The Spinoza Problem (31 page)

“You’re married! Yes, I had almost forgotten. You rarely mention your wife.”

“I should say I
was
married. Guess I still am officially. Very short marriage in 1915. Hilda Leesmann. We were together a couple of weeks in Paris, where
she was studying to be a ballerina, and at the most three to four months in Russia. Then she developed severe consumption.”

“How awful. Like your brother and mother and father. What happened then?”

“We’ve been out of touch for a long time. The last I heard, her family put her in a sanatorium in the Black Forest. I’m not sure if she’s still alive. When you said, ‘how awful,’ I winced inside because I
don’t
feel much about this. I never think of her. And I doubt she thinks of me. We became strangers. I remember that one of the last things she said to me was that I had never inquired about her life, never asked her how she spent her day.”

“So,” Friedrich said, looking at his watch, “we return full circle to the reason you contacted me. We began with no schmoozing, no interest in others. Next we looked at the part of you that desires to be sphinx-like. Then we returned to your yearning for love and attention from Hitler and how painful it is to watch him favor others while you’re left on the outside watching. And then we spoke of your distance from your wife. Let’s take a moment to look at closeness and distance right here with me. You said you feel safe here?”

Alfred nodded.

“And what about your feelings toward me?

“Very safe. And very understood.”

“And you find yourself feeling close? Liking me?”

“Yes, both.”

“Therein lies our great discovery today. I think you
do
like me, and a major reason for that is that I’m interested in you. I’m recalling your earlier comment that you don’t think you’re interested in others. And yet people like people who are interested in them. That is the most important message I have for you today. I’ll say it again:
People like people who are interested in them.

“We did good, hard work today. It’s our first session, and you’re plunging right in. I’m sorry it has to end, but it
has
been a long day, and my energy ebbs. I do hope you’ll come to see me again often. I feel can help you.”

O
ver the next year Spinoza—no longer Baruch but now and forever after known as Bento (or in his written work, Benedictus)—maintained an odd nocturnal relationship with Franco. Almost every night, as Bento lay in his four-poster bed in a small garret in van den Enden’s house, anxiously awaiting sleep, Franco’s image entered his thoughts. So seamless and stealthy was his entrance that, uncharacteristically, Bento never tried to understand why he so often brought Franco to mind.

But at no other time did Bento think of Franco. His waking hours were crammed with intellectual endeavors that offered more joy than anything he had ever before experienced. Whenever he imagined himself as a wizened old man reflecting upon his life, he knew that he would select these very days as the best of days, these days of fellowship with van den Enden and the other students, mastering Latin and Greek and savoring the great themes of the classical world—Democritus’s atomistic universe, Plato’s Form of the Good, Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover, and the Stoic’s freedom from the passions.

His life was beautiful in its simplicity. Bento entirely agreed with Epicurus’s insistence that man’s needs were few and easily satisfied. Needing only room and board, a few books, paper, and ink, he could earn the necessary guilders by grinding lenses for spectacles only two days a week and by teaching Hebrew to Collegiants who desired to read the scriptures in their original tongue.

The academy offered not only a vocation and a home but a social life—more, at times, than Bento wished. He was meant to take dinner with the van den Enden family and the students boarding at the academy but instead
often chose to take a plate of bread and hard Dutch cheese and a candle to his room to read. His absences at dinner disappointed Madame van den Enden, who found him an enlivening conversationalist and tried, without success, to increase his sociability, even offering to cook his favorite dishes and to avoid nonkosher foods. Bento assured her he was in no way observant but was simply indifferent to food and quite content with the simplest fare—his bread, cheese, and daily glass of ale followed by a smoke on his long-stemmed clay pipe.

Outside his classes he avoided socializing with fellow students aside from Dirk, soon to be off to medical school and, of course, the precocious and adorable Clara Maria. Yet generally, after a short period, he slipped away even from them, preferring the company of the two hundred weighty, musty volumes in van den Enden’s library.

