B007HXL46C EBOK Page 11

  No. The Olympus computer, Wille, didn’t exactly favor Walaschek one hundred percent.

  Mortal aims befit mortal men,

  as Pindar once cautioned, and so farewell, country, Walaschek seemed to say, looking up at the sky with eyes full of disappointment, as when the ball flies past the defense perfectly but lands three centimeters too high or hits a pole, the goalie stranded, and the crowd’s O, long and hoarse . . .

  With all the ifs of the insatiable. If only it had been Horace (Orazio!), says a Latinist, Antonius Stilus, slapping his thigh like Dante’s farmer. Horace was also a farmer’s son, but a noble farmer from Rome; he’s astute, obstinate, honest yet quite sly, coarse, and wise, with keen senses and vulgar impulses—a born joker, his thumbs firm in his pockets and his soul firm in its place, vital; he could keep his slave-girl in a hall of mirrors and then study, in slow motion, on instant replay, that refined forward of eros and poiesis. The ifs, the regrets, the mimetic reconstructions (instant replay) of the strike, the dart, the jaculum (in the ejaculation), failed: at night, in the cafés all the way to the osterias on the port. If, if, if . . .

  If it had been Pindar—ah, Pindar!

  But the ancient

  splendor sleeps; and mortals forget

  what does not attain poetic wisdom’s choice pinnacle,

  yoked to glorious streams of verses.

  Therefore celebrate in a sweetly sung hymn

  Strepsiades too, and Eu Genia Walaschek.

  With a central triad like Walaschek, Belli, and Trello, these lambdas dancing their lambada switch back and forth in a bewildering whirlwind, concordia discors all the way to the opponent’s net (for Walaschek could have worn number 10 as well as number 8), Pindar could have dashed off another triumphal Isthmian. Belli, the center forward, was French and, as such, was able to spend several months as a guest at the Stalag IV-F in Germany, with prisoner number 36293. He became Swiss only later. Trello (hypocorism for André) Abegglen was Xam’s (palindrome of Max) brother, who was center forward for the Grasshoppers, the opposing team. Trello begged his Servette teammates, before the second final, not to do anything to his brother. Is this mercy the reason for their defeat?

  Pindar could have sung this drama of Trello’s: fraternal love in conflict with national interest.

  No, Klee’s O would not be picked up by Pindar like the gold ring of a bride who dances all whitedressed on her wedding day. It was dented, detached from its chain, and nobody could foresee where it would wind up; like those guys who pound beers on their way to the stadium, far away from their familial chains; and a pleasant warmth rises first to their heads, then drops down to their groins, and they want to roll around on the ground, yell, rip the white gowns off every bride. And since the other team made a goal within the first ten minutes they wanted to take an iron bar in their hands and whack the heads off every swan in the lake.

  One of them, in the top section of the stands, stood up and ripped off his checkered shirt, baring his chest and looking around with fierce, ferocious eyes. Everyone was yelling out insults and shoving each other. If it didn’t come to a tie there would be a mess. The people in the fortieth row might jump onto the ones in the thirty-ninth and start a huge brawl, fists flying like the letters of a mad alphabet, as in the painting by Paul Klee.

  Io tengo una pistola caricata, the bride’s friends sang, the last ones at the reception, all a little drunk with their white shirts wrinkled.

  Io tengo sei fratelli, con gli occhi bianchi e neri, io tengo sei fratelli, t’ammazzeranno.

