The Dream Lover (40 page)

“Ah, you are wrong. The words you are writing play out upon your brow. It is fascinating to behold.”

“As music is represented in your face when you play.”

“Without a doubt. But you also sigh quite often.”

“Do I?”

He nodded solemnly, then imitated me, arranging his features into what I suppose he thought was a reasonable facsimile of feminine expression and heaving a sigh.

I burst out laughing, quickly covering my mouth; I did not want to wake the others.

Then I said, “Do you know, Franz, some mornings I sit in my room when I awaken, waiting to hear the sounds of your piano. And I often grow quite impatient that you have not yet started when I am ready for you to!”

“I thought you slept the mornings away.”

“Only when I am working well. I am not working well lately. Tonight was an exception. When I am happy, my pen can barely keep up with my thoughts. When I am in despair, my imagination is as flat and lifeless as my spirit.”

“Tell me, dear friend. What is the sorrow that fills you with such despair?”

“It is simple. I am not loved.”

“But your friends, your children, your many admirers! And surely you must know how much I love you!”

“I am grateful for that. But I need romantic love as I need air to breathe. I need someone to offer body, heart, and soul and to accept mine in return.”

Franz rose from his chair and came to sit closer to me. He took hold of my hands. “George, the soul of a man belongs only to God. And that is how it should be.”

“I know you believe that, Franz. I know that you have not lost the ardor for God that you had as a child.”

It was one of the things that made us immediately close, the similarities Franz and I shared with regard to mysticism. Early on, he had confided in me, somewhat shyly, how he used to speak aloud to the statue of the Virgin that was at his bedside as a boy. I had told him about Corambe and even shown him the spot where I had made my altar. He had moved forward into the space and stood quietly, his back to me. Then he had turned around to say, “I can
feel
what this place was to you.” I had nodded, my heart full. How glad I had been to have met someone who as a youth had longed for the same transcendence, who had read the same books as I, who had considered devoting his life to the church even as I once had.

“Imagine, Franz,” I said now, “if we had followed our earliest longings, you would now be a priest and I a nun!”

Franz smiled wryly. “It seems we have strayed far from that course. I fear you and your bold demands for personal freedom have had a corrupting influence on me!”

“Not fair, for you are your own bad influence! Your mind is divided between aesthetic ideals and lust for women, and your heart cannot choose between the need for freedom and the need for love.”

He sighed. “You are right.”

We were quiet for a long moment, enjoying the comfortable silence the way good friends can. But then a kind of melancholy
came upon me and I said, “We both long for something bigger than ourselves. But whereas you still seek that in God, I now search for it in love. Perhaps we are both irrational and destined always to be disappointed.”

Franz began to speak, then stopped himself.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Please understand that I say this with love, George. With love and great concern. I may sometimes be disappointed, but I do not despair as you do. I fear that in your romantic relationships, you tend toward the self-destructive. You choose men because they need you, not because you love them. You begin in passion but move quickly to maternal feelings.”

I thought for a moment. “If that is so,” I said, “perhaps it is because I feel that if they depend on me, they will not leave me. If they will not leave me, I can open my heart to them.”

“But where in this equation is there room for you to be cared for? You give disproportionately, and then you suffer the consequences.”

I had heard these words before. I pulled my hands away and sat straighter in my chair. “You have been talking with Arabella. I see that she has shared her conclusions about my heart's concerns with you.”

He started to defend her, but I held up my hand. “You are more of a friend to me than she. Had you not been away on tour, I would no doubt have shared my feelings with you rather than her.”

“But do you agree with what you call her conclusions?”

“Do you?”

“Ah, George. I am afraid I do.”

I wanted to argue vigorously, but the words rang true. How much of the failure of my love affairs lay squarely with me? How much did I contribute to the end of things because of habit, or example, or fear? How much did what I shared with Marie Dorval make the failure of any other relationship a foregone conclusion? I
did not know. It is an ongoing and exasperating truth about our species that one can be remarkably astute about others but blind to oneself.

