Perlmann's Silence Read online

  Before she started talking, Evelyn Mistral put on a pair of glasses with a delicate matte silver frame. She had put up her hair, and in spite of the skewed T-shirt under her cinnamon-colored jacket she looked older than yesterday: an academic, the red elephant doesn’t suit her at all today. All of a sudden she was quite alien to him – in fact, as a reader, as a worker, she’s an opponent I have to be wary of. Perlmann tried to hide and made one last desperate attempt to remember a subject that he knew something about. After her it’s my turn. But then he heard her bright voice, which sounded tense and harassed. Her feet under the table slipped out of her red shoes and back in again. She propped herself with her arms on the table, before changing position again a moment later. Instead of merely outlining her theme she constantly justified her work and talked for longer than necessary. After a while Perlmann felt that her tension had passed into his body, as if he could take it away from her. He thought he had to defend her against the faces of the others, even though there wasn’t a hint of criticism to be seen in them, merely a patronizing benevolence.

  And then, all of a sudden, she had finished, took her glasses off and leaned back with her arms folded. Perlmann felt as if the veranda were filling up with an intoxicating silence, and time seemed only to want to go on flowing when he had started talking. He felt for his cigarettes, touched the pack and discovered that it was empty. With his hand still on the box his eye drifted above Silvestri’s head and out and beyond to the sea, to check that the world, the real world, was much bigger than this hateful room, where he was now encircled by all the people whom he had assembled here only because he had wanted to accompany Agnes on her photographic journey through Italy in winter.

  Silvestri grinned, and he picked up his pack of Gauloises and threw it to Perlmann in a high arc all the way across the room. Still half-immersed in his attempt to hide in his own gaze and escape unnoticed into the light, Perlmann raised his arm and confidently caught the box. Even though that confidence seemed to issue not from himself as such, but only from his body, which he had been trying to leave behind as a decoy, it gave him back a little of his confidence. He thanked Silvestri with a nod and put one of the unfiltered cigarettes between his lips. What I say now will be completely random.

  At the first drag the sharp smoke took his breath away, and he couldn’t help coughing. He heard Silvestri laughing. Perlmann hid for a while behind his cough and finally, after wiping his weeping eyes with his handkerchief, looked around.

  ‘I’m working on a text about the connection between language and memory,’ he said. He was both relieved and shocked by the calm in his voice. It was something, he went on, that had interested him for many years. Too rarely, he thought, did his discipline investigate how language was interwoven with the various forms of experience. And in this respect it was precisely the experience of time that had received special treatment. It was an unorthodox theme for a linguist, he added with a smile that felt like a strenuous piece of facial gymnastics. But he also understood his stay here as an opportunity to go in alternative directions.

  Evelyn Mistral looked at him with radiant eyes, and now, for the first time, Perlmann noticed the green of those eyes, a sea-green with a few splinters of amber set into it. She was pleasantly surprised that he was dealing with something related to her own subject, and Perlmann had to look away to keep, in his deceitfulness, from being exposed to her smiling face any longer.

  Less had happened in the faces of the others than he had expected. Millar’s head seemed to be a little more bent than usual, but there was no mockery to be discovered in his expression, and in Adrian von Levetzov’s dark eyes there was even a gleam of moderate interest.

  Laura Sand’s suggestion for the sequence of the sessions met with general agreement. The date that Perlmann had fixed for himself was now treated as something quite natural. On that point, of course, von Levetzov avoided Perlmann’s eye. Instead he came to see him at the end of the session. He had found his announcement rather surprising, he said. But thinking about it properly he was also a little bit nervous. It must be a lovely feeling, trying out something new. He couldn’t wait to hear the result!

  Perlmann went to see Maria in the office, and introduced Millar to her. Today, as usual, she was wearing a glittering pullover that matched her hair-do, and as on the first evening Perlmann was captivated by the contrast between the hint of punk that surrounded her and the warm, almost maternal smile with which she addressed people. His two texts would be copied by four o’clock, she assured Millar. A copy would be put in everyone’s pigeonhole.

