Suddenly everything would be at an end. Everything would fly apart in an immense explosion. We approach philosophy with extreme caution, I said, and we fail. Then with resolution, and we fail. Even if we approach it head-on and lay ourselves open, we fail. It’s as though we had no right to any share in philosophy, I said. Philosophy is like the air we breathe: we breathe it in, but we can’t retain it for long before breathing it out. All our lives we constantly inhale it and exhale it, but we can never retain it for that vital extra moment that would make all the difference. Ah, Gambetti, I said, we want to set about everything and take hold of everything and appropriate everything, but it’s quite impossible. We spend a lifetime trying to understand ourselves and don’t succeed, so how can we pretend to understand something that isn’t ourselves? Instead of describing Wolfsegg to him, as I had promised, I wore Gambetti down with my diatribe, which I delivered in an intolerably loud voice as we walked the full length of the Flaminia and part of the way back, several times retracing our steps before we finally reached the Piazza del Popolo. All this time I never let him get a word in, though I knew that he would have comments to make. Every now and then he interjected that I was indulging in one of my typical philosophizing disquisitions. I would have done better to let him interrupt me than to go on listening to my own words and getting carried away by them, for I knew that sooner or later they would grate on my nerves and lead me to reproach myself for letting myself go—and, what’s more, in the presence of Gambetti, who was after all entitled to expect more self-discipline from his teacher than I was capable of at the time. When we reached the Piazza del Popolo, which at nine in the evening was as busy as most cities are just before midday, it struck me that I should be more careful and not let myself go in Gambetti’s presence, especially when indulging in one of my philosophical escapades. However, I told Gambetti that we should never feel ashamed if on occasion we more or less lost control because our mind required us to, for the mind was always excited when it had been primed to think. Gambetti could not help laughing at this remark, which amounted to an overdue apology. With his usual discernment, he ordered us only a half bottle of white wine, and I was able to begin my description of Wolfsegg. As usual when I describe Wolfsegg, I began with the view from the village. Wolfsegg lies above the village, I told Gambetti, at a height of more than two thousand four hundred feet. It consists of the main house and various outbuildings—the Gardeners’ House, the Huntsmen’s Lodge, the Home Farm, and the Orangery. And the Children’s Villa, which is also a fine building, built for the children of Wolfsegg probably two hundred years ago, and set somewhat apart, on the east side, where you have an extensive view of the Alps. From Wolfsegg, in fact, you have the most extensive view of the Alps that you’ll find anywhere; you can see the whole of the landscape from the mountains of the Tyrol to those of eastern Lower Austria. That’s not possible from anywhere else in Austria, I told Gambetti. Gambetti was always an attentive listener and never interrupted when I was trying to develop a theme. We are usually interrupted and delayed, or at any rate inhibited, when we begin a story or a description, but not by Gambetti, whose parents, the gentlest and most considerate people, brought him up to be a good listener. Wolfsegg lies about three hundred feet above the village, from which it’s approached by a single road that can at any time be cut off by a drawbridge at a point where there’s a gap in the cliff separating it from the village. Wolfsegg can’t be seen from the village. For centuries a high thick wood has protected it from the view of those who aren’t meant to see it. The road is of gravel, I told Gambetti, and climbs steeply to a nine-foot wall that still hides the main house and the outbuildings. A visitor entering by the open gate first sees the Orangery on the left, with its tall glass windows. Even today it contains orange trees, I told Gambetti, which thrive in it thanks to its favorable location, where it gets the sun all day long. There are lemon trees too, and all sorts of tropical and subtropical plants flourish there, as in the imperial palm house in Vienna. What I loved most as a child were the camelias, I told Gambetti, which were the favorite flowers of my paternal grandmother. The Orangery was where we most enjoyed spending our time as children. I would often spend half the day there, especially with my uncle Georg, who used to tell me where all the plants came from. This was one of my greatest pleasures. It was in the Orangery that I heard my first words of Latin, the names of the many plants that were bred and grown there in a variety of different-sized pots, under the care of the three gardeners who were always employed at Wolfsegg and still are. As you can imagine, Gambetti, this is a great luxury in Central Europe today, I said. My first contact with other people, as they were called, was with the gardeners. I observed them as often as I could and for as long as I could. But even at this early stage I wasn’t content with the gorgeous colors of the plants. I had to know where these gorgeous colors came from, how they originated, and what they were called. The gardeners at Wolfsegg had infinite patience. They radiated calm, and their lives had a regularity and a simplicity that I admired above all else. It was the gardeners I was attracted to most; their movements were of a kind that was absolutely necessary for the tasks they performed, purposeful and reassuring, and their language was utterly simple and clear. As soon as I could walk, the Orangery became my favorite resort, whereas my brother, Johannes, spent most of his time at the Home Farm, with the horses, cows, pigs, and chickens. I preferred plants, he preferred animals. My greatest pleasure came from the plants in the Orangery, his from the animals on the Farm. The best time at the Orangery was winter, when nature was snow-covered, cold, and bare. From the beginning I was allowed to spend my time with the gardeners, watching them and even working with them. My greatest delight was to sit on a little bench in the Orangery next to the azaleas, watching the gardeners. The very word Orangery always fascinated me, I told Gambetti. It was the word I loved best of all. The Orangery was built on the escarpment above the village in such a way that the mild sunlight that fell on it benefited all the plants that grew in it. The old builders were clever, I said, cleverer than those of today. And the amazing thing is that they spent only a short time working on a building, unlike modern builders, who can spend years over a single structure. A stately home that was built to last for centuries would be completed in a few months, with all its fine, even highly sophisticated features. Today they waste years putting up some vulgar, unsightly, and ludicrously unpractical monstrosity, and one wonders why, I said. In those days every single builder had taste and worked for pleasure. This is obvious when you look at old buildings, which are entirely suited to their purpose, unlike any that are built today. Every detail was lovingly fashioned, I said, with the greatest sensitivity and artistry; even minor features were executed with the utmost taste. The Orangery is not only ideally situated, I told Gambetti, but it’s built with exquisite taste; it’s a work of art that can easily stand comparison with the finest creations of its kind in northern Italy and Tuscany. Each master builder was a minor Palladio, I told Gambetti. Modern building is degenerate, not only tasteless but for the most part unpractical and quite inhumane, whereas earlier building styles were artistic and humane. Built onto the left side of the Orangery is a big arch, made of conglomerate, tall enough for all the farm vehicles to pass under. Behind it is the spacious yard of the Home Farm, which consists chiefly of three cowsheds and a generously proportioned stable. Above them are the quarters occupied by the farmhands, who have always earned a good living. The Farm is built in the shape of a horseshoe. The living quarters above the stable and cowsheds could accommodate about a hundred people. They all have big rooms, no smaller than those in the main house, which is a very elegant structure built on an eminence directly opposite the Farm, at a distance of two hundred yards. One has the finest view of it from the Farm, through the arch that I’ve just mentioned. It has two upper floors and is exactly a hundred feet high, I told Gambetti. I love the view of the house. The front is more austere than any other I know in Austria, and more elegant. In the middle
is the main entrance, twenty-five feet high, painted in such a dark shade of green that it appears black, with no ornamentation except for the brass knob, which is screwed on and never polished, and an iron bell pull to the left. The first-floor windows are set at a height that prevents anyone from looking in. Stepping into the entrance hall is always a shock to me when I come from Rome; its coldness, as well as its fine proportions, its height and its length, always make me catch my breath. It’s about a hundred feet long, up to the courtyard wall, and the only natural light falls from above onto the hundred-fifty-year-old larchwood floorboards, each of which is about twenty inches wide and now quite gray from generations of use. I don’t know a more beautiful hall, I told Gambetti. It’s imposing by its size and its absolute severity. There’s not the slightest decoration on the walls, no pictures, nothing. The walls are whitewashed and give an impression of uncompromising austerity. It was like this for centuries. Recently, I said, my mother has taken to placing baskets of flowers in the hall; these don’t improve the effect, but they don’t destroy it—they disturb it a little, I told Gambetti, but it’s too grandiose to be destroyed. On first entering the hall, which has always struck me as cold and awesome, one might find it somewhat eerie, and more than one visitor has feared he would freeze to death. Most of them start shivering, because they are quite unused to entering such a large, splendid, and extraordinarily grand hall. No other entrance hall I know is so large or so splendid or so extraordinarily grand, and therefore so forbidding. It’s always seemed forbidding to everyone but me, for I still find its very grandeur and coldness attractive. On entering it, I told Gambetti, you think for a moment that you’re going to die, and you look around for something to hold on to. Your eyes are blinded when you step out of the daylight into the relative gloom of the hall, and for a moment you feel completely exposed. Immediately to the left of the entrance is the servants’ hall. Next to this is the door to the stockroom, followed by the door to the chapel. The chapel is as big as the average village church. It has three altars—a Gothic altar in the middle and two side altars. Even today mass is said there every Sunday morning at six. Either the priest or the chaplain comes up from the village on foot, which is a great effort for the old priest. In the sacristy we still have large cupboards full of vestments, some of which go back three centuries. Wolfsegg has been spared by most of the wars waged in Europe, and the fires that broke out in the last century were all quickly extinguished, as the village boasts one of the most famous and efficient fire brigades in Austria. Not a day goes by without my mother kneeling in the chapel between seven and eight in the evening. We were brought up to visit the chapel every evening. Naturally it was always a great occasion when the archbishop of Salzburg appeared in his ceremonial robes for special events such as christenings, confirmations, weddings, and so forth. The spectacle put on by the Church was at one time supremely important to me, as it was to all my family. That quickly changed. But I still remember how immensely impressive the ceremonies were, Gambetti, with the light streaming through the big window of the chapel during these colorful celebrations. Opposite the chapel is the kitchen, as big as a dressage hall and still not heated, even in winter, with its great ovens, some used no longer for cooking but simply as surfaces for standing things on, and the hundreds, indeed thousands, of dishes, cups, and bowls in the cupboards and on the walls. Eight women and girls used to work here, even when I was thirty, as I can remember my thirtieth-birthday party, and especially the activity in the kitchen. I was almost as fond of the kitchen as of the Orangery, but here I was in a female ambience, which interested me no less than the male ambience of the Orangery. There I was attracted by the fragrance of the flowers, here by the smell of the wonderful puddings and desserts. And the cheerfulness of the cooks, who were all well disposed to me, as I sensed at once, ensured that I too was cheerful. I was never bored in the kitchen. Indeed, during the first half of my childhood the kitchen and the Orangery were my dual points of reference. All in all, I can say that between the flowers in the Orangery and the desserts in the kitchen I had a happy childhood. In the kitchen no one asked me tiresome questions, and I could behave freely, just as I could in the Orangery, or anywhere away from my parents. My constant preoccupation was how to get down to the kitchen or across to the Orangery. Even now I often have dreams in which I see myself as a child running down to the kitchen or across to the Orangery, whatever the season. The child runs down to the kitchen to see people who seem happy and well disposed to him, or across to the Orangery to see others who appear equally happy, escaping those who are strict and seem to him malign, who are impatient with him and constantly demand the impossible. In my dreams I’m always running away from my impatient, demanding parents, out through the hall, past the Orangery and the Farm and into the surrounding woods, I told Gambetti. I lie for hours on the bank of a stream, watching the fish in the water and the insects on the reeds. The days are long and the evenings far too short. Having entered the hall, I told Gambetti, you walk about twenty paces and up a wide wooden staircase leading to the second floor. You turn right into what is called the upper hall. At the east end of this you see the large dining room, the door of which is always open. The dining room is immediately above the lower hall and has a big balcony. As children we were allowed in the dining room only on special occasions, when we were ordered there and had to sit at table, properly dressed, and keep quiet. The cupboards and sideboards in the dining room are full of costly china and cutlery, priceless treasures collected by our family over the centuries. On the walls hang portraits of those who built Wolfsegg and those who preserved and administered it, all of them long since laid to rest in our vault in the churchyard. If this dining room could talk, I told Gambetti, we’d have a full and unfalsified history of humanity, fantastic yet real, splendid yet terrible. This dining table undoubtedly saw history in the making, and not just local history. But dining tables don’t talk, I said. Which is all to the good, for if they did they’d very soon be smashed to pieces by those who have to sit at them. I remember sitting at this table with altogether eight different archbishops and cardinals and at least a dozen archdukes, I told Gambetti, and this naturally made a big impression on me as a child. And with many grand society ladies (I don’t recall their names), who came to visit us from Vienna, Paris, and London. And who all spent the night at Wolfsegg, in rooms that were normally kept locked but were opened up specially for guests, big, stuffy rooms with dark wallpaper and heavy drapes, so heavy that you have to be very strong to be able to draw them in the evening or draw them back in the morning. In these guest rooms, which are all on the north side, I always felt scared. Anyone who stayed in them even briefly was sure to become ill. But guests were always accommodated on the north side, in rooms that were deliberately furnished in this uninviting manner and kept at such a low temperature because guests were not meant to stay longer than was absolutely necessary. Nobody was invited to stay unless there was a particular reason, unless the family wanted something from them, some benefit that couldn’t be obtained in any other way. Guests who had spent the night in these rooms invariably showed signs of having caught a chill, turning up for breakfast with scarves around their necks and, what was most striking, usually coughing. Yet in spite of this they kept coming back, because they found Wolfsegg so fascinating. They couldn’t wait to be invited back. My grandparents used to invite lots of guests, my parents far fewer, as they didn’t have such a craving for company. My father didn’t care for company at all, and my mother at first had too many inhibitions and hang-ups about all these people, who in her opinion came to Wolfsegg only to spy out her social errors and report them wherever such intelligence could harm her. And for the first ten years she didn’t invite my father’s friends; she invited only hers, from whom she had much less to fear, with the result that all these frightful people from the so-called educated middle class descended on us, people who unfailingly make you cringe, Gambetti, especially if they come from Wels and Vöcklabruck, from Linz and
Salzburg, and fancy they are a cut above the rest of humanity. I always found such guests repugnant. On the other hand, Wolfsegg was very new and strange to my mother, not her scene at all, in fact, and she would very soon have been utterly isolated beside my not exactly exciting father. She’d have been bored to death. Wolfsegg would very soon have crushed her, the wife who came up in the world, as my father used to say jocularly in the early years of their marriage. She’d have simply curled up and died, as they say. So from a certain moment on, a moment that was crucial to her survival, she started dragging her own sort up to Wolfsegg and, as my father put it, throwing it open to the proletariat. She was entitled to come to her own rescue, I told Gambetti, even if we couldn’t stand the means she employed. In the main house alone there are more than forty rooms, though I’ve never done a precise count. We children weren’t allotted rooms of our own until we were twelve, and interestingly enough my brother and I both had rooms on the south side, while my sisters’ rooms were on the north side. They were forever catching colds, and it’s more than likely that they owe their susceptibility to colds to being exiled the north side. The girls were always exiled on the north side, as if to punish them for being girls. But that’s only my surmise, I said. People who grow up on the north side are at a disadvantage later on, I told Gambetti, and remain at a disadvantage all their lives. The north side was unpleasant even in summer, as it never warmed through. The walls at Wolfsegg never warm through, whether they’re north-facing or south-facing. They’re always cold, and it’s dangerous to get too close to them. Even the third-floor windows at Wolfsegg are more than six feet tall, and as children we always had difficulty in opening them. We had to get help if we wanted to let in the fresh air. Our parents had a servants’ bell by their beds, but of course we didn’t. When we were children there were no bathrooms on the third floor, where we not only slept but spent most of the day, since our rooms served as both bedrooms and studies. If we had to answer the call of nature in the night, we used the china chamber pots, as had our grandparents, for whom this was a matter of course. And these, I must tell you, were routinely emptied next morning from one of the windows of the third-floor corridor. In the evening we had to take our washing water up to our rooms in big stoneware jugs, as there was no water supply on the third floor. The dirty water was also thrown from a window. On the ground seventy feet or more below the windows from which we emptied our chamber pots and washbasins, the grass was more luxuriant than anywhere else. The Wolfsegg children soon overcame any fear they had and got used to feeling exposed in this huge, icy building. Visiting children were terribly scared and screamed if they were left alone even for a moment, but we were not in the least scared. I think it was when we were four or five that we were banned from our mother’s room, first to a shared room, of course, but banned all the same. After we had washed she would come in and kiss us good night. Johannes always wanted to be kissed good night, but I didn’t. I hated this good-night kiss but couldn’t evade it. Even now my mother haunts me in my dreams with her good-night kiss, I told Gambetti. She bends over me, and I am completely powerless as she presses her lips firmly to my cheek, as if to punish me. After kissing us good night she would put the light out, but she didn’t leave the room at once. She would stay by the door for a while and wait for us to turn on our sides and fall asleep. Even as a child I had very acute hearing and knew that she was standing listening behind the closed door before going down to the second floor, where she and my father slept. She even distrusted her children; I don’t know why. She suffered from an immense, compulsive distrust that couldn’t be cured or allayed and that now strikes me, I must say, as quite perverse and unnatural. All the rooms at Wolfsegg were whitewashed. In the third-floor rooms the drapes were dark green, almost black; in the second-floor rooms they were dark red and almost black. On the third floor, where we had our rooms, they were made of heavy linen; on the second floor they were of heavy velvet, imported from Italy by my paternal grandmother before the turn of the century. For as far back as I can remember these drapes were never washed, which means that they were never taken down. When we were doing our homework, my brother and I, and later our sisters, were locked in our rooms until we had finished it, and only in the most urgent cases, when we couldn’t get any further with it, were we allowed to call for help. But Mother didn’t help us; she always said we must find the answers to our problems ourselves. This procedure was not meant to be educative: it merely suited her convenience. Father never troubled about our schoolwork. He would simply be angry if we came home with bad marks. If one of us got a five or a six (the lowest mark was still a six when we were at school) he would tell us that we were absolutely unworthy of him. Two sixes inevitably entailed repeating a year, but although we often got one, we never got two. Our rooms on the third floor were heated only in exceptional circumstances, when the temperature fell to ten degrees below freezing, though we always had more wood than we knew what to do with. And even then we had to carry the wood up to our rooms and light the stoves ourselves, as the servants weren’t allowed to carry firewood up to the third floor for us. This was on my father’s orders, because he wanted to bring us up tough. Gambetti did not understand this use of the word tough, and I tried to explain it to him. In fact these attempts to toughen us, to give us what my father called a tough upbringing, didn’t toughen us at all but made us exceptionally susceptible to every possible ailment, though less so than our sisters, who grew up on the north side. Father’s toughening methods only made us unusually sensitive and achieved the opposite of the desired effect, making us far sicklier than those who were spared such treatment, far sicklier than the village children, whose rooms were properly heated, even though their families were poor, while we were rolling in wealth. Wolfsegg, I told Gambetti, was dominated by the most dreadful avarice, and my mother was the most avaricious of them all. I’ve often thought that avarice was her only real passion. Leaving aside the small fortune she spent on clothes, I have to say that she was the cheapest person I’ve ever known. She never treated herself to anything. Only the most basic food could be cooked in the Wolfsegg kitchen, and it had to be home produced, not bought in the village. This was why we always ate so much pork and beef. At Wolfsegg we had blood sausage all the time, and all kinds of porridge, pasta, oatmeal, and puddings. And of course egg dishes galore. Only when some important visitor came did they put on a show; the kitchen would then go into top gear and produce an abundance of matchless delicacies. My mother was always anxious to impress outsiders and preoccupied with what others thought of her, how they assessed her, and she naturally wanted to be well thought of, well assessed. In the kitchen they could cook superbly, I exclaimed to Gambetti, but most of the time they produced boring dishes, which came around again every few days. I often wondered why we employed three gardeners, since we never had decent vegetables or any other reasonable garden produce, though it would have been so easy to serve good, tasty vegetables prepared in various ways, and delicious salads. I happen to be very fond of vegetables and salads. But no, all our vegetables and lettuces were sold: they never appeared on the table but were taken by the gardeners to the markets in Wels or Vöcklabruck, as this brought in a profit. There was no need for my father to suffer from stomach complaints, I said. The cooks and their assistants, as I have said before, were kept busy most of the time canning and pickling, and even making sausages, because the slaughtering was done at Wolfsegg and we ate only home-slaughtered meat. They certainly made the best blood sausage I’ve ever had. A butcher would come up from the village to slaughter the cows, calves, and pigs, which were then neatly dressed in our own butchery next to the Farm. It was a pleasure to see the butcher at work. As small children, of course, we found it repulsive and sickening, but later I came to regard butchery as one of the supreme arts, on a par with that of the surgeon, if not even more admirable. As small children we thought it natural for animals to be slaughtered and dressed, and were soon no longer scared by it. What had at first seemed repulsive
