Vertigo by W. G. Sebald
Later on, I sat on a bench in the square outside the station for about half an hour, and had an espresso and a mineral water. It was good to sit in the shade, at peace in the middle of the day. But for a few taxi drivers dozing in their cabs and listening to their radios, there was no one in sight, until a carabiniere drove up, left his vehicle in the no parking zone immediately in front of the entrance, and disappeared into the station. When he emerged again, all the drivers got out of their taxis, as if at a signal, surrounded the somewhat undersized and slightly built policeman, whom they had perhaps known at school, and upbraided him on account of the illegal way he had parked. Barely had one said his piece but the next one began. The carabiniere could not get a word in, and whenever he tried he was promptly talked down. Helplessly, and even with a certain panic in his eyes, he stared at the accusing forefingers pointed at his chest. But since the entire performance merely served the taxi drivers as a timely diversion to dispel the midday boredom, their victim, for whom these accusations plainly went against the grain, could make no serious objection, not even when they set about faulting his posture and putting his uniform to rights, solicitously brushing the dust off his collar, straightening his tie and cap, and even adjusting his waistband. At length one of the drivers opened the police car door, and the guardian of the law, his dignity somewhat impaired, had no option but to climb in and drive off, tyres squealing, around the circle and down Via Cavour. The taxi drivers waved him off and stood around long after he was out of sight, reliving this or that part of the comedy, quite beside themselves with merriment.
Punctually, at a quarter past one, the blue bus I was to take to Riva arrived. I boarded it and took one of the seats in the middle. A few other passengers got on too, some of them locals, others travellers like myself. Not long before the bus departed at twenty-five past, a boy of about fifteen climbed aboard who bore the most uncanny resemblance imaginable to pictures of Franz Kafka as an adolescent schoolboy. And as if that were not enough, he had a twin brother who, so far as I could tell in my perplexed state of mind, did not differ from him in the slightest. The hairlines of both boys began well down their foreheads, they had the same dark eyes and thick brows, the same large and unequal ears, with the lobes growing into the skin of the neck. They were with their parents, and sat some way behind me. The bus started off, down Via Cavour. The branches of the trees lining the avenue scraped on the roof. My heart pounded, and a vertiginous feeling came over me as it used to in my childhood, when any car journey would make me feel sick. I leaned my head against the window frame, in the breeze, and for a long time did not dare look around. Not until we had left Salò far behind and were approaching Gargnano was I able to master the fright which had frozen my limbs and glance back over my shoulder. The two lads had not vanished, as I had partly feared and partly hoped they would have, but were half concealed behind an outspread newspapers, the Siciliano. A while later, summoning up all my courage, I tried to get into a conversation with them. Their only response to this was to grin witlessly at each other. Nor did I have any success, when I approached their parents, an exceptionally reserved couple who had already been watching my strange advances to their sons with mounting concern, in order to explain what the nature of my interest in these two sniggering boys actually was. The story I told them about a scrittore ebreo from the city of Praga who took the waters at Riva in the month of September 1913 and as a young man looked exactly - esatto, esatto, I hear myself repeating in despair, time after time - like their two sons, who were now and then peeping maliciously out from behind the Siciliano, evidently struck them, so their gestures conveyed, as pretty much the most incomprehensible nonsense they had ever heard. When at length, to dispel any suspicions they might have regarding my person, I said that I should be perfectly happy if they would send me, without revealing their name, a photograph of their sons to my English address once they had returned home from their holiday to Sicily, I realised that they were now quite certain that I must be an English pederast travelling Italy for his so-called pleasure. They informed me in no uncertain terms that they would not under any circumstances comply with my improper request and that they would appreciate it if I would return to my own seat right away. I realised that, if I did not, they would have been prepared to stop the bus in the next village and hand over this nuisance of a fellow passenger to the authorities. Grateful for every tunnel we had to pass through on the steep west bank of Lake Garda, I remained motionless on that bus seat from then on, embarrassed to the utmost degree and consumed with an impotent rage at the fact that I would now have no evidence whatsoever to document this most improbable coincidence. Continually I heard the sniggering of the two lads behind me, and in the end it was affecting me so badly that, when the bus stopped in Limone sul Garda, I took my bag down from the luggage net and got out.
