Abel and Cain

by Gregor von Rezzori

  The eggs of the parasitic ichneumon wasp, Mr. Brodny, never become butterflies; they are placed in caterpillars which, in turn, nurture the hope of becoming butterflies. The evil guests eat up their hosts from the inside; no beautiful metamorphosis ever comes about. All that remains is an empty shell into which (as into Uncle Helmuth’s mediums when they stepped out in a trance) an astral being, freely floating in the beyond, can take up residence and materialize at will. Should your kind interest in me go so far that you muster enough patience to skim through the papers I am sending you with this (far too lengthy, far too prolix—forgive me) epistle, then you will find the faithful notation of such an occurrence.

  Any utilization for book dealers—as the first glance will reveal—is, to be sure, out of the question. The three folders, A, B, C, contain dismally fragmentary material. Needless to say, you have long since divined that these fragments are pieces, patches, sketches, notes for my book (the masterpiece of the era, right? the lifework of a potential Nobel laureate). May I take the liberty of leaving them with you as a legacy, not with a thought to any possible publication but as reparation for my regrettably poor behavior chez Calvet—

  and with the hope that you may find someone to tell you the story in three sentences.

  A

  You must realize that writing is one of the most lamentable roads, leading to anything and everything.

  —ANDRÉ BRETON, First Manifesto of Surrealism

  The limits of my language stand for the limits of my world.

  —LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN, Notebooks, 1914–1916

  Why did I write? What sin to me unknown

  Dipp’d me in ink? My parents’ or my own?

  —ALEXANDER POPE, Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot

  Fear is a female faint in which freedom loses consciousness; speaking psychologically, the Fall of Man always takes place in a faint.

  —SØREN KIERKEGAARD, Fear and Trembling

  I sort through my papers with a restlessness that nests deeper, closer to the breeding grounds of fear than the fidgety impatience I’ve retained from my damned formative years in Vienna, a restlessness like a nervous tic, the involuntary closing of an eyelid or the annoyingly recurring, dribbling twitch of a tiny muscle in a nostril, as if a tiny alarm clock there were ringing at unpredictable intervals. Those were the “years of my deepest humiliation.” At least that’s what I used to call them when I told my friend S. about them, quoting a once current phrase of Hitler’s—ironically, of course, but without any joy. Even today I see that time, in which those charged with raising me discharged their duties upon me like acts of revenge, trying to make me “get my head out of the clouds,” to teach me to “take life seriously,” as an attack (albeit one presumably undertaken with the best of intentions) on everything bright and true in my being (see notes on Cousin Wolfgang: my two-pronged relationship with him, my feelings of guilt towards him—and not just after his death).

  •

  It is night. The eighth since I have locked myself in this room. Eight nights and a goodly portion of the days (during which I prefer to get some sleep; the nights are quieter) I have spent rummaging through my papers. These are the notes for my book (though not all, sadly; I feel the absence of some with such agitation that I break into a sweat). What is here is chaos: countless beginnings, chapters worked out or drafts of outlines, fragments, the remnants of discarded drafts, attempts, outlines, studies, essays, ideas, thoughts—in short, all that piles up over nineteen years of, alas, all too frequently interrupted—but always with manic persistence recommenced—labor on a book: two suitcases and a few large cardboard boxes full of wastepaper, from memo pad paper with microscopic scrawls to sheets of A4 paper with lines of text crisscrossing them like saber strokes; from newspaper clippings to book pages filled with handwritten glosses on the margins of the printed text (there’s even a beer coaster among them, a few yellowed comments written on it that today are wholly detached from any conceivable context and thus unintelligible).

  •

  This is not the first time I’ve undertaken such a sifting. I’d say it occurs with periodic regularity. Whenever I delude myself into thinking I might yield to the hope that I could finally find enough time, concentration, leisure (or rather: freedom from pressing necessities) to produce something conclusive and whole out of this welter of eruptively hurled-out literary production, the compulsion to create order overcomes me. Needless to say that each time I have had occasion to lament how thoroughly I had acted in prior cullings. In the past I have destroyed the irreplaceable—in all likelihood this time as well. And not once have I managed to advance the new conception, for whose sake I so horribly mangled the old one, far enough that my manuscript found a clearly defined form.

