nothing short of a crime committed by Caecilia against her, and her alone, though she confided this to no one but us, not wishing to lose face. It had been a foregone conclusion that her two daughters would remain at her beck and call all their lives, at Wolfsegg in other words, and that marriage was ruled out. Until all her plans were frustrated by our aunt in Titisee with this absurd idea of hers, as my mother put it. The wedding was a blow for Amalia too, I thought, for the two sisters were tacitly committed to lifelong mutual loyalty, which meant that neither would marry, as marriage would entail separation. This separation had now occurred in consequence of what seemed to me an utterly bizarre marriage, which my mother maliciously referred to as a union, a word that had always been used pejoratively at Wolfsegg. The wine cork manufacturer, however, spoke only of their union, never of their wedding, because the term was familiar to him, a native of Baden, and he did not find it embarrassing, not being conversant with our local irony. I don’t regard him as a rogue or a fortune hunter, I thought, but as a fool aspiring to supposedly better things, a type that we encounter wherever we go, in every bar and restaurant and in all but the most intimate company. He’s not cunning enough to be a rogue or a fortune hunter, I thought — he’s just an honest social climber. I could of course have forced him to answer my questions, I told myself; it would not have been difficult to confront him, but I had no wish to do so. Maybe I didn’t want to be exposed to his grotesque Baden dialect, I thought. I had visited my aunt in Titisee several times and always been put off by the bonhomie of the Badeners, which I found insincere, like the easy charm of the Viennese, whose malicious stolidity I have always abhorred. I have always been irritated, indeed depressed, by the notion of easy charm or bonhomie, involving as it does a vulgar approach to life and human nature and, if pursued to extremes, a thoroughly base distortion of our view of the world. The wine cork manufacturer, I may say, wormed his way into Wolfsegg, for my sister took him there deliberately to spite my mother, using him as an accessory in the capital crime she was committing against her. A man who’s never heard anything by Max Bruch! my mother once said over dinner when we were talking about the wine cork manufacturer and only about him. My mother had not the foggiest idea of music, yet she of all people felt obliged to ridicule her future son-in-law more than he had been ridiculed already, not just by her but by all of us, by invoking the dubious name of Max Bruch, whose violin concerto never failed to send her into raptures. To my friends in Rome I did not breathe a word about the wine cork manufacturer until the wedding was more or less fixed. I then told a malicious version of the story to Zacchi and Gambetti, and to Maria, who could not contain herself for laughter on hearing my account. Only later did it strike me that my behavior had been contemptible, redounding not so much to the discredit of my new brother-in-law as to my own and amounting in effect to a self-denunciation. Unable to take my brother-in-law seriously, I resorted to the bitter irony that I always have to hand when I cannot bear to be serious. People like the wine cork manufacturer have always roused my ire and brought it to white heat, as they say, because they present a distorted image of humanity, an intolerable caricature that brings out all its ridiculousness, which is not to be confused with helplessness. It is one thing to be confronted by a simple person, quite another to be confronted by a proletarian, the one being tolerable and reassuring, the other intolerable, disturbing, and grotesque, I thought. The proletarian is a creature of industry and did not exist before industrialization. He is a slave to the machine, constantly degraded and vulgarized by the machine, but unable to defend himself against this indignity. The simple person, on the other hand, at least as I see him, has never been enslaved by the machine, has never let it degrade and destroy him, I thought. The petit bourgeois and the proletarian are pitiful but insufferable products of the machine age; we are shocked when confronted with them and forced to contemplate what the machine and the office have made of them. The bulk of humanity has been destroyed and annihilated by the machine and the office, I thought. The wine cork manufacturer has been destroyed and annihilated by his office and the machines in his wine cork factory and has thus become insufferable, I thought as I reached the second floor and paused at the top of the stairs. I do not know what made my sister choose this particular man as a husband. On the other hand, I know that she had found no one else willing to marry her, having failed in her many attempts, as she was bound to with a mother like hers, who forbade her daughters to have any relationships with men. Even at the age of thirty my sisters were still bound by this maternal prohibition and dared not flout it for fear of being disowned and stripped of their rights. My mother often threatened to disinherit them if they disobeyed her orders, and so they complied, fearing nothing so much as being disinherited, for it is fair to say that they felt completely helpless when left to their own devices. Once when Caecilia expressed a desire to go to Salzburg for two days with a friend, whom she injudiciously described as a boyfriend, she was forbidden to leave the house for a week. Amalia fared no better when she proposed similarly dangerous excursions, as my mother called them. How ought I to behave toward the wine cork manufacturer? I asked myself as I stood at the end of the passage, hearing their voices but unable to make out what they were saying, though it clearly related to the funeral. What is my best course? How should I act after making my entrance? Such deliberations usually lead nowhere and merely make things harder, complicating what is actually quite straightforward, though it appears exceedingly tricky and complicated. I knew that everything would work out, as they say, that there was no need to agonize over such supposedly difficult questions as how to conduct myself on returning home and meeting those who were waiting for me, who had witnessed the tragedy or been the first to be hit by it. We know that everything will sort itself out, but we do not trust this knowledge; we therefore ignore it and subject ourselves to the most dreadful mental torment. If my sisters were alone, I thought, there wouldn’t be the slightest difficulty: I’d already be discussing the immediate future with them. But the presence of the wine cork manufacturer prevented me from making a spontaneous entrance. He’s in my way, I thought, inhibiting my natural impulses. Now, after only a week, the wedding turns out to have been a ghastly mistake, I thought. It will drive a wedge between Caecilia and Amalia and cause a fundamental rift, far more than the momentary pique that caused Amalia to move into the Gardeners’ House for a ludicrously short time in order to punish her sister. The wine cork manufacturer is sitting in there with them, discussing what they ought to be discussing with me, I thought, meddling in matters that don’t concern him and possibly taking charge of Wolfsegg in his feebleminded way, airing his petit bourgeois ideas and opinions, which can never amount to intelligent insights. After less than a week he’s already established himself at Wolfsegg and taken over, I thought as I moved to a position from which I could hear almost everything they were saying. I was anxious above all to hear anything they said about me, anything at all, but all I heard was that the mortician had already paid three visits and they could not reach an agreement with him, that eighty wreaths and forty bouquets had already arrived, that they had arranged for substantial obituaries to appear in the