Compass
Page 4
The third room, probably an old chapel, is devoted to Carmilla and vampires. Sarah tells me how the Irish writer Sheridan Le Fanu spent an entire winter in Hainfeld, a few years before Hammer-Purgstall the Orientalist moved there; Carmilla is inspired by a true story, she says: Count Purgstall did indeed take in one of his orphan relatives named Carmilla, who immediately struck up a profound friendship with his daughter Laura, as if they had always known each other — very soon, they became intimate; they shared secrets and passions. Laura began to dream about fantastic animals that visited her at night, kissed her, and caressed her; sometimes, in these dreams, they transformed into Carmilla, until finally Laura wondered if Carmilla was actually a man in disguise, which would explain her agitation. Laura fell ill with a wasting disease that no doctor managed to cure, until the Count heard tell of a similar case, a few miles away: several years before a young woman died, two round holes in the upper part of her throat, victim of the vampire Millarca Karnstein. Carmilla is none other than the anagram and reincarnation of Millarca; she is the one sucking out Laura’s vitality — the Count would have to kill her and send her back to the grave with a terrifying ritual.
In the back of the crypt where large blood-red panels explain the relationship of Hainfeld to vampires there is a canopy bed, carefully made up, with white sheets and wood paneling hung with brilliant silk veils that the curator has lit up from below, with very gentle lighting; on the bed, the body of a young woman is lying, in a diaphanous dress, a wax statue imitating sleep, or death; she has two red marks on her chest, at the level of the left breast, which the silk or lace leaves completely uncovered — Sarah walks over, fascinated; she leans over the young woman, gently strokes her hair, her chest. I am embarrassed, I wonder what this sudden passion signifies, before feeling a suffocating desire myself: I observe Sarah’s thighs in their black stockings rub against the light cloth of the white nightdress, her hands brushing against the statue’s belly, I’m ashamed for her, very ashamed, suddenly I’m drowning, I breathe in deeply, lift my head from my pillow, I am in darkness, I am left with this last image, that baroque bed, this crypt that’s both terrifying and gentle, I open my mouth wide to rediscover the cool air of my bedroom, the reassuring contact with the pillow, the weight of the duvet.
A great shame mingled with traces of desire, that’s what’s left.
Such memory in dreams.
One wakes up without having fallen asleep, seeking to recapture the shreds of pleasure of the other in oneself.
There are recesses that are easy to shed light on, others that are darker. The dark liquid probably has to do with the terrifying article I received this morning. Amusing that Marc Faugier invited himself into my dreams, I haven’t seen him in years. Specialist in Arabic coitus, that would make him laugh. Of course he wasn’t present at that conference. Why did he appear there, through what secret association, impossible to know.
It was definitely Hainfeld castle, but larger, it seems to me. I feel a very strong physical loss, now, the pain of separation, as if I had just been deprived of Sarah’s body. Love potions, caves, dead young women — as I rest I have the feeling that I myself was stretched out under that canopy, that I was ardently desiring Sarah’s caresses, on my own deathbed. Memory is quite surprising, the horrible Gurdjieff, good grief. What was he doing in there, that old Oriental occultist, I’m sure that gentle, bewitching melody is not by him, dreams superimpose masks and that one was very obscure.
Who wrote that piano piece, I have the name on the tip of my tongue, it could be Schubert, but it’s not him, a passage from Mendelssohn’s Romance sans paroles maybe, in any case it’s not something I listen to very often, that’s for sure. If I fall immediately back to sleep I might rediscover it, with Sarah and the vampires.
