Notwithstanding that his dreams had been different with every change and had sometimes taken on the character of nightmares. Dreaming per se had remained the same, whether a boy’s conjuring up a vision of himself as a white hunter or a world-famous artist or champion amateur jockey, or the eternal dream of a man whose love is fulfilled, or other banal wishful thoughts that scarcely suggested originality. Indeed, what had allowed him unswervingly to feel himself as I through all the real and dreamed-up transformations was not what he dreamed, but how he dreamed — an outwitting of self developed to a fine art, with the help of which he eluded any out-and-out collision with reality.
The first time he had seen a bullfight (not in Spain, which events of world history had prevented him from visiting until quite late, but in Mexico, where he lived during a transitory stage as a car salesman), wearing a tremendous sombrero and sitting with a breathtakingly beautiful gumchewing American girl friend in the shady parabolic section of the arena, he watched as the matador made the black dart of the bull aim at the red cloth of the capa over and over again, and the matador over and over again steered the bull past by a hairbreadth. The first time he watched this, he realized with amusement that he himself employed the same tactic with himself, and that he had developed equivalent mastery. Elude an out-and-out collision with reality…. No, sir, this was not cowardice about life, not escapism — rather the contrary: he, too, could look reality in the face, better than most other people, for he knew how dangerous reality was. But the artful feat of always holding up a new possibility of himself, a fiction of himself, and the knack, the balletic skill, of eluding reality, withdrawing the fiction at the last instant before colliding with reality — those were talents no one could emulate.
Indispensable talents, if you wanted to survive. For otherwise, how could you stand the look of your face of yesterday? For instance the reddened face of the teenager in the Carpathians, eyes burning, lips trembling in the greed to kill something, a dove, a hare, a roe deer … or the face of the young man in love, not dry behind the ears but scandalizing the beau monde of prewar Bucharest with his sentimental performances, who, while the world around him is about to crumble, Europe preparing to commit suicide, welcomes the Nazi invasion in Poland just because he loathes Poles, since the lady whom he happens to love (one of the several unique great loves of his life, each of which promised fulfillment, bliss on earth attained, the very goal of troth and loyalty) — well, she has had a Polish lover before him and sometimes seems to mind that he has left her … or the face of the hideous fop who, under the hail of bombs on Berlin in 1943, leads an idler’s life, cynically watching a world in flames, millions of people dying, being crippled, suffering unutterable grief, but he, in the midst of a panicking crowd that rushes toward an air-raid shelter even before the sirens have howled their warning, pulls a watch from his pocket, looks at it, then up at the sky, and with an ugly sneer says in a loud voice, “They’re late today. Do let’s hope nothing has happened to them on the way!” … or the face of the man who sleeps, sleeps for days in a Munich room whose door leads into a corridor that leads, in turn, into space — half the house is missing, piled up in a heap of brick and mortar, broken window frames and splinters of glass and slate where once a charming street in Schwabing gave out on to the Englische Garten, now a narrow path across the rubble, glittering in the frost winter of 1947, and he doesn’t care whether there is coal for the stove in the corner of the small room where his (first) wife, a refugee from East Prussia, sits in a mangy lambskin coat staring hatefully at him, despising him for his refusal to find a job or do the least work to make their improvised habitation habitable or try and get into some petty black-market racket in order to procure a bagful of potatoes or half a pound of rancid butter … or the ridiculous, mustachioed face of the would-be lothario who, after all this and two divorces and a pitiless fight with his second wife over their little son (a fight that ended with the poor boy’s death) sits outside a café on the Via Veneto eagerly trying to adjust himself to the glory of Cinecittà ….
Well, go on with your biography. Jump a decade forward, or backward if you please. Examine at random this or that possibility of yourself: you always come across someone you would be embarrassed (or even outright ashamed) to identify with, someone you’d refuse to frequent if you weren’t forced to live with, because he happens to be yourself ….
yes, but there’s always another dimension, another possibility ….
this “yes, but” which allows you to admit that all these dubious characters were you — or, in any case, possibilities of yourself — that all these faces (including the face in your shaving mirror) were undeniably yours, what else is this “yes, but” but a bullfighter’s slight, elegant, perfidious twist of the capa that makes the bull’s horns miss him by a hairbreadth? … “yes, but” the boy in the Carpathians was brought up in a peculiar, anachronistic world, a feudal world, a strictly traditional education that used the lust for killing — shall we call it, less emotionally, the pleasure of hunting — as a way of strengthening the heart for equally exciting and far nobler feelings, all rooted in the rules of chivalry, such as one’s duty to defend the oppressed, the feeble, and the poor, the readiness to die for the sake of troth and flag or for one’s lady — infantile notions, you’d call them, yes, but notions on which our civilization is based … and as for the creature who, out of sick jealousy, welcomes the assassination of a small and very noble people by the power-drunk followers of a lunatic: well, “yes, but” consider the utter violence of the love that led to such sick jealousy, a love in which all that pent-up romanticism broke loose; at last, after a childhood, an adolescence, of craving to be a good knight, at last he could realize an unconditional commitment to a flag, a cause — his lady … mind you, fanaticism was in the air at the time; supposing instead of falling so violently in love, he had committed himself to the SS? (though, strangely enough, their view on Poland didn’t differ much from his) … “yes, but” take the same face a few years later, in Berlin in 1943: that look of cynicism is but the fruit of suffering, he is sick with hatred, hatred not only for the Nazis but for everyone and everything, for the Germans as a whole and in particular the remnants of their old high society, now apathetically attending their Götterdämmerung; equally, however, he hates the British for their hypocrisy and shortsightedness, the French for their rêverie of lost glory, the Italians for their greed and vanity, and most of all the Americans for their devious self-righteousness — did all these imbeciles not see that their glorious war was not for or against a man called Hitler, or a nation, or an ideology, or a political system, but against themselves? couldn’t they admit that this was the class war they were bound to lose, that would destroy the very things they pretended to fight for: ideals, holy traditions, values handed down from generation to generation; couldn’t they understand that every bomb that gutted a house — here, there, on this side or that side of a front line (a front line that in reality ran through the social structure of each of their countries) — that every one of those bombs simply opened the cellars and set the rats free, the profiteers, the greedy, the uncivilized, the illiterates, the oppressed and offended who wanted their share of the cake no matter how — perhaps through revolution that would, conceivably, bear fruit in the future …