Extinction (23 page)

Siebenkäs
was an invention of Jean Paul. However, as she had no idea who Jean Paul was, I had to add that he was a writer and that
Siebenkäs
was one of his books. Oh, she said, if only I’d known! I thought
Siebenk
ä
s
was something you’d invented to spite me. I thought you were just playing a nasty trick. I laughed uproariously over this disclosure on the way from the Hassler to the Austrian Embassy, as I had every reason to do, but she remained silent. Then she asked me if it was really true that Jean Paul was a writer and that
Siebenkäs
was one of his works. She did not believe it at first, having never believed anything I told her. So
Siebenk
ä
s
is a book by a writer called Jean Paul, my mother said more than
once on the way to the Austrian Embassy. During the first part of our walk to the embassy she hardly said another word, but when we were halfway there she suddenly asked, And is Kafka a writer too? Yes, Kafka’s a writer. What a pity, she said. I thought you’d invented them all! What a pity! She could not get over the fact that Jean Paul and Kafka were writers, the authors of
Siebenkäs
and
The Trial
, and not inventions of mine designed to trick her. So now, I said to Gambetti, you can see the intellectual state my family is in. That Wolfsegg is in. Five libraries, Gambetti, and not the foggiest notion of our greatest writers, to say nothing of the epoch-making philosophers, whose names my mother has never heard of, at least not consciously. My father knows their names, of course, but even he has no idea what these people thought and wrote. Being a farmer, he has always had a primitive contempt for the intellect: cows and pigs mean everything to him, the intellect more or less nothing. If my father could choose between the company of Kant and that of a prize porker, I told Gambetti, he would instantly plump for the porker. I didn’t introduce you to my mother when she was in Rome, Gambetti, because she wouldn’t have understood you. She would only have found fault with you, for not wearing a necktie, for instance, or for carrying a work of philosophy under your arm instead of an income tax table. Though you actually missed something, I said. We arrived late for the embassy dinner, of course; everyone else had arrived and was waiting for us. These people stand around and run one another down, showing off about their backgrounds and decorations, constantly telling you that they’ve been accredited in China, Japan, Persia, and Peru, stirring the stale old diplomatic broth, repeatedly declaring that they know God and the world and nothing else, and that they are as bored in their city apartments as they are on their country estates. They talk about books as if they were a kind of tasteless crispbread, and they know as much about conducting a symphony orchestra as they do about Spinoza, as much about Heidegger as about Dante, yet to the keen observer they always appear to have seen everything and nothing. All in all, my mother doesn’t cut a bad figure at such receptions, because she keeps up her normal role without seeming out of place and diverts her metropolitan audience with her lighthearted country chatter, in which the futility of her fatuous existence comes into its own. As her escort I am
condemned to silence and ultimately to playing the fool for her. When we left the embassy, at about midnight, she again asked me whether I had told her the truth about Jean Paul being a writer and
Siebenk
ä
s
being one of his books. Having never believed anything I told her, Gambetti, she disbelieved me on this point too. My mother came to Rome only to satisfy her curiosity, I said, because she had to know
where and how I lived
. Impelled by this curiosity, she got on a train one day and came to Rome to spy out the land, as Uncle Georg would have put it. The Piazza Minerva meant nothing to her, and the Pantheon was just a weird name she’d heard somewhere. All the same, the fact that I had taken one of the finest apartments in Rome and actually occupied the whole of it made a big impression on her.
A real palazzo
, she exclaimed on seeing the building where I had my fourth-floor apartment. With a view of the Pantheon, I told her, as you’ll see shortly. She couldn’t wait.
You really live like a prince
, she said, even before she’d seen the apartment, and her tone was almost reproachful.
That’s a tremendous doorway!
she exclaimed, standing in front of the palazzo and looking up at the marble facade. I’d pictured it all quite differently, she said. I suggested she should go in and walk up to the fourth floor with me. There’s no elevator, I said—that wouldn’t suit you. As she went up the stairs, she turned around every few moments to exclaim,
Like a real prince!
The fact that the house—I didn’t say
palazzo
—has no elevator makes the apartment relatively cheap, I told her, but the rent I have to pay is still one of the highest. I couldn’t refrain from saying this as I went up the stairs with her to my apartment, now three steps in front of her, now behind her. There was a certain solemnity about it all, as you can imagine, Gambetti. At last we reached the fourth floor and stood outside the door of my apartment. She was a little put out to see no nameplate on the door. No nameplate, she said, so not even the postman knows you live here.
