Nor was I the man to tame her. I had such profound respect for the thus-and-thus-alone of any living creature that I couldn’t summon up the courage to take the darkest innermost parts of a human and shape them and light them. It’s not possible to be an educator if you have diffidence in your veins. Nor was I masterful in love, not least because my senses in their guilty darkness were unfree. All this requires to be said: it’s the hidden source of all that follows, otherwise no one could understand how things took their subsequent course.
Guilt: the word makes me flinch, but from the very beginning there was guilt in my relationship with Ganna. I never felt any passion for her. I didn’t realize it right away. It took me a while to understand. Once I had understood, I had to fight off Ganna’s sudden surges of passion with secret dread. She misunderstood me. She had to misunderstand me, because otherwise she would have fallen out of the sky. I couldn’t allow that to happen. I had to see that she stayed up there for as long as possible. It wasn’t so terribly hard. She took refuge in fantasy. I was Robert Browning and she was Elizabeth Barrett. The model of a highly intellectual marriage made it possible for her to reinterpret my growing reluctance to give her the much-craved protestations of love as a metaphysical union. I had to admire the tenacity with which she managed to live in a fantasy. My admiration for her was altogether undiminished. I was able to discuss all my plans with her. Within a very short time she had mastered all the technical expressions of a hard-boiled novelist. When news I had from Germany left me in no doubt that my book was not only a critical but also a popular success (though that didn’t lead to any great earnings for me, seeing as I’d changed publishers, and my former publisher was insisting on a large transfer sum and the return of unearned advances), I noticed that she lost the calm and equilibrium that had previously cladded her being like a sort of enamel. It appeared she was no longer so certain of me. I asked her directly if that was so. Reluctantly, she admitted it was. She thought it was her duty to keep the lures of the world and the blandishments of fame away from me. ‘Whatever for?’ I asked in astonishment. ‘What are you afraid of?’ She said she had no guarantees of a future. ‘Do you need guarantees, Ganna?’ Of course, she replied, the present wasn’t enough. ‘But surely,’ I said, ‘you can’t carry me around with you like a kangaroo her joey?’ Yes, she could, that was exactly what she wanted, she replied with her sweetly cunning smile. She wanted security. She hungered for more security. She admitted it. I stroked her hair. I called her little soul, the tenderest endearment the German language has to offer.
BANK ACCOUNT AND ANANGKE
In Taormina we stayed in a hole-in-the-wall dive. There were bedbugs. The mosquitoes ate us alive, there were no nets. At night Ganna burned all sorts of incense, but that only made us choke with the reek and smoke. If we’d had just two lire a day more to spend, we could have lived somewhere human. Ganna didn’t want to know. Keeping to budget was her biggest anxiety. Budget was one of the magic words that turned up on the horizon shortly after we were married, like so many glow-worms in the gathering dark. The concept ‘budget’ was linked to the concept ‘bank account’. ‘Bank account’ was the biggest and mightiest of the glow-worms, and of course another magic word. Her father had dinned it into her never on any account to eat into her capital, not even to use a dime more than we had from the interest. ‘Someone who eats into his capital will stop at nothing,’ had been the Professor’s awful watchword. Ganna was now parroting it. Her father, more revered the further he receded into the distance, was so to speak the high priest of ‘capital’, a revered fetish, and he kept his mighty hand over the mysterious institutions of those tamper-proof investment papers that were the basis of the bank account. So many securities.
Ganna knew of course that the majestically round figure of 80,000 crowns had already been reduced by the sum that had been necessary for the cancellation of my debts. She had come up with a financial plan to make good the missing amount. Following this plan, we were to use not the full four and a half per cent interest of 3,600 crowns, but only 3,000; the rest was to go to the capital, and any further expenses were to be defrayed from my income. I thought the plan was inspired. It called for extreme economies. Every bedbug and mosquito in Signor Pancrazio’s wretched quarters was physical proof of the guarantee system of the head priest and the gilt-edged tabernacle. What touching lengths Ganna went to to prove to me that my ironic contempt for these divine securities was based on folly and ignorance. She spoke nobly of the ethos of self-restraint and the moral duty to twist the sword from the grip of fate, as it stood there menacing the noble-minded. Immersed in her Plato, the pencil in her hand to scribble in the margin of her copy, her girlish brow creased, she pointed to the irresistible force of anangke, before which everyone had to bow. I was impressed. I said she was right. Truth to tell, it wasn’t me who was in charge of the money. Even if the bank account was kept in my name, I submitted to Ganna’s economies without demurring. I was in the position of a man whom pride and self-respect kept from laying a hand on the preserve of others.
A PRIMAL CREATURE?
I undertook to climb Etna and had promised Ganna to be back by the evening of the third day. I got lost in the lava fields, moreover the weather turned and I was compelled to seek shelter in a shepherd’s hut. That delayed my return by six hours. Ganna had been waiting for me in growing impatience. By six o’clock she had alerted Signor Pancrazio and his household. Two hours later, crying, she demanded that the police be notified and a detachment of carabinieri sent out to look for me. At eleven o’clock the pleading of the landlord’s entire family and other German guests was not enough to dissuade her from pulling on her raincoat, and she sobbingly set off down the pitch-black lane, followed by Pancrazio’s two sons, who were eventually able to prevail on her to turn round. When I arrived at around midnight she hurled herself at my chest with a piercing scream, like a madwoman. Pancrazio and his family, shaken by such a display of conjugal fealty, treated her thenceforth with an awed respect of which only Italians are capable. With delightful sapience, a fourteen-year-old girl expressed the supposition that the signora must be expecting. Which soon enough proved to be the case. Two days later, when a south wind flung the yellow dust of the Sahara over the island, shrouding the scene in eerie yellow twilight, Etna spat fire and the frightened populace organized propitiatory processions, Ganna, with wide Sibyl’s eyes, intoned: ‘Now do you understand my fear? I could feel it coming. It was already in me.’ Oppressed, I asked myself how I was to cope with such lack of restraint in future. I really believed there was some connection between her and the dark forces of nature. I wondered how such a primal creature could have slipped out of the sober bosom of the Mevis family.
RETURN
Pregnancy was not on the agenda. We had decided not to have children for another two years. You can’t go gadding about the planet with an infant in tow. It was in Rome that, trembling with happiness, she came to me with the great news. A crowned head could not have been more diligent than Ganna in the business of making an heir. She sent for medical literature from Vienna. She observed a stringent diet of her own devising. She found a German doctor and consulted him for hours on end. She treated the temple of her body with loving care. Inside and outside, she went around on tiptoe. Her one and only thought was of the child. Her only concern was that it should be beautiful, beautiful and important. She was certain she had it within her power. Like a farmer’s wife, she believed in the effect of transferred shock and so she avoided ugly sights. She spent her mornings in the Vatican collections and sat with avid, adhesive eye before the statuary. She bought a postcard of the Neapolitan fresco of Narcissus. She put it up over her bed and gazed at it with hypnotic devotion, before going to sleep and when she woke. She thought nothing was beyond her illimitable will — not even influencing an embryo in the womb. I wasn’t allowed to say anything otherwise she would get angry. Ironic remarks annoyed her. She had no use for irony. She didn’t think she was someone to be smiled at, she thought she was holy. And there was something else as well. The ultimate security she thirsted for — she had it now. Since she didn’t want to have her baby in a foreign city, and she was missing her family, we went back to Vienna in the autumn.