Abel and Cain

by Gregor von Rezzori

  and I had lost her. And the man reeling under the impact of this blow is not I: he is my friend Johannes Schwab. As though I had not personally experienced this whole foolish love story, which any sensible person would only shake his head at; as though I had experienced it vicariously for him, Schwab—what am I saying? For our entire generation, allegedly incapable of achieving much of a solid inner state, as though it were suffering from a kind of emotional scurvy. It was an act of salvation, in a word. From now on, people could point at me if anyone started in about the death of emotional life and the shift of feeling to collective experiences like soccer matches and politics. I was still different from the others; my emotional life was of prewar quality.

  I was the exception that proved the rule, if you please. I maintained the link with the emotional possibilities of our fathers, said Schwab. I was living proof that continuity had not been broken, at least in this respect—the “specifically European conception of love and capacity for love.” That is to say, love as a revolutionary act, as the revolt of the individual against the strictures of society. . . and not as an adolescent, mind you, no, as a mature, reflective, much-tested adult. Granted, this too a way of dragging the past into presence—but not merely passive, not merely in the act of experiencing; rather inherited action . . .

  And now what? Now that I had reached the head of the class and now that—as foreseen—the whole emotion business lay in pieces, now I refused to take the next logical step? I didn’t despair, I didn’t shoot a bullet into my head, I didn’t join the Foreign Legion in order to vanish forever into the unknown? No. I was, I am, as cheerful and serene as ever.

  It doesn’t help to tell Schwab that I am in a certain respect only partially involved, insofar as it is not my entire self that lost Dawn. Only one of my two souls is concerned. Her loss, I say, is entirely the fault of those traits and qualities of mine that were stamped on me by my formative years in Vienna: the disgusting eagerness to take moral possession, the desire to improve and help, the need to educate and alter. As though it were one of the tasks of love to develop the other person toward so-called normality at any cost. (For instance: my persistent concern about Dawn’s health, both physical and mental, my pampering and caring, my making sure that nothing happened to her, that she didn’t do anything to herself. The picayune morality, the anxious conformism behind all that, and of course the cannibalism, the eating of human flesh in mental and physical ownership. In short, everything that made John and Stella so violently hate the bloody fucking middle classes and their shitty morality and that had, alas, partly become my nature during twelve Viennese years with Uncle Helmuth, Aunt Hertha, Aunt Selma, and Cousin Wolfgang.)

  In contrast, however, I tell my friend, there is an entirely different side to me, namely, the side with which I won Dawn—in beautiful freedom: overlooking any craziness of hers, fulfilling every foolish wish, never correcting or criticizing her, approving of all her madcap ideas, even feeding her pills instead of foie gras, buying her mushroom-like hat-stumps instead of fancy hats, suffering with a smile when she dressed like a scarecrow. . . In other words, that in me which is of the artist, which tends toward the artistic, and on top of this the generosity, the elegant neutrality in handling human relationships that I had managed to copy from such outstanding personages as Uncle Ferdinand. The cautious live-and-let-live attitude of Uncle Agop Garabetian’s extraordinary amiability. The imaginativeness, the delicious playfulness of a Bully Olivera, whose acquaintanceship had been one of the most fruitful gifts of my unbourgeois childhood before Vienna . . . Had any of the three of them, I said to Schwab, learned that someone wanted to kill himself, he un-hesitatingly would have given that person the opportunity. . .

  And this side of mine, I tell friend S., did not lose Dawn, can never lose Dawn. And most certainly not if the rubber collar around the other half of my soul was what made her leave me. “You understand what I mean,” I say to him. “The very thing stated by Romano Guardini, whom you so highly esteem: ‘The first step to the other is the movement that takes away the hands and clears the space in which the self-concerned quality of the person can come into action. This motion constitutes the first effect of justice and is the basis of all love.’ ”

  He turns crimson. He thinks I’m trying to make fun of him. He regards my quoting (especially from Guardini!), my attack against the middle classes, and my ironical eulogy of the plutocrats Uncle Ferdinand, Sir Agop Garabetian, Bully Olivera, as a venomous personal jibe. “Don’t act more cynical than you are,” he says.

