Compass

by Mathias Enard

  Sarah found that phrase extraordinary, “Take me, lead me where you like; I won’t bother you, I sleep all day, in the evenings you can let me go to the concert and at night you can do what you like with me,” a declaration of absolute beauty and despair, a total nudity — unlike Liszt I know where she is buried, the Montmartre cemetery, which Sarah showed me. The fate of the original, though, was more enviable than that of the Lady of the Camellias; the younger Dumas has even, if we judge him by that phrase, tarnished her character a little: Verdi’s adaptation of the life of Marie Duplessis, however, is indeed musical, but a little excessive in tragedy. La Traviata was created in Venice in 1853, things moved quickly at the time; seven years after her death, the little courtesan Marie Duplessis alias Marguerite Gautier alias Violetta Valéry is famous, with Dumas fils and Verdi, all over Europe. Liszt confides sadly:

  If by chance I had been in Paris during la Duplessis’s illness, I’d have tried to save her at all costs, for she was truly a delightful person, and the habit that is called (and that may be) corrupting never stained her heart. Believe me when I say that I had conceived for her a somber, elegiac attachment, which, quite without my knowing it, had set me on the track of poetry and music. That was the last and only jolt I’ve felt in years. One must give up explaining these contradictions, the human heart is a strange thing!

  The human heart is indeed a strange thing, Franz Liszt’s artichoke heart didn’t stop falling in love, even with God — in these reminiscences of opium, as I hear the virtuosities of Liszt that occupied me in Constantinople rumbling like death march drums, a singular girl also appears to me, over there in Sarawak, even if Sarah has nothing in common with la Duplessis or with Harriet Smithson (“Do you see that fat Englishwoman sitting in the proscenium,” Heinrich Heine has Berlioz saying in his account), the actress who inspired the Symphonie Fantastique. Poor Berlioz, lost in his passion for the interpreter of “poor Ophelia”: “Poor great genius, grappling with three-quarters of the impossible!” as Liszt writes in one of his letters.

  You’d need a Sarah to be interested in all these tragic fates of forgotten women — what a spectacle, though, of Berlioz’s, mad with love, playing the timpani in his own March to the Scaffold when the Symphonie Fantastique was performed in the great Conservatoire hall. This fourth movement is pure madness, a dream of opium, poisoning, ironic, grating torture, a march to Death, written in one night, a night of poppies, and Berlioz, writes Heinrich Heine, Berlioz from his timpani was looking at Harriet Smithson, staring at her, and every time his eyes met hers, he beat his instrument harder, like a man possessed. (Heine also notes that the timpani, or percussions in general, were instruments that suited Berlioz. Berlioz never traveled to the Orient, but was, at the height of his twenty-five years, fascinated with Hugo’s Les Orientales. So there might be a second Orient, that of Goethe or Hugo, of people who know neither Oriental languages, nor the countries where they are spoken, but who rely on the works of Orientalists and travelers like Hammer-Purgstall, and even a third Orient, a Third-Orient, that of Berlioz or Wagner, which feeds on these works that are themselves indirect. The Third-Orient, there’s a notion to develop. For instance, there are more things in timpani than are dreamt of . . .) The fact remains that this poor Ophelia that was Harriet Smithson, unlike the British troops, succumbed to the French percussions and married the artist. This marriage forced by art ended in disaster, sometimes music can’t do everything, and Heine notes, a few years later, as the Symphonie Fantastique is being performed again at the Conservatoire, that “Berlioz is again seated behind the orchestra, at the drums, and the fat Englishwoman is still in the proscenium, and their gazes meet again . . . but he doesn’t strike so hard on his timpani.”

  You have to be Heine to be able to outline in this way, in ten lines, the story of a defunct love; the fine, witty Henri Heine, as Théophile Gautier calls him, Heine who asks him, as the hashish-smoker is about to leave for Constantinople, in Paris at a concert of Liszt’s, with his German accent full of humor and mischievousness: “How will you manage to talk about the Orient when you’re actually there?” A question that could have been put to all travelers to Istanbul, so much does the journey diffuse its object, disseminating and multiplying it in reflections and details until it loses its reality.

