Abel and Cain

by Gregor von Rezzori

  Originally, S. had not been given a significant part. To be sure, I had toyed with the thought of letting him stroll across the stage; after all, he was important in my life story, and hypothetical as my projected autobiographies may have been, I nevertheless took from the one reality whatever served me for the truth of the other reality. But still, the Johannes Schwab character was merely one of the tinier pebbles from my idiots’ game, a so-called supernumerary—

  so that was what had become of the living man, the human being, my friend and spiritual brother J. S . . . I still know rather precisely when I had begun to jot down utterances, habits, particular features of his: here, in Paris, one morning on the Île de la Cité, when we were on the Pont Neuf, gazing up the Seine, and he made a remark implying that he was planning to write about me. I wanted to beat him to the punch. Surprise him one day with a portrait that would completely scuttle his plans. But never had I seriously planned to use him as a main figure in any of the countless drafts for my book.

  Yet now a certain Johannes Schwab was erupting from every even halfway intelligible sheet of paper. He clung to me like a shadow—and placed me under him. He was not to be shaken off. He was simply everywhere. He dominated everything. He squeezed into the new draft of my book and did not look all that bad in it. But he made it burst: he enlarged it, made it boundless. If I gave in to his pushiness and took the character of Johannes Schwab into the story, then he pushed the events in a different direction, way beyond the plot line. With him, the story proliferated all over the place, beyond its original shape, metastasizing in new and entirely unforeseen dimensions. It could scarcely be kept under control; it demanded a thorough rethinking; it required a plot ten times longer; it opened new paths for invention. But without him, the story now seemed lifeless, artificial, too obviously contrived, too literary to be believed, too private to be interesting. My dead friend S. suddenly seemed to contain all the life of my book.

  For eight full nights and fitfully dozed days, I sought a way out of this grotesque dilemma (always pursued by my lurking dream), until finally I realized that my resistance was futile. Either I had to take Schwab into my book (which meant that I would have to rewrite it; that is, again put it off indefinitely) or else, for the time being, I would once more have to fling my outline to the wind.

  That’s bad enough. The thing that has been agitating me so profoundly since then is the discovery of such a blatant, absolutely undeniable, inexplicable, and effective magic.

  At some point when S. was still alive and kicking, I found and wrote down a name: Johannes Schwab . . .

  and thus a human being is put on paper and is alive . . .

  he has the features of my friend S. (who is no longer alive), he moves, he carries himself like my friend, he talks like him, he articulates thoughts that he could have uttered, he behaves like him, he has his unhappy genius, his standoffish character, his forcefulness and his weakness, his whims, crotchets, and eccentricities—and in the end his destiny as well. The demonic power of words on the page has awakened a dead man.

  Now I have him around me day and night. Since the baneful hour when I re-exhumed him (in his role as a character in a novel), he has been my worst tormentor, the most sublime, the most murderous instrument of self-destruction.

  He peers over my shoulder when I rummage through my papers; he watches my fingers when I write (yes even as I write this down). It was he who drove me to destroy entire sections of the book. Because of him, I ripped up and threw out the tangle of beginnings, finished and still unfinished chapters, drafts, outlines. Because of him, whenever I continued working on something these past few days and nights, I eventually dropped the pen in disgust, and furiously and desperately tore my scribblings to shreds.

  He has infiltrated my thoughts, my soliloquies; he comments on them sneeringly (for instance, now); he encourages my most abstruse plans, praising them only to undermine them. He sabotages my best ideas; he presumes to judge my abilities, my intentions, my resolutions, my decisions (it’s beyond my strength to carry them out, right?); he scorns, mocks, warns, proves, convicts, and shames me—in short, Schwab conducts himself with extraordinary willfulness (probably infected by my own worst manners). What his model (friend S. the graceful: in his lifetime the finest standard-bearer of the freedom that is granted everyone; the sovereign appreciator of any spiritual form or utterance so long as it was at least halfway equal or even superior to his; the proud and happy discoverer of my literary talent and its most ardent defender against infidels and doubters, a man who always practiced the tenderest admiration for me, an admiration deftly concealed and hence all the more flatteringly manifested)—I say, what friend S. would never have dared to do Schwab does unsparingly: he delivers the most annihilating criticism, offers the most cutting, most destructive analysis, paragraph for paragraph, line for line, word for word, expresses fundamental doubt in both the mission itself and the calling of the man who has undertaken it: your humble servant.

