I’ve fallen for loneliness like you fall for a woman with defects.
Not that you’re blind to those defects, you just can’t get along without them.
In those defects you have built yourself a home, and one morning you discover that it’s a very comfortable home. Fortunately, the outside world never comes by.
Sometimes you read about the smelting of two souls. Not, these days, without the slight discomfort that can overcome you when reading about the burning of a witch at the stake.
What I can recommend to all is the noon train from St. Moritz to Chur.
At the front of that train is a club car.
Go sit up there. There aren’t many seats. So be punctual.
Everything is made of old wood. Because they’ve taken such good care of it, the wood’s still in perfect shape.
The service is hard, but fair. This being the definition of good service.
At my table were seated an Italian countess and a South African gentleman.
At least, I assumed she was a countess, because she was always spoken to as “Contessa”.
The gentleman spoke to me in Afrikaans, but he also knew Spanish, English, Italian and German. It was freezing outside, but he didn’t have a coat, only a light yellow sweater.
Some people can rise above the weather.
A Nobel Prize is a wonderful thing, but rising above the weather is a thing I’d like to experience as well.
I had the definite impression that the countess and the gentleman were only making this trip in order to have lunch in this car. I can understand that. A rolling dining room is good for the digestion, like ginger.
Loneliness is no disaster, at least not the disaster many would like to see in it.
The countess and the gentleman availed themselves of the champagne, and the gentleman said to me in Afrikaans that he’d heard on the radio that the snowline would soon be descending to 1200 meters.
I stuck to wine. A woman with defects shouldn’t be fed champagne on a daily basis, otherwise she’ll forget her defects.
For almost thirty years I’d been trying to conquer my fear of others, and now I was seeing it with extreme clarity: loneliness is less gruesome than people.
So let them conquer their fear of me.
I’m occasionally told that I like people to be afraid of me. Nothing could be further from the truth. I want to stroke people. With a clothes brush.
When I say “I” here, I’m referring to the merchandise lying in the shop window.
Of course you have to give people a reason to seek your company.
An invitation to lunch, for example, or a free pair of orthopedic soles. It isn’t enough that it’s you.
The “I” is an abandoned church, for not only is God dead, but the rituals are too, and a pancake breakfast doesn’t cut it anymore. A good story, with or without slide presentation, is the least you can offer.
What I’m trying to say is that, in the train from St. Moritz to Chur, I came to the conclusion that there were worse things than being an abandoned church.
What I want is to be looked at and admired, but not attended. And to make the official list of monuments in a few years’ time, so that when I’m old I can start charging admission.
From Chur, it was only twenty minutes to Bad Ragaz.
I bought a pair of swimming trunks, red ones, and swam with the Russian Mafia in the pool at Grand Hotel Quellenhof. The Russian Mafia consisted of three men and a woman with lesions on her arm and forehead. During dinner she kept looking at her lesions in a compact.
After Bad Ragaz I went to Bergisch Gladbach. Close to Cologne.
My first visit to a restaurant with three Michelin stars, which happens to go by the name of Dieter Müller. Although my heart doesn’t usually beat faster for goose liver, I won’t soon forget the composition of goose liver at Bergisch Gladbach.
And here, at last, begins the story of N.
N. was a seventeen-year-old schoolgirl who had written me a friendly- but-impersonal letter back in October. The letter fluttered around my kitchen for a couple of months. But even an abandoned church must reply to the occasional impersonal letter.
When she wrote that she could perhaps love me, I suggested that we arrange a meeting. I’m not one to shirk my responsibilities.
Someone said: “You’re almost thirty, you know.”
As if I’d forgotten. As if I could do anything about it.
According to D.A.F. de Sade, the 140th passion is: “He desires only maidens of fifteen years, and beats them with holly and stinging nettles till they bleed: he is particularly conscientious about the buttocks.”
I am a moderate man, but even a moderate man must sometimes strive to pull himself up to the level of his examples.
I’d suggested we meet in the bar of the Amsterdam Hilton.
That’s where I meet everyone.
She had to come down from the north of the country. By train.
For a moment I felt guilty. Such a long trip, and for what, really? Then I thought: it’s culture. An abandoned church isn’t something you see every day, especially not from the inside. Besides, guilt is not free of narcissism, of the infatuation that simply knows no bounds: I’m speaking here of the infatuation with our own merchandise.
By email she’d warned me that I might be disappointed.
I wasn’t disappointed.
That was too bad, because that hurt.
And I only had two hours. That’s all she had, too.
“My Dutch teacher sends her regards,” said N.
“My regards back,” I said.
Her Dutch teacher was old enough to have been my mother. I didn’t know much about it, only a few details.
“My mother had to read all your emails first, otherwise she wouldn’t let me go.”
In my thoughts I flipped through the emails I’d sent her. Apparently I’d held myself in check.
“I told my father that if you did anything to me it would be in all the papers, and that wouldn’t be good for your career. Which is why you wouldn’t do anything to me. He thought that was a good argument.”
“So do I,” I said.
“Besides, you’d promised not to abduct me, and you said you’d bring me back to the station.”
“That’s true,” I said. “You have nice shoes.”
As a compliment, that seemed innocent enough. Shoes are not body parts.
Actually, I prefer the unspoiled even to a composition of goose liver.
N. was very much unspoiled.
Suffer the unspoiled to come unto me.
“Do you dance a lot?” I asked.
“When I can,” N. said, “and otherwise I talk to the elderly.”
“To who?”
“To the elderly. I saw an ad where they were looking for people to talk to the elderly. I thought that was sad, so I signed up.”
“Do you get paid for it?”
“No, it’s volunteer work.”
“But what do you talk about?”
“The old people usually talk about themselves. And when one dies, you get a new one. You’re not allowed to get too attached to the elderly.”
“It’s never a good idea to get too attached to the elderly.”
Her father was a policeman. Strangely enough, I found that reassuring.
“You have to go, don’t you?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said. “I have an appointment with my accountant.”
I wrapped up a few shrimp sticks for her father.
We’d barely touched our plates.
Then I took her to the station.
“Am I flushed?” she asked.
“No,” I said.
“Do I have a fever?”
I put my hand on her forehead. She didn’t have a fever.
“Your accountant is going to be angry about you being so late.”
“He understands a great deal,” I said. “Good accountants understand a great deal, and ask very few questions.”
She was growing quieter all the time.
I think we were both a little disappointed that the abduction wasn’t going to take place.
I’m not a person you should meet.
I don’t abduct. I get everyone to the train on time.
And then perhaps one last composition of goose liver at the station restaurant.