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  – It’s the ring of the Nibelungen, one of them ventured.

  – It’s the O of Das Rhinegold, another said.

  – The O of Lorelei, said a third.

  – Bah! Rhine gold! the geography teacher gesticulated, all in a huff. The Rhine is Swiss, too. It’s pure snow water, at least up to Basel-Kleinhüningen. After that, he said smugly, I couldn’t say.

  – There’s no gold in the Rhine, it’s in the banks. Is there silver in the Aar? Nonsense. In Lugano, some of the waste from the shore drains into the Tresa, which goes from Lake Lugano to Lago Maggiore and then to the Ticino and the Po. But who can make out the water from the Ticino in the water of the Po? It’s one big family. Everything goes down into the Adriatic, forming a nice fertile delta or a reed thicket full of mosquitoes, billions and billions of mosquitoes. Mussolini can’t drain everything—he already drained the Pontine Marshes . . .

  No, it wasn’t Rhine gold. Other contestants could try their luck.

  Was it a city block? A neighborhood, a circle of shade into which the champion, all the champions, could retreat? Throw in the towel, as they say. Your bike. Your cleats.

  Matthias Sindelar had gone one step further. A genius center forward, a weightless body, he turned on the gas. People said he was also distraught over his wife’s death. Over Austria’s death? The Wunderteam’s? Sepp Herberger chose nine Austrians, making Hitler’s Germany even more star-studded, but Sindelar never played against those provincials from Switzerland with their heathen dialect. Where would they bury Sindelar? Either they gave him a worthy funeral or else they treated him like a used tissue—secretly pulling it from a pocket, crumpling it up, and dropping it into the river—and the beautiful Danube, which ran every color but blue (after March 1938), would have carried it, without difficulty, without a ripple, toward the East, the Balkans, the Black Sea. Farewell.

  Farewell, Black Sea, farewell black well. Black hole—not that of the physicists’—the toilet. Chi ha paura dell’uomo nero? Our fathers used pans with black holes to roast chestnuts. In France, where they would emigrate in the winter, one of our own, a Swiss chestnut seller, found his cart half-destroyed because he looked Jewish, and so the Swiss chestnut seller gave the offending Nazi a wallop that would have killed a calf, nearly sending him to his Moloch-god, and the French judge, after carefully considering the case, declared “c’est juste et raisonnable”; and when he came back from France, he seemed not to want to die anymore because every day he would go around telling everyone—people he knew, people he didn’t, at the osteria, on the street, in the kitchen where women were still heating the coffee or pouring a glass—the story of that judge, and it always ended with “juste et raisonnable” so now everybody called him juste-et-raisonnable. Even the priest had stopped to listen (the nights in June were long and hot, and between the rows of grapevines and in the fenced gardens, between all the houses, there was a slow procession of fireflies) the first time—without his stocking cap, with his crew cut and curious little eyes, because even a priest has the right to hear a few curiosities besides what women reveal in the confessional. But even he, the third time he heard it, felt like laughing, saying to himself (forestalling, as they say in fùtbol, his opponent) but yes, yes, c’est juste et raisonnable, I can even translate it into Latin for you: dignum et justum est, aequum et salutare. Whereas those who translated it into dialect translated it as: bambo, fool, someone to be sent to the nut house. Or, before the asylums, fit to be tied, in the attic, with a nice big chain on his foot, to be brought bowls of soup as one does with stray dogs or criminals.

  Klee listened to everything and was silent because it seemed impossible to him that the dictionary of 1938 still contained the words juste et raisonnable. Klee’s eyes were like horizontal slits, gashes, the eyes of a cat who seems about to fall asleep but could pounce at any moment, whereas the eyes of the priest were little squirrel eyes.

  They went on guessing.

  – It’s the shield, the clipeus, as the Romans called it, of the Confederates against Hitler. We won’t let ourselves be eaten in fifteen minutes, like a sandwich, like Austria—we won’t be bratwurst.

  We’ll make you a wall

  of indomitable breasts.

  It is sweet, Helvetia,

  to die for you.

