Free Telegrams of the Soul by Peter Altenberg

paused. Then she said: ‘My husband loves you and my son loves you and I love you. I’ve never read novels. What’s the use of novels? But I’m reading one now and I can’t quite get the hang of it.’ She expressed herself so sensitively about these complicated matters that were tearing her up inside. No one can explain what happened next. Do you find this boring?! I fled from my guardian, my guiding star, whom I loved, that’s right, I fled, even though he wanted to share his life with me. But I held back my life and fled from his.”
    Pause.
    â€œAre you comfortable in that chair?” said the woman to the tattered Tartar. “You can fetch yourself a pillow. Go ahead, take these white silken ones. It makes no difference.”
    Then she continued: “After that, the bank director said to me: ‘Anita, I love you, I’d like to take care of you—.’ ‘What for, am I sick—?!’ I said. ‘Just about—,’ he said. So I accepted my gentle caretaker. He protected my somewhat fragile body like a holy thing, so that a soul could blossom in it, a soul that did not always sing his chosen hymns—. The noble man!”
    Pause.
    â€œAnd Evelyn and the son?” asked the Tartar.
    â€œThey shriveled up, I think. It may be that they both betook themselves to the fruit trees in the sun and let the dappled shade and sun spots do them in.”
    â€œAnd did the beloved guardian never kiss you?!”
    â€œOf course he did. That’s what it was. A guiding star that starts burning instead of glowing! Why did he reject Evelyn, the guardian of us all, our guiding star?!”
    The tattered Tartar thought: “Your love sank down to your waistline, Anita, splendid gazelle! You were the very incarnation of my notion of those souls that slip down to the waistline and have to stop here. The soul does not endure the ‘sacred transformation’ to the bodily, it does not release itself unto the ‘blessed delirium,’ but, rather, grows and grows into itself and never comes to an end. And finally it transforms you into an impassioned poet who is always enamored of someone, sings sweet hymns and has wondrous dreams. Love is never condensed into the ‘physical act,’ there is no physical mode of expression, no instrument for the music of living on which the soul could cry itself out, sing its heart out, set itself free! The mystery of ‘sexual release’ plays no role in the love of the sonorous, self-expressive, self-redemptive soul! Just as the word formed in the throat of the carnal, the sonorous, the revelatory, in the love that flows in bodily release, is a loose translation of the redemptive thought!
    â€œEverything stayed inside you, Anita, and grew inward into the source of mysterious deeds! Of such love a symphony is born, an external score as with the man Beethoven, an internal score for the child-virgin. Never does a little baby blossom from such love, never can you expel it from your tired loins and set it out on your lap as a whole little person. It will always keep welling up and cooling back down again in you in luminous clouds. Woman, you’re like a fantastic protoplasm, without the ‘holy becoming’ and the peace! You’re like an artist’s soul in perpetual motion, like Beethoven and the sea!”
    This is how he expounded upon Anita, traced her back to that place where she came from, her youth!
    The woman stood leaning, actually pressing against the whitelacquered door, and a faint glimmer of what she had once been hovered over her brown golden hair.
    She spoke. She stopped speaking. He spoke. He stopped speaking. She spoke. She stopped speaking—.
    It was the second day of the fairy tale of the “stranger who becomes known.” The tartar lay in the heap of white pillows and smoked.
    Then the woman spoke at greater length, with an exceptionally soft voice, saying: “What are