Aside from his interest in the fine paintings displayed in the shops of art dealers in the small streets branching off of the town hall, Bento had little affinity for the arts and resisted van den Enden’s attempts to increase his aesthetic sensibility in music, poetry, and narrative. But there was no resisting the schoolmaster’s passionate devotion to the theater. Classical drama can be appreciated, van den Enden insisted, only if read aloud, and Bento dutifully participated with the other students in dramatized class readings, even though he was too self-conscious to speak his lines with sufficient emotion. Generally twice a year van den Enden’s close friend, the director of the Amsterdam Municipal Theater, permitted the academy to use its stage for major productions before a small audience of parents and friends.

The production in the winter of 1658, over two years after the excommunication, was
Eunuchus
, by Terence, with Bento assigned the role of Par-menu, a precocious slave. When he first looked over his lines, he grinned as he came to this passage:

Bento knew that van den Enden’s wry sense of humor was undoubtedly at play when he assigned him this role. He had been persistently chiding Bento for his hypertrophied rationalism that left no space for aesthetic sensibility.

The public performance was splendid, the students played their roles with zest, the audience laughed often and applauded long (though they understood little of the Latin dialogue), and in high spirits Bento left the theater walking arm in arm with his two friends, Clara Maria (who had played Thais, the courtesan) and Dirk (who had played Phaedria). Suddenly out of the shadows stepped a frenzied, wild-eyed man brandishing a long butcher knife. Screaming in Portuguese, “
Herege, herege!
” (“Heretic, heretic!”), he lunged at Bento and slashed him twice in the abdomen. Dirk grappled with the attacker, knocking him to the ground, while Clara Maria rushed to Bento’s aid, cradling his head in her arms. Of slight build, Dirk was no match for the attacker, who flung him off and quickly fled into the darkness, knife in hand. Van den Enden, a former physician, rushed to examine Bento. Noting the two gashes in the heavy black coat, he quickly unbuttoned it and saw that his shirt, also slashed, was splotched with blood, but the wounds themselves were only skin deep.

In a state of shock, Bento, with the support of van den Enden and Dirk, was able to walk the three blocks home and slowly make his way up the stairs to his room. With much gagging he swallowed a valerian draught prepared by the schoolmaster physician. He stretched out and, with Clara Maria sitting by his bed and holding his hand, soon lapsed into a deep twelve-hour sleep.

The following day disorder reigned in the household. Early in the morning municipal authorities appeared at the door seeking information about the attacker, and later two servants arrived bearing notes from outraged parents criticizing van den Enden not only for staging a scandalous play about sexuality and transvestism but also for permitting a young woman (his daughter) to play a role—and of a courtesan at that. The schoolmaster, however, remained remarkably placid—no, more than placid—he was amused by the letters and chuckled at how tickled Terence would have been by these outraged Calvinist parents. Soon his jocularity calmed the family, and the schoolmaster returned to teaching his Greek and classics courses.

Upstairs in the garret, Bento remained racked with anxiety and could barely tolerate the gripping pressure in his chest. Again and again he was assaulted by visions of the assault, the cries of “Heretic!,” the gleaming knife, the pressure of the knife cutting through his coat, his fall to the ground under the weight of the assailant. To calm himself, he called upon
his customary weapon, the sword of reason, but on this day it was no match for his terror.

Bento persisted. He tried to slow his breathing with long deliberate breaths and deliberately conjured up the fearful image of his attacker’s face—heavily bearded, wide-eyed, and frothing like a mad dog—and stared directly at him until the image dissolved. “Calm yourself,” he murmured. “Think only of this moment. Waste no energy on what you cannot control. You cannot control the past. You are frightened because you imagine this past event occurring now in the present. Your mind creates the image. Your mind creates your feelings about the image. Focus only on controlling your mind.”

