Abel and Cain

by Gregor von Rezzori

  but while speaking so heretically to Nagel, I had the audacity to continue my boundless monologues for Christa’s ears, downy with tingling blond hairs, in order to stammer out in entangled circumlocutions things that millions of husbands have been saying to their wives for countless generations: “Darling, if only you knew how easy I am. A little affection, a little tolerance and understanding, a little friendliness and good cheer . . .” and I instantly choked on my own stupidity, terror took my breath away, for I could picture her jumping and showing her small, sharp teeth; in dreadful shame, I heard her asking if I had taken leave of my senses, expected her to bubble over in good cheer—with three frozen potatoes and my bastard in her belly and the room temperature a few degrees above freezing. She was right, she was right! . . . So I instantly corrected myself: “Of course, dearest, you have no reason to throw your arms around me like an exuberant debutante in a novel when her fiancé comes to her laden with gifts—but now and then, let me feel that I’m not the sole cause of your ill humor. Just a small gesture—anything, you understand. The shadow of a smile, a touch of your hand on mine, a glance of sympathy. That would be more than enough, it would work wonders. . .”

  Yes indeed, it was because of such modest, undemanding wishful thinking that I performed before my wife Christa like a St. Vitus dancer for hire. With an almost cultic thoroughness, I stylized the male dance before merciless female supremacy (a dance as old as mankind) into philosophical reflections on civilization; and Christa’s unshakeable silence seemed to take on a sacred sublimity. When I discussed it with Nagel, I naturally used modern-day metaphors for my crazy actions. I said, “Damn it, there are people who play chess with themselves—isn’t that so? But I for my part am playing something a lot more exciting. I’m playing soccer with myself; I’m a whole team, so to speak, with a goalie and defense and forwards, and with the concentrated energy of eleven professional players, I dribble and kick the ball of responsibility into my wife’s half field—I mean the responsibility for our misery, for our unintended but ineluctable mutual torment . . . I play it into her heart, you know, the responsibility for our terrible incapacity to understand each other, the responsibility for our bleak loneliness living at cross-purposes . . . and my playing is masterful in both tactics and technique: Posipal to Spundflasche, Spundflasche to Stuhlfauth, Stuhlfauth shoots—GOAOAOAL!!! . . . But, unfortunately, my wife’s half of the field is a wall, a solid wall on which I have only painted her players, and the better I play against them, the more sharply I shoot, the more violently the ball bounces off the wall and back into my kisser. There ought to be a penalty for a thing like that, don’t you think? Or at least satisfaction for me: there must be such a thing as justice, even here on earth. Sooner or later, the ball has to smash into the face of the woman behind the wall, and smash her good and hard! . . . I mean, sooner or later, the woman has to realize that I want only what’s best for both of us!”

  But this, unfortunately, was not the case for the time being, and so no little gesture was shown. Christa couldn’t understand that I had only pedagogical reasons for playing off on her the responsibility for our mutual failure: I was only trying to arouse understanding in her conscience and, with that understanding, her feeling for me. She was unable to realize that I did so in order to create order between us, to close a life cycle, in which affection gave birth to kindness, and kindness gave birth to deeper and deeper, more and more ardent affection. To be sure, whenever I was completely honest with myself (and I was, at times), I did not set much store by whether she loved me still or a little less, or whether she had ever really loved me with “true” love; granted, I did love her, but more as my wife, the mother of my son, than as the girl, the woman Christa—oh my goodness! My eyes had long since been drawn to other women—what am I saying? Not just my eyes (and she should have understood this, too: after all, the adulterer is homeless, all too willing to return to his own hearth). But that didn’t matter: the important thing was our case, so to speak: two people with a foundation of positive feelings for one another, right? In any case, two people who did not have it in for each other, who were actually seeking each other—and yet they did not understand each other, spoke past each other as if speaking different languages, soliloquizing into the isolation, the torture of an inability to express themselves, fell silent with each other . . . Obviously it was not a unique case; nothing special about it; on the contrary: a rather run-of-the-mill condition for many people, but that was the very reason I didn’t want to throw in the towel; I wanted to force her to understand that the soccer ball I wanted to smash into her face was, so to speak, the eternal ballon d’essai from the depth of the deepest human misery: the attempt to break out of the imprisonment, the entanglement in one’s own self . . .“I speak to you because I love you,” I wanted to say to her, “and even if it sounds as if I wanted to blame you because we are two human beings and not one, because I am I and you are you and each of us is in solitary confinement in his own self, eternally separated from the other; even if we are banished into two cells from which we cannot communicate with knock signals because neither knows the key to the other’s code . . . even if it sounds as if I were reproaching you for being blind and deaf to all that, listen to me anyway, listen to me: for whatever I say, it means only that I love you, and even if the word turns over in my mouth in the bitterness of not being understood, I mean only that one thing . . . and no one should ever say anything else, for whenever there is no love, demons prevail and speech produces nothing but confusion; no one should ever want to say anything else; all speaking should mean only that one thing . . .”

  and whether she was listening or had fallen into a deep sleep, she was silent. And what should she have said anyway, since she did not mean that one thing?

