by Thomas Mann
All this I passed over in silence when at luncheon I described my Greek evening and the princess's perfect figure.
'Which naturally made a profound impression on you,' said Senhora Maria Pia, sitting very straight as always, leaning neither forward nor back, her jet necklace and earrings vibrating slightly.
I replied: 'Impressed me, senhora? No. On my very first day in Lisbon I was vouchsafed impressions of female beauty which I confess have made me unresponsive to further ones.' At this I kissed her hand, smiling at the same time at Zouzou. That is what I always did. It was dictated by the double image. When I paid the daughter a compliment, I looked at the mother and vice-versa. The starry-eyed man of the house, sitting at the head of the small table, observed this by-play with vague benevolence, a testimony to the stellar distances from which he gazed. The reverence I felt for him was not one jot diminished by the realization that in my courtship of the double image consideration for him was wholly superfluous.
'Papa is always kind,' Senhora Maria Pia had accurately declared. I believe that the head of the house would have listened with exactly the same benevolent inattention and absent-minded kindliness to the conversations I carried on with Zouzou at the tennis court or on some excursion when we lingered behind alone — and these were unconventional in the extreme. They were so thanks to her axiom, 'Silence is unhealthy'; to her phenomenal, altogether unconventional forthrightness; and to the subject to which this uneuphemistic bluntness was directed: the theme of love. To this, as we know, she had said: 'Pfui!' I had trouble enough on that account, for I did indeed love her and let her see it in various ways; she understood it, too, but in what a fashion! This enchanting girl's idea of love was extremely odd and comically distrustful. She appeared to see in it something like the secret behaviour of nasty small boys, professed to ascribe the vice called 'love' entirely to the male sex and to consider that the female sex had nothing to do with it, felt not the slightest natural inclination toward it, and believed that flirtations were begun exclusively by young men for the purpose of enticing girls into unseemly behaviour.
I would hear her say: 'There you go again paying court to me, Louis.' (Yes, it is true, she had begun to call me Louis sometimes when we were alone, just as I called her Zouzou.) 'Murmuring sweet nothings and looking at me imploringly — or shall I say "importunately"? No, I shall say "lovingly", but that is the name for a lie. You look at me with those blue eyes of yours and you know very well that they and your blond hair contrast so very strangely with your dark skin that one can't tell what to make of you. And what do you want? What is the purpose of your melting words and melting glances? Something that is unspeakably laughable and absurd, both childish and repugnant. I say "unspeakably", but of course it is not at all unspeakable, and I shall put it into words. You want me to consent to our embracing, to agree that two creatures whom Nature has carefully and completely separated should embrace each other so that your mouth is pressed upon mine while our nostrils are cross-wise and we breathe each other's breath. That's what you want, isn't it? A repulsive indecency and nothing else, but perverted into a pleasure by sensuality — that's the word for it, as I very well know; and the word means that swamp of impropriety into which all of you want to lure us so that we will go crazy and two civilized beings will behave like cannibals. That's the purpose of your flirtatiousness.'
She stopped speaking and managed to sit quite calm after this outburst of forthrightness, without any quickening of her breath or indication of fatigue. Moreover, it did not seem like an outburst, but rather like simple conformity to the principle of calling things by their right names. I was silent, shocked, touched, and troubled.
'Zouzou,' I said finally, and for a moment I held my hand above hers without touching it, and then completed the gesture in the air, moving my hand above her head and downward, as though to shield her. 'Zouzou, you distress me dreadfully when you use such words — what shall I call them, crude, cruel, exaggeratedly true, and for that very reason only half true, in fact not true at all — when you use such words to tear away the delicate mists in which my admiration for the charms of your person has enwrapped my heart and senses. Don't make fun of "enwrapped"! I purposely, deliberately, and intentionally said "enwrapped" because I must use poetic words to defend the poetry of love against your harsh, distorted version. I beseech you, what a way to talk about love and its purpose! Love has no purpose, it neither wills nor thinks beyond itself, it is entirely itself and entirely inwoven in itself — don't scoff at "inwoven". I have already told you that I am intentionally using poetic words — and that simply means more seemly ones — in the name of love, for love is essentially seemly, and your harsh words far outdistance it in an area that remains alien to love, however familiar it may be with it. I ask you! What a way to talk of a kiss, the tenderest exchange in the world, silent and lovely as a flower! This unforeseen occurrence, happening quite by itself, the mutual discovery of two pairs of lips, beyond which emotion does not even dream of going, because that is in itself the incredibly blessed seal of union with another!'
