Thomas Bernhard - Extinction

Suddenly everything would be at an end. Everything would fly apart in an immense explosion. We approach philosophy with extreme caution, I said, and we fail. Then with resolution, and we fail. Even if we approach it head-on and lay ourselves open, we fail. It’s as though we had no right to any share in philosophy, I said. Philosophy is like the air we breathe: we breathe it in, but we can’t retain it for long before breathing it out. All our lives we constantly inhale it and exhale it, but we can never retain it for that vital extra moment that would make all the difference. Ah, Gambetti, I said, we want to set about everything and take hold of everything and appropriate everything, but it’s quite impossible. We spend a lifetime trying to understand ourselves and don’t succeed, so how can we pretend to understand something that isn’t ourselves? Instead of describing Wolfsegg to him, as I had promised, I wore Gambetti down with my diatribe, which I delivered in an intolerably loud voice as we walked the full length of the Flaminia and part of the way back, several times retracing our steps before we finally reached the Piazza del Popolo. All this time I never let him get a word in, though I knew that he would have comments to make. Every now and then he interjected that I was indulging in one of my typical philosophizing disquisitions. I would have done better to let him interrupt me than to go on listening to my own words and getting carried away by them, for I knew that sooner or later they would grate on my nerves and lead me to reproach myself for letting myself go — and, what’s more, in the presence of Gambetti, who was after all entitled to expect more self-discipline from his teacher than I was capable of at the time. When we reached the Piazza del Popolo, which at nine in the evening was as busy as most cities are just before midday, it struck me that I should be more careful and not let myself go in Gambetti’s presence, especially when indulging in one of my philosophical escapades. However, I told Gambetti that we should never feel ashamed if on occasion we more or less lost control because our mind required us to, for the mind was always excited when it had been primed to think. Gambetti could not help laughing at this remark, which amounted to an overdue apology. With his usual discernment, he ordered us only a half bottle of white wine, and I was able to begin my description of Wolfsegg. As usual when I describe Wolfsegg, I began with the view from the village. Wolfsegg lies above the village, I told Gambetti, at a height of more than two thousand four hundred feet. It consists of the main house and various outbuildings — the Gardeners’ House, the Huntsmen’s Lodge, the Home Farm, and the Orangery. And the Children’s Villa, which is also a fine building, built for the children of Wolfsegg probably two hundred years ago, and set somewhat apart, on the east side, where you have an extensive view of the Alps. From Wolfsegg, in fact, you have the most extensive view of the Alps that you’ll find anywhere; you can see the whole of the landscape from the mountains of the Tyrol to those of eastern Lower Austria. That’s not possible from anywhere else in Austria, I told Gambetti. Gambetti was always an attentive listener and never interrupted when I was trying to develop a theme. We are usually interrupted and delayed, or at any rate inhibited, when we begin a story or a description, but not by Gambetti, whose parents, the gentlest and most considerate people, brought him up to be a good listener. Wolfsegg lies about three hundred feet above the village, from which it’s approached by a single road that can at any time be cut off by a drawbridge at a point where there’s a gap in the cliff separating it from the village. Wolfsegg can’t be seen from the village. For centuries a high thick wood has protected it from the view of those who aren’t meant to see it. The road is of gravel, I told Gambetti, and climbs steeply to a nine-foot wall that still hides the main house and the outbuildings. A visitor entering by the open gate first sees the Orangery on the left, with its tall glass windows. Even today it contains orange trees, I told Gambetti, which thrive in it thanks to its favorable location, where it gets the sun all day long. There are lemon trees too, and all sorts of tropical and subtropical plants flourish there, as in the imperial palm house in Vienna. What I loved most as a child were the camelias, I told Gambetti, which were the favorite flowers of my paternal grandmother. The Orangery was where we most enjoyed spending our time as children. I would often spend half the day there, especially with my uncle Georg, who used to tell me where all the plants came from. This was one of my greatest pleasures. It was in the Orangery that I heard my first words of Latin, the names of the many plants that were bred and grown there in a variety of different-sized pots, under the care of the three gardeners who were always employed at Wolfsegg and still are. As you can imagine, Gambetti, this is a great luxury in Central Europe today, I said. My first contact with other people, as they were called, was with the gardeners. I observed them as often as I could and for as long as I could. But even at this early stage I wasn’t content with the gorgeous colors of the plants. I had to know where these gorgeous colors came from, how they originated, and what they were called. The gardeners at Wolfsegg had infinite patience. They radiated calm, and their lives had a regularity and a simplicity that I admired above all else. It was the gardeners I was attracted to most; their movements were of a kind that was absolutely necessary for the tasks they performed, purposeful and reassuring, and their language was utterly simple and clear. As soon as I could walk, the Orangery became my favorite resort, whereas my brother, Johannes, spent most of his time at the Home Farm, with the horses, cows, pigs, and chickens. I preferred plants, he preferred animals. My greatest pleasure came from the plants in the Orangery, his from the animals on the Farm. The best time at the Orangery was winter, when nature was snow-covered, cold, and bare. From the beginning I was allowed to spend my time with the gardeners, watching them and even working with them. My greatest delight was to sit on a little bench in the Orangery next to the azaleas, watching the gardeners. The very word Orangery always fascinated me, I told Gambetti. It was the word I loved best of all. The Orangery was built on the escarpment above the village in such a way that the mild sunlight that fell on it benefited all the plants that grew in it. The old builders were clever, I said, cleverer than those of today. And the amazing thing is that they spent only a short time working on a building, unlike modern builders, who can spend years over a single structure. A stately home that was built to last for centuries would be completed in a few months, with all its fine, even highly sophisticated features. Today they waste years putting up some vulgar, unsightly, and ludicrously unpractical monstrosity, and one wonders why, I said. In those days every single builder had taste and worked for pleasure. This is obvious when you look at old buildings, which are entirely suited to their purpose, unlike any that are built today. Every detail was lovingly fashioned, I said, with the greatest sensitivity and artistry; even minor features were executed with the utmost taste. The Orangery is not only ideally situated, I told Gambetti, but it’s built with exquisite taste; it’s a work of art that can easily stand comparison with the finest creations of its kind in northern Italy and Tuscany. Each master builder was a minor Palladio, I told Gambetti. Modern building is degenerate, not only tasteless but for the most part unpractical and quite inhumane, whereas earlier building styles were artistic and humane. Built onto the left side of the Orangery is a big arch, made of conglomerate, tall enough for all the farm vehicles to pass under. Behind it is the spacious yard of the Home Farm, which consists chiefly of three cowsheds and a generously proportioned stable. Above them are the quarters occupied by the farmhands, who have always earned a good living. The Farm is built in the shape of a horseshoe. The living quarters above the stable and cowsheds could accommodate about a hundred people. They all have big rooms, no smaller than those in the main house, which is a very elegant structure built on an eminence directly opposite the Farm, at a distance of two hundred yards. One has the finest view of it from the Farm, through the arch that I’ve just mentioned.Ithas two upper floors and is exactly a hundred feet high, I told Gambetti. I love the view of the house. The front is more austere than any other I know in Austria, and more elegant. In the middle is the main entrance, twenty-five feet high, painted in such a dark shade of green that it appears black, with no ornamentation except for the brass knob, which is screwed on and never polished, and an iron bell pull to the left. The first-floor windows are set at a height that prevents anyone from looking in. Stepping into the entrance hall is always a shock to me when I come from Rome; its coldness, as well as its fine proportions, its height and its length, always make me catch my breath. It’s about a hundred feet long, up to the courtyard wall, and the only natural light falls from above onto the hundred-fifty-year-old larch-wood floorboards, each of which is about twenty inches wide and now quite gray from generations of use. I don’t know a more beautiful hall, I told Gambetti. It’s imposing by its size and its absolute severity. There’s not the slightest decoration on the walls, no pictures, nothing. The walls are whitewashed and give an impression of uncompromising austerity. It was like this for centuries. Recently, I said, my mother has taken to placing baskets of flowers in the hall; these don’t improve the effect, but they don’t destroy it — they disturb it a little, I told Gambetti, but it’s too grandiose to be destroyed. On first entering the hall, which has always struck me as cold and awesome, one might find it somewhat eerie, and more than one visitor has feared he would freeze to death. Most of them start shivering, because they are quite unused to entering such a large, splendid, and extraordinarily grand hall. No other entrance hall I know is so large or so splendid or so extraordinarily grand, and therefore so forbidding. It’s always seemed forbidding to everyone but me, for I still find its very grandeur and coldness attractive. On entering it, I told Gambetti, you think for a moment that you’re going to die, and you look around for something to hold on to. Your eyes are blinded when you step out of the daylight into the relative gloom of the hall, and for a moment you feel completely exposed. Immediately to the left of the entrance is the servants’ hall. Next to this is the door to the stockroom, followed by the door to the chapel. The chapel is as big as the average village church. It has three altars — a Gothic altar in the middle and two side altars. Even today mass is said there every Sunday morning at six. Either the priest or the chaplain comes up from the village on foot, which is a great effort for the old priest. In the sacristy we still have large cupboards full of vestments, some of which go back three centuries. Wolfsegg has been spared by most of the wars waged in Europe, and the fires that broke out in the last century were all quickly extinguished, as the village boasts one of the most famous and efficient fire brigades in Austria. Not a day goes by without my mother kneeling in the chapel between seven and eight in the evening. We were brought up to visit the chapel every evening. Naturally it was always a great occasion when the archbishop of Salzburg appeared in his ceremonial robes for special events such as christenings, confirmations, weddings, and so forth. The spectacle put on by the Church was at one time supremely important to me, as it was to all my family. That quickly changed. But I still remember how