  ‘One text you know already,’ Millar said to Perlmann as he left, ‘and I’ll be keen to hear what you have to say about the other one. You have been subject to severe criticism, I’m afraid. But you know it isn’t meant personally.’

  5

  ‘It won’t be a problem to give you another room,’ Signora Morelli said off-handedly after Perlmann had told her – in halting Italian full of mistakes – his story about the bed and the pains in his back. ‘At this time of year we are far from full.’ She saw his hesitation and paused as she was about to turn towards the key racks.

  Then Perlmann summoned all his courage and said firmly, ‘I would like the new room to be on the other side of the building. Between empty rooms, if possible.’

  The hint of a smile appeared on Signora Morelli’s severe face, and her eyes narrowed slightly. She flicked through her papers, took a key from the rack and said, ‘Va bene, try this one.’

  When he turned towards her again on the stairs, she was resting both arms on the shelf behind the counter, and was watching him with her head slightly inclined.

  The new room was on the top floor of the south wing, far from the others. The corridor was gloomy, because of the three art nouveau lamps in the ceiling only two were lit: the middle one was dark, and the bulbs were broken in the other two. For a moment Perlmann was horrified by the room. It was bigger than the previous one, admittedly, and the ceiling was higher – it was almost a sort of hall – but the stucco on the ceiling was crumbling, the carpet was worn and the big mirror on the wall was half-blind. It also smelled musty, as if it hadn’t been aired for years. Only the bathroom had been completely refurbished, with a marble tub and gleaming metal taps. He opened the window and looked down the facade: the room was in the only row without balconies. Over by the swimming pool Giorgio Silvestri had stretched himself out on one of the yellow loungers. He had taken off his shoes and socks, and the open newspaper lay over his face. Like a tramp. A fearless man, a free man – and my thoughts about him are the purest kitsch.

  Perlmann sat down in the big worn-out red plush wing chair next to the window. He started assessing the room with his eyes, and even before he had finished he liked it. He lay down on the bed. Suddenly it was very easy to relax. The new room allowed him to forget what had happened at the meeting. The honks of a ship’s horn and the rattle of a motorboat reached him from far away. He thought about the fact that the two adjacent rooms were empty. Their neighboring rooms, in turn, seemed to be unoccupied as well, and his imagination produced endless series of empty, silent rooms. Then he went to sleep.

  It was shortly before three when he woke up shivering and dry-mouthed, at first confused by the surroundings, then relieved. On the way down to his old room he clutched the key like an anchor. Millar’s music would no longer trouble him, he thought, as he packed the clothes and books that he would bring upstairs at night when all was quiet.

  There was a whole hour before Millar’s texts were due to be in their pigeonholes. Perlmann picked up Leskov’s paper. Once more he ran through the sentence about the linguistic creation of one’s own past. What he had written as a translation in the morning was true. But now the text became very difficult. Leskov introduced the concept of a remembered scene – vspomnishchaya stsena – and then seemed to develop the idea that we inevitably project a self-image – samopredstavlenie – into such scenes. Perlmann had to look up every second word, and th
e typescript was slowly obscured by his scribbled translations. It was becoming increasingly clear to him: he had to buy a vocabulary book in which he could write all the new words. In this way he would produce a glossary of academic Russian, a sphere of language that was barely touched upon in the books of exercises. He suddenly felt fine: he had a plan that he was able to pursue in his new, quiet room. It was a working project. At last he was a working man again. When he walked along the port into town to find a stationery shop, his steps were firm and confident.

