I’ll tell her that he read them attentively, with extreme nonchalance and without a trace of embarrassment, savoring every morsel of news as he sat opposite me eating his bread and sausage—three or four slices; I was not sure exactly how many. I’ll say to Caecilia, Your husband even had difficulty with the big pictures taken during the night of horror, but fortunately he was sitting by the kitchen window, where the light fell at just the right angle. Observing my brother-in-law, I began to wonder how I could exploit this scene to his detriment when I reported it to his wife. Warming to my plan, I imagined a thoroughly theatrical scene in which I would go up to my sister and tell her how avidly her husband had read the newspapers. I would tell her that contrary to all her protestations, but in accordance with my suspicions, the wine cork manufacturer was actually a pretty unsavory character. I heard myself telling her, Your husband sat opposite me, reading the newspapers without any compunction, taking no notice of me, although I wanted to discuss something important with him. But he didn’t listen to me. I’m actually capable of such an outrageous perversion of the truth, I thought as I observed my brother-in-law. I knew I was not above such low conduct, having engaged in it hundreds of times before, having made a habit of it and evolved a routine, a regular routine, I thought. My brother-in-law was avidly reading the papers with my express permission, after a decent show of hesitation, though no more than a show. He was actually reading them, whereas I had of course just flicked through them, as they say, when I was alone in the kitchen two hours earlier. He looked at the pictures quite calmly and without embarrassment, whereas I had done so furtively, apprehensive lest I should be caught doing something improper, indeed shameful, and fully aware that I was committing a heinous offense. My brother-in-law, however, could afford to enjoy the newspapers under my indulgent gaze and with my express permission. I could see how much he enjoyed opening one paper after another and reading the reports. Anyone else would have put them down after a while and turned his attention to me, I thought, but my brother-in-law was not like that. He completely ignored me. He regarded the permission I had given him as an unlimited dispensation, preferring to immerse himself in the newspapers and digest his bread and sausage, rather than engage in conversation with me, which was bound to be disagreeable, as he not only felt but knew. He was using the newspapers as a means of avoiding me. The fact is that he constantly avoids me, I thought. He doesn’t seek contact with me, as I believed for a moment when I saw him standing in front of the Orangery, looking futile and stupid, not knowing what to do with himself. I had been quite mistaken, and I was certainly wrong to think that I had a duty to speak to him, that I must take him to the kitchen and place myself at his disposal. Yet I really took him with me because I wanted to needle him, not out of any sense of duty, I thought. I took him to the kitchen only to find out more about him. Getting him something to eat was merely a pretext I used in order to worm this or that bit of information out of him that I could then use against Caecilia and him. The imbecile is at least a producer of imbecilities and a revealer of all kinds of secrets, I had thought. This was my reason for taking him to the kitchen. But now I no longer wished to worm anything out of him. I was content simply to observe him, so that later, at a suitable moment, I could report my observations to Caecilia, or rather, to put it bluntly, falsify my observations for my own ends, to the detriment of them both. I would say to Caecilia, He sat there and kept me waiting the whole time. He was particularly interested in the shots of Mother’s severed head. The pictures of Father thrown back in the car seat next to Johannes, whose head was totally shattered, at least internally, were of great interest to my brother-in-law, your husband, I’ll tell her. How dare such a man immerse himself in this journalistic filth in my presence, I’ll say, especially at such a sad time for us all? I won’t say tragic, I’ll say sad: tragic is theatrical hyperbole—sad has a more human ring. My sister is bound to be horrified to learn that my brother-in-law is such a low character. But is that what I want? I asked myself. It’ll make him a more important figure than he is. On the other hand, I can’t ease up on him if I mean to expel him, to drive him out of Wolfsegg, though clearly I won’t need to make the slightest effort to achieve this. He’ll see to it himself, and my sisters will help in their underhanded way. My brother-in-law’s days are numbered, I thought. There he sat, not devouring the newspapers, as they usually say, but devoured by them. And there I was sitting opposite him and giving him my blessing, for he could do what I had been unable to do: he could read the newspapers without feeling embarrassed and apprehensive, under the aegis of his suddenly all-powerful brother-in-law. After all, I’m his brother-in-law now, just as he’s mine, I told myself, but I’m the one to be feared, the one who’ll determine the future and decide what’s going to happen to Wolfsegg. That’s the difference between us. The powerful brother-in-law is sitting opposite the powerless one who has no say in anything, I thought. The wine cork manufacturer from Baden was able to enjoy the newspapers to the full, while I had to deny myself this enjoyment. Such people always have it easy, I thought—we never do. They never have to exert themselves—we always do. Given our present situation, I would naturally have refused to peruse the newspapers if someone had suggested it. I would have had to forgo them and leave them untouched. But my brother-in-law, after a moment’s hesitation, acts upon my suggestion and falls upon these newspaper reports. Dreadful, isn’t it? was the only thing I said to him as he sat immersed in the newspapers. Twice I uttered the word dreadful, a word I often use in relation to such press reports of accidents. Dreadful is the right word in such a context, and I use it often, too often, I told myself, far too often, even in contexts where it’s inappropriate. But in the present context it was entirely appropriate. I used it now, but my brother-in-law did not look up. He did not let himself be distracted by it, he did not let it interfere with his appetite for sensation. My father must have been driving too fast, I said. My brother-in-law pretended not to hear. Nobody knows why my father was driving and not Johannes, I said, because Johannes usually took the wheel. For a long time my father had been shortsighted, I said. People over sixty should have their driver’s license revoked, I said. It’s people over sixty who cause all the accidents. They’re the ones who cause all the disasters on our roads, because their reactions are too slow. I was embarrassed at having said this, as it sounded like a typical sentence from one of the newspapers that lay on the table. Newspaper editors purvey nothing but dirt, I thought—but the dirt they throw at us is our own dirt. The world that these purveyors of dirt present in the newspapers is essentially the real world, I said. The printed world is the real world. The world of dirt printed by the newspapers is our own world. Whatever is printed is real, and the real is only what we suppose to be real. I could not expect my brother-in-law to understand me. He was probably not listening, for he did not react to what I said but went on looking at a picture showing my mother’s head, separated from the torso by at least ten inches, on a laboratory slab. Using ambulances to take away the dead is absurd, I said. My brother-in-law did not look up. I remembered describing him to Gambetti before the wedding, when I had seen him only once, as a fat man of less than forty who was getting progressively fatter, so that his clothes were getting progressively tighter, and whose fatness, due to overeating, caused breathing difficulties when he spoke, so that he had to speak in short sentences. His breathing is stertorous, I had said, and when you’re walking with him he keeps stopping and stretching out his hand to point to some object, or if there’s no object for him to point to, he’ll point vaguely in some direction at the interesting landscape, hoping in this way to divert attention from his shortness of breath. Everything about him is a function of his obesity, I had told Gambetti. Feeling embarrassed at denigrating my future brother-in-law to such an extent, I had said to Gambetti, I’m appalled by my meanness, but then I apologized for using such a distasteful word as appalled, for as his teacher I should never have used such a banal expression. I clearly remember t
elling Gambetti that although we were constantly annoyed by others when they talked in clichés, we succumbed to the same lamentable habit ourselves. Appalled was a quite inept expression, I told Gambetti. My brother-in-law, I went on, was the type of person who was known in Southwest Germany as a Baden gourmet, an average petit bourgeois who had attained a degree of affluence and liked to flaunt it, to whom it was important to be fat and overweight, to cut an imposing figure. To be thin was seen in that part of the world as a sign of sickness, something menacing that was to be shunned because it was associated with the devil. To these people any form of asceticism was repugnant, whereas the fat man represented the ideal. Fatness was reassuring, and in Southwest Germany, especially Baden, they attached the greatest importance to reassurance, and so, for that matter, did all Germans. Fat men were trusted and worthy of emulation, but thin men were distrusted. Gambetti only laughed at my theory, and I joined in his laughter. Such people are terribly idle, I now thought, sitting opposite my brother-in-law, but their idleness isn’t what I would call creative idleness—it’s the stolid idleness of the pig, I thought, which today is possibly more human than the human being, who has become more and more piglike in the last hundred years. My brother-in-law could not be roused from his idleness. I took advantage of the situation to give free rein to my own thoughts. I won’t be so unmolested for a long time, I thought. It was about half past four, and the people who were coming to express their condolences could not be kept waiting. This time spent in the kitchen with my brother-in-law would probably be my last chance to be more or less alone, I thought, even though I had my brother-in-law sitting opposite me. Dreadful, isn’t it? I said, but he did not react. These people always pretend to be the life and soul of the party, to love wine and conviviality, I had told Gambetti, but they’re actually anything but convivial. They have to have conviviality at any price, and if you refuse to join in they’re ruthless; everything inside them turns to hatred. They use their conviviality to subjugate those around them and make life hell for them if they refuse to come up with the conviviality they crave. At least this is what I always feel, I told Gambetti, when people insist on forcing their conviviality on me. As I observed my brother-in-law I had visions of Rome, until in the end I fancied I was in my study in Rome, even though I was sitting opposite my ponderous brother-in-law in our kitchen at Wolfsegg. My father’s faulty vision ultimately proved fatal, I said. They’ll be delivering the new harvester, I said, but who knows whether we’ll need it? I said this in the tone of the owner of Wolfsegg, as a farmer, so to speak. I repeated these words several times in my mind and was amazed by their farmerly tone. It was like hearing my brother speak, I thought. Uttering these words, I had turned myself into a farmer, which I had no desire to be. They’ll probably all demand that I become a farmer; they probably expect I’m one already, I thought. I was aware of this after uttering these words. That’s naturally what’s in their minds, I thought, but all my life the last thing I’ve ever wanted to be is a farmer. Of course they expect me to give up everything else, to sacrifice it all in order to provide them with the farmer they need, the farmer they must have. They undoubtedly expect me to give up Rome and are already going around full of glee at the prospect. They expect me to give up everything connected with Rome, even to be capable of doing so, I thought, but that’s absurd. Yet the idea took root in my mind that they actually believed it, because they had to believe it. As the heir apparent I was expected to surrender virtually my whole being in order to run Wolfsegg for them. It was out of the question. Gambetti, Zacchi, Maria, even Spadolini, and all the others, I thought—there’s no way I’m going to give up that atmosphere for an inherited nightmare. But all the time there’s a gleeful look in their faces, in my sisters’ faces, I thought, because I’ve now been hit by something they never dreamed of for a moment, by the ultimate absurdity: I am to become a farmer, to run Wolfsegg, to have the whole of Wolfsegg hung around my neck, and they, my sisters, are to be the beneficiaries of this nightmare scenario. My brother-in-law, still immersed in the newspapers, had no idea of what was passing through my mind as he indulged his appetite for sensation. He’d also be a beneficiary of the violence they’re planning to do me, I thought, of the self-surrender they expect—the wine cork manufacturer from Freiburg im Breisgau with his forty-five workers and office staff who probably do nothing but piss on him, as they say. But my sisters don’t really know me, I told myself. They actually believe that I’ll enter into my inheritance in the manner laid down. We’ve always known about the will; it doesn’t even need to be opened in order to be understood. My dear Gambetti, I had said on the telephone, you don’t know what I have coming to me, because you don’t know what Wolfsegg’s like. I could hear these words of mine quite clearly. While my brother-in-law, as I could see, was still enthralled by the newspapers, fascinated by the press reports of the accident, I could hear myself saying to Gambetti, Wolfsegg won’t kill me—I’ll see to that. And it occurred to me that perhaps Gambetti did not understand me. He had thought I was telephoning to decline the invitation to dinner with his parents, when all I wanted was to tell him briefly that my parents and my brother Johannes had died, fallen victim to a road accident, I said, which was a quite unsuitable formulation for a language teacher to use. However, I had never described myself as a language teacher; I simply called myself his teacher, just as I called him my pupil. I’m not a specialist teacher, I now reflected. I merely convey knowledge that is relevant to German literature. I naturally try to do my job well and convey knowledge that is worth more than the fee he pays me, which I only accept pro forma, as it were. I claim my fee as a matter of principle, and it is paid to me as a matter of principle, if for no other reason than to maintain the necessary distance in our teacher-pupil relationship. I could forgo my fee, but that would be extremely foolish, the first step toward destroying this relationship, I thought, observing my brother-in-law even more closely. I could do this quite unimpeded, for he took no notice of me whatever and sat there as though I had long since gotten up and left the kitchen. If I had gotten up and left the kitchen, I thought, he wouldn’t even have noticed. Our terrible misfortune has long since lost its sensational aspect, I told myself, and the living proof of this is sitting opposite me. My brother-in-law comes from a family whose peasant ancestors moved to a small town, prompted by an ambition to better themselves, whatever that means. They staked everything on shaking off first their peasant origins for small-town respectability, then their small-town respectability for something higher, the nature of which I cannot define. My brother-in-law is the end product of this strenuous process, as it were, which is naturally doomed to failure. For such people stake virtually everything on getting away from their real selves, but they never succeed, because they lack the intellectual energy, because they have not discovered the intellect—the intellect around them or the intellect within them—and have therefore not taken even the first step, which is the precondition for taking the second. They suddenly find themselves stranded, like my brother-in-law, no longer knowing what to make of the world around them, or of themselves, and end up getting on everyone’s nerves. Wolfsegg has simply acquired a new comic figure, I told myself as I observed my brother-in-law, but this hasn’t made the comedy any more bearable or any more interesting. This new comic figure is not amusing, only tiresome—not a wag, but a drag. For a moment I wished I had brought Gambetti with me, but Gambetti would certainly not have wished to act as my intellectual shield against all the distasteful conditions at Wolfsegg. He might even have been a liability, I thought. Even as a protective shield he would only have given me trouble, and I’ve enough of that already. At Wolfsegg our relations would have been quite different from those we enjoy in Rome. I would not have been able to devote the same attention to him as I do in Rome. Everything that makes his company such a pleasure would have been impossible. Wolfsegg air is not Roman air, the Wolfsegg atmosphere is certainly not the Roman atmosphere: Wolfsegg, in short, is not Rome. It would have been a
grave error to bring Gambetti to Wolfsegg. The proper garment for the funeral, in view of the climate, would undoubtedly be my loden, I thought, but I won’t wear it. I’ll wear one of the Roman coats I have hanging in the closet, if only to distinguish myself from the others. Princes of the Church are always afraid of catching a chill and wear lodens over their vestments when officiating out of doors. And everybody else is bound to be wearing a loden. If I wear one of my Roman coats I’ll be able to distinguish myself from them, I thought, and thereby document the fact that I’m no longer a Wolfsegger but a Roman. I’ll present myself as a Roman, which is what they’ve nicknamed me for years. I’ll make my entrance like a Roman. The coat I had in mind was one that I had bought in Padua the previous year. Tomorrow I must come across as a metropolitan, I thought. I’ll wear Roman shoes and a Roman scarf. In this way I’ll distinguish myself outwardly from the loden-clad masses, whom I’ve always detested. The loden-clad masses will do everything they can to overpower me, I thought, but I’ll know how to defend myself. Tomorrow’s Roman won’t let himself be worsted by the loden-clad masses. I was still sitting in the kitchen with my brother-in-law when I heard the first mourners arrive, not just local people who had come to offer their condolences, as I thought at first, but guests who would be staying the night at Wolfsegg. I stood up, and so did my brother-in-law, who until now had been buried in the newspapers. There was a knock on the door. Only now did it occur to me to wonder where the kitchen maids and the cook were and what had become of my sisters. The first guests had made their way to the end of the entrance hall without being received by anyone and now knocked on the kitchen door, causing me instant embarrassment. I later took my sisters to task, asking them how it was possible that the first guests had not been received at the door and had been able to get to the end of the entrance hall without being greeted. My sisters had undertaken to receive all the guests, not only those who merely came to offer condolences but those who would be staying overnight, and had placed a guest list on one of the hall tables, stating precisely where each of the guests was to spend the night, or in some cases more than one night. Some were to be put up in the village, but close relatives and close friends like Spadolini were to stay in the main house, the Huntsmen’s Lodge, or the Gardeners’ House, where rooms were said to have been prepared for them. Spadolini was to be put up in the main house, I discovered, on looking through the list. The first arrivals were relatives of my mother’s whom I hardly knew. I had to introduce myself, as they did not remember me; I had seen them once before, in Munich, where they lived, though I had forgotten the occasion. They were dressed all in black and gazed around the entrance hall rather arrogantly, it seemed to me. They at once asked where the chapel was and whether the dead were lying in state in the chapel. No, I said, in the Orangery. They wanted to go there right away to see the dead. These people weren’t at Caecilia’s wedding, I thought; if they had been I’d have noticed them. I had no intention of escorting them to the Orangery, and my brother-in-law had disappeared into the kitchen as soon as he saw them. I looked around for my sisters, who had unaccountably deserted me, and suggested to the guests that they make their own way to the Orangery. I would have taken them across, I said, but I was urgently needed upstairs. This was an excuse, but these guests had made such a bad impression on me from the moment I set eyes on them that I did not want to devote any more time to them. One after another they had held out their hands to me and I had had to shake them. I tried to hide my distaste for these people, but I may not have succeeded. I do not always succeed, especially when the people concerned are so patently distasteful. I was repelled by their ostentation, by their expensive clothes, which they had clearly bought specially for the funeral and now flaunted, as at a dress rehearsal, with such disgusting arrogance and assurance. I told them how to find the Orangery. There were five of them in all, a couple with three children in their late teens, already utterly spoiled, I thought, superficial, stupid, and insolent. They lacked any reserve and talked in loud voices, as if they owned the place. I do not know whether they had visited us before, but they probably had, as my mother had a penchant for people of this kind, I thought, her own kind. The Orangery is over there, I said, leaving them to find their way. My brother-in-law, having withdrawn to the kitchen, was joking with the kitchen maids, who were busy preparing a buffet that my sisters had ordered that morning. Big trays with every possible kind of open sandwich and big dishes with every possible kind of salad were carried in from all directions. Bowls full of sauces and creams and trays piled high with sandwiches were even brought from the chapel, which is always cool and hence particularly suitable for storing food. For the guests had to be fed. They naturally did not expect a cooked dinner, but at least they were entitled to a cold buffet, and my sisters are experts at cold buffets, even though they cannot cook. Their cold buffets have always found favor. I do not know who is the greater expert, Caecilia or Amalia; both are famous for their cold buffets. I have always been rather indifferent to cold buffets, and to food in general, but one thing I know is that Austrian food is not the world’s best and of course cannot be compared with Roman food. The smell of the cold buffet now filled the entrance hall. While my relatives from Munich made their way to the Orangery, the next arrivals were coming across from the Farm, and the stream of guests continued to flow uninterrupted from about five o’clock until late in the evening. All kinds of people arrived from every part of the country and from abroad, far more than had attended Caecilia’s wedding, and this was only the eve of the funeral. There were well over a hundred, probably a hundred twenty or a hundred thirty. I gave up counting them, and I also stopped attending to individual guests, leaving this task, which I found extremely unpleasant, indeed repugnant, to my sisters, who had taken up their position by the gate in order to receive the guests and had copies of the accommodations list. Only a few were put up in the main house, most being accommodated in the Huntsmen’s Lodge, a few in the Gardeners’ House, and a large number at various inns in the village. Most of them arrived wearing black, which made for a fine austere picture. Spadolini, of all people, did not turn up in black; he was wearing a green-and-gray all-weather coat, which I recognized as one that he had bought in Rome with my mother—in the Via Condotti, of course. But I will return to Spadolini presently. The wine cork manufacturer quickly melted into the background; Caecilia was constantly looking for him and calling out his name, rather too loudly, I felt, given the occasion, and the guests were amused to hear her repeatedly calling his name. As the weather was fine, most of the guests stood outside in the park, enjoying the opportunity to get to know one another, for many of them, as I discovered, had not met before. Others, especially the old and the elderly, stayed in the hall, where they appreciated the proximity of the kitchen and the chapel. Many of the guests, expecting the bodies to be lying in state in the chapel, went straight through the hall to the chapel and were surprised to find no bodies there. It had been so long since the last funeral, my paternal grandfather’s, that few were familiar with the Wolfsegg custom of using the Orangery for lyings in state. Most of them therefore went straight through the hall to the chapel, and only then to the Orangery, where there were now so many wreaths and bouquets in front of the entrance that the gardeners had difficulty finding room for them all. From my window on the second floor, the company conversing quietly in the park presented a beautiful and elegant picture. I had retired to my room to avoid constant exposure to the guests. Finding it unendurable to have to say the same thing over and over again and hear the same replies, I had seized the first opportunity to withdraw to my room, from which I could survey more or less the whole scene. My sisters had meanwhile posted my brother-in-law at the gateway, instructing him to tell the new arrivals where they were to be put up for the night. I have always been more attracted to funerals than to weddings, and I was now enjoying everything much more than I had at the wedding a week earlier, even though, as I looked down at the park, I saw largely the same people. Except that
