‘Any admirer of Oscar Wilde is a friend of mine,’ he said.
I duly laughed and I could tell he was pleased, but did not flatter myself that it was anything to do with me personally. I was company, that was all.
‘Mr Wilde, I would like to invite you to have dinner with me,’ I said.
‘My dear Mr Ellwood, you look far too young and indigent to be taking Oscar Wilde out to dinner at an expensive restaurant. I will take you out to dinner.’
Just imagine my delight!
‘However,’ he went on. ‘In order for me to do so, I shall require a small loan from you of a thousand francs.’
I hesitated for a moment. A thousand francs was a lot of dough, but I knew I could get a good return on my investment, so I arranged to meet him at the café that evening with the thousand francs. I may have been a greenhorn, but I wasn’t such a greenhorn as to expect that I would ever get the loan back. As Oscar said when we took our temporary leave: ‘Your reward will be in heaven, my boy.’ Then he added, characteristically: ‘Where mine will be is rather more problematic.’
That evening we met at the Café des Deux Magots where I handed him the one thousand francs. As soon as I had done so he became anxious that we should be on our way.
‘We will not go to Maxim’s or anywhere like that,’ said Oscar. ‘I know a place that is quite exquisite and even more costly: Bignon’s. We shall have a private room. They know me well there: in fact they know me so well that, out of courtesy, they always fail to recognise me. I who was once a votary of fame now worship anonymity. My reputation no longer precedes me; it dogs me like a shadow. Take my advice, my boy, and never become notorious: it is so horribly expensive.’
With an imperious gesture he summoned a fiacre which he ordered to take us to Bignon’s. When we were in the carriage he said: ‘After we have dined, I shall tell you all the dreadful secrets of my hideous life. That is what you want me to do, isn’t it?’
I tried to offer up some protest, but he waved it aside.
‘No, no. I could tell at once that you were a perfectly normal healthy young man and therefore eager to learn every sordid detail. It is quite natural. We love to contemplate the vices to which we have never been tempted. I, for instance, am always anxious to learn everything I can about the selling of insurance. It seems to me a most romantic and dangerous profession.’
At Bignon’s we were given a private room and Oscar ordered a sumptuous meal with all the best wines, making substantial inroads into that one thousand francs. During dinner, he asked me about myself and my life and seemed genuinely interested in the most minute and mundane details of my existence. I noticed that, though he plied me with food, he ate sparingly, and there were times when he appeared to be in pain, yet he said nothing of it. He consumed a great deal of alcohol by which he seemed quite unaffected, as the elegant flow of his conversation was unstemmed.
It was when the meal was almost over that Oscar began to talk about himself. He was obviously reluctant to discuss certain incidents in his career—in his present state both his triumphs and tragedies must have been equally painful to recall—so he confined himself to observations about life, art and his approach to them both. With many of these I was familiar, and I waited for an opportunity to probe beneath this urbane, epigrammatic surface. I knew I must do so subtly, because he would immediately shield himself against any crude attempt to crack the carapace. However, a moment came when I saw my chance.
‘I am one of those people,’ Oscar was saying, ‘like Théophile Gautier, “pour qui le monde visible existe”. For whom the visible world exists. As for the invisible world . . . ah, that is a more troublesome issue! I acknowledge its existence, I admire its advantages, but I have no experience of its attractions. One reads Dante, of course, but his charm for me lies in the certainty that he is reporting inaccurately. His Divine Comedy is like the best journalism, full of the most fascinating gossip that one may choose to believe or disbelieve according to taste.’
‘But there must have been times,’ I said, ‘when you would have been tempted to pierce the veil and find out for yourself.’
There was a pause during which Oscar stared at me, then he drained his glass of burgundy and said quite casually:
‘Suicide, you mean? I was never really tempted to kill myself. Even when a part of me died in Reading Gaol, I never thought seriously of that as a way out. What I felt was that I must drain the chalice of my passion to the dregs.’
‘You have written that “each man kills the thing he loves”.’
