Gregor von Rezzori - Memoirs of an Anti-Semite

It acted, accordingly, disturbed. Once, I was even prompted to consult my doctor. He gave me a pill. “Does this mean I need potency pills at the age of nineteen?” I asked in dismay. He laughed: “It’s a tranquilizer; you’re too excited. Have sexual relations a bit more regularly.”

I made every effort to do so. But the successes were always quick defeats because they were not so overwhelming as my overexcited imagination demanded: thus I was left with doubts and anxieties; and, indeed, such striking counter-evidence as the spontaneous erection in my trousers when the girl was wheeled past gave me serious reasons for brooding.

She was certainly a beautiful girl — lamentably beautiful: a doll’s face with pearly teeth behind red lips, and large, wonderfully soulful eyes. The heart-shaped face was embedded in a wealth of brown, crisply vigorous curls — by forty, or even thirty, she would probably be having difficulties with a touch of a mustache. Her breasts were outlined clear and firm in her light blouse, and her waist was slender; the hips were obviously quite sumptuous. Anything farther down was now swathed in a blanket and placed lifelessly on the footrest between the whirring spoke wheels of the wheelchair. Well, one could ignore the lower part — a surrealistic something of human limbs, no doubt — but the body above was all the more female; her eyes confirmed this, simply shouted it to the world. It was a heart-wrenchingly ingenuous, disarmed look, the look of a woman tested by adversity — yes indeed, the look of a wounded hind, as the poets say. One involuntarily held aloof. But there was also humor and merriment and alert intelligence in her look, the strength of joie de vivre , and her look had struck me squarely, calling me to account … Oh, God, was I base!

I was base because I turned away. However, not without an equally total response to her look, if only for a split second. But what did that mean? After all, such interhuman data transmission eludes measurement. If I had gazed longer and more soulfully into her eyes, it would have been embarrassing; I could scarcely have expressed myself more distinctly if my fly buttons had popped in her face. My entire soul must have been offered in my look, a readiness to love her, to unite with her forever, to make her my wife on the spot, and to spend a fulfilled life wallowing every night on her beautiful torso and wheeling her about every day, proud and happy to keep all pity away from us.

How could I explain to her that it was not the sight of her wretched condition that made me turn away but a cluster of ignominious motives that concerned only myself? I wanted to run after her and tell her this, more than anything. She was obviously of good background, well bred, loved, cared for. Her clothes, the quality of the light blanket that was wrapped around the woefulness of her withered legs, the solid wheelchair purring along on white rubber tires, chromium-glittering spokes, and ball-bearing hubs, the person pushing the wheelchair — all these testified to a prosperous family, to high rank and class. But these were the things I feared most. I would gladly have told her why: I regarded myself as déclassé. It was that which made me sensitive — and, perhaps even more, my shame at feeling this way.

Needless to say, I knew I had lost her for good. I could not turn around, retrace my steps, and speak to her or her attendant on a pretext, or follow them to find out where she lived and then try to become acquainted somehow — I was too craven, too timid, too well trained in reticence, too thin-blooded, too sluggish. But it was pleasant, indeed soothing, to imagine myself telling her about what afflicted me — telling her all about myself and my fall from grace, my great ambitions, my disappointments, the world I came from, my childhood, my home and parents, the homesick years at boarding school, the time wasted at the University of Vienna, the two or three experiences that seemed crucial to me: in short, my life story, oppressively uneventful and then again turbulent and for me exciting. I would tell her these things in one of those passionate confessions that young lovers exchange to prove to each other that they have put an end to a life of confusion and are beginning a new life, one of bliss, virtue, and clarity in each other’s arms.

Actually, I was in Bucharest as a refugee or even an exile. I felt alternately like one and then the other. What had really cast me away here was defiance. At least, that was the best interpretation I could come up with. I had been at the point of being inducted into the army; I had dropped out of school — not for that reason, of course; I did not want to go back to school after the army; I wanted to pursue my dominant passion, which at the time (if we leave out for a moment the constant preoccupation with love) was drawing and painting. I was determined to become a world-famous painter. This had inevitably led to a conflict with my parents, whose views and goals were unyieldingly conventional — and in those days, that meant far more than it does today. Certainly they had to admit I had a talent for drawing and painting, but I lacked training, and even if belatedly I had got some, my father would not have changed his mind. Granted, drawing and painting were welcome pastimes; like a gift for occasional poetry, they could become valued social virtues. Portraitists like Laszlo or, long ago, Ferdinand von Raissky, landscapists like Rudolf von Alt and even Max Liebermann (albeit a Jew), were highly respected, as were, needless to say, geniuses like Botticelli, Raphael, Adolf von Menzel. But these were giants; and did my untutored gift assure my achieving such a rank? My father dreamed of having his unfulfilled ambitions come true in me: if not the obvious goal of forest management, then zoology or simply biology, the science of the future.

At nineteen, life is a drama threatening to become a tragedy every fifteen minutes. The conflicts at home were unbearable. I disowned my parents, charged them with living in the past, with refusing to learn anything from the catastrophe of 1918, and I declared my independence from their notions of order and their values. I packed my belongings and moved from the provincial confinement of the Bukovina to the national metropolis: the Bucharest of 1933.

And here I was, doing everything but drawing and painting, and my dream of stamping my genius on the century was visibly fading. At nineteen, I had to regard myself as a failure. Even worse: I had gone in a direction that would probably exclude me forever from the world into which I was born and which had been presented to me as the only one fit for a human being to live in. I was an outcast. It had begun with my obsession with sex, or rather, the myth of sex.

My very first steps in Bucharest guided my destiny. I did not have any real plan, merely the aim, the wish, to stand on my own two feet — on the unconditional premise, of course, that I would do so through what had been so hurtfully doubted: my artistic gifts. I felt as vehement an urge to prove them as to demonstrate my virility. Yet I was so staunchly convinced of my artistic talents that for the time being, I wasted no thoughts on when, where, and in what manner I might apply them. The other thing was more pressing: to prove to myself that I could take, spellbind, hold, desert, and throw away women as I pleased. Wasn’t the one as important as the other? Conquering women, conquering the world — wasn’t it the same?

I tried not to count up how many months ago I had come to Bucharest. The day of my arrival was in any case fixed in my mind. I had brought some money with me, slipped to me by my mother, so I did not have to worry about food and lodging right away; I sent my baggage from the station to a hotel, and then, utterly carefree, I ambled out onto the street. The Calea Griviţei received me with all the shabby enchantment of the old Balkans.