  •

  The disquiet that I want to keep dammed up and imprisoned in this room until it surrenders and dissolves into the blissful torrent of speaking—the speaking of everything caused by disquiet—often becomes so powerful that it constricts my throat, making the blood pound in my temples and the sweat bead on my forehead: the urging of a reversed eroticism, as it were, an eroticism turned against myself. I crave a woman, yet I am not my SELF; I am a SELF detached from myself; I do not actually exist; I am merely a notion of myself, a projection of myself. And I crave the chimera of a woman, a notion of woman, which corresponds to my notion of myself. My imagination makes an effort for these two: it wanders through the numbered cave dwellings of this rundown hotel for stranded beings; it pictures a woman inside each cave, on her own, forlorn, helpless. A half-crazy American fashion model, for instance, who similarly exists in the bright and beautiful underworld, like a tench in the aquarium of a pederasts’ bar—was it really possible that the handsome Pole snuck up to join her at night? Or is he really sleeping with Madame instead of guarding the telephone behind the hotel desk? Is that why Madame is being deliberately cold to me? That would mean that she is playing my game. . .

  For four years now, I’ve been a regular customer in this lousy hotel; and one would think that by now me and Madame la Patronne, in the splendor of her full-blown tits and her blazing red boudin, would have developed if not out-and-out intimacy then at least a certain familiarity. Parisian shopkeepers, flower vendors, newsdealers, waitresses have cultivated such impersonally personal relations into a cordial art—the only and final manifestation of something that has otherwise vanished (if not turned into its opposite): la courtoisie française.

  But not Madame. Gravel-hard politesse, that’s all. When I arrive, a nasal “Bonjour, m’sieur, vous allez bien, m’sieur?” without a further glance at me while she writes my name in the guestbook. She hands me the key: “Je vous donne la vingt-six comme d’habitude”—the room with the windows facing hers. And not the softest flicker in her eyes. (I too occasionally leave my window open, sometimes even when I’m not alone.) We maintain form—and form is abstraction, hence immediately erotic. It’s gotten to the point where I wonder whether I am in love wi
th her.

  I need not say that Madame has not only kept all her charms but even quite uncommonly increased them. Scarcely four years, as I said, have passed since Schwab and I were able to feast our eyes on her. The peony freshness of her cheeks is barely assailed by an autumnal breath, by the frost of the first cold night. The black roots of her strong hair, when it has not been freshly dyed fox-red, reveals two or three white threads at most. The glimpses that Madame occasionally grants me through the window do not permit any precise examination; but according to an established cavalier saying, a woman’s body ages more slowly than her face. Her body must therefore now—now, man, at this hour, in this night—be bursting with ripeness (a notion to which Schwab would no doubt have gladly drunk a beer) . . . Madame must sense what effect she has on me (in me). But no: we do not smile when facing each other. Our gazes meet frankly and coolly and do not slide down to cleavage or fly level. If our fingers touch when I receive the key from her hand, this touch is unheeded, even when one of her nails, lacquered bone-splinter hard, scratches the back of my hand. Once, I came in after a rather lengthy drive from Reims, wearing a cashmere sweater and soft rubber-soled shoes; the friction of the leather car seat must have made me as electrically charged as a Leyden jar, and a spark leaped between our hands with a perceptible shock. We pretended not to notice. A pleonasm to mention something that was by no means unexpected. We wish each other Merry Christmas and Happy Easter and also exchange inner feelings through the usual reflections on the situation of the world and the weather: “Et qu’estce qu’il est devenu, vot’ gros ami allemand? . . . Il est mort? Tiens, je l’aimais bien . . .” Sometimes, I am seized with the desire to do something unreflected, even violent: hit her in the face, une bonne paire de claques dans la gueule, or else clasp a Cartier bracelet on her wrist without a word of explanation. But I know: If I hold my ground and keep as gravel-hard and impersonal as she, then her window will stay open.

  Scherping once told me a pretty art nouveau story—a childhood trauma of his. His mother was beautiful and used to punish him cruelly for the slightest offense. Once, when he had done some misdeed for which he must have expected worse punishment than normal, she summoned him. She was sitting at the mirror, brushing her hair—very beautiful hair that flowed richly over her shoulders and back. He had stepped in and paused at the door, not daring to take a step toward her, so fearing her punishment that he trembled. She gazed at him in the mirror and did not say a word. She kept brushing her hair, never taking her eyes off him. This went on for a while, which seemed like an eternity to him—an eternity in limbo. Hell, by comparison, was redemption. He could stand it no longer and asked her to hit him. He sobbed and begged her for it. She still said nothing and continued brushing her beautiful hair. And gazing at him in the mirror. . .

  Scherping says that his expectation that she might turn to him, open her arms, and cry “Come! I forgive you!” has stayed with him all his life. He will torment every person who loves him until that person stands before him with the same harshness—just so that someday someone will nevertheless open their arms and say to him, “Come! All is forgiven!” He will demean himself with everyone until he is hated: in order that someone someday will tell him he is forgiven. He despises the women who love him. He worships the unyielding ones.

