Abel and Cain

by Gregor von Rezzori

  Highway rest stop near Karlsruhe. At the next table, they’re overcoming the past: “Oh, you people are always saying Hitler did this wrong and that wrong and so on. But I say: just try to do it yourselves!”

  Slice of life, sir. Highly topical not just in Germany, but overseas too . . . By the way, murder isn’t just a political phenomenon—but as you like! The good thing about this material is that it’s flexible. We can leave it open as far as the distributor is concerned: Scientifically psychological à la Tennessee Williams—what?—Esther’s husband, right—or espionage à la Bond, all kinds of thriller-type stuff. And if all else fails, you can always make it a social satire—No, not a screwball comedy, damn it, a satire, topical, realistic. With a KNOCKOUT part for Nadine . . .

  Okay, agreed. You’ll have the treatment in four weeks. In two languages. German and also French for the worthy Mr. Copro-producer. Do you want it in English too? It makes no difference to me. My kind are as fluent in the main European languages as a grand-hotel clerk. We speak them, write them, sing them in the morning while shaving. At your service, my dear piglets. Naturally, I’ll keep Nadine informed.—What? Of course not. I certainly won’t let her interfere too much. What do you think! We want to get the work done. I mean: complete the project. Okay then. If necessary, I’ll go to bed with her. It won’t satisfy the lady’s need for literary expression, but it’ll calm her down for a while. Anyway, as I was saying, I’ll get back to you in four weeks—

  with empty hands, needless to say (my name guarantees quality and absolute unreliability). With empty hands stretching out, demonstratively, to receive another advance:

  for Nature creates rich and poor in the movie business too. With the vast amount of beauty and talent on offer, the rise of a star, for instance, can always be explained by many factors; but the ultimate reasons are always a very special aptitude and predestination for SUCCESS. Likewise, any reward is left to the workings of an Eros unique to the cinema: either you never get your money or you’re inundated with it like Danaë . . . And this cornucopia shower has nothing to do with quality or punctual delivery. It may be deserved or undeserved, but it’s never hit or miss, like in a game of chance, rather it always favors only the person of means, film-erotically preordained.

  Here too we would have to apply the harsh biblical verse: FOR UNTO EVERY ONE THAT HATH SHALL BE GIVEN, AND HE SHALL HAVE ABUNDANCE, BUT FROM HIM THAT HATH NOT SHALL BE TAKEN EVEN THAT WHICH HE HATH . . .

  Just as for more than two decades I have been fishing in the brackish waters of postwar German film (with little more than the bait of promise and God’s blessing), so would my outstretched hands be filled up again this time too—

  and I would end up right back where I am now.

  •

  For this is precisely my situation. A screenplay is expected of me in eight weeks: a screenplay after a treatment that I delivered six months ago and that since then has been reworked by me and other screen-writers seven and seventy times. Waiting for it are not only my producer piglets, but also (hired by them and ready to start filming) an entire staff in Cannes. Chief among them, in the Negresco hotel, Nadine Carrier, an international star in the waning phase that is transfigured, if not completely lost from sight, by the nimbus of outstanding thespian ability.

  Madame Carrier is already waiting for me here and now, in Paris, at the Hôtel de Crillon. Ready to participate in the treatment. Not only artistically (may the LORD preserve me!) but also personally: with an open Thou-soul striving toward my own self (and, needless to add, with the attendant hospitably open thighs). She’s already been waiting for eight days. That’s how long I’ve been lost to the movie world.

  I’m playing a risky game. Of the eight weeks I’ve got for the treatment, I’m trying to use four for different ends. If nothing else it would mean twenty-eight days of peace and quiet. I’d live in a hotel (expensed, naturally): ideal conditions for a writer. The advance I’ve drawn is enough to cover Christa’s alimony and my son’s monthly allowance (my two most ruthless creditors). The piglets have to leave me in peace, it’s in my contract. It’s only Nadine I have to keep at a distance—both physically and, sadly, emotionally as well. But I’d have twenty-eight whole days and nights for my book! . . .

