I admired him for his implacability, just as I was annoyed with myself for my readiness to relent after an initial burst of rage. To this day I have not fathomed his secret. And I always feel a kind of uncertainty toward him, going back to our very first shared moment, or perhaps the opposite thereof, that time at the door to his caravan stopping place.
And soon he had to move, after going bankrupt, to another cabin, beyond the next knoll of the Seine hills, by the upper pond in Villebon. And where this second little restaurant stood, there now grows, like the grass on the site of the first, a tangle of stinging nettles and wild blackberries. From its windows I could see the wind rippling the water down below, just as now, in his third place in Versailles-Porchefontaine, I can see on the embankment the long-distance and local trains speeding and rolling by, overlapping and blocking the view of one another.
Sometimes I set out for there for dinner, taking a roundabout route through the forest, and each time get up disappointed, without having had any complaint with the food or the table by the window. For sitting, resting, meals, pursuing my thoughts, I am constantly on the lookout for an inn like the one at Fontaine Ste.-Marie. And I do not intend to stop looking. Perhaps my friends on their various journeys will tell me about finding one.
But as for the clearing, with the bulldozed terrace area, I now avoid it — like all clearings, by the way. It seems to me that nothing more can grow there: as if today’s clearings, even including the jungle of the Yucatán, belonged to the runners, gymnasts, fitness freaks, dogs, bombing squadrons, and poisonous mushrooms. All the entrances to them could be called, like the one here in the bay, “Allée de la Fausse Porte,” the avenue of the wrong door.
And at the same time I think at least once a day of my inn in the clearing: what a lovely, eternal, simple sitting one could have there. All the things that had been studied and understood the night before forgotten, and yet close at hand. The breath of wind moves the space between one’s fingers — a snapping. Reminiscent: only this word for it comes to mind, an introductory word that calls for a noun, in the genitive, the generative case. Reminiscent of what?
And of course there was no staying there (although the solitary proprietor had his room over the kitchen, as if for the long haul).
Those were the years when, without working, I was riding high as never before and hardly ever afterward, and at the same time feeling more threatened and on borrowed time than ever.
Each time I went to bed after midnight, I had the distinct impression of having survived another day, and I actually painted the date of the new day, the only thing I entered in my notebook at that time. I understood the complaints of various involuntary (unlike me) residents of the suburbs, who saw themselves cut off there from the world as it flowed by, consigned for a time to an evacuation or pre-death zone — particularly on certain evenings when, beyond the gates of the metropolis, an un-contoured brightness settled over the streets, on which the newly leafed-out trees shriveled into wilted cemetery plants, and far and wide a queasy silence reigned, the window shutters closed tight on every side, abrupt chirping of sparrows, the wail of car alarms, and the barking of watchdogs.
That became perhaps most tangible in those suburbs greatly in demand as places to live, on the slopes above the meanders of the Seine, where one had a view of the whole city of Paris, as in Garches, Meudon, or St.-Cloud. From Paris down there in its basin, scattered over the landscape as far as the horizon like millions of bright, crowded dice, only a rustling reached the silent hills and panoramic terraces above. Down there was where everything was happening. That was where it was.
The metropolis shimmered, glowed, and way down there, inaudible, was a steady, nest-warm thrumming, and the person who had moved away, way up with his hanging gardens in the fresh air, must have felt he had no hope of ever returning there.
And even I, in my much humbler suburb, in the house from which only the tip of the Eiffel Tower could be seen, found myself thinking at night, perhaps in view of that magic triangle sticking up far off in the gaps between the houses next door, where the lights had been turned off long since, and their dark and dreary cabbage gardens, whether it wasn’t an outrage to be away from that light over there.
It was very fragile and threatening, my grand time, back then before the midpoint of life, in my first suburb.
And then one day I really did go mad. My madness remained inside me and did not last. But if it had broken into the open, there would have been no going back for me. I would have murdered my son — and was afraid I would do so, fled from myself into the remotest corner of the cellar — would have set fire to the house and would have run out on the street with a knife and an ax, striking blow upon blow against strangers, until the end. It was as if I had to destroy one thing after the other, just because it was there.
At intervals I was overcome with ghostly calm and thought all the rage of my serf ancestors, which never had an outlet, had collected in me and had now been transformed into the ravings of a madman. I went to my son, caressed him, pushed him to the ground. The child understood, and avoided me for the rest of the day, but he also did not lock his room; otherwise I would have broken down the door.
When I got to the clearing the following day at noon, having groped my way there step by step, gasping as if I had been short of breath for a long time, and told my patron about it, he responded that I had just had an ordinary tantrum, the kind that made one’s appetite return with fresh vigor. And yet I was sure that I had been in a state close to a new kind of madness, as yet not described in the literature: an interminable raving, wall-to-wall disaster, and at the same time, in distinction to the megalomaniac figures in history or drama, lacking any variation, completely monotonous — the peculiarly modern feature of such insanity being the fact that it was so boring.
My one-day insanity in the suburb now lies almost two decades behind me, and it has never recurred. And nevertheless, in contrast to other guises in which I once appeared, in my memory this one has not become a stranger — the one in which I went around and around in a circle, my hot head in my correspondingly colder hands, to be jolted out of it only by a series of violent actions, and yet far too weak to so much as lift a finger. This is one I I will never put in quotation marks.
2 — The Story of My First Metamorphosis
Something had to happen. Something had to be done. What I was experiencing in my idleness cried out for that. I decided to take the plunge and write a long story. Was this really the only way I could accomplish something?
I sent Valentin, my son, to my childless sister in her small town in Carinthia and prepared for my work by crisscrossing Europe.
Among other things I made use of my friends, who at the time were pretty much the same ones as now; for a long time I have not added anyone to the list.