But Franz had problems of his own. I leaned forward and looked directly into his eyes to say, “We both are ill-suited for love. You want a woman to be a golden-haired angel fallen to earth. Then, when your fantasy is inevitably revealed as being all too human, you want to run away.”

Franz's stomach growled just then. “The body speaks,” he said. “The body begs us to move from anguish to bread.”

Over breakfast, we changed our conversation to something less threatening to both of us. I suggested that language was limited for creative expression, but music was not.

“No, music is limited, too: to the power of the instrument, to the power of the musician's imagination, to one's ability to let go of conscious thought in favor of an unseen power.”

“It seems we are back to mysticism,” I said, and then, hearing rapid footsteps above us, I added, “And to the start of a new day.”

“Before you go, if I may be a priest after all, peace be with you,” Franz said.

“And with my spirit,” I answered. I did wish for it, truly.

August 1837

PARIS

O
n a lovely summer afternoon, my mother died. She was unaware of the seriousness of her condition, a liver that failed her. Her doctors had told my half sister, Caroline, and me that her pain was now over and there was no need to let her know that she had not long for the world. He advised us to let her last days be happy ones, and indeed they had seemed to be. We took her for a carriage ride through Paris, despite her dramatic weakness, and she smiled
throughout. Her last words, to Caroline, were “Please tidy my hair.” Afterward, she looked at herself in the hand mirror, smiled, and her soul flew away.

She was buried in Montmartre Cemetery. The next day, before I returned to Nohant, I stood by her grave and let wash over me all the memories of her I could recall. Flowers and butterflies were everywhere; it seemed incongruous to have tears on my face and a leaden ache in my heart that made it hard to breathe. My mother had been as difficult in her later years as she ever had been; I never knew, when I visited her, what face I would be met with. But she had been the first one to hear the stories I made up and, when she was in the mood, the one who most ardently praised them. I remembered clearly her pulling me onto her lap and kissing me what seemed like thousands of times, then putting my hands together to make me applaud my own ingenuity. She had taken me to the theater when we had no money for bread. She had instilled in me respect for honesty, and she had been a fierce defender of my actions when I had gone to court to separate from Casimir.

There was a flame in my heart for my mother that burned steadily all my life, regardless of the way she treated me. Overall, I believe that she tried her best. She was a deeply passionate woman, one who in another life would have had her many talents broadened and widely praised. She was broken irretrievably by the death of the truest love she had known, all but mortally wounded; yet she lived on as best she could.

And I was her daughter.

June 1838

PARIS

A
kind of turning point came between me and Chopin. Though months had gone by without any contact between us, we
had long had an interest in each other. But that spring I came to Paris often, and he and I saw each other then. He would play for me, and afterward we would talk long into the night.

It was on one of those evenings that I had come close to achieving the kind of intimacy I sought. We shared a kiss, and afterward I pressed against him, letting him know that I was eager for more. But the mood evaporated when Chopin stepped back from me, flustered, and said, “Certain deeds could spoil the remembrance.”

By then I knew the man as tidy, fastidious; he was exacting, with his insistence on lavender kid gloves, silk waistcoats, muted cravats, the finest leather boots, and hats made light so as not to bear down too heavily upon him. When he was out, his shirts were white batiste; when he taught, he wore white muslin blouses with mother-of pearl buttons. He would not be without his good soaps and his scented water. He was extraordinarily sensitive: a rose petal in a snowstorm. His manners were exquisite; he was a model of discretion and had a truly kind heart. But he was also full of contradictions: he would “fall in love” with three women in one evening and not go home with or even follow up with a single one. He loved his homeland, Poland, passionately; he had relished living in a household where intellectuals connected to the European Enlightenment gathered; but he made himself an exile rather than live under Russian rule. He knew himself to be possessed of frail health because of his numerous respiratory problems (some said he was consumptive), yet he refused to eat well or get enough rest.

