Longing (16 page)

“But she doesn't board there, as I do,” Robert excused himself lamely. “And I can't very well do it in her house, with her parents protecting what she takes absolute delight in describing as their utter belief in her virtue, which I can assure you was lost both to her and thus to me a long time before I came along. Besides,” he confessed, “I can't get enough of her.”

“Clearly,” said Glock with an agreeable sympathy so rare in a physician and even rarer in a man not so much visited as tenanted by chastity. “Which means that you have, indeed, had quite enough of her. And I must order you to resist, for now and, if you truly want my advice, forever, whatever her charms may be that have caused you thus to lay bare, if you will forgive so lame a play on words, your poor, capricious, unrepentant penis. For you are, quite literally, wearing it away. You have a wound here on the frenulum that has been caused by one thing and one thing alone, and that can be cured by one thing and one thing alone.”

“So it is not syphilis?” Robert asked warily.

“You may say as much to Christel.”

“And the one cure is abstinence?”

“Did I say that?” Now Glock was smiling again.

“You did imply as much.”

“Never trust a doctor who prescribes by implication. That's the lawyer's way.”

“Then how am I to be cured?”

“Narcissus water,” said Glock, who proceeded to dip his hands into his own bowl of soapy water, as if to signal that the examination was over and that he felt the need to cleanse himself of Robert's luxuriant sin. “Bathe your organ three times a day in a distillate of daffodil bulbs. And may I suggest you not have Christel do the honors.”

“And yet the cure is not abstinence?”

“Not for your body, my friend.”

Leipzig

MARCH 21, 1832

The whole house is like an apothecary's
.

Robert Schumann

They had left him, and now he sat here with the middle finger of his right hand dipped in oxshit.

Christel slept in his bed across the room. So she had been sleeping since he had risen from her arms and gone out to the butcher to fetch this rather farfetched cure, which had been prescribed not only by the medical student Robert Herzfeld but also by numerous of his more established if also more expensive physicians, among them Raimund Brachman, the estimable Moritz Reuter, and even the always skeptical Christian Glock, though Glock had not even deigned to mention an animal dip until both the herb poultices and the brandy rinse, not to mention abstinence (from the piano, in this case), had failed.

It amused him to think, as he sat here with his nose closed against the smell and his eyes cloudy from the fecal steam joining his cigar smoke to veil his head in this room still chilly on the first day of spring, how Christel would react when she awakened and, if she followed her usual practice, called him back to bed in her sleep-soaked, sex-singed voice.

He had moved out of the Wieck house just days after Clara and her father had departed for her first extended European tour, which had long since landed her in their ultimate destination, Paris. There, according to her charming letters, she was frustrated in her art—despite the fact that Kalkbrenner himself, as prelude to his self-serving condemnation of German pianists in general, had kissed her and in the act whispered,
“C'est le plus grand talent”
—and miserable in her missing her home, her room, her brothers,
him
.

He missed her too, of course, that spirit in her being that brought him out of himself. He had thought he would stay on in the Wieck household during her absence but had soon fled for the anonymity of the suburbs and this little room, preferring to be alone for the first time in his life to the way he felt on Grimmaischestrasse, abandoned to the silence, bereft of her music. That Christel might seek him out for periodic visits he had not expected, and he found himself as flattered by her lust for him as he was disturbed by his lust for her. He did not love her. She did not fill him with the kind of desire for perfection in his life that little Clara did; Christel merely fulfilled his desire for her, as she was, not for himself as she might render him.

Clara and her father had been planning to leave in the very midst of the previous summer. But before their scheduled departure, Clara came down with measles, which gave Robert the opportunity to sit beside her on her bed and help her with her French. He even found the word for measles, of the German variety—
rubéole
—and pretended to be her doctor and asked her what was the matter,
“Qu'avez-vous?”
so that she might respond,
“J'ai rubéole,”
unless it were the French variety, in which case she should say,
“J'ai rougeole
.” One day she surprised him by having learned,
“J'ai des frissons,”
and then throwing herself into his arms, pretending to shiver and then seeming to shiver for real, though he realized it was only her attempt to refrain from laughing that caused her to tremble.
“J'ai soif,”
she said, yet when he fetched her tea, she said,
“J'ai faim,”
and took his hand and dipped his fingers into the honey and then into the tea and only then satisfied her thirst or hunger or whatever it could possibly be by taking his fingers in her mouth, laughing almost too much to permit herself to swallow.