  The guessing game dragged on a little and began to veer into dangerous territory. Was Klee’s O the mouth of a plastic doll, like the ones in sex-shop windows surrounded by all those leather goods and studs sado-nazis are so fond of? Their mouths never close, day or night. No flies can get into a closed mouth. Or was the O one of those bone-shaped cookies, or even a bone from a body? Sir, would you like a roasted marrowbone?

  They came up with other possibilities—not one, but a hundred. Among the more original was that it was the halo of a saint, of one of the Church Fathers, one of those halos rotating at supersonic speed (yet seeming stationary) above the nice bald heads of those doctors of theology featured in frescoes and icons. These are the saints in adoration, in ecstasy, reveling in holy bliss, floating in mid-air, dizzying: like in Monday’s photograph of the center forward floating in mid-air, aloft, an instant before the spark, when with a dull snap of the vertebral column his neck would trigger the convulsive torsion of his head and impress rotational force onto the levitating ball, shooting it into the top corner of the net.

  Behind the halo, the Great Doctors team:

  Thomas

  Bonaventure Albert (the Great)

  Jerome Gregory (the Great) Ambrose

  Cyprian Anselm of Canterbury Tertullian Walaschek William of Ockham

  With a defense like that, Walaschek laughed in his dream, it’d be a cinch, even against the Red Devils. And on the bench we’ve got Hugh and Richard of Saint Victor, from the Anglo school. The Devils, though, they’ve got their strategy down pat. They’ll put Cerberus at the goal of course, but otherwise, Lucifer put together a trick formation:

  Malacoda

  Cagnazzo Graffiacane

  Ciriatto Alichino Calcabrina

  Draghignazzo Rubicante Belfagor Beelzebub Barbariccia

  With a hothead like Libicocco on the bench? Leave it to the Devils! And Screwtape too? Worse than trying to find your goats in the middle of the woods . . . worse than a house full of women. But one of the other disputants cut this short, someone they didn’t know, who jumped to his feet and said:

  – You blind fools, don’t you realize that Klee’s O is just an O? It’s not a zero—it has nothing to do with omega, death, endings. Let me explain. Sit down. He had them all sit on the lawn as if he were Christ about to perform the multiplication of the loaves and the fishes; he took pity on them.

  – Let me explain to you how it is. It’s like closing your eyes for the last time: night falls over you, and it’s even darker than a night in an alpine pass when the blizzard winds blow and you can’t see more than a meter past your nose, and it’s a long night, an hour of that kind of night is longer than a summer day for a man hunched over slaving under the gaping sun.

  You won’t be anything anymore. Without Homer, Hector would have been nothing. Without Klee, Walaschek wouldn’t be anything. The good-for-nothings on the Servette team had already forgotten him, they didn’t even wait for him to die first. But Klee . . . Because there’s a moment when all the dead who have been forgotten, erased, and reduced first to a shadow of a shadow and then to nothing, to vapor dispelled by the first puff of wind, take notice, because their entire lives are at stake, for eternity.

  So the dream was: would there be someone for me, will there? Please come! Oh Berkeley of the esse est percipi, deliver me from the limbo of oblivion. From the gray weight that keeps me down in this pit.

  In the dream, Eugene Walaschek prayed to Berkeley, to Mnemosyne, to Zeus, to all of Olympus, and the father of the gods agreed, nodding his sacred crown. Whence Fate slipped into the folds
of a degenerate painter’s mind the idea of taking a random page from the newspaper and randomly, fatefully painting letters of the alphabet on it, thereby crossing out, at random, fatefully, words, names. One name was to disappear by half. Walaschek.

  Would that do? No, said Olympus. Just as people have to be told, Here in Pisa, here in the baptistry, we don’t have just the “famous echo” enshrined in all the tourist guidebooks so that choruses of tourists in shorts and suspenders can let out choruses of boisterous Os: we also have—look up, you sons of idiots—some Giovanni Pisano, see? his arch-stones full of archimandrites? just as in Lugano the herds of tourists have to be told, Here’s Selmoni’s column; just as in Bern, given the limitations of the small-brained, someone will have to tell all the space-cases, the masses of burger-flippers’ kids who compulsively don’t go to museums: Look—in a corner of that painting over there in the corner, which will soon be taken down and put in a storeroom, a man, a soccer player, is asking, as Electra did Zeus, not to die completely. Nothing more, nothing less.