came to be seen as entirely necessary. Butchery is a difficult art, and when it is done with consummate skill it deserves our admiration. From an early age country children are accustomed to dealing with life and death, once they’ve gotten over the first shock. It soon ceases to be scary, because it’s not sensational, merely natural. At the Farm we had a curing room in the attic, I told Gambetti. This expression amused him, and I had to repeat it for him several times. In our curing room hundreds of sausages and pieces of smoked meat hung from the ceiling. Around the inner courtyard of the main house, where the greater part of family life takes place, I told Gambetti, there is a colonnade at each floor level. That is where I always clean my shoes. At this remark Gambetti laughed again as he poured some wine into my glass. And in this courtyard, in winter, we used to keep the sick or injured deer that the huntsmen found and brought to Wolfsegg for us. The Huntsmen’s Lodge is in front of the Children’s Villa but in back of the Gardeners’ House, I told Gambetti. A bird’s-eye view of Wolfsegg is like this: high above the village is the house, and in front of it the park, roughly oval in shape, extending to the east for about a hundred sixty or a hundred eighty yards, as far as the boundary wall. Set in the wall is a high stone gateway, through which the farm vehicles pass. Built onto the wall at the right is the Orangery, and opposite this is the right wing of the Home Farm, which is built in the shape of a horseshoe and is altogether two hundred fifty yards long. In back of the Farm, directly to the east, is the Gardeners’ House, in back of this the Huntsmen’s Lodge, and a little farther on the Children’s Villa that I love so much. This was built about two hundred years ago, in the style of the Florentine villas you can still see on the way to Fiesole. Of course it’s less ornate, but it’s quite extraordinary for Austria. Yet you can’t say it’s out of place in the Austrian landscape; on the contrary, it’s more attractive than anything else in the landscape. It may sound odd, but it was built for children. It has a miniature theater, where puppet plays used to be put on. The children wrote the plays, little comedies of the kind that young people can easily think up, with sad endings that on reflection weren’t really all that sad. And naturally in verse. Hundreds of children’s costumes are stored in the villa. Today the building is locked up, and I don’t think anyone has set foot in it for years. Some of the windows have been broken, probably by children from the village, but the roof doesn’t let in the rain, or at least not yet. I’ve always wanted to restore it, I told Gambetti, but my family wouldn’t countenance spending money on anything so stupid. My brother and sisters and I often put on shows there but were then forbidden to because we should do more studying and less playacting. It’s a pity that the Children’s Villa is now dead, I said, as it’s the most beautiful building for miles around. You can’t imagine how charming it is, Gambetti, in a part of the world that is not rich in charming buildings, attractive houses, and architectural gaiety. Perhaps one day I’ll get my way with the family and restore the villa. Then I’ll have the local children put on a comedy for the opening. My greatest delight was to watch the performances given by the local children, all wearing costumes that were centuries old and so colorful, so imaginative, so artistic, so truly poetic. Yet as always, I told Gambetti, whatever is truly poetic is more neglected than anything else. It’s as though no one had any use for the truly poetic. The Children’s Villa, locked up and left to dilapidate, is a rather sad but interesting chapter in the history of Wolfsegg, I said, perhaps the saddest. The huntsmen were never my friends, I told Gambetti. It was only with reluctance that I visited the Huntsmen’s Lodge, though it was my brother’s favorite haunt. Hunting soon became his ruling passion, just as it was my father’s. He goes hunting whenever he can, and several times a year they have hunting parties at Wolfsegg, which I haven’t attended in recent years. Members of the upper crust converge on Wolfsegg from all over Europe, and for days on end one hears many languages spoken, especially Spanish, when our Spanish relatives come over from Bilbao and Cádiz. These hunting parties were inaugurated by my father, who refused to let my mother put a stop to them. They’re now part of the Wolfsegg tradition. On these occasions all the rooms are occupied, even the coldest and most unfriendly. And a lot of Italians come too. The larders are emptied and dozens of jam jars are opened, and there’s even a large variety of salads and compotes. My brother loves the Huntsmen’s Lodge and retires there to work on the Wolfsegg balance sheets. All the bookkeeping is done there. I’ve never had much of a liking for hunting trophies, I told Gambetti. I’ve always been put off by the trophy cult. And I’ve always loathed hunting itself, though I’m convinced that it’s absolutely necessary. Whenever he can, my brother goes to Poland to hunt, even to Russia. To indulge his great passion he’s prepared to put up with the conditions in these Communist countries. Where hunting’s concerned, no price is too high for him. He’s crazy about sailing and crazy about hunting. And he’s only ever seen wearing hunting gear, which has long been the national costume of the Austrian countryside, so to speak. Because it’s so practical, I said. Everybody, of whatever class, goes around in hunting gear, even if he has no connection with hunting. They go around in their green-and-gray outfits, and sometimes it seems as though the whole population of Austria is made up of huntsmen. Even in Vienna they go around in their thousands dressed in hunting gear. Even city dwellers seem to have been smitten with the hunting craze, I said, for how else can you explain why you see people going around everywhere in hunting outfits, even where it seems ridiculous and perverse. The Huntsmen’s Lodge was built at the end of the last century, on the site of an earlier one that was destroyed by fire. A great-grandfather of mine had set up a library in it, I said. Imagine, Gambetti: that would have been the sixth library at Wolfsegg. It had originally been intended simply as a collection of hunting literature, but it was later extended and became a general library. I found the most incredible treasures in it, I said. It was ideal for anybody who wanted to devote himself to the books, to yield himself up to them undisturbed. No one visits the Huntsmen’s Lodge, so no intrusion need be feared. The building is airy and warm, and hanging on the walls are fine examples of verre églomisé, mainly seventeenth century, painted with exquisite artistry. It also has a copy of Schedel’s World Chronicle, colored by my great-grandmother, which lies on a heavy Josephine writing desk from Styria. The desk is covered by a slab of Carrara marble eight inches thick, a great rarity north of the Alps. Uncle Georg used to say that at this desk, with its marble slab, he had the perfect place for putting his ideas down on paper. It was here that he started writing what he called his Anti-autobiography, a two-hundred-page manuscript in which he recorded everything he thought worth recording and on which he went on working for two decades in Cannes. When he died, none of us could find the manuscript, and it was suspected that he’d burned it shortly before his death, as we had evidence from his entourage that he’d made an entry relating to Wolfsegg two weeks earlier. The good Jean himself had seen the entry but could tell us nothing about it except that it was very short and concise. Having known Uncle Georg, I’m sure it was a fairly pungent remark that might have shocked my family greatly. Maybe the good Jean himself spirited the manuscript away, I said, but I can’t exclude the possibility that my mother destroyed it, as she had access to Uncle Georg’s study before anything was moved. The manuscript had always been kept in a desk drawer, but two days after my mother had been in the room this undoubtedly interesting document was missing and nowhere to be found. My mother probably came off worse than anyone in his Anti-autobiography, and I wouldn’t put it past her to have shut herself in his study for a while, as if grieving, and read the manuscript. She may have been outraged by what she read and made short shrift of the damaging document. After all, Uncle Georg had throughout his life blamed her for everything. He always told me, Your mother is the bane of Wolfsegg, and it’s quite probable that he recorded this observation in the Anti-autobiography. The slab of Carrara marble on the Styrian writing desk is always cold, ice cold, I told Gambetti, whatev
er the temperature outside; even at the height of summer, when everyone’s wilting under the heat, the Carrara marble is ice cold. It was over this ice-cold slab that Uncle Georg noted down his ideas. Altogether the best place to think is over this cold marble slab, he used to say. In my last years at Wolfsegg, having consciously or unconsciously taken my leave of the place forever, as it were, I too sat at this marble slab and wrote down a few things I thought worth recording, I told Gambetti, philosophical ideas that admittedly led to nothing and that I later destroyed, like so much else. We do our best thinking over a cold stone slab, I said, and our best writing. This slab of Carrara marble was unique, absolutely unique. And it was one of the things that now and then made the Huntsmen’s Lodge attractive. Normally I never set foot in the Huntsmen’s Lodge, as I’ve told you, and certainly not during the hunting season. The huntsmen were my brother’s friends, not mine; my friends were the gardeners. I visited the Gardeners’ House frequently, nearly every day, in order to see ordinary people. That was what I craved, and I was happier there than anywhere else. I loved simple people with their simple ways. When I went to see them they treated me just as they treated their plants, with affection. They understood my troubles and anxieties. The huntsmen showed no such understanding. They were always ready with their overbearing remarks and saw fit to regale me, a small child, with their suggestive jokes; they thought to cheer me up by waving their liquor bottles above their heads, though in fact such crude behavior only made me feel sadder and more insecure. The gardeners were quite different: they understood me, without wasting words, and could always help me. Even from a distance the huntsmen would bear down on me in their boastful fashion and address me in their loud, drunken voices, but the gardeners behaved toward me in a way that was sensitive and reassuring. It was the gardeners I sought out when I was unbearably unhappy and distressed, not the huntsmen. There were always two opposing camps at Wolfsegg, the huntsmen and the gardeners. They had tolerated one another for centuries, and that can’t have been easy. It’s interesting that every so often one of the huntsmen would kill himself, naturally with a gun, whereas no gardener ever did. There were many suicides among the huntsmen at Wolfsegg, but none among the gardeners. Every few years a huntsman shoots himself and a replacement has to be found. The huntsmen don’t live long in any case; they soon go gaga and drown themselves in drink. The gardeners at Wolfsegg have always lived to a ripe old age. Quite often a gardener will live to be ninety, but the huntsmen are usually finished at fifty because they’re no longer capable of doing their job. They tremble when taking aim, and even at forty they have problems with their balance. They’re mostly to be found in the village, sitting around in the inns, fat and bloated, their guns beside them with the safety catches off, holding forth with their absurd political opinions and often getting involved in brawls, which naturally end in injury or even death, as always happens in the country. The huntsmen were always hooligans and troublemakers. If they didn’t like the look of somebody they would take the next opportunity of shooting him and claim subsequently in court that they had mistaken the victim for an animal. The history of the Upper Austrian courts is full of such hunting accidents, which usually earn the offender a caution, on the principle that anyone shot by a huntsman has only himself to blame. The huntsmen were always fanatics, I told Gambetti. In fact it can be shown that huntsmen are to a large extent responsible for the world’s ills. All dictators have been passionate huntsmen who would have paid any price and even killed their own people for the sake of hunting, as we have seen. The huntsmen were Fascists, National Socialists, I told Gambetti. In the village it was the huntsmen who ruled the roost during the Nazi period, and it was the huntsmen who blackmailed my father, as it were, into National Socialism. When National Socialism emerged they were the strongmen; my father was the weakling who had to yield to them. So it was that because of the huntsmen Wolfsegg underwent a rapid switch to National Socialism. I must tell you, Gambetti, that my father was blackmailed into becoming a Nazi, and of course egged on by my mother, who was a hysterical National Socialist, a German woman, as she liked to call herself, throughout the whole of the Nazi period. On Hitler’s birthday they always ran up the Nazi flag at Wolfsegg, I said. It was most unedifying. Uncle Georg left Wolfsegg chiefly because he could not and would not put up with National Socialism, which was forcibly taking over. He went to Cannes, then for a time to Marseille, from where he worked against the Germans. That’s what my family found hardest to forgive. In the end my father was a Nazi not just by blackmail but by conviction, and my mother was a fanatical Nazi. It was the most abominable period that Wolfsegg has known, I told Gambetti, a deadly and degrading period that can’t be glossed over or hushed up, because it’s all true. It still makes my blood run cold when I tell you that my father invited all the important Nazis to Wolfsegg, just because my mother demanded it of him. The local storm troopers used to parade in the courtyard and shout Heil Hitler! My father undoubtedly profited from the Nazis. And when they’d gone he got off scot-free. In the postwar period he remained the lord of the manor. He put the Children’s Villa at the disposal of the Nazis for their meetings, quite voluntarily, as I know, without needing any encouragement from my mother. The Hitler Youth practiced its handicrafts in the villa and rehearsed its brainless Nazi songs. Year in, year out, the swastika flag flew outside the Children’s Villa, until, weather-worn and washed out, it was taken down by my mother a few hours before the Americans arrived. While taking it down she cricked her neck, I told Gambetti, and from then on suffered from chronic rheumatism in the neck. Moreover, the many swastika flags at Wolfsegg were used to make aprons for the gardeners and kitchen maids after my mother had personally dyed them dark blue. My father joined the Nazi party at my mother’s instigation, and it has to be added that he was not ashamed to wear his party badge quite openly on all occasions. Some of his jackets still have holes in them where the party badge was worn for years. On Uncle Georg’s last visit to Wolfsegg there was a discussion about world affairs generally but mainly about the balance of forces between the Russians and the Americans. At the end of it he reminded my father that he had once been a member of the Nazi party, and not just briefly. Whereupon my father leaped up, smashed his soup plate on the table, and stormed out of the room. My mother shouted Swine! at my uncle, then followed her husband out of the room. So Uncle Georg’s last visit to Wolfsegg ended miserably. But his visits nearly always ended in unseemly quarrels about National Socialism. No sooner were the National Socialists gone than my family threw itself into the arms of the Americans and again reaped nothing but benefits from this distasteful association. They were always opportunists, and it’s fair to say that they were low characters, always trimming to the prevailing political wind and ready to resort to any available means to gain whatever advantage they could from any regime. They always supported the powers that be, and as true Austrians they were past masters in the art of opportunism. They never came to grief politically. It’s because of their low character, I’m bound to say, that Wolfsegg has so far been spared: I mean the buildings and the lands belonging to the estate. It’s never been bombed or burned down by enemies. The improbable truth is that during the Nazi period Wolfsegg was a bastion of both National Socialism and Catholicism. The archbishops and the Gauleiters took turns visiting Wolfsegg on weekends, ceding the door handle to one another, as it were. My mother ruled the roost at that time, along with the huntsmen, who are still Nazis to a man, just as my mother, at the bottom of her heart, remains a Nazi to this day, notwithstanding her Catholic hypocrisy. National Socialism was always her ideal, as it was the ideal of nine out of ten Austrian women, I told Gambetti. So the Huntsmen’s Lodge was always on my mother’s side. Father was never more than her executive organ, to borrow a Nazi phrase—a stupid man, she once said, who understood nothing about anything and had to do what she told him to do. Thinking of the Huntsmen’s Lodge was what set me off on this digression, I told Gambetti. The very words Huntsmen’s Lodge bring the Naz