  I say, “You misunderstand me. I’m quite serious. I’m talking about something that’s very much on my mind: a sociology of emotional life, which I have been planning to work on for some time now. I maintain that the relative emotional frigidity of the uppermost (and lowermost) strata in any society is paired with a keener sense of reality than the sentimental romanticism of the bloody fucking middle classes. With the realism of a more thorough knowledge of life. Soul (I mean an especially passionate tension in one’s nature that is designed for suffering) seems, as John and Stella always said, to be a prerogative of the middle strata. The bourgeois invents emotions that he can no longer draw from immediate contact with life. Ask Scherping, he knows a thing or two about it. He also knows what thrives especially well in these inner miasmas: a proclivity for the abstract, for the as-if, for the fictive, plus, of course, no shortage of art, especially literary art. Which you might consider an advantage—for a publisher. But interhuman relations are thereby unbearably complicated. I wish I had listened to Dawn’s warnings in time. You know, she used to say, ‘Most people fail because they try too hard.’ It’s really just like writing books, isn’t it? If only we were more lighthearted, we’d be like Nagel and produce novels like cars on an assembly line. Dawn could be very shrewd sometimes.”

  Once again, I’m the one who’s talking. But he doesn’t laugh, and he doesn’t eat any roses either. His upper lip (a bit long, and sensitive as a feeler, yet resolute above the severely retracted lower lip: the mouth of Paul Klee) trembles, as it usually does when he’s very nervous. A couple of fine little drops of sweat hang above it. (Lately, he’s been drinking oceans of rum and Coca-Cola, and he’s always quite proud when he expertly orders, “Un autre Cuba libre, s’il vous plaît!”) His eyes are bright and blank, like the eyes of a boiled fish.

  And I am talking. Spouting confused verbal gruel. I say, “Why, on the other hand, were there so few neuropaths in Uncle Ferdinand’s circle of friends, in the ‘Middle Kingdom’ of his playmates at the polo grounds and baccarat tables of Deauville and Monte Carlo? After all, their monstrous wealth and constant idleness ought to have created all kinds of neuroses and psychoses. But not a trace. On the contrary: the serenest rapport with life. Not a hint of communication problems or the like. Model sociability: Uncle Agop’s parties were epoch-making. Bully Olivera had more friends the world over than Dr. Schweitzer. Plus the smoothest, most graceful love affairs with dozens of women. I remember what Uncle Ferdinand said to me about his relationship with my mother when I visited him for the last time, in Bessarabia, during the winter of 1939– 40: ‘She was an ideal mistress in the truest sense of the word—not only a great beauty but a great teacher of life. She used to say, “The entire secret of a harmonious mind lies in the ability to recognize the imminent formation of cramps and to prevent it in time. If you desire something that you can’t get—then a cramp will form. You have to relax it before it distorts everything else. Vous comprenez, mon ami? . . .” I did understand her. She taught me that the encounter of two people is like the collision of two billiard balls: only one point of one touches one point of the other. Therefore we must never draw conclusions about the entire relationship. For only a moment later, some other point of mine meets another point of yours, changing the relationship entirely. The number of possibilities is infinite. Every instant is new and without precondition—that is to say, with no rights deriving from a previous moment. Hence, every instant of harmony is a
gift. Every possible next instant of estrangement is due to a change of reciprocal position that must be respected.’ That,” I say to S., “is what I call realism. There’s something really artistic about it. I wish our politicians had it, not to speak of the poets . . .”

  Schwab doubles over as if he’d been punched in the stomach. He hears scorn and malice in every word. He believes I am out to torture him. His hand trembles so badly that his Cuba libre sloshes out of the glass before he can bring it to his lips. His sensitivity provokes me to bait him. I needn’t think up anything. Whatever I say elicits something from him.