  This is Genia Walaschek’s entire dream, but it’s a dream that will last forever, if the Bern-Geneva InterCity train takes forever to bring old Walaschek back home, back to Geneva from Bern, back to his wife, fifty years after the final game of the Swiss Cup at the Wankdorf Stadium in Bern.

  Thus the Ministers of Fate up in the Tall Towers Above the Clouds sent an errand boy to go to the loculus marked W and grab the Walaschek file. After a brief discussion, they unanimously decided on a special gift. In a new Resolution, per the appeal of Mr. Walaschek (redacted), and per the previous Resolution (redacted), we decree . . .

  They decreed that one of the god Atramentous’ scribes, whose name begins with the letter that had beheaded Walaschek—or rather, cut Walaschek in half from the middle up, saving the schek and destroying the Wala—that is, with O, would assist the painter in his work of salvation.

  The O, fifteenth in the alphabet, isn’t the most fruitful letter. But then, it could have been Ovid who was selected to give Walaschek eternal life:

  Walaschek si Maeonium uatem sortita fuisses,

  Penelopes esset fama secunda tuae:

  quantumcumque tamen praeconia nostra ualebunt,

  carminibus uiues tempus in omne meis.

  If you, Walaschek, had been assigned to Homer,

  Penelope’s fame would be second to yours:

  Yet in so far as my praise has any power,

  you will still live, for all time, in my verse.

  And it could have been, easily, with just a slightly harder push—as in the raffles at village festivals, when the wheel turns and the eyes of the villagers and villageresses are collectively glued to the board to see what number comes up. If it’d come up 16, the man tells the woman, I’d-a-won, by one number . . . If it’d come up 16, it could have been Petrarch, Pushkin, Pindar—the great Pindar, who any soccer player would have wanted:

  For if a man takes delight in toil and expenditure,

  and so succeeds in god-framed exploits,

  and if a divine power plants in him the pleasure of fame,

  he drops his anchor at the furthest limits of happiness,

  honored by the gods. With feelings such as these

  the son of Jenny Morel

  prays to encounter Hades and to accept gray old age;

  I appeal to Clotho on her high throne, and her sister Fates,

  to agree with the noble commands of my friend.

  Why is it that only the bloody and bloodthirsty—who have crude and cruel blood in them right down to their feces—enter into the annals of posterity? “Unser Führer ist ein grosser Künstler,” a great artist, they, Hitler’s guides in the Uffizi, said to make sure they were overheard, a few days after the Wankdorf game between the Grasshoppers and Servette. But the ex-painter and his cronies had kept Manet, Cézanne, Van Gogh, et al, out of the museums . . . sold, evicted those deleterious examples, degenerates like Klee and the primitivists. And from June 1 of 1933 on, even the Corriere della sera, in German, announced “in jedes deutsches Heim gehört eine Büste unseres Führers Adolph Hitler. Naturgetreues Kunstwerk . . . Volktümlicher Preis, Lit. 50.” A bust in every house. A beyond-perfect likeness. A steal. In vain did Hegel warn that there are portraits whose likenesses are almost nauseatingly exact. People look at a picture of a donkey on a postcard and say with satisfaction that it resembles reality perfectly: yes, it’s really a donkey. And the cuckoo in the living room clock sounds just like a cuckoo. So it’s quite right for Hitler to be admired for eternity—as for the others, too bad.

  In less than two seconds, the computer of the gods—much more advanced than anything at NASA—went through more than 25,000 writers whose names begin with the letter O, Klee’s fateful letter. As opposed to the sorts of things computers do down here, the computer of the gods, or of Wille, can compute attention, pain, hope, understanding, intention, sublime visions, ecstatic transport; and looking at the screen, up there, is like looking at an endless flock of doves taking flight over a bay.