now they were quite different, restrained by the logic of the occasion, as it were. They stood around in groups and chatted, as if at a midsummer night’s celebration, I thought, their black attire disguising their otherwise unbearable tastelessness. It’s a pity, I thought, that the occasion for such a beautiful and elegant picture should be a sad one. Every so often we should give a party like this, I thought, just for the sake of the beautiful and elegant picture it presents, which has such aesthetic appeal. But heaven forbid that we should understand what they’re all saying, I thought. Standing at the window, I imagined all the time that they were asking about me, about the son, that is to say the brother, the heir, the new master, or whatever, who was not to be seen among them and had not put in an appearance, although of course he was known to be present. I had not switched on the light in my room, wishing to remain completely unnoticed and avoid discovery as I gazed down at the company below. Spadolini had not yet arrived. I expected him at any moment, but he arrived much later, causing quite a stir, as may be imagined. The time began to drag, and so I went from my own room to my father’s and sat down at the card table he had always used as a dressing table. His dressing gown still hung on the door. I got up and slipped it on, as I suddenly felt cold. I tied the belt and stood in front of the wall mirror. The tiredness that I had at first ignored when sitting in the kitchen with my brother-in-law had now worn off. Though no longer tired, I did not feel inclined to show myself in public, so I sat in my father’s chair and stretched out my legs. As I did so I noticed that the room had been cleaned since I last saw it. In no time everything had become neat and tidy, and on the table in front of the window stood a vase of flowers, though it was too dark to see what kind of flowers they were. It immediately occurred to me that this was the room that had been prepared for Spadolini. I recalled what I had said to Gambetti on the telephone: that it was not only likely but quite certain that Spadolini would come to the funeral and spend the night in my father’s room. I wasn’t mistaken, I thought. By the bedside were the English slippers that my mother had bought my father in Vienna. He had never worn them because he thought them too decadent. These very soft slippers of black kidskin, which my mother had thought so elegant and which had never been worn, were now waiting for Spadolini. So is the dressing gown I’m wearing, I thought. I got up, took off the dressing gown, and hung it on the door. The hook on the door, I thought, was put there by my father, against my mother’s wishes. She had objected to his disfiguring the door, as she put it, but could not prevent it. My father’s bathroom had been cleaned; there were fresh towels on the rails, and the faucets gleamed. The maids have done a good job, I thought. They’ve done a good job here, I thought, but they’ve done nothing in my room. My room was still just as I had left it a week earlier. I had left in a foul mood, furious with my parents because on my last day at Wolfsegg they had heaped reproaches on me concerning the life I led in Rome. I could still remember their words but did not wish to repeat them to myself. I now discovered the silver toilet set that my mother had brought my father from Paris. She always brought him presents, but this toilet set he had found too womanish. These were the disparaging words he used about the Parisian silver toilet set—It’s too womanish for me. He never used it. It had now been taken out of the drawer and placed on the table for Spadolini. Mother had had my father’s initials engraved on it, I recall, but he dismissed this as a silly affectation. My mother had not succeeded in driving out his basic good taste, I thought. Sitting in the chair, I thought of how I had always admired Spadolini and the extraordinary life he led, which began in a North Italian town near Lake Como. The son of a lawyer, he was destined for the Church from an early age. He was one of five children, all of whom went to college and made something of themselves, as they say, but he was undoubtedly the most gifted. The young priest soon went to Florence and then, at the age of twenty-five, to Rome, where he carved out a career for himself. Admired for his good looks and his conversation, he at once raised the tone of any gathering he attended. At thirty he was adviser to the papal nuncio in Vienna, and at thirty-eight he was entrusted with an important financial office in the Vatican. At forty he became a papal nuncio, first in the Far East and then in South America. He speaks Spanish and Portuguese without an accent, as well as English and French. One can talk to him about any subject, and he never has the least difficulty in responding. It was at a reception at the Belgian Embassy in Vienna that he first met my mother. Spadolini always described her to me as a child of nature, and perhaps that is how he always saw her. Now the child of nature is dead, I thought, the much loved child of nature is lying in state in the Orangery, leaving him all alone. But Spadolini has never been alone, I thought; he has always been among people, all over the world, and this is immediately obvious from his bearing. As soon as he appears on the scene, no matter where or in what company, he dominates it. Everywhere people jostle to be near him. The best entertainment is always to be had at the table where he is placed. Mother used to invite him to Wolfsegg at least twice a year, and not only to Wolfsegg but to various Mediterranean resorts, for periods of several days or several weeks, and as far as I know, Spadolini never declined a single invitation. The prince of the Church would fly first class to wherever Mother was waiting for him, naturally at the best hotels in the most delectable settings. Sometimes my father knew, sometimes he did not, and eventually he ceased to care when and where my mother met Spadolini. At times all three traveled together, to Badgastein or Taormina, for instance, or to Sils Maria in Switzerland, where they checked in at the Waldhaus, the hotel with the finest location. Spadolini would put on his cross-country skis or take a boat out on the lake and elegantly row in the direction of the Maloja Pass, toward the painting, as it were, that made Segantini famous. It must be said that the archbishop, who had three passports—a Vatican passport, an Italian passport, and a diplomatic passport—and used whichever suited his needs, was always happiest in my mother’s company. He often told me this, and I believed him. How simpleminded our Austrian bishops are by comparison, I thought as I sat in the chair, even our cardinal in Vienna! Spadolini could be called a born prince of the Church. One has only to hear how he speaks, to see how he eats, I thought. And how he dresses. He is not one of those churchmen of humble stock who haul themselves naively up the ecclesiastical ladder but, as I have said, a born prince of the Church, and as I sat in the chair, I repeated these words several times, half aloud: a born prince of the Church. His influence in the Vatican is immense, though his relations with the popes have been somewhat distant, too distant, as he himself has said more than once, and this has so far cost him his cardinal’s hat. Spadolini, the man of the world! I thought. It may be, I told myself, that Mother’s death will give me a chance to renew my friendship with him, even to consolidate it and establish a permanent claim to it. My move to Rome was due in no small measure to Spadolini. He introduced me to Zacchi, who found me the apartment in the Piazza Minerva. It was Spadolini who acquainted me with Rome, introduced me into Roman society, and first decoded the city for me, as it were. For at first I had no one in Rome but Spadolini and was entirely reliant on him. Uncle Georg too had a high opinion of Spadolini, although he knew that he consorted with my mother in what Uncle Georg called a somewhat curious fashion. Spadolini often visited Cannes, and he and Uncle Georg once spent several weeks together in Senegal, mounting an exhibition of southern French painters and at the same time conducting what Uncle Georg called philosophical conversations. Spadolini is also an artist, I thought as I sat in the chair, a highly artistic person, even if he doesn’t paint or play an instrument. I often went for walks with him in Rome, where he rescued me from black moods of despair, especially during my early days in Rome, when I did not know what to do with myself and fell prey to brooding, insomnia, and thoughts of suicide—until Spadolini made me rouse myself and engage in intellectual activity. And finally it was Spadolini who put me in contact with Gambetti, whose family he had known for decades. Spadolini often took me for walks o
n the Pincio for the sole purpose of wrenching me out of my despair through what he called intellectual exercises. He reminded me of my abilities, my intellectual capital, as it were, which I had forgotten. For my intellectual passions had atrophied and almost died. It was Spadolini who revived them, Spadolini and no other. We did intellectual exercises together and had many a good meal in Trastevere, I thought. Good eating on the one hand, good thinking on the other—this is a phrase that Spadolini often used, a principle that he dinned into me. And it was undoubtedly my salvation. He often took the trouble to drive out into the country with me, along the Appian Way and into the infinite, simply and solely to save me, and I must say that Spadolini is the only person who has ever acknowledged me. He tried to explain to my mother what kind of person I was, what cast of mind I had, so to speak, but on this topic she never listened to him. The child of nature let him talk but didn’t listen, I thought, sitting in the chair and contemplating the Parisian toilet set. How could Spadolini be so taken with my mother as to be more or less in love with her, how could he so obviously understand her and understand me, when she did not understand me at all? She never wanted to understand me, I told myself as I sat in the chair. Spadolini understood me, and he understood my mother, I thought, but my mother was always against me, even though Spadolini was for me. Spadolini could not persuade her to take any interest in me. He once said to me, She can’t relate to you; you’re completely alien to her. But considering that my mother was so much influenced by Spadolini, it is incomprehensible that she was not influenced by what he told her about me. She did not hear it because she did not want to hear it. I like you and I like your mother, but your mother doesn’t understand you, Spadolini said. In fact she hates you, but conversely you don’t like your mother either—you hate her. Spadolini has never shied away from stating the facts and telling the truth. This license he can allow himself as a prince of the Church, and he has his own view of the Church too, I thought. The Spadolinis are all independent spirits, I thought. And Spadolini the prince of the Church is no exception. The Spadolinian element, like the monarchic element, can assert itself in its own way within the Catholic Church, I thought. Even today. The smell of my father still lingered in his room. I got up and opened the closet. I counted twelve suits, all made by Knize, his Viennese tailor. As my father’s much smaller—or rather was much smaller—than I am, I won’t be able to wear these suits, I thought, and I wondered whom to give them to. To give them to the gardeners would be stupid, and I won’t give them to the huntsmen or any of my relatives, I thought, shutting the closet. My father always had about thirty pairs of shoes in his shoe cupboard. I opened the cupboard. Size forty-two won’t fit anyone here, I thought, and closed the shoe cupboard. But I’ll keep the better-quality shirts. They’re well cut and will fit me. They’ve cleared one closet for Spadolini, I thought. My father had photographs of his family on his table, one of each of us, on which we all make the same bland, harmless impression. The photographs were reassuring, not alarming, and the only question they raised was how all these likenesses could possibly be so bland. Father used to get up at five o’clock, and at half past five he sat down to work at his desk, running the estate, as he put it. At about half past seven he had breakfast with Mother in what she called the large sitting room, formerly known as the green drawing room. If the weather was fine the balcony windows would be wide open. Over breakfast they would plan the day’s events, and this led to the first quarrels and misunderstandings. In recent years breakfast was usually taken in silence, broken only by the clink of china and cutlery. Father was a man of few words, but Mother was extremely loquacious and loved talking, though in recent years she had ceased to be loquacious and talkative, at any rate with Father. Father was sick, and she expected him to die soon. She had expected it for years and believed she could read it in his face. If he was subjected to any unpleasantness she would say, Leave him alone. He’s a sick man and hasn’t long to live. She became so used to saying this that she even said it in his presence. She repeatedly said, Leave your father alone, he’s a sick man, though she refrained from adding and hasn’t long to live. Yet although she did not say it, the thought was always present. When he was away or working late she would say, Leave your father alone. He’s a sick man and hasn’t long to live. When he was present she said, Leave your father alone, he’s a sick man. Whenever she could she went to meet Spadolini, the illustrious Spadolini, as my father once called him. Not a bad description, I now reflected. Every few weeks her sick, dying, lusterless husband became too much for her and she would take up with her illustrious admirer, but when the illustrious admirer no longer had time for her she would return to the sick, dying, lusterless husband, usually at night, by stealth, so that the servants would not notice, though they always noticed, as I know—servants notice everything. People think servants notice nothing, but they notice everything, even the most trivial things, things one would not expect them to notice. They know everything. We always imagine that the servants are not in the picture, that we have hoodwinked them, pulled the wool over their eyes, when in fact they have noticed everything. The illustrious Spadolini was the perpetual object of Mother’s longing, I thought. In the end Father paid no attention to this longing and no longer asked her where she had been when she came home in the middle of the night, for she would only reply mockingly, With Spadolini. But in the end it was the lusterless farmer, not the illustrious prince of the Church, who was her strength and stay. Mother would sometimes lean on Father and say she was aware of what she had in him and grateful to him for forgiving her everything. Father just let her talk. He had already left the stage on which Spadolini was performed, this ludicrous comedy, as he called it. It had long been a piece for only two players. I have retained my preference for darkened rooms to this day, I thought, but there was also a practical reason for not switching on the light at this time of year; this had to do with the mosquitoes, which are attracted by light and immediately turn every room at Wolfsegg into a hell. After breakfast Father would go across to the Farm and look around, then usually get on a tractor and disappear into the woods. Nobody knows why he went there, probably just to find peace and quiet, away from his wife and family, I thought. In the late morning the tractor would be seen somewhere unattended, while he walked for miles across his land. This was what he loved best. He only ever wanted to be a farmer. He never entertained what are called higher ambitions. When the question of the succession became acute and he needed an heir, he married the small-town girl, the daughter of a vegetable wholesaler who jarred and canned the whole countryside around Wels, as it were, and sold the jars and cans in Vienna. After marrying my mother he still preferred the pigsty to the green drawing room, which she rechristened the large sitting room. His favorite company was to be found mainly at the Farm and the Huntsmen’s Lodge, I thought. But of course this farmer always had the bearing of a gentleman. The first child, Johannes, was the offspring he desired, who would in due course inherit the estate. As I have said, he took cognizance of me as the reserve heir. He could have done without my sisters; they were latecomers and never had a chance with him, and so naturally they were immediately tied to their mother’s apron strings. Both Caecilia and Amalia were what are called beautiful children, who subsequently became uglier and uglier; this is popularly supposed to be the destiny of beautiful children. Unprepossessing. At least in my view. But of all the children, I was always in the most difficult position, I now reflected. I had no place in my parents’ hearts, and in time I gave up trying to force myself into them, as it became clear that there was no room for me. But from the beginning I was closer to my father than to my mother, of whom I was afraid even as a very small child, whereas I trusted my father, first as a child, then as a teenager, and finally as an adult, right to the last. All my life I acknowledged his paternal authority, whatever that is, but I could not help regarding my mother as harmful to me. All my life I felt I was there only to be used as a last resort. They were not wrong, as the accident has
shown, I thought, sitting in the chair, but they didn’t reckon with their own deaths. If Johannes had been alone in the car, I told myself, they could have used me as the fallback, and their foresight would have been justified. But they themselves died along with the heir apparent and so did not benefit from the existence of a second heir. I am the second heir, I thought to myself as I sat in the chair, the sole surviving heir. This was how I now saw myself. In my capacity as the second heir I sensed my big chance. But how was I to exploit it? I was glad that Spadolini was coming. Spadolini’s a person I can talk to about everything, I thought. Spadolini has a clear head, clearer than mine, which has been confused by the present calamity. In the next few days, possibly in the next few hours, I’ll be able to talk to Spadolini. He owes it to me to show me the way out that I’m unable to see for myself. I had some ideas about the immediate future but did not know how to weld them in a meaningful plan. Spadolini is the one person I can trust to tell me what I should do, I thought. On the other hand, I don’t know what kind of Spadolini is coming; I don’t know whether it’s a useful or a harmful Spadolini that’s about to arrive at Wolfsegg, for there was no doubt that Spadolini could now be harmful to me, and the possibility scared me. But if that’s the case I must be completely mistaken about him, I thought. It may be, I thought, sitting in the chair, that while he’s been on his way here, Spadolini’s thoughts have been running in the opposite direction, that he’s having his own thoughts about the future of Wolfsegg and how it can get over the present calamity. But do I need Spadolini? I asked myself. Haven’t I a mind of my own? I don’t need Spadolini at all, I told myself. Getting up, I went to the window and looked down at the company in the park; the party of funeral guests had thinned out, as most had gone to find their lodgings. I could see that it was breaking up. Spadolini’s still not here, I thought. He’s making a point of arriving late so that he won’t have to meet all these people, so that he can avoid all the embarrassment, or most of it. In the midst of the guests, who thought nothing of trampling the lawn, stood the wine cork manufacturer, holding a tray. All by himself. Caecilia called out his name, probably from the doorway, and he went across. Here, at this window, Father had often stood for half the night when he was unable to sleep. All his life he suffered from insomnia, which Mother never did. To tire himself he would stand by the window, but even when tired, after standing here for two or three hours, he still could not sleep. And so he took to going out at three o’clock in the morning, especially in March and April, and walking in the woods. I’m a woodsman, he often said. I’d rather be in the woods than anywhere else. I recalled that he had once said, I’d like to die in the woods, but this wish was not to be fulfilled: he died an everyday death, quite the opposite of the one he had hoped for, like millions of others who die on the roads today after a momentary lapse of concentration. Spadolini made me aware of Gambetti’s character; he explained Gambetti to me, as it were, telling me how to approach him and win his trust, for according to Spadolini it was extremely hard to get along with Gambetti. Gambetti had expressed a wish to have an Austrian to instruct him in German literature, not a German. I had arrived in Rome at just the right moment, said Spadolini. I was the ideal person. Gambetti regarded Spadolini as his mentor and concurred with him in everything. Their fathers were lifelong friends, I thought, again sitting in the chair but now with my eyes closed, enjoying the quiet of my father’s room. From the sounds coming in through the open window I gathered that most of the guests had dispersed, leaving only a few in conversation with my sisters. I could not follow the conversation, as I heard only isolated words. I clearly remember hearing the words breeze, angina pectoris, anarchy, disgusting, and wet weather. Their audibility depended on the wind conditions; some were clear and distinct, others indistinct and barely comprehensible, but they were all spoken in restrained tones. From the start Spadolini was destined for a very high position, as he once said. His father had entertained ambitions for his son and sent him to college, so that he could get on rapidly in the Vatican and rise in the hierarchy, whereas his mother is said to have had no interest in this single-minded pursuit of a Vatican career. According to my mother, Spadolini immediately rose in the hierarchy and went on rising—a brilliant career such as had seldom been witnessed, especially in the history of the Church, she said. Gambetti had first assessed me, not I him, Spadolini told me, to see whether I was fit to be his teacher. He had devised a very precise method for assessing me and my teaching abilities. Spadolini quoted Gambetti as saying that I had passed the test to his entire satisfaction, I now recalled as I sat in the chair. We think we are our pupil’s teacher from the beginning, but for months we are actually being assessed by him, I thought. At the very start of our relationship Gambetti asked me many odd questions, unusual questions, it seemed to me at the time, and I did not know why. At first Spadolini, Gambetti, and I often met for dinner near the Piazza Minerva, at an establishment where one is served exclusively by nuns, who naturally made a great fuss over Spadolini, somewhat to his embarrassment. Maria went there once with me, but never again, as she found it so distasteful. On the evening in question numerous clerics were present, and the nuns were so assiduous in their attentions that Maria must have found it unbearable. We had met to discuss her poems, especially her Bohemian poem, which has since become world famous and is certainly one of the finest and most beautiful poems in the German language. I said to her, You’ve now written the finest and most beautiful poem ever written by a woman in our language. It was not just a compliment: I was telling the truth, which has meanwhile been acknowledged by the rest of the world. I have always loved Maria’s poems: they are so Austrian, yet at the same time universal, uniquely imbued with the mood of the world around us, and written by the most intelligent woman poet ever. Maria’s poems are entirely antisentimental, I thought, quite unlike those written by others, which for all their wildness and waywardness are informed by nothing but Austrian sentimentality. Maria’s poems are antisentimental and clear and deserve to be rated as highly as Goethe’s, as those poems by Goethe that I value most. Maria had to go to Rome to be able to write them, I told myself, sitting in the chair and again thinking of Spadolini, whom I have to thank for Gambetti, my dearest and most valued friend in Rome. What would my life in Rome be like without Gambetti, I thought, who confronts me daily with new ideas and new questions, who daily refreshes me by bringing me face-to-face with the real problems of our world? Gambetti, who is forever questioning and never lets up, who never gives me a moment’s peace, who comes to my apartment and questions me all night long, until the cold light of dawn comes up, whom I cannot escape. Gambetti, who wants to know everything, through the medium of German literature, which he uses merely as a device for learning about everything else, Gambetti the anarchist, who under my guidance has become a true anarchist, whom I have possibly trained in anarchism, turning him against his parents, his surroundings, and himself, I thought, yet who is also the driving force behind my own anarchism and set it in motion again in Rome. Gambetti, who throws the Corriere della Sera on my desk—and as it were in my face—and questions me about everything. Gambetti, the young man whom Maria loves more than me; Gambetti, the greatest doubter I have ever known, who far outdoes me in his doubting, who has made doubting a principle of life, and who once told me that with his doubting he had started to dismantle the whole world in order to study it properly; Gambetti, who would dearly love to blow the world sky-high but at the same time spends hours walking around Rome in a red sweater, carrying books by Jean Paul and Kleist and Wittgenstein under his arm, while dreaming of dismantling the world and blowing it sky-high. Gambetti, who, on the other hand, dines with his parents at the Hotel de la Ville and does not disturb them in their outdated attitudes, who shops only in the Via Condotti and whose room not merely is tastefully furnished but evinces the most exquisite culture. Gambetti, whom I cling to as much as he clings to me. Gambetti, I thought, sitting in my father’s chair, the quintessence of intellectual curiosity and co
