The Storyteller (9 page)

Singer of the Comic Opera (Sängerin der komischen Oper)
, 1923.

O
ne speaks of people who took their secret to the grave. Not much was missing for Captain G to have numbered among them. It was his misfortune that he did not keep his secret to himself. For those who love wordplay, one might say that it was his misfortune that he did not keep his misfortune a secret, even though he had sworn to himself that he would.

He was no longer a young man when he let himself go for the first and final time. This happened in the harbour of Seville. Seville lies on the Guadalquivir, which is navigable
until said harbour, though naturally only for vessels with small or medium tonnage. Captain G had not advanced beyond the command of the
Westerwald
, which could hold two-and-a-half-thousand tonnes. The load line of the
Westerwald
was half a metre above the water. The cargo comprised iron scaffolds bound for Marseille and seven hundred tonnes of ammonia bound for Oran. Claus Schinzinger was the name of the sole passenger.

The most remarkable thing about this passenger was the care he took to appear for every meal in the officer's mess with a different pipe, which he produced as soon as the rules of decency permitted. But perhaps even his considerable stockpile had been exhausted during the twelve-day journey, which had brought him from Cuxhaven to Seville. In any case, it was an unsightly growth, or rather a stump, from which the smoke curled upwards as Schinzinger dreamily listened to a story. His half-closed eyes were but one sign that his entire soul had resolved to listen. For Schinzinger – and perhaps this was the Captain's great misfortune – was a great listener.

Indeed, one would really have to possess G's level of aloofness and misanthropy to keep one's interactions with this passenger as rigidly within the confines of convention as had been the case during this passage. Schinzinger, for his part, appeared not to have waited for them to connect by any means; yet his willingness to endure even the longest pauses without a hint of awkwardness demonstrated sufficiently that he was a born listener. For the first time in a long while, both the captain and the passenger sat at a table where the wine in their glasses did not pitch and toss. It was a calm evening. No wind moved through the tops of the palm trees in the large park which surrounds Seville like a belt. The
Westerwald
was docked in the harbour as placidly as the sturdy garden pavilion out of
which the guests, who sat at hidden tables in the thicket, were served. Incidentally, there were few of them. Most had been prudent enough to bring a woman with them in order to be able to transform the melancholy of a Spanish song into the rhythms of their stride and their shoulders.

Schinzinger and his partner had no such avenue of escape. How is it that they had come to be there in the first place? They had barely been sitting opposite each other for five minutes when Schinzinger raised this very question. Not that he had other, let alone better plans. He was a man in his fifties and the disreputable quarters around the city's harbour no longer presented either a mystery or an attraction to him. This much, however, appeared probable: had they – he and G – sat at separate tables at opposite ends of the city, they would have been more comfortable. He had managed to laboriously prolong their consultation regarding the choice of Mavrodaphne, but their conversation soon deteriorated.

‘Greek wine? Well, as you wish.' This was the last thing that G said. Then, after an unusually short pause: ‘Do you know Wilhelmshaven?' Suddenly Schinzinger felt as though he had sojourned for an eternity in this town, with its ugly dockworkers' barracks, cranes and long, straight, desolate terraces, only to become acquainted with the young happiness that the man opposite him was able to draw in these dreary surroundings from his marriage to Elsbeth.

‘A few weeks later', G continued, ‘our afternoon class in mechanical engineering had been moved on board the
Olga
, which was alleged to be the most modern oil tanker in the German navy. Our lesson plan left something to be desired. It had not been taken into account that the examiner's commission of the North German Boiler Surveillance Association was also going to be on board in order to inspect the ship in
the name of the Stern insurance firm. The chief engineer of the commission directed the procedures while our class stood waiting at the stern. The lesson, which we had whiled away by laughing and chatting, was drawing to a close when we heard voices from the midship. Some movement ensued and we realised that something had happened. I, who at the time seized every opportunity to try out my technical skills, ran towards the chief machine operator. Yes – there had indeed been an incident.'

—

Translated by Sebastian Truskolaski
.

