Abel and Cain

by Gregor von Rezzori

  Both are now dead, mother and foster mother. Sur le chemin de la mort, ma mère rencontra une grande banquise . . . Cousin Wolfgang too is dead; Schwab too is dead; Stella is dead—elle nous regarda, mon frère et moi, et puis elle pleura. And in my dream, she had her pretty smile: un si joli sourire, presque espiègle (a pretty word: it comes from Till Eulenspiegel). Ensuite elle fut prise dans l’opaque.

  The girl from last night—she too came out of the fog. I recited poetry to her too—songs of life:

  Mon enfant, ma soeur,

  songe à la douceur

  d’aller là-bas vivre ensemble!

  Aimer à loisir

  aimer et mourir

  au pays qui te ressemble—

  Ice-dancer language. Gaia on the telephone: swaying cadences—stop (to listen)—start again—then released: the swing of a wide arc—leap—pirouette—she stands still again: the next arc already tensing in her. . .

  I love listening to her: with no one else does French sound so melodious, so artificial . . . I wait for the glass-bead tricklings of the next few sentences, look at her mouth: scarlet (gueule), behind it the predatory teeth of her black father (his lips like stamp pads) . . .

  (Gaia’s description: The Moor father of the Moor father arrives to extract his son from the affair; her mother, the Princess Jahovary, relates: “I saw him out the window from above as he was getting out of the car: cute—a short black Moor with his hair gone completely white . . .” Gaia’s granddad: a negative.)

  Gaia too is dead. I am surrounded by dead people. Barely forty-nine years old and already in the best society:

  silently over Golgotha, God’s golden eyes open . . .

  I feel it, it’s going to be a good day. I could not wish for a better day for my protracted vice, my passion for constructing sentences whose rhythmic tensions and solutions release the Eros of language:

  in the mysterious appeal and attraction that the Word achieves in its wizard-like combination with other words: so that not only does it pass itself along to the next word and the one after that, as in the Archimedean whorl, by way of transmitting a specific and intended meaning (so as to make a series of linked signals produce an image with which experience is transmitted, as a sign whose transcendent shadow, shifting like that of a sundial, forces the other signs grouped around it to yield the secrets enclosed within them) but also (beyond language) a kind of whispering begins, an echoing in the spaces around the words, spaces that would have remained closed without the overtones of the multivalence of each word, spaces that now expand like the expiring sound waves of a tolling bell, followed and driven on by further tolling: each stroke of the bell is the assault of a primordial signal on the vessel of our soul . . .

  That’s how I should have awoken all those days: in calm surrender to bed-warm sensuality. I am thinking about the girl from last night: for a few hours I loved her. I still feel her perfume on my skin. It is taut from dried fluids on the inside of my thighs and under my pubic hair. I gratefully experience the feeling of having done my proper duty as a man—this steels you for future and past defeats. You won’t be getting anything out of me today, friend Schwab. My mind is as blank as a Gelderland windowpane. Not a particle of ambition, not a speck of guilt:

  nor do I care about the insanity of my existence: locked up in a shabby hotel room, concealed from any kind of creditor, holed up within myself, denying true reality, living crazily in invented realities: a woeful demiurge, cobbling his world together out of paper and ink, paper and printer’s ink, an onanist of creation pleasure—yes, a self-satisfier, devoted to the pleasure of words—

  I do not care:

  I am walking a tightrope. I am ice-skating across the rope: start—sweeping out of the curve—leap—pirouette—into the next curve . . .

  My Doomsday is remote today:

  Le ciel est, par-dessus le toit,

  si bleu, si calme!

  Un arbre, par-dessus le toit,

  berce sa palme . . .

  (incidentally, it might really exist somewhere, cet arbre par-dessus le toit—otherwise, where would the linden leaves come from? . . .)

  I am in Paris. Are you listening, Schwab? I am in Paris—which you loved so much, “as if it were life itself”

  Mon Dieu, mon Dieu, la vie est là,

  simple et tranquille.

