A witty, philosophical novel by the author of the internationally bestselling In Times of Fading Light
Sometimes a cat comes into your life when you least expect it.
An unnamed writer finds himself in Cabo de Gata, a sleepy, worn-down Andalusian fishing village. He's left behind his life in Berlin, which it turns out wasn't much--an ex-girlfriend, a neighborhood that had become too trendy for his taste. Surrounded by a desolate landscape that is scoured by surprisingly cold winds (not at all what he expected of southern Spain), he faces his daily failures: to connect with the innkeeper or any of the townsfolk, who all seem to be hiding something; to learn Spanish; to keep warm; to write. At last he succeeds in making an unlikely connection with one of the village's many feral cats. Does the cat have a message for him? And will their tenuous relationship be enough to turn his life around?
With sharp intelligence and wry humor, Eugen Ruge's Cabo de Gata proposes the biggest questions and illustrates how achieving happiness sometimes means giving oneself up to the foreign and the unknown.
A witty, philosophical novel by the author of the internationally bestselling In Times of Fading Light
Sometimes a cat comes into your life when you least expect it.
An unnamed writer finds himself in Cabo de Gata, a sleepy, worn-down Andalusian fishing village. He's left behind his life in Berlin, which it turns out wasn't much--an ex-girlfriend, a neighborhood that had become too trendy for his taste. Surrounded by a desolate landscape that is scoured by surprisingly cold winds (not at all what he expected of southern Spain), he faces his daily failures: to connect with the innkeeper or any of the townsfolk, who all seem to be hiding something; to learn Spanish; to keep warm; to write. At last he succeeds in making an unlikely connection with one of the village's many feral cats. Does the cat have a message for him? And will their tenuous relationship be enough to turn his life around?
With sharp intelligence and wry humor, Eugen Ruge's Cabo de Gata proposes the biggest questions and illustrates how achieving happiness sometimes means giving oneself up to the foreign and the unknown.
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Overview
A witty, philosophical novel by the author of the internationally bestselling In Times of Fading Light
Sometimes a cat comes into your life when you least expect it.
An unnamed writer finds himself in Cabo de Gata, a sleepy, worn-down Andalusian fishing village. He's left behind his life in Berlin, which it turns out wasn't much--an ex-girlfriend, a neighborhood that had become too trendy for his taste. Surrounded by a desolate landscape that is scoured by surprisingly cold winds (not at all what he expected of southern Spain), he faces his daily failures: to connect with the innkeeper or any of the townsfolk, who all seem to be hiding something; to learn Spanish; to keep warm; to write. At last he succeeds in making an unlikely connection with one of the village's many feral cats. Does the cat have a message for him? And will their tenuous relationship be enough to turn his life around?
With sharp intelligence and wry humor, Eugen Ruge's Cabo de Gata proposes the biggest questions and illustrates how achieving happiness sometimes means giving oneself up to the foreign and the unknown.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781555979522 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Graywolf Press |
| Publication date: | 11/01/2016 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 120 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Eugen Ruge won the 2011 German Book Prize for In Times of Fading Light, his debut novel, which became a bestseller in Germany and has been translated into twenty languages. Anthea Bell is a prizewinning translator.
Read an Excerpt
Cabo de Gata
A Novel
By Eugen Ruge, Anthea Bell
Graywolf Press
Copyright © 2013 Rowohlt Verlag GmbHAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-55597-952-2
CHAPTER 1
Giving Notice
1
I remember stopping short midmovement. I remember the smell of coffee, or more precisely the smell of the little Arabian coffeepot I inherited from my mother, and what I specifically remember is how it smells inside when it's empty. I mean its own smell after it has brewed coffee hundreds and thousands of times (something I can describe only in rough-and-ready fashion by saying metal and coffee grounds, because usually I remember smells only when I'm actually smelling them).
As soon as I think of the coffeepot I remember the imprint of its ornamental brass handle on my left hand. But most clearly of all I remember the tiny (and probably pointless) movement of my hand when — tack-tack! — I tap the measuring spoon against the rim of the coffeepot and pause for a moment, maybe only a second.
