Abel and Cain

by Gregor von Rezzori

  But this is quite uninteresting. Back to Madame—the more edifying subject, God knows! Madame is, for me, France, even as France, for me, preserves the stylistic essence of the lost half of my life: erotically determined by the anima of the ripe woman. Don’t be led astray by the ephebes of the fashion magazines. Those are ephemeral phenomena, fashions, reflections of the era. In its stony roots, France is still Motherland. A tiny Oedipal land of milk and honey, especially in Mama’s severity. . . And now I want to tell you something that should make your eyes go round with amazement like Schwab’s when I nattered on to him about my adventures hereabouts. So just listen closely now:

  That Madame is of sovereign intelligence is something I need not emphasize: Madame is French. She displays this in the ineffably scornful hardness with which she keeps this crummy joint afloat. (Madame’s établissement, called Hôtel Épicure without false modesty, is frequented, thanks to its half-peripheral, half-central location, by a very special kind of human refuse, a bourgeoisie of the marooned, so to speak, who have found a status of their own and even something like a special dignity in being failures, losers, hopeless beginners from the start. And they jealously preserve that status and dignity. Perhaps you know this genre from the petit bourgeois neighborhoods of Warsaw or Budapest. Professions like that of a traveling salesman in colored fountain pens for first-graders; retired tax officials who become provincial tax advisers; unemployed theatrical hairdressers; an Algerian silversmith’s family, eight or nine generations altogether, with a passion for sunflower seeds; on occasion a freestyle-wrestling manager with his warriors, “Haarmin Vichtonen the Finnish World Champion,” “Costa Popovitch the Bulgarian Buffalo”; now and then, one of the old whores who have wafted around the place des Ternes like autumn leaves and whose ultimate lure is despair.)

  Madame applies to everyone the cold neutrality of that ironclad law which says there’s nothing free in life except death—and even death costs you your life. In pecuniary matters, Madame’s severity has something sacerdotal about it. She is absolutely unyielding with dilatory debtors (including me, and I’ve managed to get credit at German post offices!) even if the poor devil, begging in vain for just a little more time, is losing his last chance for the business deal that will save him, or the toothless prostitute is losing her last client.

  But then it may happen that Madame unexpectedly issues a merciful verdict, maintaining a desperate person in his desperation, pickling and preserving him in his hopelessness—as if to show the others, who believe they might escape their fate, that their fate is ineluctable. And in a miraculous way, these latter, floating belly-up and wriggling only every now and again, reflexively, are aroused by Madame’s hardness to writhing life—like a pailful of whitefish that you dump back into the creek because they’re not worth frying. They get together and bitch. Among Frenchmen, this is an act of communion—the only one they have left. There’s no other way for them to find human contact with one another. By bitching, they fuse into a community, a community of select quality: Frenchmen.

  This makes Madame’s établissement an out-and-out national shrine. Every day, a handful of her clients get together and bitch in the furiously chopped-up cackling of French éloquence, in rising and falling and again rising and falling chains of words, tinkling without start or stop, like Czerny piano exercises. They bitch about Madame and about her inhuman unyieldingness, her shameless bamboozling and penny-pinching. Naturally, they also bitch about the defects of the hotel, the lousy beds and the rarely changed linen, the lack of service; aside from the night clerk, who never hears the telephone, there are a few cleaning women, mild loonies or alumnae of penal or drying-out institutions, who show up in the morning to do something or other with brooms, pails, and mops: that’s the whole staff. This frightful French eloquence sweeps them up in its wake. Madame’s clients even bitch at the disturbance caused by these more illusory than effective cleaning measures. They bitch at the universal mismanagement, politics, the world situation, existence, creation, God the Creator, and His Only Begotten Son, little Jésu. And lo and behold, their words visibly blossom. They want to say what they have to say in a better manner, and they always do say it better and better. Like strings of pearls their sentences intertwine and intertwist into arabesques, from which leaves break out and buds open up in resplendent, sensual fullness. The glory of language proliferates among them, a glassy rosebush, enclasping and fettering them, beguiling and bewitching them with its fragrance. They themselves grow into it, become part of it, like the human figures in the ensnarled illuminated initials in a medieval Bible: iterated and reiterated, their heads peep out of the rosebush’s tangles, and its blossoms spring out of their mouths. And each of these blossoms is ennobled by literary usage, has at some point flowed into a sublime pen, has been purged by it, polished and artfully mounted to be presented to the Nation as a jewel for its treasury.

