deadly lifelong boredom; by now they’re almost completely taken up with their fancies, their jobs, their girls and their women, totally absorbed in their perversely superficial concerns. Talking to them, one finds that they have nothing in their heads but this ghastly superficiality and think only about their trust funds and their cars. When I talk to one of them, I thought, I’m talking not to a human being but to an utterly primitive, unimaginative, single-minded show-off. The people who attended the wedding were primitive show-offs belonging to what passed locally for high society, all attired in their tasteless made-to-measure suits. The scene was dominated by men wearing trousers with ostentatious stripes down the sides, jackets with enormous deerhorn buttons on the lapels, and black felt jackets and neckbands inherited from their elders. Caecilia, moreover, had dressed up her wine cork manufacturer in the kind of leather shorts that not even my paternal grandfather had worn, no doubt secretly hoping to make him even more of a figure of fun, I thought. Knowing her as I do, I was probably not wrong. She had also fitted him out with the jacket that this same grandfather had been wearing when he tripped over the root of the fir tree and was carried home from the woods, to be laid out first at the Farm and then in the Orangery. This jacket, I thought, observing the bridegroom, has already lain in state once, as my sister knows. For some perverse reason she’s quite deliberately fitted out her wine cork manufacturer in a jacket that once lay in state in the Orangery; she’s made him wear a dead man’s clothes on his wedding day. How awful he must have felt, wearing this dead man’s jacket at his wedding! I thought. My sister’s baseness knows no bounds. But quite possibly it was my mother’s idea. That was more likely, for my mother always had the most monstrous ideas and usually acted from base motives. What is more, the poor man was wearing my grandfather’s buckled shoes; I could see that he was scarcely able to walk in them and was obliged to adopt a comic gait in order to keep himself upright. The clothes he was wearing were a hundred and twenty years old, as Caecilia announced to anyone who inquired, trying to make herself interesting and at the same time, consciously or unconsciously, making her husband look ridiculous in front of the assembled guests. Basically she was presenting her husband as a clown, I thought. On the other hand, I thought, they all wore clownish costumes. Aside from a few doctors and attorneys from Wels and Vöcklabruck and a few relatives from Vienna and Munich, they all wore clothes that were at least a hundred years old, and so naturally they all appeared clownish. Weddings like this had always depressed me, and I had soon stopped attending them or accepting invitations to them. But it would have been impossible to stay in Rome and miss my sister’s wedding. Nor would I have dreamed of offending her in this way, and I was surprised to find how well I had borne up at the wedding. And it’s the last wedding I’ll attend, I told myself, as though ruling out the possibility that my other sister, Amalia, would ever marry or that my brother would marry within the next ten years. The wedding guests were so vulgar and stupid, I thought. We are pleased to see someone we have known virtually all our life and shake hands with him, but in no time we find that he has meanwhile become an idiot, I thought. And the young people are even more stupid than their elders, in whose stupidity there is usually at least a modicum of the grotesque. We always imagine, mistakenly, that others will have developed, in one direction or another, as we have. But we are wrong: most of them have stayed put and not developed in any direction, becoming neither better nor worse, but merely old and totally uninteresting. We expect to be surprised to find how somebody we have not seen for ages has developed, but the real surprise is to discover that he has not developed at all, that he is simply twenty years older, that he is no longer slim but has a paunch, and that he wears big tasteless rings on fat fingers that once were attractive. We expect to have much to talk about with this or that old friend, only to find that we have nothing to say to each other. We ask ourselves why, and the only answer that occurs to us is that the weather has changed, that there is a national crisis, that socialism has now shown its true colors, and so forth. Having imagined that our friend of long ago is still our friend, we discover in no time that this was a cruel error. With this woman you can discuss painting, with that woman you can discuss poetry, or so you think, but you are wrong. The one knows as little about painting as the other knows about poetry: all they can talk about is cooking — how potato soup is made in Vienna and in Innsbruck — or what a pair of shoes costs inMerano and a similar pair in Padua. What good conversations you were once able to have with a certain person about mathematics, you think, or with another about architecture, but it turns out that the mathematical interests of the one and the architectural interests of the other got bogged down twenty years ago in the morass of growing up. You can no longer find any purchase, anything to hold on to, and they are put out by this, without knowing why. Suddenly you are just someone who annoys them. It will be a more or less ludicrous wedding, I had thought before leaving Rome for Wolfsegg, and afterward it struck me as far more ludicrous than I had dared to imagine. But the only comment I heard from others was that it was a magnificent wedding, a wedding to end all weddings, as they say. I’ll take care not to express my opinion because theirs is the one that counts, I thought. The wedding service itself, however, was thoroughly entertaining, exquisitely comic. The chapel was of course packed to capacity, and half the congregation had to stand in the hall during the service. Naturally I refused to sit in the front row with my family but stood in the hall with the kitchen maids and gardeners. Having a sharp ear, I was able to hear everything the priest said. As he was slightly drunk, there was something improvised about his conduct of the service, which was therefore not at all boring, as is usual on such occasions, but amused everyone. Only my mother must have been sweating blood, as they say. In his address to the bridal couple the priest interwove fact and fiction and concluded with the general proposition that all life was life in the Lord until the end and nothing else. But at the climax of the ceremony, when he had to ask the bride and groom whether they would take one another to their lawful wedded husband and wife, he forgot the bride’s name and, after a noticeable pause, had to call for help and ask someone to tell him her name. My father rapped it out smartly, provoking instant peals of laughter in the chapel and the hall. He had forgotten the bridegroom’s name too, and my father, by now quite furious, once more had to oblige. This caused even louder peals of laughter than the first instance of priestly amnesia. I was tempted to shout the words wine cork manufacturer over the heads of the congregation but just managed to restrain myself. So this bit of meanness on my part remained a secret, I thought. It is always ridiculous when the bride says