  Not this time either. Although this last attempt (and failure) was undertaken with a clearer notion than ever before, and, unlike the previous ones, was not stymied by some unforeseen and unavoidable obstacle. What prevented achievement was something completely unforeseen, something that lay not in the thing itself, in the conception of the book or in my shortcomings as its author. It came from outside (I emphasize this word in order to indicate that I mean something that in fact came from outside normal reality: see the notes on Uncle Helmuth’s spiritualist circles; also Gaia’s mother—in Folder C).

  Its way was prepared in me by a state of unusual exaltation, likely as a result of my heightened state of expectation. Eight days (and nights) ago I set to working in a state of excitement such as had overcome me before now only in the most humiliating moments of love. (The same foolishly intensified existential awareness; the same heedless fixation: nothing matters anymore that isn’t connected to this one, this only true, this all-excluding love: the same immediate presentness.) Incidentally, en route here, in Reims, where I had spent the night, I had dreamed my dream.

  It is an evil dream, which has haunted me for several years. Nineteen years, to be exact. Not regularly, of course, but at various short and long intervals. I can never figure out what triggers it. This time too there was no apparent cause. It ambushed me like a highwayman. (The element of surprise is its most effective feature.)

  The dream was in most of its features the same as always. I commit my murder for no other reason than a vile cover-up. Covering up some shameful crime that would come to light if I didn’t murder the old cleaning woman. Like a coward, I kill this lamentable creature of mislived life—mistreated, humiliated humanity, foul flesh and rags—in the most brutal way. And as I go to bury the corpse, I realize with increasing certainty that nothing can help me, that I have murdered in vain and that I will be found out—worse, I will be found out along with the deeply disgraceful reason for my committing such a dreadful crime . . .

  As usual, this dream haunted me in the daytime, too—an insidious pursuer that follows me step by step and disappears around corners when I try to confront it. For, as usual, everything I did during those days was aimed at luring out the terror of the night in me.

  An unclean game. In the end it takes on a nearly erotic aspect (our friend Scherping would find it blissful). But I do not play it for pleasure. It inveigles and hoaxes me with the promise that I’m on the verge of some kind of revelation. The paralyzing horror at my deed has a moment of utmost intensity—in the moment in which I awake. I think I recognize in it something that is at the core of my being, or at least the key to it—and which I lose by waking up.

  •

  This goes on for a few days. I act as if nothing had happened, go about my customary business. I see this person, speak to that one, settle my accounts with yesterday and make my plans for tomorrow. But secretly I wait for the terror of my dream to ambush me again.

  For it is always near—and yet I can never conjure it up. If I think of it, it fades away. If, seemingly unconcerned, I busy myself with something different, it skulks after me. If I glance around (so to speak), then the street is empty. . . But I sense it hiding somewhere behind me. It lies in wait for me, as I for it. Only it is inc
omparably more skillful, more nimble, more agile. At times, I feel the horror very close. The expectation that it will assault me again makes my knees go weak and the hair stand up on the back of my neck. But I am too impatient, I anticipate its desire. Even before the blow occurs—the terrible blow with which it might enter me and descend to the refuse heaps of consciousness in which the key to myself is lost—I already want to relish the rending that would pass through me if finally I were to lay hands on it—

  And thus, everything dissolves into nothing again—as in awakening. There it was, the massive rending—but before I could see what was opening with it, I lost its pain. I can still feel its far-off echo. This too vanishes.

  •

  Should I then try to summon up the individual events of my dream, it is to find it completely empty. What had been image has become verbal. I can say in words: that I have dreamed this or that—but it has lost all reality. My attempt to grasp it has robbed it of its magic. There I stand, empty-handed, a swindled swindler.