Fragment written c. 1925; unpublished in Benjamin's lifetime. Final paragraph thought to have been lost.
Gesammelte Schriften VII
, 644–6.

Garden of Passion (Garten der Leidenschaft)
, 1913.

T
here he sat. He always sat there around this time. But not like this. Today the unmovable one, who customarily stared off into the distance, looked idly about himself. Yet it did not appear to make a difference, for he saw nothing here either. But the mahogany cane with the silver knob did not lie beside him, perched on the edge of the bench as it usually did; he held it, directed it. It slid across the sand:
O
, and I thought of a fruit;
L
, and I halted;
Y
, and I felt embarrassed, as though I'd been caught doing something forbidden. I saw that he wrote the thing not as someone who wishes to be read. Rather, the
signs interwove, as if each one wanted to incorporate the next: there followed – in nigh on the same spot as before –
MPIA
, and the first marks had already begun to vanish as the last ones emerged. I came closer. This too did not cause him to look up – or should I say awaken? – so accustomed was he to my presence. ‘Calculating again, are you?' I asked, without letting on that I had been watching him. I knew that his ruminations concerned imaginary budgets for distant journeys, journeys that extended as far as Samarkand or Iceland but which he never undertook. Had he ever left the country at all? Aside from that secret journey, of course, which he'd gone on in order to escape the memory of a wild and, as they say, unworthy, indeed, shameful young love – Olympia – whose name he had just absent-mindedly scrawled into the sand.

‘I'm thinking of my street. Or of you, if you will – they're one and the same. The street where a word of yours became more vivid than any other I have heard before or since. It is just as you once told me in Travemünde: that in the end, every journey and every adventure must revolve around a woman, or at least a woman's name. For such is the grip required by the red thread of experience, in order to pass from one hand to the next. You were right. But as I walked up that hot street, I could not yet fathom quite how strange it was – and why – that for the past few seconds my footsteps appeared to call out to me like a voice from the reverberant, deserted alleyway. The surrounding buildings had little in common with the ones that made this southern Italian town famous. Not old enough to be weathered and not new enough to be inviting, this was an assembly of whims from the purgatory of architecture. Closed shutters underscored the obduracy of the grey facades, and the glory of the South seemed to have withdrawn into the shadows that mounted under the earthquake supports and arches of the
side streets. Every step that I took led me further away from all the things that I had come to see; I left behind the pinacoteca and the cathedral, and I would have scarcely had the strength to change direction even if the sight of red wooden arms – apparently candelabras which, as I only just noticed, appeared to grow in regular intervals out of the walls on either side of the street – had not given me cause for new reverie. I say reverie precisely because I could not fathom, and did not even attempt to explain how traces of such archaic lighting forms could have survived in this mountain town, which – though it is poor – is nonetheless electrified and irrigated. That is why it seemed perfectly reasonable to me, a few steps farther, to stumble across shawls, drapes, scarves and rugs that had seemingly just been washed. A few crumpled paper lanterns, which hung from the dingy windows of the surrounding houses, completed the image of wretched, paltry housekeeping. I would have liked to ask someone how to get back to town by a different route. I was fed up with this street, not least because it was so devoid of people. Precisely because of that, I had to abandon my intention and – nigh on humiliated – go back the way I had come, as though under the yoke. Determined to make up for lost time, and to atone for what appeared to me as a defeat, I decided to forgo lunch, and – more bitterly – any midday rest, so that after a short walk up some steep steps, I found myself on the square before the cathedral.