‘My dear Ellwood, what on earth makes you think that I love myself? Self admiration and self love are quite different things. To love oneself is the beginning of folly, to admire oneself is the beginning of an exquisite career, and perhaps the end of it too. Besides, to commit suicide is not to kill oneself. On the contrary, it is to destroy everything but oneself. Don’t you see? We can escape all things but ourselves. That is man’s glory and his tragedy; at least it is mine, and that amounts to the same thing.’
‘But there must have been times, nevertheless . . . ?’
Another long pause followed, and I thought he was not going to rise to my challenge, but eventually he said: ‘You are quite right, and there was one occasion when I thought of ending my life. There is at Naples a garden where those who have determined to kill themselves go. It is called, I believe, il Giardino dei Stranieri, the Garden of Strangers. I do not know if the name has some sinister import or if it was called that long before it began to be put to such deadly use. Well, some two years ago, after Bosie had gone away, I was so cast down by the boredom of leaving the villa at Posilipo, and by the annoyance that some absurd friends in England were giving me, that I felt I could bear no more. Really, I came to wish that I was back in my prisoner’s cell picking oakum. I thought of suicide. Yes! Oscar Wilde, the passionate worshipper at the shrine of life, once contemplated such a thing.’
‘Did you go to this garden with the means of performing the act? What did you take with you? A gun? Prussic acid?’
‘Oh, my dear Ellwood, nothing so vulgarly practical.’ He laughed. ‘I suppose I had a vague notion that someone would be there to sell me the means, just as in pleasure gardens there may be sellers of balloons or ice cream. Incidentally, dear boy, talking of ice cream, they do a Bombe here which is a work of art. It is the Mona Lisa of ices. Shall we indulge, before our cognac?’
We ordered our ices and he continued.
‘It was too far to walk from my hotel in Naples so I determined to take a carriage. I tried any number of drivers, but they refused, even for ready money. They seemed to look upon the act of driving me to my grave as ill-omened. Eventually I secured the services of a villainous old fellow who was prepared to take me there in his dreadful old carrozza for a perfectly ridiculous sum of money.
‘The Garden of Strangers is situated on a little hill overlooking the bay of Naples. I had occasion to reflect that the rather absurd injunction to “see Naples and die” had an ironic appropriateness for me. At any rate the view was, I suppose, as views go, a good one. Personally, I have very little time for views. Views are like women of a certain age: the vaster they are, the less they have to offer. Give me a simple silver-crowned olive tree to contemplate, or a dew drop upon a rose. It is the small things which enlarge the soul.
‘As for the garden itself, I understand that it had once been attached to the villa of a Neapolitan nobleman who, in a fit of misguided philanthropism, had left it upon his death to the Municipality. He had evidently disregarded the universal truth that what belongs to everyone, belongs to nobody; but perhaps his bequest was a subtle act of revenge on the world, for the Marchese di Catalani del Dongo—yes, that was his extravagant name—died by his own hand. It was the old story: unrequited hatred. He could not bear the fact that the friend whose wife he had so callously seduced was still very fond of him. Can you imagine a more cutting insult to an Italian lover? In England and France they do things differently, of course
. In France they are realists and know that it is always the lover and not the cuckolded husband who is the true injured party, so they shrug their shoulders. In England respectability is everything: in private you threaten to horsewhip your wife’s lover; in public you take him out onto the golf course and offer him an insulting three stroke advantage. The Italians know nothing of golf: that is the secret of their charm, and the origin of their misfortunes.
‘Well the garden is not a very exciting affair. A few dusty paths wind between overgrown and uncared-for shrubberies. Tall sentinels of cypress—that most melancholy of trees—pierce the sky. There are a number of terraces where one may sit down upon a stone bench to contemplate the view, and, presumably, commit the awful act. So I went and sat down upon one of these.
‘It was a dull evening, thick and oppressive, and I knew that the coming night would be unblessed by stars. I was relieved to see that there was nobody about, nobody living, that is; but I immediately became aware that I was, nevertheless, not alone. I felt, as one sometimes feels when walking along a busy street in a great city, oppressed by the massed crowd of strangers whose lives are unknown to you, who pass by uncaring, who mean nothing to you and to whom you mean nothing. I thought then that the garden was well named.