You always loved being anonymous
, she said before we entered, to which I replied that it had always seemed more agreeable to preserve my anonymity. She, by contrast, was always anxious to make herself known as somebody special, though she never knew quite what it was about her that was special. Looking at the photograph of my parents boarding the Dover train at Victoria Station in London, I remembered
how
my mother had entered my apartment on the Piazza Minerva. Once inside, she was both astonished
and alarmed. At first it took her breath away and she had difficulty finding words to express her feelings. I, meanwhile, having unlocked the door of the apartment, couldn’t help thinking of something totally absurd, Gambetti. Many years earlier my mother had lost one of her strongbox keys, which was never found. She searched not only her own rooms but all the other rooms, and she had others search them too, but the key was nowhere to be found. Suddenly she suspected me of having taken it for some reason that she couldn’t fathom, though clearly I had done it out of some base motive, as she put it. She accused me, on no grounds whatever, of getting rid of the key as soon as suspicion had fallen on me, out of dire necessity, so to speak, surmising that at the very last moment I had thrown her strongbox key down the well shaft outside her window in order to avoid being unmasked as a common thief. The well shaft had dried out long before. And just imagine, Gambetti, my mother gave orders for it to be searched, and she looked on as one of the gardeners was lowered down the shaft by a workmate to retrieve the key that I, the
limb of Satan
, was supposed to have thrown into it as a last resort. Naturally the gardener didn’t find the lost key, which couldn’t have been in the shaft because I hadn’t thrown it there, except in my mother’s lurid imagination. The gardener emerged from the well shaft and repeatedly assured her that the strongbox key wasn’t in the well, that there was
nothing
in the well but an old half-rotted shoe. The fact that there was no key in the well shaft, but only a half-rotted shoe, so incensed my mother that she swore at the gardener. She swore at me too—in pretty foul language, I must say—and went on swearing until late that evening. For days after the gardener’s unavailing descent into the well shaft she continued to tell me, You took the key, and even if you didn’t throw it down the well shaft, you
got rid of it, somewhere or other
. Even today I haven’t been cleared of this suspicion. I’m still under a cloud: after all these years my mother is still convinced that I made the strongbox key disappear. Of course I never took it, Gambetti. I can’t imagine why I would have done so, for what purpose. It would never have occurred to me. No sooner had I unlocked the door and let my mother and myself into the apartment than I thought of this typical incident, which says more about our relationship than any other. It’s one of the most revealing incidents, I told Gambetti, perhaps the most revealing.
As my mother entered the apartment I was thinking all the time of how she had once had the well shaft searched because she thought I had thrown her strongbox key into it for some nefarious purpose. The process of unlocking the door of my apartment had brought to mind this incident from the remote past, and I went on thinking about it, but I didn’t tell my mother what it was that preoccupied me more than her first visit to my apartment, not even when she became uneasy, upset by my odd behavior, and asked what was on my mind.
Nothing
, I said. I was careful not to reveal that I was thinking about the affair of the strongbox key in the well shaft and was more preoccupied by this memory than by the fact that she was paying her first visit to my apartment in the Piazza Minerva. To do so might have revived an unpleasant quarrel after so many years, Gambetti. I was afraid of quarreling with my mother, and still am. On this occasion she had left my father alone at Wolfsegg, though I know he would have liked to come to Rome. She had persuaded him that his presence at Wolfsegg was absolutely indispensable.
You can’t leave Wolfsegg at a time of such uncertainty
—this was her invariable remonstrance, I thought as I contemplated the photograph.
