Abel and Cain

by Gregor von Rezzori

  But can I then in good conscience answer “Me?” (Who am I? Who am I in the face of this new world?) And even if I dared to say “Me,” I wouldn’t be taking a safe position. The signal of technological behavior patterns that would allow me into the honeycomb labyrinths here or there (beyond them the conversation with the metallic voice ghost would not survive), would be irrelevant. The residential mechanism overcomes dehumanization by multi-digited repeatability of the same setup: it basically makes no difference whether I go here or there, I would merely be arriving at an experience that can be repeated at random. Each of these twelve enormous housing machines is threaded with the capillaries of six stairwells (exactly similar to the one I now enter), each of which leads, on each of the twenty-two stories, to three medium-size or studio flats. That, according to Adam Riese (sic!), makes 4,752 four-to-six-celled lairs for consumers of the goods of life on an elevated self-service level. Theoretically (with just one studio flat per landing), the same experience with one of 1,464 unattached women, not intrinsically different from the broad, could be granted to me 1,464 times: I enter and find my bearings with somnambulistic sureness in the very same topography; to the left of the tiny vestibule are the bedroom and bathroom, to the right the living room and kitchenette; through the half-open (and intersecting) door, I see a female shoulder busy over kitchen chores (the shoulder covered with the synthetic and wool of a thinnish sweater lightly fragrant with cologne, soup broth, and femaleness; the odors vie for predominance, the female smell wins by a nose over the soup broth, the cologne evanesces in a field of straggling contenders). I sense the erotic appeal of the eel-round flesh of an upper arm naked from shoulder to elbow, the stays of the brassiere under the armpit, the curving of the back adorned with a half ribbon of apron string, the plump roundness of the hip in a plaid skirt jersey skirt corduroy skirt who-knows-what-kind-of skirt, the somewhat crooked seam of the nylon stocking over a full calf. The head is covered for the time being; if it moves and a slice of it becomes visible, then one may assume with a likelihood verging on certainty that the neck hairline, razor-cut too high, would irritate me in all 1,464 cases, that a voice with a monotonously singsong and rather nasally constricted Hamburg tone would say, “Hi there, just make yourself at home till I’m ready, everything’s prepared out there—a whole bunch of magazines just came in!”

  So I simply go out to the yard; it is not that I am expected, but rather that it is utterly inconceivable that I could stay away. The wheeled table already offers what she calls “a little something to munch on”: a small basket of black bread (“Just try it, it’s whole-grain bread”) rye bread caraway-seed bread graham bread aniseed bread crispbread salt sticks cheese sticks, a little board with ham on it (“Just dive right in, that’s homemade cottage-cured ham”), her familiarity is quite neutral, impersonal, noncommittal, the act of taking possession occurs by way of the exceptionally rich offering of first-class consumer goods: smoked goose breast (“It’s a home recipe, from refugees from Pomerania”), fat liverwurst (“You’ll never get that in a normal store, it comes from Holstein, straight from the farm”), a small crock of butter (“genyuwine country butter”), a stone jug of Steinhäger beer (“Drink some right away, it’s nicely chilled”), a bottle of Bommerlunder, half a bottle of kümmel, a remnant of cognac, reams of paper napkins, a small dish of salted almonds, another of sweets, a cup containing cigarettes (Copenhagen brand: gull motif), an ashtray (Rosenthal porcelain decorated by Bele Bachem’s artistic hand with a cat-faced debauchee in a corset and laced boots plus a Montgolfier floating high in the air), the weekly magazine pile (“Knowledge Is Power”)—all she’d have to do is have my slippers ready (“Why don’t you take off your tie, it’s a lot comfier”). I promptly stretch out in the chaise longue, hack off thick slices of whole-grain and rye bread, goose breast and home-cured ham, heartily heap up liverwurst on playing-card crispbread, poke the salt sticks in the butter, the cheese sticks in the mayonnaise. I need something to hold on to, something solid in this boneless situation, in this strangely abstract world; the life-giving food has to produce the reality of life I lose when I walk into the hallway here and certainly under the sunshade with stitched-on toadstools in this sunless wasteland. I try to find the reality of life in the illustrated magazines, I peruse Der Spiegel, Stern, Good Housekeeping, Better Living, Modern Woman, Radio and TV Guide; while doing so I slip more and more deeply, more and more hopelessly into abstractness, also losing my (already diluted) identity.

