Abel and Cain

by Gregor von Rezzori

  The figures have to work out—arithmetically. Otherwise, they will not be right—and do not seem right, at first glance. Uncle Ferdinand is an aristocrat, and the spider is no image for aristocracy. No one has a spider in his escutcheon. On a coat of arms, a spider would be the out-and-out negation of the knightly spirit: not just the symbol of treacherous ambush but a token of shameful languishing. Only old rubbish that’s been stored away gets covered with cobwebs, dusty stuff now useless and worthless.

  But as we know, life is a constant transvaluation of values. Something that may be old junk today, because it is useless, can be doubly precious tomorrow, because it evokes the mood of a yesterday that seems increasingly rich and pure, a life more pleasing to God

  (presumably because we feel—through no special fault or guilt of today, simply the fault or guilt of existing—that we were more innocent yesterday than we are today and than we shall be tomorrow. . .)

  True, in 1940 we were not so Americanized that we piously placed a cowbell of old-fashioned iron on the coffee table as an antiquarian relic, thereby marking ourselves as aesthetes and placing ourselves one rung higher in the cultural pecking order. But still, even then, aristocrats were understood as the aimless and useless, if quite evocative, remnants of a lost but all the same far more colorful world, closer to nature, less hectic, in short: a world altogether more pleasing to God—and thus fitted out with an antique value that was entirely fictive, to be sure, yet burdened with ethical demands that should not, in fairness, have been made on it. Throughout his life (he was born in 1872 and probably died soon after my coming home to him and the arrival of the Russians, to whom Bessarabia had been ceded; i.e., roughly in September 1940), Uncle Ferdinand, who had a line of ancestors going back to the emperors of Byzantium, found himself in historical situations that made it impossible for him to exercise the virtues that troubadours and minnesingers idealized in the beautiful legend of King Arthur’s Round Table as the Mount Olympus of chivalry.

  You have to make allowances. In the capitalist era, the image of the aristocrat, even if he was one to let chivalrous notions of Honor, Truth, Courage, Sacrifice, and so on flutter over his head like banners, could no longer be that of Parsifal or Lancelot. The feudal lords of the epoch were really Napoleon III and Edward VII—sovereigns whose peers and paladins were the Rothschilds and Sassoons—no longer Gawain and the seneschal Kew.

  My mother would accompany Uncle Ferdinand to the Riviera. That is to say, when we moved into the house at Antibes, which, as a matter of course, I regarded as one of our houses, intended solely for my mother and me, as well as Miss Fern and the rest of the staff (the maître d’hôtel, the housekeeper, the lady’s maid, innumerable parlormaids, the chef, a few kitchen helpers, the chauffeur, the gardeners). There, after weathering the somewhat eerie merriment of the Mardi Gras, we looked forward more calmly to Uncle Ferdinand’s regular visits from Monte Carlo, where he occupied an entire hotel floor. At that time, the Roaring Twenties, among the intimate friends who accompanied him, the percentage of names listed in the old Almanach de Gotha was almost infinitesimal compared with the names of Bolivian tin-mine owners, Argentine cattle breeders, Irish beer kings, Dutch petroleum magnates, and Levantine gunrunners. Not even the addition of a number of penniless Russian grand princes could even out this disparity.

  We should probably renounce certain compulsive ideas in the concept of aristocracy; the intellect and nonintellect, virtues and vices, of the caste that had been manipulating the fate of Western Civilization for more than a millennium, especially its will to survive, to continue (like certain streams that suddenly vanish underground only to bubble up unexpectedly somewhere else, perhaps on the other side of a mountain range) in a new and entirely different form and manner, adjusted to a new and different zeitgeist.

