Memoirs of an Anti-Semite

by Gregor von Rezzori

  what did this properly dressed, gray-haired man, walking along a deserted Via Veneto on a drizzly winter morning, with a large box of marrons glacés under his arm, on his way to pay his respects to a Russian great-aunt of his (present, third, Italian) wife—a regular visit he had been paying once a week for years now—what did he have to do with the boy who, fifty years ago (half a century—and what a century!), had lain in the grass on a hilltop somewhere in the forest Carpathians, dreaming up a life in Jack London style: a prosperous farmer in East Africa, the bougainvillea around the farmhouse reaching into luxuriant plantations, the plantations into the Masai Plain, ostriches and vast zebra herds, thousands of antelope, sometimes the blacks running up to get the bwana with the unerring elephant rifle because a lion has broken into the ox kraal … such dreams were not at all extravagant or impossible back then; the reality they evoked truly existed, as late as yesterday even; today they are anachronistic, purely romantic, even as a mere boy you make a fool of yourself with such daydreams, you place yourself in the category of those who live in the golden haze of myth.…

  well, he had learned to adjust to such changes in the world: as a child in the Bukovina, within walking distance of the Dniester River, beyond which Russia began, he had been awakened in the night—the Austrians had marched out, the Rumanians had not yet marched in, people were afraid the Bolsheviks might attack or at least maraud, hordes were already passing through the countryside and plundering the military depots. He had retained the images of that time all his life; above all, trembling hands—the trembling hands of the nanny waking him up and dressing him, the trembling hands of his mother putting the jewelry in boxes to hide it, the trembling hands of the servants to whom his father—an eternal Don Quixote—distributed pistols.…

  had he fallen into a deep slumber back then like Rip Van Winkle and awakened only in the world of today, he would go crazy with despair: what has happened to this world between then, 1919, and today 1979, is so incredible, has changed it so radically that one can scarcely believe the same person lived in both epochs. Whatever his parents, the people of that world of yesterday, were afraid of—today’s reality is much, much worse than anything anyone could have imagined then. The red, the blood-red reality of the Bolsheviks was bursting with life compared to the gray anemic reality of the crumbling democracies. Yet, blood still flows today as it did then; blood has always flowed, in torrents, all through his lifetime; that it was not his own blood was due to random circumstances that one cannot even call fortuitous: the only dignity to be maintained in our time is the dignity of being among the victims.

  Experiencing such highly varied conditions, he said to himself, one inevitably goes through many metamorphoses. What, for instance, would seem to indicate that he, the distinguished, gray-haired, well-shaven man in a dark blue overcoat, walking down the Via Veneto in drizzly winter weather, is the same person as the newcomer here twenty years ago: the mustachioed, happy-go-lucky, Capri-shirt-sporting lothario who, with a hunter’s skill and sharp eye, manages to grab a seat at the small, crowded tables outside one of the now vanished cafés, and sits round-eyed at his granita seeing the protagonists of a breathtaking Dolce Vita in every gigolo and movie floozy strolling by: he himself, for all his apparent sophistication, an utter simpleton, for whom Rome is a daily festival, as for an enthusiastic tourist—the sight of the Castel Sant’ Angelo in floodlight a revelation, the Pantheon in the mist of crepuscule, the Campidoglio at sunrise impressions as deep as the glory of a Christmas tree in childhood, at night, by starlight, he takes visiting friends to the Piazza dei cavalieri di Malta like children to a crèche, has them peep through a keyhole in a garden gate to see the dome of Saint Peter’s in the vanishing point of an avenue of cypresses, shows them the cloister of the Quattro Coronati as if it were the spot of his own martyrdom, talks about it as eloquently as Gregorovius ….

