Montano's Malady

V. The Spirit’s Salvation

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.

I dined with writers who, had they not been dead, I would have thought were civil servants. I dined with the constant impression that I was really in Haut-les-Aigues, a corner of the Jura near the Swiss border, where Dr. Alfred Attendu, in a story by Wilcock, directed his panoramic Re-education Sanatorium, meaning hospice for cretins or refuge for the mentally retarded. I looked at the writers, I listened to their voices, and all the time I thought about Dr. Attendu, who overturned an age-old prejudice and affirmed that the idiot is simply the primitive human prototype, of which we are just the corrupt version, subject, therefore, to disorders, to passions, and to unnatural vices that do not, however, affect the authentic, pure cretin.

I dined with cretins, lousy, dead writers cum civil servants. This race of writers, people who copy what has been done before and lack any literary (though not financial) ambition, is a plague even more pernicious than the plague of publishing directors working away enthusiastically against the literary. I spent the whole dinner in silence watching these writers, trying with my severe gaze to reproach them for their worthless literature. At various points I reminded myself that I was a heartless man with only literary emotions. And at various points I also struck quixotic poses. In an attempt to amuse myself and also to lash these morons who, at the start of the twenty-first century, were trying to finish literature off, from time to time I imagined that the whole of my body, because of the gigantic potato salad’s peculiar side effects, was changing inside and I was turning into, I was embodying the history of literature’s complete memory. And they were so stupid that they didn’t even realize.

There was nothing nice or exotic or original about this meeting. It was really just another literary conference of the many scattered throughout this world of corruption. It was a conference of twits, sectioned idiots, poets with swollen lips and pig eyes who seemed to be digging holes to sit in. This dinner with dead writers was endless and extremely irritating. After dinner, all of them appeared to be supplied with sticks. It wasn’t necessary to understand German to see that they were beating one another, as if it were a therapy imposed by the conference organizer, who, seeking to eliminate any trace of social aggressiveness from their mental void, seemed to have thought it best for them to whack one another with a stick. I realized that, since I had reached that hotel at the foot of Matz, only the vociferous electrician with the black headscarf had given reliable proof of being alive. The others were dead people who, among other things, were nothing out of this world, but at the same time they were of this world, bitter enemies of the literary and direct allies of Pico’s filth.

The electrician was friends with a mountain guide, who lived nearby and spoke Spanish because his wife was Cuban. This guide, who was from Basel and was called Thomas, dropped by the hotel shortly after the dinner ended and, although he was a little difficult to follow, I finally had somebody to talk to, while waiting for Miss Schneider to arrive. From the whole of our conversation, I could only make sense of the following: he liked Cuba more than the Swiss mountains, and he sometimes turned into a “very black Negro Cuban” and danced until dawn. Both the electrician and Thomas claimed — I later saw that they were lying — to have a passion for free events. Hence they planned to stay for the reading session. In July they were going to attend another literary gathering, which was also free, a festival taking place in Leukerbad; they went to everything in the Alps that was free.

The first session of open-air readings commenced at midnight. I was relieved that, as Thomas translated for me providentially in time, they didn’t need me for the opening-night session, nor was it entirely clear whether they would need me at any other time during the conference. I sat down with my book by Montaigne at one side of the stage, almost on the stage, at a distance from Thomas and the electrician, who were seated in an area of the stage that was more discreet and, above all, darker. I prepared to listen to all that fate had in store for me in German.

“Boshaft wie goldene Rede beginnt diese Nacht,” I heard the first dead writer recite. The sentence was in the program I kept inside Montaigne’s book, Thomas translated it for me during the intermission: “Malicious as golden speech this night begins.”

At the end of the long, and quite monotonous, reading session, divided into two soporific acts, I was just nodding off when suddenly someone whispered in my ear, “Come what has not yet been.” It was Thomas, abruptly transformed into my alarm clock and impromptu translator of German prose in the open air. The sentence—“Come what has not yet been”—penetrated and roused my brain from sleep. I looked at Thomas, who smiled at me: an open smile, a solid set of white teeth, it was easy to imagine him with a dark face dancing until dawn. Then, as if he were telling me something personal, he added, no doubt a sort of surprise password: “You mustn’t say you understand me.” He said this and left, he went over to where the electrician was and disappeared; I never saw him again, he merged with the area’s imposing darkness, he may have vanished while dancing, I don’t know what can have happened to him, and now I shall never know.