  Cette paisible rumeur là

  vient de la ville—

  (and you plunge into the paisible rumeur—I yank you back—a cabby’s head emerges from a taxi and yells: “Dis donc—le trottoir: c’est seulement pour les putains?”—do you remember?) It was by the Madeleine, where you picked up that girl—only it wasn’t bright out: la ville lumière was drowned in fog—the bright, lovely underworld . . .

  and whatever you have to say: my soul will be forgiven

  God spoke a gentle flame to his heart: oh, Man!

  I know today will be a good day. I am as God originally meant me to be: a breathing creature that does not regard its existence as a curse: I lie here and feel MYSELF in the creaturely bliss of existence. I am still aglow with the images of my dream, images that are signs for other meanings: Aunt Selma’s smile means woman:

  woman’s flesh, woman’s fullness, woman’s warm skin, in which the spherical triangle of pubic hair is sharply inserted in pure contour: powerfully streaming from the base to the vertex, into the closure of the thighs, insular and mystical like the grove around a grotto temple—

  here I am SELF-towered:

  violently a black horse rears: the hyacinth curls of the maid grab at the ardor of his purple nostrils . . .

  I look for the face of a girl and do not find it in me. It is often quite close, but when I think I’m about to recognize it, it dissolves. I am so awash in lazy self-feeling that nothing in me has distinct contours.

  I AM

  and am content in ME:

  I SELF-brimming

  The warm mother hen of laziness broods me and makes beautiful thoughts slip from beautiful images.

  FOR UNTO EVERY ONE THAT HATH SHALL BE GIVEN, AND HE SHALL HAVE ABUNDANCE, BUT FROM HIM THAT HATH NOT SHALL BE TAKEN EVEN THAT WHICH HE HATH . . .

  All my power (and all my fear) is rooted in this verse, and no one is left around me to measure its truth by. . .

  Truly, Brother Schwab: your death was a severe stroke of fate for me. You were to the best years of my adulthood what Cousin Wolfgang was to my adolescence: the lovely echo, the magic mirror on the wall. I know every last feature of your face and his. The nervous pride of the brow. The twitching vulnerability of the mouth. The bright lurking and the despair in the half-blind eyes, which could look so sharply from behind the glasses’ lenses. —

  Your eyes and his were almost ludicrously the same. Never will I forget his gaze when in August 1939—shortly before I went to Romania to be a soldier myself—he came to me in plain military gray: wordless, with the force of an expressionist stage entrance. His globular eyes peered through glasses as thick as bottle bottoms (just like yours: all in all, he could have been your twin), and these eyes expressed, in an ineffably stupid stare, “Well, what do you have to say now? . . .” And they almost burst with fear of finding out what I might say.

  Wasn’t this often your fear too, friend Schwab? Otherwise, in order to have a brother, I could have made do with Nagel. He was never afraid of what I might say. He did not seek his defeats in me. He evaded me like a man (for that’s basically what it’s all about, isn’t it? Measuring yourself against someone else?) . . . Let me reveal one of the secrets that made you blush when you were alive, a medium-size depth-psychological secret (but don’t tell Hertzog): I was never afraid of being beaten up by you. If by anyone, then Nagel (although that’s absurd: the poor man has only one arm, after all). Nagel doesn’t want to measure himself against me. You always wanted to measure yourself against me. I for my part am sorry: I want to measure myself against the handsome Pole. Remember his arms? Fantastic, man! . . . I sometimes daydream about smashing him in the kisser—a
nd then . . . just ask Sherping what happens when a man imagines he could be helplessly abandoned to his defeat.

  (Schwab’s confession: the blush in his face when he told me about how he would come home and run into his wife Carlotta’s lovers on the stairs; how he confronted her, and she told him straight to his face, “Yes, somebody comes every day when you’re not here.”

  And John’s stony expression when I returned with Stella, both of us still glowing . . .

  or I in front of Dawn in the sleeping car, in the morning: I had lain awake all night in the next compartment, she sitting on the bed, the damp stain half-concealed on the sheet, and I ask, “What about your friend?” “Oh, he left. He got off the train somewhere last night.” Our last—no, next-to-last—meeting. She talking in the phone booth, I, outside, hear what she’s saying: “But I love you—you can’t leave me . . .” These are male experiences: they lead to measurings.)

