Beautiful Soul: An American Elegy (37 page)

Duino is disappointing and at the same time not. The
ancient castle hulks high above the water on white cliffs, but you’re not
allowed to walk there; tourists are confined to the newer castle (newer! it
dates to the 14th century) which has a big enclosed courtyard, as if the
inhabitants wished to hide from the sea, or from Rilke’s terrible angels.
They’re not so terrible to me, an old woman trying to keep the wind from
blowing her sunhat off. He must have listened to the wind, walking back and
forth there, until he heard… what he was prepared to hear. Life is wasted on
young men, angels too. I’ve stood for a long time in that castle, listening.
And when I get tired there’s a café, of course, and an espresso sets me up for
the bus ride back to town. Bernardo came with me the last time, he’d never
been. Imagine living in this place all your life and never once going to see
the castle where Rilke once lived. Of course that sort of thing happens all the
time. But he’s not an imbecile, I gave the poems to him and he’s reading them.
He likes the end of the First Elegy best:

The children who have gone
ahead no longer need us,

weaned
from earthly things as
from

the
mother’s breast. But we
who need

these
secrets—for from sadness

springs
our progress—can we be
without them?

Is the story false that
grief for
Linos

first
dared music to pierce our
drought,

so
that, in shocked space,
the outline of youth, almost godlike

suddenly
forever departed, that
void vibration

that
now ravishes us, comforts us,
and helps.

To live in the kingdom of
elegy.
The present tense only an aftermath, thin
consolation for the thickness of past.
The decisive moments
that go
unglimpsed. I can show you the before, I can live
the after. The event is plural and passes without recognition, passes
unsurpassed. To fix it is the work of the fictional. The characters pursue the
event in vain. When did she become my mother? Why did I fall in love? When did
I resign my hopes?

Linos the singer, murdered
with his own lyre.

She drops off her bag at
the Hotel Verdi and goes straight to the address on the Via dei Piccardi, not
bothering to ring the bell for number 3. She knows the apartment is empty, or
let to another. But she presses the buzzer for 5, again and again, until a
hoarse woman’s voice answers:
Si?

My name is Elsa Freeman. I
believe that you know my mother.

Su madre?

Si, Signora.

I don’t know.
Suspiciously.

She knew your son as well.
His name is Bernardo.

A long pause, and then the
buzzer.

The apartment is spacious
but dark, Signora Bruno herself a long black feather with faded cheeks done up
a morbid shade of rouge. I have called my son, the Signora makes it plain to
her through signs and gestures and particles of English. He will be here soon.
Do have some tea, or some coffee.

Grazie.
I
mean,
no
grazie.
I’m fine.

You look like her, the
Signora announces, falsely.

Bernardo.
He is old enough to be
Ruth’s father. He makes a courtly, embarrassed little bow and speaks rapidly in
Italian to his mother, without taking his eyes off of Ruth. She shrugs. He
offers Ruth his arm and says in nearly accentless English, Let us talk
somewhere else.
Your first time in Trieste?
We will go
to the San Marco, it is not very far.

The streets are narrow. Old
World, she thinks, Old World. What is there in me that
responds
to these streets. Is it M, in my blood, speaking.

I wanted to meet
you,
she says when they are seated at a table in the buzzing
Vienna-style café.
Around her mostly middle-aged men and
older with espresso cups and glasses of wine, talking and gesticulating.
She hears snatches of languages that don’t sound quite Italian. My mother wrote
me about you.

She was a great lady,
Bernardo says.
Very brave.
Very
strong.

Is it true, Ruth asks,
pausing, not sure she wants to hear the answer. Is it true that… you were her
friend?

For a little while, yes.

You knew about her husband?

Bernardo is embarrassed
again. He coughs and sips some water. Yes. But she was
not,
we were not involved in the way that you think.

It’s none of my business if
you were.

Yes. But I
want,
I think she would have wanted you to understand her.
She was lonely, but proud. She wanted to meet the end alone. I was a kind of
weakness, an indulgence of hers. You must forgive her.

Must I?

What she says is: I never understood
her. I have tried. But I don’t know why she left.

Why.

She told me once she wasn’t
searching for anything. I’m not looking for love, she said, or for answers, or
for anything. I’m not looking for a cure for the cancer. I want to be alone for
a while. Because once I’m dead, I won’t be alone any more. I won’t belong to
me.

She said that?

Yes, it’s a peculiar
phrase, isn’t
it.
She said it a few times so I’d
remember it. “Once I’m dead, I won’t belong to me”

To whom does she belong,
then?

Bernardo lowers his eyes. I
could not say. I only knew her for a little while.

She must have trusted you.

I don’t know.
Perhaps.

And… when she died?

There, I am afraid, I was
like you. I didn’t know until it had already happened. I hadn’t seen her for a
few days. I became worried. Then the concierge told me about the letter.

What letter?

The… the note I suppose you
would call it.
So that the concierge would know whom to call.
Me.
And then, the police.
I thought it was best to let
the authorities notify you. Nothing she’d said to me made me think I was, how
to put this, authorized to contact you. She was afraid of the confusion it
might cause.