  I write. I love reality as an unyielding lover. Realizations for me can occur only in abstract. I despise cheap fulfillment. I need Madame’s never-kept promise. God forbid I finally did land in bed with her—or on the divan behind the clerk’s desk, on the pool table in the lounge, on a pile of rolled-up carpets in the stairwell. An assault, wordless, brutal, a willingly granted rape, my fists clawed in her arse, my bared teeth foaming between her wonderful tits, the backs of her knees hooked over my shoulders, expertly bestial, in keeping with her voluptuous, sweaty, hennaed female ripeness—

  even if we vented our rage on each other, if I made her fizz, burst like a geyser, if she brought me to a snarling frenzy of destruction and then gasping exhaustion, my back crooked as though whipped, my head dangling between her knees, blind and drooling, we would not forget for even a moment that we were merely playacting, playing ourselves in the scene, a performance, inauthentic, rehearsed, put on. We would be playing nature but we would no longer be nature. And we would know it in every moment, know that it wasn’t us at all who had hammered themselves into one another, balled up together into something “that was hatred and that rolled on the floor like an animal with wounded legs”: nothing at all original in us, no urge, not the faintest remnant of primordial man, but rather the opposite: only something learned, inherited, uncritically acquired: conventions of a collective lifestyle. Traditions even of the senses. This would be the reality that we produced.

  I lust for Madame. A rammer grows from my groin to smash through the fictions separating us: to smash it, the fiction of the other, which throws me back upon myself and isolates me in myself; smash the fiction of bodies that imprison us and keep us locked apart; smash the fiction of woman that makes me the fiction of man; smash the fictions of solitude, uniqueness, and unrepeatability, which exclude me from the world, splice me away from oneness with God and His cosmos . . . Assuming I were to meet Madame in some dark corner of the hotel—there are so many! Madame all alone and lusting as much for me as I for her (or even merely guileless, unprepared, so that I could succeed in catching her off guard): I pounce upon her, yank her skirt high and her underwear off, and thrust my rammer into the blackness between her white hams, bore into her with all my might . . . for all the pleasurable yelping, all the snarling and gasping, the two-backed animal we would form (in the bed or on the sofa, on the pool table or on a carpet roll in the stairwell), the epileptically twitching package of human limbs human clothes human hair and human flesh would remain unaltered: Madame and I, each of us hermetically encased in his or her story and because of it hopelessly different from the other. Each one a tissue of his or her memories, a product of the specific, manifold, complex fictions that he or she has lived, is still living, and will continue to live. None of this, nothing, could be shaken off, not even with the wildest fucking. Nothing could be changed, nothing overcome, not even with the fiction of love. After all, everything would still stand between us, keeping us remote from each other. . .

  we couldn’t even deny the national dimension of our existence (or the lack thereof, depending): Madame would still bear in mind that she is a Frenchwoman, and she would feel sublimely superior, even though she was receiving a non-Frenchman into her. One form of pride would still be with her. Dutifully she would place my carefully emptied testicles on the altar of the Patrie: “Voici! N’y a qu’une française qui baise comme ça! Qu’il s’en rende compte, le pauvre bougre!”

  And I, for my part, would fuck Madame-to-the-second-power, the Frenchwoman! I would fuck Marianne with her banner waving, fuck her so that the blue-white-and-red cockade would fly out of the Phrygian blood sausage; I would get my revenge on her. I would humiliate, besmirch the superiority, unflappability, enormity of their national fictions, the legendary, the nonpareil, the incomparable self-assurance of the French. I’d pay them back in full here: Je baiserais leur Liberté, je fouterais leur Égalité, j’enculerais leur Fraternité and all their gloire and culture, all their shitty sense of family, chamomile tea. . .

  and thus, this would most certainly not be an individual act but rather all the more a collective act: a vengeance in the name of all those who, like me, nurturing hope for Europe, have lost hope because of the French: because of their fossilization, their cataleptic stylization, their utterly inalterable form.

  The sexual act too is tradition, is form. Our very drives are secondary and artificial. Even before we hit on the idea of using our thumbs as pacifiers to drive away the boredom of our baby existence, we are products of civilization, prisoners of our inevitable fictions, mewed up in the cage of our traditions, in the straitjacket of our conventions. In vain do we yearn for a transcendence into the natural. We mime originalit
y because we want so badly to believe we are real; and all we find over and over again are fictions. No matter how deep we tumble into the chasms of our animal nature, we encounter cultural goods: our shrieks of pleasure, however guttural, sound like opera; the obscenities we stoke our fires with are, at best, a weak copy of Rabelais; the mendacious words of tenderness that we murmur at each other to benumb our despair are as classic as Rostand; and our imaginations, which are supposed to pull us toward unification with the universe, are ruled by the most artistic, the most stylized Frenchman: the Marquis de Sade . . .