“You don’t understand, baby,” she said, her face bathed in tears. “I love you. I love you more than myself. More than anything in the whole world.”
“More than the dead?”
“The dead!” she said with an ineffably scornful shrug. “Who cares about the dead! You just don’t understand, baby. Come, I’ll show you how much I care about the dead! I’ll burn the photo up. Look, I’ll dump it in the garbage!” She took the photo from the night-table drawer.
“Let me look at it, at least,” I said.
“What for? The dead are dead. Why awaken him?”
“Don’t talk such rubbish! I want to know what the man you married looked like.”
I took the photo from her hand. Her husband was in his fifties, dark-haired, graying, massive, with an intense look in his eyes that reminded me of someone I may have met earlier, but couldn’t tell when or where; so I kept studying that face, until she took the photo away from me. “That’s enough!” she said. “And now look what I’m gonna do with it. I want to keep the frame; it’s still good. But the picture — just look how much I care about it!” She took the picture out of the frame and ripped it up into little pieces. Her expression was so wild that it frightened me. The scene was stamped vividly in my mind, almost as an archetype, and I haven’t been able to think of it since without horror: the naked woman with the bushy pubic hair at her groin, standing in front of her equally naked boyish lover and tearing her dead husband’s picture to shreds.
Gradually, I learned the story of her marriage — that is to say, I got it out of her bit by bit. There had been no great intimacy between them — hatred, if anything, rather than love. He was a very strange man, with no head for business, which he pursued merely to earn money. In the end, he had left the shop entirely in her hands, while devoting every available moment to his two passions — or, if you will, his two vices: Jewish philosophy and women. Of course, my Andalusian added, they both amounted to the same thing for him, the ultimate philosophical problem.
I failed to understand. In what way?
Well, she said with a heavy sigh, it touched upon the crucial problem of all Jewish philosophy, namely — as much as she understood it — the incompatibility, or rather the sought-for compatibility, of rational knowledge and divine inspiration. This brought up the question of free will, and that was his existential conflict. He was extraordinarily, almost uncannily attractive to women — one might as well say he was cursed, it was his doom. So irresistible was his magical effect that he became its victim, he was defenseless against the women he fascinated. She said that ultimately he shook his fists at heaven in blasphemous despair because of yet another woman — or rather because he had fallen victim yet another time to the fascination he exerted on women. It killed him in the end. Finally, one day, he had been found, his head slumped over his book, his mouth foaming.
Not to her uncontrollable grief, she had to admit. During the years of her marriage, she had gone through all the torments of hell. Upon saying this, she embraced me desperately, as though it were my job to save her from the memory of that life.
“What a fabulous fool,” I observed.
“A fool, baby? How do you mean?” She had looked upon him as damned, she said. He knew he was possessed by an evil spirit. All he had to do was walk down the street, and some female was ready to give herself to him. And he had to take her; it was compulsive. She soon was forced to pity him; in the last years of their marriage, pity was all that bound her to him, pity plus respect for his earnest way of trying to deal with the problem philosophically.
“That’s exactly why I said: what a fabulous fool!” I was grumpy. I felt challenged. “There’s only one philosophical attitude toward that problem. Do you know the story of the man who had a gulash at Neugröschl’s Restaurant, a famous place in Vienna?”
She peered at me with that mixture of timidity and resistance, devotion and distrust, which emphasized all her racial characteristics.
“Don’t make that owlish face again,” I said. “This is the story. One day in Vienna, a man eats gulash in Neugröschl’s Restaurant, as he does every day. The instant he comes home, he makes his wife twice, his sister-in-law three times, and rapes the maid, and they only manage to capture him just as he is about to try it with his own daughter. The case is medically so interesting that a committee gets together, chaired by a world-famous professor. The family doctor reports that the man has not done anything unusual; he has merely been to Neugröschl’s to have a gulash. ‘What does the Herr Professor feel should be done?’ they ask the great scholar, all eyes on him. ‘I don’t know what you’ll be doing, gentlemen,’ says the professor. ‘But as for me, I’m going to Neugröschl’s to eat a gulash.’ ”
She slapped me tenderly — a teasing motion contrasting bizarrely with her tragic expression. “You’re being wicked, baby, honestly. I love you precisely because that’s not you. You don’t know how horrible it is to be afflicted by sex. At first, when I met him and was swept off my feet—” She hesitated, unwilling to frame it in words; then she shook her head and clutched me. “Ah, baby, that’s why I love you, because with you it’s different.”
That made it all the worse for me. Now the thorn of jealousy was in me. I gave her no peace. What had been the secret of his attraction? Was he so potent, so powerful? Did he have such great endurance, such amorous skill? All the myths of sex reared their heads again in my imagination and plagued me with scoffing challenges to measure myself against the competition. I was very sorry that she had ripped up his photograph. From his face, I might have been able to glean something of the essence of his supernatural virility and learn what it came from. The face had reminded me of someone I knew, and I finally decided he looked like the man in the sleazy hotel on Calea Griviţei, the one who had cheated me and beaten me up when I tried to make love with the Gypsy girl there. This delusion entrenched itself firmly in my mind, and confused me.
This thug was not only an irresistible ladies’ man, he was also a philosopher?! Scornfully I asked just what “Jewish philosophy” was, anyway. I instantly felt as if I had started a rockslide over my head. All my embarrassing ignorance became obvious. Not only had there been a specifically Jewish philosophy in Alexandria during pre-Christian times, reaching its initial high point in Philo Judaeus, but also in the early Middle Ages, Jewish philosophy had flourished under the aegis of the Arabs, mainly in Andalusia, with the Kalamists, the Jewish Neoplatonics, Aristotelians, and Anti-Rationalists. I was cascaded with names like Judah Halevi, ibn-Daud, Maimonides, Gersonides — names I was hearing for the first time and did not know what to make of. I was chagrined about my defective education; I felt barbaric and presumptuous. She, however, my Andalusian, seemed to enjoy telling me about it all. She would assume her owl-face, the “eternal” face of a not just physical but spiritual motherhood. It was, indubitably, her love that inspired her to tell me about her forebears, as she would have told a child about them; nothing was further from her mind than to show me up in my ignorance. Nonetheless, a suspicion crept over me: obviously she had taken great interest in the spiritual potency of her deceased husband just as, in the beginning of their marriage, she had taken active part in his sexual potency, and I went so far in my self-torment as to suspect her of letting me know this in order to fire my performance in bed. Never before had my not very stable ego been so shaken.
Oddly, that did not diminish my love for her. On the contrary: so long as jealousy tortured me and the feeling of inadequacy humbled me, I was in bondage to her. But no sooner did I feel superior to her than my criticism of her began — shameful as this was, I had to admit it to myself, and thereby to the girl in the wheelchair. I was enraged by the idea that even my blond, long-legged anima might fall victim to the irresistible erotic attraction of this Jew.