Longing (56 page)

“Well, I couldn't very well have put that name in the return address.”

“Are you afraid people will think you're a madman?”

“It's no longer chic to be mad.”

“I'm sorry to hear that.”

He suffered, he told Johannes, from the
furor divinus
described by Plato in his
Ion
, at least so far as, like Plato's poet, he sang his beautiful melodies in a state of inspiration. But he did not agree with Plato that the spirit by which he was possessed was not his own. It was precisely the fact that everything he did and everything he was came from
within
that rendered his insanity divine. The artist was his own god. And the madness through which Plato said in
Phaedrus
we receive the greatest benefaction comes not as a gift of Heaven but as a kind of blessed curse from the self.

Robert and Johannes toured the shelves of books like travelers who carry flambeaux toward the walls of churches, who try to memorize a sunset. With them, always, was Clara, a memory for Robert and for Johannes a dream of travel yet to come, which sometimes is the best of travel, to sit at home and picture what it will be like to get where you will, though you do not yet know it, finally get to go.

Robert took down
Either/Or
and told the boy how he'd missed his wife the first time she left him as his wife, to go to Copenhagen, where she'd met the author of this book. And how fortunate that had been, for otherwise Robert might never have come upon the story Kierkegaard tells of the Sicilian tyrant Phalaris, who executed his prisoners by putting them in a bronze bull and setting a slow, hot fire beneath the bull, yet when their shrieks of agony reached his ears, they were transformed by having passed over the reeds he'd placed in the bull's nostrils, so that all Phalaris heard was music so sweet he could not bear to have it stop. This, then, was the artist, as he made his way to freedom the only way he could, through beauty, turning anguish into beauty, dying like Saint Eustathius himself as he sacrificed his family to his unwilllingness to appease the false gods who tempted every artist into the simplifying subversion of his art.

But the anguish wasn't always quite so veiled, as evidenced by the Bulwer-Lytton shelf, the most weighted in most people's libraries, with such prolificacy of more than symbolic meaning, for here was a man who, like me, said Robert, worked himself through the exhaustion of toil and study into madness, which he called “anxiety and grief.” Bulwer-Lytton ended up at a place named Malvern, about which he wrote
Confessions of a Water-Patient
, his copy of which Robert placed in his new friend's hands. “I have had my own hydro-treatments,” he explained. “I had gone from Dr. Carus to Dr. Glock to Dr. Reuter to Dr.
Carl
Carus—relative of Dr. Ernst Carus but not so blessed in marriage—to Dr. Walther to Dr. Helbig to Dr. Hasenclever to Dr. Müller, none of whom I ever abandoned for reasons other than geography, and none of whom ever abandoned me, aside from dear Dr. Reuter, who died before his patient, which is always cause for a kind of retroactive concern. Each had his specialty, of which Dr. Müller's seems to be treatment by water. A couple of years ago he had me bathing naked in the Rhine each day for three weeks. When that didn't work, he packed me off to Scheveningen, in Holland, where the water, being of the sea, was even colder, and Clara lost a child. How was I to know, after that, whether I remained sad and anxious because I was merely sad and anxious or because another of our children drowned before birth?” He snatched back
Confessions of a Water-Patient
and in its stead, like a flower for a weed, presented the startled young man with
The Last Days of Pompeii
. “I gave this to Clara for her sixteenth birthday,” he said, replacing at least in his own mind the image of the disconsolately relieved wife at Scheveningen with the girl he had not yet corrupted.

Brahms seemed unable to get enough of the books or of their peculiar owners, who saw no error in the equation by which their lives (time, home, children, food, affectionate regard) would be exchanged for his music and his presence. It was so easy to seduce him with their routines and their possessions, and so easy to be seduced in return by his spirit and his physical beauty and the music that was sometimes so difficult to comprehend, not as much for its form as for its source. Robert saw him sprung whole from the head of Zeus. Clara could not help continuing to think he had been sent by a god who spoke German.