ld calculation—Gambetti, the youthful bewitcher of all around him. I looked over to the Orangery, now illuminated from within, a picture I had not seen before. There was now only a handful of guests in the park, and I could not recognize them. I had a duty to present myself to them, I thought, to go down and shake hands with them, but I was not up to it and had unloaded this formality on my sisters, who were in any case better qualified to perform it. After all, they’re the daughters and know how to deal with their own kind, whereas I’ve long since forgotten how to deal with their kind, I told myself, gazing in fascination at the Orangery, which was illuminated solely by the feeble candlelight from within. The prelude is drawing to a close, I thought. Spadolini still hasn’t arrived, and the others don’t really matter. I’ve nothing whatever in common with them, I thought; they don’t concern me. All these people are just tiresome. I despise them and they despise me. Suddenly I thought I saw my cousin Alexander enter the park, without his wife, and it occurred to me that my sisters would naturally have sent a telegram to him in Brussels. I had not thought of him until now. It really was Alexander approaching the Orangery. I watched him shake hands with several of the people standing in front of it, in that characteristic way of his that again struck me as so attractive, both elegant and entirely natural. I recalled that Alexander, my dreamer, was exactly my age. We had parted thirty years before, when he left the boarding school and went to Belgium with his parents, but we had never severed our contact. His marriage, which I must admit I at first regarded with misgiving, actually deepened our friendship, which had nothing to do with our being related to each other, a fact that neither of us considered important. I have often visited Brussels. I stayed there during my first journey to London, and since then I have always gone over to Brussels whenever I was staying in Paris. When I stayed with him and his wife they took me out into the country near Brussels to visit their Belgian friends, and also to Ostend. They introduced me to the art of Ensor and Delvaux, and the fine country houses near Brussels. But chiefly I remember spending whole nights with Alexander, sitting with him in his study while he set the world to rights, as they say. During these nocturnal sessions, Alexander the philosopher would paint his philosophical picture in my head, and for weeks afterward I would be obsessed by it. I went for walks with him in Brussels and visited his friends, who all lived in reduced circumstances, virtually destitute, and came from various countries, chiefly Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Romania—East Europeans who had fled from their national regimes into Alexander’s arms, as it were. His first contact with these political refugees was at an office next to the Gare Luxembourg at Ixelles, where he offered to protect them against arrest and imprisonment, to which they were liable as illegal immigrants. In other words, he set himself the task of helping these political refugees, and was well qualified to perform it. No sooner had they realized that he genuinely wished to help them, prompted solely by his excellent character, than he was snowed under, as they say. They pestered him day and night, but that was what he wanted, I thought, observing him from the window of my father’s room. Although he had just arrived from Brussels, he looked as if he had merely taken a walk behind the Farm or the Children’s Villa. He wore the simplest of clothes, with no trace of pretension or ostentation. The people he associated with often called him a fool, finding him too natural, unable to take their formalities seriously, though he did not hate them, as I did. They called him a fool only because they had bad consciences and did not understand his cast of mind, I thought. Alexander’s cast of mind is admittedly very hard to understand, above most people’s heads, and calls for ruthless intellectual probity. I was never equal to such ruthless intellectual probity, I thought, and was invariably worsted. My visits to Brussels, agreeable though they were, always resulted in spiritual discomfiture. Alexander would hold forth, but I would fail to understand him. For a minute or two I watched Alexander, who would of course be staying in the main house, I assumed, then I ran down to the entrance hall and out into the park to greet him. He had meanwhile entered the Orangery. I had not seen him for years. He never came to Austria, which he found intolerable, for the same political reasons as I did, and I did not go to Belgium because of the climate, though earlier, over two decades, I had regularly spent weeks, even months, in Brussels. During these enjoyable and rewarding visits I stayed on the fifth floor of a house in the Rue de la Croix, on which my cousin had a lease. Up on the fifth floor I wrote something about Pascal, who was then my favorite author, and about some poems by Maria, whom I had not yet met. I also wrote a short essay on Bohuslav Martinu, of whom I was very fond, but immediately threw it away. Alexander introduced me to Brussels society and took me for long walks in the glorious woods near Brussels. It was at that time that he suffered the first attacks of his later chronic disease, which he tried to combat not only with cortisone but with strenuous exercise. The exercise actually overtaxed his strength; twice a week he would go for a two-hour run on the beach at Ostend, and I often ran with him. But jogging on the beach in the salt sea air, though supposedly beneficial, did not have the therapeutic effect he had hoped for, encouraged by one of those Belgian doctors who are well known as the world’s worst. Belgian doctors are notorious as the most stupid in Europe, as I learned later. For twenty years my cousin was kept alive by cortisone and nothing else, he maintained. Before I went to Rome, my cousin Alexander was my philosophy teacher, along with Uncle Georg, though he was my age. Just as I was about to follow him into the Orangery he came out, having stayed inside no more than half a minute. He pressed my hand in his, and we walked up and down outside the Orangery, ignoring the others standing there, who probably knew him, though we paid no attention to them; they did not interest us. Alexander said he had left Brussels immediately and come alone as his wife was ill. He was glad to be able to walk up and down with me in front of the Orangery, as he intended to retire at once to the inn in the village that we had allocated to him, so that he could finish some work he had brought with him, a petition, he said, that I have to send to the Belgian government and the king about my refugees, whom the Belgian government treats like animals. The dreamer asked after my sisters and made a remark about the people standing next to us that amused me but was of course inaudible to them; had they heard it, they would have been deeply hurt, I thought. He did not mention our misfortune or the dead lying in state in the Orangery. Then he left, saying that he could find his own way and would be at the funeral the next day, but he would be returning to Brussels immediately, on the evening train. I did not have the chance to tell him that I had naturally wanted him to stay at the house, so that he could be near us. It was always his way to make an unceremonious exit, but on this occasion he set a new record. He hasn’t changed, I thought, he’s still my beloved dreamer. I now saw that the people who had been standing next to us were two families from Wiener Neustadt, relatives on my mother’s side. I naturally greeted them and even asked if they had had a pleasant journey, addressing them in a tone that seemed far too cordial and immediately displeased me, as they were so unlikable. They stood there as though expecting that I would now devote myself to them, as though they were the only people present whom I had to attend to. I’ll get away from these people as fast as possible, I thought, and apologized, again too profusely, for having to leave them, as there was something I had to attend to urgently. I quite simply abandoned the party from Wiener Neustadt and went over to the Farm, then to the Huntsmen’s Lodge, without knowing what I was looking for. I went into my father’s office, which houses all the documents relating to Wolfsegg, all the estate accounts. This office has always been a nightmare to me, like everything that remotely resembles an office. It had the typical office smell, which after a very short time inevitably makes me feel I shall suffocate if I do not leave immediately. But this time I actually sat down in the office—something I had never done before. I sat down at the desk, on which the previous day’s mail was lying, addressed to my father. Bills, business letters, brochures advertising agricul
tural machinery. I hate brochures. I hate business mail. I pushed the pile of mail far enough away to be able to place a sheet of paper on the desk. On it I wrote in capital letters ALEXANDER, MY DREAMER, exactly in the middle of the sheet, without knowing why I wrote the word ALEXANDER at all. For no reason, it seemed to me. I was in an extreme state of nerves, as they say. Sitting in the office chair, I suddenly became aware that I was sitting in my office, not my father’s. Suddenly overcome by fatigue, I gazed at the walls of the office and was sickened by them. By the hundreds of three-ring binder files on the shelves, marked only with the word Wolfsegg and, underneath it, the relevant year. I looked at them until I thought I would go mad. Father was a pedant, I thought. I was always repelled by his neat handwriting and the primitive way in which he expressed himself. He taught himself to write a fair hand, and he retained this hand, which is typical of an insufferably pedantic person, I thought. And all his life he tried to turn Johannes into an insufferably pedantic person. He never ceased working on his successor, trying to form him in his own image. He succeeded in forming Johannes in his own image, I told myself. But such formed images are repellent. My father’s fair hand was set down on paper by an atrophied brain, I thought. By the atrophied person my father became. Sometimes he wanted to break out of his atrophy, but he did not succeed: it was too far advanced. Father’s hand was of the type favored by schoolteachers, the neat, workmanlike hand used by small-town schoolteachers, bespeaking an anxious, suppressed character. Father was a suppressed character, I thought, relentlessly suppressed by Wolfsegg and by my mother. Nothing’s left of my father but his school-teacherly hand, I thought. These reflections were prompted by the discovery of an unfinished letter on his desk. It was addressed to a firm that produced artificial fertilizers at Lustenau in Vorarlberg, in response to an offer. But this is how a commercial assistant writes, I thought, not the master of Wolfsegg. I read my father’s unfinished letter several times; it did not get any less primitive. My father was no letter writer, but nobody should write like this, I thought. And the way he’s left the writing materials on the desk is depressing, I thought. This is how a schoolteacher or a commercial assistant leaves his writing materials, not a man of stature. Was my father a man of stature? I asked myself. My fatigue prompted a few more pointless questions about my father. What is stature after all? I asked myself. The sight of the three-ring binder files, going back to the early years of the century, profoundly depressed me. You escaped from this world, I thought, and now you’ve been pitched headlong into it again by a stroke of fate. The words stroke of fate, so emetic and dishonest, were all I needed. I got up and walked to the window. From the window one looked straight across at the wall of the Farm, to which was attached a picture of the Madonna and Child, painted in oils on galvanized metal. The Madonna’s neck is longer than I have seen it in any other painting, and the Christ Child is positively hydrocephalic. The picture had always amused me, and it amused me now. I could not help laughing out loud, not caring whether anyone heard me. Caecilia had appeared in the door. She had come to fetch me for an early supper—just for us, she said—separate from the buffet for the guests. I at once took her to task for putting up Alexander in the village, saying that he, of all people, should have stayed with us at the house. I asked her where she had booked him. If Spadolini stays with us, it’s obvious that Alexander should stay with us too, I told her as we left the Huntsmen’s Lodge. It was grotesque, I said, to have the wine cork manufacturer in the house, but not Alexander. She could not tell me where she had booked Alexander—she really did not know, she said. As we walked across to the house, I continued to reproach her about Alexander. I also said that the people she had put up at the house were the very people I found insufferable, and I listed the names of a few people I had already seen at the house, who would presumably be spending the night there. These revolting specimens, I said, from Mother’s side of the family—you know how they get on my nerves, and yet you put up Alexander in the village! That’s just beastly. I was instantly sorry I had used the word beastly. I didn’t intend to hurt you, I said, but this whole funeral was getting on my nerves. I was close to losing control altogether. I may have laughed out loud over the picture of the Madonna, but it was nervous, hysterical laughter, I said, as if trying to excuse myself for using the word beastly. It had slipped out inadvertently and been quite out of place, as it was not only my nerves that were on edge but my sisters’ too, and when we reached the door, where a number of new arrivals were standing in the entrance hall, I told her that I was sorry I had hurt her, that I had not wanted to hurt her, but that in my present state of extreme tension I could no longer behave as people were bound to expect me to behave. We went into the hall and had to shake hands with the latest guests and utter the by now well-practiced phrases before escaping to the second floor for our early supper. It’s a pity, I said to my sisters, that Alexander isn’t having supper with us; he would certainly have made it much more entertaining. How can we possibly leave him to his own devices at one of the village inns? I asked. But my sisters had acted deliberately. They wished to have supper alone with me and wanted to sound me out. But they could elicit nothing from me. From below came the sound of the guests crowding into the kitchen, where the buffet awaited them, while the three of us ate more or less the same food upstairs. At my request Caecilia had locked the door to the second floor, so that the gargoyles can’t get in, I said. She had obediently gone to the door and locked it. I can’t stand these people, I said, and reverted to the subject of Alexander, though I was actually waiting for Spadolini, who was bound to arrive at any moment. After my last visit to Wolfsegg, I told my sisters, I never wanted to come back. I said never, though I meant not for a long time, but the word never made a greater impression, and so I repeated it several times. My home is in Rome, not here, I told them, and again I said that Alexander should have been put up at the house. Instead of sending all these revolting people from Wiener Neustadt and Wels and Munich down to the village, we’ve sent Alexander. This was a piece of unpardonable meanness—Alexander of all people, I said several times. I began to wonder whether I ought not to go down to the village and fetch him back, but my sisters did not know where he was staying. It’s monstrous that we’re having a decent meal here while exposing Alexander to the garbage they dish up in the village, I said. Especially as I was always treated so well in Brussels, where he entertained and accommodated me so generously. I accused my sisters of having deliberately put Alexander up in the village because they disapproved of my relationship with him and wanted to spite me. This was certainly an exaggeration, and my suspicion was probably unfounded. To send an admirable person like Alexander down to the village, I said, while putting up these utterly bogus, brainless people from Wiener Neustadt and Wels here, cheek by jowl with us, as it were—it just didn’t bear thinking about. As I repeatedly upbraided my sisters for their treatment of Alexander, none of us much enjoyed our intimate supper behind closed doors. My sisters remained silent and let me go on. They knew what they were doing: they watched me putting myself more and more in the wrong, then tried to exploit the situation by asking me several questions about the immediate future and finally inundated me with questions about what was going to happen to Wolfsegg. I did not answer a single one of their questions, because I honestly did not know any of the answers; I knew as little about the future of Wolfsegg as they did. Of course we all knew what was in the will, which was deposited not only in the safe at Wolfsegg but also with our attorney at Wels. There was never any secret about the will, and so there were no problems. On the death of my parents and my brother, Wolfsegg devolved wholly upon me, though of course I was under an obligation to accord my sisters their proper place at Wolfsegg, the share that was due them, or else pay them off, and right from the beginning I was more inclined to pay them off than to share the estate with them. They wanted to hear about my immediate plans for Wolfsegg, but I told them nothing. I left them completely in the dark. The decision is mine, not theirs,
I thought. I have to admit that as soon as I heard of my parents’ death I decided on a payoff, not a share-out. I was still holding the telegram in my hand, I recalled, when I decided in favor of paying my sisters off. Hardly had I read the telegram than I went to the window of my Roman apartment, looked down at the Piazza Minerva, then across to the windows of Zacchi’s apartment and the dome of the Pantheon, and said to myself, Of course I’m for paying them off, not for sharing the estate with them. Paying my sisters off was the very first thought that entered my head on receiving the telegram. My sisters wanted to know what was to become of them, but I did not tell them. They did not ask in so many words, but their concern was obvious from their whole demeanor during supper. They did not say a word but let me do all the talking, as I have said. For a long time it did not strike me that my brother-in-law was absent, until I suddenly noticed that a place had been set for him. I asked where he was. Caecilia said he had gone down to the village, probably to one of the inns. In the week since the wedding he had made a habit of going down to the village instead of having supper with the family. That’s typical of people like him, I said: they don’t even honor a simple obligation like having supper with the family if it suits them to go and booze at an inn. Caecilia remained silent, and so did Amalia. It’s intolerable, I said, that this man should do just as he pleases. Why did they not stop him from going down to the village and mixing with the locals, especially on a day like this? They did not reply. He’ll get us a bad name in the village, I said. It’s just not right. It’s outrageous, I said, though I immediately added that I could understand it, as I could not stick it out with such sisters and such a family either—which in any case no longer exists. No longer exists, I repeated, whereupon my sisters looked daggers at me. My brother-in-law sits around in the inns and makes us look ridiculous, I said. I’ll give him a piece of my mind as soon as he gets back. Amalia said that her brother-in-law never got back until after midnight, when the inns closed. Caecilia said nothing. I drew my own conclusions. I could understand my brother-in-law, I said, but to behave like this today was intolerable. I asked whether he had gone down to the village in the evenings to tank up when our parents were still alive. Caecilia said he had. But she had saddled herself with the wine cork manufacturer, I said. This brought me to our aunt from Titisee. I asked whether she had arrived. I was told that she had arrived a long time ago and gone to bed. Naturally she was staying in Mother’s room. Yes, I said, in Mother’s room, naturally. But it’s grotesque, I thought, that our aunt from Titisee should spend the night in Mother’s room, of all places. I had not seen her. I haven’t seen her, I said. An impudent woman, I added. Whereupon my sisters rounded on me and accused me of not bothering about the guests, of loading them on them. It went without saying that I should have received them, all of them, without exception, Caecilia said, and Amalia seconded this. All of them had asked after me as soon as they arrived, even before going to the Orangery to pay their last respects to my parents and my brother. I had avoided all these people, I had lain low in the most craven fashion. They had looked all over for me and had other people look for me, but I had evaded these naturally tiresome proceedings, playing an artful game of hide-and-seek. That had always been my way. So should I have stood at the door all the time, shaking hands with them and repeating the same words over and over again? I asked. That was what they had demanded of me, I said—that I should stand at the door with them, wearing a fittingly solemn mien, and receive the guests as they arrived. I didn’t do you this favor, I told them, because I wasn’t up to it. Even before leaving Rome I decided not to stand at the door. Before I left Rome I knew what this funeral would be like. Dreadful, I said, with every possible attendant horror. But it’ll soon be over, I said, and all the horrors will be over. This is neither the time nor the place for hypocrisy. The whole thing has nothing to do with mourning—it’s all theater, I said. Our parents no longer exist. There’s nothing lying in the Orangery but three bodies consigned to decay, I said, which no longer have anything to do with the human beings they once were. What’s left is pure theater. And I have neither the desire nor the ambition to be gaped at as the principal actor. We naturally all spoke softly, so as not to be overheard, so that no one would understand what we were saying, supposing that someone was eavesdropping, which I thought quite possible. From time to time people knocked on the locked door but then stopped, although they certainly did not know what we were doing inside. Our private supper was after all only a device for being alone and undisturbed, my sisters must have thought, but that was not how it worked out, as the repeated knocking gave us hardly any peace. We were all highly agitated, as may be imagined. My sisters told me that about eighty people had already arrived and would be staying the night. I remarked that most of them would be attending the funeral just so that they could have a break in this beautiful part of the world and for no other reason. It’s the right time of year, I said, and they’ll all get it more or less for free. After all, we’re paying their bills—they’ll all be paid out of the Wolfsegg coffers. I’d gladly pay for all these people to have a break somewhere else, so that I wouldn’t have to see them. But now I have them in the house. I did not say, Now we have them in the house—I said, Now I have them in the house, speaking as the sole proprietor. We mustn’t deceive ourselves, I said—funerals are never anything but theater. No sooner had I said this than I realized that I had gone too far and wished I had held back. I wished I had not said a word, but I had said so many words, so many senseless words, all of which showed me in an impossible light. Hearing me talk, people must think I’m the worst character in the world, I thought, but there are undoubtedly much worse characters. To divert attention from my outbursts of fury, especially against the funeral guests who had been accommodated at the house, I told my sisters that Rome meant everything to me, that I could no longer live anywhere else. Suddenly they woke up and did not understand me. Really, I said, I have only to think of Rome and I can’t wait to be back there—and I’ve been here only a few hours. I find it quite bizarre that this morning I was still in Rome, I said. Then I asked whether Spadolini had called. Yes, I was told, he had called from Rome to say that he would naturally be coming, this evening; he did not know how he would be traveling, but he would be arriving today. So we all waited for the archbishop, Mother’s lover, the illustrious Spadolini. Gambetti always reproaches me with being unable to control myself, I told my sisters, but I’ve always been uncontrolled and unpredictable, and I’ve always relied on people’s making allowances for my lack of control. My lack of control, and the lack of consideration that goes with it. But of course that’s expecting too much. In Rome I’m quite different, I said. There I don’t get so excited, so out of control, and I’m not so unpredictable. Rome calms me down—Wolfsegg works me up. Rome has a soothing effect on the nerves, even though it’s the most exciting city in the world, but at Wolfsegg I’m always agitated, even though it’s so peaceful here. I’m a victim of this paradox, I said. In Rome I express myself quite differently, I talk to everyone quite differently. Gambetti once told me, I said, that whenever I returned from Wolfsegg I talked in a very agitated manner, but only when I’d been to Wolfsegg. On that occasion I had told Gambetti that my family was to blame. He said that my thinking got out of phase with its normal rhythm, what might be called its Roman rhythm. Gambetti had often said that he hardly knew me when I had been to Wolfsegg and could never have made friends with the kind of person I was at such times, since I had an entirely different persona, quite the opposite of what might be called my Roman persona. He could not stand my Wolfsegg persona; he liked only my Roman persona. He said that when I returned from Wolfsegg it took me several days to revert to my Roman persona and become once more the kind of person who was useful to him as a teacher, the kind of person to whom he could be a friend, a pupil, and a conversational partner. He could be none of these when I was in my Wolfsegg mood. Gambetti maintains that Wolfsegg’s bad for me, I told my sisters, that two or three days at Wolf
segg are enough to throw me off balance for several weeks. I’ve never understood what it is that throws me off balance at Wolfsegg. I don’t know whether it’s the landscape, the people, or the air, though the air here is the best I know—the air at Wolfsegg is superb. Is it more to do with the buildings or more to do with the people? I don’t know. It’s Wolfsegg as a whole, I said. It was ridiculous to entertain such thoughts, and not only to entertain them but to express them, given that I had become heir to Wolfsegg overnight and had taken it over, as my sisters were bound to believe. It was not that I was going to take it over—I had already done so, I thought. They were forced to take the question of the succession seriously. They could not imagine that I would not comply—in every detail and with all the consequences that compliance entailed. Despite the fact that they had not heard most of what I had been thinking and therefore did not know the drift of my thoughts, I suddenly said to them, I’m not a farmer, the sort of man who gets on a tractor, as Father did. I’m not a tractor man, and I’ve no wish to haggle with warehouse managers over a bag of artificial fertilizer because it’s only half full and I’ve paid for a full bag. I’m not Johannes, I said. My parents overlooked the fact that I’m not Johannes. I had intended to elaborate on this last remark, but there was such a persistent knocking at the door that Caecilia went to unlock it. The wine cork manufacturer wanted to be let in. Without saying a word, he went and sat at the table where a place was set for him. You were wrong, I thought, he hasn’t been down to the village to drink. My brother-in-law was in fact sober. His wife put a piece of meat on his plate and poured him a glass of wine. He had been in the Gardeners’ House all the time, he said by way of excuse. Out of sheer exhaustion he had retired to the Gardeners’ House and fallen asleep there. He had been up at three that morning, or so he said, because my sisters wanted him to go to the village and see various craftsmen and shopkeepers in connection with the funeral. And he had suddenly had a headache. It had been pleasantly cool in the Gardeners’ House. Was everything coming along all right? he asked. He immediately started to eat, as if he was famished, though I recalled that he had eaten only two or two and a half hours earlier, when he was in the kitchen with me. Unable to stand the sight of my brother-in-law eating, I got up and went out. If I get away from my brother-in-law and my sisters, I thought, I’ll avoid giving offense, and so I went down to the entrance hall, paying no attention to the people standing around, who at once turned and looked at me. I put on a suffering look, as they say, and went into the chapel, where I sat down in one of the middle pews. The chapel was agreeably cool. It’s quite obvious why it’s used for storing food, I thought. Without thinking, I knelt down, but when I realized what I had done I got up and sat in the pew. Suddenly I sensed the presence of our aunt from Titisee. I turned around. I was not mistaken. She had her constant companion with her, a niece of twelve or thirteen. The old lady was veiled and garbed almost wholly in black, in honor of her dead brother. Sensing that she was observing me malevolently, I got up and left the chapel, but not without kissing her hand, which she stretched out from her black attire. I went through the hall, out into the park, and across to the Orangery, where two of the huntsmen stood guard. The smell of decomposition seemed to have become more pungent. I lifted the black sheets to check the blocks of ice under the coffins. They had obviously been renewed. I allowed myself only a quick glance at the faces of the dead, as I could not bear to look at them for longer. The two huntsmen had assumed a soldierly bearing, as they say, when I entered the Orangery. I found this repugnant. When I came out it seemed even more ludicrous, but there was nothing I could do to alter this whole distasteful ceremonial, which had been meticulously worked out by my sisters, more especially Caecilia, in accordance with the rules. They would not have dreamed of deviating from the funeral plan in the slightest detail. On the other hand, I thought, the ceremonial is in keeping with Wolfsegg, and it would be foolish to destroy it. Everything here is done properly, I thought, even if one finds it displeasing. But the huntsmen on either side of the catafalque were undoubtedly comic figures, like tin soldiers outfitted by a stagestruck costumer. As I stood by the coffins the gardeners were changing the water in the flower buckets. Again I saw clearly how the huntsmen differed from the gardeners: the huntsmen were ridiculous and artificial, the gardeners natural. I was prompted to wonder what it was that made the huntsmen so different from the gardeners, what they stood for, and it gave me great pleasure to pursue this speculation, quite untroubled by the fact that I was in the presence of the dead. There’s no outward clue to what I’m thinking, nothing to indicate that I’m thinking about the difference between the huntsmen and the gardeners, I thought, let alone that I’m thinking about the mentalities of the huntsmen and the gardeners and the relation between the two mentalities. People will suppose that I’m thinking about the funeral, I thought, but as I stood in front of the coffins, right next to the bodies, I was not thinking about the funeral at all. The gardeners are sensitive people, I thought, whereas the huntsmen represent a brutalized world. The fact that we employ both at Wolfsegg is what gives the place its charm. Wolfsegg has great charm for anyone intent upon seeing only the charm. Visitors to Wolfsegg always speak of its special charm. And it’s possible to see Wolfsegg that way, as the most charming country estate imaginable. But I can no longer see it that way. I never could, I thought. I can no longer stand it; I’ve ruined it for myself, I thought as I went out. The park was deserted. The rest of the family’s still having supper, I thought, looking up at the windows over the balcony. There are three of them too, I told myself—my brother-in-law, Caecilia, and Amalia. Maybe they’ve locked themselves in. How can I escape this inner turmoil? I asked myself. My conduct is bound to offend everyone: not just my sisters, not just my brother-in-law, but everyone. Yet I’m not at all the offensive person they’ve always called me, ever since I was a child, I thought. Then I immediately told myself that I was just such an offensive person. I had told Gambetti that I would have to discuss everything very carefully with my sisters and bring my brother-in-law in on our discussions. I’ll approach everything cautiously, I had told him. I had repeatedly told Zacchi and Maria the same—that I must proceed with caution at Wolfsegg. But I’m not proceeding with the least caution, I thought. I’ve shown no consideration for anything or anyone. No wonder they feel I am inconsiderate, even mean, since my behavior has been totally inconsiderate. But it’s been quite simply impossible to behave otherwise, I told myself, it’s been impossible for me to act differently toward them. I can’t cope with this whole situation, and I’m not responsible for it, I didn’t will it. At that moment Spadolini arrived. I took him straight up to see my sisters, and Caecilia showed him to my father’s room, where he said he would like to freshen up. Meanwhile I sat in the upper left library. It had been locked, but I had obtained the keys of all our libraries from Caecilia. I’ll open all five libraries tomorrow morning, I thought, before the funeral proceedings begin. I had seated myself in a chair by the window with a copy of Siebenkäs, but of course I was too agitated to be able to read. And I could not take my mind off Spadolini. The tremendous impression he had once more made on me was more potent than Siebenkäs, and so I put the book down. I had known that Siebenkäs was in this library, together with other books from Jean Paul’s period. At some stage one of our ancestors, no one knew which, had arranged the books in our libraries. They must have been cultured people, I thought, unlike the present lot. But what do we mean by cultured? I asked myself. If we say that someone is cultured and someone else isn’t, we’re talking nonsense, I thought—we say it unthinkingly. Spadolini was carrying only a small black traveling bag, I thought as I sat by the window. I could hear him showering, as the library was next to my father’s room. I imagined him enjoying himself under the shower. I’ve never known Spadolini not to enjoy himself, I thought. I stretched out my legs, turned off the light, and thought about my meeting with Maria, whom I had given a manuscript to look through. Like all my manuscripts, it’
