Clara Mondschein's Melancholia

by Anne Raeff

“We could go on a train ride, just go to Barcelona and come right back on the next train. You would hardly have to go out at all. Don’t you like trains?”

  “I do. They are my preferred means of transportation, but I prefer not to transport myself anywhere.”

  “But you wouldn’t be really. We’d just go and come back.”

  “Then why go in the first place? I’m no Huckleberry Finn, you know. You can’t get me to go on the train just for the fun of it because I wouldn’t find it fun at all.”

  “But you said you don’t feel comfortable here anymore.”

  “This is true. I need a larger room—Lebensraum.” He stood up and started stretching his arms, demonstrating how small our little corner was, and then he took three or four Lincolnesque steps and was out the door. I followed him because I had nothing else to do.

  We ended up at the Barbieri because George Liddy couldn’t walk any farther than that, and it certainly was more open, larger than any other place in the neighborhood that we could think of. George Liddy chose a table right in the middle of the café, stretched his arms out to see if he had enough room, and started moving them up and down like when you make angels in the snow. Luckily the Barbieri wasn’t crowded at all and most of the people there were alone, reading newspapers or books, and were seated along the edges of the room.

  “That’s better, don’t you think?” he said, finally sitting down.

  There was no point in arguing with him about it and even less reason to tell him I was worried that Marisol might turn up here, so I tried to convince myself that it was a good exercise for me, to sit there and make myself not nervous about seeing Marisol. The only thing was that I didn’t expect that I would be faced with Marisol and my mother together. We had only just ordered our drinks—I had decided to stick to soda water— when they walked in.

  I felt bad for my mother right away because she was the only one who wasn’t uncomfortable. She seemed pathetic to me, like a child happy to be on an outing with her parents, oblivious to the fact that her parents despise each other. She actually seemed glad to see George Liddy and me and sat down at our table without even doing the usual standing and talking that you do when you bump into someone but aren’t sure if you are interrupting. That’s the sort of thing that usually annoys me about my mother, that she can’t even imagine there might be people in the world who would not want her to sit down at their table, that maybe they had things to talk about that didn’t include her.

  Although the table was round, we ended up sitting in two distinct camps—George Liddy and I on one side and my mother and Marisol on the other. George Liddy graciously or not so graciously, I’m not sure, broke the ice by turning to my mother and saying, “Deborah tells me you’re a poet.”

  “She does?” was her only reply.

  “Yes, she mentioned you were working on something about Judith and Holofernes. Have you ever seen Goya’s Judith? She’s absolutely marvelous, lascivious, bosom exposed, red cheeks.”

  Marisol offered my mother a cigarette, which, to my surprise, she accepted and masterfully breathed in deeply as Marisol held a match to it. This was the first time I had seen my mother smoke and I tried my best to look nonchalant about it. My mother exhaled slowly and replied that she hadn’t seen Goya’s Judith, to which George Liddy said, “But you must. It is a tragedy to die without seeing all of his later paintings, don’t you think?” This time the question was directed at Marisol, who merely shrugged, to which George Liddy responded by very dramatically lighting up one of his Lucky Strikes.

  “Don’t you find the summers here unbearably hot?” my mother, very comfortably and charmingly, asked.

  “Actually, no. I thrive in this heat. It gives me an excuse to be languorous, which I much prefer to being industrious. Don’t you?”

  I wondered whether George Liddy would consider my mother’s depressions languor or whether he might think of them as the complete opposite of languor, as a great expenditure of effort. During this conversation, Marisol was smoking, looking around the Barbieri as if she were hoping to spot someone she knew to save her from our company. I concentrated on being really attentive to my mother and George Liddy’s conversation because I didn’t want to have to try to talk to Marisol.

  My mother went on to say something platitudinous about the necessity of balance.

  “Balance?” George Liddy laughed. “Balance, like happiness, is overrated.” George Liddy is really good at terminating stupid conversations, which I could tell this was going to be. What is balance, anyway?

  “Are you a Catholic, then?” my mother asked, turning to George Liddy as if she were asking him if he were an early or late riser. “I believe Catholics are not particularly concerned with happiness or balance.”

  “Now that would depend on your definition of Catholic and happiness and balance, I suppose, but as a rule I suppose you’re right. We certainly don’t thrive around too much happiness. Imagine what the Irish would do with peace. We certainly would kill ourselves with happiness, which brings me to the answer to your question. I am a Catholic in spirit although I have absolutely no patience for such things as the Resurrection and the Virgin Birth. And Salvation, what a preposterous notion!”

  “Then you’re not really a Catholic,” my mother said.

  “And you? Do you believe in God?”

