Robert Walser

The Gifted Person


Into the Bahnhofstrasse spilled the vesperal fluid, whispering traffic.  Athletes decorated with laurel wreaths that shimmered gold and silver in the torchlight were just then returning from the hubbub of a distant festival, to their wives and children who awaited their homecoming with impatience.

In an alley, conceivably almost romantic with its utter hush and sequesterdness, a woman, who felt at this instant beautiful, good, noble, magnanimous and distinguished, was looking up at a room on the fourth or fifth floor, where from a window an incalculable young man, who suffered from mood swings, looked down upon her and with a theatrical gesture threw to the timorous shadowy figure waiting there a rose which he might have picked unsolicited with a lilylike tenderness in a park.  Wife though she was of a diamond merchant, she'd been promptly thrilled to have given her heart to somebody without any income to dispose of.  He, however, seemed in his thoughts to be elsewhere, not with her, suffer as she might for him and his frolicsome spates of indifference.  Let us leave her to her whispers, speaking to the rose she has received from his white hands, which glowed in the dark of night, words of endearment.

Being gifted he certainly deserved the reverences of a woman so sensitive and not at all unbeautiful, but divinely graceful and knowledgeable.  The outstretch of her cultivation resembled an unsurveyable sea, and while he gaily and frivolously wrangled with himself, all those treasures lay at his feet.

Down the star-clouded alley a girl came leaping with an exclamation on her tongue: "Where shall I find the fellow who chatted me up for a while today and enchanted me, while so doing, with his lovelocks?  I don't think I'll be able to endure life unless he shares it with me."

The woman, who seemed to nose out who it was that the newcomer was referring to in words that harmonized with the splash of fountains and the fragrance of flowers that issued from the local gardens, laughed at the tearful simpleton and spoke: "I am a heroine."

Said a passer-by: "For all my generally recognized capabilities and the respect I enjoy, I have never been loved."

The gifted person called down to the group: "Being touched by the sympathy shown me, as I live at the foot of a mountain in the strange industrial city where for a while the Italianist Gobineau sojourned once, my thoughts are upon the ravishing Jewess with whom, while a cloudburst was pouring down, I rode across the Potsdamer Platz in an omnibus."



trns. by Christopher Middleton

in the catalog