. .

My aunt, the mortadella sausage, folded her hands and whispered quietly: “God protect her!”

I led her back . . .

She was altogether flustered. “I beg you,” she said, “don’t breathe a word of this to my husband or my daughter, I just showed her to you because you’re so crazy . . .”

I looked her in the eyes and said: “Of course . . .”

Then she said: “Will you get a load of the high-class boys my daughter’s hobnobbing with . . . ?!”

“Pst,” I said, “from the standpoint of the national GNP . . .”

“Indeed,” she said, “but I also want Elsie to marry well, rich and happy . . .”

“Of course . . . ,” I said, “are you happy, Auntie?”

“I’m too fat and too crazy for happiness . . . ,” she said, “but that’s between me and you.”

“To the last point at least I can attest . . . ,” I said, whereupon my aunt exploded in laughter.

Career

The press photographer who was supposed to photograph two walls of my room because “the big European illustrated magazines” wanted to give their eager readers a glimpse of P.A.’s digs, said: “I’d like to include in the picture a piece of your desk.”— “That’s altogether unnecessary, since, first of all, I don’t have a desk, and second, I do all my writing in bed. Why don’t you include a bit of my bed!”—I said: “So how do you become a press photographer? I only know how you become a poet. You’re a disgrace to your kind-hearted parents, a failed lawyer, doctor, book dealer and then nothing at all. But how do you become a press photographer?!”

The man wrinkled his brow into deep pleats—I never actually observed this happen, before or then and there, but since they put it that way in novels—and began: “I had a voice, bass, baritone and tenor all rolled in one!”

“Must one have that if one wishes to become a press photographer?”

“I had a voice! Opera director Herbeck, who happened to be in the audience incognito, approached me and said: ‘Go to Gänsbacher tomorrow, sing him what you sang today, he’ll give you lessons, there’s no fee!’ I had no idea who Herbeck was, Gänsbacher either. Only my father wept tears of joy and my mother said: ‘I always knew it!’ (It’s a mother’s job to know everything in advance when things happen after the fact and the father’s iron severity melts into hot and discrete tears at the first sign of some ‘success.’) Gänsbacher said to me: ‘Damn good!’ After the seventeenth lesson I took a trip to Luxembourg, and when, all sweaty from rowing, I sneezed in the skiff, a chilly gust blows by and I lose my voice. The next day Gänsbacher said to me: ‘Get lost and don’t you ever come back.