My grandfather’s sister’s husband, an unsuccessful painter in Europe who through his marriage had come into a fairly large estate, which he owed to my grandfather’s industry, left at the turn of the century on—as he maintained at the time—a scientific expedition to Argentina and stopped over in some coastal city. He had announced that the duration of the expedition, and thus of his stay in South America, would be four months; he is supposed to have been involved in a scientific topic with which, without exception, all of our ancestors have been concerned and in which some of them achieved fame by their publications on precisely this topic. After the four months had passed, my great-aunt heard no more of her husband, who had, up to that point, written to Europe from time to time. One day she received, in the mail, her husband’s wallet with a note saying that her husband had taken a horse in that coastal city and had ridden off and not returned. According to eyewitnesses, there were terrible storms around at the time, and it was assumed that he had died in these storms. Nor was there any sign of the horse. My grandfather’s sister therefore had to come to terms with the death of her husband, who was originally from Eger, and she was left alone with the twelve-year-old daughter her husband had also abandoned. Sixty-two years after her husband had ridden off in South America and had, as she certainly believed, died, she learned from Le Monde, which she had read every day for forty years, that her husband, sixty-one years after being declared dead by the Austrian authorities, had in fact only now died in Rio de Janeiro, unmarried but surrounded by women who looked after him, and as a world-famous painter who, as Le Monde wrote, had given South American painting and, indeed, the whole of South American art a new impetus and an international repute, using the same name that he had lived under in Europe but with an ‘o’ at the end. Immediately, his widow, who had, in the meantime, grown very very old but not so old that she could not read Le Monde anymore, and her daughter had considered recovering by legal means what was now known to be their husband’s and father’s massive estate.

Legacy

LEGACY