  They’ll kill you. Isn’t it easy to kill, perhaps? For some people it’s a banality, harder to say than to do, dixit Caesar (to Metellus), in Rome after the Rubicon. At the mere thought, however, Professor Syntax, a boor at home, albeit a highly esteemed colleague at the Academy of Schoolteachers, removed his hat and mopped his vast brow. You can grow up and spend two thirds of your life with the belief, almost the certainty, that you’d never hurt a fly (well, admittedly, at least a European fly; the problem arises, if at all, with African, Asian ones, idem for spiders, etc.), then one day go and find yourself, just by pure chance, in the lobby of a building on a somewhat seedy street. To enter or not to enter, that is the question. Whether ’tis . . . After all, the schoolteacher could do it for scientific reasons. The word “scientific” is, in the twentieth century, and not only in the brain of Professor Syntax, the ultimate pass against every “halt, who goes there?” A teacher knows that to possess is one thing, to be possessed another. Homo sum, nihil humani a me alienum puto. I am a man; nothing human is foreign to me. Even if the schoolteacher didn’t go around, as he should have, with an iron-tipped cane. He was about to enter when he felt a hand, like a waft of spring wind, brush his head. He turned, curious, and saw a tall blond young man with a dirty smiling face waving his hat up high and spitting at the schoolteacher derisively. He was holding Professor Syntax’s hat like a Yashin with the ball he could block with the utmost ease, holding it well above the reach of his adversaries’ heads, ready to throw it with both hands to the first of his to break free. Indeed, the blond adolescent threw the hat to another companion who passed it, at chest-level, to a third, that one to a fourth, and so on, with their dizzying Brazilian-style stalling maneuvers, and so the hat went back to the blond man with the dirty face, the one who had first snatched it from Professor Syntax in that red-light lobby, who started the others throwing it just centimeters away from the schoolteacher’s completely flushed face. It was flushed with shame and rage; he could have had a heart attack. This had to be Zamora, a student, a descendant of the famous Spanish goalkeeper, who with his left hand would seize the ball in the fray near the goal and with his right (or vice versa) would shove with cunning or even jab his fist into the throat or the scowling mug of the bulldog center forward, who deserved nothing less; who steps in front of you, that hijo de puta, with his leg out, or his knee poised to knee you in the jewels, in the lower abdomen, in the—sorry, excuse my language, but it must be said—in the balls. Professor Syntax heard—he felt like he heard—the old resident Methuselah who, very very softly, almost as if issuing a threnody from the hereafter on low batteries, saying to the hooligans: Leave the poor man in peace, can’t you see that he could be your grandfather?

  – Call . . . the schoolteacher cried out. He realized he hadn’t finished his sentence, that is, that he was no longer a teacher here.

  – Huh? huh? said the Resident Methuselah, apparently stone deaf. Luckily, the teacher hadn’t completely lost his head, so he was able to come to his senses: “Yeah,” he told himself, “great idea, call the police, that way you’ll end up in the local papers and look like a pig for the rest of your days, and then, post mortem, they’ll remember you as a pig.”

  So he sank onto some sort of bench in that lobby, it too having ended up there, that nasty thing, by the will of Schopenhauer’s Wille, and in seeing that milksop knocked down, one of the hooligans with a Judah’s face, interrupting their Brazilian game, planted himself in front of the teacher, opened the zipper of his faded jeans, soiled his hat, then took that hat all dirty and damp with dank and rank humors and flung it into the highest, furthest corner of that lobby. As to a felled Don Quixote, so to the schoolteacher, poetry, refuge of the defeated, came to mind:

  With humors dank and rank

  gush indiscreet springs.

  It was a brief moment of weakness, of catastroika. As he saw that the hooligans were leaving the “field,” the schoolteacher felt something welling up deep inside him, something that had never welled up before. He dragged himself to the edge of the lobby where there was a wide staircase directly overlooking the sidewalk. He saw that the hooligans were going down, skipping athletically, tired of the hat and its owner, already on to other enterprises, other targets.

  – Hey you, the teacher shouted, hey you . . .

  No one turned. So the teacher stuck his left h
and in his pocket, and having found a few coins he closed them in his fist and hurled them vehemently at the boys, already in the street, without hitting them.

  But if it had been a revolver he’d have pulled the trigger. He said to himself: “Yes!” And so he didn’t so much sit as plunk down onto the top stair of that staircase. What worried the other Methuselah a little about that atrium, the one who tore the entrance tickets and who, in order to avoid trouble, came over and, seeing the teacher prostrate but unharmed, said like a tried and true member of the golden-years set: – Dumb kids today. Vulgar. Nothing to do and nowhere to go. What are we coming to? You know what I say? Pay no attention, go inside and watch your movie, fill your head with something else. See your little minxes.

  He didn’t even let him launch into the catalogue of delights. With an agility at which he was the first (and only) to be surprised, he found himself back on the street. He didn’t worry about recovering his soiled hat; he would brandish his bare head on that dicey side street. What should he do? Buy a beheading bowler like Oddjob’s in Goldfinger? An actual gun? If it were Sunday and not Friday, he would have gone to the stadium. No. Lassie, come home. Back to the fields, Bigio. Everyone, at least once a year, should make a pilgrimage, not to Santiago de Compostela or Lourdes, but to one of the great temples of football, where the violent hooligans transform into a riotous mass, the same who had paid him honor that Friday, at three o’clock P.M. The Ninth Hour. He closed his eyes.

