back in at the end of the story, leaving a blank screen.
Chapter 11
Schadenfreude
“Today only exaggeration can be the medium of truth.”
—Theodor Adorno
BARCELONA
Gregor’s loft is in an abandoned factory on a narrow sheet in a worker’s section of town that’s being modernized. But in a good way, he tells me, not like in New York. The old and poor won’t get pushed out. It will be better here, with more services. He hasn’t been back in Germany—he’s from Cologne—in several years. I’m not staying with him; I didn’t want to. There’s an inexpensive hotel in the center of town, a sliver of a building on a sheet across from an impressive church whose bells ring on the quarter hour. Its bell tower can be seen from my window.
A Hunchback of Notre Dame
setting. It suits me better. Gregor’s generosity can easily be abused. I don’t want to be one of those to do it. The hotel manager, Mr. Del Rio, speaks no English and what I speak to him is a combination of German, Spanish and French, a few words of each, and he finds this amusing. At least I hope he does when he doesn’t find it frustrating. I’m reading Highsmith’s
Ripley’s Game
.
Gregor reads voraciously and keeps a diary that he writes in scrupulously each day at a desk surrounded by small fileboxes in which are stored annotated comments about what he’s read. He’s disciplined, a vegetarian, and his home is nearly bare, except for the vast wall of books which I’ve referred to as his Berlin Wall. Irony, yes? he asks. All of Freud, in German and English, Melanie Klein, Christa Wolf, Hegel, Marx, Handke, books on Hollywood film, Dickens, Stendhal, Flaubert, Resnais, Duras, biographies galore. He tells me he sometimes is transfixed in front of his books, awed and dismayed. He has put money into a few films, acted in some, written a play about, he says, his alienated generation, and receives monthly checks from his father. Guilt money, Gregor calls it. Though he doesn’t like to see people—he is, he insists grimly, compulsively counterphobic—he knows many and keeps a stack of notebooks near his telephone, with names and addresses of the interesting people he’s met. All over the world, I suppose, or at least the Western one.
That’s how I meet Clara, or Clare, as she was called in the States. Gregor thought I would find her appealing, this elderly but still youthful woman who has livid everywhere and done everything. A “classic” was his way of designating her. There is no one quite like her, he says. Gregor brings us together for dinner at a small restaurant that serves excellent octopus which Clara can’t eat and neither can L You have a sensitive stomach, she says, like me, except when I was young I could eat anything. She is trim, about my height, not short or tall, and speaks English infected by her native German.
Clara came to the States before the second war, a young woman just able to escape alone and with no possessions. I guess she’s in her early seventies, but has no gray hair, like my mother who is years younger. Clara offers to take me to the Picasso Museum the next day, always a pleasure for her, and so much more now that Generalissimo Franco is dead and one can be in Spain again and even Picasso can be in Spain again.
I meet Clara at her apartment house. She’s waiting in the lobby, looking at her watch. She takes my arm and leans against me with a presumption of intimacy that I appreciate. We walk like this to the museum. Clara claims each stair cautiously as we climb to the room where, she tells me, Picasso’s versions of Velázquez’s
Las Meninas
hang. She puts on her reading glasses to see the dates of the Picassos. The Velázquez, she remembers, was 1656. The Picassos were done in 1957. Velázquez’s triumph challenged Picasso, Clara explains, and so the little man—she speaks as if she had taken his measure firsthand—had to take it up, for the father must be slaughtered by the son. To
Chapter 11
Schadenfreude
“Today only exaggeration can be the medium of truth.”
—Theodor Adorno
BARCELONA
Gregor’s loft is in an abandoned factory on a narrow sheet in a worker’s section of town that’s being modernized. But in a good way, he tells me, not like in New York. The old and poor won’t get pushed out. It will be better here, with more services. He hasn’t been back in Germany—he’s from Cologne—in several years. I’m not staying with him; I didn’t want to. There’s an inexpensive hotel in the center of town, a sliver of a building on a sheet across from an impressive church whose bells ring on the quarter hour. Its bell tower can be seen from my window.
A Hunchback of Notre Dame
setting. It suits me better. Gregor’s generosity can easily be abused. I don’t want to be one of those to do it. The hotel manager, Mr. Del Rio, speaks no English and what I speak to him is a combination of German, Spanish and French, a few words of each, and he finds this amusing. At least I hope he does when he doesn’t find it frustrating. I’m reading Highsmith’s
Ripley’s Game
.
Gregor reads voraciously and keeps a diary that he writes in scrupulously each day at a desk surrounded by small fileboxes in which are stored annotated comments about what he’s read. He’s disciplined, a vegetarian, and his home is nearly bare, except for the vast wall of books which I’ve referred to as his Berlin Wall. Irony, yes? he asks. All of Freud, in German and English, Melanie Klein, Christa Wolf, Hegel, Marx, Handke, books on Hollywood film, Dickens, Stendhal, Flaubert, Resnais, Duras, biographies galore. He tells me he sometimes is transfixed in front of his books, awed and dismayed. He has put money into a few films, acted in some, written a play about, he says, his alienated generation, and receives monthly checks from his father. Guilt money, Gregor calls it. Though he doesn’t like to see people—he is, he insists grimly, compulsively counterphobic—he knows many and keeps a stack of notebooks near his telephone, with names and addresses of the interesting people he’s met. All over the world, I suppose, or at least the Western one.
That’s how I meet Clara, or Clare, as she was called in the States. Gregor thought I would find her appealing, this elderly but still youthful woman who has livid everywhere and done everything. A “classic” was his way of designating her. There is no one quite like her, he says. Gregor brings us together for dinner at a small restaurant that serves excellent octopus which Clara can’t eat and neither can L You have a sensitive stomach, she says, like me, except when I was young I could eat anything. She is trim, about my height, not short or tall, and speaks English infected by her native German.
Clara came to the States before the second war, a young woman just able to escape alone and with no possessions. I guess she’s in her early seventies, but has no gray hair, like my mother who is years younger. Clara offers to take me to the Picasso Museum the next day, always a pleasure for her, and so much more now that Generalissimo Franco is dead and one can be in Spain again and even Picasso can be in Spain again.
I meet Clara at her apartment house. She’s waiting in the lobby, looking at her watch. She takes my arm and leans against me with a presumption of intimacy that I appreciate. We walk like this to the museum. Clara claims each stair cautiously as we climb to the room where, she tells me, Picasso’s versions of Velázquez’s
Las Meninas
hang. She puts on her reading glasses to see the dates of the Picassos. The Velázquez, she remembers, was 1656. The Picassos were done in 1957. Velázquez’s triumph challenged Picasso, Clara explains, and so the little man—she speaks as if she had taken his measure firsthand—had to take it up, for the father must be slaughtered by the son. To
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