  The creature from my pen, whom I have called Schwab, carries on like a literary tax investigator, so to speak, an unrelenting snooper who quickly spots the finagling in a balance sheet, ferrets out any evasion, tracks down any unlisted source of income—

  and, unfortunately, he does not limit himself to that. He uses the literary as a pretext to burrow into my private life, and there he really throws his weight around, demands absolutely accurate data on incidents that I would much rather have let lie, confronts me about things I may have once, foolishly blinded, viewed as vile and concerning but on which I might now blissfully look down, like a martyr at his battered body—if the former vileness had not been restored, thanks to his pastoral activity, drilling down into the bottom of everything—

  as if even the most false, stupid, nay inhumane commandment still contained something ethically valuable in essence, not forfeited with the Expulsion of the Idols, and which even with the establishment of a new and more radiant God cannot be completely banished from the world—

  Thanks to Schwab, I am surrounded again by a forest of those formerly worshiped totems and feared taboos, with all their terrifying grimaces: I experience the most absurd incidents of my formative years in Vienna under the same moral pressure that made them traumas in the past, not to mention later events. In short: My dead friend S. (le pudique, who blushed furiously at the slightest indiscretion, so that his lips turned pale and began to tremble; S. the broad-mindedly playful man, passionné des cascadeurs, enraptured gaper at my feats in the art of life, who released an orgiastic “Ah!” at every vault, every salto mortale with which I managed to twist out of the allegedly fateful alternatives of existence; S., who was in love, the fiery head of a claque in a small but select audience, endlessly delighted by my adventures, my gambles, and their stunning peripeties, as well as my ether-clear somnambulism)—this friend S. was replaced by a man named Schwab: an unpleasant zealot and tough-as-leather moralist, a boorish second-guesser and nitpicking examiner, who continues to live the life of tactful, sensitive, generous S. but in a puritanically narrow-minded and aggressive manner, in annoying, obtrusive, uncanny ubiquity—

  and I, for my part, find myself embarrassingly obsequious to him. I am at his mercy. I am as submissive to this changeling of fantasy and reality as I was to the “protective spirit” that my foster parents invented to keep me on a string during my formative years in Vienna. (This was allegedly one of the spirits that joined the séances of Uncle Helmuth’s spiritist community, the New Star, every Saturday evening: a lofty gentleman in the beyond, I was told, taking care of my dead mother there, hence astrally, they were to her what my various uncles had been when she was alive; however, he was far more severe, more serious-minded, more draconian. With faces stricken lifeless by shock, Uncle Helmuth and Aunt Hertha informed me of his disappointment at my conduct, which he observed very carefully; they scarcely dared hint at his threats of punishment—just the usual, terse “You’ll see . . .”)—

  The pen-and-paper homunculus who
m I had given the name Schwab has taken possession of not only my conscience but also, thereby, my book—

  but not quite without a deeper meaning. That is: not just for art’s sake: Schwab is not merely a personification of my literary conscience: he is. He is S., my dead friend. J. S. wants to materialize through him, in him. Fine! I am supposed to write J. S. into life as Johannes Schwab. Of course, I must warn you, my honored dead friend J. S., this is no longer you: Schwab is here on the paper. He is living his own life here. I cannot do anything for you now. He will have your features, your powerful body; he will move like you, carry himself like you, speak like you, speak thoughts you could have uttered, reveal feelings you could have felt; he will act like you, for he has, I repeat, your unhappy genius, your standoffish character, your forcefulness and your weakness, your whims, crotchets and eccentricities, and ultimately your destiny as well: he will have died because he could not write his book. But he will be he, not you.

