Extinction (20 page)

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 love, or Italian literature for that matter. German is essentially an ugly language, which not only grinds all thought into the ground, as I’ve already said, but actually falsifies everything with its ponderousness. It’s quite incapable of expressing a simple truth as such. By its very nature it falsifies everything. It’s a crude language, devoid of musicality, and if it weren’t my mother tongue I wouldn’t speak it, I told Gambetti. How precisely French expresses everything! And even Russian, even English, to say nothing of Italian and Spanish, which are so easy on the ear, while German, in spite of being my mother tongue, always sounds alien and ghastly! To a musical and mathematical person like you or me, Gambetti, the German language is excruciating. It grates on us whenever we hear it, it’s never beautiful, only awkward and lumpy, even when used as a vehicle of high art. The German language is completely
antimusical
, I told Gambetti, thoroughly common and vulgar, and that’s why our literature seems common and vulgar. German writers have always had only the most primitive instrument to play on, I told Gambetti, and this has made everything a hundred times harder for them. Looking at the family photographs, I reflected that our calculations do not always work out, because an accident can throw everything into disarray. The mocking faces of my sisters on the photo taken in Cannes actually
are
my sisters: I only ever see them as these mocking faces. Whenever and wherever I see them, and whatever the state of our relations, I see only these mocking faces. These are what come to mind whenever I think of my sisters. It is
these mocking faces
that I keep in the drawer of my desk in Rome, not the
various other faces they have, their
sad, proud, disdainful, and downright arrogant faces; no, only these mocking faces
. I once told Gambetti that when I spoke of my sisters I was speaking not of my sisters as such but only of their mocking faces, captured by chance in this photograph. If they were dead, I told myself, I’d have nothing left of them but their mocking faces. In my dreams I hear them laugh, and sometimes as I walk through Rome I suddenly hear this curious laughter of theirs, with its confident assurance of longevity, and I at once see their mocking faces, nothing else. They say something, and I think about what they’ve said, and I see their mocking faces. They take after their mother, I tell myself, who has a similarly mocking face that becomes hideously grotesque when duplicated in my sisters. I have often tried to rid myself of their mocking faces, to transform them into faces that don’t mock, but I’ve never succeeded. I have no sisters, I told myself, only their mocking faces. There’s no Caecilia and no Amalia, only two mocking faces, frozen forever in this hideous picture. They wanted to look young and beautiful, to project an image of happiness, I told myself as I studied the picture, but in this photo they’re ugly, and though still very young, they don’t look young: they look quite old and present a
profoundly unhappy
image to photographic posterity. Had they known that nothing would remain but their mocking faces and this unhappy image, they wouldn’t have let themselves be photographed. But they insisted on it, I told myself. I recall quite clearly that they wanted to be photographed. They posed for the picture and pressed close to each other in a simulation of happiness, spontaneity, and innate naturalness, yet it was all appallingly artificial and unnatural, and the result was a cruel distortion. I remember not wanting to take the picture. I’m not to blame for this cruel photograph, I told myself. They’re to blame for insisting on my taking it and so forcing their mocking faces on me for the term of my natural life, so to speak, though neither they nor I could have known this at the time. Since then I have never been able to escape their mocking faces. Every attempt has failed. At one point it occurred to me to destroy the photo, to tear it up or burn it, but it seemed ludicrous to resort to destroying something so quintessentially ridiculous and trivial, and so I put it back in the drawer with the others. It’s not my sisters who haunt me day and night, I told myself, it’s their mocking faces, which give me no peace and often
torment
me for days or weeks on end. By using the devilish device of photography, we capture just one of the millions and billions of moments in the lives of two people and then spend a lifetime blaming these two people for this one moment that revealed their mocking faces. But I do have sisters, I told myself, not just their mocking faces, and this absurd thought made me clap my hand to my forehead. I have sisters at Wolfsegg, not just two mocking faces that seem hostile to me in every way. One of these two mocking faces is now married (as I had to say in order to avoid inconsistency) to the wine cork manufacturer from Freiburg, this comic character whose head seems far too small for his heavy build and substantial girth. One of the mocking faces now has a husband, but the other hasn’t, and because of this the one without a husband has withdrawn to the Gardeners’ House, hating its companion piece for having married all of a sudden, overnight as it were. However, I have never succeeded in seeing my sisters’ mocking faces
separately
, however hard I have tried: I have only ever seen them
as a pair
. The photo shows two mocking faces, I told myself, but do my sisters really have such mocking faces? Or did they just have them at that one moment in Cannes when the picture was taken? Possibly they had them only for that one moment, I told myself, and never again, yet now I believe they’ve always had them. Photography really is the devil’s art, I told myself: for years, for decades, indeed for a whole lifetime, it forces us to see mocking faces that actually existed only once, for a single moment, when we acted on a sudden impulse and casually took a snapshot. And this sudden impulse then has a devastating lifelong effect that cannot be switched off and sometimes drives us to the verge of despair. I can’t switch off these mocking faces of my sisters any longer, I once told Gambetti, to whom I have often spoken, in a no doubt distasteful manner, about my sisters’ mocking faces, which have
always
played a large part in my life since I took
this fatal photo
, as I have often called it. So far I’ve been talking about the mocking faces of my sisters, which I can’t switch off and expel from my mind, I told Gambetti, but we have the same experience with other photos, though its effect may be less drastic, with photos of well-known and famous people whom we regard as important. Just think of the photo of Einstein sticking his tongue out. I can no longer visualize Einstein without his tongue sticking out, Gambetti, I
said. I can’t think of Einstein without seeing his tongue, that cunning, malignant tongue, stuck out at the whole world, indeed the whole universe. And I can only see Churchill with his lower lip distrustfully thrust forward. The likelihood is that Einstein only once stuck his tongue out in that cunning, malignant manner, and that Churchill only once thrust his lower lip forward in such an expression of distrust, on the occasion when the particular photo was taken. Yet when I read Churchill’s writings, I told Gambetti, I constantly see him with his lower lip thrust forward, and when I read something by Einstein, I’m completely obsessed with his tongue, stuck out at the whole world, the whole universe. I even fancy that it was not Churchill who wrote his memoirs, but his distrustfully prominent lower lip, not Einstein who made those earth-shaking pronouncements, but his malignantly protruding tongue. I once considered whether I could free myself from the mocking faces of my sisters Amalia and Caecilia by writing a piece about them, but I naturally rejected the idea as one of the absurdest I had ever entertained. I’ll never be able to free myself from my sisters’ mocking faces, I told Gambetti. I’ll have to live with them for the rest of my life. It might of course be incredibly useful to write a piece entitled
The Mocking Faces of My Sisters
. But what would be the point? I’d have to endure the most extreme boredom in order to write such a piece, Gambetti. I was always prevented from doing so by these mocking faces, which have never given me any peace for as long as I can remember. It would of course be foolish to think I’d be rid of them if I tore the photo up or threw it in the stove or cut it into a thousand fragments. They’d torment me all the more. And my parents in the second photo don’t make a good impression either, only a pathetic, ridiculous, comic impression as they board the Dover train at Victoria Station in London. No luggage, just their Burberry umbrellas on their arms, and my father in his thirties knickerbockers, which he bought before the war in Vienna, at Habig’s elegant store in the Kärntnerstrasse. He went around in them throughout the Nazi period. For as far back as I can remember I’ve seen him wearing these knickerbockers, I told myself. Even when he’s wearing something quite different I still see him in these knickerbockers from Habig’s, constantly saying