Longing (41 page)

There he stayed, and grew, when she played his études, moving from the simple theme he'd taken from Baron von Fricken into perfect resonances of musicians they had loved together, Paganini, Mendelssohn, Bach, the history of their love in music, which of all the arts provided best a cloister of creation shared.

He didn't care that those around him seemed puzzled by the music. He enjoyed their consternation. The less his art was grasped, the freer he was to write it as he wished. It might be a musician's job to please an audience; a composer's was to please himself.

He left as soon as she was done, turned his back to her and did not applaud so as not to vulgarize his pleasure. Love was not meant to be shared, and the expression of it was not meant to be common.

She looked for him as she bowed and did not see him. She had been told he would be there, and had been told, as she rested backstage before the concert, that he was there. But she had not seen him and wondered, as she searched the congratulatory bouquets of flowers dropped at her feet like slain birds, whether he had been there at all.

As soon as she was able to break away from well-wishers and sycophants and the usual young men who had detected personal messages in her phrasings and the way her dress revealed her shoulders, she left the hall alone and walked the streets and then into the woods, suffering far more than the customary letdown after a performance. She wanted to see him there, in her mind if not, as she fantasized, coming toward her from behind the trees among which he used to hide when she was young, jumping out like a ridiculously large forest sprite to startle and amuse her. She saw no trees, no flowers, no meadowland, even as she walked among them and through them. Her eyes were for him alone. Yet not for him at all, because she'd been told she mustn't see him and had trained herself to see him not at all. He was, as always, wholly with her, and wholly absent.

By the time she arrived home, the bottom of her dress wet with dew and the back of the skirt stained from when she had sat down in the leaves and grass to rest and wait for him who never came, she was convinced she'd made a terrible mistake. She should not have played his music and certainly should not have used it to try to bring him to her. She'd become the siren he had read her of when she was just a little girl, the ocean nymph to match and to destroy his forest sprite, using music to manipulate desire.

She was sitting in despair upon her bed when Nanny knocked and, without waiting for response, entered. Clara thought at first that Nanny's smile signaled news she'd heard of the supposed success of Clara's concert. But the smile grew as Nanny handed her a folded sheet of paper and said, “God bless you, child,” as she touched Clara's cheek and then departed.

The sheet was folded in thirds and sealed. On the outside, in Robert's unmistakably muddled hand, was a message:

After endless days of silence, of pain, of hope, of despair, may these words be received with the love that you once felt for me. If you no longer feel it, please return this letter unopened.

If tears could have broken that seal, it would have melted as they fell upon that letter and her fingers that but hours before had let him hear his études for the first time.

The 13th of August, 1837

My dearest Clara,

As you have broken the seal on this letter, so you have repaired my heart. That your eyes might see my words is, to me, after such long silence, as if they were gazing into my own. I can feel you with me even as I sit alone at my desk, imagining this letter in your hands, your breath upon it, your eyes alight, the very scent of you spreading over it and me.

Have you been faithful? As much as I believe in you, my desire for you is restless and perverse. When nothing is heard for so long from the one I love most in the world—and that is who you are—I lose faith in your strength of will and by so doing in my own.

The fidelity I speak of is not to me but to us. One may give oneself to another without, as it were, taking the other to oneself. What I have learned in our time apart, which is a year and a half nearly to the day, is that we are inseparable, no matter how much time or space is put between us, but that, inseparable or not, we cannot survive in separation.

Therefore, will you promise me that on your birthday one month from now you will give your father a letter from me? He would not have put my études in your program were he not somehow disposed toward me. Say you will. Say “yes” to me. I will not rest until I have your vow.

My heart lies on this page. And now my name.

Robert Schumann

Leipzig August 15, 1837

My Robert,

A simple “yes” is all you want? I have spent my whole life saying “yes” to you, whether you have heard it or not.

As for if I have been faithful, I cannot say “yes” to that. I have betrayed you with my tears, which should have been laughter for our time together and the love we made. I have betrayed you with my dreams, which failed to make real their ecstasy. I have betrayed you with my words, whispered to you every night too softly for you to hear. I have betrayed you with my body, which I have yielded time and time again to memory. I have betrayed you with desire, which has used you in your absence as if you were upon me. I have betrayed you with no man, who is yourself when you are gone from me.

I would say “yes” were you to ask me to cut off my hands and send them with your music pouring forth. But when you ask me to give a letter to my father, begging of him whatever it is you might beg (and if it is not me, then do not break the seal on this letter), that strikes me as risky.

It is one thing for him to allow your music played in public by me—he seems to respect your music, at least so long as everyone else finds it incomprehensible. But your person—so long as I find it desirable, which will be for as long as I live, he…I cannot bear to write the words.

But of course I shall give him your letter. If only to be able to say “yes” to you in the one way I may right now.

Your Clara

P.S. It is actually the 14th on which I am writing this letter, but out of fear that you will not receive it until tomorrow, I am putting tomorrow's date upon it, so that we may at least have the illusion that we are somehow together on this day, whichever day it may be, today, tomorrow, even yesterday. Time has been our enemy, in that it provides a measurement of our isolation; in this way we may vanquish it.

The 13th of September, 1837

Dear Herr Wieck:

On your daughter's birthday—the day on which the most cherished being on earth for each of us first heard the breathing of this earth—I write to you for your blessing.

Of your regard for her, there can be no doubt. Her music sounds it to the world.

Of your regard for me, I believe we are both undeserving of it—you for holding it, I for having it held against me.

I know you like my music, quite against the prejudices of the world at large. But why, then, honoring its complexities, can you not honor the complexities in its creator? I know my faults well enough not to have to repeat them to someone who himself has repeated them to anyone who will listen.

