Abel and Cain

by Gregor von Rezzori

  I am wheeling and dealing to have her elected this year’s Mardi Gras princess (it promises to be a scream). At the Astra Art Films ball, which will greatly overshadow that of Gloria Films, she cannot as yet play the starring role. This part is automatically awarded to Astrid von Bürger as a former Ufa star and Stoffel’s spouse. But Gudrun Karst will lead the Pleiades, the group of seven up-and-coming starlets to be introduced to the public and the press. Bele Bachem is already designing the costumes with Bessie Becker.

  The press (which is having a tremendous upswing in the new reality) is starting to get seriously interested in Gudrun Karst. To give her the status of a working student, I have registered her at the university (as a psychology and sociology major). Every morning when she is not shooting, I send her to school in a horse-drawn carriage (the last hackney cab in Munich). We have lunch at the Four Seasons, which is also the seat of the Montgolfier Club, an association of hot-air balloonists that Gudrun wishes to bring to life. In the evening, she plays Anouilh and Claudel under Schweikart’s direction.

  At night, in the rococo bed of the merely half-bombed-out home of the countess (I told her I have unfortunately drifted away from Christa—all too Protestant, alas—over questions of faith), I give Gudrun’s mind the finishing touches. I explain the eschatological character of the time we are living through: the messianic promise of Americanism, the paradise of smart boys on earth that comes before doomsday. I tell her about the effect of atomic bombs and how the dollar got its name from the Thaler, which in turn got its name from Joachimsthal, where uranium was first discovered in pitchblende. We chat about the German women who, like Scarlett O’Hara (like Christa), swore they would never go hungry again, and about the hazardous childhood of their sons, who, in the midst of bombings, gleaned pieces of fallen coal on railroad embankments from under passing freight trains; and about the later offspring, who are children today and whose every wish we fulfill (like me with my little boy) before they so much as sense the wish themselves.

  Even our erotic relationship has a spiritual element. When her senses gain the upper hand, I have her re-experience the spahis, man for man. She now quite regularly confesses to me when and under what special circumstances and conditions she felt desire against her will. Then, released and sobbing, she drifts off in my arms.

  And all this for the sake of Astra Art Films and their reality.

  Verily, I say unto you: The future lies in abstraction.

  7

  Such and similar things, my dear Mr. Brodny, stand between me and the image of the old Yurop, in which the other half of my life is lost, and are the reason I can’t tell you the plot of my book in three sentences. The story proliferates with no help from me, quite on its own, in parthenogenetic self-propagation under my hands. Whatever I narrate breeds more narrative. Every tale hatches ten others: a hybrid cell growth that cannot be controlled by any form.

  Around this and little else revolved my endless conversations with Schwab. Paris, city of dreams, gave us ample occasion to speak of it. Everything steered us to that cancerous proliferation. For instance (in connection with the definitive, I might almost say irredeemable, formed nature of the French): the curious fact that in our hemisphere one could obviously now create any number of fatherlands (along with Zaire, Uganda, and similar exotic ones elsewhere, there are now two in the German-speaking world alone, and with Austria and German-speaking Switzerland it would make four), but no new people, no new nation; while at the same time, you have the identity loss of most European nations and the sclerosis of the French.

