Gregor von Rezzori - Memoirs of an Anti-Semite

The physician I randomly picked and consulted was named Dr. Maurer, even though he was a thoroughbred Rumanian. “Where did you dig up these splendid specimens?” he asked after briefly inspecting my lower abdomen and upper thighs. I was crawling with crablice.

At this moment I paused to evoke the past few months in my memory. Supposing the girl in the wheelchair had really become my beloved and had been willing to hear the confession of my past. How, I wondered, could I have told her about such base incidents and circumstances? In reality, I could scarcely do so without embarrassing her or at least arousing her amazement, perhaps even abhorrence. She had looked protected and innocent, such as only a girl of good background, especially in her ailing condition, could appear. And yet she seemed intelligent and open-minded, and tested by her suffering — yes indeed, by her own suffering. That had to make her sympathetic toward something so bad, at least so humiliating, embarrassing. When all was said and done, this too was human.

In my imagination, she now played the part of the ideal companion. Scarcely had I passed her on the street, just a few paces, when I knew I could tell her anything, no matter how dreadful. I considered her as my twin soul, from whom I could hold back nothing. She was the good sister who understood every danger in a man’s life, and she was also, incidentally, my beloved, her breasts at least as firm and well shaped as those of the Gypsy girl — whiter, probably; purer, more innocent. I would be able to respect her, even if I had sex with her, voluptuously and thoroughly, despite her crippled legs. And she would be grateful to me and would long since forgive me for the distasteful adventures that the man who now made her so happy had once been forced to endure.

But, after all, this was not really what I wanted to tell her; it was not the explanation for my turning away and going past her, though it did, of course, lead to it. The episode with the Gypsy girl was at the beginning of my plunge into shame, and I had to tell her how one thing had led to another. Out of context, the events took on distorted perspectives and erroneous proportions, and I wanted her to have the precise picture. It was I who was urging myself to communicate. I wanted to experience myself in her once again. She was the mirror I held up to myself, reflecting my image pure and full, not warped by the fragmentation that so distressed me when my agitated mind recollected events in emotional bits and pieces. A logical, indeed chronological, narration yielded a far more harmonious picture.

In any case, if I had not gone past her but spoken to her, got to know her, and taught her to love me, and if she had truly become my beloved and my sister, my sisterly confessor, then I would have to tell her about Dr. Maurer. For, indirectly, it was he who had brought me into circumstances more embarrassing than crabs or beatings — so embarrassing that the sight of a young girl of good family terrified and made me turn away, even though (or perhaps precisely because ) I found her so attractive, despite her crippled legs, that I entered a state I usually only dreamed about.

It had begun with Dr. Maurer. This excellent specialist in skin, venereal, and other juvenile diseases noticed my relief when I learned I was afflicted merely by crabs and not by some previously unknown variety of genitoinfectious leprosy. Then he began gently to inquire where I came from and what I was doing in Bucharest; my bumps and bruises also interested him, both medically and humanly. He was fairly young, in his mid-thirties, though graying slightly, and had that virile gravity and solidity which always put me in an obedience relationship of adolescent to adult. But his questions were not avuncular, nor did he seem to judge what I said. I promptly told him everything he wanted to know and a little more, especially about my adamant intention of starving to death rather than betraying my vocation as a world-famous artist.

“I have a friend who runs the publicity office in a cosmetics firm,” said Dr. Maurer. “I know he has trouble finding window decorators. I can’t judge whether this has much to do with your art. But if you’re interested, I’d be glad to recommend you to him.”

It had nothing to do with the art of drawing and painting at all. When I presented myself as an applicant at the address he gave me, I found myself trying out for the position by constructing an agreeable pyramid of empty cold-cream jars with gaudy festoons of crêpe paper wound around them. The man to whom Dr. Maurer recommended me, my future boss and ruler of the publicity department of the Aphrodite Company, Inc., seemed to find utility in my clumsiness. He hired me. And that was what made the final schism within my soul.

My crippled beloved (if she had become my beloved) would certainly have been able to understand the dichotomy. On the one hand, I was puffed up with pride, a world conqueror who had taken his first step toward triumph. I was earning a salary — modest, but indisputably mine. In other words, I was independent; from now on, I could make my own decisions. Of course, what I was doing temporarily was in no way what I wanted to do, not even what I had imagined I might have to do, but I felt I had started out on the road toward that destination. The Aphrodite Company was one of those concerns that are now called “multinational.” Even in those days, achievement could lead to promotion and quite possibly even a transfer to a more important country with better training possibilities or even to the central office. The latter employed world-famous commercial artists, including Cassandre, whose work I tremendously admired. Such first-rate people would discover my talent sooner or later and guide it to its true vocation. The huge advertising division of the central office, which supplied us with posters, packaging, and other publicity material, obviously had a dearth of men of my stamp. In short, the future lay before me. My triumph over those who had not believed in me was only a question of time. On the other hand, I gnashed my teeth under the humiliations I had to endure in the here and now.

The Aphrodite Company both distributed and manufactured many things: from laundry soap to shaving cream, from toothpaste to shampoo, pretty much anything that could serve cleanliness and beauty hygiene on a soapy basis. It was the task of the window decorator to bring all these items into the windows of the Bucharest drugstores and cosmetics shops and to display them, cyclically featuring one or the other article, as eye-catchingly and as temptingly as possible. In those days, the city of Bucharest had more than two hundred such places. A few elegant boutiques in the center, around the royal palace and the Calea Victoriei; several large places with a big turnover in the commercial sections around the Boulevard Elisabeta and the Lipscani; and the swarm of tiny shops in the farther peripheries and suburbs, making the area around the Calea Griviţei where I had suffered my misadventure seem metropolitan by comparison. This gradation determined my experiences, albeit in a reverse hierarchy.

My duties appeared simple. I set up a model decoration, as flexible as possible to fit into various types and sizes of display windows. Then, taking along the materials, I systematically traipsed from client to client of Aphrodite. Unfortunately, the shops also patronized other firms, competitors that used the same method to catch the consumer’s eye. With all the offers of free displays, the shopkeepers were spoiled — indeed, fed up. I and the rival decorators took the doorknobs out of one another’s hands. It came to out-and-out races between us as to who could arrive first at a potential victim and get the order.

This might have been fun, had it not been for the scorn with which we were treated. In the elegant downtown boutiques, my requests to beautify the windows with pyramids of cold-cream jars and garlands of crêpe paper were usually rejected with an arrogance that sent the blood rushing to my face each time. Back home, no Jewish ragpicker would have been dealt with so rudely. And if I entered such an establishment as a customer to purchase a bar of soap or a bottle of cologne, or, even more, if I escorted my mother, whose use of cosmetic articles was considerable, I was treated with melting eagerness. So the arrogance, in contrast, made my downfall all the more painful, and I was further embittered by the humiliating need to go on acting friendly and officious to the proprietors and their staff — all of whom disposed of a repulsive gamut of expressions from bootlicking to baseness.