As far as I know there was no crypt in Hammer-Purgstall’s actual castle, neither crypt nor exhibit, on the ground floor there was a typically Styrian restaurant serving veal schnitzel, goulash, and Serviettenknöndel — though it’s true that we took an immediate liking to each other, Sarah and I, even without any ghouls or supernatural couplings, we took all our meals together and spent a long time scrutinizing the shelves in the library of the surprising Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall. I would translate for her the German titles she had trouble deciphering; her Arabic, much better than mine, allowed her to explain to me the subject of books I could make nothing of and we stayed there by ourselves for a long time, shoulder to shoulder, while all the Orientalists had hurried to the restaurant, fearing there wouldn’t be enough potatoes for everyone — I had just met her the day before and already we were side by side, leaning over an old book; my eyes must have been dancing over the lines and my chest contracting, I could smell the perfume of her curls for the first time, I was experiencing the power of her smile and her voice for the first time: it’s strange to think that, without any special surveillance, in this library whose large window (sole accidental in the outer façade, which was so regular as to border on monotony) opened out onto a little balcony overlooking the southern moat, we had in our hands a collection of poems by Friedrich Rückert hand-dedicated to his old teacher Hammer-Purgstall — wide, sprawling handwriting, a complicated, slightly yellowed signature, dated from Neuses, somewhere in Franconia, in 1836, while below us trembled, by the water’s edge, the sweet rush known as calamus, which long ago was used to cut reed pens. “Beshnow az ney tchoun hekayat mikonad,” “Listen to the ney, the reed, how it tells stories,” begins Rumi’s Masnavi, and it was wonderful to discover that these two Persian translators, Hammer-Purgstall and Rückert, were there together, while outside the rushes offered us a majestic synesthesia, evoking, in a gesture, the tenderness of Schubert and Schumann’s lieder, Persian poetry, the aquatic plants used to make flutes over there in the Orient, and our two bodies, held motionless and barely touching, in the almost absent light — as it was long ago — of this library with immense wooden shelves bent by the weight of the years or the books, behind their fittings made of precious marquetry. I read for Sarah a few poems in this little collection by Rückert, and tried to translate them for her as best I could — it mustn’t have been very brilliant, this sight-translation, but I didn’t want the moment to pass, so I took my time, I admit it, and she didn’t make any move to shorten my hesitations, as if we were reading an oath.
A funny oath, since odds are she no longer remembers that time or, rather, that she never attached the same importance to it as I did — and as proof, this morning she sends me, without a word, this article, so out of character, which is giving me nightmares worthy of an old opium addict.
But now with my eyes wide open, sighing, a little feverish, I have to try to fall back asleep (some shivers running up my calves, the colder I feel the hotter I burn, so to speak, as in the Louise Labé poem) and forget Sarah. We’ve stopped counting sheep a long time ago; “Go to your happy place,” someone said to a dying man in an American TV episode, what would be my happy place, I wonder, somewhere in my childhood, by the edge of a lake in the summer in the Salzkammergut, at an operetta by Franz Lehár in Bad Ischl, or in bumper cars with my brother at the Prater, maybe in the Touraine at our grandmother’s house, a region that seemed extraordinarily exotic to us, foreign without being so, where the maternal language we were almost ashamed of in Austria suddenly became dominant: in Ischl everything was imperial and shimmering, in Touraine everything was French, we murdered chickens and ducks, we picked green beans, we chased sparrows, we ate rotting cheeses rolled in ash, we visited fairy-tale castles and played with cousins whose slang we didn’t entirely understand, since we spoke an adult French, the French of our mother and a few Francophones in our entourage, a Viennese French. I can see myself as King of the Garden, stick in hand, as captain on a barge floating down the Loire beneath the walls of Alexandre Dumas in Montsoreau, on a bicycle in the vines around Chinon — these childhood lands are making me feel a terrible pain, maybe because of their sudden disappearance, which prefigur
es mine, illness and fear.
A lullaby? Let’s attempt a catalog of lullabies: Brahms who rings out like a cheap music box, whom all the children in Europe have heard in their beds, nestled in a blue or pink stuffed animal, Brahms the Volkswagen of the lullaby, solid and efficient, nothing puts you to sleep as quickly as Brahms, that mean bearded pillager of Schumann without any daring or whimsy — Sarah adored one of Brahms’s sextets, the first one probably, opus 18 as I remember, with a theme — how to say it — that overwhelms you. The amusing thing is that the actual European hymn, the one that resounds from Athens to Reykjavík and leans over our charming blond heads, is that damn lullaby by Brahms, atrociously simple, just as the most effective sword blows are the simplest. Before him Schumann, Chopin, Schubert, Mozart, and tutti quanti, hmm, there might be an idea for an article in that, the analysis of the lullaby as genre, with its effects and its prejudices — not many lullabies for orchestra, for example, the lullaby belongs by definition to chamber music. To the best of my knowledge, there is no lullaby with electronic accompaniment or for player piano, but I’d have to check. Am I capable of remembering a contemporary lullaby? Arvo Pärt the fervent Estonian composed some lullabies, lullabies for choirs and string ensembles, lullabies to put entire monasteries to sleep, I spoke of them in my crushing paper on his piece for string orchestra, Orient & Occident: you can perfectly picture dormitories of young monks singing before going to bed, conducted by bearded priests. But I have to admit there is something consoling in Pärt’s music, something of that spiritual desire of Western crowds, desire for simple music resounding like bells, of an Orient where nothing has been lost of the relationship that links man to heaven, an Orient brought close to an Occident by the Christian credo, a spiritual leftover, a husk for times of desolation — which lullaby for me, then, lying in the dark, here and now, when I’m afraid, I’m afraid, I’m afraid of the hospital and disease: I try to close my eyes but I’m worried about this confrontation with my body, with my heartbeats that I’ll find too rapid, the pains that, when you pay attention to them, multiply into all the recesses of the flesh. Sleep will have to come by surprise, from behind, the way the executioner strangles or decapitates you, the way the enemy strikes you — I could take a pill, quite simply, instead of curling up like a petrified dog under my damp covers which I pull back, too warm underneath, let’s go back to Sarah and to memory since both are inevitable: she too has her illness, much different from mine that’s for sure, but an illness all the same. This Sarawak business possibly confirms my doubts, has she too become lost in turn, lost body and soul in the Orient like all those characters she has studied so?