  I then try to deceive myself with all sorts of childish maneuvers. I fake guilelessness. I pretend to focus my interest on something else, something peripheral, innocuous—for instance, I count up the women I have slept with in any seven fat or lean years—

  for even our wealth of amorous adventures (as shown by the Leporello lists we secretly kept up in triumph and humiliation) is not due to skill in eroticis but occurs or fails as naturally as good or bad harvests (of course, the soil must be conscientiously tilled). And just as our fate, according to the mood or grace of the weather and the ripening, sometimes brings a shortage and other times leads us to abundance, and perhaps from prosperity soon back again to meagerness, so too we are granted a fixed quota of erotic success, inscribed in us, readable in our faces, so to speak, which, with its clear benchmark, ensures that it is neither exceeded nor unfulfilled. And you cannot trump it with any effort or skill, with any physical, much less mental, quality or quantity. Neither the beguiling eloquence of Cyrano de Bergerac will help you nor his long nose (or whatever other lengths or sizes can be brought to bear), because Nature has created poor and rich in every respect—and hence in this respect too . . .

  Such are the things I busy myself with and write down, and thus end up among my papers again; that is, lying in wait for myself

  and yet I know that I cannot escape my destiny; I am pressured by time: I’ll soon be fifty, I could be dead tomorrow, and I haven’t done my work! Here’s my book, proliferating before my very eyes, in horrible hybrid cell growth, turning into a monstrosity—hence, I yearn for the dreadful, pleasurable recognition to fall upon me just once more, one single and lucid last time, the recognition with which (albeit for only a fleeting moment) I can be certain that it is true, that old nightmare: that I have in fact murdered, shamefully and for no other reason than to conceal some baseness deeply rooted in me—

  but when? how? where? and whom? That’s what I can’t grasp. I’ve repressed it.

  Even without consulting Dr. Sigmund Freud, I realized long ago that my forgetfulness suggests disreputable sediment in the dark depths of my soul, and I wisely make a point of not trying to fish it out with what that great son of the literary nineteenth century recommends as a fishing rod: the biographical. My horror, which I fear to the point of lust and then desire again, is of the sort that cannot be pursued back to my parents’ bedroom. It springs from the sheer terror of existence itself. Such a momentary revelation of the totally unknown that lies behind and beyond all that can be known is what the primitive man calls GOD.

  •

  How fine I’d have it if it were just a matter of biography (something like the early experiences of Freud’s Wolf-Man). A street ditty in a movie. Perfect pap for my piglets. The stuff writes itself, in contemporary style, which, in its love of atmosphere—oozing quotations of style—betrays its attraction to the past:

  POSTER

  (in psychedelically dynamized Jugendstil graphics: the linear flow narrowing to a cascade, the spectrum sprouting teeth, a buzz saw of nerves—rose-madder, sulfur-yellow, leek-green, violet . . . with interspersed boutique heraldry: two male hands, hacked off at the gentlemanly cuffs, with forefingers stretching like pistol barrels, point from either side at the name)

  ARISTIDES

  Chief Mechanic for the Western Union Tunnel of Love

  (collage: model of an early locomotive from pioneer days, its cathedral-bell smokestack sending up as a cloud of steam a distilling flask with alchemical stuff in it—toads, snakes, embryos, homunculi; in the engineer’s cab, his booted foot on a female body with a bald head, General Custer with a drawn sword, his left hand waving a fresh scalp)

  invites you

  on a

  TRIP TO HADES

  into the

  SPIRITUAL INNARDS

  of the

  CONSUMER SOCIETY TROGLODYTES

  (newspaper advertisement praises a method for treating clubfeet and ears that stick out; likewise nose-shapers, body-hair removers, wart, blackhead, and goiter remedies)

  Idea:

  !A MIDDLE-AGED MAN COMES TO REALIZE

  THAT HE IS REPRESSING GUILT!

