Extinction (11 page)

over
statements were in fact monstrous
under
statements and that the Wolfsegg I had described to him was idyllic by comparison with the real Wolfsegg. Gambetti, I said, you can’t imagine Wolfsegg; you’ve never had the opportunity to visit such a hideous dolls’ house. There’s no other such hideous dolls’ landscape in the world. My father, I said, is a puppet of well over seventy, with moribund
limbs and a head that’s become dull and hard from being tugged at all its life. My brother is a puppet in its forties that similarly doesn’t resist the constant tugging at its head and has given up defending itself against its unspeakable puppet mother. The Germans have a mother fixation, I said, and so have the Austrians. Mothers are not to be questioned, mothers are sacred, but in fact most of them are perverse puppet mothers who tug at the heads of their families until they’ve tugged them to death. Germany and Austria don’t have mothers like those in the Latin countries, who are natural mothers, not puppet mothers, I said. In Germany and Austria there are only puppet mothers, who spend all their lives relentlessly tugging at their puppet husbands and puppet children until these puppet husbands and puppet children have been tugged to death. In Central Europe there are no longer any natural mothers, only artificial mothers, puppet mothers who bring artificial children into the world. Even in the remotest Alpine valleys you won’t find natural mothers any longer, only artificial mothers. And it’s self-evident that an artificial mother invariably gives birth to an artificial child, which goes on to procreate another. As a result we now have only artificial human beings, not natural human beings. It’s a fallacy to call human beings natural, for none of them is. What we have now is the artificial human being, and we’re alarmed when we come across a natural human being again, because it’s something we’re not prepared for, because for so long we’ve been confronted only with artificial human beings, who’ve been ruling the world for ages, a world that long ago ceased to be a natural world and is now thoroughly artificial, Gambetti, an artificial world. The artificial world produced the artificial human being, and conversely the artificial human being produced the artificial world. Nothing is natural any longer, I said. We start from the premise that everything is natural, but that’s a fallacy. Everything is artificial, everything is artifice. Nature no longer exists. We always start from the contemplation of nature, when for ages we should have been starting from the contemplation of artifice. That’s why everything’s so chaotic. So false. So desperately confused. Where there’s no nature there can be no contemplation of nature, Gambetti—that must be obvious. The photo of my brother getting into his sailboat on the Wolfgangsee shows him posing as a happy person, but in the photo he is the unhappiest person imaginable. In the photo taken in
front of Uncle Georg’s villa in Cannes my sisters are frozen in an expression of happiness that makes them look far unhappier than they really are. My father and mother, pictured at Victoria Station in London, look as unhappy as they are, while trying to look happy. I wonder why it is that when people have themselves photographed they always want to look happy, or at any rate less unhappy than they are. Everybody wants to appear happy, never unhappy, to project a falsified image, never a true image of the unhappy person he is. Everyone wants to be portrayed as good-looking and happy, when they are in fact ugly and unhappy. They take refuge in the photograph, they deliberately shrink into the photograph, which produces a totally false image, showing them as happy and good-looking, or at least not as ugly and unhappy as they are. What they demand of the photograph is an ideal image of themselves, and they will agree to anything that produces this ideal image, even the most dreadful distortion. It never strikes them how appallingly they compromise themselves. The good-looking person in a photograph is invariably the ugliest, the happy one invariably the unhappiest. They have photographs taken of themselves and hang them on their walls as representations of a happy and beautiful world, though in reality it is the unhappiest, ugliest, and falsest of all worlds. All their lives they stare at the happy pictures on their walls and are gratified by them, though they ought to be appalled. But because they don’t think, they are shielded from the awful knowledge that they are unhappy, ugly, and false. They even show visitors these pictures in which they think they are portrayed as happy and good-looking people, though the visitors can see at a glance how ugly, unhappy, and stupid their hosts really are. They are not even ashamed to show them to people who actually know them and can therefore recognize them on the photos as mendacious and totally false individuals, totally lost souls. We live in two worlds, I told Gambetti—the real world, which is mean, depressing, and ultimately deadly, and the world of the photograph, which is thoroughly false, though it is regarded by most people as the ideal world. If you deprived people of their photographs, if you ripped them off their walls and destroyed them, once and for all, you’d deprive them of more or less everything. Hence, there’s nothing people cling to so much, nothing they rely on so much, as the photograph. The photograph is their salvation, Gambetti. At this Gambetti
laughed and called me a
forenoon fantasist
. I had never heard the expression before and it made me laugh. Gambetti joined in my laughter, and we both savored the joke. Without the art of exaggeration, I told him, we’d be condemned to an awfully tedious life, a life not worth living. And I’ve developed this art to an incredible pitch, I said. To explain anything properly we have to exaggerate. Only exaggeration can make things clear. Even the risk of being branded as fools ceases to worry us as we get older. In later years there’s nothing better than to be declared a fool. The greatest happiness I know, Gambetti, is that of the aging fool who is free to indulge his foolishness. Given the chance, we should proclaim ourselves fools by age forty at the latest and capitalize on our foolishness. It’s foolishness that makes us happy, I said. I put the photograph of my brother, Johannes, at the top and the one of my parents at Victoria Station at the bottom. The effect was amazing: my brother and my parents related quite differently to my sisters, who were now in the middle. My sisters were always defensive in their attitude to my brother, though not as obviously as in their attitude to me; their defensiveness toward him was more covert. They needed him, but they did not need me. He was their future provider, and so they always had to treat him quite differently from me, from whom they had nothing to fear. To their parents, their immediate providers and protectors, they owed respect and consideration, and therefore subservience. To Johannes too, their indirect provider and protector, they owed respect and consideration, but only when necessary, not all the time. To me they owed neither, because they never saw me as a potential provider and protector. I was easiest to deal with, the one to whom no respect was due. But they still had to consider me—for a quite different reason: they had to protect themselves against me, because I always appeared unpredictable and inscrutable, though they never regarded me as a vital person on whom they were dependent, or would be one day. One day they would be dependent on Johannes, but not on me. Their dependence on their parents automatically called for respect, consideration, subservience, and so forth. Though according me neither respect nor consideration, they were wary of me. The position of my brother’s photo, now at the top, signified that he was the most important member of the family, whereas my parents, now at the bottom, counted for much less. My
sisters did not have an easy time with any of them—either with their present providers and protectors, due shortly to step down, or with their brother, due shortly to take over. I was accorded neither respect nor consideration; at first I was feared, but only until I left Wolfsegg more or less forever. I naturally posed no threat to them from Rome, or even from London or Vienna. I no longer counted, as they say. And now, I thought, looking at their two mocking faces, disaster has overtaken them, for now
I
am the one they depend on—there’s no doubt about that. With my parents and my brother dead, Wolfsegg has passed to me. This is a legal fact. Three weeks earlier I had said to Gambetti, When I get back from Caecilia’s wedding I won’t return to Wolfsegg for a long time. Wolfsegg is over for me. I no longer have any reason to go there; I no longer need Wolfsegg, and the people there don’t need me. What is the wine cork manufacturer like? he asked. I tried to tell him. I also told him what a dreadful place Freiburg was—petit bourgeois, Catholic, unbearable. But maybe this man’s a good match for Caecilia, I said. He could be her salvation. I never expected either of my sisters to marry. They had never shown any inclination, and their parents, especially their mother, did all they could to prevent their marrying. My aunt in Titisee engineered this marriage, I told Gambetti,
this utterly ludicrous alliance