I remember my surprise at suddenly finding myself there in my kitchen, in exactly that attitude, holding that coffeepot, in the middle of the tiny and probably pointless movement — tack-tack! — that I had carried out in just the same way the morning before (and the morning before the morning before), and for a moment I had the feeling that it was the same morning and I was the same man, a man who, like the undead, was doomed to repeat the same sequence again and again. The next moment I would go barefoot into the bathroom, as I had the morning before (and the morning before the morning before), I would have a cold shower, I would go back into the kitchen, still brushing my teeth, to turn down the gas when the coffee foamed up for the first time; I would stir my muesli — four kinds of cereal flakes with apple and banana — would make my way to my desk balancing the coffeepot in my left hand, and the muesli bowl on top of the coffee cup in my right hand, and I would switch on the PC while I began eating my muesli, hearing the fan start up with a sound like a spaceship, hearing the murmur of the hard disk, the eager clatter of the printer briefly testing itself and announcing that it was ready, and then, as on the morning before (and the morning before the morning before), I would sit in front of the screen, staring at the motionless blinking of the cursor, and I would know that, yet again, I wasn't going to get anything done today.
The next thing I remember is the moment when I tore off my old running pants and the cashmere pullover with holes in it (my favorite working clothes), and put on my jeans. I remember the stiff denim of the jeans, and the effort of forcing my body into them while it was still soft with sleep. I remember the despairing rage I felt, which in reality had nothing to do with the stiff fabric, but was the result of my casting my usual habits to the four winds. I was contravening an inescapable ritual, I was playing hooky from my self-imposed duty to work. My rage was vague and confused, but was directed chiefly against my father, as if it were his fault that I was reproducing, or imitating, his own regular, mechanical lifestyle, the way he sat down to work like a robot. The fact that it brought him success made it all the harder to bear.
I remember that a hot day was beginning outside, or rather I remember going down the corridor of the back part of the apartment, where I had been living since Karolin and I split up. I remember the cool air in the corridor and even now when, in my mind's eye, I pass the brightly painted front door of the punks who lived on the ground floor, I remember the smell of stale beer and marijuana and the lukewarm air blowing toward me through that ever-open door. I remember the penetrating heat of the sun outside the apartment building. I remember the brownish color of the asphalt. I remember that I was very soon sweating, because I was too warmly dressed, but most of all I remember the sweat cooling on my back and forehead as I sat in the Coal Café (in full, the People's Own Coal and Energy Café), in the shade of the large chestnut tree, perusing the breakfast menu.
I was the first customer. A waitress was going around with a small bowl, wiping down — a futile act — the garden furniture, which resembled bulky waste and which at the time, in the years of political change, I took for an interim solution, although it has now turned out to be a variant of the bohemian Prenzlauer Berg style in its own right. I forget what I ordered (some kind of Italian or Spanish or healthily organic breakfast), but I do remember that the waitress, who was probably studying business management or political science, addressed me by the formal you pronoun, and although I usually find it slightly intrusive to be addressed with too much informality in places like the Coal Café, the waitress's formality that morning annoyed me.
I don't remember the breakfast itself at all, or only the lettuce leaves that I didn't eat and the crumbs on the tabletop, and even those I recollect just because the sparrows set about pecking them up. I do know that I sat at the table for some time without moving, watching the sparrows. They approached cautiously but also with haste, their little claws slipping around on the tabletop as if they were novice skaters, and I also remember thinking it remarkable that even after thousands of years these birds, who after all had adapted superbly to city life, would probably never master the art of moving on a smooth tabletop without slipping off. It was simply beyond their capabilities, I reflected, but before I could pursue this train of thought any further the waitress came up to clear the table, shooing the sparrows away, and asked if I would like anything else.
Although my financial situation at the time was so precarious that before ordering every cup of coffee, I stopped to wonder whether I could afford it — or perhaps it was for that very reason, perhaps it was because I didn't want to look like a failure down on his luck to the obviously uninterested waitress — I ordered another latte macchiato anyway, and while I waited for my latte macchiato, something happened that I remember to this day in almost every detail.