  it doesn’t take more than two decades for this to change completely, the man and the city. Eternal Rome is eternal only in its constant change, perhaps what allows him to feel unalterably himself is also his perpetual changing. “I” is a notion that requires the immediate present. Yesterday’s “I” is mythical, a mere possibility of today’s “I.” Where has this “I” of twenty years ago gone now? Well, where has the glamor of Cinecittà gone that brought him here? The grandeur of swinging Italy back then? Prince Massimo marrying the film starlet Dawn Adams: an epochal connection. Fleeting the epoch, like the many others he has lived through: the echo of the Habsburg Empire in the Balkan operetta world, the entrance and dying fall of the roaring twenties in Berlin; the elegant thirties in Vienna, in Prague; the entrance of America into the core of Europe: Barbara Hutton marrying Count Haugwitz-Reventlow, the king of England marrying Mrs. Simpson, a sporting and shooting club at Mittersill Castle in Austria attracting the most frivolous specimens from a newly formed café society on both continents; and at the same time: Adolf Hitler expanding his Berghof at nearby Berchtesgaden, Reichspropaganda-minister Dr. Joseph Goebbels compromising the actress Lydia Barowa—the scandal shocks public opinion more than the shooting of Röhm … altogether, everything, the events, concentrating more and more on Germany, on Berlin; it whirls together there, the suction pulls him in too: soon an epoch of ration cards and air-raid shelters begins, cities crumble, what is left of Berlin’s high society attend dinner parties with stiff upper lips and toothbrushes in their pockets in case they might not find their houses standing when they come home; and even this passes, gives way to a short and violent epoch of women-raping Russians, the division of Germany and Austria into zones, icy rubble-cities, a black-market time, hunger time in Germany while Italy begins to swing, Existentialism triumphs in France, Juliette Greco sings before Jean-Paul Sartre in Saint Germain-des-Prés, Italian musica leggera erupts, Dior’s New Look conquers Brindisi, the khaki uniforms of Americans are visibly withdrawn from circulation and, instead, the city-scape of Rome is dominated by a gaudier sort

  —and where have they gone, the swarms of crinkly-mouthed climacterials with black, butterfly-wing-framed glasses like carnival masks, cobweb-fine matron’s coifs for their laundry-blue-rinsed hair and ants in their pants? Where have their Mennen-drenched, corpse-washed escorts and consorts gone with their raspberry-colored slacks, violently checkered clown jackets, snow-white moccasins on huge feet, and toilet-bowl-white porcelain teeth in their kissers, the Supermen of America’s short-lived supremacy? …

  to be sure, one must bear in mind that anyone born then, twenty years ago, is now twenty years old: for anyone at the outset of his life, a decade is enough to change a world, and certainly more so two decades, or even four; but seen from the end of a life, the decades went by like last week—and yet the fusti of Trastevere, so much liked by the American climacterials, with attractively swollen thorax muscles under skintight T-shirts, are now dyspeptic postal workers and fat espresso-bar managers; Anita Ekberg and Gina Lollobrigida hint at their not sharing the secret of Dorian Gray, in their cases the news has leaked out; meanwhile, the babies born in Lollo’s and Anita’s heyday and now twenty years old are crippling one another with monkey wrenches and bicycle chains, mowing down dutiful government servants and unpopular judges in broad daylight with sheaves of machine-gun fire; yet the epoch is not lively and dynamic, but oddly stagnant, not colorful, gaudy, but utterly gray like the winter weather—the closer the Molotov cocktails and homemade bombs explode (philanthropic publishers offer how-to instructions at a low cost in paperback editions), the more blood flows across the sidewalk into the gutters, the more hectically the pantere of the Carabinieri race around corners with howling sirens and flashing blue lights, then the more life becomes provincial, a drab Biedermeier: the cities are quiet, dead quiet, anyone with an eight- or nine-digit bank account (lire are such a flimsy currency) fears to venture out after the stores close for the night, bodyguards with machine guns, safety catches released, stand in front of building entrances, the children are in Switzerland (and most bank accounts too, of course),
the evening’s entertainment on television is both suspenseful and paralyzing: it shows you highly exciting events of no consequence whatever, a most romantic standstill, a still-life of chaos, so to say, of scandals, of corruption and continuous crises—government crises, oil crises, supply crises; the national passions for soccer and bicycle racing are gradually replaced by a national passion for strikes; the more visible the mechanisms of behind-the-scenes wire-pullers become, thanks to the indefatigable educational efforts of (bribable) journalism, then the more anonymously these selfsame wire-pullers withdraw into obscurity ….

