Charbonneau (15 page)

DECEMBER 23: “Amalie’s husband is home on leave for the holidays; she claims to be simply eager to see me, but what she seems is unconsciously eager to flaunt her affair before her husband, which I find embarrassing and distasteful. In addition, her
clinging
is becoming
cloying
. As I am returned to the Prince’s apartment for the time and obliged with a busy holiday season here, I think it better to let the affair drop. It was only a passing dalliance, pleasant enough, in the life of
le sauvage naïf
.”

JANUARY 1, 1825: “Sternenstein left the grand celebration at the castle yesterday evening before midnight, in a minor transgression against my host in this country, to attend Madame Hoffman’s assembly. She, dressed in black coat and trousers, as is apparently her custom, looked most striking with her pale skin and jet hair. I feigned indifference to her for an hour before admitting—to myself only—that I am as entranced with her as before. She engaged in a substantial discussion of a painter whom I know nothing of. Once again I was thinking that I behaved like an awkward, retreating boy: but whether or no, I am invited to tea on Thursday. She says she has a friend who is most eager to meet me. Our hero’s single resolution for the New Year is to cultivate Madame Sophie Hoffman, and amorously.”

Just as Baptiste was chiding himself for sitting there frozen, and wondering whether hot coffee might loosen his arthritic tongue, Sophie launched in.

“Johannes”—that was the portly professor of music in the leather chair—“is interested in Indian music,” she said. “I understand that you play. Will you?”

He apologized for not having his mouth organ and for being inept at the pianoforte. (Damn! She must have heard about my demonstration at Herr Weiskopfs.) Johannes lent him his churchwarden.

“The Sioux begins his songs by offering his respects to the gods,” Baptiste started, the pipe in his hand. He mimed blowing smoke upward, downward, and to all four sides. “He honors the sky, the earth, the west, where the thunder-beings live, the north where lives the white giant, the east whence comes the morning star, the south whence comes the spring.” Johannes looked fascinated. “He takes his time about all this. It does not do to hurry the sacred powers.

“He holds up his medicine bag as he sings. It holds some object—a bear claw, a jay’s feather, a black stone—that has been revealed to him in a dream as his private, sacred emblem and protector. The song is holy as well, and it is his personal song. Songs often come in dreams, and are handed down from father to son. A man who does not dream a song or inherit one, must buy a song from a man who has one. Songs are sacred personal property. An elementary notion of copyright, sanctified.

“This is a song that a holy Sioux heard the sun sing at daybreak one day:

With visible face I am appearing.

In a sacred manner I appear.

For the greening earth a pleasantness I make.

The center of the nation’s hoop I have made pleasant.

With visible face, behold me!

The four-leggeds and two-leggeds, I have made them to walk.

The wings of the air, I have made them to fly.

With visible face I appear.

My day, I have made it holy.

He sang it in the Sioux tongue, knowing that he was getting half of it wrong. He sang with his eyes closed, trying to bring back some of the rapt intensity of the old medicine man who chanted it.

He was damned uncomfortable, but Sophie and Johannes were eager for more. He gave them two of his favorites and tried to quit. Then he gave them three or four more that he knew well, plus a couple that he might be misremembering. Johannes had taken out a notepad and pencil and asked if Baptiste would play them on the piano; he wanted to transcribe one or two. So Baptiste picked them out with one finger—he had some idea of the pitch equivalents from his mouth organ.

In the middle of the “Corn Song,” Karlheinz came in with a stranger, Hamlet trailing. “So you have him,” the fellow said at large when the song ended. Sophie presented him as Jacques Balmat, professor of philosophy. He was a tall man with a red face, strong bony features, and a strange air of energy about him. He was Baptiste’s idea of what a revolutionary would look like.

“You are more than fashionably late, gentlemen,” Sophie chided them.

“I delayed Jacques because of a most engaging barmaid,” Karlheinz grinned.

The maid served more coffee and cakes. “I am curious what you see as the central differences between white and Indian cultures,” Jacques started.

“Jacques, must you be so blunt?” asked Sophie.

He ignored her. “Some philosophers have the idea that man left alone in his natural state, untouched by civilization, has an innate nobility. The traditional idea is that the savage grovels in benightedness.”

