In due course, Eugen returned with no tale to tell about his disappearance. One family story has it that Emma promptly put him in the poorhouse. But some of the cousinage have found their gravestones, side by side, in a Catholic cemetery at Racine. Her place of birth is given as Carthage. This was the best Racine could do with Cartagena where she had been born, thanks to the Peninsular War: She was a daughter of the Swiss captain of the Spanish king’s guard. Gene had no interest in history, his own or anyone else’s, so what he might have been told by his grandparents and others he had long since forgotten by the time I started asking questions. One aunt recalled having seen Eugen Fidel who spoke with a heavy German accent and every evening wore a frayed red velvet jacket. I have two small boxes containing slips of paper addressed to him by classmates from Lausanne, wishing him luck, presumably in the New World. I could find no references to medicine or any other profession in these slips of paper. I did discover that his maternal grandfather had been burgermeister of Feldkirch while family legend has it that Emma had had a falling out with the Jesuits who effectively governed Feldkirch from their vast monastery on a hill overlooking the town. The fight had to do with a contested piece of property, which she lost, thus explaining an anticlerical streak in the entire family ever since.
Along with numerous essays I was novel-writing again, in longhand on yellow legal pads which were then typed up by an eccentric American woman who had worked for a time for Lawrence Durrell and had many stories to tell, mostly about his apparently prodigious capacity in the kitchen and at the dinner table. Briefly, she had been involved with a Jewish American and they had moved to Tel Aviv, where she had expected a brilliant intellectual life like nineteenth-century Prague. “Instead,” she grumbled, “it’s just another hopelessly incompetent Mediterranean city like Rome.” In the end she moved back to Rome and a lifetime of irritability. Since I had no expectations of Rome other than its history, in which I was marinated from what seems like birth, what bored her enchanted me. But in the end I, too, was bored and so was Howard. From Klosters I did some research in the files of St. Stephen’s Church. Although birth and death certificates were missing, there was a full record of everyone’s marriages. Apparently in the 1580s we moved on south to Friuli, to a village called Forni a Voltri where we lived until, as the record bleakly puts it, the father of Eugen Fidel returned home to “the empire”…to Feldkirch where the Vidals had a prosperous pharmaceutical business with a number of outlets including, I assume, Forni a Voltri and Venice itself. When my father died he left me a stained-glass medallion with a picture of a bearded man wearing a hat. Back of him are jewel-like vases containing drugs. A man wearing a sword waits patiently for his fix. The man at the counter is my ancestor Caspar Vidall and the date is 1589. On my first visit to Feldkirch I visited the shop with its vast cellars where every sort of chemical had been stored. My last trip to Feldkirch revealed that the tradition-loving Austrians had torn down Vidalhaus, built in 1300. I did learn that another interesting family had lived there in our time: the Frei family who later emigrated to Chile where two members became president. The medallion which has passed from eldest son to eldest son since the 1500s is all that is left of our time in the Austrian empire.
The Freis had, I am told, the best pastry shop in Feldkirch. I suggested to a dull biographer that he write the current Frei for information but, alas, because I had begun my first memoir with an ironic joke about memoirs being “tissues of lies” he assumed that everything I’d written in my own memoir was a lie to be relentlessly probed by his resolute dullness. The biographer, himself Jewish, was positive we were Spanish Jews who had converted in the fourteenth century at the time the family business began in Feldkirch. I thought this romantic and thought no more about it. Then on October 2, 1990, one Robert E. Wachs wrote: “Dear Mr. Vidal, I came upon something which may be of interest to you. I was walking through the Montparnasse cemetery in Paris last week, and saw in the Jewish section of that cemetery a gravestone for Vidal-Bouvier. The name struck me because I seem to recall that you are related to Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, but assumed that Bouvier was Catholic, and that neither Vidal nor Bouvier was Jewish.”
Since the death of the apothecary Caspar Vidall, this stained-glass medallion from 1589 has descended from eldest son to eldest son until 1969 when my father died and the medallion came to me. Caspar presumably lived in Vidalhaus in Feldkirch, Vorarlberg (Austria), where he can be seen at work preparing some sort of potion for a carriage-trade gentleman. My one visit to Vidalhaus was in the 1960s and I was struck by the huge cellars where the drugs from a network of such shops extended across the then Austro-Hungarian empire all the way down to Friuli and Venice. The family Vital was Romanisch and a branch still lives in the Engadin. Under fascism Mussolini insisted that the mountain folk add vowels to their names so Vital became Vitale; the “t” had become a “d” as early as the 1580s. Also at home in Vidalhaus was a family of pastry makers called Frei; they emigrated to Chile where, in recent years, two of them became president.
I’ve always known that Vidal was a name Jews took in troubled times since the Latin root vita vitalis for Vidal in Italian means “life,” as does the Hebrew Chaim. Though my quarrel with Bobby K. had ended my friendship with Jackie I couldn’t resist sending her a copy of the letter with the note: “I’d heard about me but not about you.” I fear she did not sprint to the letter box to confess. Now my far-flung readers have come up with a more plausible origin of name and family. I’d always taken it for granted that we were Romanish people placed in the Alps by Tiberius to defend the frontiers. The Romano Raetians are the smallest Swiss minority with their own difficult Latinate dialect honored by Swiss law. Recently, I received a letter from a reader in Sent, a town near Saint Moritz in the Engadine valley. Mr. Not Vital wrote, “I was astounded and very proud to read that you are a Raetoromansh, so am I. During lunch with my mother here in Sent, I told her that your grandfather was Felix Vidal. She looked at me: ‘Fila Vidal [Fila is Felix in English] left Sent for America.’ ” Unfortunately, my grandfather Felix Vidal was born in Racine, Wisconsin, the son of Eugen Fidel Vidal born in Feldkirch in 1820 who emigrated in 1848. How best to claim so exotic a heritage!