Pulse

by Julian Barnes

  My senses were more alert than usual that evening. As I’d followed her from the car, I noticed her lightly floral scent; but this was soon blotted out by restaurant smells, as a mound of glistening spare ribs passed our table. And when the food came, it was the familiar amicable contest of taste and texture. The paperiness of the chopped leaf they call seaweed; the crunch of the beans in the heat of their sauce; the slick of plum sauce with the bite of spring onion and the firm shred of duck, all wrapped in the parchment pancake.

  The background music offered a milder contrast of textures: from easy-listening Chinese to unobtrusive Western. Mostly ignorable, except when some overfamiliar film number nagged away. I suggested that if ‘Lara’s Theme’ from Doctor Zhivago came up, we should both make a run for it and plead duress in court. She asked if duress was really a defence in law. I went on at what might have been too great a length about this, then we talked about where our professional areas overlapped: where law came into medicine, and medicine into law. This led us on to smoking, and at which precise point we’d like to light up if it wasn’t now banned. After the main course and before the pudding, we agreed. We each declared ourselves light smokers, and each half-believed the other. Then we talked a little, but warily, about our childhoods. I asked how old she had been when she first noticed the ends of her fingers turning yellow in the cold, and whether she had many pairs of gloves, which made her laugh for some reason. Perhaps I’d hit upon one of the truths of her wardrobe. I almost asked her to describe her favourite gloves, but thought she might get the wrong idea.

  And as the meal went on, I decided that it was going to be all right – though by ‘it’ I meant only the evening; I could see no further. And she must have felt the same, because when the waiter asked about pudding she didn’t look at her watch apologetically, but said she could just find room for something as long as it wasn’t sticky and filling, so chose the lychees. And I decided not to tell her about that game from long ago, nor about that production of King Lear. And then I did momentarily dare a future, and thought that if we came back again sometime, maybe I’d tell her. I also hoped that she’d never played the game with Ben, and been handed a mozzarella.

  Just as I was thinking this, ‘Lara’s Theme’ oozed out of the speakers. We looked at one another and laughed, and she made a gesture as if to push back her chair and rise. Maybe she saw alarm in my eyes because she laughed again and then, playing along, threw her napkin down on the table. The gesture took her hand more than halfway across the cloth. But she didn’t get up, or push her chair back, just went on smiling, and left her hand on top of her napkin, knuckles raised.

  And then I touched her.

  Harmony

  THEY HAD DINED well at 261 Landstrasse, and now passed eagerly into the music room. M—’s intimates had sometimes been fortunate enough to have Gluck, Haydn or the young prodigy Mozart perform for them; but they could be equally content when their host seated himself behind his violoncello and beckoned at one of them to accompany him. This time, however, the lid of the klavier was down, and the violoncello nowhere visible. Instead, they were confronted by an oblong rosewood box standing on legs which made the shape of matching lyres; there was a wheel at one end and a treadle beneath. M— folded back the curved roof of the contraption, disclosing three dozen glass hemispheres linked by a central spindle and half-submerged in a trough of water. He seated himself at the centre and pulled out a narrow drawer on either side of him. One contained a shallow bowl of water, the other a plate bearing fine chalk.

  ‘If I might make a suggestion,’ said M—, looking round at his guests. ‘Those of you who have not yet heard Miss Davies’s instrument might try the experiment of closing your eyes.’ He was a tall, well-made man in a blue frock coat with flat brass buttons; his features, strong and jowly, were those of a stolid Swabian, and if his bearing and voice had not obviously denoted the gentry, he might have been taken for a prosperous farmer. But it was his manner, courteous yet persuasive, which impelled some who had already heard him play decide to close their eyes as well.

