rather tragically, to renew the appearance of our family vault —but perhaps that was the very reason I went there: to see it.
It had to be some self-tormenting impulse that led me there, because for one thing this work, irritatingly amateurish in its own right, offended my good taste and my aesthetic sense, and for another, here in front of this statue the anger I felt toward Father, the revulsion and hatred could finally surface and be intensified by the trite sentimentality and calculated falsity with which the stonecutter had tried to reconcile his client's express wishes with his own so-called artistic concepts, for while he hadn't modeled the angel's head directly after my mother's but had augmented his own memories of her with the artistic ingenuity of using the portrait of her hanging on the dining-room wall, a rose-tinted image of Mother as a young girl, he nevertheless managed to slip some of Mother's characteristic features into that sweetly virginal, little-girl face: the angel's abruptly protruding brow and close-set eyes were reminiscent of Mother's forehead and eyes; the thin, gently curved nose, somewhat impudent lips, and charmingly pointed chin did bring to mind Mother's mouth and chin; but to make the confusion utter and complete, the crudely articulated stone cloak —in itself completely alien to any human shape—revealed the outlines of such an ethereally fragile body—with high-set, small, barely budding, yet aggressive breasts, a round belly, softly bulging buttocks, and hips a little bonier than necessary—and the wind, blowing into the angel's face and dramatically sweeping back her hair, made the cloak cling to the deep groin of this slender, about-to-ascend figure with such intrusive shamelessness that a viewer, faced with this hodgepodge of coarse details, could not possibly contemplate death or the possibility of dying; oddly enough, the statue did not evoke anything lifelike or natural, unless one considered natural the pitiful imaginings of an all-too-accommodating, aging artisan; and the tomb was vulgar and tasteless, too vulgar and tasteless to waste words or feelings on it if its creation had been the result of an unfortunate accident—the stonecutter's inability to realize, with noble simplicity, what Father had asked him to do; but no, it was neither accident nor coincidence but, on the contrary, the secret nature of necessity—unmistakably signaling an imminent doom—revealed that this statue was more a monument to my father's depravity than a memorial to my mother's life.
But who could have foreseen then, in the mundane portents of our days, the future in its entirety?
"We'll be late for the train," Father said, still there on the seashore, and almost imperceptibly his expression changed, the ironic self-satisfied look he had worn while leaning on the parapet and looking at Mother now mingling with a kind of impatient embarrassment; Mother, however, appeared to ignore both the odd intonation and the unusual sentence — unusual in that it was uttered at all; she made no reply.
She couldn't, unless she was going to interrupt her breathing exercise, because at this moment she was busy keeping her mouth open, her tongue stuck out, and with rhythmical, panting breaths she was trying to expel from her stomach the gradually inhaled, forcibly held-in air —like many women, she found this abdominal breathing difficult; but there was also a sort of offended, provocatively didactic intent in Mother's silence, a suggestion of increased tension that chose silence as a means to indicate that what had just happened would not pass without consequences, because they had an agreement; they had an agreement, concluded sometime ago, in tones that for my benefit were meant to be jocular but turned out to be serious, fueled by heated emotions, for just such occasions, when Father could no longer endure this "bestial existence," as he liked to put it, and it came about during one of those fresh-air
It had to be some self-tormenting impulse that led me there, because for one thing this work, irritatingly amateurish in its own right, offended my good taste and my aesthetic sense, and for another, here in front of this statue the anger I felt toward Father, the revulsion and hatred could finally surface and be intensified by the trite sentimentality and calculated falsity with which the stonecutter had tried to reconcile his client's express wishes with his own so-called artistic concepts, for while he hadn't modeled the angel's head directly after my mother's but had augmented his own memories of her with the artistic ingenuity of using the portrait of her hanging on the dining-room wall, a rose-tinted image of Mother as a young girl, he nevertheless managed to slip some of Mother's characteristic features into that sweetly virginal, little-girl face: the angel's abruptly protruding brow and close-set eyes were reminiscent of Mother's forehead and eyes; the thin, gently curved nose, somewhat impudent lips, and charmingly pointed chin did bring to mind Mother's mouth and chin; but to make the confusion utter and complete, the crudely articulated stone cloak —in itself completely alien to any human shape—revealed the outlines of such an ethereally fragile body—with high-set, small, barely budding, yet aggressive breasts, a round belly, softly bulging buttocks, and hips a little bonier than necessary—and the wind, blowing into the angel's face and dramatically sweeping back her hair, made the cloak cling to the deep groin of this slender, about-to-ascend figure with such intrusive shamelessness that a viewer, faced with this hodgepodge of coarse details, could not possibly contemplate death or the possibility of dying; oddly enough, the statue did not evoke anything lifelike or natural, unless one considered natural the pitiful imaginings of an all-too-accommodating, aging artisan; and the tomb was vulgar and tasteless, too vulgar and tasteless to waste words or feelings on it if its creation had been the result of an unfortunate accident—the stonecutter's inability to realize, with noble simplicity, what Father had asked him to do; but no, it was neither accident nor coincidence but, on the contrary, the secret nature of necessity—unmistakably signaling an imminent doom—revealed that this statue was more a monument to my father's depravity than a memorial to my mother's life.
But who could have foreseen then, in the mundane portents of our days, the future in its entirety?
"We'll be late for the train," Father said, still there on the seashore, and almost imperceptibly his expression changed, the ironic self-satisfied look he had worn while leaning on the parapet and looking at Mother now mingling with a kind of impatient embarrassment; Mother, however, appeared to ignore both the odd intonation and the unusual sentence — unusual in that it was uttered at all; she made no reply.
She couldn't, unless she was going to interrupt her breathing exercise, because at this moment she was busy keeping her mouth open, her tongue stuck out, and with rhythmical, panting breaths she was trying to expel from her stomach the gradually inhaled, forcibly held-in air —like many women, she found this abdominal breathing difficult; but there was also a sort of offended, provocatively didactic intent in Mother's silence, a suggestion of increased tension that chose silence as a means to indicate that what had just happened would not pass without consequences, because they had an agreement; they had an agreement, concluded sometime ago, in tones that for my benefit were meant to be jocular but turned out to be serious, fueled by heated emotions, for just such occasions, when Father could no longer endure this "bestial existence," as he liked to put it, and it came about during one of those fresh-air
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