Abel and Cain

by Gregor von Rezzori

  and Madame would actually be proud of this. Being a French-woman means carrying French cultural awareness between your legs too. Kalokagathia is attained when the culture du moi matches the moiteur du cul . . .

  Thus, if we forgot ourselves with each other, we would be doing nothing but constantly quoting, citing, reciting. We would be de-claiming a rutting fuck by all the fine, grand, good rules of the Comédie Française, and that brief moment of snuffing out, toward which we would thereby be whipping ourselves so fiercely, would distort our faces into the two masks that hang over every provincial theater.

  •

  And the horrifying aftermath is, at its best, cinematic art.

  We’ve met the quota of obligatory biological performances. Now there’s nothing left to depict; that’s the final take. With the last quiver of our orgasm, the scene fades, we are no longer in the frame, we have played our cameo parts: the well-rehearsed roles we have prepared for since we first heard about sex, with curiosity, anxiety, and yearning; that we have never tired of rehearsing and reiterating; that we have memorized more and more perfectly, more and more adroitly, an imperceptible flicker, a mere grain of light in a movie that has been repeating the same event millions of times for millions of years now, performed in every waning instant—now in the just now beginning, just now passing, just now passed second—by millions of performers in precious few, pathetically unimaginative variations: in beds and on sofas, on pool tables and carpet rolls or on the bare ground, in haylofts, forests, roadside ditches, railroad compartments, lying, standing, squatting, in clay huts or igloos, under starlight and in the darkness of caves, in the palm shade of oases, camping tents, canopied beach chairs, and by the thousands in the roaring wastelands of big cities, from in front, from behind, sometimes with him on top and her underneath, sometimes with her on top and him underneath, or à l’amazone, sideways, with the lady crooking her leg. The possibilities are soon exhausted; at best, there are still a few acrobatic improvements, like those of a horse of the haute école, between the pillars. I personally find this extremely uncomfortable, at times even annoyingly comical, but that is a private view; it doesn’t count on the global scale; in any case you always take part in a collective enterprise even with the most peculiar contortion. Every individual act of coitus is merely a partial action in a steady mass course of events, whether or not the participants realize it. Still and all, the theatrical passion deployed is astonishing: every actor or actress devotes élan vital and every power of expression—most of all, the pent-up ones, the trembling, bashful ones whose palms break out in a sweat before their other glands open. The less naturally gifted ones simply make up for it with artificial means: panting, gasping, rattling, laughing half-crazily, sobbing, murmuring sweet nothings or slobbering obscenities, raging fiercely, in ecstasy, in murderous delusion, or fading with the slaughter-victim look of lovers . . .

  all in all, carried out by the millions, as mentioned, recorded over millions of years, the result is a highly interesting, significant, with-it, modern film. The title, needless to say, is Reality: Mr. Warhol’s undisputed masterpiece if he’d let me write the script: the history of mankind subsumed as a continuous act of mass procreation.

  For we are born for nothing else than to cooperate in the preservation of the human race. To eat in order to procreate and to die in order to be eaten by worms so that the worms may procreate. We occur on this shitty planet for no other purpose than to let the same thing occur over and over again. We exist for no other purpose than simply to cooperate in life—in life, which is lived by eating life in order to create life. Life that procreates by eating life. And having done this, having played out our tiny parts in this huge, in this sublime play of Mother Nature’s, we are kindly furloughed from reality for a while. We can go and play our own little games. We can whip up our own reality, some gaudy figment, a merry or dreary as-if. Our private or collective little fiction. For instance, that we are writers and have to write our books. Or readers who have to read these books. Or great actresses, like Nadine Carrier, who gives so ineffably much to millions of people with her mature art of portraying human beings. Or literary agents . . . Some gracious or ungracious delusion, according to our taste. It does not count, it is not essential, it is not real. The real thing is our biological existence as a minute particle, as a mini-micro-function in the sublimely stolid play of Mama Nature.