  Franz Liszt doesn’t say much about this visit to Turkey, of which a commemorative plaque, in the little street that goes down to the French Consulate in Beyoglu, briefly reminds passersby. We know he was welcomed, as soon as he disembarked from his boat, by the music master Donizetti and the Austrian ambassador, whom the Sultan had summoned to form part of the welcoming committee; that he stayed at the palace of the composer Ali Rıfat Çağatay for a few days, invited by the Great Lord, and that he gave a concert there on that famous Érard piano; that he then spent some time at the Austrian embassy and then at the French embassy, where he was the guest of the ambassador François-Adolphe de Bourqueney and gave a second concert, still on the same instrument that followed him positively everywhere; that he met the ambassador himself at the end of his stay, since the wife of said ambassador had been ill till then; that he gave a third concert in Pera and rediscovered two old acquaintances there, a Frenchman and a Pole, with whom he went on an excursion into Asia; that he sent thanks by mail to Lamartine, great specialist in the Ottoman Empire, who had sent him a letter of introduction to the Minister of Foreign Affairs Reshid Pasha: that’s pretty much all we can say for certain.

  I can picture again my walks between sessions poring over archives and the newspapers of the time; my visits to specialists who might be able to inform me, always somewhat grumpy historians frightened, as so often in academia, by the possibility that a young man might know more than they or catch them in a mistake, especially if said young man was not Turkish, but Austrian, and worse, only half-Austrian, and that his research subject fell into a scientific void, a hole, between the history of Turkish music and European music: sometimes, which was a little depressing, I felt as if my thoughts were like the Bosphorus — a beautiful place between two shores, indeed, but one that, at bottom, was nothing but water, not to say wind. In vain I would reassure myself by telling myself that the colossus of Rhodes or Hercules had also in their time had one foot on each shore — the mocking gazes and acerbic remarks of the specialists still often managed to discourage me.

  Fortunately there was Istanbul, and Bilger, and Faugier, and opium, which opened up the gates of perception to us — my theory on Liszt’s inspiration in Constantinople arose from his Harmonies poétiques et religieuses, and mainly from the “Bénédiction de Dieu dans la solitude,” which he composed not long after his stay in Istanbul, in Woronice; the musical “adaptation” of the poem by Lamartine answers the question of the first lines, “D’où me vient, ô mon Dieu! cette paix qui m’inonde? / D’où me vient cette foi dont mon coeur surabonde?” (Whence, oh my God! does this peace that is overwhelming me come? / Whence comes this faith with which my heart is overflowing?) and I was utterly convinced it had to do with Liszt’s encounter with Oriental light and not, as commentators often described it, with a lover’s memory of Marie d’Agoult “rehashed” for princess Carolyne zu Sayn-Wittgenstein.

  After his visit to Istanbul, Liszt gave up his life as a wandering musician, renounced the fame of his brilliant years, and began, in Weimar, a long trajectory toward contemplation, a new journey that was opened up — even though some of these pieces had in fact been sketched out before — by the Harmonies poétiques et religieuses. Despite being massacred by all beginning pianists, the “Bénédiction . . .” nonetheless remains not only the most beautiful of Liszt’s melodies, but also contains the composer’s most simply complex accompaniment, an accompaniment (and this, to my beginner’s ears, was what brought the piece closer to an illumination) that one had to make sound like overflowing faith, while the melody represented divine peace. That seems to me today a slightly “teleological” and simplistic reading (music rarely being redu
cible to the causes of its composition), and above all to be linked to my own experience of Istanbul — one morning that was intensely blue, the air crisp with cold, when the Prince Islands stood out in the oblique light beyond the Seraglio Point and when the minarets of old Istanbul streaked the sky with their lances, their pencils to write the hundredth name of God into the pure hollow of the clouds, there still weren’t many tourists or passersby in the strange little street (high, blank stone walls, old caravanserai, and closed libraries) leading to the back of the Süleymaniye mosque, built by Sinan the Divine for Süleyman the Magnificent. I pass the colored marble peristyle; a few gulls flit between the porphyry columns; the tiled pavement gleams as if it had rained. I have already been inside several mosques, Santa Sophia, the Blue Mosque, and I will see others, in Damascus, Aleppo, in Ispahan even, but none will have this immediate effect on me, once I’ve left my shoes in a wooden compartment and penetrated the prayer hall, a wrenching at my heart, a loss of bearings, I vainly try to walk and let myself fall where I stand, onto the red rug with blue flowers, trying to collect my wits. I discover that I am alone in the monument, alone surrounded by light, alone in this space with its disconcerting proportions; the circle of the immense cupola is welcoming, and hundreds of windows surround me — I sit down cross-legged. I am moved to the point of tears but I do not cry, I feel lifted up from the earth and I run my eyes over the Izmit faïence inscriptions, the painted surroundings, everything glitters, then a great calm seizes me, a wrenching calm, a summit glimpsed, but very soon the beauty eludes me and rejects me — little by little I rediscover my senses; what my eyes perceive now indeed looks magnificent to me, but has nothing in common with the sensation I’ve just felt. A great sadness grips me, suddenly, a loss, a sinister vision of the reality of the world and all its imperfections, its pain, a sadness accentuated by the perfection of the building and a phrase comes to me: only the proportions are divine, the rest belongs to humans. As a group of tourists enters the mosque I try to stand up and my legs, gone numb after the two hours spent seated, make me stumble and leave the Süleymaniye like a drunken man, a man hesitating between joy and tears, and I flee, I fled more than left the mosque; the great wind of Istanbul finally woke me up, especially the cold of the marble in the courtyard, I had forgotten my shoes, completely disoriented, realizing that I had spent two hours motionless or almost motionless, two hours have gone by, nonexistent, recalled solely by my watch: I suddenly realize I’m standing in my socks in the middle of the courtyard and my shoes have disappeared from the rack where I had left them, there’s something that brings you instantly back to the sufferings of the World — so I in turn stole a pair of thick blue plastic sandals, after a few fruitless attempts at discussion with a mustached concierge who struck his arms against his body as a sign of powerlessness, “no shoes, no shoes,” but let me appropriate these lifeguard’s flip-flops lying there, with which I crossed Istanbul like a dervish, my soul suffering.