It will have been close on four in the afternoon when, weary and rather the worse for wear after the long journey from Vienna via Venice to Padua and then on to Limone, during which I had not slept at all, I entered the Hotel Sole on the lakeside, which at that time of day was deserted. One solitary visitor was sitting beneath a sunshade on the terrace, and inside, in the darkness behind the desk, stood the proprietress, Luciana Michelotti, also alone, jangling a small silver spoon absent-mindedly in an espresso cup that she had just drained. On that day, which as I later learned was her forty-fourth birthday, this woman whom I remember as resolute and zestful made a melancholy and even inconsolable impression. With a noticeable lack of urgency she dealt with my registration, leafing through my passport, perhaps intrigued at my being the same age as herself, repeatedly comparing my face with the photograph and at one point gazing long into my eyes, before finally locking the document carefully away in a drawer and handing me my room key I was planning to stay for several days, do some writing, and rest a little. In the early hours of the evening, having found a suitable boat in the harbour with the help of Lucianas son Mauro, I rowed a good way out onto the lake. On the westerly side, everything was already sinking into the shadows that billowed down the steep cliff faces of the Dosso dei Ròveri like dark curtains, and on the opposite east bank to the radiant evening light climbed the heights steadily, till all that could be seen was a pale pink glow over the peak of the Monte Altissimo. The whole of the darkly gleaming lake lay silently about me. The nocturnal noise of the loudspeakers on the hotel terraces and in the bars and discos of Limone, which had now begun, reached me as a mere dull pulsation, and seemed a negligible disturbance, measured against the huge bulk of the mountain that towered so high and steep above the quivering lights of the town that I thought it was inclining towards me and might tumble into the lake the very next moment. I lit the lamp in the stern of my boat and set myself rowing again, half towards the western shore and half against the cooling northerly breeze that passes over the lake every night. When I had reached the deep shadow of the rock wall, I shipped the oars, and drifted back slowly in the direction of the harbour. I extinguished the lamp, lay down in the boat and looked up into the vault of the heavens, where the stars were coming out over the glowering crags in such vast numbers that they appeared to touch one another. The rowing had left me aware of the blood coursing through my hands. The boat floated past the steep terraces of the derelict orchards where once upon a time lemons had been grown. In the darkness of these abandoned gardens, step by step scaling the heights stood hundreds of square stone pillars which once supported wooden cross-beams and the straw mats outstretched between them to protect the tender evergreen trees from the cold.
It was almost midnight in Limone when I got back into harbour again and walked round to my hotel. Holidaymakers were everywhere, in couples or family groups, a gaudy crowd moving like a cortège in procession through the narrow streets of the small resort locked between the lake and the sheer side of the mountain. Their sunburnt, painted faces swaying over the solid mass of their bodies were those of the wandering dead. Unhappy they seemed, every one of them, condemned to haunt these
August the 2nd was a peaceful day. I sat at a table near the open terrace door, my papers and notes spread out around me, drawing connections between events that lay far apart but which seemed to me to be of the same order. I wrote with an ease that astonished me. Line by line I filled the pages of the ruled notepad I had brought with me from home. Luciana, at work behind the bar, threw me repeated sideways glances, as if to check that I had not lost my thread. She also brought me an espresso and a glass of water at regular intervals, as I had requested, and from time to time a toasted sandwich wrapped in a paper napkin. Often she would stand beside me for a while, making a little conversation, her eyes wandering over the written pages. On one occasion she asked if I was a journalist or writer. When I said that neither the one nor the other was quite right, she asked what it was that I was working on, to which I replied that I did not know for certain myself, but had a growing suspicion that it might turn into a crime story, set in upper Italy, in Venice, Verona and Riva. The plot revolved around a series of unsolved murders and the reappearance of a person who had long been missing. Luciana asked whether Limone featured in the story too, and I said that not only Limone but indeed the hotel and herself would be part of it. At this she beat a hasty retreat behind the bar, where she continued her work with that absent-minded precision that was peculiarly hers. Now she would prepare a cappuccino or hot chocolate, now pour a beer or glass of wine or grenadine for one of the few hotel guests sitting on the terrace during the daytime. Occasionally she would make entries in a large ledger, her head inclined to one side, looking for all the world as if she were still at school. More and more frequently I felt impelled to look over towards her, and whenever our eyes met she laughed as if at some silly inadvertence. On the wall behind the bar, between the colourful, shiny rows of spirits bottles, there was a large mirror, so I was able to watch both Luciana and her reflection, which gave me a curious satisfaction.
