Longing (42 page)

“Unless you've had a child with one of those whores of yours, you have no idea what it means to be responsible for the life of another. She is my daughter. She is not even my only daughter. Nor my son or only son. But she is the child dearest to me and the one who costs me most—my time, my dreams, the sharing of my knowledge, which I tried to share with you, to transfer from my head and my heart to your hands, only to have you disdain me by crippling your hands.
Hands
, yes. A pianist has but one hand, divided in two. We speak of hands, but each hand is, literally, the other hand. So it is with Clara and me. We are one hand. Injure one of us, and the other is destroyed. She is my treasure, and I am her bank. I put her share away for her within. In the meantime, room and board. If you want a metaphor for life—you with all your books and the foolish magazine articles you write in which you pretend to be two people,
*
as if you were your own two hands—then there it is, the metaphor for life itself: room and board.”

“She can live with me free,” Robert ventured, attempting to bring Wieck back to the topic at hand.

Wieck returned from across the room. Robert could not tell if he came for the conversation or the sherry. “I see you're using your sleeve as an ashtray,” Wieck observed. “There might be the metaphor for yourself: the man who makes a mess of himself for others to clean up.”

“This is your ash,” Robert informed him. “And I can clean it up myself.” He shook his sleeve toward the fireplace. The ash remained intact when it hit the hearth. Then what must have been a wind through the flue blew the ash back toward Robert and onto the rug before the hearth, where it disintegrated.

“She cannot live with a man who drops his ashes on the floor. Imagine what her life would be like. Children running about. Noise. You playing the piano. She playing the piano. No money. The world shrunk down into your tiny rooms in your tiny house somewhere. The
world must
be her world, as it is now. She is wanted everywhere. We are leaving soon for Dresden, Prague, Vienna…Vienna! I cannot let you enslave her.”

“Enslave! I want to marry her, not—”

Wieck held up his hand. “It's the same thing. Marriage is enslavement.”

“Are you enslaved then?”

“I? Oh, no. Not I. But my wife is.” Wieck began to laugh. “My wife certainly is.”

“And your daughter?”

“My daughter is free.”

“I'm glad to hear you say that. If she's free, then she's free to marry.”

“Free of you,” Wieck said. “Free of you.”

Robert shook his head and sat down in a chair that faced the cold fireplace.

“Herr Wieck, I am a young man of twenty-seven with a restless mind. I am an artist who thrives upon some expression of the world within my being. And yet for eight years I have not set foot out of Saxony. I have remained here, working ever harder on my compositions, falling ever more in love with your daughter, saving my money for what I have known for some time is the life I plan for us to have together. Can it be that all my industry and the austerity to which I have confined my life are lost upon you? Is there nothing about me that would recommend me to yourself and for your daughter?”

Wieck came and stood before him. “Your new études,” he said. “Did you think I wouldn't know that if I let her play them at the Börsenhalle they would bring you two together? It was inevitable.”

“Then why…”

“I understand you, Schumann. I understand you, and my daughter understands your music. We are together in our understanding of you. But if you come between us, then nobody will understand you. Why can't you leave us all as we are?”

“Because I want her.”

“You cannot have her.”

“Will nothing change your mind?”

“Nothing. More sherry?”

Robert took his glass from the table and held it out toward Wieck, who filled it. “Do you know what a privilege it is for me to have let you in this room? This is my gun room. I keep my pistol in that cupboard. Except, of course, when Clara and I are traveling. It is my job to protect her.”

“Are you going to shoot me?” asked Robert.

Wieck gestured for Robert to stand up. When Robert was on his feet, Wieck put his glass into his hand and then picked up his own and held it out toward Robert. “A toast. To Clara—alone.”

His words were like a knife, thrust hilt and all into Robert's heart.

