The Tanners

The two of them spent the evening wandering from one bar to another, the nurse being a fairly passionate drinker, since he didn’t know what else to do with his free time. Simon found it appropriate to follow his lead in every sense. There in the tiny, stuffy bars, he made the acquaintance of individuals who played cards with unbelievable endurance. The card game appeared to constitute a world of its own to these people, one in which they were unwilling to be disturbed. Others just sat there all evening long clenching the long pointed stalk of a cigar between their teeth without otherwise calling notice to themselves except by the fact that when the nub of their cigar got too short to be pressed between their lips, they would stick it on the tip of their pocket knives to be able to smoke it all the way down to the most miniscule brevity. An emaciated, ravaged-looking pianist told him that her sister was a bad sister but a celebrated concert singer, and that she’d long since broken off all familial ties with her. Simon found this comprehensible, but he behaved with delicacy and refrained from telling her he found it comprehensible. This person, he felt, was more unfortunate than morally corrupt, and he always honored misfortune, and corruption he saw as a consequence of misfortune, and therefore it also required at least a certain decorousness. He saw short, fat, horribly sprightly innkeepers’ wives who approached their guests with untoward familiarities of all sorts while their husbands dozed on sofas and in armchairs. Often a splendid old folksong would be sung by a person who masterfully executed the modulations of key and voice that were part of these old songs. How beautiful and melancholy they sounded, you couldn’t help sensing how many a rough vibrant throat must already have sung them in bygone days and long before. One man was constantly telling jokes, a short young fellow wearing an old, large, wide, tall, deep hat he must have purchased in a junk shop somewhere. His mouth was lubricious and his jokes no less so, but they forced you to laugh whether you wanted to or not. Someone said to him: “You there, I admire your wit!” But the witty man thrust aside this foolish admiration with well-feigned astonishment, and this was truly a joke that might have brought pleasure even to a learned man. The male nurse told all the people who came to sit beside him that he was basically too flawed and at the same time, when he thought it over more carefully, too good for his native country. Simon thought: “How idiotic!” But then the nurse gave a far more appealing report on the topic of Naples, saying for example that the museums there contained wonderful remnants of ancient human beings, and that one could see by looking at them that these ancestors far outstripped us in height, width and girth. These people had arms nearly the size of our legs! Now that must have been a race of women and men! What were we by comparison? Merely a degenerate, crippled, atrophied, attenuated, longitudinally and latitudinally cracked, torn and shredded, emaciated generation. He also gave a charming portrait of the Gulf of Naples. Many listened to him attentively, but many were asleep and, being asleep, didn’t hear a thing.

It was very late when Simon got home, and he found the downstairs door locked from within; as he didn’t have his key with him, he brazenly rang the doorbell, for he was in that condition which inevitably causes one to behave inconsiderately. A window flew open at once following the jangle of the bell, and a white figure, no doubt the woman in her nightgown, threw down the key wrapped in heavy paper.

The next morning, rather than being angry, she smiled at him with the friendliest “Good morning!” and said not a word about the disturbance in the middle of the night. Simon therefore decided it would be inappropriate to mention it, and so, half out of delicacy, half out of laziness, he offered no apology.