  “Yes, I do,” my mother said very quietly, as if she really didn’t want anyone to know. And that’s how we reacted, as if she had told us something embarrassing. That was the first I heard about my mother’s belief in God, and I realized I didn’t even know if it was a new belief or one that she had always held because we never talked about God in our house. God was taboo. Like true Jews, my parents were afraid of the power of the word. If we had been alone, sitting at a corner table away from everyone, I might have asked her if she had had some kind of revelation or if this is what she had always believed and just never told us. But we weren’t alone. There was Marisol fidgeting with her earrings, watching the ceiling fan go round and round and round, and George Liddy sitting tall over us with the trace of a smile on his lips. I wanted to grab my mother and take her away from them. I would have given anything if, at that moment, the Barbieri were magically transformed into a concert hall and all the patrons reading political columns in the paper or talking and talking and talking and all the waiters in their smudged white jackets and ornery expressions disappeared, to be replaced by a full symphony—men in black tails and women in long black gowns, waiting attentively as the conductor raised his baton.

  But George Liddy rescued us all by saying he had always followed the flipside to Pascal’s principle: that if there were a God, one would have to ignore Him and live as if there weren’t.

  For some reason my mother found this funny, although her laughter sounded exaggerated, like she didn’t quite understand the joke. Marisol laughed too. I didn’t really understand what was so funny, anyway. I guess George Liddy just has a way of making serious things seem funny.

  After that, George Liddy got carried away and invited us all to come visit him in Ireland for Christmas. He described the Christmas dinner he would prepare for us in great detail—duck with red currants—and said he would have to consider suicide if we refused his invitation, so we all promised we would come even though we knew we wouldn’t.

  Finally, after what seemed like forever but was really only as long as it took George Liddy to drink one Cointreau and coffee, Marisol and my mother left. Apparently my mother had agreed to model for her after all. I wanted to ask them if she would be modeling clothed or nude, but I didn’t.

  Just as they were leaving, my mother suggested that it would be nice to have me play for them while Marisol painted and my mother sat or stood or whatever it was that Marisol would have her do—iron or peel onions. “It would be calming, don’t you think?” my mother said and Marisol said she
didn’t want her to be calm, that the whole point was to capture what she referred to as domestic anxiety. That’s when I realized that my mother knew even less about Marisol than I did, and I wanted to warn her but didn’t know how, short of telling her what had happened, blurting it all out right there with everyone listening.

  “Well, perhaps another time then,” my mother said. “The cello really is the king, or should I say queen, of instruments and Deborah is a master. You must play for Marisol, Deborah.” She turned to Marisol and added, “No one plays Vivaldi better than she does!”

  I hate it when my mother brags about me. She doesn’t do it often, largely because there really are very few people around to brag to. Still, my mother is not the bragging sort, so it always throws me off guard when she does.

  “Maybe some other time,” I said, knowing there would be no other time.

  “Yes,” Marisol said, looking at my mother, not at me. Then she turned and headed towards the exit with my mother following behind her.

  “You’ve never offered to play for me,” George Liddy said as soon as the door closed behind them.

  “You’ve never asked.”

  “I try not to ask for favors anymore. They always come with strings attached, no pun intended.”

  “I’d love to play for you, no strings attached. I promise.”

  “I hope my Gallegos don’t mind. I’m not supposed to entertain visitors, you know. We might have to invite them to listen too if they aren’t watching some terribly important television show. You wouldn’t mind playing for them too, would you?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Good. You still have my card, don’t you?” And so it was decided I would get my cello and meet him at the pensión.

  George Liddy’s place was tucked away on a small street behind Tirso de Molina. I rang the bell downstairs and someone buzzed me in without asking who I was. The pensión was on the fourth floor and, as I climbed the well-worn stairs with my cello, I thought of George Liddy ascending to his little room in the early hours of the morning. Does the timed light go out before he makes it to the top, or does he use his last burst of energy to dart up the stairs?

  Pilar, the sister, opened the door for me. Her harelip was worse than I had expected—the split went all the way up into her nose—and I couldn’t help staring at it. I tried to look into her eyes instead, but couldn’t. She didn’t seem to mind, though. I guess she was used to people staring at her that way. They had set up a little area in the living room—a chair for me to sit on and three other chairs in a neat row facing mine. Pilar introduced me to her brother Manolo, who was already sitting in the middle chair, waiting. He had a thick red mustache and beard and his forearms were covered with tattoos of the Virgin Mary and ships. I asked him if he sometimes got a hankering to go back to sea, but he said he didn’t at all. That was the end of our conversation. He was not a very talkative man. Manolo watched me unpack my cello, tune it, rosin the bow. When I was ready, we sat face to face staring at each other. After a while, I asked him if George Liddy and Pilar were getting ready and he called to Pilar, who came running into the room with her hands wet.

  “We’re ready,” he said. “Tell the Señor.”

  Pilar hurried off down a hallway and returned with George Liddy. He had changed into a linen summer suit—something very Italian-looking—and had showered for the occasion. Pilar took off her apron and sat down, too. She crossed her legs and stared straight ahead. They all stared right at me and sat stiffly in their chairs as if I were a teacher about to give them a very stern lecture. And that’s how they stayed the whole time—whether I played Dvorák or Schubert or Bach or Vivaldi, they maintained their postures. So I stared back at them and found myself playing incredibly well because I had stopped trying to please my strange trio of an audience and instead played for the sake of playing, as if I were alone in my room or alone on top of a mountain.