  meanwhile, clouds of poison gas escape accidentally and turn children’s faces into cactus blossoms, the coasts rot under the beached dead fish, the climate of southern Italy becomes like Scotland’s but scientists assure us that this has nothing to do with the increasing density of jet planes in the stratosphere … it may be understandable that the twenty-year-olds today are restless, more restless than even we were at their age, the pressure bothers them more than it bothers us, our generation has gone through so much it can put up with this, too—above all, we have learned to put up with things, to make the best, even of the worst; but the young people, born back then when he first had come to Rome—in a word, his son’s contemporaries, if the son had survived, the poor little thing …

  he instantly pushes the thought aside: he stops thinking of his son, forbids himself to think of him—what was I thinking about? Yes, the young people of today: why are they so restless? We were restless because of our dreams—dreams of the future. Do they have a future? What do they dream about? socialism come true at last? heroism in the adventure of the Revolution? or simply world fame as a rock singer? as a hero of Formula-I racing? … Certainly not about love, as we did when we were their age; they’ve got it too easy in this respect, they’re already copulating at the onset of puberty, in short pants and pinafores, so to speak; at twenty, they have acquired the sexual experiences of an active man in his mid-forties; enviable but of course detrimental to eroticism; the feelings are sure to deaden with such an unresisting, such an insensitive, such a semi-involved possibility of sexual activity—or at least so our envy encourages us to presume. As for great love, the very notion of which in our time made all the feelings in the forehead and the pit of the stomach and the Venus mound contract in poignantly sweet ardor—the unique great love with which life is fulfilled and bliss on earth attained, the one great love that is the attained goal of troth, loyalty, allegiance to the banner that waves over a life—they, the young ones today, most likely never dream of that. So they say, in magazines, anyway; and polls, surveys, and statistical analyses confirm it ….

  Be that as it may: they must dream about something, they too, these young people, even if only about finding their identity. For what made him, the man with gray hair and the box of marrons glacés under his arm, walking along the Via Veneto to visit a Russian great-aunt of his (present, third, Italian) wife—what made him identical with the forty-year-old of twenty years ago, here, outside one of the now vanished cafés, Rome-hungry and future-minded, freshly divorced from his (second, Jewish) wife, and expecting his little boy to be awarded to him; what made him one and the same person as the adolescent on the hilltop in the Carpathians half a century ago and, even further back, the child who awakened at night (because they feared the Bolsheviks were coming), or the air-raid-shelter sitter under the hail of bombs in Berlin, and the freebooter in the intellectuals’ interregnum during the Ice Age of the German rubble-cities, and the writer of screenplays for Cinecittaà during the fifties—what made him one with all these characters and various other forms of his diverse metamorphoses? Yes, there was an answer. The thing that made them all one and the same person was: dreaming. When he thought I, he felt as if he were dreaming himself up: Somnio, ergo sum—I dream myself up, therefore I am.

  Notwithstanding that his dreams had been different with every change and had sometimes taken on the character of nightmares. Dreaming per se had remained the same, whether a boy’s conjuring up a vision of himself as a white hunter or a world-famous artist or champion amateur jockey, or the eternal dream of a man whose love is fulfilled, or other banal wishful thoughts that scarcely suggested originality. Indeed, what had allowed him unswervingly to feel himself as I through all the real and dreamed-up transformations was not what he dreamed, but how he dreamed—an outwitting of self developed to a fine art, with the help of which he eluded any out-and-out collision with reality.

  The first time he had seen a bullfight (not in Spain, which events of world history had prevented him from visiting until quite late, but in Mexico, where he lived during a transitory stage as a car salesman), wearing a tremendous sombrero and sitting with a breathtakingly beautiful gumchewing American girl friend in the shady parabolic section of the arena, he watched as the matador made the black dart of the bull aim at the red cloth of the capa over and over again, and the matador over and over again steered the bull past by a hairbreadth. The first time he watched this, he realized with amusement that he himself employed the same tactic with himself, and that he had developed equivalent mastery. Elude an out-and-out collision with reality…. No, sir, this was not cowardice about life, not escapism—rather the contrary: he, too, could look reality in the face, better than most other people, for he knew how dangerous reality was. But the artful feat of always holding up a new possibility of himself, a fiction of himself, and the knack, the balletic skill, of eluding reality, withdrawing the fiction at the last instant before colliding with reality—those were talents no one could emulate.