Outside the café that had once been an ordinary coal merchant's place (and not, as the new owner from the Prenzlauer Berg district unwittingly supposed, a People's Own firm from East German days), a black BMW stopped and three men got out. They were young, or at least younger than I. Two of them wore short-sleeved T-shirts and jeans; the third was rather older than the others, looked more dissipated, and in general was what I imagined a pimp would be like. He wore a dark suit and a flowered shirt with its collar falling over the lapels of the suit jacket; a pair of presumably expensive sunglasses was perched in his mop of curly hair as if it had found its ultimate destination there; and he wore delicate shoes unsuited to any form of serious locomotion. They were moccasins, if that word is still in circulation, with two small strips of leather tied in a mock bow over the instep of each, the ends of the strips in turn forming tiny tassels.
In the "front yard" of the café, which in defiance of the regulations consisted of part of the broad Berlin sidewalk, commandeered for use by its customers, the seating was made up, among other things, of old planks that had once been part of some scaffolding and were now stacked along the wall of the building. They had probably been wiped down several hundred times by a waitress, but all the same they were covered with traces of whitewash and cement that had eaten into them. The suit wearer sat down on one of these planks without hesitating and began talking, in a loud Bavarian (or was it Austrian?) accent about things to do with computers. Or rather, he was talking about the sale of things to do with computers, about market shares and expansion. Words like sales, marketing, percentage, profit margin, and franchising (unknown to me at the time and still not entirely comprehensible today) assailed and penetrated my ear. The other two, more normally dressed men sat on plastic chairs turned to the speaker, bending slightly forward, nodding and making approving comments on what he said now and then, while the speaker himself, leaning back against the wall of the building, sat on the scaffolding plank with his legs crossed, letting an expression like that of a conqueror assessing what would shortly be his conquest travel over Kopenhagener Strasse, visible here for much of its length: over the gray facades, the windows, the rows of parked cars, and all the time, so my memory tells me, jiggling the foot of his crossed leg while the tassels of his ridiculous shoes, unsuitable for walking as they were, leaped around one another like dachshund puppies.
That, I think, was the moment when I conceived the idea of leaving this city (this country, this life) until further notice.
2
I recollect the sunny but already cool day in fall when I went to the mailbox. I was moving as if guided by remote control, or if my memory serves me correctly, like a man venturing into the street for the first time after a long sickness.
I also remember the letter dropping into the box, and the brief squeak of the flap. I remember that after mailing my letter I didn't go straight home but on along Gleimstrasse, past Falkplatz and toward the tunnel. The leaves of the maple (was it a maple?) on Falkplatz were already turning, the road led slightly downhill, and it could have been this downhill direction that reminded me of another occasion, several years earlier, when I had given notice before. Then I had not been giving notice of my intention to leave an apartment; I was giving notice at work, where I had a well-paid and of course permanent position at the Institute for Chemical Engineering. Even the fall of the Berlin Wall made no difference to that. The institute stood on a small rise called the Ravensberg, and now, as I walked past Falkplatz toward the Gleimstrasse Tunnel, I remembered going the long way from the Ravensberg down to the city on foot after a final conversation with the human resources officer. It had been fall then, too, with the sun shining, large, leathery leaves rustling underfoot, and the word downhill was haunting my mind like a prophecy.
Next I gave notice to the energy supplier and the telecommunications company. I recollect tedious phone conversations that went on and on, until one of the ever-changing people at the other end of the line agreed that I couldn't possibly be in possession of my own death certificate. That tiny detail may have been the deciding factor. I began searching my moving boxes, still not completely unpacked from last time, for other agreements, insurance policies, and so on, and although my haul can't have been particularly large I still seemed to be surprisingly deeply entangled in the whole thing (I mean society, the system), and the more difficult and laborious it subsequently became to extricate myself from that entanglement, the stronger my urge to do so became, until I was possessed by a positive mania for giving notice. I don't recollect in detail to whom I gave notice about what; I just gave notice to everyone and everything. I even succeeded in liberating myself from the medical insurance that every German citizen is legally bound to have, on the grounds that I would be out of the country for an indefinite period of time. But when I finally went to the residents' registration office, where oddly enough I had to produce written confirmation from my landlord before I could de-register, it turned out that to do so was possible only if I entered my future place of residence on the de-registration form.