immensely impressive the ceremonies were, Gambetti, with the light streaming through the big window of the chapel during these colorful celebrations. Opposite the chapel is the kitchen, as big as a dressage hall and still not heated, even in winter, with its great ovens, some used no longer for cooking but simply as surfaces for standing things on, and the hundreds, indeed thousands, of dishes, cups, and bowls in the cupboards and on the walls. Eight women and girls used to work here, even when I was thirty, as I can remember my thirtieth-birthday party, and especially the activity in the kitchen. I was almost as fond of the kitchen as of the Orangery, but here I was in a female ambience, which interested me no less than the male ambience of the Orangery. There I was attracted by the fragrance of the flowers, here by the smell of the wonderful puddings and desserts. And the cheerfulness of the cooks, who were all well disposed to me, as I sensed at once, ensured that I too was cheerful. I was never bored in the kitchen. Indeed, during the first half of my childhood the kitchen and the Orangery were my dual points of reference. All in all, I can say that between the flowers in the Orangery and the desserts in the kitchen I had a happy childhood. In the kitchen no one asked me tiresome questions, and I could behave freely, just as I could in the Orangery, or anywhere away from my parents. My constant preoccupation was how to get down to the kitchen or across to the Orangery. Even now I often have dreams in which I see myself as a child running down to the kitchen or across to the Orangery, whatever the season. The child runs down to the kitchen to see people who seem happy and well disposed to him, or across to the Orangery to see others who appear equally happy, escaping those who are strict and seem to him malign, who are impatient with him and constantly demand the impossible. In my dreams I’m always running away from my impatient, demanding parents, out through the hall, past the Orangery and the Farm and into the surrounding woods, I told Gambetti. I lie for hours on the bank of a stream, watching the fish in the water and the insects on the reeds. The days are long and the evenings far too short. Having entered the hall, I told Gambetti, you walk about twenty paces and up a wide wooden staircase leading to the second floor. You turn right into what is called the upper hall. At the east end of this you see the large dining room, the door of which is always open. The dining room is immediately above the lower hall and has a big balcony. As children we were allowed in the dining room only on special occasions, when we were ordered there and had to sit at table, properly dressed, and keep quiet. The cupboards and sideboards in the dining room are full of costly china and cutlery, priceless treasures collected by our family over the centuries. On the walls hang portraits of those who built Wolfsegg and those who preserved and administered it, all of them long since laid to rest in our vault in the churchyard. If this dining room could talk, I told Gambetti, we’d have a full and unfalsified history of humanity, fantastic yet real, splendid yet terrible. This dining table undoubtedly saw history in the making, and not just local history. But dining tables don’t talk, I said. Which is all to the good, for if they did they’d very soon be smashed to pieces by those who have to sit at them. I remember sitting at this table with altogether eight different archbishops and cardinals and at least a dozen archdukes, I told Gambetti, and this naturally made a big impression on me as a child. And with many grand society ladies (I don’t recall their names), who came to visit us from Vienna, Paris, and London. And who all spent the night at Wolfsegg, in rooms that were normally kept locked but were opened up specially for guests, big, stuffy rooms with dark wallpaper and heavy drapes, so heavy that you have to be very strong to be able to draw them in the evening or draw them back in the morning. In these guest rooms, which are all on the north side, I always felt scared. Anyone who stayed in them even briefly was sure to become ill. But guests were always accommodated on the north side, in rooms that were deliberately furnished in this uninviting manner and kept at such a low temperature because guests were not meant to stay longer than was absolutely necessary. Nobody was invited to stay unless there was a particular reason, unless the family wanted something from them, some benefit that couldn’t be obtained in any other way. Guests who had spent the night in these rooms invariably showed signs of having caught a chill, turning up for breakfast with scarves around their necks and, what was most striking, usually coughing. Yet in spite of this they kept coming back, because they found Wolfsegg so fascinating. They couldn’t wait to be invited back. My grandparents used to invite lots of guests, my parents far fewer, as they didn’t have such a craving for company. My father didn’t care for company at all, and my mother at first had too many inhibitions and hang-ups about all these people, who in her opinion came to Wolfsegg only to spy out her social errors and report them wherever such intelligence could harm her. And for the first ten years she didn’t invite my father’s friends; she invited only hers, from whom she had much less to fear, with the result that all these frightful people from the so-called educated middle class descended on us, people who unfailingly make you cringe, Gambetti, especially if they come from Wels and Vocklabruck, from Linz and Salzburg, and fancy they are a cut above the rest of humanity. I always found such guests repugnant. On the other hand, Wolfsegg was very new and strange to my mother, not her scene at all, in fact, and she would very soon have been utterly isolated beside my not exactly exciting father. She’d have been bored to death. Wolfsegg would very soon have crushed her, the wife who came up in the world, as my father used to say jocularly in the early years of their marriage. She’d have simply curled up and died, as they say. So from a certain moment on, a moment that was crucial to her survival, she started dragging her own sort up to Wolfsegg and, as my father put it, throwing it open to the proletariat. She was entitled to come to her own rescue, I told Gambetti, even if we couldn’t stand the means she employed. In the main house alone there are more than forty rooms, though I’ve never done a precise count. We children weren’t allotted rooms of our own until we were twelve, and interestingly enough my brother and I both had rooms on the south side, while my sisters’ rooms were on the north side. They were forever catching colds, and it’s more than likely that they owe their susceptibility to colds to being exiled the north side. The girls were always exiled on the north side, as if to punish them for being girls. But that’s only my surmise, I said. People who grow up on the north side are at a disadvantage later on, I told Gambetti, and remain at a disadvantage all their lives. The north side was unpleasant even in summer, as it never warmed through. The walls at Wolfsegg never warm through, whether they’re north-facing or south-facing. They’re always cold, and it’s dangerous to get too close to them. Even the third-floor windows at Wolfsegg are more than six feet tall, and as children we always had difficulty in opening them. We had to get help if we wanted to let in the fresh air. Our parents had a servants’ bell by their beds, but of course we didn’t. When we were children there were no bathrooms on the third floor, where we not only slept but spent most of the day, since our rooms served as both bedrooms and studies. If we had to answer the call of nature in the night, we used the china chamber pots, as had our grandparents, for whom this was a matter of course. And these, I must tell you, were routinely emptied next morning from one of the windows of the third-floor corridor. In the evening we had to take our washing water up to our rooms in big stoneware jugs, as there was no water supply on the third floor. The dirty water was also thrown from a window. On the ground seventy feet or more below the windows from which we emptied our chamber pots and washbasins, the grass was more luxuriant than anywhere else. The Wolfsegg children soon overcame any fear they had and got used to feeling exposed in this huge, icy building. Visiting children were terribly scared and screamed if they were left alone even for a moment, but we were not in the least scared. I think it was when we were four or five that we were banned from our mother’s room, first to a shared room, of course, but banned all the same. After we had washed she would come in and kiss us good night. Johannes always wanted to be kissed good night, but I didn’t. I hated this good-night kiss but couldn’t evade it. Even now my mother haunts me in my dreams with her good-night kiss, I told Gambetti. She bends over me, and I am completely powerless as she presses her lips firmly to my cheek, as if to punish me. After kissing us good night she would put the light out, but she didn’t leave the room at once. She would stay by the door for a while and wait for us to turn on our sides and fall asleep. Even as a child I had very acute hearing and knew that she was standing listening behind the closed door before going down to the second floor, where she and my father slept. She even distrusted her children; I don’t know why. She suffered from an immense, compulsive distrust that couldn’t be cured or allayed and that now strikes me, I must say, as quite perverse and unnatural. All the rooms at Wolfsegg were whitewashed. In the third-floor rooms the drapes were dark green, almost black; in the second-floor rooms they were dark red and almost black. On the third floor, where we had our rooms, they were made of heavy linen; on the second floor they were of heavy velvet, imported from Italy by my paternal grandmother before the turn of the century. For as far back as I can remember these drapes were never washed, which means that they were never taken down. When we were doing our homework, my brother and I, and later our sisters, were locked in our rooms until we had finished it, and only in the most urgent cases, when we couldn’t get any further with it, were we allowed to call for help. But Mother didn’t help us; she always said we must find the answers to our problems ourselves. This procedure was not meant to be educative: it merely suited her convenience. Father never troubled about our schoolwork. He would simply be angry if we came home with bad marks. If one of us got a five or a six (the lowest mark was still a six when we were at school) he would tell us that we were absolutely unworthy of him. Two sixes inevitably entailed repeating a year, but although we often got one, we never got two. Our rooms on the third floor were heated only in exceptional circumstances, when the temperature fell to ten degrees below freezing, though we always had more wood than we knew what to do with. And even then we had to carry the wood up to our rooms and light the stoves ourselves, as the servants weren’t allowed to carry firewood up to the third floor for us. This was on my father’s orders, because he wanted to bring us up tough. Gambetti did not understand this use of the word tough, and I tried to explain it to him. In fact these attempts to toughen us, to give us what my father called a tough upbringing, didn’t toughen us at all but made us exceptionally susceptible to every possible ailment, though less so than our sisters, who grew up on the north side. Father’s toughening methods only made us unusually sensitive and achieved the opposite of the desired effect, making us far sicklier than those who were spared such treatment, far sicklier than the village children, whose rooms were properly heated, even though their families were poor, while we were rolling in wealth. Wolfsegg, I told Gambetti, was dominated by the most dreadful avarice, and my mother was the most avaricious of them all. I’ve often thought that avarice was her only real passion. Leaving aside the small