The Loser by Thomas Bernhard Read Free Book Online Page A

were his walks, not mine, I thought. He always walked faster than me, I had trouble keeping up with him although he was the sick one, not I, precisely because he was the sick one he always walked ahead of me, I thought, left me behind as soon as we started out. The loser is one of Glenn Gould’s brilliant inventions, I thought, Glenn just saw through Wertheimer the moment they met, he completely saw through everyone he met for the first time. Wertheimer got up at five in the morning, I got up at five-thirty, Glenn never before nine-thirty because he went to bed around four in the morning, not to sleep, said Glenn, but to let the sound of my exhaustion die out . Kill myself, I thought, now that Glenn is dead, that Wertheimer has committed suicide, as I looked around the restaurant. Glenn was always afraid of the dampness of Austrian restaurants, he feared death would claim him in these Austrian restaurants, where the air hardly circulates or not at all. Actually death claims many people in our restaurants, the innkeepers refuse to open the windows, not even in summer, and so the moisture seeps into the walls for eternity. And everywhere this gaudy new tastelessness, I thought, the complete proletarianization of even our most beautiful inns, I thought, continues unabated. No word has turned my stomach more than the word socialism when I think what people have done to this term. Everywhere this dog-do socialism spouted by our dog-do socialists who exploit the people with their socialism, eventually dragging it down to their own dog-do level. Today everywhere we look we see this deadly dog-do-level socialism , we smell it, it’s penetrated everything. I know the rooms in this inn, I thought, they’re deadly. The thought that I had come to Wankham merely to see Wertheimer’s hunting lodge struck me at that moment as base. On the other hand, I told myself immediately, I owe it to Wertheimer, I repeated precisely this sentence, I owe it to Wertheimer, I said to myself out loud. One lie followed another. Curiosity, which has always been my most prominent character trait, had taken a firm grip on me. Perhaps the heirs have already moved everything out of the hunting lodge, I thought, changed it from top to bottom, heirs have an unscrupulous way of taking over that we can barely imagine. Clear out everything within hours of the deceased’s final breath, as they say, cart it all away and won’t let anyone in the door. No one ever cast a more damaging light on his relatives than Wertheimer, described them into the dirt . Hated his father, mother, sister, reproached them all with his unhappiness. That he had to continue existing, constantly reminding them that they had thrown him up into that awful existence machine so that he would be spewed out below, a mangled pulp. His mother threw her child into this existence machine, all his life his father kept this existence machine running, which accurately hacked his son to pieces. Parents know very well that they perpetuate their own unhappiness in their children, they go about it cruelly by having children and throwing them into the existence machine, he said, I thought, contemplating the restaurant. I first saw Wertheimer in the Nussdorferstrasse, in front of the Markthalle. He should have become a businessman like his father, but in fact he didn’t even become a musician as he, Wertheimer, wanted but was destroyed by the so-called human sciences , as Wertheimer said. We run away from one thing into the other and destroy ourselves in the process, he said. We just simply go away until we have given up, so he said. Preference for cemeteries, like me, I thought, entire days spent in the cemeteries in Döbling and in Neustift am Wald, I thought. His lifelong yearning to be alone, I thought, is mine too. Wertheimer was no traveler like me. Was no passionate address-switcher. Once with his parents in Egypt, that was all. Whereas I exploited every opportunity to travel, no matter where, broke