by J. D. Landis
“What shall I wear?” she asked Robert.
“You’re asking me!”
The shock and amusement on his face simply amused her. “My mother is too far away, and my stepmother is too vulgar.”
He considered for a moment. “A dress, I should think.”
Having no idea whether he was serious, which made his remark all the funnier, she laughed again. “Of course, a dress! But what color?”
“Black,” he said.
“You’re impossible.”
“I wear black. All the time. It’s the only serious color.”
“You’re a man. And a most serious man at that. I’m just a little girl. I can’t wear a black dress to my debut.”
“Of course you can,” he said.
She wore white. Until then, when she had played in public, her colors had indeed been those of a little girl, pastels in which she had always felt both shrunken and giddified, offered like a candy to a fat man. Lately, at home, she had been wearing darker clothes, almost, she realized, as dark as Robert’s, though usually set off at the throat and wrists and sometimes even at the hem with lashings of white lace. But for her debut, she would wear white, silk, with some of the jewelry people had been sending her so she might show her appreciation for their acknowledgment of her superiority.
She was not nervous over her debut. Most important, the piano was to be one of her father’s Grafs, familiar to her in its suppleness and vastly different from the tree trunk of an instrument whose unyieldingness had caused her the year before to interrupt the wild cheering of the audience at the end of her performance in Dresden with an apology for her tone and tears for their ignorance. She had by now played so often for an audience that she was more concerned with the grace of her movements onto the stage and the depth of her bows than with her musicianship. Perhaps this was because the major works she was to play—by Kalkbrenner and Herz and Czerny—were no longer difficult for her. They might be virtuoso pieces, meant precisely for the kind of show she was expected to provide, but, once mastered, they were reduced to a kind of animated simplicity. They were hell to practice, because without an audience to hear them, they had no meaning. But with the Gewandhaus filled—and her father had seen to it that there would be no empty seats—this music, and she, would be rapturously hosannaed.
She spent much of her performance trying to find Robert in the audience. It was not easy, and she never succeeded. Those seated down the long, narrow auditorium that extended from the stage to the back of the hall faced not the stage but the center corridor and thus one another across it, making it difficult for the soloist, whose back was to the audience when she was playing, to find anyone’s eyes. So she imagined his on her, wide and blue, not squinting, able to see her hands, impressed with their strength and ridiculous speed in the Kalkbrenner rondo, dazzled by her dress, pleased with her hair as it sat motionless and undisturbed atop her head, as fond as he could possibly be of his little friend, especially when she was up here all alone, the orchestra departed, her father and his physharmonica departed, she by herself at the end of her recital with nothing to occupy her hands but her own variations on her own theme, such a relief to be playing, and nothing to occupy her heart but him.
She saw him finally after the first of her final bows, so that it was the only successful bow, the rest being much too quick.
Leipzig
MAY 13, 1831
Charitas came completely and was bleeding.
Robert Schumann
Christian Glock was looking at Robert’s penis through a magnifying glass.
“Oh, my,” said Glock. “Oh, my my my.”
“I trust you’re exclaiming over its magnitude,” joked Robert, who wouldn’t have minded a look at it himself in its enhancement but had been ordered to remain supine upon Glock’s examination table.
Robert had turned to Glock, his medical muse and fellow Hoffmann worshipper, because he couldn’t bear the thought of displaying to Dr. Ernst Carus the very organ he still dreamed of burying deep within the doctor’s very own wife.
“What’s her name?” asked Glock as he raised and lowered his face as if to bring the suffering beast into proper focus.
“I’d hardly call it a ‘she,’” Robert answered.
“Then what is his name?” asked Glock.
“My penis doesn’t have a name!”
Glock laughed. “I should hope not. It is my experience that men who name their penises are otherwise without friends. And I would have thought that you came to me with your problem precisely because we are friends.”
“Precisely.”
“Then as your friend, and also as, for the moment, your physician, I would like to know the name of your lover.”
“Christel,” Robert pronounced her name.
Glock looked disappointed. “Who?”
“Christel. Otherwise known as Charitas.”
“Known to whom?”
“To me, of course.”
“Well, I don’t know her by either name. Who is she?”
