In accordance with his rank and position, my grandfather was unconditionally loyal to Emperor Francis Joseph I. This was not in contradiction to the Italian origins of the family, which he proudly acknowledged, but rather was strengthened by these ultramontane traditions. The Rezzori name derives from a fief in Sicily which, until the Bourbons, had belonged to the Holy Roman Empire of German Nations. Thus, Rezzoris had always been loyal subjects of the Habsburg monarchy. After an offspring of the family by the name of Ambrogio, as ambitious as he was poor, migrated to Vienna in 1750 by way of Lombardy (an Austrian possession at the time), the Austrianization of the family proceeded with all due speed: Ambrogio’s son still was called Giovanni Battista, but his son bore the name Johann Nepomuk. And Johann Nepomuk’s son was none other than my grandfather Wilhelm. Though he liked being called Guglielmo and spent every moment he could spare from his official duties on the Adriatic, he was a Habsburg subject through and through. Quite in contrast to my father, Hugo, who was swept along by the Sturm und Drang zest of the Greater Germany movement.
This was a secondhand Storm and Stress, fomented by the murkiest impulses of the time. When in later years my father, having become at least as conservative in spirit as his progenitor, ranted against the calamitous consequences of the French Revolution, he overlooked the fact that one freakish revolutionary offshoot was surely the Napoleonic Wars, which in turn helped to produce the disastrous German nationalism to which he had fallen prey so blindly in his youth (including its raging anti-Semitism). The strange reciprocity between spirituality and daimon inherent in any enthusiasm — enthusiasm that often deteriorates into fanaticism and corrupts the original purity of great ideas (and, inversely, filters pure intentions and aspirations from what is foul, placing them in the service of the devil) — seems to emerge quite regularly with each new generation. And nothing seems more difficult for the young than to elude the currents of their time. My grandfather’s cast-iron monarchical loyalty had no argument strong enough to muster against the collective folly of youth; on the contrary, it served only to inflame his son’s pigheaded stubbornness.
This led to unpleasant scenes. That he was sent from the family dinner table because, with an irony anticipating that of Musil’s, he asserted in the presence of guests that the Emperor Francis Joseph I was certainly not the model for all of Austro-Hungary’s full-bearded janitors but, rather, that it was he, first servant of the state, who assiduously emulated the janitors, this is to be counted among the more harmless conflicts. Much worse was that he adhered to the Break with Rome movement and left the Catholic Church. A final rupture became unavoidable when he participated in the Badeni riots. Count Badeni, minister of the Interior at that time, provoked the German nationalists by favoring the Czechs in a school reform. The students took to the streets, my father was arrested and, as an ardent admirer of Georg von Schönerer, challenged a high police official to a duel in which shots were exchanged. As a result, he was stripped of his newly acquired commission as an officer in the reserves, which meant the end of the many hopes his father had entertained for his future.
He hesitated at the university between chemistry and mathematics but finally decided in favor of structural and civil engineering. What determined his choice was not so much that conforming with the career notions his father still held for him was more promising than the uncertain future of a so-called free profession: rather, he was swayed mainly by the chance to get as far away as possible from his mother, as well as from the bureaucratic environment, which struck him as stuffy and confining. The Austrian monarchy in those days stretched all the way to the southeastern corners of Europe: a colonial empire whose colonies happened to be located contiguously on the same continent. And there was room in it to realize adventurous pioneer aspirations. He joined a railway construction project in the recently acquired province of Herzegovina, which at the time seemed as remote from civilization as Karl May’s wildernesses of Kurdistan. When he had earned his first spurs in that service and after some grass had grown over his rebellious aberrations, my grandfather used some pull. Together with a new chief provincial administrator, my father was assigned to the Bukovina: the position was a sinecure.
He played excellent tennis, which led to his introduction to my mother and to their subsequent engagement. She was what is called a good catch — and not only as a tennis partner. So everything now seemed to follow a track toward orderly, normal circumstances. However, long before the First World War eradicated an era of European history and disrupted the old order, it became apparent that this no longer young gentleman hardly fitted the unsettled conditions of the times. He was an anachronism, though in an entirely different way from my mother: she had been molded entirely by an obsolete past, but he belonged to a type whose time had not yet come; to a high degree, he was the “artistic human” Nietzsche anticipated — his nonconformism, his rebellion against the bourgeois social framework, his manifold talents and minitalents, his urge for independence. But he saw himself rather as a representative of the world of the Baroque who had landed in the wrong century.
He attended to his hunting with scientific thoroughness and at the same time with an almost cultic observance of its traditions, all the age-old lore that invests the hunt with solemn poetry. He intended to train me in the medieval rigor of venery’s three disciplinary phases: “houndsgroom” to “small-game apprentice” to “stag maturity’’; unfortunately, as in all his other pedagogic endeavors, he had only moderate success. Nevertheless, our relationship changed fundamentally as soon as I was able to handle a gun. As a child, I had feared rather than loved him. When he punished in anger, he wasn’t choosy as to the means he used: the closest dog whip came in handy. He seemed much fonder of my sister than of me, but she belonged to the female category of the species and as such was the opposite of everything manly that was connected to hunting. That the divine protectress of the hunt in antiquity was a goddess, Diana (or, as he preferred to call her in humanistic pedantry, Artemis), was not a contradiction. He was fond of expatiating on this subject: Artemis was not truly a woman but a virago — a male spirit in a female body, beyond all sexuality, in a higher kind of virginity. A mortal was among her retinue of nymphs: Atalanta, forsaken child of King Oinoïs of Arcadia, a great hunter who had wanted a son and rejected his daughter. Abandoned Atalanta was nursed and nurtured by a she-bear and accepted by the goddess in her cortege of hunting companions. When she became nubile, she was compelled to leave and return to the world of mortals, cast out from divine purity back into the gloom of the sexual. It wasn’t as if my father disdained this domain of human nature; he experienced the carnal with full-blooded vitality. But he chose to believe his own daughter immune to its enticements. He would have wished her to be a virginal nymph like Atalanta who, upon her homecoming, had become the perfect hunting companion for her father. Because my sister was nothing of the sort — she showed no disposition at all for the hunt — he sought the ideal hunting buddy in me, one to whom he would pass on all he knew and loved.
From that moment on, I was no longer a child to him (he hated children). Even though I was still a boy, he considered me a small man and as such possessor of an honor that was not to be violated; he no longer punished me corporeally — the disgrace of a blow could be expiated only in blood, and he expected me to appreciate this. He castigated any carelessness in the handling of arms and the slightest misuse of hunting terms. I was not yet a dozen years old when I was no longer forgiven for errors when I confused antlers with attire or hornings; rutting with mating; singles with brushes; or when speaking of fowl, of fangs or clutches (in the case of birds of prey), of webs (of swimmer birds) or, exceptionally, of simple feet (in the case of the Tetraonidae: capercaillie, woodcock and hazel hen). In comparison to this rigidly esoteric terminology, Cassandra’s linguistic patchwork was moronic babble, and I wisely took good care not to let any of her distortions enter my speech with my father.