Gregor von Rezzori - Memoirs of an Anti-Semite

meanwhile, clouds of poison gas escape accidentally and turn children’s faces into cactus blossoms, the coasts rot under the beached dead fish, the climate of southern Italy becomes like Scotland’s but scientists assure us that this has nothing to do with the increasing density of jet planes in the stratosphere … it may be understandable that the twenty-year-olds today are restless, more restless than even we were at their age, the pressure bothers them more than it bothers us, our generation has gone through so much it can put up with this, too — above all, we have learned to put up with things, to make the best, even of the worst; but the young people, born back then when he first had come to Rome — in a word, his son’s contemporaries, if the son had survived, the poor little thing …

he instantly pushes the thought aside: he stops thinking of his son, forbids himself to think of him — what was I thinking about? Yes, the young people of today: why are they so restless? We were restless because of our dreams — dreams of the future. Do they have a future? What do they dream about? socialism come true at last? heroism in the adventure of the Revolution? or simply world fame as a rock singer? as a hero of Formula-I racing? … Certainly not about love, as we did when we were their age; they’ve got it too easy in this respect, they’re already copulating at the onset of puberty, in short pants and pinafores, so to speak; at twenty, they have acquired the sexual experiences of an active man in his mid-forties; enviable but of course detrimental to eroticism; the feelings are sure to deaden with such an unresisting, such an insensitive, such a semi-involved possibility of sexual activity — or at least so our envy encourages us to presume. As for great love, the very notion of which in our time made all the feelings in the forehead and the pit of the stomach and the Venus mound contract in poignantly sweet ardor — the unique great love with which life is fulfilled and bliss on earth attained, the one great love that is the attained goal of troth, loyalty, allegiance to the banner that waves over a life — they, the young ones today, most likely never dream of that. So they say, in magazines, anyway; and polls, surveys, and statistical analyses confirm it ….

Be that as it may: they must dream about something, they too, these young people, even if only about finding their identity. For what made him, the man with gray hair and the box of marrons glacés under his arm, walking along the Via Veneto to visit a Russian great-aunt of his (present, third, Italian) wife — what made him identical with the forty-year-old of twenty years ago, here, outside one of the now vanished cafés, Rome-hungry and future-minded, freshly divorced from his (second, Jewish) wife, and expecting his little boy to be awarded to him; what made him one and the same person as the adolescent on the hilltop in the Carpathians half a century ago and, even further back, the child who awakened at night (because they feared the Bolsheviks were coming), or the air-raid-shelter sitter under the hail of bombs in Berlin, and the freebooter in the intellectuals’ interregnum during the Ice Age of the German rubble-cities, and the writer of screenplays for Cinecittaà during the fifties — what made him one with all these characters and various other forms of his diverse metamorphoses? Yes, there was an answer. The thing that made them all one and the same person was: dreaming. When he thought I , he felt as if he were dreaming himself up: Somnio, ergo sum —I dream myself up, therefore I am.

Notwithstanding that his dreams had been different with every change and had sometimes taken on the character of nightmares. Dreaming per se had remained the same, whether a boy’s conjuring up a vision of himself as a white hunter or a world-famous artist or champion amateur jockey, or the eternal dream of a man whose love is fulfilled, or other banal wishful thoughts that scarcely suggested originality. Indeed, what had allowed him unswervingly to feel himself as I through all the real and dreamed-up transformations was not what he dreamed, but how he dreamed — an outwitting of self developed to a fine art, with the help of which he eluded any out-and-out collision with reality.

The first time he had seen a bullfight (not in Spain, which events of world history had prevented him from visiting until quite late, but in Mexico, where he lived during a transitory stage as a car salesman), wearing a tremendous sombrero and sitting with a breathtakingly beautiful gumchewing American girl friend in the shady parabolic section of the arena, he watched as the matador made the black dart of the bull aim at the red cloth of the capa over and over again, and the matador over and over again steered the bull past by a hairbreadth. The first time he watched this, he realized with amusement that he himself employed the same tactic with himself, and that he had developed equivalent mastery. Elude an out-and-out collision with reality…. No, sir, this was not cowardice about life, not escapism — rather the contrary: he, too, could look reality in the face, better than most other people, for he knew how dangerous reality was. But the artful feat of always holding up a new possibility of himself, a fiction of himself, and the knack, the balletic skill, of eluding reality, withdrawing the fiction at the last instant before colliding with reality — those were talents no one could emulate.

Indispensable talents, if you wanted to survive. For otherwise, how could you stand the look of your face of yesterday? For instance the reddened face of the teenager in the Carpathians, eyes burning, lips trembling in the greed to kill something, a dove, a hare, a roe deer … or the face of the young man in love, not dry behind the ears but scandalizing the beau monde of prewar Bucharest with his sentimental performances, who, while the world around him is about to crumble, Europe preparing to commit suicide, welcomes the Nazi invasion in Poland just because he loathes Poles, since the lady whom he happens to love (one of the several unique great loves of his life, each of which promised fulfillment, bliss on earth attained, the very goal of troth and loyalty) — well, she has had a Polish lover before him and sometimes seems to mind that he has left her … or the face of the hideous fop who, under the hail of bombs on Berlin in 1943, leads an idler’s life, cynically watching a world in flames, millions of people dying, being crippled, suffering unutterable grief, but he, in the midst of a panicking crowd that rushes toward an air-raid shelter even before the sirens have howled their warning, pulls a watch from his pocket, looks at it, then up at the sky, and with an ugly sneer says in a loud voice, “They’re late today. Do let’s hope nothing has happened to them on the way!” … or the face of the man who sleeps, sleeps for days in a Munich room whose door leads into a corridor that leads, in turn, into space — half the house is missing, piled up in a heap of brick and mortar, broken window frames and splinters of glass and slate where once a charming street in Schwabing gave out on to the Englische Garten, now a narrow path across the rubble, glittering in the frost winter of 1947, and he doesn’t care whether there is coal for the stove in the corner of the small room where his (first) wife, a refugee from East Prussia, sits in a mangy lambskin coat staring hatefully at him, despising him for his refusal to find a job or do the least work to make their improvised habitation habitable or try and get into some petty black-market racket in order to procure a bagful of potatoes or half a pound of rancid butter … or the ridiculous, mustachioed face of the would-be lothario who, after all this and two divorces and a pitiless fight with his second wife over their little son (a fight that ended with the poor boy’s death) sits outside a café on the Via Veneto eagerly trying to adjust himself to the glory of Cinecittà ….