  On the stands they also lit smoky fires and shot firecrackers and hurled coins onto the playing field. Their curses were those of soldiers on the attack, the difference being that soldiers shoot, they have to. Tatatatatatata . . . at a much faster rhythm than a Lempen racing toward the opposing team’s goal, carrying the globe on his forehead, balanced between a Siberian nose and a forehead probably deformed by the forceps like a mound by a bulldozer.

  In Switzerland the stadiums are never overflowing with oceanic crowds. Switzerland is often insulted and vilified for—they say—preaching morality from their high horse, for living in peace and pantofles—they say—without any more William Tells or the heroes of Novara and Marignano. And yet old Homer would praise Switzerland for not wanting to break the peace, unlike the power-hungry Greek aristocrats. Old Homer would praise Sindelar and recommend him for the Nobel Peace Prize. In memoriam! He tried as hard as he could to lead the people in the stadiums of the world to a vision of harmony and beauty and not to bestiality.

  – Bestiality? the butcher, Enrico il Piccolo, jumped in. Bestiality, you say? But beasts don’t point a gun at your head, they don’t pull the trigger as if they were just swatting a fly. Beasts are better than us. Beasts only resemble us in hunger or sex. Take a billy goat. Male like all males. He’s the only male in a herd of nanny goats. But if he meets another herd of a hundred nanny goats with its single billy goat, the two goats begin to duel. To the death. Which isn’t to say rough, but to say that they can keep going until one of their cranial vaults splits. All this in silence, because goats, unlike men, not being made in God’s image and likeness, do not have the gift of language. Not even to swear. The only sounds are the dull, fast, and quickly executed blows of butting horns. Their eyes are similar to those of human males, but they look like fake glass in fake rings.

  And when one of the two goats falls, it’s like when it snows, soft, in the mountains; it seems like God is taking the opportunity to make a round of inspections throughout the world, and God’s visit strikes a bit of fear into the hearts of men.

  It wasn’t snowing in the stadium and the enraged fans ripped out bars, handrails—they would have grabbed the I-beams if they could. Paramedics stood discreetly on the sidelines. The nervousness of the mothers idem.

  In Vienna, a little cloud drifted through the Viennese sky. The Danube moved sluggishly toward the sea—the Black. A nurse in Vienna diligently went through a stack of files. Sindelar? Who was that? A proletarian poet, who died in 1938, not thinking of Sindelar, but as if he were, as he walked through a field, wondered, “But is it really possible not to doff your hat in the face of such beauty?” An invalid with amputated legs was looking at photos of actresses; he felt like whistling the “Lili Marlene”: unter der Laterne . . . but a placard imposed silence. Another invalid was looking at old photos of star footballers. A third was crying and wasn’t looking at anything.

  Whereas at the stadium they were shouting and people were reaching automatically for their cigarettes. And when the time came for the penalty kick it was like a revolver being lifted to somebody’s temple: is there a bullet or isn’t there? But a few hours after the game, even in Paris in 1938, they could get gypsy violins. Could the Swiss, and Walaschek, having beaten Germany 4 to 2, grant themselves the luxury of a nightclub, of beer or champagne? No, gypsy violins it is. A soccer player has responsibilities to his country, and the Federal Council had sent a telegram of congratulations. Good job, boys. And as everyone was coming back from the stadium in the Parisian twilight, they asked one another, with incredulous glances, how these Swiss guys had managed to beat Hitler’s Grossdeutschland. It was as if there were a beautiful sports pennant on the top of the Eiffel Tower on that evening of Parisian sport. Only the bus drivers and all the Parisian workers in general still wore their usual workaday expressions, with their eyes that seemed to say: we’re neither German nor Swiss, we’re just regular Frenchmen, regular Turks, regular Algerians. Like me, you got your ration of kicks in the ass today, but most of them were given politely, admit it! Anyway, it’s better that Switzerland won.

