Kaputt (42 page)

"It's unthinkable," said Dornberg, "the sort of people Countess Ciano gathers around herself. I never have seen anything like them even at Monte Carlo around the
vieilles dames à gigolos—
old girls with their gigolos."

"At heart Edda is a
vieille femme,"
said Agatha.

"But she is only thirty!" exclaimed Princess von T— .

"Thirty years is a lot, if one has never been young," said Agatha, and added that Countess Ciano had never been young, that she was already old, that she had the wit, the temper and the capricious and despotic whims of an old woman. Like those old women who surround themselves with smiling servants, she tolerated around her only obliging friends, easy lovers and evasive people capable of amusing and distracting her. "She is a mortally sad woman," Agatha concluded. "Her worst enemy is boredom. She spends the nights playing dice like a Harlem Negress. She is a kind of Madame Bovary. Can you imagine what Madame Bovary would have been, if she were the daughter of Mussolini?"

"She often weeps. She spends entire days locked in her room, weeping," said Veronica.

"She always laughs," Agatha said in an evil voice. "She often spends the nights drinking in the beautiful company of lovers, crooks and spies."

"It would be much worse if she drank alone," said Dornberg. And he told us that in Adrianople he had met an unhappy British consul who was bored to death and who, in order not to drink alone, sat all evening in front of his mirror; he kept on drinking hour after hour, in silence, in his lonely room, until his reflection in the mirror began laughing. Then he rose and went to bed.

"Edda would have thrown her glass at the mirror within the first five minutes," said Agatha.

"She has weak lungs and she knows she has not long to live," said Veronica. "Her eccentricities and her capricious and willful temper are a result of her illness. At times I feel sorry for her."

"The Italians hate everybody whose most humble servants they are," said Countess W— contemptuously.

"It may merely be a servant's hatred," said Agatha, "but they detest her!"

"The Capri people," said Alfieri, "are not fond of her, but they respect her and forgive her all her eccentricities. 'Poor Countess,' they say, 'it's no fault of hers that she is a madman's daughter.'

The Capri people have an odd way of looking at history. After my illness last year, I went for a few weeks of convalescing to Capri. The fishermen of Piccola Marina, watching me go by looking thin and pale, and thinking that I am a German, because I am Ambassador in Berlin, said to me, 'Don't take it too much to heart, sir. What do you care if Hitler loses the war? Think of your health.' "

"Ha, ha, ha!" laughed Dornberg. "'Think of your health!' That's not a bad policy."

"They say she hates her father," said Princess von T— .

"Actually, I think she abominates her father," said Veronica, "and her father worships her."

"And what about Galeazzo?" asked Baroness von B— . "She is supposed to despise him."

"She may despise him, but she is also very fond of him," said Veronica.

"At any rate she is very faithful to him," said Princess von T— ironically.

Everybody laughed, and Alfieri, "the best-looking ambassador and most chivalrous of men," said, "Ah! Are you casting the first stone?"

"I was eighteen when I cast the first stone," replied Princess von T— .

"Had Edda received a better education," said Agatha, "she would have been a perfect nihilist."

"I don't know what form her nihilism is," I said, "but there certainly is something savage about her. At least that's what Isabelle Colonna believes. One evening at a dinner in a great Roman house the talk turned to the Princess of Piedmont. Countess Ciano said: 'The Mussolini dynasty is like the Savoys,- it will not last long. I shall end like the Princess of Piedmont.' Everyone was aghast. The Princess of Piedmont was seated at the same table. Once, at a dance in the Colonna Palace, Countess Ciano said to Isabelle who was advancing to meet her, 'I'm wondering when my father will make up his mind to sweep away all this.' We were talking about suicide one day. She suddenly said to me, 'My father will never have the pluck to kill himself.' I said to her, 'Show him how to shoot himself.' Next morning a police inspector came to my house to request in the name of Countess Ciano that I avoid her in the future."

"And you have never seen her again?" asked Princess von T— .

