I could hope only very timidly that my beloved would understand what I was feeling in this atmosphere. It would have been pointless to tell her how profoundly I felt the suspense in this encounter of two great solitudes — the encounter of two bleaknesses consuming one another: here the wasteland of the city with its encroaching horrors, its progress, which was decay, the mange of rust and mortar; and there the relentlessly misanthropic vastness and power of nature, against which no sky-storming walls, no denser and denser throngs of lost people, could grant permanent protection ….
My Jewess must have known this forlornness in the enormity of nature from her native shtetl. She was certainly familiar with the threat from the evening sky, its picture-postcard kitsch camouflaging all its disastrous forebodings. The gentle breeze that the sky sent us was sheer mockery; I quite understood how a woman from Galicia or Bessarabia might want to choose the city rather than sit in contemplation of that tragic beauty.
No, I could not ask her to understand why I preferred merciless nature, much less what pleasure I felt here, at the sight of the titanic struggle between the two wastelands. That view of beauty could only have inspired a painter of battles, not a defenseless Jewish widow who hid behind her mascara and her kitsch furniture. I tended to persuade myself that I was about to say farewell to my youth and its anacreontic poetry, and to exchange them for a more mature existence with a more refined poetic sensibility. But a secret unease warned me against the danger of delusion. I saw myself as old in my youth — at least a century older than this Jewish woman, whose race, despite two millennia of suffering, maintained unshakable faith in man’s destiny as the child of God, while I looked down scientifically from cosmic distances at the planet and at myself and the likes of me, microscopic earthworms, tiny particles of an infestation that was soon to be swept away.
It annoyed me that she made no effort to conceal her discomfort. I imagined introducing her here to an audience of friends. I knew many of the people (almost all men) at the surrounding tables at least by sight: artisans and small tradesfolk from the area around the Aphrodite plant: the coal drayman, for instance, some of the horse dealers from the Thursday market, and the types that sat around in taverns there or watched the farces of Karaghios staged by itinerant comedians. I had not failed to notice the attention aroused by our entrance, for my lady friend’s succulent ripeness had been generally acknowledged. In one of the faces turning to us, I had recognized Mr. Garabetian — the father, of course. I wanted to wave to him, but another head interposed itself, and I could not see him. We were sitting at an unfavorable angle, but still, I told myself, he was bound to see us, and I wanted her to make a good impression on him. “A decent business,” I thought I could hear him say. “An attractive, mature woman and obviously not penniless. No floozy like the sort my boy runs around with.”
But she was not relaxed. Now, granted, the bench was not exactly well carpentered or even particularly clean, but she perched on its edge as if that alone were already too great a concession to an environment which in no way matched her social standing and demands. The food, while primitive, was hearty and tasty, but she barely touched it, although she usually ate with gusto. Very delicately nauseated, she poked around in her salad to remove a bug that had dropped out of the elm tree; she barely sipped the wine; her responses to my — more and more artificial — expressions of well-being were chillingly monosyllabic.
At least, I thought to my relief, I had managed to prevent her from disguising herself as a grande dame. Her hair had a simple part and was combed back naturally, and she could have made a beautiful Gypsy with her fiery head and magnificent décolleté. But when I told her that and tried to slip a red carnation behind her ear (in my good mood, I had just bought the flower for my buttonhole), she struck my hand away, lapsed into offended silence, and then, when I kept urging her, finally squeezed out sotto voce that for her it was no compliment to be compared to a Gypsy.
“Not even an Andalusian Gypsy, for God’s sake?” I asked.
“No, not even an Andalusian Gypsy. It’s hard enough being Jewish,” she concluded, with a hateful expression on her face that I had never seen.
At this point, I began to seethe. She hasn’t successfully disguised herself as a mock lady, I told myself bitterly, and inwardly her effort is even less successful. And now, here she’s forced to realize that it’s all useless. Here everyone is quite simply what he is, I thought grimly. But not she. She’s too “elegant” for her own good. If only she finally accepted herself, if only she finally admitted that she’s a middle-aged Jewish shopkeeper, and that’s all! …
To prevent the silence from growing between us again, something I had been fearing since the last evening we had gone out together, I heedlessly started to chatter. Frivolously I talked of my intention — postponed, to be sure, but not canceled — someday to devote myself to the fine arts. I explained what welcome subject matter could be found in popular scenes, once painting came of age and freed itself of the constraints of devotional martyrdoms and kingly portraits: just recall the Dutch painters and certain realists, whose master in Lombardy was il Pinochetto, Ceruti, or the most delightful of all, Jean-Siméon Chardin ….
I might just as well have been speaking Chinese. Her eyes were as blank as mine must have been when, à propos her deceased husband’s studies, she told me of the importance of the addenda of the Saburaim and Geonim in Talmudic learning. Only she, when doing so, had worn her primordially maternal owl-face, full of kindness, a happiness-gilded smile always ready in the depths, while I went on angrily, tormenting myself. Finally she said, “What are you straining yourself for? Why don’t we just stop talking for a while?”
Then I saw a sudden terror in her eyes, and trembling lips, and I turned to see what she was staring at. A troupe of lautari had come by, itinerant players and jugglers, and they were about to put on a show. They had a tame bear on a chain. He waddled upright on short, crooked clown-legs with in-turned paws, sported a Turkish fez on his thick skull, and wore a leather muzzle on his face. On one of his long-clawed paws a tambourine was tied, and the other paw banged clumsily against the tambourine’s bell-jingling hide.
I knew these dancing bears; they had been the delight of my childhood. Most of them were trained to kiss the hand that tossed a few coins into the tambourine, and I could never forget the fearful, blissful tickle in the pit of my stomach the first time the muzzled jaws, one bite of which could have mashed my hand into a bloody pulp, sent the long lilac-colored tongue slithering out like a serpent to lick my fingers, while the bear’s trainer raked in the coins from the tambourine with a magician’s skill. I called out to the man who led the bear to bring him near me.
I had not reckoned with my lady friend’s panic. She leaped up, incapable of uttering a sound, her eyes widening in mortal horror, her fingers clawing at her teeth. I found this terror so overexaggerated that I could not help laughing. Her behavior was too childish — after all, the bear was muzzled, and a powerful man was holding him on a thick chain. I felt I was about to lose my temper. I said, “C’mon, stop acting so silly; he only wants to kiss your hand nicely!” And I took her hand and tried to bring it to the bear’s moist nose. But she resisted vigorously, and now I really did lose my temper and pulled her hand to the bear’s nose. She whimpered like a child. Then, with a final desperate exertion, she wrenched her hand free. For an instant, I totally forgot myself and slapped her face.