Abel and Cain

by Gregor von Rezzori

  28

  Five years ago, shortly before I saw a white rose eaten from its stem and before I was smart enough to view this sight as symbolic of the fact that my romance with Dawn had no future (I am speaking of a past that seems more remote, more past, more legendary to me than any other, even more alien than the present), I had pretty much finished dreaming my dream of myself as the author of the literary masterpiece of the era and future Nobel laureate. This was the time of my increasingly hectic dashes from Hamburg to Paris (via Holland, where my son attended boarding school, and where I would hurriedly insert a visit that was probably disappointing to him). I dashed back and forth until I finally stopped going back to Hamburg. Except one last time, in early 1965, for Schwab’s funeral. And, oddly enough, I retain the memory of those days as a happy period, despite all the ordeals that Dawn inflicted on me. I served my piglets fairly and honestly, was, with my nationless language skills, even more useful to them here in Paris than in their country, but of course was not fairly and honestly rewarded for my services, though I lived well on their expense accounts. Paris, the bright and beautiful underworld, into which I had descended like Orpheus to bring Dawn/Eurydice back to the light of day, turned out to be a rather comfortable place to live. I enjoyed the renown of a man having a romance with a setting star, Nadine Carrier, to whom I ran back after sporadic abstinence like a dipsomaniac to his bottle. My name haunted the gossip sheets (“Will Nadine be unlucky in love with her screenscripter?”). Whenever I visited my son at his Dutch school, his classmates asked me for autographs, and here in Paris the newsdealer in the stand outside the Deux Magots treated me like a familiar and intimate friend. My cases, crates, and cartons were crammed with the starts, the commenced and uncompleted chapters, the drafts, notes, and all the possible sketches for my book that I had carried through life for fourteen years, and now I was about to dump them into the nearest dustbin and finally be liberated from my obsession. It was only with Schwab that I kept up the fiction that I was still writing, and I construed his farewell gesture, when I last saw him, in October 1964, as a desperate request to keep going, undaunted. After being fired by Scherping, Schwab could no longer get me advances for my book, but he urgently wanted me to finish writing it. He stuffed into my pockets the money that was bursting out of his, in order to obligate me to write, the bastard . . .

  A little later I didn’t need him, for Gaia had entered my life, the chocolate-brown Princess Jahovary, God bless her in her vanilla-scented weightiness. It was she who from then on identified with my masterpiece, and since my need for love had not been fulfilled by all the previous one great only and exclusive loves, I loved her ardently and did whatever she wanted. Thus did my suffering begin anew.

  At this time, Nagel was at the height of his fame, and, with the nasty alertness of a rival secretly arming himself, I studied his lean style, which was itself learned from Hemingway. Next to it, anything I wrote seemed like Gaudí’s Sagrada Familia next to a utilitarian building by Adolf Loos. I was green with envy. I would tell myself, every morning, noon, and evening, “Save! Pinch! Scrape! Be picky, like an old maid. From all you’ve imagined, envisioned, the same as from all you’ve lived, experienced, select only what contains and renders the essential. Nothing superfluous! A book is a masterpiece if it contains not one syllable more than its table of contents!” However, I probably had a different notion of the contents of a book than did Nagel. Which was what I told Schwab. I said, “One has to make up one’s mind; you too have to make up your mind, dammit; after all, you too are thinking about writing a book. Don’t deny it! I planted the idea in you, just as you planted the idea in me: like a parasitic ichneumon wasp’s egg that hatches and eats up its host. Well, stick to business. No more excuses. Don’t be an alarmist—especially with yourself. Even if you tell yourself that everything around us is totally chaotic and that chaos can’t be turned into form, your heart is still tormented by a nagging feeling: the feeling that it would be your human duty to arrange chaos in your way. Didn’t the notes of a flute build the walls of Thebes? Or was it singing? Words? . . . My cousin Wolfgang would know. He was a humanist like yourself—and you don’t remember? Regrettable, but of no importance, for the moment. What I want to say is that even if your pride commands you to claim that only silence is possible against the wealth of absurdity around us, your noble insatiability will demand that you find the word to name such a stance. It will force you to do so—the IT that also urges Nagel to express himself. Even though his banalities, puffed up as literature, do not quite express what it urges him toward. Do not try to hide how greatly it urges you, dear friend; one can tell by the tip of your nose. Of course, not to tell some trivial story artistically, as Nagel does, but to create a reality out of existence, a reality reflecting the reality we live in and through—to a frightening degree—that’s what it urges you to. You do understand me, don’t you, as a humanist? Perseus had to look at a reflection of the Gorgon in order to slice off her head; the direct sight of her would have turned him to stone . . . and isn’t it wonderful that Pegasus sprang forth from her dripping blood? Climb on, friend! Undaunted! Do tricks on horseback! You are of the fearless breed who never hesitate to keep their eyes open. Staring into nothingness, like my aunt Selma. You are not of the bluffers and barkers who lull us to sleep with fairy tales, as nannies do to little tots. And do not be discouraged if you can wrest the word from yourself only in tortured efforts: your stammering will be all the more poignant . . .”

