He would strip me by force, of course!
You could always call a guard for help.
You forget who my father was!
You mean your birth makes you incapable of treason.
Yes, that is what I do mean! And I mean that I admire Garibaldi! And I mean that he was a superb horseman! And I am a patriot!
She was not angry. Each sentence made her smile more. At the end she laughed, stroked her husband’s arm and sat down.
I fear, said von Hartmann to G., that your countrymen may be stupid enough to declare war on us.
I am not a political man.
If you were, you would not tell my husband, murmured Marika.
I have come nevertheless to plead a case and, with your permission, I would like to plead it before you both.
G. had no doubt that his host would categorically reject his advocacy and that his wife would embrace it. The case of Marco would supply, for a short while, a subject by means of which the woman he desired could openly establish her common interest with him and the necessity of intrigue against her husband could become apparent.
The Austrian banker wanted to give the impression of listening patiently and attentively. He lay back in his chair, occasionally lowering his eyes and turning his head. His eyes were small and very quick, incapable of real attention towards anything except the swift thoughts in the brain behind them.
G. was pleading a case in which he did not believe, but von Hartmann was a man to whom no appeal, however desperate or deeply felt it might be, was possible. By the same token he was immune to most threats. Appeals and threats, when once they have been made, work their way into the consciousness of the person to whom they have been addressed, by a process not unlike that by which a rumour spreads among a crowd. The appeal or the threat is whispered and passed on, but each time it is repeated the whisperer gives it his own stress. In the end one rumour may give birth to several rumours but they will all share the same kind of alarm or hope. Yet who is the crowd? Who goes on circulating and whispering the appeals and threats in the mind until the decision has been taken? The crowd is an assembly of all the other possible selves, commenting on the self in power, whom they believe to be a usurper. They were born from visions in the past; they have failed to establish their own power, but they have not been dispersed, they still inhabit the personality.
Von Hartmann was a man who had eliminated all his possible selves. All that remained from his past were obsolete versions of the same self. He was like a man engraved on a postage stamp.
He would of course have responded to crude physical threats at a reflex level. If his life were threatened he might break down and whimper like a child: more probably he would remain curiously impassive. The silence which emanates from death only continues the silence of such a man’s subjective life. Von Hartmann was a man who could be removed, but not challenged. On account of this it might be claimed that he was the ideal administrator.
As Marika listened, the young man who had been arrested at the frontier became inextricably mixed with Garibaldi and with G. in the internment prison from which she would help him to escape. She decided immediately that the young man must be released. More than that, she decided that she would ask the governor herself. Marika’s decisions were immediate because she had no interest in justifications. If the needle of her will indicated the magnetic north, all she had to do was to set out; it was incomprehensible to her why anybody should want to adjust the compass to the needle and take other readings. Yet she was a woman who reflected. The difference between her and most others was that her reflexions were exclusively concerned with the past and were in the form of stories and legends. In some she herself played a part, in others, which interested her no less, she did not appear at all. A legend, a story, for Marika was what remained when the necessities which determined it had ebbed away; afterwards the story lay there like a boat cast high up on the beach by an exceptional tide, or like a ring no longer worn but kept in a jewel box. Sometimes what remained was an absence, as in the case of a woman friend who lost an arm in a riding accident. She was galloping away from her lover whom she discovered by chance in a wood making love to somebody else. Before the arm was amputated, when the ring was still worn, when the boat was sailing, life was too fateful to allow for reflexion.
Marika, how I love you! Your smile is more complete than any last judgement. When you take off your clothes you are pure will. We make each other bodiless. All the rest are talkers or sensualists. Marika! When will G. say this?
As soon as he came to the end of his speech, Marika exclaimed: There is only one thing to do, have him released.
Her husband nodded his head. Contrary to convention, he often nodded when about to refuse something. Your eloquence, you see, has won her heart, but I am afraid that under the present conditions it would be quite impossible to intervene in any way on your young friend’s behalf. Impossible and dangerous. Let us assume that he is as innocent as you say. In himself he may not be dangerous. But what would be the effect on the city of showing leniency at a moment like this? Many more would be encouraged to try to cross the frontier. The numbers would double. And what would this lead to? Our soldiers on the frontier have orders to shoot at anybody who does not stop or answer their challenge. By relaxing the law in the special case of your friend one might well be responsible for the death of several other young men. And the affair would not stop there. The political and diplomatic repercussions of such frontier incidents might well prove disastrous. It would probably mean war. My wife does not understand politics. In politics nothing is ever merely itself. There is your young Italian whose father is dying, he is arrested crossing the frontier illegally and he stands to be given what may seem a harsh prison sentence, yet to show undue clemency in this one exceptional case could well cause a war in which tens of thousands of sons and fathers would die.
A telephone rang in a distant room. The banker rose to his feet, walked over to his wife and covered her hand, which was resting on the arm of the chair, with his own.
That is why he cannot be set free as you would like, he explained.
She did not look troubled. She no more made arguments than she listened to them. She was like an animal or a person who, having run along a path, turns a corner and finds that it leads to the bank of a wide, fast-flowing river; anger or impatience would be futile. Her expression was calm, stationary. She was looking up and down the river to decide which way to turn before running on. She knew that she lived under licence and she knew that it was too late for her to live otherwise. It was not something she reasoned about, but she sensed it as one can sense the size of a plain or the proximity of the sea without being able to see them. Without a Wolfgang she would become like a gipsy, and she despised gipsies. Furthermore she sensed that the chronicles of the world, the stories that would remain, were passing into the keeping of men like her husband.
A servant came to the door and announced that the telephone call was from Vienna. Von Hartmann excused himself and left the room.
I would like to dance, said Marika, standing up and swaying in slow gliding circles across the inlaid parquet floor towards where G. was sitting. Who are you really? she asked him. You are not he who you say you are. (She spoke an awkward and incorrect Italian.) Who are you really?