Gerontius

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  She sat down on the leather-quilted piano stool and lifted the keyboard’s lid. The sight of it diffused over her a resonant happiness. The inlaid florid signature had a certain Austrian exuberance as if to say ‘I, Ludwig Bösendorfer, in my little factory here in Vienna, have created a work of art. There – I sign it thus, with a proud flourish. Now, my unknown performer, the rest is up to you.’ Passing a fingertip over the letters she could detect scarcely a variation in the silky veneer. Even twenty-five years of equatorial humidity had found neither crack nor swelling to exploit. Now that her letter to Edward was out of her hands she regretted acting with such dispatch. Strangely, she had never envisaged what had actually happened. She had often conceived of going back to Europe for some reason, retiring there maybe, of sending him a letter of condolence on the death of Lady Elgar (instantly rejected as being too pointed, not to say downright threatening), of making an anonymous pilgrimage to some concert or festival where he was conducting. Certainly her imaginings had always included a moment of mutual recognition. But whatever her fantasy it had always depended on her taking the initiative. It had never occurred to her that in all innocence of this being her home (of that she was sure) he might one day fetch up on her threshold as a tourist. Had she taken more time to consider, she now perceived, how very easy it would have been simply to avoid him for the duration of his stay – to have lain low for a few days behind the walls of her mercantile villa and the disguise of her mercantile name.

  Still, she was too old to dwell on such things. It was done now. Either he would come or he wouldn’t, either they would meet or not. And if they didn’t, then his happening briefly to share the same small town many thousands of miles from Europe was merely a curious irony such as Fate occasionally supplied in impish mood, a way of pointing up four decades of estrangement between two people before each went to a widely-distant grave.

  She brushed both palms over her thighs and began to play the second of Schumann’s Davidsbündler dances. It was what she had played when the news of Eusebius’s death had reached her, and she had done so with the unopened letter on the music stand as though she were playing the text she had no need of reading. The letter from her surviving sister, with whom she had so little communication that she vaguely knew the handwriting before she could identify it, had exuded an unmistakable aura of next-of-kin. Besides, no letter from Germany in late 1917 could possibly have brought good news. And so she had played without stopping to wonder what to play for an occasion she had long awaited. Later, having done with more conventional ways of expressing loss, she wondered at so unhesitant a choice. As a formally-trained pianist she had, after all, more than three hundred years of keyboard music from which to choose. Why not Bach? Mozart? Almost any Beethoven slow movement? But instead what had come foremost to her fingers was this haunted piece of romanticism, full equally of longing and the loss which engenders it, and with that air of not trying to console which is its own consolation. Beginning on a wayward harmony, the music transcended mere wistfulness by suggesting to the inner ear even after the final cadence that it was still going on endlessly, forever slanted away from resolution.

  This short piece she now played without self-indulgence as to rubato, letting the dreamy, faraway quality of the writing do its own work. The notes rang softly in the wood-cased room. Presences came and went: Eusebius, who had himself loved it; Otto, who hadn’t. Behind them the years stretched back to Leipzig where she had studied at the Conservatoire, full of ambition to become the Clara Schumann of her day. And behind even such evanescent ghosts of the personal past the great tradition of European culture stood, that magic mountain from which this gem had been chipped. It bulked in the room as in her life. It was as if most days when the roosters woke her in the villa she left her netted bed and went to the opened windows and saw, rising majestically from the still-benighted stain of forest stretching to every horizon, this huge and singular alp. It imprinted its splendour on the landscape of dawn, drawing the eye up the dark pyramid of its foothills towards the peak from whose glittering snows the wind drew a plume of ice crystals like smoke across the pale blue sky. Sometimes the mountain was there when she looked again; often it vanished completely for weeks or even months as if worn out by having to transcend so inimical a climate, so unpromising a place. It was a reassuring vision; it was poignant. It had been many years before she finally accepted that she would only ever be able to look at it: she would never herself tread even its lowest slopes and gaze out with a unique view. This realisation had been a source of abject despondency, then of sadness, and led finally to a judgement – neither resigned nor bitter – that things were as they were and that it was more to the point to run a Schiller Institute in an outpost which craved culture than to keep up the pretence of failed genius in perpetual exile. Brisk as she was accustomed to be with herself, Frau von Pussels was honest enough to wonder whether it was still possible for her to be betrayed by what had once been a marked tendency towards Schwärmerei, a certain girlishness of admiration for anyone she suspected of being able to see for themselves the view from the magic mountain.

