There’s a sudden emptiness here, he said, then immediately added that new people would take charge of Wolfsegg and do everything for the best. Meanwhile, I thought, his jacket has probably been pressed as he wanted it pressed, and his trousers too. My sisters are doubtless pressing his clothes while he’s in Father’s room praying for everything connected with Wolfsegg, I thought. He used to go to the chapel to pray, I thought, but today he’s afraid of being disturbed by the other guests. Grief is a beautiful virtue, he said, as I now recall. The Almighty closes one door in order to open another. His words suddenly sickened me. I had heard them all before, but I had never found them so patently sickening. After he had finished eating and recounted the Etna anecdote, I recalled, he said that when Mother had last visited him at his office she had been tearful and disconsolate. She came to see me in Rome, tearful and disconsolate, in search of help. He still did not know the cause of her despondency and wondered whether we did. It had something to do with your father, he said. Something that was troubling him, connected with Wolfsegg. Mother was always greatly concerned about Wolfsegg, he said, and especially about her children, about us. There was no one with whom he had had better conversations, he said, as she was such a good listener. The truth was the exact opposite, I thought. Mother could never listen, she always interrupted; she would not let anyone say anything but broke up every conversation as soon as it started. She could not stand conversations and never allowed one to develop, I thought. She had no scruples about hogging the scene and disrupting whatever conversation was going on. And the remarks she made in order to disrupt a conversation were so stupid. It was one of her intolerable traits that she detested any conversation, especially an intellectual conversation, pitched at a higher level, so to speak. She could not endure it and would break it up with her foolish remarks. She was our conversation-stopper, I thought, and from this we all suffered. Spadolini described Mother in the shameful manner that survivors commonly adopt in order to put themselves in a favorable light, I thought. According to Spadolini, Mother had listened to Mahler like an angel, but the truth is that concerts bored her stiff, whatever was being played; only the most superficial music could make her face light up, I thought. Only the most superficial book could hold her attention, and then only for a few pages, for there was nothing she hated so much as reading. With Mother everything was pretense, I thought; she would seize upon everything quite ruthlessly in order to falsify and degrade it. And she had not the slightest respect for any product of the mind: that was why she hated Uncle Georg, why she hated me, why she hated everything intellectual, I thought. Spadolini went far too far, I thought, when he called Mother an artistic person, with an interest in all things intellectual, and then added, in his fulsome way, that this was rare in a woman. The truth is that Mother had no intellectual interests and was not even remotely artistic. Even my father, to whom it was basically a matter of indifference whether or not his wife had intellectual interests, whether or not she was an artistic person, often referred to her as a simpleton, and he, her lifelong companion, must have known her better than anyone. Spadolini went so far in his apotheosis as to say that she had a vein of philosophy, though his Italianate intonation lent even this piece of mendacity a certain charm. When I heard him utter the phrase, I had thought it particularly charming, without thinking what he meant by it. The manner always overlaid the matter, I thought. It was inevitable that he should also call Mother a pious woman, a faithful daughter of the Church and a good Christian. In Rome Mother had bought him a silk nightshirt — in the Via Condotti, of course — which he wore only on real feast days. She chose it herself, and she chose the best and most beautiful. Your mother used to mother me, he said — these were his very words. Sometimes she felt terribly alone, he said, abandoned by everyone. At Wolfsegg, among you, said Spadolini, quite alone, truly lonely. It is of course true that she was a lonely woman, as he said, but what he did not know was that she sought refuge from loneliness, more than from anything else, in a world that she hated because it bored her. Curiously, my thoughts now shifted from Spadolini to Goethe, the German patrician whom his countrymen have adapted and adopted as their very own literary prince, as I had observed to Gambetti when we last met. Goethe, the honest burgher, the collector of insects and aphorisms, with his philosophical mishmash. (Gambetti did not know the meaning ofmishmash and I had to explain it to him.) Goethe, the petit bourgeois of philosophy, the man on the make, of whom Maria once observed that he did not turn the world on its head but buried his own in German parochialism. Goethe, the classifier of stones, the stargazer, the philosophical thumbsucker of the Germans, who ladled their spiritual jam into household canning jars, to be consumed at any time and for any purpose. Goethe, who assembled commonplaces for the Germans, to be published by the house of Cotta and rubbed into their ears by schoolmasters until they were completely blocked. Goethe, who betrayed the German mind more or less for centuries, paring it down to the German average with what I had described to Gambetti, at our last meeting, as Goethean assiduity. Goethe is the philosophical pied piper, the German for all seasons, I told him. The Germans take their Goethe like medicine, believing in its efficacy, its health-giving properties. Goethe is nothing other than Germany’s foremost intellectual quack, I told Gambetti, her first intellectual homeopath. The Germans swallow their Goethe, as it were, and are healthy. The whole German nation ingests its Goethe and feels better. But Goethe is a charlatan, I told Gambetti; Goethe’s writings and philosophy are the acme of German charlatanry. Be careful, Gambetti, I said, beware of Goethe. He gives everyone indigestion, except the Germans. They believe in Goethe and revere him as one of the wonders of the world. Yet all the time this wonder of the world is a philosophical truck farmer. (Gambetti did not know what a truck farmer was and laughed loudly when I told him.) Goethe’s work as a whole is a philosophical truck farm. Goethe never reached the heights in any sphere, I said. He never rose above the mediocre in anything he attempted. He isn’t the greatest lyric poet, he isn’t the greatest prose writer, and to compare his plays with Shakespeare’s is like comparing a stunted dachshund from the Frankfurt suburbs with a tall Pyrenean mountain dog. Take Faust, I said — what megalomania! A totally unsuccessful experiment by a megalomaniac whose ambition went to his head and who imagined that this head could encompass the world. Goethe, the Frankfurter with big ideas who moved to Weimar, the megalomaniac patrician in the world of women. Goethe, who turned the Germans’ heads and made fools of them and has had them on his conscience for a hundred fifty years. Goethe is the gravedigger of the German mind, I told Gambetti. Compared with Voltaire, Descartes, or Pascal, for instance, and of course with Shakespeare, Goethe is an alarmingly small figure. The prince of poets — what a ridiculous notion! Yet how utterly German! Hölderlin is the great lyricist, Musil the great prose writer, and Kleist the great dramatist. Goethe fails on all three counts. But now my thoughts returned to what Spadolini had said about my mother’s being a special person. He’s right, I thought, in that every human being is special, including my mother, but that isn’t what he meant. Spadolini, for opportunistic motives, painted a false picture of her over supper, depicting her as unusually good, unusually cultured, and unusually interested in everything — which she was not. Mother was really quite ordinary, not at all unusual. There was nothing unusual about her, unless I were to say that she was unusually inconsiderate and, to my mind, unusually stupid, as well as unusually vain, in a primitive way. And unusually greedy where money was concerned, it now occurred to me, but Spadolini probably did not know this; perhaps he could not know it. When I think of the many apartments she acquired