The Salzburg Tales (46 page)

In the museum at Naples we came upon the bronze of Antinoüs, the beloved of Hadrian. I left Flavian lost in thought before this face, slumbrous, pensive and lovely without pride, and made a complete inspection of the galleries. I even stayed a very long time before the
unique statue of Diana of the Ephesians, exquisite in beauty, and reproached myself for keeping Flavian waiting. But when I returned he was still on the same spot, as if transfixed. Three sculptors with their figurines were at his coat-tails, talking into his ear, trying to sell him copies of the statue. I drove away these artists and waited for my friend to come to himself. Presently he began to speak, saying:

“Do you see him yet, surrounded by desires floating like clouds of cherubs in the antique serene, and dissolving? His brow cinctured with gold, broad like the Bosphorus, and the dispute of love and discontent making a pool of scarlet in the tawny arena of his cheek; curls curling like the sea, and limbs like Jupiter's columns, the eye the lofty thunderous beam on a summer morning, the sinuous rare smile as flag-lilies raising their leaves in the shining desert breeze, the groins, arches and hollows redolent like the gardens of Lydia, the whole wrapped in the regretful languor of an effete being: the voice fluted, the hands glowing with gems, the lips taking meat and drink from gold, and the broad shoulders swinging with princely vanity the flattering purples and white: the arm bound with a silver bracelet whose interior thorns secretly pierce the flesh, awaken the senses, punish subdued manhood and refresh the soul.

“Despair descends like a cloud on his dissipated and delicate heart, germinating nightmares. He looks some day, as he rides past, at a statue of himself in the street, personating Bacchus, Apollo or some other beautiful god, and the immense boredom of his life surprises him. He thinks of the mysterious deaths and suicides now common among his friends and enemies, the dissolute, patrician youths and the old cynical bachelors, and wonders what is wrong with his world; is it sick? Will it die? Will he see the end, night close over the amphitheatre, the games ended and the people gone? He looks thoughtfully at himself in marble: thus will the statue stand on some other day, reposeful and full of natural grandeur, in mourning, and under it Hadrian prostrate, the old man, weeping: to augment the beauty of marble by tears and blood and the corrupt waters of
death, which wear it not but make it rather shine, and ornament with mossy shadow the inner parts, that will be his end.

“And so, my friend,” said Flavian, “in Egypt one day with the brasses of the legions flaming in the desert and the noon pouring over him its tangled hyacinthine hair, following some too, too boring tête-à-tête with Hadrian, he plunges into the Nile and dies.”

So he said; and I found on the flyleaf of a book of verses, two days later, a drawing of the statue, the head especially human, the eyes swimming with luminous melancholy. Flavian went with me to Rome, and, in the galleries of the Vatican, again we found, though in coarser stone, the fatal Bithynian youth.

My Flavian became solitary, and I left him to walk through the decayed villas, the weed-tangled chambers and half-excavated pleasure-gardens of the past, and the damp pavements and marshy floor of the forum where the boys still play ancient games. Flavian began to complain of headaches and burned with fever. He wanted to stay at home all day now without eating, trembling and passionate, and acridly spitting out his work: he said he had found what he came for, inspiration and desperation: but I imagined he had malaria, and took him away from Rome. He would only return to Naples.

He walked about the country from Amalfi to Baiae, visited the islands, the caves, the secret shores; and hung, in clear water as in air, over the submerged tombs and sunken palaces of Pausilypon, where the murenae dart their heads from urns and amphorae. He pursued late at night, without regard for the fierce farm-dogs and the occasional thief's knife, through starlight, moonlight and rain, the traces of the dead whose sullied tides swelled and ebbed on this same shore. This same air blew through the curls of Antinoüs when fresh from the Euxine shore he first looked at the Roman world with eager eyes, it scattered dirt from the swallows' nests in the capitals of the forum during the games, brought in the galleys with news from Egypt, and fluttered the flags of festivals held in his honour at his deification: it blew through Athens and Eleusis and to all the
corrupt cities of the empire the seductive dream of youth suiciding before dishonour and decay, drew tears from changing hearts for the death of a human god, and stimulated with his anarchic seed the romantic vision of the dissolving empire.

