Gregor von Rezzori - Memoirs of an Anti-Semite

I had even less success trying to open her eyes to what excited me about the seamy life of the suburbs: my snobbish passions, such as the turf, were bad enough, but this was truly unintelligible to her. “What’s so wonderful about the desperate face of a thief who’s been caught stealing? His despair? Do you know what despair really is?” she asked, shaking her head. “Honestly, baby, I just don’t understand you. First you go to pieces telling me about some dog that’s been run over and his master can’t stand seeing him suffer so he cries and kills him with a club. And then, when I ask you to come along to my neighbor’s funeral, you tell me it’s none of your business. First you tell me that I should throw away the stone I check the hundred-lei pieces with, because the riffraff bring so many phony coins into the shop, and that it’s hardhearted because they’ve been fooled themselves, and vulgar, too, not suitable for me, you say. And then you want me, a decent woman, to go with you to Crucea de Piatră and look at the hookers. You can watch them baking bread there for hours, with the cockroaches strolling all over the dough, but when I rub in my mascara with a little spit, you hit the roof. Has anybody ever seen so much contradiction? If you knew the Mahalà as well as I did — always scared of someone sticking a knife into your ribs — you wouldn’t say that life was more honest here than in the quarters where the rich people live ….”

I hated her when she talked such rubbish. I felt she was committing treason against herself. I could have beaten her for such petit bourgeois narrow-mindedness, for it snuffed out the face that made me love her whenever tenderness overwhelmed her.

But one day, even the sight of her happiness turned dull for me. We had gone out again one evening, for God’s sake, just to the kind of place she loved: a garden restaurant. Blue, yellow, and red light bulbs in chestnut leaves, a Gypsy band playing, and a singer singing with eyebrows raised like circumflexes. She was wearing an unspeakably awful dress, a kind of elflike, innocent version of a Pierrot costume in white, with gigantic black polka dots and a silly ruff. All she needed to do was let her breasts hang out and don a gauze cap with two huge feelers to play a splendid black-and-white ladybug in the masquerade teeming around Crucea de Piatră. But no, she had had some hair stylist in Văcăreşti bake one of her horsehair cakes again, and she had stuck in a celluloid Spanish comb with rhinestones — it just about turned my stomach.

She was excited by the fashionable atmosphere around us. “Look over there,” she said, “but don’t be obvious about it. Isn’t that a chic couple?”

I looked: it was young Garabetian in a white suit, razor-sharp shoulders, fist-sized knot in his tie, reflections in his Valentino hair, and accompanied by one of his enviably well designed high-class whores. He glanced over and smiled ironically as he murmured a few words to his lady, who burst out laughing; then he greeted me with a sarcastically exaggerated bow.

“Do you know him?” my black-and-white polka-dotted widow asked respectfully. I knew not only him but also the two men sitting a few tables farther on and watching us with equally great interest. It was the chief clerk and a department head from Aphrodite, with their Sudeten German spouses.

I had no desire to spoil her evening, but it was impossible for me to conceal my bad mood. While she chatted away, I poked around in my food, drinking too much wine too quickly and vehemently. Then she likewise fell silent. At first, the silence — hers timidly guilt-ridden, mine defiantly pouting — hung over us like a cloud that might drift past. But it expanded, entered us icily, eventually took full control; neither of us could break it. We left the restaurant as though we had just put a wreath on the grave of our love.

I drove her home in my Model T. When I saw her to her door, she unlocked it and went inside without a word but leaving the door open behind her. It would have meant breaking off totally if I had not followed her. For an instant, I wondered if I should let things reach that pass. But in defiance of my friend Garabetian’s foppish son with his floozies, and of the clerks from Aphrodite and their fat-assed wives, I followed her into her house.

Inside, she received me in despair. “Forgive me, baby! I’ll do anything you tell me to. From now on, we’ll only go to places you like. Honestly, baby, I swear to you. But please, please, be nice again!”

She was more ecstatic than ever in my arms, and I caught myself observing her with almost scientific attention. I was on the alert for the change in her face, the increasing rapture, in which the boring mask of her ancestral tragedy dissolved to make room for the slight and mysterious smile of the Inconnue de la Seine , until passion broke open the lips and an eruption of happiness inundated her features. She drew out this moment now, keeping her eyes shut and letting her smile drift, filled with the inner happiness of the blind. And I had the crazy flash that if she opened her eyes, this blessed, soulful smile might take on a cunning aspect, like the Mona Lisa’s, which, after all, were she to shut her eyes, would simply be a smile of voluptuous pleasure. A pang of wild jealousy cut through me at the thought of how basically questionable this ennoblement of a woman’s face was, how little really I had to do with it, and how much more convincing that ennoblement must have been when my Andalusian was spellbound by her husband’s incredible erotic aura. That same instant, I felt, to my horror, that I was ejaculating — before the point that was the rule in our well-coordinated lovemaking, that is, before her face turned to its ultimate and most beautiful state.

If she was disappointed, she tried to conceal it. She showered me with tenderness. “Don’t worry, baby, it was beautiful for me too, really; it makes me happy because it shows that you love me despite everything.”

I was uncertain how to interpret this “despite everything.” I linked it, insanely enough, to my delusion that I had seen through to the trivial and selfish character of her ecstasies, and I said to myself, If you only knew…. Most likely I could not have supplied this seemingly stunning evidence of my love had I not been assisted by the image of her pleasure in her husband’s arms ….

With a sudden insight into what I was doing and thinking, into the kind of home movie I was screening for myself, and how I imagined I was thereby regulating my feelings and bringing them to climaxes I could not otherwise reach, a choking horror at myself overwhelmed me. I should have felt a still greater horror at the thought of our abysmal solitudes. Cosmic spaces separated us while we believed we loved each other.

I pretended to be asleep when she went on calming me, stroking me, and whispering, “My little boy! My darling! My baby!” I wished she would stop calling me “baby.”

I had never gone along with her wish that I spend the night and wake up in her arms the next morning. Nor had I lost my fear of this typically Jewish luxury marriage bed with its profusion of down pillows in the Art Deco bedroom: it was a trap. Even the petit bourgeois house, in a district that was actually a ghetto, got on my nerves. It could just as easily have been a house in some shtetl under the evening sky toward Galicia. It had too much Chagallian poetry. In fact, I had avoided getting established in that house, preferring brief, passionate sex on the Biedermeier sofa in the shop’s back room where we had first embraced. The fact that I had to be at the stables by five A.M. in order to get a mount had always been an effective excuse. This time, I did not even bother with my excuse. I left with no explanation after pretending to awake from my brief slumber.