fortune she spent on clothes, I have to say that she was the cheapest person I’ve ever known. She never treated herself to anything. Only the most basic food could be cooked in the Wolfsegg kitchen, and it had to be home produced, not bought in the village. This was why we always ate so much pork and beef. At Wolfsegg we had blood sausage all the time, and all kinds of porridge, pasta, oatmeal, and puddings. And of course egg dishes galore. Only when some important visitor came did they put on a show; the kitchen would then go into top gear and produce an abundance of matchless delicacies. My mother was always anxious to impress outsiders and preoccupied with what others thought of her, how they assessed her, and she naturally wanted to be well thought of, well assessed. In the kitchen they could cook superbly, I exclaimed to Gambetti, but most of the time they produced boring dishes, which came around again every few days. I often wondered why we employed three gardeners, since we never had decent vegetables or any other reasonable garden produce, though it would have been so easy to serve good, tasty vegetables prepared in various ways, and delicious salads. I happen to be very fond of vegetables and salads. But no, all our vegetables and lettuces were sold: they never appeared on the table but were taken by the gardeners to the markets in Wels or Vöcklabruck, as this brought in a profit. There was no need for my father to suffer from stomach complaints, I said. The cooks and their assistants, as I have said before, were kept busy most of the time canning and pickling, and even making sausages, because the slaughtering was done at Wolfsegg and we ate only home-slaughtered meat. They certainly made the best blood sausage I’ve ever had. A butcher would come up from the village to slaughter the cows, calves, and pigs, which were then neatly dressed in our own butchery next to the Farm. It was a pleasure to see the butcher at work. As small children, of course, we found it repulsive and sickening, but later I came to regard butchery as one of the supreme arts, on a par with that of the surgeon, if not even more admirable. As small children we thought it natural for animals to be slaughtered and dressed, and were soon no longer scared by it. What had at first seemed repulsive came to be seen as entirely necessary. Butchery is a difficult art, and when it is done with consummate skill it deserves our admiration. From an early age country children are accustomed to dealing with life and death, once they’ve gotten over the first shock. It soon ceases to be scary, because it’s not sensational, merely natural. At the Farm we had a curing room in the attic, I told Gambetti. This expression amused him, and I had to repeat it for him several times. In our curing room hundreds of sausages and pieces of smoked meat hung from the ceiling. Around the inner courtyard of the main house, where the greater part of family life takes place, I told Gambetti, there is a colonnade at each floor level. That is where I always clean my shoes. At this remark Gambetti laughed again as he poured some wine into my glass. And in this courtyard, in winter, we used to keep the sick or injured deer that the huntsmen found and brought to Wolfsegg for us. The Huntsmen’s Lodge is in front of the Children’s Villa but in back of the Gardeners’ House, I told Gambetti. A bird’s-eye view of Wolfsegg is like this: high above the village is the house, and in front of it the park, roughly oval in shape, extending to the east for about a hundred sixty or a hundred eighty yards, as far as the boundary wall. Set in the wall is a high stone gateway, through which the farm vehicles pass. Built onto the wall at the right is the Orangery, and opposite this is the right wing of the Home Farm, which is built in the shape of a horseshoe and is altogether two hundred fifty yards long. In back of the Farm, directly to the east, is the Gardeners’ House, in back of this the Huntsmen’s Lodge, and a little farther on the Children’s Villa that I love so much. This was built about two hundred years ago, in the style of the Florentine villas you can still see on the way to Fiesole. Of course it’s less ornate, but it’s quite extraordinary for Austria. Yet you can’t say it’s out of place in the Austrian landscape; on the contrary, it’s more attractive than anything else in the landscape. It may sound odd, but it was built for children. It has a miniature theater, where puppet plays used to be put on. The children wrote the plays, little comedies of the kind that young people can easily think up, with sad endings that on reflection weren’t really all that sad. And naturally in verse. Hundreds of children’s costumes are stored in the villa. Today the building is locked up, and I don’t think anyone has set foot in it for years. Some of the windows have been broken, probably by children from the village, but the roof doesn’t let in the rain, or at least not yet. I’ve always wanted to restore it, I told Gambetti, but my family wouldn’t countenance spending money on anything so stupid. My brother and sisters and I often put on shows there but were then forbidden to because we should do more studying and less playacting. It’s a pity that the Children’s Villa is now dead, I said, as it’s the most beautiful building for miles around. You can’t imagine how charming it is, Gambetti, in a part of the world that is not rich in charming buildings, attractive houses, and architectural gaiety. Perhaps one day I’ll get my way with the family and restore the villa. Then I’ll have the local children put on a comedy for the opening. My greatest delight was to watch the performances given by the local children, all wearing costumes that were centuries old and so colorful, so imaginative, so artistic, so truly poetic. Yet as always, I told Gambetti, whatever is truly poetic is more neglected than anything else. It’s as though no one had any use for the truly poetic. The Children’s Villa, locked up and left to dilapidate, is a rather sad but interesting chapter in the history of Wolfsegg, I said, perhaps the saddest. The huntsmen were never my friends, I told Gambetti. It was only with reluctance that I visited the Huntsmen’s Lodge, though it was my brother’s favorite haunt. Hunting soon became his ruling passion, just as it was my father’s. He goes hunting whenever he can, and several times a year they have hunting parties at Wolfsegg, which I haven’t attended in recent years. Members of the upper crust converge on Wolfsegg from all over Europe, and for days on end one hears many languages spoken, especially Spanish, when our Spanish relatives come over from Bilbao and Cádiz. These hunting parties were inaugurated by my father, who refused to let my mother put a stop to them. They’re now part of the Wolfsegg tradition. On these occasions all the rooms are occupied, even the coldest and most unfriendly. And a lot of Italians come too. The larders are emptied and dozens of jam jars are opened, and there’s even a large variety of salads and compotes. My brother loves the Huntsmen’s Lodge and retires there to work on the Wolfsegg balance sheets. All the bookkeeping is done there. I’ve never had much of a liking for hunting trophies, I told Gambetti. I’ve always been put off by the trophy cult. And I’ve always loathed hunting itself, though I’m convinced that it’s absolutely necessary. Whenever he can, my brother goes to Poland to hunt, even to Russia. To indulge his great passion he’s prepared to put up with the conditions in these Communist countries. Where hunting’s concerned, no price is too high for him. He’s crazy about sailing and crazy about hunting. And he’s only ever seen wearing hunting gear, which has long been the national costume of the Austrian countryside, so to speak. Because it’s so practical, I said. Everybody, of whatever class, goes around in hunting gear, even if he has no connection with hunting. They go around in their green-and-gray outfits, and sometimes it seems as though the whole population of Austria is made up of huntsmen. Even in Vienna they go around in their thousands dressed in hunting gear. Even city dwellers seem to have been smitten with the hunting craze, I said, for how else can you explain why you see people going around everywhere in hunting outfits, even where it seems ridiculous and perverse. The Huntsmen’s Lodge was built at the end of the last century, on the site of an earlier one that was destroyed by fire. A great-grandfather of mine had set up a library in it, I said. Imagine, Gambetti: that would have been the sixth library at Wolfsegg. It had originally been intended simply as a collection of hunting literature, but it was later extended and became a general library. I found the most incredible treasures in it, I said. It was ideal for anybody who wanted to devote himself to the books, to yield himself up to them undisturbed. No one visits the Huntsmen’s Lodge, so no intrusion need be feared. The building is airy and warm, and hanging on the walls are fine examples of verre églomisé, mainly seventeenth century, painted with exquisite artistry. It also has a copy of Schedel’s World Chronicle, colored by my great-grandmother, which lies on a heavy Josephine writing desk from Styria. The desk is covered by a slab of Carrara marble eight inches thick, a great rarity north of the Alps. Uncle Georg used to say that at this desk, with its marble slab, he had the perfect place for putting his ideas down on paper. It was here that he started writing what he called his Anti-autobiography, a two-hundred-page manuscript in which he recorded everything he thought worth recording and on which he went on working for two decades in Cannes. When he died, none of us could find the manuscript, and it was suspected that he’d burned it shortly before his death, as we had evidence from his entourage that he’d made an entry relating to Wolfsegg two weeks earlier. The good Jean himself had seen the entry but could tell us nothing about it except that it was very short and concise. Having known Uncle Georg, I’m sure it was a fairly pungent remark that might have shocked my family greatly. Maybe the good Jean himself spirited the manuscript away, I said, but I can’t exclude the possibility that my mother destroyed it, as she had access to Uncle Georg’s study before anything was moved. The manuscript had always been kept in a desk drawer, but two days after my mother had been in the room this undoubtedly interesting document was missing and nowhere to be found. My mother probably came off worse than anyone in his Anti-autobiography, and I wouldn’t put it past her to have shut herself in his study for a while, as if grieving, and read the manuscript. She may have been outraged by what she read and made short shrift of the damaging document. After all, Uncle Georg had throughout his life blamed her for everything. He always told me, Your mother is the bane of Wolfsegg, and it’s quite probable that he recorded this observation in the Anti-autobiography. The slab of Carrara marble on the Styrian writing desk is always cold, ice cold, I told Gambetti, whatever the temperature outside; even at the height of summer, when everyone’s wilting under the heat, the Carrara marble is ice cold. It was over this ice-cold slab that Uncle Georg noted down his ideas. Altogether the best place to think is over this cold marble slab, he used to say. In my last years at Wolfsegg, having consciously or unconsciously taken my leave of the place forever, as it were, I too sat at this marble slab and wrote down a few things I thought worth recording, I told Gambetti, philosophical ideas that admittedly led to nothing and that I later destroyed, like so much else. We do our best thinking over a cold stone slab, I said, and our best writing. This slab of Carrara marble was unique, absolutely unique. And it was one of the things that now and then made the Huntsmen’s Lodge attractive. Normally I never set foot in the Huntsmen’s Lodge, as I’ve told you, and certainly not during the hunting season. The huntsmen were my brother’s friends, not mine; my friends were the gardeners. I visited the Gardeners’ House frequently, nearly every day, in