  Each man seeks his defeat in the other: that’s the simple solution to the riddle of brotherhood. (Are you really blushing now? What’s it like when a soul blushes? Like when the light in the air shaft outside the window filled up with the redness of dawn?)

  However, I am speaking the truth:

  Everyone seeks his murderer in the other; that is what makes human beings brothers. It’s as simple as a pulp romance novel, (“and so marvelously symbolic,” as Fräulein Ute Seelsorge would say). I was always sympathetic to your attraction to Nagel: it is fascinating to watch him fall into despair for sheer courage; but did you really ever take him seriously when it happened? And you don’t even know everything about Nagel. What you admired, why you envied him, was relatively easy to endure: his cast-iron character; his boy-scout single-mindedness; the raging ardor with which he wrote book after book; his poignant wrestling with the angel of literature (Hemingway as Gabriel); his touching and unswerving faith in the writer’s mission . . . What if you found out that he has given up all those things—in favor of political action?

  He is a man of honor, our good Nagel . . . like you . . . isn’t that so? May I ask what you died of? Surely not the combination of alcohol, uppers, and downers? I suspect you died because you took it too seriously that you failed to take yourself as seriously as Nagel.

  And now I’d like to know what so fascinated you about me, friend Schwab. The evil? . . . That’s a fabulous notion. Evil. Admit it. Be honest for once (it can’t matter to you anymore): What was the measuring between us? What did my irony challenge in you? Or rather: As what did it challenge you? as evil? That should have occurred to me for my last draft of the book—what a lummox I am! I have the stuff of seven best sellers in me and stand in front of literature as if it were a barn door—

  of course: EVIL was the basis of measurement between Schwab and me. EVIL tempted us in each other . . . If that’s not a find! . . . I’m going to turn it into a movie: The Tempter (get the title registered right away!).

  •

  BELOVED TEMPTER

  An Intercosmic Film

  Script: Aristides Subicz. Lead actress: Nadine Carrier (this time playing a man)

  •

  If this doesn’t put some spring into the curly tails of my piglets! Done very discreetly, you understand, very delicately: a man, by means of sheer irony—okay?—gets another man—his bosom buddy, of course—to—what?—well, obviously: TO COMMIT A MURDER . . .

  (call Wohlfahrt immediately: he’ll flip his lid; he’ll fly to Hitchcock with the idea tomorrow.)

  I knew it: this is going to be a creative day. The idea is brilliant. Eventually, it’ll lead to the theodicy, which was so important to Schwab. EVIL in its most sublime, most perfidious variations: love, friendship, brotherhood. The brotherhood of Cain and Abel . . . It would have fascinating dramatic high points: Cousin Wolfgang’s appearance, for example: “Well, what do you have to say now? . . .” Nothing. What should I have said? A man is given the chance to survive at least the first half of a struggle between maddened nations, survive it calmly and well fed in a brown shirt, but his conscience does not permit him; or rather: THE TEMPTER has aroused this conscience in him . . . So, at the very start, for the Polish campaign, he plants himself before the tempter in a poignantly simple military gray, and his eyes ask with defiant anxiety, “Well, what do you say now? . . .” Plants himself with clumsy significance before the tempter, like the lead actor in an expressionist play, his very entrance fulfilling a bit of German destiny, the man in military gray symbolizing Langenmarck, Stalingrad . . . and his eyes, mole blind from reading so much Stefan George, heart-breakingly tragic and defiantly anxious, ask, “Well, what do you have to say now? . . .”

  I have nothing to say. Not to you, either, dear Schwab. I lie here and breathe in the creaturely bliss of existence. I’ve got eight days and nights of a Descent into Hell behind me and presumably a few more days and nights ahead of me: I KNOW THAT I AM A MURDERER—like anyone who has a brother.