  For whether we pray or kill one another, argue with joke with or gyp one another, kick one another in the balls deliver weighty thoughts or wet clay for kneading fetishes, whether we laugh weep twist in pain or leap for joy, whether we are awake or dreaming, dancing or sleeping—everything is aimed at only this one thing, means only this one thing, is concerned with only this one thing, leads to this one thing: to procreate in order to create procreators. It all has only this one purpose: to preserve life. It has only one reality: the reality of being created in order to create life-devouring life and to be devoured by life. A perfectly meaningful playing together, in order to produce an inherently meaningless duration: the duration of life from here to eternity. Achieved by a gigantic squandering, a continual immense lavishing of myriads and myriads of individual lives. An insane wasting of tens of thousands of genera, species, breeds: the game of a certifiably mad demiurge.

  Thus would we have performed our mini-parts, Madame and I—a micro-role, an imperceptible flicker of a grain of light in a film hundreds of thousands of billions of feet long—and now we’d find ourselves on the shadowy line between horror at the nothingness of this reality and terror of the fictions that fill time for us between two such acts of biological realization: so-called everyday life and its reality, which everyone takes for granted as reality . . .

  the very thing that drives Nadine into her dressing room after every completed take in order to exult in having some guy (in an emergency: me) between her legs . . .

  (then, afterward, the other horror in her eyes, when the veils of orgasm dissolve and those eyes are forced to recognize the fellow lying on her, heavy, as if dead, and are forced to recognize that she too has been expelled from this reality of being and has been cast back into her nothingness: the immense terror in it, as if she had looked right in the face of the whole swindle, the sheer madness of Creation)

  Nagel once told me a story from his seafaring days. Leaning indolently over the railing of some ship he’d signed on with, he watched a pair of mice that had fallen into a vat of syrup on a wharf and had been able to clamber out. It was the image of pure love. The two little mice licked each other with heartrending, nauseating fervor. They clutched at each other with their little paws, slopping and lapping; they drew their little tails through their little mouths; they bored their rosy little tongues into each other’s little ears; they kissed the little drops of syrup from each other’s every little finger—and for a moment, they stood nose to nose, peering into the black pinheads of each other’s eyes, and then sprang apart as if the devil had leaped between then. They had forgotten all about each other, said Nagel; had completely forgotten they were mice, with good reason to be frightened of any other animal, even another mouse; and so they were both frightened to death when they saw each other so close up . . .

  But I believe that Nagel does not have the full image of reality. From my own experience, I believe I can say: Each little mouse saw itself in the other’s eyes—and behind, the cat.

  •

  Yesterday, late at night, in a fit of irrepressible contrition, I began a letter to Christa, intending to explain, far too long after the fact, my inner turmoil. (What for?)

  Fortunately, I didn’t get past the beginning. Not only was I embarrassed about making such an apology in confessional form but I was overcome by pure fear: I caught myself writing like Nagel: the closer to self-confession I got, the more dithyrambic I became . . . yet stylistically all the more restrained. The beautiful soul that does not wish to say outright how beautiful it is—you’re supposed to notice by its quivering. The poet as a taut st
ring, which resounds splendidly even when he scratches his ass—

  And even this style is smugly abandoned with an ironic stylistic cover: a wink to the reader, making quotation marks unnecessary—

  and this to Christa (whom I could best approach spiritually in a street song, if not with Rilke):

  You to whom I never say

  That I lie awake at night

  Weeping . . .

  at any rate, did I squander an entire night trying to fathom what the devil it was that kept urging me to make confessions in the first place?

  (To continue in Nagel’s style:

  —as if my accusers were drawing nearer and nearer to me, aboutto confront and unmask me—and I were futilely hurling new masks of me at them, each closer to the truth than the last and yet not the truth, but only an image with whose delusion my guilt only worsened—

  whereby the most deceptive of these images would emerge with the confession of the whole truth.)

