Gregor von Rezzori - Memoirs of an Anti-Semite

I held my tongue guiltily. Had I confessed my shameful scruples to Mr. Garabetian, his indolent eyes would have gone all agape.

“He,” Mr. Garabetian continued, with a scornful snort through his nostrils and with his chin motioning in the direction in which his son had vanished, “he won’t have anything to do with his father’s work, much less any work of his own. Did you notice how hurriedly he said good-bye? He knows who you are, of course, and he’s too embarrassed to admit he’s my son.”

I wanted to object, but Mr. Garabetian anticipated me, waving off my objection. “I see him twice a month. On the first, like today, when he comes for his allowance, and on the fifteenth, when he comes for an advance on next month’s allowance.”

I could not reply to this either, unless I told Mr. Garabetian that until recently, my wish to go home to my parents had been equally cyclical and prompted by the same motives.

Mr. Garabetian took a sip of coffee, lit a new cigarette, and inhaled the smoke, deeply filling his lungs as though trying to free his mind of wearisome thoughts and switch into a more philosophical gear. “What can you do,” he said. “That’s the way he is, that’s how he’s made — or rather, that’s how I made him. When I was a child, I was poor as a churchmouse. I wanted him to be spared that. What he has been spared is being considerate, being a decent person. I’ve spared him that and the ability to think about things in general. All he’s got on his mind, if anything, is women.”

It was unsuitable, I felt, to add to Mr. Garabetian’s paternal grief with the disabusing news that he was nurturing illusions about me in this respect too. If anyone in the world had only women on his mind, it was I.

But, alas, I had them only on my mind — that was what I wanted to tell my siren in the wheelchair. She was to know everything about me, even things I barely admitted to myself. I was filled with great tenderness for her as I pictured myself sitting close to her poor, blanket-wrapped legs, holding her hands warmly in my own, and explaining with a guilty smile that I was schizophrenically split. I ran around convinced that I was a lothario and an irresistible seducer, or at least acting as though I were, and I believed that other people believed I was too. But if ever I did get a chance at seduction, fear of my own clumsiness turned me into an oaf. But not just this fear, I wanted to tell her. Also a sense of the ideal. She had to believe me. Certainly, I was always on the make, as they put it; I wanted to omit nothing, miss none of the erotic possibilities — usually imaginary, alas — offered me at every step. But I did not want to give my heart away below my rank — my moral rank, of course. That was something she had to know.

In any event, I had diminished my chances as a lover through another passion. I had told my parents only very vaguely what I was up to in Bucharest, and I had not revealed anything about my job and my — albeit modest — salary; as a result, my mother kept on sending me money. I accepted it without a thought, assuming that spiritual well-being is at least as important as physical well-being, and I applied the cash to my old and ardent passion for horses. Every morning at five, I was at the riding track and in the stables around Shossea Khisseleff and Shossea Jianu, where the thoroughbreds gathered for early workouts in the courtyards of old caravanserais. Being light and having a good hand, I almost regularly got a mount. At seven, I was at the Aphrodite Company, changing from the life of a riding-enthused gentleman to that of a window cleaner, loading up my Model T with publicity material. All day long, I worked — if one can apply the term “work” to enriching junk-shop windows with packages of soap. In the evening, after drinking my coffee with Mr. Garabetian, I ate my grătar —grilled meat — in some small surburban restaurant and went to bed, dog-tired — I did not know how. I had little opportunity to meet people of my own age, nor did I seek them out. For months, Mr. Garabetian was the only person I conversed with, beyond chitchat with my clients and a few banalities exchanged with colleagues at work.

Naturally, there was the occasional erotic encounter; the girl in the wheelchair ought to know this too. A waitress in a restaurant where I sometimes ate my modest dinner would not be taken in by my superior airs; she dragged me up to her room. I owed a proud night to her experience, but there was no repeat. She might do for a casual adventure, but an out-and-out relationship with a waitress was, I felt, beneath my dignity — by which I meant, to my disgrace, my social dignity. There was a pretty salesgirl in a boutique in Cotroceni, a remote area where a residential district had grown around the palace of the Queen Mother Maria. I knew this salesgirl had a crush on me, and accordingly I treated her badly. One day, I asked her out to the movies, then to supper. She refused to come to my room; she was scared of God knows what, perhaps only of getting home late. So we finally did it on the park bench where we had been necking and squeezing each other for hours. The discomfort and constant fear of being discovered by a park watchman or late stroller made it so horrible that when I saw her again, on the occasion of a decoration change from Velvet soapflakes to mint toothpaste in the windows of the boutique she worked in, I acted as if nothing had ever gone on between us.

For a couple of weeks, I was even in love, or at least fascinated — the focus of my attention being the extraordinary horsewomanship of the daughter of a trainer who now and again let me ride one of his horses. She was an impish creature with a pug face and tow-blond, curly hair; but to see what she did with a horse when she mounted it gave me such sensual pleasure that it turned into desire. She would have come to my room without further ado and would probably have soon installed herself there: a convenient long-term affair. But I carefully kept my early-morning role as a gentleman rider separate from my daytime role as a window decorator for the Aphrodite Company, and I revealed nothing of the circumstances under which I changed costumes from one role to the other to either my work colleagues or my riding colleagues. Even if I had been willing by some chance to let someone in the cosmetics world know where and how I lived, I refused to allow anyone in the riding world to find out anything about what I did for a living. Thus, she and I got together on bales of straw in the fodder room; the pungent odor of the girl’s body, especially her very wet vagina, prevailed so victoriously against the mare and cat urine that I felt almost sick. It was because of her that I consulted Dr. Maurer again, this time to get a prescription for potency pills, because, for a while, I was incapable of any repetition. Instead of potency pills, Dr. Maurer repeated his prescription for a tranquilizer. When I called upon the sharp-glanded horsewoman once again, I found I had long since been replaced by an English jockey.

Meanwhile, my imagination blazed away. If just once I could call one of them my own — one of those long-legged, high-bosomed creatures with curls tumbling luxuriously on their shoulders, the kind of woman that Mr. Garabetian’s son drove around in his Chrysler! If just once I could sway with one of them, nestling body to body in a dancing-bar to the rhythms of nostalgic blues, feel her breasts, her lap pressed snugly against my thighs, my lips in her hair. When the bittersweet voices of the saxophones had died out, I would wander with her somnambulistically into the starry night, hand in hand, lead her to my bed, strip her clothes off piece by piece while she threw her head back, cover her bare body with my kisses while she moaned, unite with her tenderly yet mightily, almost drunkenly ….