‘If previously the absence of people had been oppressive, now it seemed a liberating solitude. My spirit was lifted instantaneously. Nothing would have been more unwelcome than being spoken to or even noticed. All at once I was returned into the hands of my traveller's fate – that of the lone adventurer – and once more I recalled the moment when I first became conscious of it, standing, racked by pain, above the Marina Grande, not
far from Ravello. This time too I was surrounded by mountains. But in place of the stony cliffs with which Ravello cascades into the sea, it was the marbled flanks of the cathedral, and above its snowy slopes countless stone saints seemed to descend on a pilgrimage down to us humans. As I followed the procession with my eyes, I saw that the foundation of the building lay exposed: a passage had been excavated, and several sharp steps led underground to a brass door that stood slightly ajar. Why I sneaked in through this subterranean side entrance, I do not know. Perhaps it was only the fear that sometimes befalls us when we enter one of those places that we've heard described a thousand times, a fear that I sought to avoid through my aimless wanderings. But if I had believed that I would enter a dark crypt, then I was duly punished for my snobbishness. Not only was the room that I entered, the sacristy, whitewashed and illuminated by the bright light from its upper windows; it was filled with a tour group, whom the sexton regaled for the hundredth or thousandth time with one of those stories whose every word resounds with the ringing of copper coins, which he raked in each of the hundred or thousand times he told it. There he stood, pompous and rotund, beside a pedestal upon which the attention of his listeners was fixed. An apparently ancient, yet exceedingly well-preserved early Gothic capital was attached to it with iron clamps. In his hands, the speaker held a handkerchief. One might have assumed that it was because of the heat. Indeed, sweat was streaming from his forehead. But far from using it to dry himself, he just absent-mindedly wiped it across the stone block, like a maid who habitually runs a dust cloth over shelves and console tables during an awkward conversation with her masters. The self-tormenting disposition, known to all those who travel alone, regained the upper hand and I let his explanations beat about my ears.

‘“Until two years ago” – this was the gist, though not the exact wording of his sluggish disclosure – “there was among the townspeople a man whose utterly ridiculous outburst of blasphemy and mad love had put the town on the tip of everyone's tongue for some time. He spent the rest of his life making amends for his transgression, atoning for it even when the affected party – God himself – had possibly long since forgiven him. He was a stonemason. After ten years of being involved in the restoration of the cathedral, he advanced through his skilfulness to become the leader of the entire project. He was a man in the prime of life, an imperious character without family or attachments, when he got caught in the web of the most beautiful, most shameless cocotte that had ever been seen in the neighbouring seaside resort. The tender and unyielding nature of this man may have made an impression on her. At any rate, nobody knew that she graced someone else in the area with her favour. And nobody suspected at the time at what cost. Nor would it ever have come to light were it not for the unexpected visit of the team of building inspectors from Rome, who came to see the renowned restoration works. Among them was a young, impertinent, but knowledgeable archaeologist who had made the study of Trecento capitals his specialty. He was in the process of enriching his forthcoming monumental publication by adding a ‘Treatise on a Capital on the Pulpit in the Cathedral at V…' and had announced his visit to the director of the Opera del Duomo. The director, more than ten years past his prime, lived in deep seclusion. His time to shine and be daring was long gone. But what the young scholar took home from this meeting was anything but art historical insight. Rather, it was a scheme which he could scarcely keep to himself and which finally resulted in the following being reported to the authorities: the love that
the cocotte had bestowed upon her suitor had been no obstacle to her, but rather an incentive to charge a satanic price for her affections. For she wanted to see her nom de guerre – the trademark name that women of her métier customarily assume – chiselled in stone in the cathedral, this holiest of sites. The lover resisted, but his powers had limits and one day, in the presence of the whore herself, he began working on the early Gothic capital which replaced an older, more weathered exemplar, until it landed as a corpus delicti on a table in front of the ecclesiastical judges. Before that, however, some years had passed, and by the time that all the formalities had been taken care of and all of the files were to hand, it turned out that it was too late. A broken, feeble-minded old man stood before his work and nobody supposed that it was play-acting when this once respected head leaned with furrowed brow over the tangle of arabesques in a vain effort to discern the name that he had hidden there so many years ago.”

‘To my surprise I noticed that – I cannot say why – I had stepped closer. But before I could reach out and touch the stone, I felt the hand of the sexton on my shoulder. Well-intentioned, yet surprised, he attempted to determine the reason for my interest. In my insecurity and weariness, however, I stuttered only the most senseless thing possible: “Collector”, whereupon I toddled off home.

