Clara Mondschein's Melancholia

by Anne Raeff

  “Well, I suppose you’re right. So now what are we going to do—two strangers in Ávila in the middle of the hot afternoon? Perhaps we should have some lunch,” he said, his face lighting up.

  So we had some lunch—a huge plate of cocido, a stew made with cabbage and something like thirteen types of meat including pork and veal and veal trotters and bacon and blood sausage and big hunks of fat. We were the only customers in the place, so the waiter kept coming up to us every few minutes to ask if everything was okay, bringing more bread and wine.

  When we finally finished, I felt like all I wanted to do was sleep. I hate eating a big meal in the middle of the day because it makes me so tired and lethargic and I invariably end up dozing off, and then it’s dark by the time I get up, and I feel like I’ve wasted a whole day like when you come out of an afternoon show at the movies, and you feel lazy and disoriented from the sudden darkness. Also, even though I’m a more practiced drinker than most teenagers, I was not used to keeping up with someone like George Liddy, so the beer and wine really had gone to my head. I’m sure we were quite a sight, George Liddy and I, walking arm in arm down the sun-baked streets of Ávila. We walked and walked with George Liddy leaning on me. My arm grew sore from trying to hold him up, and, once, he tripped over a protruding cobblestone, toppling us both to the ground.

  “I must keep my eyes on my feet,” he laughed, “but my mother always used to scold me about looking at the ground as I walked. She said people would think I was looking for money. My mother’s main purpose in life was to make other people believe we were not poor. I gave her a grand funeral when she died. I hope she appreciated it, but somehow I doubt it. What do you think?”

  “I think you should have cremated her.”

  “Well, I suppose I could have the body exhumed. Perhaps when I return to Ireland I shall do that. But we can’t sit here in the middle of the street talking about cremation, now can we?” And up he stood, pulling me with him.

  “Don’t you think it’s time to look for your friend?” I asked. I was sure I was getting heatstroke and figured that if there were no purpose to our wandering, we would wander forever because George Liddy seemed to have an inexhaustible supply of energy.

  “Ah yes, my friend, the one who lives in Ávila. What does one call a person from Ávila, an aviliano? Perhaps we should stop in here for a moment and ask one of Ávila’s own townspeople.” And so we found ourselves in the courtyard of a very old apartment building. It was shady and cool and we could hear the noise of televisions coming from the apartments that overlooked the courtyard. I would have been happy to lie down right there and take a nap, but George Liddy had other plans. “Yoo-hoo,” he called, cupping his hands around his mouth. “Yoo-hooooooooooo.”

  No one answered.

  “I don’t think they can hear over their televisions,” I said, hoping he would give up on his plan, but he just yoo-hooed even louder and longer until, finally, a woman leaned out of her window and asked us what we wanted. George Liddy proceeded to very gallantly remove his beret and then asked in his horrible Spanish if she would be so kind as to tell us what a person from Ávila was called.

  “What?” the woman screamed.

  He repeated his question in a slightly abbreviated form.

  She still didn’t understand what he was trying to say, so she told us to come up.

  We ended up having to eat yemas and drink overly sugary coffee with the old lady, but I guess we couldn’t just go all the way up to her apartment to ask her what people from Ávila were called and then simply say we had to run. We sat in the woman’s apartment on a very hot brown velvet sofa with little doilies all over the arms and back while she made the coffee and arranged the yemas on a porcelain dish. I looked around the room. There were portraits of St. Teresa all over the walls, crammed into every possible inch of space.

  “Are you a great admirer of St. Teresa?” George Liddy asked the woman when she had settled herself next to us on the sofa. I didn’t understand why she wanted to sit so close to us, especially given the heat and the fact that there were three matching brown velvet armchairs crammed into her little sitting room.

