Chapter Eighteen
As a man newly confirmed in his love, and one who had every right to believe himself loved in turn, I hardly minded when I received word in my office from Mme. Brunel, M. Petitpoix’s secretary, that the not-so-great man had me on his schedule for an unscheduled (by me) 9:00 meeting on the morning of that Monday following the most memorable week of my recent life. Nor did I especially object, when I arrived in the director’s office, to see a strange bullet-headed man in thick glasses and a business suit sitting on the sofa. But when Petitpoix—who was, uncharacteristically, himself wearing a suit, albeit one that looked as if it had come direct from the Flea Market on Plainpalais—introduced his guest as Dr. Martin Duerrenmatt, consultant psychoanalyst, and made it clear that the good doctor’s subject at Calvin College would be me, I became somewhat tetchy.
“Psychoanalyze?”
“At the college’s expense, of course. What I am proposing, Termi,” intoned Petitpoix, making a chapel of his fingers and gazing upward, at cobwebs or beyond, “is that you take the three or so weeks remaining in the Christmas term as a paid leave of absence during which we will all of us together try to come to terms with your ah. Condition.” He made it sound as if I were expecting a baby. “And reach a mutually agreeable conclusion.”
“Meaning, Petitpoix,” I suggested, “you want to find out if I’m bonkers or not before you chuck me out, just in case I decide to take you to court.”
“No, no, no, my dear professor,” interjected Dr. Duerrenmatt in a voice both high-pitched and hoarse. “No one’s suggesting anything more drastic than a short medical break and a series of casual conversations with me. Everyone is well acquainted with the widely varied forms that overwork and stress can take. Why, once, after a particularly trying course of teaching at the Zurich Poly, I went around the house saying nothing but ‘FIGUGEGL’ for three days! My wife was threatening to call the police by the time I snapped out of it.”
“’FIGUGEGL,’ eh? Charming, I’m sure. What does it mean?”
“’Fondue isch guät und git e guäti luunä.’ Zurich dialect for ‘fondue is good and puts you in a good mood.’Well, to be quite frank,” and here he lapsed into a series of powerful wheezes I interpreted as his version of laughter, “my wife thought I was headed straight for the burgerhölzli.” He smiled blandly. “The loony bin.”
How Swiss-German, I thought. How banal. Despite several spells in the army surrounded by Swiss-Totos, as we Genevese call our Swiss-German compatriots, I had never had the slightest interest in learning to speak their fractured patois. High German, aber jawohl! The language of Mann, Luther, Goethe, and Kant? Natürlich! But schwyzertütschli? The dialect of goatherds and barmaids and Zurich busdrivers? Nay, merci! as they said in Bern….
“So: Nothing formal at all,” said the excessively-amiable Dr. Duerrenmatt. “We can meet at a café, if you want.”
“And if I say no?”
Petitpoix lowered his gaze from the ceiling and tried to level it at me in a menacing fashion, but his eyes flickered, and I realized, with a small feeling of satisfaction, that I made him more nervous than he made me.
“If you say no, of course, we will have to discuss alternatives. But I strongly urge you to agree, for all our sakes.”
“How conciliatory of you, Petitpoix. I thought the gossip column in Le Procope Helvète was the last straw for you. Now you’re giving me another chance?”
He shrugged and said nothing. He didn’t need to. For all his lust to give me the sack, he’d come up against reality. This psychoanalytical caper was only the first act in the entirely predictable drama of easing an employee around the various obstacles our benevolent confederation has placed in the way of an employer eager to give said employee the heave. But it would be a long and tortuous process, and I had cards to play, too; in fact, in Switzerland the government bureaucrats are, theoretically, entirely on the employee’s side, unless gross misconduct or malfeasance of spectacular dimensions can be established, and I quote from memory: “assassination planned or actual; regular embezzlement from the company finances; clandestine filming of management procedures and/or wash rooms; daubing graffiti; using coarse language in public places”; etc. And I was guilty of nothing worse than claiming to have seen the Archangel Michael. In the Age of the Videohead, when the young are raised with, if not by, rapid-fire, ever-changing, unreal computer images, it hardly seemed like much of a transgression. (Yet I still hadn’t told Martine, even or especially after the other night when we’d had so much, and so little, to discuss… I still reeled, incidentally, sitting there in Petitpoix’s office, with Dr. Duerrenmatt perching on the edge of the sofa, as if ready to spring if I made a move—yes, I still reeled, and in my stomach flowered the thrill of knowing that I loved and was loved….)
“Yes, of course, Dr. Duerrenmatt,” I said, breezily. “By the way, I went to a doctor who told me I have a touch of limited-access porphyria that might be the cause, but that then again might not be.”