i period back to me. I could tell you other things about the Huntsmen’s Lodge, things that I found quite sinister as a child, for instance about murders that were connected with it and with National Socialism, but I don’t feel like doing so at present, in the present cheerful atmosphere. But one day, I said, I’ll set about recording all the things about Wolfsegg that obsess me and give me no peace. For decades Wolfsegg has given me no peace. It haunts me day and night. And since my family have neither the will nor the ability to describe Wolfsegg as it is and always has been, it’s clearly incumbent on me to do so. At least I’ll try to describe Wolfsegg as I see it, for everyone has to describe things as he sees them, as they appear to him. And if I had to admit to myself that I saw Wolfsegg as a terrible place inhabited by terrible people, I’d be obliged to state it. I’m sure this is roughly what Uncle Georg intended to do in his Anti-autobiography, but since that work no longer exists, it falls to me to take a dispassionate look at Wolfsegg and report what I see. If I don’t do it now, when else should I do it? I ought to do it now, when I’m in a position to do it, when I’m in the right frame of mind and have the detachment that comes from living in Rome, which can only be beneficial to such a project. Here, in my apartment on the Piazza Minerva, where I have quiet and am basically undisturbed, yet at the center of the modern world, I have the ideal circumstances for writing such an account. For years I’ve thought that I must write about the people at Wolfsegg and the conditions they live in, of their misery and baseness, their frailty and lack of character, about everything they’ve shown me of themselves, which, to be truthful, Gambetti, has given me sleepless nights all my life. I’ll try to portray my family as they are, even if the portrait corresponds only to the way I have seen them and still see them. Since nobody has so far written anything about them, except Uncle Georg, whose Anti-autobiography has been destroyed, it’s up to me to do so. Of course the problem is always how to begin such an account, how to hit upon the right opening sentence. The fact is, Gambetti, that I’ve often started work on it, only to be defeated by the first sentence. I’ve given up again and again, clapping my hand to my head and reflecting that it’s probably madness even to think of writing an account of Wolfsegg, because only a madman would do such a thing. I’ve always asked myself what use it will be and come to the conclusion that it can’t be of any use. Yet it’s always been clear to me, and it’s become even clearer to me recently, that it has to be written, that I can’t get out of writing it, and that one day I’ll have to write it, whatever misgivings I may have. My mind demands it of me. And my mind has become implacable, above all toward myself. Absolutely implacable. And you know I’ve precious little time left. If I don’t make a start it’ll be too late. I don’t know, I told Gambetti, but I feel I’m running out of time. And an account like this requires the writer to spend years over it, possibly not just one or two years but several, I said. It’s not enough simply to make a sketch, I said. The only thing I have fixed in my head is the title, Extinction, for the sole purpose of my account will be to extinguish what it describes, to extinguish everything that Wolfsegg means to me, everything that Wolfsegg is, everything, you understand, Gambetti, really and truly everything. When this account is written, everything that Wolfsegg now is must be extinguished. My work will be nothing other than an act of extinction, I told Gambetti. It will extinguish Wolfsegg utterly. I sat with Gambetti on the Piazza del Popolo until almost eleven, I recalled as I contemplated the photos on my desk. We carry Wolfsegg around with us, wanting to extinguish it in order to rescue ourselves, to extinguish it by recording it and destroying it. Yet most of the time we haven’t the strength to perform this work of extinction. But maybe the moment has arrived. I’ve reached the right age, I told Gambetti, the ideal age for such an undertaking. In the semidarkness of my apartment on the Piazza Minerva, with the curtains almost completely drawn so that I can be undisturbed, shielded from the Roman light, I can start work. What’s preventing me from starting right away? I had asked Gambetti, though I had immediately added, We think we can embark on such an undertaking, yet we can’t. Everything’s always against us, against such an undertaking, and so we put it off and never get around to it. In this way many works of the mind that ought to be written never see the light of day but remain just so many drafts that we constantly carry around in our heads, for years, for decades—in our heads. We adduce all sorts of reasons for not getting on with the work. We dredge up every possible excuse, we invoke all kinds of spirits—malign spirits, of course—in order not to have to start when we should. The tragedy of the would-be writer is that he continually resorts to anything that will prevent him from writing. A tragedy, no doubt, but at the same time a comedy—a perfect, perfidious comedy. But it should be possible to compose a valid account of Wolfsegg, even if it’s not faultless, of the Wolfsegg that I’ve already told you so much about, Gambetti, which has always meant so much to me and is probably the most important thing in my life. It’s not enough to make notes about something that’s important to us, perhaps more important than anything else, I said, namely the whole complex of our origins. It’s not enough to have filled so many hundreds and thousands of slips of paper on the subject, a subject that encompasses our whole life. We must produce a substantial account, not to say a long account, of what we emerged from, what we are made of, and what has determined our being for as long as we’ve lived. We may recoil from it for years, we may shrink from such an almost superhuman enterprise, but ultimately we have to set about it and bring it to a conclusion. What’s the point in having this whole Roman atmosphere and my apartment in the Piazza Minerva, unless I’m to achieve this end? But I’ve probably thought about it too often already: too much reflection saps one’s resolve. I’ll call my account Extinction, I told Gambetti, because in it I intend to extinguish everything: everything I record will be extinguished. My whole family and their life and times will be extinguished; Wolfsegg will be extinguished, Gambetti, in the way I choose. Uncle Georg made a record of Wolfsegg, and what he could do in Cannes I can surely do in Rome, with even greater independence and clarity of vision. Rome is the ideal place for a work of extinction such as I have in mind, I told Gambetti. For Rome isn’t the ancient center of a superannuated history: it’s the modern center of the world, I said, as we can see and feel every day and every hour if we’re observant. The center of today’s world isn’t New York or Paris or London, it isn’t Tokyo or Beijing or Moscow, as we read and are told all the time—it’s Rome, once again it’s Rome. I can’t prove it, at least not at this moment and not in so many words, but I can feel it. You won’t believe it, Gambetti, but in the Piazza Minerva I’ve become a new man. I’ve found myself again after having been lost for so many years, in every possible place. For years I didn’t think I could be saved. All I could see was my approaching dissolution. In all these years, Gambetti, I could see myself going to pieces, slowly declining, getting increasingly lost. I saw myself nearing the end, an end that couldn’t be delayed. Everything within me had become quite meaningless. Neither in Paris nor in Lisbon was I able to find what I had sought for so many years, something new to hold on to, a new beginning. But in Rome I found it. And I hadn’t expected anything of Rome. I’d merely thought it would afford me a week’s distraction, nothing more. At best that it would take me out of myself for a few months. Incidentally it was Uncle Georg’s idea that I should leave Lisbon, which I love, and come to Rome. Lisbon may be splendid, he said, but it’s provincial, whereas Rome’s a cosmopolitan city, or what is termed a cosmopolitan city, he said, correcting himself. So I came to Rome, in the hope of retarding my relentless decline, but scarcely expecting to be saved. And then it became clear that Rome was the city for me, the only one, the one I needed, the one that could save me. In Rome I started to make notes again, something I’d been unable to do for years, and to formulate ideas about everything: not just about my approaching dissolution but about everything imaginable, Gambetti. I was suddenly interested in everything, even in politics, which hadn’
t interested me for years. In all kinds of artistic matters. And in people, Gambetti, for the fact is that for years I’d had no interest in people; they’d been merely a nuisance and aroused no interest in me. In Rome I went to a theater for the first time in years. And to the opera, which for years I’d shunned like the plague. And I started reading again. For years I’d read nothing but the newspapers, Gambetti, but now I read books, real books, not just the daily press with its unbearable garbage, on which I’d gorged myself daily in order to escape from my deadly boredom. For years, Gambetti, I’d been bored almost to death. Everything was bound to bore me, as I could find no distractions. I avoided everybody and everything, people and things, and in the end even the fresh air, and this led to a physical decline. I actually became sick, and wherever I was, the only people I saw were doctors. My sole company consisted of members of the medical profession, with whom I could talk only about disease; chiefly, of course, about my own indefinable diseases, which they all said were incurable, my own deadly diseases. And what is there more awful than talking to doctors, who are altogether the most uninteresting people in the world, because they’re the most uninterested? Doctors are the most depressing conversationalists imaginable, and at the same time the most disreputable, because they always tell you that you have only a short time to live and that you’re going to have a dreadful, miserable life, a useless and unnatural life, wrapped up in yourself and your diseases, a life not worth prolonging. In Paris or Madrid or Lisbon I would shut myself up in my apartment and go out only to the post office, to make sure that my money was still being remitted from Wolfsegg. It was so depressing that in the end I did nothing in Lisbon and Madrid but commute between the post office and various venal and irresponsible doctors. And it was the same in Naples, where I went for a time, but Naples didn’t suit me, as the climate was unbearable and the city unspeakably provincial. You must forgive me, Gambetti, I said, for calling Naples unspeakably provincial, but I can find no other phrase to describe it. The view of Vesuvius I find devastating, because it’s been seen by so many millions, possibly billions, already. In recent years, before moving to Rome, I’d been completely obsessed with myself and had therefore neglected myself in the grossest and most unpardonable way. I’d let myself go to pieces, chiefly mentally but also physically. I’d become thoroughly degenerate, not only sick but intolerant and distrustful, with the result that I almost suffocated in my ceaseless self-observation and self-contemplation. I’d entirely forgotten that in addition to my own terrible world there was another, which was not entirely terrible. Above all I’d forgotten about intellectual life. I’d forgotten my philosophers and poets, and all my creative artists, Gambetti. I might even say that I’d forgotten my own mind. I clung to my sick body, and by ceaselessly clinging to this sick body I almost ruined myself. Until I came to Rome. Until my friend Zacchi got me the apartment in the Piazza Minerva, for at first I lived at the Hassler, as you know, not at the Hotel de la Ville like Uncle Georg—no, I’d become a megalomaniac and had to live at the Hassler. In the very first moment, I looked across the Spagna toward Rome, took a deep breath, and sensed that I was saved. I won’t leave here, I thought to myself in this first moment. Standing at the open window, I said to myself, I’m here to stay, nothing will make me leave. And it all worked out: I stayed in Rome, I didn’t leave. Although I loved all the other cities I’d lived in, none of them had such an overwhelming, existential effect on me. Although I’d spent long or longish periods in all these other cities, I’d never felt at home in them. They had a place in my heart, to use a foolish familiar phrase, but none of them had ever become my city. I love them all, Lisbon especially, and Warsaw and Krakow and Palma, even Vienna and Paris, and London and Palermo, but I couldn’t bear to live in any of them for long now. I’ve left them all behind, without feeling that I’ve lost something that belongs to me, that belongs to me absolutely. Sometimes I’ve thought I could spend as long in Lisbon as I’ve spent in Rome, but then I always recall Uncle Georg’s telling remark about Lisbon, which seems to me the most splendid city of them all. Indeed, Lisbon is more beautiful than Rome, but it’s provincial. The pleasantest years of my life were spent in Lisbon, but not the best years; these have been spent in Rome. Lisbon has a perfect blend of architecture and nature, such as you find in no other city. It’s a pity you’ve never had a chance to visit Lisbon, Gambetti. The years I spent there were my pleasantest and probably my happiest. But I have to say that Lisbon was not the ideal city for my mind, which is what matters to me most, whereas Rome always has been. Rome is of all cities the most congenial to the mind: it was the ideal city for the ancient mind, and it’s the ideal city for the modern mind—precisely for the modern mind, given the chaotic political conditions that prevail here today. No other city, not even New York, is ideal for the mind, but Rome quite definitely is, beyond all doubt. It’s explosive, and that suits me, Gambetti. It’s explosive, Gambetti, and that’s what I love. At this point it occurred to me that I had already gone quite a long way toward alienating Gambetti from his parents, and I wondered how far I could go, how far it was permissible to go, in alienating him from his parents and their world—that is to say, from their ideas. But this thought at once struck me as absurd. I was annoyed at having even entertained it, for my relationship with Gambetti naturally involves alienating him from his parents and their ideas. By teaching him German and getting him to read Siebenkäs and The Trial I am ostensibly acquainting him with German literature, but in fact I am quite consistently alienating him from his parents and their ideas, I thought, as if I were entitled to alienate him from them and remove him farther and farther from their world, a world that was diametrically opposed to mine. In other words, I thought, I’m now doing to Gambetti what I did to myself ages ago, when I removed myself from Wolfsegg. What was good for me then, I thought, is good for Gambetti now. I’m playing the role of Uncle Georg, who drove me out of Wolfsegg with all his ideas, with his revelations about Wolfsegg and all it meant, which finally made it impossible for me to remain there. Just as Uncle Georg drove me out of Wolfsegg, I’m driving Gambetti out of his parents’ world. But I haven’t deliberately tried to do this: it’s happened automatically, without my being aware of it at first, as a by-product of my teaching, so to speak. Gambetti has heard my views on how the world should be changed, by first radically destroying it, by virtually annihilating it, and then restoring it in a form that I find tolerable, as a completely new world—though I can’t say how this is to be done, only that the world must be annihilated before it’s restored, since it’s impossible to renew it without first annihilating it. Listening to my views, he becomes much more attentive and fascinated than when I hand him a copy of Siebenkäs and tell him to read it and then ask me questions about it. Gambetti’s mind has already absorbed a great deal from mine, I thought. It will soon contain more of my ideas than his own. His parents are uneasy about what they see happening, I thought. And they’re not as pleased to see me as Gambetti makes out. True, they invite me home for dinner, but basically they wish I’d go to hell, because for years they’ve considered me a bad influence on their child, who has meanwhile become an adult and outgrown them. They’re alarmed at having brought a budding philosopher and revolutionary into the world, which is not what they intended, someone who’s out to destroy them instead of evincing a lifelong, unquestioning attachment to them. They now blame me not only for possibly being the seducer of their naturally much loved son but for being his destroyer, and consequently their own, whom they have invited into their house and to whom they pay a great deal of money. For Gambetti’s tuition is not cheap. I charge higher fees than any other tutor, but the Gambettis are rich people, I tell myself, and I don’t have to have a bad conscience about relieving them of so much money, which in any case I don’t need, as I have plenty of my own. But the Gambettis have only an inkling of this, no precise knowledge. Gambetti of course knows about my financial position. He once said to me, If my parents knew how rich you were they wouldn’t
pay you anything and wouldn’t allow me to be taught by you. As it is, they think they’re making a generous gesture and see themselves as patrons. For them this is an important element in my tuition arrangements, which they’ve found rather worrying for some time. They take refuge in their role as patrons in order to distract themselves from the idea that by paying you to teach me they might be conniving at something discreditable or destructive. Gambetti himself finds it quite in order for his parents to throw their money out the window, as it were, so that I can alienate him from them and implant in him ideas that will one day shoot up and pose a terrible threat to them and their world. Yet it was never possible for them to see me just as a harmless German teacher from Austria, I thought—it’s so obvious what I am and what I’m about. So I don’t reproach myself for the function I perform, which is to inculcate a knowledge of German literature in their son’s mind, along with my own ideas about changing, and hence annihilating, the world. After all, I didn’t insinuate or force myself into this role, I thought. Gambetti came to me at Zacchi’s instigation, and his parents expressly asked me to be their son’s tutor, telling me that I would be an ideal teacher. I too feel that I am the ideal teacher for Gambetti, and he shares this feeling. What his parents have come to regard as sinister strikes him as necessary and entirely natural. Gambetti has repeatedly told me that my teaching is consistent and logical, and that he regards German literature, which was a fortuitous choice on his part, simply as a pretext for everything else I teach him—meaning my ideas, which he has meanwhile made his own. Little by little we must reject everything, I told Gambetti on the Pincio, little by little we must oppose everything, so that we can play our part in the annihilation we envisage, putting an end to the old and finally destroying it in order to make way for the new. The old must be discarded and destroyed so that the new can emerge, even though we don’t know what the new will be. All we know is that it has to come, Gambetti—there’s no going back. Thinking in this way, we naturally have the old against us, Gambetti, which means that we have everything against us. But this mustn’t deflect us from our goal, which is to replace the old by the new that we long for. Ultimately we have to abandon everything, I told him, discard everything, extinguish everything. Looking down on the Piazza Minerva, I remembered telling Gambetti of a dream I once had, in which I was in a transverse valley of the Grödnertal with my college friend Eisenberg, Maria, and Zacchi. I first had this dream at least four or five years ago, I told him. In it I was still a young man, perhaps twenty. Eisenberg was the same age and Maria not much older. We’d taken rooms in a small inn called The Hermitage. I can still see the inn sign quite clearly. I had often recalled this dream and tried to fathom its meaning, but now I wanted at all costs to distract myself from thinking about the dreadful telegram I still held in my hand, and the dream seemed to provide the most effective distraction. I cannot say what made me recall the dream. Perhaps it was a remark that Gambetti had made two or three hours before I received the telegram, a passing remark containing the word Alps. Gambetti had mentioned that next summer he intended to go to the Alps with his parents, and of course with you, he had added emphatically. He loved the Alps, he said, and we could stay in a narrow valley that he had known since childhood and spend an extremely pleasant and profitable time pursuing our studies, away from the distractions that usually interfere with them. Quite incidentally he had said he would be going to the North Italian Alps with his parents, but above all he wanted to take me too, and if I didn’t mind he would invite me to join them on this Alpine study vacation, as he called it. We had just been talking about Schopenhauer, and about Schopenhauer’s dog, which he had placed above his housekeeper in order to be able to think out and finish writing The World as Will and Idea, and about how the dog and the housekeeper had guided Schopenhauer’s pen, as Gambetti put it. Then, to my surprise and apropos of nothing, Gambetti had suddenly talked of visiting the Alps next summer and taking with him a notebook with squared paper, though he did not explain the significance of the squared paper and I did not press him, but I can distinctly hear him uttering the words to the Alps with my parents and adding and of course with you. This, I fancy, is what reminded me of my strange dream, which comes back to haunt me, I may say, several times a year. I think I first had the dream four or five years ago, at Neumarkt in Styria, in a dark twin-bedded room in an old villa belonging to relatives of my mother, where I was to recuperate, they said, from an unidentifiable feverish illness. I lay with the curtains drawn in this house belonging to my relatives, who have a big furniture factory at Neumarkt. I do not know why I was visiting them, probably for no other reason than to catch cold in Neumarkt, which is one of the wettest and gloomiest places I know. I spent two days and nights at Neumarkt, a really ugly town, lying in bed with drawn curtains and no nourishment. I can no longer even vaguely picture the faces of my relatives. All I know is that I had this dream at their house. We had arrived in the rain in this valley in northern Italy, I told Gambetti—Eisenberg, who was my age, Zacchi, the philosopher, who was also my age, and Maria, my first woman poet, my greatest poet at that time. Maria joined us from Paris, not from Rome, where she already had her present apartment. But in those days the apartment looked different: it contained only hundreds of books, not thousands. And no carpets, Gambetti. But even in those days Maria spent most of her time in bed, where she received her guests. Maria joined us from Paris, dressed in a crazy trouser suit. She looked as though she were going to the opera or had just been to the opera. Black velvet trousers, Gambetti, with big silk bows below the knees, and a scarlet jacket with a turquoise collar. She naturally caused something of a stir when she turned up in that Alpine valley wearing this operatic outfit. Eisenberg went to meet her, and I watched from a distance as she walked toward The Hermitage, moving her arms, her legs, and her head in an operatic fashion, Gambetti, as though she were dancing toward the inn. At first, from a distance, her outfit couldn’t be seen so clearly. Naturally I didn’t think it was Maria. It had never occurred to me that she would come, and certainly not in such an outfit, either from Paris or from Rome. Eisenberg went to meet her, but neither Zacchi nor I did. It was as though Eisenberg knew she would be arriving at that time, while Zacchi and I didn’t. Standing at my window inside the inn, I assumed that Zacchi was in his room, still in bed but not asleep: he usually got up late, unlike Eisenberg and me, who have always been early risers. Eisenberg used to get up even earlier than I did, I told Gambetti, so it was natural that he, not Zacchi or I, should go out to meet Maria. Maria arrived very early, before five in the morning. I had had a sleepless night, as I always do in the Alps, and had spent more or less the whole night looking out of my window for hour after hour, until I had almost collapsed, I told Gambetti, though in fact I didn’t collapse. Then I saw Maria approaching the inn, where we had checked in the evening before in order to discuss Schopenhauer and Maria’s poems. In my dream this was our only reason for going there, and we had chosen what we regarded as an ideal setting, this narrow mountain valley, which is approached by a trail, not by a road, and can therefore be reached only on foot. Maria should have been with us the previous evening, and I can still see myself trying to mollify the landlord by repeatedly telling him he could rest assured that the chief guest, our friend Maria, was definitely coming. The landlord of The Hermitage was afraid that we intended to pay for only three people’s board, for we had booked not only our rooms but full board, so that we could pursue our plan totally undisturbed, the plan being to compare Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Idea with Maria’s poems. Eisenberg, Zacchi, and I had agreed in Rome that it was a particularly attractive project. It was Eisenberg’s idea, and Zacchi had embraced it with enthusiasm. I had then booked the rooms at The Hermitage, and Maria had agreed to everything, so long as it’s not Heidegger, she said, so long as it’s Schopenhauer. She said she was looking forward to our enterprise but had to spend the night in Paris. She wouldn’t tell me why, though I begged her to. In my dream I told Maria tha