Flavian explained this to me. I asked him one day, nevertheless, “What are you looking for?” “Antinoüs!” he said in a thoughtful tone: “It came to me one night when I followed deceptive enchanting shadow and illusive light from thicket to shore, amid the knife-play of moonbeams and the ambush of the garrotting branches, amid the crepitation of underfoot leaves and the harsh voices of the shingle, that I will find on this shore his wanton, unwarmed shade.”

“Why has Antinoüs this effect on you?” I asked him, surprised.

“I only know that when I first looked on him,” he replied, “I saw him move and breathe, wrapped in a calm and tender atmosphere, not Naples', not Rome's, but his own. His downcast face entered my heart sharply like a thorn. Since then, his face has been before me. I have known him, his slow resolutions, his sensuality, the sparkle of his angry eye, his brooding petulance, the smoothness of gems in the palm of his hand, the bustle of camps and courts in his ear. I have heard the passion and languorous discontent rise in floods in the cockles of his heart: I have dived as a swimmer swimming under-water in the flood-tides at full moon, to the silver bottoms and weedy beds of his soul, and come up shining and phosphorescent: I have lived in the full moon of his lusty season, fished by the light of his lantern and caught fish in the grottoes of his shore. I have taken my evening way through the naked welkin even as the black swans flying in an arrow towards their nests among the marsh-waters, and have drunk deep and slept in the brackish wells of his love. I have clothed myself in his effete imagination, and stripped myself, even as he, of natural life, the better to ferment the insobriety of the furiously fertile soul.

“The shadow of beauty, the unshattering crystal of perfection which casts its image on a brow in passion or dilemma, the shudder which shakes the body like a snake, in pain, the cold blast of terror, the sound which the blood has, humming like a contrebass at the onset
of delight, I have sometimes known, but now have always present to me looking at the image of this youth. To this madness I must devote myself for a short time, and travel in the regions Antinoüs travelled in, and steep myself in those antique civilisations that he saw, even if I go on foot, poor or hungry. It is even as if he were able to come to life again in me, as if I conceived him the first moment I saw him and now must tread again in every particular the path he trod before.”

Flavian left me in a few days, and travelled in Asia Minor, Greece and Egypt. He went last to Egypt, and in Egypt died, some say, but I would not be surprised to see him turn up again some day with a tale of strange peregrinations.

T
HE
guests were silent. The penetrating voice of the Italian Singer said:

“I know a tale, too, of that shore divine where death cannot die but is clothed in immortality: if not in an immortal name, then through the immortal regeneration of the soil, and the fertility of the sun.”

“If you know a tale, tell it,” said the Master: “and if you can sing, sing to us sometimes in the tale: that will be something none of us has heard before.”

“I will sing now, if you wish it, the song that comes into my tale,” said the Singer. A single strain rose through the wood, meditative, without refrain; there was silence everywhere. At the end the Italian Singer, in a low voice, began his tale.

 

I
WAS
born in the north of Italy, but each year in spring I go south, and even into Sicily and Calabria, to hear the sonorous accent of their primitive fountains of song.

Three years ago, in early winter, I put down my bag at the Hotel of the Siren, in Torre del Greco, on the Neapolitan shore. The tranquil sun of antiquity lay over all the unkempt orchards, the villas were closed, and the Vesuvian cloud rolled out towards Capri. In the early morning I arose and went out about the sleepy villages. Presently I came to the Villa Ginevra, once made famous by an Italian poet. There was no sign of life there. The green shutters were closed: but fowls cackled loudly, and the orange trees in the gardens, bearing a hundred little suns, rejoiced my heart in villeggiatura. I walked round the property, plucked a full-blown rose from the fence, and went down to the sea to watch fishermen hauling on the black beach.

I returned that way two hours later, warbling among the market gardens. For a long way two Aphrodite butterflies preceded me, dancing round each other, and they both darted into a myrtle tree of the Villa Ginevra. It was about ten o'clock; I felt hungry, so I sat down under the tree to eat and drink. I started from a daydream to know that music had just begun. An organ was playing in the villa, the shutters were wide open and the fowls were pecking. I looked through the fence, covered with clematis. A dark, slender young man came to one of the windows, whistling the air played by the organ, and began to scrape a chisel over the grass. The foolish fowls rushed up, and retired, confused that they could not eat plaster. The organ presently stopped, and the youth spoke to the player. There came and stood on the doorstep a fair woman dressed in a blue gown, with falling lace at the wrists and bosom, an Opera Lucia or Elsa. The youth moved behind the woman and put his arms round her: she leaned her head backwards on his breast, and they kissed solemnly, less with ardour than as a rite, without a glance to heaven or earth. As she leaned backwards, a river of brilliants, hitherto concealed by a fold of the dress, flashed into my eye.

The mountain sent down his voice through a cloud like the prophets of old, the vines of Vesuvian grape strung glistening on the dark four-harvesting earth, the eucalypt with lacerated bark and spotted skin cast a shadow, and the cuckoo called through groves of
pomegranates, olives, figs and aloes. At some moments, any music sounds divine. I began to sing the music of Duparc for “L'Invitation au Voyage” of Baudelaire. The man and woman started from their classic attitude and came vivaciously down the path. I laughed up at them and continued my song. The youth then took me by the hand, and looking at my satchel and flask of wine, asked me, in a beautiful French, to breakfast with them.

They offered me that spontaneous intimate love that a recluse offers to a chance acquaintance. I saw all their work in music and sculpture. Only one thing the youth would never show me, and that was a block of stone kept under a cloth, half-dressed, he said, a poor block too, of disappointing grain.

When I left to go to Rome, that detestable city, where I had an engagement, the youth gave me the address of a friend of his, a Dutchman like himself, who lived above a garden on the Pincian Hill. This friend, J. van Hoven, received the letter of introduction in a dry style, defensively asked me to be his guest and avoid in his well-aired apartment the malaises of the city, discussed the pair at Torre with glum caution, and in a day or two opened out suddenly, in the manner of northern phlegm, and told me their history.

The woman, Helena, an organist, was the finest living exponent of César Franck. She was an American woman from the Middle West, and had been married five years and given numerous public concerts, when she was sent to Paris by her husband to study there. Her husband, wealthy and proud of her talent, sent her an ample allowance, had given her as a parting gift the beautiful set of emeralds I had seen her wear on several occasions, and had sent her since several fine jewels.

She was at that time a brilliant young woman, ample, tall, with bronze hair wound in a thick plait round an oval head. She was to be seen at all the concerts in the Salle Pleyel, the Salle Gaveau and elsewhere, noticeable for the youthful pomp, insolence and gaiety of her bearing.

At one of the concerts she met Willem Vanderweyde, a boy in manner mild, reserved and exquisite, but in mind, passionate,
thinking by analogy, and fantastic. At the second concert of this series, contrary to her simple habit, she wore a splendid fur coat, her hair done in a crown of curls and the emeralds: at the third, she stood by, smiling and vain, while Willem ran round on her commissions: at the fourth she wore a red rose, and made it evident to all by signs as simple that she was in love with Willem. At this point J. van Hoven broke off and said, with his natural spleen: “Women are wantons: a young limb is better than an old one.”

This pair lived together from that time on; never quitting each other, impatient for each other's company if separated, and in conversation, always in peal, like bells melodiously struck.

Helena returned to America for a series of concerts, leaving the emeralds in gauge of love with Willem: he cut on his arm a triangle, “the sign of love”, and bound the emeralds round it, swearing to keep them so till she returned, and live in strict fidelity. Her husband offered to liberate her, so that she could marry the Dutchman, but she refused it. She was five years older than Willem, of another nationality, nature and talent; perhaps she feared, as women do, excessive passion, and chafed at any tie except the plighted troth, which melts, as is well known, in water.

Willem was distressed to find the heart so frail and the tongue so apprehensive of perjury. One day she received from her husband a ring in which their two names were engraved. She got out her jewel box and stood before the mirror trying all her jewels, and wound her emeralds in her hair. Willem said to her suddenly, that if she ever was unfaithful to him, or left him, he would castrate himself. “I will remain a hand and an eye, but die as a man.” He swore it on those terrible emeralds, which he compared to the eternal fire and colour of his jealous love. He swore it by the Trinity and the names of his parents; he flung the profane emeralds on the table between them, where they lay curled like a snake, S, the letter of God and the Devil.