Abel and Cain

by Gregor von Rezzori

  “When they’re making a movie and they want to give a modern cityscape a period character, they sometimes take small cardboard cutouts painted naturalistically—walls, merlons, gingerbread eaves, gables, oriels—and attach them to the camera lens, replacing or concealing whatever is missing in reality or destroys the illusion. That is, whatever does not fit in with the desired representation. Photographed together, the real city and the cutouts yield the intended image perfectly.

  “I am expressing myself vividly enough, aren’t I? I mean, it would be wrong if you had the idea that this is a solid, closed world, a world of Frenchmen, to which you find no entrée because you yourself, true to the cliché of a German, are too formless, too weightless, too nebulous. On the contrary, you have to realize that here, beyond the cutout of Paris that you carry before your eyes, evolution has taken a step into another aggregate state. This different state of things doesn’t allow you to identify with it, because it’s you—yes sir, you, yourself—who has too clear a form, is made of too solid material, flesh, bone, a turtleneck sweater, corduroy pants. In short, it’s you who are too much alive. An act of dematerialization has taken place here, in Paris, which our kind still have left to us. A rarefaction of matter, as when water is transformed into steam. The molecules have moved apart, making contact and communication impossible—not really for psychological reasons but purely for physical reasons.

  “I grant you, it’s not easy to accept this. The city of Paris is constructed of hard stone. The French are a hard people. Their roots vein the rock beneath their soil—a fine soil, a rich earth that brings forth wheat and wine grapes in abundance, and, one would think, an earth whose children are cheery, sociable, bighearted. But no, they have stony faces, their souls are frozen in the glacial coldness of a national culture that produces instant classics, that emits each classic with a helmet, a shield, and a spear, like Pallas Athena springing full blown from the brow of Zeus. They still have the gift of form, these French. They think and speak nothing but beautiful petrifacts. When they laugh it sounds like pebbles clattering . . . And if one is not made of stone as they are (and is a pederast in the bargain, for along with a few exotics, a couple of Balkanese, and some Russian Jewesses, pederasts are the ones who make the stone circus here dance to their tune)—if someone does not belong to their stony world, he is simply ground down into sand. Soon he no longer exists, no longer finds himself present, finds only rubbish left over from himself, the materia prima of which he once was made, now pulverized, scattered. He is no more than a humming in his own skull; that’s all that’s left of him. Well, that is true, and yet it’s still just another illusion. Reality is paradoxically the reverse. For all this is utterly abstract. It takes place in the concrete, but so entirely translated into the spiritual, so knowingly staged without any connection to the natural, that only lunatics can accept it as reality.

  “Sure, you have problems with the language. This leads to even greater deceptions and misconceptions. Despite eight years of school French, eight years of studying this beautiful language that institutions of humanistic learning count among the living languages and that is no more alive than the grillwork on a Gothic church window—despite eight years of French, you, a highly educated man, can manage in this language to claim proudly that you are the state, and not much more. And there’s little one can do with that nowadays, the state being the most controversial institution of the present age. Here, you are restricted to the purely optical; that is, so to speak, to the zoological.

  “Here in Paris, you see mainly Frenchmen. Well, for all his national characteristics, a Frenchman looks as universally human as any other exemplar of the White Race. All in all, the French are an important, probably the most important, people in Europe. If one is struck dumb before the French, it is not just for reasons of linguistic ignorance—if you will forgive that expression—but out of admiration. Unfortunately, this obtains most of all for the French themselves. I swear to you: you could be as eloquent as Cyrano de Bergerac, but your chatter would never succeed in snapping the French out of their mania—the mania of their self-absorption. They live in a kind of trance—not merely a different state of consciousness but a different state of biological existence.

