Gregor von Rezzori - Memoirs of an Anti-Semite

and he did not slap him in the face, he simply turned on his heel and walked out of the theater, and, coming home (or at least the apartment they called home at that time), he packed his bags and went off, ultimately landing here in Rome after several detours and provisional sojourns, divorced from her at last, and resolved to do everything he could to get his little boy away from her baleful influence.

Today, after twenty years (the boy would be going on twenty-five today — he cannot imagine him a twenty-five-year-old, he would not like to imagine him a monstrous replica of himself, he still sees the pale childish face with the enormous black eyes, and he feels a sharp pang in his heart each time, alleviating the pain with the thought that in many ways, in every way, it is better that the poor thing died …), today he looks back on all that as if it were not really his own story: in fact, it did happen to someone else, not the man now walking along the Via Veneto with a box of marrons glacés in order to pay the doubtless final visit to the ninety-four-year-old aunt of his (present, third, Italian) wife; for she probably will not make it much longer, la cara zia Olga , even the last time her life spirits were drooping critically ….

seldom does one feel the power of the present so strongly as at this moment, he thinks: the past is always fairyland. How could she fail to understand this, his quondam, second, Jewish wife? Granted: a past in which you are presented to schoolmates as the crucifier of Christ and then to a pack of SS bulls as the model German Girl while you think you are about to be raped eighty times and then strung up on the nearest branch, this cannot be shaken off lightly, this cannot lightly be reinvented into a fairy tale; likewise, his first, East Prussian wife could not rid herself of the images of the flight from the Russians; yet that should probably not be compared to the other…. Well, he too has a number of horror images at his disposal — Germany under the hail of bombs provided a wealth of them, but they belong to another existence, probably because even when those images were being stamped upon him, he saw them as though someone else were seeing them ….

to be sure: now, with the detachment of the sixty-five-year-old (although still with that certain childlike naïveté in the sky-blue gaze, the naïveté that is part of his compelling charm), he senses that his strength for reinventing reality is beginning to wane, the reality-forming reinvention of the present as well as the transfiguring fairy-tale reinvention of the past. It is drizzling over Rome, one cannot even get a decent winter in this lousy town: a negative plate of a town, in every respect, a ghost town of thick-blooded vulgar human flesh and ghostly rubble of the past: the traffic hectic as if it were an industrial center in the Ruhr, yet nothing happens here, absolutely nothing: a town of abstract administrators, of lawyers, even in cardinal’s red — sheer luck that his little boy was spared having to grow up here — just imagine what might have become of him: a young bomb-throwing radical — a Jewish leftist intellectual like the ones who helped the Bolsheviks in Russia…. well, they are being recompensed by the Russians nowadays, those stupid wretched Jews, always seeking the truth, the absolute, the Eternal Holy Empire ….

if she were here now, his former, second, Jewish wife (she had loved Rome so much, he had probably moved here to spite her by living here without her), if she were with him now, he would take her to Doney, one could still sit there, not very cozily, of course, on a kind of inverted summer terrace, but she could eat the typical tartuffo ice cream of Rome there which she liked and he could take her hand and say to her:

“Do you know why — why we quarreled? Don’t say a word, I too know it, and I too know that it was not so harmless, so irrelevant as I made it out to be. I knew you were stupid, my darling, and I loved you very much for what I often tenderly and often with hatred called your stupidity; yet you should have understood that as someone lost among the lotus eaters, like yourself, I couldn’t believe in the truth of reality. One can’t believe in a reality that comprises Auschwitz and the Opernball of Vienna at the same time. One simply has to escape into possibilities that make it appear possible. Yet, one must not fool around with the dreadful power of invention: a fool can create a reality that drives millions to madness, I know, I know…. Only, you must admit that it was grotesque when, between the two of us, you, the fervent art-consumer, the glowing admirer of art-creators, should believe in the reality of facts, and I, the lowbrow, the pedestrian, should be elevated by my powers of invention … isn’t it ridiculous? And even more so, that you, the Jew, defended the absolute, the unconditional, and I the goy defended the relative like a rabbinical student…. Look: my betrayal of pure truth — isn’t it also a possibility for the fallen angels to make the world lucid? You who believe in art the way St. Cecilia believes in resurrection in God, you ought to have known that my transfigurations, the fairy tales I wove out of images from my and other people’s past, were an act of love; love — as we both always knew — is identification. Well, this was the only way to identify with a world one was bound to hate and a mankind one loathed and despised. Transfiguration as the alchemists’ who strove to change vulgar metals into gold — I could even identify with myself; had I not done this I would have denied myself. But I did make something lucid with my love and my hate, didn’t I? … Yes, I know,” he would have quickly said, “we shouldn’t get at it psychologically, the thing’s too general. What is truth? Naturally not in the sense of whether it’s true that this waiter already has flat feet at a young age, but rather in the metaphysical dimension — the way the Russian aunt of my present wife understands it. The way she feels truth when she utters the word with her heavy Russian accent and cracked Slavic voice. When she says ‘ pravda ,’ the word is virtually surrounded by a nimbus, by the pealing of Easter bells — just as I told you when we were still in love the word skushno means not just homesickness or yearning but far, far beyond it, way beyond the dusky horizon, the homesickness, the yearning for God … but, honestly, my beautiful, once so tenderly beloved wife, are we Russians? I mean, do we believe in God? Or do we only occasionally act as if we did, out of despair because we really don’t and also because we enjoy doing so, as artists: as actors of ourselves, for the sake of the “as if,” just as we enjoy acting as if we were Russians when we drink vodka or listen to the Don Cossacks…. Look into my eyes and tell me what truth is!”

and she would probably smile now and repeat what she would have hissed back then: “You’re always right when you talk. But the instant you leave the room, nothing is true anymore!”

Exactly. As when you put down a book. As when the curtain falls in the theater ….

Never will he forget the pain in his little boy’s eyes when he was told “Papa’s lying.” “Perhaps,” he would say to his wife, “it was even more than pain; it was fear. And it lingered in our darling boy’s eyes, for it might have been the fear that Papa could seek truth — for instance in those huge belladonna-black eyes of our little boy the Talmud student, and in the susceptibility of the eternally sickly child, the Jewish shack in which his mother’s ancestors had lain in the same bed by the dozens, coughing tubercles at one another …” but that would have been too cruel to tell her: cynicism, even as an act of self-defense, has its limits — he suffers, he feels sick at the thought of what an unbearable intellectual snob the boy would most likely have become under his mother’s pretentious, exalted bluestocking ways. And how he must have suffered from her cruelty. The cruelty of the really stupid: once, when she tried to be ironical, asking him whether he had invented himself in his earlier phases as so fine, so good, so courageous only to set an example for their little boy, and he had nodded, she shouted scornfully, “He’ll respect you more if you confess what you really are! …”