t it was rather odd to go to Paris just for one night. There must be an existential reason, I said, but she wasn’t listening. She put on her coat and left at once, saying as she went out that she would join our party punctually. And in fact I saw her approaching the inn, dressed in her operatic outfit, at the very moment when we were due to start our discussion. Throughout the previous evening I had been preoccupied with Schopenhauer and Maria’s poems, even though I spent all my time standing at the window, comparing the one with the other and trying to establish a philosophical relationship between the two mentalities, between Maria’s poems and Schopenhauer’s philosophy, repeatedly subordinating the one to the other, contrasting them and trying to bring out the philosophical element in Maria’s poems and the poetic element in Schopenhauer’s work. The fact that I didn’t sleep at all that night was a great boon, I told Gambetti. We must be grateful for all the sleepless nights of our lives, Gambetti, as they enable us to progress philosophically. Gambetti listened attentively as I went on with my dream narrative, not letting myself be distracted by the noises on the Pincio. Not even the twittering of the birds, which has always seemed to me the most mind-deadening noise, could interfere with my narration. I had stood all night at my window in The Hermitage, Gambetti, reflecting on Maria and Schopenhauer. The previous evening I had decided to pursue these reflections as long as I could, which was probably why I didn’t sleep. Seeing this grotesque figure, at first completely black and quite unrecognizable as Maria, approaching The Hermitage and advancing out of a snow flurry to a distance of more than forty or fifty yards, I eventually realized that this grotesque apparition, with its marionette-like movements, could only be Maria, and I now knew the reason for her nocturnal visit to Paris: she’d gone there quite simply to see an opera, Gambetti, and of course in this outfit, which I knew from Rome. She’d bought this trouser suit in Rome when we were out shopping together one afternoon, one desperate afternoon, as she always puts it, and by making this purchase we’d turned a desperate afternoon into an enjoyable one. Shopping can sometimes be our salvation, if we brace ourselves and don’t shy away from the greatest luxury, from the most exquisite and expensive goods, the very costliest goods, no matter how grotesque, like this suit of Maria’s. Rather than die of despair it’s better to go into a luxury shop and fit ourselves out in the most grotesque fashion; it’s better to turn ourselves into a luxury creation for a kitsch production of Don Giovanni than to take to our beds and resort to a treble dose of sleeping pills, not knowing whether we’ll ever wake up, even though it’s always been worthwhile to waken. At this moment it was clear to me, as Maria walked toward The Hermitage in her grotesque outfit, that she’d been to Paris to see her favorite opera, Pelléas et Mélisande. Maria thinks nothing of coming straight from the Paris Opera to our Alpine valley in order to keep her promise, I thought as I stood at the window and watched her walk toward The Hermitage while Eisenberg went to meet her, I told Gambetti. Eisenberg hasn’t slept either, I thought as I watched him, so naturally he was the first to see Maria and go out to meet her. That’s typical of Eisenberg, I thought, standing at the window. Maria and Eisenberg always had not only a good understanding but the best understanding: they were intellectual equals. Eisenberg loves the same philosophy as Maria, and they share each other’s ideas about poetry. I’ve learned as much from her as I have from him, I thought. Maria wasn’t carrying anything, I told Gambetti. Emerging from the snow flurry, she looked radiantly happy as she walked toward The Hermitage. How relieved the landlord will be! I said to myself on seeing her. Zacchi had been the only one to doubt that Maria would come. How can she go to Paris in the evening instead of coming with us to the Alps, he had said, and yet be with us first thing in the morning at The Hermitage, where we’ve booked her a room? Zacchi was always the distrustful one, I told Gambetti. We used to call him the doubter. Maria stopped, and Eisenberg went up to her, I had told Gambetti, as I now recalled, standing at my study window and looking down on the Piazza Minerva. Continuing my narration, I told him that I had then heard a dreadful bang, like a thunderclap, and that at the same moment the earth had quaked. But oddly enough, as I learned later, nobody else heard the bang or felt the earth quake. Maria and Eisenberg didn’t hear the bang or feel the quake. As Maria and Eisenberg walked toward the inn, unaware that I was watching them intently from my window, Maria appeared to be walking barefoot, and then I saw that Eisenberg was carrying her shoes; she really was barefoot. Eisenberg was always the most considerate person, I told Gambetti—consideration was second nature to him. I stood awhile longer at the window, looking down and trying to follow as far back as possible the footprints left by Eisenberg and Maria as they walked toward The Hermitage. I counted a hundred twenty. I remember it exactly, I told Gambetti—it’s as though I were dreaming it all now, not four or five years ago. Then there was a break in the sequence. Suddenly I see Maria and Eisenberg in the inn lobby. She pulls off his boots, then puts her shoes on his feet, and he puts his boots on hers. All the time they laugh uproariously, but they stop as soon as I enter the lobby. Then, after a short pause, they burst out laughing again so that the whole of The Hermitage shakes. Maria stretches out her legs and holds them up with Eisenberg’s boots on her feet, the black boots that he always wears, those incredibly soft black boots, Gambetti, while Eisenberg hops to and fro in the lobby, wearing Maria’s shoes, ballet shoes with a slightly silvery sheen. Both of them yell, We’ve swapped shoes! We’ve swapped shoes! until they’re exhausted, and Maria falls on my neck, draws me down onto the seat in the lobby, and kisses me, while Eisenberg stands with his back to the wall and watches as we collapse on the seat. Maria goes on kissing me, but suddenly I jump up. At this moment Eisenberg demands that Maria give him back his boots. She takes them off and throws them at his head. Eisenberg dodges and avoids being hit by them. He bends down to pick them up, while Maria points to her ballet shoes, which Eisenberg is still wearing. It was a grotesque sight, Gambetti: Eisenberg in his black overcoat, reaching almost down to his ankles, and with Maria’s ballet shoes on his feet. Eisenberg says he won’t take off Maria’s shoes himself: we must take them off. Whereupon Maria thumbs her nose at him. But then, seeing that he’s upset about having to take off her shoes himself, she bends down and takes them off for him. He stands barefoot in the lobby, I told Gambetti, and then goes up to Maria, who presses herself against me. He kneels down in front of her and hands her the shoes. They’re your shoes, he says. After giving her the shoes he stands up. Maria kisses him and runs out of the inn, carrying the shoes. Eisenberg and I watch her as she goes out. I hope that child won’t freeze to death, says Eisenberg. It has started snowing again. I next see myself sitting with Eisenberg and Zacchi at a little corner table in The Hermitage, I told Gambetti. Open in front of us are Maria’s poems and Schopenhauer’s World as Will and Idea. The landlord comes in and wants to serve our breakfast. He tells us to clear the table. Move that stuff off the table, he says, then makes to clear it himself. Maria comes in just as the landlord is about to start clearing the table without having been given permission. He tries to whip The World as Will and Idea off the table, but Eisenberg shouts at him, What do you think you’re doing? Maria, standing behind the landlord, doesn’t understand what’s going on, I told Gambetti. Eisenberg jumps up and shouts at the landlord several times, What do you think you’re doing? This makes the landlord really angry. As quick as lightning he tries to whip the open volume of Schopenhauer off the table. But Eisenberg forestalls him; he snatches up the book and clasps it to his chest. I snatched up Maria’s poems and Zacchi rescued our notebooks, which were also on the table. The landlord was so furious that he threatened to kill us. He was a strong man and we were all scared of him. Maria had now sat down next to me and pressed herself against me. She didn’t understand what had happened. In Rome she’d been told that The Hermitage would be an ideal place for our project, that it was run by a friendly and extremely accommodating landlord and was in every way the perfect setting for our project. And now
she was faced with a man who was getting fearfully worked up, threatening to kill us, and would clearly shrink from nothing. We had chosen The Hermitage because no other inn seemed suitable for our purpose. Continuing to threaten us, the landlord laid the table, because he was accustomed to laying the table for breakfast under all circumstances, I told Gambetti. He had to lay it because his wife had told him to, and so, while continuing to threaten us, he simultaneously laid the table. And you haven’t even paid yet! he shouted as we clasped our books and papers to our chests in fright, unable to utter a word. You must pay right away! he shouted, and repeated this several times until he’d finished laying the table. We couldn’t say a word, but we knew that the landlord’s wife was lurking behind the kitchen door. Or at least I did, as I could hear her breathing. At the sight of our books and papers the landlord couldn’t contain himself, and even after he’d finished laying the table he went on threatening us. People like you should be locked up, he exclaimed, they should be behind bars, people like you who carry books and papers like that around and wear clothes like that, he said, quite out of breath and pointing first at Maria’s outfit and then at Eisenberg’s long black coat. Finally he pointed at Eisenberg’s beard and said, People with beards like that should be hanged. He worked himself into a terrible state, I told Gambetti, and shouted several times, Riffraff like you should be exterminated. Several times he screamed the word exterminated in our faces. Then he seemed to suffer some sort of seizure. He suddenly put his hand to his chest and supported himself on the table with the other. We took advantage of the landlord’s sudden indisposition to leave the parlor and flee from The Hermitage. We ran down the valley, clutching our Schopenhauer and Maria’s poems, as if we were running for our lives. Maria ran in the middle. There was such a dense snow flurry in the valley that we couldn’t see a thing, but it was a narrow valley and we managed to reach the end. Gambetti, as always, had listened attentively. He did not ask a single question about my dream. Naturally I had told Eisenberg, Zacchi, and Maria about it too. None of them had said anything either. Gambetti speaks of Maria as someone who has everything permanently present in her mind and, because of her intelligence, can hold her own in any company. This is why Maria immediately becomes the focal point of any gathering, without having to say a word. Spadolini too, in his way, is the focal point of any gathering. Maria is inevitably the person on whom everyone has to concentrate, and she knows it, just as Spadolini always knows that he is bound to be the center of attention in whatever company. If Maria and Spadolini are both present at the same party they inevitably disrupt it; they quite simply break it up. I’ve often seen this happen, I told Gambetti. When they’ve been together at a party it has immediately split up into its constituent parts, as they say, because they’ve disrupted it. Either Spadolini or Maria is the focal point, but they can’t both be. Spadolini at least gives the impression that he doesn’t hate Maria, but she never conceals her contempt for him; on the contrary, she flaunts it whenever she has a chance, I told Gambetti. Spadolini constantly says how much he admires Maria’s poems, thereby hoping to divert attention from his hatred of her and seeing such expressions of admiration and esteem as a means of concealing his hatred, but of course he doesn’t succeed, Gambetti. He always goes a shade too far in his praise for Maria’s poems, which incidentally can’t possibly appeal to him because they are directed against him in every way and must have a positively devastating effect on him, I said. Spadolini publicly praises Maria’s translations of Ungaretti’s poems, but his praise is so fulsome as to reveal the true measure of his hatred. He pays court to her, even though he doesn’t like her and finds everything she says repugnant. Maria, on the other hand, openly criticizes Spadolini and can’t understand why I didn’t sever my links with him long ago, Gambetti. She can’t understand that I’m attached to him and don’t want to give him up. She always describes Spadolini as a depraved character and tells me why, Gambetti. She reproaches me for seeing him relatively often, for meeting this dingy character who repeatedly seduces your mother, as she puts it. In her eyes Spadolini is the most hypocritical person, a born charlatan, a born opportunist when his own interests are involved, not just his ecclesiastical interests but his wholly despicable personal interests. Only last night she told me that my continued association with him showed a lack of character on my part, I told Gambetti on the Pincio. Maria gives a poetry reading at the Austrian Cultural Institute and Spadolini applauds enthusiastically because he thinks it will be to his advantage, not because he’s enjoyed the poems, I told Gambetti. Spadolini introduces Maria to the Peruvian ambassador as the greatest living woman poet, although he can’t stand her. He hates her, and yet he invites her to dinner at least once a month in the Via Veneto, which he loves but she loathes and detests, and although she declines all his invitations he goes on issuing them. He says to me, I’ve invited Maria out again and she’s turned me down. I’ll go on inviting her out and she’ll go on turning me down. In his way Spadolini is what they call a great personality and therefore bound to be rejected by Maria. She can’t tolerate a great personality beside her, but Spadolini is a great social diplomat who has mastered all the subtleties. Maria hasn’t mastered them and demonstrates this openly because she can’t do otherwise. Each of them, I told Gambetti, is the focal point—there aren’t two focal points—Spadolini through his sophistication, Maria through her naturalness, I told Gambetti. Maria’s naturalness derives from her Austrian origins, Spadolini’s sophistication from his Vatican connections, I told Gambetti. Both are equally great, and they hate each other with equal fervor. Both are conscious of their greatness and their hatred, but Spadolini is the stronger of the two and therefore does not always have to retreat, unlike Maria, whose only weapon has always been retreat. Spadolini really comes into his own when things get dangerous, I told Gambetti, but Maria retreats. Both have a penchant not only for sartorial extravagance but for extravagance generally. After all, they both came from the provinces, Gambetti, and could assert themselves only through their extravagance. Everything about Spadolini is extravagant, and so is everything about Maria; his extravagance is extremely sophisticated, hers extremely natural. She once told me that if she were to write a book about the quintessence of charlatanry she wouldn’t hesitate for one moment to make Spadolini the chief figure. She says she’s always dreamed of writing prose, but all her efforts in this direction have failed: either she’s given up at once or, if not, she’s realized that she hasn’t produced a work of art but only what she calls an astonishing performance. Spadolini is the great zealot, Maria the great artist, I told Gambetti. Basically I’m fortunate in having two such people, two great personalities, as friends, no matter how these friendships are viewed from outside, no matter how Spadolini views Maria or she views him. I’ll go on cultivating them and never forfeit them, never, I told Gambetti. Listening to Spadolini telling me about Peru is just like listening to Maria reading me her poems: both experiences are on a par, Gambetti. If we associate only with people of high character we very soon become dull, I told Gambetti. We have to keep company with supposedly bad characters if we are to survive and not succumb to mental atrophy. People of good character, so called, are the ones who end up boring us to death. We must be especially careful to avoid their company, I told Gambetti. Maria and Spadolini have always taught me a great deal, Gambetti. But I’ve never told them this. I got to know Maria through Zacchi, who is an expert at bringing people together—Zacchi the eccentric philosopher, the much traveled man of the world. He was already acquainted with Eisenberg, who introduced me to him. Before going to Vienna, Zacchi spent three years in Rome. Eisenberg broke away from his home in Switzerland in order to go to Vienna, where he became my dearest friend. It now occurred to me that the time I spent in Vienna with Eisenberg after my flight from Wolfsegg—for which I have to thank Uncle Georg—was vital to my subsequent mental development. The direction in which I developed was determined by Eisenberg. I began to study the world and gradually to decode and analyz
e it. Eisenberg, who was my own age, was the person who had the greatest influence on me intellectually and pointed my ideas in the right direction. Standing by my window and watching the few people strolling across the Piazza Minerva, I recalled that when I was in Vienna with Maria we had spent most of our time with Eisenberg, making excursions to the Kahlenberg, the Kobenzl, and Heiligenstadt. He introduced Maria to Vienna and showed her the beauties of the city, which was crucial to her existence too. We were always happy when we were with Eisenberg and never bored, I thought. Right from the beginning Eisenberg and Maria had a philosophical relationship, which I found quite fascinating and was able to observe without feeling in the least disturbed emotionally. Observing them, I was able for the first time to see how people of an intellectual disposition can be ideally attuned to one another, and it always struck me how rare such mutual understanding was. Maria came from the ridiculous little provincial town in southern Austria where Musil was born—though throughout the rest of his life he had nothing more to do with it—and she exploited this fact with the most tasteless insistence. This town was dangerously close to the border, in an area notable for the vulgar efflorescence of nationalism, National Socialism, and provincial stolidity. With its stolid self-importance, its stifling petit bourgeois atmosphere, its depressing and ineptly planned streets, its dreary topography, and its stale and unrefreshing air, it had all the ridiculous features that typify a town of some fifty thousand souls who know nothing of the world outside, yet fancy they are at its hub. For the same reasons that made me quit Wolfsegg, Maria set off from her equally dreary hometown and went to Vienna. With all her future poems in her head, I reflected, with her little handbag and all the illusions of the rebel, of the fugitive intent on escape, she set off for Vienna, as I had done, in the hope of gaining a foothold, as they say. But it was not easy. After the war all thinking spirits in the provinces expected more of Vienna than it could deliver. At that time the city did not keep its promises, to Maria or to anyone. Initially Vienna proved to be a lifeline, but only for a short time, after which it paralyzed all who sought their salvation there, as it still does. Vienna affords only a brief respite to those of a philosophical or reflective cast of mind who go there for mental stimulation. I discovered this myself, and it has been demonstrated a million times. To go to Vienna is to be saved for only a brief spell. Anyone who takes refuge there must therefore leave as soon as he can, for he will come to grief unless he turns his back as soon as possible on this ruthless and utterly decadent city. Maria soon grasped this, and so did I. Eisenberg is the only one of us who has survived in Vienna to this day, but then Eisenberg is much tougher than either of us and has a far clearer head, I thought, standing at the window. A soul like Maria’s is soon crushed in Vienna, Eisenberg had once said, as I now recalled, looking down on the Piazza Minerva and then across to the Pantheon and the windows of Zacchi’s apartment. Maria got away, first to Germany, then to Paris, and finally to Rome, as her poetic talent dictated, though she made recurrent attempts to settle in Vienna and took up with all kinds of people who she thought could facilitate her return. But whenever she was about to return, everything fell apart and her plans collapsed, sometimes because she offended the very people who had found her somewhere to live. She acquired life tenancies on a number of apartments but gave them up and never moved in. She let herself be enticed to Vienna by lots of frightful people, especially people in the Ministry of Culture, and let herself be taken in by these people with their frankly dirty motives. She refused to believe that all these people who tried to entice her to Vienna could possibly have dirty motives, although I told her time and again that their real interest was not in her but only in their own paltry purposes, that they were using her as a means to do themselves a favor, to promote their own interests by exploiting her by now famous name. I was well acquainted with all these people, I now recalled, but she let herself be taken in by them because she had a sentimental attachment to Vienna—which, contrary to common opinion, is an utterly cold and unsentimental city—but only up to the critical moment when she turned them down and issued a snub from Rome, where she felt happiest. At one moment she would say to me, Basically I want to go back to Vienna, and then, often only a few minutes later, she would say with equal conviction, Basically I don’t want to go back to Vienna. Basically I want to stay in Rome, even die in Rome. Maria often said she wanted to die in Rome, I now recalled. Her good sense compelled her to stay in Rome—to love Vienna but live in Rome. Yet only a few weeks after snubbing all the people who had found apartments and opened all