  “Please, take another yema,” she said to me, holding the plate under my nose. I took one and she shook the plate to indicate that I should take another, which I did. If you have never eaten a yema, it is very difficult to understand how I felt sitting there, drunk and stuffed with cocido, sun-stroked, squeezed between George Liddy and a rather plump, elderly avilana (which she later explained to us is the name for a person from Ávila) with a booming voice, forcing myself to eat the little, round, sugary sweets. I didn’t know what was going to happen first—whether I would vomit, scream, or pass out. As it turned out, I did none of those things and was forced to sit politely for over an hour while George Liddy and the avilana discussed the wonder that was St. Teresa.

  I didn’t really pay attention to the whole St. Teresa conversation because I don’t have much interest in saints. I know St. Teresa is admired by many women because she started a whole order on her own and ruled over it with an iron fist and wrote poetry and memoirs that scholars, to this day, can write volumes and volumes about, but for me she was still a saint, which means that she lived and died for religion. And that, frankly, is something I don’t find all that enthralling. Later when I told my father that I had been to Ávila, he went on and on about how St. Teresa was actually from a Jewish family, which I don’t think makes much of a difference if she wasn’t a practicing Jew. People place way too much emphasis on blood. As far as I’m concerned, St. Teresa was a Catholic and I’m sure she would have agreed with me about that.

  Finally, after what seemed like hours, George Liddy got up to leave. He kissed the woman’s hand graciously and we were on our way. “Come back soon,” she called after us as we descended the stairway. When we reached the bottom, George Liddy turned around and bowed.

  “What a tedious woman. I absolutely despise St. Teresa and all the nuns of Christendom. They destroyed my childhood, but that’s another story,” he said when we were out in the street again.

  “So why did we stay so long?”

  “I just couldn’t bear the idea of going back out into this sun.”

  “Don’t you think we should ask around for your friend?”

  “My friend? Ah yes, my friend. Well, Deborah, I will have to confess now because I’m too tired to continue this charade. There is no friend. I never had a friend either in Toledo or in Ávila, although I wish I did. I honestly wish I did.”

  “I knew it all along,” I said and started walking more quickly.

  “Well, why didn’t you say something sooner? No one in his right mind visits Ávila in the summer.”

  “I was going to go to Toledo. You were the one who insisted on Ávila.”

  “So I did. Well, I must be a masochist.”

  And then we went back to Madrid after stopping for one last drink on the way to the train station. When we pulled into Atocha Station, it was past ten o’clock at night and my head ached from the sun and the alcohol and the cigarette smoke on the train, and all I wanted to do was go home to sleep. George Liddy and I parted on Atocha Street and he handed me a card—Pensión Lugo, Plaza Tirso de Molina 3. “You can always call for me there,” he said. “I plan to stay for a very long time.”

  “I will,” I said, but I wasn’t sure if I would. I felt as if we had run out of things to say, but it didn’t make me sad; on the contrary, I felt free and walked home almost happy despite the headache, looking forward to reading in my little room with the slanted ceiling.

  When I got home, my father was sitting in the living room reading and I didn’t ask where my mother was. I didn’t really think to ask whether she was even home. My father and I said good night, and I fell asleep immediately and didn’t wake up until the next morning. The apartment was empty. At that
point, I had no idea that my mother hadn’t come home the night before and that my father had gone out at about two looking for her. Still, I felt their absence because I wanted to talk to them, tell them about my adventure in Ávila—the meandering, the sickening yemas—because with experiences like that you can’t really know if they actually happened until you start telling someone about them.

  So I went out into the already hot day, hoping that I would find them in one of the bars on our street, drinking coffee, relaxing a little before my father went off to the library. I went to all the bars on our street. I asked the bartenders if they had seen them—two Americans, a man and a woman, husband and wife—but they hadn’t seen any foreigners that morning. I went back to the apartment and grabbed a book to read at the Barbieri. At some point, I figured, my mother would show up there. I imagined her walking nonchalantly to where I was waiting for her, saving her preferred table.

  “Where have you been?” she would ask and I would reply, “Where have you been?” And then we would laugh. That’s how I pictured it. It was all very clear in my mind.