You can’t leave the huntsmen when the hunting season is on
, she had told him, at the same time assuring him that it wouldn’t be much fun for her in Rome without him, accustomed as she was to traveling with him as her
protector
, which is what she often called him in playful flattery. Not that she really regarded him as her protector, which he wasn’t and never had been. So she came to Rome by herself to find out what I was up to, or so she told my father and Johannes, but once here she spent most of her time with her friend Spadolini, who was already a senior Vatican official and had attained the rank of archbishop at an early age. She spent every night with Spadolini, and whenever I called the Hassler—at eleven, at twelve, at half past one or at three—I was told that the
signora
was not in. That’s the truth about my mother and her visit to Rome, for which I was merely the pretext, Gambetti. I was the excuse she gave my father for coming to Rome. She had known Spadolini ever since he was a minor counselor to the papal nuncio in Vienna. I can’t say that I’ve ever disliked Spadolini. On the contrary, he’s
a quite fascinating figure
and I’ve nothing against my mother’s keeping up her acquaintance, or rather her friendship, with him and cultivating it for decades, but I do object to the
secretiveness
of their association, which is
actually an affair
, Gambetti. And I also know that this was not the only time, or even the last, that my mother was in Rome. She’s often flown to Rome to meet Spadolini, alleging an urgent trip to Vienna, just to spend one or two nights with him. Spadolini has often been to Wolfsegg too, where he’s been put to the embarrassment of celebrating mass in our chapel, decked out in all his finery as though he were celebrating at Saint Peter’s. My mother is hooked on ceremonial and loves ecclesiastical pomp more than anything else. I suspect that the only reason she is such a keen Catholic is that she loves Catholic pomp and, above all, Catholic funeral rites, I told Gambetti. She was fascinated by the idea of having an archbishop in the house and, what’s more, one of the highest Vatican officials, and she has yielded to this fascination on every occasion. For a long time my father failed to see through her duplicity, and when he did, it was too late, as the pair had already perfected their plot. But of course Spadolini is an extraordinary personality; otherwise he wouldn’t have risen so high in the hierarchy, I told Gambetti. Aside from this unappetizing affair with my mother, I have the highest regard for him. He’s an extremely intelligent and cultured man. After all, he’s been nuncio in Lima, Copenhagen, and Paris, and in New York and Madrid—that’s not nothing, Gambetti. And all the languages he speaks, and the thousands of books he’s read, and all the things he’s seen and heard! The astonishing thing is that a man like him should have taken up with my mother, such an utterly superficial woman, and remained attached to her. She came to Rome to meet him, using me as the pretext, I told Gambetti. On the surface she had to visit her son, so that under the surface, as it were, she could meet the archbishop, which amounts to a degree of duplicity that’s nothing short of contemptible. Just imagine: she flew to Palermo for two days with Spadolini, then spent another two nights with him at Cefalù. I’ve nothing against that, Gambetti, but I find the duplicity distasteful. I really don’t know anyone more cultured, anyone I value more highly, than Spadolini, except yourself and Zacchi. Such a highly sensitive character, with such a fine mind, yet carrying on such a sordid clandestine affair with my mother for years, for decades. But my mother learned nothing from Spadolini. Maybe what fascinates him about her is her frivolity, her silliness, I told Gambetti. During the day she did the rounds
of the Roman shops with me, and at night she met Spadolini in Trastevere, as I happen to know. But not, like us, just to eat fish, drink wine, relax, and enjoy the ambience, Gambetti, not just that. The two of them visited various dives near the so-called dog destruction unit, which you know, and weren’t at all disturbed by the terrified howls of the strays that were brought in to be destroyed. Of course I won’t divulge the source of my information, I told Gambetti, not even to you. Spadolini, this intelligent man and outstanding scholar who has written so many excellent works, this genius in the art of speech and the art of silence, who has always exercised a tremendous fascination over me! When he first came to Wolfsegg it seemed to me that we had never had such a splendid guest. You can’t imagine how thrilled I was, Gambetti, when he first said mass at Wolfsegg, wearing his pentecostal vestments. I came very close to jettisoning all my doubts about the Catholic Church when I first saw him. Such a handsome man, and with such manners, uniquely natural, yet at the same time uniquely artificial. The truth is that I instantly fell in love with Spadolini. But he was always a thorn in my father’s side. He could do nothing against him. My mother decided when Spadolini should visit us and when she should visit Spadolini, her lover, in Vienna, in Paris, or finally in Rome. I’ll go and see Spadolini, she told herself, and then told my father she was going to see me. Possibly she pretended to me that she had only just arrived in Rome when she turned up at the Hassler that afternoon. She may have been in Rome with Spadolini for days—who knows? I wouldn’t put anything past her. Spadolini took her to the opera, Spadolini went with her to Naples, Spadolini hired a taxi to take the two of them to Bari to see a mutual friend, as I happen to know. Spadolini, you know, is a man who fascinates women; all the ambassadors’ wives fall for him, jostling to kiss his hand and look up into his eyes, their knees atremble. And it would of course be wholly unnatural for a man like that to be lost to the secular world, I told Gambetti, but it’s unfortunate that from the hundreds of women who would have succumbed gladly to his matchless charm he should have singled out my mother. I am the lie that makes their liaison possible, Gambetti. My father, of course, has not just an inkling but