  It was his first venture into the town, and for a long time it looked as if there wasn’t a single shop selling writing equipment. At last, in a dark side street, he found a scruffy little shop selling not only stationery but also magazines and trashy novels, as well as cheap toys and sweets. Still annoyed at having had to search for so long, but now also relieved, he turned the handle with brio and pushed against the locked door with his shoulder and head. Still siesta, even though it was nearly four o’clock. He stopped by the shop window and rubbed his aching forehead. After a while his eye was caught by a big book which was set up behind the dirty pane, surrounded by tinsel and paper chains, like a holy book in a shrine. It was a chronicle of the twentieth century. The front cover was divided into four fields showing world-famous photographs, icons of the century: Marilyn Monroe, standing over the ventilating shaft, holding on to her skirt as it blew up; Elvis Presley in a pale blue glittery suit, bent far back as he played; Neil Armstrong’s first footstep on the moon; Jackie Kennedy in Dallas, bending over the assassinated president in the open-topped car. Perlmann felt the pictures drawing him into their spell as if he had never seen them before. The idea of being able to read something about the subjects of these pictures, right now, electrified him, and suddenly nothing seemed more exciting, nothing more important, than to comprehend the century in which he lived from the perspective of pictures like that. Excitedly, he tore open the packet of cigarettes that he had bought on the corner. No, it wasn’t like that: it wasn’t a matter of understanding a century like a historian. What he wanted was to reappropriate his own life by imagining what had happened in the world outside while he was alive. The idea first came to him there in that dark, deserted alley, smelling a bit of fish and rotten vegetables. He was unsure whether he fully understood what he was thinking, but he was impatient to get started, whatever it might be.

  The shop’s proprietor, when she finally opened the door to him, was a fat woman with far too many rings on her plump hands. She was at first annoyed by Perlmann’s unconcealed impatience. But when he asked for the chronicle, her grumpy attitude gave way to solicitous friendliness. She was taken aback, as if she had never imagined that anyone might actually want to buy that big, unwieldy book, the centerpiece of her display; certainly not someone with an unmistakeably foreign accent, and during the dead time of the Italian siesta. She fetched the heavy volume from the shop window, dusted it down in the open door and handed it to Perlmann with a theatrical gesture: Ecco! She wouldn’t take anything for the vocabulary notebook – it was gratis. She stuffed the bundle of cash into the pocket of her apron. She was still shaking her head with surprise as she watched him leave from the doorway.

  Two streets on, Perlmann saw an unprepossessing sign: trattoria. He parted the glass-bead curtain, walked down the long, gloomy corridor and suddenly found himself in a bright, glass-roofed internal courtyard with dining tables covered by red-and-white checked tablecloths. The room was empty, and Perlmann had to call twice before the proprietor arrived wearing an apron. They themselves had just eaten, he said genially, but Perlmann could still have a minestrone and a plate of pasta. Then, when he brought the food, his wife and daughter appeared as well. Perlmann was itching to read the chronicle, but the family was curious to find out about the man with the big book who plainly lived against the grain of the daily rhythm. In return for their hospitality at such an unusual time, Perlmann told them about the research group. Investigating languages, that was interesting, they thought, and he had to tell them more and more. Sandra in particular, the thirteen-year-old daughter with the long, pitch-black hair, asked question after question, and her parents were visibly proud to have a daughter with such a thirst for knowledge. Talking about these subjects went amazingly well given his poor Italian. Perlmann was pleased with every successful turn of phrase that he wouldn’t have thought himself capable of, and this delight at his linguistic success, along with the desire not to disappoint Sandra made him draw a positive, almost enthusiastic picture of what they were doing over at the hotel, which was grotesquely at odds with his internal misery. When the proprietor and his family finally withdrew to leave him to read, in their eyes he was an enviable man who was lucky enough to do exactly what interested him most; the rare case, then, of a man who lived in perfect harmony with himself.

  Perlmann opened the book at the year of his high-school graduation. The first controlled nuclear fusion. A come-back for De Gaulle. Boris Pasternak forced to give back the Nobel Prize. There had been elections in Italy. Pope Pius XII had died. The Torre Velasca in Milan had been completed. The Bishop of Prato, who had insulted a couple as pubblici concubini and pubblici peccatori because they had refused a church wedding, was accused of slander before a court, fined and later, after a rebellion of the church, absolved on the grounds of insindacabilità dell’atto.