order to see ordinary people. That was what I craved, and I was happier there than anywhere else. I loved simple people with their simple ways. When I went to see them they treated me just as they treated their plants, with affection. They understood my troubles and anxieties. The huntsmen showed no such understanding. They were always ready with their overbearing remarks and saw fit to regale me, a small child, with their suggestive jokes; they thought to cheer me up by waving their liquor bottles above their heads, though in fact such crude behavior only made me feel sadder and more insecure. The gardeners were quite different: they understood me, without wasting words, and could always help me. Even from a distance the huntsmen would bear down on me in their boastful fashion and address me in their loud, drunken voices, but the gardeners behaved toward me in a way that was sensitive and reassuring. It was the gardeners I sought out when I was unbearably unhappy and distressed, not the huntsmen. There were always two opposing camps at Wolfsegg, the huntsmen and the gardeners. They had tolerated one another for centuries, and that can’t have been easy. It’s interesting that every so often one of the huntsmen would kill himself, naturally with a gun, whereas no gardener ever did. There were many suicides among the huntsmen at Wolfsegg, but none among the gardeners. Every few years a huntsman shoots himself and a replacement has to be found. The huntsmen don’t live long in any case; they soon go gaga and drown themselves in drink. The gardeners at Wolfsegg have always lived to a ripe old age. Quite often a gardener will live to be ninety, but the huntsmen are usually finished at fifty because they’re no longer capable of doing their job. They tremble when taking aim, and even at forty they have problems with their balance. They’re mostly to be found in the village, sitting around in the inns, fat and bloated, their guns beside them with the safety catches off, holding forth with their absurd political opinions and often getting involved in brawls, which naturally end in injury or even death, as always happens in the country. The huntsmen were always hooligans and troublemakers. If they didn’t like the look of somebody they would take the next opportunity of shooting him and claim subsequently in court that they had mistaken the victim for an animal. The history of the Upper Austrian courts is full of such hunting accidents, which usually earn the offender a caution, on the principle that anyone shot by a huntsman has only himself to blame. The huntsmen were always fanatics, I told Gambetti. In fact it can be shown that huntsmen are to a large extent responsible for the world’s ills. All dictators have been passionate huntsmen who would have paid any price and even killed their own people for the sake of hunting, as we have seen. The huntsmen were Fascists, National Socialists, I told Gambetti. In the village it was the huntsmen who ruled the roost during the Nazi period, and it was the huntsmen who blackmailed my father, as it were, into National Socialism. When National Socialism emerged they were the strongmen; my father was the weakling who had to yield to them. So it was that because of the huntsmen Wolfsegg underwent a rapid switch to National Socialism. I must tell you, Gambetti, that my father was blackmailed into becoming a Nazi, and of course egged on by my mother, who was a hysterical National Socialist, a German woman, as she liked to call herself, throughout the whole of the Nazi period. On Hitler’s birthday they always ran up the Nazi flag at Wolfsegg, I said. It was most unedifying. Uncle Georg left Wolfsegg chiefly because he could not and would not put up with National Socialism, which was forcibly taking over. He went to Cannes, then for a time to Marseille, from where he worked against the Germans. That’s what my family found hardest to forgive. In the end my father was a Nazi not just by blackmail but by conviction, and my mother was a fanatical Nazi. It was the most abominable period that Wolfsegg has known, I told Gambetti, a deadly and degrading period that can’t be glossed over or hushed up, because it’s all true. It still makes my blood run cold when I tell you that my father invited all the important Nazis to Wolfsegg, just because my mother demanded it of him. The local storm troopers used to parade in the courtyard and shout Heil Hitler! My father undoubtedly profited from the Nazis. And when they’d gone he got off scot-free. In the postwar period he remained the lord of the manor. He put the Children’s Villa at the disposal of the Nazis for their meetings, quite voluntarily, as I know, without needing any encouragement from my mother. The Hitler Youth practiced its handicrafts in the villa and rehearsed its brainless Nazi songs. Year in, year out, the swastika flag flew outside the Children’s Villa, until, weather-worn and washed out, it was taken down by my mother a few hours before the Americans arrived. While taking it down she cricked her neck, I told Gambetti, and from then on suffered from chronic rheumatism in the neck. Moreover, the many swastika flags at Wolfsegg were used to make aprons for the gardeners and kitchen maids after my mother had personally dyed them dark blue. My father joined the Nazi party at my mother’s instigation, and it has to be added that he was not ashamed to wear his party badge quite openly on all occasions. Some of his jackets still have holes in them where the party badge was worn for years. On Uncle Georg’s last visit to Wolfsegg there was a discussion about world affairs generally but mainly about the balanceof forces between the Russians and the Americans. At the end of it he reminded my father that he had once been a member of the Nazi party, and not just briefly. Whereupon my father leaped up, smashed his soup plate on the table, and stormed out of the room. My mother shouted Swine! at my uncle, then followed her husband out of the room. So Uncle Georg’s last visit to Wolfsegg ended miserably. But his visits nearly always ended in unseemly quarrels about National Socialism. No sooner were the National Socialists gone than my family threw itself into the arms of the Americans and again reaped nothing but benefits from this distasteful association. They were always opportunists, and it’s fair to say that they were low characters, always trimming to the prevailing political wind and ready to resort to any available means to gain whatever advantage they could from any regime. They always supported the powers that be, and as true Austrians they were past masters in the art of opportunism. They never came to grief politically. It’s because of their low character, I’m bound to say, that Wolfsegg has so far been spared: I mean the buildings and the lands belonging to the estate. It’s never been bombed or burned down by enemies. The improbable truth is that during the Nazi period Wolfsegg was a bastion of both National Socialism and Catholicism. The archbishops and the Gauleiters took turns visiting Wolfsegg on weekends, ceding the door handle to one another, as it were. My mother ruled the roost at that time, along with the huntsmen, who are still Nazis to a man, just as my mother, at the bottom of her heart, remains a Nazi to this day, notwithstanding her Catholic hypocrisy. National Socialism was always her ideal, as it was the ideal of nine out often Austrian women, I told Gambetti. So the Huntsmen’s Lodge was always on my mother’s side. Father was never more than her executive organ, to borrow a Nazi phrase — a stupid man, she once said, who understood nothing about anything and had to do what she told him to do. Thinking of the Huntsmen’s Lodge was what set me off on this digression, I told Gambetti. The very words Huntsmen’s Lodge bring the Nazi period back to me. I could tell you other things about the Huntsmen’s Lodge, things that I found quite sinister as a child, for instance about murders that were connected with it and with National Socialism, but I don’t feel like doing so at present, in the present cheerful atmosphere. But one day, I said, I’ll set about recording all the things about Wolfsegg that obsess me and give me no peace. For decades Wolfsegg has given me no peace. It haunts me day and night. And since my family have neither the will nor the ability to describe Wolfsegg as it is and always has been, it’s clearly incumbent on me to do so. At least I’ll try to describe Wolfsegg as I see it, for everyone has to describe things as he sees them, as they appear to him. And if I had to admit to myself that I saw Wolfsegg as a terrible place inhabited by terrible people, I’d be obliged to state it. I’m sure this is roughly what Uncle Georg intended to do in his Anti-autobiography, but since that work no longer exists, it falls to me to take a dispassionate look at Wolfsegg and report what I see. If I don’t do it now, when else should I do it? I ought to do it now, when I’m in a position to do it, when I’m in the right frame of mind and have the detachment that comes from living in Rome, which can only be beneficial to such a project. Here, in my apartment on the Piazza Minerva, where I have quiet and am basically undisturbed, yet at the center of the modern world, I have the ideal circumstances for writing such an account. For years I’ve thought that I must write about the people at Wolfsegg and the conditions they live in, of their misery and baseness, their frailty and lack of character, about everything they’ve shown me of themselves, which, to be truthful, Gambetti, has given me sleepless nights all my life. I’ll try to portray my family as they are, even if the portrait corresponds only to the way I have seen them and still see them. Since nobody has so far written anything about them, except Uncle Georg, whose Anti-autobiography has been destroyed, it’s up to me to do so. Of course the problem is always how to begin such an account, how to hit upon the right opening sentence. The fact is, Gambetti, that I’ve often started work on it, only to be defeated by the first sentence. I’ve given up again and again, clapping my hand to my head and reflecting that it’s probably madness even to think of writing an account of Wolfsegg, because only a madman would do such a thing. I’ve always asked myself what use it will be and come to the conclusion that it can’t be of any use. Yet it’s always been clear to me, and it’s become even clearer to me recently, that it has to be written, that I can’t get out of writing it, and that one day I’ll have to write it, whatever misgivings I may have. My mind demands it of me. And my mind has become implacable, above all toward myself. Absolutely implacable. And you know I’ve precious little time left. If I don’t make a start it’ll be too late. I don’t know, I told Gambetti, but I feel I’m running out of time. And an account like this requires the writer to spend years over it, possibly not just one or two years but several, I said. It’s not enough simply to make a sketch, I said. The only thing I have fixed in my head is the title, Extinction, for the sole purpose of my account will be to extinguish what it describes, to extinguish everything that Wolfsegg means to me, everything that Wolfsegg is, everything, you understand, Gambetti, really and truly everything. When this account is written, everything that Wolfsegg now is must be extinguished. My work will be nothing other than an act of extinction, I told Gambetti. It will extinguish Wolfsegg utterly. I sat with Gambetti on the Piazza del Popolo until almost eleven, I recalled as I contemplated the photos on my desk. We carry Wolfsegg around with us, wanting to extinguish it in order to rescue ourselves, to extinguish it by recording it and destroying it. Yet most of the time we haven’t the strength to perform this work of extinction. But maybe the moment has arrived. I’ve reached the right age, I told Gambetti, the ideal age for such an undertaking. In the semidarkness of my apartment on the Piazza Minerva, with the curtains almost completely drawn so that I can be undisturbed, shielded from the Roman light, I can start work. What’s preventing me from starting right away? I had asked