Gregor von Rezzori - Memoirs of an Anti-Semite

I did not envy young Mr. Garabetian for his beauties. I merely took them as the basis of departure for my dreams, although, of course, I realized what kind of shady tarts and floozies they were. The imagination is flexible, as we know; my fantasy beloved, as I saw her, was physically as exciting as those others, and also much sweeter, softer, finer, better bred — less vulgar, to be blunt. She was a lady from head to toe, and she had a wonderful soul. Needless to say, she was an excellent horsewoman and she loved country life — horses, sheep, dogs. In a word, she was perfect. All too frequently, her image inserted itself between me and the real women, who could not hold a candle to her but who were willing to make at least the erotic part of my wishful thinking come true.

She , of course, the girl in the wheelchair, fitted my ideal image almost perfectly, even though there would probably be a hitch in regard to country life. She could have as many dogs and sheep as she liked, but there would probably be no question of her riding. The rest was exactly what I wished for, especially her breasts: I thought of them with inexhaustible delight; I pictured them vividly in my mind. Nor was there any doubt as to the depth of her soul; her gaze had revealed it to me fully. I wanted her to know that I treasured this soul of hers far more than the charms of her body, which, maimed in the lower extremities, was probably all the more manageable above the waist.

Despite my fiery thoughts about sensory joys, I cared more about her mind, her empathy, her education, her good breeding, her ladylike qualities — everything I awaited from a lifetime partner. That was what I desired more than anything: to have someone I could love constantly, all my life. That was what had spirited the hard-on when I saw her: the delight, the divine joy of encountering a human being whom I could love all my life because her soul was congenial with mine and her rank equal to mine.

And that was why I had to tell her about my true fall from grace, about how I had betrayed her by giving my heart away. Betrayed not only her, but my ability to love, betrayed them shamefully below my dignity: with a widow, an aging widow, and a Jewess, to boot. Whether I could ever regain the purity of my feeling, and thereby of my dignity, depended on her forgiveness.

It was not all that long before, a few weeks at the most. My itinerary included the cosmetics stores of Văcăreşti, Bucharest’s Jewish quarter. A nearby district was called Crucea de Piatră—the Stone Cross. The one-story petit bourgeois houses, with gabled ends facing the street and narrow longitudinal courtyards in between, were all brothels. These courtyards teemed with girls; they swarmed through the streets in an eternal, plundering Mardi Gras, which — odd as it may sound — fitted in with one of the mood elements of my childhood. For this carnival made something obvious: the fundamental erotics in Surrealism, whose origin, I thought, could be traced back to some fanciful artists of the Jugendstil . There were mouths with black lipstick, and green eyelids under powdered rococo periwigs, such as I knew from illustrations in some of my mother’s books; thin, supple riding crops and fans, corsets and tutus; one girl had a toreador jacket on and was naked underneath down to her pirate boots; another wore wide Turkish pantaloons of transparent muslin with her bushy pubic hair sticking through; another had enormous breasts dangling naked out of a tangle of necklaces that constricted her body like shackles — Beardsley characters. Still another was entwined in a black feather boa like a serpent; her skinny naked body, which stilted along on towering high heels through the throng of musketeers, veil dancers, sailors, dragonflies, looked as if it had been drawn by Beyros. Sphinxes lay in the windows, corseted trunks like that of the “trunk lady” in sideshows, putto heads with gigantic ostrich plumes, flowing Mary Magdalene hair, fiery red wigs around pre-Raphaelitic angel faces, rachitic adolescents, matrons, crones, fatties ….

I spent as much time here as I could. At first, when I was still feverishly longing to become a world-famous artist, I would go there to draw. I saw myself as a new Pascin. But my efforts got me into hot water. When the girls realized what I was up to, they alerted a couple of goons, who made it clear to me, short and plain, that their charges were plying an earnest trade and did not wish to be viewed as curiosities and committed to paper. I speedily packed up my drawing pad and watercolor box.

Strangely enough, however, my urge for self-expression with a pencil and a brush waned. My dream of world fame as an artist was suffering from consumption; the drawing pad and the paint box remained untouched for longer and longer periods. It was as if the world I was discovering day by day were too vivid, life too immediate, too powerful, for me to capture it. I first had to shape myself according to this world. I was too confused, too self-tormented, far too self-absorbed, to be a mirror of things; I had to take things in, stow them away, store them up, let them take effect and mellow before I could hand them on. I went through a time of looking, of observing, or storing, of not doing.

Here, too, in the red-light district, I did nothing but look. As the most favorable vantage point, I picked a table outside a small tavern at an intersection; sitting there over a black coffee and a glass of raki , I could gape in all four directions of the compass. Diagonally across, in one of the courtyards where the erotic carnival was frolicking, two lemon saplings in green tubs flanked a plaster column with a teasing amoretto; in front of the column stood a crib, and in the crib lay something like a Mardi Gras queen, the madam of the house: an excessively fat dwarf in a wide, transparent directoire gown and a black-velvet ribbon around the sweaty throat, which was wedged between the double chin and the bosom, and a second velvet ribbon knotted around the forehead under the severe, ballerina hairdo. With her cheeks painted peony red and the doll-like gaze of eyes in coal-black circles, she looked highly artificial. I did not need my pad; I sketched her into my memory — or rather, into my soul — along with the fat cat wearing a brass bell on a blood-red velvet ribbon around her neck. The dwarf queen leisurely stroked the feline, like a black panther in her lap, while an old crone renewed the water in a glass every fifteen minutes. After inserting a spoonful of jam from a jar into her tiny, cherry mouth, the dwarf would very delicately take a few sips from the glass, elongating her little finger, which sparkled with the diamonds of countless rings.

One day, the afternoon light was growing dimmer and finally became abstractly transparent; I suddenly realized I had sat there too long. It was late, and I had not filled my quota. I had just enough time left to beautify a single display with fresh crêpe paper and soap bars, and the window I chose was the one closest by. Unfortunately, the proprietress was the most difficult.

Normally, it was pleasant working in Văcăreşti. The usually Jewish shopkeepers were kind and mellow people so long as the two-thousand-year-old panic did not flare up, which made them hysterically vehement, and they never gave me much trouble when I arrived with my motley jumble. But this one woman, the owner of a store called Parfumeria Flora, had always been a ticklish case in the itinerary of the decoration campaign.

She was all on her own — a widow, it was said — and in the trade, even among the salesmen, she had a bad reputation for being harsh and disagreeable. This was not, incidentally, the only reason why she was talked about so much; she had a solid place in the salesmen’s erotic gossip. No sooner did her name come up in a discussion at the Aphrodite Company than several voices evoked her with the husky undertones of desire: the embodiment of the raven-haired Jewess, whose succulent ripeness contrasted sexily with her coldness. Probably only the oldest representatives knew her real name; she was generally called the Black Widow. And it was also generally felt that sinning in her company may have been good business, for her shop was doing well and she seemed to have money on the side. Unfortunately, they said, she was a block of ice, and you could freeze off practically any part of yourself.