  And memory is such a sad thing, for I remember more clearly my shame walking through the city in socks in my worn-out navy-blue rubber slippers than the emotion that had overwhelmed me and the vanished hours in the Süleymaniye, the first spiritual exaltation I’d ever felt that didn’t stem from music — a few years later, telling this story to Sarah, which she called “The Satori of the Shoe,” I remembered this quatrain by Khayyam:

  I went to the mosque and stole a rug there.

  Much later, I repented,

  And went back to the mosque: the rug was worn-out,

  It had to be replaced.

  Unlike old Omar Khayyam I never dared go back to the Süleymaniye, the last time I passed through Istanbul I stayed in the garden, to see the tomb of that architect, Sinan, who was, along with few other men, an intermediary between us and God; I addressed a brief prayer to him, and thought again of the loathsome sandals I inherited that day and had lost or thrown out since, without first verifying, man of little faith that I was, whether or not they were miraculous.

  Stendhal syndrome or real mystical experience, I have no idea, but I imagined that Liszt the heavenly Gypsy had also been able to find there a release, a force, in these views and buildings; that perhaps a little of that light of the Orient he carried in him had been revived during his visit to Constantinople. That was no doubt an interesting intuition on the personal level but for scholarship, in view of the few commentaries we have by Liszt himself about his journey on the Bosphorus, surely an excessive aspiration.

  What I did on the other hand manage to reconstruct was a pretty plausible description of the first Ottoman ensemble, the private orchestra of Abdülaziz, who played sitting on the ground on the seraglio rugs; we know that the Sultan was annoyed by the “Oriental” tics of his violinists when they performed Italian and German works, and that he had organized a chorus to provide private concerts of operas, especially The Marriage of Figaro: the great man became enraged because his singers had difficulty singing any other way but in unison, and the virtuosic duos, trios, quartets, and octets of Figaro became a sonorous jumble that wrenched impotent tears from the music-loving monarch, and this despite all the efforts of the eunuchs with their angelic voices and the wise advice of the Italian music master. Istanbul, though, had already given birth, in 1830, to a great forgotten composer, August von Adelburg Abramović, whose existence I had patiently retraced: after a childhood on the Bosphorus, Adelburg became famous in Budapest for a “national” opera, Zrinyi, in which he tried to demonstrate that, unlike what Liszt asserted, Hungarian music was not of gypsy origin — there’s something fascinating in this, that it’s precisely a Levantine who made himself the champion of Hungarian nationalism through the intermediary of his hero Miklós Zrinyi, sworn enemy of the Turks; it’s probably that intimate, profound contradiction that pushed him toward madness, a madness that was so serious that it would lead to his internment and his death, at the age of forty-three. Adelburg, the first important European musician born in the Ottoman Empire, ended his life in madness, in the rift of alterity; as if, despite all the bridges, all the links held out by time, a mixed identity turned out to be impossible, faced as he was with the nationalist pathology that was little by little invading the nineteenth century and slowly destroying the fragile footbridges constructed earlier, giving way only to the politics of domination.