  The speakers sound as if they know this and are proudly aware that they are quoting and whom they are quoting, and as if they are honoring the quoted by quoting him. Thereby and therewith, they themselves become taller, tauter, more dignified—oui, on rouspète, mais on rouspète sur un niveau très élevé . . .Their bitching has long since lost the hatefulness of anything personal. It sovereignly detaches itself, has turned into pure form, into Truth and Art. And thereby and therewith, they too, the bitchers, detach themselves from one another, become more and more impersonal, more and more formal, more and more stylized, more and more French.

  There they stand, clustered in Callot grouplets on the dark landings or in the narrow, shabby stairwell corridors of the Hôtel Épicure, a third-class hostel for the homeless in one of those bog-like, stagnating corners of the city, whose maelstrom dumps out its slops here: a handful of castaways and failures, washed out by weather and life, wearing the rags of long-past prosperity, which was probably never theirs, the tatters of long-past fashions, hung with the improvised and converted implements of solitary existence, the seat-cane umbrellas, thermoses, the multifarious pouches and pockets: each man a Robinson Crusoe in the frightful desolation of the metropolis, Paris, isle of the marooned . . . For a few minutes, language has broken open the crusts of their isolation. They can speak with one another, communicate with one another. And now, this same language, in its refinement and perfection, is tearing them away from one another, pulling them apart in the same powerful flight that brought them together: the plunge and upswing of two hyperbolas arching toward, and then away from, one another.

  And yet, among these castaways into, and castoffs from, life, something wonderful has happened—something that solidifies, edifies, and elevates them. The riffraff have become Frenchmen, self-certain children of the Nation until old age, worthily wrapped in the bunting of cant, swathed in it like mummies, isolated to a compulsively neurotic degree, stiff and proud. Proud of forming, along with millions of other isolated beings, the collective that bears the sublime name of La Nation Française and that, in an abstract yet effective way, gives their individual existence a dimension in which it is invulnerable, ordered, tested, and gloriously transfigured for all time, as pitiful as it may be in and of itself. Each individual is a choice blue-white-andred morsel in the aspic of their National Culture (an image that would not have failed to arouse an involuntary snort from Schwab).

  •

  Like the crest of a municipal coat of arms—Marianne’s Phrygian cap—Madame’s burning red boudin hovers above all this. Below, in the white field: the blue shadows of her eyelids and the harsh lipstick of her Toulouse-Lautrec mouth. Man! . . .

  Schwab was the first to pay his respects to the high rank of her intellect; this, in recognition of her keen discernment that he was a man of quality, even though the two of them never managed to exchange a word beyond a conventional “Bonjour, madame” and an icy “Bonjour, m’sieur” (the rest of Schwab’s French vocabulary, including the singing of “Allongs angfanz della patrieyeh,” never found employment).

  To be sure, he had every rea
son for thankful wonder at how sovereignly Madame ignored his drunkenness. Which is to say: she understood it. Once, after accompanying me here, when we were about to say good-bye at the entrance, he slipped out of my energetically supportive hand. Through the glass panes, he had spied the rubber tree in the vestibule and imagined he was inside and the plant outside. So he splintered through the door and staggered toward the tub unbuttoning his fly. Whereupon Madame said a brief word to the handsome Pole, who came from behind the desk, grabbed a chair, and shoved it (to my great surprise; I was just about to come to Schwab’s defense) into the hollows at the back of S.’s knees. When S. crashed down on the chair, the Pole swiftly left, then returned with a bottle of calvados and a glass, which he filled and handed to S. Incidentally, Schwab’s reaction was no less sensitive. He did not with gross familiarity raise a toast to Madame, as any other drunkard would have done. No, indeed. Schwab tipped the glass very elegantly and skillfully over his projecting lower lip, handed it back to the handsome Pole, rose to his feet, peered around, looked into the corner of the vestibule, spotted a broom placed there by the charwomen in preparation for the morning cleanup (it was well after midnight), grabbed the broom, and presented it to Madame, as he had learned to do in the army—ah! after a fashion, though not much of one, the hopeless Pfc. Dogface, four-eyes, the screwed-up, fucked-up intellectual—presented the broom, skewily, awkwardly, touchingly, and managed to blurt out, “Madame . . . le boche . . . présente les armes . . . à vous . . .” Sheer agony was glazed in his eyes.

