Gregor von Rezzori - Memoirs of an Anti-Semite

I know that this change in her face was what made me love her. Subsequently, I did all I could to conjure it up, over and over again, this melting of harshness, nastiness, anxiety, banality, this lovely fading of the bad signs of life under the intensely happy surge of erupting love. I succeeded — at least for a while — in recharging my love in hers. For even though I loved her — and often so passionately that the thought of her was like a punch in my solar plexus; sometimes indeed quite simply, relaxed and happy and always with sincere gratitude for her love — I was tormented by the sense that through her I was deceiving “love” itself: the love I wanted to hold in readiness for the girl whom I could love all my life.

It is mortifying to admit, but she in no way matched my image of this ideal beloved, and I fought a losing battle against this wishful-thinking affliction. The ideal had been stamped into me so early and so thoroughly that I could not rid myself of it. I felt like someone who makes a daily resolution to stop smoking and then greedily reaches for the first cigarette every morning.

Yet I had to tell myself that this ideal of a curly-blond, long-legged horsewoman surrounded by playful greyhounds, a woman with whom I intended to spend my life in a whirlwind of Grand Prix races, operas, masquerades, at ski lodges, seaside resorts, and on the upper decks of ocean liners — I had to own that this ideal was utterly banal and downright embarrassing, truly the clichéd dream image of every shop assistant. In contrast, my Black Widow — or rather, my Andalusian, as I now tenderly called her — was of a different caliber in every respect but one: she was, alas, a petit bourgeois Jewish woman and almost twice as old as I. Our liaison could remain, must remain, but an episode.

Yet her age — she was at least in her mid-thirties; I never found out exactly how old she was, nor did I ever ask her — her age bothered me much less than her being petit bourgeois. She was beautiful. Early on, I had learned the old cavalier saying that a woman’s body ages later than her face. She didn’t have to prove it. Despite its occasional harshness and sometimes cheapness, her face expressed duennalike dignity; it was smooth and taut and amazingly youthful, especially around the full, fleshy lips with the very lovely teeth, though not around the tragic, darkly embedded eyes. And her body was splendid. Naturally, she was a very ripe woman, but that was precisely what fired my passion; I did not have to consult Dr. Maurer for potency pills.

I felt I could ask the girl in the wheelchair to forgive me for such details if I actually got to the point of offering her my confession. Would she be discriminating enough to know just what I was talking about? Not, of course, a cynically perceived erotic experience: at nineteen, after all, one wants to make sure that everyone understands the moral purity and logical consistency of one’s every action, feeling, or thought; whatever one does has to seem of the purest purpose and most honorable intention. No, this was no frivolous sexual encounter; it was sincere love — on my part, too, even though it lasted only a short time. And that precisely was the cause of the conflict: despite its genuine and spontaneous beginnings, this love was not intended for the woman it went to. It had, so to speak, dropped into her lap, a fruit that had long since ripened for someone else. It was originally meant for the personification of my anima , whom I finally met today: my siren in the wheelchair, of course.

True, the girl in the wheelchair did not correspond to the criteria of my anima in all particulars. You could not say that she had blond Jean Harlow hair; her attractive mop of fuzzy hair was an intense chestnut brown; the little face framed by the hair was perhaps a bit too chubby-cheeked and doll-like; and despite the obvious merits of her torso, any mention of the long-legged horsewoman’s figure would have been downright tactless. But after all, the physical factor was not the decisive one. In regard to the physical, one becomes more experienced and more mature, and one adjusts one’s ideals more flexibly to the insufficient realities. Everything else was all right, and that was the important thing: her proper birth, her careful breeding, the aura of her good background.

I would have been lying if I had not admitted that the aura of her lowly origins was what made my love for the Black Widow as rotten as if it were crawling with maggots — a gradual crumbling under minor irritations that gnawed in, bored in everywhere. It was not just the way she spoke — she could not, of course, deny she was Jewish. Her race was written in her features, in the very face that had overwhelmed me with its inundation of happiness; but not only that: she could also take on a different expression, which I loved, an owllike, archaically wise expression of primordial motherhood. At such times, she looked like an ancient goddess…. But her language, as I was saying: her singsong, the flattened vowels, the peculiar syntax of people who, although having known an idiom since childhood (in her case, Rumanian), remain alien to it, and then the Yiddish expressions interjected all over the place — these things betrayed her the instant she opened her mouth. And yet that was the least that irritated me. I had finally understood that it was quite possible for me to love a Jewess, not in spite of the eternal Jewish tragedy, the age-old Jewish sadness showing in her face, but because of it: to see that face suddenly transformed by happiness — in fact, actually inundated with happiness — affected me deeply. But then I was equally affected by the “earth mother” look on that face when she was in a serious mood. Thus, experiencing so many astonishing things in myself, I accepted her Jewish features as part of her, just as I would have endured tattoos or brass disks grown into the lips, had it been possible for me to love a Central African native.

Besides, the specifically Jewish quality in Jews had never repelled me so much as the attempt — doomed from the start — to hush it up, cover it over, deny it. The yiddling of Jews, their jittery gesticulation, their disharmony, the incessant alternation of obsequiousness and presumptuousness, were inescapable and inalienable attributes of their Jewishness. If they acted as one expected them to act, so that one could recognize them at first glance, one was rather pleasantly touched. They were true to themselves — that was estimable. One related to Jews in the same way as an Englishman to foreigners: one assumed they would not act like us. If they did so nevertheless, it made them look suspicious. It seemed artificial. It was unsuitable. Like the Englishman confronted with a foreigner behaving in an assiduously British manner, we saw the so-called assimilated Jew as aping us.

Perhaps it would have been good if I had spoken about this frankly with my Black Widow. She surprised me sometimes with an intelligence and often with a knowledge I would not have attributed to her milieu. She most likely would have if not approved of it then at least understood that for us Gentiles (“goyim,” as she would put it), the point at which our hair stood on end was when Jews revealed in their social pretentions their desire to belong to us. Not because we might have feared compromising ourselves by accepting them as our own but, rather, because the attempt was so feebly presumptuous. In so-called polite society, they were insufferable; they gave it an “as if” quality, thereby making it base. It was even worse when they tried to break into a class whose characteristics antagonized us anyway.

That was exactly what my Black Widow was doing. Even if I could have discussed it with her, I could not have made her see that my resistance was grounded not in arbitrary fictions but rather in a real difference in mentality, in psychic constitution, a difference that could not be bridged by the best will in the world.