“Such as?” I said, taking a breath.
“Men value me. Why? Because I know ‘my place.’ Obediently I served and facilitated the literary talent of a man, I served the mind of a man, I am, therefore, a dream-woman for many men, I am also their dream-widow. I was Levin’s secretary and archivist, his spouse, editor, agent . . . I have not re-married, I have served him long since his death and I will serve him until I die. He left me, after all, with his symbolic capital, which I built on with careful stewardship. Anyone who has had anything to do with Levin knows we were husband and wife for barely three years; that we married when he was already seriously ill, at a time when that marriage was not, nor could it be, consummated, nor was it ever likely to be. Levin never kept any of that from me . . .”
I was at a loss for words. The Widow’s monologue, with her hushed and slightly monotonous intonation (that is how the English language spoken by a Hungarian sounds to my ear) in that setting of the beautiful park, the dazzling day, the blue sky, and the heady air, came across as surreal. Her words were heavy and filling, and exerted a hypnotic effect, much as Beuckelaer’s canvases had done moments before.
“Having said that, I should say that this story is hardly unique to us,” continued The Widow, “I assure you, if you were to poke around in the biographies of artists you would find many similar stories. All of Levin’s fans keep failing to note the key details and would rather believe in an image that has nothing to do with the facts. For them I am a marvel of a woman, I have sacrificed myself for literature, because of literature I live permanently in widow’s weeds. And they are pleased when they see my age, because they insist on forgetting the fact that when I was getting to know Levin I was nearly forty years younger than he. The older I get, therefore, the more ‘suitable’ I become for the image of me they cherish. If they were to accept the factual state, they might be led to conclude that Levin was an aging pervert who turned a young émigré woman into his nurse and typist . . .
“Women value me for the same reason. The thing is, you see, I know ‘my place.’ Others find me easy to identify with. They can’t do the same with you, you don’t know ‘your place,’ you dare speak in your own voice, as good a reason as any for them to despise or resent you. I know you disagree with me, what I say is not exactly how things now stand, you’re thinking, perhaps they stood that way in the old days but today they most definitely do not. That’s why you brushed off your defeat of the other day and shooed away your momentary humiliation as if it were a buzzing fly, and turned to the new day, ready to wage your battles. The first and most important was your battle against mediocrity. Yet the very vocation you so fervently pursue thrives on mediocrity. Mediocrity is the underlying principle of every artistic venture. There is no industry that can thrive only on first-rate quality and still enjoy success. Yet here you are, a diligent toiler in the vast creative industry and you stubbornly believe you will turn the situation to your advantage. Where’s your early warning system for defeat?”
It seemed to me we two had both lost our sixth sense for defeat, I, who listened breathlessly to a person I hardly knew, and she, who said so much to somebody she knew not at all. For just a moment I flattered myself. Perhaps she had read one of my books, I wondered, then dismissed the thought. All this had merely been an interlude, a rare gift that comes with fraternizing at literary gatherings, time to relax. So why was I all ears, icy with fear and disquiet? Fear of what? Of whom? Of a lonely old woman who was a bit too chatty, though everything she was saying felt so apt? There is definitely something wrong with me, with my ability to listen. It was I, not she, who’d lost my early warning system . . .
“I became acquainted with a writer whom I saw again after many years. He’d been anxious his whole life about how to insure his own survival, because, by taking care of himself he was taking care of his books, the ones already written and the ones he’d yet to write. I heard he’d married for a third time to a much younger woman. His wife, however, ‘betrayed’ him by dying suddenly. His face twisted into an ugly grimace right there in front of me. He looked as if he’d burst into tears and kept saying, ‘This is not what we agreed, not what we said . . .’ Of the whole performance the only sincere part was his horror at the possibility that after his death his work would end up in the wrong hands, or in the trash, essentially the same thing. No need to add that the unfortunate woman had been a literary historian . . .” said The Widow.
“Writers are a little like motorcycle enthusiasts . . .”
“How!?”
“Haven’t you noticed how motorcyclists always choose compatible life partners, feather-weight, petite little women who fit snugly on the back seat . . .” I said.
The Widow was amused.
