Gregor von Rezzori - Memoirs of an Anti-Semite

I was intoxicated. I saw, I felt, I smelled the nearby Orient. A dimension of the world that had previously been a fairyland became a tangible presence — filtered, to be sure, through a garbagey modernity in which all the dubious aspects of technocratic civilization came to the fore, decaying and degenerating, but nevertheless swirling with life, color, adventure. This was a world in which a man could still prove he was a man. Here, sheer strength was what counted — especially since cunning laid snares and set traps for it everywhere.

The Calea Griviţei teemed with loafers, passersby, street vendors at their heels, beggars, strollers, sheep, chickens, trodden dogs, whip-cracking coachmen, knots of peasants on rattling carts, wildly honking automobiles — and out of this swarm, a young Gypsy girl came toward me. She was straight out of a picture book: fiery eyes, glittering teeth, flashing silver coins, raven-wing blackness. A slender bent arm, from which the full sleeve of her blouse had slipped, supported a huge flat basket of corncobs on her shining head. Her skin was as golden as the corn in her basket. Gazing into every pair of passing eyes with an unabashed smile, she sonorously called, “ Papushoy! ” But no one bought any.

As she approached, she had to sidestep a ruffian who almost knocked her down. A movement of her hip, which made the flower cup of her skirts whirl, brought her past him. But this caused her left breast to slide out of her deeply cut blouse; touchingly girlish, with the uneven seam of the rosy areola, it bobbed full and bare for all to see.

She was not the least bit embarrassed. With a casual motion of her free hand, she adjusted her décolleté so that the breast slipped back in; then, still laughing with her white teeth, she called “ Papushoy! ” at me.

I stopped her. “How much is your corn?” My heart was beating in my throat.

“One leu a cob. Five cobs for four lei.”

“How many do you have in your basket?”

“Seventy or eighty.”

“I’ll give you a hundred lei. But you have to come with me.” I swallowed. “I have nothing to carry them in,” I added awkwardly.

She had long since got my drift. “Let’s go, my handsome young man!” she said merrily. “But you’ll have to give me one pol more.”

A pol was twenty lei, but I did not want to act too docile. I ignored her request and walked ahead wordlessly — besides, I was embarrassed by the attention our commerce had aroused. A couple of Jews were standing in front of a shop. She followed me, and I heard laughter behind me and a few dirty cracks.

I could not be wrong in assuming that here, by the station, there would be some dubious hotel for traveling salesmen where a room might be rented by the hour. The hotel was sleazier than I had imagined. The unshaven fellow between the rickety table and the switchboard did not even have a shirt on, just an undershirt; the trousers hung from a belt under his belly. He was unusually powerful; his tremendous lower arms were matted with black hair. He demanded payment in advance, three hundred lei. At that time, so many counterfeit hundred-lei pieces were in circulation that businessmen tested the coins by throwing them on a flat stone and deciding on their genuineness by the ring of the impact. I was surprised that he did not do so, since the stone lay before him on the table. But I gave it no further thought. Above his head, from a nail in the keyboard, hung a small, light-blue tin box stamped with a Star of David — the box was a kupat kerem kayemet , for contributions to build the Promised Land of Israel. It was typical for such a seamy hotel of ill repute to be in Jewish hands.

Just as we were about to climb the stairway — or, rather, the ladderlike steps — to the rooms upstairs, the man behind the table snapped at the Gypsy girl: “The basket of corn stays here.”

“Let him have it,” I said to the girl. “If he doesn’t want to eat the stuff because it’s not kosher, he can sell it — for pig feed.”

I experienced all this in a kind of trance. This was not my first visit with some female to a bedbug-infested room, but this time it corresponded in every way to my notion of domineering virility and swift, casual adventure. The more disreputable the surroundings, the more authentic the adventure seemed.

I did not even look the room over; I pulled the door shut behind us and locked it.

The Gypsy girl stood before me. Her mute, sarcastically challenging laugh hinted that if I approached her, she would leap aside at the last moment and start a hatefully teasing game of tag, such as coy girls launch in order both to delay and to provoke the brutality of the sex act. But she stayed where she was, never stirring, nor changing her sarcastic look; all she did, when I was close to her, was to hold out her hollow palm. I put in a hundred lei piece. She remained motionless. I placed a twenty-lei coin upon it and then a second one. Quick as a flash, she pulled back her hand and spirited the money away.

She had not averted her eyes; as I stripped the blouse from her shoulders, she kept smiling and gazing into my eyes as if she knew I was doomed to fail. And for one instant, I was spellbound by her naked breasts, overpowered by a reality more precious than all daydreams. This was it: those breasts — two sturdy handfuls, warm, silky-smooth breasts, scented with almond milk and tipped by rose buds, which contracted, hard and wrinkled, when I touched them, these witnesses to a blissful thrill coursing through her body into the darkness of the womb; the crunchy-black funnel caught the thrill, leading it to the moist grottoes charily wedged between the thighs, which she now gently opened…. That was what I saw, most clearly and most excitingly, in my erotic fantasies; that was what tightened my throat in anticipation of delight; that was what sank sweetly, heavy with tenderness, into the pit of my stomach: the epitome of the feminine, the purest image of the essence of woman, that eternally alien, laughing, always elusive essence, which always slips out of reach, the creature whom I feared, scorned, and had to love, to my torment, to my damnation. Entering a woman’s womb was already something abstract, it made her image vanish, it snuffed her out: I was being received not by her but rather by the universe, the huge, dark hollow of the cosmos, swallowing me, snuffing me out too. But her breasts were life, blood-warm, living Being, sensory fact, reality …

When I raised my hands to take hold of her, there was a knock on the door. Startled, I pulled up the girl’s blouse, walked over, and opened. The man from downstairs stood in the doorway, holding out a coin: “This hundred-lei piece is phony.”

While he peered over my shoulder into the room, I fished another coin out of my pocket, gave it to him, and shut the door. The Gypsy girl was still standing there, mutely laughing. “C’mon!” I said, leading her to the ghastliness of sweat-yellowed linen, rachitic pillows, and a feltlike horse blanket — our wedding bed. She lay on her back without the least resistance. That too confused me. All the myths of vigorous malehood surrounded me like totem poles. All my fears and self-doubts fluttered around me in alarm and fanned out. I ordered myself not to listen to myself, for God’s sake, not to hear whether I would be able to respond to her readiness with my own. Slowly, I slipped one hand under her skirt and felt for her breast with the other. There was a second knock at the door. Once again, it was the fellow from downstairs; this time, decidedly insolent: “This hundred-lei piece is phony too!”

I gave him another one. “I do not wish to be disturbed any more,” I said, and instantly heard how ridiculously out of place this luxury-hotel formula sounded, not to mention the arrogant sharpness in my tone. He dawdled; he peered into the room and at the Gypsy girl lying on the bed, her skirt up to her groin and her breasts exposed. I slammed the door in his face, then ostentatiously turned the key in the lock twice and went back to my untouched beauty.