  “Encounters such as you may have envisaged (Goethe runs into Lavater: ‘ ’Tis thou?’—‘ ’Tis I!’) no longer occur here, not even as a hostile collision. And it is no advantage to you that, forgive me for saying so, a Frenchman can identify you as a boche a kilometer away. It does not even bring you hatred, which, after all, would be a relationship of some kind, even if in the negative, so to speak. Not even the aggression normally and subconsciously released by the collective mind against old archenemies (I mean the aggression that once acted as Keeper of the Seal for such tensions in old Europe), not even this ancient human feature emerges here. This cannot be good in the long run, my friend. I worry about our dear old continent. You feel like a stranger here, all right. As if you had been cast ashore on a different star. Do you think you’re the only person who feels like this? No, no, I tell you: the sense of being fundamentally alien here, of finding oneself on a different planet, among Martians, is not restricted to us non-Frenchmen, us foreigners, us transients in Paris. Some fifteen million native Parisians and purebred Frenchmen share that feeling with us. Just about everyone here lives on a different star. Simply through the abstraction of this French world, which immunizes the individual against the immediately human. Believe me, friend, it won’t help you to truck through the streets in your still-earthly constitution, with good German fat on your belly and beer-thickened blood in your veins. One doesn’t inveigle one’s way into life here by being conspicuous. Take me, for instance: I am certainly anything but a run-of-the-mill type in these surroundings—true, I’m not exactly striking, but at least I can’t be easily classified, readily placed in an ethnic category. I’m rather shapeless, amorphous. An ethnic jellyfish, as it were. A non-Frenchman with no pronounced racial characteristics or identifiable accent (since I don’t give my diction the broadness of padded American shoulders, as certain other people can). Fitting in with no ethnological cliché and yet easily made to fit any at all. Whenever I find it too difficult to explain why I am not the child of any fatherland, too difficult to cite my confused background and the requisite facts about the ethnic, geographic, and historical conditions of Central Europe, then I can get away with calling myself a Russian, Dutchman, Swiss, North Italian, or Irishman. But not a Frenchman, for God’s sake. So one cannot deny there is something blatantly different about me.

  “Now, one might think I could easily get lost in the crowd here, on the much-celebrated Paris boulevards, which, as we all know, sport the dregs of the melting pot like the head on a glass of pilsner beer. I don’t stand out in any way, either in clothing or in conduct, I am not visibly stunted or crippled, not spastic or mongoloid, and I don’t have an obvious nervous tic—an angular jerking of the head out of the shirt collar, or even a sneering sidelong twist of the mouth, tightening the nostrils and giving them a deathly pallor; in short, I am conspicuous by being inconspicuous, as it were. And still, the stares of all who come toward me tell me that I am a stranger, that I am essentially, substantially, and fundamentally foreign, and yet am nevertheless no more foreign than anyone else.

  “The stares of the people coming toward me are neither curious nor disapproving nor even hostile, but certainly not pleasant or friendly. All they express is complete indifference. But they want me to feel this indifference. As if I were supposed to realize that I am not worth so much as a shrug, even as an alien. Just like any fellow Frenchman. On se fout de vous, monsieur, because it’s intrinsic in the French national character. On se fout de vous comme on se fout de tout le monde, mêmes de nous-mêmes.

  “But beyond that, I am devoid of a physiognomy, as far as they are concerned. I could run around without a face, as if painted by Magritte: a patch of blue sky with a cumulus cloudlet between hat and coat collar. But the French seem eager to mak
e me aware of the abstract manner in which I exist here without existing for them, the abstract manner in which we all exist here without existing for one another: optically experienced not as human faces but as physiognomic splotches in the continuously and nervously altered, shifted, changing mosaic of the city; flesh-colored swabs in the torrent of hundreds of thousands of nonexistent coexisters on the streets, avenues, boulevards, and promenades; the flotsam of detached anatomical parts—a pair of eyes, an ear, a nose, a tuft of hair (lots of hair recently, long smooth curly kinky bushy shaggy matted hair), a bald pate, an extremely beautiful wart, the amazing craquelure of veins in a drunkard’s cheeks, the scrotum-like bags under a rich dowager’s Saint Bernard eyes, the ludicrous drama in an intellectual’s knitted brow. . . drifting rubbish, as I said, lamentable testimonies to earlier human presence in a flooded area. The inundating element in which all these things float is the French national consciousness. And now I ask you: Is this a suitable price to pay for form? . . .

