It did me good to think such thoughts, and to recall the details of the Gypsy girl’s kiss again, her hand in my hair, her adorable, precious breasts…. And this promptly unleashed my impotent rage again and my thirst for vengeance, the bitter humiliation of being thrashed by a Jew and not chastising him for the insolent way he had gawked at my girl’s exposed breasts, the disappointment, the distress that I had not kissed, not caressed these precious, adorable breasts, that I had not been able to chew them up in the unconsciousness of lust, that her sweet reality had become a lost phantom, a vision among so many other, similar visions.
The evening of that first day in Bucharest, I was covered with swellings and discolorations. Nevertheless, after more or less putting myself in order at my hotel, I picked up one of the prostitutes on Calea Victoriei. She was anything but beautiful; her face was hard, her hair was dyed a strawy blond, her speech was vulgar, and her voice was unspeakably common. When we entered her (frightfully expensive) room, she did not even want to undress; instead, she pulled up her skirt, pushed her panties down to her knees, cursed me for not being Johnny-on-the-spot, milked me impatiently, and then lay under me like a corpse. Luckily, I came almost immediately, after tormentingly pushing my way in, only half stiff ….
And the Gypsy girl’s breasts, which I forced myself to think of during the act, moved ever further away into the tantalizing kingdom of wishful thinking. I almost vomited.
Three days later, panic-stricken, I was leafing through the telephone book, looking for a specialist in skin and venereal diseases. In those days, two anxieties gave every amorous encounter a touch of imminent catastrophe and just deserts for sinning. The lesser anxiety concerned impregnation; and now the greater anxiety was brandishing its scourge over me. It was all the more ominous because I was stricken by a mysterious complaint with symptoms that no warning adviser had ever depicted to me.
The clap, I had been taught, could be recognized by a purulent discharge: “The first day, it burns. The second, it drips. The third, it runs.” Syphilis, on the other hand, had a different primary stage: crater-shaped, raspberry-colored, hard and insensitive symptoms; but they appeared only after several weeks; you could hardly ever be certain about whom you’d got it from and whom you might pass it on to. If you had a soft chancre, then something also hurt or swelled up; in case of doubt, it was the lymph gland or the head of the penis. In any event, it was not so bad as the other two stages, which were considered practically incurable. You could, of course, use Salvarsan to hold up the development of the second or third stage — the latter usually involved softening of the brain. But even with Salvarsan, traces of cerebral damage remained, as we had known at least since Nietzsche. And the spinal marrow was sometimes affected — everyone knew the bizarrely twitching, marionettelike walk, the occasional digressing sidesteps of elderly cavaliers who suffered from so-called tabes. This walk was a bit ridiculous, to be sure; but it was not without a certain elegance. And the clap, too, was actually something you kept all your life. Whenever you thought you had got a new dose, it was just the good old one you’d had originally. And what I had, this horrible multiplication of unbearably itching, reddish, yellow-crusted dots around the penis and on the thighs, could only be some dreadful disease — a Balkan specialty, no doubt, hence particularly malicious. And if not ultimately mortal, perhaps, then at least with destructive consequences at the level of my fly.
The physician I randomly picked and consulted was named Dr. Maurer, even though he was a thoroughbred Rumanian. “Where did you dig up these splendid specimens?” he asked after briefly inspecting my lower abdomen and upper thighs. I was crawling with crablice.
At this moment I paused to evoke the past few months in my memory. Supposing the girl in the wheelchair had really become my beloved and had been willing to hear the confession of my past. How, I wondered, could I have told her about such base incidents and circumstances? In reality, I could scarcely do so without embarrassing her or at least arousing her amazement, perhaps even abhorrence. She had looked protected and innocent, such as only a girl of good background, especially in her ailing condition, could appear. And yet she seemed intelligent and open-minded, and tested by her suffering — yes indeed, by her own suffering. That had to make her sympathetic toward something so bad, at least so humiliating, embarrassing. When all was said and done, this too was human.
In my imagination, she now played the part of the ideal companion. Scarcely had I passed her on the street, just a few paces, when I knew I could tell her anything, no matter how dreadful. I considered her as my twin soul, from whom I could hold back nothing. She was the good sister who understood every danger in a man’s life, and she was also, incidentally, my beloved, her breasts at least as firm and well shaped as those of the Gypsy girl — whiter, probably; purer, more innocent. I would be able to respect her, even if I had sex with her, voluptuously and thoroughly, despite her crippled legs. And she would be grateful to me and would long since forgive me for the distasteful adventures that the man who now made her so happy had once been forced to endure.
But, after all, this was not really what I wanted to tell her; it was not the explanation for my turning away and going past her, though it did, of course, lead to it. The episode with the Gypsy girl was at the beginning of my plunge into shame, and I had to tell her how one thing had led to another. Out of context, the events took on distorted perspectives and erroneous proportions, and I wanted her to have the precise picture. It was I who was urging myself to communicate. I wanted to experience myself in her once again. She was the mirror I held up to myself, reflecting my image pure and full, not warped by the fragmentation that so distressed me when my agitated mind recollected events in emotional bits and pieces. A logical, indeed chronological, narration yielded a far more harmonious picture.
In any case, if I had not gone past her but spoken to her, got to know her, and taught her to love me, and if she had truly become my beloved and my sister, my sisterly confessor, then I would have to tell her about Dr. Maurer. For, indirectly, it was he who had brought me into circumstances more embarrassing than crabs or beatings — so embarrassing that the sight of a young girl of good family terrified and made me turn away, even though (or perhaps precisely because) I found her so attractive, despite her crippled legs, that I entered a state I usually only dreamed about.
It had begun with Dr. Maurer. This excellent specialist in skin, venereal, and other juvenile diseases noticed my relief when I learned I was afflicted merely by crabs and not by some previously unknown variety of genitoinfectious leprosy. Then he began gently to inquire where I came from and what I was doing in Bucharest; my bumps and bruises also interested him, both medically and humanly. He was fairly young, in his mid-thirties, though graying slightly, and had that virile gravity and solidity which always put me in an obedience relationship of adolescent to adult. But his questions were not avuncular, nor did he seem to judge what I said. I promptly told him everything he wanted to know and a little more, especially about my adamant intention of starving to death rather than betraying my vocation as a world-famous artist.