Desiderio linguistico

Presumably the narrator, who feels words, needs a double imago: a furious brain that reaches all the way down to her skeleton and makes her shudder like in an early-nineteenth-century English novel—and someone who can utter an invitation to an ice-cream parlor so innocently that the narrator loses herself in the idea that, while talking about Oscar Wilde, he might touch a thigh in such a way that she would be in danger of biting through the straw in her iced coffee.

For Nana, every sexual interaction is as beautiful as the narration that crowns the act. In a bed-warm, drowsy moment in the last pre-pandemic summer, she associates a prestige-splendidly adorned, freshly dug grave. She sees herself at a grand bourgeois funeral with a famous eulogist. Nana sits beside Cornelius, and that is enough to make them draw closer together like accomplices.

Everywhere loom the pitfalls of the mechanical. A wrong word whose redundancy reveals how noncommittal the speaker is about the matter shortens the erotic runway so much that Nana cannot take off.

An act wordlessly exercised through and finished off orgasmically remains a desolate affair. Something can be dull and still end in an orgasm. Desire has its own alphabet; everyone must begin again from the beginning as soon as they want to become personally honest with themselves.

Charles Baudelaire called George Sand a “philistine of immorality.” He imputed to her the depth of judgment of a “warder.” Nana would not spare a word for that if it had not been Baudelaire who—so Hans Mayer explains—“laid bare the dialectic of scandal and bourgeois synchronization in the case of George Sand.”

Aurora and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch are much sought-after people. Leopold, a scandal author, enjoys great renown. The most original minds of the era make pilgrimages to the knight of letters in Graz, without taking offense at his down-to-earth overexcitement. Down-to-earth, as Nana puts it, because the erotomaniac’s spatial radius forms a stable counterpoint to his literary excesses. The urban center of Styria is for many years the pivot point of an author with a European reach.

Aurora encounters Alberta von Maytner, who publishes under the pseudonym Margarethe Halm. With peculiar justifications the writer avoids public transport. In summer it is too hot, in autumn too cool, in winter too cold. Spring remains unmentioned in the list.

Cold makes one “ugly.” Maytner receives visitors in her bedroom. A bed hung with gauze curtains functions as the pièce de résistance. So Aurora says. She finds Maytner “still … pretty enough.”

In bed the ultra-domestic woman wears a “court dress … (with) an enormous train.”

“Her black hair, which three days a week had had to languish in curlers, was now free and flowed over her back in graceful waves.”

Maytner regards herself as the ancestress of a new humanity. In her bedroom she receives divine transmissions. She tries, esoterically, to whet the pleasantly skeptical Aurora’s appetite; while Leopold speaks to the exalted woman as she would like to be spoken to. No one can be too mad for him.

Among the most eccentric personalities in Leopold’s orbit is the editor and translator Anna-Catherine Strebinger. She has “flowers she bought herself or telegrams she sent herself delivered to the theater,” so that she can receive them with magnificent astonishment.

Aurora calls her Kathrin. In Austria Anna appears as the epitome of a Frenchwoman, although—with a Bavarian father in the overheated post-bellum climate after 1871—she is so little allowed to be one that her perpetual fiancé, the passionate anti-Bonapartist and at times touted as a French presidential candidate, the Marquis de Rochefort, was given an ultimatum by his supporters: either leave Kathrin or lose the support of his party.

Nana recounts all this in Ned’s presence. He sits at her university desk with an unobstructed view of the institute’s linden tree outside the window.

She hears herself say, “I’ll never let you go again.”

Most of all she would like, from now on, to present only a charming image. Nana wants to become an indelible part of Ned’s inner gallery of images. He is never to get her out of his head. For later she makes a note of the sentence: We have used up our arousal and now look at each other with shy eyes.

As I said, this is a fantasy. Sometimes they cruise together in Nana’s restored ’68 Mustang GT Fastback … and Ned also looks a bit like Steve McQueen as Lieutenant Frank Bullitt in the legendary car chase through the streets of San Francisco … across the North Hessian savannah. They reach a meadow in a Fulda valley. Nana believes she is dreaming, so blue does the lake lie in the ground-moraine landscape. The lake fills a travers de glaciers, a sweet little glacial furrow. Boys sing wicked songs on its shore, veined with primeval rootwork. Their beasts cast lustful glances at cyclists’ calves.

Grandiose caldera formations shape the landscape. The excesses of geological faulting provided picturesque backdrops for sudden processions of depopulation. Tourists revel in decay. There is a ruins hype. All paths lead to burial mounds, Japanese Shōwa.

“The Shōwa period … designates … the reign of Tennō Hirohito, the third emperor of the modern period, from December 25, 1926, to January 7, 1989.” —Wikipedia

In the Japan-inflected chat Nana and Anson check into a luxury love hotel. For the first time they form themselves, in fantasy, as a couple. They are married and are making up for the honeymoon they had no time for after the wedding. They want to go beyond what is tried and true. That is alluring, since in reality they have no shared routines except the chat’s sameness, which draws its greatest charm from the monotony with which Simone describes what she is wearing and what she is taking off.

Anson tells his stories and Nana reacts indirectly—and exactly as—to the purely written narrator as if she were experiencing his presence in a barely compromising tête-à-tête situation. The setting structure collapses. Nana apologizes and bows out. The shock to her reliability as a language-desire partner troubles her.