True, the girl in the wheelchair did not correspond to the criteria of my anima in all particulars. You could not say that she had blond Jean Harlow hair; her attractive mop of fuzzy hair was an intense chestnut brown; the little face framed by the hair was perhaps a bit too chubby-cheeked and doll-like; and despite the obvious merits of her torso, any mention of the long-legged horsewoman’s figure would have been downright tactless. But after all, the physical factor was not the decisive one. In regard to the physical, one becomes more experienced and more mature, and one adjusts one’s ideals more flexibly to the insufficient realities. Everything else was all right, and that was the important thing: her proper birth, her careful breeding, the aura of her good background.
I would have been lying if I had not admitted that the aura of her lowly origins was what made my love for the Black Widow as rotten as if it were crawling with maggots — a gradual crumbling under minor irritations that gnawed in, bored in everywhere. It was not just the way she spoke — she could not, of course, deny she was Jewish. Her race was written in her features, in the very face that had overwhelmed me with its inundation of happiness; but not only that: she could also take on a different expression, which I loved, an owllike, archaically wise expression of primordial motherhood. At such times, she looked like an ancient goddess…. But her language, as I was saying: her singsong, the flattened vowels, the peculiar syntax of people who, although having known an idiom since childhood (in her case, Rumanian), remain alien to it, and then the Yiddish expressions interjected all over the place — these things betrayed her the instant she opened her mouth. And yet that was the least that irritated me. I had finally understood that it was quite possible for me to love a Jewess, not in spite of the eternal Jewish tragedy, the age-old Jewish sadness showing in her face, but because of it: to see that face suddenly transformed by happiness — in fact, actually inundated with happiness — affected me deeply. But then I was equally affected by the “earth mother” look on that face when she was in a serious mood. Thus, experiencing so many astonishing things in myself, I accepted her Jewish features as part of her, just as I would have endured tattoos or brass disks grown into the lips, had it been possible for me to love a Central African native.
Besides, the specifically Jewish quality in Jews had never repelled me so much as the attempt — doomed from the start — to hush it up, cover it over, deny it. The yiddling of Jews, their jittery gesticulation, their disharmony, the incessant alternation of obsequiousness and presumptuousness, were inescapable and inalienable attributes of their Jewishness. If they acted as one expected them to act, so that one could recognize them at first glance, one was rather pleasantly touched. They were true to themselves — that was estimable. One related to Jews in the same way as an Englishman to foreigners: one assumed they would not act like us. If they did so nevertheless, it made them look suspicious. It seemed artificial. It was unsuitable. Like the Englishman confronted with a foreigner behaving in an assiduously British manner, we saw the so-called assimilated Jew as aping us.
Perhaps it would have been good if I had spoken about this frankly with my Black Widow. She surprised me sometimes with an intelligence and often with a knowledge I would not have attributed to her milieu. She most likely would have if not approved of it then at least understood that for us Gentiles (“goyim,” as she would put it), the point at which our hair stood on end was when Jews revealed in their social pretentions their desire to belong to us. Not because we might have feared compromising ourselves by accepting them as our own but, rather, because the attempt was so feebly presumptuous. In so-called polite society, they were insufferable; they gave it an “as if” quality, thereby making it base. It was even worse when they tried to break into a class whose characteristics antagonized us anyway.
That was exactly what my Black Widow was doing. Even if I could have discussed it with her, I could not have made her see that my resistance was grounded not in arbitrary fictions but rather in a real difference in mentality, in psychic constitution, a difference that could not be bridged by the best will in the world.
As for the girl in the wheelchair, I expected her to be so genuinely of my breed that if I described these tortures, she would, like me, burst into laughter, the helpless, enervated laughter of surrender. Notwithstanding the tragic element (mainly for the poor Black Widow), it was grotesquely comical to see how my amorous paroxysms would be chilled by the cold spurts of some aesthetic affront — I say “aesthetic” because it really was a question of class aesthetics, the tremendous effect of which is often overlooked.
Once, for instance, the passion of our frantic discharges of love wrenched a noise of enthusiasm out of her that did not come from her throat. And my fiery Andalusian was almost driven to suicide by mortal fear, deep shame, a contrite sense of guilt — all of which shocked me much more than her innocent and spontaneous utterance of enthusiasm, which had the advantage that it could not be mendacious and which I instantly rewarded with a surge of tenderness. But no: she was so embarrassed that she raced out of the room, and for days thereafter met me with a bewildered hostility and injured mien, as though I were the one who had farted and not she.
It was certainly absurd, nay, downright scandalous, to think that this rare gift of destiny, this fortunate event — the love of a beautiful, vivacious, experienced, and emotionally mature woman for a young man still wet behind the ears, a love that could cast a blissful glow over the rest of his life — would have to be destroyed by such fiddle-faddle as her leaving the spoon standing in the coffee cup like a pitchfork in a heap of manure, whereas “one” was accustomed to one’s taking the spoon out and putting it on the saucer, or “one” did not vanish under the table with muffled apologies when one had to blow one’s nose during a meal. But that was the way it was; I had to admit it. The toothpick that Mr. Garabetian, even while speaking, seldom removed from his mouth (and then mostly just to clean his ear) did not detract in the slightest from my affection and friendship for him. Yet my love for the beautiful Jewess, in whose face I saw all the sun-drenched passion of Andalusia (where, in gratitude for everything that the Jewish spirit had contributed to Western civilization by so grandiosely fusing Occident and Orient, the stakes had blazed), my love for the golden, happiness-flooded face of the beautiful sufferer, dissolving in a smile satiated with the mystery of mortal bliss, like the smile of La Belle inconnue de la Seine—my love was wiped out, chewed up, ground down by the way she dressed, the way she stuck out her little finger when she ate ice cream, the pretentiously pompous respectability with which she behaved toward her customers, with which she laced the splendor of her breasts and hips as firm as cannonballs in rubber armor, in order to be “ladylike,” the way she did up her beautiful black hair like a pastry cook’s masterpiece when she wanted to go to a restaurant with me, the way she would act “refined” when dealing with people to whom she felt superior, raising her eyebrows, shoulders, and voice, speaking through her nose, and taking on the bitter, hostilely cautious expression of people who have social pretentions beyond themselves, just barely far enough beyond themselves so that they never get further than that.