  •

  I do not expect you to show emotion, Jacob G. I mention this minor incident simply to give you as graphic a picture as possible of Madame. Rhetoric—especially national rhetoric!—creates reality, after all, creates its own flesh, which in turn creates its own mind. As for myself, I could prolong the list of unusual and intelligent things that Madame did in these years, starting with her surprising sympathy for Dawn, for the progressive abstraction afflicting the Daughter of the American Revolution, and the resolute way she took the soon batty girl into her maternal custody and ultimately into her arch-feminine, anti-male protection against me. (“But she must know that I’m ready to do anything for Dawn,” I complained. And Schwab replied, “Yes. That’s just it.” “What?” I asked, obtusely. And S., “You’re playing Ariosto. You’re leading her into the Valley of the Moon, where they keep the time that is wasted in dreams. Madame realizes it. And that’s what she wants to shield Dawn from.”) But the list of Madame’s wise and wonderful deeds would be incomplete if I neglected to mention that every so often, even now, she leaves her window open—of course, without standing naked at her mirror, but for occasional little glimpses of her physical merits all the same. As though she knew what delicious morsels are prepared from such inspirations in a writer’s alchemical kitchen.

  Back then, after our ignominious exposure as juicy voyeurs, leaden with lust for her gorgeous nakedness, Madame outdid herself and all expectations of her: like Bonaparte she crowned herself with her own hands . . .

  I am speaking about her majestic assurance the next day, when returning our artificially unselfconscious salutes. Schwab had come over from the Left Bank to pick me up. As he came through the door, I arrived at the bottom of the stairs in the vestibule. Madame, as usual, was enthroned behind the desk, in front of the key hooks. (There is, as I have said, no clerk during the day; when the handsome Pole is off in some corner snoring out his fatigue after performing his multifarious duties, Madame receives and bullies her guests herself.) Both Schwab and I said, “Bonjour, madame!” at about the same time, and she replied with her icy “Bonjour, m’sieurs!” watching as we greeted one another. Her gaze was so clear and forthright that we realized she knew what made us boyishly self-conscious and, under her basilisk eyes, almost embarrassed. Namely, that the sight of her yesterday, her female body eavesdropped upon and lecherously felt and fingered by our desire and secretly enjoyed, had been an erotic catalyst, causing the essential core to emerge from the delicate saturated state of the friendship between S. and myself. As though in our shared lust for her we had in an abstract way consummated our wedding.

  10

  You shouldn’t find anything strange, Mr. America, in my confessing these intimate events to you. The consensus, I know, is that Anglo-Saxons are easy to shock in erotic matters. The least protrusion of intimacy will elicit embarrassment—profound reddening of the face and rapid blinking of the eyes. But let me tell you this is true only of the social strata my paternal friend and patron John referred to as the “bloody fucking middle classes.” Strata less caught up in their own shittiness appreciate candor (désinvolture, which Schwab used to talk about so much; tell me your ideals and I’ll tell you what you’re lacking).

  John (later Sir John, after displaying a great deal of ambivalence at the Nuremberg trials and then being cold-storaged as His Britannic Majesty’s ambassador in Manila, where he is probably still stranded today, God rest his soul! . . . but at that time, in our Nuremberg days, and before that in Vienna, simply the Right Honourable John William Robert Derek Russell Quincey Fogg)—well, John gave me an impressive object lesson in elegant unabashment. In regard to his deceased spouse Stella, for instance, with whom I, at nineteen, had maintained amorous relations, which I strove to conceal from him at any price, he expressed himself as follows: “An excellent poke, indeed, a most exquisite fuck—didn’t you think so? Poor girl, what a shame she had to die so soon—though she too would today be fairly close to her forties. And you know, they don’t age very well, those Bedouin Jewesses; they become skinny and grow mustaches—oh come on, you wouldn’t roll her as eagerly now as you did back then, would you?”

