Gregor von Rezzori - The Snows of Yesteryear

I don’t believe that his escapades were accompanied by much passion. He was sensual but unsentimental in his relations with women. Yet those who knew him well knew that he could be unreservedly affectionate. In this too his defiant contrariness was involved. He too had experienced a youthful infatuation he had not gotten over — with a highly musical young lady by the name of Olga, who all her life kept contact with my sister and me. This unfulfilled love — which in his case surely meant a love not killed by marriage — left him disappointed, with a scornful attitude toward women.

The admixture of self-irony could be misleading. He frequently advertised his crushes with such abandon, for all the world to see, that one could hardly deem them serious even when they were. He serenaded the lady of his heart of the given moment in his early-morning vocalizings, praised her beauty and virtues at the top of his voice, showered her with flowers and the disastrous products of his painterly zeal, and was offended if she did not decorate her rooms with his capercaillies bubble-plopping their mating calls in the rosy dawn or his stags bellowing in autumn mists. Not all women were willing to become his desired playmates; when one or the other obliged him, he soon carried the game to such lengths that she was forced to break it off if she did not wish to be hopelessly compromised. I recall a significant episode from my childhood: one of my mother’s sisters came from Vienna for a visit, my much beloved Aunt Paula. She, my mother, my sister escorted by her temporary English — or French? — governess and I holding on to the hand of Cassandra are taking a demure walk in the People’s Park. Along one of the avenues my father approaches from the opposite direction, in the company of a lady. The exchange of salutations between the grown-ups is icy. I can’t understand why and notice only that my father and the lady are dressed precisely in the same way: both are wearing traditional Austrian costume, which was beginning to be rare in the Bukovina but was nevertheless worn occasionally, especially by hunters. I am innocent enough to see in this harmony of attire — gray loden with green facings and side braidings, and stag-horn buttons — nothing more shadily significant than an entertaining masquerade, and I cheerfully crow my discovery that even their cuff links are identical: stag teeth set in gold. Without a word my mother tears us from our escorts, turns on her heel and majestically sweeps us away, followed by the crestfallen aunt, the deeply shocked governess and an incomprehending but amused Cassandra.

When my father observed greater discretion in later years, he did so mainly out of consideration for my adolescent sister. If one assumes that there really is such a thing as a “single great love in life,” then my sister was his. Surely he also loved my mother in his unromantic way and would have known how to invest his feelings with greater affection if only she had met him halfway. That he was not insensitive to her charm he revealed on many occasions: with the gifts he gave her, the books he sent her even after they had separated, such as, surprisingly — in some way as a counterweight to his mating capercaillies and bellowing stags— Sonnets to Ead by Anton Wildgans, and also, almost as antidote, the scandalous diaries of Franziska von Reventlow. Unfortunately, he could not dampen his humorous impulses; he had overpowered her with indomitable vitality from the very beginning of their marriage, provoking ruffled resistance, then stiffness and ultimately anger. Rarely can there have been a more unhappy combination of temperaments, and when he said, “It’s all chemical, anyway,” he spoke a heartrending truth. They were certainly not well matched.

In the case of my sister, the chemistry was right: she was blood of his blood, though quieted by the thinner blood of our mother, and curbed as well by a clear intelligence, similar to his own but more disciplined. Her love for him was as unconditional as it was luminous. She would sometimes shake her head at him but laughed as she did so. In amusement she would follow his scurrilous train of thought, and she always knew what was meant as a joke and what was to be taken seriously. Her attitude toward his escapades was one of maternal tolerance, and whenever he went too far, she found an outlet for her irritation in the convulsive laughter that shook both of us when we spoke of the vagaries of family life.

My father no longer saw her during the last year of her life, which she spent partly in Vienna, her spirit unbroken despite the futile and tormenting efforts of the doctors to check her inexorable decay, and partly in a sanatorium near Hall in the Tyrol. She loved the Tyrolean Alps, but there was another reason for this choice. Of the separation from him, she spoke only once, when I saw her for the last time. She said: “If he were here, he would give me something to save me from this death-in-life.” It was as if she and he, in perfect understanding of their psychic accord, wordlessly had agreed to spare each other the sight of their dying. He did not visit her during her last months in the Tyrol, respecting her discipline in dying, the same discipline he himself displayed at his own end. It was based on the sober conviction that dying is a strictly private matter that cannot be shared with anyone, and that the pain is only sharpened if one allows this ultimate and most revealing manifestation of one’s innate archsolitude to be witnessed by the one person whose love enabled one, fleetingly, to deceive oneself as to its inescapability.

Despite my love for him, which never for an instant was diminished by the usual and allegedly unavoidable father-son conflict, I could never deceive him on this point. With the exception of the mutually shared hours of hunting pleasures, which each of us might have experienced just as well with some other congenial intimate, we left each other alone. Neither of us was given the blissful ability to communicate our emotions. True, on many occasions he gave me touching proof of his affection. We were not estranged or at a distance from each other; on the contrary, we were close — yet noncommittally so. There was never between us the same degree of intimacy as between him and my sister. Various experiences I have had with my own brood lead me to surmise that the much vaunted parent-child love is closely linked with the nurturing an infant receives between the stage of his helplessness and his first expressions of independent development. Without doubt, a father’s soul is touched more deeply when he observes in the eyes of his newborn daughter how he is beginning to glow for her like a star on which, with each passing day and with growing consciousness, she bestows her smile, than when, upon meeting his almost five-year-old son for the first time, he sees how the boy stares at him as at a stranger, turns around and speedily takes refuge in the arms of his nurse. To this must also be added “chemistry.” Psychologists of all schools will have to relegate many of their pet theories to the wastebasket once the cross-reactions and interplay of purely physical emanations are elucidated more fully.

It need be said, however, that my father showed me affectionate understanding even in my early childhood. I was in the habit, as soon as I was put to bed, of crawling entirely under the bed covers. Embryonally curled up in that uterine cave, I made up all kinds of stories — or more accurately, situations that were as eloquent as stories. These were surely proto-erotic: I can still feel the intimate passion with which, as I fantasized tender episodes, I would press the back of my left hand with the right hand against my cheek, as if it were a loved one asking to be caressed. Whenever the blanket was torn away by some adult wanting to find out what the devil I was doing, I was always found in that same innocent position — which should have allayed suspicion that I was masturbating in the dark. But this failed to convince my concerned mother. Cassandra was given strict orders to prevent my holing up under the covers. There was mention of strapping me down to prevent any possible movement: the transformation of a child’s cot into a straitjacket. My father forbade such nonsense. Instead, he came in and sat on the edge of my bed one evening and asked me in passing what I liked to do under the covers. “Undercover games,” I answered ingeniously. For instance? I said one was called “Naked and Sword.” Oh, and others? Another was called “The Golden Rose,” and still another “The Wreath.” Quite satisfied, my father told anyone interested that my childish fantasy was animated by images of knightly symbolism of the early Middle Ages; this was no reason to think of metempsychosis, since everyone carried elements of humanity’s age-old heritage in his innermost self, usually buried at the bottom of the soul and hardly noticed, let alone recognized when they fleetingly floated to the surface in dreams or visions; instruction was given not to disturb me in this storing of psychic flotsam. At that time, the theories of C. G. Jung had not yet reached Czernowitz. My mother opined that my father’s follies had now come to the point that it was time to place him under guardianship.