  I say, “I don’t quite know whether I should be flattered or insulted by your suspicion that my equanimity about losing Dawn may not be genuine. That it is only feigned to camouflage wholly different and dramatic feelings.” (I intentionally use the word “camouflage,” which is bound to provoke him.) “How little you know me! I mean, how poorly you appreciate my literary déformation professionelle! Don’t you notice? I’m so fascinated by myself as a case that I haven’t got a scrap of attention left for my personal feelings. I must ask you to indulge me: regrettably, I cannot suffer, as you wish, after the loss of my beloved, because for the time being I am much too interested in what actually went on here. Something in any case that didn’t simply happen to me. Rather something that, as you witnessed, I undertook of my own free will and with open eyes. After all, I dashed into this madness consciously and deliberately: I needed the experience. An experience, though, that was the very opposite of what you think.

  “Possessed by my foolish love for a will-o’-the-wisp, an apparition of a human being—if we’re being honest, right?—in any event, a sheer fiction of a woman, a fata morgana of a love object, I no doubt carried out something exemplary—I mean, something beautifully consistent with the zeitgeist. But why and to what extent? That it has something to do with repetition, that much is clear—Papa Kierkegaard would be thrilled. Once again rummaging for the lost half of my life, I was doing something in its style. In the style of the twenties and thirties, which quite commonly these days have come to trigger in just about everyone an ever more self-conscious nostalgia. Thus, not only did I repeat something, individually, but something repeated itself through me: the it, the id in me, part of the collective of my race, my civilization, my culture, and my time. It had me do what is due to be done in this time. Even in my extravagance, I was once again merely a leaf in the wind of the zeitgeist—isn’t that a breathtaking thought? Everything that occurred, exactly as it occurred, is typical of the time—and that means: that from it we can draw conclusions about the quality and character of our time. For instance, the abstractness, the echo-like quality of the relationship between Dawn and myself, the experience detached from ourselves and all surrounding reality, not to mention the high symbolism of her farewell gesture, first eating the white rose and then making the sluttish request for money—simply glorious!! But you must understand that I now yearn for a less anemic reality. After so much abstraction, so much fiction, such a toying as-if, I would like to fortify myself with raw flesh and warm blood . . .”

  I do so every evening at a cheap cabaret on the place Blanche, where a troupe of delicious negresses are making a guest appearance. They too perform in the Folies Bergères style of the Mistinguette and Josephine Baker era (ergo, they too drag the past into presence), with pistachio, violet, and flamingo-colored ostrich feathers foaming on their heads and from their tailbones, with sequined corsets, and stilettoes tall as their insteps and thin as a pencil under their sinewy feet. They hurl their wonderfully limber legs at the rotating colored lamps under the ceiling, as if they were trying to yank them out of their hip joints. They bend their pelvises forward and backward and around with such sharp, grotesque contortions that one involuntarily bends with them, vibrates with them as if in the back and forth of an erotic shadowboxing. Their solid, fine-tipped breasts jiggle like rubber, and the lianas of their arms intertwine and unravel to the intertwining and unraveling saxophone voices of the Dixieland band accompanying them. In short, they are worthy of admiration. I tell S., “Worthy of ad-miration. You have to come and see them, ab-solutely!”

  He doesn’t need to be asked, he clings to me anyway, never leaves me unguarded for even an instant. This suits me fine: I’ve already left a small fortune with the black beauties anyway; I’ve borrowed the money from the clerk at the George V. God’s and the movie piglets’ providence will see to it that he gets the money back. In any case, for now, Schwab has the honor of paying the bills.

  He does so with obvious pleasure. After all, there’s something for him here too. The spectacle boasts scenes that you won’t catch anywhere else. For example, on the very first evening, the third from the right in the chorus line, a particularly sinewy and well-proportioned chorine, was irritated by her left-hand neighbor (softer, taller, more voluptuous), presumably because of the attention I paid the latter—an incessant torrent of flowers, a gigantic, sky-blue teddy bear, champagne between the numbers, whereby, needless to say, I drew the general attention of the audience to her. Finally, at the end of the performance, it was time for the curtain call and the artistes were presented by name, each one stepping forward and curtseying to our applause. The sinewy girl calmly waited for my favorite to bow and me to unleash universal jubilation (the pimps and beatniks and tourists attending the spectacle were amused by my clowning). Then, upon being called, the irritated chorine stepped forward very prettily, curtseyed, and sprang back with the agility of a monkey—planting the stiletto heel of her strapped shoe on the naked toes of her voluptuous colleague. The victim folded up in pain like a penknife.