  Probably not. Though I had sworn back then I would always do it with her until the last breath I drew, with her alone, and never, no never, with anyone else. Stella was the first of my great, final, only, real and true loves, the latest for the moment having been Gaia, the black Princess Jahovary. To complete the list: Christa, my wife for a time; Dawn, the dervish; before, afterwards, and again and again in between: Nadine, the international star . . .

  But Stella was actually more, was different, was more powerful, more divinely generous than any other woman after her. Christa, for instance (an experiment with inadequate means on an unsuitable object, to put it in legalese; to be a legitimate wife in an unconstrained legal position was ultimately the only demand she made on me). Or later, Dawn (likewise, an enterprise doomed from the start, albeit with more poetic, more hazardous, more insane, quixotic traits). Yes, even Gaia (sumptuous fulfillment unto death). And in between, before Dawn even, long before Gaia, and since then over and over again in almost dipsomaniacal repetition, Nadine: when I’m totally confused, estranged from myself, tangled up in hopeless movie projects, incapable of taking refuge in my book (the other act of insanity), close to the worst of despairs, apathy, when all my fuses have blown and my pity for her—for myself—becomes so ardent that it kindles a sort of passion in me . . . well, I don’t want to exaggerate; a repeated flash in the pan, as Christa would have put it, and swiftly gone, granted: tout de même . . .

  Stella was reality. She was the day. I wish I could have explained it to John—but what for? Besides, he probably knew anyway. He always knew more (true to the traditions of perfidious Albion) than he admitted or even hinted at. In every way, at every closer look, he was surprisingly denser, richer in dimension, and of course more inscrutable. (My ludicrous feelings of guilt toward him back then! The poignant conflicts with my boyish honor, despite Stella’s semi-amused, semi-annoyed laughter, her impatient shrugging when I persisted . . .“C’est jeune et ça ne sait pas,” Gaia would have said.)

  Needless to say, I also loved him back then, and naturally John knew that too, as he knew everything else. Just as Stella knew that he knew everything and hence this too. It was a game I did not want to join, I was quite simply and foolishly young—and that means barbaric. I did not catch the essence of the situation. As a good philistine, I merely s
aw the scandalous surface: an elegant woman keeping a nineteen-year-old lover with her husband’s sufferance. And since, according to convention, I was the most despicable of the partners, the gigolo, I refused to admit that our unconventional relations were lifted, so to speak, to an elevated moral plane by honest, noble, even passionate feelings. Hence, John was not a cuckold, Stella not Messalina, I not a kept stud but rather the love object of two beautiful souls, an ideal son and thereby a lucky fellow. . .

  And I certainly didn’t see what John and Stella presumably cared about most: style. The neat arrangement, the elegant and civilized behavior that puts such a triangle—forget about the feelings—beyond banality: art deco, lived, loved, lauded . . . Back then, in the lost first half of my life, even such matters had their form.

  To say this to John later, in Nuremberg, where he was preoccupied with his poetic deed of madness in presenting to an astonished world Stella’s death as a sacrifice of love, to make him somehow understand that now I finally knew how delicately we had danced, all the way to the threshold of the Third Reich, in step with the music of a cherished zeitgeist—well, my efforts would have been superfluous if not embarrassing. A characteristic of being German, he used to say, is to emphasize the obvious . . . And besides, how long ago it all was, faded, vanished, buried by the dust of the many, many years we have lived through since then! . . .

  Only one other of my great, uniquely true, and final loves—told here for the sake of completeness—might possibly be compared to my love for Stella, I mean in the wealth of experience, in the grateful bliss with which I felt and practiced and ultimately buried it within myself as an undying memory, as the pretty expression goes. (Incidentally, it was for the longest time the only love without toil or suffering, the only love that poured out of me without being performed, without cerebral or—if you will—psychoanalytic help, without the Sisyphean labor of loving; the only love that flowed from me with the undemanding naturalness of a forest wellspring, watering my spirit as it bloomed.) My bliss lasted for fourteen years (a magic number for me in many ways: two times the evil seven makes a good number). But needless to say I destroyed this love—indeed, out of the need to achieve; out of an industrious desire to love.