When, shortly afterward, I approached this area of darkness to exchange passwords with other possible accomplices, also fighting against the enemies of the literary, a thick mist had settled right in the middle of that area of darkness and, as the footmen of Action Without Parallel were maliciously circulating, you couldn’t see a thing. In fact everything now moved (because of the agents of Action Without Parallel, who suddenly revealed themselves as traitors to literature’s cause, infiltrators of the walled conspiracy, aiming to to destroy its work of resistance from the inside) everything moved in a radius of action whose center was the action’s own void. That said, not everything was so disappointing, since if, instead of talking to the members of Action, you talked to the walled conspirators; then you saw that the forces were divided: there were those of malicious Action with its void, but also those of the wall on the watch for enemy Action.

I recalled other times and took my leave in silence, there in the mist, of many worlds I hoped not to have to see again. I recalled other days, in which pale dreams in the hanging mist disappeared. I walked along in the darkness and mist; it started to rain. In the wind of the night, the road led nowhere, but it was good to walk in the fine rain that was falling. I recalled errant winds on other roads and other twilight rains on other days. Between false and genuine members of the resistance, as if I were walking to an ancient and literary rhythm, I, Robert Walser, began to stray across that dark area of thick, infinite mist, I began to walk alone and without direction on the byroad.

I remembered the horrible potato salad we had eaten. And by an association of images, perhaps searching the domestic and ordinary for something to hold on to in the metaphysical fog I was beginning to move in, I recalled Rosa three days before, rubbing her eyes with the back of her hand and then taking a saucepan of boiled potatoes from the fridge and tossing them into the salad bowl. I had stopped on the threshold of the kitchen, watching her and the remains of the red umbrella to which I attribute creative virtues; I had stopped to observe the vibrant operation, watching how Rosa washed a stick of celery under the tap, cut it into little pieces and then threw it on top of the potatoes, while, with her old habit of doing everything quickly, she emptied a whole can of olives into the salad bowl and some chopped onion and a cloud of cayenne pepper. It was only three days since I had witnessed Rosa prepare that dinner with her customary speed, but it seemed like an eternity. Because in these parts, on the byroad, commonplace cans of olives and ordinary chopped onion seemed to represent the soul of the conventional home, miles away by now, finally abandoned for good from the precise moment I had strayed into the thick mist of the area of darkness.

I might bump into Musil, I told myself. Everything was extremely senseless, but to seek Musil was even more so. He was hiding no doubt because he had discovered the real intentions of Action Without Parallel, a false resistance movement that had infiltrated the wall. Action’s henchmen, as in a bad adventure story, were after him to eliminate him. That at least is what I thought I understood from the signs sent to me, from cracks in the wall, by the Chinese conspirators, on the alert against Action’s movements. At one point I looked for someone to discuss this with, but the byroad was empty. With my book by Montaigne, I kept going, another night fell on the night that had fallen five hours before. Suddenly I saw a shadow move next to an empty house. I thought it might be — my mother had prophesied this in her diary — Hamlet asking after Rosario Girondo. I also told myself that it might be Emily Dickinson, with her white housecoat and sad dog. But it wasn’t Hamlet, it wasn’t Dickinson. It was a woman very like the young Montano, who said she was called Mzungu, just as the native Africans called the first white explorers. “‘He who walks without direction’ is what Mzungu means,” she explained. She was dressed in an old-fashioned way, with a thin lace net covering her dark hair, a collar gathered on a black velvet mantilla, her feet in buckled shoes. She was young, but her face changed at times and seemed to come from time immemorial. I walked with her while the night that had grown inside the first night lasted, I accompanied Mzungu’s steps until dawn. At first light, I decided to carry on alone. She was shortsighted, she came up to say good-bye, in fact she came up to see if I had aged at all in the last hours. “Good-bye,” she said to me, “die sane and live mad.”

“Good-bye, Montano, good-bye,” I answered. I walked for hours until, turning off the byroad, I entered the silence of a forest without birds. Leaving behind the wood, I walked with Montaigne’s book and Mzungu’s memory along an infinite road that finally narrowed and turned into something like a winding staircase. And suddenly I saw Musil next to an abyss with his white open-necked shirt, a very black coat down to his feet, and red, broad-brimmed hat. He was staring thoughtfully at the ground. He seemed to be measuring the speeds, angles, magnetic forces of the fugitive masses of the abyss that opened before us. He raised his head and looked at me. Before us there was only void, Action Without Parallel and other enemies of the literary had us surrounded. “It is the air of the time, the spirit is threatened,” I said to him. Musil looked toward the uncertain horizon. In the distance, far away, beyond everything, like a mirage of salvation rising from the void and the abyss, the sea was visible, with its shoals, and swarms of white, triangular sails. “Prague is untouchable,” he said, “it’s a magic circle. Prague has always been too much for them. And it always will be.”