  In other words, though you might find all kinds of aristocrats and all sorts of odds and ends testifying to the legends of chivalrous origins—in Sleeping Beauty castles belonging to mediatized German princes; in baroque palaces flanked by black cypress torches and bombarded by sunlight, belonging to Spanish and Sicilian grandees; in the manoirs of certain deeply provincial French nobles, as solemn as though risen from the ancestral tomb; and, needless to say, on the poor farms both east and west of the Elbe belonging to Junkers in leather leggings—the aristocracy as a still-powerful upper class were now fraternizing with the “upper ten thousand” of the international business world and gathering at places that grossly contradicted the ethos of chivalry. They frequented the boardrooms of banks, industrial concerns, and insurance companies and, for relaxation, nightclubs and gambling casinos as well as yacht marinas on southern shores. These are the meeting places for the tiny group of men who manipulate not only movie starlets, playing cards, and polo mallets but also the fate of Western Civilization (and hence mankind).

  So I need not cudgel my brain about the heraldic validity of the spider as a vision of Uncle Ferdinand’s phase of completion. His aristocratic quality leaves every branch of zoology open to this possibility. Had not my fairy-tale childhood been suddenly aborted and had I not been cast out into the grayness of life as an eternally duped poor wretch, I would never have so much as dreamed of viewing Uncle Ferdinand as a standard-bearer of the chivalrous spirit, or his breeding as an ideologically acquired quality to be analyzed in the light of intellectual history. This was middle-class thinking, not only in its categories but also in its abstraction, in its remoteness from life. It wouldn’t even have elicited a shrug from Uncle Ferdinand himself; he would merely have stared into space for a moment and then changed the subject.

  Still, it is interesting to picture what might have happened if I hadn’t retained any of the intellectual restraint acquired as part of a good upbringing, and it occurred to me to ask Uncle Ferdinand straight out (alluding, perhaps, to the similarity between certain notions of the ideology of chivalry—for instance, that a knight must always test his mettle anew; i.e., constantly realize himself anew—and analogous interpretations of existence in existential philosophy): the blank astonishment in the three circles of eyes and mouth in his countenance would be stupendous to behold. But this astonishment would promptly give way to an expression of great weariness and melancholy.

  With the touching kindness he always demonstrates when he has to instruct youthful ignorance, Uncle Ferdinand would reply that human beings are not like our dear dogs: dogs, he would say, are developed into breeds having different functions, so that the physical and mental characteristics needed to perform those functions are passed down not only unadulterated but actually intensified—e.g., the pointer’s and retriever’s fine nose, the hound’s stamina, the powerful fangs of the mastiff, and all the other useful and beneficial qualities of hunting dogs, as well as the extraordinary character traits of the various sheepdogs and watchdogs, and finally the droll, affectionate qualities of the breeds developed for playing, pleasure, and companionship . . . Rather, Uncle Ferdinand would say, man himself seems to be a breed with a highly developed specialty, a function that he probably does not yet understand but that is beginning, eerily, to crystallize: he is a kind of cosmic microbe, a bacillus or virus with the mission to destroy the planet Earth—and perhaps not just the planet Earth. But that’s just by the by.

  In any case, however, Uncle Ferdinand would continue, any further special function could probably no longer be bred. Every newborn baby has all the possibilities of human life available—some quite unexpected, even surprising, and some so amazingly pre-programmed that one is tempted to believe in transmigration (of a very desultory kind); however, any further shaping of these pre-programmed possibilities is left, Uncle Ferdinand would say, to environment and education . . . and, naturally, generations of belonging to a given milieu would also develop certain traits, features, and if not characteristics then certain tendencies that would, overall, identify the individual as belonging to this milieu. But nothing more than that.

  Just as a peasant can be identified as a peasant, a seaman
as a seaman, a boor as a boor, Uncle Ferdinand would say, each one of them—just like each of our beloved companions the dogs—has his specific character quite independent of that fact; that is, he may be either a very sweet or a very ferocious dog, a poor dog or a stupid dog.

  Very few members of the two latter categories were to be found in Uncle Ferdinand’s circle of friends—which was quite simply the world for him, the Middle Kingdom. Even rarer than a poor or stupid dog was a sweet dog. Most of them were ferocious dogs. Of course, Uncle Ferdinand and his friends knew how to make this ferocity seem innocent, yes, even lovable; namely, to seem fully and exclusively in service of the most gay enjoyment of life.