the important doors for her, she would again start talking of going back to Vienna, which was after all her home, she said. I always greeted this with a laugh, because the word home, coming from her lips, sounded as grotesque as it would coming from mine, though I never use the word, which I find too emetic, whereas Maria used it nonstop, saying that home was the most seductive word. She would write again to her Viennese contacts in the various ministries and call at the Austrian Embassy or the Austrian Cultural Institute in the Via Bruno Buozzi, the ostentatious palace near the Flaminia in which Austrian brainlessness, in all its subtle shades, has had its Roman dependency ever since the building was erected. She attends so-called poetry readings by so-called Austrian poets and miscellaneous pseudoscholarly lectures given by miscellaneous Austrian pseudoscholars in the Via Bruno Buozzi. She even goes to lieder recitals, which are regularly given there by once celebrated Austrian singers who no longer have any voice but have a geriatric croak that can only inflict irreparable damage on the Italian ear. Maria wants to be Roman yet at the same time Viennese, I thought, and it is this dangerous mental and emotional condition that generates her superb poems. The dream about The Hermitage, which made a great impression on her, put me in mind of Maria, and I enjoyed thinking of her as I stood at the window, looking down on the Piazza Minerva. What would Rome be to me without her? I thought. How lucky I am that I have only to walk a few yards to refresh myself in her presence! How lucky I am to have Maria! My conversations with her are always more meaningful than any others I have, and altogether the most delightful. It is always stimulating to be with Maria, always exciting, and nearly always a source of happiness, I thought. Maria has the best ideas, and for Gambetti she is always an experience, as he puts it. In her thinking she recoils from nothing, I reflected. Her poems are one hundred percent authentic, which can’t be said of the products of her fellow poets, however celebrated they may be, the rivals who constantly intrigue against her. She is fully present in every line she writes, everything in it being uniquely hers. It was from Spadolini that I first really learned to see and observe, I told Gambetti, and from Maria that I first learned to hear. Both of them trained me to be what I am. I went on to tell Gambetti how Spadolini never disdained to accept money from my mother, even for strictly personal purposes. It enabled him to indulge his vanity, I told Gambetti. She remitted large annual sums to him, doubtless from the Wolfsegg funds. Possibly with the connivance of my father, I said, who would go to any lengths to appease her and thought nothing of making up a threesome for a trip to Italy, as crown witness, so to speak, of this extraordinary relationship, in which he, not Spadolini, played the part of onlooker. My father is just as fascinated by Spadolini as I am and wouldn’t give him up for the world, I told Gambetti. Spadolini is not the kind of man you give up. Once we meet a person like him, we don’t renounce him, whatever mischief he makes. Then it suddenly occurred to me how odd it was that I should be teaching Gambetti German literature, of all things—German, Austrian, and Swiss literature, the literature of German-speaking Europe, to use the usual clumsy formulation—despite the fact that I find this literature impossible to love and have always rated it below Russian, French, and even Italian literature. I wondered whether it was right to teach something I did not love, simply because I thought I was better qualified to speak about it than about another literature. Even in its highest flights, I told Gambetti, German literature is no match for Russian, French, or Spanish
literature, which I love, or Italian literature for that matter. German is essentially an ugly language, which not only grinds all thought into the ground, as I’ve already said, but actually falsifies everything with its ponderousness. It’s quite incapable of expressing a simple truth as such. By its very nature it falsifies everything. It’s a crude language, devoid of musicality, and if it weren’t my mother tongue I wouldn’t speak it, I told Gambetti. How precisely French expresses everything! And even Russian, even English, to say nothing of Italian and Spanish, which are so easy on the ear, while German, in spite of being my mother tongue, always sounds alien and ghastly! To a musical and mathematical person like you or me, Gambetti, the German language is excruciating. It grates on us whenever we hear it, it’s never beautiful, only awkward and lumpy, even when used as a vehicle of high art. The German language is completely antimusical, I told Gambetti, thoroughly common and vulgar, and that’s why our literature seems common and vulgar. German writers have always had only the most primitive instrument to play on, I told Gambetti, and this has made everything a hundred times harder for them. Looking at the family photographs, I reflected that our calculations do not always work out, because an accident can throw everything into disarray. The mocking faces of my sisters on the photo taken in Cannes actually are my sisters: I only ever see them as these mocking faces. Whenever and wherever I see them, and whatever the state of our relations, I see only these mocking faces. These are what come to mind whenever I think of my sisters. It is these mocking faces that I keep in the drawer of my desk in Rome, not the various other faces they have, their sad, proud, disdainful, and downright arrogant faces; no, only these mocking faces. I once told Gambetti that when I spoke of my sisters I was speaking not of my sisters as such but only of their mocking faces, captured by chance in this photograph. If they were dead, I told myself, I’d have nothing left of them but their mocking faces. In my dreams I hear them laugh, and sometimes as I walk through Rome I suddenly hear this curious laughter of theirs, with its confident assurance of longevity, and I at once see their mocking faces, nothing else. They say something, and I think about what they’ve said, and I see their mocking faces. They take after their mother, I tell myself, who has a similarly mocking face that becomes hideously grotesque when duplicated in my sisters. I have often tried to rid myself of their mocking faces, to transform them into faces that don’t mock, but I’ve never succeeded. I have no sisters, I told myself, only their mocking faces. There’s no Caecilia and no Amalia, only two mocking faces, frozen forever in this hideous picture. They wanted to look young and beautiful, to project an image of happiness, I told myself as I studied the picture, but in this photo they’re ugly, and though still very young, they don’t look young: they look quite old and present a profoundly unhappy image to photographic posterity. Had they known that nothing would remain but their mocking faces and this unhappy image, they wouldn’t have let themselves be photographed. But they insisted on it, I told myself. I recall quite clearly that they wanted to be photographed. They posed for the picture and pressed close to each other in a simulation of happiness, spontaneity, and innate naturalness, yet it was all appallingly artificial and unnatural, and the result was a cruel distortion. I remember not wanting to take the picture. I’m not to blame for this cruel photograph, I told myself. They’re to blame for insisting on my taking it and so forcing their mocking faces on me for the term of my natural life, so to speak, though neither they nor I could have known this at the time. Since then I have never been able to escape their mocking faces. Every attempt has failed. At one point it occurred to me to destroy the photo, to tear it up or burn it, but it seemed ludicrous to resort to destroying something so quintessentially ridiculous and trivial, and so I put it back in the drawer with the others. It’s not my sisters who haunt me day and night, I told myself, it’s their mocking faces, which give me no peace and often torment me for days or weeks on end. By using the devilish device of photography, we capture just one of the millions and billions of moments in the lives of two people and then spend a lifetime blaming these two people for this one moment that revealed their mocking faces. But I do have sisters, I told myself, not just their mocking faces, and this absurd thought made me clap my hand to my forehead. I have sisters at Wolfsegg, not just two mocking faces that seem hostile to me in every way. One of these two mocking faces is now married (as I had to say in order to avoid inconsistency) to the wine cork manufacturer from Freiburg, this comic character whose head seems far too small for his heavy build and substantial girth. One of the mocking faces now has a husband, but the other hasn’t, and because of this the one without a husband has withdrawn to the Gardeners’ House, hating its companion piece for having married all of a sudden, overnight as it were. However, I have never succeeded in seeing my sisters’ mocking faces separately, however hard I have tried: I have only ever seen them as a pair. The photo shows two mocking faces, I told myself, but do my sisters really have such mocking faces? Or did they just have them at that one moment in Cannes when the picture was taken? Possibly they had them only for that one moment, I told myself, and never again, yet now I believe they’ve always had them. Photography really is the devil’s art, I told myself: for years, for decades, indeed for a whole lifetime, it forces us to see mocking faces that actually existed only once, for a single moment, when we acted on a sudden impulse and casually took a snapshot. And this sudden impulse then has a devastating lifelong effect that cannot be switched off and sometimes drives us to the verge of despair. I can’t switch off these mocking faces of my sisters any longer, I once told Gambetti, to whom I have often spoken, in a no doubt distasteful manner, about my sisters’ mocking faces, which have always played a large part in my life since I took this fatal photo, as I have often called it. So far I’ve been talking about the mocking faces of my sisters, which I can’t switch off and expel from my mind, I told Gambetti, but we have the same experience with other photos, though its effect may be less drastic, with photos of well-known and famous people whom we regard as important. Just think of the photo of Einstein sticking his tongue out. I can no longer visualize Einstein without his tongue sticking out, Gambetti, I said. I can’t think of Einstein without seeing his tongue, that cunning, malignant tongue, stuck out at the whole world, indeed the whole universe. And I can only see Churchill with his lower lip distrustfully thrust forward. The likelihood is that Einstein only once stuck his tongue out in that cunning, malignant manner, and that Churchill only once thrust his lower lip forward in such an expression of distrust, on the occasion when the particular photo was taken. Yet when I read Churchill’s writings, I told Gambetti, I constantly see him with his lower lip thrust forward, and when I read something by Einstein, I’m completely obsessed with his tongue, stuck out at the whole world, the whole universe. I even fancy that it was not Churchill who wrote his memoirs, but his distrustfully prominent lower lip, not Einstein who made those earth-shaking pronouncements, but his malignantly protruding tongue. I once considered whether I could free myself from the mocking faces of my sisters Amalia and Caecilia by writing a piece about them, but I naturally rejected the idea as one of the absurdest I had ever entertained. I’ll never be able to free myself from my sisters’ mocking faces, I told Gambetti. I’ll have to live with them for the rest of my life. It might of course be incredibly useful to write a piece entitled The Mocking Faces of My Sisters. But what would be the point? I’d have to endure the most extreme boredom in order to write such a piece, Gambetti. I was always prevented from doing so by these mocking faces, which have never given me any peace for as long as I can remember. It would of course be foolish to think I’d be rid of them if I tore the photo up or threw it in the stove or cut it into a thousand fragments. They’d torment me all the more. And my parents in the second photo don’t make a good impression either, only a pathetic, ridiculous, comic impression as they board the Dover train at Victoria Station in London. No luggage, just their Burberry umbrellas on their arms, and my father in his thir
ties knickerbockers, which he bought before the war in Vienna, at Habig’s elegant store in the Kärntnerstrasse. He went around in them throughout the Nazi period. For as far back as I can remember I’ve seen him wearing these knickerbockers, I told myself. Even when he’s wearing something quite different I still see him in these knickerbockers from Habig’s, constantly saying Heil Hitler. They were probably very expensive, because they never wore out. They’re actually quite smart, I told myself, but not on my father—on him they look ridiculous. He wore these knickerbockers when he received the Gauleiter of Salzburg at the entrance to the farmyard and then led him straight to the stables, believing that this would make the best impression on him, immediately proving that Wolfsegg was a great estate and he a great landowner. And he wore these knickerbockers to receive the archbishops—which was tasteless but in keeping with the Nazi period. There they were, boarding the train in London, my mother stretching out her neck so that her hat perched precariously on her head, probably held by a single hatpin. Why have I only this picture of my parents in my desk and no other, I asked myself, this comic, ridiculous picture that shows my parents as comic, ridiculous people, and not some other, on which they’re not comic and ridiculous? Most of the time they were quite different, not at all comic and ridiculous but severe, forbidding, cold, and calculating. While their Burberry umbrellas hang vertically from their arms, their bodies are inclined, as is normal when boarding a train. The main reason for their looking so comic and ridiculous in this photo is the combination of the inclination of their bodies with their vertical umbrellas. The law of gravity is what makes them comic and ridiculous, though they naturally did not know this when they were photographed. They did not want to be photographed, but they were photographed, by me. I once had hundreds of photos of my parents, but I have destroyed them all or thrown them away. This is the only one I kept and put in my desk, the one in which they appear comic and ridiculous. Why? I asked myself. I probably wanted to have comic and ridiculous parents in the photo I was going to keep, I told myself. I also wanted to have a photo of my brother that showed him not as he really was but as I wanted to see him, in a ridiculous pose on his sailboat on the Wolfgangsee—an undoubtedly good-looking man who was made to look ridiculous, insignificant, and unnatural, not to say foolish and helpless, so that he could not be taken seriously. I only ever wanted this one photo of my brother, in which he looks ridiculous, I told Gambetti. I wanted to have a comic, ridiculous brother, just as I wanted to have comic, ridiculous parents, and no sisters at all, only their mocking faces—that’s the truth, Gambetti. There is a devilish streak in us that manifests itself in such trifles, as we like to call them, in such trivialities as the photographs we collect, which reveal how base and despicable and shameless we are. And for no other reason than that we are weak, for if we are honest we have to admit that we ourselves are far weaker than those we wish to see as weak, far more ridiculous than those we wish to see as ridiculous, comic, and characterless. It is primarily we, not they, who are characterless, ridiculous, comic, and unnatural, Gambetti. By keeping only these photos of my family and no others—and, what’s more, in my desk, so that I can look at them whenever I wish—I am documenting my own baseness, my own shamelessness, my own lack of character. I have only to open the drawer of my desk in order to gloat over my impossible sisters, the ridiculous appearance of my parents, and the pathetic posture of my brother; I have only to take out these photos and look at them in order to fortify myself in an access of weakness and console myself with what I am bound to describe as my own baseness. This shows how low one can sink. We describe others as base and contemptible and adduce every possible argument in support of our case, yet the description applies even more alarmingly to ourselves. Instead of hiding ourselves in the desk drawer as we ought, in the form of some comic and ridiculous photo, we hide our family there, so that when the need arises we can misuse them for our own utterly base ends, I told Gambetti. Naturally, I said, there are people who keep photos showing their relatives in a good light, but I am not one of these: I keep only comic and ridiculous photos, as I am fundamentally a weak person, a thoroughly weak character. Although every photo is a vulgar falsification, there are some that we keep out of respect and affection for the persons they depict, and others that we put in our desks or hang on our walls for unworthy motives, out of hatred for the subjects. Unfortunately I have to own that my motives belong to the second category. At a certain age, I said, when we are about forty, we often manage to present ourselves as we really are, with all our contemptible traits—something we wouldn’t have dreamed of doing earlier. From then on we occasionally allow alarming glimpses of our inner selves. At my age, Gambetti, we have to a large extent drawn back the curtains that for decades were drawn so closely that we almost suffocated behind them. One day they’ll be fully drawn back, I said. How will my sisters react, I wondered, when I confront them as executor and heir? Will they receive me as insolently as ever? I dared not pursue this question and took care not to. The surviving beneficiaries, my sisters and I, I thought. The surviving beneficiaries are the very people whom no one thought of as survivors. They always thought I would soon die, a victim of what they called my breathlessness, somewhere or other, but not at Wolfsegg. It’s possible, even probable, I now thought, that they always expected to receive a telegram informing them that I had died. And my sisters have survived, the two people who didn’t matter at all in any serious sense, because according to my mother they were totally unimportant. But I never expected a telegram telling me that my parents were dead. Lots of people are afraid of receiving such a telegram, but I never was. Millions of people, I had often told Gambetti, live in daily dread of getting a telegram telling them that someone they love and respect has died. I’ve never been afraid of getting such a telegram. Seeing photographs like those on my desk, we think that the people depicted in them at least pose no danger to us, but they may in fact pose the utmost danger. Mortal danger. The people in the photographs, at most four inches high, don’t even contradict us. We attack them and they don’t defend themselves. We can say anything we like to their faces and they don’t move. This drives us to fury, to ever greater fury. We curse the figures in the photographs because they refuse to answer back or respond in any way, when there’s nothing we hope for, nothing we crave, so much as a response. Contending with microscopic dwarfs, as it were, we become demented. We lash out at microscopic dwarfs and drive ourselves utterly crazy. We let ourselves get so carried away that we hurl insults at heads only half an inch in diameter, Gambetti, and so make ourselves quite ridiculous. I look at my parents in the photo of them boarding the Dover train at Victoria Station in London and insult them. What ridiculous creatures you always were! I say, without realizing how ridiculous that makes me—far more ridiculous than my parents could ever be or ever have been, Gambetti. You idiot! I say to my brother, not quite four inches tall. You perverse creatures! I say to my sisters, who measure less than three inches on the terrace at Cannes. To take a photograph of a person is to mock him, Gambetti, and by the same token all who take photographs, even if they do it professionally and achieve the greatest artistry, are nothing but mockers of humanity. Photography is the greatest mockery in the world, the ultimate mockery of the world. But today, I told Gambetti, there are a hundred times more people in photographs than there are in reality—than natural people, in other words. That should give us pause. Am I glad, I said to Gambetti two days ago on returning from Wolfsegg, to be back here, to have escaped from the north and its imbecilities for a while! From the clutches of my family, above all from my mother’s excited moods, my father’s constant carping, and the Austrian weather. For three-quarters of the year we have bad weather, and when we think spring has come it’s months before it’s really there, only to merge at once into summer, and the summers get shorter and shorter. And the fall, which is actually the most beautiful season, causes trouble for all who suffer from gout or rheumatism in Austria, where bad weather predominates, remindin