s sloppily written, I thought. When I’m back in Rome she’ll go through it with me and take it to pieces, and then I’ll throw it away, like everything else of mine that I’ve given her to read. I’ve thrown away more manuscripts than I’ve kept, I thought, and those that I’ve kept I can’t bear to look at; they depress me because they present my thoughts in a ludicrous form that’s not worth talking about. My manuscripts are worthless, I told myself, but I haven’t given up trying to write things down, to do violence to the intellect, as it were. Maria is ruthlessly honest and treats my manuscripts as they deserve, I thought. Having thrown away a manuscript that she’s examined, I’m invaded by a sense of relief, I thought. I embrace her and we both watch the manuscript go up in flames in her stove. With Maria that’s always a high point and induces a state of elation, I thought. Only Maria is in a position to demonstrate to me that my manuscripts are worthless and deserve to be consigned to the flames. She once accused me of doing violence to philosophy, of sinning against the spirit. She meant it as a joke, but I took it seriously. I haven’t given up, I told myself. I already have something new in mind. Maybe I’ll call it Extinction, I thought. As I write it I’ll try to extinguish everything that comes into my head. Everything I write about in this work will be extinguished, I told myself. I was pleased with the title. It exercised a great fascination over me. I could not remember where I had dreamed it up. I think it was Maria who suggested it to me: she had once called me an expert in extinction. I was her extinction expert, she said: whatever I set down on paper was automatically extinguished. When I get back to Rome I’ll set about writing this new work, but it’ll take me a year, I thought, and I don’t know whether I’ll have the strength to commit myself to it for a whole year, to concentrate on Extinction to the exclusion of everything else. I’ll write my Extinction and discuss everything relating to it with Gambetti, Spadolini, and Zacchi, and of course with Maria, I thought. I’ll discuss everything relevant to Extinction with them, but they won’t know what I have in mind. I felt an immense longing to be back in Rome. What I’d like most would be to go straight back to Rome with Spadolini, I thought. It pained me to have to deny myself this pleasure. Spadolini’s going back to Rome tomorrow and you’re staying on at Wolfsegg—that’s your life sentence, I thought. Having dinner with Maria, I thought, talking to her about her latest poems—that’s what I should be doing now. Listening to her. Confiding in her. Pouring wine for her. I picked up Siebenkäs again, opened it, and switched on the light. I wondered whether I had not been wrong, quite wrong, to give Gambetti this book. I had been right to give him The Trial, but not Siebenkäs. And instead of Esch or Anarchy I should have given him Schopenhauer Revisited. Now he’ll have started on Siebenkäs; he’ll be well into it, trying to master it. I pictured him in his study, where he could get away from his parents and devote himself to what interested him, namely German literature, and be entirely undisturbed—and all the time thinking about dismantling the world and blowing it sky-high. Perhaps I’ll suddenly hear an almighty bang, I thought, indicating that Gambetti really has blown the world sky-high, that he’s put his ideas into effect. So far he’s only dreamed of dismantling the world and blowing it sky-high. But one day, I told myself, people like Gambetti, given the chance, put their fantasies into effect. Gambetti’s not just a born fantasizer, he’s also a born realizer of his fantasies. I’m still waiting for the big bang, I thought, stretching my legs out and listening to Spadolini showering. The floor of the library was covered with thousands of dead flies that had accumulated over the years and never been swept up, because nobody had entered the library. Now that I have the keys I’ll open them all, I thought, but not today—I’m too tired. I’ll do it in the morning, before sunrise. I’ll open all five libraries forever, I thought, whereupon I got up, walked to the window, and looked across at the Orangery. Maria would find this a tremendous sight, I thought, the inspiration for more than one poem. The gardeners were still carrying fresh wreaths and bouquets from the Farm to the Orangery. They won’t finish work this evening, I thought; they’ll have to go on throughout the night. The scene was utterly theatrical. Assuming that Spadolini would need at least another half hour for his toilet, I left the library and went down into the hall. It was half past eight, and there was no longer anyone around. I entered the chapel. Our aunt from Titisee had long since retired to her room. I sat down in the very place where she had sat with her young and—I must say—beautiful companion. The crone and the maiden, I thought, the protectress and the protected, and vice versa. I knelt down, again without thinking, then got up and sat in the pew. I reflected that the princes of the Church were all involved in an evil game, treating the Church as a monstrous universal drama in which they played the main parts. All these princes of the Church thrust themselves into the foreground and put on a grand performance. No matter what they say, they know that it is the biggest, the most mendacious show ever staged. Spadolini is always center stage, close to the main actor, the Pope. But not so close as to be in danger of dying or being toppled with him. He’s outlived three popes, I thought, and he’ll outlive the present one too, who’s known to be terminally ill, and he’ll go on playing his part with his usual panache. Spadolini is completely absorbed in the ecclesiastical drama. I had at first thought I would have time to go across to the Farm and visit the cowsheds, which I did at this time of day, if at all, when the animals had settled for the night, but then it occurred to me that I must not offend Spadolini by leaving him alone. I had also intended to go down to the village and look for Alexander, but I soon gave up that idea too, as I did not want to expose myself to the gaze of the villagers—not today, not this evening. Once, in Brussels, I had introduced Spadolini and Alexander to each other, intending to get the prince of the Church and the dreamer to converse with each other until they reached agreement. But my experiment failed: I had made a bet with myself, as it were, and I lost. At one moment Spadolini got the better of Alexander, and then Alexander got the better of Spadolini; it was a delight to hear them score points off each other, but the contest ended in a draw. Spadolini often said he would like to meet Alexander again, and Alexander would have liked to see Spadolini again. How unfortunate, I thought, that Spadolini, the prince of the Church, is staying with us at the house, while Alexander, the dreamer, has been exiled to the village. I briefly considered taking Spadolini, when he was ready, down to the village to look for Alexander, but I dropped the idea, as I could not expect Spadolini to go looking for Alexander when he had only just arrived and not had a bite to eat. Spadolini would in any case have rejected the idea out of deference to my sisters, who were now sitting in the drawing room waiting for him, His Excellency from Rome. For a moment it seemed perverse to be sitting in the chapel of all places, where I had once sat with Maria after returning from a walk in the woods. I had met her at Wolfsegg on her way from Paris to Rome, having invited her to stay here during my parents’ absence. When they returned, Maria and I were back in Rome, and my sisters told them a pack of stupid lies. Maria was naturally thrilled by Wolfsegg. The best air I’ve ever breathed, she said. I went for two long walks with her across the Hausruck, one of them as far as Haag, from where we returned by train. Johannes picked us up at Lambach. Maria thought Johannes simple but a nice person. We spent the evenings in the village, at the Brandl, where the atmosphere was always relaxing, and once we went to Ottnang, to the Gesswagner. Maria became quite talkative and immediately got into conversation with the landlord and his wife, and with all the other guests. This was unusual for her, as she normally found it difficult to relate to simple people, more so than I did, for I have never found it difficult to make contact, at least not with simple people—proletarians are another matter. It transpired that Maria’s childhood had been similar to that of the landlord’s wife, whom I have always found a goodhearted woman. While she was staying with me Maria said, I like Wolfsegg, but I don’t like your people. I can still hear her saying this. She could not be persuaded to pay a second visit. It’s not my sc
ene, she said. She wrote nothing while she was at Wolfsegg, or for weeks afterward. Wolfsegg’s not a place for poetry, she said. Not a place for her poetry, I reflected as I got up and left the chapel. Spadolini was with my sisters. The cook had been sent to the kitchen to get him some hot soup and roast meat. My brother-in-law sat opposite him, overawed and open-mouthed, never having been in the presence of a genuine archbishop before, a real excellency, and during the whole time after I joined them he remained silent. I sat next to Caecilia and drank a glass of wine, then a second, as I listened to Spadolini, who was a past master at initiating and conducting a conversation. He said he felt as though our parents would join us at any moment. It’s as though your mother were about to enter the room. It was true that nothing had changed since my parents’ death, at least not visibly, though in fact everything within us had changed. And within Spadolini too, of course. He said he had held my father in high esteem. He was a noble character. This was a word that Spadolini, being Italian, could permit himself to use, and he looked around, savoring its effect. He had had a lifelong friendship with my father, a noble friendship, he said. From anyone else’s lips such an expression would have been insupportable, but from Spadolini’s it sounded superb. He had first met my father at a dinner in Vienna, at the Irish ambassador’s residence in the Gentzgasse, just after the war, at a time of extreme hardship, he said. Father had at once struck him as the most unusual of all the guests, a fine character, a man of perfect breeding. He was the person he had most enjoyed talking to, and Father had invited him to Wolfsegg there and then. At the time I was counselor to the nuncio, said Spadolini. Wolfsegg had fascinated him. He had never seen anything like it in his life—buildings of such Austrian elegance and grandeur, at once grandiose and natural, such friendly people and such excellent food. Mother had always treated him as a son, he said. Father and Johannes had visited him in Rome on their way to Palermo, and he had shown them around the city, but all the time he could not help thinking of Wolfsegg and its magnificence. His Italianate pronunciation and turn of phrase amused me and my sisters, not because they seemed ridiculous but because they were so charming. Spadolini has a highly musical manner of speaking, it seems to me. He described Father as a prudent man who was a blessing to his family, who never put on a show, who always acted for the good of his family and was popular wherever he went. Horses were his favorite animals, said Spadolini. Your father was happiest with the animals, in the company of his animals. And hunting, said Spadolini. He had often hunted with Father, though Mother was always scared. Huntsmen are unpredictable, he said. Father was a real prince, a true aristocrat. And a man of great intelligence. Highly educated. The father Spadolini saw was different from the one I saw, from the one my sisters saw. Everyone who describes a person sees him differently, I reflected. So many people describing the same person, each looking at him from a different viewpoint, a different angle of vision, produce as many differing views, I told myself. Spadolini’s view of Father is different from ours. It was certainly an unusual view, I thought, an extraordinary view that undoubtedly made Father seem more admirable than Spadolini really believed him to be, even as he was speaking. Father was wiser than others, he said. He had so many interests, more than almost any other man of his class. Father was the most reassuring person, he said, only to add a moment later that he was the most restless. He was a model of decency. A great gentleman. A philosopher. A modest man. A generous man. A reasonable man, a good man, both controlled and popular. Spadolini spared no encomiastic epithets in describing my father. He had once met him in Cairo, and they had crawled into the Pyramid of Cheops, he said, up and up across the wooden planks until they were exhausted. In Alexandria they had sent us a postcard that never arrived. In Rome he had always taken my father to the Via Veneto because my father loved it. Your father loved Rome, he told us. Your father was such a marvelous man to drink wine with, he said. Your father was a philosophical person, he said, and highly educated politically. Basically I thought that everything Spadolini said about Father as he sat eating his supper in our presence was wrong. Everything he says about Father is quite wrong, I thought. I would have said the exact opposite—that he was neither reasonable nor controlled nor philosophical, nor any of the other things he had just been called. Spadolini had described a father who had never existed, I thought, but whom he now felt he had to invent. Yet although everything Spadolini has said about Father is wrong, I thought, it has an air of authenticity. We often hear the most arrant nonsense spoken about someone, downright lies and falsehoods, but accept it as the unadulterated truth because it is uttered by someone whose words carry conviction. But with me Spadolini’s words carried no conviction. It was quite obvious that his picture of Father was the one he unshed to see, not the real picture. Father was not at all like the person that Spadolini had just sketched, I thought. Spadolini’s sketch was an idealization, but not tasteless, I thought, as it was presented with such charm—and with an undertone of grief, which was not inappropriate, as Father had been dead for only two days—as to conceal the underlying tastelessness of the falsification. Spadolini must have been conscious of this, for he was too intelligent not to realize how false his picture of Father really was. Father was certainly decent and reassuring, as Spadolini said, and he was probably also a gentleman, but he was none of the other things Spadolini had credited him with being. Yet it was obvious from my sisters’ faces that they hung on Spadolini’s words as though they represented the pure unvarnished truth. For a long time Spadolini avoided speaking about Mother and dwelled at length on Father. I was obliged to conclude that although Father was not really interesting enough for Spadolini to speak of him at such length, he was a convenient means to divert Spadolini’s mind from Mother, who had been his mistress. Yet Spadolini must have known that as he was speaking of Father we were all waiting to hear what he would say about Mother. He and Father had once gone on a climbing expedition to the Ortler, he said, and Father had saved his life by throwing him a rope down the rock face at the last moment, at the very last moment. It did not seem to trouble him in the least that he was the only one eating while we looked on. Our only concern was that he should enjoy his supper. The kitchen had made a special effort for Spadolini. His supper had not been hastily rustled up but was carefully prepared, as I saw at once. At Sitten in Switzerland, in the Rhône Valley, he said, he and Father had once visited a little church, a Romanesque church, where they had seen a picture of Christ with a strangely distorted face, unnaturally distorted. Father had told Spadolini that this picture impressed him more than any he had ever seen. Father was a great connoisseur of art and a friend of artists. Spadolini seemed to relish the word artists and repeated it more than once, for his own delectation. He was a lover of nature, said Spadolini. And a lover of justice, he added, and he knew where he stood with his religious faith. Your father was a good Catholic, he said, with a glance at my sisters. With this he concluded his characterization of Father and, simultaneously, his supper. Nobody uses a napkin so elegantly to wipe his mouth, I thought. Caecilia poured him some wine. Leaning back, he said he had to be in Rome the following evening, as the Pope had summoned him to his presence, but with this Pope one never knew whether the person he had summoned would be received at the appointed time. The most dreadful conditions prevailed in Rome, he said. The political climate had become much worse, with both the Communists and the Fascists planning to seize power in the near future. But neither the Communists nor the Fascists will succeed, he said. When he went out he never knew whether he would get home alive. The Fascists simply picked people off, whether or not they had anything to do with their cause, just to draw attention to themselves. It was a time of unrest, a dreadful time. On the other hand, it was the most interesting time that Italy had seen. I’m so attached to Rome, he said, that I can’t imagine myself leaving it, though it’s not for me to decide whether or not I stay. I’m at the mercy of the higher powers. I wondered what was the basis of my admiration for Spadolini. He himself supplies t
he answer, by his very presence, I thought. It’s the way he says things, the way he presents himself as he says them, that compels my admiration, I thought, not what he says. He says everything differently from everyone else, I thought. Then suddenly, without any apparent embarrassment, he began to talk about Mother. He said it was impossible to describe her, and then proceeded to do so. She was always elegant, and it was she who first took him to the Vienna Opera, to see Der Rosenkavalier. It was through her that he had met the most famous women singers who performed at the Vienna Opera, and he still had the most cordial contacts with them. It was she who had acquainted him with Austrian music by taking him to Philharmonic concerts when she was in Vienna. Together with Father they had attended concerts at the Musikverein and elsewhere. In particular he owed it to Mother that he had heard so much Mahler in Vienna. She had drawn his attention to Mahler, whom she was very fond of at the time, and taken him to every possible Mahler concert. She was highly musical, and he had always thought it a pity that she did not play an instrument, as she would probably have been a great pianist. His chief regret at being moved from Vienna and suddenly posted overseas was that it cut him off from music. Mother had gone with him on a boat trip up the Danube to Dürnstein in the Wachau. She had taken him around Salzburg and shown him the Salzkammergut; then shortly after their first meeting she had invited him to Paris, which he had never visited before. At that time, as a mere counselor, he did not have the opportunity for travel that he later enjoyed as nuncio, and so he was fairly restricted, as he put it. Mother also invited him to Florence, where she was spending several weeks with my father in the fall. It was through her that he first got to know the city properly. He had often been to Florence, but it was Mother who taught him to love the city of the Uffizi. And he owed it to her that he knew Upper Austria so well, those beautiful lakes and mountains, he said, and all those magnificent castles, such as one finds nowhere else. And the glorious landscape of Upper Austria, he said, the most beautiful in Austria. He had always had a deep respect for Mother and could not help loving such an extraordinary person. They had had an incomparable friendship, spanning thirty years. Mother had restored his health, he said. Again and again she had supplied him with the best medicines and visited him in his darkest hours, when he lay at death’s door, in a more or less hopeless condition, having been given up by the doctors. Your mother was the best doctor I ever had. She brought these Upper Austrian herbs to me in Rome, and they cured me. Perhaps I owe my life to these Upper Austrian herbs that your mother brought me. She had spared no effort in visiting him, he said, and traveled to Rome under the most difficult circumstances in order to save him. She saved my life with her herbal remedies, Spadolini exclaimed. My mother’s medicinal herbs from Upper Austria had preserved him for humanity—these were his very words, uttered with a degree of pathos but with a charm that made them not in the least embarrassing. If necessary, he said, I’ll recommend these medicinal herbs from Upper Austria to the Pope. He paused for some minutes, and none of us dared break the silence. My brother-in-law, sitting opposite Spadolini, was utterly speechless, and my sisters respectfully observed this perfectly timed silence. Spadolini went on to say that only the previous week he had arranged to go with Mother to Calabria, but it was not to be. To the Trullis, he said. It had long been her dream to see Calabria, a dream that she had hoped to realize in early summer. But suddenly everything has changed, he said. He then talked of the Etna excursion that he once had made from Taormina with Mother and me. I think it was some five or six years ago that Mother visited me in Rome. For days I walked around Rome with her, trying to find some shoes that she had set her heart on. They had to be blue and made of a particular kind of pigskin, as thin and as soft as glove leather, and after searching for days we finally found the right ones. She bought three pairs. She dragged me to several dinners with acquaintances of hers, not relatives, just to establish an alibi for my father’s benefit, to cover up her continual meetings with Spadolini, which no one really begrudged her and everyone knew about, but which she constantly tried to conceal. She took me with her to these dreadful dinners, but she did not return home with me, because she wanted to spend the night with Spadolini—and she did. I did not begrudge my mother these nocturnal meetings with Spadolini. I felt sorry for her because she was dependent on them, as I was bound to conclude. I know that after these dinners Spadolini would be waiting for her somewhere in Trastevere, where they would repair to an apartment belonging to friends of his and stay together till morning. I was sorry not only for Mother but for Spadolini too. On the other hand, I despised them both. But on the excursion to Etna, at the end of January, they took me with them. In Taormina we naturally stayed at the Timeo. We hired a taxi and drove up to the snowline. From there we went by cable car to the Etna plateau. The main crater was shrouded in fog. There was nothing to be seen. All three of us were the happiest people imaginable. Spadolini now described our Etna excursion. We took the cable car to the top and went into the restaurant, he said. But it was so cold that we wanted to stay there only long enough for a cup of tea. Then your mother and I, he said, addressing me, decided to walk down the mountain on foot, but you refused because you said you were afraid. Do you remember? Yes, I said, I was afraid. You were afraid, said Spadolini, but we weren’t. I took your mother’s hand and we walked down the mountain. You went back by cable car. We saw you in the cable car from below, and you saw us from above, he said. Suddenly there was a snowstorm, so dense that we couldn’t see you anymore. We couldn’t see you, and you couldn’t see us. The cable car was no longer visible to us, and we were no longer visible to you as you stood in the cable car. You said later that it had swayed so much that you were afraid it would be wrenched from its moorings. You said you had looked for us in the snow under the cable car but lost sight of us. The cable car swayed so much that you thought your last hour had come, said Spadolini. We couldn’t see anything either in the snowstorm and crouched in a crevice in the ice. In minutes the snow had drifted so high that we were almost buried. As in the Alps, said Spadolini, as in the Alps. We thought we were going to perish, as people perish in the Alps. We could no longer see a thing, said Spadolini. If we don’t want to freeze to death we must keep going, I thought. I got hold of your mother and went on. But I was soon exhausted, and she got hold of me, and so on, said Spadolini. You had long since arrived at the station in the valley, and the snowstorm hadn’t stopped. You notified the police. But they didn’t go up the mountain because the storm was too fierce. We were in a lava crevice, said Spadolini, and thought we were going to fall down the mountainside. We didn’t move. But your mother kept saying, We must go on. She got hold of me and pushed me forward, farther and farther forward, said Spadolini. Finally we crouched in a lava crevice, convinced that we were going to die. I prayed, said Spadolini, silently, without your mother’s knowing. Quite silently. Then the snowstorm abated, and we were saved. You had warned us, Spadolini said. We shouldn’t have gone down the mountain on foot. Lots of people have perished that way. Etna is a deadly mountain, he said with some pathos. But your mother and I were lucky, he said. I’ll never forget our Etna excursion. Then we went back to Taormina. Exhausted and half frozen, we went to our beds. That evening we turned up in the dining room in full rig, as if nothing had happened. I should have listened to you, but my love for your mother made me quite crazy. Just imagine what would have happened if your mother hadn’t repeatedly gotten hold of me and pushed me, he said, literally pushed me down the mountain! When necessary, your mother was what they call a fearless woman. Energetic, said Spadolini, full of verve. And that evening she looked so elegant, wearing a Persian dress, a cream-colored dress, he said—you’re bound to remember it. My God, he said, how good your mother looked in that dress! Perhaps you don’t remember your mother as I do, he said. I have the most wonderful memories of her. I felt terrible when I heard the news, said Spadolini. It was the most terrible news I’d had for a long time. How often your mother saved me from death—that’s
