Gregor von Rezzori - The Snows of Yesteryear

Cassandra’s hair, the beauteous counterpart of her homeliness, was one of the delights of my childhood. She usually wore it tied in two braids, thick as arms, coiled on top of her enormous head and crowning it like a flattened Kurdish turban, a style — she told us — favored by all the women in her village so as to serve as a kind of pillow on which better to carry heavy baskets and pitchers. When she loosened her hair, it would fall down over her shoulders and back in a silkily crackling, glistening wealth, reaching down almost to the hollow of her knees. To grab it and dip my little hands in its dry flows was for me an inexhaustible pleasure. Evenings, when she undressed me to put me to bed, I would stand on the nursery dresser in front of her and take the pins out of her hair, unwind the braids and cover her face with them. Laughing and joking, she let me have my way. At times I would wrap myself entirely in its folds, hiding myself as behind a curtain, and call to my sister — already in bed and usually reading a book — to come and find me. Blissfully I inhaled its pungent smell of almonds and frankincense. Such flowing hair has remained for me the epitome of the sweetly voluptuous darkness in all that is feminine — once more in perfect harmony with the late Art Nouveau style of the era I was born in, but in antithesis to that other, more problematic and refractory feminine element, so different as to be almost inimical to the first, which found its purest incarnation in my mother’s and sister’s ethereal skin and all but translucent eyelids.

This puzzled me later on, since it seemed inconceivable to me that I ever could have perceived in Cassandra anything that could be defined as sexual, let alone the quintessence of “woman.” For me she belonged to those objects and beings of my own, most intimate childhood sphere, among which some — my dog, my magpie, my rabbit or a favorite toy (my teddy bear, an elephant made of some rubbery substance from which I hardly ever was separated) — were especially “soul endowed” through the strength of my love for them. To all these objects I was tenderly attached and I would mourn their loss bitterly, but they had nothing to do with the factual, real world I was growing into: the world of adults, who guarded the secrets of sexuality and death. Cassandra was of my own world, and if I discovered that my domino set was the object of erotic fantasy, this would not have seemed more absurd to me than if this were claimed to be the case with regard to Cassandra.

Naturally, I was not without libidinous stirrings. Thoughts of the feminine rose in me early. Even as a six- or seven-year-old, I was perennially infatuated: with a youthful aunt; an elegant lady who had come to visit; a pretty girl I had seen in passing; or merely a picture in some illustrated journal; the daughter of our physician, more or less of my own age; and many more. My imagination was replete with images of blissful embraces, tender kisses exchanged in fondly silent togetherness, even temporary misunderstandings between myself and the loved one, and the ensuing all the more delightful reconciliations, when all would be cleared up once more — to my own satisfaction, of course. But such emotions were purely “platonic,” in the parlance of that period—“chaste,” as my mother would have said. They had no connection with the signs of budding sexuality that my infantile body exhibited upon chance arousals — much to the delight of Cassandra, I need admit, who on such occasions, with loud praises, half derisive and half in earnest, accompanied by much laughter, was wont to show me off in my proud condition to the cook, the chambermaids and whosoever else happened by or readily could be called to witness the spectacle. This too I saw as nothing but a boisterous prank, all the more so since the chambermaids, almost all of them — like Cassandra herself — barely domesticated daughters of Carpathian shepherds, fled screaming with laughter from this exhibition. Nevertheless, adherents of Professor Freud may find some satisfaction in knowing that then my direst nightmare consisted in my sitting on the potty in an open passageway, exposed to all eyes and unable to flee since, on rising, my naked behind would be fully revealed. The feeling of self-inflicted distress in this dream was every bit as terrifying as the recurring nightmare of a treacherous murder I had supposedly committed, which frequently haunted me as an adult.

At that time, matters scatological played a paramount role in this world I shared with Cassandra. For Cassandra carefully watched over my digestion, expertly commented on its variable functioning, on the consistency and color of the excretions, further elaborating her diagnoses with many a homespun anecdote and earthy rustic proverb, regularly interweaving the matter of defecation into most of her stories. In almost all the fairy tales chronicling the adventures of two lovers — as, for instance, in my favorite story of the miraculous steed that always catches up with the princess repeatedly abducted by the Storm King, until the abductor finally manages to escape on the equally fast twin of the miracle stallion — the conclusion of such symbolically engaging yarns was signaled thus: “And then the two squatted down and together they crapped on the ground.” Cassandra always concluded her tale with this bald simplicity, nor was there any doubt that this function signified a ritual sensory expression of a happy ending, the consecration of a connubial union more pure, solemn, on a higher moral and even aesthetic level — because performed in the full possession of one’s own individuality instead of in mutual abandon — than the rude couplings we knew all too well from our dogs and the other animal life around the house, couplings that we also called, in equally unabashed innocence, “marrying.” It would never have entered my head that animal copulation might have anything to do, or even be equated, with the blissful conclusion of the love romances in my dreams. The ritual of joint crapping — a shared and mutual catharsis — came closer to the idea of my fantasized epiphany.

All this might never have become known, for it occurred only in the intimacy of a like-minded world view, the exclusive twosomeness of Cassandra and me, sealed, so to say, in the piecemeal piebald gibberish I had learned from her, which we developed into a kind of secret idiom understood by no one else. Ever more frequently I had to translate word by word some utterance of Cassandra’s for the other inmates of our household. The linguistic crudity and drollness that emerged in such endeavors amused my father and those others in the house who relished the humorous as much as it repelled and, at times, even horrified my mother. I was careful, of course, not to divulge any of the most intimate bond between Cassandra and myself — her fairy tales and the almost trancelike attention with which I listened to them. So the strange act of consecration that always concluded the conjoining of two lovers (comparable though not similar to two lovers in Indian folktales partaking a meal from the same cup) would have remained Cassandra’s and my own secret if childhood’s pressing urge to comprehend the incomprehensible had not driven me to unintentional treason.

It happened one night in my sister’s and my bedroom, when Cassandra no longer slept with me. The lights were out, but my sister went on babbling as if to herself — something that always annoyed, excited or frightened me. This time she was embarked on a description of my clumsiness as a toddler still learning to walk, breaking whatever fell into my hands, putting anything within reach into my mouth, bawling, dirtying my pants and so on. She harked back to our exile near Trieste. Spitefully my sister embroidered on my helplessness at a time when she already knew how to behave like a young lady and was chattering in Italian — all of which was even more tormenting since I had no memory of that phase of my life and no remembered image with which to test the truth or falsity of her allegations. I had to accept whatever she said, as if my impotence of those days was extended to the present and into all future time still to come: I would always remain the latter-born, the less developed, the underdog, and she would always have an advantage over me in a world of exquisite experiences and superior knowledge and abilities. The only thing that remained for me from that time near Trieste — and even this merely as a blurred image, picked up I could not say where — was that female figure standing on the cliff by the sea in whom I seemed to recognize my mother, and the man I did not know. Naively, I told my sister about this image in an anxious murmur and asked her — my heart throbbing in hope that the old puzzle would now finally be explained to me — whether she thought that then these two had squatted down together to crap on the ground.