Brief Encounters with Che Guevara

by Ben Fountain

  When one is sickened by ugliness, tedium, stupidity, false feeling—by daily life, in other words—one must construct rigorous barriers of tact and taste in order to survive.

  They walked in all weathers, at all times of day, sometimes covering the entire four kilometers of the Ringstrasse. After one such outing Hugo made this terse entry:

  Walking with A today on the Ring.

  Insolent thugs holding a meeting in the park opposite the Reichsrat, chanting, singing vile Reform Union songs.

  Cries of Ostjuden—they actually threatened us!

  I have never been so furious in my life. Still trembling six hours later, as I write this.

  A in a state of collapse.

  Witnesses gave a decidedly sharper account of the incident, which arose not in connection with a Reform Union “meeting,” but rather with a demonstration by some Christian Social toughs over the language rights bill currently paralyzing Parliament. These witnesses—including a Dienstmann on break and the note-bearer to the emperor’s First Lord Chamberlain—said that perhaps thirty demonstrators strutted out of the park and approached the young couple, chanting “Jew, where is your patch? Jew, where is your patch?”—an obvious reference to the triangular yellow patch that Jews were required to wear before emancipation. It was unknown whether the mob specifically recognized the Kuhls, or simply assumed they were Jewish on the basis of looks; in any event, they continued chanting as they surrounded the couple, crowding in so closely that there was, as a nearby coachman put it, “a good deal of mushing about, not blows exactly.” With one arm around Anna, the other fending off the mob, Hugo maintained a slow but determined progress past the park. Eventually the mob broke into laughter and fell away, manifesting a mood that was, on that day at least, more sportive than resolutely bloody.

  Months later Hugo was still brooding in his diary, his humiliation evident; as for the young virtuoso, if the incident put her in a state of collapse, she recovered quickly. Within the week she traveled to Budapest and performed a program of Beethoven’s C minor Concerto and Brahms’s Paganini Variations. Her novel handling of Brahms’s octave glissandos was especially stunning, the way she took them prestissimo, staccato, and pianissimo all in one, producing a feverish, nearly unbearable nervous effect which electrified the critics no less than the crowd.

  “The child,” Heuberger wrote in the Neue Freie Presse, “does not play like a child, but with the mastery of genius powered by long and serious study.” The pan-German press reviewed the performance in typically viperish tones. “Like glass shattering,” the Deutsche Zeitung said of the sounds she produced. “Her hair is almost as beautiful as Paderewski’s,” the Deutsches Volksblatt sarcastically remarked, adding, “the position of her fingers on the keys reminded one of spiders.” Her fingers: though Puchel’s technical exercises ensured that all fingers developed equally, the teacher had not, to this point, chosen to emphasize her sixth finger in performance, though it could be heard, or perhaps more accurately, felt, in the cascades of her arpeggios and brass-tinged double notes, the dizzying helium lift of her accelerando. But at some point during the spring or summer of 1899, Herr Puchel sat Anna before the Fantasy. Even from the beginning, practice sessions devoted to that work took place in the privacy of the Kuhls’ comfortable Salesianergasse apartment, rather than in Puchel’s more accessible Rathaus studio. In the interest of maximizing box-office receipts, Kornblau had decreed to Anna’s inner circle that the dormant and presumed-lost Fantasy would be presented to the public with all the drama and mystery of a Strauss debut.

  “Such an odd piece,” Hugo recorded after hearing it for the first time. “And needlessly difficult; Visser’s rolled chords seem impossible even for Anna’s hands.” Several days later he makes this entry:

  Lunch at Sacher Garden w/Anna, Hermine, Mother.

  When I brought up the Fantasy, the weirdness of it, A simply smiled. “Visser was enjoying himself when he wrote that,” she said. “He was being himself, perhaps for the first time in his life. I suppose it felt like taking a deep breath after holding it in for all those years.”

  “But do you like it?” I asked her. “The sound of the thing, I mean.”

  Answer: “I like him. I like him in that particular piece, though he scares me.”

  “Scares you?”

  She laughed. “Yes, because he’s flaunting it. The thing that made him different. Which seems dangerous, in a way.”

