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I was gradually reaching the limit of my abilities to contain the disconcerting rushes, the incompatible surges that were sweeping over me. I roamed aimlessly through the house, I spent a whole hour caressing with my fingertips the polished wooden ornaments decorating the doors to von Üxküll’s apartments, I went down to the basement with a candle to lie down on the hard dirt floor, damp and cold, I inhaled with delight the dark, stale, archaic smells of this underground chamber, I went to inspect with an almost forensic meticulousness the two ascetic bedrooms of the house servants and their bathrooms, Turkish-style toilets with carefully polished corrugated foot rests, set far apart to leave ample room for the intestinal discharge of these women whom I pictured as strong, white, and well built, like Käthe. I no longer thought about the past, I was no longer at all tempted to turn back to look at Eurydice, I kept my eyes firmly in front of me on this unacceptable present, which was swelling endlessly, on the i
From time to time, when these i
Quant fait que faire ne desire
Pur sun buen qu’il ne puet aveir
Encontre desir fait voleir.
When he does what he does not desire to do
Because he can’t have what he wants
He turns his will against desire.
And once again it was as if her long ghostlike hand had come and slipped under my arm, all the way from her Helvetian exile or else right behind me, to place a finger gently in front of my eyes under these words, this irrevocable sentence that I couldn’t accept, that I rejected with all the miserable determination I could still muster.
And thus I fell into a long, endless stretto, where every response came before the question was over, but in retrograde, like a cancrizans. Of the last days spent in that house, only scraps of images, disco