  Needless to say, it was the aggressor I took home that evening (to the apartment in the rue Jacob that I had been keeping for months to welcome the ruefully returning Dawn). I did not comfort the victim until the next evening. And needless to say, S., in his old rattletrap VW with double-H (Hanseatic Hamburg) license plates, tagged along both times. He pursued us straight across Paris to the Rive Gauche, even though I finally got sick of it and had fun steering my Ferrari very fast along the boulevards with lots of side streets, from which another car with the right of way could shoot out at any moment. But S. behaved courageously, downright heroically.

  There was a third and fourth nocturnal drive (after all, the troupe had sixteen beautiful, coffee-brown girls), and we didn’t have an accident until the fifth. I stopped and put the car in reverse. I had just barely squeaked through a traffic light when it changed from yellow to red. Schwab, not far behind me, lost his nerve and slammed his heavy Teutonic foot on the brakes. He failed to notice that some guy in an old 204 had been tailgating him—an atavistic hunting instinct, as we know, aroused by an apparently fleeing object. He smashed right into Schwab’s rear.

  Nothing much had happened, thank goodness. Just a lot of noise and banged-up metal. No one was hurt. Schwab complained about a whirring in his head, but then the old boy had been boozing rather heavily. It was a miracle he had been able to drive at all. The cars were wrecked, of course. The engine in Schwab’s Beetle had been shoved into the back seat, the hood of the old 204 was arched up. But it was three a.m. and no one cared about precise details. So the matter was settled on the spot and without the police. The two drivers exchanged insurance numbers and encouraging pats on the back while I interpreted. Then I loaded Schwab into the (rather cramped) back seat of the Ferrari.

  That evening, for variety, I had made my choice from the audience rather than the troupe: something uncommonly exotic, also coffee-brown but pure French (whereas the troupe came from Jamaica), extraordinarily elegant and expensively perfumed, luxuriously hung with real jewelry (discernible by the nasty flashing of the pure-water diamonds), yet quick, witty, obviously of above-average intelligence, yet also larger than life, with mammoth thighs and the gigantic face of a merry-go-round Moor—and she called herself Princess Jahovary! I found her fascinating. “Isn’t she fas-cinating?” I said to S. after picking her up (she was with some suspici
ously chic cocktail-party types, but I quickly maneuvered her away from them and to the bar). She obviously enjoyed me too. She said she was an agent for popular music, a record manufacturer. So not a kept woman then, as the diamonds had led me to think. We drank two or three whiskeys at the bar. Then it was time to go. I took her by the arm and waved good-bye to Schwab (as on the previous nights). And as on all previous nights, he hurriedly paid the check and plunged after us into the Russian roulette of side-street traffic. The fact that he was shot down from behind was (as John would say) tough luck. The one who really took it amiss, however, was the chocolate-colored Princess Jahovary. She wanted to get out when I wedged my dazed friend S. past her fullness into the back seat. She asked me to see her to the nearest taxi. When I told her we were only a few minutes from the rue Jacob, she acted as if this were the first she’d heard that I intended to bring her there, and she staunchly demanded that I drive her to the sixteenth arrondissement, where (typically) she resided. Nor would she hear of my first dropping S. at his hotel. So I drove her to the sixteenth arrondissement. Slowly and carefully, at her express wish. She wasn’t just miffed, she was downright furious. “Un bel caratteraccio!” I mumbled to myself. She asked me where I had learned Italian. I said that knowing several languages wasn’t always a sign of a good education but often merely the dregs leftover from a checkered career. And did she, as Princess Jahovary, speak Romanian? No, she said, her mother had never spoken it to her. And her father? “He was an American.” Aha. No further comment.

  But her anger had obviously cooled and she was cheery again. An Aries, no doubt? She cheerfully admitted it. Schwab had fallen asleep in the back. He had probably drunk a lot more than I realized. He was snoring and we laughed.