the truth—by inviting me to Wolfsegg. Here I had the peace I needed in order to survive, he said. This house and this landscape are dearer to me than any others. The high culture that is to be found everywhere here shields one from despair. When I was nuncio in Peru I constantly thought of Wolfsegg, of you and your mother. Thinking of you here enabled me to survive there. But Peru is a magnificent country, said Spadolini, magnificent, magnificent. The news was the saddest I could possibly have received, he said. He got up and said that he would now go across to the Orangery and see the dead. Before we all left the room, he came up to me and said that the death of my mother was the greatest loss he could have suffered. Don’t lose control, he said. You’re now the master of Wolfsegg. The time had come for Spadolini to visit the Orangery. The other guests had long since retired to their rooms. Noises could still be heard from the kitchen, but silence reigned everywhere else. Caecilia led the way, almost running and opening all the doors. She arrived first at the Orangery. For the last ten or twelve yards she slowed down to a walking pace. She did not go straight in but waited for Spadolini, who was following her. He had lost none of his composure. He was wearing the most elegant shoes I have ever seen. I had noticed them earlier as I walked behind him up to the second floor. It was always a delight to see him buying his shoes, only in the Via Condotti, of course, never on the Corso, where I bought mine. I looked admiringly at them in the fresh grass. They showed up particularly well in the light of the catafalque lamps, which lit up part of the park, while the rest was in darkness. Spadolini wanted me, or Amalia at least, to enter the Orangery first, but we ceded precedence to him. He took Caecilia’s arm and went in. He halted in front of the coffins and pressed Caecilia to his side. My brother-in-law stood behind her, and Amalia stood behind Spadolini, while I stationed myself in the background, behind them all. The huntsmen who were keeping watch stood stock-still, their faces impassive, as at a military lying in state. The scene reminded me of the monument to the Unknown Soldier in Warsaw, which I had once seen with Johannes when we met in Warsaw for a trip to Krakow. He had been hunting near Zakopane, and I had been visiting relatives near Wilamowice. For a few minutes we all stood motionless. Then I conceived a sudden desire to see the faces of my sisters, my brother-in-law, and Spadolini, instead of the dead and by now quite alien faces of my father and my brother. I went up to the coffins and pretended to check the ice blocks, lifting the sheets, looking under them, then dropping them again, though I was interested only in the faces of Spadolini, my sisters, and my brother-in-law. Yet their faces gave no hint of what was going on in their minds. They betrayed nothing. They were quite motionless, like curtains behind which everything lay hidden. I had hoped that these faces would reveal what lay behind them, but everything that would have interested me remained hidden. They’re all so clever and controlled, I thought as I stood in front of them, not knowing whether they had divined my purpose. I could well believe this of Spadolini, and of my sisters. The only one who showed his true face, with no curtain drawn over it, as it were, was my brother-in-law, the wine cork manufacturer. He had not drawn a curtain over his stolidity, of which he was not even aware, I thought. All the others had their facial curtains drawn; my brother-in-law, the wine cork manufacturer, was the only one who did not interest me at all. What the others are thinking behind these facial curtains would certainly be extremely interesting, I told myself. But I know what kind of thoughts they’re thinking. I don’t have to pull back the curtains to know what’s going on behind them, I thought. Carefully, in keeping with the occasion, I again lifted one of the sheets, then gently let it fall back over the ice blocks, fully aware that I was behaving atrociously. It’s natural that Spadolini should have taken Caecilia’s arm, I thought. Like a scene in a film. Faces in a film. Film stars’ faces. I stepped back quickly, as though suddenly realizing that I had disturbed a solemn act, and returned to my former position behind the group. The huntsmen were irritated but tried to remain composed in spite of their irritation. The faces of the dead were now like wax, their color a dirty gray. These dirty-gray sunken faces must be washed in the morning, I thought. I’ll give instructions. I mustn’t forget. Suddenly Spadolini knelt down in front of Mother’s coffin. It was an embarrassing scene. My sisters had no option but to kneel down with him. I naturally remained standing. For two or three minutes, which is a long time in such a situation, Spadolini and my sisters knelt before the coffins. A film scene, I thought again. It occurred to me that before visiting the Orangery Archbishop Spadolini had fortified himself with a hearty supper. First we have supper, then we pay our respects, I thought. How elegantly he rises to his feet, I thought, unlike my sisters, whose movements were awkward as they got up off their knees. Spadolini turned around to me as if to ask what happened next. I led him to the entrance, and he went out. It was completely dark. Your mother was probably so badly injured that it was impossible for her to lie in state like your father and Johannes, he said softly. Then, after we had walked a few yards toward the house, he asked how the accident had happened. My sisters being unable to give a coherent account, I told Spadolini what I had read in the papers, speaking in short sentences, as though reciting the headlines. After a concert, I said. Ah, after a concert, said Spadolini. Our lives are in the hands of God, he said. And naturally we don’t understand God. We don’t have the strength to understand Him. May God give you the strength to come to terms with your life, he said. All he wanted to do now, he said, was retire to his room, until the funeral. I’ll pray for the dead, he said, the dear departed. My sisters had expected Spadolini to spend the rest of the evening with us and were very surprised when he left them standing. Suddenly obliged to make do with me again, they proposed that we go up to the drawing room for a glass of wine. My brother-in-law was in favor of this, but I wanted to end the day my own way, without seeing any more of the family. I said I was going to my room, and left my sisters and my brother-in-law standing, as Spadolini had done a moment earlier. I went up to my room and locked the door but had no intention of going straight to bed, which would have been foolish, as there was no question of my being able to sleep. What Spadolini said about Mother was superficial, I thought. He described her as he wanted us to see her, from his point of view. This superficial view showed her as he himself wished to see her while he sat with us over supper, not as he had really seen her. He wished to see her as a woman who loved Austria and people and artists. I found this picture of my mother rather embarrassing, despite Spadolini’s presentation, but my sisters saw it differently. They took all he said seriously, but it was not to be taken seriously, I thought, though he had given a quite good account of the Etna excursion, being careful to describe it in a way that I could not really quarrel with and that would lead anyone who had not been involved, as I had, to regard it as a merely trivial episode. Yet I can still recall the sinister aspect of this episode, I thought as I sat in my chair, not turning the light on but surrendering myself to the darkness. He had described the Etna episode as though it had been trivial and insignificant, with nothing diabolical about it, but in fact it was utterly diabolical, I thought. What Spadolini had described as a harmless outing from Taormina to Catania and Mount Etna had in fact been anything but harmless. Their descent from the plateau on foot was a diabolical plot, I thought, hatched jointly by my mother and Spadolini. They took advantage of the snowstorm. They took advantage of the crevices in the ice. They reckoned with the drifting snow and deliberately ventured into the snowstorm, leaving me up there alone, not knowing what was happening, as they calculated. The pair of them were anything but harmless, I thought. With them calculation was an abiding principle. Over supper Spadolini had portrayed Mother as a harmless person who loved and respected him, but Mother was not like that, I thought. She was not a harmless person who would make a harmless excursion to Mount Etna with Spadolini. She was cunning, and her cunning was at least a match for his, far more than a match. Mother was always sly, I thought This ugly word seemed to fit her perfectly, and I did not recoil
from it. The two of them were always sly. Spadolini described Mother as though she were a superficial woman with only good qualities, a woman who knew no evil, was on her guard against evil and would not allow it near her. But Mother was not at all like that—she was the epitome of evil, I thought. I did not shrink from pursuing this idea as I sat in my chair. Mother was evil personified, I thought. Spadolini must have seen this; he’s too intelligent not to have seen it, too well schooled intellectually, I told myself, borrowing one of his phrases. He had spoken as though Mother had been what they call a woman of the world, which she never was: she was a typical provincial, an upstart, I thought, and totally anticultural. This last term seemed more apposite than any other, for she naturally never loved Mahler or admired any composer. Music was just a means that she used to show off her latest tasteless clothes to the set she respected, though there was nothing about it to respect, I thought. It’s the most repulsive set there is, I thought, which has no time for any form of art and despises anything to do with art. Spadolini said Mother had imbued him with a love of Florence, but in fact it was only with reluctance that she went to this old city, only with reluctance that she visited its fine churches, only with reluctance that she attended concerts and exhibitions. And she never read a good book—which says a lot, I told myself. What Spadolini dished up was a completely bogus picture of Mother, I told myself. How distasteful his remarks suddenly seemed! Utterly hypocritical and mendacious, wholly tailored to the occasion, which he kept calling a sad occasion as he sat at the table, though without feeling any real sadness, for this was beyond his capacity. Mother suddenly became—this was not how he really saw her but how he chose to describe her—a woman of taste, full of the joy of living, a person who loved life, as he put it, interested in everything, a good mother, a born educator. And a born homemaker to boot, I thought. More than once he referred to her as the soul of Wolfsegg. As a profound observer of nature and a generous hostess. Spadolini spoke of someone who had turned Wolfsegg into a paradise for all of us, someone notable for her goodness and vivacity, whom we could not help loving, who was loved by all around her, because to love her was the most natural thing in the world. Your mother was goodness itself, he told us. She held the family together. He actually said, Your mother was a dear soul, and I am still wondering where he picked up that emetic phrase. In Spadolini’s speech one falsehood interlocked with the next, I thought. But Spadolini’s not really mendacious, I thought, just utterly calculating. The way he said a dear soul was quite inimitable. Nobody I know could have said it with such natural tenderness and nobility. Only Archbishop Spadolini, I thought as I sat in my chair and drank in the darkness. I took pleasure in going through Spadolini’s studied performance word for word, examining his vocal inflections, his verbal artistry. I can learn a lot from Spadolini, I thought, always something new. The way he pronounced the name Caecilia on greeting her, and the name Amalia, and the term brother-in-law, which came out with such unbelievably studied awkwardness, I thought. The way he turned around outside the Orangery, looked across at the house, and said, This magnificent building, this extraordinary work of art. The way he said to Amalia, Your mother told me many things about you, and always good things. And to Caecilia, Your mother always praised you. And to me, Your mother set all her hopes on you. He also spoke of Johannes, saying that he was a God-fearing man and the handsomest he had ever known, the purest character, the most restrained conversation partner. The selfless, reassuring brother. He had grown very fond of Johannes, as he had of my father; he had loved them both, right from the beginning. I once took Johannes on a tour of the Vatican palaces, he said, and presented him to the Holy Father. There’s a sudden emptiness here, he said, then immediately added that new people would take charge of Wolfsegg and do everything for the best. Meanwhile, I thought, his jacket has probably been pressed as he wanted it pressed, and his trousers too. My sisters are doubtless pressing his clothes while he’s in Father’s room praying for everything connected with Wolfsegg, I thought. He used to go to the chapel to pray, I thought, but today he’s afraid of being disturbed by the other guests. Grief is a beautiful virtue, he said, as I now recall. The Almighty closes one door in order to open another. His words suddenly sickened me. I had heard them all before, but I had never found them so patently sickening. After he had finished eating and recounted the Etna anecdote, I recalled, he said that when Mother had last visited him at his office she had been tearful and disconsolate. She came to see me in Rome, tearful and disconsolate, in search of help. He still did not know the cause of her despondency and wondered whether we did. It had something to do with your father, he said. Something that was troubling him, connected with Wolfsegg. Mother was always greatly concerned about Wolfsegg, he said, and especially about her children, about us. There was no one with whom he had had better conversations, he said, as she was such a good listener. The truth was the exact opposite, I thought. Mother could never listen, she always interrupted; she would not let anyone say anything but broke up every conversation as soon as it started. She could not stand conversations and never allowed one to develop, I thought. She had no scruples about hogging the scene and disrupting whatever conversation was going on. And the remarks she made in order to disrupt a conversation were so stupid. It was one of her intolerable traits that she detested any conversation, especially an intellectual conversation, pitched at a higher level, so to speak. She could not endure it and would break it up with her foolish remarks. She was our conversation-stopper, I thought, and from this we all suffered. Spadolini described Mother in the shameful manner that survivors commonly adopt in order to put themselves in a favorable light, I thought. According to Spadolini, Mother had listened to Mahler like an angel, but the truth is that concerts bored her stiff, whatever was being played; only the most superficial music could make her face light up, I thought. Only the most superficial book could hold her attention, and then only for a few pages, for there was nothing she hated so much as reading. With Mother everything was pretense, I thought; she would seize upon everything quite ruthlessly in order to falsify and degrade it. And she had not the slightest respect for any product of the mind: that was why she hated Uncle Georg, why she hated me, why she hated everything intellectual, I thought. Spadolini went far too far, I thought, when he called Mother an artistic person, with an interest in all things intellectual, and then added, in his fulsome way, that this was rare in a woman. The truth is that Mother had no intellectual interests and was not even remotely artistic. Even my father, to whom it was basically a matter of indifference whether or not his wife had intellectual interests, whether or not she was an artistic person, often referred to her as a simpleton, and he, her lifelong companion, must have known her better than anyone. Spadolini went so far in his apotheosis as to say that she had a vein of philosophy, though his Italianate intonation lent even this piece of mendacity a certain charm. When I heard him utter the phrase, I had thought it particularly charming, without thinking what he meant by it. The manner always overlaid the matter, I thought. It was inevitable that he should also call Mother a pious woman, a faithful daughter of the Church and a good Christian. In Rome Mother had bought him a silk nightshirt—in the Via Condotti, of course—which he wore only on real feast days. She chose it herself, and she chose the best and most beautiful. Your mother used to mother me, he said—these were his very words. Sometimes she felt terribly alone, he said, abandoned by everyone. At Wolfsegg, among you, said Spadolini, quite alone, truly lonely. It is of course true that she was a lonely woman, as he said, but what he did not know was that she sought refuge from loneliness, more than from anything else, in a world that she hated because it bored her. Curiously, my thoughts now shifted from Spadolini to Goethe, the German patrician whom his countrymen have adapted and adopted as their very own literary prince, as I had observed to Gambetti when we last met. Goethe, the honest burgher, the collector of insects and aphorisms, with his philosophical mishmash. (Gambetti did not know the meaning of mishmash and I had t
o explain it to him.) Goethe, the petit bourgeois of philosophy, the man on the make, of whom Maria once observed that he did not turn the world on its head but buried his own in German parochialism. Goethe, the classifier of stones, the stargazer, the philosophical thumbsucker of the Germans, who ladled their spiritual jam into household canning jars, to be consumed at any time and for any purpose. Goethe, who assembled commonplaces for the Germans, to be published by the house of Cotta and rubbed into their ears by schoolmasters until they were completely blocked. Goethe, who betrayed the German mind more or less for centuries, paring it down to the German average with what I had described to Gambetti, at our last meeting, as Goethean assiduity. Goethe is the philosophical pied piper, the German for all seasons, I told him. The Germans take their Goethe like medicine, believing in its efficacy, its health-giving properties. Goethe is nothing other than Germany’s foremost intellectual quack, I told Gambetti, her first intellectual homeopath. The Germans swallow their Goethe, as it were, and are healthy. The whole German nation ingests its Goethe and feels better. But Goethe is a charlatan, I told Gambetti; Goethe’s writings and philosophy are the acme of German charlatanry. Be careful, Gambetti, I said, beware of Goethe. He gives everyone indigestion, except the Germans. They believe in Goethe and revere him as one of the wonders of the world. Yet all the time this wonder of the world is a philosophical truck farmer. (Gambetti did not know what a truck farmer was and laughed loudly when I told him.) Goethe’s work as a whole is a philosophical truck farm. Goethe never reached the heights in any sphere, I said. He never rose above the mediocre in anything he attempted. He isn’t the greatest lyric poet, he isn’t the greatest prose writer, and to compare his plays with Shakespeare’s is like comparing a stunted dachshund from the Frankfurt suburbs with a tall Pyrenean mountain dog. Take Faust, I said—what megalomania! A totally unsuccessful experiment by a megalomaniac whose ambition went to his head and who imagined that this head could encompass the world. Goethe, the Frankfurter with big ideas who moved to Weimar, the megalomaniac patrician in the world of women. Goethe, who turned the Germans’ heads and made fools of them and has had them on his conscience for a hundred fifty years. Goethe is the gravedigger of the German mind, I told Gambetti. Compared with Voltaire, Descartes, or Pascal, for instance, and of course with Shakespeare, Goethe is an alarmingly small figure. The prince of poets—what a ridiculous notion! Yet how utterly German! Hölderlin is the great lyricist, Musil the great prose writer, and Kleist the great dramatist. Goethe fails on all three counts. But now my thoughts returned to what Spadolini had said about my mother’s being a special person. He’s right, I thought, in that every human being is special, including my mother, but that isn’t what he meant. Spadolini, for opportunistic motives, painted a false picture of her over supper, depicting her as unusually good, unusually cultured, and unusually interested in everything—which she was not. Mother was really quite ordinary, not at all unusual. There was nothing unusual about her, unless I were to say that she was unusually inconsiderate and, to my mind, unusually stupid, as well as unusually vain, in a primitive way. And unusually greedy where money was concerned, it now occurred to me, but Spadolini probably did not know this; perhaps he could not know it. When I think of the many apartments she acquired secretly, in every possible town, largely behind my father’s back! Possibly he never knew, or even suspected, how greedy she was, I thought. And I am reminded of her perverse enthusiasm for stocks and bonds. Over supper Spadolini painted an unwarrantably false picture of her, deploying all his artistry and charm in order to present us with a mother quite different from the real one. He idealized Mother much more than Father, though he began, quite deliberately, by painting an unbearably idealized portrait of him too. What he said to me and my sisters, I thought, amounted essentially to an unwarrantable idealization of ourselves. I was able to see through it, since by now I had a good ear for the tune he was playing. It was the calculating Spadolini who sat with us at supper, the calculating Spadolini who went with us to the Orangery, resolved to put on a calculated show of grief, I thought. He idealized Wolfsegg too, for the Wolfsegg he described bore no relation to the real Wolfsegg. In the few hours he’s been here, this man of the church has shown himself immensely adept at calculation and falsification, I thought. Before our very eyes and ears he’s transformed fools into thinkers, malevolent individuals into saints, illiterates into philosophers, low characters into models of virtue, baseness and meanness into inward and outward greatness, monsters into human beings, an appalling country into a paradise, and a stolid populace into a nation deserving of respect. Spadolini had extolled the dead in a quite impermissible manner, I thought, essentially falsifying them and selling us the fake as the genuine article. He had abused our eyes and ears, as it were, by trying to deceive them and enlist us on his side, in order to show himself to the best advantage and get off as lightly as possible. But he miscalculated, I told myself, by overdoing the falsehood and falsification. He underestimated us, he even underestimated my sisters, who after all aren’t so stupid as to let Spadolini dictate to them what their parents and their brother were like. According to him they were wholly admirable, praiseworthy characters, but not even my sisters saw them as such. They weren’t stupid enough to swallow Spadolini’s bait, I thought. Even they must have known that Spadolini was talking twaddle, that everything he said was the opportunistic twaddle that people usually talk in such situations, in the face of death—to use a tasteless cliché—in order to make the dead palatable to the living, when throughout their lives they were distasteful and insufferable. He too subscribes to the principle that a false light must be cast on the dead, I told myself. And the false light that Spadolini cast on those who now lay in state was so glaring as to be positively repellent. Whoever dies has led a real life, I told myself, whatever it was like, and no one is entitled to falsify it by suddenly perverting the nature of the dead just because it serves his purpose, because he wishes to put on an appealing performance. Spadolini wished to put on an appealing performance by describing my mother, my father, and my brother as he did, I thought. And the performance this churchman put on was so appealing that it nauseated me—that’s the truth, I thought. Spadolini probably thought we were stupid enough to fall for it and felt obliged to display this distorted mirror image of the dead. Spadolini painted a picture of people he had never seen. He did not shrink from presenting one lie after another to our ears and eyes, but our ears and eyes have always been sound, I believe, capable of hearing and seeing something quite different from what Spadolini presented to them. Spadolini is a born falsifier, I told myself, a born opportunist—a born prince of the Church. I suddenly understood why Spadolini had had such an incredible career, which took him to the highest office at such vertiginous speed. Maria has the advantage over me, I thought: she has an unerring eye that isn’t taken in by outward show. She never let herself fall for Spadolini’s outward show, least of all for his subtle art of persuasion. Never, I thought. Maria judged Spadolini correctly. She did not admire him as I did but was always repelled by him. I find Spadolini repellent, she often told me, and to you he’s dangerous. He endangers everything he touches, she said. She always called him the dangerous Spadolini. We’ve had this dangerous Spadolini to supper today, I thought. And now we have the dangerous Spadolini staying in the house. We immediately sanctify the dead in order to be safe from them, so that they will leave us in peace—that’s another saying of Maria’s, I thought. It’s not the first time I’ve been wrong about Spadolini, I thought. The repellent Spadolini. I’ve often been in this situation in Rome, first repelled by him and then the next day—or even just an hour later—fascinated by him again. One is constantly repelled by such people and then once more fascinated by them, I thought. Spadolini is the kind of person who both repels and fascinates, and often we’re unsure whether we’re fascinated or repelled, whether we should let ourselves be fascinated or repelled. But we can’t give up such a person, we tell ourselves, and I’ve never been able to