Gambetti, though I had immediately added, We think we can embark on such an undertaking, yet we can’t. Everything’s always against us, against such an undertaking, and so we put it off and never get around to it. In this way many works of the mind that ought to be written never see the light of day but remain just so many drafts that we constantly carry around in our heads, for years, for decades — in our heads. We adduce all sorts of reasons for not getting on with the work. We dredge up every possible excuse, we invoke all kinds of spirits — malign spirits, of course — in order not to have to start when we should. The tragedy of the would-be writer is that he continually resorts to anything that will prevent him from writing. A tragedy, no doubt, but at the same time a comedy — a perfect, perfidious comedy. But it should be possible to compose a valid account of Wolfsegg, even if it’s not faultless, of the Wolfsegg that I’ve already told you so much about, Gambetti, which has always meant so much to me and is probably the most important thing in my life. It’s not enough to make notes about something that’s important to us, perhaps more important than anything else, I said, namely the whole complex of our origins. It’s not enough to have filled so many hundreds and thousands of slips of paper on the subject, a subject that encompasses our whole life. We must produce a substantial account, not to say a long account, of what we emerged from, what we are made of, and what has determined our being for as long as we’ve lived. We may recoil from it for years, we may shrink from such an almost superhuman enterprise, but ultimately we have to set about it and bring it to a conclusion. What’s the point in having this whole Roman atmosphere and my apartment in the Piazza Minerva, unless I’m to achieve this end? But I’ve probably thought about it too often already: too much reflection saps one’s resolve. I’ll call my account Extinction, I told Gambetti, because in it I intend to extinguish everything: everything I record will be extinguished. My whole family and their life and times will be extinguished; Wolfsegg will be extinguished, Gambetti, in the way I choose. Uncle Georg made a record of Wolfsegg, and what he could do in Cannes I can surely do in Rome, with even greater independence and clarity of vision. Rome is the ideal place for a work of extinction such as I have in mind, I told Gambetti. For Rome isn’t the ancient center of a superannuated history: it’s the modern center of the world, I said, as we can see and feel every day and every hour if we’re observant. The center of today’s world isn’t New York or Paris or London, it isn’t Tokyo or Beijing or Moscow, as we read and are told all the time — it’s Rome, once again it’s Rome. I can’t prove it, at least not at this moment and not in so many words, but I can feel it. You won’t believe it, Gambetti, but in the Piazza Minerva I’ve become a new man. I’ve found myself again after having been lost for so many years, in every possible place. For years I didn’t think I could be saved. All I could see was my approaching dissolution. In all these years, Gambetti, I could see myself going to pieces, slowly declining, getting increasingly lost. I saw myself nearing the end, an end that couldn’t be delayed. Everything within me had become quite meaningless. Neither in Paris nor in Lisbon was I able to find what I had sought for so many years, something new to hold on to, a new beginning. But in Rome I found it. And I hadn’t expected anything of Rome. I’d merely thought it would afford me a week’s distraction, nothing more. At best that it would take me out of myself for a few months. Incidentally it was Uncle Georg’s idea that I should leave Lisbon, which I love, and come to Rome. Lisbon may be splendid, he said, but it’s provincial, whereas Rome’s a cosmopolitan city, or what is termed a cosmopolitan city, he said, correcting himself. So I came to Rome, in the hope of retarding my relentless decline, but scarcely expecting to be saved. And then it became clear that Rome was the city for me, the only one, the one I needed, the one that could save me. In Rome I started to make notes again, something I’d been unable to do for years, and to formulate ideas about everything: not just about my approaching dissolution but about everything imaginable, Gambetti. I was suddenly interested in everything, even in politics, which hadn’t interested me for years. In all kinds of artistic matters. And in people, Gambetti, for the fact is that for years I’d had no interest in people; they’d been merely a nuisance and aroused no interest in me. In Rome I went to a theater for the first time in years. And to the opera, which for years I’d shunned like the plague. And I started reading again. For years I’d read nothing but the newspapers, Gambetti, but now I read books, real books, not just the daily press with its unbearable garbage, on which I’d gorged myself daily in order to escape from my deadly boredom. For years, Gambetti, I’d been bored almost to death. Everything was bound to bore me, as I could find no distractions. I avoided everybody and everything, people and things, and in the end even the fresh air, and this led to a physical decline. I actually became sick, and wherever I was, the only people I saw were doctors. My sole company consisted of members of the medical profession, with whom I could talk only about disease; chiefly, of course, about my own indefinable diseases, which they all said were incurable, my own deadly diseases. And what is there more awful than talking to doctors, who are altogether the most uninteresting people in the world, because they’re the most uninterested? Doctors are the most depressing conversationalists imaginable, and at the same time the most disreputable, because they always tell you that you have only a short time to live and that you’re going to have a dreadful, miserable life, a useless and unnatural life, wrapped up in yourself and your diseases, a life not worth prolonging. In Paris or Madrid or Lisbon I would shut myself up in my apartment and go out only to the post office, to make sure that my money was still being remitted from Wolfsegg. It was so depressing that in the end I did nothing in Lisbon and Madrid but commute between the post office and various venal and irresponsible doctors. And it was the same in Naples, where I went for a time, but Naples didn’t suit me, as the climate was unbearable and the city unspeakably provincial. You must forgive me, Gambetti, I said, for calling Naples unspeakably provincial, but I can find no other phrase to describe it. The view of Vesuvius I find devastating, because it’s been seen by so many millions, possibly billions, already. In recent years, before moving to Rome, I’d been completely obsessed with myself and had therefore neglected myself in the grossest and most unpardonable way. I’d let myself go to pieces, chiefly mentally but also physically. I’d become thoroughly degenerate, not only sick but intolerant and distrustful, with the result that I almost suffocated in my ceaseless self-observation and self-contemplation. I’d entirely forgotten that in addition to my own terrible world there was another, which was not entirely terrible. Above all I’d forgotten about intellectual life. I’d forgotten my philosophers and poets, and all my creative artists, Gambetti. I might even say that I’d forgotten my own mind. I clung to my sick body, and by ceaselessly clinging to this sick body I almost ruined myself. Until I came to Rome. Until my friend Zacchi got me the apartment in the Piazza Minerva, for at first I lived at the Hassler, as you know, not at the Hotel de la Ville like Uncle Georg — no, I’d become a megalomaniac and had to live at the Hassler. In the very first moment, I looked across the Spagna toward Rome, took a deep breath, and sensed that I was saved. I won’t leave here, I thought to myself in this first moment. Standing at the open window, I said to myself, I’m here to stay, nothing will make me leave. And it all worked out: I stayed in Rome, I didn’t leave. Although I loved all the other cities I’d lived in, none of them had such an overwhelming, existential effect on me. Although I’d spent long or longish periods in all these other cities, I’d never felt at home in them. They had a place in my heart, to use a foolish familiar phrase, but none of them had ever become my city. I love them all, Lisbon especially, and Warsaw and Krakow and Palma, even Vienna and Paris, and London and Palermo, but I couldn’t bear to live in any of them for long now. I’ve left them all behind, without feeling that I’ve lost something that belongs to me, that belongs to me absolutely. Sometimes I’ve thought I could spend as long in Lisbon as I’ve spent in Rome, but then I always recall Uncle Georg’s telling remark about Lisbon, which seems to me the most splendid city of them all. Indeed, Lisbon is more beautiful than Rome, but it’s provincial. The pleasantest years of my life were spent in Lisbon, but not the best years; these have been spent in Rome. Lisbon has a perfect blend of architecture and nature, such as you find in no other city. It’s a pity you’ve never had a chance to visit Lisbon, Gambetti. The years I spent there were my pleasantest and probably my happiest. But I have to say that Lisbon was not the ideal city for my mind, which is what matters to me most, whereas Rome always has been. Rome is of all cities the most congenial to the mind: it was the ideal city for the ancient mind, and it’s the ideal city for the modern mind — precisely for the modern mind, given the chaotic political conditions that prevail here today. No other city, not even New York, is ideal for the mind, but Rome quite definitely is, beyond all doubt. It’s explosive, and that suits me, Gambetti. It’s explosive, Gambetti, and that’s what I love. At this point it occurred to me that I had already gone quite a long way toward alienating Gambetti from his parents, and I wondered how far I could go, how far it was permissible to go, in alienating him from his parents and their world — that is to say, from their ideas. But this thought at once struck me as absurd. I was annoyed at having even entertained it, for my relationship with Gambetti naturally involves alienating him from his parents and their ideas. By teaching him German and getting him to read Siebenkäs and The Trial I am ostensibly acquainting him with German literature, but in fact I am quite consistently alienating him from his parents and their ideas, I thought, as if I were entitled to alienate him from them and remove him farther and farther from their world, a world that was diametrically opposed to mine. In other words, I thought, I’m now doing to Gambetti what I did to myself ages ago, when I removed myself from Wolfsegg. What was good for me then, I thought, is good for Gambetti now. I’m playing the role of Uncle Georg, who drove me out of Wolfsegg with all his ideas, with his revelations about Wolfsegg and all it meant, which finally made it impossible for me to remain there. Just as Uncle Georg drove me out of Wolfsegg, I’m driving Gambetti out of his parents’ world. But I haven’t deliberately tried to do this: it’s happened automatically, without my being aware of it at first, as a by-product of my teaching, so to speak. Gambetti has heard my views on how the world should be changed, by first radically destroying it, by virtually annihilating it, and then restoring it in a form that I find tolerable, as a completely new world — though I can’t say how this is to be done, only that the world must be annihilated before it’s restored, since it’s impossible to renew it without first annihilating it. Listening to my views, he becomes much more attentive and fascinated than when I hand him a copy of Siebenkäs and tell him to read it and then ask me questions about it. Gambetti’s mind has already absorbed a great deal from mine, I thought. It will soon contain more of my ideas than his own. His parents are uneasy about what they see happening, I thought. And they’re not as pleased to see me as Gambetti makes out. True, they invite me home for dinner, but basically they wish I’d go to