The only thing I still recall is that she used to wear a skirt with vertical stripes, so that she looked like a high wooden lattice on top of which an unpleated white blouse hung. When she spoke, it was invariably to contradict, and this usually happened in approximately the following manner: someone said, for instance, that Ottavina was beautiful. “Yes” – she immediately added – “a noble Roman type.” Meanwhile she looked at you with such certainty, that for the sake of preserving world order, you had to correct her, whether you wanted to or not; for Ottavina, the chambermaid, was from Tuscany. “Yes” – she replied – “from Tuscany. But a Roman type! All Roman women have noses attached directly to the brow!” Now Ottavina was not only from Tuscany, but she also did not have a nose attached directly to her brow; nonetheless, the lady from Wiesbaden possessed such a lively spirit that a preconceived notion always popped out of her head simply because other preconceived notions elbowed it out. I am afraid she was an unhappy woman. And perhaps she was not a woman at all, but a girl.

She had traveled by boat around Africa and wanted to visit Japan. Apropos of this, she told of a girlfriend who had drunk several glasses of beer and smoked forty cigarettes, and she called her a swell chum. When she talked like this, her face looked terribly dissolute, with too much skin and crooked slits for a mouth, nose, and eyes; you thought at the least that she smoked opium. But as soon as she no longer felt herself observed, she had a perfectly proper face that stuck in the other like little Tom Thumb in seven-league boots. Her highest ideal was the lion hunt, and she asked us all if we thought one needed a great deal of strength to go on one. Courage – she said – of courage she had plenty, but was she also up to the hardships? Her nephew was trying to talk her into it because he would just love to be taken along; but for such a twenty-two-year-old rascal it was a different matter altogether, was it not? The good world-traveling aunt indeed! I am convinced that under the African sun, she will give her nephew a good strong slap on the shoulder, and that the lion will slip away, as did Mme. Gervais and I whenever we got the chance.

Then I sometimes snuck over to Mrs. Nevermore’s office or slipped down the hallway in search of Ottavina. I could just as well have cast a glance at the stars in heaven, but Ottavina was more beautiful. She was the second chambermaid, a nineteen-year-old peasant girl who had a husband and a little son at home; she was perhaps the most beautiful woman I have ever seen. Let no one tell me there are many different beauties, beauty of many types and degrees: I know all that. In fact, I never even held much by Ottavina’s type of beauty; it was Raphael’s type, to which I even have an aversion: But despite this beauty, what overpowered my eye was Ottavina’s beauty! Fortunately, I can permit myself to say that for those who have never seen the like, it is impossible to describe. How revolting are the words harmony, symmetry, perfection, noble bearing! We have stuffed them so full of meaning, they stand before us like fat women on tiny feet and cannot even move. But once you have seen real harmony and perfection, you are astounded how natural it is. It is down to earth. It flows like a stream, not at all evenly, with the unabashed self-regard of nature, without straining for grandeur or perfection. If I say about Ottavina that she was big, strong, aristocratic, and elegant, I have the feeling that these words were borrowed from other people. She was big, but no less graceful. Strong, but in no way staid. Aristocratic without any loss of originality. At once a goddess and the second chambermaid. I never succeeded in speaking with the nineteen-year-old Ottavina, because she found my broken Italian unsuitable, and to everything I said, responded only with a very polite yes or no; but I think I worshipped her. Of course I don’t even know for sure, because with Ottavina, everything meant something else. I did not desire her, I suffered no loss, I did not swoon; quite the contrary, every time I saw her, I tried to make myself as inconspicuous as a mortal who has stumbled into the company of the gods.