The thing that actually sealed our friendship, after Hainfeld and our readings of Rückert, was the little thirty-kilometer excursion that we took at the end of the conference; she had suggested I go with her, I obviously accepted, lying about the possibility of changing my train ticket — so, after a slight lie, I took part in this expedition, to the great displeasure of the waiter from the restaurant who was driving the car and was surely planning on finding himself alone in the countryside with Sarah. It seems very clear to me now that this was no doubt the reason for my invitation, I had to serve as chaperone, remove any possible romantic character from this outing. What’s more, since Sarah knew very little German and the driver-for-the-day had poor command of English, I was commandeered (as I soon unhappily realized) to provide conversation. I was reasonably impressed by what Sarah was eager to see, the reason for the excursion: the monument to the Battle of Saint Gotthard, or more precisely of Mogersdorf, an arrow’s flight away from Hungary — what possible interest could she have taken in a battle in 1664 against the Ottomans, a victory of the Holy Empire and its French allies, in a village in the middle of nowhere, atop a hill overlooking the valley of the Raab, tributary of the Danube that flowed a few hundred meters away from the rushes of Hainfeld, I would find out before long, but first I had to suffer through forty-five minutes of endless talk with a young, not particularly forthcoming guy who was extremely disappointed at seeing me there next to him when he had pictured Sarah and her miniskirt — I myself was wondering why I had committed myself to all these expenses, train ticket, additional night in a hotel in Graz, just to chew the fat with this country waiter who, I’ll admit, was not a bad guy. (I realize that Sarah, quietly sitting in the backseat, must have been having a good secret laugh at having managed to kill two erotic birds with one stone, the two suitors canceling each other out in one sad, reciprocal disappointment.) He was from Riegersburg and had gone to the local hotel school; on the way, he told us a few anecdotes about the burg of Gallerin, fief of the Purgstalls, an eyrie perched since the first century on top of a high peak that neither the Hungarians nor the Turks ever managed to capture. The Raab valley was unfurling its orange-hued autumn foliage and, around us, the hills and old extinguished volcanoes of the Marches rolled verdantly as far as the eye could see under the gray sky, forests and vines alternating on their slopes, a perfect Mitteleuropa landscape; all that was missing were a few layers of fog, the cries of fairies or witches as a sonorous background for the tableau to be complete — a fine drizzle had started falling; it was eleven a.m. but it could easily have been five in the afternoon, I wondered what on earth I was doing there, on a Sunday, when I could have been happily seated on my train headed for Tübingen instead of going to a lost battlefield with a stranger or near-stranger and a rustic waiter who must have only gotten his driver’s license last summer — little by little I was turning sullen in the car; obviously we had missed a turn and had reached the Hungarian border, opposite the town of Szentgotthárd whose buildings could be seen beyond the customs barracks; the young driver was embarrassed; we turned back — the village of Mogersdorf was a few kilometers away, on the side of the promontory that interested us: the camp of the Holy Empire, marked by a monumental concrete cross a dozen meters high, built in the 1960s; a chapel made from the same material and at the same time completed the ensemble, a little further away, and a stone panel depicted the scenario of the battle. The view was clear; you could see the valley, which continued straight east, on our left, toward Hungary; toward the south, hills pleated the thirty or forty kilometers separating us from Slovenia. Scarcely had Sarah gotten out of the car than she became excited; once oriented, she looked at the landscape, then the cross, and kept saying over and over, “It’s just extraordinary”; she kept walking back and forth across the site, from chapel to monument, before returning to the big engraved information table. I wondered (the waiter too, apparently, who was smoking and leaning on his car door, looking at me from time to time in a slightly panicked way) if we were witnessing the reconstruction of a crime, à la Rouletabille