  This was disarming, and would quite appropriately confirm John’s statement that if everyone got to know the so-called exploiters of mankind personally, there would be no such thing as social envy and class struggle. These things really didn’t exist, he said, when the common people had free access to the dining rooms and sleeping chambers of kings, and could gape to their heart’s content at the great people of this world in their ordinary humanity (rather like the good citizens standing at the wolf cage in the zoo on a Sunday afternoon: “Just look at him scratching himself—just like Rover!”).

  And indeed, my memories of Uncle Ferdinand’s friends (some of whom, incidentally, were as close to my much-beloved mother as he was) were heartwarming. Our spring sojourns on the Riviera—when Bessarabia still lay under snow but the small pond in the park was beginning to thaw—contributed in no small measure to the radiant effect that this entire lost half of my life had on me, not only the brilliance of those glorious early years but virtually the illumination of an era.

  14

  Never have I met anyone so effervescent, so funny, so eager for the craziest jokes and pranks as “Bully” Olivera, a tiny, roly-poly, mercurial South American who played outstanding polo and poker and, it was said, owed his immense fortune to the slave labor of entire tribes of half-starved, lice-ridden Indians. (One of his ideas, which would have delighted the pataphysicists, was to go to the Casino at Monte Carlo in the few hours between closing time and dawn—when you hear the shots of suicides—sugar-frost it, and then top it, at sunrise, with several tons of whipped cream and strawberries.) And never will I forget the kindness, the tireless concern, the unabating efforts for the welfare of his neighbors, the warm, active humanity of Sir Agop Garabetian (known in the financial world as “Mr. Choke” because of his cutthroat methods).

  Aboard his steamer yacht Nereide, where Uncle Agop was the most solicitous of hosts at famous “little” dinners (which, needless to say, were far more intimate, more exclusive, and therefore more sought after than the great “galas”), he personified the highest degree of civilization a human being can possibly attain. Unforgettable to me are his charm, his tenderness, the cordial white-toothed smile in the pomaded, parted, twiddled coal-black beard that framed his Arabian Nights head like a rococo cartouche and gave him exaggerated pomp and opera buffa menace, heightened by a sparkling monocle wedged in his left eye socket and precariously clutched by the black caterpillar of an uncommonly mobile eyebrow. (Privately, my mother called him Monsieur Raminagrobis, which I, as an avid reader of Madame la Comtesse de Ségur, found quite accurate.) In contrast, the deep, Orientally wise melancholy of those almond-cut eyes whose pupils floated in the jaundiced whites of his eyes like black olives in oil. The blandishing melody of his voice, its sonorous strength nevertheless making the blood-red petals of the carnation quiver in the silk lapel of his white tuxedo. The gentle, skillful movements of his blue-flashing beringed bayadère hands when he placed a chinchilla around bare female shoulders that might shiver in the night wind; or when he raised a glass of wine to scrutinize it against the candle flames of a girandole (spiriting a ruby onto the diamond-sown indigo velvet of night over the forest of masts at the marina); or when, with positively scientific devotion, he helped a friend (and no less well-versed connoisseur) to select a cigar, or pushed over to him the crystal carafe of port that (according to those privileged to taste it) was in no way inferior to the magnificence of the Easter Mass in a Russian cathedral; when finally he stroked my head with fatherly solace because Miss Fern, to my ineffable regret, insisted on detaching me from my mother’s arms (in which, ringleted and cherry-eyed, I lay like the daughter of Madame Vigée-Lebrun) to take me belowdecks to our cabin and get me into bed before the Charleston band began to play. This band, which along with the Venezuelan tango orchestra was a part of Uncle Agop’s household, had several soloists who today are counted among the classical musicians of jazz: their art having been immortalized on records, they are the teachers of a generation of performers whom Gaia managed and commercially exploited; the money she earned was largely devoted to creating the atmosphere of suitable comfort and elegant freedom from care that I needed to write my book . . . yes, indeed, Brodny my friend, the world is small and round, one thing rolls into another. A whore’s son simply can’t become anything but a whore schnorrer; literary laws are more severe in this respect than life itself . . . But that should not prevent me from finishing the paragraph and returning to my reflections, to illustrate which I have invented Bully Olivera and Sir Agop Garabetian (and imbued them with such vim and vigor that their healthy appetite for life threatens to chew up the thread of my story) . . . I mean to say: Uncle Agop and all my other elective and nominal uncles and godfathers (and possible fathers) had a robust appetite for life during the era between WWI and WWII, when they lived in a reality within reality, and it was this that provided the brilliance that makes the lost half of my life seem illuminated as though by a promise of spring. Their irresistible charm and fascinating manners reveal not only that, as true masters of the art of living, they grasped the virtue of humanity as an aesthetic commandment but also that they were indeed great gentlemen.

