Karsten is a man who believes that procreation is not good because it creates new scenarios for suffering. His own past shows the extreme vulnerability of a human being. His wife proposes to adopt a child, which he accepts with excitement. But the psychologist who has to judge the suitability of the applicants for official permission questions his arguments.
Meanwhile, an obscure pro-life organisation that knows of his writings and internet presence on the subject of antinatalism tries to defame him. Life is a risky adventure with no happy ending, says Karsten, and his internet slogan is “make love not babies”. He wants to be in control of his own end, while at the same time ensuring the promotion of his messages.
Translation
Alfonso Sa Terriza
Approaches
“In fact, it is also possible that the psychologist would have aroused some interest in me,” said the German, who did not understand a word of what the detective was explaining to him, “if she had been thirty years younger and had a nicer face, let’s say. So what? Besides, indecent, why would it be indecent?”
The detective shrugged.
“As you wish,” he replied. “I have already fulfilled my purpose. I won’t say anything to anyone about the incident with the psychologist. The accusation of «indecent proposals», by the way, is a mere occurrence of mine. I just wanted to show you that, by having detailed information, you can pressure people with interpretations that are not necessarily correct but remain quite convincing. Maybe they would accuse you of harassment, which is what’s trendy nowadays. My former clients of Devotos de la Bella Vida would surely be interested. Their bête noir is the growing anti-natalism in our societies or the tendency, at any rate, to give up on forming families with many children. Ideology and religion aside, many have clothing, food and children’s book companies, businesses in the children’s sector in general and interests linked to private schools. Well, I’m leaving…”
It is neither love for the arts nor an ambitious display of talent that drives the pen of this improvised biographer, who does not even know where to start. There is a lot of material to sort through and investigate, and one possesses more will than craft, although there are plenty of reasons as well. The most important of these is to restore the reputation of a person who does not deserve the public treatment he has received, who is the target of a thousand inanities launched from some sectors of the media, each being less rigorous than the previous one, not to mention the impertinent echo in social networks. The unfortunate accident that left that child paralyzed does not justify such treatment, but it seems that there is interest in making that man guilty of something completely unpredictable. It was an accident and nothing more. And it’s completely gratuitous to accuse him of hating children for his renunciation of having children. Many times, in order not to do anyone the favour of upsetting me, I repeat to myself his battle cry: “For the sake of my mission, I’d rather be spoken ill of than be completely ignored.” Certainly, I also think that it is even better not to be ignored and, at the same time, to be treated with respect, a consideration that gives me sufficient motivation to carry out my difficult task, because, increasingly, any public dispute is resolved with insults and defamations.
Where to start? I will try to fit coherently the pieces of his personal history, complex as anyone’s, for which I have fortunately abundant material: some third-party testimonies and numerous digital documents full of autobiographical notes of the protagonist, so that we may attribute him some participation in this portrait. It is written in two pens, if you’d like. And it is not his that is the most accommodating; on the contrary, one can almost speak of self-flagellation on many occasions, motivated by repentance. So, if I can dig into his soul, so to speak, it is no less thanks to those writings than to knowing him personally or to having done my research.
Although it is easy to deny his enemies, it is not so easy to relate the affinities of his heart with his gestures and manifestations, something that, moreover, can be said of anyone, because there is not a thing in nature where the surface hides more from the eyes than the human being.
His work in the archive of medical records in a hospital of Barcelona was not up to his academic training or his interests, something not that uncommon in our country, and even more so if they are studies as impractical as Hispanic Philology or Philosophy. Even so, none of his previous precarious jobs had met working conditions as good as this one.
The most painstaking worker of Clinical Documentation was Oriol, a resolute and quite conceited fellow, also known as “the Infallible”, nickname of which he was secretly aware of and which he apparently did not dislike that much, ignoring perhaps the ironic tone that underpinned it, or instead dealing with it with sportsmanship, who knows. What most of his colleagues really thought was that he was cut out for being a social climber. We are talking about Oriol, the same person, and that is why I mention it, who during one of our sublime television talk shows qualified his former colleague as “very weird” and went so far as to insinuate supposed sexual harassment incidents for which at no time did he provide any details. And for what?
Karsten Obermaier had been living in Spain for more than twenty-five years. He could be called German or Goettingenian after the city where he grew up, Goettingen, although he was born in Austria, the homeland of his ancestors. Although he can hardly be considered a foreigner or outsider at this point, the fact is that in his working environment he was called “the German”, and that was fine with him. People could guess his foreign origin from his accent (especially the R’s betrayed him), as well as from his blond hair and even from his introverted temperament, perhaps, as is commonly seen in the north, not as expressive in his manner as we are in the Mediterranean lands.
