‘Have a nice time, Walter,’ he said.
I shaved and changed. In case it was all right for the Opéra. I was far too early, although I walked all the way to the Champs Elysées. I sat down in a café next door, in a glazed verandah with infra-red heating, and had hardly been served my pernod when the stranger with the pony-tail walked past, without seeing me, likewise far too early, I could have called her…
She sat down in the café.
I was happy and drank my pernod without hurrying. I watched her through the glass of the verandah, she gave her order, then she waited, smoking, and once she looked at the clock. She was wearing her black duffle coat with the wooden toggles on cords and underneath it her blue evening frock, ready for the Opéra, a young lady trying out her lipstick. She was drinking a citron pressé. I was happier than I had ever been in Paris and I called the waiter so that I could pay and go – across to the girl who was waiting for me! And yet I was quite glad that the waiter was so slow in coming: I could never be happier than at the moment.
*
Since I have learned how it all came about, and particularly since becoming aware of the fact that the young girl who went with me to the Paris Opéra was the same child that we two (Hanna and I) didn’t want to have on account of our personal situation, quite apart from the political state of the world, I have discussed with many and varied people their attitude to abortion, and I have discovered that, in the last analysis, they share my views. Nowadays abortion is a matter of course. In the last analysis, what would become of us without abortion? Advances in medicine and technology compel the most responsible people to adopt new measures. Mankind has trebled its numbers in a century. Previously hygiene was unknown. To conceive and bear and let the child die in the first year of its life, as nature decrees, was more primitive, but not more ethical. War against puerperal fever. Caesarean operations. Incubators for premature births. We take life more seriously than in earlier times. Johann Sebastian Bach brought thirteen children (or thereabouts) into the world, but less than fifty per cent of them lived. Men are not rabbits, it’s the consequence of progress that we have to regulate things for ourselves. The world is threatened by overpopulation. My head physician was in North Africa, I quote his very words: ‘If the Arabs ever stop relieving themselves round their dwellings, we must reckon with the Arab population doubling itself inside twenty years.’ Nature everywhere ensures the survival of the species by overproduction. We have other ways of ensuring the survival of the species. The sanctity of life! Natural overproduction (when we bear young haphazard, like the animals) becomes a disaster; not preservation of the species, but destruction of the species. How many people can the earth feed? An increase is possible, this is UNESCO’s job, the industrialization of underdeveloped areas, but there is a limit to the possible increase. Let’s take a look at the statistics. The reduction of tuberculosis, for example: through successful prophylaxis tuberculosis has been reduced from thirty per cent to eight per cent. God does the job with diseases, we have snatched the diseases out of his hand. The result: we must take procreation out of his hand as well. There is no cause for pangs of conscience, just the reverse: it is man’s privilege and duty to act rationally and decide for himself. Otherwise we have to replace disease by war. An end to romanticism. Anyone who rejects abortion on principle is romantic and irresponsible. It should not be done thoughtlessly, that’s obvious, but in the last analysis we must face facts, for example, the fact that man’s existence is not least a question of raw materials. The fostering of an increased birth rate in Fascist states, but also in France, is a scandal. It’s a question of living space. Automation mustn’t be forgotten: we no longer need such a large number of people. It would be more sensible to raise living standards. Everything else leads to war and total destruction. Ignorance and unrealistic thinking are still very widespread. It is always the moralists who do the most harm. Abortion is the logical outcome of civilization, only the jungle gives birth and moulders away as nature decrees. Man plans. A great deal of unhappiness is caused by romanticism; think of the thousands of disastrous marriages still contracted out of sheer fear of abortion. What’s the difference between contraception and abortion? Both are expression of the human will not to have children. How many children are really wanted? The fact that the woman would rather have it once it’s there is a different matter, an automatic reaction of the instincts, she forgets she tried to avoid it and added to this is the feeling of power over the man, motherhood as an economic weapon in the hands of the woman. What does ‘destiny’ mean? It is ridiculous to attribute mechanico-physiological accidents to ‘destiny’, unworthy of modern man. Children are something we want or don’t want. Injury to the woman? There is no physical injury, unless the abortion is carried out by a quack; if there is any psychological injury it is only because the person in question is dominated by moral or religious ideas. What we repudiate is the practice of idolizing nature. To be consistent, those who argue that abortion is ‘unnatural’ would have to say: no penicillin, no lightning-conductors, no spectacles, no D.D.T., no radar and so on. We live technologically, with man as the master of nature, man as the engineer, and let anyone who raises his voice against it stop using bridges not built by nature. To be consistent, they would have to reject any kind of operation; that would mean people dying every time they had appendicitis. What an outlook! No electric light bulbs, no engines, no atomic energy, no calculating machines, no anaesthetics – back to the jungle!
*
Of our trip through Italy I can only say that I was happy, because the girl, I believe, was happy too, in spite of the difference of our ages.
She scoffed at young men.
‘Boys!’ she said. ‘You can’t imagine what they’re like – they think you’re their mother, and that’s frightful!’
We had stupendous weather.
The only thing that worried me was her hunger for art, her mania for looking at everything. No sooner were we in Italy than there wasn’t a single place at which we didn’t have to stop – Pisa, Florence, Siena, Perugia, Arezzo, Orvieto, Assisi. I’m not used to travelling like that. In Florence I rebelled and told her that frankly I thought her Fra Angelico rather mawkish. Then I corrected myself and said ‘naïve’. She didn’t deny it, on the contrary, she was delighted; it couldn’t be naïve enough for her.
What I enjoyed was Campari!
I didn’t even mind the beggars with mandolins.
What interested me was the way they built their roads and bridges, the new Fiat, the new station in Rome, the new Rapido rail motors, the new Olivettis…
Museums don’t mean a thing to me.
I was sitting outside the Piazza San Marco, while Sabeth, out of pure spite I believe, went all over the monastery, drinking my Campari as usual. During the last few days, since Avignon, I had looked over all sorts of things, merely to be close to her. I saw no reason to be jealous, and yet I was jealous, I didn’t know what a young girl like that might think. Was I her chauffeur? Well and good; in that case I was entitled to sit drinking Campari until my employer came out of the nearest church. I wouldn’t have minded being her chauffeur, if it hadn’t been for Avignon. I was often at a loss what to think of her. What an idea – to hitchhike to Rome! Even though she hadn’t done it in the end, the very idea made me jealous. Would what happened in Avignon have occurred with any man?
I thought about marriage as never before…
The more I loved the child, the less I wanted to bring her to such a pass. I hoped from day to day that there would be a chance to talk to her, I was resolved to be perfectly frank, only I was afraid she wouldn’t believe me or would laugh in my face…. She still found me cynical, I believe, even flippant (not towards her, but towards life in general) and ironical, which she couldn’t bear, and there were times when I just didn’t know what to say any more. Was she even listening to me? I really began to feel that the young were beyond me. I often appeared to myself a deceiver. Why? I didn’t want to undermine her belie
f that Tivoli surpassed anything I had ever seen anywhere and that an afternoon in Tivoli, for example, was happiness squared; but I just couldn’t feel that way about it. Her perpetual fear that I didn’t take her seriously was the reverse of the truth, I didn’t take myself seriously and something kept making me jealous, although I made an effort to be young. I asked myself whether young people today (1957) were totally different from those of our day, and I realized I knew nothing about the youth of today. I watched her. I followed her into museum after museum, simply to be near her, so that I could at least see Sabeth reflected in a glass case teeming with Etruscan potsherds, her young face, her earnestness, her joy. Sabeth didn’t believe that I understood nothing about all that; on the one hand she had boundless trust in me, merely because I was thirty years older, a childish trust, and on the other hand no respect at all. I was vexed to find I expected respect. Sabeth listened when I told her about my experiences, but as one listens to an old man; without interrupting, politely, without believing, without getting excited. At most she interrupted in order to anticipate the story and so indicate that I had told her all that before. Then I felt ashamed. In general, only the future counted for her, and to a slight extent the present; but she had no interest at all in past experiences, like all young people. She didn’t give a rap for the fact that there was nothing new under the sun, and for what had been, or could have been, learned from the past. I took careful note of Sabeth’s hopes for the future and soon realized she didn’t know herself what she hoped for, but merely looked forward to it. Could I expect from the future anything I didn’t already know? For Sabeth it was all quite different. She looked forward to Tivoli, to seeing her mother, to breakfast, to the time when she would have children of her own, to her birthday, to a gramophone record, to definite things and especially to indefinite things; she took pleasure in everything that lay in the future. Perhaps this did make me envious, but it wasn’t true that I took no pleasure in anything; I took pleasure in every moment that was in any real sense pleasurable. I didn’t turn somersaults, I didn’t sing, but there were certain things that I, too, enjoyed. And not only good food! I can’t always put my thoughts into words. How many of the people I meet are interested in whether I’m enjoying myself, in my feelings at all? Sabeth considered that I went in for understatement, or that I hid my feelings. What I enjoyed most was her joy. I was often amazed at how little she needed to make her sing, really nothing at all; she would draw the curtains, discover it wasn’t raining, and sing. Unfortunately I once mentioned my stomach trouble; now she kept thinking my stomach was troubling me, with motherly concern, as though I was a child. Our journey wasn’t easy, though often curious: I bored her with my experience of life, she made me old by waiting from morning to evening, wherever we were, for my enthusiasm…
In a large cloister (Museo Nazionale) I refused to listen to her Baedeker, I hoisted myself up on to the parapet and tried to read an Italian newspaper, I was fed up with this accumulation of stone debris. I went on strike, but Sabeth was still not convinced, she thought I was making fun of her when I confessed I knew nothing about art – she based her view on a saying of her Mamma’s that anyone can respond to a work of art, except the cultured philistine.
‘That’s very kind of your Mamma!’ I said.
An Italian couple strolling along the wide cloister interested me more than all the statues, especially the father, who was carrying their sleeping child on his arm…
There was no one else to be seen.
Birds twittered, otherwise it was as silent as the grave.
Then, when Sabeth had left me alone, I put away the paper, which I couldn’t read anyhow, and placed myself in front of a statue to test her mother’s statement. Anyone can respond to a work of art! But I found that her mother was wrong.
I was merely bored.
In the little cloister (glazed in) I was lucky. A whole group of German tourists, conducted by a Catholic priest, was crowding around a relief as though it was the scene of an accident, so that I grew inquisitive, and when Sabeth found me (‘There you are, Walter, I thought you had gone off after your Campari already!’) I told her what I had just heard the priest saying: Birth of Venus. The girl at the side, a flute-player, I found especially charming…. Charming wasn’t the right word for a relief like this, thought Sabeth; she found it smashing, super, out of this world, shattering, terrific.
Fortunately some people came along…
I can’t bear being told what I ought to feel; although I can see the subject under discussion, I feel like a blind man.
Head of a Sleeping Erinye.
This was my own discovery (in the same side hall on the left) without the help of any Bavarian priest; I didn’t know the title, which didn’t worry me in the least, on the contrary, the titles generally worry me, because I’m not familiar with classical names anyhow, they make me feel as though I’m doing an exam…. Here I found it – magnificent, impressive, superb, profoundly impressive. It was the stone head of a girl, so placed that when you leaned forward on your elbows you looked down upon it as though upon the face of a sleeping woman.
‘I wonder what she’s dreaming about…?’
That was no way to look at art, perhaps, but it interested me more than the question whether it dated from the fourth or third century B.C…. When I went to look at the Birth of Venus again, she suddenly called out ‘Stop!’ I wasn’t to move. ‘What’s wrong?’ I asked. ‘Stay where you are,’ she said. ‘When you stand there this Erinye looks much better, it’s amazing what a difference it makes!’ I must see for myself. Sabeth insisted on our changing places. It really did make a difference, but this didn’t surprise me: it was merely a matter of lighting. When Sabeth (or anyone else) stood by the Birth of Venus she cast a shadow, and because the light fell upon one side only, the face of the sleeping Erinye appeared far more wide awake, more lively, positively wild.
‘Incredible what a difference it makes,’ she said.
We changed places once or twice more, then I was in favour of moving on, there were still whole halls full of statues Sabeth wanted to have seen…
I was hungry.
It was no use talking about a ristorante, though it passed through my mind; I didn’t even get an answer when I asked where Sabeth picked up all those clever words, my only answer was the words themselves – archaic, linear, Hellenistic, decorative, sacral, naturalistic, elemental, expressive, cubistic, allegorical, cultic, compositional and so forth, a whole highbrow vocabulary. Only at the exit, where there was nothing more to be seen but arches of ancient brick, simple but sound pieces of building construction that interested me, did she answer my question. Passing in front of me through the turnstile, she remarked casually, as always when she spoke of Mamma:
‘From Mamma.’
Every time we went to a ristorante I found fresh pleasure in watching the girl, her delight with the salad, the childlike way in which she gobbled rolls, the curiosity with which she looked about her, chewing roll after roll and looking around, her solemn enthusiasm about an hors d’oeuvre, her high spirits…
As regards her Mamma:
We plucked our artichokes, dipped leaf after leaf in the mayonnaise and drew them between our teeth as I learned a few facts about the clever lady who was her Mamma. I wasn’t very curious, to be frank, because I don’t like intellectual ladies. I learned that she had actually studied philology, not archaeology, but she was working in an archaeological institute – she had to earn a living, because she was divorced from Herr Piper. I waited, my hand round the stem, to clink glasses; I wasn’t in the least interested in Herr Piper, a man who lived in Eastern Germany out of conviction. I raised my glass and interrupted, ‘Prosit!’ and we drank…
In addition I learned:
Mamma was also a Communist at one time, but in spite of this she couldn’t get on with Herr Piper, hence the divorce, I could understand that, and now Mamma was working in Athens, because she didn’t like the Western Germany of today either, I could un
derstand that, and for her part Sabeth was in no way upset about the divorce, on the contrary, she had a hearty appetite as she told me about it and drank the white Orvieto – which I always found too sweet, but which was her favourite wine: Orvieto Abbocato… She hadn’t been particularly fond of her father, in fact Herr Piper wasn’t her father at all, because Mamma had been married before and Sabeth was the child of her first marriage, her Mamma had been unlucky with men it seemed to me, perhaps because she is too intellectual I thought, but of course I didn’t say anything; instead I ordered another half-bottle of Orvieto Abbocato, and then we talked about all sorts of things, about artichokes, Catholicism, cassata, the Sleeping Erinye, travel, the poverty of our time, and the best way to the Via Appia…
Sabeth read from her Baedeker:
‘ “The Via Appia, the queen of roads built in 312 B.C. by the censor Appius Claudius Caecus, led via Terracina to Capua, from whence it was later extended as far as Brindisi…” ’
We had made a pilgrimage out to the Via Appia, two miles on foot, and were lying on one of these tombs, a mound of stones or debris covered in weeds, which fortunately wasn’t mentioned in Baedeker. We lay in the shadow of a pine tree smoking a cigarette.
‘Walter, are you asleep?’
I was enjoying this relief from sightseeing.
‘Look,’ she said, ‘that’s Tivoli over there.’
Sabeth as usual was wearing her black jeans with the once white seams and her once white rope-soled shoes, although I had already bought her a pair of Italian shoes in Pisa.
‘Does it really not interest you?’
‘It really doesn’t interest me,’ I said, ‘but I’ll look at anything, my love. What isn’t one willing to do on a honeymoon!’
Sabeth thought me cynical again.
I was quite content to lie on the grass, never mind about Tivoli, the important thing was to have her head on my shoulder.