"Yes, only once, a little while later. I was strolling toward Matromania through the wood at the back of my house when I met her on the path. I told her she should avoid entering my woods if she had no desire to see me. She looked at me with an odd expression and replied that she wanted to talk to me. 'What have you to tell me?' I asked. She looked sad and downcast, 'Nothing! I wanted to tell you that I could ruin you, if I wanted.' She held out her hand, 'Let us be friends,' she said, 'shall we?' 'We have never been friends,' I replied. She moved off in silence. At the end of the path, she turned back and smiled. I felt very shaken. I have felt very sorry for her since that day. I should add that I feel a superstitious respect for her. She is a sort of Stavrogin."

"A sort of Stavrogin, did you say?" asked Baroness von T— .

"Why do you think that she is a sort of Stavrogin?"

"She loves death," I replied. "Her face is extraordinary,- on some days it is a mask of murder, on other days it is a mask of suicide. I would not be surprised if I were told some day that she had killed somebody or that she had committed suicide."

"Yes, she loves death," said Dornberg. "On Capri she often goes out alone at night; she scrambles over the cliffs that rise sheer above the sea. She balances herself on the edge of precipices. Peasants saw her one day sitting on the little wall of the Salto di Tiberio, her legs swinging in the void. She leans over the Migliara rock, above a precipice fifteen hundred feet deep, as if it were a balcony. One night, during a thunderstorm, I saw her with my own eyes walking about the roof of the Certosa, leaping from dome to dome like a bewitched cat. Yes, she loves death."

"Is it enough to love death," asked Countess von W— , "to become a murderer or a suicide?"

"It is enough," I replied. "That is Stavrogin's secret morality, the mysterious meaning of his awful confession. Mussolini is aware that his daughter is of the same cloth as Stavrogin. He is afraid of her; he has her watched; he wants to be informed about her every step, her every word, her every thought and vice. He went so far as to push a man belonging to the police into her arms, so he could spy, even through another man's eyes, to spy on his daughter in her moments of abandonment. He would like to draw from her Stavrogin's confession. His only enemy, his real rival is his daughter. She is his secret conscience. All the black blood of the Mussolinis is not in the father's veins; it runs in Edda's too. Were Mussolini a legitimate sovereign and Edda a prince and his heir, he would have done away with her to safeguard his throne. At heart Mussolini rejoices in his daughter's disordered life and in the disease that is threatening her. He can rule in peace. But can he sleep in peace? Edda is merciless, she obsesses his nights. Some day there will be bloodshed between the father and the daughter."

"That's a very romantic story," said Princess von T— . "Isn't it the story of Oedipus?"

"Yes, perhaps," I replied, "in the sense that a shade of Oedipus can be found in Stavrogin."

"I think you are right," said Dornberg. "It is enough to love death. Captain Kifer, a doctor in a German military hospital in Anacapri, was summoned one day to the Quisisana Hotel to attend Countess Ciano who was suffering with a violent and persistent migraine. This was his first opportunity to observe Edda closely. Captain Kifer is an able physician who knows how to look at things; he knows that disease is mysterious. He felt very troubled after leaving Countess Ciano's room. He said later that he had noticed a discolored spot on her temple that resembled the scar of a pistol shot; he added that, no doubt it was the scar of a pistol shot that she would one day fire into her temple."

"Another romantic story!" exclaimed Princess von T— . "I admit that I am beginning to be fascinated by that woman. Do you really believe that she will shoot herself at thirty?"

"Don't be afraid; she'll kill herself when she is seventy," said Giuseppina von Stum suddenly.

We turned to look at her in amazement. Everybody laughed. I watched her in silence. She was very pale and she smiled. "She is not of the butterfly breed," said Giuseppina von Stum in a contemptuous voice.

Her words were followed by an uncomfortable silence.

"Last time that I came from Italy," finally said Virginia Casardi with her American accent, "I brought an Italian butterfly with me."

"A butterfly? What an idea!" exclaimed Agatha Ratibor. She looked angry, almost hurt.

"A Roman butterfly from the Appian Way," said Virginia. And she told us that the butterfly had dropped into her hair one evening, while she was having supper with some friends in that inn with the odd name near the tomb of Cecilia Metalla.

"What is the odd name of that inn?" asked Dornberg.

"It is called 'One Never Dies Here,'" replied Virginia.

Giuseppina von Stum began laughing, stared at me, then said softly, "Horrible!" and covered her mouth with her hand.

