Gregor von Rezzori - The Snows of Yesteryear

Whatever wrong I did — a disobedience, an impudence against a governess, an assault against my sister or a failing in school — I was made to understand that a human being capable of such ignominy no longer could count on the indulgence of his fellow beings; he was to be expelled from their community. One of the worst offenses of which I became guilty also made me deeply ashamed of myself, albeit not as expected. Precociously engrossed in erotic dreams, I had been writing love letters to myself, as if these had been addressed to me by various girls. My mother, who felt duty-bound to check on everything, managed to find the letters in their hiding place and was outraged. She believed me capable of leading the double life the letters suggested, in which I indulged — God alone would know how, when and where — in lively sexual activities. As to me, I was mortified by this revelation of my secret inner life. She had found me out as an ignominious fraud. I do not exaggerate when I declare that, barely ten years old, I already was considered a failure and felt myself as such; I was all the more crestfallen since, even as a monster, I could not achieve anything so remarkably wicked or loathsome to warrant a real suicide.

As children and even more so as headstrong adolescents, my sister and I were of course unable to grasp that what, between us, we bluntly called Mother’s “nuttiness” was in reality the tragicomedy of an obsolete pedagogic principle. The strictness of her own upbringing had established for her a world cast in primer-like simplicity, which contained no real human beings but merely standard roles whose comportment was assigned irrespective of individuality, character, temperament or nervous disposition. It was the world concept of a stable social order, a world of stereotypes: a peasant was unmistakably a peasant, a sailor a sailor, and a privy councillor was forever nothing but a privy councillor; any deviation into the specifically individual was a step toward chaos.

Especially in the picture of the family, which was known to be the germinal nucleus of all civilization, the stereotypes stood in firmly ordered rows. What a “father” or a “mother” had to be, or a “sister” or a “brother,” or a “husband” or “wife,” was rigidly determined; it had its own costume and certainly its own prescribed text, just as in a stage play. Whoever deviated from this predetermined role, a role reduced to its most essential or trivial elements, or whoever went so far as to forget the assigned role altogether, was not merely reprehensible but downright evil. This was the case with her own husband, who refused to play the role of the competent and kind, affectionate and considerate paterfamilias, and therefore took on for her all the characteristics of an egocentric and inconsiderate, beastly and lustful proprietor of a conscripted slave wife. Paradoxically, this nonconformity extended to herself, for she recognized her own failings. She felt only too acutely that she was no match for my father’s full-bloodedness and consequently that she was a failure as his “life partner,” as much as in her hackneyed notion of the role of mother, in which no one, least of all we children, took her seriously. The harder she tried to embody the image of the heroic mother (heroic pediatrician sacrificing herself to shield her brood from the diabolical perils of disease, death and moral decay), the more piteously her efforts miscarried.

Yet there was often something deeply touching about these efforts. Decades later, as a grandmother, she still could not desist from her heartrending solicitude. She showered on my youngest son all her nurturing and pedagogic instincts, which his brothers had repelled as meanly as I myself had disdained them toward the end of my childhood. So that he would not sit on bare ground while playing, she had the carpenter of the village where we happened to be living at the time — once more as refugees — fashion a diminutive stool that she then carried faithfully after him whenever she could not persuade him to lug it himself. His playmates’ derision may have strengthened his personality but certainly did not contribute to making it more affectionate. For my sons, especially the youngest one, she resurrected many aspects of her relationship with my father, and they were pathetically moving, for example, the darning of their clothes: she had always been shocked by the heedlessness with which my father wore his hunting clothes, and she would secretly weave and repair, as invisibly as possible and with her own hair, the rips in his rough tweeds and donegals. She certainly did not love my father, but this gesture of almost medieval marital devotion expresses her ineffectual conception of her supposed duties, even those she assigned to herself like a curse.

Ironically — if one cares to impute such literary subtlety to the existential drama — the years of her unhappy marriage and anxiety-ridden maternity may well be counted as her most fulfilled ones. She had not yet quite lost her girlish charm and she preserved something of that magic of vulnerability which disarms criticism. “She is ailing, after all,” it would be said. Or, “She just takes everything too seriously; she places everything in a tragic light; she is haunted by her sense of maternal duty’’—all of which was true. Whenever she managed to loosen the desperate grip of her conscientiousness, when she was abandoned in thoughts of something outside her rage-distorted imaginings — especially if this something would bring pleasure to us children — her forlorn poetic inspiration would reappear. No one knew how to give presents as well as she, showing moving empathy for the most secret wishes, dreams and fantasies of the receiver, and each of her gifts was a truly treasured thing. Festivals like Christmas, Easter or birthdays were so blissful in my childhood they could never be reproduced in later years. Her benevolent spirit also carried over to everyday life: the memory of our nursery is filled for me with a sensation of freshness and luminosity, a fastidious cleanliness and restful quiet, broken only occasionally by happy or belligerent noise, a combined sensation which even today represents for me the incarnation of all desirable well-being.

In her lovable moments she was as seductive as the most supportive woman could ever be. Once, on one of our confused summer sojourns on the Black Sea — we were alone together, as my sister had been allowed to go with my father to the Moldavian monasteries — I found myself in Constanţa in front of a shop window that displayed the embodiment of all boyhood’s longings: the model of a steamboat, accurate in all its details, with tiny life buoys hanging on its dinghies, innumerable portholes between the decks, a captain’s bridge with lifelike miniatures of the rudder, binnacle and other technical sophistications — in short, perfection, the faultless reproduction of reality on a reduced scale. I was ready to give my life for it. I promised anything that would ever be requested of me: limitless consumption of Formamint and permanganate; ready acceptance of wool scarves and coats for the evening breezes; stringent respect for the prescribed limit beyond which I was prohibited to swim; even the renunciation of a white-bordered navy-blue blazer with brass buttons, the promise of which I already had wheedled out of my mother; generally, total future obedience if only I could call this model ship my own. Unfortunately it was not for sale; the display window in which it stood was not that of a toy shop but that of a steamboat agency.

The two Levantines who managed the agency — two olive-eyed gentlemen with remarkably heavy black moustaches and similarly luxuriant black hirsute growths on the back of their hands — had not counted on my own and my mother’s persistence, however. For a few days I behaved like a howling dervish (I must have been a brat, incidentally), and for a few more days my mother exchanged telegrams with the steamship company. Shortly thereafter I paraded down to the pier, flushed with victory and clad in a white-bordered navy-blue blazer with brass buttons, the model ship clutched under my arm, accompanied by my indulgent mother, who allowed that for the price of the toy she could have bought herself a diamond ring. Held by her so as not to fall in, I lowered the precious model into the water — and watched with horror as it forthwith disappeared under the surface and sank like a stone, gluglugluglup, right to the bottom. When I straightened up and met my mother’s eyes, something totally unexpected occurred: she burst into relieved and happily liberating laughter. Closely holding each other, we walked back to the casino esplanade to enjoy some ice cream. Decades later I tried imagining how different life for all of us might have been if only once she could have laughed like that with my father.