hell, because for years they’ve considered me a bad influence on their child, who has meanwhile become an adult and outgrown them. They’re alarmed at having brought a budding philosopher and revolutionary into the world, which is not what they intended, someone who’s out to destroy them instead of evincing a lifelong, unquestioning attachment to them. They now blame me not only for possibly being the seducer of their naturally much loved son but for being his destroyer, and consequently their own, whom they have invited into their house and to whom they pay a great deal of money. For Gambetti’s tuition is not cheap. I charge higher fees than any other tutor, but the Gambettis are rich people, I tell myself, and I don’t have to have a bad conscience about relieving them of so much money, which in any case I don’t need, as I have plenty of my own. But the Gambettis have only an inkling of this, no precise knowledge. Gambetti of course knows about my financial position. He once said to me, If my parents knew how rich you were they wouldn’t pay you anything and wouldn’t allow me to be taught by you. As it is, they think they’re making a generous gesture and see themselves as patrons. For them this is an important element in my tuition arrangements, which they’ve found rather worrying for some time. They take refuge in their role as patrons in order to distract themselves from the idea that by paying you to teach me they might be conniving at something discreditable or destructive. Gambetti himself finds it quite in order for his parents to throw their money out the window, as it were, so that I can alienate him from them and implant in him ideas that will one day shoot up and pose a terrible threat to them and their world. Yet it was never possible for them to see me just as a harmless German teacher from Austria, I thought — it’s so obvious what I am and what I’m about. So I don’t reproach myself for the function I perform, which is to inculcate a knowledge of German literature in their son’s mind, along with my own ideas about changing, and hence annihilating, the world. After all, I didn’t insinuate or force myself into this role, I thought. Gambetti came to me at Zacchi’s instigation, and his parents expressly asked me to be their son’s tutor, telling me that I would be an ideal teacher. I too feel that I am the ideal teacher for Gambetti, and he shares this feeling. What his parents have come to regard as sinister strikes him as necessary and entirely natural. Gambetti has repeatedly told me that my teaching is consistent and logical, and that he regards German literature, which was a fortuitous choice on his part, simply as a pretext for everything else I teach him — meaning my ideas, which he has meanwhile made his own. Little by little we must reject everything, I told Gambetti on the Pincio, little by little we must oppose everything, so that we can play our part in the annihilation we envisage, putting an end to the old and finally destroying it in order to make way for the new. The old must be discarded and destroyed so that the new can emerge, even though we don’t know what the new will be. All we know is that it has to come, Gambetti — there’s no going back. Thinking in this way, we naturally have the old against us, Gambetti, which means that we have everything against us. But this mustn’t deflect us from our goal, which is to replace the old by the new that we long for. Ultimately we have to abandon everything, I told him, discard everything, extinguish everything. Looking down on the Piazza Minerva, I remembered telling Gambetti of a dream I once had, in which I was in a transverse valley of the Grödnertal with my college friend Eisenberg, Maria, and Zacchi. I first had this dream at least four or five years ago, I told him. In it I was still a young man, perhaps twenty. Eisenberg was the same age and Maria not much older. We’d taken rooms in a small inn called The Hermitage. I can still see the inn sign quite clearly. I had often recalled this dream and tried to fathom its meaning, but now I wanted at all costs to distract myself from thinking about the dreadful telegram I still held in my hand, and the dream seemed to provide the most effective distraction. I cannot say what made me recall the dream. Perhaps it was a remark that Gambetti had made two or three hours before I received the telegram, a passing remark containing the word Alps. Gambetti had mentioned that next summer he intended to go to the Alps with his parents, and of course with you, he had added emphatically. He loved the Alps, he said, and we could stay in a narrow valley that he had known since childhood and spend an extremely pleasant and profitable time pursuing our studies, away from the distractions that usually interfere with them. Quite incidentally he had said he would be going to the North Italian Alps with his parents, but above all he wanted to take me too, and if I didn’t mind he would invite me to join them on this Alpine study vacation, as he called it. We had just been talking about Schopenhauer, and about Schopenhauer’s dog, which he had placed above his housekeeper in order to be able to think out and finish writing The World as Will and Idea, and about how the dog and the housekeeper had guided Schopenhauer’s pen, as Gambetti put it. Then, to my surprise and apropos of nothing, Gambetti had suddenly talked of visiting the Alps next summer and taking with him a notebook with squared paper, though he did not explain the significance of the squared paper and I did not press him, but I can distinctly hear him uttering the words to the Alps with my parents and adding and of course with you. This, I fancy, is what reminded me of my strange dream, which comes back to haunt me, I may say, several times a year. I think I first had the dream four or five years ago, at Neumarkt in Styria, in a dark twin-bedded room in an old villa belonging to relatives of my mother, where I was to recuperate, they said, from an unidentifiable feverish illness. I lay with the curtains drawn in this house belonging to my relatives, who have a big furniture factory at Neumarkt. I do not know why I was visiting them, probably for no other reason than to catch cold in Neumarkt, which is one of the wettest and gloomiest places I know. I spent two days and nights at Neumarkt, a really ugly town, lying in bed with drawn curtains and no nourishment. I can no longer even vaguely picture the faces of my relatives. All I know is that I had this dream at their house. We had arrived in the rain in this valley in northern Italy, I told Gambetti — Eisenberg, who was my age, Zacchi, the philosopher, who was also my age, and Maria, my first woman poet, my greatest poet at that time. Maria joined us from Paris, not from Rome, where she already had her present apartment. But in those days the apartment looked different: it contained only hundreds of books, not thousands. And no carpets, Gambetti. But even in those days Maria spent most of her time in bed, where she received her guests. Maria joined us from Paris, dressed in a crazy trouser suit. She looked as though she were going to the opera or had just been to the opera. Black velvet trousers, Gambetti, with big silk bows below the knees, and a scarlet jacket with a turquoise collar. She naturally caused something of a stir when she turned up in that Alpine valley wearing this operatic outfit. Eisenberg went to meet her, and I watched from a distance as she walked toward The Hermitage, moving her arms, her legs, and her head in an operatic fashion, Gambetti, as though she were dancing toward the inn. At first, from a distance, her outfit couldn’t be seen so clearly. Naturally I didn’t think it was Maria. It had never occurred to me that she would come, and certainly not in such an outfit, either from Paris or from Rome. Eisenberg went to meet her, but neither Zacchi nor I did. It was as though Eisenberg knew she would be arriving at that time, while Zacchi and I didn’t. Standing at my window inside the inn, I assumed that Zacchi was in his room, still in bed but not asleep: he usually got up late, unlike Eisenberg and me, who have always been early risers. Eisenberg used to get up even earlier than I did, I told Gambetti, so it was natural that he, not Zacchi or I, should go out to meet Maria. Maria arrived very early, before five in the morning. I had had a sleepless night, as I always do in the Alps, and had spent more or less the whole night looking out of my window for hour after hour, until I had almost collapsed, I told Gambetti, though in fact I didn’t collapse. Then I saw Maria approaching the inn, where we had checked in the evening before in order to discuss Schopenhauer and Maria’s poems. In my dream this was our only reason for going there, and we had chosen what we regarded as an ideal setting, this narrow mountain valley, which is approached by a trail, not by a road, and can therefore be reached only on foot. Maria should have been with us the previous evening, and I can still see myself trying to mollify the landlord by repeatedly telling him he could rest assured that the chief guest, our friend Maria, was definitely coming. The landlord of The Hermitage was afraid that we intended to pay for only three people’s board, for we had booked not only our rooms but . full board, so that we could pursue our plan totally undisturbed, the plan being to compare Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Idea with Maria’s poems. Eisenberg, Zacchi, and I had agreed in Rome that it was a particularly attractive project. It was Eisenberg’s idea, and Zacchihad embraced it with enthusiasm. I had then booked the rooms at The Hermitage, and Maria had agreed to everything, so long as it’s not Heidegger, she said, so long as it’s Schopenhauer. She said she was looking forward to our enterprise but had to spend the night in Paris. She wouldn’t tell me why, though I begged her to. In my dream I told Maria that it was rather odd to go to Paris just for one night. There must be an existential reason, I said, but she wasn’t listening. She put on her coat and left at once, saying as she went out that she would join our party punctually. And in fact I saw her approaching the inn, dressed in her operatic outfit, at the very moment when we were due to start our discussion. Throughout the previous evening I had been preoccupied with Schopenhauer and Maria’s poems, even though I spent all my time standing at the window, comparing the one with the other and trying to establish a philosophical relationship between the two mentalities, between Maria’s poems and Schopenhauer’s philosophy, repeatedly subordinating the one to the other, contrasting them and trying to bring out the philosophical element in Maria’s poems and the poetic element in Schopenhauer’s work. The fact that I didn’t sleep at all that night was a great boon, I told Gambetti. We must be grateful for all the sleepless nights of our lives, Gambetti, as they enable us to progress philosophically. Gambetti listened attentively as I went on with my dream narrative, not letting myself be distracted by the noises on the Pincio. Not even the twittering of the birds, which has always seemed to me the most mind-deadening noise, could interfere with my narration. I had stood all night at my window in The Hermitage, Gambetti, reflecting on Maria and Schopenhauer. The previous evening I had decided to pursue these reflections as long as I could, which was probably why I didn’t sleep. Seeing this grotesque figure, at first completely black and quite unrecognizable as Maria, approaching The Hermitage and advancing out of a snow flurry to a distance of more than forty or fifty yards, I eventually realized that this grotesque apparition, with its marionette-like movements, could only be Maria, and I now knew the reason for her nocturnal visit to Paris: she’d gone there quite simply to see an opera, Gambetti, and of course in this outfit, which I knew from Rome. She’d bought this trouser suit in Rome when we were out shopping together one afternoon, one desperate afternoon, as she always puts it, and by making this purchase we’d turned a desperate afternoon into an enjoyable one. Shopping can sometimes