  Thus development of form as an evolutionary stage that has been outgrown, as Professor Leblanc maintains—but it would be too much trouble now to formally introduce the great physician and researcher; let’s save that for later. Anyway, his views are not interesting in and of themselves but rather above all in regard to the situation in which he developed them—namely, at Gaia’s deathbed, two years ago, during one of our hectic and boisterous chats, when my brave beloved, the chocolate-brown Princess Jahovary, laughing once again—(laughing with dreadful exaggeration, intoxicated in her more and more extravagant decay: all thirty-two horse-healthy mulatto teeth seemed to leap from her mouth, the lips could barely restrain them, the violet hue they had assumed in the past few weeks turned pale under the tension, like overly taut rubber bands—oh Lord! how often, how ardently, how voluptuously and pleasurably had I kissed them when they were still oxblood-red, those sucking soaking stamp-pad lips melting creamy-mild under mine! How tenderly I had marveled at them with my worshipful dwarf-gaze, my Lilliputian fingertips lusting for exploration, the hopping troll of my tongue running over the beeswax-warm mahogany of her cheek hills and slipping into the rococo pits of the corners of her mouth. There, with her fleshiness, voluptuously notched like a fruit bursting in sweet overripeness, the thread-fine bright line—the blemish of mixed blood—sprang forth; as at the opening of the rock snail’s shell, it accompanied her luxuriously curving contour, and there, where the soft, moist double hump of the lower lip, almost lascivious in its swelling, was delicately cocked over the chin recess, it was swallowed by deep cocoa tones covered with a down as delicate as mold . . . Oh Lord! to what foolish extremes did I not go in order to make them burst into a smile, those fat Negro lips, and to watch them rolling from the ivory of the teeth, brightly shining like hard-boiled egg white until, at the salmon-colored arcades of the gums, the ivory turned yellow, like translucent yolk, turned yellow into primordial cannibal strength which was now so protrudingly bared, so bitingly exposed . . . Ahh! but I loved her sword-swallowing, fire-eating laugh, I loved nature in it, crude, unadulterated nature, loved the laryngological glimpse into the yawning monster-throat, that multivaulted, hortensia-hued grotto, that lilacky Bomarzo, the art nouveau arches of pale-lilac lip-flesh, the Gaudí cornices of pale-pink gums, the purple cupola of the palate over the dragon’s hump of the tongue, which knotted forward out of the rosy-fleshed gate of hell of the esophageal muscle with the bud-like flesh stalactite of the uvula—all this still ineffably fresh and clean, just scoured by surf on palm-fanned spice beaches, still incredibly healthy, full of animal vitality despite her lamentable condition; only, because she was emaciated, her face a skull, it now looked as if she had eaten her own tonsils and was offering them for one last inspection, awaiting an official go-ahead before swallowing them down. Oh, dear God, her torso was all skin and bones now, and I did not care to picture what she looked like farther below; but when she, half rising up, half sinking into the pillows, let her skeletal trunk, covered with a skin like saddle leather, rise out of her billowy nightgown, as frightening as one of the nightmare figures in Picasso’s Guernica, and when she laughed and laughed, she really did look like a dying horse, a drowning horse, and I thought, She wants to carry them to shore, she wants to rescue them beyond death, these lovely, flawless teeth—and what a pity it was! . . .)—when she, laughing once again, complained, “J’comprends jamais c’qu’il veut dire, cet ours—croyez-vous que c’est de ma faute?” then Professor Leblanc, in the usual Cartesian crystal-clear way, developed his pertinent ideas. Bold, not only because they were articulated at the bedside of a cancer patient but of course especially piquant for that very reason: cancer as a universal phenomenon of the age; the inability to preserve form; hybrid growth of everything and everyone in accordance with the physicist’s modern view of the world: the cosmos as a monstrous explosion. Form as antinature, in a word.

  •

  At any rate, it’s an awful pity that Schwab died so early—I mean, alas, too early to hear my naive findings in this area being confirmed by a scholar of Leblanc’s rank. I will not forget the pain around his mouth when once, on a similar occasion, he quoted Valéry’s “trouver avant de chercher” (and I brutally remised, FOR UNTO EVERY ONE THAT HATH SHALL BE GIVEN . . . BUT FROM HIM THAT HATH NOT SHALL BE TAKEN AWAY THAT WHICH HE HATH . . . But all this later, later! . . .).

  8

  Meanwhile, you can glean from the foregoing, es
teemed Mr. Brodny, how the dialogue with my dead friend continues. I mean how difficult—nay, impossible—it is for me to eliminate him from my thinking (so that in the end, you step up to take his place). Which, however, leads—on my part—to an unintentional, yet unavoidable, unbridled hybrid proliferation of everything I would like to narrate. Indeed, as you will hear, this was the dilemma of my book, which, thanks to an enlightening idea that occurred to me a few days ago on the road from Reims to Paris, was to become its theme. (After all, writing always means making virtues of necessity.)

  For example, I just cannot do without Schwab when, as living proof of my (and Professor Leblanc’s) views on the relationship between a people (as form) and individual character, I cite the handsome Pole, whom S., for some enigmatic reason, so violently hated (I surmise homoerotic impulses at the sight of the fellow’s dreadfully muscular arms).