“I have been exposed to Monsieur Rousseau,” Baptiste said uneasily.

“Jacques,” interjected Karlheinz, “must you philosophers always play chess with ideas? If you want to play chess, then, let’s play. Sophie, have the board brought.” He gave Hamlet a small cake.

“Baptiste,” Sophie said quietly, “how much did you live with your Indian people?”

His own tribe he scarcely knew, he answered. He had lived until his sixth year among the Mandans and Minatarees, and five summers among various tribes—Sioux, Osage, Ankara, Iowa, Kansas, Pawnee. And how long among the whites? He’d gone to school in St. Louis for twelve years, he said, and then had come to Europe. He was twenty years old.

“You are a white man, then, with red skin,” inserted Jacques. “Your mind is white.” Jacques seemed to be very sure and definite about everything. It made Baptiste uncomfortable.

“The first six years can be formative,” Sophie said.

She led him into talking about Indian music and white music and the difference between them. Baptiste explained that all Indian music is sacred. It is all, in effect, prayer. The Osage “Corn Song” he had sung for them, for instance; it is a tribute to the force—the god, if you like—that makes things grow, and was intended to produce the effect of a healthy and abundant crop.

A mid the earth, renewed in verdure,

A mid the rising smoke, my grandfather’s footprints

I see, as from place to place I wander,

The rising smoke I see as I wander,

A mid all forms visible, the rising smoke

I see, as I move from place to place.

A mid all forms visible, the little hills in rows

I see, as I move from place to place.

A mid all forms visible, the spreading blades

I see as I move from place to place.

A mid all forms visible, the light day

I see as I move from place to place.

Baptiste translated the song into German, line by line, pointing out that the new greenness and the growth-bringing mist are the visible forms of the great spirit, his footprints, and pointing out the tone of reverence and thanks. The incantation of these powers, he explained, would make the corn sprout from the earth. The Indian perceived a magic power not only in natural forces, but in the words of his song that named them. The making of the sound of the word, this act itself, has a magical power. So it is with a death song, he said. An Indian sings his death song and clutches his medicine when in ultimate danger. The object would have been revealed to him in a dream, as protective against death, and the song with it. He believes that if he invokes the powers implicit in the object and the words of the song, they will defend him against insuperable odds. So it is with a rain song and rain dance, a buffalo song and buffalo dance. All call on mysterious forces in nature to make something happen. Indian music in that way is sacred.

Baptiste was talking animatedly. He had not quite known he knew these things.

Johannes asked if the white man’s music seemed sacred to him as well. Baptiste considered. He thought not. He did not see a religious attitude in a boatman’s song or in a square-dance music or a polka or a drinking song. But in some European music, yes. He thought of the orchestra concert he heard when first in Stuttgart. That had a serious tone, maybe a sacred tone. The words were elusive here, he thought, the meaning of “sacred.” He mentioned Beethoven and Mozart. Some of their music was not frivolous like a drinking song. Still, young ladies performed their music in salons to demonstrate their personal accomplishments, with no sacred motive. That was frivolity. The white man had a different attitude toward music.

Jacques asked what the words “visible forms” in the “Corn Song” meant.

Some Indians have the idea, Baptiste said, that things, objects in the world, are visible representations of their true forms, which reside in the center of the earth and are sometimes revealed to men by the gods in dreams. Thus “renewed verdure” is the visible form of the principle, the force, that brings spring back to the earth. The principle is permanent and true, the greenness its manifestation.

“Plato among the primitives,” Jacques exclaimed, amused.

Baptiste remembered something of Plato’s metaphor of the cave from a lecture at the University, but he was impatient of metaphysical speculation. He remembered also that the lecturer pondered whether individual men exist or only the idea Man, or whether all men and all existence might not be an idea in the mind of God, and have no independent existence at all. Baptiste thought that sort of questioning the silliest thing he had ever heard. Only a white man, he had thought, would ask whether hunger pangs were real, whether he had a belly to be empty. A sensible man asked only where the pantry was.

So Baptiste was annoyed at the prospect of the conversation’s taking a metaphysical turn.