give up Spadolini. And when I’m back in Rome I’ll go and see him and let myself be repelled and fascinated again, but more fascinated than repelled. I can’t do without him, I thought. Spadolini’s always been indispensable to me, I thought, but at the same time I remembered that this repellent character was spending the night in my father’s room, no doubt engaged in his habitual calculations. Spadolini’s calculations are always extreme, and he doesn’t spare himself, I thought. Before going to bed he swallows half a dozen tablets and observes himself in the mirror. Perhaps he’s sleeping in the silk nightshirt my mother bought him. Spadolini’s tastelessness is the opposite of my mother’s, but no less tasteless for all that. Over supper he was at pains to avoid mentioning his innumerable secret meetings with my mother, although my sisters and I knew about most of them. All the time, I was struck by how cleverly he would speak of meetings we knew about, passing over and simply ignoring ones we did not know about. In this way he was able to exclude their secret meetings. But he shouldn’t have excluded them, I thought. It was much more embarrassing to exclude them than to speak of them openly. Had he done so, he could have spared himself a good deal of nervous tension, I thought, and talked about everything far more calmly. He wouldn’t have had to be so exceedingly cautious in presenting his sketches, as we possibly knew more about their secret meetings than about the others. But Spadolini was always an exceedingly cautious man, and this is what aroused such admiration in me, and not only in me, I thought. He was more than just a born diplomat. Spadolini talked about the Etna excursion, I thought, which was of course interesting, but less interesting than the one to Syracuse or the one to Trapani, to say nothing of the trip to Malta that he made with Mother behind my back. It would certainly have been more interesting if he’d talked about these trips and excursions, more interesting to me at least, though far more embarrassing for him, I thought. I could not help thinking of all the hotel bills that Mother used to leave around in her room, always made out for two persons, the second being Spadolini, who was naturally kept by her, as they say, on all these trips and excursions. The archbishop traveled at her expense, and she had her triumph. At the same time one could not help finding it highly touching that for thirty years they went on trips and excursions together and that during all these years he never tired of her or she of him. I know that their relationship never weakened but actually intensified as they grew older. This relationship was always beneficial to Father, I thought, as it enabled him to keep her increasingly under control. Father was the wittingly complaisant husband, and he was proud, as I know, of the way he performed this role, though he concealed it even from them. Father never objected to their relationship—or perhaps he did at first, when he must have blamed himself for introducing Mother to Spadolini, presumably knowing what he was like. For thirty years he calmly watched their association develop from a turbulent and shocking liaison into a relationship that he must have judged to be vital to her existence, a stable relationship that was best left undisturbed. At supper Spadolini was reticent about all that was dearest to him in his relationship with Mother and touched only upon incidental aspects of it, throwing us a few crumbs, as it were, but keeping to himself whatever was precious to him. Yet Spadolini could have told all and admitted all, I thought, as we had long been aware of their secret, and his reticence could not fail to rekindle the embarrassment that had been dormant for years. But it didn’t occur to Spadolini that we knew more than he thought we did, that we’d long since arrived at our own conclusions, based on this superior knowledge, I in my own way and my sisters in theirs, and that what was to him a reason for reticence—for locking up the facts, locking them away, keeping them under wraps—was to us a foregone conclusion. To this extent, listening to Spadolini’s reminiscences about Mother was a ludicrous experience. Spadolini will get along quite well without Mother in future, I reflected. In fact he’s already put her behind him and is detained only by the funeral formalities. In Rome he’ll go on telling little stories about her, I thought, using her as a means to obtain further subsidies, to coax money out of me in the name of my dead mother. I was at once appalled by this thought and appalled by myself for thinking it. I would have given anything not to have thought it, but as I reflected on Spadolini’s suppertime conversation I could not suppress it, could not switch it off. It had to be thought, I told myself, like so many other thoughts we’re forced to think, whether we want to or not. There was no question of my being able to sleep, and naturally I did not want to take any sleeping tablets, as I had to be up early. I therefore decided to pass the time reading—a method that had proved effective millions of times before and been a habit with me for decades. Kierkegaard and his Sickness unto Death came to mind. Thinking that I would find it in the upper right library, the one nearest my room, I went out as quietly as possible to get it. I had read Sickness unto Death once, many years before, at least twenty years before. But on the way to the library it struck me as ridiculous to want to read Sickness unto Death, of all books, to want to read anything by Kierkegaard, of all authors, given the circumstances and the proximity of Spadolini. It was perverse to want to read Kierkegaard’s Sickness unto Death now, I thought, and I turned back before I reached the library, because it seemed altogether senseless to read anything. I could think of no book that might interest me or hold my attention. Perhaps something by Jean Paul, I thought, or Börne—perhaps Kleist, I thought, or Heine. Or perhaps I should go straight for Schopenhauer. But it was not a good idea to read anything—much better to sit quietly in my room and reflect. How long it is since I’ve sat quietly and reflected! I thought. I went back to my room, sat down, stretched my legs out, and closed my eyes. But I was too agitated to sit for long. I had missed my chance, it was no longer possible, and so I got up and walked back and forth in my room, but even this did not calm me, because I kept wondering how I would get through the night, this most dreadful of all nights, I thought, which will stretch on and on and can’t be shortened. I dread nothing so much as these endless nights that cannot be shortened. However intense my reflections, I won’t be able to shorten the night, I thought. I’m fully in control of myself, I haven’t taken sleeping pills for ages, and I can’t escape the night. Even when I think I shall be unable to sleep and it gets to half past twelve or half past one, I still do not take a pill. In any case there’s no problem, I thought: I mustn’t take one under any circumstances, as I have to be up by four at the latest in order to get ready for the funeral. I opened the window to let in some fresh air, but the air that came in was warm and heavy. Curiously, the air in the room was better than the air outside, and so I shut the window. Spadolini can afford to take a sleeping pill, I thought, rather enviously. He can stay in bed until eight or nine. And my silly sisters always sleep well. They’ve never taken a sleeping pill in their lives. However, since I could not take a pill and did not want to read, being sickened by the thought of literature of any kind—even French or English literature, with which I usually whiled away the night when I could no longer endure German literature—I had to think of something else to do. It was clear that simply sitting in a chair or walking up and down was on the one hand not enough and on the other hand too much. I wondered whether it would not be better to leave my room and go out. I slipped on my jacket and went down into the hall. I looked into the kitchen. The kitchen maids had not cleared away the chaotic remains of the buffet left by the guests. This irritated me, as it indicated negligence not only on the part of the kitchen staff but indirectly on the part of my sisters, their mistresses, or at any rate a degree of sloppiness that could not be allowed to continue. The pile of newspapers still lay on the table. I sat down and picked them up, thinking that I could now read them as nonchalantly as my brother-in-law had done a few hours before. After all, he had demonstrated how to read the newspapers without feeling ashamed or embarrassed, but I had not been able to. He had been quite shamelessly absorbed in the newspapers, but I was now instantly revolted by them, having at first imagined that I would enjoy th
em. I threw them down and left the kitchen. In the hall the smell of the overnight guests still lingered, especially that of our aunt from Titisee, and it was still present in the chapel, to which I now repaired. It was probably twelve o’clock, but I cannot remember exactly. The chapel had always frightened me, as I have said, because it had seemed like a law court, not just when I was a child but even later, when I was grown up. And now the feeling came back. I could not stay in the chapel and feel safe; I had to leave. I felt far too warm, and so I took off my jacket, hung it over my shoulders, and went across to the Orangery, which was of course still open. The whole park seemed to be filled with the smell of decomposition. I decided to go in. The huntsmen were still there, not having been relieved, and on seeing me they at once sprang to attention. They were surprised by my sudden appearance, because I had approached the Orangery so quietly. These people are perpetual stage figures, I thought on seeing them again. Whoever controls them can get them to do anything. They’ll carry out the most absurd and senseless instructions—that’s the military part of their makeup, I thought. Order them out and they’ll obey, order them in and they’ll obey, send them to their deaths and they’ll obey. To them Father was always the Colonel, I thought, which was his wartime rank, in the Nazi period. But the Colonel didn’t die on the field of honor, as befitted his calling, I thought, but was killed when his head collided with the windshield of his car at the Lambach turnoff. Again I wanted to know whether the ice blocks had been changed and whether there were enough, but instead of beckoning one of the huntsmen over, which would have been the obvious thing to do, I went over and asked one of them whether the ice blocks had been changed and whether there were enough. He answered with a nod. By addressing the huntsman I had signified my approval of the ceremonial organized by my sedulous sisters in accordance with our time-honored funeral plan. Again unable to control myself, I tried to raise the lid of my mother’s coffin, only to find that it really was firmly screwed down. I was by now inured to any embarrassment I felt at being observed by the two huntsmen as I attempted to raise the lid. We no longer know what we’re doing, I told myself, when our nerves are so tense that we expect them to snap at any moment. I stepped back and, not wanting to show myself up in front of the huntsmen by casually leaving the Orangery, I stood for a while in front of the coffins, but as I stood there I thought of nothing but how repulsive the huntsmen were—the most repulsive people I knew—how I could no longer stand the sight of their uniforms, how I loathed their faces and had always loathed them. I was suddenly afraid of the coming day. But it’ll all go off smoothly, I told myself, echoing the words that Caecilia had used several times in the last few hours. I can rely entirely on my sisters, I told myself, especially Caecilia. She’s not asleep; she’s lying in bed, watching the cortege pass before her mind’s eye and checking it all thoroughly. She won’t miss anything that’s out of place or even seems to be out of place, I thought. Her gift for combination and arrangement—what might be called her stagecraft—is inherited from Mother, I thought. She’ll stage the funeral as Mother would have staged it. And all the time she’ll have the feeling that Mother is watching to see that everything is staged as she would have wished, not otherwise. A funeral is about to be presented, I thought—the funeral of our parents and our brother, production by Caecilia. I could see the playbill announcing the details of the performance—the title, the actors, the producer, and so forth. The huntsmen did not lose control, nor did I. I stood for a while in front of the coffins, imagining tomorrow’s premiere, produced by my sister, and enjoying it. Suddenly I wondered what would happen if Mother’s coffin were opened and I were to compel Spadolini to inspect the contents. With an immense effort I forced myself to drop the thought, and to prevent its reemerging, I went out of the Orangery. The air outside was worse than before, almost unbearably oppressive. It occurred to me that if I went over to the Children’s Villa, this time alone, my frame of mind might improve. I walked across to the Children’s Villa, pausing on the way at the Farm. The animals were lying in their stalls as though dead. I was disgusted by the sight and could not endure the smell. I was not like Johannes, who was attracted by the smell of animals, who actually loved this animal smell. People always say that one can find peace with animals, but I never have; I am always agitated when I am with animals and forced to inhale their smell. I have never acquired what they call a love of animals and feel no affinity to animal lovers. I find animals disturbing. I have always dreamed of being attacked and devoured by animals; my childhood was full of such terrifying animal dreams. Unlike Johannes, I was always scared of animals, and even now I am haunted by dreams of animals attacking and devouring me. Time and again I have tried to find peace in the presence of animals, as others can, but I have never succeeded. Animals always make me uneasy, even the smallest and most insignificant animals. I am scared of any contact with insects, for example, to say nothing of fish, which my brother used to enjoy catching. He would seize them by the tail, bash their heads in, and throw them back in the water. To this day I have visions of the fish he killed, glinting in the sunlight as they float down the stream behind the Children’s Villa. Our servants’ children thought nothing of decapitating chickens on the chopping block. They got immense pleasure from this sport, and so did Johannes. His parents forbade it, but this only increased his enthusiasm for chopping off chickens’ heads. Even as a small child he could chop off the head of a hen with one blow and then watch as the headless bird flew twenty or thirty yards through the air in its death throes. Johannes enjoyed watching the sticking of pigs and the slaughtering of cows in the Wolfsegg slaughterhouse—for our beef broth, Father used to say. I too was enthralled by these activities and sometimes took part in them, but they never gave me the same pleasure as they gave Johannes; on the contrary, they horrified me, I thought. I am not Johannes. In the cowshed I took in at a glance ninety-two head of cattle—the ideal number, my father called it. Here at least the business is still intact, I thought. It occurred to me, because my mother had once impressed the fact on me, that the milk pipe over the cows’ heads had cost three hundred eighty thousand schillings. The milk-producing unit is naturally quite decent, I thought. I then went across to the Children’s Villa. They’ve actually left all the windows open, I thought, not because I said they were to stay open but because they’ve forgotten to shut them. There hasn’t been a storm, I thought, but there was certainly one in the air. You can’t go and look for Alexander now, I told myself. I sat down on the bench in front of the villa. If Alexander had been with us at supper, Spadolini would have been less expansive, I thought. Supper would have passed off quite differently, and Spadolini would have projected a quite different image of himself. Otherwise Alexander would have simply laughed out loud at his remarks and made him look ridiculous. In Alexander’s presence Spadolini would have had to resort to quite different tactics. It now seemed to me that Spadolini was the bad character and Alexander the good one. But to say that Alexander is the good character and Spadolini the bad one is not right either, I thought. Alexander’s goodness conceals much that is bad, such as the ruthless single-mindedness with which he forces his ideas on others and his way of punishing those who resist by refusing to talk to them for days, locking himself in his room and threatening suicide. This good character is a ruthless bully, I thought, who is capable of driving another person to desperation and even, in some circumstances, doing him to death in order to vindicate some undoubtedly ridiculous idea he has conceived. Yet this demonic Alexander is concealed beneath the popular Alexander, always lovable and unfailingly helpful. However lovable a person is, we have merely to consider him for a time—if only in our mind, in which case he can be as far away as we like—and little by little he is transformed from a good person into a bad person. We are not content until we have turned this good and lovable person into someone wicked and worthless, if it serves our turn. We are prepared to misuse him, to misuse anyone, in order to rescue ourselves from some dreadful mood that is tormenting
us, some mood we have gotten into without knowing how. Just now, I thought, I have been misusing Alexander in order to rescue myself, probably because Spadolini and the others can no longer serve my purpose; I have simply seized on the good Alexander and gradually transformed him into someone wicked and malign, treating him no differently from all the others who seemed to lend themselves to such misuse. No longer able to make do with reading or pacing up and down or looking out the window, we have to resort to our dearest and closest friends in order to rescue ourselves from some dire mood, I thought. Time and again I have observed that when I am possessed by one of these dire moods, I seize upon all available persons, one after another, and tear them apart, denigrate them, demolish everything about them, and denude them of more or less all their virtues so that I can rescue myself and breathe freely again. When I’ve done with my parents, my sisters, Johannes, and all the others, I thought, because they can no longer serve my purpose, I set about myself with what can be described only as the utmost ruthlessness. At this moment the victim happens to be Alexander, because my sisters and Spadolini and my brother-in-law are no longer adequate. That’s the truth. In order to gain relief we walk on faces, I thought. In the Children’s Villa I looked for my childhood, but naturally I did not find it. I went into all the rooms in search of my childhood, but of course it was not there. What’s the point of restoring the Children’s Villa, I wondered, when there’s no longer anyone around to enjoy it and benefit from it? It would be senseless to restore the Children’s Villa, which is what I had intended to do until this moment, to restore it to what it had once been for us children, I thought. It’s absurd even to think of it: I can’t restore my childhood by restoring the Children’s Villa, I thought. At first I had believed that if I had the Children’s Villa thoroughly restored—or renovated, as my sisters would say—I would be restoring or renovating my childhood. But my childhood is now as dilapidated as the Children’s Villa. Its rooms have been cleared out and plundered and their contents sold off as ruthlessly as those of the Children’s Villa. Unlike the Children’s Villa, however, my childhood was plundered not by my mother but by myself. I was even more ruthless in disposing of my childhood than she was in selling off the contents of the Children’s Villa. I’ve disposed of the finest pieces that furnished my childhood, just as my mother disposed of the finest pieces in the Children’s Villa. There’s no longer any point in opening the windows of my childhood, I thought; this would be as ludicrous as opening the windows of the Children’s Villa. My childhood became worn out and was sold for a song. I exploited it until there was nothing left to exploit. We search everywhere for our childhood, I thought, and find only a gaping void. We go into a house where as children we spent such happy hours, such happy days, and we believe we’re revisiting our childhood, but all we find is a gaping void. Entering the Children’s Villa means nothing more or less than entering this notorious gaping void, just as going into the woods where we used to play as children would mean going into this gaping void. Wherever I was happy as a child, there now appears to be a gaping void. We dispose of our childhood as if it were inexhaustible, I thought, but it isn’t. It’s very soon exhausted, and in the end there’s nothing left but the notorious gaping void. Yet this doesn’t happen just to me, I thought; it happens to everyone. For a moment this thought consoled me: no one was spared the knowledge that revisiting our childhood meant staring into this uniquely sickening void. To this extent it was a good idea to go back to the Children’s Villa, thinking I was going back to my childhood and believing it was possible. It proved to be an error, but the error was wholly beneficial, for it cured me of the belief that in order to reenter my childhood I had only to reenter the Children’s Villa, or the woods or the landscape I had known as a child. I now knew that wherever I went I would find nothing but this gaping void. I won’t expose myself to it again, I thought. In Rome I sometimes think of Wolfsegg and tell myself that I have only to go back there in order to rediscover my childhood. This has always proved to be a gross error, I thought. You’re going to see your parents, I have often told myself, the parents of your childhood, but all I’ve ever found is a gaping void. You can’t revisit your childhood, because it no longer exists, I told myself. The Children’s Villa affords the most brutal evidence that childhood is no longer possible. You have to accept this. All you see when you look back is this gaping void. Not only your childhood, but the whole of your past, is a gaping void. This is why it’s best not to look back. You have to understand that you mustn’t look back, if only for reasons of self-protection, I thought. Whenever you look back into the past, you’re looking into a gaping void. Even yesterday is a gaping void, even the moment that’s just passed. You wanted to go into the Children’s Villa in order to go back into your childhood, which you’ve spent years throwing out the window, believing it to be inexhaustible. And now it’s exhausted—you’ve spent it all quite thoughtlessly. Having used up all your other possibilities, you yielded to base sentimentality and conceived this plan for the Children’s Villa, which has now been revealed in all its horror: the Children’s Villa is a nightmare. When you first thought of restoring it and told your sisters of your plan, you actually thought that by doing so you could restore your childhood. You actually believed that your childhood could be repainted and redecorated, as it were, that it could be refurbished and reroofed like the Children’s Villa, and this in spite of hundreds of failed attempts at restoring your childhood, I thought. For this was by no means the first time you’d had the idea. You’ve often entertained it. You’ve even forced it on others and seen them come to grief when they’ve tried to realize this absurdest of all ideas. You’ve deliberately driven people to embrace it, knowing that it was doomed to failure; you’ve kept quiet about your own experience with this absurdest of all absurd ideas and left them to find out the truth for themselves. That was monstrous. I walked away from the Children’s Villa and went to the office. The Huntsmen’s Lodge was open, presumably so that the huntsmen could go in and out in order to relieve one another during their guard duty. I wouldn’t come to the office every day as Father had done, I thought. I wouldn’t take up residence there in order to deal with the business mail, to talk to the farm manager and other employees in this stifling atmosphere. Unlike my father, I wouldn’t have to treat this office as my natural habitat, I thought. My existence won’t be constricted, like my father’s, by the three-ring binders that finally crushed him. These binders at first constricted his existence, I thought, then one day fell on him and crushed him. That’s not just a vision, I thought, it’s stark reality. The business mail made Father a slave to the business. He subordinated his whole existence to the daily business mail, I thought. My grandparents stuck him in this office, by which in due course he was crushed. But it won’t crush me, I won’t let myself be crushed. The way the office is furnished is enough to crush anybody, I thought. I did not turn the light on, as I did not want to be discovered, though of course the huntsmen knew I was there. I’ll never enter this office as a farmer, I thought. I’m not a farmer, I’ve no interest in farming. One of the binders must contain details of the allowance that’s been paid to me all the years I’ve been away from Wolfsegg, I thought. I got up and looked for the relevant binder, but could not find one bearing my name. All sorts of names were inscribed on the various binders, but not mine. What was this immense sum to which my father always referred, with which my mother constantly reproached me, and which drew malevolent remarks from my sisters? They always maintained that I was kept by Wolfsegg, that I never hesitated to demand more and more from the Wolfsegg funds, that I subjected them to ever greater extortion. There must be a binder in which this immense sum was recorded, I thought, but I could not find it. I took down a number of them and leafed through them, but I could not find the one relating to me—the fatal binder, I thought, recalling that my mother had once said I would drop dead on the spot if I knew how much money they had expended on me. On the wastrel who exploited Wolfsegg for his dubious and di