Once she was recovered, their trip had to be postponed once again because the Polish-Russian war of that year had augmented its spread of deliberate death with an unintended but even more efficient and democratic epidemic of cholera (unless it was true, as many said, that the disease had been caused by Jews poisoning the well water). It had wasted its way through Bavaria into Saxony and was well on its way to Leipzig, causing Robert to drink more beer than ever, as the only safe alternative to water, and to make out his will and to announce to Clara and her father as they ate lunch at the Wasserschenke that this might be the last time they would see one another because soon he was either going to be dead or on his way to live in Italy or Weimar. At this news, Clara grasped him by both arms and either pulled him to her or her to him and clung to him for the rest of the meal, while Wieck sat shaking his head after having pronounced, “Weimar is no safer than Leipzig, considering that both are on major roads. But Clara and I fear neither and in fact leave tomorrow ourselves for Weimar to seek the blessing of Goethe himself.” At this news, Robert found himself as much clinging to his friend as clung to by her.

The next time he heard from her, she wrote about how they had been refused entrance to the great Goethe's preposterously yellow house on Weimar's Jungfrauenplan, so her father had found other homes for her to perform in, homes of enough “aristocratic pretension” to allow reports of her playing to reach Goethe, who insisted on being kept informed of all that was new and exciting though he himself had only just come around to appreciating Mozart, whom he had heard play when Mozart was only seven, and even now found Schubert's music incomprehensible.

Goethe invited Clara to perform for him, and for his grandchildren, and, as Clara wrote to Robert:

He went out of his way to rise from his chair—he is over eighty and none too swift of foot nor straight of spine—to find a pillow for me. He delivered it to me at the piano and pushed it under my fanny in such a way that his hand, which I could feel and later see had a ring on nearly every finger, was between the pillow and my fanny itself. And wouldn't you know that hand stayed right there, as if to arrange the pillow though it was my fanny he nearly rearranged and almost caused to close together upon his hand and trap it there. When indeed the piano bench was of sufficient height for me without either a pillow or his naughty hand. And yet once he withdrew his hand, I think his grandchildren heard me better than did he. I had wanted to play Chopin or Beethoven, as I had in other homes in Weimar, but Papa insisted I play Herz, because Herr Goethe made no secret of his distaste for Beethoven and his ignorance of Chopin. [Why is it, thought Robert upon reading this, that artists who were revolutionary in their youth become not merely indifferent but antithetical to artistic revolution in their age, as if to shut out the light in fear of the darkness soon to fall upon them?] So I played Herz, and the children bounced around in their seats appropriately—I could scarcely sit still on mine as I played the Bravura Variations—while Herr Goethe himself sat there staring off into space with one finger occasionally in his ear, which had a halo of little white hairs around its hole, and another finger even more occasionally in his nose, the hairiness of which I shall desist in describing to you in case you are eating while you are reading this letter. I can only imagine what was on his mind. (I shall put into these secret parentheses some gossip I heard: when Herr Goethe was in his seventies, he fell in love with a teenaged girl scarcely older than I, who in case you forgot turned twelve almost a month ago, and it was for her he wrote his Trilogy of Passion poems, which I'd never heard of but which of course I can't wait to read if I can do so in secret without Papa knowing. Can you imagine! A man like that in love with a mere girl.
*
I'll bet you can! This story at least went a long way toward explaining to me why he had put his hand upon my fanny, though of course I did not mention this to those who told it to me nor to Papa either but only to you, dear Herr Schumann. And lest you think you are so different from Goethe, though you are in terms of genius, yours being greater of course, you should realize that he too came to Leipzig to study, and he too left his friends behind in Leipzig to study law, though in Strasbourg, not Heidelberg, and he too traveled to Italy where he no doubt to judge from his hand on my fanny had acciacctura adventures to rival your own, mere grace notes before the true melody of love. And that's the end of the secret part of this letter.) While he may not have listened to me, old Goethe did exactly what Papa had wanted him to do. He wrote a letter about me and put it in a little box and gave me the box. Papa took it away immediately. But I got to read the letter. In it, he said I was stronger than six boys put together—which made me picture whether he had perhaps wrestled with that girl he was in love with and seems in love with still. He told me if I would call him Herr Schönfuss,
*
he would give me candy; which I did, and he did. But the candy tasted quite old, more like his foot than a sweet, just the way a footnote is rarely as delectable as the text it hangs from.
**
And then he gave me a bronze medal with—what else?—his face carved upon it. With news of his approval, all of Weimar opened to us. It was as if its ancient walls had been breached, not by cannon but by rumors of beauty.