“Women are no different, lelkem, once they muster the courage. And Alma Mahler, by the way, is the queen of all widows. Thomas Mann dubbed her ‘la Grande Veuve.’ To her celebrated shish kabob of marriages to Mahler, Gropius, Werfel, one can add her lovers, such as Gustav Klimt and Alexander van Zemlinsky, whom she called her ‘ugly little dwarf.’ She railed the most personally against Franz Werfel, whom she was married to the longest and who left her a financially comfortable old age. Known for her anti-Semitic outbursts, Alma called Werfel an ‘ugly, fat, little Jew.’ Twice-over a widow, she buried Mahler and Werfel while Gropius outlived her by a few years. Her children—a daughter Maria with Mahler, eighteen-year-old Manon with Gropius, and a ten-month-old son whose father was Franz Werfel—all predeceased her. She had admirers, including composer Franz Schreker and biologist Paul Kammerer—who threatened to kill himself on Mahler’s grave out of unrequited love . . .”
“And Kokoschka . . .”
“Oskar Kokoschka, indeed . . . All in all she left behind a heap of broken hearts, the insults she lambasted men with, and yet everyone adored her, she outlived many of them, she was a mega-parasite, many fed her, dedicated their works to her. Her life today is performed as theater with the title Alma and travels around like a biography circus. We have to admit: ‘Who, today, has heard of Werfel?’ Many, however, know of Alma Mahler. And she left us with only seventeen poems . . .”
“Did she have promise as a composer?”
“I couldn’t say. Her main talent was a deep and abiding knowledge of the economy of love. She was fully versed in how the shares rose and fell on the love market. Alma’s biologist, Kammerer, threatening suicide on Mahler’s grave, defined the essence of that economy.”
“And that was?”
“That through women, men find their way to other men. It is, perhaps, in poor taste for an older woman to speak of such things, but I know a little something about this from my own life. I’ve had lovers, suitors, friends thanks to the fact that I am Levin’s widow, though I could have sworn it would be the other way around. A young woman married to a fast-fading older man is hardly the most attractive sight in the world. Yet after his death, many rushed to make my acquaintance, though it was Levin they were interested in. This did not diminish the sincerity, passion, solemnity, or comedy of my relations with men. The fact is, however, that Levin’s shadow was carousing right there along with us, just as we, I assume, were carousing with his ghost.”
At this point The Widow fell briefly still. She closed her eyes and seemed to be listening to sounds. I didn’t know how to respond to all she’d said, or whether I should respond at all. Fortunately I didn’t say anything, because The Widow, leaning back on the bench, had dozed off. Above her wrinkled lips, barely visible droplets of sweat glistened exactly like droplets on a spider’s web. She slept sitting almost fully upright, with her head tipped just a little to the side like a bird’s. She snored softly. I felt a glow of satisfaction spread through me, the pride of a guard dog. It was a comical yet touching feeling. I enjoyed listening to the birds and sniffing the sweet air around me.
Her nap didn’t last long; evidently it was part of her daily routine. She apologized, she was embarrassed. And for a moment she wasn’t sure where she was.
/> “What did you dream?” I asked.
“Ah, lelkem . . . I have no idea,” she said.
A famous Croatian woman poet—in her youth a beauty with flashing black eyes, a broad face with pronounced Slavic cheekbones, long, curly dark locks—grew ugly, unfortunately, as she aged. She developed logorrhea and people began avoiding her, though I assume they might have avoided her no matter what. Her lovers had long since jilted her, life was gradually pushing her away, and then quite literally: from a large apartment she was pushed into a smaller one, then into a smaller one yet, then out into the street . . . A goiter swelled on her neck, which in time became so large that it engulfed her face and throat. The famous Croatian poet looked like a wig-wearing Humpty Dumpty. She was stubborn: just as she’d refused to cut her hair she would not allow them to operate, although in her case the operation, or at least so they said, would have been routine. She strutted around with the goiter like a crazed turkey, claiming that inside it, right there in that unsightly swelling, dwelt her creative powers. In time she learned how to swathe it with fetching shawls, but the ragtag wrappings, under which the big, bulging mass could still be seen, only made matters worse. As her shares on the literary and social scene fell with age and unsightliness—men are forgiven such things, but women never!—her shares rose in her other, parallel, world. In the morning on a certain day each week, those who revered her magical powers, all of them neighborhood men—the butcher, cobbler, postman, tailor, and barber—would knock at her door. She, the great priestess, defiant, her hair flowing loose, messily dyed dark with a good inch of gray roots showing, still in her nightgown, would open the door, and they, on tiptoe, would slip quietly into the apartment and take seats around her little kitchen table. In the solemn silence she’d make coffee, serve it to everybody in demitasse cups, and then she, too, would sit, shut her eyes, and turn the huge goiter, smooth and shiny like a soothsayer’s crystal ball, toward her visitors. (The postman even said that in the mornings the goiter of the great poetess shone with a bluish light.) And then, ruminating numbers through the goiter as if spinning a lottery drum, she’d speak in combinations. The men, who already had slips of paper and pencils poised, would jot down the numbers, then race off to the nearest kiosk and buy lottery tickets. Legend had it that one of the number combinations always won a sizeable sum. The men divvied the take in equal parts and gave the poetess her share.
