Memoirs of an Anti-Semite by Gregor Von Rezzori

lowered and hands folded in clerical modesty, wearing his dark, well-tailored, but dreadfully stained suit, the shirt with frayed cuffs and collar, and the skew and sloppily knotted tie; yet his elegance was undeniable. His tall stature and well-proportioned frame, the distinguished head with the blazing white hair and the very beautiful red lips, were as attractive as the rest of him was repulsive—his terribly ruined teeth; his dark-brown fingers tanned by incessant smoking; the pale, decayed, and overfed flesh bloated from his stay-at-home existence. As long as his almost colorless light eyes between the half-closed lids scrutinized the all-too-familiar furniture in the dining room and the usually quite sumptuously laden table, they expressed scornful irony. But barely had they encountered the eyes of the host, the hostess, or one of the other guests when they faded; abruptly they seemed like a blind man’s eyes, even though they must have perceived as sharply as before; and Stiassny’s face resumed a look of the most servile self-denial, as though he were about to say, “But then who am I to be so forward as to venture even the least critique on what is so magnanimously offered us here? If, however, such an impression may have arisen, then I beg you not to take any notice of it.”
    At meals, Stiassny sat at the end of the table: that is, next to or near me. He ate with a greed that had become proverbial. “He eats like Stiassny” was said, for instance, about a horse that had been under the weather and refusing its fodder but was now finally starting to recuperate. Greatly as his excessive gusto repelled me, I could not help watching Stiassny from the corner of my eye. It afforded me a dark pleasure to see his noble, finely carved, sensitive, and overindulged profile wolfing down incredible amounts of all kinds of food, at times even compulsively, mechanically. My pleasure was the sort one receives from certain Mannerist paintings that along with beauty also show us its terrible reverse. Stiassny was far too sensitive not to feel my stealthy sidelong glances. He would turn to me when I least expected it, catch me off guard, and, offering his repulsiveness en face to my scrutiny, strike me with a smile of perfidious complicity, as though recognizing in me a confederate of similar vice. But he was generously content to establish this without showing that, even on a level of equal lowness, there is a hierarchical difference between the sovereign perpetrator and the subaltern wisher who is a sinner merely in thought. Yet his colorless eyes remained so expressionless that he seemed to be striving to conceal any advantage of his person—the aura of his intellect, enormous knowledge, and superiority—over the lowbrows he was forced to live among, his presumable vulnerability, and perhaps even his kindness and need for love; to camouflage them behind the mask of undisguised evil.
    Naturally, such a look bewildered me. I would be disquieted for days, flung out of the saddle of my self-assurance, in which I sat—by no means a descendant of Count Sàndor—none too securely anyhow. Stiassny seemed to know this, and sometimes I thought he was trying to embarrass me permanently. Ever since I had come into my relatives’ home—or rather, ever since he had to watch me entering into a growing intimacy and familiarity there, a familiarity that was more and more taken for granted (“Like an epiphany,” he said with a smile, baring his ruined teeth)—he treated me with a civility that was too exaggerated not to convey an impression of sheer irony to even the most impartial observer. “Lo and behold, the heir apparent!” he would say, rising ceremoniously, whenever I came into the room, and waiting until I took my place before he sat down again, leaning forward as though waiting assiduously to hear what I had to say. Such behavior was bound to confuse me as much as his