  Often since her husband’s death it had been supposed she might leave Manaos and return to Germany although no-one had been so tasteless as actually to presume it to her face. Yet she had spent half her lifetime here and everything she read and heard about Europe led her to imagine she would find little left that was familiar. The Germans – and the English too, for that matter – had a saying which in effect ran: ‘You’ve made your bed, now lie in it’ which was always meant punitively. Yet in the last thirty years she had been making a bed here which she accepted would also be her death-bed and she was perfectly content to lie in something she had prepared with care and which fitted her comfortably. It was not the moment for a lumpy mattress amid the wreckage of the land of her birth.

  Not that by contrast with Europe Brazil itself had remained hearteningly unchanged. The whole of the Amazon region, and Manaos in particular, had seen a heyday arrive and depart. To that heyday she owed the last three decades of her life. Without it her husband would never have been tempted to pull up his Hanseatic roots and re-plant himself in the scalding red laterite of the South American jungle. Without it, too, she herself would have had no Schiller Institute, no thriving cultural court. This was Brazil, not California or Australia. She had seen pictures of the ghost towns which had once been centres of gold rushes or various other mad scrambles for mineral wealth (she was a little vague about what it was they mined in Australia) and despite contemporary accounts of prodigious fortunes and booming local economies there appeared to remain little now but a single main street in the middle of nowhere, a sad splintery line of wooden shacks through whose sagging doorways many hundreds of pungent men had once been carried or thrown in the last stages of mortal injury and inebriation. Amazonas, by contrast, was a land where a living was even more hazardously earned on the edges of a primaeval abyss of bites, stings, fevers, poisons and murderous slavery into which anyone might topple at any time and vanish without headstone. Yet on every cartload of the sticky black footballs of borracha latex creaking and rumbling down to the wharf at Manaos the Government had levied a tax of twenty per cent with which it built O Teatro do Amazonas, now ubiquitously known as the Opera House. The souls of the town’s inhabitants no doubt dwelt in the shadow of its Cathedral but their lives were lived in the radiance shed by the dome of the Opera House with its gilded tiles. ‘Look,’ this splendid and preposterous building said to them as it winked and flashed amid the endless forests like a Fabergé egg on a football pitch, ‘I am no ornament, I am central to life. Without art, without music, there is nothing. Without civilisation the sun shines only on the backs of greedy men grubbing endlessly for gold. Without culture they leave hovels and a wasteland, a Klondyke from which the survivors stagger away with what wealth they can carry, as truly impoverished as when they arrived.’