But what of my virtues? I work almost endlessly at my music, and what time I might take away from it to spend with your daughter would be time spent happily—I might say relievedly—away from my art, which can only benefit from the happiness she would bring to it and me. (I am not one of those who believes that great suffering produces great art; great suffering produces great lives, except for those who live them.)

I have been left an inheritance by both my poor departed father and mother, so that even if the publication of my compositions does not produce great income for some time, I shall be able to take care of your daughter.

I have known your daughter since her childhood. I have watched her and watched over her and have grown to love her now as a man as once I loved her as a charmed visitor to her sweet and wholesome life, which you provided her and that now I ask your blessing so I might do the same.

I beg of you, be a friend again to one to whose friendship you entrusted your child, and in so doing be the best of fathers to the best of daughters.

Robert Schumann

Leipzig

SEPTEMBER 17, 1837

If I should give my daughter in marriage to another man
,

it would be to keep her from you
.

Friedrich Wieck

To prepare for his interview with the man he desired as his father-in-law only insofar as that man had fathered the woman he loved, Robert spent the night denying himself both sleep and drink, the former because of his mind's rehearsal for the great event, the latter only through the most profound act of will.

And so when, almost immediately upon his arrival at the Wieck home, Wieck offered Robert a sherry, as he was pouring one for himself, Robert accepted, grateful for what he took to be the acknowledgment of his nervousness and Wieck's consequent wish to put him at his ease.

They were meeting in a small parlor of the Grimmaischestrasse house within which Robert had never set foot. It was furnished only with a single chair and table and, against one wall, a closed cupboard. He had not even known of this room's existence, nor noticed the narrow, unglassed door that opened into it. He found this rather unsettling, because he had, after all, lived in this house and had, he thought, investigated every inch of it, not only out of curiosity but also, once he became aware of his attraction toward Clara, because he believed that those we desire leave desire in every room through which they pass in life, emanations of the shadow self that attach to objects and suffuse the very air.

But he could not feel her in this room. In the house at large, yes. He had had only to enter the front door, to come into this home from which he had been exiled for so long, to feel both her presence and his desire for her. He had no idea if she was even at home. He had rehearsed her running down the stairs to greet him, as she had often done as a child, and in one mad version of this as-yet-unlived day she had taken him by the hand and pulled him up the stairs all the way to her room on the third floor. But reality had hidden her away. And now this strange, hitherto unseen parlor had erased her from the house. She, too, had never stepped within, or Robert would know. Her father had found the one place in the house where she could not comfort him nor he covet her.

The fireplace was filled with wood but unlit. While it might be too soon in the season for a fire, with summer gasping its last, cool breaths, this room was chill, as well it might be, given its ghostly nonexistence until now. All the more reason for the warmth of the sherry.

Wieck even offered him a cigar, which was sufficiently unlike him that Robert wondered if his letter might have done the trick entire and Wieck was merely going to raise his glass in a toast and, bypassing this dreaded interview entirely, pronounce his blessing upon the union of his daughter and the only man who loved her more than he did.

“Habano?” Robert let the smoke drift out of his mouth and into his nostrils, which is what a male human being did to show his appreciation for the gift of a cigar, and as further demonstration of his gratitude he also waggled the glistening brown cylinder of tobacco gently between his first two fingers, making sure Wieck could observe the gesture.

“Caribbean,” answered Wieck. “That's all I know about it. If there's anything I can't bear, it's a cigar pedant.”

“I was merely—”

“How is the sherry?”

“Oh, very good.” Robert could not help himself, he now waggled his little glass before Wieck.

“You drink too much.” Wieck punctuated his judgment with a long swallow from his own sherry glass, immediately refilling it from the decanter. When he moved to top off Robert's glass, Robert did not know whether to hide it behind his back or hold it forth in defiance of Wieck's reproof. It seemed safest to imitate Wieck himself; Robert brought the little glass to his lips, slowly raised his head, and drank down the sherry, Wieck be damned.

“More?” Wieck held out the decanter.

“I drink too much.” Robert, smiling confidently, could not help mocking his inquisitor.

“I'm glad to hear you admit it. It's one more reason why you must not marry my daughter.”

Robert took the decanter from his hand and poured his own drink. “Are you denying us your permission, Friedrich?”

“Have you heard me deny you my permission, Herr Schumann?”

“No, I have not.” Robert became nervously optimistic. “May I assume we then have your permission?”

“You may assume anything you want. Assumptions are the very fodder of misconception. For example, suppose I were to assume you have enough money to support my daughter in the style in which I support her. Let us say an income of a thousand thalers. Would that not be a misconception?”

“Yes, it would.”

“Aha!” Wieck waved his cigar with such heartiness that its ash flew off and landed whole and corklike—the sign of a good cigar indeed—on Robert's sleeve. Robert was afraid of offending Wieck by brushing it off either onto the floor or into the fireplace or the ashtray on the mantlepiece. So he held his arm out rigidly before him, balancing the ash thereon, as he proceeded to offend Wieck far more grievously than he would have done had he taken a deep breath and blown the ash directly onto Wieck's cravat.

“The misconception is that
you
support her. If I am not mistaken, it is the money she makes from her concerts and recitals that you keep and spend.”

Wieck turned his back and walked away. Only when he reached a wall did he turn around. He pushed his cigar almost punishingly between his lips and sucked on it again and again until his cheeks swelled and only then did he release a huge cloud of smoke toward Robert. Wieck's words seemed to Robert to percolate out of that smoke as the Devil's might out of the steam of Hell.