He carried around
The Last Days of Pompeii
until he had been presented with so detailed a description of Clara's sixteenth birthday and the parties attending it that he felt, he said, finally, if momentarily, no longer the youngest person in the room. He looked at her as if she were sixteen, and he twenty, as he was, attempting to read the past in her body and in so doing to obliterate those lost years.

They passed him between them like a gift to each other. When he and Robert were alone, they read and talked and smoked and played chess and indulged in the newly popular table-turning, which allowed Robert a chance to communicate with the dead and in the process to introduce his compassionate new friend to his old friends and family passed away. Otherwise, Clara had him to herself.

Robert could hear them at her piano, she instructing, Brahms playing, each time a bit differently, as he was literally absorbing her into his hands.

“Chohannes,” she would say, her voice impeded still by the affliction of her childhood, but only when she addressed him privately. She struggled otherwise for a certain propriety in the public represented by the rest of the family, trying to breathe his name correctly.

She had been taking on students for years, even during her concert tours. Such money as she made from this seemed to Robert tainted, because she should not have had to earn it. Yet with such a pupil as Brahms, whose payment came in his mere willingness to be taught by her, her teaching became a gift given back to herself through him.

He played for them each evening—a fantasie he'd written, songs of his own and Hungarian folk songs, both piano and violin parts of a violin sonata—and each evening through his playing moved more deeply within their lives.

“Tell Robert about Liszt,” she said, laughing as she said it, full of a kind of private pleasure that made Robert envy not only Brahms and Clara, for what they shared, but himself for having reason to envy them.

“I fell asleep,” said Brahms.

“That's
the punch line
!” Clara touched him on the shoulder.

“You fell asleep while Liszt played!”

Clara now turned to Robert. “How did you know?” And to Brahms: “Did you tell Robert this story before you told me?”

“How
did
you know?” Brahms reached out and put his hand on Robert's sleeve.

Robert tapped himself on the forehead.

“Music is not your only supernatural power,” Brahms flattered him.

“Robert can see into the past,” teased Clara.

Brahms had fallen asleep some four months earlier while visiting Liszt in Weimar at the Altenburg, the grand home of his mistress, Princess Carolyne Sayn-Wittgenstein, who had inherited thirty thousand serfs from her father and from her mother the vastly more commutable strength in her thighs that allowed her to stay in her horse's saddle for eight hours straight and to lock Liszt in place as no woman had before.

“I liked her,” said Brahms. “She had black teeth from cigars. She kept them in a box she told me was from Egypt.”

“She kept her teeth in an Egyptian box?” asked Clara.

“Her cigars!” The boy's laugh was as high-pitched as his voice; it joined with Clara's and made Robert shiver with delight. He had not seen her so frolicsome since that part of her girlhood she'd spent with him, nor so provocative with a man since she had been so with him.

“The
cigar
box was lined in pearl,” Brahms went on. “She would take my hand and put it in and run the tip of my finger along the pearl lining and then close my hand over the biggest, fattest cigar. That one was mine. She smoked small cigars. But she smoked them
all the time
!”

“And Liszt?” insisted Clara. “Is he not still the same insufferable cock?”

“Oh, I don't think he is,” said Brahms. “He doesn't wake early.”

They were not able to determine, when they discussed this later, whether his naïveté was real or assumed. It hardly mattered, for it flattered him, and it flattered them, that he should be so unashamedly childlike in their presence, when he must know that both saw him as a god.

“He asked me to play for him, and when I wouldn't—I was frightened by his reputation, and I
hated
the room—he took my scherzo from me and put it on the piano and sat down to play. You've seen it—it's scored in my own hand. My own father wouldn't be able to read it. But Liszt—he just sat there and played it. It was even better than I thought—my piece, I mean, though so was his playing.”

“And still you fell asleep?” Robert found this hard to believe; Liszt had sight-read Robert's work, and he didn't sleep for three nights after that experience.

“Not when he played
my
work,” Brahms answered.