  For Manaos was a marvellous, romantic idea, and this was what she loved – perhaps e
ven more now it was in its first evident stages of decay. An Opera House seating sixteen hundred people (many of them in four tiers of boxes decorated with cherubs and angels) in the middle of the world’s most trackless jungle: how could that idea be resisted? And some of the best-known figures in the performing arts had made no attempt to resist, sailing up the Amazon with their tiaras and entourages, impresarios with snapping black moustaches and boxes holding collapsible opera hats. Tetrazzini, Melba, Melchior, Caruso, Gigli, Rubinstein, the Ballet Russe … all had come and sung and played and danced and even – in the case of Villa-Lobos – composed here. Sarah Bernhardt had played Phèdre. Yet not the least of the place’s oddities, as Frau von Pussels took pleasure in reflecting, was that in all her years here she could not recall a single performance of an opera. Instead the musical lions and grandees made the pilgrimage to give recitals, for as an experience it was unforgettable, salutary in a way in which commuting between state opera-houses in Dresden, Berlin, Vienna, Paris and Milan was not. In Europe’s capitals the performers vied to keep their careers in as dazzling a shine as possible; here they could play the messianic role of bearing a brave, raw flame into prehistoric night. They soon found it did no harm to their careers, either, to add Manaos to the list of places where they had triumphed. To have taken Copenhagen by storm would probably have been just as within their powers but it lacked glamour. In 1901 an American big-game hunter variously named as Blenker and Blanket had ascended the dome of the Opera House and shot an onça prowling the nearest outskirts of town. By 1923 it would have been necessary to go to the last stop on the tramway to be able to get a clear shot at a jaguar, but even now there was no part of the town further than twenty minutes’ walk from aboriginal and unexplored jungle.

  About such a place – one which Frau von Pussels knew stone by stone – there was more than a hint of dignified decline. As the eyebrows of elderly aristocrats might gradually show a tendency towards bushiness or their ears and noses to sprout odd tufts of hair, so were the colonial mansions beginning to betray their age and circumstances, albeit without real shabbiness as yet. Their gardens were for ever on the point of rampage. Speckles of jungle had begun breaking out here and there across town, swags of greenery bursting through stucco façades. On the roof of the tramway’s main shed orchids grew and power failures were becoming more frequent so that passengers were sometimes trapped inside their stalled machines for the duration of the midday downpour. After dusk all the street-lights would suddenly go out and passers-by would pick their way carefully along pavements full of tilted flagstones and potholes by the intermittent lightning-bursts of a silent storm far overhead. When the electroliers came back on they revealed, sauntering out of a tropical night full of obstacles such as dead curs and the legs of beggars, beautifully dressed ladies and gentlemen arm-in-arm, raising their straw hats to one another or stopping to point out a passage in the evening newspapers they carried in one gloved hand.

  About all this there was nothing resembling the deluge which had so recently swept away much of Old Europe. From the viewpoint of an overseas observer the writing was on the wall there – or on such walls as were still standing. Here by contrast the walls sprouted nothing more prophetic than mango suckers, and the business community cheerfully speculated about the next boom which would restore the region’s fortunes as if there were some law common to nature and commerce which provided that all glory, once departed, must return. Only at times was the Director of the Schiller Institute overtaken by a certainty that something was unstoppably ending. But when she thought more carefully about what it might be she was always faced with her own ungainsayables: her son, her husband, her life. By the mere virtue of having lived into her seventh decade, Magdalena von Pussels was herself inexorably declining. Beside that the temporary ups and downs of a local economy seemed as repairable as masonry.

  When she had finished playing she closed the lid of the piano and stood up. The music hanging in the air continued to speak of irresolution. If she no longer actively missed the first twenty-five years of her life with their endless concert-going and music-making, her marriage and uprooting still occasionally seemed to have set off an unnatural silence. It was presumably to be expected that the friends of her youth should mostly have dropped away until she now did no more than exchange one or two dutiful letters at Christmas-time. But the suddenly-materialised ghost of Edward was another matter, for his career had been as vivid to her as if she had watched it from an adjacent room instead of from so many thousand miles away.

  From their first meeting in Leipzig in 1883 he had dazzled and exasperated her early twenties and, it had turned out, he was fated to remain for her as a beloved paradigm of the young artist plodding his lonely way up the sunless side of the magic mountain. Yet at the time she had believed she was also making the same ascent, unimpressed by the uniformly gloomy view and puzzled by how uncompanionable it was. Eventually it had been she who ended the relationship, her amour propre wounded by his refusal to pay at least as much court to her genius as she did to his. Later that same year she had gone to England for a two months’ return visit when he had taken lodgings for her in Worcester. On his home ground she had wondered at his strange mixture of childishness and ruthless self-sufficiency which she could all too easily see might characterise genius. It was something she conspicuously lacked herself; and the more she reasonably insisted on her daily three hours’ piano practice the more it seemed to be asserting a hollowness. Edward had been amiably indulgent, which made it worse. He was not fond of the piano as an instrument and once told her it was a useful tool to keep in a vestry. Finally, genius had to be creative in some way: even Clara Schumann had written her own music and, what was more, in the face of her husband’s.