  I wanted to tell Mercedes about my mother’s disappearance when we were driving to orchestra practice the other night. I wanted to tell her about how I sat like an idiot at the Barbieri from eleven in the morning until five in the afternoon, trying to read, looking up every time someone walked in the door. She was telling me about her father’s infidelities, about how her mother told her that it is a wife’s duty to support (that’s the word her mother used) her husband’s weaknesses. She said, “My mother’s a fucking idiot,” and I blurted out that she shouldn’t say things like that about her mother, and as soon as I said it, I knew it was a really stupid thing to say because why shouldn’t she say whatever she feels like saying about her mother, especially when her mother was, in fact, being so completely idiotic. And of course Mercedes laughed, so I changed the subject.

  “Did you know that when Hitler’s army was stuck in the Soviet Union in the dead of winter, the soldiers’ feet were so frozen solid that when they tried to run, their feet just broke off?” I asked.

  I had just read an article about this on the Internet. I was supposed to be getting information about white supremacists for a project I was working on in history class, but I got sidetracked. I was tired of reading the same old nonsense about the Jewish plot to take over the world with the help of the “mud people.” I don’t know why I chose such a dumb topic because there’s not much new to say about it, since what they believe is obviously so stupid and their ideas are obviously dangerous and sick, and how many times can you say that? I guess I could go on about how they have thousands of websites, but I don’t in any way want to imply that censorship is the answer. If I were a hacker, I would download that little piece of information about the German soldiers’ feet breaking off and put it on all of those websites, but they probably wouldn’t get the irony. They probably would set up some huge memorial to the broken feet of the martyred German soldiers, and then I could chuckle about how they got their inspiration from the daughter of a Holocaust survivor.

  I hadn’t expected her to be too interested in the broken-footed soldiers, but she went on and on about how horrible it must have been to find yourself lying in the snow with your feet lost somewhere along the way.

  “Do you think it hurt, or do you think they were beyond feeling at that point?” she asked seriously.

  “I guess they were beyond feeling.”

  “Maybe they didn’t even know that their feet had broken off. Maybe they kept trying to get up and walk and kept falling until they lost all their strength and died.”

  “Maybe.” Then we both sat there feeling sorry for the Nazi soldiers. I wonder what those soldiers would have thought if they knew when they were lying there in the snow dying that fifty years later we would be sitting in a car in New Jersey wondering how they felt. I wonder if knowing such a thing would have made it worthwhile to them, not because of the Nazi cause or the Fatherland, but because two complete strangers on the other side of the world thought about them, immortalized them. Maybe I’ll write a sonata for them, The Sonata of the Broken-footed Soldiers.

  The rest of the way to orchestra practice we were silent. I was half thinking about my sonata, trying to come up with a theme—something arrhythmic, the beat of someone walking on stumps—and half thinking about what Mercedes was thinking about. I guess I could have asked her, but I always hate it when people ask me what I’m thinking about or when they say, A penny for your thoughts. I hate that expression.

  The Wizard

  “Mrs. Mondschein, you’re looking very tired. Are you ill?” Tommy asked when I entered his room. Tommy’s health, however, had improved immensely in the few days since I’d seen him. The nurses assured me that, as far as the pneumonia was concerned, he was out of danger, which was a great relief.

  “No, I’m not sick,” I replied, “but I couldn’t sleep all night. My downstairs neighbors had a terrible dispute. Jimmy, who is such a nice young man even though there always seems to be a different woman living with him, stabbed his most-recent girlfriend in the liver. They don’t know if she’s going to live. I awoke to terrible, hysterical screaming and, without thinking, put my bathrobe on and ran down my dangerous stairs. I didn’t even think about the steps—can you imagine?”

  “You didn’t call the police first?”