I pledge my word that is how I spoke. I did so because Zouzou's habit of discrediting love actually seemed to me childish and I regarded poetry as less childish than this girl's crudity. Poetry, moreover, came easily to me in my foundationless existence. It was simple enough for me to say that love has no ulterior object and does not think beyond a kiss at most, because in my unreal state I could not permit myself to come to grips with reality and, for example, to woo Zouzou. At best I could set myself the goal of seducing her, but there were serious obstacles in the way: not circumstances alone, but also her fabulous forthrightness and her exaggeratedly literal notion of the laughable impropriety of love. Just to listen to the retort with which she met my poetic sally.
'Patatipatatá!' she exclaimed. 'Enwrapped and inwoven and the lovely flowery kiss! All sugar to catch flies, a way of talking us into small-boy nastiness! Pfui, the kiss — that tender exchange! It's the beginning, the proper beginning, mais oui, or rather, it is the whole thing, toute la lyre, and the very worst of it. And why? Because it is the skin that all of you have in mind when you say love, the bare skin of the body. The skin of the lips is tender, you're right there, so tender that the blood is right behind it, and that's the reason for this poetry about the mutual discovery of pairs of lips: they in their tenderness want to go everywhere, and what you have in mind, all of you, is to lie naked with us, skin against skin, and teach us the absurd satisfaction that one miserable creature finds in savouring with lips and hands the moist surface of another. All of you do this without any feeling of shame at the pathetic ludicrousness of your behaviour and without giving thought — for it would spoil your game — to a couplet I once read in a book of spiritual instruction:
However fair and smooth the skin,
Stench and corruption lie within.'
'That's a nasty little verse, Zouzou,' I interrupted with a sad, disapproving shake of my head, 'nasty, however spiritual it pretends to be. I'll accept all your crudity, but that verse you've just recited cries to high heaven. And do you want to know why? Yes, yes, I am sure you do want to know. And I am prepared to tell you. Because this villainous little verse is designed to destroy belief in beauty and form, image and dream, belief in every phenomenon that, because it exists in words, is necessarily appearance and dream. But what would become of life and what would become of joy — without which there can be no life — if appearance and the surface world of the senses no longer counted for anything? I'll tell you something, charming Zouzou: your spiritual verse is more blasphemous than the most sinful lust of the flesh, for it is a spoil-sport, and to spoil the game of life is not only sinful, it is simply and entirely devilish. What do you say now? No, please, I'm not asking that to invite an interruption. I let you talk, however crudely, and now I am talking nobly, and am inspired to do so! If things went according to that altogether malicious verse, then the only thing really and not just apparently admirable would be, at most, th
e inanimate world, inorganic Being — I say at most, for when you think of it critically there is a question about its soundness, too. One may well ask whether an Alpine sunset or a waterfall is especially admirable, more so than an image or a dream, whether it is as true as it is beautiful — that is, true in itself without us, without our love and admiration. Now some time ago by the mysterious process of spontaneous generation organic life emerged from lifeless, inorganic Being. That its inward processes and essence are not of the cleanest goes without saying. Indeed, a smart aleck might say that all nature is nothing but mildew and corruption on the face of the earth, but that is simply the wisecrack of a smart aleck and never, to the end of time, will it succeed in killing love and joy — the joy in images. It was from a painter that I learned that. He painted the mildew with devotion, and was highly respected for it in the end. He used the human figure, too, as a model, as a model for a Greek god. Once in Paris, in the waiting-room of a dentist who made a small gold inlay for me, I saw a picture book entitled La Beauté humaine. It was filled with pictures of the finest reproductions of the human figure painters and sculptors had made throughout the ages with devotion and with joy. And why did it contain so many of these glorious pictures? Because at all times the earth has been full of fellows who paid not the slightest heed to your spiritual rhyme, but saw truth in form and appearance and surface, and made themselves their priests and very often won dignity and fame by doing so.'
