Beautiful Soul: An American Elegy (18 page)

In this life I do
not expect pity, Elsa, from you or anyone else. I expect no response. I don’t
expect you do anything but to read this page, and I know that I cannot even
really expect that. I do not know what you will feel or what you will want to
do. I’m writing to tell you simply what you must already know, that I am going,
or gone. So if you have anything to tell me, even in your mind, you might as
well tell me now. I have come to rest. Each day I walk. Sometimes I walk very
far, all out along the coast road to Miramare. Have you heard of it? It is a
castle, the second famous castle on this coast. The first of course is Duino,
I’ve been there too, to listen for Rilke’s angels, but I heard nothing except
tourists snapping pictures of each other. Miramare is different. A hundred and
fifty years ago it was caused to be built by Maximilian, the sailor, future
Emperor of Mexico, younger brother to Franz Joseph who was then midway through
his endless reign. It’s a strange blocky gray building, more house than castle,
dramatically situated on a promontory thrust out into the water. I’ve heard the
tour guides speak about it so frequently I could be a guide myself. The story
is that when Maximilian was serving in the meager naval forces of the
Austro-Hungarian Empire, his ship was blown by a storm into the Gulf of Trieste
and nearly sank within sight of that promontory. As a way of giving thanks,
perhaps, or just struck by the beauty of the spot, he returned there in after
years and had the castle built. He was never happier than when he was at sea,
so he had his rooms in the castle done up to look just like the cabin of his
ship, the
Novara
, in which he had sailed around the world in the years before the
castle was built and which would carry himself and his wife to Vera Cruz a few
years later, in 1864, where they became Emperor and Empress. On the instigation
of Napoleon III a picked delegation of Mexican aristocrats had come to visit
him at the castle, persuading him that an election had expressed the will of
the Mexican people that they join a new empire in thrall to the interests of
France and Austria. He must have loved the idea: that in one stroke he could
step out of his minor role in a minor empire and into a more paradoxical empire
denominated by democracy. Once in Mexico he alienated every constituency: the
liberals wanted nothing to do with a monarchy, while the conservatives who had
dreamed up the empire were displeased with Maximilian’s progressive ideas,
which included a limited monarchy and the elimination of a system of serfdom
that had virtually enslaved his native Mexican subjects. Three years later he
was dead, a benevolent but naïve imperialist executed by republicans outraged
at the very idea of an Emperor of Mexico, let alone a bewhiskered adventuring
Habsburg who spoke not a word of Spanish. They say his last words before the
firing squad were “Viva, Mexico!”—which shows a kind of touching, stubborn
loyalty to the fiction that had overtaken his life. His poor wife,
Charlotte—the Mexicans called her Carlota—went mad afterward; she had returned
to Europe seeking help for her beleaguered husband when the republicans were at
the gates: no one would help or could help and she spent a few years after
Maximilian’s execution in seclusion here, in this impossibly lonely and
isolated castle surrounded by the sea, surrounded by artifacts of the couple’s
brief reign over the land of the Aztecs. Her own quarters were on the second
floor, but perhaps often she wandered into her dead husband’s nauticalized
chambers to stare out the porthole-shaped window at the Adriatic, the castle
almost shaking in the strong wind, imagining herself once again on the voyage
to Vera Cruz, or more pathetically on the voyage home, in a womblike wooden
room that must have all but smelled and tasted of the body of Maximilian, whom
she had truly loved. Eventually she was too much of an embarrassment for the
Habsburgs and was shipped back to the country of her birth, Belgium, where she
wasted away as the Empress Dowager in another castle for long decades,
outliving not just her husband but his empire, while her cousin Leopold used
her money to pillage the Congo.

It is a strange,
haunted place, redolent not just of the nineteenth century but of how the
nineteenth century imagined itself; a kind of mirror like its name, a funhouse
reflection of mingled idealism, strategically ineffectual politics, and
cruelty. I wander from room to room, I walk the grounds, which are extensive
and beautifully landscaped, and the sunshine all but banishes the ghosts that
walk alongside me. On the very tip of the promontory, before the great windows
of the castle, one can indeed feel as though on a prow of a ship, thrusting
forward through the water toward a sublime or ridiculous destiny—it hardly
matters which, the illusion of motion is the point. I persist, you see, in
thinking I’m alive. Don’t you do the same?