He frowned.
“Porphyria? But this is a disease of old people, Asiatics, peasants…”
“Quite. So I’d be delighted to have a chat. Which café do you frequent?”
Petitpoix emitted an audible gasp of pleasure. Duerrenmatt beamed, etching a surprising network of deep Amazon-delta wrinkles across his broad schwyzerdütsch features.
“Actually, my favorite’s the Temple,” he said. “In Carouge.”
“Good place,” I averred. “Good wine list.”
Bathing in bonhomie, we agreed to meet there in three days’ time. Petitpoix was so delighted he rose and came round his desk to shake my hand before escorting me out his office door, a dry run for the much-anticipated day when he would escort me out of the building for the last time…but the more I thought about it, the less that prospect worried me. I had a solid twenty-four years’ service and a reasonable pension plan and a good case for early retirement; I had my books, my poetry, my music, my mamma, my car…my woman…
….my Archangel…
So I was only too pleased, that chill, still, gray November day, to abide by the Senate’s injunction and take a leave of absence. I stopped at the Café des Philosophes across from my flat and had a coffee and a boule de Bâle and a small bowl of steamed carrots in garlic butter and enjoyed the snug warmth and quiet chitchat of the place, where occasionally that old Homer of modern Geneva letters, Marco Baldas, holds court for a worshipful clique of student admirers through a fug of Gauloise smoke and exhalations of threadbare philosophy and cheap eau de vie.
Casually, I filleted the papers: La Tribune, Le Temps, Le Dauphiné, the latest Le Procope….and yes, there it was, on page 3.
“Follow-up,” mewed the rag, “to last week’s epic spectacular The Professor and the Archangel. (We received more hits on our Internet site as a result of this article than for anything else we’ve published since Rabid Taki’s outing of the gay Iranian ayatollah in the March 17th issue.) Said mystical prof, now certifiable, waved arms and legs jointly in an access of dementia and bayed like a keeshond in heat and claimed once again to be in the presence of the Archangel Michael, whom by the way no one else could see, before collapsing in front of some 20 students in a lecture theatre at one of our venerable local educational institutions which is, even as we speak, exploring ways of putting the old lunatic out to pasture. (Unless this was a ploy on his part to enliven one of his notoriously puerile and insanely boring Alpine Literature classes.) Any openings for part-time Buddhas in the local Chinese eateries would be greatly appreciated. More anon.” The article was, like the last one, unsigned. I read on, but the next item was tedious droning about the rights of squatters in the St. Jean district. Fuming, I smoked. There was an irritating familiarity about the style of these Procope pieces, not just the usual sneering of the professional malcontent, but an extra soupçon of disdain, that reminded me of the style of a certain writer of my acquaintance…although to be fair to him it was a style much prized by modern critics (especially the ones on the way out), who, no doubt as a result of May 68, urban terrorism, the downfall of the family, and Andy Warhol, see their job as one not of elevation but of mockery. And yet! “Max Menninger,” Gax had once written in one of his more amiable pieces, “produces big, brown words in the same way that a prize hog produces big, brown shits.” Gax was the guru of a whole generation of so-called critics whose ultimate goal has nothing to do with inspiring a love of literature (ha!) but is, rather, to steer their own revolting little persons into as many television studies and beds as possible. “Notoriously puerile and insanely boring”: h’m. I could almost hear those words hanging in the air. Yes, it sounded like an inside job, these being the kinds of word pairings best uttered in the lofty drawl of unearned juvenile irony. There was a mole in my class. And there was an accomplice outside, and his initials, I greatly feared, might well be G.G.
I crossed the street to my apartment building, narrowly avoiding death from the speeding front end of a Fiat, and climbed the stairs with scarcely a wheeze. In my flat dust floated quietly about and the refrigerator hummed tunelessly to itself. There were no messages on the phone machine, not that I ever got any. Martine was in Interlaken for a “quickie shoot,” as they called it, of the opening of the Edelweiss Supreme, a new Chinese-owned but echt-Schweizerische resort hotel complete with a hundred waltzing Heidis and strutting alpenhornists. She would be away for another two days. (And when she came home it would be home to her professor. Already I envisaged crisper window curtains, polished parquet floors, a solid queen-sized captain’s bed to replace the sway-backed old backbreaker I’d been snoring on for these fifteen years and more.)
I weighed the merits of returning to my half-hearted new poem (how dated already, those celibate fulminations!) but instead read my e-mail on my sluggish second-hand Bell computer. Amid the exhortations for larger dick size and eternal youth: One anonymous misspelled group posting ribbed me for my visions and alluded to the Procope piece.
“Arch Poseur and His Angels, in Le Procope…or Are they Demons of Drink?”