  God grant that I could come up with such a thing: I could sell it instantly to my piglets.

  the peppy little producers, co-producers, copro-producers who teem and crowd wherever the milk of financial assistance, government grants, and development prizes pours from the overlapping folds of showbiz and the culture industry:

  the bright, alert magician’s apprentices, soon outstripping the great film sorcerers—and the hatchlings of the movie business, living it up on expense accounts; rosily fattening on petits fours, foie gras, crab claws, slices of Nova Scotia, caviar dollops at the press conference buffets (with champagne, of course!), their tiny eyes sated and wearied by young starlet flesh—

  yet physically in top shape—supremely fit, swept along by the process of beauty-construction in the studio and location wardrobes—groomed and spruced up, their little fingernails pared, filed, and polished between the motherly breasts of staff manicurists, their cheek skin smoothed and salved by epidermically solicitous makeup men, their intervertebral disks loosened and their bodies shaken aright by studio chiropractors, kneaded and massaged to firm up their tissue by junior-star gym teachers, their blood circulation refreshed in stars’ genuine Finnish saunas in the bungalows of leading men, their flesh treated to ultraviolet rays even in the winter months and then tanned to a crisp by the spring sun over the beach promenades of Mediterranean festival settings—

  men of the world, of course: well traveled, as they go about preparing big unrealizable projects, and thus surefooted on the parquet floors of Hilton hotel banquet rooms—

  hence mentally too at the highest attainable peak: shrewd, crafty, brazen, hard-boiled—and infernally clever at wielding the magic wand that every moviemaker carries in his old kit bag and that opens wide all doors, hearts, female legs—yes, even bank accounts:

  so that over and over again by the fictions of uncovered checks and uncashed allowances they manage to keep shooting off a firework of verisimilitude, of adventurously colorful and dynamic, lightly pulsating life; and with swindling promises and dishonest assurances they determine destinies (and not even necessarily for the worse) without ever being troubled by the law: for they do nothing but add more and more possibilities to the everlasting game of the exchange of fiction and reality . . .

  •

  For two decades now, I have been their partner in this game, their stooge and assistant, their officious servant and loyal stable boy. I know them and their keen instincts. I know how eagerly their little ears perk up to the whisper of movie ideas, wriggle with every flash and trash therein; and I know that this particular thought-trash would most blissfully tickle their little piglet ears.

  It would be best to funnel it in through the telephone receiver early in the morning.

  Special priority call, Paris–Munich: Hello? Intercosmic Art Films? Hi there. May I spe
ak to Herr Wohlfahrt.—Ah, it’s you! I didn’t recognize your voice.—What? All night? Who with? hahaha!—Who’d’ve guessed!—What? What project? Man, you’re obsessed! But listen, I’ve got a new one for you. No, not a package, for now. But it would be a piece of cake making one out of it.—Anyway, that’ll be your problem.—What? Imagine, well just let it . . . by the way, you really put one over on me with the last contract.—You certainly did! But, okay, that’s water under the bridge. Listen: just picture it, right?—so, a middle-aged man—okay?—let’s say early to midforties, close to fifty—so precisely the generation that’s now stepping up to the plate.—What?—That’s right, our generation, right on the nose. It’d be ridiculous if it weren’t, right? Anyway, a man in his best years, something for the female audience, okay?—No, I really mean it. Something a woman can identify with. Her guy, right? Postwar reconstruction man, head of the family, divorced, with a kid and so on, irreproachable life so far, right? Well, one fine day, let’s say on a business trip abroad—quite by chance, you see, this man suddenly comes to realize HE IS REPRESSING GUILT! He has COMMITTED MURDER AND KNOWS IT! But he doesn’t know who the victim was. Or how it happened. And—Ne coupez-pas, mademoiselle! Ah, merde!!—Hello.—Intercosmic.—Hello! . . . ah, there you are. Did you get it all? Well: HE NO LONGER KNOWS when and how and where. Suspenseful, right? But that’s only the beginning. I mean, the opening situation.—What? No, no! You know me. I don’t like flashbacks either. You know that. No way! Anyhow, that’s just the basic idea. Now, the point is: do you want the rest of it to be a genuine German problem film?—What?—Well, so who cares? No, no, don’t just wave it off as old hat. The times are changing again. Back in 1958 I wrote down something that says: