Aunt Sophie changed. Her blunt, crusty, warmhearted realism became sharp, occasionally gross. Instead of endorsing every statement of Uncle Hubi’s, as she had done all her life, she now frequently contradicted him; and her “Well, Hubi’s perfectly right again” was gradually transformed into an equivalent stereotype: “Well, naturally, that’s one of Hubi’s typical idiocies again.”
I learned all this from hearsay, for I was never to see them again. I spent the entire school year in Austria, traveled during the vacations, and, above all, went more and more eagerly with my father on his hunting trips. Aunt Sophie died while I was preparing for my final school examinations; I could not even manage to get to her funeral. A few months later, Uncle Hubi also died. The estate passed to one of his distant relatives. I never went there again.
Sometimes, when I was in Vienna, I thought of tracking down Wolf Goldmann. It would certainly have been possible to find him through his mother — who, as I knew, was head ceramicist at the Wiener Werkstätten — or at the Academy of Music, which he must have been attending. But I did not look for him, partly out of laziness and partly because of a rather heavily burdened conscience. Although Dr. Goldmann had triumphed as a man of honor over poor Uncle Hubi, his refusal to give me medical treatment stood him in ill stead. The medical commission excluded him from its ranks, his license was revoked, and supposedly the district attorney wanted to look into the matter. Dr. Goldmann moved out of the village in which his father had “erected his house” as in a land of promise. Deserted and unsellable, the bepennoned red-brick villa soon went to ruin.
The only person from whom I had any sign of life was Stiassny. He moved from my relatives’ home — I never knew where he went — but shortly after he left, at the Christmastide following the events I have narrated here, I received a package from him. When I unwrapped it, out came two small busts made of wood and ivory, which I had always beheld with as much fascination as disgust whenever I went into his room. The busts were a male and a female head from the Rococo period, both with wigs, very pretty and dainty and lifelike. But they were sliced in half, and while you saw their charming profiles and fresh cheeks on one side, you could peer at the anatomy of the skull on the other side, with bones, muscles, veins, and even the cerebral convolutions. My parents felt this was no Christmas gift for a boy my age; the two busts were taken away from me, vanishing somewhere, never to be seen again. In regard to Stiassny, too, the only thing left was a memory, and memories are all I have retained of that faraway time.
Youth
When I saw her, two things happened to me. First, an impulse to hide gripped me; the vehemence of my movement was such that I could conceal it only by acting as though something across the street had suddenly caught my attention. At the same time, I felt the erection in the tautness of my trousers.
The second struck me as more peculiar than the first. At nineteen, one lives in the utter idolatry, therefore the extreme superstition, of sex. Monstrously exaggerated tales about sexual feats, which we listen to greedily, determine our expectations. The disappointments are correspondingly great. My reactions to the mere sight of a woman were not usually so obvious as this. Needless to say, I was worried.
I was afflicted by awareness of my inadequacy. I desired any even halfway attractive woman, whether alive or in a photograph; promptly, in my imagination, I saw her before me naked and myself on top of her. Every female whom I passed, whether a child who was barely a girl or a matron ripened almost to decay, I immediately saw as a partner for an imaginary sexual act. Of course, reality was woefully in arrears. In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred I was totally paralyzed by shyness. Therefore, even if a woman was willing, I affected a cold indifference that would have seemed rude. Fortunately, in most cases she saw through it; then her knowing smile pained me like a whiplash.
Now and then I did go to bed with someone. The points I chalked up to confirm my virility were probably not much under the average of any boy my age. But I knew every time that the point had been scored dishonestly. It was not that I, the he-man, had conquered the woman but, rather, that she had picked me. It was not that some irresistible stud quality on my part succeeded over and over again but, rather, that my little cock would once again fall into a trap.
It acted, accordingly, disturbed. Once, I was even prompted to consult my doctor. He gave me a pill. “Does this mean I need potency pills at the age of nineteen?” I asked in dismay. He laughed: “It’s a tranquilizer; you’re too excited. Have sexual relations a bit more regularly.”
I made every effort to do so. But the successes were always quick defeats because they were not so overwhelming as my overexcited imagination demanded: thus I was left with doubts and anxieties; and, indeed, such striking counter-evidence as the spontaneous erection in my trousers when the girl was wheeled past gave me serious reasons for brooding.
She was certainly a beautiful girl — lamentably beautifuclass="underline" a doll’s face with pearly teeth behind red lips, and large, wonderfully soulful eyes. The heart-shaped face was embedded in a wealth of brown, crisply vigorous curls — by forty, or even thirty, she would probably be having difficulties with a touch of a mustache. Her breasts were outlined clear and firm in her light blouse, and her waist was slender; the hips were obviously quite sumptuous. Anything farther down was now swathed in a blanket and placed lifelessly on the footrest between the whirring spoke wheels of the wheelchair. Well, one could ignore the lower part — a surrealistic something of human limbs, no doubt — but the body above was all the more female; her eyes confirmed this, simply shouted it to the world. It was a heart-wrenchingly ingenuous, disarmed look, the look of a woman tested by adversity — yes indeed, the look of a wounded hind, as the poets say. One involuntarily held aloof. But there was also humor and merriment and alert intelligence in her look, the strength of joie de vivre, and her look had struck me squarely, calling me to account … Oh, God, was I base!
I was base because I turned away. However, not without an equally total response to her look, if only for a split second. But what did that mean? After all, such interhuman data transmission eludes measurement. If I had gazed longer and more soulfully into her eyes, it would have been embarrassing; I could scarcely have expressed myself more distinctly if my fly buttons had popped in her face. My entire soul must have been offered in my look, a readiness to love her, to unite with her forever, to make her my wife on the spot, and to spend a fulfilled life wallowing every night on her beautiful torso and wheeling her about every day, proud and happy to keep all pity away from us.
How could I explain to her that it was not the sight of her wretched condition that made me turn away but a cluster of ignominious motives that concerned only myself? I wanted to run after her and tell her this, more than anything. She was obviously of good background, well bred, loved, cared for. Her clothes, the quality of the light blanket that was wrapped around the woefulness of her withered legs, the solid wheelchair purring along on white rubber tires, chromium-glittering spokes, and ball-bearing hubs, the person pushing the wheelchair — all these testified to a prosperous family, to high rank and class. But these were the things I feared most. I would gladly have told her why: I regarded myself as déclassé. It was that which made me sensitive — and, perhaps even more, my shame at feeling this way.