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