  Nothing can be done about it, alas. He is already here, on these pages, already living in them—and in a sharply outlined figure at that. If I had written down nothing but his name, Johannes Schwab, he would already be quite unmistakably himself. He no longer escapes himself—and I could not help him escape. No man escapes himself if he has forfeited himself to the demonic world of words on the page, whether alive or deceased.

  I do not doubt that you, friend S., in that world beyond where you are now, are among the free, the mighty, the illuminated (although it strikes me as a bit suspicious that you feel such a vehement urge to cross back over the threshold, so vehement that already you virtually have a foot in the door, so that I cannot shut you out). But there’s not much left for you to do here. Someone else has taken your place. And here (I am obliged to point this out to you), here we must apply the harsh biblical verse: FOR UNTO EVERY ONE THAT HATH SHALL BE GIVEN . . . BUT FROM HIM THAT HATH NOT SHALL BE TAKEN EVEN THAT WHICH HE HATH.

  So I ask your forgiveness. I, for my part, must now join Schwab. For I too am in these pages: I am already placed upon them, pasted on them, and will appear all the more vivid and diversely colored the more I pull away from them—into One who writes me . . .

  Here too I wish to be of assistance. My wanted poster is quickly written.

  I write. But I lack the so-called demonic element one expects of a writer. I am (despite Aunt Selma’s occasional doubts) a good, soft-hearted, anyway banal person. I love children, dogs, cats, fresh milk, the moon in the evening sky, my friends (Schwab and Nagel). I of course do not love myself. I find myself extremely suspect.

  I hate my lie of a life. The grand hopes and good intentions I left unrealized because I was supposedly summoned to some greater fulfillment—I would have left them unrealized anyway. I’m a miserable screenwriter, not because I have the zeitgeistian task of writing the great novel of the twentieth century but simply because I am indolent, negligent, apathetic, easily bought. My book is an excuse. The years I have squandered on it—I would have squandered them anyway. The people I have disappointed because of it, the women I have exploited, deceiving and deserting them, my son whom I have frustrated—I would have exploited, disappointed, deceived, deserted, and frustrated them anyway. The shameful junk I have written for my piglets to scrape out a meager living with partridge and Mouton Rothschild—I would have written it anyway.

  For I have this phlegm in me and I would have coughed it out in one way or another—if possible ardently believing that it was a message of salvation.

  Nevertheless, I’m no monster, no freak. No splendid malformation like a medieval curse. Nothing to put me on the level of dwarfs, bearded ladies, Siamese twins in a sideshow. I am simply weak flesh. An average child of mankind. Though a retarded child: a child of almost fifty, constantly playing with the detritus of his life while daydreaming that one day it might be used to create a literary masterpiece.

  That is what I daydream about every moment in which I’m not pursued by the nightmare of my sleep, dream it blasphemously, almost sinfully ignoring the sober experience of here and now. I sneak away from the full reality of Here and Now so as to skulk back along a stretch of the path of life and pick out a tiny, colorfully glittering splinter out of the past from the detritus, turning it back and forth in sheer delight before my inner eye: to see whether it contains the secret that is called SELF and that eludes me when I think of my SELF. Whether it isn’t a piece of reality from me? . . .

  •

  I embrace a woman, am one with her—her mouth tastes sweetly of my saliva, I feel the warmth of my skin on her smooth limbs, I feel sensual pleasure, physical happiness concentrated to the point of painfulness—

  and my thoughts wander through a day of my childhood: what was it that I lost (or won) back then? What might it mean in my book?