  “You envy me for living here. But have you ever figured out how I really live here? Enviably naturalized, right? A true-blue Parisian. Chives in my soup. Greeted like a long-familiar person by the hotel clerk, by the concierge in the rue Jacob, by the waiters at the Flore and the Deux Magots, by the newsdealer at the corner stand, by the greengrocers in the Marché Buci. Granted, a long-familiar person with whom, for ten years now, they have never exchanged more than sporadic sentences about the weather and the lousy political situation. Of course, I also know a few Parisians who belong to a less accessible category. All kinds of movie people, not only the aloof creative ones but also the solid business kind: distributors, theater owners. I also know a lawyer, a banker, why, even pillars of culture, for instance a museum director. We call each other ‘cher ami,’ we invite each other out for lunch or dinner, with the wives, if you please. My captivating way with the ladies even gets me invited to people’s homes. I send flowers, exchange hugs, we drink aperitifs, I shine, I fondle the kids, the maid, I praise the food, admire the family porcelain, the wine, the elegant furnishings, I piss into the family bathroom sink, dry my hands on Monsieur’s towel, brush my hair with Madame’s brush—why, greater intimacy cannot be imagined, except of course the ultimate one. But that too has occurred, yes indeed. One has exchanged lewd tendernesses with the wives, même dans le lit matrimonial. The husbands were away. But even then, one parted with the feeling of having rid oneself of a burdensome obligation. At least with a sense of relief that one wouldn’t have to go through the same thing again for another six months. The form is always maintained.

  “I go out of town a lot, unfortunately. Still, I come back regularly, and then I may possibly have folkloristic experiences that make it seem as if some forgotten corners of existence still had the bright lively life that, before losing the first half of my life, I once assumed was naturally present and profuse everywhere, even if (and precisely because) I myself was for the moment not taking part. For instance, my aforementioned concierge in the rue Jacob evidently couldn’t stand watching me suffer over Dawn, so she invited me to her niece’s wedding in some almost rustic banlieue out near Le Bourget. And there I could sniff the warm, wine-soured, garlic-sharpened breath of the people. Since then, I say hello to every street cleaner I see because I imagine he might have been one of my fellow revelers. We ate and drank gargantuanly. We whirled in waltzes, swinging tubs of sweaty female flesh laced up to an ironclad roundness. We avowed our mutual friendship and thumped each other so hard on the back that our tonsils slid out through our teeth. Here too, of course, it came to lewd business with one of the bridesmaids, a girl in her thirties and hence short of breath during the inspection of erogenous zones. We made a date to get to the bottom of the matter, but naturally I didn’t show up, and actually I’m sorry about it today, although one can’t be too careful in such matters. The animal triste post coitum, you know, is especially dangerous here in Paris; one gets the craziest ideas.

  “I remember a girl sitting at the next table in the Flore. I had been ogling her for a while, not only because her profile was vaguely reminiscent of Stella’s (an Algerian Jew, presumably) but because everything about her—looks, eyes, mien—was simply screaming with loneliness. She sat there, crushed beneath the terrifying ordeal of being human, the curse that dooms us to live in an eternally irreconcilable dichotomy: on the one hand, we are herd animals who can’t get along without one another and who are unhappy alone; and on the other hand, we are prisoners in the cage of the self, unable to escape, unable to reach the other, unable to find salvation from ourselves. . .

  “This was so tremendously eloquent in the girl’s wan face that I had to keep peeking at her. She couldn’t ignore this in the long run, and when I stared very hard, she turned to me and our eyes met. At first, it was very beautiful—or it might be better to say, very pure—in a bleak way. We knew what we wanted from each other and what, in the best case, we could expect. We were agreed without having to pretend we had come even a millimeter closer together. I motioned to the waiter and paid for my Pernod and her coffee. It was only when we were on the street and trying to decide where we wanted to go that we first exchanged words.

  “I could have taken her around the corner to the rue Jacob. The apartment was available. Dawn had taken flight again and I had temporarily given up looking for her. But she might return at any moment. So we went to the girl’s place. It was far away, on the boulevard Extérieur.

  “I don’t have to describe what happened in that dump, which was unfit for human habitation. It was stereotypical, starting with the horror in her (and probably also my) eyes when we set about doing the dreadfully intimate initial manipulations of sexual intercourse, then, on top of that (registered, horridly enough, in full consciousness), the raging, one against the other, which in spite of everything did occur, and finally, the heartrending silence, which neither of us dared break, since a wrong syllable, a false tone, might have led to murder.

