Extinction (9 page)

cupboards in the other rooms. At an early age the prospect of having to spend the next few decades consuming all the jam that was stored in these jars, carefully labeled by my mother and sisters, filled me with a permanent loathing for everything jarred, especially jam. The larders also contained hundreds of jars full of preserved chicken thighs, pheasant thighs, and pigeon thighs, which were of a dull yellow color that never failed to nauseate me. Although we ate gradually less and less jam and less and less jarred fruit at Wolfsegg, my mother and sisters jammed and jarred increasing quantities; having been obsessed with jamming and jarring for as long as I could remember, they could no longer be cured of this obsession. And every week they made bread crumbs from the stale bread, so that we had whole galleries of jars full of bread crumbs, which were never used, as we no longer had schnitzels, Viennese cooking having gone out of favor. We went in mostly for Parisian-style cooking, which was to my mother’s taste, and at Wolfsegg her taste prevailed in all things. Looking at Wolfsegg, one could see quite plainly that hers was the predominant taste. As soon as she moved in she got rid of all the things my father liked and replaced them with whatever she liked. My
father’s house
, I have to say, became my
mother’s house
, and not to its advantage, as is testified by the countless aberrations in the furnishing of the rooms. And not only the rooms: everything at Wolfsegg, even the gardens, gradually came under my mother’s influence and has consequently been deteriorating for a long time. For centuries the gardens at Wolfsegg had formed a park, cultivated in accordance with certain strictly observed principles, until my mother transformed it radically. At one time, as I know from old prints, the grounds consisted of a great tract of natural landscape, but they have since been converted into a more or less conventional and excruciatingly dreary park that could almost be described as suburban. Everything bears Mother’s imprint, so to speak. I have to say that her big ideas have gradually diminished everything. A woman who comes up from nowhere is not necessarily a disaster for an estate like Wolfsegg, but my mother was. My father was weak and lacked the force of character to call a halt to his wife’s megalomaniac idiocies. Indeed, he approved of everything his wife wanted and considered it the sum of all wisdom, welcoming all her errors of taste and extolling them as something good, outstanding, and even magnificent,
with the result that she felt increasingly entitled to regard herself as the
savior of Wolfsegg
and to act accordingly. Yet all the time she was in fact its greatest despoiler. And she soon turned my sisters into obedient and unquestioning assistants, who propagated and promoted her tasteless ideas whenever they could and in time became her two most dangerous mouthpieces. These mouthpieces were always standing, sitting, or lying in wait. Sisters like these are capable of darkening an inherently happy scene, I once told Gambetti. On an estate like Wolfsegg such a mother and such characterless sisters can turn day into night whenever they choose. And they’ve darkened so many days, even years, at Wolfsegg. They’ve quite simply turned the light out on us all, for no other reason than that they felt like it. When a man like my father marries, I told Gambetti, he turns the light out on himself. He no longer lives as he did previously but gropes around more or less clumsily in the darkness, to the delight of those who created the darkness. Men like my father are at first reluctant to embark upon any liaison, let alone marriage, and they continue to put it off until suddenly, fearing that they will otherwise be lost and become a laughingstock, they run into a trap laid by some scheming woman. The trap immediately snaps shut and proves fatal, I told Gambetti. My father, unlike Uncle Georg, was naturally made for marriage, I said, but not to a woman like my mother. He married a woman who destroyed and betrayed him. Naturally I love my mother, I told Gambetti, but I am not blind to her meanness and destructiveness. Baseness comes into its own, I told Gambetti, and morality becomes a joke. Of course there are counterexamples, where a woman appears on the scene and actually saves
everything
. But
this woman, our mother
, was bent on destruction. On the other hand, I told Gambetti, this may just be the way I see it. It may be that the situation is really quite different and that without my mother the disaster that’s befallen Wolfsegg would be
even greater
. Uncle Georg often described the conditions that my mother introduced at Wolfsegg as his
biggest stroke of luck. My calculations worked out
, he often said. And I have to admit that my own calculations worked out too. It is probable that my development would have been quite different if Wolfsegg had developed differently and my father had married a different woman. I would not be the man I am if Wolfsegg had been different. On the whole I consider myself lucky, especially as I can
live in Rome, I told Gambetti, so I’ve no reason to speak of Wolfsegg as a disaster all the time. Yet perhaps I have a sense of guilt, I said, to which I have to admit, over the rather inconsiderate manner in which I left Wolfsegg in its present state. As we know, we hate those who provide for us, and this is partly why I hate Wolfsegg, I told Gambetti, for Wolfsegg provides for me—whether rightly or wrongly is beside the point. We feel hatred only when we’re in the wrong and because we’re in the wrong. I’ve gotten into the habit of thinking—and saying!—that my mother is revolting, that my sisters are equally revolting, and stupid with it, that my father is a weakling and my brother a pathetic fool, that they’re all idiots. I use this way of thinking as a weapon; this is basically contemptible, but it’s probably the only way to assuage a bad conscience. They could just as well rail at me and pillory me for the same malevolence that I’ve discerned in them all these years. We very soon get used to hating and condemning people without ever asking ourselves whether this hatred and condemnation are in any way justified. All in all, we should have most sympathy with
poor people
, I told Gambetti, because we know ourselves and know that they, like us, lead a miserable existence, whether they want to or not, and have to come to terms with it. Why are we always more ready to dwell on the faults and foibles of others than on their virtues? I asked. But on examining the photos I was forced to revert to my earlier attitude, because they showed my sisters as the ridiculous women they really were. I no longer doubted that they were ridiculous. But do they deserve to be called
repulsive?
I asked myself. At this time? I felt ashamed but immediately told myself that we could not get outside our own heads, and so I persisted in the belief that my sisters were both
ridiculous and repulsive
. A so-called family tragedy, I told myself, doesn’t justify us in fundamentally falsifying the image of the family concerned, in yielding to an access of sentimentality and more or less giving up, out of selfishness. No tragedy, not even the most terrible, can justify us in falsifying our thoughts, falsifying the world, falsifying everything—in siding with hypocrisy, in other words. I have often observed that people who throughout their lives have been judged repulsive and distasteful are spoken of after their death as though they had never been repulsive and distasteful. This has always struck me as tasteless and embarrassing. When someone dies, his death does not make him a
different person, a better character: it does not make him a genius if he was an idiot, or a saint if he was a monster. It is
in the nature of things
that we have to endure such a calamity and suffer all its attendant horrors, in the certain knowledge that the true image of the victims has not changed. It is said that we should not speak ill of the dead—but this is base hypocrisy. After the death of somebody who throughout his life was a dreadful person, a thoroughly low character, how can I suddenly maintain that he was not a dreadful person, not a low character, but a good person? We daily witness such tastelessness when someone has died. But just as we should not be afraid to say, when a good person dies, This good person is dead, so we should not be afraid to say, This base, despicable person is dead—with all his faults, we should say,
and
with all his wonderful and delightful qualities, if he had such qualities. A person’s death must in no way be allowed to distort our image of him. We should tell ourselves that for us he remains what he was, and let him rest in peace. I won’t return to Wolfsegg for a long time, I had told Gambetti,
and now I have to return immediately
, I thought. I can’t endure Wolfsegg any longer, I had said. I can’t stand the house, any more than I can stand the people, and I now find the climate unbearable. I hadn’t thought it would become unbearable so soon, I had told him. I can’t stand my parents any longer, or my brother and my sisters, but it’s my sisters who get on my nerves most of all, I said. I’ve been in Rome too long, I’ve been abroad too long, I’ve become a foreigner. I find it unendurable to spend a single hour at Wolfsegg; I can’t imagine that I’ll ever go back for any length of time, I told him. Wolfsegg no longer means anything to me; I loathe everything connected with it; the history of Wolfsegg is a
crushing burden
that I won’t take up again. And now I have to return to Wolfsegg immediately. And under what circumstances, what awful circumstances! I said to myself. Less than four hours earlier I had told Gambetti I would rather not visit Wolfsegg again. It had become intolerable, I had told him. The whole place is a lie, Gambetti, I had said, dominated by an unendurable artificiality that you can’t imagine. These people are deaf to everything that means so much to me, to nature, to art, to anything of real importance. They don’t read, they don’t listen to music, and all day long they talk only about the most futile and banal things. One can’t have a worthwhile conversation with them—only the most