“She studies with Wieck. I don’t know her surname.”
“From the condition of your prick, I should think she studies even harder with you.”
“Thank you,” said Robert proudly.
“Don’t thank me. Thank her. Though I’m not sure it’s gratitude you ought to be feeling. You must be in considerable pain from this.”
“I am. But, oh, what pleasure has caused it!”
“I can imagine,” said Glock.
“‘Imagine’?” Robert teased him.
“Alas, yes. Imagine. I’ve not had a woman since I began my studies.”
“Medical school?”
“Before medical school.”
“Law school?”
“Before law school.”
“Theology school?”
“Yes, before theology school. In fact, it was a woman who caused me to enroll in theology school in the first place.”
“How so?”
“She left me. The pain was so great that I thought I would never understand it until I came to understand God.”
“And did you?”
Glock shook his head. “I came to understand that the two things that can never be understood—never understood!—are the workings of a woman’s heart and the pain that God allows us—causes us—to feel.”
Sad at his friend’s sadness, Robert whispered, “And so you…”
“And so I became both a lawyer and a doctor. This way I can at least understand the workings of man, if not of God. Man cheats. Man decays.”
Robert sat up, to engage Glock more closely in his cynicism. “And that is your total view of man?”
“Man also engages in sexual intercourse,” added Glock. “I may not, thank God, but Man does. Now this Christel, Robert, is she your first?”
“I don’t know,” he confessed.
“What do you mean, you don’t know?”
“I mean, I don’t know if she was my first. She may have been, she may not have been.”
“With all due respect, Robert, and speaking out of experience that may be years in the past but lives within my memory as if it had happened not five minutes ago, one’s first woman, whether she is merely one’s first or is also one’s only, is not someone to be forgotten, to say nothing of the first time she is gotten.”
“I’m sorry, Christian, but I just don’t know. She feels to me like my first, but there may have been a whore here and there. I simply can’t remember.”
“And why can’t you remember, Robert?”
“Drink.”
Robert confessed this somewhat shamefacedly, for while he had certainly drunk his share, and more, in the presence of Glock the friend and musician, who himself was known to take a glass of wine so long as it was not of German origin, he felt he was speaking now to Glock the physician, and all the physicians Robert had ever known found drink the easiest thing to tell a patient to forgo, as if they had no understanding of what an important function drink served
in painting over the grim features of life with its own limpid tinctures.
“Ah, yes,” said Glock, smiling leniently. “I recall one night this past winter when you came to the Hôtel de Pologne dressed as a woman, like some Berliner attending the Inverts Ball. We ended up carrying you home, and you woke up on the very threshold of the Wieck residence and said, ‘Don’t let Clara see me like this, she will think I am a ghost,’ as if such a child might be awake at such an hour. And were those clothes you wore that night perhaps borrowed from this Christel of yours?”
Robert buried his face in his hands, though whether out of embarrassment or a memory of another of his terrible hangovers he did not know. “Believe me, if I had had Christel at that time, I would not have needed to go about in her clothes.”
“So this relationship of yours is of more recent vintage,” said Glock.
“Much more recent.”
“Well, from the looks of your member there, I would say that the two of you must be going at it not only with ferocity but also with rather alarming frequency.”
“You would not be wrong,” said Robert with undisguised pride.
Glock’s face suddenly lost its look of commodious remembrance and hardened into the physician’s captious gaze.
“How can you be fucking someone in the home of your teacher? Right under his nose, as it were? And one of his own students? Does this not strike you as both indiscreet and degenerate?”
“But she doesn’t board there, as I do,” Robert excused himself lamely. “And I can’t very well do it in her house, with her parents protecting what she takes absolute delight in describing as their utter belief in her virtue, which I can assure you was lost both to her and thus to me a long time before I came along. Besides,” he confessed, “I can’t get enough of her.”
“Clearly,” said Glock with an agreeable sympathy so rare in a physician and even rarer in a man not so much visited as tenanted by chastity. “Which means that you have, indeed, had quite enough of her. And I must order you to resist, for now and, if you truly want my advice, forever, whatever her charms may be that have caused you thus to lay bare, if you will forgive so lame a play on words, your poor, capricious, unrepentant penis. For you are, quite literally, wearing it away. You have a wound here on the frenulum that has been caused by one thing and one thing alone, and that can be cured by one thing and one thing alone.”