  Engagements throughout Europe were scheduled for the fall, among them a series in London in which she would play twenty-two Beethoven sonatas. In the midst of her preparations, Anna was approached by officials from the Ministry of Culture, requesting her, as the child prodigy and pride of Vienna, to take part in a special Wagner program. In an attempt to defuse rising political tensions, the government was promoting those aspects of culture that all of the Empire’s competing factions shared. Thus it was no coincidence that Anna, a Jew, was being asked to perform Wagner, the champion of pagan vigor and Teutonic mysticism so beloved by the pan-German zealots.

  And beloved, incidentally, by Anna as well; she agreed. The evening approached with much fanfare; even the emperor Franz-Josef would attend, emerging from high mourning for the late empress, stabbed to death in Geneva the previous year by the anarchist Luccheni. The program began well enough. Winkelmann roused the audience with “Der Augen leuchtendes Paar”; Schmedes and Lehman lifted them further with the “Heil dir, Sonne!” from Siegfried. Anna took the stage and was fairly into the Prelude from Tristan when jeers of “Hep! Hep!” rang out from the audience. Within moments everyone understood: a contingent of pan-Germans had taken a block of seats near the stage, and on prearranged signal they began braying the classic anti-Semitic insult. Others in the audience tried to shout them down while a phalanx of policemen came scurrying down the aisle; in the meantime Anna set her jaw and played on, furnishing heady background music for the impending riot. At the last moment, just as the police were poised to wade into the seats, the pan-Germans rose and marched out in ranks, singing “Deutschland über Alles” at the tops of their lungs.

  Until now the pan-German press had, however thinly, veiled its attacks in the rhetoric of musical criticism, but now they savaged Anna with unrestrained glee. “No Jew,” declared one reviewer, “can ever hope to understand Wagner,” and to the list of Jew bankers, Northern Railway Jews, Jew peddlers, Jew thieves, and subversive press Jews, they now added “this Jew-girl, this performing metronome with her witch’s hand and freakish improvising.” And when word leaked of her intention to perform the Fantasy the following January, her enemies were livid. “A perversion,” the Kyff-hauser shrieked of the Fantasy, seizing at once on Visser’s putative Jewish origins, “an immoral composition born of the ghetto’s foetid mewlings and melancholies,” while the Deutsches Volksblatt called it “degenerate, antisocial music, full of contempt for all great ideals and aspirations.” The liberal press counterattacked with accusations of revanchism and demagoguery, the pan-Germans fired back in shrill paranoid-racist style, and the battle was joined.

  Herr Kornblau, of course, could not have been more pleased. The contract had already been signed for Anna’s performance at the Royal Opera House on the twentieth of January; she would present the Fantasy in a program that, calculated for balancing effect, would include such standards as Liszt’s Love Dreams and Beethoven’s “Moonlight” Sonata, along with works by Mozart, Schumann, and Chopin. Meanwhile Anna continued her rigorous schedule of practice and performance. She played in Berlin’s Kroll Hall, battling the poor acoustics, then Leipzig, Paris, and London, which brought her back to fractious Vienna in mid-November with a scathing cough and bruiselike discs beneath her eyes. Hugo was clearly worried for his cousin; “elle travaille comme une negresse,” he confided to his diary, and then there is this entry for November 29: “I feel as if Anna is being slowly ground up.” Her name figured in the Parliamentary debates over the new, allegedly decadent, art; Deutsches Volksblatt, the paper of the ascendent
Christian Socials, warned that “fists will have to go into action on January 20,” while the writers of the Young Vienna movement published a pro-Kuhl manifesto, vowing to meet the “barbarization” of public life with an equal strength of purpose.

  She gave her final concert of the century in December, at the Royal German Theater in Prague. It was, at her insistence and over her managers’ objections, a program consisting entirely of Chopin. Those present said that she looked pale and strained; critics noted a fragile, almost glassine quality in her playing, which seemed to heighten rather than diminish the emotional effect. “She was dreaming,” the countess Lara von Pergler recorded in her memoirs, “and she allowed us to dream with her. It is a dream which, after all these years, haunts me still.” And indeed, it appears that Anna captured the rare essence of Chopin that night. Romantic and expressive, yet aristocratic and restrained, it is difficult even for masters to convey the spirit of Chopin, which is, ultimately, sadness. Not the sadness of great tragedy, but the irredeemable sadness of time itself: days pass, the world changes, and that which we most treasure must inevitably be lost.