  The walks with Edward up on the Malvern hills and down by the river were perfectly memorable for ebullient conversations inexplicably broken off when she would glance at him and know she no longer existed. There were rumpled pieces of manuscript paper in his pockets, some of which had bars showing every evidence of having been scrawled behind the tree where he was supposed to be answering a call of nature. Even at a distance of nearly forty years Magdalena experienced afresh the feel of his company, that gawky young man with legs whose thinness could be inferred through his trousers and the brown hair he always seemed to be combing with water. She had never before or since met precisely his blend of chronic self-doubt and arrogance, especially not allied with all sorts of exuberant high spirits. For a short while she had been happier than she would have thought likely; and in this tropical room so far removed from the original scene saw again a slicing of light off varnished oars, a swan drift by with a single black web tucked up across its back. The sadness which followed this vision had less to do with lost opportunities than it did with the mere ability to look back forty years to a sunlight which was not imagined.

  Raymundo pushed open the door of the salon but remained diffidently on the threshold as if uncertain from the silence whether she were still in the room.

  ‘It’s about the bush.’

  ‘Bush, Raymundo? Oh yes, I’d forgotten to tell João. I’ve heard it’s arriving on the fifteenth, that’s Saturday week, so you and he will arrange to meet the boat and bring it back then, please. It is to go in the hall like last year’s but this time if it’s too tall will you make certain João cuts an appropriate amount off the bottom rather than the top? It looked most peculiar.’

  ‘Sim senhora. But that was because …’

  ‘I quite remember what I said then and I was wrong. It was a mistake. I don’t wish to repeat it.’

  The boy disappeared leaving a flash of dark eyes on the air behind him, but it was not one of comprehension. To somebody born within horizons filled with nothing but trees it must have seemed eccentric indeed to bring a single Christmas tree in a ship from a distant country. It had been beyond Magdalena’s patience to explain either the Weimar Republic or its idea that the battered Germanic spirit might be inspirationally nursed bac
k to health by means of national symbols. In the Ministerium in Berlin someone had conceived the image of exiles gathering in embassies and cultural missions across the world to sing ‘O Tannenbaum’ as if from the glary African or South American sky outside heavy snow were really falling on shivering Germans hurrying in for Glühwein and gingerbread. The tree they had sent last year arrived in Manaos scarcely three weeks after it had last sighed to the winter winds of the Black Forest. It was in perfect condition, beautifully packed in a long deal box like some monstrous cigar. Only when João the gardener had come to unpack it was it found to be three feet too tall for any room in the house. It had been her idea not to cut off the bottom since she entertained a fancy of re-planting it in the garden after the festivities were over. It had seemed scandalous to bring a living tree all that way merely to bundle it up as firewood, and it intrigued her to imagine it taking root in so alien a habitat.

  The roots had been left and the top pollarded instead so the tree ended flatly like a bottle-brush. This had been more or less disguised by artful tapering but it was not an aesthetic success for all its popularity with visitors. João had carted it off and dropped it into a hole in an obscure corner of the garden. To everyone’s surprise it had not died at once but quite the contrary had begun growing at an amazing rate, putting out shoots and sprigs for a period of several months. Then just as suddenly, as if drained by this unnatural spring, it had wilted and gone brown, its spears etiolated as wild asparagus. João had dug it up again and it did indeed play its part in the burning of several batches of the Institute’s guava jelly.