  Perlmann read with his eyes aflame. The texts weren’t demanding, and by and large his Italian was up to the task. The whole thing was written in a sensational style and had a tabloid whiff about it, but that didn’t bother him. He actually enjoyed it, and the fact that the selection of events was made from the Italian perspective gave the affair an exotic charm. He was boundlessly surprised by his fascination, when he read, for example, that the Hungarian uprising, which had been a great embarrassment to the Italian Communists two years previously, had not lost the Party any votes in the elections. He couldn’t understand why he asked Sandra to bring him one espresso after another, while smoking like a chimney. But he enjoyed surprising himself by making an unexpected discovery about himself, which, he felt vaguely, could be the start of something.

  The sky over the glass roof was almost black by now, and the ships’ lanterns on the walls had been lit for a long time when Perlmann left. On a momentary whim he asked the proprietor to keep the chronicle for him; he would come back to go on reading. As he walked through the quiet alleys to the port, Perlmann had the feeling of having found a place or refuge to which he could retreat when the world of the hotel, of the group, threatened to crush him. And he felt a furtive joy at the thought that none of the others would ever find out about this refuge. But as he was walking along the harbor jetty and turned into the shore road on which the hotel stood, those feelings quickly seeped away, even though he paused several times and tried, eyes closed, to stop them. And when he stood by the front steps and looked up at the name of the hotel, written in white neon letters on a gleaming blue background, his bad conscience at having frittered away half a day superimposed itself over everything else.

  The two texts by Millar which Signora Morelli handed him were a shock. The one that Perlmann had stuffed into the offprints cupboard at home was fifty-nine pages long; the other one sixty-five, with seven pages of notes. When he was flicking through it in the elevator, the last remainder of freedom that he had experienced in the trattoria fled. What remained was a leaden weariness and the sense that it would take him hours to read so much as a single page.

  In his room he set the papers aside. There wasn’t much time left before dinner. He picked up Leskov’s text and wrote down the unfamiliar words that he had looked up so far in his vocabulary book. Several times he paused and stared in cheerful amazement at his Russian handwriting. It was a little clumsy, but correct, and it was Russian without a doubt. The annoying thing was that words appeared in the subsequent sentences that weren’t in his pocket dictionary. Nonetheless, he was by and large able to follow Leskov’s next step. Self-images, the text argued, were somet
hing quite different from the experienced contours of an internal world. Making an image of oneself was a process that required far more articulation than the inner perception, the inner exploration of contours of experience could provide on their own.

  He had a nose for striking examples, this Vassily Leskov, and gradually Perlmann developed a feeling for the text. He liked its blunt, unembellished style and its laconic tone. As an author, he thought, Leskov was quite different, much more congenial than usual, and Perlmann noticed how the shapeless, pipe-smoking figure of his memory retreated behind another person who had no appearance, but a voice, and thus a clear and strong identity.

  It was twenty to nine when he remembered dinner. He quickly changed, grabbed the shirt with the torn-off button and chose a wide tie to hide the spot. Giovanni at reception grinned when he saw him hurrying down the stairs. It was the grin of someone seeing a late school pupil dashing down an empty corridor to the classroom. Perlmann wanted to slap him, this clueless Italian with his bushy eyebrows and ridiculously long sideburns. The glance Perlmann gave him was so poisonous that Giovanni’s grin vanished for a moment.

  He didn’t want a starter, he told the waiter before sitting down next to Silvestri who, plainly involved in a heated exchange with Brian Millar, had set his knife and fork down in a cross on his plate and lit a cigarette in the middle of the meal. Yes, he was saying, and absently blowing the smoke into Millar’s face, Franco Basaglia’s experiment in Görz must be deemed a failure. But that was still no proof that the traditional psychiatry of grilles and bolted doors could not be changed; and a malicious tone was entirely inappropriate. At any rate, Basaglia had displayed more sensitivity, commitment and courage than the whole psychiatric establishment, whose inertia was directly proportional to its lack of imagination.