Most bafflingly, he seemed to want out of a self-imposed prison regarding the display of his affection, yet he did nothing about it. Liszt said that Chopin gave everything but himself. I knew Chopin had been hurt in love by a young Polish girl whose parents had disallowed their marriage, but that had been long ago.

I wrote for help to Count Albert Grzymala, our mutual friend and Chopin's countryman, asking for guidance. If Chopin's affections were bound up with another, I said, I would desist in my attempts to forge an intimate relationship with him. But otherwise,
what would compel him to open himself to me? What lay behind his inability to indulge in the joys of an intimate and exclusive relationship? I wanted to care for him, who needed care; did Grzymala think he would let me?

It was a very long letter, and in it I did a great deal of soul-searching. I wanted to be fair, to be honorable, to be honest. I did not want to force myself upon someone who would rather I not do so. But Chopin's responses to me had varied so much I was lost in confusion.

The letter I got back from Grzymala was nothing less than an exhortation to accelerate my efforts. And so I did. One evening in the summer of 1838, alone with Frédéric in his apartment, I took him by the hand and led him to his bed. I laid him down gently, lay beside him, and kissed him. When I pulled away, I saw in his face a kind of sadness, but then he put his hand to the back of my neck and gently drew me down to him, and one thing—eventually, tenderly—led to the other. Afterward, when I lay beside him, our breathing a melody in counterpoint, he idly ran his fingers through my hair. There was in the gesture a kind of distractedness, and I could sense that there was something he felt unable to say.

I spoke softly: “I know that there is now and will always be something that keeps you from me completely. I will not ask you what it is, but I will tell you that I, too, have a certain inability to offer myself wholly. As I would never ask from you something I am incapable of giving, I suggest that we serve as comfort and shelter for each other, that this be our form of love.”

With that, there came from him a great sigh of relief. When I looked up at him, he nodded.

November 1838

MAJORCA, SPAIN

I
once wrote to a friend that my most beautiful, my sweetest journeys have been made “at my own fireside, my feet in the warm ashes and my elbows pressed on the worn arms of my grandmother's chair.” But with winter approaching and my concerns about Maurice developing rheumatism, I decided to take the children away for the season, to a warmer climate. When Chopin heard I was going, he argued jealously that he himself would benefit from such a trip, perhaps more than my son would.

“Come with us, then,” I said, pleasantly surprised, for Frédéric found disquieting any disruption of his routine. Still, after some wrist-rubbing thought, he agreed that he would. We considered Italy, but then some Spanish friends enthusiastically recommended Majorca, the largest island in the Mediterranean's Balearic archipelago.

We decided to travel separately to Perpignan. Though my separation from Casimir was legal, Frédéric still feared the gossip that swirled around us at any provocation. And he had not yet met my children. In Spain, he said, we would all be on equal footing, for none of us had been to Majorca before.

We arrived in Palma, the island's capital, in mid-November. It was nearly comical to see aloes and lemon trees when we knew how the wind was whistling through the bare branches lining the boulevards in Paris. The warm air against our exposed skin had us closing our eyes in hedonistic pleasure. The colors were so saturated, so primary, they reminded one of a child's drawing: blue seas, red pomegranates, yellow lemons, green mountains. During the day, one heard the beguiling tinkle of the bells on the donkeys, and at night came the romantic and far-reaching sound of guitars.

My children were immediately charmed by Chopin. He was
kind and gentle and sensitive to the fluctuations in their moods, perhaps because he, too, was victim of such fluctuations. They also very much appreciated his music—Solange, especially; and he promised that once we were settled, he would give her piano lessons. “When I get back to Paris, I shall play just like him,” she told me, and I thought she actually believed it. I said nothing to dissuade her from that belief: her behavior had been very agreeable from the outset of this trip, and I did not want to disturb the equilibrium.