Longing (15 page)

Sometimes women, and their daughters with them, would, in their servants' places, deliver the gifts themselves, and it had become the custom for them to ask to fix her hair. People loved her hair. It was dark and soft and fine, and when it was pulled away from her face and piled atop her head or twisted behind in elaborate shapes, her eyes, like an actor's when the curtains are drawn apart, seemed to grow larger and become more alive. “Striking,” they would say, looking at her. Never “beautiful”—always “striking.” She thought she would play the piano for anyone who called her beautiful, and go anywhere to do it.

But there was no praise like Robert's. He was some kind of mad genius, the way he would sit at the piano and improvise for hours on end and produce unanticipated changes of key and strange chords she could not manage to find within her own fingers. She often felt a longing for his music. It was not altogether a pleasant longing. She felt the same thing when he was not there, as when his music was not. A missingness, she called it, a grief, like for her distant mother, or her dead brother, or even her own double, who she thought might take from her some of the burden of her life.

“I would like to meet my double,” she told him.

“Oh, no!” he said. He seemed shocked. “Oh, no, you wouldn't! To meet your double is a sign you will soon die.”

She thought for a moment of pretending to be frightened, so that he might hug her, but she preferred he see her strong. “I don't believe that,” she said.

“Don't believe that? But you must. It is true. How can you not believe that?”

“For the very reason you gave me. My double cannot play the piano as well as I. You said so yourself. Therefore, it would have to be my double who died and not me, should we ever meet.”

He hugged her anyway. “Has anyone ever had such faith in her art?”

It was him, not her art, in whom she had faith. It was he who spoke of art as if it were religion. So far as she was concerned, she simply played the piano. It was her purpose on earth. This was not religion but life.

But so was this, being held by her friend, who was indeed her only friend, and feeling it would be impossible for her to have a double because there was no room in the universe for such a feeling as this to be duplicated.

When Robert's mother in Zwickau sent him his birth certificate, which he was required to show to the military authorities, Clara asked to see it.

She smoothed it out with her hands and then read it. “‘Robert Alexander Schumann,'” she said. “I don't believe it.”

“You don't like my name?”

“I love your name. What I don't believe is that you actually exist.”

He spoke of trying to get a medical deferment because of his eyesight and a tendency to vertigo, but he was convinced he would be drafted and spoke of escaping either to America or to Twer, in Russia, where he had an uncle.

She desperately wanted him not to go, and at the same time to go with him. She imagined an endless trip, with howling winds and blankets over their laps and all the untold stories he would tell her, and at the end of the trip, when she would be much older than she was now, a piano.

As it turned out, he was not drafted and he did not go away. The revolution was over quickly, at least in Germany, and from what she could tell in hearing her father discuss it with Robert and some of the older students, the freedoms that were being won by the people in England and Belgium and Portugal and Spain and Switzerland had been denied the people of Russia and Poland and Austria and of course Germany. Nothing had changed except for those who had died.

And for her, since she could now make her debut at the Gewandhaus.

The Gewandhaus itself was an old clothing hall, where Leipzig's linen merchants used to store and sometimes sell their cloth. It had been converted into a concert hall nearly fifty years before, and a local orchestra had been playing there—never very well—in the intervening time.

A Gewandhaus performance represented a significant change in the status of the solo musician. In the past, such artists, no matter the glory of their virtuosity, were primarily household servants who performed at the whim of their wealthy patrons; musicians were paraded out like so many jugglers and tumblers to impress invited guests or on occasion to perform privately for the patron himself, who might have a headache or want to play along upon his very own flute or, if he were truly enlightened, to take a small dose of the profound humility any sensible human being should—but so few do—experience with religious ferocity in the presence of a great musician.

“What shall I wear?” she asked Robert.

“You're asking
me
!”

The shock and amusement on his face simply amused her. “My mother is too far away, and my stepmother is too vulgar.”

He considered for a moment. “A dress, I should think.”

Having no idea whether he was serious, which made his remark all the funnier, she laughed again. “Of
course
, a dress! But what
color
?”

“Black,” he said.

“You're impossible.”

“I wear black. All the time. It's the only serious color.”

“You're a man. And a most serious man at that. I'm just a little girl. I can't wear a black dress to my debut.”

“Of course you can,” he said.

She wore white. Until then, when she had played in public, her colors had indeed been those of a little girl, pastels in which she had always felt both shrunken and giddified, offered like a candy to a fat man. Lately, at home, she had been wearing darker clothes, almost, she realized, as dark as Robert's, though usually set off at the throat and wrists and sometimes even at the hem with lashings of white lace. But for her debut, she would wear white, silk, with some of the jewelry people had been sending her so she might show her appreciation for their acknowledgment of her superiority.

She was not nervous over her debut. Most important, the piano was to be one of her father's Grafs, familiar to her in its suppleness and vastly different from the tree trunk of an instrument whose unyieldingness had caused her the year before to interrupt the wild cheering of the audience at the end of her performance in Dresden with an apology for her tone and tears for their ignorance. She had by now played so often for an audience that she was more concerned with the grace of her movements onto the stage and the depth of her bows than with her musicianship. Perhaps this was because the major works she was to play—by Kalkbrenner and Herz and Czerny—were no longer difficult for her. They might be virtuoso pieces, meant precisely for the kind of show she was expected to provide, but, once mastered, they were reduced to a kind of animated simplicity. They were hell to practice, because without an audience to hear them, they had no meaning. But with the Gewandhaus filled—and her father had seen to it that there would be no empty seats—this music, and she, would be rapturously hosannaed.