We were invited to court, where the Grand Duke sat beside me at the piano and would surely have turned my pages had he known how to read music. The Town Theater, which we had not even been allowed to rent, was now given us without fee, and I played there to five hundred people and must have been asked by at least that many to sign autographs, which as you can see even now has made my usually perfect handwriting almost as bad—note I say “almost”—as yours. So we left Weimar in total triumph, though not before Papa got in a fight with the Privy Counselor, who refused to give Papa letters of introduction because he claimed Papa took my career more seriously than he took Beethoven's music. But Papa didn't care. He said with Paganini and Goethe behind us, what did we need Privy Counselor Schmidt for anyway. Besides, here in Kassel, where you should not be worried to hear the cholera has also reached, Ludwig Spohr himself introduced me to the court. There, we were seated at the royal dining table, and Herr Spohr turned my pages and allowed me to introduce him and all of Kassel to the Chopin Variations as well as to my own scherzo (for which I have written Herr Spohr a new coda just to keep him happy and also a little letter much shorter than this one to tell him that I once got a new piano because I had learned all his songs) and wrote for Papa an endorsement saying I have such gifts as “might be found only in the greatest of living artists” and then insisted I stay until the very end of the grand ball, though Papa, with the endorsement in hand (in his pocket, actually, and well buttoned up as you might imagine) kept telling me I need stay no longer and should go to bed, as if he didn't know as you do how much I love to dance.

Your friend,

Clara Wieck

He apparently didn't. In a separate letter, in which Wieck told Robert with much less charm and much more tympany of Clara's various triumphs, he remarked of the grand ball in Kassel that “all such diversions and attentions and invitations to gavotte make no impression on Clara.”

Robert knew. He and Clara had danced together often. He had attempted to teach her the steps he had learned from his sister and his mother (his father had not objected to the idea of dance, only to its practice as what he had called “the greatest temptation there can be, since one
can
smoke and read at the same time, to a man at his books”) and various forgotten women in various forgotten taverns on various unforgettable but, alas, forgotten nights. The gavotte, certainly, with the lifting of the feet at which Clara became adept only after he had told her to think of stepping over puddles. And the courante in which the feet glide. And the carmagnole that had them marching around her room singing revolutionary songs. And the allemande, savior of German reputation in the dance, much like the Ländler that his sister danced as he had played for her, except Emilie had danced alone and Robert danced with Clara in his arms, astounded at the smallness of her, boned and edgy, every muscle in her back making an impression on his fingertips, and the strength of her, particularly in her hands, as might be expected, one gripping his hand and the other his shirt as far as she could reach toward the crest of his shoulder.

Her brother Alwin, two years almost to the week younger than she, often played the violin for them to dance to. And he played it well, provided his playing was not measured by his sister's, which Robert would never have thought to do—you might as well compare a mallard to a thrush. But Wieck had not long prior to their departure made that mistake himself and thrown poor Alwin to the floor and taken his violin away with one hand and pulled the boy's hair with the other, complaining all the while of how poorly Alwin had been playing. Alwin, like Clara when Wieck forbade her the piano, begged and begged for his instrument back, but his father would not give it to him. Clara sat through all this with a strange smile and finally sat down at the piano and played, a Weber sonata as Robert recalled, trusting she did this to remove the terrible pressure and humiliation being heaped upon her brother and not to shine at Alwin's expense. As for Wieck, Robert felt he was getting to know him as he would prefer not to know him, a man who ranked his children according to their talents and acted like a Jew with his fervent eye on the cash drawer when there was a chance to stick four groschenstück into his own pocket.