Gregor von Rezzori - The Snows of Yesteryear

I have not forgotten the wistfulness of her look as she watched an ophthalmologist — a woman of eminence, a Russian and, so it was said, a morphine addict — the chief physician at the Czernowitz eye clinic, which, under her leadership, was recognized as state-of-the-art. This aristocratically thin-boned, eagle-nosed lady in a white smock was treating me after an accident in which I almost lost my eyesight. While examining me, she chatted of this and that. My mother’s anxious, attentive, wistful expression as she listened changed to horror when the doctor said in passing, in her smoky, Slavic voice: “No woman who hasn’t had syphilis can call herself truly a woman.” No, Mother’s notions of feminine self-fulfillment were less radically emancipated.

Shortly before her engagement, she danced at her first ball — one waltz too many — with a young lieutenant of the lancers, a golden-blond Pole with an interesting nervousness in his behavior, no doubt due to his being hounded by creditors. She was taken home forthwith. Decades later, when I had grown up, she confessed to me that she had fallen in love with him at first glance and irrevocably had dedicated her life to him. He remained the “great love” of her life even though — or rather because, although she could not admit this — she never saw him again. She still remembered his name but would never disclose it. “A name with a great many twittering sounds,” she admitted with a bewitching smile and a surprising touch of irony. He cast a fair shade over her entire life: her sole, her lost great love which forbade her ever to love another man. The punishing stroke with the cane had been sublimated. After being sent home from her first ball after one too many waltzes, she knew herself to have been cheated of life’s happiness.

And what about that other shade in the slouch hat and the artist’s flowing lavalliere, on the sea cliff near Trieste? She never spoke of him and I never dared ask her about him; no doubt there is an unutterable reason behind both her silence and my discretion. So this man remained a mystery between us in a twofold way: as a sign of that most intimate core which every human being conceals in his innermost self, and as that undefinable and most private reserve which keeps us from penetrating the innermost self of another being.

Of her engagement with my father she told only horrifying stories. According to her, he was bent on hurting her by shocking the whole world. In the fashion of the times favored by lady-killer bachelors, he had shaved his head completely. She was too inexperienced to perceive that he was anything but a lady-killer. He was simply a man who lived a more full-blooded life than all the straitlaced people around them. He bubbled over with irrepressible zest and vigor — different from her stealthily tenacious vitality, which was to help her survive him by several decades. His overwhelming good spirits never failed him; he was always spontaneous, full of humorous notions and scurrilous ideas. Because only a very few could match his lust for life, he rubbed almost everyone the wrong way. Out of a puerile defiance that remained one of his distinctive features all his life, he took pleasure in his role as the philistines’ bugaboo. No stranger to the accepted rhetoric of the day, he used it in antithesis. One of his favorite sayings was: “ Il faut épater les bourgeois! ” To my mother’s Victorian soul, this was sheer blasphemy. She soon saw him as a true monster.

My father was a full fourteen years older than my mother; when she was eighteen he was already thirty-two, an age at which he could be expected to show a manly, staid character. Instead, he behaved as if he had just emerged from puberty. He joked frivolously with my mother’s younger sisters, who were silenced, baffled, repelled by and, at the same time, hopelessly enamored of him. What they might have found amusing in a contemporary scandalized them in a mature man. He countered by calling them a bunch of silly geese and soon no longer spoke to them. He even dared to contradict their father — and had the additional temerity in proving to be in the right. Nothing like that had ever happened to my grandfather; he almost had a stroke and would have canceled his daughter’s engagement forthwith if he had not feared the embarrassment this would have entailed. Meanwhile the son-in-law to be, from whom more respect was to be expected — after all, the bride had a quite considerable dowry — amused himself by composing a little song satirizing the arrogance of the propertied:

I own a theater box

Where I’m seen in tails and high hat.

I have servants and horses and cars,

My money allows me all that ….

The ditty bore the hardly flattering title “The Show-off.’’

Of his future mother-in-law my father asserted that, when preparing for bed, she wore white heron feathers in her hair along with her nightgown, and that when she wrote to her couturier in Paris everybody in the house had to walk on tiptoe. Instead of a bouquet of flowers, he presented his bride with a brace of freshly shot woodcock tied by a leather thong. His dogs attacked the idolized scion of the family (the only son and heir after five daughters), a boy of extraordinary beauty and equally exceptional stupidity, and almost bit off his nose, so that it had to be sewn on again; the scar remained visible to the end of his days. When the bride summoned up her courage to ask her maverick bridegroom whether he might not please let his hair grow again, he replied, smartly clicking his heels, that to his everlasting regret he unfortunately was totally bald but would see to it that the matter was redressed: henceforth, throughout the summer of 1908, except at meals, he wore a heavy woolen cap with a red pom-pom, headgear suitable for winter sports. My mother’s grandmother was then still alive, over ninety and no longer in full possession of her mental faculties, but highly respected as was her due according to her rank in the family and her forebears in far-off Wallachia. During a tennis match, Father managed to smash an overhead ball straight in the face of the venerable lady— unintentionally, it goes without saying — and this did not make him more popular with the family, especially when we children learned of the incident years later and found it irresistibly amusing. “It’s obvious they’ve taken after their father,” was the tart comment.

And indeed this was true in that we could always see the grotesque or comical aspect of a situation and express our enjoyment of it in a rather exuberantly Rabelaisian way. My mother’s legacy seems to me more dubious: from her we inherited irascibility.

In the myth that my mother created of herself, she ascribed her perennially smoldering rage to the disappointment in her marriage. It was not to be expected of her to recognize its other sources, least of all the helplessness implanted in her long before. She stubbornly stuck to the notion that all the shortcomings in her life originated in that period when she should have experienced her true flowering as a woman and instead, at the side of an unloved man — one whose undeniably lovable qualities she never appreciated — was confronted with inadequacy both as wife and later as mother.

I suspected at times that her anger had yet another root, namely in a profanation of her naive faith. She had been brought up in a thoughtless Catholicism that saw in regular religious practices — church visits, the telling of the rosary beads, occasional confessions and Holy Communions — a more than adequate fulfillment of one’s duties toward God and His Holy Son, toward the Holy Mother and the Holy Church. This in no way equaled the self-evident reality of God’s world as Cassandra saw it, though it was equally unquestioning — but unquestioning only with regard to dogma and mere theology: any discussion of the Pope’s infallibility would have left my mother as empty of thought and as blankly incomprehending as an inquiry into the dual godlike and human natures of the Savior. As a Christian and a good Catholic, she lived in the innocence of ignorance, which unfortunately vouchsafed only a vulnerable and trivial state of grace. Her fiance’s booming atheism, with its bold Nietzsche quotations and Wagnerian background music (occasionally also bitingly ironic — still more disconcerting) was bound to throw her off the comfortable path of her shallow faith. He was destined to be her spouse, her lord and master, to whom on principle she was to grant the same authority as her father had, and if his views were shocking to her, they also opened up a confusing vision of a spiritual freedom in which she was anxious to participate so as to please him. Had her parents been aware of even a hint of this dilemma, they would gladly have allowed her to pursue the study of pediatrics. This, after all, was the direction in which the winds of the time were blowing. Meanwhile she thought to assuage her burgeoning doubts by reading Renan, and what in all probability remained concealed was a remnant of guilt, which she later attributed to her husband’s subsequent misconduct.