Portofino is world-renowned, and on Wednesday Zündel managed to get up at nine. – Today we’re going on an excursion, old paleface, he said into the mirror. We’re going to Portofino, what do you say. Nietzsche was there. And the restless spirit of some French writer found peace there too. So, avanti!
By train to Santa Margherita. Palms, orange groves, tourists. Onward journey by ferry or bus. Let’s say ferry. Bus is everyday, ship is more festive.
Great crowds of people were milling around on the quay. Among them a tour group from Germany. What a language, thinks Zündel, and to amuse himself he makes up little equations: Italian to German is like angora hair to boar bristle. Or: Italian to German is like ballet shoes to clodhoppers, or cherry to garlic.
Here comes the ship, toots its horn, docks, and with voice cracking with intensity, the leader of the German tour group yells: All right everyone, occupy the top deck!
Zündel takes the bus.
So this is Portofino. Knickknack stalls, boutiques, yachts, jolly-boats and snap-happy tourists, but otherwise really very picturesque. There’s even a fisherman repairing his net, a fellow worth taking a picture of with his sinewy sinews and chest hair.
Konrad has managed to find an empty table under a sunshade. He orders a cappuccino. The piazza is spread out in front of him like a bustling theater stage.
He smokes and looks round and feels good. For minutes on end, he admires the people. The women too. The women even especially. Especially the one woman who walks so harmoniously across the square, not so much walking as floating, and has now stopped, then floats on at an obtuse angle to her progress thus far, which is to say: making straight for Zündel.
O benevolence rewarded. O terror. She’s joining me at my table. Puts her hand on my arm. Says simply: Bonjour, ça va?
He gulps and says Oui. – She says: Tu es Suisse, n’est-ce pas? – He stammers Oui a second time. (No doubt she finds me dull as anything, and is bitterly regretting her impulse.) But she smiles at him and whispers: Tu me plais. – He can’t even say Oui to that. Just sips in consternation at his cappuccino.
She says in German – she has the sweetest accent: I’m Nadine, no, I’m Eve – oh, tell you what, just call me Nounou! No one’s ever called me Nounou!
Suddenly Konrad feels a little easier. He says: And I’m Traugott, but that’s a bit hard for you to say, so why don’t you just call me Pansoti. That’s a type of Ligurian pasta that I’m especially fond of.
Nounou giggles and asks: Do you know what “Nounou” is? – No, says Zündel. – She says: Nounou is the name of a Greek brand of condensed milk that I’m especially partial to. – Are you Greek? he asks. – Part, she replies, but don’t quiz me. Will you have supper with me? – Zündel, confused: Do you live here then? – Nounou repeats: Will you have supper with me? – He asks: When? – She says: Now, today, tonight! – He reflects and before he can say anything she gets up and says: Eh bien, then skip it. – Zündel quickly: Oh, yes, yes please! – Slowly and softly Nounou says: But not today! – And she leaves without saying goodbye.
He sits there, stunned. Sees a couple of puffy Swiss at the table beside him stare after his disappearing Nounou, hears one of them say: Not so bad! hears the other saying: But her legs could be longer! – and his bewilderment at Nounou’s behavior gives way to fury about those thick-rumped fellows and indignation at the unquestioning alacrity with which the least attractive of men deliver themselves of aesthetic judgments on women.
They make ready to leave. They summon the waiter. They address him in a sort of German that German speakers believe is well-adapted to understanding by Italians. They say: Listen, you, not cheat us! – The waiter doesn’t react and tells them what they owe. They think the price is outrageous, and complain. In the end, they pay. Finally they get up, and as they do, they secretly pocket their coffee spoons.
Zündel has seen them do it.
This time, he didn’t keep quiet about it.
He said: Put those spoons back, or I’ll make a fuss.
They gawped at him vacantly, then grinned like idiots, and quickly put the spoons back.
Good for you, Zündel! thought Zündel. A victory at last.
He drank a couple of almond liqueurs.
Then Nounou came back, took his face between her hands, and said: Bonjour, Pansoti! – He said nothing, but thought: You whimsical can of Greek condensed milk. – She looked at him inquiringly with her orange-brown eyes and whispered: On y va?
Her apartment in the historic center of Rapallo was dark and tiny. Nounou put on a scratched flamenco record and braided her black hair into a plait. Then she started cooking rice. Every so often she opened a jar of blueberry jam, dipped her middle finger into it, and licked it clean.
Zündel watched her from the little sitting room. He was sitting in a leather armchair like a boxing glove. On the floor in front of him were innumerable printed outlines, some still pristine, others already colored in, all with the same subject: little boats in a bay against a beach promenade with palm trees in front of a picturesque row of houses under a sky with cumulus clouds. – Good Lord! thought Zündel, and at the same moment Nounou called out: That’s what I live off, tourists can’t get enough of them! – He called back: Why is your German so good? – Nounou called: Leave me alone! – Do you mind if I smoke? he asked. She didn’t say anything, but hopped into the sitting room on one leg and kissed Konrad on the mouth. Then she sat down cross-legged on the floor and stared into empty space for several minutes. Before she got up to check on her rice, she said: I’m not a great talker.
Her voice was dark and beautiful.