g them, with its frequent storms and the icy cold that comes even in October, that their existence is constantly threatened. To say nothing of the winters, which make everything unendurable for anyone over thirty. People here don’t appreciate the unique climate they live in but long for the cool north—the fir trees, the mountain lakes, and the refreshing Alps. You see, Gambetti, some people yearn for the south and others for the north, with the result that they’re all more or less equally discontented. But at present I enjoy this refreshing but warm air, these noisy but carefree people, I said. At Wolfsegg I wore my winter overcoat, but here I go around in an open-necked shirt with my sweater around my shoulders. That’s the difference. People are not weighed down here with pounds of clothing, heavy shoes, heavy jackets, and thick felt hats. They walk around in the lightest of clothes and eat out of doors nearly all year round. Not for a long time! I could still hear myself exclaiming, meaning that I would not be returning to Wolfsegg for a long time. But this telegram now compels me to return in the shortest possible time. Obvious though this was, I sought to delay the inevitable by doing nothing, by simply sitting at my desk and looking at the photographs. I continued to contemplate them and submit them to minute scrutiny. I spread the telegram out beside them, so that I would have its short message announcing the deaths in front of me all the time. I repeatedly spelled out the message until I felt I would go mad. My brother, unlike me, was a calm person: at Wolfsegg I had always been the restless spirit, but he was the soul of calm. My parents always referred to him as the contented one and to me as the malcontent. If we got in trouble, it was always my fault, never his. They believed his explanations, not mine. If, for example, I lost money that had been entrusted to me for some reason, they refused to believe I had lost it, despite all my asseverations. They preferred to believe that I had pocketed it and only pretended to have lost it, but if my brother said he had lost some money they believed him. If he told them that he had lost his way in the wood, they instantly believed him, but if I told the same story they refused to believe me. I always had to justify myself at great length and in great detail. On one occasion my brother pushed me into the pond behind the Children’s Villa. Whether intentionally or not, he pushed me in while passing me at the edge of the pond, where the wall is not wide enough for two people to pass. I had the greatest difficulty keeping my head above water and not going under. I actually thought I was going to drown, and I also thought that my brother might have pushed me in on purpose, not inadvertently out of clumsiness. This thought tormented me as I struggled for dear life in the pond. My brother could not help me without risking his own life. He naturally made many attempts, but failed. The pond is deep, and a child is bound to go under and drown if he can’t keep himself on the surface, I told Gambetti. Just as I felt sure I was going to drown I caught hold of a ring fixed to the wall below the surface, which was used for mooring the little boats we had on the pond, and managed to clamber out. When I got home, my parents wanted to know why I was completely soaked. Instead of telling the truth, I lied to protect my brother, saying that I had accidentally fallen into the pond. They at once accused me of having deliberately jumped into the pond in order to get my brother in trouble. When I said no, I had fallen in by accident, they called me a liar and drew my brother close to them as if to protect him, while I was packed off to the kitchen to be dressed in fresh, dry clothes. Throughout this scene my brother remained silent. He did not say a word, he did not tell the truth or even say that I was not to blame for falling into the pond. He watched the whole sorry scene without attempting to explain anything or put me in a better light. He just pressed his head against my mother’s skirt as if for protection, and this made things even worse for me. If I fell and tore my socks, they scolded me for tearing my socks but did not think of comforting me because I had grazed my knee and was bleeding and in pain. Instead they scolded me for hours, and in the evening, when I had forgotten about the mishap, they scolded me again, as if it gave them pleasure to make me cry. They comforted my brother if he hurt himself even slightly, but they never comforted me, even if I hurt myself badly. They repeatedly scolded me because they thought I visited the gardeners too often and for too long; they disapproved of my spending time with the gardeners, who supposedly had a bad influence on me. They wanted me to spend my time with the huntsmen, who were thought to have a good influence; but I hated the huntsmen, as I have said, and always went to see the gardeners, whom I loved. I was scolded whenever it transpired that I had been with the gardeners, and they were scolded too for paying attention to me, because their company was considered very harmful to me, as my mother put it. Whenever my brother visited the huntsmen they would say, It’s nice that you’ve been with the huntsmen—that’s what we like to see. And they always said it in my hearing, when they were sure of hurting me. Once, when I had been with the huntsmen because for some reason I wanted to go and see them—I cannot recall why—they asked me where I had been, and I told them I had been with the huntsmen. They did not believe me and boxed my ears in the presence of my brother, who knew that I had been with the huntsmen, as he had gone with me, but instead of coming to my aid and telling them the truth, he kept quiet. He always kept quiet, even when our mother boxed my ears because I had told what she took to be a lie, when in fact it was the truth. I recall that even when I grew up, my parents never believed me. If someone had been to see me they would ask the name of the visitor, but when I told them, they refused to believe me, saying that they knew very well who had been to see me, and it was not the person I said it was. If I had been to Wels and they asked me where I had been, I would tell them, whereupon they would say that I had not been in Wels: they knew where I had really been—in Vöcklabruck, in Linz, in Styria, but not in Wels. They could never be persuaded of the truth. They never believed anything I told them; they considered me to be not just a normal liar but, as my mother used to say, a born liar. What do you do all the time in the library? they would ask when I emerged from one of our five libraries, all of which were suspect, as I was the only person to use them. You certainly don’t go there to read, they would say, and take me to task. It was no good assuring them that I went to the library only to read. You go to the library to pursue your perverse thoughts, my mother would insist, no matter how often I protested that I went to the library in order to read and for no other purpose, and that I did nothing else there. I repeatedly swore that I went to the library only to read, that I spent my time there reading. She would not be convinced but called me a liar and repeatedly maintained that I had gone to the library to pursue my perverse thoughts. When I asked her what she meant by my perverse thoughts, she refused to answer but called me a troublemaker, as she had so often since my early childhood. She added that I was an impudent liar and walked off. She constantly suspected me of pursuing perverse thoughts. She probably had no idea what she meant by this, but it became a stock reproach, and even in company I was not safe from it. At dinner, in the presence of strangers, usually the kind of guests I found most repugnant—middle-class people from the neighboring small towns whom she had known since childhood and still kept up with—she would say that I was always pursuing my perverse thoughts. I have to say that my mother loved my brother, Johannes, above all because he never felt any need to visit the libraries. Johannes, she would say, doesn’t go to the library to pursue perverse thoughts: he goes to the Huntsmen’s Lodge, where it’s fun. In my view, based on experience, the fun at the Huntsmen’s Lodge was of a fairly basic and vulgar variety, consisting in the endless recital of crude and utterly vulgar jokes that I could never find amusing without feeling dirty. This was the main reason that I abhorred the Huntsmen’s Lodge, whereas my mother always enjoyed the crude, basic, and abysmally primitive jokes that circulated at the Huntsmen’s Lodge. Nothing delighted her more, and she always left the Huntsmen’s Lodge with tears of laughter in her eyes—which on one occasion even my father called perverse. You go to the Gardeners’ House, she used to say to me, where it’s all so boring—that’
s typical. She thought nothing of spending half the night with the huntsmen, joining in their brainless songs, pressing up close to them on a bench, and permitting them to make unequivocal verbal passes at her; indeed, as the evening progressed she would not object to their making physical passes or even, I have to say, pinching her bottom. When my brother had finished his homework he was always told he had done well, but when I had finished mine they always found something to criticize, noticing a mistake here, an irregularity there, and constantly upbraiding me for what they called my illegible writing. If my brother came home with a good mark they naturally praised him, but in my case a good mark was acknowledged only by a reluctantly friendly nod. I recall that my brother was given the best bed linen, unlike the worn sheets that I had to sleep on, and first-class pillows, unlike mine, which were patched and mended. My stockings, coats, and jackets had to last longer than his; his clothes were replaced when they became dirty or had unsightly holes in them, but it was no use my asking for new clothes. If I did I was called a wastrel, but they never called my brother a wastrel. I do not think my parents ever treated me fairly, for even in my early childhood they had a feeling that I might be superior to them, though I cannot say exactly what prompted this feeling. Only my grandparents were fair to me. They treated me just as they treated Johannes; for them there was no difference between their grandsons, or at least they made no difference between us. Our happiest times at Wolfsegg were when our grandparents were alive. This was natural, I once told Gambetti, as they showed no favoritism. As soon as they died I became aware that my parents wished to punish me because they thought my grandparents had treated me better than my brother. This was not true, but it was what my parents always imagined, especially my mother. It was as though our parents, after the death of our grandparents, had thought to themselves, Now we must turn our attention to Johannes, who had a raw deal from his grandparents; we must treat him particularly well because he was always put down by his grandparents and had to suffer from the favoritism they showed to his brother. The truth is that my brother was never put down by our grandparents, nor was I ever shown favoritism. Our parents, however, believing that I had been at an advantage and my brother at a disadvantage, decided that from now on I should be made to pay for what they imagined to have been the case, though it bore no relation to the truth. And so, once our grandparents were dead, our parents always treated Johannes with affection and me with aversion, and in due course the favoritism they showed him became unbearable, and its effect was compounded by the aversion they showed to me. They became accustomed, in short, to loving my brother and hating me. It’s absurd, I had told Gambetti on the Pincio, that in a house that boasts five libraries the mind should be held not only in low regard but in positive contempt. I have to suppose that one library was not enough for those who built Wolfsegg and were its first occupants. They had a natural need for thought and intellectual activity and were undoubtedly passionate thinkers, who were devoted to mental endeavor and made thinking their chief preoccupation, as so much of the evidence we have about them shows. They were convinced that the consummation of human existence was to lead a life of thought, a life centered on the mind, Gambetti, not one bounded by everyday concerns and everyday stolidity, as my family believed. What times those were, when understanding was elevated to the plane of thought and to think was the supreme imperative! Today everything that once distinguished Wolfsegg has atrophied, having been consciously belittled by successive generations and actually trodden in the dirt in the past century, above all in recent decades. They provided themselves not just with one library but with five, I told Gambetti—the upper left library, the upper right, the lower left, the lower right, and the one in the Children’s Villa. For centuries all branches of learning were represented in them, all schools of thought, all the arts. On one occasion, Gambetti, I had retired to the upper left library to read Jean Paul’s Siebenkäs, which was incidentally one of Uncle Georg’s favorite books. Poring over it for hours, I gradually forgot everything around me, including the fact that at the time I was supposed to be helping my mother sort her mail. I had forgotten that on alternate Saturdays I had to go to her writing room, as it was called, at six o’clock in the evening to sort her letters. Siebenkäs had made me forget everything, including my mother’s instructions. Every Saturday between six and seven she used to sit in her writing room and have either me or my brother sort the letters that had arrived during the week into the exact order of their receipt. Having sorted them, I had to put them in a certain spot on her desk. While sorting the letters I was able to have a quiet talk with my mother, which was not possible at any other time. She would meanwhile deal with her correspondence and give me a chance to consult her on various matters. Although she never liked it when I asked what she considered importunate questions, I was allowed to do so while sorting the mail, and she was prepared to answer them. This routine of sorting the mail in the writing room during the brief hour before supper gave me my one opportunity to get close to my mother. Sometimes she herself would address a kind, even affectionate, word to me. As I sorted the mail I often felt that I loved my mother, indeed that I loved her dearly. As I looked at her from the side, her face seemed beautiful, though at other times I was put off by its ordinariness. The feeble light cast by the lamp on her desk was flattering and showed her face to advantage, I told Gambetti on the Pincio. When I had sorted the letters and placed them on the desk, she would sometimes look up from her correspondence and place her hand on my head, almost tenderly. Then, as though instantly ashamed of this gesture, she would withdraw her hand and dismiss me. She would take her hand away and promptly return to her correspondence, as though suddenly realizing that I was not Johannes. But I wanted to tell you something else, Gambetti. It was nine o’clock when, having ensconced myself in the upper left library to read Siebenkäs and forgotten all about sorting the mail, I suddenly woke up, as it were, in a state of alarm and put the book aside. I left the library, which, as you know, was more or less off limits, and went down to join the others, who had long since finished supper. For five hours I had been rooted to my seat in the library, reading Siebenkäs, and had forgotten not only about the mail but also about supper. I came downstairs, Gambetti, to find them all sitting in the green drawing room, waiting for me. I was received in silence. After a while, during which my brother waited in gleeful anticipation of what was about to happen, my mother took me to task without so much as looking at me, demanding to know where I had been, why I had not turned up to sort the mail, and how it was that I had put the finishing touch to my customary insolence by not only ignoring the sorting of the mail but also failing to appear for supper. There was no excuse, she said, or at least none that she could imagine, for ignoring my obligation to sort the mail and leaving them to have supper without me. They had all been extremely worried about my whereabouts, she said, thinking of all the dreadful things that could have happened to me. Did I realize what terrible anxiety I’d caused her? You’ve no excuse whatever for not turning up to sort the mail and for missing supper, she said. She had still not deigned to look at me. Then she rounded on me and said, You’re a monster! If I’m not mistaken you’ve been in the library! And what have you been doing there? You’ve been pursuing your perverse thoughts again. My father, my brother, and my sisters waited tensely for the culmination of the accusation, their whole attention fixed on me as I stood terrified in the doorway. I was perhaps nine or ten at the time—I’m not sure exactly. I was trembling all over. My sisters, though still only very small girls, were agog with malevolent excitement, longing to see some sensational punishment meted out to me after my mother’s pitiless scolding. Now, what were you really doing in the library? my mother asked. I was reading Siebenkäs, I replied. Whereupon she jumped up, boxed my ears, and sent me to bed. My real punishment was to be locked in my room without food for three days. I sat down at my table and for three days did nothing but howl, while my sisters incessantly ran to and fro outside the door, gleefully shouting
Siebenkäs, Siebenkäs, Siebenkäs. If you ever read Siebenkäs, my dear Gambetti, don’t forget this little story, I said. Does Gambetti still remember this story after all this time, I wondered, now that I’ve actually given him the book to read? All the books I read at Wolfsegg have a subsequent history like this; they are all linked to a subsequent history (or prehistory!) that has affected my whole life, I thought, though not always such a sad one. My mother had no idea what Siebenkäs was, Gambetti, and thought I was kidding her. When she was in Rome five years ago in the fall—you remember—I naturally took her on a tour of the city. But she was bored to death. All she wanted to see were the famous shops, especially those on the Corso and the Via Condotti. She had a long list of these famous shops and planned her walks accordingly, but she had listed them alphabetically, which she soon saw was a mistake, as their alphabetical order bore no relation to their locations. We visited one famous shop after another, especially in the vicinity of the Piazza di Spagna, and never spent less than half an hour at any one of them; in most of them she spent up to an hour, and this drove me almost to distraction. My mother has a quite primitive craze for jewelry, I told Gambetti, and so she rushed from one jeweler to another in search of not just one ring or one necklace that suited her taste but masses of them. I was extremely reluctant to accompany her, as you can imagine, but I had no choice. As you know, I disapprove of people who want to see only famous monuments and churches, but I must say that I have never known anybody with such a shameless and undisguised lack of interest in the countless cultural treasures that Rome has to offer. My mother went to see Saint Peter’s. I took her there, and she was of course thrilled by the Bernini altar, which I detest, but aside from this she saw nothing during her stay in Rome but the interior decor of Roman jewelry shops and fashion houses. On my recommendation she stayed at the Hassler, which was too old-fashioned for her. She found fault with everything there, although the Hassler is undoubtedly the best hotel in Rome and perhaps one of the three or four best in the world. Nothing was good enough for her. In the end she’d made so many purchases that she didn’t know what to do with them, and her room was piled high with parcels. We had five invitations to dinner with relatives, and of course with our friend Zacchi, I told Gambetti, but she accepted only one—not Zacchi’s, as you may imagine, but the Austrian ambassador’s, because she took it to be the grandest, though it was as boring as usual. The company at the embassy dinner consisted of the usual brainless diplomats and their even more brainless wives, who spent two hours reeling off their social inanities. But you must be wondering why I’m telling you all this, Gambetti. I’ll come to the point. On our way from the Hassler to the Austrian Embassy, my mother, quite suddenly and apropos of nothing, reverted to something that had happened years ago, in fact decades ago. What was this Siebenkäs that I had teased her with years ago? For decades she had been obsessed with the Siebenkäs episode, which I now realized had affected her as much as it had affected me. We had left the Hassler, Gambetti, on one of those wonderful Roman evenings that make you believe in paradise, and we’d gone only a few yards when she asked me, What is Siebenkäs? Can you tell me? I told her that Siebenkäs was an invention of Jean Paul. However, as she had no idea who Jean Paul was, I had to add that he was a writer and that Siebenkäs was one of his books. Oh, she said, if only I’d known! I thought Siebenkäs was something you’d invented to spite me. I thought you were just playing a nasty trick. I laughed uproariously over this disclosure on the way from the Hassler to the Austrian Embassy, as I had every reason to do, but she remained silent. Then she asked me if it was really true that Jean Paul was a writer and that Siebenkäs was one of his works. She did not believe it at first, having never believed anything I told her. So Siebenkäs is a book by a writer called Jean Paul, my mother said more than once on the way to the Austrian Embassy. During the first part of our walk to the embassy she hardly said another word, but when we were halfway there she suddenly asked, And is Kafka a writer too? Yes, Kafka’s a writer. What a pity, she said. I thought you’d invented them all! What a pity! She could not get over the fact that Jean Paul and Kafka were writers, the authors of Siebenkäs and The Trial, and not inventions of mine designed to trick her. So now, I said to Gambetti, you can see the intellectual state my family is in. That Wolfsegg is in. Five libraries, Gambetti, and not the foggiest notion of our greatest writers, to say nothing of the epoch-making philosophers, whose names my mother has never heard of, at least not consciously. My father knows their names, of course, but even he has no idea what these people thought and wrote. Being a farmer, he has always had a primitive contempt for the intellect: cows and pigs mean everything to him, the intellect more or less nothing. If my father could choose between the company of Kant and that of a prize porker, I told Gambetti, he would instantly plump for the porker. I didn’t introduce you to my mother when she was in Rome, Gambetti, because she wouldn’t have understood you. She would only have found fault with you, for not wearing a necktie, for instance, or for carrying a work of philosophy under your arm instead of an income tax table. Though you actually missed something, I said. We arrived late for the embassy dinner, of course; everyone else had arrived and was waiting for us. These people stand around and run one another down, showing off about their backgrounds and decorations, constantly telling you that they’ve been accredited in China, Japan, Persia, and Peru, stirring the stale old diplomatic broth, repeatedly declaring that they know God and the world and nothing else, and that they are as bored in their city apartments as they are on their country estates. They talk about books as if they were a kind of tasteless crispbread, and they know as much about conducting a symphony orchestra as they do about Spinoza, as much about Heidegger as about Dante, yet to the keen observer they always appear to have seen everything and nothing. All in all, my mother doesn’t cut a bad figure at such receptions, because she keeps up her normal role without seeming out of place and diverts her metropolitan audience with her lighthearted country chatter, in which the futility of her fatuous existence comes into its own. As her escort I am condemned to silence and ultimately to playing the fool for her. When we left the embassy, at about midnight, she again asked me whether I had told her the truth about Jean Paul being a writer and Siebenkäs being one of his books. Having never believed anything I told her, Gambetti, she disbelieved me on this point too. My mother came to Rome only to satisfy her curiosity, I said, because she had to know where and how I lived. Impelled by this curiosity, she got on a train one day and came to Rome to spy out the land, as Uncle Georg would have put it. The Piazza Minerva meant nothing to her, and the Pantheon was just a weird name she’d heard somewhere. All the same, the fact that I had taken one of the finest apartments in Rome and actually occupied the whole of it made a big impression on her. A real palazzo, she exclaimed on seeing the building where I had my fourth-floor apartment. With a view of the Pantheon, I told her, as you’ll see shortly. She couldn’t wait. You really live like a prince, she said, even before she’d seen the apartment, and her tone was almost reproachful. That’s a tremendous doorway! she exclaimed, standing in front of the palazzo and looking up at the marble facade. I’d pictured it all quite differently, she said. I suggested she should go in and walk up to the fourth floor with me. There’s no elevator, I said—that wouldn’t suit you. As she went up the stairs, she turned around every few moments to exclaim, Like a real prince! The fact that the house—I didn’t say palazzo—has no elevator makes the apartment relatively cheap, I told her, but the rent I have to pay is still one of the highest. I couldn’t refrain from saying this as I went up the stairs with her to my apartment, now three steps in front of her, now behind her. There was a certain solemnity about it all, as you can imagine, Gambetti. At last we reached the fourth floor and stood outside the door of my apartment. She was a little put out to see no nameplate on the door. No nameplate, she said, so not even the postman knows you live here. You always loved being anonymous, she said before we entered, to which I replied that it had a