  When I stopped between pieces, they remained motionless, waiting patiently, and when I finally had had enough, I was drenched in sweat and my thighs hurt from pressing hard on my cello. Two hours had passed. I stood up to let them know I was finished, and they all applauded furiously; they clapped so hard their hands must have stung and Pilar yelled, “Bravo! Bravo! Bravo!” over and over and over again until her brother told her to be quiet.

  “I hope I didn’t bore you,” I said, not out of false modesty but because two hours of straight solo cello music is hard to take.

  “Not at all,” George Liddy said. “It was absolutely mesmerizing.”

  Then Pilar started crying, not just a few quiet tears because she was moved by the music, but giant sobs befitting a truly tragic occasion. Manolo completely ignored her as if he were used to this type of outburst, but George Liddy and I couldn’t just pretend that nothing was happening, so we each took one of her hands and tried to console her, which only made her cry harder. Since she was crying so hard and trying to speak at the same time, it seemed as if she were about to choke, so we stopped asking her what was wrong and just let her cry without letting go of her hands. I was standing on one side of her and George Liddy was on the other side. We must have looked odd—like an unlikely family posing for a portrait. After a while, Manolo got up and left the room without saying a word.

  We stood like that until Pilar calmed down. It happened quite suddenly. One minute she was still sobbing and the next minute she was offering us something to drink. While she was in the kitchen getting us some special homemade drink from her village, George Liddy explained that he had heard her crying several times before when she was watching something on television.

  “Isn’t it weird for the guests?” I asked.

  George Liddy agreed that it did make him uncomfortable but that the guests didn’t spend much time in their rooms. They were mainly young backpackers and newly arrived Moroccan workers.

  Pilar returned with the special drink called orujo, which turned out to be a very strong spirit made from grape resin. She did not drink with us, but made sure that we were drinking ours. Apparently it had medicinal qualities, although she didn’t name them specifically. I could tell that George Liddy was really upset about drinking it since he firmly believed that sticking to one drink was the only thing keeping him from total alcoholic collapse and because from experience he knew that once he got started on something as potent as orujo, he couldn’t stop until he passed out. Pilar and I carried him to his room ourselves. That’s how light he was.

  The Ukrainian

  The St. Matthew Passion came to an end and Tommy fell asleep again. I thought he had fallen into a coma, but the nurses assured me it was nothing more than sleep. I tried to rest too, but I was sure he would slip away from me during the night. “When will he wake up?” I kept asking the nurses, who patted me on the shoulder and said pneumonia is very, very tiring, so I should let him sleep. “But he doesn’t want to sleep,” I said in his defense. “It is what he needs” was their reply, and I was afraid to disobey them, afraid to bring him back to consciousness, afraid he would awaken in the same state and that never again would he remember who I was. So I let him sleep, sleep way into the next day. I denied myself rest, though the nurses admonished me about how important it was for me to maintain my strength and my health for Tommy’s sake.

  At three in the afternoon he stirred, asked me for a glass of water, which I brought him, and then fell back asleep. At six he opened his eyes and spoke. “Ah, Mrs. Mondschein. I dreamt that you and my mother were having coffee and éclairs on the top of a mountain. You sat at a table set with a perfectly white tablecloth and silver cutlery. You were both wearing hats with feathers and white dresses, and the wind blew your hair and you said it was a little chilly despite the sun, and my mother lent you her shawl.”

  “And then?”

  “Nothing. You drank coffee and ate your éclairs. It took a very long time
and I thought you would never finish. The éclairs didn’t seem to be getting any smaller and no matter how many times you lifted the coffee cups to your mouths to sip, there was always something there.”

  “Did we talk?”

  “No, or maybe I just couldn’t hear because you were so far away on top of the mountain.”

  “And where were you?”

  “I’m not sure, too far away to hear you talking.”

  “Do you know that you were in a coma?” I asked.

  “A coma?”

  I explained to him that I had kept talking because I had promised to do so and because they say patients in comas can see and hear everything that goes on around them. “What is the last thing you remember from my story?” I asked. He remembered everything about the commandant’s proposition; he even remembered the Vivaldi and the cognac. I didn’t ask him whether he remembered laughing or that he had been awake and could not recognize me.

  “What a pleasure it would be to die in one of those Magic Mountain-type sanatoriums in Switzerland. Imagine spending the warm afternoon sitting in the mountain sun all wrapped up in a Scottish blanket, listening to the birds. Then we could drink coffee and eat éclairs, too.”

  “I would prefer something harsher,” I said, not because I had ever thought I would prefer to die a violent death but because the thought of coffee and éclairs in Switzerland reminded me too much of my first husband.

  “Well, it seems incredibly civilized to me, quiet and civilized and mundane. I think it must be nice to die doing something perfectly mundane, but not sleeping. That’s too neutral.”

  “I don’t see what’s so civilized about drinking coffee and eating pastry.”

  “It’s civilized because there’s nothing spiritual or hopeful or philosophical or meaningful about it.”

  “Then why does it have to be on top of a mountain?” I asked.

  “It doesn’t have to be on top of a mountain, but it should be someplace beautiful. I would prefer to die someplace beautiful, but, alas, that is not my fate.”