She spent much of her performance trying to find Robert in the audience. It was not easy, and she never succeeded. Those seated down the long, narrow auditorium that extended from the stage to the back of the hall faced not the stage but the center corridor and thus one another across it, making it difficult for the soloist, whose back was to the audience when she was playing, to find anyone's eyes. So she imagined his on her, wide and blue, not squinting, able to see her hands, impressed with their strength and ridiculous speed in the Kalkbrenner rondo, dazzled by her dress, pleased with her hair as it sat motionless and undisturbed atop her head, as fond as he could possibly be of his little friend, especially when she was up here all alone, the orchestra departed, her father and his physharmonica departed, she by herself at the end of her recital with nothing to occupy her hands but her own variations on her own theme, such a relief to be playing, and nothing to occupy her heart but him.

She saw him finally after the first of her final bows, so that it was the only successful bow, the rest being much too quick.

Leipzig

MAY 13, 1831

Charitas came completely and was bleeding
.

Robert Schumann

Christian Glock was looking at Robert's penis through a magnifying glass.

“Oh, my,” said Glock. “Oh, my my my.”

“I trust you're exclaiming over its magnitude,” joked Robert, who wouldn't have minded a look at it himself in its enhancement but had been ordered to remain supine upon Glock's examination table.

Robert had turned to Glock, his medical muse and fellow Hoffmann worshipper, because he couldn't bear the thought of displaying to Dr. Ernst Carus the very organ he still dreamed of burying deep within the doctor's very own wife.

“What's her name?” asked Glock as he raised and lowered his face as if to bring the suffering beast into proper focus.

“I'd hardly call it a ‘she,'” Robert answered.

“Then what is
his
name?” asked Glock.

“My penis doesn't have a name!”

Glock laughed. “I should hope not. It is my experience that men who name their penises are otherwise without friends. And I would have thought that you came to me with your problem precisely because we
are
friends.”

“Precisely.”

“Then as your friend, and also as, for the moment, your physician, I would like to know the name of your lover.”

“Christel,” Robert pronounced her name.

Glock looked disappointed. “Who?”

“Christel. Otherwise known as Charitas.”

“Known to whom?”

“To me, of course.”

“Well, I don't know her by either name. Who is she?”

“She studies with Wieck. I don't know her surname.”

“From the condition of your prick, I should think she studies even harder with you.”

“Thank you,” said Robert proudly.

“Don't thank me. Thank her. Though I'm not sure it's gratitude you ought to be feeling. You must be in considerable pain from this.”

“I am. But, oh, what pleasure has caused it!”

“I can imagine,” said Glock.

“‘Imagine'?” Robert teased him.

“Alas, yes. Imagine. I've not had a woman since I began my studies.”

“Medical school?”

“Before medical school.”

“Law school?”

“Before law school.”

“Theology school?”

“Yes, before theology school. In fact, it was a woman who caused me to enroll in theology school in the first place.”

“How so?”

“She left me. The pain was so great that I thought I would never understand it until I came to understand God.”

“And did you?”

Glock shook his head. “I came to understand that the two things that can never be understood—
never understood!
—are the workings of a woman's heart and the pain that God allows us—
causes
us—to feel.”

Sad at his friend's sadness, Robert whispered, “And so you…”

“And so I became both a lawyer and a doctor. This way I can at least understand the workings of man, if not of God. Man cheats. Man decays.”

Robert sat up, to engage Glock more closely in his cynicism. “And that is your total view of man?”

“Man also engages in sexual intercourse,” added Glock. “I may not, thank God, but Man does. Now this Christel, Robert, is she your first?”

“I don't know,” he confessed.

“What do you mean, you don't know?”

“I mean, I don't know if she was my first. She may have been, she may not have been.”

“With all due respect, Robert, and speaking out of experience that may be years in the past but lives within my memory as if it had happened not five minutes ago, one's first woman, whether she is merely one's first or is also one's only, is not someone to be forgotten, to say nothing of the first time she
is
gotten.”

“I'm sorry, Christian, but I just don't know. She feels to me like my first, but there may have been a whore here and there. I simply can't remember.”

“And why can't you remember, Robert?”

“Drink.”

Robert confessed this somewhat shamefacedly, for while he had certainly drunk his share, and more, in the presence of Glock the friend and musician, who himself was known to take a glass of wine so long as it was not of German origin, he felt he was speaking now to Glock the physician, and all the physicians Robert had ever known found drink the easiest thing to tell a patient to forgo, as if they had no understanding of what an important function drink served in painting over the grim features of life with its own limpid tinctures.

“Ah, yes,” said Glock, smiling leniently. “I recall one night this past winter when you came to the Hôtel de Pologne dressed as a woman, like some Berliner attending the Inverts Ball. We ended up carrying you home, and you woke up on the very threshold of the Wieck residence and said, ‘Don't let Clara see me like this, she will think I am a ghost,' as if such a child might be awake at such an hour. And were those clothes you wore that night perhaps borrowed from this Christel of yours?”

Robert buried his face in his hands, though whether out of embarrassment or a memory of another of his terrible hangovers he did not know. “Believe me, if I had had Christel at that time, I would not have needed to go about in her clothes.”

“So this relationship of yours is of more recent vintage,” said Glock.

“Much more recent.”

“Well, from the looks of your member there, I would say that the two of you must be going at it not only with ferocity but also with rather alarming frequency.”

“You would not be wrong,” said Robert with undisguised pride.

Glock's face suddenly lost its look of commodious remembrance and hardened into the physician's captious gaze.

“How can you be fucking someone in the home of your teacher? Right under his nose, as it were? And one of his own students? Does this not strike you as both indiscreet and degenerate?”