  •

  —My book—

  That sounds as if I were carrying it within me like Nagel carries one of his: like a divine mission . . .

  as if, in the flood of printer’s ink inundating us, I were chosen to create the maelstrom that could stir up the human race; I, the conscience of our race (as if this race still existed as a race and as if yet another pang of conscience might help it):

  the book that bears witness to man in the second half of the twentieth century and to his heroic effort to save himself from himself:

  —Prometheus as fire captain: using the brittle hose of humanity to put out the fire the spark for which he stole in its, humanity’s, name;

  Daedalus astray in his own labyrinth: shouting warnings to others not to follow him;

  Noah in the deluge of overpopulation: doubting whether he is truly the only righteous man to choose from,

  the tragicomical hero at the end of a civilization, who (in order to carry out his mission with clean hands, hands that violence has not desecrated) has no way out other than literature—

  literature, which has slid below the mark: the feuilleton amidst the mixed news items on the development of the cobalt bomb, the strategic importance of space travel, speculations on the outcome of the Korean conflict, the state of arms negotiations in the Congo and Indochina, the Vietnam War, the failure of disarmament negotiations, the fruitless conclusion of this or that world summit.

  Stephen Dedalus would have had to be a reporter to make the front page. Otherwise, his self-realization as the “conscience of our race” remains a thoroughly private matter.

  •

  My book is a thoroughly private matter. Professor Hertzog (of Hamburg: Schwab’s psychopompous) would say it is the wish-fulfillment of my guilt complex

  —final justification of an existence which isolated itself with nothing but a promise (which referred to nothing but itself): And sundering and sin are cognates. Hence (just as sinfulness contains an obligation to do penance and can escape itself only by willingly accepting its punishment) the arrogance of such an isolation, such a sundering, can be atoned for only with the arduous demonstration that it was justified—

  My book is a promise that I’ve never made in words (not even to Gaia—and she certainly paid enough for it!) and that anyone who’s been blown into the birdcage of my existence and soon back out the other side (lovers within and without the bounds of law; growing and still unconceived sons; well-meaning people of all sorts, chief among them my friend Schwab) thinks he can demand from me like overdue rent. All because, while I never promised it in words, I have presumably pledged it with each of my bizarre actions, with each of my peculiar character traits, each of my far-fetched qualities—in short, with my alienating and rebellious way of being this-way-and-not-like-the-others:

  —afflicted with the most annoying of all birth defects, which arouses no pity like other strokes of a stepmotherly Nature, such as a cleft palate, for instance, or a harelip, or other bizarre deformations and malformations: a hump, a hydrocephalus, all kinds of nervous and mental ailments, cretinism, falling sickness, and the like. No indeed. This is a far more repulsive handicap, which summons an arbitrary hatred against the altogether different, the fundamentally alien:

  THE CAIN’S MARK OF EXISTENTIAL CONSCIOUSNESS

  stamped on those who are condemned to recognize in themselves not just any human being but humankind itself:

  as if the capsule of their individuality had a crack through which the individual leaked out into the teeming of his species, and further out into the swarming of past generations, along the entire family tree to the root ends at the origins of the genus, and then right into the cosmos: so that every experience has an echo from the universe . . .<
br />
  but instead of a human specimen of salient character emerging from such profound depths, all that comes out is an uncertain, unsteady, unsettled seeker, who listens beyond things and cannot accept empirical reality in its givenness and its causality as a complete world, and who keeps countering it with skulking non-conformity, a pigheaded if-and-but, which in an insidious way dislocates and unmoors all that is conventionally established, generally believed and determined through unanimous agreement, until eventually nothing is reliable anymore, and reality knows as many redirections, subterfuges, and loopholes as a lawyer; and thus it is only fair that such a misbegotten troublemaker (if he does not wish to be counted among the dangerous fools and recalcitrant villains and be truly isolated behind bars) must ultimately accomplish something that will turn his stated ideas of interpreting the world and life into a model for a new kind of life, expanded by a new dimension

  whereby, of course, my book might not have remained a private matter—and this is the dilemma that can destroy a conscientious man (for instance, Schwab).

