Extinction (4 page)

naturally eager to know why. Central Europeans behave like puppets, not like human beings, he said. They’re all tense, they don’t move naturally, everything about them is stiff and ultimately ridiculous. And unendurable. Like the language they speak, which is the most unendurable language. German is quite unendurable. I was thrilled when he talked about
the Mediterranean countries
. It’s a shock to come back here, he said. It did not worry him in the least that his remarks spoiled the appetites of his audience. And what atrocious food! he exclaimed. In Germany and Austria, and even in German-speaking Switzerland, it’s not food, it’s just junk! The much vaunted Austrian cuisine is just a joke, an insult to the stomach and the whole of the body. When I’m back in Cannes it takes me weeks to recover from Austrian cooking. And what’s a country with no sea? he exclaimed, without pursuing the idea. After taking a mouthful of wine he would wrinkle up his nose. I could see that he even disapproved of Austrian mineral waters, which are generally well thought of, but he made no comment on them. He must be infinitely bored at Wolfsegg, I thought at the time, for he never had the chance to take part in a lively conversation, which was what he always enjoyed most. Sometimes, at least early on in one of his visits, he would try to initiate one, for instance by throwing the name Goethe into the arena, more or less apropos of nothing, but they did not know what to do with it, let alone with names like Voltaire, Pascal, or Sartre. Being unable to keep up with him, they contented themselves with disliking him, and their dislike intensified from day to day until in the end it turned to overt hatred. They were always intimating that while they worked hard, he had apparently made idleness, and the cultivation of idleness, into the daily content of his life, into a lifelong ideal. You know, he once told me, I come to Wolfsegg not to see the family but to see the house and the landscape, which bring back my childhood. Then, after a pause, he said, And to see you. In his will he left instructions that he was to be buried not at Wolfsegg, as the family expected, but in Cannes. He wished to be buried by the sea. Dressed in somewhat pompous and utterly provincial outfits, my parents rushed to his funeral expecting to inherit an immense fortune, only to be confronted, as I have already indicated, by what my mother called
the greatest disappointment of our lives
, which was all they had to take home with them. The good Jean, the son of a poor Marseille
fisherman, inherited stock to the value of twenty-four million schillings and real estate worth at least twice as much. Uncle Georg left his art collection to the museums in Cannes and Nice. His gravestone, erected by the good Jean, was to bear only his name, followed by the words:
who left the barbarians behind him at the right moment
. Jean adhered strictly to Uncle Georg’s instructions. When my parents visited the grave a year ago on their way to Spain, they are said to have been so outraged that my mother swore she would never visit it again. She thought the epitaph a monstrous disgrace, and on her return to Wolfsegg she is said to have talked of nothing but the crime that her brother-in-law had perpetrated. I went for long, interesting walks with Uncle Georg in the country around Wolfsegg, as far as Ried in one direction and Gmunden in the other. He always had time for me. Thanks to him I know that there are more things in the world than cows, domestics, and public holidays that have to be strictly observed. I owe it to him that I learned not only how to read and write but how to think and fantasize. It is to his credit that I attach great importance to money, but not the greatest, and that, unlike my parents, I regard people outside Wolfsegg not as a necessary evil but as an endless challenge, a challenge to get to grips with them as the greatest and most exciting monstrosity. Uncle Georg initiated me into the secrets of music and literature and familiarized me with composers and writers, who now became living people, not just plaster figures that had to be dusted three or four times a year. I owe it to him that I began reading the books that seemed to have been locked away in our libraries forever and a day and have never stopped reading them, that I finally learned to philosophize; that I developed not into the sort of person who automatically became a cog in Wolfsegg’s financial and economic mill but into one who could properly be called a free agent. I have him to thank for the fact that I have never made the kind of brainless educational journeys, so called, that my parents went in for, taking me with them in my early years—to Italy and Germany or to Holland and Spain—but have learned the art of travel, one of the greatest pleasures in the world and one that I still enjoy. Thanks to Uncle Georg I have become acquainted not with dead but with living cities; I have visited not dead but living peoples, read not dead but living writers, heard not dead but living music, and seen not dead but living pictures. Instead of
sticking the great names of the past on the inner walls of my brain like so many dreary transfer pictures from an equally dreary history, he presented them to me as living actors on a living stage. Every day my parents would show me a totally uninteresting world that progressively paralyzed my mind, a world in which life was basically not worth living, whereas Uncle Georg showed me the same world as one that was invariably interesting. Thus, as quite a small child I already had a choice between two worlds: my parents’, which I always found uninteresting and merely tiresome, and Uncle Georg’s, which seemed packed with tremendous adventures and in which one could never be bored but wished to live forever, hoping that it would never end; the automatic consequence was that I wanted to live in this world perpetually, for all eternity. To put it simply, my parents always took everything as it came, whereas Uncle Georg never took anything as it came. From their birth my parents lived by the laws laid down for them by their predecessors and never dreamed of making themselves new laws to live by, laws of their own, whereas Uncle Georg lived solely by his own laws, which he himself had made. And these self-made laws he was forever overturning. My parents followed a preordained path, and they would never have thought of deviating from it for a moment, but Uncle Georg went his own way. To cite another instance of the difference between them and my uncle: they hated what they called idleness and could not imagine that a thinking person simply did not know what idleness was and could not afford it, that when a thinking person indulged in apparent idleness he was actually in a state of extreme tension and excitement. This was because theirs was true idleness and they did not know what to do with it, for when they were idle there was actually nothing going on, as they were incapable of thinking, let alone of engaging in a rigorous mental process. For the thinking person there is no such thing as idleness. My parents’ idleness was of course genuine idleness, for when they did nothing there was nothing going on in them. By contrast, one might say, the thinking person is at his most active when he is supposedly doing nothing. This is beyond the comprehension of genuinely idle people like my parents and my family in general. Yet on the other hand, my parents did have an inkling of the nature of Uncle Georg’s idleness, and this was why they hated him, for they guessed that his idleness, being quite different
from theirs, not only could become dangerous, but always was dangerous. The thinking person who is idle appears as the greatest threat to those for whom idleness means simply doing nothing, who actually do nothing when they are idle. They hate him because, in the nature of things, they cannot despise him. At the age of four Uncle Georg is said to have taken himself off to Haag, a village about five miles away, where he told total strangers that he came from Wolfsegg and did not intend going back. The villagers, understandably at a loss to know what to make of this strange child, brought little Georg back, kicking and screaming, to his parents. Most of the time his parents, and others who were put in charge of him, more or less had to chain him to Wolfsegg like a little dog to stop him from running away. He told me that as a very small child he had resolved to stay at Wolfsegg no longer than was absolutely necessary. But naturally I waited for the moment when I could free myself from Wolfsegg without hardship, he once told me in Cannes, that is to say until I had all the means that were necessary for total freedom. Of course, Wolfsegg itself is a wonderful place, he said, but the family has always soured it for me. Your father, he once said, is a weak character. He’s actually a kind man, but insufferable. And your mother’s a greedy woman who married him only for venal motives. Of course, she was a nobody. She’s said to have been pretty, but there’s no sign of that now. Your father isn’t basically a greedy man. It was your mother who aroused a kind of primitive greed in him. But even before he met your mother I didn’t get along with him. We were complete opposites. Sure, he’s good-natured, he still is, but please don’t be angry when I say he’s a stupid person. Your mother has him completely under her thumb. Yet at school he was better than I was. Everything he did was excellent. He handed in the best work. He was popular, and I wasn’t. He always got better grades than I did. But although we were dressed alike, I always looked smarter than he did. I don’t know why. But I only say this, said Uncle Georg, because basically I’ve always loved your father, who after all is my brother. And the last time he was in Rome Uncle Georg actually told me more than once that he still loved his brother more than anyone else in the world. If only that woman, your mother, hadn’t appeared on the scene! A woman turns up and marries a man, against his will, and then proceeds to drive out his good qualities, his good character,
