It has already been mentioned that he was a mathematician, and nothing more need be said of that for the moment; in every profession followed not for money but for love there comes a moment when the advancing years seem to lead to a void. After this moment had lasted for some time, Ulrich remembered that a man’s native country is supposed to have the mysterious power of making the mind take root and thrive in its true soil, and so he settled there with the feeling of a hiker who sits down on a bench for eternity, but with the thought that he will be getting up again immediately.

When he set about putting his house in order, as the Bible has it, it turned out to be the experience he had actually been waiting for. He had got himself into the pleasant position of having to restore his run-down little property from scratch. He was free to follow any principle, from the stylistically pure to total recklessness, free to choose any style from the Assyrians to cubism. What should he choose? Modern man is born in a hospital and dies in a hospital, so he should make his home like a clinic. So claimed a leading architect of the moment; and another reformer of interior decoration advocated movable partitions in homes instead of fixed walls so that people would learn to trust their housemates instead of shutting themselves off from one another. Time was making a fresh start just then (it does so all the time), and a new time needs a new style. Luckily for Ulrich, the little château already had three styles superimposed on one another, setting limits on what he could do to meet all these new demands. Yet he felt quite shaken by the responsibility of having the opportunity to renovate a house, what with the threat hovering over his head of “Show me how you live and I will tell you who you are!”—which he had read repeatedly in art magazines. After intensive study of these periodicals he decided that he had best take the extension of his personality into his own hands, and began to design his future furniture himself. But no sooner had he come up with an impressively massive form than it occurred to him that something spare, and strictly functional, could just as easily be put in its place; and when he had sketched a form of reinforced concrete that looked emaciated by its own strength, he was reminded of the thin, vernal lines of a thirteen-year-old girl’s body and drifted off into a reverie instead of making up his mind.

He was in that familiar state—not that the occasion mattered too seriously to him—of incoherent ideas spreading outward without a center, so characteristic of the present, and whose strange arithmetic adds up to a random proliferation of numbers without forming a unit. Finally he dreamed up only impracticable rooms, revolving rooms, kaleidoscopic interiors, adjustable scenery for the soul, and his ideas grew steadily more devoid of content. He had now finally reached the point to which he had been drawn all along. His father would have put it something like this: “Give a fellow a totally free hand and he will soon run his head into a wall out of sheer confusion.” Or this: “A man who can have anything he wants will soon be at a loss as to what to wish for.” Ulrich repeated these sayings to himself with great enjoyment. Their hoary wisdom appeared to him as an extraordinary new thought. For a man’s possibilities, plans, and feelings must first be hedged in by prejudices, traditions, obstacles, and barriers of all sorts, like a lunatic in his straitjacket, and only then can whatever he is capable of doing have perhaps some value, substance, and staying power. Here, in fact, was an idea with incalculable implications. Now the man without qualities, who had come back to his own country, took the second step toward letting himself be shaped by the outward circumstances of life: at this point in his deliberations he simply left the furnishing of his house to the genius of his suppliers, secure in the knowledge that he could safely leave the traditions, prejudices, and limitations to them. All he did himself was to touch up the earlier lines, the dark antlers under the white vaultings of the little hall, the formal ceiling in the salon, and whatever else that seemed to him useful and convenient.

When it was all done he could shake his head and wonder: “Is this the life that is going to be mine?” What he possessed was a charming little palace; one must almost call it that because it was exactly the way one imagines such places, a tasteful residence for a resident as conceived by furniture dealers, carpet sellers, and interior decorators who were leaders in their fields. All that was missing was for this charming clockwork to be wound up, for then carriages bringing high dignitaries and noble ladies would come rolling up the driveway, and footmen would leap from their running boards to ask, looking Ulrich over dubiously: “Where is your master, my good man?”

He had returned from the moon and had promptly installed himself on the moon again.

6

LEONA, OR A CHANGE IN VIEWPOINT

Once a man has put his house in order it is time to go courting. Ulrich’s girlfriend in those days was a chanteuse in a small cabaret who went by the name of Leontine. She was tall, curvaceously slender, provocatively lifeless, and he called her Leona.

He had been struck by the moist darkness of her eyes, the dolefully passionate expression on her handsome, regular, long face, and the songs full of feeling that she sang instead of risqué ones. All these old-fashioned little songs were about love, sorrow, abandonment, faithfulness, forest murmurs, and shining trout. She stood tall and lonely to the marrow on the tiny stage and patiently sang at the public with a housewife’s voice, and even if something suggestive did slip in now and then, the effect was all the more ghostlike because she spelled out all the feelings of the heart, the tragic as well as the teasing, with the same wooden gestures. Ulrich was immediately reminded of old photographs or engravings of dated beauties in ancient issues of forgotten women’s magazines. As he thought himself into this woman’s face he saw in it a large number of small traits that simply could not be real, yet they made the face what it was. There are, of course, in all periods all kinds of countenances, but only one type will be singled out by a period’s taste as its ideal image of happiness and beauty while all the other faces do their best to copy it, and with the help of fashion and hairdressers even the ugly ones manage to approximate the ideal. But there are some faces that never succeed, faces born to a strange distinction of their own, unyieldingly expressing the regal and banished ideal beauty of an earlier period. Such faces wander about like corpses of past desires in the great void of love’s traffic, and the men who gaped into the vast tedium of Leontine’s singing, unaware of what was happening to them, felt their nostrils twitch with feelings quite different from those aroused by brazen petite chanteuses with tango spit curls. So Ulrich decided to call her Leona and desired to possess her, as he might have wanted to possess a luxurious lion-skin rug.

But after their acquaintance had begun, Leona developed another anachronistic quality: she was an incredible glutton, and this is a vice whose heyday had passed a very long time ago.