  I know my measure of guilt. Even for certain deaths (including yours) for which I am only very indirectly responsible. Cousin Wolfgang, for example, would not have had to pass away so prematurely but for me (“Well, what do you have to say now? . . .”); likewise Stella; likewise Gaia. But this was, so to speak, the midwife’s role I played for death. Everyone plays it occasionally and also finds his own helper when his hour comes. Nor do I want to mention the corpses that still walk about on two feet in broad daylight: Christa in Hamburg or Dawn in her madhouse. And perhaps also my once so deeply beloved son—a growing corpse, a corpse apprentice, so to speak—who will soon mature to manhood, find a trade, woo a wife, make babies: all this as someone who died prematurely, killed by his father . . . I did it in order to be close to an Other. The way Nadine always wants to be close to someone. Like Christa, when we first met in the hell of Nuremberg—like Dawn: initially her awakening, her happiness, and then the plunge back into solitary confinement with herself—

  Why did you die, Schwab? To reach someone else? . . . To show me and Nagel and Carlotta and Hertzog and Scherping and God knows who else that your tormented existence in contemptuous conditions was no fiction, no literary as-if, but a dreadful reality? . . . I imagine that your dead eyes must have contained the same defiantly anxious question as Cousin Wolfgang’s eyes when he stood before me, dressed in military gray for the sacrifice: “Well, what do you have to say now?. . .”

  Let me tell you what I have to say: Your murder was not properly structured; your sacrifice was in vain; you proved nothing, you only proved yourself to be a biological backfire; you did not kill yourself because your despair at existence in contemptuous conditions did not even let you write about it; the truth is: you lived in despair because you had to kill yourself.

  You taught me a great deal about life, Schwab: you made me realize in what way I am superior to all of you: I ACCEPT THIS EXISTENCE IN CONTEMPTUOUS CONDITIONS HUMBLY AND GRATEFULLY. This is my HAVING for whose sake I AM GIVEN . . .

  I am like that wolf in Bessarabia: I bite at everything around me, slavering, I bite into my flanks, and the bullet that is to release me shoots only my leg off, and I limp away on three legs, grateful THAT I AM ALIVE . . .

  That is my monstrous power: the power with which I murder even when I don’t murder with my hands: FEAR IS MY POWER: wolf hunger and wolf tenacity and wolf fear in my sucked-in belly. . .

  The fear, for instance, THAT I WILL NOT WRITE MY BOOK: this book with no solid ground plan or outline, no foundation-laying idea, no shaping principle. This book, which increases and proliferates like a cancer, nourished by my moods and whims, by my hopes, wishes, dreams, and visions, my ecstasies, illuminations, contritions, despairs, revelations, insights, perceptions, wrong erroneous foregone conclusions, drives, compulsions, likes and dislikes, by my wisdom and by my folly . . . This book, which grows out of all these things like one of the monstrous houses that fools build out in provincial nooks somewhere, remote from the times, like turned-up giant-dwarf grottoes among the gillyflowers and Aaron’s rods of their rustic gardens
: with a hundred arches, stairways, galleries, oriels, and balconies; gabled, domed, and betowered; crowned with merlons, steps, ramps, balustrades; adorned with blind niches, vases, rosettes, and lanterns. All the formal elements of our form-proliferating, form-devouring Europe hybridly piled one on top of the other, crusted one on top of the other . . . thus proliferations of form coming not from a lack of form, but rather from a glut of it. I want to say everything in this book: everything I know, presume, believe, recognize, and sense: everything I have gone through and lived through; the way I have gone through it and lived through it; and, if possible, why and to what end I went through it and lived through it . . .

  and I say it with the ardor of credulous simplicity—with blind faith in God—that a specific form must ultimately be ingrown in something that is so immediately and compulsively produced out of necessity (and against all expectations to the contrary) . . .

  •

  . . . and while I was thinking all these things, a memory flashed through me, terrifyingly, a memory of a conversation with S. (in front of Pollock’s canvases at the first Documenta? or later? at some trashy Action Painting show here in Paris?). Anyway, a conversation I outlined rather accurately and didn’t come across while going through my papers during the past few days. A conversation then that must be misplaced or lost, like so many other things . . . and (precisely because it’s been lost) seemed to contain something that must finally, as the conceptual essence of my book, contain the key to its form . . .

  A conversation with Schwab about snails and the houses they produce out of themselves as the expression of their species: always quite typical and yet individually distinct in pattern, coloring, and ultimate form . . . Plus a quotation from Valéry, which Schwab, of course, promptly had at hand, and which I will never find again without my notes and books . . .

  And with that, I was at last fully awake and greeting the dear day.