be our salvation, if we brace ourselves and don’t shy away from the greatest luxury, from the most exquisite and expensive goods, the very costliest goods, no matter how grotesque, like this suit of Maria’s. Rather than die of despair it’s better to go into a luxury shop and fit ourselves out in the most grotesque fashion; it’s better to turn ourselves into a luxury creation for a kitsch production of DonGiovanni than to take to our beds and resort to a treble dose of sleeping pills, not knowing whether we’ll ever wake up, even though it’s always been worthwhile to waken. At this moment it was clear to me, as Maria walked toward The Hermitage in her grotesque outfit, that she’d been to Paris to see her favorite opera, Pelléas et Mélisande. Maria thinks nothing of coming straight from the Paris Opera to our Alpine valley in order to keep her promise, I thought as I stood at the window and watched her walk toward The Hermitage while Eisenberg went to meet her, I told Gambetti. Eisenberg hasn’t slept either, I thought as I watched him, so naturally he was the first to see Maria and go out to meet her. That’s typical of Eisenberg, I thought, standing at the window. Maria and Eisenberg always had not only a good understanding but the best understanding: they were intellectual equals. Eisenberg loves the same philosophy as Maria, and they share each other’s ideas about poetry. I’ve learned as much from her as I have from him, I thought. Maria wasn’t carrying anything, I told Gambetti. Emerging from the snow flurry, she looked radiantly happy as she walked toward The Hermitage. How relieved the landlord will be! I said to myself on seeing her. Zacchi had been the only one to doubt that Maria would come. How can she go to Paris in the evening instead of coming with us to the Alps, he had said, and yet be with us first thing in the morning at The Hermitage, where we’ve booked her a room? Zacchi was always the distrustful one, I told Gambetti. We used to call him the doubter. Maria stopped, and Eisenberg went up to her, I had told Gambetti, as I now recalled, standing at my study window and looking down on the Piazza Minerva. Continuing my narration, I told him that I had then heard a dreadful bang, like a thunderclap, and that at the same moment the earth had quaked. But oddly enough, as I learned later, nobody else heard the bang or felt the earth quake. Maria and Eisenberg didn’t hear the bang or feel the quake. As Maria and Eisenberg walked toward the inn, unaware that I was watching them intently from my window, Maria appeared to be walking barefoot, and then I saw that Eisenberg was carrying her shoes; she really was barefoot. Eisenberg was always the most considerate person, I told Gambetti — consideration was second nature to him. I stood awhile longer at the window, looking down and trying to follow as far back as possible the footprints left by Eisenberg and Maria as they walked toward The Hermitage. I counted a hundred twenty. I remember it exactly, I told Gambetti — it’s as though I were dreaming it all now, not four or five years ago. Then there was a break in the sequence. Suddenly I see Maria and Eisenberg in the inn lobby. She pulls off his boots, then puts her shoes on his feet, and he puts his boots on hers. All the time they laugh uproariously, but they stop as soon as I enter the lobby. Then, after a short pause, they burst out laughing again so that the whole of The Hermitage shakes. Maria stretches out her legs and holds them up with Eisenberg’s boots on her feet, the black boots that he always wears, those incredibly soft black boots, Gambetti, while Eisenberg hops to and fro in the lobby, wearing Maria’s shoes, ballet shoes with a slightly silvery sheen. Both of them yell, We’ve swapped shoes! We’ve swapped shoes! until they’re exhausted, and Maria falls on my neck, draws me down onto the seat in the lobby, and kisses me, while Eisenberg stands with his back to the wall and watches as we collapse on the seat. Maria goes on kissing me, but suddenly I jump up. At this moment Eisenberg demands that Maria give him back his boots. She takes them off and throws them at his head. Eisenberg dodges and avoids being hit by them. He bends down to pick them up, while Maria points to her ballet shoes, which Eisenberg is still wearing. It was a grotesque sight, Gambetti: Eisenberg in his black overcoat, reaching almost down to his ankles, and with Maria’s ballet shoes on his feet. Eisenberg says he won’t take off Maria’s shoes himself: we must take them off. Whereupon Maria thumbs her nose at him. But then, seeing that he’s upset about having to take off her shoes himself, she bends down and takes them off for him. He stands barefoot in the lobby, I told Gambetti, and then goes up to Maria, who presses herself against me. He kneels down in front of her and hands her the shoes. They’re your shoes, he says. After giving her the shoes he stands up. Maria kisses him and runs out of the inn, carrying the shoes. Eisenberg and I watch her as she goes out. I hope that child won’t freeze to death, says Eisenberg. It has started snowing again. I next see myself sitting with Eisenberg and Zacchi at a little corner table in The Hermitage, I told Gambetti. Open in front of us are Maria’s poems and Schopenhauer’s World as Will and Idea. The landlord comes in and wants to serve our breakfast. He tells us to clear the table. Move that stuff off the table, he says, then makes to clear it himself. Maria comes in just as the landlord is about to start clearing the table without having been given permission. He tries to whip The World as Will and Idea off the table, but Eisenberg shouts at him, What do you think you’re doing? Maria, standing behind the landlord, doesn’t understand what’s going on, I told Gambetti. Eisenberg jumps up and shouts at the landlord several times, What do you think you’re doing? This makes the landlord really angry. As quick as lightning he tries to whip the open volume of Schopenhauer off the table. But Eisenberg forestalls him; he snatches up the book and clasps it to his chest. I snatched up Maria’s poems and Zacchi rescued our notebooks, which were also on the table. The landlord was so furious that he threatened to kill us. He was a strong man and we were all scared of him. Maria had now sat down next to me and pressed herself against me. She didn’t understand what had happened. In Rome she’d been told that The Hermitage would be an ideal place for our project, that it was run by a friendly and extremely accommodating landlord and was in every way the perfect setting for our project. And now she was faced with a man who was getting fearfully worked up, threatening to kill us, and would clearly shrink from nothing. We had chosen The Hermitage because no other inn seemed suitable for our purpose. Continuing to threaten us, the landlord laid the table, because he was accustomed to laying the table for breakfast under all circumstances, I told Gambetti. He had to lay it because his wife had told him to, and so, while continuing to threaten us, he simultaneously laid the table. And you haven’t even paid yet! he shouted as we clasped our books and papers to our chests in fright, unable to utter a word. You must pay right away! he shouted, and repeated this several times until he’d finished laying the table. We couldn’t say a word, but we knew that the landlord’s wife was lurking behind the kitchen door. Or at least I did, as I could hear her breathing. At the sight of our books and papers the landlord couldn’t contain himself, and even after he’d finished laying the table he went on threatening us. People like you should be locked up, he exclaimed, they should be behind bars, people like you who carry books and papers like that around and wear clothes like that, he said, quite out of breath and pointing first at Maria’s outfit and then at Eisenberg’s long black coat. Finally he pointed at Eisenberg’s beard and said, People with beards like that should be hanged. He worked himself into a terrible state, I told Gambetti, and shouted several times, Riffraff like you should be exterminated. Several times he screamed the word exterminated in our faces. Then he seemed to suffer some sort of seizure. He suddenly put his hand to his chest and supported himself on the table with the other. We took advantage of the landlord’s sudden indisposition to leave the parlor and flee from The Hermitage. We ran down the valley, clutching our Schopenhauer and Maria’s poems, as if we were running for our lives. Maria ran in the middle. There was such a dense snow flurry in the valley that we couldn’t see a thing, but it was a narrow valley and we managed to reach the end. Gambetti, as always, had listened attentively. He did not ask a single question about my dream. Naturally I had told Eisenberg, Zacchi, and Maria about it too. None of them had said anything either. Gambetti speaks of Maria as someone who has everything permanently present in her mind and, because of her intelligence, can hold her own in any company. This is why Maria immediately becomes the focal point of any gathering, without having to say a word. Spadolini too, in his way, is the focal point of any gathering. Maria is inevitably the person on whom everyone has to concentrate, and she knows it, just as Spadolini always knows that he is bound to be the center ofattention in whatever company. If Maria and Spadolini are both present at the same party they inevitably disrupt it; they quite simply break it up. I’ve often seen this happen, I told Gambetti. When they’ve been together at a party it has immediately split up into its constituent parts, as they say, because they’ve disrupted it. Either Spadolini or Maria is the focal point, but they can’t both be. Spadolini at least gives the impression that he doesn’t hate Maria, but she never conceals her contempt for him; on the contrary, she flaunts it whenever she has a chance, I told Gambetti. Spadolini constantly says how much he admires Maria’s poems, thereby hoping to divert attention from his hatred of her and seeing such expressions of admiration and esteem as a means of concealing his hatred, but of course he doesn’t succeed, Gambetti. He always goes a shade too far in his praise for Maria’s poems, which incidentally can’t possibly appeal to him because they are directed against him in every way and must have a positively devastating effect on him, I said. Spadolini publicly praises Maria’s translations of Ungaretti’s poems, but his praise is so fulsome as to reveal the true measure of his hatred. He pays court to her, even though he doesn’t like her and finds everything she says repugnant. Maria, on the other hand, openly criticizes Spadolini and can’t understand why I didn’t sever my links with him long ago, Gambetti. She can’t understand that I’m attached to him and don’t want to give him up. She always describes Spadolini as a depraved character and tells me why, Gambetti. She reproaches me for seeing him relatively often, for meeting this dingy character who repeatedly seduces your mother, as she puts it. In her eyes Spadolini is the most hypocritical person, a born charlatan, a born opportunist when his own interests are involved, not just his ecclesiastical interests but his wholly despicable personal interests. Only last night she told me that my continued association with him showed a lack of character on my part, I told Gambetti on the Pincio. Maria gives a poetry reading at the Austrian Cultural Institute and Spadolini applauds enthusiastically because he thinks it will be to his advantage, not because he’s enjoyed the poems, I told Gambetti. Spadolini introduces Maria to the Peruvian ambassador as the greatest living woman poet, although he can’t stand her. He hates her, and yet he invites her to dinner at least once a month in the Via Veneto, which he loves but she loathes and detests, and although she declines all his invitations he goes on issuing them. He says to me, I’ve invited Maria out again and she’s turned me down. I’ll go on inviting her out and she’ll go on turning me down. In his way Spadolini is what they call a great personality and therefore bound to be rejected by Maria. She can’t tolerate a great personality