If you will not
meet me in this place, this margin, what will I do? What I have been doing. I
will wander the reduced and palpable streets of my former life. I will read. I
will write to you. I will imagine that I have a grandchild who knows my name,
who knows what I look like, who can recognize my voice. I will imagine, without
expecting or deserving, your forgiveness.

3.
Pavement

Perched
on a mannequin head,
coolly observing them both, the white wig, heavy as a swan.
Gustave shoots a glance at
it, then rises to stand with his arms at his side, to face the intruder with
his level, curious gaze.

Why have you found me
again?

Not
how
. We’re past that now.
On the verge of story.
Lamb looks at him.

Because you know something
about her.

Who?

Don’t play games. Lamb
lifts, pinched between thumb and forefinger, a photograph. The heavy man’s
face, as though struck, reaches for it, wondering. The gesture is all he needs.
Lamb pulls the photo away and tucks it into his pocket.

You were involved with her.

Involved is a good word,
the other man says at last in his nearly accentless English. Devoted is a
better one.
In the religious sense.

Then tell me about your
devotions to her.

We are speaking of the same
woman?
The
woman, as Sherlock Holmes
might say?
Of M?

The American shrugs.

I wish you would tell me something
of your client. I have no rights there, I suppose.

None.
Let’s get on with it.
Your story.

My confession, do you mean?

Your side of things.
Do you mind if I use this?
Holding up a small black oblong.
A
digital voice recorder.
And this?
A camera.

Do you know Gertrude Stein?

Who, the writer?

The writer.
She was an American, like
you.

I’ve never read her.

You don’t read Stein, not
really, the man says. It’s pure grammar.
Like pictures of
sentences.
You spend time with them. I’ve improved my English a good
deal spending time with Miss Stein.

What’s your point?

“Fathers are depressing.”
An observation of hers.
A warning.

Let’s get on with it.

Very well.
Are you recording now?

Yes.

This won’t take long, the man says. He steeples his
fingers, closes his eyes for a moment, opens them.
Looks
right into the camera, unsmiling.
The camera cradles his face as you,
reader, demand this story.