  As always when in the mood for parodies, I was desperate, restless, jittery, mordant particularly toward myself—and this naturally ended once again with my clumsy attempt to stumble across the threshold of consciousness behind which my murder lies in darkness.

  It was almost morning by now. I had switched off the light and thrown myself onto the bed, and once again I recapitulated the image of my dream in every detail. I set up each one in front of me, sneaked around it, tried to attack it from the rear, as it were, to take it by surprise and thereby force it to surrender the truth that it was mirroring to bits—but something came at me from behind: a horror at myself, which made the marrow freeze in my bones.

  I spent the day destroying everything that was literature in my book. Everything that did not reflect the purest verifiable truth. Any figment, fiction, fancy, fantasy that could disguise or falsify truth. I thus destroyed my book for good; but I wanted things to be clean and orderly at last.

  It is now long after midnight again (I heard twelve strokes from somewhere a while ago; that’s beside the point anyway; I feel utterly fresh; I am writing easily again—only I feel a cramp burgeoning in my hand—poor Nagel!)—

  I wrote down what happened yesterday and (together with a few jottings I fished out of the garbage with Monique’s help—I believe she has become shrewd and stores my refuse in some broom closet) put it into a folder of its own (everything else into Folder C).

  To supplement the above, I must add: If my reckoning of time is correct, then it has been exactly one week since I went back to the Épicure. I’d come from Reims, as I’ve said, spending the night there while en route from Munich. There wasn’t much traffic on the roads, and I made rapid headway. The day was high and bright and clear, the sky blue, the fields golden. I drove through the Frenchest France, toward Paris. Hamlets lay there like primer pictures, small toy towns, and everything about them was utterly French. La douce France. The heartland of Europe.

  I had it in my blood. It had been in me since my childhood, implanted in me at the same time that Miss Fern’s gentle firmness and strict moderation, the scent of Pear’s soap, the sharp stroke of a scrubbing brush, and the burning of Geo. F. Trumper’s West Indian Extract of Lime on my shivering skin breathed the breath of Great Britain into me. It belonged to me like my fingers or my voice or the tip of my nose. Just as, presumably, rock ’n’ roll rhythms or Donald Duck (and with them New York and the Rocky Mountains, and with them, America) belong to my son. It was an element in my chemical makeup, and I wondered if I was capable of speaking it.

  Let’s assume, I told myself, that you had to explain what France is to your son, who has never heard of it and doesn’t know the usual illustrative material. Or even better: to the wolf boy—one of the outcasts who has grown up among animals in the wild and scurries around on all fours. You’ve caught him and you’re supposed to teach him about the human world. How will you tell him about France? Her essence: her fragrance, her sounds, her colors, her light, her mood, her unmistakable style? . . .

  What is this—France? You carry it within yourself as the impression of a very definite azure density of air, golden fields, a little blue-white-and-red flag on neatly banal municipal buildings, tin soldiers in red trousers, buttoned-back jacket tails, and front-squashed shakos or gray-green WWI poilus in steel helmets with a middle rib, high coat collars, and puttees, such as you scissored out of sheets of pictures by the dozens when you were a child in Cannes. You carry it within yourself in the maquis on the rugged coasts of the Corniche and in the pictures of particolored marketplaces where old gentlemen, wearing berets and carrying poles of white bread under their arms, browse around for the fleshiest eggplants, the ripest tomatoes, the plumpest mushrooms. It speaks to you in the airy lattice of the Eiffel Tower, in the tiny, sharply etched illustrations of Larousse, the classicism of Corneille and Racine, of course, in Impressionist paintings, and so forth up to La Reine Pedauque and Cousin Pons (to spare ourselves the banality of the classics) and the sublime spirituality of Paul Valéry. . . But what can you say about all this? How can you crystallize the common essence, the—well, unmistakable Frenchness? How can it be said? Oh Lord! What can be said? . . .

