Read Online The Snows of Yesteryear by Gregor Von Rezzori - Free Book Online Page A

traditional lady-killer pose, leaning on a rudimentary birch-lattice fence (the standard background of the while-you-wait photographer at the entrance to the public park), one arm bent akimbo, the sleeve embroidered with a filigree of gold braids and his hand nonchalantly holding a pair of white cuff-gloves, the saber hanging low in the belt. Cassandra placed the picture on a table, lit a candle in front of it, knelt down, crossed herself and started to pray ... at first in a murmur, then ever louder, first in deep seriousness and apparent piety, then ever more satanically, her rising rage driving her into demonic merriment, praying ever more wildly and interjecting into her prayers increasingly terrifying invectives and the most shocking gestures ... until she finally grabbed the picture, drew a pin from her hair and with it pricked out his eyes, drove it through his heart and time and time again at the juncture of his legs; then she tore the picture into small scraps with which, after lifting her skirts, she wiped her behind, finally burning each scrap separately in the flame of the candle.
    At first, I was deeply frightened. Cassandra, the piously strict, for whom God the Father, Jesus Christ and all the saints were part of the world as real as the mountains, the rivers and the trees in the forest where she had been born, all of them as firmly grounded in her life as the walls of the monastery in which she, a sinner, had found refuge, she who never failed to make the sign of the cross before speaking the name of something holy, she who had led me into every church that happened to be on our way— she now celebrated right here before my very eyes a black mass, she sinned in the most blasphemous manner imaginable, she indulged in shamanic magic and invoked satanic powers for the lowest of purposes: to take revenge on one whom she had loved. It was so monstrous, so unexpected and so baffling that, irresistibly, it reverted to the comical. I ended up raked by laughter. I could not wait to tell my sister about it and I rejoiced in anticipation of that moment, even though I knew this would constitute a betrayal of Cassandra and our twin togetherness. Our family storehouse of anecdotes had gained another pungent Cassandra story—and I had lost one more part of my innocence.
    Retrospective perception of the milestones of life, which tends to make you see existence as divided into distinct phases, leads me to see this episode as marking the end of my true childhood. After it I could no longer identify myself with Cassandra naturally and spontaneously. For the first time I “saw” her consciously and perceived her through the eyes of the others to whom I betrayed her. I had left the safe haven of her hair, in which I had been sheltered from those others, and I had switched over to their camp. We still lived in a time in which an almost unbridgeable gulf gaped between the so-called educated classes and the so-called common people. My family’s situation, based on the abstract image of a once privileged position—mainly the myth of former wealth, which encouraged us to live beyond our true means and to indulge in expensive habits we could no longer afford—placed us absurdly far above the “common people,” who, for the most part, lived in abject poverty, a poverty borne humbly and with eyes raised in admiration to their “masters.” For the first time I thought of Cassandra as belonging not to my own lineage but to that other race of the poor, the know-nothing and the lowly. At the same time, there awoke in me a sense of the social pecking order. The longings for my putative milk-brother began to fade. Had I met him then, I would have felt separated from him by the same gap that set me apart from the neighborhood children with whom we were forbidden to play.
    It may be that this event was preceded by another less spectacular one that had an even greater impact, an initiation of a different