Vertigo (15 page)

With the approach of evening, Dr K. began to be aware of the growing numbers of people out on the streets, apparently solely for their pleasure, all of them arm-in-arm in couples or groups of three or even more. Perhaps it was the bills, still posted throughout the city, announcing the
spettacoli lirici all'Arena
that August and the word
 
AIDA
 
displayed in large letters which persuaded him that the Veronese show of carefree togetherness had something of a theatrical performance about it, staged especially to bring home to him, Dr K., his solitary, eccentric condition — a thought he could not get out of his head and which he was only able to escape by seeking refuge in a cinema, probably the Cinema Pathé di San Sebastiano. In tears, so Dr K. recorded the following day in Desenzano, he sat in the surrounding darkness, observing the transformation into pictures of the minute particles of dust glinting in the beam of the projector. However, there is nothing in Dr K.'s Desenzano notes to tell us of what he saw on that 20th of September in Verona. Was it the Pathé newsreel, featuring the review of the cavalry in the presence of His Majesty Vittorio Emanuele III, and
La Lezione dell'abisso,
which, as I discovered in the Biblioteca Civica, were shown that day at the Pathé and which are both now untraceable? Or was it, as I initially supposed, a story that ran with some success in the cinemas of Austria in 1913, the story of the unfortunate Student of Prague, who cut himself off from love and life when, on the 13th of May, 1820, he sold his soul to a certain Scapinelli? The extraordinary exterior shots in this film, the silhouettes of his native city flickering across the screen, would doubtless have sufficed to move Dr K. deeply, most of all perhaps the fate of the eponymous hero, Balduin, since in him he would have recognised a kind of
doppelgànger,
just as Balduin recognises his other self in the dark-coated brother whom he could never and nowhere escape. In one of the very first scenes, Balduin, the finest swordsman in all Prague, confronts his own image in the mirror, and presently, to his horror, that unreal figure steps out of the frame, and

henceforth follows him as the ghostly shadow of his own restlessness. Would this sort of scenario not have struck Dr K. as the description of a struggle in which, as in the contest he himself had set against the backdrop of the Laurenziberg, the principal character and his opponent are in the most intimate and self-destructive of relationships, such that, when the hero is driven into a corner by his companion he is forced to declare: I am betrothed, I admit it. And what alternative does a man so cornered have but to try and rid himself of his dumb attendant by means of a shot from a pistol? - a shot which, in the silent film, is visible as a puff of smoke. In that moment, in which time itself seems to dissolve, Balduin is released from his delusions. He breathes freely once more and, realising in the same instant that the bullet has penetrated his own heart, dies a dramatic, not to say ostentatious death, the whole scene like a flickering light about to be extinguished, representing the soundless aria of the hero's demise. Final contortions of this kind, which regularly occur in opera when, as Dr K. once wrote, the dying voice aimlessly wanders through the music, did not by any means seem ridiculous to him; rather he believed them to be an expression of our, so to speak, natural misfortune, since after all, as he remarks elsewhere, we lie prostrate on the boards, dying, our whole lives long.

On the 21st of September Dr K. is in Desenzano on the southern shore of Lake Garda. Most of the townspeople have gathered in the market square to welcome the Deputy Secretary of the Prague Workers' Insurance Company. Dr K.,

however, is reclining on the grass down by the lake, before him the waves lapping the reeds, to his right the promontory of Sirmione, to his left the shore towards Manerba. Simply to lie in the grass is one of Dr K.'s favourite ways of passing the time, when reasonably well disposed. If at such a moment, as once happened in Prague, a gentleman of some distinction with whom he has occasionally had official dealings rides by in a two-horse carriage, Dr K. relishes the pleasures (but only, as he notes himself, the pleasures) of being declassed and freed from all social standing. In Desenzano, however, even this modest happiness eludes him. Rather he feels ill, sick, as he puts it, at every point of the compass. There remains only the one consolation that nobody knows where he is. We have no record of how long the people of Desenzano continued their watch for the Deputy Secretary from Prague that afternoon, nor when, disappointed, they finally dispersed.