  •

  I have been working on this book for nineteen years. Sometimes it blazes out of me. Then I can’t do or think of anything else. I drop everything else, I ignore what’s happening around me. Everything gets delayed and disorderly. Important deadlines are forgotten, excellent opportunities are lost. I fail to deliver promised work, I neglect bills, I’m sued, creditors beat down my doors. I won’t see anyone, I open no mail, I disguise my voice on the telephone. I barely sleep, I eat standing up or at my desk, I stop shaving, I don’t even scratch out the dirt from under my fingernails. I’m in a trance, the hours fly. . . until my writing stalls, until eventually I can’t go on, and my doubts about the whole thing return, and fear, rebellion, surfeit, and finally all sacred enthusiasm is snuffed out.

  Sometimes, the flame is steadier. For a happy span of time I work a few hours every day with a clear mind. I don’t have to strain my mind, there’s nothing for me to invent. There’s material galore, in heaps, in piles of paper covered with writing. I link up fragments, fill out joints, smooth over bumps. The sober craft of working and reworking makes me feel my growing abilities and capabilities. I am pumped so full of faith and confidence that I soon burden myself with other work—work that brings in cash. I then spend the money right and left: it is a light currency and I’m on top. I feel I can do the impossible, I dare to make all sorts of ambitious plans, I accept obligations I cannot honor—and I soon find myself so entangled in promises and agreements, contracts, coercions, warnings, dunnings, final notices, that I have to apply all my time and energy somehow to complete things I have hastily begun, finally to tackle things that are long overdue, further to delay things I have frivolously promised . . .

  most of these matters drag on forever; I dare not even think about my book. And the weeks wear on, the months, the years . . .

  There are also periods when I am incapable of anything. I brood obtusely and stupidly over empty pages. I am unable to form a sentence out of a subject, verb, object. Nothing comes to me. Even my worst spirits abandon me: my impudence, my wittiness. Doubt in myself, in what I have to say and in my ability to express it, sucks up what little energy drove me to the desk to at least make a stab at it. Discouragement assails me, impairs my other work along with it. Even (and especially) the movie scripting, long since a cynical routine, is now impossible. I dawdle through the days, grow restless, swell with impatience, long for action, want to be among people and thus avoid them. So I leap over not only my own inhibitions but all sustainting distances as well, smash the neutrality of noncommittal relationships and make them personal: I soon find myself entangled in disagreeable friendships and useless love affairs from which I can extricate myself only in the most brutal fashion. I get lazy, I can’t get out of bed in the morning or into it at night (at least not my own). Suspicious passions break out: I collect all kinds of superfluous stuff (deluxe editions of books I won’t read, sinfully expensive objects I don’t know what to do with and soon give away). I tend to my appearance with the vain punctiliousness of an aging pederast, I shower my tailor, my shoemaker, my shirtmaker with orders, I spend a fortune on neckties, ascots, dressing gowns, slippers, soaps, toilet water, brushes, files, and I reach under every skirt I can find. I feel time flying by, and I run a race with it: no car is fast enough for me, I drive heedlessly at break-neck speed, I invent the necessity of dashing from place to place: the experience of speed both calms me and tires me, both whips me up and wipes me out, leaves me unfeeling and unthinking.

  But my book still glows in me. It has burnt to ashes nearly a third of my life.

  It screwed up my marriage with Christa and drove Dawn to the madhouse. It was the lie (never fully exposed, yet shining through everywhere and soon filtering into everything) that kept Gaia from trusting me (which then caused her death). It turned my son (a child with eyes like well water in which I was reflected as a star) into a bitter little bookkeeper of my unkept promises and unfulfilled assurances—hence turned me into an ever shrewder swindler, an ever craftier liar and counterfeiter. It turned my existence into a more and more threadbare as-if.

  For whatever I write, it ultimately writes me. Whatever I narrate, it ultimately narrates me. In other words, it is not I who live my life, my book lives me. And what I live and how I live are determined by the success or failure of my book.