  WEDNESDAY 20 DECEMBER

  To Uncle’s; pretended to read while Anna practiced, then got her bundled in her cloak and out the door before Hermine et al. could come along, thank God.

  Gray skies, bitter cold; plane trees along the Ring limned in snow. Walked in contented silence for a kilometer, her arm on mine. Blessed moments! We understand silence, cousin and I.

  “How do you do it?” I finally asked. “What you create on the piano, how do you do it?”

  A: “I concentrate, and I hear it. But I must concentrate very hard—that’s the value of practice, really, learning to concentrate properly, but in a way it’s not me, it’s something coming through me. If I concentrate very hard it comes through me.

  “Then there’s this.” She pulled her right hand out of her muff, shot back her sleeve, and held up her hand, examining it as one might judge a piece of fruit.

  “You see this.” She was smiling! Smiling as she waggled her extra finger, and blushing, her breath rapid. I was excited too. “This isn’t mine either.”

  “Nonsense,” I said. “It’s yours and it’s wonderful, just as everything about you is wonderful.” But she only shrugged and slipped her hand back inside the muff.

  At the time she was trying to master the nearly impossible fingering of the Fantasy, a task made harder by the fact that her hands were much smaller than Visser’s—she could stretch somewhat past an octave with her left, and marginally better than that with her right. In the midst of her efforts Christmas came and went, followed by the turning of the century. Hugo duly noted the fireworks and balls in his diary, along with the latest crises in Parliament, new ideas for plays, and his obsessive running count of the city’s suicides, a not unusual preoccupation in Vienna—to the mystification and endless fascination of its citizens, the Austrian capital led Europe in the self-murder statistic. He rather drily records as well his engagement to Flora Lanner, the blond, beautiful, magnificently wealthy daughter of Oskar Lanner, manufacturer of fruit conserves. By all appearances it would be a brilliant match, not least for the families’ smooth pragmatism regarding matters of faith; though Jewish, the Lanners were so fully assimilated that two of Flora’s brothers had been baptized in order to join the Imperial officer corps. Whether Hugo’s engagement had any bearing on his cousin’s fate—whether, bluntly put, he and Anna were in love, and the engagement a source of despair to her—is impossible, at this late date, to say; the chaos of two world wars, not to mention a highly efficient program of genocide, have erased much evidence that we otherwise might have had, and Hugo demonstrates in his surviving diaries a sure talent for glossing over his own emotional turbulence.

  In any case, his famous cousin soon found herself the object of a nerve-shredding public hysteria. The pan-Germans continued their threats to disrupt the concert, citing as justification the “occult” fits and seizures which the Fantasy had induced seventy years before. The Secessionist and Young Vienna movements appropriated the young pianist as their champion, while a congeries of beards from the Conservatory accused Anna and her managers of sensationalism, fomenting needless conflict for publicity purposes. An obsessed fan worked out a dizzying mathematical correlation between the date of Visser’s death and Anna’s birthday, which the Abendpost featured in a front-page story. Professors of neurology and musicology were invited to propose theories explaining the Fantasy’s violent effect on listeners, while Sigmund Freud—obscure, struggling, no longer young, shunned by the medical establishment and passed over for professorship—followed the controversy from his office on the Berggasse, where he read the newspapers and wrote the Interpretation of Dreams in the long stretches between patient appointments.

  “You don’t have to do this, you know,” Hugo told Anna on January 11. “Nobody would blame you for backing out.” “Nor you,” is the curt answer that he recorded—apropos of Flora? Mayor Lueger of the Christian Social Party said that he could not guarantee security outside the Royal Opera on the evening of the twentieth, citing “forces beyond all but the Almighty’s control.” But the young vir tuoso was nevertheless resolved. Those with access to the Kuhl household at this time reported that Anna was the very essence of composure. Though it seems that a phase was widely feared, and perhaps secretly desired, among her inner circle, she practiced unstintingly each day, the Beethoven, the Liszt, her beloved Chopin, and the Fantasy over which her fingers were gradually gaining control. Pianists will tell you that they practice in order to reduce the risk of catastrophe, but they know that to play with complete safety is an insult to their art. Music demands risk, a condition that Anna seems to have embraced with near-manic devotion, as if by engaging the demons inherent in her art she might destroy all claims they might have on her.