  And just what did I have to say? Myself—certainly. But wasn’t France in me too? It was part of the light that illuminated the first half of my life. It was one of the elements in the spectral composition of its light, as specific, intrinsic, and irremovable as the greenish-golden flickering of the German nixie-world or the full yellow wine light over the sepia and cypress darkness of the Mediterranean coasts, the glacier blueness and trumpet flashes of Old Austria in a dying Vienna or the melancholy under the brooding sun of Eastern Europe. I had to be able to say these things. I had to be able to say what the light had been like when a spring wind full of urgent promise, the wind of a new era, had blown through it before the great Ice Age—and then, from one day to the next, as if the pendulum of time had swung back, the light had tipped over into a different state.

  For it had been at the center of my days then, this light, even when they were bleak and gray. It shone even on the dreary tenement apartment of my Viennese youth, padded it with confidence: that beyond, past the houses across the way, which may have blocked our view but could not totally extinguish the brighter, airier vastness of the sky overhead, lay Schönbrunn. It had been my comfort in the bitter early years of my exile from the vast stretches of Bessarabia and the light-and-color intoxications of the Côte d’Azur, and I went to the park there as often as I could. Sat on a bench, breathed, gazed. Did not know, of course, what it was that calmed me. Only sensed that the vast layout of these imperial grounds and the little garden of the trolley conductor’s family, which I had visited one Maupassant-like Sunday, had something in common, which I carried within myself along with my yearning for the park in Bessarabia: a piece of orderly nature—the European legacy, which we were squandering. Here in France, there was something left of that legacy, and this was what I had to say in my book.

  •

  After nineteen years, I still did not know what it wanted to be, this book of mine. It had always been clear that it would have to be an autobiographical novel. A novel because its subject was a continent: the period of a lifetime. Autobiographical because this necessarily had to be the lifetime of the person telling it. “It’s gotten around that the world cannot be experienced objectively,” I said to Schwab. “The titans in the early years of our century knew that one can no longer reflect reality without showing the person who experiences it. Where the eyes through which they had the reader experience such a world-within-the-world weren’t exactly those of a narrator in whom the reader unerringly recognized the author himself (as in Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past). They belonged to a potential narrator, who to some extent was a projection of the novelist into the plot: a character placed in the midst of the events and trying to unravel what was problematic in them, because he will presumably have to tell about it all someday (like Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus and even Musil’s Ulrich).”

&
nbsp; Thus, I felt, in literature that is more than broadsheets and street ballads (a possibility that must be accorded even to us dwarfish epigones), the world is the experience of a character who is, only fictitiously, not the same person as the author himself. The first-person narrative blossoms. But for the cunning reader, this zealously confessional anonymous narrator, this I, is transparent enough to reveal the writer of the story. The reader follows the con of fiction up to a point, but no further. Fiction is possible only with the reader’s tacit consent. A complicity that should not be overtaxed.

  •

  I blathered on endlessly with Schwab about all this. “We are in a dilemma,” I kept on saying. “Especially you—if you really intend to write your book one day. You would truly have something to say. Come now: such a valuable, massively earnest man—a top student, completed doctoral dissertation lying in his drawer, not handed in because of his elegant discretion (spiritual hygiene to the point of near-sterility)—and what is expected of him but an act of self-exposure or, worse, a glimpse into his spiritual digestive processes? This is sure to be embarrassing. Insuperable for an aristocratic character such as yours. I, on the other hand, am an entirely different type. I have always been narcissistic, exhibitionistic. But let us not talk about me and my effronteries. Let us take Nagel—a model of the contemporary man of letters. He is not without his discretion either, no, no. Yet he is incomparably more democratic. In a dignified way, even: deliberately run of the mill. Highly simpatico. You are disgusted at the thought of being in bed with the reader, but it’s only half so difficult for Nagel, because he lets it happen on the basis of the universally human.