  •

  I sit, leaning back in the leather easy chair of an executive office, portentously splaying my cigar between my index and my sexually experienced middle finger, cognac in a snifter, leg over leg (my comically abbreviated reflection in the deep brilliance of my polished shoe tip: a towering microcephalic with elephantiasis of the outer extremities: knees like a mammoth, hands like barn doors, a newspaper advertisement of the man of success: a caricature of five-and-dime splendor). I witness another act of modern magic: the breathless voodoo rite of conjuring up money. One speaks of a film project, talks about art and means profit. A shaman’s dance: The counterfeiters drum out their cant. Language foams under the strokes of their witches’ brooms, sentences tangle up into serpents’ nests, numbers are encrusted with the lecherous spawn of zeros, individual words bubble out from the sputum of mouths, float through the room, the air delicately traced with cigarette smoke and fragrant with secretarial secretions (a hazy stretch of surf coast: on the ribbed sand in the crumbling foam, the purple-fish aperture of a vagina), and strike out in vicious pursuit of one another: the iridescent bubble of “cultural mission” hits “box-office receipts” and both burst in a soapy flash; the “level of quality,” which “absolutely must be maintained” (how? where? by whom? for what?), collides with “production costs,” which tear the skin off the nothing that they and it are made of; “artistic creation,” “universal human problem,” and “topical issue” concatenate in a mucous cluster—and furiously the “co-production considerations” pounce upon them and shatter with them . . . and all this floats over a roaring surf of blathering, waves cresting, agitating, foaming, only to vanish in the sand: a crumbling squandering of words, hissing and seething foam, seeping of mirages and phantoms . . .

  nevertheless, the surging, heaving emptiness brings something forth, for, mightily and magically, the totem of the Project grows, and it will both create and determine lived reality. . .

  •

  and meanwhile, I walk up a mountain slope near Lake Zurich, hand in hand with Dawn, and brood about what makes the nervous texture of this hour as heavy as a honeycomb—Dawn’s profile against the sparse backdrop of the firs (trunks as rusty as her hair)—or the constrictions of Nature, which painfully jerks up the memory of a late-summer park somewhere between the Pruth and Dniester rivers: a park with a little pond where a frail old-fashioned boat is rotting:

  Si je désire une eau d’Europe, c’est la flache

  noire et froide où vers le crépuscule embaumé

  un enfant accroupi plein de tristesses, lâche

  un bateau frêle comme un papillon de mai—

  (And Schwab, dismayed, pausing at the little Sisley in Hamburg’s Kunsthalle, the almost foolishly poignant expression with which he looked at me in order to say, “There really was such a thing once: such a summer garden”)

  There really was. It belonged to very simple people. The man was a trolley conductor, the woman carved a lantern for us from a pumpkin, the son was my friend in times that have wafted away. There really was such a thing, this little garden, a piece of orderly nature. And I find myself in it again, the way I may have once been and no longer am (even though, or rather because, I now am
only in such pictures).

  I seek myself in it, madly in love with the various images of myself, a mythological caricature (damnable expression of misanthropy in the great Daumier): Narcissus as archaeologist, mirroring myself in the shards unearthed from various strata of my prehistory (when I had not yet begun to think about my book) and, in bewilderment, comparing them with the images of my later existence:

  —in search of the innocence of a time when my life was still a first draft of a life, dreamed within the myth of its time—

  I see my Fall and Original Sin in the reality that has sprung up around me—a betrayal of the myth of my time. I am a foundling of this myth, a latecomer to an era that had set out to dream the dream of man as a blissful inhabitant of ANTHROPOLIS but was born into the age of maggots teeming in the carcasses of cities. Through my veins runs the nostalgia for the promise of that time of beginning, and from it I draw a majesty I feel guilty about—

  and that is why I have to believe I can write my book. In it, I hope to find what I no longer am and no longer have. I know I’m thereby robbing myself of the present, destroying it, so that it can become only a rotten future. The past lies before me as my future. This is no mere wordplay: it is my last innocence, and I do not want to lose it.

  •

  My book is my chaste vice. Whenever I think of it, I blush like a whore in love. When I sit down to work on my book, I don wedding garments. I slip into a different, a purer, existence. I become timid and high-strung (like Schwab, my dead friend).

  In my book, I stop deceiving. I renounce my cheap (and sturdy) irony, all my tricks. I jettison my imaginative faculties (become almost proverbial in the movie business). I put aside my shrewd way of combining an accursed knack for the “depth effect” in “the art of spinning a yarn,” the “interesting yet lucid architecture,” and all the other legerdemain, for whose sake even so-called serious producers (not to mention the piglets) overlook my breaches of contract, my failure to meet deadlines, my constant revision of outlines, and instead go on paying me (as they say) “top fees.”