‘Actual physical impressions were slight. I heard a rustling noise which might only have been the fluster of a bird in the shrubberies, and a sighing which could have been the breeze. Cloud-like things seemed to cluster round me, but that could merely have been the evening mist. But there was life there, of a sort, I was sure of it: the very stillness was like a live thing, and no bird sang.
‘I sat on my bench, now not daring to move, feeling the presence of many beings very near. They seemed to come close to me for warmth and for the little life that I had within me. I sensed that some wished to communicate with me, but either they could not or did not know how; yet there were three presences, less insubstantial than the rest, who appeared to have that ability. Why these three and no others I cannot say; it is a mystery to me. They clustered round me so close that I could vaguely discern their shape. I could just feel their cold breath upon my cheek and hair; and I could hear their voices, at least with my inward ear.
‘The first spirit to address me was, I think, the youngest and female. A vision was impressed upon my imagination of a beautiful raven-haired girl. Her origins were humble, she told me, for she was one of seven, the daughter of a small shopkeeper in Porto Ercole. She could not have known English and my Italian was somewhat more classical than hers, but when our minds met we understood one another perfectly. Her name was Simonetta.
‘ “My father wanted me to marry some man just because he had a shop that was much bigger than our own,” said Simonetta. “Everyone said it was a good match, even though he was old and fat. But I could not have married him because I was already in love. Carlo was a fisherman working on the boats out of Porto Ercole. He was dark like me, and tall, and his eyelashes were long. I had seen him first on the beach walking with bare feet down to his boat and I knew then that he must be mine. He walked so easily; it was the walk of a man who knew what he was doing, where he was going, and he had beautiful feet. So I found a way in which we should meet and we fell in love. We did not say much to one another—there are some things which are beyond words—but he told me he was alone in the world, his mother and father having both died. Carlo and I exchanged tokens. I gave him an old ring which I had found in a drawer of my father’s house and he gave me a little sea shell on a silver chain. Then one night, on the beach, beneath a crowd of stars and a crescent moon, we became man and wife. The next day at dawn he and his boat sailed out into the bay to catch tuna. The weather changed: there was wind and rain, and the sea turned black, but he did not return. I became half mad with grief. I begged some of the other fishermen to go out and look, but they would not for fear of losing their own lives. On the fifth day after he had gone Carlo’s body was washed up on the shore. His face was half eaten away with fishes and gashed by the cruel rocks but the other half I knew to be his. He appeared to be asleep, looking as I had last seen him when I had left him on the beach in the green dawn, and my ring was still on his finger. You think that was what made me come here to cut my throat with a knife? No, it was not that; it was what happened at the funeral. Few went, but there was one there whom I had not seen before. She was a young woman like myself, but painted and dressed in cheap finery. I had seen such women parading up and down on the Strada della Marina and I knew what sort she was. I wondered what she was doing there, and my heart became full of terror. When the coffin was lowered into the grave this woman took something from around her neck and cast it into the grave, and I saw that this thing was a little seashell on a silver chain, like mine. At that moment, I believe I lost my soul. I became distracted. I was a mad thing, and there was no-one who could do anything for me. At last I found myself in the Giardino dei Stranieri because there seemed to be nowhere else that I could go. It is a hard thing to make oneself die, but what followed was still harder. At the moment of my death Carlo, my beloved Carlo came to me in a vision, weeping.
‘ “ ‘Why have you done this thing, carissima?’ he cried. ‘We might have been together for all eternity, but now a gulf is fixed between you and me because of your terrible act.’
‘ “ ‘Do not speak to me, Carlo,’ I shouted at him. ‘I have no desire to spend all eternity with a faithless lover.’
‘ “ ‘Faithless? How faithless?’ said Carlo. ‘I was never faithless to you, Simonetta.’