But I knew all about you,
Ruth says. She holds up the packet of letters. She wrote to me about you.

A gravely pleased look is
his reply.

She is
still
writing to me, Ruth
murmurs.

I have an appointment, she
adds.
A last appointment.
I have to go to the castle,
Miramare.

Why do you want to go
there?

Because that’s where it
happened.
Where it ended.

I don’t understand.

Didn’t she tell you? In the
letter she left for you? Where she went to end it?

Eyebrows
raised
slightly, he looks at her, in mild shock of inquiry. She takes the envelope
from her purse.

This was the first letter.
Or the last letter, take your pick.
Look.

The canceled stamp: a gray
formal crenellation like the rook of a chess set.
The address
in a steady, legible cursive hand with U S A in block letters underneath it
like a signature.

How do I get there?
To Miramare?

You had better not,
Signora.

It’s the only reason I’m here.

He looks at her with his
puzzled, kind, infinitely tired eyes, and shrugs in a way that reminds her
ineffably of her grandfather.
So nu?

Then you had better take a
taxi. No. I have a better idea. There is a boat you can take. You will have a splendid
view.

All right.
Signor Bruno…
Bernardo.
Can you just tell me
…
The
last time you saw her… She struggles to formulate a question that makes sense.
He puts his warm, dry hand
on top of her own
.

The last time I saw her, he
said, was here. At this very table. She sat where you are sitting now. She did
not look ill, not at all. She did not wish to.

What did you talk about?

He shrugs, lifts his other
hand,
spreads
the fingers.

She said she was going on a
journey.
Before going into the hospital.
I thought
perhaps she meant she was going to try and find her husband. I thought she was
going to go north.

How did she look?

Bellisima
.

But in her mind she saw
that head, hairless, that body, reduced to air and bone, in a hospital bed, in
a universe of plastic and taupe.
Sleeping.
Tiny sleeping bird with its head under its wing.

She had only to close her
eyes.

Ah, my poor signora,
Bernardo says. You have had a hard journey, I think.

It is almost over, she
says, rising.

She sits in the bow of the
motor launch that carries her, from the Grand Canale out into the harbor on a
wide arc, watching the castle swing into view.
Miramare,
mirror of the sea.
In her mind’s eye the woman in gray is a mirror
behind the mirror, the great glass prow of the castle where the Empress of
Mexico once stood, trapped in her husband’s dreams of the sea, of the name of
action. In our mind’s eye turning to discover Lamb, coiled in a Biedermeier
armchair, hat leveled, pistol easy in his hand. The contract is about to be
fulfilled. Hurry, Ruth says silently to the boatman, to the swell of land, the
forest of Miramare beginning to crowd itself around them.
To
her own heart.
Hurry, and at last.

The mistral is blowing, it
renders everything dusty and spectral, the banners on the castle’s peaks whip and
thrum in the wind, the ground itself seems to vibrate. It’s an ordinary Tuesday
in the off season. There’s a man on the promontory, the great doors behind him,
coat blowing behind him, black gloves on his hands, black hat pulled low, no
sign of any suitcase. The boat pulls around, she watches him, too far,
she
can’t see his face. The castle grounds are silent when
she alights in the sheltered lagoon from which Maximilian and Charlotte used to
sail, little pleasure cruises in the evening, she imagines, on a wooden boat
with silent splendid servants, as alone as royalty can be, going out just far
enough to look back on the castle and on their lives. The heavy wind shakes the
layered branches of the oaks and firs. She wraps her coat around her and steps
onto the shore.

In the castle foyer there
are sober tapestries, a parquet floor. Ruth holds her entrance ticket in front
of her. Looking around at the high ceilings, she passes into the private
quarters of Maximiliano, the frigate-rooms, feeling herself as she is meant to
at sea. Where is he? Stepping to the porthole window that looks out on the
promontory where he was standing like a figurehead, almost crucified by the
wind. He is gone. But he is here. She climbs the great stairs toward
Charlotte’s rooms, frozen and disintimate, past the somber portraits of dead
empires. That is Franz Joseph, she tells herself, and that is Franz Ferdinand,
and that is Ferdinand Maximilian Joseph, Emperor of Mexico for three years and
seventy days, and this is the house that he built on the edge of his empire of
tolerance, that for a while held together so many nations and tribes, that
agreed for a bit to forget their grievances against each other, a peaceable
kingdom, almost pastoral, that could not go on finally refusing the brute
invitations of history. Where is she buried, really buried, not the anonymous
plot in New Jersey they shipped the box to, where I stood with Ben and the baby
and a few cousins, is she buried here, in this city, I never saw the body, I
can never know her death, or what I am, till I meet her. Having climbed to the
top, to Charlotte’s bedroom, where the mad Empress might have sat in that
uncomfortable chair by the window with a bit of sewing or simply staring, out
to sea, while doctors looked after her, while a servant looked up into her
face, where a cousin might have come to visit to read to her from the Bible in
French, the language of her youth.