*
Wieck was referring to Schumann's going by the names, and sometimes even assuming the characters, of Florestan and Eusebius. Florestan was the hero of Beethoven's
Fidelio
, rescued from certain death in a dungeon by his wife, who was disguised as Fidelio, a man. Eusebius had been a much-persecuted fourth-century Christian priest, and eventually saint. Florestan, at least as embodied by Schumann, was wild, impulsive, even dissolute; Eusebius, gentle, contemplative, abstemious. Schumann did not so much outgrow them as grow beyond them. But while they lasted, they satisfied his desire, shared by so many of his artistic contemporaries, for that elusive double (or, in his case, double double) who, like a parallel universe, may both share and appease the anguish of existence and the equivocacy of art.

Vienna

APRIL 11, 1838

These visits from my adorers are more than I can bear
.

Clara Wieck

Clara was sitting by the open window in her room overlooking the Sonnenfelsgasse, reading the latest of Robert's letters to be smuggled to her, when as though from the sky there fell upon the letter, and from there onto her lap, a small, stiff piece of paper.

She knew it could not have come from Robert's letter; she was reading that letter now for the third time. Robert's letter was addressed, as had been the inner envelope in which it arrived, to Fräulein Entfernt, yet another invented “pseudofundonym” (as he called them) Robert used in case her father might intercept, or come upon, one of his letters. But what, she wondered, would her father make of a letter addressed to a Miss Faraway? How could he not know that it was she, and that her correspondent was the one who shared the torture of the distance between them? Robert must either be insulting or entreating him with the very transparency of the ruse.

Her own name and address on the outer envelope had been written by one or another of Robert's accomplices, most often Dr. Reuter, to hide Robert's own handwriting from her father, who would recognize it instantly and use the occasion both to confiscate the letter and to claim that Robert's terrible penmanship was further evidence of his lack of fitness to be her husband.

The small piece of paper was blank, at least on the side that faced her. Clearly, it was a calling card. While its method of arrival through the open window was unorthodox, she feared it was from another of the seemingly thousands of strangers who, since her arrival in Vienna over six months ago and her triumphant recitals here, wanted now to meet her, either that she might endorse some business of theirs or that they might bathe in or drink in whatever glory they imagined poured forth from her. She had become a prisoner in her own house, unable to walk the streets for fear of being surrounded, stared at, touched, stripped, torn apart, eaten—whatever people might be driven to do to her or with her by the very fame that was, they believed, their gift to her. This was not even in exchange for her gift: Such adoration, such annihilation, came as much from those who had merely heard
of
her as from those who had heard her. Fame, she had discovered, soon becomes divorced from its source, in her case music, the piano, her interpretation of the former and her effect upon the latter. Fame was now attached to her, like skin on beauty. It rendered her both wholly distant and wholly, delectably, devourable. Merely the anticipation of her presence caused mayhem; if it were announced, even erroneously, that she was to perform at the Redoutensaal or the Musikvereinsaal or the Burgtheater or the even larger Winterreitschule, the last two of which held thousands, thousands more than they could ever hold would overrun the box office so the police had to be summoned to turn them away. When her father reported to her with delight that masses of people were seen weeping, he did not seem to question, as she did, whether it was truly because they had been denied tickets for her performance or rather as a result of having been beaten by the truncheons of Metternich's police and trampled by their horses.

A calling card thrown through her window was threatening only in that it was now known beside which window she sat in her banishment. When she turned the card over, however, and read the name upon it, she almost leapt from her seat. She pushed the window open even wider, leaned out, and saw there, on the street below, a man looking up at her with a face so beautiful she did not know what to do with her eyes and so just stared at him.

“I kiss your hand, gracious miss.” He employed the traditional Austrian greeting.

Though she was seeing him for the first time, she had seen innumerable renderings of him and would have recognized him on sight; there was, she thought, perhaps no man on earth for whom a calling card would be as superfluous. Even at this distance from her window to the street, viewing him slightly from above, what he most resembled for her still was Franz Joseph Gall's famous casting of his head, some fifteen years ago. His hair remained as long, his green eyes as big (and his nose even larger, from what she could see), and the bones of his face as startling in their aggressive symmetry. He was now twenty-seven; she was eighteen. He was exactly a third older than she, both their ages divisible by nine, by three. It was a kind of symmetry of time. He had come upon her at the moment when they were most in harmony, balanced not only on the scale of time but dangling similarly, now that she had conquered Vienna, over the gaping, devouring mouths of the public.