and destroy him, or at least to turn him into a puppet on a string. Your mother made your father her puppet. My God, Uncle Georg exclaimed, how your father could have developed if he’d found himself a different wife! I know no woman more uncultured than your mother, he said. She goes to the opera but doesn’t understand the least thing about music. She looks at a picture but understands nothing about painting. She pretends she reads books but she doesn’t read any. Yet at mealtimes she prattles away nonstop and talks down all around her with her arrant nonsense. All the same she ought to know how money can be made to multiply by itself, not in the perverse, idiotic way that she goes about it and that your father has taken over from her. Uncle Georg was referring to his own gift for making money and continually adding to his fortune. It’s almost unbelievable that your father and I are from the same stable, he often said. I’ve always had lots of ideas, he said, but your father’s never had one. I’ve always traveled because I’ve wanted to and have a passion for travel, but your father’s never felt the slightest need to travel and has only ever done so because it’s the thing to do. He always arranged his journeys in accordance with stupid plans made for him by others, all of them revolting individuals who called themselves art experts. You must go to Rome and visit the Sistine Chapel. You must see the Giorgione in the Accademia, called
La Tempesta
, they told him, and so he took a train to Venice to see
La Tempesta
. You must go to Verona and see the grave of Romeo and Juliet, they said, and so he went and saw it. The Acropolis is something you must see, they said, and so he went to Athens and saw the Acropolis. You must see Rembrandt, you must see Vermeer, you must see Strasbourg Minster, Metz Cathedral. He went everywhere and saw everything that his so-called art experts recommended. And what frightful people they were, those advisers of his, dreadful people with petit bourgeois minds and professorships, whose only reason for approaching him was that it gave them a chance to spend a few days free at our lovely Wolfsegg. Those appalling specimens from Vienna whom he was forever inviting—university professors, art historians, etc.—because he took them to be cultured people. Those horrors from Salzburg and Linz who came to Wolfsegg on weekends and polluted the atmosphere with their malodorous presence, so-called philosophers, scholars, and lawyers who did nothing but exploit him. They
came in droves and spent the weekends gorging themselves and regaling us over dinner with their pseudoscholarly garbage. And then there were those revolting doctors he sent for from Vöcklabruck or Wels. Who only ruined him—mentally. Your father was persuaded, quite wrongly, that high-sounding academic titles were a guarantee of high mental capacity. He was always wrong. All my life I’ve hated such titles and their holders. I find nothing so repellent. The very word
professor
makes me feel sick. Such a title is usually proof positive that its holder is an egregious nincompoop. The grander the title, the greater the imbecility of its holder. And then his wife, your mother! Where
she
comes from they’ve always trampled on the intellect. And in the years she’s been married to your father she’s added many refinements to the art. But your father was never capable of independent thought: he hadn’t the wherewithal. He always admired others whom he took to be thinking people and let them do his thinking for him. He’s always been indolent, of course. And this indolence has left its mark. He’s never developed. I’m sorry, said Uncle Georg, but your father’s a particularly stupid man. And such a man was just what your mother needed. She was always artful. Looked at in this way, your parents were an ideal couple. I can still hear him saying this. We were sitting in the open on the Piazza del Popolo late one afternoon, and Uncle Georg became more talkative than ever before because, contrary to his custom, he had drunk several glasses of white wine that afternoon. It’s because I’ve always loved your father, my brother, and still do, that I allow myself to speak of him like this, said Uncle Georg—you know that. I always hoped your father would marry somebody different from your mother. But after all, he said, suddenly looking at me in consternation, she
is
your mother. Maybe it was a mistake for you to get to know me. Perhaps you’d have been happier without me—who knows? I said, simply,
No
. He was staying at the Hotel de la Ville, his favorite hotel, by the Spanish Steps, only a few yards from the Café Greco. He came to Rome at least once a year—when Cannes gets on my nerves, he would say. Once a year Cannes got on his nerves. I don’t care for Paris, he often said, but I always enjoy Rome. Partly because you’re here. In a city you love there’s always a person you love, he said. It’s a pity that Rome has become so noisy. But then all cities have become noisy. Although Uncle Georg did not appear on the photo of my sisters Amalia