Oasi di Benessere - Aline narrates

I have an early shift and enjoy being almost alone in the company. I discipline myself by not allowing myself to jump ahead of things and get everything done in one sweep in a Western, efficiency-driven way. On the path toward relaxation, self-observation is helpful. I take as much pressure out of my body as I possibly can. I look at myself in the large mirror in the foyer with great self-satisfaction. I make myself a cup of tea. I drink from a mug from my childhood that I keep safely stored in the tea kitchen, and I watch Japanese breakfast television. Today my favorite presenter is visiting a karate school in Kyoto; the master is a brutal bone of a man. His name is Usagi. His victims usually crawl around like beaten dogs; you can see them in half a dozen YouTube videos. They suffer terribly. Usagi is a real Hulk with a fascist haircut. In his dojo he trains mysteriously incompetent students.

Usagi is one of my favorites in the realm of human comic-book figures. He shows the presenter this and that, but her attention is entirely on the cameras swarming around her. She is the star.

Japanese presenters go through hell for their job. Usagi’s chief dummy has to make a fool of himself in front of her. In my world he counts as one of the celebrities of involuntary comedy. The dummy has a colleague who suffers just as badly, while Usagi makes it clear that he has once again used at most three percent of his energy. The colleague knows better than anyone that he doesn’t come across well with his ragged teeth and his doglike gaze, which reminds me of my second-worst romantic mistake. Usagi remains consistently condescending. He responds to the pain contortions of his assistants with indifference. He handles a few more antique folk weapons, shortened flails, and multi-part striking instruments.

Niran appears. He has this streak of the draconian. He enjoys exerting a dominating presence. But the presence of the other high potentials keeps him in check.

Chet narrates

We are staying at the Oasi di Benessere, a brutally constructed 1970s brutalist, now somewhat shabby lodging block in Chiavenna. Under our window the Mera flows charmingly. Chiavenna is a Lombard municipality with Roman imperial foundations and a medieval old town. The nearest ski area is a twenty-minute drive away. People meet in front of the rack railway in Campodolcino. Most guests have arrived in at least five-person family groups for skiing. After breakfast they fan out and return in the afternoon. Then they peel out of their perfect ski outfits, wrap themselves in white hotel bathrobes, occupy deck chairs along the edges of the three paddling pools in the basement, and photograph each other with tablets. Now and then a mother pulls the fluff off her leg and stands there, just before stepping into the water, briefly bare-arsed in a storm of flash photography.

Aline prefers to read “The Night in Lisbon” once again rather than watch aromatized steam rise over hot stones in the sauna. For hours I have the sanus per aquam zone and the wellbeing area almost entirely to myself. Physiotherapists flit about. Heavily pregnant women feel their way through their programs. Convalescents limp to their treatments. A Chinese bodybuilder noisily uses the machines.

In the hotel parking lot and garage there is nothing cheap. The Italian middle class appears neat and content. There are a few Swiss guests and hardly any Germans. I enter the room and notice Aline’s scent. The scent dominates the smells of strangeness. Once again I consider Aline’s extraordinary presence. One would not suspect it at first glance. She doses her charisma, though not with me. With me she supplies all her magic. She meets me with a thoughtful look and puts the book aside.

“Come to me,” she entices. Her tenderness spreads like an air freshener. Air is her element. Aline is a being of lightness, born of air. She lifts her dress, raises her hips, and slips off her panties. She does this for me. It is a move I like to see. Aline’s tireless affection gives me a new home in the world. I come to her and the world stops being a large operation. Now there is only you and me. We are in a realized dream. Before you there was nothing, and after you there will be nothing more.

From offstage

She grants him a dive into Arctic eye-blue. The black of the pupil develops an Atlantic pull. Their way of experiencing each other allows for erotic games from the realm of advanced relaxation. It feels to her as if she were offering herself in an Aztec way to a personal sun whose cosmic fire cannot harm her alone. Sometimes she wonders what Chet is like with other women—how tender and how passionate. At the beginning of their love she still thought she could rise above it with ease, but now she knows it would tear her apart.

They are food for one another. Their unconditionality turns harsh when the contract of love is not fulfilled down to the last clause. By chance, or perhaps by its nephew, it happens that Aline and her sister Achara are sitting on their lovers at the same moment—one in a Lombard village that already existed in antiquity, the other in a North Hessian village where the history of the House of Hesse began. Between them lie only five hundred and fifty kilometers as the crow flies.