I lie in the bed in which my mother (if memory serves me and this really is the extra-wide bed that she ordered from London before 1926) presumably received Uncle Ferdinand, the rooster . . . I am no longer a child and I can imagine what happened then. Nor do I have any illusions about my beautiful mother’s professionalism in this respect: I can exchange Uncle Ferdinand at will with any of my numerous godfathers and nominal uncles and leave the scene unaltered. (Mama, after all, had ordered not just one of these brass beds but several, dispatching one to our house on the Côte d’Azur, one to Uncle Bully’s house in Biarritz, one to Uncle Agop’s house in Ireland, and God knows where else.)

Here, as everywhere, it was the same. A high-class courtesan (poule de luxe, as the term was in those days) always serves her present backer. My mother the trollop. I, the son of a whore. A suicide’s bastard. Stella the Jewess’s gigolo, kept by her husband, the spy. . .

I say this out loud to myself to test the effect that the echo of such disgraceful epithets might provoke in me. But there is no effect. Quite the contrary: It amuses me to imagine the irony with which my beautiful mother might have plied her loose trade and been ready to grant her sundry lovers’ every desire. Thanks to her (and John and Stella and all my nominal uncles and godfathers) I am totally lacking in the sense of shame that my Viennese relatives tried to instill in me: Aunt Hertha occasionally at length and with insinuations about the past and my mother’s end that were scarcely to be mistaken, Aunt Selma in spellbound silence, Uncle Helmuth with biting discretion, and Cousin Wolfgang generously not saying a word: the poor blind fools! The pitiful misled saps! The victims, constantly deceiving themselves, of the criminal narrowness of their reality within a reality! Martyrs of the falsity of their shittily vertical Middle Kingdom, who have no past and no trace of a future, but only a gray, cheerless present for all time: always reflected in themselves; seeing nothing before them but themselves, their eyes incapable of seeing anything else! . . . But what really torments me is the discovery that I know as good as nothing about my mother, don’t at all know her as she really was; that I’m but a hypothesis of myself based on a hypothesis of her. The image of her that I have been carrying around might, on the whole, correspond only hazily and casually to her actual reality, despite the sharpness of countless details—like the images I preserved within myself of this house, the village, and even the park (images that here and now I find myself forced incessantly to correct). I have found photographs of her: they do not fit the legend of my sweet mother in any way, and yet they complement and complete it, as though I were now discovering an unknown dimension of her, of myself, that might conceal yet other dimensions . . .