The address was Swiss, the pen name Schtroumpf. I contemplated a reply but deleted the message and napped, then made tea and returned to the adventures of S. and A., albeit somewhat reluctantly after the deeply nauseating images of sex with the Führer (Good God, Martine! What were you thinking?), to the unusual life of Frau Lebel, née von Rothenberg. (Why didn’t she just get an annulment from the wretch and have done with it?)
“Psychoanalyze?”
“At the college’s expense, of course. What I am proposing, Termi,” intoned Petitpoix, making a chapel of his fingers and gazing upward, at cobwebs or beyond, “is that you take the three or so weeks remaining in the Christmas term as a paid leave of absence during which we will all of us together try to come to terms with your ah. Condition.” He made it sound as if I were expecting a baby. “And reach a mutually agreeable conclusion.”
“Meaning, Petitpoix,” I suggested, “you want to find out if I’m bonkers or not before you chuck me out, just in case I decide to take you to court.”
“No, no, no, my dear professor,” interjected Dr. Duerrenmatt in a voice both high-pitched and hoarse. “No one’s suggesting anything more drastic than a short medical break and a series of casual conversations with me. Everyone is well acquainted with the widely varied forms that overwork and stress can take. Why, once, after a particularly trying course of teaching at the Zurich Poly, I went around the house saying nothing but ‘FIGUGEGL’ for three days! My wife was threatening to call the police by the time I snapped out of it.”
“’FIGUGEGL,’ eh? Charming, I’m sure. What does it mean?”
“’Fondue isch guät und git e guäti luunä.’ Zurich dialect for ‘fondue is good and puts you in a good mood.’Well, to be quite frank,” and here he lapsed into a series of powerful wheezes I interpreted as his version of laughter, “my wife thought I was headed straight for the burgerhölzli.” He smiled blandly. “The loony bin.”
How Swiss-German, I thought. How banal. Despite several spells in the army surrounded by Swiss-Totos, as we Genevese call our Swiss-German compatriots, I had never had the slightest interest in learning to speak their fractured patois. High German, aber jawohl! The language of Mann, Luther, Goethe, and Kant? Natürlich! But schwyzertütschli? The dialect of goatherds and barmaids and Zurich busdrivers? Nay, merci! as they said in Bern….
“So: Nothing formal at all,” said the excessively-amiable Dr. Duerrenmatt. “We can meet at a café, if you want.”
“And if I say no?”
Petitpoix lowered his gaze from the ceiling and tried to level it at me in a menacing fashion, but his eyes flickered, and I realized, with a small feeling of satisfaction, that I made him more nervous than he made me.
“If you say no, of course, we will have to discuss alternatives. But I strongly urge you to agree, for all our sakes.”
“How conciliatory of you, Petitpoix. I thought the gossip column in Le Procope Helvète was the last straw for you. Now you’re giving me another chance?”
He shrugged and said nothing. He didn’t need to. For all his lust to give me the sack, he’d come up against reality. This psychoanalytical caper was only the first act in the entirely predictable drama of easing an employee around the various obstacles our benevolent confederation has placed in the way of an employer eager to give said employee the heave. But it would be a long and tortuous process, and I had cards to play, too; in fact, in Switzerland the government bureaucrats are, theoretically, entirely on the employee’s side, unless gross misconduct or malfeasance of spectacular dimensions can be established, and I quote from memory: “assassination planned or actual; regular embezzlement from the company finances; clandestine filming of management procedures and/or wash rooms; daubing graffiti; using coarse language in public places”; etc. And I was guilty of nothing worse than claiming to have seen the Archangel Michael. In the Age of the Videohead, when the young are raised with, if not by, rapid-fire, ever-changing, unreal computer images, it hardly seemed like much of a transgression. (Yet I still hadn’t told Martine, even or especially after the other night when we’d had so much, and so little, to discuss… I still reeled, incidentally, sitting there in Petitpoix’s office, with Dr. Duerrenmatt perching on the edge of the sofa, as if ready to spring if I made a move—yes, I still reeled, and in my stomach flowered the thrill of knowing that I loved and was loved….)
“Yes, of course, Dr. Duerrenmatt,” I said, breezily. “By the way, I went to a doctor who told me I have a touch of limited-access porphyria that might be the cause, but that then again might not be.”
He frowned.
“Porphyria? But this is a disease of old people, Asiatics, peasants…”
“Quite. So I’d be delighted to have a chat. Which café do you frequent?”
Petitpoix emitted an audible gasp of pleasure. Duerrenmatt beamed, etching a surprising network of deep Amazon-delta wrinkles across his broad schwyzerdütsch features.
“Actually, my favorite’s the Temple,” he said. “In Carouge.”
