Abel and Cain

by Gregor von Rezzori

  So you see, my child, you were born into a divine conflict. Although you’ll be raised to think you live in a monotheistic community of faith, it isn’t so. There are countless other gods besides HIM, the ONLY god who keeps the whole shebang going, among them the god of the toothpick Eiffel Tower builders. And his clergy is also supported by the community; he too is given credit. Above all, you yourself will give your father credit. He is a high priest of the idle deity PLAY, one of those who invent their world in play: a WRITER. Now, how shall he present himself to you as such? You’ll have to tiptoe so as not to disturb him in his sacred “work.” And if you peek through the keyhole into the room where he has withdrawn as if into the holy of holies of his high priesthood, you’ll see him lying on the couch, smoking and staring at the ceiling if he hasn’t already closed his eyes and fallen asleep. It can also happen that you’ll hear him pounding on his typewriter like a wild man, and then—alas!—that all too rare flow of words will be dismayingly interrupted by the grinding sound of the page being torn from the roller and the crunch as it’s balled up and tossed on the floor. You’ll fear the stillness that follows, fear your pretty mother’s pallor. Haggard and disheveled, he—your father—will appear at the door, make a beeline for the bottle of cognac in the liquor cabinet, pour himself a drinking glass full, and down it in one swallow—

  and although your mother will roll her eyes to the Savior above the ceiling, she’s so much under the spell of the myth of the work ethic, she’ll take just such a ostentatious performance of a so-called creative crisis as the occasion to compensate her for her disappointment in a husband without a steady income and benefits with the hope she places in his power as a creative artist. She will doubt him, but she’s too proud to admit that she was mistaken about him. But you’re going to feel like throwing up. You’re going to see through the false myth. Your father is nothing but a swindler. A confidence man. He may court you as other fathers court their sons. He may hold your hand and take you to Hagenbeck Zoo or rent a rowboat and go rowing on the Alster with you like a cabinetmaker locksmith carpenter lathe operator father with his son. You’ll take it as your due and know that your father is a parasite on the world by making a promise he can’t keep. (Why, oh why aren’t you Karl Nagel’s son!) You will see it in the eyes of your parents’ friends, relatives, and acquaintances that they don’t believe in his creative power any more than you do, although they also pretend that if—against all expectations—his promise should actually be realized, they will see therein the culmination and fulfillment of the myth of creativity: mythic, although useless. It would be the birth of a book! (Of which there are a few hundred thousand a year.) But you would know that your father is a swindler. And if they said, “What a great man!” an inner voice would say to you, “Yes, but unfortunately all too much a man!” Especially when he falls short.

  I love you, little man, and I don’t like to think about the immediate future, where humiliations unavoidably await you given your unfortunate choice of a father: creditors pounding on the door (the rent is overdue); the bailiff’s sympathy with your mother’s troubles, which doesn’t stop him from doing his duty; the neighbors’ malicious gossip (“—’cause these have-nots from out of town think they’re better than us—”). The false myths that circulate about your father (“Artists and writers are always part of the bohemian scene”) will make him seem—and this will particularly disgust you—sleazy and Romantic. Rumors will circulate branding him an irresistible seducer of young ladies from the best families and recently married wives of German men with steady incomes and benefits, and at the same time a shameless whoremonger. He’s often spotted in the bordellos on the Reeperbahn. He appears in public with a prostitute named Gisela who’s known all over town. One can’t help wondering if he’s her pimp, because he can’t afford her price, so he probably is. You’ll look at your mother and admire her good breeding, her slim figure, the girlish blond of her hair, the magical enchantment of her blue eyes, and her haughty little mouth, and your love for her will tie up your heart, along with your hatred for the man who’s inflicted such abuse on her in the name of his inflated myth as artist and high priest of one of our lesser gods.