Around midday the guests disappeared from the terrace, and Luciana too left her post. The writing was becoming increasingly difficult, and soon it all seemed to be the most meaningless, empty, dishonest scrawl. I was greatly relieved when Mauro appeared, bringing the newspapers I had asked him to get me. Most of them were English and French, but there were also two Italian papers, the Gazzettino and the Alto Adige. By the time I was reading the last of them, the Alto Adige, the afternoon was almost over. A breeze was stirring the sunshades on the terrace, the guests were gradually returning, and Luciana had long since been busy behind the bar again. For a long while I puzzled over an article the heading of which, Fedeli a Riva, seemed to me to suggest some dark mystery, though the piece was merely about a couple by the name of Hilse, from Lünen near Dortmund, who had spent their vacations on Lake Garda every year since 1957. However, in the arts section of the paper I came across a report which did have a special meaning for me. It was a brief preview of a play that was due to be performed the next day
in Bolzano. I had just finished reading this short article, underlining a thing or two, when Luciana brought me a Fernet. Once again she lingered, looking at the newspaper spread out before me. Una fantesca, I heard her say quietly, and I thought I felt her hand on my shoulder. It occurred to me then how few and far between in my life were the moments when I had been touched in this way by a woman with whom I was barely acquainted, and, thinking back, it seemed to me that about such unwonted gestures there had always been something disembodied and ghoulish, something that went quite through me! For example, I remember an occasion years ago, sitting in the darkened consulting room of a Manchester optometrist's and gazing through the lenses inserted into those strange eye-test frames at the letters in the illuminated box, which were in clear focus one moment, completely blurred the next. Beside me stood a Chinese optician whose name, so a small badge on her white overall told me, was Susi Ahoi. She said very little, but every time she leaned towards me to change the lenses I was aware of the cool aura of solicitude that surrounded her. Time and again she adjusted the heavy frame, and once she touched my temples, which as so often were throbbing with pain, with her fingertips, for rather longer than was necessary, I thought, though it was probably only in order to position my head better. Luciana's hand, which surely rested on my shoulder unintentionally, if it did so at all, as she leaned to take the espresso cup and the ashtray from the table, had a similar effect on me, and as on that distant occasion in Manchester I now suddenly saw everything out of focus, as if through lenses not made for my eyes.
On the following morning - I had decided to go over to Verona after all - it turned out that my passport, which Luciana had placed in a locker in the reception desk when I arrived, had gone astray. The girl who made up my bill, repeatedly stressing that she helped out at the hotel only in the mornings, rummaged in vain through all the drawers and compartments. At length she went to wake Mauro, who spent a quarter of an hour turning everything upside down and inside out and leafing through every one of the various passports kept at reception without finding mine, before fetching his mother down. Luciana gave me a long look when she appeared behind the desk, as if to say this was a fine way to take one's leave. Taking up the search for my lost passport, she said that the passports of all guests were kept in the same drawer, and not a single one had ever been mislaid since the hotel had been in existence. So the passport must be here in the drawer, and it was only a question of using one's eyes. But then, she told Mauro, he had never been any good at using his eyes, presumably because she, Luciana, had always used hers for him. Ever since he was small, if he couldn't find something right away - a schoolbook, his pencil case, his tennis racquet, his motorbike keys - he simply claimed it wasn't there, and whenever she, Luciana, had come to look, of course it tuas there. Mauro objected that she could say what she liked but this passport, at any rate, had vanished -spa-ri-to, he said, emphasising the individual syllables as if for someone hard of hearing. Il passaporto scomparso mocked Luciana. One remark led to another, and before long the argument started by my passport had escalated into a family drama. The padrone, too, whom till that moment I had not set eyes on and who was half a head shorter than Luciana, now arrived on the scene. Mauro told the entire story from the start, for the third time at least. The girl stood there without saying a word, continuously smoothing her pinafore with an embarrassed air. Luciana had turned away and, shaking her head and running her fingers through the curls in her hair, kept saying strano, strano, as if the disappearance of the passport, which could no longer be doubted, were the most extraordinary thing that had happened in all her life. The padrone, who had promptly embarked on a systematic search, placing all the Austrian, all the Dutch and all the German passports together, pushing the Austrian and Dutch ones aside with a definitive gesture, and examining the German ones closely, concluded from this operation that while my passport was indeed not among them, there was, in its stead so to speak, one which belonged to a certain Herr Doll who, if he remembered correctly, had left yesterday and must inadvertently have been given my passport — I still hear him c