No, I can’t tell you everything about being rich, because it would take all night — not just one night, but a thousand nights, and then another thousand, just as in the fairy story, I could talk for a thousand nights, for years on end. So I won’t go on to list everything there was in their cupboards, their chests of drawers, how many outfits and accessories they had, but, believe me, it was like a vast theatrical wardrobe, something to fit every occasion, each part, every second of life! It’s just impossible to go through all that! I’d rather tell you what they were like inside, in themselves. That’s if you’re interested. I know you are. So you just lie there and listen.
You see, it became clear to me after a while that all that great pile of things — the treasures and trinkets with which they packed their rooms and cupboards — weren’t really necessary. They didn’t need them. Certainly, they pushed things to this or that side but really they weren’t concerned whether anything could actually be used, and if so, for what. The old man had a store of clothes to suit an aging character actor. But he, you see, slept in a nightshirt, wore braces, emerged from the bathroom with his mustache tied up, and he even had a little brilliantined mustache brush with a tiny mirror on top … He liked to walk around his room in a worn old dressing gown whose elbows had worn through even though he had a half a dozen silk ones hanging in his wardrobe, stuff he had been given as birthday or name-day presents by Her Ladyship.
The old man grumbled a bit but was generally pleased that most things were shipshape. He looked after the money and the factory and adapted well to the role he partly created, partly inherited, though secretly he would have preferred to drink spritzers and play skittles in the afternoon at a nearby inn. But he was smart and knew that whatever a man produces in some ways produces him. It was that man who told me that once, the artistic one, that everything turns against you, and that you’re never free, because you are always captive to the thing you created. Well, the old man had created the factory and the money and was resigned to the fact that he was bound to these things and could never escape them. That’s why he didn’t go to play skittles in Pasarét in the afternoon, but played bridge instead at a millionaires’ club somewhere in the center of town, no doubt with a wry expression on his face.
There was a kind of bitter, ironic wisdom in the old man that I can’t forget. When I brought him his orange juice on a silver tray in the morning, he looked up from his English newspaper that he had been scanning for stock-market news, pushed his glasses up on his brow, and put his hand out for the glass in his shortsighted way … but there was a bitter smile playing about his lips under the mustache, the kind people pull when taking some medicine in which they have no faith … He dressed with the same expression. And there was something about that mustache. His mustache was cut like Franz Joseph’s — Uncle Joe, you know — it was one of those k und k jobs, proper empire. It was as if the whole man was a leftover from another world, from a time of real peace, where masters were really masters and servants were really servants, when great industrialists thought in terms of fifty million people at a time, when they manufactured a new steam engine or a modern pancake-maker to order. That was the world the old man sprang from, and it was clear that he found the new mini-world too small, too narrow. There was, of course, the small matter of the war.
He had this mocking smile under his mustache, a mixture of self-contempt and general disdain. The whole world was ridiculous to him. That was how he dressed, how he played tennis, sat down to breakfast, kissed Her Ladyship’s hand, whenever he was being delicate and courteous … it was all somehow contemptible, fit for ridicule. I liked that about him.
I grew to realize that all the stuff they packed the house with was not for use as far as they were concerned: it was just a form of mania. You know how it is when people suffer a breakdown and have to keep repeating certain obsessive acts, like washing their hands fifty times a day and so on? That’s the way these people bought clothes, linen, gloves, and ties. I remember ties particularly because I had a lot of trouble with them. It was my job to keep my husband’s and the old man’s ties in order. Enough to say they had quite a few ties between them. There is no color in the rainbow that was not covered among those ties: bow ties, dress ties, ready-tied ties all hanging in their wardrobes, arranged in color order. I don’t suppose it’s impossible that there might even have been ties in shades beyond ultraviolet. Who knows?
On the other hand, no one dressed more simply, more soberly than my husband. He never once wore anything conspicuous. You’d never catch him with a loud or vulgar tie. God forbid! He dressed in what they call “best bourgeois taste.” I once heard the old man quietly say to his son: “Look at that ridiculous man there, dressing like gentry.” He was pointing at someone wearing a short fur coat with a drawstring and a hunter’s cap. They avoided anyone that was not of their class, the class that, according to them, constituted civil society. Being respectable members of society, they owed nothing either to those below or above them.
My husband somehow always succeeded in wearing the same clothes: a suit made of heavy charcoal-gray material. And a plain, dark, neat tie to go with it. Of course he changed his outfits with the seasons and according to the customs of the house, society, and universal taste. But when I think of him now … he rarely comes to mind, occasionally in dreams, and he’s always looking at me as if he’s cross about something. I don’t understand why! I always see him in a dark suit, a solemn, double-breasted gray suit, like a kind of uniform. The old man was similar. He always seemed to be in an old-fashioned suit with a frock coat that generously covered his paunch. That’s what I always imagined him in, anyway, and I think it actually was like that! They took great care that their environment, their very lifestyle, should always be discreet, retiring, colorless. They knew what money meant; even their grandparents were rich, Grandfather being a highly placed bureaucrat and wine grower. They didn’t have to learn to be wealthy the way some Johnny-come-lately bumpkins do now, the kind who love nothing better than wearing a silk top hat as they climb into their brand-new American cars. Everything about the house was quiet, like the color of their ties. It was just that, deep down, secretly, they always wanted more. Things just had to be perfect. That was their obsession. That’s why the wardrobes were overflowing, why they could never get enough of shoes, linen, and ties. My husband took no notice of fashion: he just knew what was necessary and what was superfluous. It was in his blood. But the old man was still not completely confident in all the ways of high society. I’ll give you an example. In one of his wardrobes, on the inside of the door, he had a printed English-language table of what color clothes and what sort of tie it was appropriate to wear on what occasion. On a rainy Tuesday in April, for example, the drill might be to wear a dark-blue suit with a pale-blue striped tie, and so on.
It’s really hard being rich.
So I mugged up on it — wealth, that is. I studied with them for years, drinking it all in. I studied wealth as religiously as children study catechism at the village school.
It was only after a while I understood that it wasn’t a matter of this or that outfit, this or that tie, not really, but something else. They wanted to be perfect. That was what they were obsessed with: perfection. That’s why they were crazy. Perfection seems to be the rich man’s plague. It’s not a set of clothes they want, it’s a clothes store. Nor is one store enough. If there is more than one wealthy person in the house, it takes several stores. Not because they need or use them: just so they should have them available.