  and while I chattered on, friend Brodny, filtering such shallow tidbits through the dull eardrums of an alcoholic into his extremely sensitive soul, I myself was afflicted with the most absurd anxieties about how I would never finish my book, and I invented a new reason every day to tell myself that I couldn’t possibly write it. No, it couldn’t be written—not as I wanted to write it.

  In Gaia’s time, when I was living a luxurious life at her expense (I was used to it from Stella, of course), I had again hit upon the amusing idea that the novel of the era, in which everyone was to recognize himself, recognize his era, his destiny, was something I couldn’t write because I lacked the essential experience of my generation: the war. Yes, you heard me correctly, sir: I lack the experience of war. As far forward and as close to the whites of the enemy’s eyes as possible. An experience that had, after all, been granted to my colleagues Nagel and Schwab. Nothing of the sort had been allotted to me. I had laid down my arms when Bessarabia was peacefully handed to the Russians. While Nagel was gathering material for his stories, losing his arm in the process, and meeting God, I was carrying out the struggle as an interior experience in the beds of the homebound wives of warriors. The steel storms came down as aerial bombs upon a man with the most peaceful of intentions. Of course, Schwab (to whom I once indicated my qualms in this respect; to be sure, only in order to explain to Scherping why my book was making such little progress)—Schwab argued that this inexperience should have made me even more aware of the essence of that event of war, the hole that that suicidal madness had torn into the world, the corruption into which the time had decayed, that enormous void whose suction had demolished the entire past and driven apart the very molecules of the entire present and future, thus dematerializing them, making them unreal, implausible. But Schwab’s argument was, of course, merely one of his charming civilities, inspired on such occasions by his lovely envy. I rejected his amiability. Apperceptive occurrences that had to be explained with the aid of epistemological metaphysics were too abstract for me, I said tersely.

  I also had fun refuting my own theories. By trying to show that it was madness to invent a reality out of causal connections in order to have it mirror a reality determined solely by chance, I set up a collection of crazy causes with completely nonsensical effects. I also looked for them in my own background and found a good number—for instance, my marriage to Christa, which had come about because her devouring mouth had so tormentingly drawn my notice in Nuremberg, in the canteen for German attorneys and wi
tnesses at the Fürth Court of Law. This then led to fourteen years of mutual torture and a son who hates his father. Still, it led to “multiplying” me, to fulfilling my biological duty. From this too metaphysical connections can be deduced: a devouring mouth, the symbol of Great Mother Nature . . .

  29

  And thus the years wore by, highly esteemed Mr. Brodny; autumn leaves and calendar leaves flit through the images left in my memory. Soon those leaves will be as dense as the leaves of the countless manuscripts I have gathered for my book, rejected and abandoned, ripped up and patched together, shredded and stored away for later use in folders, cartons, and cases—for nineteen years, to be precise. And meanwhile, the other half of my split personality served the movie piglets and snickered derisively whenever the future author of the novel of the era, the potential Nobel laureate, gnashed his teeth in envy at the expressive devices of cinema, its immediate visuality, its freedom from place and time, its multidimensionality. . . and all these things merely to present pulp novels and granny fairy tales! . . . Pop art indeed, governor . . . but what inexhaustibility in raw material, in the immediately pictographic, vivid . . . while our sort are supposed to depict the most sublime, the most complex, the most multivocal, the most fragile things in pale words within the rail network of grammar. (A snort of protest from Schwab. He turns red with anger at such statements; the blood drains from his cheeks as, in annoyance, the thrust of air driven from his nostrils loses strength, eventually being taken back in a ponderous sigh.)