“Good place,” I averred. “Good wine list.”
Bathing in bonhomie, we agreed to meet there in three days’ time. Petitpoix was so delighted he rose and came round his desk to shake my hand before escorting me out his office door, a dry run for the much-anticipated day when he would escort me out of the building for the last time…but the more I thought about it, the less that prospect worried me. I had a solid twenty-four years’ service and a reasonable pension plan and a good case for early retirement; I had my books, my poetry, my music, my mamma, my car…my woman…
….my Archangel…
So I was only too pleased, that chill, still, gray November day, to abide by the Senate’s injunction and take a leave of absence. I stopped at the Café des Philosophes across from my flat and had a coffee and a boule de Bâle and a small bowl of steamed carrots in garlic butter and enjoyed the snug warmth and quiet chitchat of the place, where occasionally that old Homer of modern Geneva letters, Marco Baldas, holds court for a worshipful clique of student admirers through a fug of Gauloise smoke and exhalations of threadbare philosophy and cheap eau de vie.
Casually, I filleted the papers: La Tribune, Le Temps, Le Dauphiné, the latest Le Procope….and yes, there it was, on page 3.
“Follow-up,” mewed the rag, “to last week’s epic spectacular The Professor and the Archangel. (We received more hits on our Internet site as a result of this article than for anything else we’ve published since Rabid Taki’s outing of the gay Iranian ayatollah in the March 17th issue.) Said mystical prof, now certifiable, waved arms and legs jointly in an access of dementia and bayed like a keeshond in heat and claimed once again to be in the presence of the Archangel Michael, whom by the way no one else could see, before collapsing in front of some 20 students in a lecture theatre at one of our venerable local educational institutions which is, even as we speak, exploring ways of putting the old lunatic out to pasture. (Unless this was a ploy on his part to enliven one of his notoriously puerile and insanely boring Alpine Literature classes.) Any openings for part-time Buddhas in the local Chinese eateries would be greatly appreciated. More anon.” The article was, like the last one, unsigned. I read on, but the next item was tedious droning about the rights of squatters in the St. Jean district. Fuming, I smoked. There was an irritating familiarity about the style of these Procope pieces, not just the usual sneering of the professional malcontent, but an extra soupçon of disdain, that reminded me of the style of a certain writer of my acquaintance…although to be fair to him it was a style much prized by modern critics (especially the ones on the way out), who, no doubt as a result of May 68, urban terrorism, the downfall of the family, and Andy Warhol, see their job as one not of elevation but of mockery. And yet! “Max Menninger,” Gax had once written in one of his more amiable pieces, “produces big, brown words in the same way that a prize hog produces big, brown shits.” Gax was the guru of a whole generation of so-called critics whose ultimate goal has nothing to do with inspiring a love of literature (ha!) but is, rather, to steer their own revolting little persons into as many television studies and beds as possible. “Notoriously puerile and insanely boring”: h’m. I could almost hear those words hanging in the air. Yes, it sounded like an inside job, these being the kinds of word pairings best uttered in the lofty drawl of unearned juvenile irony. There was a mole in my class. And there was an accomplice outside, and his initials, I greatly feared, might well be G.G.
I crossed the street to my apartment building, narrowly avoiding death from the speeding front end of a Fiat, and climbed the stairs with scarcely a wheeze. In my flat dust floated quietly about and the refrigerator hummed tunelessly to itself. There were no messages on the phone machine, not that I ever got any. Martine was in Interlaken for a “quickie shoot,” as they called it, of the opening of the Edelweiss Supreme, a new Chinese-owned but echt-Schweizerische resort hotel complete with a hundred waltzing Heidis and strutting alpenhornists. She would be away for another two days. (And when she came home it would be home to her professor. Already I envisaged crisper window curtains, polished parquet floors, a solid queen-sized captain’s bed to replace the sway-backed old backbreaker I’d been snoring on for these fifteen years and more.)
I weighed the merits of returning to my half-hearted new poem (how dated already, those celibate fulminations!) but instead read my e-mail on my sluggish second-hand Bell computer. Amid the exhortations for larger dick size and eternal youth: One anonymous misspelled group posting ribbed me for my visions and alluded to the Procope piece.
“Arch Poseur and His Angels, in Le Procope…or Are they Demons of Drink?”
The address was Swiss, the pen name Schtroumpf. I contemplated a reply but deleted the message and napped, then made tea and returned to the adventures of S. and A., albeit somewhat reluctantly after the deeply nauseating images of sex with the Führer (Good God, Martine! What were you thinking?), to the unusual life of Frau Lebel, née von Rothenberg. (Why didn’t she just get an annulment from the wretch and have done with it?)