lways seemed more agreeable to preserve my anonymity. She, by contrast, was always anxious to make herself known as somebody special, though she never knew quite what it was about her that was special. Looking at the photograph of my parents boarding the Dover train at Victoria Station in London, I remembered how my mother had entered my apartment on the Piazza Minerva. Once inside, she was both astonished and alarmed. At first it took her breath away and she had difficulty finding words to express her feelings. I, meanwhile, having unlocked the door of the apartment, couldn’t help thinking of something totally absurd, Gambetti. Many years earlier my mother had lost one of her strongbox keys, which was never found. She searched not only her own rooms but all the other rooms, and she had others search them too, but the key was nowhere to be found. Suddenly she suspected me of having taken it for some reason that she couldn’t fathom, though clearly I had done it out of some base motive, as she put it. She accused me, on no grounds whatever, of getting rid of the key as soon as suspicion had fallen on me, out of dire necessity, so to speak, surmising that at the very last moment I had thrown her strongbox key down the well shaft outside her window in order to avoid being unmasked as a common thief. The well shaft had dried out long before. And just imagine, Gambetti, my mother gave orders for it to be searched, and she looked on as one of the gardeners was lowered down the shaft by a workmate to retrieve the key that I, the limb of Satan, was supposed to have thrown into it as a last resort. Naturally the gardener didn’t find the lost key, which couldn’t have been in the shaft because I hadn’t thrown it there, except in my mother’s lurid imagination. The gardener emerged from the well shaft and repeatedly assured her that the strongbox key wasn’t in the well, that there was nothing in the well but an old half-rotted shoe. The fact that there was no key in the well shaft, but only a half-rotted shoe, so incensed my mother that she swore at the gardener. She swore at me too—in pretty foul language, I must say—and went on swearing until late that evening. For days after the gardener’s unavailing descent into the well shaft she continued to tell me, You took the key, and even if you didn’t throw it down the well shaft, you got rid of it, somewhere or other. Even today I haven’t been cleared of this suspicion. I’m still under a cloud: after all these years my mother is still convinced that I made the strongbox key disappear. Of course I never took it, Gambetti. I can’t imagine why I would have done so, for what purpose. It would never have occurred to me. No sooner had I unlocked the door and let my mother and myself into the apartment than I thought of this typical incident, which says more about our relationship than any other. It’s one of the most revealing incidents, I told Gambetti, perhaps the most revealing. As my mother entered the apartment I was thinking all the time of how she had once had the well shaft searched because she thought I had thrown her strongbox key into it for some nefarious purpose. The process of unlocking the door of my apartment had brought to mind this incident from the remote past, and I went on thinking about it, but I didn’t tell my mother what it was that preoccupied me more than her first visit to my apartment, not even when she became uneasy, upset by my odd behavior, and asked what was on my mind. Nothing, I said. I was careful not to reveal that I was thinking about the affair of the strongbox key in the well shaft and was more preoccupied by this memory than by the fact that she was paying her first visit to my apartment in the Piazza Minerva. To do so might have revived an unpleasant quarrel after so many years, Gambetti. I was afraid of quarreling with my mother, and still am. On this occasion she had left my father alone at Wolfsegg, though I know he would have liked to come to Rome. She had persuaded him that his presence at Wolfsegg was absolutely indispensable. You can’t leave Wolfsegg at a time of such uncertainty—this was her invariable remonstrance, I thought as I contemplated the photograph. You can’t leave the huntsmen when the hunting season is on, she had told him, at the same time assuring him that it wouldn’t be much fun for her in Rome without him, accustomed as she was to traveling with him as her protector, which is what she often called him in playful flattery. Not that she really regarded him as her protector, which he wasn’t and never had been. So she came to Rome by herself to find out what I was up to, or so she told my father and Johannes, but once here she spent most of her time with her friend Spadolini, who was already a senior Vatican official and had attained the rank of archbishop at an early age. She spent every night with Spadolini, and whenever I called the Hassler—at eleven, at twelve, at half past one or at three—I was told that the signora was not in. That’s the truth about my mother and her visit to Rome, for which I was merely the pretext, Gambetti. I was the excuse she gave my father for coming to Rome. She had known Spadolini ever since he was a minor counselor to the papal nuncio in Vienna. I can’t say that I’ve ever disliked Spadolini. On the contrary, he’s a quite fascinating figure and I’ve nothing against my mother’s keeping up her acquaintance, or rather her friendship, with him and cultivating it for decades, but I do object to the secretiveness of their association, which is actually an affair, Gambetti. And I also know that this was not the only time, or even the last, that my mother was in Rome. She’s often flown to Rome to meet Spadolini, alleging an urgent trip to Vienna, just to spend one or two nights with him. Spadolini has often been to Wolfsegg too, where he’s been put to the embarrassment of celebrating mass in our chapel, decked out in all his finery as though he were celebrating at Saint Peter’s. My mother is hooked on ceremonial and loves ecclesiastical pomp more than anything else. I suspect that the only reason she is such a keen Catholic is that she loves Catholic pomp and, above all, Catholic funeral rites, I told Gambetti. She was fascinated by the idea of having an archbishop in the house and, what’s more, one of the highest Vatican officials, and she has yielded to this fascination on every occasion. For a long time my father failed to see through her duplicity, and when he did, it was too late, as the pair had already perfected their plot. But of course Spadolini is an extraordinary personality; otherwise he wouldn’t have risen so high in the hierarchy, I told Gambetti. Aside from this unappetizing affair with my mother, I have the highest regard for him. He’s an extremely intelligent and cultured man. After all, he’s been nuncio in Lima, Copenhagen, and Paris, and in New York and Madrid—that’s not nothing, Gambetti. And all the languages he speaks, and the thousands of books he’s read, and all the things he’s seen and heard! The astonishing thing is that a man like him should have taken up with my mother, such an utterly superficial woman, and remained attached to her. She came to Rome to meet him, using me as the pretext, I told Gambetti. On the surface she had to visit her son, so that under the surface, as it were, she could meet the archbishop, which amounts to a degree of duplicity that’s nothing short of contemptible. Just imagine: she flew to Palermo for two days with Spadolini, then spent another two nights with him at Cefalù. I’ve nothing against that, Gambetti, but I find the duplicity distasteful. I really don’t know anyone more cultured, anyone I value more highly, than Spadolini, except yourself and Zacchi. Such a highly sensitive character, with such a fine mind, yet carrying on such a sordid clandestine affair with my mother for years, for decades. But my mother learned nothing from Spadolini. Maybe what fascinates him about her is her frivolity, her silliness, I told Gambetti. During the day she did the rounds of the Roman shops with me, and at night she met Spadolini in Trastevere, as I happen to know. But not, like us, just to eat fish, drink wine, relax, and enjoy the ambience, Gambetti, not just that. The two of them visited various dives near the so-called dog destruction unit, which you know, and weren’t at all disturbed by the terrified howls of the strays that were brought in to be destroyed. Of course I won’t divulge the source of my information, I told Gambetti, not even to you. Spadolini, this intelligent man and outstanding scholar who has written so many excellent works, this genius in the art of speech and the art of silence, who has always exercised a tremendous fascination over me! When he first came to Wolfsegg it seemed to me that we had never had such a splendid guest. You can’t imagine how thrilled I w
as, Gambetti, when he first said mass at Wolfsegg, wearing his pentecostal vestments. I came very close to jettisoning all my doubts about the Catholic Church when I first saw him. Such a handsome man, and with such manners, uniquely natural, yet at the same time uniquely artificial. The truth is that I instantly fell in love with Spadolini. But he was always a thorn in my father’s side. He could do nothing against him. My mother decided when Spadolini should visit us and when she should visit Spadolini, her lover, in Vienna, in Paris, or finally in Rome. I’ll go and see Spadolini, she told herself, and then told my father she was going to see me. Possibly she pretended to me that she had only just arrived in Rome when she turned up at the Hassler that afternoon. She may have been in Rome with Spadolini for days—who knows? I wouldn’t put anything past her. Spadolini took her to the opera, Spadolini went with her to Naples, Spadolini hired a taxi to take the two of them to Bari to see a mutual friend, as I happen to know. Spadolini, you know, is a man who fascinates women; all the ambassadors’ wives fall for him, jostling to kiss his hand and look up into his eyes, their knees atremble. And it would of course be wholly unnatural for a man like that to be lost to the secular world, I told Gambetti, but it’s unfortunate that from the hundreds of women who would have succumbed gladly to his matchless charm he should have singled out my mother. I am the lie that makes their liaison possible, Gambetti. My father, of course, has not just an inkling but full knowledge of it, yet it would be quite useless for him to rebel, as my mother can do whatever she likes with him. Even so, she wasn’t prepared to travel openly to Rome to see Spadolini: she had to use me as the pretext, the crazy megalomaniac son who stayed at the Hassler for months and then defied all the rules of decency by taking a lease on one of the most expensive apartments in the Piazza Minerva for years, possibly for decades, because he wanted to combine breakfast with a view of the Pantheon. And my mother doesn’t know that I’m aware of the true reason for her visiting Rome, I told Gambetti. She puts on a superb act when it comes to dissembling to my father, I told Gambetti; she displays an incomparable mastery worthy of the greatest artists. Having come to Rome just to see Spadolini, I reflected, looking again at the photo of her and my father at Victoria Station, she was bored whenever she was with me, because all the time she was thinking of Spadolini. Their relationship is not of Spadolini’s making, I told Gambetti, but entirely of my mother’s. You can’t leave the huntsmen alone when the hunting season is on. These words, spoken to my father, strike me now, so long after her visit to Rome, as even more contemptible than they did at the time. Even the huntsmen, and finally I myself, had to be involved so that she could meet Spadolini in Rome. With nothing else on her mind but meeting Spadolini again, she had the effrontery—the gall, as they say—to send my father dreary picture postcards of the Pantheon or Saint Peter’s every day, with such messages as: We [she and I, that is!] are having a wonderful time in Rome, etc. She had me sign them and so provide her with an alibi, as she thought, proving that she spent every day with me and no one else. Spadolini was the principal figure during her visit to Rome, during all her visits to Rome, Gambetti, not me. Of course I don’t attach any importance to being the principal figure myself. My mother’s mendacity was by then at its most brazen, I told Gambetti, though I immediately felt ashamed of having said this, sensing that I had gone too far, at least by saying it to Gambetti, as I instantly gathered from his reaction. He is so sensitive, I thought, that he’s bound to feel that this remark, like other remarks of mine, is out of place, if not positively distasteful. The teacher mustn’t present such a distasteful image to his pupil, I reflected, but the reflection came too late. On the other hand, I thought, I have to be open with Gambetti, who is my pupil after all. Open, yes, but not base, I thought, correcting myself; open, yes, but not vulgar; open, yes, but not common and contemptible. But Gambetti’s known me so long that he can’t fail to understand me, I thought—he’s known me a long time, and he accepts me. He must have his reasons, I thought. This matter of Spadolini and my mother is a dangerous chapter, I told Gambetti, closing it once more. We had been walking up and down under the house of De Chirico, unable to decide whether to have tea in the teashop on the Spagna or to go and sit in the Greco. Then, as so often happened, a sudden shower forced us to shelter in the Greco, where we continued our conversation. It actually centered on Pavese—not on Spadolini and my mother—of whom I had been reminded by an observation in Pavese’s famous The Business of Living, a favorite book of mine on which I had commented to Gambetti that day, comparing Pavese with Heine and explaining the reasons that prompted the comparison. I can no longer remember what it was in Pavese or my beloved Heine that suddenly reminded me of Spadolini and my mother. Spadolini himself has naturally never told me about meeting my mother in Rome. Although I see him often, and enjoy seeing him—I visit him nearly every week at his apartment or his offices—he has never once mentioned their meetings. The churchman has maintained a discreet silence. I am not sure whether he is aware that I know about his meetings with my mother. One day all three of us met and went up to Rocca di Papa, where Spadolini, generous as ever and one of the best hosts I know, invited us to lunch. On this occasion my mother and Spadolini showed themselves to be consummate actors. Nothing that occurred over lunch indicated that they had met the previous evening and spent the night together, or that they had an assignation for that evening too. My position between these two liars and hypocrites was not altogether agreeable, as may be imagined—between a lying mother and a hypocritical ecclesiastic—but I carried it off perfectly, without betraying the slightest hint of suspicion. My mother, who had arranged a rendezvous with him for that evening, took her leave of Spadolini at Rocca di Papa as though it were the last time she would see him. Spadolini went back to Rome by taxi, and so did my mother and I. I found these separate taxi journeys, one behind the other, embarrassingly grotesque. They were so perfectly stage-managed as to make the whole situation quite clear to me. I cannot say who displayed the greater aplomb, Spadolini or my mother, but I may presume that, as in all such situations, she was the smarter of the two. It seemed to me at the time that Spadolini was merely the medium for her art of dissimulation and took his cue from her, I told Gambetti. I find it quite mortifying, as you can imagine, to have to tell myself that this prince of the Church is just a poor fool in thrall to my mother. Their liaison makes my relationship with Spadolini rather tricky, of course, but I’ll never give it up, even if it comes under even greater strain, because I don’t want to deprive myself of such a person. I enjoy seeing him, and I’m glad he’s in Rome. We don’t know many people who are more interesting and fascinating to meet when we need their company. Spadolini is without doubt one of the few true intellectuals I know in Rome. No one with any sense would willingly forfeit such a contact. No, really, Gambetti, I said, I haven’t the slightest scruple where Spadolini is concerned. I just begrudge my mother such a man: she doesn’t deserve a man like Spadolini. What the two of them call friendship, I said with a laugh, is after all just a dingy and utterly ludicrous affair, I told Gambetti. The photographs don’t disguise or conceal anything but make everything obvious, brutally obvious, I thought, still contemplating the photos. They reveal everything that the people in them wanted to disguise and conceal all their lives. The distortion and mendacity of the photos is actually the truth, I thought. This total defamation is the truth. The fact that the people depicted in them—exposed, as they say—are now dead doesn’t make them any better. When they were in London in 1931, I told myself, my parents were still what they call a young couple. They traveled a lot. They had no children. For years my mother refused to have children, until my father insisted. He demanded an heir from her. Wolfsegg had to have an heir. Having given birth to Johannes, she is said to have sworn not to have another child. But a year later I arrived, the troublesome one, the limb of Satan, the bringer of unhappiness. I was always told that she did not want me and tried to avoid having me. But she had to have me, the source of her unhappiness, as she
called me to my face on every possible occasion, on countless occasions. But she was not happy with my sisters either, who were born after me. She was never what is commonly called a happy mother, if indeed there is such a thing as a happy mother. The heir was accepted, but I was never really accepted: I was acknowledged as a possible stand-in, but no more. All my life I have had to see myself as a substitute for Johannes and been given to understand that I am only the reserve heir, conceived for the ultimate emergency, so to speak—one summer evening at the Children’s Villa, I am told. Reluctantly conceived, my mother has often told me. In the heat of battle, as it were, in the middle of August. My mother apparently consulted a specialist in Wels, in the hope of getting rid of me, but he refused to operate, as it would have endangered her life. Abortion was not so simple in those days and always involved a risk to the mother’s life. She accepted her fate, but all her life I was the unwanted child, and she would describe me as such, whatever the occasion, often calling me the most superfluous child one can imagine. I sought refuge with my grandparents, my maternal grandparents in Wels and my paternal grandparents at Wolfsegg, but I was always the one who did not belong. This actually made me impossible to bring up, almost ruining the early years of my life and nearly destroying me at the age of seventeen or eighteen. It was only Uncle Georg, I may say, who finally saved me by taking charge of me at a time when I felt abandoned by everyone. They were all fairly indifferent to the reserve heir, always looking to Johannes and not troubling themselves about me. It was always our Johannes when things were rosy. I was only ever mentioned when they turned sour. What made matters even worse, as I once told Gambetti, was the advent of National Socialism. My family was highly susceptible to National Socialism, which suited them down to the ground, because in it, one might say, they discovered themselves. Now, in addition to their great God, who in any case was only their dear God most of the time, they suddenly had their great leader. Although National Socialism had long been a thing of the past by the time I reached the years of discretion, as they say, I still felt its baleful effects. For the National Socialism of my parents did not end with the National Socialist era: in them it was inborn, and they continued to cultivate it. Like their Catholicism, it was the very stuff of their lives, an essential element in their existence; they could not live without it. Hence, although the National Socialist period had long been over, I was given a National Socialist and Catholic upbringing and thus subjected to the Austrian mixed-power regime that has such a dire effect on the growing child. This combination of the Catholic and National Socialist elements, of Catholic and National Socialist educational methods, is the norm in Austria. They are the commonest and most widespread methods, applied everywhere without restraint, and produce atrocious and devastating effects on the whole of this essentially National Socialist and Catholic nation. National Socialist and Catholic educational methods enjoy unrestricted authority in Austria. Anyone who denies this is a liar or an ignoramus. And the laws of the land are nothing other than National Socialist and Catholic laws, which operate as a mechanism that brings devastation and destruction. That’s the truth about Austria. By nature the Austrian is a National Socialist and a Catholic through and through, however hard he tries not to be. In this country and this nation Catholicism and National Socialism have always been in balance—now more National Socialist, now more Catholic—but never just the one or the other. The Austrian mind thinks only in National Socialist and Catholic terms. And this is true also of Austrian philosophers, who use their unappetizing National Socialist Catholic minds no differently from their compatriots. If we take a walk in Vienna, the people we see are all essentially National Socialists and Catholics, who behave at times more as National Socialists, at times more as Catholics, but usually as both simultaneously; this is why we find them so repulsive on closer acquaintance and closer