  I am talking about the man who plays night clerk in this lousy hotel—he’s probably perched down there now, at his desk, in front of the switchboard in the Rembrandtian light-space-darkness (a well-turned phrase devised especially for Schwab, which together with my superficial pretense to cultivation in describing such a trivial object would have been a tasty morsel of annoyance for him!), perched there in the meagerly shaded beam of the tiny night lamp, so deeply absorbed in one of his idiotic detective pulps that he does not hear the telephone . . .

  well, this outstanding male, who looks like a holy dragon killer on a counterfeit icon—I mean, he’s much too handsome, much too lewdly holy, with his egg-shaped face beyolked by archangel-golden curls, with black almond eyes and a straw whisk mustache (plus his ever-bared butcher arms)—this hormone-flaunting popinjay, I tell you, has obviously changed since he became a French citizen. You see, he wasn’t naturalized during Schwab’s lifetime (i.e., before five years ago). Back then, he was stateless, like me, but no one could doubt that he felt Polish, was Polish, and would always remain Polish—whatever that might do to a person. It was awe-inspiring. When he took my passport upon my first arrival here, he scrutinized the dubious document (“Alien’s Passport of the Federal Republic of Germany. . . The bearer of this passport does not possess German citizenship”), then scrutinized me with undisguised disapproval (as though I had neglected to wipe my shoes on the mat when entering), and said insolently, “En voici un autre!”—as if he had had enough of this sort. And it was only upon my venomous question “Quelque chose ne va pas?” that he explained himself: “Vous êtes apatride.”

  “What’s his problem?” asked Schwab, who had come with me from his hotel on the Left Bank (he was his old self again, of course, namely drunk, and held his head, slack mouth half open, so far back that the eyelids had tilted over his carp-gaze behind the thick glasses, like the lids on a baby doll placed on its back; he looked as if he were asleep standing; nobody would have guessed that he was listening to my dialogue with the archangel by the key hooks).

  “He’s delighted that I’m stateless. ‘Apatride,’ it’s called in French,” I said. “He probably thinks it’s something mythological. A race that devours its children.”

  “Ce n’est pas commode,” said the mustachioed angel-head over the rower’s thorax. “D’ailleurs, je le suis aussi, moi . . .”

  “What’s that dialect he’s speaking?” asked Schwab, his head raised toward the ceiling, like a blind seer.

  “Not a dialect, an accent. Some Slavic snail’s dish of labials and sibilants.” “Vous êtes polonais d’origine?” I asked the holy athlete.

  “Oui, monsieur!” he said, growing a foot taller: male beauty from a pulp romance, the far too short sleeves of his cotton T-shirt (Americans, as you ought to know, J. G., wear this as an undershirt) constricting his muscle-packed arms.

  “There you have it,” I said to Schwab. “Shove a national air pump up a man’s asshole and see how it puffs out his chest. Enviable, eh? At least one thing is certain.”

  “Yes,” said Schwab up to the ceiling (he was already having a hard time speaking). “The self-certainty of the stupid.”

  •

  But it’s really not so simple, I think. The issues require our careful attention. For instance (I still see this anthropologically, in terms of a people as a form), the relationship between aggression and form. Take the handsome Pole. Having ceased to be a Pole and become a French citizen (thus arriving in the refuse heap of the nationalized non-French, all those bicots and pieds noirs and so forth), he no longer swells up half so awe-inspiringly. Something gave him a fine pinprick; he no longer holds air. The perfect egg-shape of his apostle’s head has become an angel hair-framed zero with a yellow mustache—a nothing, a child’s drawing on a clouded windowpane; you can wipe it away with your hand. Honestly, I believe I could beat the hell out of him now. I could punch him straight in the mustachioed egg, un direct en pleine gueule, without having to fear his butcher-arms.

  What’s happened to him? He’s lost his form and with it his self-assurance. Yet not his stupidity. Has he grown smarter as a Frenchman? Or by doubting whether he is really French and not still Polish? Are we, Yankel G. Brodny (à propos, what does the G stand for? George? Gilbert? Ganef? or ultimately even Goy?), are you and I so unpleasantly smart because we are nothing and everything, because our heads hum with doubts as to what we truly are and where we belong? Have we in the course of one lifetime achieved something that took Signor Lombroso at least two generations to reach—genius (and madness)—by migrating and settling in a new environment? How is it in America, where such migrations are the rule? A people that originated with immigrants? Madness galore; and where is genius?. . .