  M— soaked his fingertips in water, flicked them dry and dabbled them in the chalk. As he pumped at the treadle with his right foot, the spindle turned on its bright brass gudgeons. He touched his fingers to the revolving glasses, and a high, lilting sound began to emerge. It was known that the instrument had cost fifty gold ducats, and sceptics among the audience at first wondered why their host had paid so much to reproduce the keening of an amorous cat. But as they became accustomed to the sound, they started to change their minds. A clear melody was becoming detectable: perhaps something of M—’s own composition, perhaps a friendly tribute to, or even theft from, Gluck. They had never heard such music before, and the fact that they were blind to the method by which it came to them emphasised its strangeness. They had not been told what to expect and so, guided only by their reasoning and sentiment, wondered if such unearthly noises were not precisely that – unearthly.

  When M— paused for a few moments, busying himself on the hemispherical glasses with a small sponge, one of the guests, without opening his eyes, observed, ‘It is the music of the spheres.’

  M— smiled. ‘Music seeks harmony,’ he replied, ‘just as the human body seeks harmony.’ This was, and at the same time was not, an answer; rather than lead, he preferred to let others, in his presence, find their own way. The music of the spheres was heard when all the planets moved through the heavens in concert. The music of the earth was heard when all the instruments of an orchestra played together. The music of the human body was heard when it too was in a state of harmony, the organs at peace, the blood flowing freely and the nerves aligned along their true and intended paths.

  The encounter between M— and Maria Theresia von P— took place in the imperial city of V— between the winter of 177– and the summer of the following year. Such minor suppressions of detail would have been a routine literary mannerism at the time; but they also tactfully admit the partiality of our knowledge. Any philosopher claiming that his field of understanding was complete, and that a final, harmonious synthesis of truth was being offered to the reader, would have been denounced as a charlatan; and likewise those philosophers of the human heart who deal in storytelling, would have been – and would be – wise not to make any such claim either.

  We can know, for instance, that M— and Maria Theresia von P— had met before, a dozen years previously; but we cannot know whether or not she had any memory of the event. We can know that she was the daughter of Rosalia Maria von P—, herself the daughter of Thomas Cajetan Levassori della Motta, dance master at the imperial court; and that Rosalia Maria had married the imperial secretary and court counsellor Joseph Anton von P— at the Stefanskirche on 9th November 175–. But we cannot tell what the mixing of such different bloods entailed, and whether it was in some way the cause of the catastrophe that befell Maria Theresia.

  Again, we know that she was baptised on 15th May 175–, and that she learnt to place her fingers on a keyboard almost as soon as she learnt to place her feet on the floor. The child’s health was normal, according to her father’s account, until the morning of 9th December 176–, when she woke up blind; she was then three and a half years old. It was held to be a perfect case of amaurosis: that is to say, there was no fault detectable in the organ itself, but the loss of sight was total. Those summoned to examine her attributed the cause to a fluid with repercussions, or else to some fright the girl had received during the night. Neither parents nor servants, however, could attest to any such happening.

  Since the child was both cherished and well-born, she was not neglected. Her musical talent was encouraged, and she attracted both the attention and the patronage of the empress herself. A pension of two hundred gold ducats was granted to the parents of Maria Theresia von P—, with her education separately accounted for. She learnt the harpsichord and pianoforte with Kozeluch, and singing under Righini. At the age of fourteen she commissioned an organ concerto from Salieri; by six
teen she was an adornment of both salons and concert societies.

  To some who gawped at the imperial secretary’s daughter while she played, her blindness enhanced her appeal. But the girl’s parents did not want her treated as the society equivalent of a fairground novelty. From the start, they had continually sought her cure. Professor Stoerk, court physician and head of the Medical Faculty, was regularly in attendance, and Professor Barth, celebrated for his operations on cataract, was also consulted. A succession of cures was tried, but as each failed to alleviate the girl’s condition, she became prone to irritation and melancholia, and was assailed by fits which caused her eyeballs to bulge from their sockets. It might have been predictable that the confluence of music and medicine brought about the second encounter between M— and Maria Theresia.