  In those days, when brooding on the problems of writing novels, even far below the intellectual stratosphere of Messrs. Lukács and Robbe-Grillet, I (and my brother Schwab) did not find those problems as childish as perhaps you do, esteemed Djakopp Djee. Being fed up with theory and ideology, we did not tackle the issue on the soaring level of the essayists but rather on the pedestrian level of the pragmatic writer, usually ending up at the dead point where the psychology of the writer coincides with the question of the significance of what is to be written. Why bother with a novel today? What else remained to be said? And was it of any importance how it was to be said? The aesthetic was indisputably of secondary interest.

  There was one thing we did agree on, though, Schwab and I: it was no longer possible not to include the author when writing. Even in scientific experiments, after all, the person of the experimenter is largely taken into account nowadays. Intensifying our self-observation, we soon realized that it was probably this it (Nagel’s it, presumably borrowed from Freud’s It, or Id) that urged us to write. To put it in plain terms: what it urges a fair and honest writer to write is himself.

  This conclusion instantly stirred up a whole swarm of further questions, and I had a devil of a time luring poor Schwab into their midst and watching him flail about with them. I did it with vile pleasure. After all, he was acting as if the business concerned him purely in theory and for my sake. He was professionally interested only insofar as he was an editor for my publisher, Scherping, and thus obligated to dispel my doubts in myself and my work. Dispel them so thoroughly that I would speedily finish that book and earn back my advances. The fair man! The honest man! Yet he never concealed his distress when noticing how utterly I saw through him. He never resented me for using the grossest con man tricks (always pretending I had something far more profound in mind) to lead him to some relevant theme and snidely wait and see how long it took him to realize that he was dealing with some commonplace—after all, he was usually quite liquored up. For it must not be forgotten that in those days I was at the peak of my dichotomous existence. The potential author of the novel of the era and the future Nobel laureate—incessantly constructing new arguments for why it was superfluous, impossible, sheerly arrogant, and hubristic to want to write and yet never ceasing work on his book in his mind and on any available scrap of paper, nourishing his parasite’s egg with himself—this author lived in the most intimate symbiosis with the eager servant of the movie piglets, and each of the two personalities within myself kept an eagle eye on the other, each slyly learning useful things from the other—

  and thus, in my existential form as a servant of swine, it warmed my heart to watch what happened to certain scenes of a script I had written, scenes written in the sweat of my intellectual’s brow and fixed on celluloid after murderous financial sacrifices, scenes tugged back and forth, back and forth on the editing table, and then, after a quick snip of the scissors, twisting and hissing into a wastebasket . . . scenes for which I had struggled with my producer piglets in the thick blue cigar smoke of all-night script conferences, had wrestled over like Jacob with the angel; takes for which directors had suffered heart attacks and world-famous actresses fits of hysteria; image sequences in which cameramen of international renown had seen the crowning of their careers; shots in which lighting artists had expected the final recognition of their earlier, so wretchedly neglected work . . . and snip! It was as if they had never been, like so many important, significant, decisive moments, episodes, situations in our lives. With no harm to the plot and no damage to the film’s artistic value . . .

