Joseph Roth - Flight Without End

As if a President who supported peace in Europe and declared his esteem for Germany had to justify being acquainted with a M. Cardillac who owned German relations, the old man said:

‘I don’t know M. Cardillac very well. He was introduced to me some years ago. He comes from an old Milanese family which produces the world-famous tiled stoves, as well as common knick-knacks of all kinds. M. Cardillac is well-situated; he practises as an art-dealer, I believe, his contacts are more of a business than a social nature, but as you know, my dear sir,’ he repeated, ‘my dear sir’ — ‘since the war business and social life have become more or less identical …’ And for a few moments the President lapsed into silence, into a restorative pause to allow himself time to recover from the self-administered shock of propounding the identity of commerce and society.

He certainly desired peace between nations, but what he understood by that was peace between certain social strata; he had no prejudices, he considered himself the most progressive member of the cultural world, but the categories he had created for himself were firmly based on the very prejudices he abjured. With those who are labelled ‘reactionary’, the President had a common foundation; his house was more airy, it had more windows, but it would collapse the moment its foundations were disturbed. He was certainly ashamed of his acquaintance with M. Cardillac. It was distasteful for him to have to speak of that gentleman. Perhaps he could just as easily have put Tunda in touch with some other, better-connected young lady. But then, Tunda no longer stood so high in his estimation since his appeal for help.

Thus Tunda gained entrance to M. Cardillac’s home.

He had never seen a larger house. It seemed to him even more spacious than it really was because he did not become fully acquainted with the whole of it, because — since he only managed to see parts or fragments of the house — he knew it as little as one knows a dictionary where one singles out a particular section from time to time in order to look up a particular word.

He was most interested in Mlle. Pauline, with whom he had to carry on conversation. Eighteen years old, with the familiar brown complexion of the Balkans — M. Cardillac originated from southern Rumania — a complexion reminiscent of the colour of meteorites and seeming to comprise iron, wind and sun, with sloping, meagre, pitiful shoulders, with soft, delicate hips threatened, in years to come, by a dangerously disfiguring breadth — Pauline seemed worthy of a better father than the one she had, and a wider, fuller life than the one she led. It was one of Tunda’s fatal propensities to feel compassion for pretty women. To him their beauty seemed merely the proper index of their value, he could not get used to the idea that beauty is not some abundance of the female body, not grace or luxury, something akin to the genius of a masculine mind, but the self-evident tool of their existence, like their limbs, their head, their eyes. A woman’s beauty is her single, yes her primary distinguishing feature, as the breast is the organ of her sexuality and her maternity. Most women are beautiful, just as most men are not cripples. But Tunda was disconcerted by this beauty to such an extent that he was inclined to seek an explanation for it in some inadequately appreciated virtue in its possessor. His love was always initiated by compassion, together with the compulsion to rid the world of an atrocious injustice.

At first, then, he overestimated Pauline. It gave him pleasure to see how she entered the room where he awaited her, how for a moment she left slightly ajar the door which led into her room, a room that seemed to be filled with indescribable, amorphous, purely ethereal extravagances. It delighted him to see how, with graceful helplessness, she placed her arm behind her back to shut the door, whose handle was level with her head. She did this as if she was trying to conceal something dangerous, known only to the two of them, so that every time it seemed for a moment as if they had a forbidden tryst. Her slender hands, scarcely trusting themselves to hold anything, were cool, a pale, fading red which lingered hesitantly on from Pauline’s earlier adolescent years. She used these hands cautiously, as if they were precious limbs that she had been lent; Pauline was conscious of her hands only vaguely, as young birds are of their wings. She extended her arms too far, or she pressed her elbow too anxiously against her breast, she had not yet acquired experience in judging distances. Tunda appreciated the rounded quadrant of her recessed chin seen in profile, and the soft white down which entirely covered her russet face, a kind of silvery moss of youth and beauty.

Nevertheless, he remained aware that this girl, young and undeveloped as she was, came, like her adult counterparts from a world he despised and one which did not deserve its beauty. What kind of people had she been with; to what kind of people was she going? Her days and nights were filled with the ignominious and ridiculous ideas, conversation, experiences and emotions of these people. She went on outings with them, attended balls, visited mountains and spas, fell in love with them, played and danced with them, would marry one of them and bear children which looked as they all did. Reason enough to despise her! Reason enough to suppose that Nature, blind as she is, endows the women of this unnatural caste with beauty just as she makes its men grow straight and healthy. As a monk, exposed to the risk of being attracted by a woman, escapes this danger by means of the unnatural but infallible remedy of abstracting the woman from her charms, so Tunda began to relate Pauline to her world. Soon he found in the depths of her darting, flirtatious, yet always circumspect eyes, in those anatomically indeterminate, medically unfathomable depths, a blank screen against which the images of the world were sadly shattered.

He found in her smooth and well-ordered features the chill stupidity which so resembles charming good nature, unselfconscious grace and naive joy in living. He found that same cheerless, enchanting, elegant stupidity that takes pity on pavement beggars yet tramples a thousand lives with each light step it takes.

It was a rich house. The young people who frequented it were as much at home in the Tattersalls and stadiums of the international sporting world as their fathers had been in the jewel markets from Bucharest to Amsterdam. But just as the slightly colour-blind are insensitive to part of the spectrum and cannot, or only with difficulty, tell violet from blue and blue from dark-green, so these young people lacked a feeling for the beauty, ugliness, naturalness, unnaturalness, charm and disgust of particular situations and particular circumstances. Yes, they lacked this totally. Most of all, Tunda was amazed that, although they were enthusiastic about nature and claimed — indeed believed themselves — to be at one with it, yet they were quite unaffected by nature’s changing moods, exhibiting the same expression on dull, cold days as on warm and bright ones, always finding themselves in that specially animated, hectic and slightly perspiring condition common to participants and ballboys at tennis tournaments, whether in thundery oppression or after-rain freshness, at noon, at sunrise or at sunset. Whether in dinner-jackets or sports-shirts, they were the same. With strong, square, white teeth, like an advertisement for toothpaste, which they bared in place of a smile, with broadly-padded shoulders and narrow waists, with large muscular hands from which all tactile sense had been hygienically removed, with their coloured cravats round their necks, with tidily cut and well-tended hair which showed no hint of ever losing its colour, massaged, showered, always giving the impression of having just emerged from a sea-bathe, he encountered these young men as a species of urban domesticated beasts of prey, kept on the main boulevard, and cared for and supported by the municipality. They spoke with resounding voices, the echo already present within their oral cavities. With imperturbable seriousness they uttered the kind of polite phrases that are listed in the cheapest etiquette books. They were able to discuss every aspect of human life in the tone which the fashionable magazines employ when dutifully dealing with politics, literature and finance on their last pages, and in the smallest print, after a thorough discussion of the season’s fashions. These young people discussed machines and motor-cars in the language of the classified advertisements. Indeed, they seemed to base their style on the advertisement sections of these magazines. They always knew exactly what to say about things and affairs, and what they said stood in roughly the same relation to these as a snapshot taken by an aerial photographer does to the facial expressions of a restive courting couple.