She died there a few months later.
Pravda
“As if he were lost among the lotus eaters, he seemed to have forgotten his fatherland.…” What was this? Where did it come from? It had the rhapsodic intonation of memory, but he was not sure whether it was his memory, although grammatically it sounded as if it were: even his memories could no longer be narrated simply in the murmuring imperfect tense, they required the resolutely indicated “as if,” the subjunctive, the mood of possibility, in any case the shift into the indefinite; even if occurrences had occurred from occurrences, the chain of motifs reached so deep into the past, reached back to the beginning of recorded time, the dawn of history, the golden haze of myth where everything was open, any possibility. Only one thing was certain: time was passing, had passed even if occurrences had not assumed a visible shape, time had slipped, kept slipping through the grip of memory, a great, great deal of time — and he had lived from the fullness of days as if they were inexhaustible, he especially: for it was not just one life which, these days, formed and would go on forming (not for much longer, he told himself, perhaps for ten more years, at best fifteen), but a half dozen different lives, lived in different eras, in different countries, in different languages, among totally different people; his name had had a different ring, had been pronounced in different ways, his costume had changed with his tailors and barbers, with the fashion of his environment, people he had met frequently twenty years ago could not for the life of them recall having made his acquaintance, he certainly looked different at sixty from what he had looked like at forty, at twenty, a man with totally different characteristics: in the south, his gestures were livelier than they had been in the north, there he had smoked a pipe, here cigarillos, there he had drunk whiskey, here wine, there a woman’s shiny black hair had electrified him, here it was the fragrant mane of a blonde.…
to be sure, through all this, he had unshakably said “I” to himself, he had never felt any doubt as to his identity. He raised his eyebrows ironically whenever he heard or read the phrase that someone was “seeking his identity” like some lost or never possessed object that was rightfully his; it gave him a sardonic pleasure, when someone expressed perplexity or unfulfillment or disconnectedness, to ask that person in the broadest American accent, “You’re lookin’ for your lost iden’ity, aren’tcha?”—even though he himself could scarcely have indicated what constituted his own identity—:
what did this properly dressed, gray-haired man, walking along a deserted Via Veneto on a drizzly winter morning, with a large box of marrons glacés under his arm, on his way to pay his respects to a Russian great-aunt of his (present, third, Italian) wife — a regular visit he had been paying once a week for years now — what did he have to do with the boy who, fifty years ago (half a century — and what a century!), had lain in the grass on a hilltop somewhere in the forest Carpathians, dreaming up a life in Jack London style: a prosperous farmer in East Africa, the bougainvillea around the farmhouse reaching into luxuriant plantations, the plantations into the Masai Plain, ostriches and vast zebra herds, thousands of antelope, sometimes the blacks running up to get the bwana with the unerring elephant rifle because a lion has broken into the ox kraal … such dreams were not at all extravagant or impossible back then; the reality they evoked truly existed, as late as yesterday even; today they are anachronistic, purely romantic, even as a mere boy you make a fool of yourself with such daydreams, you place yourself in the category of those who live in the golden haze of myth.…
well, he had learned to adjust to such changes in the world: as a child in the Bukovina, within walking distance of the Dniester River, beyond which Russia began, he had been awakened in the night — the Austrians had marched out, the Rumanians had not yet marched in, people were afraid the Bolsheviks might attack or at least maraud, hordes were already passing through the countryside and plundering the military depots. He had retained the images of that time all his life; above all, trembling hands — the trembling hands of the nanny waking him up and dressing him, the trembling hands of his mother putting the jewelry in boxes to hide it, the trembling hands of the servants to whom his father — an eternal Don Quixote — distributed pistols.…
had he fallen into a deep slumber back then like Rip Van Winkle and awakened only in the world of today, he would go crazy with despair: what has happened to this world between then, 1919, and today 1979, is so incredible, has changed it so radically that one can scarcely believe the same person lived in both epochs. Whatever his parents, the people of that world of yesterday, were afraid of — today’s reality is much, much worse than anything anyone could have imagined then. The red, the blood-red reality of the Bolsheviks was bursting with life compared to the gray anemic reality of the crumbling democracies. Yet, blood still flows today as it did then; blood has always flowed, in torrents, all through his lifetime; that it was not his own blood was due to random circumstances that one cannot even call fortuitous: the only dignity to be maintained in our time is the dignity of being among the victims.
Experiencing such highly varied conditions, he said to himself, one inevitably goes through many metamorphoses. What, for instance, would seem to indicate that he, the distinguished, gray-haired, well-shaven man in a dark blue overcoat, walking down the Via Veneto in drizzly winter weather, is the same person as the newcomer here twenty years ago: the mustachioed, happy-go-lucky, Capri-shirt-sporting lothario who, with a hunter’s skill and sharp eye, manages to grab a seat at the small, crowded tables outside one of the now vanished cafés, and sits round-eyed at his granita seeing the protagonists of a breathtaking Dolce Vita in every gigolo and movie floozy strolling by: he himself, for all his apparent sophistication, an utter simpleton, for whom Rome is a daily festival, as for an enthusiastic tourist — the sight of the Castel Sant’ Angelo in floodlight a revelation, the Pantheon in the mist of crepuscule, the Campidoglio at sunrise impressions as deep as the glory of a Christmas tree in childhood, at night, by starlight, he takes visiting friends to the Piazza dei cavalieri di Malta like children to a crèche, has them peep through a keyhole in a garden gate to see the dome of Saint Peter’s in the vanishing point of an avenue of cypresses, shows them the cloister of the Quattro Coronati as if it were the spot of his own martyrdom, talks about it as eloquently as Gregorovius ….
it doesn’t take more than two decades for this to change completely, the man and the city. Eternal Rome is eternal only in its constant change, perhaps what allows him to feel unalterably himself is also his perpetual changing. “I” is a notion that requires the immediate present. Yesterday’s “I” is mythical, a mere possibility of today’s “I.” Where has this “I” of twenty years ago gone now? Well, where has the glamor of Cinecittà gone that brought him here? The grandeur of swinging Italy back then? Prince Massimo marrying the film starlet Dawn Adams: an epochal connection. Fleeting the epoch, like the many others he has lived through: the echo of the Habsburg Empire in the Balkan operetta world, the entrance and dying fall of the roaring twenties in Berlin; the elegant thirties in Vienna, in Prague; the entrance of America into the core of Europe: Barbara Hutton marrying Count Haugwitz-Reventlow, the king of England marrying Mrs. Simpson, a sporting and shooting club at Mittersill Castle in Austria attracting the most frivolous specimens from a newly formed café society on both continents; and at the same time: Adolf Hitler expanding his Berghof at nearby Berchtesgaden, Reichspropaganda-minister Dr. Joseph Goebbels compromising the actress Lydia Barowa — the scandal shocks public opinion more than the shooting of Röhm … altogether, everything, the events, concentrating more and more on Germany, on Berlin; it whirls together there, the suction pulls him in too: soon an epoch of ration cards and air-raid shelters begins, cities crumble, what is left of Berlin’s high society attend dinner parties with stiff upper lips and toothbrushes in their pockets in case they might not find their houses standing when they come home; and even this passes, gives way to a short and violent epoch of women-raping Russians, the division of Germany and Austria into zones, icy rubble-cities, a black-market time, hunger time in Germany while Italy begins to swing, Existentialism triumphs in France, Juliette Greco sings before Jean-Paul Sartre in Saint Germain-des-Prés, Italian musica leggera erupts, Dior’s New Look conquers Brindisi, the khaki uniforms of Americans are visibly withdrawn from circulation and, instead, the city-scape of Rome is dominated by a gaudier sort