It is true that he tended to be distant, with a certain air of indifference, or arrogance if his wife’s family is to be believed. The easiest thing to do was to attribute some unusual aspects of his character to his foreign origin. You know, the German coldness, his rigidity… Be that as it may, it would be more useful to talk about his personality traits than to speculate on the weight of his cultural heritage. With regard to his reserved character, he once hyperbolically confessed: “I can read and write, what I cannot do is speak.” As we shall see, it can be understood that an extreme shyness and serious difficulties in relating to others during his adolescence left him, as a legacy, a certain difficulty in spontaneous communication, which did not, however, cancel out his capacity for long disquisitions on complex subjects, as Marina, his study companion and privileged addressee of his thought, knows well. In short, he was a person of remarkable culture but lacking in people skills, the kind of person who might seem rather dim-witted if you don’t know them well. In his childhood and youth, he himself considered himself a fool for that very reason. I understand that arrogance and inadequacy are not mutually exclusive, but the latter could precede and explain the former. His apparent arrogance could have different explanations.
Marina was a thirty-two-year-old veteran student with whom he had conversations on all sorts of subjects, usually in the canteen of the Faculty of Philosophy, which he attended without much regularity, taking advantage, according to him, rather of the library and the computers than of the professors. His main interest lay in completing and publishing an essay on ethics, in which he tried to derive all notions of evil from suffering and criticised philosophers for shying away from the absolutely essential importance of suffering in our judgements and values. He attempted, for example, to dismantle Kant’s conceptual edifice based on the search for universal principles foreign to human sensibility. Everything that matters is or refers to sensibility, he said; the concept of importance itself implies sensibility. We are vulnerable, and who can deny the importance we attach to protecting our own wellbeing? Everyone acknowledges it, at least to themselves.
In the archive, the birth of an archivist’s daughter was once celebrated with many congratulations and some amusing warnings.
“No more being able to do whatever you want,” warned one of them. “Time to change nappies,” said another.
“I sense a touch of envy in the tone of your words,” replied the brand-new father.
“If we are talking about having children, fatherhood is not the main issue,” said Karsten, surprisingly, “but whether it is good or bad to create a new human being, because of what it means for said human being in and of themselves. A new individual is more than the
satisfaction of the parents’ wishes, it is an autonomous person exposed to many threats. I believe it is an ethical issue.”
There was a moment of silence and perplexity.
“But, what do you have against children?”, finally said the father.
“You don’t understand me. I’m talking about whether or not the very act of bringing a new human being into the world, whose fate we have no control over, is a good thing. Life can involve a lot of suffering and we have no guarantees. Your daughter is already in the world and you have to take care of her, evidently, and treat her with love and a positive attitude. I am not against children. I am talking about purpose, about decision making. There is a new scenario for suffering at stake and that should be taken into account.”
“Man, we can’t avoid suffering, life is like that,” replied the father.
“That’s what I say too, life is like that. And into that life we throw new, needy, vulnerable and mortal beings, we impose it without taking into account that the soul is a potential for suffering.”
“Well, we must accept life as it is,” interjected the Infallible, “and let each other decide freely. You have your own opinion, others have their own opinions, each one is free to have however many children they want… If you don’t want them, then don’t have them. Well… on the offensive! There are still three carts full of envelopes to hang up.” And after a brief pause, he continued: “By the way, Karsten, why do you take the medical records to the nursing assistants when it’s them who have to come and collect them?
A little defensively, he replied:
“Well…, I did it yesterday, it’s true, it’s just that I wasn’t very clear about it. According to them, they had been asking for it for a long time.”
The archivists’ quarrels with the nursing assistants were part of the job and added salt to the bland labour menu. When handling the envelopes, there was always a drawback to be squeezed out; after medical visits, the assistants would leave the medical records in whichever way they pleased, and the archivists would have to bend down to pick them up. The Infallible took pictures with his mobile phone of envelopes “lying all over the floor” in order to have evidence of this, and he made Montse, the Archive’s duty manager, complain to the assistants’ superior.
It is clear that Karsten did not contribute to his reputation when, on that occasion, he took a medical record to a doctor’s office against the opinion of the Infallible and others, who were convinced that an assistant had to come to collect it, because the problem was a lack of
foresight on their part. What were they thinking, that the Archive had personalised service? And the truth is that Karsten, as a novice, was in no position to question unwritten rules.