  The computer selected O/17360. It reported that this O was Klee’s O, that 1736 was Klee’s number in the cremation register at the Lugano crematory, with the addition of a zero derived from that selfsame mark of Klee’s over Walaschek’s name. Next to the O/17360 on the computer, a name appeared: “orelligiovanni.” If only one less number had come up! Or even a few less. No need to go all the way back to Ovid: just to the poet Giorgio Orelli, for instance, he of the astute musical ear and the light touch in composing the sound of his sighs (Klee, if he had lived a little longer, would have been impressed); or else, one digit more, even without expecting to get to Ovid, there’s Johann Caspar Orelli, the great philologist, who introduced to the Germans, among other things, the poets Campanella and Foscolo. A few digits further and we have the American sexophage O’Relly, or the nearly asexual and chaste Susanna Orelli, born in 1845 (and who died in 1939, so she would have been around long enough to read Walaschek’s name not only in the April 19 National Zeitung but in all the papers, and perhaps also to have seen the name Paul Klee), who had married a Johann (= Giovanni) Orelli in 1879, already a bit old, a mathematician, soon deceased; beautiful and widowed too soon, she moved up in this society of eager drinkers (the Swiss); and when the country finally recognized her mission, legions of citizens and citizenesses too would soon pass their tongues, moistened and quick, over Susanna’s back (or verso), the never-forgetful Post Office having effigied her, in profile, on a stamp: long live Susanna. Or, crossing the ocean and into painting, just a few digits less and it could have been one Gaston Orellana, who has observed the horror in the world so as not to contribute to it.

  Nope. It came out orelligiovanni, O/17360.

  No, Walaschek, having been born in Moscow in 1916, wasn’t born under a lucky star. He opened his left eye just halfway. Then he drifted back to sleep.

  He didn’t dream of one of the American Edward O’Relly’s (Orelli) sexercises isometric or isotonic but of a Swiss corporal three-fourths through the obstacle course, at those rocks that can pierce the groin just as the Christians were run though after being thrown off cliffs during the days of the legion of Martigny. The corporal grappled with a new recruit (scribe O/17360?) like a rove beetle with an earthworm. He chose the time and the place to fix him with the claws of his Ks:

  – E lü, ki ka l’è lü? Ke ’l s’anünciga!

  – And you, who are you! Identify yourself!

  Yes, Walaschek may have been disappointed that Wille had chosen him—that rookie—as scribe. On the other hand, didn’t Walaschek perhaps expect too much? That Apollo, that one of the nine muses, who? Calliope? would come down from Parnassus and Helicon just for him, bearing literary Nansen passports, and thus enter the brain of that scribe (one could have also called him, in the Swiss language—because the Swiss do what the pope does when he wishes Happy Easter urbi et orbi
(on a smaller, on a miniature scale, that is)—saying Happy Easter in English, in Portuguese, in Korean, in Polish, in Russian too, in over thirty languages—whereas we, in the three official languages of Switzerland, could have called him a löli, a chaibe löli, a tschumpel, a schnöderi, a morveux, a narigiatt, a gnolon, a mangiamuco: which is to say, a nincompoop . . .); and once inside (the brain of O/17360) perhaps suggest how he should sing Walaschek, the Schwarze pastose Wasserfarbe auf bedrucktem Zeitungspapier, Klee’s dancing alphabet? Like the prompter from his corner feeds the libretto’s words to the tenor? Or else that river and wood nymphs would come to sit on his (the scribe’s) knees, to stroke his brow something like Thetis did with Zeus’s chin—he was delighted with her solicitations, just a tad worried about Hera: don’t let her see you, oh! that busybody—bringing him into their circle of Oreads and Nereids and doing a nice rondeau for him?

  Sure, the rondeau of the rotten egg.

  O may thousands upon thousands of poets, from A to Z, in the guise of plumed angels with wax wings, astride gingerbread horses or mules, ride over to him and recite with him a hymn, an ode, a poem, to the football with the dynamic violence and grace impressed therein by Walaschek, the torsion of all the muscles in his body—just like when an act of God floods the universe and washes over all creatures, immerses them: wherever they are, there it is; it precedes them, accompanies them, follows them. One has only to yield to its waves. The ball will fly past the defensive line in mockery, it will elude the goalkeeper’s catlike leap and hit the ropes of the net, where the poles meet.