a forenoon fantasist. I had never heard the expression before and it made me laugh. Gambetti joined in my laughter, and we both savored the joke. Without the art of exaggeration, I told him, we’d be condemned to an awfully tedious life, a life not worth living. And I’ve developed this art to an incredible pitch, I said. To explain anything properly we have to exaggerate. Only exaggeration can make things clear. Even the risk of being branded as fools ceases to worry us as we get older. In later years there’s nothing better than to be declared a fool. The greatest happiness I know, Gambetti, is that of the aging fool who is free to indulge his foolishness. Given the chance, we should proclaim ourselves fools by age forty at the latest and capitalize on our foolishness. It’s foolishness that makes us happy, I said. I put the photograph of my brother, Johannes, at the top and the one of my parents at Victoria Station at the bottom. The effect was amazing: my brother and my parents related quite differently to my sisters, who were now in the middle. My sisters were always defensive in their attitude to my brother, though not as obviously as in their attitude to me; their defensiveness toward him was more covert. They needed him, but they did not need me. He was their future provider, and so they always had to treat him quite differently from me, from whom they had nothing to fear. To their parents, their immediate providers and protectors, they owed respect and consideration, and therefore subservience. To Johannes too, their indirect provider and protector, they owed respect and consideration, but only when necessary, not all the time. To me they owed neither, because they never saw me as a potential provider and protector. I was easiest to deal with, the one to whom no respect was due. But they still had to consider me — for a quite different reason: they had to protect themselves against me, because I always appeared unpredictable and inscrutable, though they never regarded me as a vital person on whom they were dependent, or would be one day. One day they would be dependent on Johannes, but not on me. Their dependence on their parents automatically called for respect, consideration, subservience, and so forth. Though according me neither respect nor consideration, they were wary of me. The position of my brother’s photo, now at the top, signified that he was the most important member of the family, whereas my parents, now at the bottom, counted for much less. My sisters did not have an easy time with any of them — either with their present providers and protectors, due shortly to step down, or with their brother, due shortly to take over. I was accorded neither respect nor consideration; at first I was feared, but only until I left Wolfsegg more or less forever. I naturally posed no threat to them from Rome, or even from London or Vienna. I no longer counted, as they say. And now, I thought, looking at their two mocking faces, disaster has overtaken them, for now I am the one they depend on — there’s no doubt about that. With my parents and my brother dead, Wolfsegg has passed to me. This is a legal fact. Three weeks earlier I had said to Gambetti, When I get back from Caecilia’s wedding I won’t return to Wolfsegg for a long time. Wolfsegg is over for me. I no longer have any reason to go there; I no longer need Wolfsegg, and the people there don’t need me. What is the wine cork manufacturer like? he asked. I tried to tell him. I also told him what a dreadful place Freiburg was — petit bourgeois, Catholic, unbearable. But maybe this man’s a good match for Caecilia, I said. He could be her salvation. I never expected either of my sisters to marry. They had never shown any inclination, and their parents, especially their mother, did all they could to prevent their marrying. My aunt in Titisee engineered this marriage, I told Gambetti, this utterly ludicrous alliance. Just imagine: a wine cork manufacturer suddenly gains entrée to Wolfsegg! A Catholic petit bourgeois who had to be told by my mother that one didn’t turn up for dinner wearing suspenders! A German from the most German corner of the sticks, I told Gambetti, from the Black Forest, where the foxes say good night and German stolidity reigns supreme. I was not afraid of the wine cork manufacturer, or of my sisters. Yet although I was not afraid of them, it was clear that I would find them trying, desperately trying, in this dreadful situation. Occasionally it had occurred to me, as I once told Gambetti, that Amalia might marry one day, but never Caecilia. And now there they are, wholly reliant on me, with the intensest expectations and misgivings. Perhaps the grave has already been dug, I said to myself; perhaps the black banners are already draped from the windows at Wolfsegg. The last time the black banners were out was when Uncle Georg died. Half an hour after getting word of his death they were all running around in black. I wished Uncle Georg was still alive. He would have made everything much easier for me. The mocking faces of my sisters, captured on the photo, are doubly comic, I thought. The mockery comes from having been dominated by their mother for so many years, I told myself. These mocking faces were their only weapon. Amalia has withdrawn to the Gardeners’ House and now hates Caecilia, and Caecilia probably married the wine cork manufacturer just to spite her mother, who had always forbidden them to make overtures to men. Amalia must hate the one who got away. She at once made common cause with her mother in the hope of destroying Caecilia’s marriage. Knowing her as I do, she’s probably sitting on a stool in the Gardeners’ House, wondering how best to break up her sister’s unexpected and wholly undesirable marriage. Mother and daughter hatched a plot against Caecilia’s marriage. No good will come of this marriage between my sister and a wine cork manufacturer from the Black Forest, I had told Gambetti before leaving for the wedding. Sooner or later it’ll come apart. They’re all against it, and Caecilia is no match for the wine cork manufacturer, stupid though he is. My sister’s triumph, the trick she’s brought off, will one day end in disaster, I told Gambetti. She won’t stick it out in the Black Forest. She suspects this already: that’s why she didn’t want to go to the Black Forest with her husband straight after the wedding. She thinks she can stay on at Wolfsegg without him, but that’s absurd. She’ll have to go with him, like it or not. He’ll force her to. You can’t enter into a marriage just for appearance’ sake and in order to punish your mother, and then refuse to make it a real marriage. This man must feel totally out of place at Wolfsegg, totally miserable, I told Gambetti, and if it’s money he’s after, I think he has completely miscalculated. He has nothing whatever to expect — Mother will see to that. She’s known and feared for her shrewdness in legal matters. If he isn’t a fortune hunter, I said, I wonder what made him marry Caecilia? Caecilia’s anything but attractive, anything but marriageable. And the same goes for Amalia. But of course we often wonder what couples find attractive in each other, what induces them to marry. How is it possible — why