  I am most intimately, most personally spoken to (as among gallows birds and pastors’ daughters), initiated, involved, drawn into complicity. Editors honor me with letters, fraternally presenting me with their ethical motives (not neglecting to add their passport photos), sibyls whisper their queenly wisdom to me in a uterine tone (with a profound gaze, a Mona Lisa smile around the vulva that appeals directly to my gonads). This is flattering, but it’s not meant for me; what is meant and addressed is something in me that is no longer my SELF but probably one of the countless sub- and co-selves of my experiencing self. I don’t want to be pedantic—that would promote total dissolution. But anyway it’s something embarrassingly general into which the substance of my self (perhaps slashed open by the categorical imperative) runs out—whether the ID of the psychologists (according to Sigmund Freud, the pleasure principle rules unrestrictedly there) or the ONE of the existentialists (according to Jean-Paul Sartre, the world of the salauds) makes no difference to me, it’s not my SELF—yet it is, but not really. . . There is evidently a collective self in me, into which any other self (together with its idiotic demands) can be projected, a communal multiplicity in which everyone can identify with everyone else, everyone with all the others, all with everyone. Otherwise, I couldn’t be expected to let myself be drawn into matters that are not at all my matters, utterly remote from the things that really affect me and certainly remote from the things that I can affect with my actions.

  Here, the borders of no Middle Kingdom are respected. What in God’s name do I care about the Congo? What am I to do, what can I do about the extermination of the giraffes in East Africa or about Konrad Adenauer’s stubbornness? . . . Yet here, these issues are urgently presented to me as though my material and spiritual welfare depended on them, my happiness, my moral integrity, my ethical climate. This surprises me somewhat. I must admit: Until now I haven’t expected anything other than a shallow means of passing the time, distraction—at the dentist’s, for example, or at the hairdresser’s (when I’m waiting for a girlfriend haloed in blue light and hygienically decapitated by the barber’s smock fastened under her chin in the thin-walled cubicle, mysteriously deaf and dumb like the Trunk Lady in a carnival stall, giving me the absent smile of Brigitte Helm in Metropolis under a massive space helmet of glittering nickel, she likewise holding a magazine in her hands, which are no longer at all connected to her). It can presumably be traced back to this that I had the notion that one reads illustrated weeklies with one’s fly undone—

  which is to say: with the carefree distraction of a three-year-old playing with his oatmeal. But this is a mistake, people take me for far more grown up than I am, I note this now, here: threatened by five hundred forty balconies that aim down at me from nine residential machines. An astounding development in the consciousness of the global citizen, in the contemporary conscience, in the feeling of responsibility of the individual for the fate of all, must have taken place in Germany during my frequent (often lengthy) absences in the last five, six years, and consequently a simultaneous mobilizing of public opinion, which is yielding quite the audacious results. I am struck by the boldness of the published word. We didn’t have this before in this country. It almost makes me feel there is now no danger in making daring statements. Perhaps this was always the case, but intelligent self-censorship always considered the possibility of consequences. However, consequences no longer seem to occur. Anyway, it is flatteringly assumed here that I have taken part in this agreeable development, that I on my end am prepa
red to emotionally carry out the aggressive new West German journalistic élan. Alas, I am not: I live abroad too much, where events occur much less robustly, with kid gloves on, as it were. I am struck by the combativeness with which, for instance, a government minister is publicly accused of corruption here; since his continued stay in office would lead one to conclude that he can effortlessly refute the charges, why doesn’t he do so? There’s something out of kilter: Either the accusations are false, which would have to have consequences, or they are correct, which would certainly also have consequences. But nothing happens; the whole thing seems to take place in a vacuum. Perhaps there are two realities: a pedestrian reality, so to speak, in which I move, in which probably most of the Middle Kingdoms lie—that is, in which what I and everyone else directly experiences takes place—and another reality, superordinate, vaster, and more comprehensive, in which the dramatic public events that I see here take place: a superreality, in which the gods struggle as in the Iliad . . .

  But then, these latter events go beyond me, concern me only indirectly, as a consumer of destiny, so to speak. I no longer have the law of action in my hand. So why should this superreality be brought home to me in such a bewilderingly direct fashion, as if heaven knows what were contingent on my feeling involved in it? The illustrated newsmagazines leap at me, they almost harass me; like a total stranger grabbing my arm in the street and sputtering his conflict-laden experience-broth at me—from his marital problems to his philosophical ideas, his professional, athletic, and erotic perils, possibilities, prospects, his difficulties in raising his children, his traffic delinquencies, his thoughts on urban planning the fight against cancer food for the world ideas on American Russian Chinese Persian Venezuelan domestic and foreign politics Fidel Castro Onassis Anita Ekberg Karl and Groucho Marx—not because he mistakes me for an old acquaintance with whom he has often discussed such issues and problems (or because he recognizes me as especially open and receptive to them) but simply because he has pulled me out by sheer chance from several tens of thousands, and I could just as easily have been another passerby coming his way—he merely assumes in sovereign schizoid autism that whatever regards concerns occupies excites exasperates him is bound to regard concern occupy excite exasperate someone else, ergo that I must instantly be passionately moved and captivated—

  okay, fine: Dostoevsky does the same to me, Henry Miller even employs my libido for this purpose, but with them I at least know that this is fiction, it is meant to pull me out of the reality of the here and now and transpose me into a different one, removed from time and space, a superreality that sovereignly fills its own time and space, so that experiencing it makes me realize all the more keenly what reality is, that I may grasp it all the more clearly, comprehend it all the more fully . . . This is splendid, my eyes ought to brim with tears in sheer gratitude: the poets want what’s best for me, they hand me keys that give me access to what lies in (and behind) my Middle Kingdom, beyond the pedestrian reality I can directly experience: its symbolism, its transcendence.