One of them is reported to have observed that those in whom we invest our hopes only ever make their appearance when they are no longer needed.

Following this failed encounter, which was as disheartening for him as it was for the people of Desenzano, Dr K.
spends three weeks in Riva at Dr von Hartungen's hydropathic establishment, arriving by steamer just before nightfall that day. A porter wearing a long green apron fastened at the back with a brass chain shows Dr K. to his room, from the balcony of which he gazes out over the lake, serenely peaceful in the gathering darkness. All is now blue on blue, and nothing appears to move, not even the steamer, already some way out upon the water. In the morning, the daily routine of the hydro begins. In the intervals between the various cold douches and the electrical treatment prescribed for him, Dr K. tries as far as possible to immerse himself entirely in quiet and tranquillity, but the woes he endured with Felice, and she with him, continually come over him, like a living thing, usually when he

awakes, though also at mealtimes when he often feels quite paralysed and unable to pick up his knife and fork. At table, as it happens, the place to Dr K.'s right is occupied by an old general who remains silent for the most part, but now and then will venture a cryptic yet penetrating observation. Thus on one occasion, looking up abruptly from the book which always lies open beside him, he remarks that, when one thinks about it, a vast range of unfathomable contingencies come between the logic of the battleplan and that of the final despatches, both of which he knew inside out. Tiny details imperceptible to us decide everything! Even the greatest battles in the history of the world were won or lost like that. Tiny details, but they weigh as heavy as the 50,000 dead soldiers and horses at Waterloo. The fact is that ultimately it all comes down to the question of specific gravity. Stendhal had a clearer grasp of this than any high command, he says, and now, in my old age, I have apprenticed myself to that old master, so that I may not die quite without understanding. It is a fundamentally insane notion, he continues, that one is able to influence the course of events by a turn of the helm, by will-power alone, whereas in fact all is determined by the most complex interdependencies.

Although he is aware that the remarks of his dining companion are not directed at himself, Dr K. experiences a slight surge of confidence and a species of tacit solidarity as he listens. The girl to his left, whom he takes to be unhappy on account of the silent gentleman to her right, that is, on account of himself, now begins interestingly to acquire definition in his mind. She is somewhat short of stature, comes from Genoa, looks very Italian, but is in fact from Switzerland, and, it now transpires, has a voice of a curiously dark timbre. Whenever she speaks to him in that voice, an infrequent enough occurrence, it seems to Dr K. like an extraordinary expression of confidence and trust. In her frail condition she becomes most precious to him, and before long he is rowing out a short way onto the lake with her in the afternoons. The crags rise from the water in the mellow autumn light, nuanced in shades of green, as if the entire location were an album and the mountains had been drawn on an empty page by some sensitive dilettante, as a remembrance for the lady to whom the album belongs.

Out there they tell each other their ailments, both of them, as one would like to believe, buoyed up by an ephemeral improvement in their condition and sense of peaceable quiescence. Dr K. evolves a fragmentary theory of disembodied love, in which there is no difference between intimacy and disengagement. If only we were to open our eyes, he says, we would see that our happiness lies in our natural surroundings and not in our poor bodies which have-long since become separated from the natural order of things. That was the reason why all false lovers (and all lovers, he adds, are false) closed their eyes while lovemaking or else, which came to the same thing, kept them wide open with craving. Never were we more helpless or lacking in rational sense than in that condition. Our dreams could then be constrained no longer and we became subject to the compulsion of constantly going through the whole gamut of variations and repetitions which, as he himself had often enough found, extinguished everything, even the image of the lover one so wished to preserve. Curiously, when he became caught up in such states, which he considered bordered on madness, the only thing that helped was to clap an imaginary black Napoleonic tricorne over his thoughts. At present, however, there was nothing he had less need of than such a hat, for out here on the lake they were indeed almost disembodied, and possessed of a natural understanding of their own scant significance.