Zündel didn’t eat much. He hadn’t been hungry for days. But to settle his nerves, he helped himself to wine. – Alcohol helps me rise to the occasion, he said to Nounou. After five or six glasses the police dog in my brain loses most of its teeth. After two more it stops growling, and the present becomes frictionless and silky. Perhaps love of alcohol is the logical outcome of a culture that takes each minute of life as requiring commentary and control and justification. – Am I talking too much for you? – Nounou said: I had a girlfriend at school. She had three big boards up in her room. One over her bed, one over her desk, and one beside the door. On each one of these boards was the same slogan. On her twenty-first birthday she swallowed eighty painkillers. Her name was Beatrice.
Nounou fell silent, and Zündel asked impatiently what was written on the boards. – Guess! she said. He guessed: Always look on the bright side? – Wrong, absolutely wrong! – Arbeit macht frei? – No! – Remember to wash your hands? – Warmer! – God is watching? – Almost! said Nounou, but more psychological delicacy. – I give up! said Konrad. – Kiss me, and I’ll tell you, she said. He leaned forward across the table, but before he had reached her lips, she had put out her hands, pushed him away and cried in horror: What would Jesus say? – For a moment, Zündel was so bewildered that Nounou squealed with delight. – Now you know! she said. Poor Beatrice. Jesus was her police dog.
After a while he said: Parents like that deserve a good whipping! – No! she exclaimed. – Yes! he shouted back. – No, she said, all parents deserve a good whipping, because they all get everything wrong. But since most people are grateful for their parents’ mistakes, because those mistakes excuse their own, the parents don’t deserve a good whipping. Voila. You probably want to go to bed with me now?
I’m not sure, he said. – But I am! declared Nounou. I know. You men all have sex on the brain. You’ll spend all evening talking to a woman, but all your sentences have a lurking quality and your eyes betray a secret regret that these sentences, which only delay the moment of seizing us, are necessary at all.
Zündel said: There was once a little mother who had seven daughters. One day she called them all to her and said: My dear little daughters, beware of men, they only ever want one thing. They are terrible dissemblers, but they have a vulgar organ that always gives them away. – What organ is that? the little daughters asked. The little mother said: I have to go now, otherwise I’ll miss my bus. – The good little daughters said: Dear Mama, we promise to be on our guard, today and always.
Haha, replied Nounou and stuck out her tongue at Zündel. Then she disappeared into the bedroom. A little later she was standing in front of him completely naked, saying: Je suis jolie, n’est-ce pas, Pansoti, je suis jolie! – But he didn’t touch her and said: You’re standing so near me I can’t see you. – Nounou said: Je suis nue, mais toi aussi, Pansoti, tu es perdu! – You’re so right, he said with feeling, you’re so right.
Later they lay together side by side like brother and sister. Nounou said: I think I understand my husband now. He was always differently wired to me, in sexual, emotional terms. Do you want to hear? All right. My husband always felt like sleeping with me when we were alienated, when there were tensions, discords, disunities in our relationship that threw us both behind our personal frontiers. It was like having two bird cages in the room, each with a canary in it, furiously pecking and yearning at its grille. Right. In those sorts of situations, my husband liked to feel me – and I didn’t. I liked to feel him when we were terribly close to each other emotionally, sort of as a physical seal to that closeness. But at those times he had no desire for me at all. Emotional harmony seemed to stop his drive, while it aroused mine. For him, sex was a means to overcome alienation, for me it’s an expression of existing closeness. Voilà. We had to split up. Are you asleep? – No, said Zündel. – Am I a chatterbox? – No, he said, I like listening to you. – Do you want to tell me about yourself? – Not really, he replied. – She asked: Do you want me to blow out the candle? – Konrad said: So why is it you suddenly understand your husband now? – Because with you I feel the way he did with me. You are so strangely familiar to me and dear, that a violent contact would seem almost destructive, and certainly unnecessary. – Yes, sighed Zündel, physical desire is all well and good, but I never set much store by that breaching of frontiers either. Bodies smacking against each other remain strange, perhaps that’s why the so-called sexual act feels so absurd and bloody-minded, and maybe that’s why any reasonable person will feel a bit dismayed, even after the most apparently successful coition. Where is he now? – Who? asked Nounou. – Your husband. – He’s dead, she said. Three months after we broke up, he fell in the Dolomites. He was Swiss like you. He even resembled you a bit. When I saw you sitting at your table all alone, I had a shock because you were so like Martin. – Zündel said: That’s a little bit disappointing for me. – How come? she asked. – Because you didn’t like me for my own sake, but on account of him. I’m just a stand-in. – But that’s always how things are, you silly Pansoti, said Nounou, kissing him on the eyes. Every couple is just a couple of stop-gaps! Love is never anything but the mutual willingness to replace the other’s original. – You’re mad, said Zündel, and Nounou replied sleepily: Do you think so? – After a long pause, she asked him to get the blueberry jam out of the kitchen for her, she had such a craving for it. When he came back with spoon and jar, she was fast asleep.
He picked up his clothes, pinched out the candle flame, slunk out of the room, and shut the door quietly behind him. He turned on a light in the little living room. Then he got dressed. He found a sheet of paper, and sat down at the desk.
Nounou, I have to go. Who knows, perhaps by tomorrow it would take a hundred knives to cut us apart, and the day after a thousand. I promised myself the other day that I would try and remain independent, and not participate in any storming of heaven. I’ve used up all my parachutes. My damned brain sniffs a dungheap behind every paradise. Adieu, Nounou, je t’embrasse. Pansoti.