I swear that's how I spoke, for I was inspired. And not just once did I speak thus, but repeatedly, whenever opportunity offered and I was alone with Zouzou. Sometimes it was on one of the benches beside the tennis courts, sometimes during a walk when four of us — including Senhor Hurtado, who would join us after luncheon — would stroll along the woody ways of the Campo Grande or between the banana plantings and tropical trees in the Largo do Principe Real. There had to be four of us so that I could walk alternately with the august half of the double image and then with her daughter. When I dropped back a little with Zouzou I could always find wise and noble words with which to combat her stupefying forthrightness and her childish notion that love was the unappetizing vice of small boys.
She clung stubbornly to this conception, though once or twice she betrayed by a silent, inquiring, sidewise glance fleetingly directed toward me that she had been struck by my eloquence and partly convinced — in short, that my zealous advocacy of joy and love had not completely missed its mark. There was one such moment, and I shall never forget it, when after many postponements we finally drove out in my carriage to the little village of Sintra. Under Dom Miguel's edifying guidance we had inspected the old castle in the village and then the citadels on the rocky heights with their fair prospects. Finally we drove on to the famous monastery of Belem (that is, Bethlehem), erected by the pious but ostentatious monarch King Emanuel the Happy, in honour and memory of the highly profitable Portuguese voyages of discovery. To be honest, Dom Miguel's lectures on the architectural styles of the castles and monasteries — the Moorish, Gothic, Italian elements, with an unexpected epilogue on Hindu influence — went, as they say, in one ear and out the other. I had other things to think about: to wit, how I could make love comprehensible to the forthright Zouzou. When one is occupied with a human problem, nature and the oddest architectural monuments alike become nothing but decoration, nothing but superficially apprehended background for what is human. Nevertheless, I must admit that this fairyland of stone was not without its effect. The incredible, magic delicacy of the cloister of Belem, belonging to no time and like a child's enchanted dream, with slender towers and delicate columns in the niche-vaults, the lightly patinated white sandstone cut into such fairytale magnificence that it seemed as though the stone could be worked with the slightest of fretsaws to produce these gems of lacy openwork — all this, I say, truly enchanted me, imaginatively exalted my mind, and certainly contributed to the excellence of the words I addressed to Zouzou.
We four had lingered rather a long time in the fabulous cloister, wandering around it repeatedly, and as Dom Miguel had no doubt noticed that we young people were not paying very close attention to his lecture on the King Emanuel style, he stayed with Dona Maria Pia, going ahead, and we followed at a distance that I did all I could to augment.
'Now, Zouzou,' I said, 'I imagine that in respect to this edifice our hearts beat as one. A cloister of this sort is something I have never come across before.' (I had not come across a cloister of any sort before, and it was just chance that my first one was this kind of child's dream.) 'I am very happy to visit it with you. But let's come to an agreement about the right word to describe it. "Beautiful"? No, that does not fit, though, of course, it is anything but unbeautiful. But "beautiful" — the word is too severe and elevated, don't you think? We must take the meaning of "pretty" and "charming" at their best, raise it to the nth degree and then we shall have the right term of praise for this cloister. For that's what it is: prettiness raised to the nth degree.'
'There you go babbling again, marquis. It's not unbeautiful, but it is not beautiful either, but simply extremely pretty. After all, what is extremely pretty is certainly beautiful.'
