I'm Not Stiller by Max Frisch Read Free Book Online Page B

volcano,' I finished my story, 'and if you ever go to Mexico, my dear Doktor, drive out to this Paricutin. The roads are terrible, but it's worth while, especially at night; glowing stones fly fifteen hundred feet into the air, and there is a rumbling like the rumbling of an avalanche, and just before it begins smoke always billows up from the crater like a giant cauliflower, but black and red, red underneath where it catches the light from the flames below. Not so long ago the eruptions succeeded one another at pretty short intervals—six minutes, ten minutes, three minutes, each eruption throwing up a cascade of glowing stones, most of which were extinguished before they struck the ground. It's a first-class firework, believe me. Especially the lava. From the middle of a dark heap of dead slag, on which the moon shines without detracting from its blackness, the lava shoots out bright crimson, in spurts, like blood from a black bull. It must be very thin and runny, this lava, it sweeps down over the hillside almost as quick as lightning, gradually losing its brightness, until the next eruption comes glowing like a blast furnace, gleaming like the sun, lighting up the night with the deadly heat to which all life is due, with the molten heart of our planet. That's a sight you must see. I remember that our souls were filled with a jubilation that could only find an outlet in dancing, in the wildest of all dances, an outpouring of horror and delight, such as the incomprehensible people who cut the warm heart out of the living breast might have understood.'
    My counsel made notes.
    'Paricutin?' he asked. 'How do you spell that?'
    'As it's pronounced.'
    We chatted about this, that, and the other. The cigar was new to me, but very good of its kind. Once more we never got down to business (as he calls his heap of papers).
    'Herr Doktor,' I shouted after him down the corridor, 'you needn't bother to inquire about my working on that plantation, Herr Doktor, you can save yourself the trouble. Even your Swiss Embassy won't be able to find anything.'
    'Why not?'
    'Because of the lava.'
    He'll telegraph just the same.
    ***
    I'm not their Stiller. What do they want with me? I'm an unfortunate, insignificant, unimportant person with no life behind him, none at all. Why am I lying to them? Just so that they should leave me my emptiness, my insignificance, my reality; it's no good running away, and what they are offering me is flight, not freedom, flight means acting a part. Why don't they stop it?
    ***
    Herr Dr Bohnenblust (that's my counsel's name) has fetched the lady from Paris, who thinks she is my wife, from the airport and seems to be very charmed with her.
    'I just wanted to let you know,' said my counsel, 'that the lady has landed safely. Of course she sends her love—'
    'Thank you.'
    'She's now at the hotel.'
    My counsel was incapable of sitting down, he could only rub his hands triumphantly, as though the lady from Paris were the big gun that was going to force me to surrender.
    'Herr Doktor,' I said, 'I have no objection to visits from ladies, I merely repeat the warning I gave you before: I'm a hot-blooded man, unrestrained, as I told you, especially at this time of the year.'
    'So I told her.'
    'Well?'
    'The lady insists,' he said, 'on seeing you
tête à tête.
She'll be here on Monday at ten o'clock. She is convinced that she knows her husband better than he knows himself, and there's no question of his being unrestrained, she says, that was always a wish-dream of her husband, says the lady, and she's quite sure she can manage him on her own.'
    Then he offered me another cigar.
    'Monday at ten o'clock?' I said. 'All right.'
    ***
    Knobel, my warder, is beginning to get annoyed with my questions about the lady from Paris who claims to be married to me.
    'I told you,' he grumbled, 'she looks smart. And her scent fills the whole corridor.'
    'What about her hair?'
    'Red,' he said, 'like rose-hip jam.'
    He is incapable