The Loser by Thomas Bernhard Read Free Book Online

Catholic church stinks to high heaven! Glenn’s death has hit me very hard, I once heard him say clearly, while I stood in the restaurant, still in the same spot, I’d merely put my bag on the floor. Wertheimer had to commit suicide, I told myself, he had no future left. He’d used himself up, had run out of existence coupons. It’s completely like him to have slept with the innkeeper in her inn, I thought, I looked up at the ceiling in the restaurant, reflecting that the two of them had probably joined bodies right above the restaurant, in the innkeeper’s bed. The superaes-thete in that filthy bed, I thought. Mr. Refinement, who always claimed he could live only with Schopenhauer, Kant, Spinoza, sleeping with the innkeeper from Wankham at more or less regular intervals underneath her cheap feather bed. At first I had to laugh out loud, then it turned my stomach. No one had even heard my laughter. The innkeeper remained out of sight. As I watched the dining room got dirtier and dirtier, the whole inn more and more questionable. But I had no other choice, this was and is the only inn in the area. Glenn, I thought, never played Chopin. Refused all the invitations, all the highest fees. He always talked people out of the idea that he was an unhappy person, he claimed he was the happiest, the most blessed by happiness. Music/obsession/ambition/Glenn , I had once noted in my first Madrid notebook. Those people in the Puerta del Sol that I described to Glenn in nineteen sixty-three after discovering Hardy . Description of a bullfight, Retiro Park speculations, I thought, that Glenn never acknowledged. Wertheimer often invited Glenn to Traich, the hunting lodge would surely be to his liking, Wertheimer thought, Glenn had never accepted the invitation, not even Wertheimer was a hunting-lodge person, never mind Glenn Gould. Horowitz was never the mathematician that Glenn Gould was. Was . We say he is , then suddenly he was , this terrible was , I thought. Wertheimer would lecture at me when I was working on, for example, Schönberg, Glenn never would. He couldn’t accept that someone knew more than he did, couldn’t tolerate someone explaining something he didn’t know about. Embarrassed by his ignorance, I thought, standing in the inn and waiting for the innkeeper. On the other hand Wertheimer was the reader, not Glenn, not I, I didn’t read a great deal and when I did it was always the same thing, the same books by the same authors, the same philosophers over and over as if they were always completely new. I had developed the art of perceiving the same thing over and over as something new, developed it to a high, absurdly high skill, neither Wertheimer nor Glenn had that skill. Glenn read almost nothing, he avoided literature, which was just like him. Only what really serves my own purposes, he once said, my art. He had all of Bach in his head, the same with Handel, a good deal of Mozart, all of Bartók as well, he could sit down and interpret for hours, that was his word for it, naturally without a mistake and brilliantly, inglenniously , as Wertheimer used to say. Basically I realized from the moment I met Glenn on Monk’s Mountain that he was one of the most extraordinary people I had ever met in my life, I thought. The physiognomist in me isn’t wrong. Years later the world confirmed my judgment, but this only pained me, like everything confirmed by the newspapers. We exist, we don’t have any other choice, Glenn once said. It’s total nonsense what we have to go through, even he, I thought. Even Wertheimer’s death could have been predicted, I thought. Curiously Wertheimer always maintained that I would commit suicide, hang myself in the woods, in your beloved Retiro Park , he once said, I thought. He never forgave me for having just got up and left for Madrid, without saying a word to anyone, abandoning everything. He’d grown used to my walking through Vienna with him, for years, a whole decade, of course they