They looked at one another for a moment more before both, in the same instant, pointed in the direction of the front door. Together, they disappeared from one another's view for the time it took for them walk to the door and her to open it.

He was wearing—with his long, unbelted redingote, black suit, and flowing white shirt—peculiarly green gloves, both of which he removed before he reached for her right hand with his and clasped it gently. Upon his index finger he wore a gold-grounded ring, within which lay, in silver, a death's head. So sure was Clara that Liszt would do as he had promised and kiss her hand that she found herself pushing against the pressure of his own. In the moment before embarrassment would have overtaken her, he yielded to the pressure and to her desire and put his lips to the back of her hand.

As he then motioned with his eyes for them to leave the doorway and proceed into the house, he said softly, almost conspiratorially, his hand grazing the back of her sleeve to guide her, “Forgive my unorthodox means of announcing my presence. As you know, I was urged by Chopin to track you down. As you don't know, I was told by Chopin to avoid the man I believe is your father, at least until you and I have had a chance to size one another up, as it were, and to discuss the subject I believe is the cause of your father's incivility. Is there a place we might sit and talk where, when we are discovered, as inevitably we shall be, your reputation will not be ruined by your proximity in private to the likes of me?”

She couldn't tell if he was boasting of or apologizing for his reputation that accounted him a seducer and those he seduced the most fortunate women on earth. Neither could she think of anywhere to go but back to her own room, into which she led him, all the way to the window through which they had met, as if her showing it to him were the excuse she needed to bring him to what was in fact the most private place for her in all this rather large rented house.

He looked out the window into the street, pretending, she realized, to get his bearings. “Did you know that Sonnenfelsgasse used to be called Johann Sebastian Bachgasse? Note, I say ‘used to be.' Sonnenfels was a rabbi, of all things, who worked for Empress Maria Theresa. No one in history, I suspect, has hated Jews as much as Maria Theresa. She borrowed their money to build the little summer place she wanted, Schönbrunn. But when she met with them to negotiate for the loan, she so feared contamination from the odium that had adhered to them ever since they had murdered her Lord that she sat behind a screen and put her hands over her ears much as you did over your eyes.
*
Not, I trust, because you find me odious.”

Clara shook her head.

“Thank goodness for that!” Liszt started to walk around the room, gazing at her possessions in a way that provoked in her no more discomfort than she was already feeling. “In any case,” he went on, “whether she could bear the sight of him or not, she listened to Rabbi Sonnenfels. He convinced her to stop torturing political prisoners. These included anyone who might upset the public order—thieves, spitters, liars, dissidents, blasphemers, freethinkers, French. He was a good man. Not good enough to displace Sebastian Bach's name on a street sign, perhaps… Chopin was so outraged by that he has sworn never to come to Vienna, though I suspect that may have more to do with the presence of Thalberg in the very flesh than with the absence of Bach on a street sign. But the good rabbi, through no fault of his own, managed to get Bach's name removed forever from the streets of Vienna and, such is the cruel congruity of imperial happenstance, what else but a piece of music dedicated to him.”

Like an actor hitting his marks, Liszt was at her piano at exactly the moment he might take his cue from himself and begin to play. He moved about twenty measures into the piece, when the opening arpeggio burst, as it had from the beginning been threatening to do, into the beginning of the tempest that gave the piece its nickname. At that point he simply stopped. None of the flourishes for which he was famous. No tossing of his hair, flinging of his arms, jangling of medals, not even, alas, one of his no doubt hundreds of lace-trimmed handkerchiefs thrown to the floor that she might later retrieve, since he always, it was said, left behind talismans for the ladies, be they such handkerchiefs chastely inseminated with his cologne or what was left of one of his cigars, moist with spittle from his lips and tongue.