. Just imagine: a wine cork manufacturer suddenly gains entrée to Wolfsegg! A Catholic petit bourgeois who had to be told by my mother that one didn’t turn up for dinner wearing suspenders! A German from the most German corner of the sticks, I told Gambetti, from the Black Forest, where the foxes say good night and German stolidity reigns supreme. I was not afraid of the wine cork manufacturer, or of my sisters. Yet although I was not afraid of them, it was clear that I would find them trying, desperately trying, in this dreadful situation. Occasionally it had occurred to me, as I once told Gambetti, that Amalia might marry one day, but never Caecilia. And now there they are, wholly reliant on me, with the intensest expectations and misgivings. Perhaps the grave has already been dug, I said to myself; perhaps the black banners are already draped from the windows at Wolfsegg. The last time the black banners were out was when Uncle Georg died. Half an hour after getting word of his death they were all running around in black. I wished Uncle Georg was still alive. He would have made everything much easier for
me. The mocking faces of my sisters, captured on the photo, are doubly comic, I thought. The mockery comes from having been dominated by their mother for so many years, I told myself. These mocking faces were their only weapon. Amalia has withdrawn to the Gardeners’ House and now hates Caecilia, and Caecilia probably married the wine cork manufacturer just to spite her mother, who had always forbidden them to make overtures to men. Amalia must hate the one who got away. She at once made common cause with her mother in the hope of destroying Caecilia’s marriage. Knowing her as I do, she’s probably sitting on a stool in the Gardeners’ House, wondering how best to break up her sister’s unexpected and wholly undesirable marriage. Mother and daughter hatched a plot against Caecilia’s marriage. No good will come of this marriage between my sister and a wine cork manufacturer from the Black Forest, I had told Gambetti before leaving for the wedding. Sooner or later it’ll come apart. They’re all against it, and Caecilia is no match for the wine cork manufacturer, stupid though he is. My sister’s triumph, the trick she’s brought off, will one day end in disaster, I told Gambetti. She won’t stick it out in the Black Forest. She suspects this already: that’s why she didn’t want to go to the Black Forest with her husband straight after the wedding. She thinks she can stay on at Wolfsegg without him, but that’s absurd. She’ll have to go with him, like it or not. He’ll force her to. You can’t enter into a marriage just for appearance’ sake and in order to punish your mother, and then refuse to make it a real marriage. This man must feel totally out of place at Wolfsegg, totally miserable, I told Gambetti, and if it’s money he’s after, I think he has completely miscalculated. He has nothing whatever to expect—Mother will see to that. She’s known and feared for her shrewdness in legal matters. If he isn’t a fortune hunter, I said, I wonder what made him marry Caecilia? Caecilia’s anything but attractive, anything but marriageable. And the same goes for Amalia. But of course we often wonder what couples find attractive in each other, what induces them to marry. How is it possible—why
these
two? we ask ourselves, and we find no answer. We may know somebody as a certain type of person and be convinced that he will under no circumstances marry this or that person whom we know equally well. We find it totally inconceivable, yet these very people do marry, and no one can say that the marriage will be
unhappy—though quite often it turns out to be the unhappy marriage that we foresaw and warned against, without being listened to. Perhaps the wine cork manufacturer thinks he’s chosen the right moment, I told Gambetti, but I think he’s made an enormous mistake. You see, my sister Caecilia is as artful as a wagonload of monkeys, and so is Amalia. Stupidity doesn’t preclude cunning. And it’s a well-known fact that the stupidest people are the most dangerous—that is to say, when stupidity is allied with baseness, I told Gambetti, without feeling the least compunction. It occurred to me now that I had only ever told Gambetti disagreeable and distasteful things about my family, because I had always thought it quite natural to reveal my feelings, and in recent years I had had the most disagreeable and distasteful feelings for my family. There had been no occasion to tell him of any other feelings. Disagreeable things. Distasteful things. Absurd things at best. And I had never felt embarrassed about it. You must never dissemble with Gambetti, I always told myself, you mustn’t let him catch you in a lie or any kind of dishonesty. After all, you’re his teacher, and a teacher is expected to be truthful and honest—that goes without saying. Your relationship with Gambetti is one of absolute trust. You must never take refuge in prevarication, let alone lying, even if this makes you appear inconsiderate, even mean. And there is no doubt that I am at times inconsiderate and mean. It is a danger that no thinking person can avoid; he has to reckon with it, resign himself to it, and live with it. He must plead guilty and not try to deny his guilt. Wolfsegg has become absolutely impossible, I told Gambetti. The atmosphere there is stifling—it’s enough to drive you to distraction! On the other hand, Gambetti, if only you could see those magnificent rooms, those vaulted ceilings, those hallways, and the