In 1967 I came to Paris as an art student. Naturally I
submitted to the mania of the times, felt that simply to look out the window
was to have my eyes peeled open as though I were being born, and this happened
dozens, even hundreds of times every day. We all felt it, all the beautiful
young men and women, plus me, a coarse unlovely youth from the provinces, whose
accent was mocked by the professors and bureaucrats of the university where I
was one of the students, plus one. I had come up in the fall of ‘67 from the
little village on the Rhine where I grew up, where from an early age my
drawings had won me a degree of infamy, for I drew what I could see, and,
universally ignored except for the occasional good-natured offhand beating, I
saw everything: drunkards beating their wives, wives who took in boarders and
fucked them while their husbands were at work, the field west of town where
with a dog’s help you could turn up bones they said had belonged to
collaborators executed by partisans during the war. Once I climbed a mound of
coal outside the window of the house of LaFleur the barber and saw him sitting
at his dining table with the business end of a revolver in his mouth. Startled,
I slipped and fell, scattering the coal and marking my clothes, feet and hands
with black dust. He came out the door a moment later but I had already made my
getaway, down to the riverside where I tried in vain to scrub my sooty clothes
clean. I let them go, they drifted blackly downstream toward the Mediterranean,
and walked naked in my shoes back home, where my mother bent over me
sorrowfully, scrubbing at my shoulders and cheeks with a rough towel until I
howled. LaFleur hanged himself a week later; he never fired a shot, I don’t
know why. I drew the things I saw on foolscap stolen from my father’s office—he
was a kind of country barrister, originally from Lyon, who’d met and married my
mother right before the war, gone to the Line and been captured and spent the
next five years in a prison camp, then came drifting home again in ‘44 to find
me, just four years old, his son. It was known to all without needing to be
said that I was German, that my mother had accepted or given comfort to one or
more of the Wehrmacht passing through. Or had it been a fellow citizen,
reclaiming temporarily his pure Germanness in the bastard’s brew that was
Alsace-Lorraine, his pride in the thousand-year Reich leading him to my
mother’s bed, and then carried away again by duty or defeat back to Germany, or
back into frightened Frenchness, silence, anonymity. He must have been a large
man for I was large, even at birth, more than four and a half kilos,
an
astonishing size in that time of universal
malnourishment. My father, a slightly built man, accepted my existence
dutifully, as though in the spirit of a legally binding agreement to which he’d
stipulated, though by all rights he could have walked away from my mother and me,
returned to Lyon, regained his dignity and lived a different life. Instead he
stayed on in that little town, the butt of jokes, the hairs on the back his
neck bristling every time he left a room as though he could feel by static
electricity the sign of horns that some yokel—his own client, like as not—was
even then making to the sniggers of others. Pitiable, really, even in his
rages, taking me behind the outhouse no matter what the weather to beat me with
a bit of rope he hung there for the purpose, so that the neighbors might listen
to me squirm and scream, though in fact even by the age of eight I was large
enough to put up a stiff resistance if I so chose. He was good at least for
paper, and high-quality inks and pencils, for he loved to write by hand and had
the most elegant script, which I only later learned was a mark of his own
provinciality and lower-class origins, for the aristocrats, the grande ecole
types, have always prided themselves on their sloppy handwriting. I was
considered slow, and a bastard besides, but I was in this one way only
fortunate in my size, and the other boys learned not to pick on me, if only
because their kicks and punches went nowhere, it was impossible to do me
visible damage, I stood and panted with the excitement of violent contact and
covered their faces with my breath until, embarrassed, they dropped their fists
and stepped away. Besides, my drawings were in demand, especially the lewd ones
that for a couple of coins I’d draw inside of your notebook—I was careful, you see,
but I got caught anyway, only I was lucky enough to be caught by Father Juneau,
what you’d call the principal of our only school. He was a little like my
father, a stranger in our little provincial town, having been exiled from the
capital for some indiscretion or other. He was a sallow, slightly built man,
bald on top, with a pot belly poking through his black robe, and long fingers
that he drummed unhappily on his desk when we were brought before him for the
usual transgressions: shouting, cursing, fighting, stealing, defacing school
property, maybe a bit of buggery in the toilets. I’d been caught doing
something a little rarer, giving half my earnings to Genevieve, a lanky blonde
dairyman’s daughter with protruding ears and gap teeth and a long braid she
said had never been cut, who in exchange for my few coins in her father’s barn
would slip out of her coarse cotton dress and pose naked for me, the blades of
sunlight that shone through the slats in the walls cutting across her white
belly and breasts, blinding me. How well I remember those afternoons after
school when I would come by and find her at the milking stool, her hands firm
on the udders, and without more than glancing at me she’d lean back, take a