‘ “I told him not to lie to me, but Carlo said that the dead cannot lie, only the living can do that. So I asked him what that woman was doing at the funeral and why she was wearing the same love token that he had given me.
‘ “Carlo said: ‘It was my sister. Fool that I was, I never spoke of her to you out of shame for what she had become. I did not want even the thought of her to soil the purity of your innocence.’ And so my true lover Carlo left me, and I remain in this place.”
‘With that the shade of Simonetta drifted away, leaving me filled with an immortal sadness. By this time night had descended over the Garden of Strangers and I could see little save the lights of Naples glimmering fitfully in the distance. As I rose to go, shivering, another presence held me, this time a man. He pleaded to be heard and I could not deny him.
‘ “Signor,” he said, “I know you to be a great artist, and because of this you will understand and sympathise.”
‘So you see, my boy, my reputation extends even beyond the grave. It is quite wonderful what publicity will do these days. Well, this person, or shade, who insisted on calling himself Maestro Martini, was a curious fellow. I sensed rather than saw that he was a small nervous person, forever restless, and he told his story, accompanied by a whole repertoire of little groans, grunts and squeaks, as if the air around him was infected by his turbulence.
‘ “Signor,” said Martini, “I was born in the city of Nola, the son of the town choirmaster and music teacher, and early I showed an aptitude and a diligence for the art of music. My talent was for the violin and very soon I exceeded what my father could teach me, so I was sent to Naples where I had lessons with Maestro Tardini. I made good progress and was accepted among the second violins at the San Carlo Theatre. But my ambition was to be a great virtuoso, like the great Paganini, travelling the world and exhibiting my art to the admiration of all. I longed above all else to show everyone what an artist I was, so I practised, gave lessons on the instrument to unruly boys, and saved from my meagre salary, because I had decided to prove myself by giving a concert in this city. Eventually I imagined that I saw my opportunity, having discovered from my teacher, Maestro Tardini that the great virtuoso and composer Sivori was about to visit the city. I would persuade Tardini, a friend of Sivori’s, to invite the Maestro to my concert after which he would praise my great gift, endorse my genius and initiate my career as a virtuoso. What I could do in the way of assiduous practice, the hiring of a conc
ert hall, the engagement of musicians and their rehearsing, I did. When the great day arrived I was as ready as I would ever be.
‘ “For the first half I had prepared some Paganini caprices, then after the interval I would play the great E Minor Concerto of Mendelssohn which was just then beginning to be all the rage. Ah, signor! I know what you are thinking! You are thinking that the whole concert was a fiasco and that is why I am here! You are wrong, signor. The concert went superbly and I played as well, if not better than I had ever played with the result that the reception I received was most gratifying. Afterwards I awaited a visit from Maestro Tardini and the great Sivori, but imagine my disappointment when it was only Signor Tardini who called on me after the concert. He said that Sivori had sent his profuse apologies, but that he could not come to thank me in person for he had some pressing business. I asked Tardini what his friend had thought and then I saw my teacher hesitate. Sivori, he said, had thought my playing most correct and accurate, that I would always be a most valuable member of an orchestra, and, no doubt, in time an admirable teacher of the instrument, but I would never be a virtuoso. I lacked the fire, he said, the inner spirit of the true maestro. It was nothing to be ashamed of, he said: some had the spark and some had not. Maestro Tardini laid a kind hand on my shoulder and said that this too was his opinion, but that I was not to be downhearted for such gifts were given to very few.
‘ “When he had left me, I went out and wandered the streets weeping, because I too knew that he was right. I possessed everything in the way of diligence and knowledge, but I lacked the one thing that I needed and wanted. After I had wept I felt a great rage inside me against God who had denied me the only thing that I had ever desired. The prize that I would have toiled through wind and rain to achieve had been capriciously snatched from me. I had done so much; I had achieved so little. I thought that God was a cheat and this world was a sham, so I thought I would cheat both of them. I bought some spirits of aconite and some drops of laudanum at an apothecary’s. I mixed them together in a small glass bottle and set off for the Garden of Strangers.
The Complete Symphonies of Adolf Hitler Page 5