  Indispensable talents, if you wanted to survive. For otherwise, how could you stand the look of your face of yesterday? For instance the reddened face of the teenager in the Carpathians, eyes burning, lips trembling in the greed to kill something, a dove, a hare, a roe deer … or the face of the young man in love, not dry behind the ears but scandalizing the beau monde of prewar Bucharest with his sentimental performances, who, while the world around him is about to crumble, Europe preparing to commit suicide, welcomes the Nazi invasion in Poland just because he loathes Poles, since the lady whom he happens to love (one of the several unique great loves of his life, each of which promised fulfillment, bliss on earth attained, the very goal of troth and loyalty)—well, she has had a Polish lover before him and sometimes seems to mind that he has left her … or the face of the hideous fop who, under the hail of bombs on Berlin in 1943, leads an idler’s life, cynically watching a world in flames, millions of people dying, being crippled, suffering unutterable grief, but he, in the midst of a panicking crowd that rushes toward an air-raid shelter even before the sirens have howled their warning, pulls a watch from his pocket, looks at it, then up at the sky, and with an ugly sneer says in a loud voice, “They’re late today. Do let’s hope nothing has happened to them on the way!” … or the face of the man who sleeps, sleeps for days in a Munich room whose door leads into a corridor that leads, in turn, into space—half the house is missing, piled up in a heap of brick and mortar, broken window frames and splinters of glass and slate where once a charming street in Schwabing gave out on to the Englische Garten, now a narrow path across the rubble, glittering in the frost winter of 1947, and he doesn’t care whether there is coal for the stove in the corner of the small room where his (first) wife, a refugee from East Prussia, sits in a mangy lambskin coat staring hatefully at him, despising him for his refusal to find a job or do the least work to make their improvised habitation habitable or try and get into some petty black-market racket in order to procure a bagful of potatoes or half a pound of rancid butter … or the ridiculous, mustachioed face of the would-be lothario who, after all this and two divorces and a pitiless fight with his second wife over their little son (a fight that ended with the poor boy’s death) sits outside a café on the Via Veneto eagerly trying to adjust himself to the glory of Cinecittà ….

  Well, go on with your biography. Jump a decade forward, or backward if you please. Examine at random this or that po
ssibility of yourself: you always come across someone you would be embarrassed (or even outright ashamed) to identify with, someone you’d refuse to frequent if you weren’t forced to live with, because he happens to be yourself ….

  yes, but there’s always another dimension, another possibility ….

  this “yes, but” which allows you to admit that all these dubious characters were you—or, in any case, possibilities of yourself—that all these faces (including the face in your shaving mirror) were undeniably yours, what else is this “yes, but” but a bullfighter’s slight, elegant, perfidious twist of the capa that makes the bull’s horns miss him by a hairbreadth? … “yes, but” the boy in the Carpathians was brought up in a peculiar, anachronistic world, a feudal world, a strictly traditional education that used the lust for killing—shall we call it, less emotionally, the pleasure of hunting—as a way of strengthening the heart for equally exciting and far nobler feelings, all rooted in the rules of chivalry, such as one’s duty to defend the oppressed, the feeble, and the poor, the readiness to die for the sake of troth and flag or for one’s lady—infantile notions, you’d call them, yes, but notions on which our civilization is based … and as for the creature who, out of sick jealousy, welcomes the assassination of a small and very noble people by the power-drunk followers of a lunatic: well, “yes, but” consider the utter violence of the love that led to such sick jealousy, a love in which all that pent-up romanticism broke loose; at last, after a childhood, an adolescence, of craving to be a good knight, at last he could realize an unconditional commitment to a flag, a cause—his lady … mind you, fanaticism was in the air at the time; supposing instead of falling so violently in love, he had committed himself to the SS? (though, strangely enough, their view on Poland didn’t differ much from his) … “yes, but” take the same face a few years later, in Berlin in 1943: that look of cynicism is but the fruit of suffering, he is sick with hatred, hatred not only for the Nazis but for everyone and everything, for the Germans as a whole and in particular the remnants of their old high society, now apathetically attending their Götterdämmerung; equally, however, he hates the British for their hypocrisy and shortsightedness, the French for their rêverie of lost glory, the Italians for their greed and vanity, and most of all the Americans for their devious self-righteousness—did all these imbeciles not see that their glorious war was not for or against a man called Hitler, or a nation, or an ideology, or a political system, but against themselves? couldn’t they admit that this was the class war they were bound to lose, that would destroy the very things they pretended to fight for: ideals, holy traditions, values handed down from generation to generation; couldn’t they understand that every bomb that gutted a house—here, there, on this side or that side of a front line (a front line that in reality ran through the social structure of each of their countries)—that every one of those bombs simply opened the cellars and set the rats free, the profiteers, the greedy, the uncivilized, the illiterates, the oppressed and offended who wanted their share of the cake no matter how—perhaps through revolution that would, conceivably, bear fruit in the future …