  “Because she lived on a dead-end street, an absurd one-way street to boot, I had parked my car out in the boulevard. It was shortly before evening. The stores and offices had already closed, and even a nearby gas station was shut. Oddly enough, I can’t remember the season. I know I didn’t have a coat—but I seldom wear one, even in winter. You go from heated buildings to heated cars and then back again into heated buildings. So you don’t really need a coat. But I believe it was the evening of a long summer’s day. The precarious hour before darkness, when the Paris sky displays a full, an absolutely inexhaustible gamut of oppressive, heart-stopping stages of decay. The lava of cars flowed in two opposite torrents, roaring and glistening metallically along the boulevard. And there were swarms of pedestrians: the street teemed and crawled as with termites, pouring from all sides toward a black whirlpool, a vortex which, like a funnel, sucked in the thronging vermin, gulping it down in masses. The entrance to a Métro station, of course. Evening rush hour.

  “This was fascinating to observe in my vulnerable spiritual state, removed from my everyday life. I stood in one spot for almost twenty minutes, watching the sidewalk shaft with its art nouveau frame as it sucked in humans swarming like insects. Gradually, the trickle thinned out, grew sparse, while the sky slowly receded, duller and duller, more and more spacious, backing away from the earth as though wanting nothing to do with it, until at last the final stragglers were sucked from the street.

  “With the same mysterious immediacy of the first star of evening appearing in the sky all of a sudden, the streetlights went on, pallidly dotting the pigeon-blue, which darkened as it flowed out into the evening. And soon the torrent of cars on the boulevard exhausted itself too. All at once the city was utterly silent. I stood alone in an empty world.

  “Believe it or not, I found this so beautiful that tears came to my eyes. I felt like the Prodigal Son who has found his way home. I understood how very much we really are the children of this world, this stony world of termites; children of the artificial rocky wastes, of twilight befo
re nightfall . . . Oh God! the heart-gripping courage of the wan streetlamps . . .

  “I went to my car. The street was completely lifeless. All except for one good housewife who had slipped out of a building to walk her dog. She had her back to me while the dog pulled her along, the leash taut as iron, and the dog’s nose sniffed and scrubbed along the piss-black edge of the sidewalk. When she heard my footfall behind her, she was so startled that she jumped and let out a noise like a valve cap being sucked shut. A man on the street at this time of night could only be her murderer. Now let me ask you, Johannes Schwab, whether this isn’t our real home. I mean, what are you actually looking for when you come fleeing here from Hamburg-on-the-Elbe? After all, you’ve got enough folklore there—at least in the philistines around you, those provincials who still in large part have been thought up by Wilhelm Raabe or Wilhelm Busch or formed after Wilhelm II and for the rest are merely insects. You don’t mean to tell me that you come here from a world marked by the German soul in order to be uplifted by a Paris that begins as splendidly as the Eroica, with the beautiful notes of sky, Seine, and beautifully ordered city, and continues to build, soulful and stirring the spirit. No, no, my friend. The Paris of the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre, of the bâteaux mouches and alluring luxury garments in the shop windows along the Faubourg Saint-Honoré; the bouquinistes on the banks of the Seine, whose stalls, as we know, can be combed for bibliophilic trouvailles (for instance, a copy of Nagel’s first novel, no?); the ville lumière of first-class whores and the charmingly authentic eateries in Montparnasse and around Les Halles, where one can feast on delicate (canned) snails dripping with garlic and all kinds of radioactive oysters—all this is not for our kind, it’s for Americans: a larger-than-life Disneyland. People like us are looking here for something completely different: namely, THE CITY, the metropolis with all its perverse charms and exquisite terrors, above all the unreal and the surreal. The abstract and the fictitious. The as-if of the human in the inhuman. We are intoxicated by the loss of reality here, under the bombardment of tattered impressions, the drumfire of the fragmented, the disjointed. Nowhere can we become so urgently self-aware as here in the frazzling stream of the crowd. Nowhere is our self so fully shaped as in encapsulated anonymity. Only when the world dissolves into disconnected entities drifting by like flotsam in a flood—an ear, a wheel, an umbrella, a dog turd, a shop sign, a gaze—only then do we realize how grand we are. Only here can we understand that we carry the entire cosmos within ourselves, that we must become artists so as to express our inner wealth—and are even more majestic when we refuse to impart it . . . Here, in the torrent of the anonymous crowd that overflows all shores, every man is sovereign.