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except a man in a black suit and hat, a Protestant with a Bible beneath his arm who reduced Professor Jones’s last years to ashes. I feared him much more than I did the Professor.

TWO
    E ight years before I was born—on the same day El Benefactor died in his bed like any innocent grandfather—in a village in the north of Austria, a boy named Rolf came into the world. He was the last son of Lukas Carlé, the most feared of all the upper-school masters. Corporal punishment was a part of schooling; spare the rod and spoil the child was sustained by both popular wisdom and pedagogical theory, and so no parent in his right mind would have protested its application. But when Carlé broke a boy’s hands, the school administration forbade him to use the ferule, because it was clear that once he began he lost all self-control in a frenzy of lust. To get even, the students would follow his son Jochen and, if they could catch him, beat him up. The boy grew up fleeing bands of boys, denying his surname, hiding as if he were the hangman’s son.
    Lukas Carlé had imposed in his home the same rule of fear he maintained at school. His marriage was one of convenience: romantic love had no place in his plans; he considered romance barely tolerable in opera or novels, and totally inappropriate in everyday life. He and his wife had been married without any chance to get to know one another, and from her wedding night on she despised him. To Lukas Carlé, his wife was an inferior being, closer to animal than to man, God’s only intelligent creation. Although in theory a woman was a creature deserving of compassion, in practice his wife drove him out of his mind. When he arrived in that village after long weeks of wandering—he had been uprooted from his birthplace by the First World War—he was about twenty-five years old; he had a teaching diploma and money enough to survive for one week. First he looked for work, and then a wife. He had chosen her because he liked the sudden gleam of terror he saw in her eyes, and he approved of her broad hips, which he considered necessary for begetting male offspring and for doing heavy housework. He was also influenced in his decision by two hectares of land, a half-dozen head of cattle, and a small income the girl had inherited from her father; all of which he immediately claimed as legitimate wealth.
    Lukas Carlé liked women’s shoes with very high heels, and best of all he liked red patent leather. When he traveled to the city, he paid a prostitute to strut around naked, clad only in that uncomfortable footwear, while he, fully dressed, wearing even his overcoat and hat, and ensconced in an armchair like a feted dignitary, tingled with indescribable pleasure at the sight of her buttocks—as ample as possible, white, with dimples—jiggling with every step. He did not touch her, of course. He never touched such women, because he was fanatic about hygiene. Since he did not have the means to indulge in such luxuries as often as he would like, he bought some gay high-heeled French ankle-high boots and hid them in the most inaccessible part of the wardrobe. From time to time he locked his children in their room, turned up the record player to full volume, and summoned his wife. She had learned to gauge her husband’s changes of mood and could anticipate—even before he himself knew—when he was feeling the urge to humiliate her. She would begin to tremblewith dread, and dishes would fall from her hands and shatter on the floor.
    Carlé did not tolerate any noise in his house—I have enough to put up with from my students, he would say. His children learned not to cry or laugh in his presence, to steal about like shadows and talk in whispers, and they developed such skill for passing unnoticed that sometimes their mother thought she could see through them, and was terrified that they might become transparent. The schoolmaster was convinced