sgusting purposes—for his disgusting intellectual purposes, I thought. His lordship goes for walks in Rome while we slave away here, my father would tell everyone when he felt hostile toward me, and in recent years he always felt hostile toward me, when it had become clear that I had no intention of returning to Wolfsegg but was determined to stay in Rome, or at any rate somewhere far away, in some remote territory of the mind, so to speak. He had no compunction in running me down to all and sundry because of my monthly allowance, to which I was in any case fully entitled, I now thought, remembering all the money that they themselves threw out the window for the most ridiculous purposes—my mother’s mania for clothes, my father’s enthusiastic support for various associations, and my brother’s craze for motor-boats and yachts, all of which cost them far more than I did. It was true, I thought, that my sisters cost less than any of us, but they weren’t worth any more: it was a pity to spend even a penny on them. This stuffy office was practically my father’s home, I thought. It was to this desktop that he fled from his family, on his desktop that he wrote all those senseless business letters, like the one still lying on it. Sometimes he would mount a tractor and endure the stench and rattle of the engine in order to get away from his family; at other times he would flee to his office. In the last ghastly years of his life he was totally isolated. Pitiful, I thought. But then he courted such isolation and did nothing to counter it. Father was too weak to counter anything, I thought—it wasn’t his way. He preferred to follow this miserable path leading to total atrophy. Such tremendous natural beauty, I thought, and such a tremendous estate, yet Father led this pathetic office-bound existence! The office was to blame for the expressionless face he had in the end. The office ultimately destroyed him. His twice-yearly cultural trips, so called, no longer brought him any benefit. He set out on them reluctantly, already worn out; when he returned he was still worn out, sickened by yet another failure to escape from himself, and the office was once more his refuge. By imperceptible degrees he was being destroyed, partly by the family, who were bent upon his destruction, and partly by the office, where the accumulation of bureaucratic imbecilities seemed calculated to crush him and his existence. Yet Father took refuge in these bureaucratic imbecilities, I thought, to escape his hysterical wife, my mother, and most of the time he locked himself in. Only the huntsmen had free access, no one else. The family had to make appointments to see him. If they knocked on the door unannounced they were not admitted. His implacable destroyers were forbidden to enter. I won’t let myself be destroyed and annihilated by this office, I thought. It won’t be my refuge. I won’t make the three-ring binders my secret, silent companions, as Father used to do for half a day or a whole day at a time and often, obscenely, for half the night, even the whole night. Father often called his office the captain’s bridge, but that’s not what it’ll be for me, I thought. I felt a sense of personal humiliation on recalling how my father used to call the office the captain’s bridge, for he never wielded a captain’s authority at Wolfsegg. The real authority was wielded by my mother, who let him go on prating about the captain’s bridge because she knew how ludicrous it sounded. No, this won’t be my office, I thought. I won’t let myself be tyrannized by the three-ring binders. Millions are tyrannized by three-ring binders and never escape their tyranny, I thought. For the last century the whole of Europe has let itself be tyrannized by three-ring binders, and the tyranny is increasingly oppressive. Soon the whole of Europe will be not only tyrannized but destroyed by them. I once told Gambetti that it was above all the Germans who had let themselves be tyrannized by three-ring binders. Even their literature is subject to their tyranny, I told him. Every German book written in this century is a product of this tyranny. German literature has been tyrannized and almost destroyed by three-ring binders, I said. And this present-day literature, produced under this tyranny, is naturally the most pathetic there has ever been. No other age has seen such a helpless, pathetic literature, a ludicrous desktop literature dictated by three-ring binders. At least that’s how it seems to me whenever I read a recently written book. All these books are utterly pathetic, I said, written by authors who all their lives have let themselves be totally dominated by three-ring binders. All we have now is a petit bourgeois bureaucratic literature, I told Gambetti. This applies even to the great figures in German literature, I said, even to Thomas Mann, even to Musil, whom I rate highest among all these exponents of bureaucratic literature. Even Musil produced only dreary bureaucratic works. The whole of this literature is middle class through and through, and for the most part lower middle class, I told Gambetti on the Pincio. Even Thomas Mann and Musil, in every line they wrote, let themselves be dominated by three-ring binders. Reading this literature, we see how a bureaucrat writes, a more or less lower-middle-class bureaucrat who draws his inspiration ultimately from the three-ring binder files. The patrician Thomas Mann produced thoroughly lower-middle-class works, I told Gambetti, addressed to lower-middle-class readers who fall upon them with gusto. For at least a hundred years we’ve had nothing but what I would call binder literature, lower-middle-class bureaucratic writing, and the masters of this literature are Musil and Thomas Mann, to say nothing of the others. The one exception is of course Kafka, who actually was a bureaucrat, though he didn’t write bureaucratic works, but none of the others could write anything else. Kafka, the bureaucrat, was the only one who produced not bureaucratic literature but great literature. One can’t say this of any of the so-called great German authors of our century, Gambetti, unless one wishes to make common cause with the millions of scribblers who write for the cultural pages of the press and in the past hundred years have turned the newspapers into a cultural soup kitchen, regurgitating their hair-raising misconceptions ad nauseam. In this century the Germans have basically produced literature dominated by three-ring binders, which I have no hesitation in calling binder literature, because I don’t want to risk being compromised at some future date, when this binder literature is recognized for what it is and consigned to the trash can of literary history, which is where it belongs. On the other hand, the literature of the present day is our literature, and we’ll have to live with it, like it or not, because we’re committed to it, I said, not without a touch of pathos. Our literature actually has many imposing peaks, I said, but we mustn’t compare them with the likes of Shakespeare. Gambetti listened attentively, I thought, but without taking me seriously. I thought it a pity that he did not take me seriously on the subject of modern German literature. I concluded my disquisition by saying, as if to console him, But Maria is the exception, meaning that some of Maria’s poems were superior to anything else written in German in her time—that is to say, in our time. He may have understood this as a charming jest prompted by friendship, but it was the truth. I seriously believed that Maria’s poems represented a high point in German literature, not just in our own dingy decades but in the whole of the century, which would probably end without reaching another such high point. As I see it, Gambetti, the Germans and the Austrians are so enfeebled—and will continue so for at least another half century—that neither they nor we will reach another such peak. For I’ve given up believing in miracles, Gambetti. In any case, I added, it’s unlikely that by the end of the century the world will still exist as we now know it, as we have to put up with it day after day. I very much doubt that it will. Everything seems to indicate that it will change so radically as to become unrecognizable. It will be totally changed, totally destroyed. Everything points to this, I said, and then I added, But this vision of mine comes supplied with inbuilt error. Whereupon Gambetti burst into his usual unrestrained laughter. We’re often led to exaggerate, I said later, to such an extent that we take our exaggeration to be the only logical fact, with the result that we don’t perceive the real facts at all, only the monstrous exaggeration. I’ve always found gratification in my fanatical faith in exaggeration, I told Gambetti. On occasion I transform this fanatical faith in exaggeration into an art, when it offers the only
way out of my mental misery, my spiritual malaise. I’ve cultivated the art of exaggeration to such a pitch that I can call myself the greatest exponent of the art that I know of. I know of none greater. No one has carried the art of exaggeration to such extremes, I told Gambetti, and if I were suddenly asked to say what I really was, secretly, I’d have to say that I was the greatest artist I knew in the field of exaggeration. Gambetti again burst into his characteristic laughter, which promptly infected me, so that that afternoon on the Pincio we both laughed more than ever before. But of course this too is an exaggeration, I realize as I come to write it down—a typical instance of my art of exaggeration. The art of exaggeration, I told Gambetti, is the art of tiding oneself over existence, of making one’s existence endurable, even possible. The older I get, the more I resort to this art, I told Gambetti. Those who are most successful at tiding themselves over existence have always been the great exaggerators. Whatever they were, whatever they achieved, they owed solely to the art of exaggeration. The painter who doesn’t exaggerate is a poor painter, the musician who doesn’t exaggerate is a poor musician, and the writer who doesn’t exaggerate is a poor writer, I said. With some, of course, the art of exaggeration consists in understating everything, in which case we have to say that they exaggerate understatement, that exaggerated understatement is their particular version of the art of exaggeration, Gambetti. Exaggeration is the secret of great art, I said, and of great philosophy. The art of exaggeration is in fact the secret of all mental endeavor. I now left the Huntsmen’s Lodge without pursuing this undoubtedly absurd idea, which would assuredly have proved correct had I developed it. On my way to the Farm, I went up to the Children’s Villa, reflecting that it was the Children’s Villa that had prompted these absurd speculations. Extinction, I thought, turning away from the Children’s Villa and walking toward the Farm—why not? I’ll need a lot of time—more than a year, maybe two years, maybe even three. Every so often we feel fully competent to create a work of the mind, even one like Extinction, which has to be written down, but then we shy away from it, knowing that we shall probably not be able to stick it out, that we shall make quite good progress at first and then suddenly fail, with the result that all will be lost, and not just the time we have spent—and therefore wasted—in the attempt. We shall have made utter fools of ourselves, maybe not in front of others but in front of ourselves. Not wanting to expose ourselves to such discomfiture, we refuse to make a start, even when we think we are capable of doing so. We procrastinate, as though afraid of being grossly embarrassed, I thought, of grossly embarrassing ourselves. We expect others to perform well, outstandingly well, but we ourselves don’t perform at all; we don’t come up with even the most risible mental product. But that’s how it is, I thought: of everyone else we demand the highest achievements, but we ourselves achieve nothing. Not wishing to lay ourselves open to the awful humiliation of failure, we repeatedly shelve our plan for a written product of the mind and take refuge in any excuse, any subterfuge, that serves our turn. We are suddenly too craven to begin. Yet all the time we have this product of the mind in our heads and want to produce it, come what may. We’ve decided on it, we tell ourselves, and for days, weeks, years, perhaps even for decades, we go around telling ourselves that we have decided on it, yet we never get down to it. What we have in mind is something tremendous, we tell ourselves; sometimes we even tell others, being too vain to keep it to ourselves, but all we are capable of is something utterly risible. I’m going to write something tremendous, I tell myself, yet at the same moment I am afraid of it, and in this moment of fear I have already failed and can no longer begin. We say grandly that what we have in mind is something unique and tremendous. We do not shrink from such an assertion, yet at the same time we lower our heads, take a pill, and go to bed, instead of starting on this unique and tremendous project. That’s how we are, I once told Gambetti. We pretend we’re capable of everything, of the very highest achievement, but can’t even pick up a pen and write down a single word of the unique and tremendous work that we’ve just announced. We all succumb to megalomania, I told Gambetti, in order to avoid having to pay the price for our constant ineffectuality. Extinction, I thought, but to be honest I still had only a vague notion of the form the work should take, though I had thought about it for years. What I have in mind isn’t something unique or tremendous, I told Gambetti, but it’s rather more than a sketch, rather more than an existential sketch. What I have in mind is something worthwhile that I needn’t be ashamed of, I said. I consider myself competent and able to write something that I consider worthwhile because it’s important to me and will give me pleasure. I’m not really a writer, I told Gambetti, only a literary broker dealing in German literature, a kind of literary realtor, as it were, a dealer in literary real estate. It’s true, of course, that anyone who writes so much as a postcard nowadays calls himself a writer, but I don’t, notwithstanding the hundreds of works I’ve tried to write or have actually written. In any case I detest the majority of writers, I said. There are very few that I love, but these few I love dearly. I’ve always shunned writers, especially German writers, and have never shared a table with one. I can’t imagine anything worse than meeting a writer and sharing a table with him. I’m prepared to accept his works, but not their producer. Most of them are bad characters, if not positively repulsive, no matter who they are, and if you meet them they ruin their work for you—they simply extinguish it. People jostle to meet some writer whom they love or admire—or even hate—and this completely ruins his work for them. The best way to liberate yourself from the work of some author that obsesses you for one reason or another—either because you hold it in high esteem or because you detest it—is to meet the author himself. We go and meet the author of a literary work and are instantly rid of it, I told Gambetti. Writers are on the whole the most repulsive people, I told Gambetti. I have to admit that as a young student I actually sought them out, forced my way into their presence, waylaid them, took them by surprise. I even insinuated myself into the company of a number of authors in order to spy on them. But having sought them out, I hated them all without exception and could no longer read their works. All these writers I sought out and spied on, I told Gambetti, now seem to me low, vulgar, stupid individuals who have attained a degree of literary fame but whose company I can do without because they have nothing to offer me but their mediocrity. Everything about them is mediocre, I told Gambetti. Everything about them is redolent of common malice and a base philistinism that battens on megalomania. They are all basically simpleminded, like the books they write and put on the market, I once remarked to Maria. It’s as though for the last hundred years German literature had been misappropriated by provincials. All we have today is provincial literature, I told her, nothing else. I remembered saying this as I walked toward the Farm. Only your writings, I had told her, are great and unique and will endure—we won’t have to be ashamed of them in a hundred years’ time. No, I told Gambetti, I never wanted to be a writer. It never occurred to me, but I always had a desire to write something down, just for myself, and the fact that some of my things have been published here and there is a matter for regret. I’m not really a writer, I said, not at all. Passing the half-open windows of the Farm buildings, I could hear the cows breathing. It occurs to me that we can often recall details, so-called trivialities, if we take the trouble to observe them carefully and pay attention to them, looking first at them and then through them. On the way from the Children’s Villa to the office, for instance, I observed precisely how the clouds behind the villa had taken on the shape of a dragon with a wide-open mouth. Even in memory such a triviality can remain clear, so that we can sometimes picture precisely the movement of the cloud formations even weeks, months, or years later. We do not have the slightest difficulty in calling it to mind, in reliving it, as it were. The same is true of the motions of a face we once saw years ago. We have no difficulty in recalling them. I, for instance, have no difficulty in recalling the faces of
my family as they stood in front of the coffins. I can picture them exactly as they appeared to me then, with all their facial movements, for even a supposedly motionless face is in motion, since it is not dead, and even a dead face is not really dead—and so forth. What we witnessed years ago can still be seen and heard precisely, if we can master the mechanism that makes this possible. The same applies to the sense of smell, as we know. Walking along a street in Paris, we may be reminded of something that happened twenty or thirty years ago, or even more. We can visualize the object or event or encounter in question in every detail, even though the original experience lies twenty or thirty years back. I believe I have developed this natural mechanism into an art, which I practice every day and intend to perfect. Hearing the cows breathing, I suddenly felt utterly exhausted. I went up to my room and drew the curtains. It was half past one. Naturally I could not sleep. Lying awake, I could think only of what was to become of everything—of Wolfsegg and everything connected with Wolfsegg. For over two hours the question that preoccupied me was not What’s going to happen to Wolfsegg? but What can I make of Wolfsegg, which has come crashing down on my head with my parents’ death and is threatening to crush me? The immense mass of Wolfsegg has suddenly fallen on my head, I thought. It was insane to tell myself that I could calm myself by lying first on one side and then on the other. I was suddenly conscious of the hopelessness of my situation, and this consciousness gave me no respite. Not a single reasonable thought would come to me. I could not lie on one side even for a minute, as my heart was pounding so fiercely. And so I spent the rest of the night anxiously observing my heart, counting the heartbeats and noting the irregularities that broke up their rhythm at diminishing intervals, until in the end I was in a state of extreme anxiety. I recalled how terrified I had been when my specialist in Rome told me, with brutal insensitivity, that I had only a short time to live. Doctors wish to be confirmed in their prognoses, I thought, and would rather tell you that the end is imminent than predict that it will be delayed for some time, since they are reluctant to compromise themselves and fear nothing so much as the unforeseen death of one of their patients. They spare themselves such embarrassment, as my Roman specialist did, by telling the patient that he has only a minimal life expectancy. However, I have to say that Roman doctors are superior to their Austrian colleagues, whom I can describe only as completely unscrupulous and callous. My Roman specialist having predicted that I had not long to live, I lay awake wondering what I was going to do with Wolfsegg. Of course I did not know the answer, and certainly not now, preoccupied as I was with the speed and irregularity of my heartbeat. We naturally listen to what a doctor tells us, in this case my specialist in Rome, but we give no credence to it. We hear what he has to say but refuse to believe it—we ignore it. It now strikes me that this may well be the best reaction. Naturally we surfer all the time after being told that we have not long to live, but we shield ourselves from this dire prognosis because we want to go on living. We may inveigh against life and affect to despise it, but we still cling to it and want to hang on to it forever. It occurred to me that it had been weeks since I thought about my health, but now, lying in bed unable to sleep, I was worked up about everything. Just now, I thought, having firmly resolved to write Extinction, I must do all I can to protect myself, yet here I am, letting myself get worked up to such an extent that it could prove harmful, even lethal, to me. In Rome I’ve accustomed myself to a rhythm in keeping with my illness, I thought, and this takes into account my duties as Gambetti’s teacher. I’ve adjusted this rhythm precisely to my illness. In Rome I’ve subordinated everything to my illness, but now, at Wolfsegg, I’m letting myself get worked up to a quite unwarrantable degree. Every time I’ve been to Wolfsegg in recent years I’ve become overexcited and put a strain on my heart, I thought. On returning from Wolfsegg I’ve seen my Roman doctor and been told that I’ve overtaxed my heart simply by going to Wolfsegg, indeed by visiting Austria at all. I’ve never spared my heart, I thought, and this accounts for its present state. No heart can put up with a nature like mine, I told myself. My heart has little capacity for resistance, having been abused since childhood. From my earliest childhood I’ve abused my heart, overtaxed it and never given it a moment’s rest. My heart’s never been given the rest it should have had, I thought, and now it’s finished. Instead of sparing my heart by sticking to a proper rhythm, I have to endanger it by coming to Wolfsegg. But only for one day, I told myself. I’ll return to Rome as soon as possible because of my heart condition. I’ll go back to Rome. Rome is my home, not Wolfsegg. I won’t make excessive demands on my heart. This had been my specialist’s advice, and Maria’s too. She’s always said, You demand too much of your heart—you must look after it. I always listen to Maria, I thought, but then take no notice, even though she’s right. Maria, my Roman physician, my great poet, my great doctor, I thought, who knows all there is to know about the art of living. Whenever I’m in a state I run to Maria, I thought. Unable to stay in bed with my heart pounding, I got up and went to the bathroom to freshen up. Then, still in my dressing gown, I took down a monograph on Descartes from the shelf and sat down by the window. Descartes instantly distracted me from all my anxieties. No sooner had I read the first sentences by Descartes—not about Descartes—than I was saved. Reading these sentences, I was immediately distracted—not calmed but distracted. The great philosophers are my saviors, I thought. Whatever I read of them distracts me and saves me. There is apparently no certain knowledge so long as one does not know the author of one’s existence, I read. I was at once distracted and saved. This one sentence enabled me to get through the remaining few hours at the window before I had to get up and go downstairs for the start of the funeral ritual. For some time I watched from my window as my sisters stood in front of the Orangery talking to the huntsmen, the gardeners, and various other people who had a function to perform in the funeral ritual, among them my brother-in-law. But I did not go down and join them. I had the impression that they were expecting me, but I did not go down as I did not want to interrupt my observations, which I could pursue from my window undisturbed. They all seemed very much occupied, and there must have been even more going on inside the Orangery. A vast quantity of wreaths and bouquets had been loaded on two large carts, which were pushed by the gardeners and two stable lads (we still have stable lads at Wolfsegg!) up to the wall by the gateway, leaving room for the hearse to pass. Everything I observed from the window seemed to be proceeding in accordance with the funeral plan that Mother had always spoken of. Nothing I saw seemed to go beyond the plan, let alone contravene it. It looked as though it might rain, but it was not raining and I did not think it would. Everyone was dressed in appropriate funeral attire, though not necessarily in black. A number of people from the village stood in front of the Orangery, and I saw the first members of the wind band taking up their positions. Their instruments sparkled, and the musicians wore uniforms of black and green, my favorite color combination. As I saw from the window, Caecilia was fully in charge of the imposing spectacle that was gradually unfolding. Every so often she whispered instructions to Amalia or to her husband, the wine cork manufacturer, whereupon they went into the Orangery to carry out her instructions, though I could not know what they were. The lights in the Orangery had obviously been extinguished. The time had come to get the funeral under way, to remind people of their cues and take them once more through their roles. The important moments had arrived for the producer—not the high points, I thought, though these would not be long delayed. The musicians formed up in front of the Orangery, as if for a rehearsal, and then dispersed again. The gardeners and the huntsmen wheeled up the two carts with the wreaths and bouquets and brought them to a halt, as if this too were part of the rehearsal, and I watched Caecilia as she checked everything. Amalia and my brother-in-law remained behind her. More and more people arrived from the Farm, the Huntsmen’s Lodge, and the village. None of the notables had appeared, but there was still plenty of time. Finally