  M— was born at Iznang on Lake Constance in 173–. The son of an episcopal gamekeeper, he studied divinity at Dillingen and Ingolstadt, then took a doctorate in philosophy. He arrived in V— and became a doctor of law before turning his attention to medicine. Such an intellectual peripeteia did not, however, indicate inconstancy, still less the soul of a dilettante. Rather M— sought, like Doctor Faustus, to master all forms of human knowledge; and like many before him his eventual purpose – or dream – was to find a universal key, one that would permit the final understanding of what linked the heavens to the earth, the spirit to the body, all things to one another.

  In the summer of 177–, a distinguished foreigner and his wife were visiting the imperial city. The lady was taken ill, and her husband – as if such were a normal medical procedure – instructed Maximilian Hell, astronomer (and member of the Society of Jesus), to prepare a magnet which might be applied to the afflicted part. Hell, a friend of M—’s, kept him informed of the commission; and when the lady’s ailment was said to be cured, M— hastened to her bedside to inform himself about the procedure. Shortly thereafter, he began his own experiments. He ordered the construction of numerous magnets of different sizes: some to be applied to the stomach, others to the heart, still others to the throat. To his own astonishment, and the gratitude of his patients, M— discovered that cures beyond the prowess of a physician could sometimes be effected; the cases of Fräulein Oesterlin and the mathematician Professor Bauer were especially noted.

  Had M— been a fairground quack, and his patients credulous peasants crowded into some rank booth, as eager to be relieved of their savings as of their pain, society would have paid no attention. But M— was a man of science, of wide curiosity, and not obvious immodesty, who made no claims beyond what he could account for.

  ‘It works,’ Professor Bauer had commented, as his breath came more easily and he was able to raise his arms beyond the horizontal. ‘But how does it work?’

  ‘I do not yet understand it,’ M— had replied. ‘When magnets were employed in past ages, it was explained that they drew illness to them just as they attracted iron filings. But we cannot sustain such an argument nowadays. We are not living in the age of Paracelsus. Reason guides our thinking, and reason must be applied, the more so when we are dealing with phenomena which lurk beneath the skin of things.’

  ‘As long as you do not propose to dissect me in order to find out,’ replied Professor Bauer.

  In those early months, the magnetic cure was as much a matter of scientific enquiry as of medical practice. M— experimented with the positioning of the magnets and the number applied to the patient. He himself often wore a magnet in a leather bag around his neck to increase his influence, and used a stick, or wand, to indicate the course of realignment he was seeking in the nerves, the blood, the organs. He magnetised pools of water and had patients place their hands, their feet, and sometimes their whole bodies in the liquid. He magnetised the cups and glasses they drank from. He magnetised their clothes, their bedsheets, their looking glasses. He magnetised musical instruments so that a double harmony might result from their playing. He magnetised cats, dogs and trees. He constructed a baquet, an oaken tub containing two rows of bottles filled with magnetised water. Steel rods emerging from holes in the lid were placed against afflicted parts of the body. Patients were sometimes encouraged to join hands and form a circle round the baquet, since M— surmised that the magnetic stream might augment in force as it passed through several bodies simultaneously.

  ‘Of course I remember the gnädige Fräulein from my days as a medical student, when I was sometimes permitted to accompany Professor Stoerk.’ Now M—was himself a member of the Faculty, and the girl was almost a woman: plump, with a mouth that turned down and a nose that turned up. ‘And though I can recall the description of her condition then, I would nonetheless like to ask questions which I fear you have answered many times already.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘There is no possibility that the Fräulein was blind from birth?’

  M— noticed the mother impatient to reply, but restraining herself.

  ‘None,’ her husband said. ‘She saw as clearly as her brothers and sisters.’

  ‘And she was not ill before becoming blind?’

  ‘No, she was always healthy.’

  ‘And did she receive any kind of shock at the time of her misfortune, or shortly before?’

  ‘No. That is to say, none that we or anyone else observed.’

  ‘And afterwards?’

  This time the mother did answer. ‘Her life has always been as protected against shock as we are able to make it. I would tear out my own eyes if I thought it would give Maria Theresia back her sight.’