  But that is just what the annoying sleeve-tugger on the glossy pages of the illustrateds does not do. On the contrary: he speculates with robust naiveté on the fascination of existence that is transmitted close to the skin, sour on the stomach, and warm as the breath (and granted: such fascination is huge in this modern world, which sails out into the abstract with concept-filled sails!). And it is certainly true of the magazines in this bunch—which I peruse, more and more excited, more and more addicted, more and more obsessed—that they present my pedestrian reality and no other; I cannot doubt it, it’s printed here in black and white and color; the camera, as we know, does not lie. To be sure, it has only a wraith-like similarity to what I actually experience (especially here and now: right at the edge of the world, lying on a yellow-and-white-striped chaise longue surrounded by pathetic flowerpots, under a green, toadstool-stitched sunshade, which stands in something that one can describe at best as the negative of a garden, ringed by roaring emptiness, from which 2,336 windowpanes, in front of me, over me, and at either side, gaze down blankly, and 540 concrete terraces are reproachfully held out to me like empty boxes, like beggar’s bowls of a humanity cheated of itself), but this reality in the illustrated magazines, parsed in still photos and served up like a well-shuffled pack of cards, is not entirely alien. On the contrary, it is even traumatically familiar, intimate; a déjà vu experience afflicts me several times on every page. I’ve seen all this before (indeed, many, many times), though most likely just in other magazines; still, I can imagine I experienced these things myself, and could re-experience them at any time at any step along the way—

  thus, it is not directly my reality but, so to speak, its pedestrian superreality, meant to be experienced by me in its fullness, as I experience it here and now: from the void of an abstract superreality I have previously overlooked and failed to heed only for lack of sufficient attention and for want of a sense of the factual.

  Okay, fine, I’m ready to accept this. My profane experiences hardly suffice to make me fully cognizant of the reality around me. Nor am I surprised that it is so full, brimming with the unexpected, the astonishing, the wonderful—but why are these unexpected astonishing wonderful matters presented to me as the most humdrum everyday matters (indeed, as my everyday experience)? I certainly don’t doubt that they have reality, are reality, but I am very far removed from it. The struggle of the gods over us mortals may also decide my destiny, but that doesn’t mean that I can intervene, that I can interfere and say, “Hey, fellas—calm down! This really won’t do!” Then why does the superreality of the magazines simulate this possibility for me? Why does it strike me with every picture (of oil sheikhs lunar-rocket passengers duchesses poisoners), with every report (of earthquakes jungle warfare atomic explosions floods) as the most up-to-date topicality I can encounter at any step of the way? Things become so grandly colorful and dynamic only in literature, in my dreams, at best. There, my hand meets Haroun el Rashid’s in the lamb pilaf, I fly to the moon, sleep with duchesses, am poisoned by green-eyed sorceresses, the earth quakes beneath me, machine-gun muzzles emerge from the thicket of fat tropical plants like the eyes of a Douanier Rousseau tiger and aim at me, and ultimately God’s wrath blows up the planet . . . But if I simultaneously experience myself as immobile, trapped in the vacuum of a void from which there is no escape, while a thousand voices whisper to me, shout at me, cry to me, “Do something! Get involved! Intervene! Stop the monstrous thing from happening! Prevent the horrible thing!”—if that happens, then the dream turns into a nightmare, the events pass over me, press down on me, crush me.

  And that is exactly what the superreality does in the illustrated magazines on my lap. Their reality is not to be doubted, but it takes place beyond my immediate realm of experience, beyond my Middle Kingdom, it takes place powerfully, sovereignly, beyond any influence of mine; yet its topicality presses under my skin, and no matter how I turn and twist, I can ignore nothing that happens here, it happens to me, happens here and now—though it is a here and now that exists past me, growing beyond its own ephemeral self, of course. The NOW comprises not only the moment, the day, the week, but the entire epoch; the HERE is not limited to the front yard in the high-rise development where I am lounging, to my present Middle Kingdom, to Hamburg, to West Germany—no, it encompasses all realms, all kingdoms, the globe, the cosmos—