  “Police? No, they don’t rush to get to our neighborhood. I should have awakened Mr. Claromundo, but honestly I didn’t even think of it. I got to their apartment just as Jimmy was fleeing. There was blood everywhere, and his poor girlfriend—she couldn’t be more than twenty-two—was lying on the floor, bleeding and screaming like a cat. I’ve never seen so much blood before. I’ve seen many things, but not so much blood. But I was very cool, very rational, called 911—it rang twenty-three times—and explained everything very carefully. You know what they told me on the phone? You wouldn’t believe it. They told me not to touch the blood, and I didn’t, although I felt rather foolish standing in the middle of the room trying to calm the poor girl down, talking to her so she wouldn’t go into shock, all without touching her. By that time, all the neighbors were crowded into the apartment, so I had to explain to everyone about not touching the blood. And I was actually afraid. Me, an old woman who spent almost every day of her life working around blood and sickness, afraid to touch the blood of a wounded woman.”

  “You did the right thing,” Tommy said. “Do you want to die like this?”

  “Death is never pretty.”

  “No, but you worry me. You could have been stabbed yourself. Whatever got into your head to handle such a scream on your own?”

  “I’m more afraid of those stairs than of a man with a knife. Men with knives and much worse are familiar to me, but the stairs are always a mystery.”

  “What if this Jimmy guy comes after you?”

  “I doubt I’ll ever see him again. I’m sure he’s far from New York by now. He was taking classes at City College. I wonder what happened.”

  “He sounds like a brute to me. A man with a weapon is always a brute; taking classes at City College has nothing to do with it. From your own experiences, you should know better than anyone. Weren’t there officers at concentration camps who reclined on divans, listening to Bach while the prisoners carted away the dead bodies?”

  “Yes, I have known a similar case, but it was more complicated than it seems. That, however, comes much later in my story.”

  “Should we listen to some Bach, Mrs. Mondschein?”

  And so we listened to the St. Matthew Passion huddled close together. I could feel Tommy’s frail, tubercular breath that smelled faintly of metal on my cheek, and the Bach was like a warm summer downpour on my brain.

  “I want to hear about Karl’s lovers.”

  “Why do you assume there were so many?”

 
“There weren’t?”

  “No.”

  “Did he always tell you everything?”

  “What do you mean by everything?”

  “Did he tell you about all his lovers?”

  “There was only one.”

  “In his whole life, only one?”

  “You are trying to get ahead of history again. His name was Bruno and he had lost an arm in World War I, but instead of making him look grotesque and already dead like most of the World War veterans whom you would see sitting forlornly on park benches in the Stadtpark, Bruno’s missing arm made him distinguished, elegant. He always wore beautiful suits and pinned the left sleeve at his shoulder with a diamond. He had been Karl’s teacher at the University of Vienna and was a specialist in skin grafting for burn victims. He performed operations with just one hand. They called him the Wizard.

  “I didn’t meet Bruno until two months after Karl and I were married because Bruno was on a lecture tour—Budapest, Berlin, Hamburg, Zagreb, Bucharest, Geneva, Paris. He brought Karl a leather-bound set of Proust. Karl told me all about Bruno and the nature of their relationship, showed me pictures, read me his letters.”

  “All of his letters?” Tommy asked.

  “As far as I know. They weren’t very romantic, just descriptions of museums and concerts, people and politics, and lists of his Jewish colleagues in Germany who had been asked to retire. They were very grim, his letters—fighting in the streets in Serbia, yellow stars in Berlin, tens of thousands of youths in uniforms singing patriotic songs at the tops of their lungs in Hamburg.”

  “He wasn’t Jewish?”

  “No.”

  “And you weren’t jealous?”

  “No, but I was worried about his return, worried that I would be in the way, that Bruno would hate me. The night before I was to meet him, I couldn’t sleep because every time I closed my eyes, I saw the laughing face of my first husband. I almost ran back to my father’s house for good, almost packed up my few things. But I remembered that I would not fit in there either and decided it was preferable to be in the way in my new life than to be in the old one.”