Extinction (2 page)

But I can’t abolish my family just because I want to
, again forced their way to the forefront of my mind and seized possession of me. I tried to stifle them, but they would not be stifled. I no longer enunciated them clearly but gabbled them to myself several times, trying to make them seem ludicrous, but despite my attempts to stifle them and make them seem ludicrous they became all the more menacing and suddenly acquired a greater force than any words I had ever uttered. You can’t drown out these words, I told myself—you’ll have to live with them. This realization brought a sudden calm into my situation.
But I can’t abolish my family just because I want to
. I spoke the words once more, but this time in the tone I had used to Gambetti. They now meant what they had meant then. Except for the pigeons, there were no living creatures on the Piazza Minerva. Suddenly feeling cold, I shut the window and sat down at my desk. My mail still lay on it, including a letter from Eisenberg, a letter from Spadolini, the archbishop who is my mother’s
lover
, and a note from Maria. I immediately threw the invitations from various Roman cultural institutes and all the other private invitations into the wastepaper bin, together with a few letters that a cursory inspection revealed as begging or threatening, letters written by people who either wanted money from me or demanded to know what I was trying to achieve by my lifestyle and my way of thinking. They referred to a few newspaper articles I had published recently, which naturally did not suit the writers because they had been directed against all such people—people in Austria, of course, whose hatred pursued me as far as Rome. I have been getting such letters for years. The writers are not madmen, as I had at first believed, but individuals who are legally responsible—fit to plead, so to speak—yet who react to my publications in various newspapers and magazines, not only in Frankfurt and Hamburg but in Milan and Rome, by threatening me with, among other things, prosecution and death. I am always dragging Austria in the dirt, they say, denigrating my own country in the most outrageous fashion and crediting the Austrians with
base and despicable Catholic and National Socialist opinions whenever and wherever I can, whereas according to the writers, no such base and despicable opinions exist in Austria. Austria is not base and despicable, they say; it has
never been anything but beautiful
, and the Austrians are decent people. I always throw these letters away, as I had done that morning. I had kept the letter from Eisenberg, a college friend who is now a rabbi in Vienna, telling me that he had to be in Venice at the end of May and inviting me to meet him there. He intended to take me to the Teatro Fenice—not to see anything like Stravinsky’s
Soldier’s Tale
, which we had seen the previous year, but to see Monteverdi’s
Tancredi
. I’ll naturally accept Eisenberg’s invitation, I thought. I’ll write to him at once, but
at once
means
after I get back from Wolfsegg
. It’s always been a delight to walk through Venice with Eisenberg, I thought. It’s a delight just to be with him. Whenever he comes to Italy, if only for a few days in Venice, he lets me know in advance, I thought, and he always invites me to what he calls an
artistic treat
, which a performance of
Tancredi
in the Fenice is bound to be, I thought. I had also been sent a copy of the
Corriere della Sera
containing my short article on Leoš Janáček. I opened the newspaper expectantly, only to find that my article was not printed in a prominent place—which immediately put me in a bad humor. Moreover, a cursory glance revealed a number of unpardonable printing errors—which is the worst thing that can happen to me. I threw the
Corriere
away and reread the note that Maria had dropped in my letter box. My great poet wrote that she wanted to have dinner with me on Saturday,
just with you
, she wrote, adding that she had also written some poems—
for you
. My great poet has been quite productive recently, I thought. I opened the drawer in which I kept a few photographs of my family. I looked intently at a picture of my parents at Victoria Station in London, boarding the train for Dover. I had taken it myself, without their knowledge. They had visited me in London in 1960, when I was a student there. After spending two weeks in England and traveling as far as Glasgow and Bristol, they went on to Paris, where my sisters were waiting for them. My sisters had traveled to Paris from Cannes, where they had been staying with my uncle Georg. In 1960 I was still on tolerable terms with my parents, I thought. I had wanted to study in England, and they had not opposed the idea, as they must have assumed that after
studying in England I would return to Vienna and ultimately to Wolfsegg, in order to fulfill their wish that I join my brother in managing the estate. But even at that time I had no intention of returning to Wolfsegg. I had in fact left Wolfsegg for England and London with the sole thought of never returning to Wolfsegg. I hated agriculture, to which my father and brother were passionately devoted. I hated everything connected with Wolfsegg, where the only thing that mattered was the economic well-being of the family. Nothing else mattered. For as long as Wolfsegg was in my family’s hands, no one had time for anything but maximizing the profits from its production units—its farmland, which even today covers twelve thousand acres, and its mines. They thought of nothing but how best to exploit their property. Of course they always pretended to be taken up with activities other than profitmaking, to be interested in culture and the arts, but the reality was depressing and embarrassing. True, they had thousands of books in their libraries at Wolfsegg—the house has five libraries—and the books were dusted three or four times a year with absurd regularity, but they were never read. The family kept the libraries sparkling in order to be able to display them to visitors without feeling ashamed, to show off and boast about their treasures, but they never made any practical or personal use of these treasures. The five libraries at Wolfsegg, four in the main house and one in an adjacent building, were founded by my great-great-great-grandparents, and my parents never added a single volume to the collections. It is said that our libraries, taken together, are as valuable as the world-famous monastery library at Lambach. My father never read a book. Occasionally my mother would leaf through old scientific works, enjoying the finely colored engravings that adorned their pages. My sisters never visited the libraries at all, except to show them to visitors who expressed a wish to see them. The photograph of my parents taken at Victoria Station shows them at an age when they still traveled widely and were not yet afflicted by illness. They were wearing the raincoats they had just bought at Burberrys, and carrying umbrellas on their arms, also from Burberrys. Like typical continentals, they tried to be more English than the English, and the consequent impression was grotesque rather than refined and elegant. I had to laugh every time I saw this photograph, but now my laughter was gone. My mother’s neck was rather too long to be considered
beautiful, and at the moment when I took the photo—as she was getting on the train—it was stretched forward an inch or two more than usual, which made the picture doubly ridiculous. My father’s posture was always that of a man who could not hide his bad conscience from the world and was consequently unhappy. When I took the photo he had his hat pulled down lower than usual over his forehead—which made him look more gauche than he really was. I’ve no idea why I’ve kept this particular photo of my parents, I thought, but one day I’ll discover the reason. I put it on the desk and looked in the drawer for the one I had taken of my brother on the shore of the Wolfgangsee. It showed him on his sailboat, which he kept all year round at Sankt Wolfgang, in a shed rented from the Fürstenbergs. The figure in the picture is an embittered man, ruined by living alone with his parents, and the sporty attire only partly conceals the illnesses that have already taken possession of him. He has a forced smile, as they say, and only his brother—only I—could have taken the photo. When I gave him a copy, he tore it up without saying a word. I now placed the photo of my brother beside that of my parents boarding the Dover train and studied them for a long time. You loved these people as long as they loved you, I told myself, and hated them from the moment they hated you. Naturally I never thought I would outlive them. In fact I always imagined that
I
would be the first to die. The present situation is the one situation I’ve
never
envisaged, I thought. I had considered every other possible situation time and again, but never this. I had often dreamed of dying and leaving them behind, of leaving them alone without me, of freeing them from me by my own death, but never of being left behind by them. The fact that
they
were now dead and I was alive was not only utterly unforeseen, but quite
sensational
. It was this sensational element, this overwhelming sensation, that I found shattering, not the simple fact that they were dead, irrevocably dead. Though my parents had been pathetic in every way, I had always regarded them as demons, and now suddenly, overnight, they had shrunk to the ridiculous, grotesque photo that I had in front of me and was studying with the most shameless intensity. The same was true of the photo of my brother. All your life you feared these people more than any others, I thought, and this fear cast a monstrous blight on your life. All your life you tried repeatedly to escape from them, but you always failed.
You went to Vienna to escape from them, to London, to Paris, to Ankara, to Istanbul, and finally to Rome—all to no avail. They had to have a fatal accident and shrink to this ridiculous scrap of paper called a photograph before they could cease to harm you. The persecution mania’s over, I thought. They’re dead. You’re free. Looking at the photograph of my brother on his sailboat at Sankt Wolfgang, I felt sorry for him for the first time. In the photo he now seemed far more comic than when I had first looked at it. I was alarmed by my ruthless honesty. My parents too looked comic in the photo taken at Victoria Station. All three of them, lying on the desk in front of me, not four inches in height, fashionably dressed and in grotesque physical attitudes that betrayed mental attitudes no less grotesque, were even more comic than when I had looked at them before. The photograph reveals only a single grotesque or comic moment, I thought, not the person as he really was more or less all his life. The photograph is a perverse and treacherous falsification. Every photograph—whoever took it, whoever is pictured in it—is a gross violation of human dignity, a monstrous falsification of nature, a base insult to humanity. On the other hand, I found the two photos immensely characteristic of both my parents and my brother. That’s how they really are, I thought—or were. I could have brought many other photographs of my parents and my brother from Wolfsegg and kept them in my desk. The reason why I brought these is that they show my parents and my brother as they really were when I photographed them. I did not feel in the least ashamed of this thought. It was not fortuitous that I had brought these particular photographs to Rome and kept them in my desk instead of destroying them. What I have here are not idealized images of my parents, I told myself, but my parents as they really are—or were, I said, correcting myself again. And my brother as he really was. All three were so timid, so ordinary, so comic. I’d never have put up with falsifications but tolerated only true and genuine likenesses, however grotesque—and possibly repulsive. And it was this photo of my parents that I once showed to Gambetti, a year ago. I even remember where—at the café on the Piazza del Popolo. He looked at it, but made no comment, though I recall that after looking at it he asked,
Are your parents very rich? Yes
, I said. I also remember that I later felt embarrassed at having shown it to him. You should never have shown him
that
photo, I told myself at the time. It was stupid. There were—and still are—countless photos that show my parents looking
serious
, as they say, but they do not correspond to the image I have always had of them. And there are serious photographs of my brother, but they too are misrepresentations. I would never have shown Gambetti any of these misrepresentations. In any case there is hardly anything I detest more than handing photographs around. I do not show people photographs, and I do not let them show me theirs. The fact that I showed Gambetti the one of my parents at Victoria Station was quite exceptional. What made me do it? Gambetti has never shown me any of
his
photographs. Of course I know his parents, and his brothers and sisters, so there would be no point in his showing me pictures of them; he would never think of it. Basically I detest photographs, and it has never occurred to me to take any, except for the ones taken in London and Sankt Wolfgang, and another that I took in Cannes. I have never owned a camera. I despise people who are forever taking pictures and go around with cameras hanging from their necks, always on the lookout for a subject, snapping anything and everything, however silly. All the time they have nothing in their heads but portraying themselves, in the most distasteful manner, though they are quite oblivious of this. What they capture in their photos is a perversely distorted world that has nothing to do with the real world except this perverse distortion, for which they themselves are responsible. Photography is a vulgar addiction that is gradually taking hold of the whole of humanity, which is not only enamored of such distortion and perversion but completely sold on them, and will in due course, given the proliferation of photography, take the distorted and perverted world of the photograph to be the only real one. Practitioners of photography are guilty of one of the worst crimes it is possible to commit—of turning nature into a grotesque. The people in their photographs are nothing but pathetic dolls, disfigured beyond recognition, staring in alarm into the pitiless lens, brainless and repellent. Photography is a base passion that has taken hold of every continent and every section of the population, a sickness that afflicts the whole of humanity and is no longer curable. The inventor of the photographic art was the inventor of the most inhumane of all arts. To him we owe the ultimate distortion of nature and the human beings who form part of it, the reduction of