Caecilia walked across to the house. I took this as a cue to leave my room and go down to meet her. On the way I ran into our aunt from Titisee. I greeted her but quickly escaped and took care to avoid her during the rest of the proceedings. Breakfast had been prepared for me in the kitchen. I ate it hastily, in the company of my brother-in-law. What a dull, stupid man! I thought as I watched him clumsily spreading butter and marmalade on his bread. But people like him can’t help it, I thought; they don’t know any better. Then I desisted from such thoughts, which suddenly seemed to me improper—not unfair but improper—and I despised myself for entertaining them. We shouldn’t watch these people and observe their every action, I told myself, because it only makes us despise ourselves. Caecilia told me I should wear a black tie. I did not argue with her but immediately went back and put one on; it seemed obvious that I should wear a black tie to the funeral, though not a black suit. I was wearing black shoes and a gray suit. I had never owned a black suit or thought of buying one, even in the last two dreadful days. Caecilia said she would be satisfied if I wore a black tie. She said this with no apparent malevolence, even with a degree of understanding. My sister suddenly appeared to treat me with understanding, and it occurred to me that this was because she was now in her element. All kinds of people whom I had not expected to see appeared in the kitchen for breakfast, but I spoke to none of them. Though I was the chief actor on the set, I did not see myself as such. They stared at me, but I avoided their gaze. There were several people I ought to shake hands with, I thought, but I shook hands with nobody. Why should I shake hands with these people, I thought, why should I play the hypocrite? I had no intention of doing so. I had a cup of coffee and a slice of bread, then went out into the hall. My sisters were standing with the mayor, who had just arrived to offer his condolences, as I could see. He went through the familiar routine, and my sisters behaved in the manner expected of them. Quite unlike me. True to my nature, I did not behave as I was expected to behave. My sisters stood in the entrance hall, receiving condolences from all sorts of important people, dignitaries of various kinds. I stood aloof in the dark corner by the door of the chapel, where I would not be recognized. Nobody will recognize me if I stand here, I thought, and nobody did. Otherwise they would all have made a beeline for me, I thought, and not for my sisters—they would quite properly have made a beeline for the son, not for the daughters. As it was, they all made for the daughters and left me in peace. Time and again they inquired after me, but my sisters, fearing that I would take them to task after the funeral, did not reply, although—or because—they knew I was standing by the chapel door. At first I counted the guests, but I soon gave up because there were too many. In the end they came swarming in, and from my secret vantage point I was able to observe them all at my leisure. The crowd suddenly parted as the bishop of Innsbruck arrived. I must go and greet him, I thought—I have no choice. I went over and greeted the bishop. Behind him stood the archbishop of Salzburg. It fell to me to keep the bishops company and escort them to the second floor. Spadolini is so smart that he won’t make his appearance until the last moment, I thought. And so it was. I spent at least half an hour talking to the bishops before Spadolini entered, escorted by Caecilia. The bishops greeted him as if he were much superior to them in rank: they did not stand up to greet him, they jumped up. A sad occasion, said the bishop of Innsbruck, to which Spadolini replied, A terrible tragedy. Then they all sat down. They talked among themselves, and there was no need for me to join in their conversation. They talked about Rome, and the Austrian bishops were impressed by everything Spadolini told them, all of which was new to them; he knew exactly what to say in order to astonish them. Meanwhile the abbot of Kremsmünster appeared. He did not stand on ceremony but silently went and sat with the bishops. He was a fat man with the air of a prosperous innkeeper. For half an hour Spadolini talked about Rome and the Vatican—about everything and nothing, as it were. Then Caecilia asked the bishops to go downstairs. In the hall the bishops, foremost among them the elegant Spadolini, waited for Caecilia to signal that it was time to go across to the Orangery for the start of the funeral proper. Aside from the bishops there was no longer anyone in the hall. The crowd had moved to the Orangery and spread out far beyond the gateway, probably all the way down to the village, I thought, so that one could no longer speak of a cortege, since the row of mourners probably extended as far as the cemetery already. It was laid down that the funeral service should take place in the village church, not in the chapel. The bishops, having talked about Rome, then about Wolfsegg, finally turned to me, whereupon Spadolini told them that he was one of my best friends, my very first friend in Rome, as he put it. He had been a great friend of the family for many years, he said. He had often stayed at Wolfsegg and always loved the place—such a splendid landscape, such a splendid house, such a splendid lifestyle, he said. The bishops could not take their eyes off him. His clothes were probably the most elegant they had ever seen. My role was to pretend to be in shock. This seemed to me the most advantageous, as I hardly needed to say anything but simply had to make sure that I lowered my head whenever I was being observed. This does not mean that the whole thing left me cold, but I felt no more than I had felt at other funerals; I was not shattered by the fact that it was my family that was being borne to the grave, for the spectacle was too grandiose to admit of such feelings. The real shock will come later, I told myself, when it’s all over. The initial shock’s over, but the real shock’s still to come, I thought as I stood in the hall with the bishops. They admired my composure, but it was not, as they thought, the composure of one who had come to terms with a great tragedy. I chose to appear composed—it was part of my act. I felt that I had so far performed my role to perfection, repugnant though I found it. An actor knows when he’s giving a good performance—he doesn’t need to be told, I thought. More than once Spadolini had the effrontery to draw the bishops’ attention to my admirable composure—Spadolini of all people, who must have seen through me, yet repeatedly remarked to them, in a manner that I found somewhat distasteful, how admirably I was conducting myself, in view of the fact that my parents and my brother were being buried. I was simply conducting myself in accordance with my role. Caecilia now asked the bishops to go across to the Orangery. The coffins had been sealed and each had been loaded onto a separate hearse, drawn by two horses. The hearses, devoid of any floral decoration, were of the austere simplicity laid down in the funeral plan. They moved off slowly, followed by the bishops, then by my sisters and me. Behind us were the other relatives, led of course by Alexander. After these, just as I had feared, came the former Gauleiters and other National Socialist grandees, who filled me with the greatest revulsion and, I must say, the greatest fear, sporting their National Socialist decorations on their breasts. Formed up behind them was the League of Comrades, a veterans’ association of a decidedly National Socialist complexion, followed by various other groups. A procession of many hundreds gradually formed but could hardly get into motion, as its length equaled the distance it had to cover. It was only Caecilia’s organizing skill that made it possible for the procession to take shape at all: she had arranged for the crowd to assemble behind the Farm and in front of the Children’s Villa. Naturally the hearses could only make their way slowly down to the village, not leading the cortege but passing it, as no other procedure was practicable. Those lining the route drew back as far as possible on each side of the gravel road leading to the village, in order to make way for the hearses and ourselves. Caecilia’s plan worked—it was a total success. The cortege had taken shape and was on the move. She walked beside me, highly agitated and trembling all over, because she was now walking in the cortege and no longer in charge. She need not have worried: everything went according to plan, despite the hundreds of mourners. An ordinary country funeral is attended by at least a hundred people, but I estimate that the numbers attending ours probably ran into thousands, though I do not know for sure. As arranged, the archbishop of Salzburg celebrated th
e requiem mass. Watching him read the mass, with the coffins on trestles in front of the altar, I recalled that I had abandoned the Church, as they say, thirty years earlier. I could therefore allow myself to take a detached view of this church ceremony. My family never forgave me for leaving the Church, and this may have been their main reason for condemning me, I thought. The fact that I had left the Church so early and no longer had any links with it made me feel pleasantly detached throughout the mass. You’re a witness of this splendid spectacle, but it doesn’t concern you, I reflected more than once. You smell the incense, but it doesn’t dull your senses. You hear the words, but they have no destructive effect on you. For decades, throughout your childhood and early youth, you feared the Catholic clergy, but now you don’t. You no longer need to fear them. The spectacle is magnificent, I thought, and even if its magnificence grates on your nerves, it isn’t in the least menacing. In any case you’ve already taken leave of your parents and your brother. You took leave of them, briefly but definitively, when you got the telegram. The funeral is only a drama that’s been forced on you, the title of which—Paying the Last Respects—repels you with its mendacity. Every drama is mendacious, I thought, but this is more mendacious than any other. A funeral like this is the most superb drama imaginable, I thought. No dramatist, not even Shakespeare, ever wrote one to match it. Compared with this, the whole of secular drama is a joke, I thought as the archbishop of Salzburg read the requiem mass before this great concourse of people. What a good thing, I thought, that I withdrew from the Catholic Church so early! I was sitting in the front pew, with Caecilia on my left and Amalia on my right, exactly as laid down in the plan. Next to Amalia was Alexander. Spadolini, the abbot of Kremsmünster, and the bishop of Innsbruck sat in an elevated position beside the altar, set apart from the common people. Spadolini’s the chief actor in this whole performance, I thought, not the celebrant, the archbishop of Salzburg. Toward the end of the service the archbishop delivered a short address, in which he spoke of the dear departed friend who had died so tragically, of the devoted mother and the equally devoted son. Archbishops have a style of delivery all their own, I thought: they chant everything. The priests’ seminary is actually the ecclesiastical equivalent of a drama school, I thought. Even the simple souls among them, like the archbishop of Salzburg and the bishop of Innsbruck, don’t just speak, they chant, as if they were trained actors. True, they perform like popular and respected provincial actors, unlike Spadolini, who reveals himself in his every word and his every gesture as a theatrical genius, far excelling all these provincial actors and embodying the ultimate in Catholic histrionics. Spadolini has immersed himself in his silent role, I thought. Sitting with his head bowed, in a row reserved solely for him, he’s aware of his theatrical genius, I thought, his archiepiscopal genius. The fact that he had come from Rome lent his presence an additional aura, a tremendous aura, in our village church. The congregation was amazed by the sight of an archbishop from Rome, much more than by that of the celebrant, the archbishop of Salzburg, who was bound to appear by comparison more simpleminded, more primitive, than he really was. After the mass the village choir, accompanied by the village band, performed the Haydn piece rehearsed the previous day, very quietly and, it seemed to me, flawlessly. During the requiem Spadolini gave the impression of having withdrawn completely into himself. Not once did he permit himself to look up. His hands folded, he was completely immersed in his mourning, as it were, and when Mother was mentioned I had the impression that this mourning was not even simulated, but real. Yet this was a fleeting impression; a moment later he seemed once more to be playing his part to perfection. Seeing him in this attitude, I actually loved him. What I loved in him was Spadolini the great actor, for I know none greater, none with greater audience appeal, as they say. The many journeys he made with Mother and those that the three of us made together suddenly came back to me. Spadolini, who made these journeys such a delight and cast his spell over them all, as they say. Suddenly I saw Spadolini the charmer, the man of the world with whom my mother fell hopelessly in love. Sitting there, I had eyes only for him, not for the archbishop of Salzburg. I pictured him in Rome, visiting the finest shops and the most expensive restaurants, and his bearing on entering these shops and visiting these restaurants. I saw him on the Pincio and in the Borghese Gardens. I saw him at diplomatic receptions and private views, always scintillating, as they say, surrounded by a throng of admirers, the elegant man of the world who could call himself both archbishop and nuncio and boast many hundreds of friends. Spadolini, who not only had all these journeys paid for by my mother, not to mention two trips to America, a vacation in Cairo that he had set his heart on, a trip to Persepolis, and a visit to Tunisia—because he specially wanted to see Carthage—but for whom she bought the greater part of his wardrobe and furnished a whole library. Spadolini, who can pick up a book or drink a glass of wine with matchless elegance, who is mobbed by the ladies of high society no less than by the Communist officials of Rome, and who is cordially received every few weeks by the city’s Communist mayor. Spadolini, who corresponds with people from all walks of life, who knows the Vatican inside out, just as he knows the city of Rome, where he is revered, indeed loved, by everyone. I watched him from the side as one watches a great actor and concentrated on his every movement. His performance is a work of art, I thought—he displays no weakness and does not permit himself the slightest inadvertency. In the theater it’s the silent, not the wordy, roles that are the most demanding, I thought, and Spadolini has undoubtedly taken on the most demanding role in the present drama. What’s more, he’s chosen the ideal costume. It’s impossible to see Spadolini without instantly feeling respect for him, I thought, though not necessarily affection. All who see him fall under his spell, I thought. Gambetti once said that of all the actors he knew, Spadolini was the most extraordinary and the most enthralling. It was a pity, he thought, that he performed only in the Church and not in one of our foremost theaters. No producer could teach this man anything, said Gambetti—he already knows everything, can do everything, is everything. I was reminded of Gambetti’s remark as I observed Spadolini from the side. I felt no embarrassment, I have to say, and paid no heed to my immediate surroundings. I automatically stood up with the rest of the congregation when the ritual required it, and sat down again when they sat down, but all the time I did nothing but marvel at Spadolini’s artistry. I seemed to have fallen under its spell once again, as so often before. It’s as though the greatest actor of the age had come to some unknown and quite insignificant small town to give an arch-Catholic performance of Hamlet, I thought. When the mass was over, the coffins were carried out of the church, first my father’s, then my mother’s, and lastly my brother’s. My knees suddenly trembled as the gardeners bore Johannes’s coffin past me. They shouldered it with great skill, I thought, as if they were accustomed to shouldering a coffin every day. The huntsmen carried my parents’ coffins out of the church, but at my express wish Johannes was carried by the gardeners. Caecilia did not weep. I had the chance to look into Amalia’s eyes, and our brother-in-law the wine cork manufacturer, in his clumsy way, put on a brave face and made the best of a bad job. He was the one figure who was really out of place—this was more obvious than ever. All eyes were fixed on either me or Spadolini. Caecilia naturally insisted on being supported by her husband, not me, as we left the church. Amalia walked with me. Observing her, it struck me that during this period of mourning she had taken to walking with her head lowered. My sisters’ mocking faces first became embittered, I thought, and now they’ve become mournful. Caecilia was naturally more composed than her sister. Amalia looks much younger than she is, I thought, but not at all attractive. That’s why she’s still single, I thought. No man has ever been attracted to her, not even a man like the wine cork manufacturer. Momentarily I felt sorry for her, but then I could not help remembering how clownishly she had always behaved in any company. Amalia will never be happy, or even contented, I thought. Nor wil
l Caecilia, who’s walking arm in arm with her unhappiness, I thought, looking at the wine cork manufacturer’s profile. I could not help thinking that it was the profile of a subaverage individual who had managed to insinuate himself into Wolfsegg. The village band played the Haydn piece again, better than before, I thought, and the cortege moved even more slowly toward the cemetery than it had previously moved toward the church. I have always hated processions and parades, especially accompanied by music. All the world’s disasters have been inaugurated by processions and parades, I thought. I was revolted by the thought that not far behind me were the former Gauleiters of the Upper Danube and the Lower Danube, the very people who had desecrated the Children’s Villa and permanently ruined it for me. Behind them were the veterans of the League of Comrades, some of them on crutches—men who had fought for their abominable Nazi ideals and been awarded the Blood Order for doing so. And behind them—so Caecilia had whispered to me just before the procession moved off—was my student friend Eisenberg, my soul mate, the Viennese rabbi, whom I was determined to speak to as soon as the ceremony was over. A funeral procession like this is grotesque, I thought. Unspeakable. Such an endless funeral procession is not only an imposition on everybody but utterly tasteless, I thought, though I knew that my view was shared by none of the participants. They wouldn’t dream of thinking such a thing. Indeed, had they been privy to my thoughts, they would have concluded that I was utterly tasteless. Maybe I am, I thought. But I felt no shame until I stood by the open grave. I had once said to Gambetti that when we stood by an open grave we had only treachery inside us. The perversity of this ceremony was borne in on me when the archbishop of Salzburg stepped up to the graveside to make a speech. He began by calling my father a brave warrior on the field of honor. He spoke only of my father and never once mentioned my mother, or even Johannes. This was not deliberate, I thought; it could be attributed to forgetfulness and conceit, to male selfishness and arrogance. There were twelve graveside speeches, all delivered by men who pretended to have been my father’s best friends, though this was naturally untrue. The archbishop of Salzburg and the bishop of Innsbruck claimed they had been, the former Gauleiters claimed they had been, two SS officers claimed they had been, and so did the commander of the League of Comrades and the president of the Huntsmen’s Association. For a whole hour they repeatedly spoke of Father as their best friend, and this quite outrageous presumption went unchallenged, as was to be expected at a funeral. The coffins had already been lowered into the grave. Finally Spadolini stepped forward. I thought he was about to speak, but that would have been out of character. He at once stepped back, as if wishing to melt into the background again, but this was a feint, as he had been the central figure throughout the ceremony. He did not compromise himself by uttering a single platitude but rejoined the ranks of the mourners crowded around the grave. I very nearly misjudged Spadolini, I thought. The commander of the League of Comrades said that Father had lived only for the aims of the League. At first I found this assertion contemptible, but a few minutes later I changed my mind, as I had to acknowledge that it was to some extent true. The president of the Huntsmen’s Association also spoke the truth, I had to tell myself, and so did the two former Gauleiters. Father, as a party member, had been one of them, and this was how everyone saw him. I continued to think how embarrassing it was that none of them remembered to say anything about Mother. Still at the graveside, I remarked to Caecilia that none of them thought it worth their while to say a word about Mother. The speeches were made by the menfolk, I thought, and the menfolk took no cognizance of Mother. And Johannes too was a thoroughly unimportant figure in the whole business, having forfeited any claim to importance by dying too soon. Aside from carrying his coffin and laying him to rest, no one had paid him any attention. Father was the great personality they could exploit at the graveside, and they exploited him for all he was worth. Father was still useful to them, but no one else was, I thought. The archbishop of Salzburg and the bishops looked once more into the open grave and then withdrew. Whereupon everyone filed past my sisters and me, as is customary. A hundred twenty-two woodworkers and now only twenty, two dozen gardeners and now only seven, I thought, standing by the open grave. Huge forest damage in the north, right down to Gallspach, I thought. Thirty-two first-class acres lost through land consolidation—that had angered Father for weeks. On the other hand, I thought of the immense tax evasion devised by our accountant in Wels. This man’s pronunciation of the name Wolfsegg never fails to revolt me, and the way it is pronounced by other people from Wels, Linz, Vöcklabruck, and Ebensee is no less revolting. I’ve always detested the name Wolfsegg, I thought, standing by the open grave, I’ve always abominated everything associated with the name. Ever since I was a child I’ve detested everything to do with Wolfsegg—that’s the truth, I thought. Hypocrites going down from Wolfsegg to the village and the surrounding country, and hypocrites coming up to Wolfsegg from the village and the surrounding country. I was soon repelled by all these people and withdrew into myself, standing by the open grave. It’s all a gigantic deception, I thought, a criminal conspiracy that’s lasted for centuries. At first I feared the Church, and then I hated it, with increasing intensity. After all, the Church still dominates everything in this country and this state, I thought, standing by the open grave. Catholicism still holds the reins in this country and this state, no matter who is in power. Catholics, charlatans, I thought, mendacious curers of souls. We want no more to do with it, we tell ourselves, we’re sickened by it all. In this country and this state nothing escapes the Catholic clergy, even today. Withdraw from it all, I thought—I no longer had any other thought. I must go through with this ceremony and then I’ll withdraw forever, I thought. I could see how they all hated me, and not even covertly. Philosophical interests on the one hand, a total absence of such interests on the other. And devotion to art—even more offensive, I thought. And people are no different in Rome. They’re even more hypocritical there, but vastly more intelligent! There can’t be just a few hundred of them, I thought—there must be millions. There must be millions of hypocrites, not just hundreds—millions of such revolting people, not just hundreds. Take an intellectual bath, as it were, in a city like Rome, then disappear beneath the surface, I thought. The footsteps of people I hate, the voices of people I hate, I thought, standing by the open grave, the utter repulsiveness of these hateful people. This funeral really is the end, I thought. They’ve not only desecrated the Children’s Villa, they’ve desecrated everything. At first I was afraid of life, and then I hated it, I thought, standing by the open grave. And if we imagine that Rome is the solution, that’s also an error. We cling to someone like Gambetti, whom I may already have destroyed, or to somebody like Maria, but even they can’t save us, I thought, standing by the open grave. I recalled how one day, in front of the Hotel Hassler, I had said to Gambetti, You know, Gambetti, if we’re honest we have to admit that the universal process of stultification is now so far advanced that it can’t be reversed. This process of stultification was inaugurated well over a hundred years ago by the invention of photography, and since then the mental condition of the human race has been in permanent decline. This worldwide stultification was set in motion by photographic images and attained its present deadly momentum when the images began to move. Humanity has for decades been staring brainlessly at these deadly photographic images and become more or less paralyzed. Come the millennium, Gambetti, human beings will no longer be capable of thinking, and the process of stultification, inaugurated by the photograph and universalized by motion pictures, will have reached its apogee. It will scarcely be possible to exist in a world dominated by brainlessness, I said, and we’d do well to kill ourselves before this process of stultification has engulfed the whole world. To this extent it’s only logical, Gambetti, that by the millennium those who exist by thinking and through thinking should already have killed themselves. The only advice I can offer to any thinking person is to kill himself before the mil
lennium, Gambetti—that’s my genuine conviction, I had said, as I now recalled, standing by the open grave. All day it had looked like rain, but the rain had held off. I had made up my mind not to shake hands with any of the people who filed past me. Nor did I. Some held out their hands, but I did not shake them. I had deliberately imposed this embarrassment on myself. I recalled that only a few days before this unbearably tasteless funeral I had said to Gambetti, Just to think of Austria, a country that’s disfigured, degenerate, and done for, is enough to make you vomit, to say nothing of the utterly degenerate state, whose vulgarity and baseness are unparalleled not only in Europe but in the rest of the world—a state that has for decades been run by unprincipled, degenerate, brainless governments, and a people that’s been mutilated beyond recognition by these unprincipled, degenerate, brainless governments. First by the vulgar, vicious National Socialist regime, then by the no less vulgar, vicious, and criminal pseudosocialism that succeeded it, I had told Gambetti on the Pincio, as I now recalled, standing by the open grave. The destruction and annihilation of our country has been encompassed by National Socialism and pseudosocialism, aided and abetted by Austrian Catholicism, which has always cast its blight upon Austria. Today Austria is a country governed by unscrupulous profiteers belonging to parties devoid of all conscience. In the last few centuries, Gambetti, Austria has been cheated of everything and had all its sense knocked out of it by Catholicism, National Socialism, and pseudosocialism. In the Austria of today, Gambetti, vulgarity is the watchword, baseness the motive, and mendacity the key. Every morning when we wake up we ought to be utterly ashamed of today’s Austria. Time and again I tell myself that we love Austria but hate the Austrian state, Gambetti. Whether we’re in Rome or anywhere else in the world, Austria no longer concerns us. Wherever you go in Austria today you’re surrounded by lies. Wherever you look, you find only mendacity. Whoever you talk to, you’re talking to a liar, Gambetti, I said, as I now recalled, standing by the open grave. This ridiculous country and this ridiculous state are basically not worth talking about, and to think about them is just a waste of time. But woe betide anyone in this country who isn’t blind, I said, who isn’t deaf, and still has his wits about him! To be an Austrian today is a death sentence, and all Austrians are subject to this death sentence, I had said, as I now recalled, standing by the open grave. Everything Austrian is characterless, I said. Whenever one comes back to Austria, one feels dirty, I thought, standing by the open grave. The men wearing the insignia of the Blood Order, the SS officers supporting themselves on their crutches and their sticks, the National Socialist heroes, did not spare me a glance, as they say. The mourners, except for the archbishops, the bishops, and our closest relatives, were invited to the Brandl and the Gesswagner, where musical entertainment was provided by the band, which Caecilia had instructed to visit both inns. The archbishops, the bishops, and the family mourners were invited to lunch at the house. Most stayed until late afternoon. Spadolini left for Rome in the evening. At first I thought of traveling with him, but this was a stupid idea, as I saw at once. We’ll see each other in Rome in a few days, I told him. He left very quietly. I took Alexander to my room and locked the door, as I wanted to talk to him undisturbed. Alexander was again obsessed by one of his great ideas. He wanted to ask the president of Chile to release all political prisoners in Chile, that cruelest of all dictatorships; he was not put out when I told him that his request would meet with no success. He left an hour after Spadolini, to return to Brussels. I stayed locked in my room until after nightfall and left it only when I was sure of not coming upon any of the funeral guests. During this time I thought about what I was going to do with Wolfsegg, which, as had meanwhile been established beyond peradventure, belonged exclusively to me, with all rights and obligations, as legal parlance has it. I already had in mind a plan for the future of Wolfsegg and all its dependencies in Lower Austria, the Burgenland, and Vienna, and I sat up till two in the morning talking the matter over with my sisters, in the absence of my brother-in-law, whom I refused to have in on the discussion. At the end of it I still could not tell them what was to happen to Wolfsegg, although I already knew. Throughout our conversation they had nothing to say but only showed me their mocking, embittered faces. I told them that I did not know what was going to happen to Wolfsegg, that I had not the slightest idea, when in fact I had firmly resolved to make an appointment to meet Eisenberg in Vienna, intending to offer the whole of Wolfsegg, just as it stood, with everything belonging to it, as an unconditional gift to the Jewish community in Vienna. I met Eisenberg, my brother in the spirit, two days after the funeral, and he accepted my gift on behalf of the Jewish community. From Rome, where I now live, where I have written this work entitled Extinction, and where I intend to stay, writes Murau (born Wolfsegg 1934, died Rome 1983), I thanked him for accepting it.
Extinction Page 4