“Oh, no!” said Robert.

“Yes,” said Brahms. “He said he was going to play a sonata of his own, in B minor, something new, something revolutionary. Of course it put me right to sleep.”

“How terrible.” Robert found the story delightful as an anecdote but at the same time distressing when he considered either of its principals, the sleeper or the fallen-asleep-upon. Sometimes it seemed the only place for art was beyond the human capacity to defile it with indifference.

“It was the music that was terrible,” said Brahms. “To call that a sonata would be like calling rain wine. That they are both liquid will not make water intoxicating.”

“So what did Liszt do?”

“He didn't play my music again. And I didn't play his. But he did give me a gift when I left Weimar. Wait here—I'll show you.”

Brahms almost ran from the room, as he almost ran practically everywhere.

“Do you know what it is, darling?”

“Probably an undergarment—though whether Franz's or the princess's I won't hazard a guess.”

“Perhaps they share it.”

Johannes appeared with his knapsack, hand thrust within. “What are you two laughing at?”

This only amused them further. They would not tell him.

“This is it.”

“It's a box,” Clara observed.

“A
cigar
box. With my name engraved.”

“Are there any cigars inside?” Robert held out his hand.

“No cigars.” Brahms put the box into Robert's hand.

Robert looked inside, shook his head, closed the box, and stared at it. “Who is ‘Brams'?”

“Aha!” Brahms jumped off the floor.

“Well,” said Clara, “if you fell asleep while I played, I would spell your name wrong too.”

“As long as you call me Chohannes,” he replied.

He did not fall asleep at that moment, but he could without a moment's notice. The great, youthful energy he displayed in everything he did—at the piano, in perilous acrobatics upon virtually any flat or angled surface, in seizing upon ideas and reading books with a zeal that cracked their bindings—he could set aside with no more thought or preparation than a bird bestows upon the stream of air beneath its wings. He glissaded into sleep at any hour, in any place, so that they might come upon him napping in any room, on almost any surface, though he seemed to favor chairs over couches and floors (if carpeted) over tables.

When one of them happened to come upon Brahms sleeping like this, he or she would fetch the other and there they would stand side by side, watching him, as they sometimes watched their own children sleep. But this was not a child, for all they called him boy. This was their young deity, and his sleep protected them as much as they protected him and it, standing over him, able to stare into his features and limn his figure and breathe with the breath they saw migrate through his chest and move the strands of golden hair upon his shoulders like fingers on a piano.

Robert, in particular, tried to learn from Brahms to sleep so simply. He stood and matched him breath for breath and even closed his eyes upon the only thing he now could look upon with unambiguous joy. Sleep had always been his enemy. But when he saw it like this, embracing, and embraced by, a young man whose indisputable genius appeared disconnected entirely from disquietude, it seemed a whole new science, the invention of contentment. He had been insomniac, he guessed, his whole life. It was one thing not to sleep—and when he was young, he had prided himself on spending night after night awake, all fired up and in flames, seething in sweet and fabulous sounds all night, free, light, and blessed as he swam in the pure ether of dangerous emotions while writing music, smoking, drinking, until finally, one morning, the sun would so hurt his vision that he would clamp his lids against it and feel the alcohol paint his brain to rest. But it was another to lie awake and hear what Dr. Helbig called auracular delusions and Robert called his inner concerts.

Dr. Helbig proclaimed hearing the most animate of the senses once night had come, the last to shut down and the first to awaken. It was also, he said, the sense most closely related to the emotions and linked with the forces affecting discretion, aggression, revenge, and the appreciation of music. Imagine—a doctor so percipient that he is able to find a connection between hearing and music!

To draw anxiety from Robert's brain, Dr. Helbig attempted what he called transcranial magnetic stimulation by putting a magnet to Robert's head and moving it gently across his scalp and face and then, in apparent frustration, with enough force against the back of his neck to suggest to his patient the shoeing of a horse.

“You handle that thing like Lavater trying to galvanize the genitals.”