pewter ladle off the wall, dip it in the pail, and hand it to me, and I’d drink
the sweetest milk I’d ever tasted or will ever taste. Then she’d stand up from
the milking stool, much taller than I was, and look me full in the eye
and—what’s the English? not scowl, smirk, she smirked at me, and in a single
motion bend down and pick up the hem of her dress and pull it over her head,
and the smell of milk and cowshit and straw and rust, the cows lowing softly,
chickens scratching just through the walls—they were paper thin, you could hear
everything, her mother Madame Toux clucking just like the chickens as she
scattered the feed—and in response to my nod, as I produced my writing tablet
and pencil from my knapsack, she’d move to where the bands of light were
striping the strawpile and stand there, arms at her sides, awaiting my
directions. Then I would think always of the saints and martyrs in stained
glass I’d seen in the church and they would tell me to tell her what pose to
strike—left arm outstretched, right arm bent at the elbow, eyes toward the roofbeams,
or sitting on a crate with a bit of sacking on top to protect from splinters,
cradling a broomhandle like the bony body of Christ, or as Mary, holding to her
breast one of the puppies that were always underfoot (her father owned three
big bloodhound bitches that were always having litters, all of which he
drowned, but he’d take his time getting round to it). Sometimes afterward,
dressed again, she’d sit with me in the sun-drenched corner and leaf through
the drawings and giggle, and I would paw her a little, out of politeness
mostly, for her pale raw body was in no way erotic, or at least I didn’t find
it so. But it was in our favorite pose, Mary and the infant Jesus, in which we
were caught one warm September afternoon, when I’d been laboring to transform
not the dog into Jesus but Mary into Genevieve, a Genevieve with the
intelligent and queenly eyes and head of a bloodhound, and so intense was my
concentration, and hers too perhaps, that I didn’t hear her mother cease to
cluck, or the noiseless hinges of the door (little did we know that they’d been
oiled in anticipation of haytime), and only looking up, eyes squinting at the
sudden light bathing Genevieve’s whole body, and her little ecstatic cry of
shame, and I remember particularly the blonde blaze of the fine hairs on her
arms as she lifted her hands to cover her face (how strange, I thought at the
time, that she didn’t cover her pubis, which with its darker hairs was like a
little coalfire, bright at the edges and ashed at the center), dropping the dog
which squealed as it tumbled to the straw washing up like sand around
Genevieve’s blunt dirty feet. Her mother was a sober woman and didn’t scream,
in fact she had her wits about her and quickly shut the door, for her husband
was about and his rage would have been terrible. She told Genevieve to get
dressed, and then she turned toward me. I don’t remember what happened next,
but somehow I was outside, my shirt torn, running pellmell for home. It must
have been the loose board in the wall that I could just barely squeeze through
if I sucked in my gut. I began to breathe easier and walked the rest of the
way, was able to elude my own mother and get upstairs to change my clothes in
time for supper, and it wasn’t until that night, lying in my bed, that I
reached for my drawing tablet under the mattress and realized that I had
dropped it in my flight. A nameless horror gripped me for a long moment; then,
I relaxed. What can they do to me? I asked myself. I’m already a whoreson, a
freak. In a way, I was glad that finally my drawings were going to come to
light. I had a larger audience coming than that of the dirty boys who paid me a
few
sou
for sketches of half-naked nuns to beat off
to. I closed my eyes and went to sleep with a light heart. The next day, all
was normal as before, until I looked out the window, daydreaming, while Father
Juneau was teaching us algebra, and saw Genevieve’s mother striving
purposefully down the dirt road, my tablet in both of her hands like a hymnal.
Then the panic seized me again: I began to sweat, my mouth was dry,
my
palms went cold. She came in through the front door—all
eyes turned curiously toward her—and strode up to the priest, who was stiff
with surprise at the blackboard, chalk dust on his soutane. He asked her what
she wanted, and she turned and pointed at me.
Gustave?
Father Juneau said blankly. Then the spell broke and he put down his piece of
chalk, put Felix the head boy in charge, and whisked the madame into the little
closet off the main room that served as his office. Of course Felix and his
odious confederates flocked to the door, jostling each other in silence trying
to overhear what was said, leaving just me and a few of the slower and weaker
boys at our desks, staring down at unsolvable proofs. All was quiet save for
the low vibration of Father Juneau’s voice (felt in the floor) and the higher
vibration made by Madame Toux (felt in the light globes). Then Felix’s jaw
dropped and he turned toward me and pointed. Pervert!
he
announced, with just a shade of admiration. The class snickered and hooted. I
kept my head down. Then suddenly the knot of boys at the door exploded like
sparrows after a gunshot, and Father Juneau was standing in the doorway,
beckoning to me. In his office Madame Toux stood by the priest’s desk, composed
as a nun in her town clothes; the tablet lay shut on the desktop. Father Juneau
ushered me in, with a certain respect I thought, and then continued to hold the
door open. He looked at Madame Toux. When she didn’t get the hint he coughed
slightly, and again, louder.