  I don’t like to think how bitter it will be for you, since for a while in your childhood, before you begin to see through me, you will love me too. Your little hand will take hold of my big one with fervent trust. You’ll listen with bated breath to the fairy tales I tell you—and they certainly won’t be the ones I tell everyone else to their incredulous astonishment—no, they’ll be fairy tales from the forests of the country I was born in: legends of kings’ sons, of herdsmen and hajduks and beautiful women, not of the millionaire whoremongers of the Côte d’Azur, from whose number you can select you own progenitor. I’m going to hide from you the box with the dubious photographic evidence. You’ll do very well without it. You’re going to be plagued with enough ominous suspicions as it is: you’re my son, whether you like it or not. You’ll recognize yourself in me by our common blood, our common penchant for play, anger, and laughter, sharply mocking observations, our contemptuous shrug for everything petty, our brooding, indolence, innate sadness—in a word, by all the characteristics you will later strive manfully to overcome in order to correspond to your genetic material from the distaff side by being upright, unambiguous, reliable, trustworthy, and in compliance with the general rules of etiquette. You’ll still love me as I am because you’ll sense that a part of you is exactly the same. But that won’t last long. You are your mother’s son too. You’ll grow up to be a German man, my little man. And you’ll succumb to another dubious myth: what is a man?

  And I will always love you and love you all the more painfully, unselfishly—how do you say that in German? And not just for the sake of the short span of a few years in which you love me too and think I’m upright, unambiguous, reliable, and creditworthy (as far as you’re concerned, I probably will be), but rather because you’re something I created, even more abstract than the book I’ll have to write to keep the promise I go around conning people with. A promise not to others and not to myself, but—as Uncle Helmuth would have said—decreed by my karma. And to that extent, a maternal product, conceived in pleasure and languorously incubated, nourished by my mind and brought into the world amid torments and joys. Must I explain the paradox? While you, my son, flesh of my flesh, are not really my child no matter how many of my genes are kicking around inside you, my very own most personal creation would be my book—if I ever write it. And while I, as your biological progenitor, am permitted to call myself your father—i.e., a man who has produced another man—I would be the mother of my book, and therefore all the more a man. Do you understand? You are your mother’s child and my contribution to your begetting was one moment of death-like oblivion, while she did everything else: carried you inside her in all your vital reality, nourished you along with herself, let you mature and then released you amid pain, brought you from her womb into the light of day.

  Soon, my son, the faster you grow into a man, you may forget that it was she (almost) alone who made you in nine months of speeded-up recapitulation of the development from tadpole to stereotypical example of the zoological species Homo sapiens. (If only there was a puddle left in the concrete desert we live in where I could show you some tadpoles! How many hours I spent at a pond in Bessarabia, under the guidance of my pompous prince of an uncle, Ferdinand, looking at the frogs’ eggs and the swarming tadpoles, nimbly sliding past one another—“like sperm,” Uncle Ferdinand said—their mysterious development, limb by limb, into frogs that the kiss of a princess could transform into a handsome prince . . . If only there were a chance here to show you such things, little man. Until recently, there were plenty of tiny bodies of water in the bomb craters, but they were dull and barren and got buried in the rush to rebuild: life which began in the waters will come to an end in concrete.) Forgive the digression. I was speaking man-to-man about your parentage. With all the great love you bear your mother, little
man, you won’t thank her for making you (almost) by herself—or for needing a contribution from your father and thus making you into a man who’s inherited the curse of the fathers of men: to be a DRONE, incapable of bringing forth a human being out of your own body the way every mother can. May Father Freud rest in peace in the spermatozoal swarm of his adepts and disciples.

  Women’s supposed penis envy for your little willy is nothing compared to your primeval envy because you cannot REALLY BEGET. You are condemned to abstract begetting: to replaying the world in its eternal self-renewal. Condemned to imitating and aping in eternally insatiable insufficiency. Everything you produce—abstract. Never life itself, but only an imitation of life, a destruction of life. And however much you curse this legacy from your father (I fear it will be the only one!) and hate me for it, you won’t be able to sever your connection to me. You too will feel the urge to play men’s abstract game of re-creating the world. Even if as the dutiful son of your mother you choose the honest path from desk chair to pension plan, nothing will keep you from building the Eiffel Tower with toothpicks in your spare time. And it may even be that your male inheritance has made you daring enough to lead you to the applied art of a potter or even to self-realization on canvas or in clay, plaster, or marble—or even on paper. Sometime someone will say admiringly behind your back and sotto voce, “He has it from his father. An excellent man.”—

  —Just don’t forget the curse of being a man as well: a man who’s unaware of the curse remains at best someone who keeps the whole shebang going. It’s up to you to reinvent it completely.

