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pillows. And suddenly he began to exude a smell that I knew well, the smell of the dying. During these days our theology student lay facing in my direction more often than in Immervoll’s. He spent most of his time reading a theological work; I had the impression that he read nothing else. When his parents came over from Grinzing they sat on his bed and spent most of their time telling him that he was all they had in the world and that he must on no account leave them.
I
, however, did not have the feeling that he was on the way out. One night Immervoll was pushed out into the corridor in his bed: I had slept through his death. His bed was standing in the corridor, freshly made up, when I went to outpatients the next morning with my temperature chart, to have my weight checked. I myself was reduced to skin and bone, except for my moon face and my distended belly, which had become a horribly insensitive ball that looked as thoughit might burst at any moment and had a number of small fistulas on it. One day the theology student had his radio on, and hearing a broadcast of a motor race from Monza, I remembered that Paul’s other consuming passion, besides music, was motor racing. In his early youth he had been a racing driver himself, and among his friends were a number of world champions in this field, which I have always found repugnant, because I can think of nothing more brainless. But my friend was like that—there were countless sides to his personality. To me it was inconceivable that the person who in my opinion had the cleverest things to say about Beethoven’s string quartets and was the only one to decode the Haffner Symphony for me, revealing it to be the mathematical wonder I have thought it ever since, was also a motor racing fanatic, in whose ears the noise of cars roaring murderously round the circuit was music no less sweet. The Wittgensteins were all motor racing fanatics, and still are, and for years they used to invite the best racing drivers to stay with them in summer on their estates by the Traunsee. I recall that Paul would invite me to spend the evening and half the night at his house overlooking the Traunsee, in the company of Jackie Stewart and Graham Hill, both of them jolly fellows, as well as Jochen Rindt, who had a fatal crash at Monza shortly afterward. When Paul was over sixty he told me that he naturally saw things differently now; he saw that motor racing was brainless, as I had always told him. But Formula One clearly still had such a hold over him that it was scarcely possible to be with him without his mentioning his beloved motor racing at some point. He would find a way of bringing it intothe conversation and then be unable to drop the subject, so that one instantly had to think of means of steering him away from his lifelong obsession when it suddenly took over again. He had in fact two passions, which were at the same time his two main diseases—music and motor racing. In the first half of his life it was motor racing that meant everything to him; in the second half it was music. And sailing. But how could he indulge his sporting passions now? By the time I met him they were no more than theoretical, as he had long since ceased to take any practical part in motor racing and had given up sailing. He no longer had any money of his own, and his relatives kept him on a tight budget; meanwhile, after he had for years been prone to depression, they found him a job in an insurance firm, the so-called Ringturm, where he suddenly had to earn his living, being left with no other option. As may be imagined, he did not earn much money carrying documents around and drawing up lists. But he did have a wife to support, and he had to pay for his apartment in the Stallburggasse, diagonally opposite the Spanish Riding School—and the rents in the First District are extremely high. The formerly footloose
Herr Baron
now had to turn up at the office at half-past seven in the morning,