“So it is not syphilis?” Robert asked warily.
“You may say as much to Christel.”
“And the one cure is abstinence?”
“Did I say that?” Now Glock was smiling again.
“You did imply as much.”
“Never trust a doctor who prescribes by implication. That’s the lawyer’s way.”
“Then how am I to be cured?”
“Narcissus water,” said Glock, who proceeded to dip his hands into his own bowl of soapy water, as if to signal that the examination was over and that he felt the need to cleanse himself of Robert’s luxuriant sin. “Bathe your organ three times a day in a distillate of daffodil bulbs. And may I suggest you not have Christel do the honors.”
“And yet the cure is not abstinence?”
“Not for your body, my friend.”
Leipzig
MARCH 21, 1832
The whole house is like an apothecary’s.
Robert Schumann
They had left him, and now he sat here with the middle finger of his right hand dipped in oxshit.
Christel slept in his bed across the room. So she had been sleeping since he had risen from her arms and gone out to the butcher to fetch this rather farfetched cure, which had been prescribed not only by the medical student Robert Herzfeld but also by numerous of his more established if also more expensive physicians, among them Raimund Brachman, the estimable Moritz Reuter, and even the always skeptical Christian Glock, though Glock had not even deigned to mention an animal dip until both the herb poultices and the brandy rinse, not to mention abstinence (from the piano, in this case), had failed.
It amused him to think, as he sat here with his nose closed against the smell and his eyes cloudy from the fecal steam joining his cigar smoke to veil his head in this room still chilly on the first day of spring, how Christel would react when she awakened and, if she followed her usual practice, called him back to bed in her sleep-soaked, sex-singed voice.
He had moved out of the Wieck house just days after Clara and her father had departed for her first extended European tour, which had long since landed her in their ultimate destination, Paris. There, according to her charming letters, she was frustrated in her art—despite the fact that Kalkbrenner himself, as prelude to his self-serving condemnation of German pianists in general, had kissed her and in the act whispered, “C’est le plus grand talent”—and miserable in her missing her home, her room, her brothers, him.
He missed her too, of course, that spirit in her being that brought him out of himself. He had thought he would stay on in the Wieck household during her absence but had soon fled for the anonymity of the suburbs and this little room, preferring to be alone for the first time in his life to the way he felt on Grimmaischestrasse, abandoned to the silence, bereft of her music. That Christel might seek him out for periodic visits he had not expected, and he found himself as flattered by her lust for him as he was disturbed by his lust for her. He did not love her. She did not fill him with the kind of desire for perfection in his life that little Clara did; Christel merely fulfilled his desire for her, as she was, not for himself as she might render him.
Clara and her father had been planning to leave in the very midst of the previous summer. But before their scheduled departure, Clara came down with measles, which gave Robert the opportunity to sit beside her on her bed and help her with her French. He even found the word for measles, of the German variety—rubéole—and pretended to be her doctor and asked her what was the matter, “Qu’avez-vous?” so that she might respond, “J’ai rubéole,” unless it were the French variety, in which case she should say, “J’ai rougeole.” One day she surprised him by having learned, “J’ai des frissons,” and then throwing herself into his arms, pretending to shiver and then seeming to shiver for real, though he realized it was only her attempt to refrain from laughing that caused her to tremble. “J’ai soif,” she said, yet when he fetched her tea, she said, “J’ai faim,” and took his hand and dipped his fingers into the honey and then into the tea and only then satisfied her thirst or hunger or whatever it could possibly be by taking his fingers in her mouth, laughing almost too much to permit herself to swallow.
