Gregor von Rezzori - The Snows of Yesteryear

My mother’s restlessness and nervous insatiability were discharged against my sister even more virulently than against myself. She could not stand this darling of my father’s, even though she claimed maternal rights and also exacted the demands flowing from a mother’s responsibilities in regard to my sister. She could not cope with the rapidly maturing girl whom she had left alone during the first four years of her infancy. It was said that after the birth of my sister she was stricken with a kidney disease which she tried to mitigate but never could hope to cure entirely by protracted sojourns in health resorts. Until the outbreak of the First World War (and my own appearance in this world) she spent the greater part of the summers in Swiss spas and the winter months in Egypt — and it is in the latter country that, for a time, I matured in embryonic safeness. Meanwhile my sister was in the care of well-tried nurses under the supervision of our maternal grandparents in the country house in which she had been born, the so-called Odaya which had been allotted to my mother as a kind of conditional dowry. The girl hung on her father with passionate love and in ever more intense closeness.

Our mother’s frail health and almost yearlong absences from her house (the furnishing of which was only scarcely completed to suit family occupancy), a house she hated, did not benefit her young married life. Nor did the four years of war that followed bring our parents any closer. We had left the house when the Russians arrived, and I believe that their appearance came as rather a relief to her. It was a ramshackle old building, in appearance half monastic and half a Turkish konak located in a most remote region and of a rusticality that only my huntsman father did not mind. My mother much preferred our house in town. In 1918, upon our return to the Bukovina, we resumed our family life in Czernowitz; the family was split into contending parties and, in view of our father’s absences, owed its cohesion only to the permanent old-time domestics — Cassandra; Olga Hofmann, the Bohemian cook; Adam, the coachman; and finally Bunchy, those firm pillars amidst the coming and going of all the others. My parents were already so alienated from each other that for my own part I could not have found any pretext for the formation of an Oedipus complex. Jealousy I felt only toward my sister and her close bond with my father, a relationship from which I was totally excluded.

During my childhood days, my father was more a mythical than tangible figure for me. I saw him as rarely as my sister had seen her mother during her first years. Now he was away from home most of the time on hunting expeditions: Nimrod, the great hunter, whom from afar I marveled at, admired and envied and whom at close range I feared. I grew up among women, and it is through them that I experienced “the female” in three archetypal embodiments: through Cassandra, a brood-warm, protectively enveloping motherliness; through my sister, forever outdistancing me by four years and by nature’s favor or disfavor the superior, the more airy, spiritual, always nimbly evasive figure of the nymph; and through my mother, an iridescent interplay of all archfemale characteristics — sensual excitement paired with the fitful capriciousness of the potential mistress, forever vacillating between stormy tenderness and pretended indifference, between lovingly passionate empathy and cruelly punishing iciness.

A potential mistress, yes, but one in the sentimental guise of a turn-of-the-century painting. The essential of my mother’s femininity I perceive in her clothing. She was very attractive in those years, with her still girlish though gently rounded slimness. I never imagine her body but always as she appeared, formally clad, in society. To my mind she is the prototype of the lady. I love her movements, her posture, as well as certain graceful details: her smooth arms, the nape of her neck with the line of her chestnut-colored hair artfully teased into an airy, fluffy fullness — not like Cassandra’s tightly wound pillow for baskets and pitchers. But I find even more appealing the elegant line of her clothes: the long narrow skirt, slightly gathered at the hips, the tightly laced waistline and the accented high bust of the period. Her favorite color is a light pearl-gray that invests the fabric with a discreet, self-assured neutrality which brings out the bloom of her delicate skin. For jewels, she prefers pearls. Her thin pointed shoes and soft kidskin gloves that cover her arms to her elbows are endowed for me with an erotic fascination. I develop a sharp eye for the quality of hats, handbags, umbrellas and other accessories. In winter, her furs flatter her with a voluptuous sheen that speaks eloquently to me. And all this is suffused with the scent of a fastidiously cared-for womanliness.

As if she meant to transpose this ethereal physicality to a spiritual and psychological sphere, she has an unworldliness, a remoteness from life that removes her as a possible object of my sensuality and places her in a category of sublimated eroticism. What is feminine in her awakens merely a mediated desire so that it remains platonic, as one used to put it. One might say the desire was directed at the brassiere rather than at the breasts. What I perceived as “womanly” in my mother were her female accoutrements: a totality of culturally distinguishing characteristics. The inevitable attraction of the totally different, forever unattainable and eternally incomprehensible female being, though belonging to the same zoological human species, was summed up for me in the onion skins of feminine clothing.

Whether that remoteness from the world and from reality also sublimated the desire of the men in my mother’s life remains a moot question. As far as my father was concerned, this would seem paradoxical, but it can’t be ruled out. He loved her very much, even though he never took her entirely seriously and cheated on her left and right. She accused him of unbridled sensuality, thereby probably expressing her inhibitions regarding any overt assertiveness. She feared reality; her life seemed to her a spell that had cast her into irreality. She always felt guilty about not fitting, as she saw it, into a world where everyone else was at home. Nothing around her or in herself corresponded to the conceptions she had formed about her life, and this nourished a culpability that she then angrily rejected. She felt constantly reminded of her subservience to the call of duty, as if she were forever failing at some task. This unfulfilled, unfulfillable sense of duty magnified ultimately into a nervously obsessive need for self-imposed duties. She assigned herself duties like self-inflicted punishments.

My remembrance of that early time is murky. The sunny days of childhood came later for me. I was still frightened by the stormy skies and the blood-red sunsets over the deeply melancholy spaciousness of the landscape, of which we had an unobstructed view on three sides of our house and garden. Clear-lit images, such as that of my mother at the tea table on a summer afternoon before her elfin dreaminess iced over, are rare. If there hadn’t been the brood-warm love of Cassandra and her comical buffooneries, I would now be visited in an even worse way by the anxieties that in those days permeated our problematic family life. None of them are forgotten. My allergies to all kinds of tensions, exaltations and neurotic resistances have their throat-tightening origin in those days, when, presumably, the hardness I displayed to my mother at the end of her life also originated. Her endearments were of a tempestuousness that frightened more than delighted me, and in addition prompted venomous remarks from my sister. Even though I surmised, with the uncanny ability of children to plumb the reality behind the surface, that the bluntness with which my mother interfered in our harmony stemmed from her need to find some firm ground in a life that was slipping away from her, I never forgave her for it. Nor did I forgive her her absentmindedness, which she tried to correct with unyielding opinions and rigid prejudices. The hostility to anyone not sharing her opinions and intentions resulted directly from existential panic. When she was alone or thought herself so, her glance would drift away and she would lose herself in a remote nowhere, initially filled by dreams, perhaps, but later peopled by phantoms from her misspent life — in any case the true scenery of her mind.