  M— was looking at the girl, who did not react. It was probable that she had heard this unlikely solution before.

  ‘So her condition has been constant?’

  ‘Her blindness has been constant’ – the father again – ‘but there are periods when her eyes twitch convulsively and without cease. And her eyeballs, as you may see, are extruded, as if trying to escape their sockets.’

  ‘You are aware of such periods, Fräulein?’

  ‘Of course. It feels as if water is slowly rushing in to fill my head, as if I shall faint.’

  ‘And she suffers in the liver and the spleen afterwards. They become disorderly.’

  M— nodded. He would need to be present at such an attack in order to guess its causes and observe its progress. He wondered how that might best be effected.

  ‘May I ask the doctor a question?’ Maria Theresia had lifted her head slightly towards her parents.

  ‘Of course, my child.’

  ‘Does your procedure cause pain?’

  ‘None that I inflict myself. Though it is often the case that patients need to be brought to a certain … pitch before harmony can be restored.’

  ‘I mean, do your magnets cause electric shocks?’

  ‘No, that I may promise you.’

  ‘But if you do not cause pain, then how can you cure? Everyone knows that you cannot remove a tooth without pain, you cannot set a limb without pain, you cannot cure insanity without pain. A doctor causes pain, that the world knows. And that I know too.’

  Since she had been a small child the finest doctors had employed the most respected methods. There had been blistering and cauterising and the application of leeches. For two months her head had been encased in a plaster designed to provoke suppuration and draw the poison from her eyes. She had been given countless purges and diuretics. Most recently, electricity had been resorted to, and over the twelvemonth some three thousand electric shocks had been administered to her eyes, sometimes as many as a hundred in a single treatment.

  ‘You are quite sure that magnetism will not cause me pain?’

  ‘Quite sure.’

  ‘Then how can it possibly cure me?’

  M— was pleased to glimpse the brain behind the unseeing eyes. A passive patient, merely waiting to be acted upon by an omnipotent physician, was a tedious thing; he preferred those like this young woman, who displayed forcefulness beneath her good manners.

  ‘Let me put it this way. Since you wen
t blind, you have endured much pain at the hands of the best doctors in the city?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And yet you are not cured?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then perhaps pain is not the only gateway to cure.’

  In the two years he had practised magnetic healing, M— had constantly pondered the question of how and why it might work. A decade previously, in his doctoral thesis De planetarum influxu, he had proposed that the planets influenced human actions and the human body through the medium of some invisible gas or liquid, in which all bodies were immersed, and which for want of a better term he called ‘gravitas universalis’. Occasionally, man might glimpse the overarching connection, and feel able to grasp the universal harmony that lay beyond all local discordance. In the present instance, magnetic iron arrived on earth in the form and body of a meteor fallen from the heavens. Once here, it displayed its singular property, the power to realign. Might one not surmise, therefore, that magnetism was the great universal force which bound together stellar harmony? And if so, was it not reasonable to expect that in the sublunary world it had the power to placate certain corporeal disharmonies?

  It was evident, of course, that magnetism could not cure every bodily failing. It had proved most successful in cases of stomach ache, gout, insomnia, ear trouble, liver and menstrual disorder, spasm, and even paralysis. It could not heal a broken bone, cure imbecility or syphilis. But in matters of nervous complaint, it might often effect startling improvement. Again, it could not overcome a patient mired in scepticism and disbelief, or one whose pessimism or melancholy undermined the possibility of a return to health. There must be a willingness to admit and welcome the effects of the procedure.

  To this end, M— sought to create, in his consulting room at 261 Landstrasse, an atmosphere sympathetic to such acceptance. Heavy curtains were drawn against the sun and external noise; his staff were forbidden from making sudden movements; there was calm and candlelight. Gentle music might be heard from another room; sometimes M— would himself play upon Miss Davies’s glass armonica, reminding both bodies and minds of the universal harmony that he was, in this small part of the world, seeking to restore.