an experience, as he puts it. In her thinking she recoils from nothing, I reflected. Her poems are one hundred percent authentic, which can’t be said of the products of her fellow poets, however celebrated they may be, the rivals who constantly intrigue against her. She is fully present in every line she writes, everything in it being uniquely hers. It was from Spadolini that I first really learned to see and observe, I told Gambetti, and from Maria that I first learned to hear. Both of them trained me to be what I am. I went on to tell Gambetti how Spadolini never disdained to accept money from my mother, even for strictly personal purposes. It enabled him to indulge his vanity, I told Gambetti. She remitted large annual sums to him, doubtless from the Wolfsegg funds. Possibly with the connivance of my father, I said, who would go to any lengths to appease her and thought nothing of making up a threesome for a trip to Italy, as crown witness, so to speak, of this extraordinary relationship, in which he, not Spadolini, played the part of onlooker. My father is just as fascinated by Spadolini as I am and wouldn’t give him up for the world, I told Gambetti. Spadolini is not the kind of man you give up. Once we meet a person like him, we don’t renounce him, whatever mischief he makes. Then it suddenly occurred to me how odd it was that I should be teaching Gambetti German literature, of all things — German, Austrian, and Swiss literature, the literature of German-speaking Europe, to use the usual clumsy formulation — despite the fact that I find this literature impossible to love and have always rated it below Russian, French, and even Italian literature. I wondered whether it was right to teach something I did not love, simply because I thought I was better qualified to speak about it than about another literature. Even in its highest flights, I told Gambetti, German literature is no. match for Russian, French, or Spanish literature, which I love, or Italian literature for that matter. German is essentially an ugly language, which not only grinds all thought into the ground, as I’ve already said, but actually falsifies everything with its ponderousness. It’s quite incapable of expressing a simple truth as such. By its very nature it falsifies everything. It’s a crude language, devoid of musicality, and if it weren’t my mother tongue I wouldn’t speak it, I told Gambetti. How precisely French expresses everything! And even Russian, even English, to say nothing of Italian and Spanish, which are so easy on the ear, while German, in spite of being my mother tongue, always sounds alien and ghastly! To a musical and mathematical person like you or me, Gambetti, the German language is excruciating. It grates on us whenever we hear it, it’s never beautiful, only awkward and lumpy, even when used as a vehicle of high art. The German language is completely antimusical, I told Gambetti, thoroughly common and vulgar, and that’s why our literature seems common and vulgar. German writers have always had only the most primitive instrument to play on, I told Gambetti, and this has made everything a hundred times harder for them. Looking at the family photographs, I reflected that our calculations do not always work out, because an accident can throw everything into disarray. The mocking faces of my sisters on the photo taken in Cannes actually are my sisters: I only ever see them as these mocking faces. Whenever and wherever I see them, and whatever the state of our relations, I see only these mocking faces. These are what come to mind whenever I think of my sisters. It is these mocking faces that I keep in the drawer of my desk in Rome, not the various other faces they have, their sad, proud, disdainful, and downright arrogant faces; no, only these mocking faces. I once told Gambetti that when I spoke of my sisters I was speaking not of my sisters as such but only of their mocking faces, captured by chance in this photograph. If they were dead, I told myself, I’d have nothing left of them but their mocking faces. In my dreams I hear them laugh, and sometimes as I walk through Rome I suddenly hear this curious laughter of theirs, with its confident assurance of longevity, and I at once see their mocking faces, nothing else. They say something, and I think about what they’ve said, and I see their mocking faces. They take after their mother, I tell myself, who has a similarly mocking face that becomes hideously grotesque when duplicated in my sisters. I have often tried to rid myself of their mocking faces, to transform them into faces that don’t mock, but I’ve never succeeded. I have no sisters, I told myself, only their mocking faces. There’s no Caecilia and no Amalia, only two mocking faces, frozen forever in this hideous picture. They wanted to look young and beautiful, to project an image of happiness, I told myself as I studied the picture, but in this photo they’re ugly, and though still very young, they don’t look young: they look quite old and present a profoundly unhappy image to photographic posterity. Had they known that nothing would remain but their mocking faces and this unhappy image, they wouldn’t have let themselves be photographed. But they insisted on it, I told myself. I recall quite clearly that they wanted to be photographed. They posed for the picture and pressed close to each other in a simulation of happiness, spontaneity, and innate naturalness, yet it was all appallingly artificial and unnatural, and the result was a cruel distortion. I remember not wanting to take the picture. I’m not to blame for this cruel photograph, I told myself. They’re to blame for insisting on my taking it and so forcing their mocking faces on me for the term of my natural life, so to speak, though neither they nor I could have known this at the time. Since then I have never been able to escape their mocking faces. Every attempt has failed. At one point it occurred to me to destroy the photo, to tear it up or burn it, but it seemed ludicrous to resort to destroying something so quintessentially ridiculous and trivial, and so I put it back in the drawer with the others. It’s not my sisters who haunt me day and night, I told myself, it’s their mocking faces, which give me no peace and often torment me for days or weeks on end. By using the devilish device of photography, we capture just one of the millions and billions of moments in the lives of two people and then spend a lifetime blaming these two people for this one moment that revealed their mocking faces. But I do have sisters, I told myself, not just their mocking faces, and this absurd thought made me clap my hand to my forehead. I have sisters at Wolfsegg, not just two mocking faces that seem hostile to me in every way. One of these two mocking faces is now married (as I had to say in order to avoid inconsistency) to the wine cork manufacturer from Freiburg, this comic character whose head seems far too small for his heavy build and substantial girth. One of the mocking faces now has a husband, but the other hasn’t, and because of this the one without a husband has withdrawn to the Gardeners’ House, hating its companion piece for having married all of a sudden, overnight as it were. However, I have never succeeded in seeing my sisters’ mocking faces separately, however hard I have tried: I have only ever seen them as a pair. The photo shows two mocking faces, I told myself, but do my sisters really have such mocking faces? Or did they just have them at that one moment in Cannes when the picture was taken? Possibly they had them only for that one moment, I told myself, and never again, yet now I believe they’ve always had them. Photography really is the devil’s art, I told myself: for years, for decades, indeed for a whole lifetime, it forces us to see mocking faces that actually existed only once, for a single moment, when we acted on a sudden impulse and casually took a snapshot. And this sudden impulse then has a devastating lifelong effect that cannot be switched off and sometimes drives us to the verge of despair. I can’t switch off these mocking faces of my sisters any longer, I once told Gambetti, to whom I have often spoken, in a no doubt distasteful manner, about my sisters’ mocking faces, which have