The Widow brightened.
“That sounds just like a fairy tale! Did you know her?” she asked.
“Barely.”
“Interesting that you thought of that story on this very spot . . .”
“Why?”
“The book called La smorfia is the bible for all those who play the lottery. It was first published in the late eighteenth century and has been in print ever since. La smorfia is a book for interpreting dreams. With its help the dreamer translates dreams into numbers and uses the numbers obtained to fill out the lotto card. We should go to 17 Via del Grande Archivio . . .”
“Why?”
“Because every Saturday they announce the results there,” she said.
“But shouldn’t we buy lotto tickets first?”
“First you need to dream something.”
“But what if there’s no number for what I dream?”
“La smorfia has sixty thousand entries. I doubt your dreams are so original that a number can’t be found!”
“You don’t know me. As far as dreams are concerned, I’m like one of those snow-making machines,” I said, wondering where I’d dug up the snow-making-machine.
We began walking slowly toward the bus stop where the red hop-on, hop-off bus was waiting. I don’t know why, but again the feeling wormed its way into me that there was something else The Widow meant to tell me.
8.
Museo Archeologico
As we rode on the bus toward the Museo Archeologico museum where we planned to get off, I thought about how city-goers are so eager to confirm stereotypes about their cities, as if the stereotypes are themselves the city’s very foundation, and as if, without them, cities would crumble. I remembered the driver of the bus that took us from Pompeii to Amalfi. After speaking to us in the Neapolitan language, he juggled with Spanish and English, and, while barreling along a dangerous road, he sustained a constant stream of chatter. With dramatic intonation he described for us the beautiful scenery that was rolling by us, and listed the names of famous Neapolitans: Enrico Caruso, Sophia Loren, Toto—meanwhile aping the Neapolitan stereotype given to us by Italian cinema. His was a collage assembled from many, from Marcello Mastroianni, Giancarlo Giannini, and right up to the American, Jack Lemmon who, in the movie Macaroni, plays the “American,” thunderstruck by the beauty of the Neapolitan surroundings . . . The driver’s favorite words were “confusion” and “chaos.” Confusion and chaos, according to the bus driver, ran in the veins of Naples. But every catcall I felt rising inside me at his shabby performance, my every urge to resist stereotypes, was handily quelled by Beauty. Beauty silenced my internal protests, laid a finger across my lips. Shshshshshs, thaaaat’s better, good girl . . .
The Widow, seated next to me, was caught in the same trap and was compelled to resort to her own stereotype; if she were to relinquish it she’d be disqualifying herself. “The writer’s widow” was hers, another was the “professor’s wife”—produced by the reality of life on American university campuses, while the “Neapolitan gigolo” was yet another. The gigolo erodes his own sex appeal with his stream of chatter, but, if he shuts up, he undermines the stereotype, and, hence, his appeal.
Beauty. This was unequivocal beauty, beauty with no need to justify itself, beauty that humbles and leaves one breathless. “Beauty is truth, truth beauty—that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know,” whispered The Widow. The verse may be a platitude, but it had a poignant ring to it, and nothing felt more apt just then. The Widow and I hovered with melting gazes over the Pompeii frescoes, over comely faces, Paquius Proculus and his wife, the fetching expression of a young woman who for two thousand years had been resting a stylus on her lower lip, over the flora and fauna, the gods and mortals, the mythic scenes and exquisite landscapes . . .