If he slyly sided with the nursing assistants, it was because he wanted to maintain good relations with the staff in general, something that is always interesting, at least when one has not been in a company for a long time, and also because he felt that the archivist front was too demanding, with attitudes that were slightly arrogant, one might say. Apart from the ability to perform tasks, in a job you also have to know the state and dynamics of the personal and collective relations between the staff, their hidden rules and power relations, a knowledge that was difficult for our protagonist to acquire, because there will be no person less able than him to participate in secrets, conjectures and warnings, or to simply learn the names and positions of all the important staff of the company.
Some people thought that Karsten’s behaviour was due to a certain interest in a female assistant. It could be, why not? There is nothing to hide, and here must figure what he once confessed to me: “Not having a partner, and for all practical purposes I don’t have one, kills me.” “For all practical purposes?”, I asked. “For me, that means to a great extent, relations in bed. I can’t help it”. But there is no concrete evidence of it either, let alone of truly reprehensible behaviour (although there is evidence of an irrepressible desire to discover his weaknesses).
He got on badly with his wife and the relationship seemed on the verge of collapsing, probably over the issue of the children they could not have, although many other details could be involved here, perhaps insignificant disagreements that over time add up to form a wall of separation, as so often happens. And when he arrived home from work, at about half past ten at night, Rosa would always be asleep already, facing the wall. He would take advantage of this to put on a Beethoven CD so he could listen to his favourite music with headphones and without distraction. In fact, he only listened to Beethoven, exclusively, so as not to waste time. He declared himself an absolute devotee of the German composer, who, according to him, composed music about events – not simply melodies, harmonies and rhythms – music about spectacular and unique events, able to nourish the deepest emotions just through the richness of the sounds and even more so through their architecture, their refined structural engineering.
He settled in Barcelona in the mid-1980s. He had met María, his first “long-term” partner and the reason for his roots in Spain, in Cadaqués, the picturesque village on the Costa Brava, famous for its illustrious neighbour Salvador Dalí. Her family was from Cádiz
and had moved to Barcelona when she was a teenager. She was now twenty-three. Her mother was no longer alive and her father was the kind of man children never get to know. To make a living, in the summers, she used to work as a waitress on the Costa, sometimes making the rooms, other times serving in a bar.
In Barcelona they lived in a simple house with chipped walls and a butane gas cooker and heating, but with a certain charm. It was a single-storey house with a fairly large inner courtyard which, in addition to a lemon tree and rose bushes on a side strip of land, had a small artificial pond in the centre and, at the back, a storage room with a young ficus tree with long, slender branches leaning against the wall. Inside the storeroom was Maria’s pottery wheel, not as a piece of junk but as a working tool. These, intended for sale at flea markets, could be found in many corners of the house, fulfilling an unforeseen decorative function, due to a certain overproduction in relation to the possibilities of disposal.
The official tenant was called Ricardo. He worked with a van for a large warehouse, and by sporadically helping him with deliveries, the German earned a meagre income. Ricardo told the foreigner that he had spent some time with a very annoying girl who always wanted sex and wouldn’t leave him alone. He ended up exhausted and tired of her. Now Ricardo was without a partner. Karsten believed that the latter was clearly the worse of the two options. A lot of sex was much better than little or no sex, no doubt about it.
At some point a young woman by the name of Isabel entered the flat, as there was still a small bedroom available and it was convenient to share expenses. One day Maria said to her partner: “Didn’t you hear something strange at night? There must be a ghost in the flat”. The signs became irrefutable. Doors could be heard moving very slowly, making an inevitable groaning hinge noise, so there necessarily was a ghost. But even so, Isabel dragged out her somewhat absurd strategy of trying to hide the relationship for weeks. She would leave her room at night to go into Ricardo’s and return to hers before it was time to get up. Ricardo didn’t let on either, but probably at Isabel’s request. All that didn’t make much sense.
One day they were all in the dining room and Isabel blurted out to Ricardo:
“What a remarkable guy you are, now you’re going to shit in a completely different
way!”
“Well, yes, ma’am,” Ricardo replied, undaunted, “I do it differently. I climb up on the
toilet and squat down. It makes evacuation easier, it’s more natural and more hygienic, in bars, for example.”
Everyone laughed at him. He really was quite original. So long as he wasn’t like ordinary people, he would make anything up.
“Ricardo,” asked Karsten, “do you have anything to put on those door irons, I don’t know what they’re called. They make a bit of noise.”
Maria had to make an effort to contain her laughter. “Hinges. They’re called hinges.”