  When I told Schwab about this, he got very excited, and it was child’s play to lead him to the idiotic question of whether and to what degree people like us can rely on our apperception. Could we really trust our conscious minds to make the proper selection from what they perceive seamlessly and to retain whatever is worth remembering, to forget trivia and only trivia? . . . In what way, then, was that ominous it involved in this process, the it that urges us to express things we may not have had the wish to express at all? No doubt it is a demon pledged to the zeitgeist, determining our ideas in a manner that happens to us, so to speak, and leads us, much to our own amazement, to make statements revealing thoughts that are peculiar to the present era, thoughts of the zeitgeist, notions, insights, intentions, in the style of the era—

  in a word: something latent in the zeitgeist wants to be said and pushes out from the lips, pens, and typewriters of those who feel impelled to speak, even if it’s not what they originally wanted to say at all; forces them to say it in Pearris, Freanss only minutes earlier or later than in Hamburg-on-the-Elbe, Joimanny or Athens, Wyoming—that is to say, simultaneously—so that someone who has an idea that is extraordinarily interesting, because it is new and previously unuttered, that someone can be certain that at the same moment several dozen equally clever men all around the globe are having the same idea. And when you are about to write a particularly original and topical book, you can go right ahead and prematurely bet your probably meager income that at the same moment a good dozen other authors of the masterpiece of the era and future Nobel laureates are about to set down an almost identical book . . .

  and by saying all this I had gotten Schwab to the point of letting the it in him, the demon urging him to do something different from what he was planning, drag him into the next bar in order to work out his spiritual equilibrium with as even a number of glasses as possible. While I, with innocent eyes, set about offering him various examples of the scurvy, often tasteless pranks played on me by my memory (so often admired by him).

  30

  Indeed, my esteemed patron Brodny, I cannot bank on any sort of selection being made here. I distrust my subconscious. My treasure chest of memories is filled by sheer chance. I have an excellent example of this, an example I held up to Schwab with great effect. An impression taken up quite by chance but, inexplicably, with extreme keenness, and preserved down to the last detail—I am haunted by it even today. It is the image of a family filling their faces at a highway rest stop, something I saw during one of my dashes to Dawn in Paris, accompanied by Schwab. The scene is branded in my memory. Quite ineffably horrible contemporaries they were. Schwab, needless to say, did not perceive them, happy man. (Or else his subconscious functions more selectively. I suggested this to him when he showed some anxiety about his forgetful ways; however, his answer was a desperately derisive snort.)

  I, for my part, see them even now: informally
grouped around the adjacent table among vegetable fritters, sandwich wrappings, plastic bags full of orange peels, beer glasses, and Coke bottles. Dortmunders on a weekend outing or something of the sort. (John would have said “white trash.”) They were eating. Wildly relishing whatever it was they were feeding on . . . and they clung to me like burrs; I couldn’t get rid of them, people who didn’t mean a thing to me, unable to arouse the slightest interest on my part: a paterfamilias with a beefy neck, chewing disgustingly, in a Lacoste shirt with a crocodile logo; a materfamilias, shoveling repulsively, with curlers under a kerchief turban; an aunt or housemate or friend, crocheting with a knife and fork, sporting pubic hair under her hat; four children like organ pipes, chomping dreadfully: in short, highway rest stop people, humdrum faces taking nourishment, the kind of people that pass us daily, hourly, by the tens of thousands, sucking on the caries in their teeth. People that one looks at without seeing, hence that one has never seen before and, if God be gracious, will never see again—

  and these people were photographed by my memory, which obviously functions of its own accord. Photographed more sharply than any other face ever stamped on my mind; not the face of a beloved, not the face of my little boy, not Schwab’s face . . . and I don’t know why, I still don’t know why today.

  All I know is that I carry the image of these feeding anthropoids around in me like the Zadir. I could have committed a murder and forgotten it, but I can’t get them out of my brain. My head could be chopped off—they could be detected in some sediment in my blood, my tissue . . . For God’s sake! A man sees a few things in his forty-nine (going on fifty!) years of life, especially since these years span the core of the twentieth century, from WWI through WWII and on up to today: forty-nine years, up and down and back and forth through Yurop, the heartland of our civilization, from the meadows of the Dniester to Pearris, Freanss, from Scandinavia to Syracuse, Sicily, yes sir . . . Years in which a great deal has happened. Admit it, Djay Djee: a thing or two has happened between 1919 and 1968, hasn’t it? Now, if a man didn’t make a ruthless selection from among the accumulated material, what would become of him?