  But I’m already playing the Roman candle again, as Schwab ironically put it. I’m pulling your leg, sir. Still and all, you have to admit, it’s an extraordinarily piquant theme: the sublime interrelationship between stupidity and form. The interrelationship between stupidity and self-certainty is far too obvious.

  There’s nothing interesting in the question of whether stupidity grants one certainty, but rather in its converse: does certainty make you stupid? (Is French self-certainty a sign that French intelligence is biologically a form of stupidity? The seal of a lethal factor?) And what about religious certainty? The assurance of a spiritual vanishing point that keeps the chaotic world in a manageable perspective? Or an intuitive certainty, a turn toward the feminine, as it were—female self-certainty, I’d say, is a form of intelligence more safe and secure in the lap of Mother Nature, more in harmony, in a sort of clinch with this dangerous lady. Madame, for example: the boss and owner of this hotel, the handsome Pole’s employer.

  9

  Even while Schwab was alive, Madame played a key role in my reflections: the Platonic ideal of Frenchness, the image incarnate of the French Idea. Accordingly, Madame’s self-certainty—for she is French in this especially—also has flagrantly physical causes: Madame was a beauty queen, Miss Nice of 1939, clearly a vintage that ages well.

  Had I, dear Yankel Gilbert, earmarked you for the privilege of seeing Madame à poil, such as was granted Schwab and myself on one of those days five years ago—Oh, not amorously in a merry threesome, alas, but only with an indiscreet glimpse from an open window across a rather narrow airshaft into another window that likewise happened to be open. In the room beyond, Madame was stretching in front of the mirror in the wardrobe door, surveying her gorgeous nudity—oh, God! She too, I grant you, seemed to find the sight satisfying. She threw out her chest—and man, what a chest! Keeping her head high, with her henna-hair monster (known as a boudin hereabouts) at the back of her neck, and casting a proud look over her splendidly round shoulder at herself in the mirror, she propped her hand on her tightened waist over her plump behind—true bliss, that behind: her torso with its twin bounty of breasts fit into her hips like a wedge in a heart-shaped socle (Brancusi, Modigliani, art deco galore). And then did a tango step with a half twist in the mirror . . . then turned toward us full face—man!—and saw us, saw us in the window facing hers, saw us drooling, gasping, our eye
s leaden-gray with lust, les deux chleux, the prematurely senile men watching Susannah bathing (I adapted the scene for one of my best movie scripts) . . . She fled from our field of vision and, invisible now and quite explicitly disgruntled, furiously slammed her window shut . . . I tell you, had I, in creative generosity, granted you too this feast for the eyes (but that wouldn’t do: even we must obey certain laws), you would understand what I mean by the incarnation of the French Idea. This peony plumpness, this stretching sumptuousness—“as slim as a scepter and as mighty as a throne”—that’s what their cathedrals are like: the black-haired aristocrat of Amiens, the ripe blond beauty of Madame de Chartres, the redhead of Reims with the jewels on her white skin, the arrogant patrician of Bourges, the incomparably elegant grace of the brunette of Coutances, the apple freshness of the Norman in a peasant girl’s costume, the nixie Honfleur . . . and that’s what their women are like: artworks with which a nation pays tribute to itself, in Delacroix, Ingres, Renoir, Maillol. And in Madame’s case this was of special ripeness, man! Even rounder, even plumper, even tastier—plus the hard lithographic colors of Toulouse-Lautrec. You, being a connoisseur of women (I’ve pegged you), must know what I’m talking about: “Vecchia gallina fa buon brodo,” say your friends the witty Tuscans. Madonna mia santa, che paio di poppe! Does the handsome Pole get to play with them after hours? In German you could make a pun of it: Pole Poppenspeeler—who’s that by, anyway? Theodor Storm, yes indeed. Nobody reads him anymore. Schwab—yes, Schwab loved Storm. Reread him regularly. Of course, he also loved Delacroix, Ingres, Renoir, Maillol, and all that crowd. A fount of culture—Schwab, I mean. An alcoholic too, alas. But the two often go hand in hand: a disturbed ego and an artistic sensibility. What do you think? Is he finally self-certain, my brother Schwab? Certain of himself in a definitive blissful state of stupidity, in a triumphal oneupmanship, over there, or up there—somewhere in the icy blue of the sky, in his Godly Fatherland, never to be lost again? . . .