Gregor von Rezzori - Memoirs of an Anti-Semite

“I have recently seen a little color in one’s cheeks, which has caused me some worry about one’s honorable state of health,” he said. “Could this possibly come from one’s now growing seriously into one’s role of heir apparent? I mean, it appears no longer as a fiction, as a carefully considered possibility and hallucination, but instead has finally found the concrete relationship of function. One is learning one’s future métier, nicht wahr? One is being confirmed in one’s task, albeit for the moment only by holding the horses of one’s predecessor in the chain of inherited duties, and whisking away the flies from those selfsame horses with a leafy twig, while Herr Uncle has his hours of chitchat with the steward about the situation and how to improve it. But still and all, one is present, one does listen, one is initiated and instructed. Why, that must strengthen one’s self-esteem, mustn’t it? Or am I mistaken? But then who am I to know of such matters? Still, the groom will one day be a cavalier and landowner, just as the squire becomes a full-fledged knight. Perhaps one no longer feels so utterly rejected and excluded from the loftier status that attaches our honorable hostess to young Goldmann. One is strengthened by the notion of becoming something definite, however different from and less spectacular than what one’s more gifted friend is through his piano-playing. One must admit, of course, that what he is doing is quite extraordinary. But this very perfection, nicht wahr , this ruthless perfection that mercilessly excludes and degrades whatever is not equally consummate, making anything of middle rank a blasphemy — this very perfection has something cold and hard-hearted about it, something relentlessly and repulsively self-righteous. People talk so much about the demonic nature of the artist — yet that which strikes us as demonic is nothing else than this repulsiveness, the unconditional and absolute, together with the profound attraction exerted upon us by perfection. If I am expressing myself not altogether intelligibly (after all, as we know, I am considered a muddled orator in this house): that which one is to become and perhaps is already becoming, thanks to our Herr Uncle’s kindhearted intention, namely a good, solid husbandman, is certainly not of the same rank as an artist; but, by way of compensation, it is more human, more outgoing, more universal. One becomes something that previous generations have been — nothing out of the ordinary, to be sure, but with a self-conception and a self-confidence that are painfully lacking in the artist. Whereas one need only be what one is, upright and modest, he, the artist, is committed to self-realization at every instant. He must act in order to be what he is, and by thus acting he challenges and tests himself anew, risking his existence. His life is an incessant gamble — and most especially when, as one’s Frau Aunt maintains, he is a budding genius, an extraordinary individual; but, alas, he is these things in a wild isolation, which makes him an outsider to society. In contrast, it must be very agreeable — nay, downright inspiring — to know that one is unproblematically one of many similar beings in a safe, tried-and-true species, in the simple, unimpeachable existence of a farmer and — with a correspondingly venerable and traditional prosperity — an aristocrat.”

These words sounded comforting and eased my mind, since it was beyond me to figure out the provocation that Stiassny, with his wonted perfidy, must have inserted. For a while, I more calmly accepted Wolf Goldmann’s greater claim to my aunt’s attention and — I had reason to fear — affection. I forced myself to act toward him with that chivalrous generosity which guards the aristocrat against the ignominy of being resented; and I acted as though our friendship were not the least bit changed or even strained. Once, when I asked him to interrupt his morning practice briefly to come and see a nest of young owlets in the hayloft above the stables, he snapped: “Go tell your grandmother about your stupid owlets!” But when, with unassailable aristocratic equanimity, I rejoined that he had not practiced around the clock in earlier days, he said, “You just don’t know what it means, playing your Bösendorfer instead of the old crate at home!” (To my surprise, he used a clear and proper German before relapsing into his sloppily impudent yiddling.) “Maybe you can see it this way: it’s like getting off that old gray nag biting the dust out there, and then mounting one of the fiery mustangs from your cowboy-and-Indian stories. Ya see? You goyim have to have everything translated into zoology before you understand it. Like your uncle, when he explains your master brewer’s psychology in terms of a horse that’s been ridden to death. You goyim know more about animals than people.”

I could have hit him, I was so indignant. Showered with blessings by Aunt Sophie and taken into the house like her own child, he was still disdainfully labeling us “goyim,” undisguisedly expressing how stupid and clumsy he considered us all. He noticed my response and he gave me a brazen grin: “Your aunt would like it if I became one of you, right? She’s given me Rilke to read: ‘Riding, riding, riding, through the day, through the night …’ I should live so long. I’m reading Krafft-Ebing. Now, he could help you. He might explain what your uncle really wants when he keeps riding out with you, beyond the farm and deeper and deeper into the forest.”

Wolf himself eventually explained it to me. Not only was Uncle Hubert suspected of homosexuality, but people had ideas about him and his friends, the rough hunting buddies who moved into the tower during the winter, those “last heroes and warriors” of a free, virile, wind- and-weather-beaten world of peril and daring. It was generally accepted that his friendships were relationships of homoerotic love, and my friendly, good-natured, apple-cheeked kinsman was the laughingstock of the town, which viewed his well-rounded behind as the very symbol of sexual deviance. What about his model marriage with Aunt Sophie? Was I really so naïve as I seemed? exclaimed Wolf; didn’t I know what to make of Stiassny’s presence in the house for all these decades? What else was Aunt Sophie’s spiteful refusal to have anything to do with his father, Dr. Goldmann, but an act of revenge? There was an ever-festering memory that the doctor’s wife, my friend Wolf’s mother, had had an affair with Stiassny. “You goyim always try to act like you ain’t got no potz and your women ain’t got no cunt between their legs,” said Wolf.

I cannot describe the profound repugnance I felt during the next few weeks, not only toward Wolf Goldmann but toward just about everyone. Not even Haller, the blacksmith, was excluded, ever since Wolf had told me that Dr. Goldmann had once sewn up a serious injury on Haller’s penis, a wound obviously made by human teeth and hardly by a woman inept in such amorous practices but, rather, in a passionate action by a man upon the member of the disciple of Hephaestus and the German descendant of Wieland. I almost threw up the next time I went into the smithy to cast lead pellets for my slingshot. Holding out his callused palm with the pellets he had found in the garage, Haller winked and asked, “What do I get for keeping my mouth shut the other day?” Wolf Goldmann had explained that sexual perverts regard boys our age as downright tidbits.

I was homesick. I missed my mother. Her sickly, high-strung sentimentality might be disquieting; but her feelings were probably deeper and steadier than those of her older and more robust cousin, who, however, was obviously no less rapturous, no less susceptible. Although repelled by the thought, I told myself that an encounter between my mother and Stiassny would have led to an incomparably more passionate and more poetic relationship than — if I were willing to believe Wolf Goldmann — the one between Stiassny and Aunt Sophie. Nonetheless, everything in me rebelled against the idea that my mother could lie in Stiassny’s arms and that I could speak about her and her lover as unabashedly as Wolf did. Now my hotheaded father’s somber passion for hunting became the escapism of an absolutely pure and noble man who preferred the loneliness of the raw universe of mountains to the filth of the lowlands. I myself wanted to withdraw from the world’s dubious hustle and bustle. I spent a lot of time in the tower, working on the syllabus for my makeup examination.