Just then, Karlheinz fortunately suggested a supper at his favorite small restaurant, which served squid, and they all accepted.

When the supper broke up, Jacques insisted to Baptiste that they must meet again and talk. Jacques was terribly urgent about everything, Baptiste thought, but he accepted. Johannes thanked him. Baptiste noticed that Jacques took Sophie home, and was jealous. He noted in his diary that night that he had not made any small gesture toward starting his campaign to become her lover.

JANUARY 9, 1825: Baptiste’s diary: “Sophie, myself, Karlheinz, Johannes, and Jacques to the ballet this evening. Boring, boring, boring. We left at the interval.”

JANUARY 12: “Sophie, Helga, and Stemenstein to the river this afternoon for a long walk. A splendid day: The temperature was down, and kept the snow hard; it shone almost blindingly in the sunlight. Cold enough to require warmed brandy after. Helga, a middle-aged gentlewoman who was once mistress to a duke, is the only female friend Sophie has, so far as I know.”

JANUARY 15: “Visited Sophie’s salon this afternoon, but found her much preoccupied with her friend Giovanni, a Florentine sculptor who arrived today and is apparently her houseguest. Tavern-crawling with Karlheinz and Hamlet most of the night, with the result of too much wine and a groggy head.”

JANUARY 19: “The morning with
Herr Kapellmeister
: My playing has improved greatly since I dropped classes and started practicing with a modicum of regularity. Consequently, he has offered to teach me musical theory as well, which promises to be interesting. I was writing out some exercises when Sophie and Jacques appeared by surprise at my rooms. (She really cares nothing for the proprieties!) The afternoon spent amiably in their company, they talking about novelists;
le sauvage naïf
, regrettably, could do little but listen. She and Jacques are invariably together; I wonder what she sees in him, as I find him mildly interesting but abrasive.”

“Are you religious?” Jacques asked over the rim of his brandy glass.

“Sophie,” said Karlheinz, “if we are teetering into this sort of talk again, I will need much more brandy than this.”

“I’d like to talk about it,” Baptiste said. He had been given three religions, in fact: the first by his mother and the Minataree Indians, wordlessly; the second by a hell-fire-and-damnation Baptist preacher—here Baptiste gave a short comic digression on Welch’s lurid imaginings; the third by a withdrawn, effete, intellectual Jesuit. The three freethinkers were amused by the tales of the confusion these religions caused in Baptiste. Until he was fourteen or fifteen, he said, he had simply believed all of them without questioning. He was aware of no contradiction.

“And which would you choose now?” Karlheinz asked. Baptiste was taken aback at Karlheinz’s asking.

“None,” he replied promptly. “Religion is a way of putting order onto what should remain chaotic.”

Sophie asked him to describe the Indian attitudes toward their gods.

The principal difference between the Indian gods and the Christian god, Baptiste answered, was that Jehovah was a defined sort of person, a kind of superman, and the Indian gods were natural forces, power of the water that makes it flow, the power that brings rain, the power of the winds, the power in the elk, the power in grass. The Indians saw power in every animate and inanimate thing—the secret power that made it what it was—and he revered and solicited that power, the hardness of the rock, the ferocity of the bear, the warmth and light of the sun. That was the essence of his religion.

Jacques judged that it sounded more sensible to him than Christianity. At least the object of worship was, in a sense, real.

Karlheinz disagreed. It was not real. If the Indian understood that gravity makes water run downhill, that rain comes from the ocean and is brought by winds whose motion follows natural laws—if he understood that the phenomena he worshipped were natural and not supernatural—he would have no religion.

Jacques said that was why it was more sensible.

Sophie asked Baptiste what he thought.

He reflected a little before he answered. “The religion sounds more attractive than it is. The Indians I’ve seen are craven in their worship. They are dominated by fear of the powers they appeal to. Since they don’t understand natural forces, they believe the powers are whimsical, arbitrary, malicious. Why do the rains abandon them for long periods? Why does thunder come and strike their forests with fire and deluge them with water and swell the rivers until they are impossible to cross? It makes no sense. So the Indian quakes before his gods. I hate that.”