Gregor von Rezzori - Memoirs of an Anti-Semite

That made it all the worse for me. Now the thorn of jealousy was in me. I gave her no peace. What had been the secret of his attraction? Was he so potent, so powerful? Did he have such great endurance, such amorous skill? All the myths of sex reared their heads again in my imagination and plagued me with scoffing challenges to measure myself against the competition. I was very sorry that she had ripped up his photograph. From his face, I might have been able to glean something of the essence of his supernatural virility and learn what it came from. The face had reminded me of someone I knew, and I finally decided he looked like the man in the sleazy hotel on Calea Griviţei, the one who had cheated me and beaten me up when I tried to make love with the Gypsy girl there. This delusion entrenched itself firmly in my mind, and confused me.

This thug was not only an irresistible ladies’ man, he was also a philosopher?! Scornfully I asked just what “Jewish philosophy” was, anyway. I instantly felt as if I had started a rockslide over my head. All my embarrassing ignorance became obvious. Not only had there been a specifically Jewish philosophy in Alexandria during pre-Christian times, reaching its initial high point in Philo Judaeus, but also in the early Middle Ages, Jewish philosophy had flourished under the aegis of the Arabs, mainly in Andalusia, with the Kalamists, the Jewish Neoplatonics, Aristotelians, and Anti-Rationalists. I was cascaded with names like Judah Halevi, ibn-Daud, Maimonides, Gersonides — names I was hearing for the first time and did not know what to make of. I was chagrined about my defective education; I felt barbaric and presumptuous. She, however, my Andalusian, seemed to enjoy telling me about it all. She would assume her owl-face, the “eternal” face of a not just physical but spiritual motherhood. It was, indubitably, her love that inspired her to tell me about her forebears, as she would have told a child about them; nothing was further from her mind than to show me up in my ignorance. Nonetheless, a suspicion crept over me: obviously she had taken great interest in the spiritual potency of her deceased husband just as, in the beginning of their marriage, she had taken active part in his sexual potency, and I went so far in my self-torment as to suspect her of letting me know this in order to fire my performance in bed. Never before had my not very stable ego been so shaken.

Oddly, that did not diminish my love for her. On the contrary: so long as jealousy tortured me and the feeling of inadequacy humbled me, I was in bondage to her. But no sooner did I feel superior to her than my criticism of her began — shameful as this was, I had to admit it to myself, and thereby to the girl in the wheelchair. I was enraged by the idea that even my blond, long-legged anima might fall victim to the irresistible erotic attraction of this Jew.

What drove us apart in the end was even more shameful. The girl in the wheelchair would understand this. It began with my Andalusian’s pride in me, her desire to flaunt me before the world, as though for her, a widow in the prime of life, I was a desirable catch and an enviable erotic property, in any case an achievement for which she could take embellishing credit. “You just want to show off with me,” I rebelled. “If you had your way, you’d get all dolled up like a Yiddish mama on shabbes and promenade through town with me on your arm and bask in the delight of the passersby at your boychik , isn’t that so?” She wanted to mold me according to her ideas; she smeared brilliantine in my hair and wanted me to wear certain suits — the very best, needless to say — and she gave me the most dreadful neckties.

I shuddered at the thought. I was horrified that the district representative of the Aphrodite Company would inevitably get wind of our affair. I could foresee the wave of gossip that would sweep through the Sudeten German and Transylvanian Saxon gentlemen in management. Although not quite able to suppress my pride at having succeeded in “melting the iceberg,” I told her that it could have very disagreeable consequences for me professionally if anyone found out about our affair. Of course, it was hard to explain why, especially to her. Since we had begun seeing each other regularly, I had had a free hand at the Parfumeria Flora. Soon, the displays were showing nothing but Aphrodite products, different ones each week. If I did not decorate the window, because it struck me as too conspicuous, then she did it, as a favor for me, behind my back. “It would be simplest if you just stuck me between the toothpastes and the soaps. If possible with the legend ‘Not so good in bed as my late husband, but still …’ Only that wouldn’t be what Aphrodite is aiming for,” I said venomously. “After all, they’re paying me to publicize their products, not to have their products publicize me.”

Only later on, after we broke up, did it sometimes cross my mind that there was something that might have helped me understand her vanity better, namely an element of defiance in her pride. No doubt her neighbors, all Jewish, did not fail to perceive what our regular get-togethers were about. Once, an elderly man had spoken to me: smiling into the evening, as it were, very amiably, very kindly, with discreetly closed eyes, he had asked me whether I did not care to come to prayers now and again, and I had replied, more gruffly than intended, that I was not Jewish. This must have got around. Ridiculous as the prejudice against the admissibility of our relationship might seem to me in an enlightened world, chances were that the bias existed. I ought to have been touched by the courage with which she stood by me.

But the very opposite was the case. When she suggested our dining in one of Bucharest’s large, well-frequented downtown restaurants, I suspected her of using me for an attempt at social climbing. “That’s all phony,” I tried to explain to her. “All the people you see there are nothing but philistines trying to put on the dog. The truly elegant people eat at home or in a few exclusive places like the Capşa, not in a dump like that.”

She looked at me blankly. “Do you want to eat in the Capşa, baby? Even if it’s more expensive, that’s all right.”

Yet I had been doing my best to show her something of my world — or at least that tiny bit of it which I took part in during the riding half of my double life. For I was still riding every morning, and indeed spent more and more of my free time in the stables and at the track. But her encounter with the fashionable milieu of the turf ended catastrophically. “That’s supposed to be fun?” she wailed. “Me, a hardworking woman, I’m supposed to get up at four in the morning and watch someone plopping onto a wild horse and galloping off like he’s crazy or something? Baby, please, you’re gonna break your neck! Just look at how skinny you are, all because you won’t eat anything to keep fit for such a stupid, boring thing. And that stench in those stables — it can’t be healthy. How can anyone feel normal that way? No wonder that old bag who talked to you for hours on end behaved so strangely with me. She didn’t even shake hands. With all that horseshit in her lungs, she lost her good manners. What did you say she was? Lady-in-waiting to the queen? She can be the queen herself, for all I care. If she feels all right in the horse manure, well, let her. She must know what she gets out of it; she lets the stableboy grab her tushy whenever he lifts her up on her nag — I saw it with my very own eyes — yet she must be sixty-plus if she’s a day. But you, baby, you don’t need that stuff. If you like, I’ll buy you a little buggy; a horse you can get cheap. There’s a market every Thursday out by your factory; you’re sure to find something suitable, and we can put it right here in the back yard; I’ll just give notice to the people keeping goats there now; well, and a little hay and oats — how much can that cost? And a little buggy won’t ruin us either; we can go riding every Sunday on Shossea Khisseleff. What else do you want from the nags except to have fun? You don’t wanna become like that gonif of a trainer who thinks he can milk those dumb rich people dry, and those fellows do the biggest business with those poor devils who bet away their last penny ….” She looked at me with tender solicitude. “You’re no shmegegge , baby, are you? Why do you want it?” It took her weeks to calm down.