  So I live my life dissolutely, banking on the fact that my book (should it succeed) might not rectify things but will in any case justify them (and that it doesn’t matter anyway if the book doesn’t succeed). I live into the notebook of botched attempts, so to speak: toward a still-incomplete final draft. I can allow myself to drift along however chance determines, whatever circumstances dictate. Even in a no-exit situation, when all bridges are burned, I am exempt from decision, because decision comes not with what immediately happens but on the pages of my books.

  Thus my book lives me, over and beyond the dramatic high points of my existence, from which peaks I may survey a battlefield—not necessarily a field of honor, for the time being; on which (for the time being) only others are killed in action. I myself tarry outside the events until the decision has been made, has fallen, with my book. Reality presents itself to me in two alienated ways; on the one hand, delayed in the weightlessly weighty movement of slow motion, in which my seeing eyes perceive “reality”; on the other hand (experienced by me as lived) as arbitrarily swift, uninfluenceable, and inevitable as if filmed in fast motion.

  And all this has the ineluctabilty with which, terrorized until I scream in primal horror, and yet voluptuously paralyzed by curiosity about the foreknown, I dream that I am luring the old crone across the threshold of my cellar in order to murder her brutally.

  •

  I have not left this room for eight days and nights. Madame gets me wine, bread, cold meat, and eggs (which I drink raw from the shell). The handsome Pole brings the food to my room, sets it down at the door, knocks, and is usually gone by the time I open. The chambermaid comes every morning, makes the bed, and finds little else to tidy up. I don’t let her touch my papers.

  These papers drive me to despair. Each one directs me to another, which it refers to, which it adds to or is added to by—and which is not at hand. Because, with some other junk that I have left behind, it lies in some trunk in Hamburg, Munich, Barcelona, or Rome, or wherever else it was my movie-parasitical hotel-lobby-loafing life cast me away. Or even worse, it has been destroyed in some auto-da-fé like the one I have instituted here.

  I find chapters that I am sure I have written down in a tighter, clearer version. But that version is lost: entire folders are missing.

  I am often so sharply beset by impatience that I rip up wads of papers: sketches that strike me as totally absurd, first drafts that demonstrate my most lamentably unimaginative, inexpressive periods, unrelated notes—whatever they refer to is lost. A bric-a-brac of documents testifying to practically anything—but not the definitive shape of th
e book, crackpot structural designs, dozens of beginnings . . . It all strikes me as crazy, chaotic, erroneous, and useless. I regret the time, energy, ink, and paper that I’ve squandered. I destroy it like something very shameful, like the traces of a scandalous past. A few hours later, I stick my head in the wastebasket, rummage around, pull out the crumpled tatters, smooth them, and arduously glue them together again.

  Once, I almost beat up the chambermaid (a half-dotty, gentle-eyed old woman from Brittany with the dreamy name of Monique) because she emptied the wastebasket before I could salvage a couple of irreplaceable notes.

  Sometimes, I write. I often toss out pages with rough sketches I think I have already completed. But they also contain drafts for later sections, notions, discoveries, comments, the order of the subsequent chapters—and only when I reach them do I realize what is lost.

  •

  Thus do the days go by. At night, I murder.

  •

  Yet I could have a marvelously simple time of it. Put my book aside, as I’ve done so often in the past, and serve my piglets. Not just four weeks but a full eight (of which still seven are left)—seven fat expense-account weeks in Paris.

  •

  (To Schwab, in the style of a music-hall ditty:

  Oh come to the drum

  To Paree, old bum!

  and his face: the twisted, tortured smile and the abrupt, simultaneous bloating of the cheek skin in disgust—)

  Fifty-six late-summerish early-autumn days in Paris:

  Had a nice sleep, well into the morning, had a nice bath, cleaned up nice: not in the usual mobster outfit filmmakers wear—turtleneck sweater, sailor’s trousers, tam-o’-shanter, cowboy boots—but as a gent with a cineastic note: