Longing (63 page)

It was colder in the air than in the water. They threw him in the bottom of the boat among their fish, some of which seemed more alive than he, dancing themselves to death while he just lay there picking up their smell but none of their will to live.

“Why?” each of the men said, “Why?” as if he hadn't heard the other. They sounded like hysterical Italian tenors.

He was so cold he wanted to die. The rain was drowning the flowers of his dressing gown. His slippers were lost to the river. But when the fishermen came at him with a thick blanket, on which he noticed scales of fish like silk adornments sewn haphazardly into the stubbled wool, he jumped up toward the blanket, not into it, and threw himself back over the side of the boat, or thought he had, until he realized that a man who's frozen to death moves with the swiftness of a distant star and is as easy to clasp if as difficult to understand.

It was in that same blanket he was carried home, through the masked revelers who had gathered on the bridge to watch what, to judge from their lack of revelry, they had hoped would be not the rescue but the recovery of his body. They were all unrecognizable, but one of them was able to identify him even through the mask he wore of ice and grief and failure. “It's Herr Musikdirector Schumann!” No cheer went up among the gaping mummers. But at least those kind enough to carry him home now knew where to carry him. The two fishermen placed themselves at the positions of honor, and as if he were indeed a table, three took to one side of him and three to the other and thus they dined off him as the most unusual and applauded prop in the entire Carnival as the commencement of the holy season was celebrated in the streets of Düsseldorf.

Dr. Hasenclever answered the door. “Sorry,” he said, as what doctor would not to two flocculent fishermen and half a dozen dripping men in masks?

“Herr Musikdirector Schumann,” said the man who had first identified him.

“Run off,” explained Dr. Hasenclever, not unlike Gotthold Lessing's manservant.

“Herr Musikdirector
Schumann
!” The doctor's gaze was directed down toward the blanket, which was then folded open from around its burden to reveal a man who had left his slippers and his wedding ring in the Rhine and his mind in some unfathomable sea of discomposure.

But Dr. Hasenclever took him for a victim of the rain. “He ran off without an umbrella. And look at how he's dressed!”

“He tried to kill himself,” said one of the revelers.

“Well, you can certainly catch your death by going out into this weather in such clothes as these.”

“We fished him out of the river,” said one of the fishermen.

“Him and me,” said the other.

“That cannot be!”

“It can. It is,” whispered Robert. “I'm cold. Let me in my house.”

“Not yet,” said Dr. Hasenclever, who fetched Berthe the maid to stand at the door while he went off to get Clara. Or so Robert thought, until Dr. Hasenclever returned alone and said to Berthe, “The coast is clear. Have them take him directly to the bedroom.”

And so eight strangers followed Berthe's amplitudinous backside up the stairs, wholly content that the sight of it was payment for their efforts in saving his life, as it was his payment too, for as he raised his head to watch her waddle up the stairs and down the hallway, he thought how good it was to be home and alive.

Berthe had become Clara. He found himself unable to think of Clara, or to picture her, or desire her, except to the extent that he thought of his absence of thought about her. It must be what life is, if there is life after death—an awareness only of what had been, which now was no more and therefore did not exist, for if it did, how did one bear the separation? He had died and had awakened in a vacant Paradise.

Dr. Hasenclever cooperated in this vision. While Robert bathed in the hot water he had prescribed, Dr. Hasenclever sat by him.

“I have sent Frau Schumann away. You must never tell her you tried to take your life.”

“Take my life? I was not taking it. I was giving it.”

“Suicide is not a gift.”

“Or perhaps I simply have no gift for it.”

He went directly from the bath to bed and then, shortly, in dry, warm clothes, to his study, where he tried to write down the music he'd heard in the river and, failing that, went back to work on variations of the theme in E-flat major sent to him he had now decided by Schubert alone. Mendelssohn, too, was fading from his mind. As he wrote it, he could hear Clara playing it. He could not see her or feel her or even imagine her, only hear the music rise out of her fingers upon his fingers upon his pen.

His wife had left him, not as a wife leaves a husband but as a person leaves himself, leaking away slowly over time, taking everything.

He kept hold of Dr. Hasenclever's hand in the carriage transporting him to Endenich. In his other hand, he grasped a bouquet of flowers Dr. Hasenclever said had been sent by Frau Schumann for the journey. He gave a flower to Dr. Hasenclever and to each of the two guards who rode with them. He saved a flower for each of the two drivers who alternated shifts over the eight-hour journey. The rest of the flowers he stared at in order to see the faces of his children.

He had last held flowers in a carriage on the night of their wedding, on their way to their new home on Inselstrasse in Leipzig.

It was almost midnight when they arrived, almost September 13, her twenty-first birthday. They could have married on that date without her father's, and thus without the court's, permission. That their wedding day should have been on her final day without legal freedom had not been planned by them—it was the first possible Saturday after the time necessary for the reading of the banns—but this confluence of wedding and birthday, of justice and revenge, was like some happy trick of fate and an augury of future happiness for their marriage.

He rushed her into bed, or tried to, one eye on the clock, the other on her, until she disappeared into what he did not immediately realize was the bathroom, because this apartment was as new to him as marriage. It might be like all other apartments, in that it was made up of separate rooms, but he didn't know how its spaces sat in relation to one another, as he didn't know how the girl he had loved for as long as he remembered loving could possibly be loved any more as his wife.

When she reappeared, she was wearing the frilly peignoir he had placed within the trousseau he'd given her. As a bride, estranged from family, cut off, she had come with nothing but herself. He wanted to give her, as well as be for her, everything.

Her hair was down, brushed, as if she had knowingly given meaning to the garment she hugged against her nakedness, and as she lay down next to him on their bed he saw she was wearing something else that was new. She had painted her eyelids. He had always found them attractive, permissibly so even when she was a little girl and they were, like the lips, the body's conspicuous portents of future happiness, or of whatever happiness is brought by the kind of imperative attraction he felt toward her, that longing for release and capture both.

He brought the candle closer.

“What is that on your eyes?”

“Do you like it?”

He touched his finger to it, one lid, then the next.

“Is it blue? I can't tell in this light.”

“A different blue.”

“Different from what?” On stage, she sometimes wore liner, but she had never painted her lids, so far as he knew.

“From any other blue.”

“What is it?”

“It's called Manna. I bought it for tonight. It's supposed to be…well, is it?”

“Is it what?”

“If it is, I shouldn't have to tell you.”

“It's very beautiful on you.”

“Thank you. But that's not what it's supposed to be. I mean, it's supposed to do more than look good. Though I'm glad you think it looks good.”

“It is a most unusual blue.”

“It's made of woad.”

“Woad!”

“You know about woad? I should have known. You know about everything.”

He put his nose, as he had put his finger, first to one lid, then to the other.

“Why are you sniffing me? Do I smell funny?”

“Woad was used anciently as a dye. It's what the women of Lemnos were said to be wearing that caused their husbands to reject them.”

“Everyone knows that the men of Lemnos had no taste!” She laughed; whether at her own pseudopedantry or in mockery of his customary pedagogery, he could not tell. “No eye for beauty whatsoever. Unlike yourself.”

“The men of Lemnos may have liked the way their women looked with woad on them, wherever they happened to put it. What they didn't like was how their women smelled.”

“I don't smell!” It was a most feminine cry of truth and question all in one.

“Not like the women of Lemnos. Who, by the way, slaughtered their men, each and every one of them, with one exception, Thaos, who—”

“I am wearing Manna to
attract
you. I was told it would arouse you.”

“Me?”

“Any man.”

“Look at the time.” He brought forth his watch from the night-table.

“The women of Leipzig are known to kill their men who look at the time during the making of love.”

“Midnight. Your birthday. You are a woman at last.”

“You made a woman of me years ago in Dresden, Robert. Now make me your wife.”

*
The duel between Liszt and Thalberg had taken place in Paris at the instigation, as well as at the grand home, of Princess Cristina Belgiojoso, who seized upon an opportunity not only to raise money for her cherished Italian refugees but to secure her place, as indeed she did, as one of the immortal impresarias. She charged forty francs a seat and, after the
Gazette Musicale
compared the impending confrontation to the battles between Rome and Carthage, filled them not only with society folk, who could afford the tariff and were genetically disposed to appreciate the gladiatorial aspect of such supposedly refined combat, but with the likes of Chopin, Berlioz, and Heine, who reported on the palpitating breasts and impassioned breathing that accompanied Liszt's performance and, more to the point, satisfied most everyone's general lust when he wrote, “The keys themselves appeared to bleed.” Princess Belgiojoso, called upon to declare the winner, said, “Thalberg is the best pianist in the world.” After allowing time for Thalberg and his supporters to absorb this apparently benign judgment, she seemingly expunged them from existence altogether when she appended: “Liszt is the only pianist in the world.” (It was no secret that she and Liszt had briefly been lovers. Nor would it have occurred to Thalberg, or anyone else, to assume that so cosmopolitan a saloniste would have allowed such intimacy, whether past or present, to influence her judgment. Art and sex had no such congress; a lover was only a lover, but a great artist was a god.) Clara herself never engaged in such a duel, but they have remained commonplace among musicians, including the “octave Olympics” between Artur Rubinstein and Vladimir Horowitz. But probably the most famous confrontation after Thalberg/Liszt took place a century later in Nightsie Johnson's bar in Harlem, New York, where Billie Holiday egged on Coleman Hawkins by calling her putative lover Lester Young “the only tenor saxophone in the world,” inspiring Hawkins to accompany her so passionately as not only to obliterate Young's coincident efforts but to cast into doubt forever whether Pres and Lady Day had indeed ever made together, in the parlance of jazz musicians, such music as puts the bone in the microphone.

*
As had Bach before him. It was Chopin who said, “In my opinion, Beethoven was tormented by the idea of Bach.” And it was Brahms himself who was to say, in reference to Beethoven, “You can't imagine how it feels to have to live beneath his giant shadow.”

Part Five

The Breakdown Dialogues

Endenich

MARCH 10, 1854

Does he ask for me?

Clara Schumann

“I'm not a psychicist,” said Dr. Richarz.

“Nor I,” said Schumann.

“Nor a doctor.”

“I'd thought you
were
.”

“I meant
you. You
are not a doctor.”

“Nor a psychicist. As I stated.”

“They are
my
credentials, Herr Schumann, being presented here. Yours are known to me and to all my staff.”

“I'd never thought of madness as a credential.”

“I was referring to the brilliance of your compositions.”

“You flatter me. I think. Are you saying I've come to live in your madhouse because my work is brilliant?”

“You've come to live in my institution because you tried to kill yourself. Your doctors also felt you posed a threat to your wife.”

“Who?”

A Brief History of Endenich

Dr. Franz Richarz claimed not to be a psychicist. He did not believe in the talking cure and the old-fashioned imposition of rules of behavior upon the anarchy of a mind gone mad. He belonged to the new school in German psychiatry. He was an organicist. He believed that the mind was part of the body and not some indefinable, unseeable, unknowable, unfathomable, untreatable piece of cloud that floated in our heads and for all we knew when we died floated out our ears into the limitless beyond. The mind was not our soul, which was fortunate, because if it were, we would all be mindless, would we not?

And yet, Dr. Richarz was an adherent also of the progressive ideas concerning psychiatric practice that he had taken from “Romantic Medicine,” so conceived and named by Dr. Carl Gustav Carus, who had not only treated Herr Schumann in Dresden but was cousin to Dr. Ernst August Carus, with whose wife, by strange coincidence, Herr Schumann had once, he seemed eager to confess to Dr. Richarz, been in love and, by even greater coincidence, in whose very home he met Clara Wieck (“I remember
her
,” he said, “I remember
that moment
”) for the first time, at the very instant he was sitting with Frau Carus at the piano, attempting as always to seduce her, she having accomplished the same with him a year before when he was sixteen and he heard from her lips his first Schubert song and things got hot indeed in Colditz.