  Those who had played showed teammates and coaches the marks left by kicks to their shins. They recalled the elbows, the insults, the spit, the booing from the stands, warnings and penalties from the referee, defamatory insults bandied back and forth. But when you win all is forgotten. It’s when you lose that you count every mote in your eye, like all the bitter pills you have to swallow in order to secure a post in the city administration, or some little insurance agency, or a newsstand or bar. The athletes’ bar. It’s not the place to attack the outside forward or take him down if he passes you. The customers aren’t to be touched, you can’t kick at the customers’ legs. Even on a rainy day, the ex-player, now manager of the bar, thinks: wipe your feet, you slob. His instinct was to yell like Zenga or any other hothead goalie, giving instructions as to where the defensive wall should be: to the right, more to the right. The umbrella goes in the umbrella stand, what, have you got slices of salami for eyes? Ah, if only he had a nice whistle like a referee and could blow it from noon till night, pull out the yellow card, then the red. But instead . . .

  Instead: – Hello, Counselor! And smile at everybody. Greet everyone who enters and give them a hearty good-bye when they leave. Exchange at least a word or two. See you later, good seeing you. Talk about the weather? Go with the weather, even if it happens to be 1940. Talk about the championships? Sure, even if in 1940 the championships are mobilization competitions. His prediction for Sunday? Sunday’s a sure bet, we can’t lose.

  The ex-player, now manager and practically boss of the bar (this isn’t Walaschek, Walaschek would go into the finance administration of the city of Geneva) internalizes (as they say) what people expect of him. O holy purge. It is you who prepares the place for the god of athletes. O purity. O universal acceptance. O unreserved submission! It is you who draws the god of sports to the bottom of our hearts. And may their abilities be what they desire, you are, lord of sport, my every good; make of this humble being what you will, may he act, be inspired, be subject to your impulses, all is one in all, and your all belongs to you, it comes from you and acts in your stead. I no longer have anything to do with it, not a single moment of my life depends on me, it all belongs to you, I have neither to add nor subtract anything, nor seek, nor reflect. My task is to be satisfied with you, to take no action in anything, whether active or passive, but to leave everything to your will.

  In truth, the ex-halfback
turned bartender wanted to take action against an out-of-work fatso with a sallow Jewish face who always occupied a corner table for two hours sipping a tea down to its last drop. He would have happily locked him in the garage, enthusiastically shoved an air pump in his rear end and blown him up until he was as round as a balloon, then at nighttime loaded him in a truck and dumped him off a slope, listening to him roll all the way down dragging empty cans behind him. But he quickly chased those thoughts away. He returned to someone or another to talk about the team’s new acquisitions.

  – A Brazilian in his thirties.

  – But doesn’t that make him an old horse?

  – We can do what Hitler did. Take over Holland and incorporate the tulips into the national team. All they have to do is go from orange to the white-crossed red. But this chitchat was of no interest to the scribe preselected by Wille, number O/17360, who, aware of being incapable of coming anywhere close to one of Pindar’s Isthmians even with the shadow of his little toe, decided to do what he had been chosen for with diligence: if, with his Alphabet I, Klee wanted to express a moment of his interiority without conceding his privacy, his oracular voice—not using the tools (which he didn’t have anyway) of a Kabbalistic exegete, of archetypes, of the numbers of the Apocalypse, he, Scribe O/17360, like any good wordsmith at a public gathering, recorded every interpretation, however crude—cusa l’è che ’l vör dì? the doorman of building 137 wondered out loud, unhesitantly, and his wife, in a faded blue smock like the ones worn by railmen shunting on the ramp, translated supportively: What’s that supposed to mean? The eyes trained on the scribe said: you explain it, if you can.

  And so Scribe O/17360, like a good schoolteacher, glossed: Klee’s dislocated letters on the page from the April 19, 1938 National Zeitung swim like fish in an aquarium, a big parallelepiped bowl in the lobby of a luxury hotel, and the fish are in their turn the image, the emblem, the symbol (do you understand what I mean, kids?) of the human condition—they could be men and women crossing a square: Red, de la Concorde, St. Peter’s, Parade, of the blessed banks, of the ring: the Ring. It’s futile, irrelevant to ask what was going through their minds as they crossed the squares, as they went through their circumscribed everyday motions (children, do you remember the complement of circumscribed motion? Which is not the same as the complement of direction and certainly not the complement of location?): Work? Love? Money? Staying out all night? Killing? Is Klee’s O the grindstone of the knifegrinder with his own circumscribed motion, standing at the corner of the square, sharpening knives, all of them, for anyone who asks; is it the tambourine of an acrobat or a fire-eater? A monk’s tonsure that, seen from one of the spires of the cathedral, looks like an O bobbing toward the cathedral door? The cathedral that’s on one side of the rectangular square?