Gregor von Rezzori - Memoirs of an Anti-Semite

As for the girl in the wheelchair, I expected her to be so genuinely of my breed that if I described these tortures, she would, like me, burst into laughter, the helpless, enervated laughter of surrender. Notwithstanding the tragic element (mainly for the poor Black Widow), it was grotesquely comical to see how my amorous paroxysms would be chilled by the cold spurts of some aesthetic affront — I say “aesthetic” because it really was a question of class aesthetics, the tremendous effect of which is often overlooked.

Once, for instance, the passion of our frantic discharges of love wrenched a noise of enthusiasm out of her that did not come from her throat. And my fiery Andalusian was almost driven to suicide by mortal fear, deep shame, a contrite sense of guilt — all of which shocked me much more than her innocent and spontaneous utterance of enthusiasm, which had the advantage that it could not be mendacious and which I instantly rewarded with a surge of tenderness. But no: she was so embarrassed that she raced out of the room, and for days thereafter met me with a bewildered hostility and injured mien, as though I were the one who had farted and not she.

It was certainly absurd, nay, downright scandalous, to think that this rare gift of destiny, this fortunate event — the love of a beautiful, vivacious, experienced, and emotionally mature woman for a young man still wet behind the ears, a love that could cast a blissful glow over the rest of his life — would have to be destroyed by such fiddle-faddle as her leaving the spoon standing in the coffee cup like a pitchfork in a heap of manure, whereas “one” was accustomed to one’s taking the spoon out and putting it on the saucer, or “one” did not vanish under the table with muffled apologies when one had to blow one’s nose during a meal. But that was the way it was; I had to admit it. The toothpick that Mr. Garabetian, even while speaking, seldom removed from his mouth (and then mostly just to clean his ear) did not detract in the slightest from my affection and friendship for him. Yet my love for the beautiful Jewess, in whose face I saw all the sun-drenched passion of Andalusia (where, in gratitude for everything that the Jewish spirit had contributed to Western civilization by so grandiosely fusing Occident and Orient, the stakes had blazed), my love for the golden, happiness-flooded face of the beautiful sufferer, dissolving in a smile satiated with the mystery of mortal bliss, like the smile of La Belle inconnue de la Seine —my love was wiped out, chewed up, ground down by the way she dressed, the way she stuck out her little finger when she ate ice cream, the pretentiously pompous respectability with which she behaved toward her customers, with which she laced the splendor of her breasts and hips as firm as cannonballs in rubber armor, in order to be “ladylike,” the way she did up her beautiful black hair like a pastry cook’s masterpiece when she wanted to go to a restaurant with me, the way she would act “refined” when dealing with people to whom she felt superior, raising her eyebrows, shoulders, and voice, speaking through her nose, and taking on the bitter, hostilely cautious expression of people who have social pretentions beyond themselves, just barely far enough beyond themselves so that they never get further than that.

It did not help telling myself that she loved me with a terrifying passion and that this ought to be more valuable to me than good taste or the notion that she belonged to the finest society. For her, I must have been the fulfillment of a dream she had never dared to dream; with her passionate yet sober and distrustful nature, she would never have managed to believe that it could come true. It was obvious what was going on. If one viewed it in terms of Freudian depth psychology, which terms were specifically Jewish, after all, then one could reel the whole thing off like a grade-school homily: I was the son who had been denied to her, and simultaneously a most fiery lover, whose caresses were no doubt enhanced by the notion of sinful incest.

I mocked Freudianism. Was there anything like a Jocasta complex, I was tempted to ask, which, lying dormant within her, had disturbed her relationship to others? If so, she could now abreact it to her heart’s content. Here I was, her pet, her doll, her baby — so why did she care about the rest? There was no one who mattered to her in the slightest. Her immediate family had died out, she said; the others were scattered somewhere in Bessarabia, she did not know exactly where, nor did she care. Thus it was all the more incomprehensible to see how she worried about what her neighbors thought of her. She was a shrewd, prudent, hardheaded businesswoman, but her accumulation of money was leading to nothing, as she desperately admitted; it had long since become an end in itself, a compulsion, egged on by a cold unfulfillment and presumably also by that anxiety never totally overcome, rooted deep in her race and permeating her entire being. The tenderness she showered me with was all the more poignant since it erupted out of her contrary to her nature and to all her habits; sometimes I had the impression that when she resisted it, she did so as a mere reflex. But when passion did burst through her inhibitions, then she was plunged into a kind of golden intoxication, a happy delirium which radiated from her like a monstrance. She became beautiful merely by looking at me.

To be sure, this was not the case from the outset. After that initial daze, when we had plunged into each other’s arms on the sofa in the back room of the Parfumeria Flora, we went through alternations of being overwhelmed and dismayed, feeling shame and guilt, reservation and temptation, attempts to break away, irresolution, affected yielding and renewed scruples — all the emotive ups and downs that decent burghers use in their love affairs to make their own lives interesting and other people’s lives difficult. During this phase, the noble sentiments with which I tried to quell my anti-Semitic feelings were put to the acid test. Weren’t these exaggerated dramatics typically Jewish? I would have liked to discuss it with Mr. Garabetian, whose judicious and unsentimental views had a calming effect on my own exaltations. How could a woman with the sensual riches of my Andalusian act in a way you would expect of a Sacré-Coeur schoolgirl losing her innocence? Unless, together with all the burdens encumbering her much-afflicted race, she was also cursed with irredeemable philistinism. And that this was true, alas, was borne out — certainly not alone, but at least most eloquently — by the apartment in which I underwent the toil and trouble of putting down her resistance, which kept flaring up.

The apartment consisted of three rooms behind the sofa room, which lay next to the sales space of the shop. The three rooms were appointed with assembly-line furnishings in exaggeratedly fashionable Art Deco style, or rather a Balkanese version thereof, in which the futurist element joined forces with the ornamentation of carved shepherds’ crooks: dining table and chairs, complete bedroom set, parlor furniture with a mirrored cabinet — everything displayed as smartly and sprucely as at the department store where all this splendor had been purchased. With the help of crocheted doilies, tiny little vases with artificial-flower arrangements, and Pierrot and Bonzo dolls, the hand of the lady of the house had provided the warmth of a personal touch. All this was billeted in an almost rustically simple one-story house; and the back wing, facing the yard, had a wooden goat shed attached to it.

In such an ambience, I regarded it as a proud achievement to muster up sincere romantic feelings. That I ignored it, in the end, was probably due to another achievement: my courageously seeing the Black Widow as a Jew and wanting to love her even though she was Jewish — no, precisely because she was Jewish. This Jewishness, I thought, obviously involved that bad — or shall we say utterly different — taste which with its Oriental elements was something of its own, a bastardized European taste all right, but a taste that was as much a part of the Jews as their yiddling and their agitated hands. I had to accept it; I felt the same way about her initial philistine resistance to my courtship and her recurrent scruples. Could I tell whether or not some religious bias within her involuntarily rebelled against miscegenation with me, the goy? After all, everyone knew how extremely rigorous the Jewish hygienic regulations were.