Extinction Read Free Page B

simple fact that they were dead, irrevocably dead. Though my parents had been pathetic in every way, I had always regarded them as demons, and now suddenly, overnight, they had shrunk to the ridiculous, grotesque photo that I had in front of me and was studying with the most shameless intensity. The same was true of the photo of my brother. All your life you feared these people more than any others, I thought, and this fear cast a monstrous blight on your life. All your life you tried repeatedly to escape from them, but you always failed.You went to Vienna to escape from them, to London, to Paris, to Ankara, to Istanbul, and finally to Rome—all to no avail. They had to have a fatal accident and shrink to this ridiculous scrap of paper called a photograph before they could cease to harm you. The persecution mania’s over, I thought. They’re dead. You’re free. Looking at the photograph of my brother on his sailboat at Sankt Wolfgang, I felt sorry for him for the first time. In the photo he now seemed far more comic than when I had first looked at it. I was alarmed by my ruthless honesty. My parents too looked comic in the photo taken at Victoria Station. All three of them, lying on the desk in front of me, not four inches in height, fashionably dressed and in grotesque physical attitudes that betrayed mental attitudes no less grotesque, were even more comic than when I had looked at them before. The photograph reveals only a single grotesque or comic moment, I thought, not the person as he really was more or less all his life. The photograph is a perverse and treacherous falsification. Every photograph—whoever took it, whoever is pictured in it—is a gross violation of human dignity, a monstrous falsification of nature, a base insult to humanity. On the other hand, I found the two photos immensely characteristic of both my parents and my brother. That’s how they really are, I thought—or were. I could have brought many other photographs of my parents and my brother from Wolfsegg and kept them in my desk. The reason why I brought these is that they show my parents and my brother as they really were when I photographed them. I did not feel in the least ashamed of this thought. It was not fortuitous that I had brought these particular photographs to Rome and kept them in my desk instead of destroying them. What I have here are not idealized images of my parents, I told myself, but my parents as they really are—or were, I said, correcting myself again. And my brother as he really was. All three were so timid, so ordinary, so comic. I’d never have put up with falsifications but tolerated only true and genuine likenesses, however grotesque—and possibly repulsive. And it was this photo of my parents that I once showed to Gambetti, a year ago. I even remember where—at the café on the Piazza del Popolo. He looked at it, but made no comment, though I recall that after looking at it he asked,
Are your parents very rich? Yes
, I said. I also remember that I later felt embarrassed at having shown it to him. You should never have shown him
that
photo, I told myself at the time. It was stupid. There were—and still are—countless photos that show my parents looking
serious
, as they say, but they do not correspond to the image I have always had of them. And there are serious photographs of my brother, but they too are misrepresentations. I would never have shown Gambetti any of these misrepresentations. In any case there is hardly anything I detest more than handing photographs around. I do not show people photographs, and I do not let them show me theirs. The fact that I showed Gambetti the one of my parents at Victoria Station was quite exceptional. What made me do it? Gambetti has never shown me any of
his
photographs. Of course I know his parents, and his brothers and sisters, so there would be no point in his showing me pictures of them; he would never think of it. Basically I detest photographs, and it has never