And I jotted down all these little details because even then I had the feeling that there will never be the likes of such an establishment again. I certainly don’t mean to imply that there was something particularly rare or precious about the place; it merely had something to do with a coincidence of time, a phenomenon difficult to describe. If twenty clocks are hanging on one wall and you suddenly look at them, every pendulum is in a different place; they all tell the same time and yet don’t, and the real time flows somewhere in between. This can have an uncanny effect. All of us who at the time boarded at the Pension Nevermore had our own particular reasons for being there; we all had something more to do in Rome than just spending time, and since the summer heat only permitted us to carry out a tiny portion of our task each day, we met each other again and again at our home away from home. There was, for instance, the little old Swiss gentleman; he was here to represent the interests of a Protestant sect, not much larger than himself, a group that wanted to build a Protestant chapel in papal Rome, of all places. Despite the burning sun, he always wore a black suit; on the second vest button lower down hung a black medallion in which a golden cross was set. His beard really sat to the right and left of him; it sprouted so thinly from his chin that you only noticed it from a distance. In the proximity of his cheeks, this beard completely lost itself, just like on his upper lip, which was naturally beardless. The hair on this old gentleman’s head was blond-gray and unbelievably soft; and his complexion might well have been rosy, but since it was white, it was as white as freshly fallen snow, in which a pair of gold-rimmed glasses are lying. Once when we were all chatting in the parlor, this old gentleman said to Mme. Gervais: “Do you know what you need? You need a king in France!”
I was surprised and wanted to come to Mme. Gervais’ assistance: “But aren’t you Swiss and a republican yourself!?” I insisted. And here the little man radiated out over his golden glasses and answered us: “Oh, that is quite another matter! We’ve been a republic for six hundred years, and not for forty-five!” So much for the Swiss gentleman who was building a Protestant church in Rome.
With her sweet smile, Mme. Gervais responded: “If there were no diplomats and newspapers, we would have eternal peace.” “Excellent, vraiment excellent!” the old gentleman, pacified again, agreed and nodded with a titter that sounded so very refined and unnatural, as though he had a young goat trapped in his throat; he had to lift one leg from the ground to lean back in his easy chair toward Mme. Gervais.
But only Mme. Gervais could offer such sage responses. The first time I saw her, the profile of her delicate Titus-head on her slender neck, adorned with a dainty ear, stood out in relief against the dining room window, in front of which she sat like a rose-colored stone set in sky-blue silk. Her fastidious hands equipped with knife and fork, her arms drawn in upon themselves, she shaved the skin off the body of a peach she had speared. Her favorite words were: ignoble, mal élevé, grand luxe, and très maniaque. She also often said digestion and digestif. Mme. Gervais liked to tell how she, the good Catholic, was once in a Protestant church in Paris on the emperor’s birthday. “And I assure you,” she added, “it was much more refined than ours. Much simpler. None of that undignified pomp!” — That is what Mme. Gervais was like.
She argued in favor of a German-French accord, because her husband was a hotelier. More accurately, he was making a hotel career: One needs to experience everything, dining room, bar, room service, office. “Just as an engineer needs to work the vice!” she put it. She was an enlightened woman. She was enraged at the memory of how a black prince, a complete gentleman, was snubbed by Americans at a Paris hotel. “So he just went like this!” she demonstrated, enacting a delightfully disdainful turn of the lips. The classical, noble ideals of humanity, internationalism, and human dignity combined in her with the precepts of the hotel business to create a perfect unity. She did like to add, however, that as a girl she took automobile trips with her parents, and that she went here and there in the company of this or that attaché or consular secretary, or that her acquaintance, the Marquis So-and-so, had said this and that. But when talking of the hotel business she made no less of a to-do that a friend of her husband, in an establishment that prohibited tips, took in 800 Deutsch marks in tips a month, whereas her husband, in a place that permitted tips, made only 600 Deutsch marks. She always had fresh flowers with her and traveled with a dozen doilies, with the aid of which she made a little home of every hotel room. There she welcomed her husband when he was not working, and she had an arrangement with Laura, who would wash her stockings for her as soon as she took them off. She was in fact a brave woman.
Once I noticed that her little mouth could also appear fleshy, although the overall effect of her person was that of a somewhat elongated, extremely delicate angel; if you looked closely, her cheeks also rose much too high above her nose when she laughed; but strangely enough, though I found her less pretty thereafter, we spoke more seriously with each other from that point on. She told me of the sadness of her childhood, of her early and lengthy illnesses and of the torments she had to endure from the moods of a paralytic, invalid stepfather. Once she even confessed to me that it was for this reason that she married her husband without loving him. Just because it was time to take care of herself, she said: “Sans enthousiasme, vraiment sans enthousiasme!” But this she only confessed to me a day before my departure: She always knew just the right thing to say, and addressed her listeners from the depths of her soul.
I would like to be able to say something similar about the lady from Wiesbaden, who likewise belonged to our household; but unfortunately, I have forgotten a lot about her, and the little that I do remember leads me to believe that the rest would not suit my intention. The only thing I still recall is that she used to wear a skirt with vertical stripes, so that she looked like a high wooden lattice on top of which an unpleated white blouse hung. When she spoke, it was invariably to contradict, and this usually happened in approximately the following manner: someone said, for instance, that Ottavina was beautiful. “Yes” — she immediately added — “a noble Roman type.” Meanwhile she looked at you with such certainty, that for the sake of preserving world order, you had to correct her, whether you wanted to or not; for Ottavina, the chambermaid, was from Tuscany. “Yes” — she replied — “from Tuscany. But a Roman type! All Roman women have noses attached directly to the brow!” Now Ottavina was not only from Tuscany, but she also did not have a nose attached directly to her brow; nonetheless, the lady from Wiesbaden possessed such a lively spirit that a preconceived notion always popped out of her head simply because other preconceived notions elbowed it out. I am afraid she was an unhappy woman. And perhaps she was not a woman at all, but a girl.
She had traveled by boat around Africa and wanted to visit Japan. Apropos of this, she told of a girlfriend who had drunk several glasses of beer and smoked forty cigarettes, and she called her a swell chum. When she talked like this, her face looked terribly dissolute, with too much skin and crooked slits for a mouth, nose, and eyes; you thought at the least that she smoked opium. But as soon as she no longer felt herself observed, she had a perfectly proper face that stuck in the other like little Tom Thumb in seven-league boots. Her highest ideal was the lion hunt, and she asked us all if we thought one needed a great deal of strength to go on one. Courage — she said — of courage she had plenty, but was she also up to the hardships? Her nephew was trying to talk her into it because he would just love to be taken along; but for such a twenty-two-year-old rascal it was a different matter altogether, was it not? The good world-traveling aunt indeed! I am convinced that under the African sun, she will give her nephew a good strong slap on the shoulder, and that the lion will slip away, as did Mme. Gervais and I whenever we got the chance.