I don't remember the woman's face anymore, only that she was a blonde (a bottle blonde). And I remember the aunt-like note of condescension in her voice as she said:
But surely you know where you're going.
I remember my attack of nausea when the first chocolate figures of Santa Claus appeared in shopwindows, and I still didn't know where I wanted to go. I remember the snowless darkness of the streets, the candy-wrapper luster of the shopping malls, the faces of the young women who seemed to me more unforthcoming than ever before in the artificial white light. And I remember the Advent star that was suddenly hanging everywhere in the stores, and although I am not a Christian, all at once I felt it was intolerable for that symbol to be so shamelessly exploited. I was even surprised that such a thing was allowed in this (allegedly) Christian country. I walked around among all these people buying and selling, full of resentment, and felt entirely confirmed in making my plans to flee.
But there were other moments, for instance, late afternoon, the only time of day when sunlight fell into my apartment. The light then was raspberry-red, seeming to thicken the air, and I drank it like syrup as I wandered barefoot around my two rooms; the little pendulum clock that I inherited from my mother made nibbling noises in its case like a pet animal, and I couldn't understand why I had given notice to leave the place.
I asked friends and acquaintances about their own experiences of foreign travel. I remember recommendations like South Africa or Ecuador. Ghana was also mentioned several times, and the Seychelles, of which I knew nothing at all. I do know I wondered how people had managed to travel far and wide so few years after the Wall came down. However, hardly anyone could think of a place that was warm in winter, at the same time inexpensive, and preferably could be reached traveling by land. I must admit that I hesitated to mention the last of those three conditions, because I didn't want to confess to discomfort at the prospect of flying, if not actual fear of it. Instead, remembering an entry in the Swiss author Max Frisch's diary, I said I liked to preserve a sense of the distance of the journey, or tried to explain that I didn't want either adventures or tourist attractions, which of course raised the question of what I did want — and I remember that I answered that question several times in very different ways, without feeling convinced of any of them myself.
In the end I went to the municipal library and studied climate maps. I remember red and blue diagrams, numbers and measurements, but what I remember with particular clarity is that I felt at more and more of a loss the more thoroughly I studied the subject — an experience that suddenly seemed to me familiar. The more closely I looked, the more blurred everything became. At this point, of course, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle occurred to me, and I entertained the admittedly philosophical rather than scientific idea that what Heisenberg described on the nuclear plane (to wit, the incomprehensibility in principle of the subject) is a quality immanent in the material, and one that consequently, indeed inevitably, must be continued in the visible world: it was impossible for me to find the right place. I liked this realization, and indeed it actually cheered rather than alarmed me. I remember that it felt as if I weren't taking my situation seriously, as if I were standing there studying myself like a character in a novel, and if I have remembered this moment of unfounded cheerfulness, like many other, less significant moments, then it is probably because at that time I was testing everything that I did or that happened to me at the same moment, or the next moment, or the moment after that, for its suitability as a subject — that even as I was living my life, I was beginning to describe it for the sake of experiment.
3
In a kind of weapons store I bought a supersharp Opinel knife (not stainless steel), and a small can of red-pepper spray. I also bought an inflatable neck pillow in Camp Four, for traveling at night, and a hammock that weighed almost nothing and took up very little space in my bag.
I knocked two strong hooks into walls of my room and slung the hammock between them to try it out. I had never used a hammock before. I remember that the word embryonic came into my mind as I tested it: embryonic passivity. Mother Earth taking me gently in her arms. I lay in the hammock for hours; I read in it, slept in it, used it as a chair where I sat to drink coffee. Lying in the hammock, I developed several theories that I remember only in vague outline: about the connection between idling and a sense of life (I mean the ability to feel that one is alive); about Columbus, who, as we know, brought the hammock to Europe; about ideas of growth and Christianity. I pictured myself and my hammock in fantastic southern landscapes, and suddenly everything struck me as easy. As long as there were two trees to support the hammock I would not be at a loss.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Cabo de Gata by Eugen Ruge, Anthea Bell. Copyright © 2013 Rowohlt Verlag GmbH. Excerpted by permission of Graywolf Press.
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