  My glasses were under the pile of books and journals, obviously, I’m so absentminded. At the same time, to contemplate the ruins of my bedroom (ruins of Istanbul, ruins of Damascus, ruins of Tehran, ruins of myself) I don’t need to see them, I know all these objects by heart. The faded photographs and yellowing Orientalist engravings. The poetic works of Pessoa on a sculpted wooden book stand meant to house the Koran. My tarboosh from Istanbul, my heavy wool indoor coat from the souk in Damascus, my lute from Aleppo bought with Nadim. These white volumes, black silhouette with a rebellious forelock on the spines, are the journals of Franz Grillparzer — of course this cracked everyone up in Istanbul, that an Austrian was going around with his Grillparzer. Laundry detergent, fine, but Grillparzer! Germans are jealous, that’s all. I know where the problem lies: Germans can’t bear the idea (I’m not the one who invented it, it was Hugo von Hofmannsthal who affirmed it in a famous article, “We Austrians and Germany”) that Beethoven left for Vienna and never wanted to go back to Bonn. Hofmannsthal the greatest librettist of all time has also written elsewhere a strange dramatic dialogue between Hammer-Purgstall the eternal Orientalist and Balzac the indefatigable, which Sarah quotes abundantly in her article on Balzac and the Orient; I confess I no longer remember very clearly what it’s about, I fished the article out yesterday, it’s here, look there’s a little piece of paper slipped inside, a note, an old letter written on a torn-off page, with red margins and blue lines, a half-page from a school notebook:

  Dearest Franz,

  Here finally is the publication that has occupied me for the last few months. I’m a little far from my beloved monsters and other ho
rrors, as you say, but it’s only temporary. The Hainfeld conference has turned out to be quite fruitful, you can judge for yourself . . . And not just in academic terms!

  I can never thank you enough for the picture of the castle and your translations.

  I’m guessing you’re about to leave Istanbul, I hope your stay there was beneficial. Many thanks for the “commission” and the photos! They’re wonderful! My mother is delighted. You’re really lucky, what a dream, to discover Constantinople . . . Will you come back to Vienna or Tübingen? Please don’t forget to let me know the next time you come through Paris,

  Soon I hope, with love,

  Sarah

  P.S. I’m curious to know what you’ll think of this “Viennese” article — only good things, I hope!

  It’s pleasant to rediscover by surprise this dear handwriting, in ink, a little hurried, a little hard to read but tender and elegant — now that computers have taken over, we rarely see the calligraphy of our contemporaries, perhaps handwritten cursive will become a form of nudity, an intimate, hidden manifestation, concealed from everyone except lovers, lawyers, and bankers.

  Now I’m not sleepy anymore. Sleep has never really wanted me, it abandons me very quickly, around midnight, after pestering me all evening. Sleep is a selfish monster that does only what it pleases. Dr. Kraus is an awful doctor, I should switch. Dismiss him. I could offer myself the luxury of dismissing my doctor, showing him the door, a doctor who talks to you about getting enough rest every visit but is incapable of making you go to sleep does not deserve the title of doctor. I have to admit, in his defense, that I’ve never taken any of the rubbish he’s prescribed for me. But a doctor who can’t guess that you aren’t going to take the rubbish he prescribes for you is not a good doctor, that’s why I should switch. Kraus seems like an intelligent man though, I know he likes music, no, I’m exaggerating, I know he goes to concerts, which proves nothing. Only yesterday he said to me “I went to hear Liszt at the Musikverein,” I replied that he was lucky, it’s been a long time since Liszt played in Vienna. He laughed of course, saying “Ah Dr. Ritter you’re making me die of laughter,” which is all the same a strange phrase, coming from a doctor. I still can’t forgive him for laughing so much when I asked him to prescribe opium for me. “Ah ah ah, I can write you the prescription, but then you’re going to have to find a pharmacy from the nineteenth century.” I know he’s lying, I checked in the Official Journal, an Austrian doctor has the right to prescribe up to 2 grams of opium per day and 20 grams of laudanum, so it must be out there. The absurd thing is that a veterinarian of the same nationality can prescribe up to 15 grams of opium and 150 grams of tincture, it makes you want to be a sick dog. Maybe I could beg Gruber’s mutt to sell me a little of his medicine without his master knowing, so that dog could finally be useful for a change.