depressing one. Whatever I say, they don’t understand me. If I try to explain something to them, they stare at me with a total lack of interest. They don’t have the slightest taste. If I talk about Rome, which is after all the center of the world, it bores them. And the effect is the same if I talk about Paris, or about literature or painting. I can’t mention a single name that’s important to me without being afraid that they’ve never heard it. Everything there is paralyzing, and somehow it’s cold even in summer, so that I always feel frozen. You don’t realize, Gambetti, that these people have nothing on their minds but the most basic concerns—money, hunting, vegetables, grain, potatoes, wood, coal, nothing else. My mother goes on about her stocks and is always saying that she’s made
the most disastrous
investments. The word
warehouse
is always on my father’s lips. My brother thinks the world revolves around his sailboat and his
Jaguar
. And just imagine: the people who visit them are always the most awful people—stupid, ridiculous, dreary people from those dreadful small towns, people with whom one can’t have the slightest conversation. One can’t broach a single topic without coming to an immediate halt. If possible I won’t go back to Wolfsegg for another year, I had told Gambetti, not even for Christmas. That’s another habit that has become repugnant to me, because it’s at Christmas that the mendacity at Wolfsegg reaches its peak. I won’t go to Wolfsegg for at least a year. If I go at all, it’ll be for my father’s birthday, I said, as we stood in front of the Hotel Hassler. This time too I took flight from Wolfsegg and hurt their feelings, I said, though it’s not really possible to hurt their feelings, as they don’t have any. The insensitivity that prevails there defies description, Gambetti. I now find everything Austrian unendurable, and everything German too. Rome has spoiled me for Wolfsegg, I said. Rome has made Wolfsegg impossible. My taste for Wolfsegg was ruined first by London, then by Oxford, then by Paris, and finally by Rome. I don’t know how I could ever have had a bad conscience when I refused to go to Wolfsegg just because they wanted me to, for they didn’t deserve that I should ever go there again—or fly there, I said—and thereby put myself at a disadvantage. I always put myself in the wrong just by turning up at Wolfsegg. I would turn up and immediately be in the wrong. No sooner had I arrived than I put myself at a disadvantage. Everything there is mean and vulgar, I said, if I exclude the few moments I can describe as
endurable. Talking to Gambetti, I had worked myself into a state of immense indignation against Wolfsegg. This angry tirade suddenly struck me as utterly perverse and insupportable, but I could not call a halt to it; I had to give it free rein, as I was so overjoyed at being back in Rome. Never before had I been so elated. Unable to restrain myself, I made Gambetti the hapless victim of my tirade against Wolfsegg, which turned into a tirade against everything Austrian, then everything German, and finally everything Central European. I find that the north has become quite unbearable, Gambetti, I said. The farther north I go, the more unbearable it becomes, and to me Wolfsegg lies in the far north. It’s the ultimate dim Thule. Those endless boring evenings, I said, that tasteless food, those undrinkable wines, those labored conversations, which are so excruciating that I can’t describe them to you—I’m just not up to it, my dear Gambetti. You’ve no idea what it means to me to be back in Rome, to be on the Pincio again, to see the Borghese Gardens, to look down from here on my beloved Rome. My revered Rome. My wonderful Rome! Anyone who’s been in Rome as long as I have has simply blocked off all access to a place like Wolfsegg. He can’t go back—it’s become an impossibility. For days I walk around in the various buildings at Wolfsegg, trying to calm myself, and I can’t. For days I walk up and down in my rooms, hoping I’ll be able to endure it, and of course it becomes less and less endurable. For days I try to find ways of surviving at Wolfsegg without constantly feeling that I’ll go mad, but I find none. Five libraries, I said, and such hostility to the intellect! In the Latin countries even the simplest people have some taste, some culture, I said, but at Wolfsegg no one has even a modicum of taste. The Austrians don’t have the slightest taste, or haven’t had for a long time. Wherever you look, tastelessness reigns supreme. And a total lack of interest in everything—as though the stomach were all-important and the mind quite superfluous, I said. Such a stupid people, I said, and such a magnificent country—an incomparably beautiful country. Natural beauty such as you find nowhere else, and a people that has so little interest in it. Such a wonderful age-old culture, and such a barbarous absence of culture today, a devastating anticulture. To say nothing of the dire political conditions. What ghastly creatures rule Austria today! The lowest of the low are now on top. The basest, most revolting people are in power, busily