Gregor von Rezzori - The Snows of Yesteryear

I granted her all maternal privileges more willingly than to my own mother, without regard to its being disputed whether she had been my wet nurse. Cassandra affirmed it as steadfastly as my mother denied it — out of shame that she hadn’t been able to nurse me, declared Cassandra behind a hand secretively raised in front of her mouth. This, in some perfidious way, was convincing as only such believable fabrications can be. Add to this that Cassandra mourned the loss of a son of her own, whom she allegedly had to desert because of me.

Time upon time she told me — and told me alone, in our private jargon and in a singsong as plaintive as an old folk tune — of the unimaginable poverty she grew up in, the oldest of twelve children. At the birth of the youngest her mother had died, while the father had been crippled by a felled tree; she had raised her brothers and sisters, always on the verge of starvation, and whenever they had a slice of cornbread or an onion, they would thank God “on bent knees’’—all her life, in pious gratitude, she drew a cross with the knife over each loaf of bread before making the first cut. Then came a night “as full of stars as a dog’s pelt is full of fleas,” and a village inn where gypsies fiddled and “the light cast from the windows shone like golden dust,” while crickets chirped in the meadows “like water boiling in the kettle.” Someone passing by plucked her from the fence on which she was perched so as to see and hear the better—“it was our picture show,” she told me (having meanwhile been enriched by urban experience), “and we sat next to each other like swallows in autumn on a telegraph wire, young and old, Granny asleep with the baby in her lap, and only woke when some of the men came out of the inn to fight or throw up.” But then someone had picked her from the fence and taken her into the golden roar of the gypsy fiddles, the clouds of tobacco smoke and men’s voices, given her a drink and then another, and when the dazzling images began to go round and round in her head like the merry-go-round at the kermess, he took her outside and down to the side of the creek where the honeysuckle grows so thick between the tree trunks that “you can crawl and hide in it completely, like you in my hair.” “And then you both squatted down together and crapped on the ground, yes?” I asked eagerly.

Graphically, she described to me the shame of having a belly “as big as a pumpkin.” The girls in the village spat at her when she passed, and her father beat her with a fencepost, so that she hoped she would lose the child. She tried to drown herself in the creek under the tangle of honeysuckle which by then was leafless and gray like cobwebs. But the water was so shallow that she could plunge only her head into it, facedown, and since it was winter, the frost was bitter and she couldn’t hold out long enough to die. Thin ice formed over her face and when she lifted her head out of the water, the glaze of ice broke like glass — and that’s what made her so ugly, she said.

Then the pope came and took her to the monastery, a day’s journey away, and that is where my father found her. “But I had to leave the child behind,” she mourned, “your little brother’’—and once more she laughed impishly. There were times when she sobbed bitterly over the loss of my little brother, usually when some incident made her sad, but she reverted soon enough to her usual spunky jollity. “Nothing but fancy notions,” it was said in the household, “not a word of truth in the whole story. She’s not quite right in the head, anyway.” Nevertheless, I longed one day to meet my milk-brother and be reunited with him forever after in brotherly love. He was stronger, more noble and more courageous than I, and he was unconditionally devoted to me. He would accompany me through all the perils of life like one of those otherworldly helpers in times of distress who are the rightful companions of fairy-tale heroes.

Since we were not sent to school like other children when we got to be six or seven years old but were taught at home, and because those entrusted with our education devoted so much of their time and attention to my sister, who showed not only much greater intelligence but also pronounced talent and a sharper thirst for knowledge, I stayed much longer than usual in the world of childhood in which Cassandra was the most constant and direct influence. Cassandra herself was of course illiterate, and if, ultimately, she was able laboriously to form the letters of her own name, she owed this to my own and our shared efforts to penetrate the secrets of the alphabet. At first, neither of us got very far in this endeavor, and when finally I outdistanced her, she gave it up altogether and without regret. Meanwhile I owed her a much more valuable piece of knowledge than I ever owed later to my despairing teachers. It came to me out of Cassandra’s attitude toward the written word.

Cassandra was not one of those semiprimitives who are haunted by hundreds of superstitions but take for real only what they can see with their eyes and grasp with their hands, and for whom any writing belongs to a phony world created by pettifogging lawyers, in which every word is twisted and turned around topsy-turvy as if by sleight of hand. That may be how the dim-witted people of her home village thought. But Cassandra’s superstitious awe of the reality of letters, and her ultimate and voluntary rejection of their decipherment, originated in a much more archaic insight. The serried rows of books on the shelves of my father’s library were truly demonic for her. That certain things had been recorded between the covers of these books which could be grasped mentally and transformed into speech and knowledge by initiates in the shamanic craft of coding and decoding those runic symbols — this could be understood only as a supernatural phenomenon. It irritated her to see that we had lost the sense of its terrifying uncanniness and that reading was an everyday custom, publicly performed, nay, that it could even become a vice, as exemplified by my sister. With the instinctive certainty of the creature being, she felt that such casual handling of the irrational was bound in turn to generate irrationality.

She realized that for those who had acquired it, the ability to read conferred power over those to whom the written or printed word remained a sealed mystery. But she also knew that this was a power pertaining to black magic — that it turns against its own practitioners and transforms them into slaves of the abstract. She saw in it a truly devilish power, since its manipulators, who also were its most immediate victims, were not even aware of its nefarious effects. To be sure, she was unable to say what was meant by the abstract and, even less, in what consisted its peril. Yet she carried within her innermost self — not only since she had left the monastery, where, on the walls of the church, the angels, devils and saints, as well as the tormented or redeemed bodies of the mortals, together with the beatitudes of heaven and the torments of hell were most wondrously and graphically depicted in ocher, red, blue and gold — she carried from her very beginning the clear and unshakable conviction that anything supernatural that does not lead directly to God and His heavenly kingdom must bring about a downfall into damnation. Books were either sacred or devilish, and since almost all books could be interpreted either way, they also could have both holy and diabolic effects. It seemed to her that with the opening of the covers of a book both the gates of heaven and the jaws of hell were being unlocked, and the angel or devil who then emerged from its pages separated the questing spirits according to either their longing for the one and only truth or their susceptibility to devilish, pernicious lies. To expose oneself to such a momentous decision in trite everyday circumstances seemed to her downright sacrilegious. And from that she protected me.