Telegrams of the Soul

In a Viennese

Puff

*

“Say,” said the sweet, cuddly one to me, “that guy over there ain’t normal; he lives on a sandy island in the Danube, runs around half-naked, will ya get a load of him, he’s brown all over from the sun. He only comes here to sneer at us! At you too, Peter, you too. What’s the use of all your pretty poetry?”

The fellah over there really did look like life itself. Or like an African traveler. His hide tanned tough by light and air, tanned I tell you.

His friends at his table had all “fallen in love,” technically speaking.

So now they all nudged him to likewise finally “fall in love.”

“You want me to go weak?” the brown one replied to the pale faces. And everyone laughed.

“Some strength you got in you if you ain’t got none to spend!?” said sweet Anna.

“Let ’im be—,” said Hansi, “everybody knows what he’s gotta do. Even the sun probably don’t do him no good no more—.”

“Do you despise me too?” said the tanned man, turning to one of the girls who was reading a dime novel, totally immersed in it.

“Why should I despise you? I don’t even know you.”

“How did you get started in this kind of life?” said the natural man softly. Such is the standard question of all dilettantes of life.

“My story wouldn’t interest the gentleman much—.”

“On the contrary. You seem to me to have been born for something better!” Second standard line of the dilettante!

“I was corrupted—.”

“Aha, by love!”

“No, not love!”

“Then by desire!”

“No, they plied me with drink, on a picnic—.”

“By alcohol then! It’s got to have been one of the three poisons—.”

He categorized it all under the rubric “alcohol.”

Anna brushed by and said: “Hey, Mr. Robinson Crusoe, don’t you go and corrupt this innocent thing—.”

The Danube island man walked over to the open window, peered out at the darkness of the narrow street lit only with a glaring fleck of light from the pissoir, and took in a breath of the foul air with evident disgust. Then he said: “You’ve got too little respect for sunlight and fresh air, that’s your problem!”

The girls were momentarily befuddled by the thought that they actually might perhaps have too little respect for sunlight and fresh air. Since up till then they really had no respect for it at all.

Only Friederike, who never wanted to hear her named shortened into “Fritzerl” because she was the one they always called that, spoke up: “Well, we’ve got a better sense of humor than you, Mister—.”

“Zip it,” said the other girls, “don’t hurt the guy’s feelings, that ain’t right—.”

“Farewell, you fallen soul!” said the man and left.

“With our best regards, Mr. Robinson Crusoe—,” Anna called after him.

“What’d you all tell me to zip it for when I put that sorry sap in his place?!?” said Friederike.

“You can’t just go ’n rub their nose in the truth; he might still have picked one to take upstairs—.”

“No way, not that sun nut; all his sun-soaked strength makes him weak where it counts—.”

__________________

*Viennese slang for brothel