mumbled sleepily, yes, yes, she was pretty and I loved her.
I woke up when Marie got out of bed, washed and dressed. She was not shy, and I found it quite natural to watch her. It was even more obvious than before: how poor her clothes were. While she was doing up all the hooks and buttons I thought of all the nice things I would buy her if I had money. I had often stood in front of shopwindows and looked at skirts and sweaters, shoes and handbags, and pictured how they would all suit her, but her father had such strict ideas about money that I would never have dared to buy her anything. He had said to me once: “It is terrible to be poor, but it’s not very pleasant either just to get by, which is the way most people are.” “Andto be rich?” I had asked, “what’s that like?” I had flushed. He had looked at me keenly and flushed too, and had said: “You’ll regret it, my boy, if you don’t give up thinking. If I had the courage and faith to believe one could accomplish something in this world, do you know what I would do?” “No,” I said. His color mounting again he said, “I would found some kind of society to look after the children of the rich. The idiots always apply the term antisocial only to the poor.”
A lot of things went through my mind as I watched Marie dress. It made me glad and at the same time unhappy to see how she took her body for granted. Later on, when we moved together from hotel to hotel, I always stayed in bed in the morning so I could watch her wash and dress, and when the bathroom was so placed that I couldn’t watch her from the bed, I lay in the bathtub. On this particular morning in her room I would have liked to go on lying in bed indefinitely and could have wished she would never finish getting dressed. She washed her neck, arms and breasts thoroughly and brushed her teeth vigorously. Personally I have always tried to get out of washing in the morning, and I still loathe cleaning my teeth. I prefer having a bath, but I always enjoyed watching Marie, she was so clean and everything was so natural, even the little gesture with which she screwed the top on the toothpaste tube. I also thought about my brother Leo, who was very devout, conscientious, and precise, and who was always assuring me he “had faith” in me. He was just about to graduate too, and somehow he was ashamed that he had managed to do it at nineteen, while at twenty-one I was still getting annoyed at the phony interpretation of the Song of the Nibelungs. Leo even knew Marie from some study groups or other where young Catholics and Protestants discussed democracy and religious tolerance. By this time Leo and I both regarded our parents just as a kind of couple running a foster home. It had been a terrible shock for Leo when he found out Father had a mistress for nearly ten years. It was a shock for me too, butnot a moral one, I could well imagine how awful it must be to be married to my mother, whose deceptive meekness was a meekness of i and e. She hardly ever said a sentence containing a, o or u, and it was typical of her to have abbreviated Leo’s name to Le. Her favorite expression was: “We simply see things differently”—her next favorite was: “In principle I am right, I’m ready to listen to reason.” For me the shock of finding out Father had a mistress was more of an esthetic one: it wasn’t like him. He is neither passionate nor vigorous, and if I was not to assume that she was some kind of nurse or spiritual therapist for him (in which case the dramatic expression mistress is not appropriate), then the thing that bothered me was that it didn’t suit Father. In actual fact she was a nice, pretty, not terribly intelligent singer, for whom he didn’t even arrange extra engagements or concerts. He was too upright for that. To me the whole thing seemed pretty confused, for Leo it was bitter. He was wounded in his ideals, and the only way my mother could describe Leo’s condition was to say
I woke up when Marie got out of bed, washed and dressed. She was not shy, and I found it quite natural to watch her. It was even more obvious than before: how poor her clothes were. While she was doing up all the hooks and buttons I thought of all the nice things I would buy her if I had money. I had often stood in front of shopwindows and looked at skirts and sweaters, shoes and handbags, and pictured how they would all suit her, but her father had such strict ideas about money that I would never have dared to buy her anything. He had said to me once: “It is terrible to be poor, but it’s not very pleasant either just to get by, which is the way most people are.” “Andto be rich?” I had asked, “what’s that like?” I had flushed. He had looked at me keenly and flushed too, and had said: “You’ll regret it, my boy, if you don’t give up thinking. If I had the courage and faith to believe one could accomplish something in this world, do you know what I would do?” “No,” I said. His color mounting again he said, “I would found some kind of society to look after the children of the rich. The idiots always apply the term antisocial only to the poor.”
A lot of things went through my mind as I watched Marie dress. It made me glad and at the same time unhappy to see how she took her body for granted. Later on, when we moved together from hotel to hotel, I always stayed in bed in the morning so I could watch her wash and dress, and when the bathroom was so placed that I couldn’t watch her from the bed, I lay in the bathtub. On this particular morning in her room I would have liked to go on lying in bed indefinitely and could have wished she would never finish getting dressed. She washed her neck, arms and breasts thoroughly and brushed her teeth vigorously. Personally I have always tried to get out of washing in the morning, and I still loathe cleaning my teeth. I prefer having a bath, but I always enjoyed watching Marie, she was so clean and everything was so natural, even the little gesture with which she screwed the top on the toothpaste tube. I also thought about my brother Leo, who was very devout, conscientious, and precise, and who was always assuring me he “had faith” in me. He was just about to graduate too, and somehow he was ashamed that he had managed to do it at nineteen, while at twenty-one I was still getting annoyed at the phony interpretation of the Song of the Nibelungs. Leo even knew Marie from some study groups or other where young Catholics and Protestants discussed democracy and religious tolerance. By this time Leo and I both regarded our parents just as a kind of couple running a foster home. It had been a terrible shock for Leo when he found out Father had a mistress for nearly ten years. It was a shock for me too, butnot a moral one, I could well imagine how awful it must be to be married to my mother, whose deceptive meekness was a meekness of i and e. She hardly ever said a sentence containing a, o or u, and it was typical of her to have abbreviated Leo’s name to Le. Her favorite expression was: “We simply see things differently”—her next favorite was: “In principle I am right, I’m ready to listen to reason.” For me the shock of finding out Father had a mistress was more of an esthetic one: it wasn’t like him. He is neither passionate nor vigorous, and if I was not to assume that she was some kind of nurse or spiritual therapist for him (in which case the dramatic expression mistress is not appropriate), then the thing that bothered me was that it didn’t suit Father. In actual fact she was a nice, pretty, not terribly intelligent singer, for whom he didn’t even arrange extra engagements or concerts. He was too upright for that. To me the whole thing seemed pretty confused, for Leo it was bitter. He was wounded in his ideals, and the only way my mother could describe Leo’s condition was to say
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