  Overwrought fans, and on several occasions journalists, were caught infiltrating the Kuhls’ apartment house in hopes of overhearing Anna practice. An old man, one Zolmar Magg of Lvov, a tanner, was discovered to have heard Visser perform the Fantasy in 1831, and the local music society appealed for funds to send him to Vienna for the revival. And on January 16 Hugo makes this entry:

  To Uncle’s in the p.m. I can hardly bear to listen to the thing now, this “Fantasy,” this nightmare—it’s like a dream in which you’re trying to flee some hideous creature, yet for all your terror your legs refuse to move.

  The following day the Ministry of Culture announced that it was unilaterally canceling Anna’s engagement at the Royal Opera House, citing security concerns and the previous autumn’s Wagner debacle, for which, the Ministry’s communiqué suggested, Fraulein Kuhl was in part responsible. Even as shock resolved into shrill outcry, a second announcement was made, this time issuing from the Theater an der Wien, one of Vienna’s oldest theaters and its leading operetta house. The impresario Alexandrine von Schonerer, owner and director of the theater and, incidentally, estranged sister of the notorious anti-Semite George von Schonerer, had offered to suspend her current production of Die Fledermaus so that Anna might perform the Fantasy as scheduled. Kornblau publicly conveyed the Kuhls’ acceptance of the offer, noting that the Theater an der Wien had generously chosen to honor all tickets for the Royal Opera venue; the following day, the eighteenth, the pan-German press went into convulsions, calling for vengeance on “the Semitic vampires and their insipid hangers-on” and once again vowing to enjoin the concert. That afternoon the Adjutant General announced that the Emperor’s own First Hussars would be deployed in the streets around the theater, with orders to ensure the strictest security.

  THURSDAY 18 JANUARY

  Anna detached, quite removed from the outer chaos. What Kornblau, Leo, everyone fears most is a phase—Puchel looks to be on the verge of a stroke, so great is his anxiety—but it doesn’t occur to any of them that a phase might be the most normal response to all of this.

  And yet she carries on—meals, lessons, study, practice, all in the coolest way
imaginable. A method of storing up energy, I suppose. Tonight I played Soirées de Vienne for her after dinner, then read Goethe aloud, Italian Journey.

  “I will be at your side, every step,” I told her, which she acknowledged with a grave nod. “God bless you, Hugo.”

  “God bless you”—the truly blessed would get her out of here, had he the slightest scrap of courage.

  For the performance she chose a black, full-skirted gown with dark brocade roses, a shirred waist, and a high collar of mousseline de soie. A light snow was falling that evening as she and her entourage departed the Salesianergasse, the flakes fine and dry as ash, forming brilliant silver aureoles around the street lamps. Approaching the theater they began to pass mounted Hussars at the street corners, the soldiers magnificent in their blue capes with sable trim, their crested helmets and gold-edged riding boots. Soon the streets were filled with carriages all moving in a thick yet peaceable flow toward the theater. As the pan-Germans had vowed, the virtuoso experienced difficulty in reaching her destination, but it was this mass of coaches, rather than virile nationalism, which proved to be her sole hindrance—Anna was delayed by her own traffic jam, in effect.

  Frau von Schonerer received her at an obscure side entrance to the theater, along with a captain of the Hussars, six uniformed police, the theater superintendent, and three muscular assistants, as well as two plainclothes agents from the Emperor’s secret police. Anna was escorted first to her dressing room to remove her cloak, then to a basement rehearsal space where a Bösendorfer grand stood waiting for her final warmup. Puchel entered with Anna and shut the door, leaving the others to endure the chilly hall while Anna ran through fragments of her repertoire, the glorious bursts of notes and supple noodlings followed by Puchel’s muffled voice as he delivered last-minute instructions.