Patricia Highsmith: "Salt and its price"
The book
New York, 1948. Therese, 19 years old, slim and shy, engaged to the very hard-working, but also boring Richard, hopes for a chance as a stage designer. Carol, tall and voluptuous blond, has a rich husband, a little daughter and every now and then affairs. Love meets the heroines with all their might. And at the same time it is exposed to even greater dangers. When the two women decide to travel together, they are followed by a detective who is to collect evidence of their forbidden liaison.
With her novel, published in 1952 under a pseudonym, Patricia Highsmith touched on one of the biggest social taboo topics of her time, lesbian love.
The author
Patricia Highsmith was born in 1921 in Fort Worth, Texas. Her debut novel "Two Strangers on the Train" was filmed in 1951 by Alfred Hitchcock and made her famous overnight as a crime novelist. "Salt and its price" appeared in 1952 under the pseudonym Claire Morgan. Only with the new edition 1984 under the title "Carol" was Patricia Highsmith recognized as a writer. She died in 1995 in Locarno, Switzerland.
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Leseprobe "Salt and its price"
It was the rush hour of the lunch break in the staff canteen of Frankenberg? S. There was no space at any of the long tables; More and more new arrivals lined up in the queue behind the wooden barrier next to the cash register. Between the tables, people searched with their food tray in their hands for a space to squeeze in, or for someone who was about to leave, but in vain. The clanking of the plates, chairs, the sound of voices, the shuffling feet, and the cracker-crack of the turnstiles in the room with its bare walls sounded like the sound of a single big machine.
Therese ate nervously, the brochure "Welcome to Frankenberg's" leaned against a sugar bowl in front of her. She had read the thick booklet last week on her first day of training, but she had nothing else to concentrate on to master her nervousness in the canteen. Again, she read about the holiday benefits, the three weeks' vacation granted to employees when they worked at Frankenberg's for fifteen years; she ate the hot dish of the day? a gray slice of roast beef with a scoop of mashed potatoes, covered in brown gravy, a mountain of peas and a tiny cardboard bowl of horseradish.
She tried to imagine working in the Frankenberg department store for fifteen years and realized that she did not succeed. "Twenty-five" received four weeks' holiday, the brochure revealed. Frankenberg's also provided a holiday home for summer and winter vacationers. Actually, there was one more church, thought Therese, and a hospital where one could deliver. The department store was so jail-packed that sometimes, with horror, she thought it belonged to it. She flipped quickly and saw on a double page the large letters: "Are you a Frankenberger?"
She looked across the room at the windows, trying to think of something else. The beautiful black and red patterned Norwegian pullover she'd seen at Saks's and could have given Richard Christmas if she did not find a nicer wallet than the models offered for $ 20. That she could go to West Point with the Kellys next Sunday and watch a hockey game. The big square window on the opposite wall looked like a picture of? what was his name? Mondrian. The small window glass square in the corner and around it white sky. And not a bird that flew through. What kind of set would you design for a piece that was in a department store?
She was back at the starting point. But with you, it's something else, Terry, Richard had said to her. It's clear to you anyway that you'll be out in a few weeks, not with the others. Richard said that next summer, no, she would be in France. Richard wanted her to drive with him, and there was no reason for it. And Richard's friend Phil McElroy had written to him that he might be able to get her a job with a theater company for the next month. Therese had not met Phil yet, but her confidence that he could get her a job was slim.Since September, she had been searching all over New York, combing through, without any result. In the middle of winter, who should have a job for a aspiring stage designer who was about to gain her first experiences?
It seemed equally unreal to her to be in Europe with Richard next summer, sit in the street cafes with him, roam Arles with him, visit the places Van Gogh had painted, choose Richard together with cities where they could get one Wanted to stop for a while, so that he could paint. And in the last few days since she worked in the department store, it had seemed even more unreal.
She knew what she did not like about the department store. It was something she would never tell Richard. It had something to do with the fact that everything she'd never liked, as long as she could remember, was reinforced by the department store. The pointless activities, the purposeless detentions that seemed to prevent them from doing what they wanted or could have done? in this case, the complicated handling of purses, workwear control, and time clocks, which ultimately prevented the employees from doing their job as smoothly as possible, gave the impression that each one of them was related to no one else and isolated from all others, and that the meaning, the message, the love or whatever each life could find no expression.
It reminded her of conversations at dinner invitations or cocktail parties, when people's words seemed to hover over dead, immovable objects and no strings were ever struck. And when one tried to touch a sounding string, his eyes remained fixed and unflinching, so inconsequential that they did not even appear as an excuse. And the loneliness, reinforced by the fact that in the shop day after day they saw the same faces and occasionally faces that could have been addressed but never addressed and never addressed. Unlike the face in the passing bus, which seems to speak to us, flashing for a moment and then disappearing forever.
Every morning, when she waited in line at the clock in the basement and her eyes unconsciously separated the permanent employees from the temporary workers, she wondered how she had landed here? she had answered an ad, surely, but that was no explanation for her lot here? and what she might expect next instead of a stage design job. Her life was a series of zigzag movements. She was nineteen and scared. "You have to learn to trust other people, Therese, do not forget that," Sister Alicia had often admonished her. And often, very often, Therese had tried to stick to it. "Sister Alicia," Therese whispered softly; the lisping syllables had something comforting.
Therese straightened again and grabbed her fork as the boy clearing the plates approached. She could see Sister Alicia's face in front of her, bony and red as rosy stone in the sunlight, and the starched blue curve of her bosom. Sister Alicia's big bony figure, who came around a corner in the hall, walked between the white enamel tables in the refectory, Sister Alicia in a thousand different places, and her little blue eyes always found Therese infallible, seeing her as special among all the other girls. Therese knew this, although the thin pink lips always formed the same straight line.
She saw Sister Alicia handing her the green knit gloves, wrapped in tissue paper, without smiling, but holding her almost wordlessly and brusquely on her eighth birthday. Sister Alicia, who told her with the same compressed mouth that she had to pass her arithmetic exam. Who else would have been interested in whether she passed her arithmetic exam?
Therese had kept the gloves at boarding school in the back of her tin drawer for years, when her sister Alicia had long gone to California. The white tissue paper had become soft and wrinkled like old cloth, but the gloves had never worn it. And finally they were too small for her.