We peeked as well into Il Gabinetto Segreto, the Sectret Museum, where we found ourselves surrounded by placentarii, bronze figurines with long penises. There were big penises, circumcised penises, lazy penises, pudgy penises, flying penises, heavy penis-oil lamps, figurines of men, penises bared, juggling trays and dishes, statuettes of satyrs, frescoes of impressive Priapus . . .
“In the context of Pompeii, these penises are comic relief . . .” I whispered.
“Ah, and when have you, in your lifetime, encountered a tragedian?” asked The Widow, choking back laughter.
Although our conversation might easily have slid that moment in a joking-vulgar direction, my response, wisely, was silence. The rooms of the secret cabinet were overcrowded, crammed with visitors, and this meant we had to view the exhibits quickly and leave as soon as possible.
“Bellezza . . .” she said. “You are still young, lelkem, you have not yet arrived at this sensation . . . Some older people become suddenly hyper-sensitized to beauty. This is the best and worst thing that can happen to you in old age. On the one hand you can see clearly what you let slip in life, while, on the other, you realize you no longer have the time to make up for what you’ve missed. It’s as if your focus sharpens while your vision weakens, but it sharpens only for beauty, the beauty of nature, the heavens, faces, bodies, art, music . . . This is Gustav von Aschenbach syndrome. Levin had it, too. Homosexuality has nothing to do with it, at least I never read Death in Venice that way . . . Authentic beauty for women and men of my age may usurp us like a real earthquake.”
The Widow seemed shaken. When I rubbed her shoulders in a gesture of comfort, I felt her shiver a little under my hands.
“I feel like Ingrid Bergman in the movie Journey to Italy . . . At every tourist sight in Naples, including thi
s very museum, Ingrid Bergman weeps. True, her hyper-sensitivity comes from the fear that she has lost her husband’s love, while mine may well spring from senility,” she added and chuckled.
She had style. Although I hadn’t said so to her, I was pleased that before the trip to Naples each of us had watched Journey to Italy by Roberto Rossellini.
We went off to find the Herculaneum papyri. I think this was more as a nod to the prophetic power of Bulgakov’s famous phrase, “manuscripts don’t burn,” than to a wish to examine the actual carbonized scrolls of paper. The story about these papyri—touchingly intriguing and openended—stirred the imagination, especially because hundreds of people had toiled for almost two decades on their reconstruction. Some two thousand carbonized scrolls were found in the mid-eighteenth century when the villa of a rich family in Herculaneum was excavated. It took one hundred fifty years, hundreds of enthusiasts and experts, the advent of computers, technological advances, digitalization, and micro-computer tomography, to make legible the valuable original works by Greek philosophers.
“It transpires that, as fragile and sensitive as paper may be, it is, in fact, indestructible. Imagine, these carbonized scrolls lay under tons of volcanic ash for a full seventeen centuries, and today on a screen we can read all the letters that were penned on them in ink! How exhilarating! We will disappear, but paper will outlive us . . .” she said.
9.
In the Museum Arcades
Before leaving the museum we sat down on a stone bench in the arcades to rest. Our gaze swam around the lovely atrium before us and the walls of the arcade secured a refreshing coolness . . .
“Elderly people often cajole those around them. Hence their smiles and simpers that seem awkward, especially in older women. Their simpers are apologies, as if the smile is meant to mask their knowledge of their own lack of physical appeal. When we are young, none of us bothers with such things. And then we start taking care, at some point, not to ‘offend.’ Why? Because we depend on others to move through life. We only realize this when it’s too late to fight back. If people around us gradually begin pulling away, this means they’ve assigned us a one-way ticket in their thoughts, they’ve written us off. The reasons for this may be banal and most often are: they haven’t time for us, we’re taking up too much space, we’re ugly, we’re old, we’re useless, we’re tiresome, we’re weeds . . . So we step out of the way, we retreat, we have even learned to roll our shadow up behind us, we grow quieter, hush our breathing . . .”
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