But all these well-honed formulae that he had been compiling in his notebook did nothing to slow his pounding heart. He continued attempting to soothe himself with reason: “Remember that everything in Nature has a cause. You, Bento Spinoza, are an insignificant part of this vast causal nexus. Think of the assassin’s long trajectory, the long chain of events that led inevitably to his attack.” What events? Bento asked himself. Perhaps inflammatory speeches by the rabbi? Perhaps some misery in the assailant’s past or present personal life? Upon all these thoughts Bento mused as he paced back and forth in his room.

Then a soft knock sounded. Within a step of the door, he reached and opened it instantly, to find Clara Maria and Dirk standing in the doorway, their hands touching, their fingers intertwined. They instantly drew their hands apart and entered his room.

“Bento,” said a flustered Clara Maria. “Oh, you’re up and walking? Only an hour ago we knocked, and when you didn’t open, we looked in, and you were so deep asleep.”

“Uh, yes, it’s good to see you up,” said Dirk. “They haven’t caught the maniac yet, but I had a good look at him, and I’ll recognize him when they catch him. I hope they put him away for a long time.”

Bento said nothing.

Dirk pointed at Bento’s abdomen, “Let’s take a look at the wound. Van den Enden asked me to check on it.” Dirk approached closer and signaled to Clara Maria to leave them.

But Bento instantly stepped back and shook his head. “No, no. I’m all right. Not just now. I’d rather be alone for a while longer.”

“All right, we’ll be back in an hour.” Dirk and Clara Maria glanced quizzically at one another as they left the room.

Now Bento felt even worse: those hands touching and pulling apart lest he see them—that intimate glance between them. Only a few minutes ago these were his two closest friends. Only last night Dirk had saved his life; only last night he had adored Clara Maria’s performance, enchanted by her every movement, every flirtatious gesture of her lips and flutter of her eyelids. And suddenly now he felt hatred toward both of them. He had been unable to thank Dirk or even utter his name or thank Clara Maria for sitting with him last night.

“Slow down,” Bento murmured to himself. “Back away and look at yourself from a great distance. Look at how your feelings whirl about in a frenzy—first love, now hate, now anger. How fickle, how capricious are passions. Look at how you are tossed, first here, then there by the actions of others. If you want to flourish, you must overcome your passions by anchoring your feelings to something unchangeable, something eternally enduring.”

Another knock on the door. The same soft knock. Could it be her? Then her melodious voice, “Bento, Bento, can I come in?”

Hope and passion stirred. Bento felt instantly buoyant and forgot all about the eternal and the unchanging. Perhaps Clara Maria would be alone, changed, remorseful. Perhaps she would take his hand again.

“Come in.”

Clara Maria entered alone holding a note in her hand. “Bento, a man gave me this for you. A strange, agitated, rather short man with a heavy Portuguese accent who kept looking up and down the street. I think he’s a Jew, and he’s waiting for an answer in front by the canal.”

Bento snatched the note from her extended hand, opened it, and read it quickly. Clara Maria watched with much curiosity: never before had she seen Bento devour anything so ravenously. He read it aloud to her, translating the Portuguese words into Dutch.

“Clara Maria,” Bento said, “he is a friend. My one remaining friend from my old life. I must go to see him. I can make it down the stairs.”

“No, Papa said you must not climb stairs today. I’ll tell your friend to return in a day or two.”

“But he stresses ‘today.’ It must be related to last night. My wounds are merely scratches. I can do it.”

“No, Papa placed you in my care. I forbid it. I’ll bring him up here. I’m sure Papa would approve.”

Bento nodded. “Thank you, but take care that the streets are clear—no must one see him enter. My excommunication forbade any Jew to speak to me. He must not be seen visiting.”

Ten minutes later Clara Maria returned with Franco. “Bento, when shall I return to escort him out?” Receiving no answer from the two men entirely absorbed in staring into one another’s eyes, she discreetly departed. “I’ll be in the next room.”

At the sound of the door closing, Franco approached and clasped Bento firmly by the shoulders. “Are you all right, Bento? She tells me you’re not wounded badly.”