“That’s right. The door hinges make noise.” He was about to add “and they wake up at night.” But at the last moment he preferred to be discreet and not to make anyone uncomfortable.
The couple decided to take a trip to Austria, for which they also invited Isabel and Ricardo and his father, who was a humble and kind person and also had a car, to participate. The cost of fuel would be shared between all of them, and they would go to Karsten’s mother’s house, which would turn out to be cheap, taking for granted the interest that more than justified the initiative. His mother and Erwin, his stepfather, had recently bought a very nice house near Graz, at the foot of a darkly wooded mountain, where it was not difficult to spot the occasional buck or roe deer. So the German had no trouble convincing his flatmates.
It was impossible to know what Ricardo’s father was expecting from the trip. Once in France, he gave some reason to be surprised. He found it strange that the waiters in a café didn’t understand him when he asked them in good old Spanish: “Where is the toilet, please?” It seems he did not reckon the plurality of languages in such close quarters. When they crossed the Austrian border, he surprised them with the following question: “But where is Austria?” He looked in all directions for Austria, and was somewhat disappointed to learn – if he even fully grasped the notion – that they were already in Austria. At the last break, in a bar, there arose the linguistic complication that neither Spanish nor French was spoken there, but German. The old man, not without pride, tossed the waitress the formula he had just learned in France, or rather a Spanish version of it: “One «café olé», please.” (Karsten explained, in German, that he wanted a milk coffee.) In Graz he missed the gondolas, which suggests that there was some connection in his imagination between Austria and Venice. Moreover, he was amazed at the very low prices of the leather shoes displayed in the shop windows, assuming the parity between shillings and pesetas…
And if Karsten refers to these details in his documents, it is not to make fun of anyone, least of all a humble and good-natured man, but to show how remarkable it can be how many notions are at stake and how they are shaken when one does not navigate in one’s accustomed environment.
Graz, Austria’s second largest city, without the imperial pomp of Vienna, stands out in a more picturesque and welcoming aesthetic. A small mountain, crowned by the iconic Clock
Tower, as well as the passage of a river enrich the old part of town, and any stroll through its centre leads through well-preserved alleyways from better times for urban aesthetics. The façades, the doorways, the surprisingly often accessible inner courtyards, the small squares, the park… Near the town is a long, convoluted grotto, which can be accessed from two opposite sides of a mountain. Sometimes concerts are organised in the huge central cave, full of impressive stalactites and stalagmites and bizarre columns in the natural side galleries. It is exciting to see and hear the orchestra surrounded by torches playing classical music in such a setting. A nearby village features an attractive open-air museum, with old houses that have been moved and rebuilt, many of them wooden with small windows and sturdy furniture inside, as well as chapels, farmhouses and schools of peculiar charm. According to Karsten, the difference to the reality of the surroundings is so small that it is hardly worth a visit. But they visited it, as well as the grotto and many other things, to the satisfaction of all travellers.
He was very happy to see his brother Olaf in Graz. After the family’s return from Germany to Austria (with the exception of our protagonist, for reasons that I will talk about later) he had been somewhere unknown for a long time without contacting anyone. He did not care if anyone was interested in his fate, like his older brother, for example. Now he was at his mother’s house, with whom he never had a good relationship, which was a bit strange. The only possible explanation was that he was not able to earn a living and it was good for him to have free board and lodging. In any case, the relationship between Olaf and his mother seemed to have improved a lot, a development for which there was a great deal of leeway given the dismal starting point. Karsten would have liked to know more about his brother’s life, but he only gave vague answers. Karsten would have liked to know more about his brother’s life, but the latter gave only vague answers to his questions, and he did not want to be indiscreet. A few weeks later, Olaf would disappear again, and today no one knows anything about him.
“Do you like wood grouses?” Isabel asked him. “They are very beautiful. I love
them.”
Karsten had been staring for several minutes at the painting of a capercaillie that hung
above the piano in the dining room, which had been in his grandparents’ house before. “What I see is a spell,” he said enigmatically.
On their return from their trip, plagued by a lack of money and work, Karsten and Maria decided to try their luck at the grape harvest in France. Hitchhiking, sleeping in a small tent and eating baguettes and fresh grapes from the ubiquitous vines, they managed to get hired near Montpellier after three or four days of searching. The owners of the vineyards, two
old brothers of a sullen and narrow-minded disposition, took them to a two-room shack where they had to sleep on worn mattresses on the floor and in the company of the occasional insect. A family from Murcia, consisting of five members, one of them a boy of twelve at the most, was already installed in the other room. There was no electricity, only a couple of gas lamps and a gas cooker.