  But perhaps you’ll be too weak and lazy for that and remain an unfulfilled promise. I’ll still be enormously proud of you, and although it will be too late to tell you how much I love you, I always will—

  namely, as

  Your Father

  • • •

  Uncle Ferdinand’s thoughts on literature:

  “. . . So, take Goethe for example—you had a German upbringing, I mean, even in Vienna they shared the attitudes that were circulating in Germany, not in society of course, where with very few exceptions they read nothing at all, not in my day at any rate, and in the schools my sort attended they set more store by homegrown talents: Grillparzer, etc., but with nothing like the emphasis bourgeois circles placed on literature, I know because I have a lot of Austrian friends, and of course also relatives both on the Lobkowitz and the Rohan sides—I mean the Czech Rohans who belong to the five Bohemian dukes, and then the Clarys etc., we have relatives all over Europe, including Russia back then, and so as children and adolescents we were often together when our parents visited one another to go hunting, etc., and I was able to compare what they tried to teach us, only briefly in public schools, most of us had private tutors before they ever got to those institutions to prepare for their final examinations, but even in the private lessons it was apparent what would be dispensed in general, the tutors were all bourgeois intellectuals and of course wanted to teach us their conception of things, that wasn’t the case just in Austria, but in general and everywhere, my friend John Fox—you know him—and an Englishman himself, even claims that the decline of the aristocracy stems from the fact that all of us, including the non-English, had English nannies and tutors in the Victorian era inculcating us with their bourgeois ideas, among them naturally the unbelievable overvaluation of novels, an influence so strong that many people took them as a guide to life, we know that when Goethe’s Werther was published dozens of young people committed suicide, you were taught that too, but it’s a big misunderstanding that’s never been cleared up, on the contrary, it became all the more entrenched, namely, that young Werther shot himself out of love for Charlotte, it ain’t so, I’ve read Werther very carefully because I was curious to see what could bring a person in the bloom of youth to put a bullet through his head if it isn’t a case of gambling debts his family can’t or won’t pay, or simply boredom or because he was told he has syphilis—which was, by the way, quite frequent in my day—and sooner or later is going to go soft in the head despite Salvarsan and such treatments, but nobody shot themselves out of love and if they did it was extremely rare, you’d really have to be a housemaid to believe that Archduke Rudolf, the heir apparent, shot himself with Baroness Vetsera in Mayerling, that’s pure nonsense and I’m not even going to discuss it, I’ll leave that to the journalists, I’m talking about something else entirely, because if you read Werther closely, you’ll discover that the troubles caused by his unfulfillable love affair weren’t his real motive for killing himself at all, of course they constantly preoccupied him, but that was because he was young, at that age you don’t think about anything else and so naturally, it can happen that a guy who’s got a certain girl in his sights and she doesn’t let him get nearer, that he’s going to go crazy even though he knows that once he’s slept with her most of the fascination will be gone, at the end of the great majority of love affairs you can’t explain what drove you into the necessary mental state and that is exactly what I’m saying: it’s the influence of reading novels that put so much store in love, but as I said, if you read Werther again all the way through and carefully—you can read it here, there’s a nice first edition in the library, and one of the Cotta ur-Faust as well and the first English translation with engravings by Retzsch—if you give Werther a thorough reading you’ll see that he shot himself because he wasn’t admitted to an aristocratic party, they turned him away at the door and for a young person with an exalted opinion of himself and perhaps the intention to be a private tutor in a great house, that’s a real insult, but strangely enough, precisely the people who could have been in the same situation couldn’t empathize with it, no, they all stubbornly insisted that it was love that made him kill himself, although shortly after him—after Goethe, I mean—novels still had a love interest but it wasn’t their main focus anymore, which was society, especially the French with Balzac and Stendhal, one in a more bourgeois milieu and the other in aristocratic circles, but always the tension of the individual who somehow is askew in society, as for instance Madame Bovary. She’s a particularly graphic example, not to