keep secret so as not to ruin her reputation, a woman who, in spite of my will, resolve, even desires, was at the center of my secret life, standing there as firmly, enchantingly, and coldly as fate is usually depicted in stylish pseudo-classical paintings, a woman who reminded me of Dryope most of all, the one who could not return my love, not with the same burning love I had for her, because she was in love, as deeply as I with her, with the man whom in these memoirs I mentioned rather misleadingly as my kind paternal friend and to whom I gave the name Claus Diestenweg, concealing his real identity because I was determined to reveal that it was not this woman whom he loved, with the kind of fervent love with which I could have loved her or the hopeless love she bore him, but I was the one he loved and wanted with an insane passion; and if on occasion he submitted to the woman's ardent desires, it was only to taste something of my love for her, to be my surrogate, as it were, to partake of something I had denied him; he loved me in the woman, while I, if I wanted to keep something of her for myself, was forced to love him, at least as a friend or a father, and thereby to feel what I would have to be like for that woman to love only me; although this incident took place in my early youth, we became deeply involved in it only after my arrival in Berlin, following Father's horrible deed and subsequent suicide, but then occurred another terrible tragedy which, though it could not eliminate the effects of the first, ended the story of our curious threesome, and then, because I lacked the strength or courage to die, I had to start a new life; but how dreary and empty, conventionally bourgeois, petty and false this life turned out to be! Or could it be, I wondered, that the story in which man is brought closer to what is divine in him is made of just such, or similar, human muddling and confusion, or just such a frightful tremor in the unattainable? is there nothing but tragedy? but then, what's the use of all this accumulated material, research, notes, all this paper, all these ideas? once past tragedy, we tend to admonish ourselves as if we were gods, but of course we're not even close to being gods; consequently, I could not tell who the youth in my picture was and couldn't even understand why the whole thing interested me so much; how could I possibly get beyond what only the gods can get past?
Still, I couldn't get the painting out of my mind.
As if solving a puzzle, considering not only the possible evidence but all the disqualifying factors as well, I concluded again and again that the youth was as beautiful as Eros, his beauty kept me in thrall, yet he could not be Eros, because he was sad like Hermaphroditos, but he couldn't be Hermaphroditos either, since he was holding Pan's pipe and Hermes' staff, then again, I countered, refuting an elusive opposition while fondly observing the youth's phallus, rendered with the delicate strokes found in miniatures, he couldn't really be Pan, if only because the great phallic god is never depicted as being so calmly immodest, his thighs spread apart and seen from the front, we always view him from the side or in a pose that conceals his member, which is logical as well as natural, since from the tip of his horn to the heel of his hoof he is one great phallus, so it would be both impossible and absurd for anyone to use paltry human judgment to decide what this phallus should look like in a painting— small or large, brown or white, thick or slender, dangling sideways over his testicles or stiffening upward like a red bludgeon; in my picture it was more like a handsome little jewel, untouched, like a hairless infant's, like his whole body, whose taut skin glistened with oil; when there was nothing more to ponder, not a single detail which I hadn't thoroughly scrutinized, either with my naked eyes or with a magnifying glass, not a single allusion I hadn't tried to clarify with the aid of scholarly books, to bring light into the dimness of my own ignorance and lack of erudition, I finally realized that it made very little difference to me who was portrayed in that picture; it wasn't their story that interested me, for the stories of Apollo, Hermes, Pan, and Hermaphroditos flow into one another like all the things I had intended to reveal about myself, and that, after all, is as it should be, and it wasn't even their humanly fallible bodies that interested me; it was the subject of my planned narrative, which seemed to be identical with that in the painting and was most clearly present in the eyes of its figures, eyes which, though bound to their bodies, were no longer corporeal, their gaze being somehow beyond their bodies, transcendent; well anyway, to pursue this line of thought I should have set out for the place where the youth's gaze as well as mine were directed, the woods, to see who was standing among the trees, who was it whom this youth loved so much and so hopelessly while he was loved just as hopelessly by someone else? what was this all about? well, we were back at the original question again, but I realized I couldn't make my own life's no doubt foolish questions more momentous by concealing them in some antique mural, because they would keep crawling out from the wall — all right, then, enough! let's talk about things as they are, no pretense, let's talk about what is ours — our own body, our own eyes; I shuddered at this thought, and at the same time I discovered something I'd been blind to up to then, though with a magnifying glass I had gone over the youth's calves, toes, arms, mouth, eyes, and forehead repeatedly, with my ruler measured the angle and direction of his glance, and with intricate calculations identified the spot where the mysterious figure had to be standing; what I hadn't noticed, simply failed to notice, was that the two ringlets falling on his forehead were actually two tiny horns, that's right, which means that he must be Pan after all, yes, Pan, no doubt about it, except this certainty no longer interested me in the least.