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And Carlotta was at his side, barely aging, the hint of the future matron barely in her face, in the slightly puffy cheeks and tear sacs, under the bovine gaze of a nymphomaniac. She might have been thinking about our first meeting, eighteen years ago, in Witte’s office: she was Witte’s secretary at that time and his dame de compagnie, although still married to Schwab, while I was married to Christa, who had talked me, a young man full of ideas, into taking Witte up on his suggestion and entering the advertising department of the Wittewash Company. Naturally this was not the result of my visit to Witte’s office. But it did lead to meeting Carlotta (and, at a certain point in the “conference,” to our launching into a fit of laughter that nothing could suppress or arrest). It led to one of those light-as-a-feather relationships never dramatized by either partner, whose basis is for many years the nearest bed or sofa, and which, unmarred by any other demand, prove to be the most durable and most useful friendships (Gisela).

Presumably, then, Carlotta (her real name was of course Hannelore, but she had sloughed off this prosaic name as an adolescent during a three-week sojourn in Florence, where she had assumed the more rigorously formed name)—presumably, Carlotta was not overwhelmed with emotion on seeing me again. She merely sized me up and down with a sober eye to check the extent to which my physical decay, undeniably commencing, could spoil the tastiness of the morsel that she had sporadically inserted into her erotic diet over a long period of time, a quite variegated diet at that. She liked me; that was certain. Besides, she had never put on a show for anybody.

In those days, I had greatly disappointed Witte; furthermore, my separation from Christa, his protégée, had convinced him how fatefully correct he had been to feel qualms about “part-time artists” (he meant, oddly enough, artistically gifted men who were careless with their talents; who lacked the ethical strength to devote themselves totally to art, commit their entire being to it). Witte, of course, had completely excluded me from the precincts of his role as God the Father, promoter, and protector. I figured at the periphery of his Middle Kingdom as a troublemaker; but ever since he had filled his flock almost entirely with full-time artists—ceramicists and interpretive dancers—I did not get all too close to his cock-of-the-walk feelings. He had (like most other people) viewed Schwab’s friendship with me as the expression of the non-middle-class leanings that one must accept in a full-time artist (for Schwab’s assignment to this category was due to his death, which had proved once again to Witte that a genuine artistic temperament will brook no compromises).

Here too Witte could, quite appropriately, play the generous man. And this, as usual, moved him to feel sentimental about himself. Only the strict obligation of a Hanseatic man to act reserved (and perhaps also the suspicion that a news photographer might be present and could possibly publish the photograph) prevented him from waving me over to shake my hand with deep concern.