  They were the princes of their time, whether or not their names were listed in the Almanach de Gotha. Their courts were no less arabesquely and hieratically composed of officials, sycophants, favorites and minions with kith and kin, flatterers, jokesters, porters, couriers, stooges of all kinds, than any duodecimo court at the height of the Renaissance. And these courtiers were no less devoted to the enjoyment of life, albeit less ethically ideologized, than any court of love in the days of Chrétien de Troyes.

  Only, in the year 1940, all this was no longer so concrete. It was its own self in a different state, so to speak: like ice thawed into water, or water boiled into steam. Even this world within the world and this reality within reality were subject to the process of rarefaction, of abstraction, which affected the entire world of humanity, as though its molecules were flying apart (just as, as we know, the whole universe is supposedly flying apart).

  Likewise, Uncle Ferdinand’s world of games and gamesters, the innermost circle of the shrewdest, hardest, most cynical possessors of reality, is on the verge of dematerializing. It would now take a Chosen Being to capture it in its new aggregate state and weave it together anew.

  15

  The vision of Uncle Ferdinand as a spider is thus perfectly valid as a symbol. Indeed, he is weaving the myth of his world. He is working on his Middle Kingdom, which needless to say is the middle of a pre-Copernican world; not a middle position between some higher and some lower world but a nuclear pole, from which the closer and farther circles of friends radiate and intersect and intertangle with the farther and closer circles of friends of other centers on the same social level. A kingdom of the extraordinarily wealthy, extending across many lands and girded by the Great Wall of Money, beyond which live those whom Destiny or Divine Providence or the random blindness of nature has denied the truly liberating, really propitious goods of this earth: teeming nations without money or happiness or names, without memorable faces, dwelling in areas that are unrecorded on the lovely maps and charts in the atlas of deluxe living—on sait que cela existe et on s’en fout.

  This is the reason that Uncle Ferdinand does not even now (it is February 1940; the tree
s are covered in frost, the pond in the park is frozen, I could blissfully skate upon it like young Goethe on the Ilm, if I found pleasure in doing turns and waltz-wave-welling curves on my mother’s deathbed) . . . I say, this is the reason that Uncle Ferdinand does not even now realize how abstract, how virile, how artificial is the activity on which he concentrates all his high intelligence, his energy, all the persistence of his domineering character—a princely character that is accustomed to giving orders, brooks no contradiction, and will not be discouraged by any obstacle. He authors the myth of his world and himself.

  As if he had lived solely and exclusively for this “reality within reality,” as if, like a character in a novel, he had been invented only for this particular one of the book’s themes, existed only for, found his reality only in the world of the “upper ten thousand,” as it was called in his day: the beau monde of the monstrously rich—whether they had always been rich, are rich still and now indeed are quite rich, or if they have only recently become rich and are newly settling into it—in any case, in the kingdom of the monstrously rich and their high life he finds himself realized, and among them especially the inner circle of dynamic enjoyers of life at Deauville, Biarritz, and the Côte d’Azur, with their many beautiful houses in all the most beautiful places on this wondrously beautiful earth; their parks and shooting grounds; their oceangoing yachts, polo ponies, Rolls-Royces, and Bugattis; their wondrously beautiful women, spoiled, sheathed in brocade and precious fur and hung with legendary jewelry; the expensive whims, jokes, flashes of inspiration; the captivating manners and the powerful carnivore teeth, in which (as Uncle Helmuth and Aunt Hertha alleged) the bones of the disinherited classes splintered so crunchingly (as I, in contrast, can assure you) that it was a delight to watch.