beside her, but Spadolini is a great social diplomat who has mastered all the subtleties. Maria hasn’t mastered them and demonstrates this openly because she can’t do otherwise. Each of them, I told Gambetti, is the focal point— there aren’t two focal points —Spadolini through his sophistication, Maria through her naturalness, I told Gambetti. Maria’s naturalness derives from her Austrian origins, Spadolini’s sophistication from his Vatican connections, I told Gambetti. Both are equally great, and they hate each other with equal fervor. Both are conscious of their greatness and their hatred, but Spadolini is the stronger of the two and therefore does not always have to retreat, unlike Maria, whose only weapon has always been retreat. Spadolini really comes into his own when things get dangerous, I told Gambetti, but Maria retreats. Both have a penchant not only for sartorial extravagance but for extravagance generally. After all, they both came from the provinces, Gambetti, and could assert themselves only through their extravagance. Everything about Spadolini is extravagant, and so is everything about Maria; his extravagance is extremely sophisticated, hers extremely natural. She once told me that if she were to write a book about the quintessence of charlatanry she wouldn’t hesitate for one moment to make Spadolini the chief figure. She says she’s always dreamed of writing prose, but all her efforts in this direction have failed: either she’s given up at once or, if not, she’s realized that she hasn’t produced a work of art but only what she calls an astonishing performance. Spadolini is the great zealot, Maria the great artist, I told Gambetti. Basically I’m fortunate in having two such people, two great personalities, as friends, no matter how these friendships are viewed from outside, no matter how Spadolini views Maria or she views him. I’ll go on cultivating them and never forfeit them, never, I told Gambetti. Listening to Spadolini telling me about Peru is just like listening to Maria reading me her poems: both experiences are on a par, Gambetti. If we associate only with people of high character we very soon become dull, I told Gambetti. We have to keep company with supposedly bad characters if we are to survive and not succumb to mental atrophy. People of good character, so called, are the ones who end up boring us to death. We must be especially careful to avoid their company, I told Gambetti. Maria and Spadolini have always taught me a great deal, Gambetti. But I’ve never told them this. I got to know Maria through Zacchi, who is an expert at bringing people together — Zacchi the eccentric philosopher, the much traveled man of the world. He was already acquainted with Eisenberg, who introduced me to him. Before going to Vienna, Zacchi spent three years in Rome. Eisenberg broke away from his home in Switzerland in order to go to Vienna, where he became my dearest friend. It now occurred to me that the time I spent in Vienna with Eisenberg after my flight from Wolfsegg — for which I have to thank Uncle Georg — was vital to my subsequent mental development. The direction in which I developed was determined by Eisenberg. I began to study the world and gradually to decode and analyze it. Eisenberg, who was my own age, was the person who had the greatest influence on me intellectually and pointed my ideas in the right direction. Standing by my window and watching the few people strolling across the Piazza Minerva, I recalled that when I was in Vienna with Maria we had spent most of our time with Eisenberg, making excursions to the Kahlenberg, the Kobenzl, and Heiligenstadt. He introduced Maria to Vienna and showed her the beauties of the city, which was crucial to her existence too. We were always happy when we were with Eisenberg and never bored, I thought. Right from the beginning Eisenberg and Maria had a philosophical relationship, which I found quite fascinating and was able to observe without feeling in the least disturbed emotionally. Observing them, I was able for the first time to see how people of an intellectual disposition can be ideally attuned to one another, and it always struck me how rare such mutual understanding was. Maria came from the ridiculous little provincial town in southern Austria where Musil was born — though throughout the rest of his life he had nothing more to do with it — and she exploited this fact with the most tasteless insistence. This town was dangerously close to the border, in an area notable for the vulgar efflorescence of nationalism, National Socialism, and provincial stolidity. With its stolid self-importance, its stifling petit bourgeois atmosphere, its depressing and ineptly planned streets, its dreary topography, and its stale and unrefreshing air, it had all the ridiculous features that typify a town of some fifty thousand souls who know nothing of the world outside, yet fancy they are at its hub. For the same reasons that made me quit Wolfsegg, Maria set off from her equally dreary hometown and went to Vienna. With all her future poems in her head, I reflected, with her little handbag and all the illusions of the rebel, of the fugitive intent on escape, she set off for Vienna, as I had done, in the hope of gaining a foothold, as they say. But it was not easy. After the war all thinking spirits in the provinces expected more of Vienna than it could deliver. At that time the city did not keep its promises, to Maria or to anyone. Initially Vienna proved to be a lifeline, but only for a short time, after which it paralyzed all who sought their salvation there, as it still does. Vienna affords only a brief respite to those of a philosophical or reflective cast of mind who go there for mental stimulation. I discovered this myself, and it has been demonstrated a million times. To go to Vienna is to be saved for only a brief spell. Anyone who takes refuge there must therefore leave as soon as he can, for he will come to grief unless he turns his back as soon as possible on this ruthless and utterly decadent city. Maria soon grasped this, and so did I. Eisenberg is the only one of us who has survived in Vienna to this day, but then Eisenberg is much tougher than either of us and has a far clearer head, I thought, standing at the window. A soul like Maria’s is soon crushed in Vienna, Eisenberg had once said, as I now recalled, looking down on the Piazza Minerva and then across to the Pantheon and the windows of Zacchi’s apartment. Maria got away, first to Germany, then to Paris, and finally to Rome, as her poetic talent dictated, though she made recurrent attempts to settle in Vienna and took up with all kinds of people who she thought could facilitate her return. But whenever she was about to return, everything fell apart and her plans collapsed, sometimes because she offended the very people who had found her somewhere to live. She acquired life tenancies on a number of apartments but gave them up and never moved in. She let herself be enticed to Vienna by lots of frightful people, especially people in the Ministry of Culture, and let herself be taken in by these people with their frankly dirty motives. She refused to believe that all these people who tried to entice her to Vienna could possibly have dirty motives, although I told her time and again that their real interest was not in her but only in their own paltry purposes, that they were using her as a means to do themselves a favor, to promote their own interests by exploiting her by now famous name. I was well acquainted with all these people, I now recalled, but she let herself be taken in by them because she had a sentimental attachment to Vienna — which, contrary to common opinion, is an utterly cold and unsentimental city — but only up to the critical moment when she turned them down and issued a snub from Rome, where she felt happiest. At one moment she would say to me, Basically I want to go back to Vienna, and then, often only a few minutes later, she would say with equal conviction, Basically I don’t want to go back to Vienna. Basically I want to stay in Rome, even die in Rome. Maria often said she wanted to die in Rome, I now recalled. Her good sense compelled her to stay in Rome — to love Vienna but live in Rome. Yet only a few weeks after snubbing all the people who had found apartments and opened all the important doors for her, she would again start talking of going back to Vienna, which was after all her home, she said. I always greeted this with a laugh, because the word home, coming from her lips, sounded as grotesque as it would coming from mine, though I never use the word, which I find too emetic, whereas Maria used it nonstop, saying that home was the most seductive word. She would write again to her Viennese contacts in the various ministries and call at the Austrian Embassy or the Austrian Cultural Institute in the Via Bruno Buozzi, the ostentatious palace near the Flaminia in which Austrian brainlessness, in all its subtle shades, has had its Roman dependency ever since the building was erected. She attends so-called poetry readings by so-called Austrian poets and miscellaneous pseudoscholarly lectures given by miscellaneous Austrian pseudoscholars in the Via Bruno Buozzi. She even goes to lieder recitals, which are regularly given there by once celebrated Austrian singers who no longer have any voice but have a geriatric croak that can only inflict irreparable damage on the Italian ear. Maria wants to be Roman yet at the same time Viennese, I thought, and it is this dangerous mental and emotional condition that generates her superb poems. The dream about The Hermitage, which made a great impression on her, put me in mind of Maria, and I enjoyed thinking of her as I stood at the window, looking down on the Piazza Minerva. What would Rome be to me without her? I thought. How lucky I am that I have only to walk a few yards to refresh myself in her presence! How lucky I am to have Maria! My conversations with her are always more meaningful than any others I have, and altogether the most delightful. It is always stimulating to be with Maria, always exciting, and nearly always a source of happiness, I thought. Maria has the best ideas, and for Gambetti she is always an experience, as he puts it. In her thinking she recoils from nothing, I reflected. Her poems are one hundred percent authentic, which can’t be said of the products of her fellow poets, however celebrated they may be, the rivals who constantly intrigue against her. She is fully present in every line she writes, everything in it being uniquely hers. It was from Spadolini that I first really learned to see and observe, I told Gambetti, and from Maria that I first learned to hear. Both of them trained me to be what I am. I went on to tell Gambetti how Spadolini never disdained to accept money from my mother, even for strictly personal purposes. It enabled him to indulge his vanity, I told Gambetti. She remitted large annual sums to him, doubtless from the Wolfsegg funds. Possibly with the connivance of my father, I said, who would go to any lengths to appease her and thought nothing of making up a threesome for a trip to Italy, as crown witness, so to speak, of this extraordinary relationship, in which he, not Spadolini, played the part of onlooker. My father is just as fascinated by Spadolini as I am and wouldn’t give him up for the world, I told Gambetti. Spadolini is not the kind of man you give up. Once we meet a person like him, we don’t renounce him, whatever mischief he makes. Then it suddenly occurred to me how odd it was that I should be teaching Gambetti German literature, of all things — German, Austrian, and Swiss literature, the literature of German-speaking Europe, to use the usual clumsy formulation — despite the fact that I find this literature impossible to love and have always rated it below Russian, French, and even Italian literature. I wondered whether it was right to teach something I did not love, simply because I thought I was better qualified to speak about it than about another literature. Even in its highest flights, I told Gambetti, German literature is no. match for Russian, French, or Spanish literature, which I lovЧитать дальше