Naturally, she had had an affair with the SS man who had presented her to his men as the very model of a German girl, and when she then confessed to him that she was Jewish, he was crushed. He said he could not spend another minute with her, he must never see her again, never think of her again. His honor was troth, he had sworn total loyalty to his Führer, to his flag, to the Third Reich, allegiance to his Faith in the Purity of the German Race — it was his obvious duty to report her to the authorities, he said, but he could not, because of his hapless love for her — the tragedy, the catastrophe of this love — he writhed under it as under a disastrous stroke of fate, as under a curse. He might overlook the fact that his flesh could be so mistaken as to desire her, a Jewess, but that he had to love her, “genuinely and truly,” that he had to see her as “his female counterpart,” that he was “in spiritual bondage” to her — this drove him to despair. He drew the inevitable conclusion: volunteering for the front that very day, he hurled himself into the thick of battle and was dead within a few hours — but he had saved her life, obtaining papers for her, food, a secure hiding-place ….
The gray-haired man with the large box of marrons glacés under his arm (a box whose contents would suffice to kill a horse, if the horse tried to consume them at one swoop, not to mention a ninety-four-year-old woman) pulls up his coat collar: it is drizzling, he has no hat, headgear never suits him, under hats, caps, hoods, his face looks oddly asexual, his masculinity must be located in his forehead and in the short-cropped iron-gray hair above it, his mouth is effeminately soft with his mustache removed, even though the not-all-too-full lips have narrowed over the years. He knows it: it’s the mouth of an old crone. Not a pleasant face, he has to tell himself, even though he has been told there is a great deal of charm, a great seductiveness in the way he speaks, in his liveliness, alertness, and even at times lascivious malice—“your goddamned charm,” as his second, Jewish wife used to say, “your abominable, disreputable charm” …
yes, but behind this disreputable charm, which sometimes strikes even him as abominable, he sees an often astonishing naïveté—more distinct (because of the contrast) in the mustachioed lothario who sat here twenty years ago on the Via Veneto, elegant in the by no means unintended, not unflirtatiously selected, unconventional, vacationlike casualness of his clothing (as though the blue Mediterranean lay right behind the walls of papal Rome; as though the palms of Hammamet were growing right there), to all appearances blasé and urbane, a man who wasn’t born yesterday, who can do anything, and who throughout his checkered career has pretty much learned all the tricks of the trade — and yet a childlike, round-eyed believer in miracles like the one that you could change the world by filmmaking ….
that’s how he sees himself here, among all sorts of whores and pimps: ready to transfigure the surrounding world for himself, redreaming it into the world that was promised him in earlier stages of his existence — although promised only in his dreams, promised only as an eternal wish. Nevertheless he never tires of reinventing it for himself; he sits here, knowing he is surrounded by nothing but different varieties of prostitution: the straightforward, unadulterated prostitution of female flesh, of boys’ flesh, intellectual prostitution, the prostitution of talent, of ambition, of faith, of enthusiasm — he sees all this accurately, he has no delusions about it. In this respect, he only knows he will draw his nourishment from the wealth of images which he takes in like a whale taking in plankton, the pigment with which he can transfigure Rome—
for he is prepared to love this city, he has sought it out as a final refuge, as the last colorful nook in a leukemic Europe. All through his life he had felt alive only to the extent that the world around him seemed alive. And Rome in its ancient decay appears alive as a compost heap. This is the only legacy he has for his son, and he is determined to will it to him. The unhappy little bastard should at least become a European. In other respects, the boy resembles his father only in a shadowy, ghostly way. Then at least in this one respect there is to be semantic harmony. He is prepared to fight all the more energetically for this random son (still and all his only son!), now that the divorce has been granted and the child awarded to her. He wants to use any legal and, if necessary, illegal means to get him here, to Rome, into his custody. He even considers kidnapping him if all else fails—
for he wants to defend the child against her, against her restlessness, her insecurity and stupid insistence on the absolute, her (as he puts it, “not always housebroken”) fanaticism. Once, when they were making a halfway peaceful attempt to agree on the boy’s upbringing, she screamed at him, “I’m the mother!” and he himself lost his composure and screamed back, “That’s precisely the kind of lie I want to protect him from!”—whereupon, disarmed by her incomprehension, thrown back on his irony, he shrugged and turned away while she hurled back at him with a sonorous theatrical laugh and thespian gestures, “You?! You?! …”
“Well, I’m waiting,” he snapped maliciously over his shoulder. “You can’t just stop at two dramatically meaningful ‘You!’s. You ought to drop from your high-toned theater German to the yiddling level and blurt out, ‘You! Of all people! …’ Your sense of style should have obliged you to do so: Neo-Realism instead of Weimar.”
Too bad. But stupidity is unforgivable. Besides, their being at daggers drawn, mangling one another furiously, had begun very early, right after the child was born. He remembered the pang in his heart when he learned it was a boy and not a girl. A girl would be she, would be her likeness increased by him, a creature to be worshiped. He had ardently wished it would be a girl. That it had to be a boy struck him as fatefuclass="underline" he could not say, then, why he regarded racial mixture as a boon in a girl and as a curse in a boy. Today he knew: a boy was he himself as a Jew; a monstrosity, a kind of curse — he had felt that, back then, but had not dared to admit it to himself. Nor had he understood back then that the quarrel erupting between them had concerned only one thing: the conception of “Truth”; they had never come to terms with what this actually meant.
Not even when the argument had assumed outright criminal proportions. He recalled a certain day: the little boy, five years old, had contracted a childhood disease, measles or something of the sort — he tended to make light of such matters, he also wanted to spare the boy the torments caused by his own mother’s maniacal anxiety; the circumstances were very different, of course: while he himself had been a fairly robust child, his little son (he almost said resignedly, “Naturally!”) was frail, susceptible — in any case, the child was in bed and had been looking forward so much to the father’s visit that his temperature rose steeply; the father was no longer living with the wife but visited the boy as often as he could, though his work kept him so busy that he seldom managed to come; now he was sitting by the sick child’s little bed, telling him stories — talking into the disquieting, huge, belladonna-black eyes, telling him stories from the forests of the Carpathians, from his own childhood there: many wonderful and dreadful tales about deer, weasels, and falcons, about bears and lynxes, about flute-playing shepherds and poachers and brigands hiding out in the immense woodlands … and she, the mother, hatefully called to the child, “Don’t believe a word he says! He’s lying!”