mention the great Russians, of course, Tolstoy and then especially that stigmatized idiot Dostoevsky and whoever else you can think of, the English with Thackeray and Dickens, that’s where it starts to get interesting again, who cares anyway how much Monsieur Dupont loves Mademoiselle Legrand—at least, that’s what one would think, but the great reading public is just extraordinarily slow on the uptake, and once it finally realizes there’s something it needs to understand, you can bet your life that it misunderstands, it’s been that way since the world began: all great ideas get immediately corrupted and it’s the same with discoveries, you’ve got to shove people’s noses into something and even then they misunderstand it and turn it into something they’re familiar with, Goethe knew that very well or he wouldn’t have written Elective Affinities so close to his end, a novel that takes the theme of love ad absurdum, I mean, why do you have to bring metaphysics—or rather, metaphysiology—into play to have two healthy and attractive couples discover they’re not just attracted to their respective partners, but also crossways, nowadays that’s positively become a sport, only people aren’t as discreet about it as we used to be in our circles, but then, there used to be a lot more urbanity back then, people knew that if you invited a friend to be a houseguest, don’t tell me you didn’t know what you were doing, especially if you loved your wife and wanted to have a free hand yourself, just take Putzi Schrempff—you know, from the Schrempffs in Auffenberg who went to Hungary and had the most fabulous stags in the Danube meadows—he always said ‘Je veux bien être embêté par les femmes, mais pas tout le temps par la même,’ and burst out laughing at himself, especially when his wife was present when he said it, but she was so good-natured, dear old Tina, if she hadn’t porked up so much in her last years there are quite a few who would have gladly been guests in her house, of course, it takes a sedentary nature to do that and there were
n’t many of those among Putzi’s friends, and that’s why he didn’t share the same fate as Edoard and Carlotta (I call them that because I read Elective Affinities in Italian, where the house guest is called Ottone, which unfortunately loses the piquant similarity of Otto and Ottilie, not completely, but still) but that’s just one of Goethe’s ironical artifices and you know, the irony in Werther is even more subtle. It’s not true that young Werther is hopelessly in love with Charlotte, not at all, she’s constantly offering herself in the most shameless way, just read it once through and pay attention, it’s very interesting, even as a married woman she’s still making innuendos and you’ve got to be a dope to misunderstand them, take the scene with the bird she wants to get to ‘peck’ her, for example—couldn’t be much clearer than that! But no, the jackass acts like he doesn’t get it. He just doesn’t dare go for it. That’s the real suffering of young Werther, and then he gets turned away from the party and that’s enough for him to doubt himself and reach for his pistol. But that’s a nonissue in Elective Affinities. They’ve completed the sex act long since in their minds, what’s at issue is just that one shouldn’t think love is the only power that makes the world go round, people like Putzi and Tina were much too well brought up to think that, they understood the irony, but for others—the great crowd of readers that can get drunk on novels—it was for them that he wrote that story of the lovers attracted crisscross to one another and had a good laugh at people for thinking it unbelievable that, for example, Charlotte bore a child with the red hair of one man and the mole on his cheek of the other and God knows what other personal characteristics from the other two members of the quartet, and the gruesome outcome of the whole calamity, like in Greek tragedy, where everyone knows there are more serious things involved than love, Goethe ironized the whole thing with colossal delicacy and I consider Elective Affinities at least as important a book as Don Quixote, it’s totally in Cervantes’s spirit, who would want to write a chivalric romance after Don Quixote and who’d have a word to say about erotic attraction after Elective Affinities, and I’m not just talking about sex life, but the illusion of spiritual connections spun back and forth between us when we’re in the condition of physical attraction. Especially when you’ve lived too long in the country and haven’t been out in the world for a long time—but I can see you aren’t interested in what I’m rattling on about, you can’t keep your eyes open anymore—no no, no need to apologize, I know at your age you need twice as much sleep as me, it’s one of nature’s injustices: you could get more out of life if was the other way round—at least when you’re young, it’s of no use to me now. . .”