The painter stopped and laughed. “Hm. What will I do? What will we do? Because my enemies elude my enmity.”
He stepped down from the stairs to city level and continued: “One day, when passing the statue of Mozart, I was surprised for a moment to notice that the face is turned toward the Old City. I had always thought of it as looking toward the river and away from the city. Then another day I was surprised to see that the two Gorgons’ heads to the right and left of the New Gate — the real mountain tunnel — point the way out of the city; I had always thought that the snakes in their hair and their blood-curdling eyes were addressed, rather, toward people going into the city.”
We went from one Old City square to another: all deserted, except for one where a drunk was leaning against the fountain, asleep; he was clutching a bottle, and one of his cheeks was puffed up. But the bars were loud with what the painter called the laughter of “triumphant heartlessness.” At that point, to my own surprise, I managed a reply of sorts.
“But,” I said, “would the light and air beyond the borderlines you speak of be so effective, so refreshing, so substantial if not for the dead calm in the center? Without it, would I, in passing from the Old City to the plain, always be overwhelmed by a wave of space? When I stay away from the city, the wave fails me. Doesn’t this suggest that the one sphere makes the other possible? And what better example can there be of how emptiness and superabundance complement each other? I, in any case, need the city and I need it as it is. My place is the center; it, too, takes its measure from outside, from the plain, and then I am its master. Every swarm of tourists that bars my way is welcome to me. The circle I describe around camera-toters starts me on my way to the open meadows; every detour I make in the crowd brightens the country daylight for me. The poet Georg Trakl, who celebrated the ‘beautiful city’—didn’t they all go strolling on the empty plain almost every day? Maybe it’s just that Salzburg should have another name: Charleroi or Taranto, or in a pinch Salinas? Yet salt was once held sacred. It transformed the stranger into an honored guest. Look at a handful of salt crystals under a magnifying glass; those translucent cubes glitter like the walls of a white city, with the crystals strewn farthest from the center as its outworks. Salt is dear to me-to look at, to touch, to season with. It reminds me of my birth and embodies a kind of measure, or law. Once in a Mediterranean salt marsh I saw the ‘house where it was born,’ a stone building on a jetty far out in the water, with an outdoor stairway leading to the entrance on the upper story. In Virgil, salt is always connected with the words ‘small’ and ‘concealed.’ This salt house seemed small and its inhabitants, or so at least I thought, lived in concealment.”
We had stopped at the end of the Mozart Footbridge across the Salzach. At that point the painter asked me my name, which, he said, he hadn’t caught when we were introduced. Then a strange thing happened; without a moment’s hesitation, I said my name was Hurler, and even added: “No, I’m not joking, that’s my real name — Hurler.”
The painter answered in a tone of friendly mockery: “Judging by what you’ve just been saying, it ought to be Spite.” Thereupon he set foot on the wooden bridge. As I remained on the bank below, his eyes were now level with mine. His way of taking leave was to observe that my face reminded him of the boisterous idiots whose forays through the city he would so gladly have joined: “They were my family.” Then he vanished across the bridge. Once, from halfway across, he called back that he wished for my sake that this night’s snow would turn to salt. Reclusive as I was, I then learned something: to look back — the backward glance, as it were.
The footbridge remained deserted. Just once, a couple appeared, the woman wearing a long evening dress under her fur coat, followed by a little girl with braces on her teeth, pushing a bicycle. Under her footsteps, the bridge swayed like a gangplank. The entrance to the bridge with its crossbars looked like a gangway that would be lifted as soon as these people had passed; then no one would be able to board the ship.
The squat, mottled trunks of plane trees came into sight on the opposite bank, lighting up that whole part of the city. On the hither side, brownish slush was splattered by cars, in whose dark interior a white shirt collar could now and then be seen. Accentuated by the swarms of snowflakes, the headlight beams of cars moving bumper to bumper looked like towropes. Here by the side of the shore road, the victim of a traffic accident had once lain, whimpering, clutching his legs to his belly, foaming at the mouth, his teeth chattering; mistaken at first for a “victim” in a first-aid exercise. The swollen but almost soundless river carried whole green bushes along with it. Not a single bell was ringing. In an isolated house on the slope of the Kapuzinerberg, the lights went out one by one. An alarm clock ticked; an ink pad dried. It came to my mind that the name of the road I was standing on was masculine and that of the one on the opposite shore feminine: Rudolfskai and Giselakai. The deserted footbridge was framed on both sides by an iron structure which crossed the river in three arches, hop skip jump. The entrance to the bridge was an arcade, decorated with a climbing plant that made me think of Virgil’s “smiling” acanthus. Here, however, nothing smiled. The bridge gave off the wrong emptiness, not the kind I wanted. For a while, I inwardly kept up my conversation with the painter, at first so intensely that I accompanied it with gestures; then my arms hung motionless and my silent monologue died away. A whiff of perfume came to me from the arcade — from the woman in the evening dress? — and the melting snow dripped and gurgled in the drains. I had had epaulettes of snow, which now quickly vanished.