The Loser by Thomas Bernhard Read Free Book Online Page B

loose the first time to Venice for ten days with my grandfather’s medical bag and one hundred and fifty schillings, visiting the Accademia by day and attending performances at La Fenice by night. Tancredi for the first time in La Fenice , I thought, my first desire to make a go at music. Wertheimer was always and only the loser. No one pounded the streets of Vienna like he did, coming and going in all directions again and again until he was totally exhausted. Diversion maneuvers, I thought. He wore out tremendous quantities of shoes. Shoe fetishist were words that Glenn once said to Wertheimer, I think he had hundreds of shoes in his Kohlmarkt apartment, and that was also a way he drove his sister to the brink of madness. He revered, indeed loved, his sister, I thought, and in time drove her crazy. In the nick of time she escaped his clutches by going to Zizers bei Chur, broke off all contact, ditched him. He left her clothes exactly the way she had kept them in her wardrobes. Didn’t touch any of her things. Basically I misused my sister as a page turner , he once said, I thought. No one could turn pages like her, I taught her how in my ruthless manner, he once said, in the beginning she couldn’t even read music. My brilliant page turner , he once said, I thought. He had degraded his sister into a page turner, in the long run she couldn’t put up with it. His she’ll never find a husband turned out to be a horrible mistake, I thought. Wertheimer had built a top-security prison for his sister, totally escapeproof, but she got away, in the dead of night, as they say. That had made Wertheimer terribly ashamed. Sitting in his armchair he became obsessed with the idea of killing himself, as he said, I thought, pondered over the proper method for days at a time, but then didn’t do it. Glenn’s death already made the thought of suicide a permanent frame of mind for him, his sister’s escape strengthened this permanent frame of mind, as he related. Glenn’s death drove home his own failure with furious clarity. As for his sister, it was her base, vicious nature to have abandoned him in a crisis situation for a thoroughly low-life character from Switzerland who wore tasteless raincoats with pointy lapels and Bally shoes with brass buckles, as Wertheimer said, I thought. I should never have let her go to that awful internist Horch (her doctor!), he said, for that’s where she met that Swiss. Doctors are in cahoots with chemical-plant owners, he said, I thought. Never should have let her go , he said about his forty-six-year-old sister, I thought. The forty-six-year-old had to ask his permission to go out, I thought, had to account for every one of her outings. At first he, Wertheimer, believed that the Swiss, whom he’d sized up as a ruthlessly self-interested person, had married her for her money, but then it turned out that he was much richer than the two of them put together, that is, loaded , Swiss rich, which is a good deal richer than Austrian rich, as he put it. The father of this person (the Swiss), said Wertheimer, had been one of the directors of the Leu Bank in Zurich, just imagine, Wertheimer said, the son owns one of the biggest chemical plants in the world! His first wife lost her life in mysterious circumstances, no one knows what happened. My sister as the second wife of some upstart, so Wertheimer, I thought. Once he sat for eight hours in the ice-cold St. Stephen’s Cathedral and stared at the altar, the beadle showed him the door to St. Stephen’s with the words: Sir we’re closing . As he went out he slipped the beadle a hundred-schilling bill, a short-circuit operation, as Wertheimer put it. I wanted to sit in St. Stephen’s till I fell over dead, he said. But I couldn’t manage it, not even by totally concentrating on this wish. It wasn’t possible for me to be totally concentrated, and our desires are realized only when we are totally concentrated. From early childhood he had experienced the