Once she was recovered, their trip had to be postponed once again because the Polish-Russian war of that year had augmented its spread of deliberate death with an unintended but even more efficient and democratic epidemic of cholera (unless it was true, as many said, that the disease had been caused by Jews poisoning the well water). It had wasted its way through Bavaria into Saxony and was well on its way to Leipzig, causing Robert to drink more beer than ever, as the only safe alternative to water, and to make out his will and to announce to Clara and her father as they ate lunch at the Wasserschenke that this might be the last time they would see one another because soon he was either going to be dead or on his way to live in Italy or Weimar. At this news, Clara grasped him by both arms and either pulled him to her or her to him and clung to him for the rest of the meal, while Wieck sat shaking his head after having pronounced, “Weimar is no safer than Leipzig, considering that both are on major roads. But Clara and I fear neither and in fact leave tomorrow ourselves for Weimar to seek the blessing of Goethe himself.” At this news, Robert found himself as much clinging to his friend as clung to by her.
The next time he heard from her, she wrote about how they had been refused entrance to the great Goethe’s preposterously yellow house on Weimar’s Jungfrauenplan, so her father had found other homes for her to perform in, homes of enough “aristocratic pretension” to allow reports of her playing to reach Goethe, who i
nsisted on being kept informed of all that was new and exciting though he himself had only just come around to appreciating Mozart, whom he had heard play when Mozart was only seven, and even now found Schubert’s music incomprehensible.
Goethe invited Clara to perform for him, and for his grandchildren, and, as Clara wrote to Robert:
He went out of his way to rise from his chair—he is over eighty and none too swift of foot nor straight of spine—to find a pillow for me. He delivered it to me at the piano and pushed it under my fanny in such a way that his hand, which I could feel and later see had a ring on nearly every finger, was between the pillow and my fanny itself. And wouldn’t you know that hand stayed right there, as if to arrange the pillow though it was my fanny he nearly rearranged and almost caused to close together upon his hand and trap it there. When indeed the piano bench was of sufficient height for me without either a pillow or his naughty hand. And yet once he withdrew his hand, I think his grandchildren heard me better than did he. I had wanted to play Chopin or Beethoven, as I had in other homes in Weimar, but Papa insisted I play Herz, because Herr Goethe made no secret of his distaste for Beethoven and his ignorance of Chopin. [Why is it, thought Robert upon reading this, that artists who were revolutionary in their youth become not merely indifferent but antithetical to artistic revolution in their age, as if to shut out the light in fear of the darkness soon to fall upon them?] So I played Herz, and the children bounced around in their seats appropriately—I could scarcely sit still on mine as I played the Bravura Variations—while Herr Goethe himself sat there staring off into space with one finger occasionally in his ear, which had a halo of little white hairs around its hole, and another finger even more occasionally in his nose, the hairiness of which I shall desist in describing to you in case you are eating while you are reading this letter. I can only imagine what was on his mind. (I shall put into these secret parentheses some gossip I heard: when Herr Goethe was in his seventies, he fell in love with a teenaged girl scarcely older than I, who in case you forgot turned twelve almost a month ago, and it was for her he wrote his Trilogy of Passion poems, which I’d never heard of but which of course I can’t wait to read if I can do so in secret without Papa knowing. Can you imagine! A man like that in love with a mere girl.* I’ll bet you can! This story at least went a long way toward explaining to me why he had put his hand upon my fanny, though of course I did not mention this to those who told it to me nor to Papa either but only to you, dear Herr Schumann. And lest you think you are so different from Goethe, though you are in terms of genius, yours being greater of course, you should realize that he too came to Leipzig to study, and he too left his friends behind in Leipzig to study law, though in Strasbourg, not Heidelberg, and he too traveled to Italy where he no doubt to judge from his hand on my fanny had acciacctura adventures to rival your own, mere grace notes before the true melody of love. And that’s the end of the secret part of this letter.) While he may not have listened to me, old Goethe did exactly what Papa had wanted him to do. He wrote a letter about me and put it in a little box and gave me the box. Papa took it away immediately. But I got to read the letter. In it, he said I was stronger than six boys put together—which made me picture whether he had perhaps wrestled with that girl he was in love with and seems in love with still. He told me if I would call him Herr Schönfuss,* he would give me candy; which I did, and he did. But the candy tasted quite old, more like his foot than a sweet, just the way a footnote is rarely as delectable as the text it hangs from.** And then he gave me a bronze medal with—what else?—his face carved upon it. With news of his approval, all of Weimar opened to us. It was as if its ancient walls had been breached, not by cannon but by rumors of beauty.