During work, the brothers applied a method of pressure consisting of watching the workers from behind and intervening from time to time strategically with their own hands. One of the patrons drove the tractor into which the buckets full of bunches of grapes had to be emptied. The other would step in to cut when someone was a little behind in his row compared to the others, all moving in parallel. In this way, the worker who was lagging behind was marked, and everyone tried not to fall a metre behind, while the old men imposed a rapid pace. The vines were of a very low and stunted variety and you had to work with your back bent, with “a lot of reverence” as María used to say. After a while you couldn’t stand up straight without even more pain, but you had to do it from time to time so that you didn’t become permanently bent over. In short, the work was harder than they had imagined. In any case, the only thing that mattered was to work for a few weeks, hopefully three, and earn money that they couldn’t earn in Spain in two months.
On the eighth day, after a gradual lengthening of the shift, it occurred to the German grape harvester to ask those men, in the French he was able to remember from school, why they collected them half an hour before the agreed time and usually finished a similar amount of time later. The answer was a spectacle of unprecedented intensity. Instantly, one of the two old men choked and the colour of his face changed to purple; his brother, suffering a motor agitation, with his arms swirling in the air, began to shout out in a flurry of jumbled words, among which one could hear, like a spittle, the term communiste. It was so grotesque, especially the intended insult, that the German could not suppress a short laugh, which must have infuriated the indignant winegrowers even more. Maria had also stopped and was following the fuss in amazement. The communist turned to see how the Murcians were reacting, so he had another reason for astonishment: they were already at the other end of the field cutting bunches of grapes with the dedication of a sailor in the middle of a storm.
Once they had regained some composure and after a coughing fit from the tractor driver, the old men left the Murcians unattended for the first time to take the rebellious couple home and settle accounts. They were fired and sent off for the week’s work with a sum that included various subtractions, namely deductions from what had been agreed, such as taxes, which made no sense since they had not even been asked for their papers, and even
compensation for the half-rotten potatoes and tomatoes they had been given so that they would have something to eat in that hut far from any human population where they had had to live.
They considered going to the police. But a fairly strong intuition told them that nothing could be gained by doing so in hostile land, where one’s rights must have seemed like a defiant pretence: “What are you doing here if you don’t like it?,” they would think. As well as being anti-communist, this was likely xenophobic territory. Filled with rage, Karsten declared himself in favour of throwing stones at the thieves’ windows, but Maria dissuaded him, fearing trouble, as is easy to understand. So, they set off on the road again to hitchhike and get as far away from the place as possible. They asked in a few more places, but saw that it was no longer possible to find work in the area and returned home.
That house in Nou Barris no longer exists, having been demolished like many others in the area. As I write this, it can still be seen – I discovered it during a stroll to reconstruct details of the German’s life in Barcelona – an imposing ficus tree, with a trunk as wide as an old oak trunk, in the middle of some bushes and some broken flagstones. It must be the same one that our protagonist knew, still thin and fragile, leaning against the wall of the storeroom, as it matches the location of the now disappeared house in Rialb street, his home for at least the first five years of his life in Spain, perhaps the happiest by comparison, albeit with the shadows of scarcity of work and money and moments of serious economic concern.
He finished his workday at ten o’clock at night. Once in bed, after a quick supper and with his wife already asleep, he would listen to Beethoven for an hour or more. He even liked his Misa Solemnis, perhaps his most conventional work, which is the same as saying that it was not very Beethovenian. At one point, a violin descends mysteriously from the clouds with an ethereal movement destined to leave mortals spellbound at its transcendental call, impossible to describe, but it is undoubtedly the Holy Spirit. This moment alone justified hearing the entire mass.
Karsten used to say: “Life is a lousy setting, but there is Beethoven’s music.”
That idea which would mark his future appeared on a beautiful sunny day that anticipated the end of winter. The fragrance of mimosas in bloom scented the air. The Congost river was flowing more abundantly and happily than usual. It occurred to Rosa as they strolled along:
“Maybe we could see what that adoption thing is all about.”
“Okay,” Karsten replied calmly, because there can be many ideas; human beings are animals with a great talent for ideas and witticisms. Their brains are made to formulate all possible realities and even those that are not.
“All right,” said Karsten, digesting the suggestion slowly and gradually discerning a hint of transcendence. For this was a significant proposal, and by no means just a passing occurrence.
…And he already found himself doing paperwork, filling in forms, rummaging for certificates.