‘If sleep, as some maintain, is not only a physical need of the organism, but a compulsion effected by the unconscious upon consciousness such that it vacates the scene in order to make room for drives and images, then perhaps the exhaustion that overcame me at noon in a southern Italian town had more to say than it ordinarily would. Be that as it may, I dreamt – I know I dreamt – the name. But not as it had stood before me, undiscovered in the stone; rather, it had been abducted into
another realm – elevated, disenchanted and clarified at once – and amid the myriad tangles of grass, foliage and flowers, the letters, which at that time had caused my heart to beat most painfully, quaked and quivered towards me. When I awoke it was past eight. Time to have dinner and raise the question of how the rest of the day should be spent. My hours of napping during the afternoon prohibited me from ending it early, and I lacked both the money and the inclination to embark on more adventures. After a few hundred indecisive steps, I happened upon an open square, the Campo. It was dusk. Children were still playing around the fountain. This square, which was off limits to all vehicles, and which no longer served for gatherings, only markets, had its vital purpose as a huge stone play and bathing area for children. For this reason, it was also a popular spot for carts selling sweets, monkey nuts and melons. Two or three of them still stood around the square, gradually lighting their lanterns. A blinking light shot forth from the vicinity of the last one that still had children and idlers crowded around it. As I approached, I gleaned brass instruments. I am an observant ambler. What will or hidden wish, then, prohibited me from noticing what could not possibly have evaded even the most inattentive person? Something was afoot on this street, at whose entrance I now found myself again, without having expected it. The silk drapes that hung from the windows weren't laundry at all – and why should the peculiar candelabras have survived here and nowhere else in the country? The music got underway. It erupted into the street, which quickly filled with people. And it became apparent that wealth, where it brushes up against the poor, only makes it more difficult for them to enjoy what is theirs. The light from the candles and torches clashed violently with the spherical yellow beams that shone from the arc lamps, illuminating the cobblestones
and house walls. I joined in right at the very end. Preparations had been made to receive the procession in front of a church. Paper lanterns and light bulbs stood closely together, and a perpetual trickle of the faithful began to break away from the jubilant crowd only to get lost in the folds of the curtains that enshrouded the open portal.

‘I had paused some distance from the centre, which shone red and green. The crowd now filling the street was not just some colourless mass. These were the clearly defined, closely connected inhabitants of the local district, and because it was a petit bourgeois neighbourhood, no one of any higher standing was present, let alone any foreigners. As I stood against the wall, my clothing and appearance should by rights have seemed conspicuous. But, strangely, nobody in the crowd paid any attention to me. Did nobody notice me, or did this man who was lost to this scorching and singing street – he who I was more and more becoming – appear to everyone to belong here? Pride filled me at this thought. A great sense of elation came over me. I did not enter the church. Content with having enjoyed the profane part of the festivities, I had decided to make my way home, along with the first of the well-satiated revellers, and long before the over-tired children, when I laid eyes on one of the marble plaques with which the poor towns of this region put the rest of the world's street signs to shame. It was bathed in the glow of the torch, as though it were ablaze. Sharp and lustrous, the letters erupted from its middle and, once again, they formed the name that turned from stone into a flower, and from a flower into fire; growing ever hotter and more ferocious, it reached out for me. Firmly intent on returning home, I took off and was pleased to find a small street that promised to be a considerable shortcut. Everywhere, the signs of life had begun to subside. The main street, where my
hotel was located, and which had been so animated until a moment ago, now appeared not only quieter, but narrower as well. While I still pondered the laws that connect such aural and optical images with each other, a distant but powerful blast of music hit my ear; and as I heard the first notes, illumination struck me like a bolt of lightning: here it comes. This is why there were so few people, so few bourgeoises, out in that street. This was the great evening concert at V…, for which the locals assemble every Saturday. At once, a new expanded city – indeed a richer and more vivid city history stood before my eyes. I doubled my pace, turned a corner and paused – paralyzed with astonishment – only to find myself, once more, on the street that had reeled me in, as though with a lasso. It was totally dark now and the music band offered up their last forgotten song to this lonesome listener.'