Only the teacher of religion remained silent. From Törless’ speech he had retained the word “soul,” mentioned so often, and he felt sympathy for the young man.
But all the same he had not managed to form a clear opinion of the sense in which Törless had used it.
I reached the mountain refuge at the foot of Matz Peak on the afternoon of June 7th, after a lengthy journey that, following Miss Schneider’s detailed instructions, I began by plane from Barcelona to Geneva and continued by train from Geneva to Basel, where I spent the first night of my trip in the Thann Hostel, reading the pages that Montaigne devotes to his passage — exactly that, for him passing was the chief characteristic of the human condition — through the city of Basel, where in his Journal of Travels he noted that the clock in this city, not in the suburbs, however, was an hour fast: “If it strikes ten, it’s only nine o’clock; because, they say, this defect of the clock once saved the town from a threat that had arisen.”
I read Montaigne’s Swiss pages and ended up wondering at what point in the history of this city the Basel clock started telling the right time again, and I told myself that it must have been a fascinating moment for all the citizens, something like the adventure of going in search of the authentic life and finding it exactly, at a time that is right, in a high climate, which showed the location, beyond the infinite, not of this world’s false void, but of the true void and nothingness or, who knows, which may show the salvation of the modern void, the salvation of the spirit in an age when reality has lost its meaning and literature is an ideal instrument for utopia, for building a spiritual life where the right time is finally known.
A salvation of the spirit — to be precise — linked to the salvation of the literary, a kind of salvation that I consider essential when it comes to being able to endure the wait — possibly in vain — for the day to come when one discovers beyond doubt the way to disappear from this world and really to do so for good.
The Journal of Montaigne’s Travels in Italy: By Way of Switzerland and Germany in 1580 and 1581 was the perfect companion from the very start for my long journey to the Alps. Montaigne’s journal lets us witness to the experiments or daring essays on subjectivity in the text their author wrote in such an innovative way, a traveler on horseback through sixteenth-century Europe, a traveler who, when asked about his motives for leaving Bordeaux, his native land, answered like this: “To those who ask me the reason for my travels, I tend to respond: I am well aware what I am fleeing from, but not what I am searching for. In any case it is better to exchange a bad state for an uncertain one.”
Soul and travel are the concepts most obstinately and frequently investigated by the traveler Montaigne, who seems to be fleeing from the dark grave where the spirit of his time lies: “The soul while traveling is constantly being exercised as it observes unknown and new things; and I know of no better school for the formation of life than consistently bringing before it the diversity of so many other lives.”
This sentence accompanied me as soon as I departed from Barcelona. On the first night of my journey it can be said that I fell asleep thinking about it and about the Basel clock. The following day, I abandoned the Swiss city and began the second stage of my journey by bus, which would leave me at a cable car, which in turn would leave me at the refuge at the foot of Matz. The meeting of writers was not on the peak of this mountain as I had absurdly supposed — there are not so many mountaineering writers — but in this mountain refuge, where those taking part gradually gathered during the day.
I had already suspected something in Barcelona. This meeting struck me as odd from the start, not because it was, but because the “mountain spirit” and the literary geography it belonged to made me feel like an intruder or stranger in the middle of this atmosphere so far removed from my world. But I could find novelesque material here, especially if somebody helped me and I ceased to be incommunicado because of language. I only wished Miss Schneider would arrive — why was she taking so long? She had arranged the complicated itinerary for my trip to perfection and spoke Spanish moderately well, which gave me some hope that she could be of valuable assistance for me to find my bearings here at the foot of Matz Peak.
I am shy, I can’t help it. To the person who welcomed me on behalf of the organization, I must have seemed like a sad, inarticulate wretch. The fact is, he sent me straight to reception, and in reception they sent me straight to an inhospitable room, with a bed like a monk’s cell’s and a horrible Alpine painting. My shyness still had time to grow when I settled down in the hotel bar to read Montaigne’s journal, or rather to pretend that I was reading it — protected behind the book, I actually proceeded to observe everything I saw there that was strange, unknown, and new — and some of the writers began to ask me if I was French and to view me with insulting pity when, hiding my double Odyssey’s identity from them, I replied politely in Spanish.
I thought I noticed that, apart from my logical unease in this world that I did not know, this gathering nevertheless had certain peculiar nuances. I thought I noticed this when, on leaving the bar and going out to see what kind of preparations were under way for the session of open-air readings at midnight, I bumped into various ruddy-cheeked writers devoted body and soul to the consolidation of their national awareness, singing at the top of their voices part of an opera by Wagner, the racconto from Lohengrin.
The evening was in full decline and the Wagnerian scene, with a backdrop of red clouds fading on top of the neighboring rocky peaks, struck me as both strange and of an indisputable aesthetic beauty. Taken aback by this unexpected combination of fatherland and dusk, I continued wandering, helped an electrician who was wearing a black headscarf — a broad and vociferous man, I helped him install the microphones for tonight’s open-air reading — and ended up returning to the hotel bar, with my French book under my arm.
“Montaigne and horse,” a German writer called Franz suddenly said to me in Spanish, no sooner had I entered the bar. He seemed very ingenuous, as if, unlike the others, he presumed to speak my language because he loved it. I was restless and still stunned by the Wagnerian dusk and didn’t know what to say to him, though there wasn’t much I could say. Franz proceeded to tell me, in an impossible Spanish — which makes me think I may have misunderstood him — how the previous evening, on the way to the hotel, he had eaten with the colleagues traveling with him at a roadside restaurant, where they had been given some little Spanish birds called writers, served wrapped in vine leaves and roasted, but even so they bled when you cut them. For a moment I became very paranoid and wondered whether it wasn’t all a trap, a joke in very bad taste, set from some part of the globe at my expense.
“Little Spanish birds, writers,” my colleague Franz kept saying, as if he wanted to frighten me. And he laughed. All I did was plead with the gods for Miss Schneider to come soon, for midnight to come, when the session of readings in the moonlight would allow me to retreat into a corner and listen to German words without feeling I was being watched all the time. But it seemed that neither Miss Schneider nor midnight would ever come.
Midnight did come, it always does. Miss Schneider must also have arrived. If she did, it was after midnight; but I shall never know.
I dined with the dead. The good part about not understanding a thing is that one can understand that thing however one chooses. Also, being radically alone and incommunicado, one has plenty of time to watch, analyze, delve into the surroundings. I dined with an illustrious group of the dead. There must have been about thirty writers with their eyes sunk into a monumental potato salad, talking melancholically about the peaceful setting and the eternal harmony of the Alpine universe. I remembered a poem in which the men and women of a town called Spoon River, in short epitaphs that are autobiographies, that are poems, tell the story of their sorrowful lives from the graveyard where they he buried. And I remembered the island of Pico, where there was not a soul in sight, but everything seemed ready for the wind at any time to bring voices speaking from sadness, grief, and death.