'No, there is a distinction. How can I make it clear to you? Your Mama, for example -'
'Is a beautiful woman,' Zouzou interrupted me quickly, 'and I am pretty at most; that's what you mean, isn't it? You are going to use us to illustrate your silly distinction, aren't you?'
'You anticipate me,' I replied after a measured pause, 'and you somewhat distort my thought. It does indeed run along the lines you indicate, but not precisely. It delights me to hear you say "we", "we two", of yourself and your mother. But after I have enjoyed the combination, I divide you again and proceed to admire you separately. Dona Maria Pia is perhaps an illustration of the fact that beauty, to be perfect, cannot entirely dispense with prettiness and loveliness. If your mother's face were not so large and stern and such a terrifying example of Iberian racial pride but had instead a little of your loveliness, she would be a completely beautiful woman. As things stand, she is not altogether what she ought to be: a beauty. You on the other hand, Zouzou, are prettiness and charm to perfection, raised to the nth degree. You are like this cloister—'
'Oh, thank you! I am a girl in the King Emanuel style, I am a capricious edifice. Many, many thanks. That's what I call gallantry.'
'You're free to make fun of my sincere words, to distort them and to call yourself an edifice. But you mustn't be surprised that this cloister has touched my heart so profoundly that I compare you to it, for you, too, have touched my heart. I am seeing the cloister for the first time. You certainly have seen it often?'
'Yes, a few times.'
'Then you should be happy to see it now in the company of a neophyte to whom it is all completely new. For that allows you to see the familiar with new eyes, the eyes of the neophyte, as though for the first time. One should always try to see everything, even the most commonplace, the most completely matter of fact, with new, astonished eyes as though for the first time. In this way it wins back its power to amaze, which has faded into matter-of-factness, and the world remains fresh. Otherwise, everything fades — life, joy, amazement. Take love, for example —'
'Fi donc! Taisez-vous!'
'But why? You, too, have talked of love, repeatedly, in accordance with your probably sound theory that silence is unhealthy. But you have expressed yourself so harshly about it, quoting nasty little spiritual verses, that you make one wonder how it is possible to speak so unlovingly of love. You have so grossly omitted sentiment in talking about the thing called love that what you say is unhealthy in its turn, and one feels obliged to contradict you and, if I may say so, to set you right. When one looks at love with new eyes, as though for the first time, what a touching and altogether amazing spectacle it is! It is nothing more or less than a miracle! In the last analysis, seen in the most comprehensive possible way, all existence is a miracle, but, according to my estimation, love is the greatest. Recentl
y you said that Nature had carefully separated and divided one human being from another. Very apposite and only too true. That's how it is and that's the rule. But in love Nature has made an exception — a very marvellous one if you look at it with new eyes. Notice carefully that it is Nature that admits this astounding exception, or rather, introduces it, and if you take sides in this matter for Nature and against love, Nature will not thank you in the least; it's a faux pas on your part, you are taking sides against Nature. I'll explain that, as I've undertaken to set you right. It is true: a man lives separated and divided from others inside his own skin, not only because he does not wish it otherwise. He wants to be as separate as he is because essentially he wants to be alone and cares nothing at all about others. Anyone else, everyone else within a skin of his own, is actually repulsive. His own person is the only thing that is not repulsive. That's a law of Nature, I state it as it is. When he sits meditatively with his elbows on the table, his head in his hands, he may place a couple of fingers against his cheek and one between his lips. All right, it's his finger and his lips, and so what of it? But to have someone else's finger between his lips would be insupportable, it would actually fill him with loathing. Don't you agree? Loathing in actual fact is the essence of his relation to others. When their physical presence becomes oppressive, it is odious to him in the highest degree. He would rather suffocate than open his senses in proximity to alien bodies. Involuntarily he in his own skin takes every precaution, and it is only to spare his own sensibilities that he is considerate of others. Good. Or, at any rate, true. With these words I have sketched the natural over-all state of affairs briefly but accurately, and now I come to a paragraph in the speech I have specially prepared for you.