or Sherlock Holmes: I expected her to unearth some rusty swords or horse bones, for her to point out the position of such-or-such regiment of uhlans or Piedmontese pikemen, if there were uhlans and Piedmontese in this melee, facing the fierce Janissaries. I was hoping this would give me an opportunity to shine by adding my knowledge of Turkish military music to the battle and its importance for the alla turca style so common in the eighteenth century, Mozart being the most famous example — in short, I was waiting to ambush them near our carriage, with the coachman, not caring to dirty my shoes further along near the edge of the promontory, the information table and the immense cross, but five minutes later, once her circumvolutions were finished, Sarah the savage detective was still in mid-contemplation of the engraved map, as if she were waiting for me to join her: so I walked over, imagining a feminine maneuver to get me to join her, but maybe the memory of battles isn’t actually propitious for the game of love, or else I just didn’t know Sarah too well: I had the feeling I was disturbing her thoughts, her reading of the landscape. Of course, what interested her in this place was the way memory was organized, not so much the confrontation in itself; for her, the important thing was the big cross from 1964 that, by commemorating the Turkish defeat, traced a frontier, a wall, facing Communist Hungary, the East of t
hat time, the new enemy, the new Orient that was naturally replacing the old. There was no place either for me or for Mozart’s Turkish March in her observations; she took a little notebook out of her pocket and took a few notes, then smiled at me, obviously very happy with her expedition.
It was starting to rain again; Sarah closed her notebook and put it back in the pocket of her black raincoat; I must have reserved my reflections on the influence of Turkish military music and its percussions for the ride back: it’s certain that in 1778, when Mozart composed his eleventh piano sonata, the Ottoman presence, the siege of Vienna, and this battle of Mogersdorf were already quite remote, yet his Rondo alla turca is quite certainly the piece of that era that bears the closest relationship with the mehter, the fanfares of the Janissaries; is this because of travelers’ accounts, or simply because he had a genius for synthesis and deployed, magnificently, all the characteristics of the “Turkish” style of the time, no one knows and, to shine in this old car creeping along in the midst of Styria oozing of autumn, I didn’t hesitate to synthesize (or rather appropriate) the work of Eric Rice and Ralph Locke, unsurpassed on the subject. Mozart succeeded so well in embodying Turkish “sound,” the rhythms and percussions, that even Beethoven the immense with the tam taladam tam tam taladam of his own Turkish March from The Ruins of Athens just barely managed to copy it, or pay homage to it, perhaps. It’s not the easiest thing in the world to be a good Orientalist. . . . I’d very much like to tell Sarah, now, to make her laugh a little, about that hilarious performance, recorded in 1974, of eight world-famous pianists interpreting Beethoven’s Turkish March onstage, with eight massive pianos in a circle. They played this strange arrangement for sixteen hands first, and then, after the applause, they sat back down and played it again, but in a burlesque version: Jeanne-Marie Darré got lost in her score; Radu Lupu materialized a tarboosh from God knows where and plonked it on his head, maybe to prove that as a Romanian he was the most Oriental of them all, and he even pulled a cigar out of his pocket and played any old way, his fingers encumbered by the ash, to the great displeasure of his neighbor Alicia de Larrocha who didn’t look as if she found it very funny, this concert of dissonances and wrong notes, no more than did poor Gina Bachauer, whose hands looked tiny compared to her enormous body: quite definitely the Turkish March is the only piece by Beethoven with which they could allow themselves this schoolboy farce, although we might dream of the exploit being repeated for a Chopin ballad or for Schönberg’s Piano Suite, for example; it would be nice to hear what humor and slapstick could add to those works. (There’s another idea for an article, on appropriations and irony in twentieth-century music; a bit broad in scope no doubt, there must already be studies on the subject, I vaguely recall a contribution — by whom? — on irony in Mahler, for example.)