scrutiny, whether we’re prepared to admit it or not, I told Gambetti. Any article we read in the Austrian press is either Catholic or National Socialist, and that, it must be said, is the essence of everything Austrian—doubly mendacious, doubly vulgar, doubly anti-intellectual. If we talk to an Austrian for any length of time, Gambetti, we soon have the impression that we’re talking to a Catholic, not to a free and independent human being, or else we have the impression that we’re talking to a National Socialist—but in the end we have the impression that we’re talking to an out-and-out Catholic National Socialist, and we are very soon revolted. The Catholic National Socialist spirit—if I am to besmirch the word spirit by using it in this context, because I can’t do otherwise—has always reigned supreme at Wolfsegg and always will. My brother is imbued with the same spirit, and so are my sisters, but with them it naturally takes the form of pertness and insolence. My brother, like my father, has spent more or less all his life cultivating the Catholic National Socialist spirit, which is in fact a negation of the spirit, a peculiarly Austrian form of mindlessness, as I’ve said before. I withdrew from its ambience, Gambetti, but I’ll have to contend with it all my life, because it’s inborn. Inborn spirits either can’t be exorcised at all or can be exorcised only for a time, at tremendous cost, and never permanently. The whole of my existence has been a struggle to throw off the disease of Austrian mindlessness, I told Gambetti, which constantly reinfects me. No sooner do I notice the symptoms of this archetypal Austrian condition than I summon up all my strength to fight it off. In 1931, I thought, looking at the picture taken at Victoria Station in 1960, my parents were newly married. My mother had scored her triumph and was riding high, as it were. My father, of course, had not yet realized his ambition of begetting an heir. Men like my father do not want a child, they want an heir, and they marry late in life, for this one compulsive purpose. In their desire for an heir they rush into marriage with a virtual stranger, about whom they know hardly anything. By the time an heir is born they are fairly debilitated and can already be described as old. The mother promises to give her husband an heir and then proceeds to rob him of more or less everything. The new father, for his part, feels that he has done his duty to himself. Once the heir is born he loses interest in his wife. Most of the time he punishes her by ignoring her, or, if the mood takes him and she gives him cause, he reproaches her for having grossly exploited his generosity and married him only to get her hands on his fortune. In due course they reproach each other with everything, and life becomes hell. Their marriage does not produce mutual respect or the comfort and succor that the one should have of the other. It does not generate sympathy and mutual understanding but gradually degenerates into a shared hell. The spouses accommodate themselves to this hell and end up hating each other, but they soon recognize this hatred as inevitable and use it to quite good effect as a means to enliven the remainder of their lives. As my father turned against my mother and gradually withdrew into himself, she began to look around for a sphere in which she could give expression to her womanly whims and passions, which were far from spent; in other words for a Spadolini, I told myself as I contemplated the photos. By a happy chance, these more or less unhappy circumstances brought her together with an archbishop, who had not only an enviable physique but one of the brightest minds. I am told that when she is happiest with Spadolini she calls him my nuncio. Such a scene must be unbearably touching, I told Gambetti. I was furious, as I always am after speaking about the dubious Spadolini. It’s absurd, I told myself, that I should not only be teaching German literature but have the megalomaniac presumption to teach German philosophy, that I should pretend to a knowledge of German literature and German philosophy, or at least some acquaintance with it, when in fact I am only part of the Wolfsegg riffraff, the very thought of which makes me cringe. Having come to Rome from the provincial hell of Wolfsegg, I presume to talk to everyone about Schopenhauer and Goethe. Quite perverse, I told myself. When I take Wolfsegg and my family apart, when I dissect, annihilate, and extinguish them, I am actually taking myself apart, dissecting, annihilating, and extinguishing myself. I have to admit that this idea of self-dissection
and self-extinction appeals to me, I told Gambetti. I’ll spend my life dissecting and extinguishing myself, Gambetti, and if I’m not mistaken I’ll succeed in this self-dissection and self-extinction. I actually do nothing but dissect and extinguish myself. When I wake up in the morning the first thing I think of is setting about my work of dissection and extinction with a will. Our parents led us only to the brink of the abyss but did not show it to us; they never let us look into it but pulled us back at the critical moment. They always sought to lead us just to the brink, without showing us what it was that was ruining us. Billions of parents do the same, I told Gambetti. I switched the photos around and placed the one of my brother on his sailboat above the one of my parents and below the one of my sisters. They had gone to Cannes to wheedle money out of Uncle Georg for a trip they planned to America, my parents having refused to give them a penny as they thought such a trip unnecessary. While in Cannes they tried every possible trick to relieve Uncle Georg of the money they needed, but after two weeks they gave up. He did not give them a penny, believing that any money he gave them for a trip to America was money down the drain. From then on they hated Uncle Georg even more fervently than before, though he had been very generous to them in Nice, taking them out to the most expensive bars and restaurants and buying them lots of clothes, bracelets, necklaces, and so forth. Uncle Georg had seen through them. And in any case it was not their idea to go to Cannes to see Uncle Georg and wheedle money out of him for their American trip, but my mother’s, as I happen to know. She dispatched her daughters to Cannes on this squalid mission, but to no avail. I have to tell myself that the motive force behind everything bad has always been my mother, I told Gambetti. Anything bad that happened at Wolfsegg could be traced back to her—she was the source. On the other hand, I told Gambetti, it would be quite wrong to blame her, because she could do nothing about it, absurd though this may sound. Just as she was always the source of all evil, she always attracted it. It could be said that everyone who came in contact with her suddenly became a bad person, I told Gambetti. She even turned Spadolini into a bad person, just as she had turned me and my brother into bad people. And of course she did the same with my father, who was not originally a bad person—simple, yes, I have to admit, but not bad. A person like my mother can take a family that has never been bad and turn it into a bad family; she can take a house that has never been bad and turn it into a bad house, Gambetti. But it would be quite wrong to blame her for all the bad things she’s done. We do this only because we have no alternative, because it’s too difficult to think differently, too complicated, and therefore impossible, and so we simplify the matter and say, Our mother is a bad person, and all our lives we stick to this judgment. This woman made us all bad, I told Gambetti. Although the pictures I had in front of me were undoubtedly touching, this did not prevent me, even now that the people in them were dead, from accusing them and proceeding against them in the most ruthless manner. I even conceived the idea that my parents, with their usual meanness, had deliberately abandoned me. But no sooner had the idea occurred to me than I rejected it as utterly stupid. Mothers are responsible for everything, I had told Gambetti as we were walking on the Corso a few days before my departure for Wolfsegg. By that time I was totally obsessed with Wolfsegg, with what awaited me there as a consequence of my sister’s marriage to the wine cork manufacturer, and with everything about Wolfsegg that produces a sensation of strangulation even before I have left Rome. Mothers are responsible for everything but never called to account when they should be, because for thousands of years the world has held mothers in such high esteem that it cannot be eradicated. Why, I asked Gambetti, why? Mothers whelp and bring children into the world, and from then on they hold the world responsible for what has occurred and for everything that subsequently happens to their children, whereas they ought to take the responsibility themselves. The truth is, Gambetti, that mothers shirk all responsibility for the children they bring into the world. What I’m saying is true of many mothers, indeed of most mothers. But I’m quite alone in saying it! We can think such thoughts, but we mustn’t express them, Gambetti; we must keep them to ourselves and mustn’t publish them. We must choke down such thoughts in a world that would react to them with revulsion. Were I to publish a piece entitled Mothers, it would result merely in my being pronounced a liar or a fool or both. The world wouldn’t tolerate such views, because it’s accustomed to falsehood and hypocrisy, not to facts. The truth is that in this world facts are ignored, while fantastic ideals are proclaimed as facts, because that’s politically more expedient and acceptable than the opposite, Gambetti. When I received the telegram I was not shattered, as they say. It naturally caused me to review the consequences that would flow from the news, but my head was still as clear as it had been when I first read the telegram. Even after a second and third reading my hands did not tremble and my body did not shake, and hours later my hands were still not trembling, my body still not shaking. Quite calmly I surveyed my apartment, which in recent years I had furnished in accordance with my taste and temperament. I had accustomed myself to its size and adapted it perfectly to my needs. For this apartment, I thought, you are indebted to Zacchi, who lives opposite in his own palazzo. This apartment is the central point of your world and will remain so. You won’t give it up, you’ll do everything possible to avoid ever having to give it up. Nothing will drive you from Rome and back to Wolfsegg. I stood up and walked over to the window. The Piazza Minerva was quieter than it had ever been before. Just two or three walkers, no more, which was unusual at five o’clock in the afternoon. I had drawn the blinds, so that the apartment was almost completely dark. This is how I like it: in this darkened apartment I have my best thoughts. At one moment I thought to myself, I’ll go to Wolfsegg this evening, by the night train. Then I thought, I won’t go till tomorrow morning. First I thought, I’ll go at once, by train; then, I’ll go tomorrow morning, on the first plane. I paced calmly up and down, debating how I would travel to Wolfsegg. I imagined my sisters already expecting me and decided to keep them guessing about the time of my arrival. I’ll go down and telephone, I thought, and went to the door, but having reached the door I walked back to the window, then back again to the door. Dozens of times, possibly hundreds of times, I walked to the door and back—how many times I do not know, but more than just a few, more than just dozens. I sat down again at my desk, as I usually do at this time, but not to work, not to make notes, not to prepare my lessons—which are mainly for Gambetti—but to take another look at the photographs, which still lay there. I felt no need to get in touch with anyone—I wanted to be absolutely alone. I felt no need to communicate—I had to be alone with the knowledge of my parents’ death. Whom should I inform about it, and how? I thought of this and that person, considered this and that name, recalled this and that telephone number, but repeatedly rejected the idea of telling anyone of the news. Perhaps Gambetti, I thought, perhaps Zacchi, perhaps Maria, who lives near the Via Condotti and with whom I was due to have dinner that evening. For as long as I have been in Rome I have had regular meetings with Maria, the only woman with whom I have maintained any real contact and whom I have felt the need to see every week. You’re going to see your clever friend, I always tell myself, your imaginative friend, the great writer. For I have never doubted for a moment that everything Maria writes is great, greater than anything written by any other woman writer. I must call her and tell her why I have to cancel our date, why I have to go back to Wolfsegg, which I have always described to her as deadly and pestilential. Maria knows of no other Wolfsegg than the deadly, pestilential Wolfsegg, like Gambetti, Zacchi, and all the other people I meet in Rome. None of them has ever heard me describe Wolfsegg as anything other than a deadly, pestilential place, a provincial hell. I must call Maria, Gambetti, and Zacchi, I thought, then sat down again at my desk. Don’t take anything with you to Wolfsegg, I thought. Keep calm. Call your sisters. Tell them when you’ll be arriving. But first I must know when I’m leaving,
I thought, and I don’t know yet. It was impossible to make up my mind; I could not reach a decision. If there’s a rail strike I’ll fly, I told myself. If there’s an airline strike I’ll go by rail. But if I go by rail I’ll have to leave tonight; if I go by plane I’ll have to leave at five in the morning. After returning from Wolfsegg I had thought of the place with such revulsion that I swore not to return for a long time. Now I had to go back immediately. I remembered our attorney in Wels, my father’s attorney, who has an office in Franz-Josef Square, which I have found revolting whenever I have set foot in it. I suddenly saw the attorney’s wife—equally revolting. I saw our doctor in Wels—revolting. His wife—revolting. I saw Wels itself, then all the neighboring small towns, which all appeared to me in a revolting light. Vöcklabruck—revolting. Gmunden—revolting. These awful people in their hideous winter overcoats, I thought, their tasteless hats, their clodhopping shoes. I saw the marketplace in Wels and thought, How dreadful, how repulsive! I saw the town square of Gmunden and thought, How repulsive! Talking to the people in these revolting towns makes the whole world seem revolting. But if we live there we have to mix with these revolting people all the time, I thought. We can’t escape them—they’re the norm. I can’t stand the way they speak, any more than I can stand the way they dress. I can’t stand the way they think, the way they show off about what they’ve done and intend to do. I dislike everything they say and do. I simply can’t bear their Catholic National Socialist way of life, I can’t bear their accent—not just what they say but how they say it. When I observe them, I can’t summon up the feelings they deserve—only quite unjust feelings that they don’t deserve, I told myself. Maybe I have an allergy to Wolfsegg, and this is what makes me unjust to them. Maybe this allergy determines my mental attitude and makes me grossly unjust to these people and everything connected with them. The simple fact is that I loathe them, I’m sickened by them. What good are the beautiful streets in these small towns, I asked myself, if they’re filled with such revolting people? What good are the beautiful squares if such ugly people stand around in them? For ages I haven’t been able to feel any sympathy with them. I despise and detest them, yet at the same time I know I’m being monstrously unjust. But I can’t and won’t make friends with these people, I won’t pander to them and try to ingratiate myself. I can’t go back to them and their like. I can’t go back to their ridiculous shops and visit their smelly offices. I can’t revisit their icy and meretriciously ornate churches. These doctors ruined me, these lawyers cheated me, these priests lied to me. All these people failed me and humiliated me in the most appalling fashion when I trusted them. I can’t go near them any longer, I thought. They’ve become intolerable, and nothing can make them tolerable again. All these people hate what I love, despise what I respect, and like what I dislike. The very air they breathe makes me sick. Everywhere else I have friends, I told myself, but in the place that should be my home I have never had any, except among the simple people, the farmworkers and miners. Everywhere else I have been happy, at least for a time; in many places I have been utterly happy, contented and thankful, but never here, where I should have been. They don’t understand you, they don’t understand anything, I told myself. They don’t know how to live. They live to work, they don’t work to live. They’re base and common, but at the same time they have big ideas. They have an unnatural way of saying Good morning and an equally unnatural way of saying Good evening and Good night. The thought of your family makes you sick. The thought of the others makes you equally sick. Naturally anyone who thinks like this really is sick, I told myself, and I at once realized what a dangerous mood I was in. Stay calm, I told myself, keep a cool head, stay calm, quite calm. But I could not escape from this dangerous mood. I could hear them saying, He suffers from persecution mania—that’s what they always say—from a form of megalomania that’s different from ours, from his form of megalomania. When they see me they feel sick. He says Good morning, and they find it unnatural, just as when he says Good evening or Good night, I told myself. The way he dresses they find equally repellent—his clothes, his hats, his shoes—what he says, what he thinks, what he does or doesn’t do. They despise him as he despises them, they hate him as he hates them. Whose contempt, whose hatred, is the more justified? I can’t say, I told myself. I got up and went to the window, unable to go on sitting at the desk, and looked down on the Piazza Minerva. Zacchi has closed all his shutters, I told myself. He’s probably away, probably with his sister in Palermo. He often goes to see her. She has a kidney complaint and is in a hospital specializing in renal therapy, situated in one of the most beautiful regions of Sicily, below Monte Pellegrino. If all the shutters are closed he must have gone to Palermo to see his sister. All the same, I’ll try to tell him about my parents’ death. Late this evening—maybe he’ll be back by then. I went through the whole apartment, where I keep all the doors open, as wide open as possible, so that I can go back and forth unimpeded. In this way I can often avoid having to go out in the street for a break. It’s enough to walk back and forth a few times in my apartment. I removed myself from Wolfsegg, I told myself, walking through the apartment in one direction. Gradually I calmed down. I quite consciously removed myself from Wolfsegg and my family. I deliberately broke with Wolfsegg. I always offended my parents. I did everything to displease them, and I’ve always done everything to displease and offend my sisters. I was not fastidious about the way I offended them. I often ran them down and made fun of them when there was nothing about them to run down or make fun of, I told myself, and my head became clear again. I often leveled the basest accusations at my father when there was nothing to accuse him of. I lied to my mother and often made her look ridiculous in front of others, running her down in my arrogant way and hitting her where it hurt, I was now forced to tell myself. By now I really had calmed down, and my head was clear again. I quite deliberately parted from my family and willfully forfeited any rights I had in relation to them. I turned to walk in the opposite direction. I haven’t had the apartment painted for years because I can no longer bear to have workmen in, I told myself, looking at the cracks in the ceiling. I had to move into a Renaissance palazzo so that I could finally be alone, cut off from everybody, I told myself, for the truth is that I’ve cut myself off from everybody, not just from my family at Wolfsegg. The company I keep is reduced to a very small circle—Gambetti, Zacchi, Maria—and soon even this reduced circle will no longer exist, I told myself, and started to walk in the opposite direction. Come to think of it, I’m suddenly entirely alone, without a single human being, I told myself. I had my hands folded behind my back, a habit inherited from my paternal grandfather. If Uncle Georg knew how isolated I’ve suddenly become! I long to be alone, but when I am alone I’m desperately unhappy. I can’t endure being alone, yet I constantly talk about it. I may preach solitude, but I hate it profoundly, because nothing makes for greater unhappiness, as I know and am now starting to feel. I preach solitude to Gambetti, for instance, yet I am well aware that solitude is the worst of all punishments. In my role as his personal philosopher, I say to him, Gambetti, the highest condition is solitude, yet I know very well that solitude is the most fearful punishment of all. Only a madman propagates solitude, and total solitude ultimately means total madness, I thought as I turned to walk in the opposite direction. The apartment is so big that I have no cause to feel oppressed or restricted in my thinking. It affords my thoughts a freedom that they otherwise have only in large city squares. I took this into consideration when I rented the apartment, in a fit of megalomania, for indeed it was pure megalomania that made me take this big apartment in the Piazza Minerva, at immense cost, a cost that I could never have revealed to my family. I mentioned a certain sum to them because they wanted to know how much I paid for the apartment, but it was a fictitious sum, less than half the true cost. Had they known the true cost they would have said I was crazy. It’s one of the most reasonable apartments in Rome, I told them, and never said another word about its
cost. But from time to time I feel that even this apartment is a prison, I told myself, when I sometimes pace up and down like a prisoner in his cell. I often call it my thinking cell, but only to myself, not to others, lest they should suspect insanity, for they would undoubtedly think that only a madman could describe an apartment as a thinking cell. I sat down at the desk and contemplated the photographs that I had been looking at—or rather studying—all afternoon. Placing them side by side, I told myself that the people depicted in them could not be judged like this, as figures in a photograph. I now put them one on top of the other, so that the picture of my parents about to board the Dover train at Victoria Station covered the other two. I had hoped for a different effect, but the impression they made was still as comic and ridiculous as before. Putting the photographs back in the desk, I decided to call my friends and take the early morning flight from Rome, to fly home. My fingers did not tremble, my body did not shake. My head was completely clear. I knew what the telegram meant.
Extinction Page 2