"A Roman butterfly is not a butterfly like any other," said Virginia. She had brought that butterfly from Rome to Berlin by air in a cardboard box and she had released it in her bedroom. The butterfly fluttered about the room a while, then it settled on the mirror, where it stayed motionless for a few days; now and then it only moved its very delicate pale blue antennae. "It looked at itself in the mirror," said Virginia. One morning, a few days later, she found it dead on the mirror.

"It had drowned itself in the mirror," said Marquise Theodoli. "That is the story of Narcissus."

"Do you believe that the butterfly drowned itself?" asked Veronica.

"Butterflies love to die," said Giuseppina von Stum softly.

Everybody laughed and I looked at Giuseppina, annoyed by that silly laughter.

"Its reflection killed it, its own reflection looking out of the mirror," said Countess Emo.

"I think that its reflection died first," said Virginia. "That's the way things always are."

"Its reflection stayed in the mirror," said Baroness Edelstam. "That butterfly did not die. It flew away."

"Papillon
. It's a nice word,
papillon
—" said Alfieri in his silly and flirtatious voice. "Have you noticed that
papillon
in French is masculine, and
farfalla
in Italian is feminine? We are very gallant with the ladies in Italy."

"You mean with the butterflies," said Princess von T— .

"In German also," said Dornberg, "the name is masculine:
der Schmetterling.
We tend to exalt the masculine gender in Germany."

"Der Krieg
—War," said Marquise Theodoli.

"Death, too, is masculine in Greek: the god
Thanatos,"
said Dornberg.

"In German the sun is feminine
die Sonne."
I said: "You cannot understand the history of the German people, unless you keep in mind that it is the history of a people for whom the sun is feminine."

"Perhaps you are right," said Dornberg.

"What is Malaparte right about?" asked Angela in an ironical tone. "The word moon is masculine in German,
der Mond.
That is important, too, if you want to understand the history of the German people."

"Certainly," replied Dornberg. "That is very important!"

"All that is mysterious in the German character," I said, "all that is morbid in it springs from the feminine gender of the sun—
die Sonne."

"Yes, we are unfortunately a very feminine people," said Dornberg.

"Speaking of butterflies," said Alfieri turning to me, "didn't you write in one of your books that Hitler is a butterfly?"

"No, I said that Hitler is a woman."

They all looked at one another, surprised and a little embarrassed.

"Just so," said Alfieri, "to compare Hitler with a butterfly seemed to me absurd."

Everybody laughed and Virginia said, "It would never occur to me to press Hitler between the leaves of
Mein Kampf
like a butterfly. It's a very odd idea."

"It's a school girl's idea," said Dornberg smiling through the hair of his short faunlike beard.

It was the time of the
Verdunkel,
and Alfieri, not to miss the view of the frozen Wannsee glittering under the moon, instead of having the curtains drawn to darken the windows, had the candles extinguished. By degrees the ghostly reflection of the moon like faraway music invaded the room and spread over the glassware, the china and the silver. We were left tense and silent in the silvery half light; the waiters in that lunar half light moved silently around the table, in that Proustian light that appeared to be the reflection "of an almost curdled sea, of the bluish color of milk." The night was clear, without a breath of wind—the trees stood motionless against the pale sky; the snow glittered in a bluish whiteness.

We sat a long time gazing at the lake. A proud fear was in that silence, the same anguish that I had noticed before in the laughter and the voices of those young German women. "It's too beautiful," all at once burst forth Veronica, rising suddenly. "I don't like being sad." We all followed her into the drawing room flooded with light, and the pleasant conversation lasted far into the night. Giuseppina came to sit next to me in silence. At one moment I became aware that she was about to speak to me, but instead, she looked at me, rose and left the drawing room. I did not see her again that evening and I was under the impression that she had driven away because I thought I heard the crunch of wheels on snow and the fading hum of a motor. It was two in the morning when we left Alfieri and Wannsee. I drove back to Berlin with Veronica and Agatha. On the way I asked Veronica whether she knew Giuseppina von Stum well. "She is Italian," replied Veronica.

"She is rather crazy," added Agatha in her slightly squeaky voice.