Remember Me (14 page)

At Hohenschwangau he whipped himself into a fury. He decided to abdicate, for one thing he would not do: he would not give his crown into the hands of the
Prussians.
Let someone else do that. He would not, like Cleopatra, make the long sea journey to Rome in order to keep his crown at the precise moment that he had begun to lose his country. Once he abdicated, he would rule the hills. No one would ever dislodge him there.

It was something he had threatened to do before, and he must have known that he really did not mean to do it. He would be king of the Alpsee, as sunbathers in the course of time, because they cannot tear themselves away from the sand, become the recognized
jerifes
of the beach.

Therefore he sent for Otto. That turned out to be a mistake. One look at Otto was enough to show him why. When Ludwig told him what he proposed, Otto turned a pale, groping face towards him, like that marble face Elizabeth Ney had carved, but much farther away. As Ludwig watched, he seemed to see the sands of sanity slip out from under Otto, as the latter found himself in a sudden surf of events. Otto could never rule.

The light in the room was dim. Ludwig turned away, flinching. He did not want to see Otto sitting like Cnut
in the surf of his own madness, stubbornly, until at last there would only be an empty chair to show where he had been, against which the returning waters faintly washed.

“Speak,” he said. “Say anything, but speak.”

Otto did not want to speak. He looked frightened, but compliance was part of his nature. His voice, when it came, dubious to answer any question, was the thin, furry, bloodless shriek of a bat, too tired at evening to find a place to hang.

“No,” he said. It was the only word he could be induced to say any more, as though he were the negative of himself, but a negative dusty and cracked and
impossible
to print up any longer. He was not quite mad yet. Yet for long afternoons he would sit with his forehead pressed to the glass of a window, looking out at the rain, repeating that one syllable over and over to himself.

Ludwig did not like to see him. It was like looking down unexpectedly into one’s own fresh-dug grave. That woman should not have made that bust, for in so doing she had made something real that otherwise could have been held off a little longer.

Ludwig sighed and tried to explain the situation. Otto only smiled. It was the smile of apathy, the smile of saints. He sat in his mind like the figure in a child’s snow toy, as the artificial snow more slowly settled and
everything
was still around him. Ludwig twitched his hands. There was no escape from the crown he had himself destroyed. All its jewels sprouted into thorns, the emerald spikes, the diamond flowers, the ruby blood. Everyone has a cross to bear, but only now did it occur to him that he was himself his own. Golgotha, too, was a mountain of sorts, towards which he had to drag his way, while the crowds began to jeer. He had had no idea the way could be so long.

Very well. It was quite obvious that he could not abdicate. But he could send Otto to Versailles, where his pale, blinking withdrawn face would show how far Bavaria must be reduced, to yield her sovereignty to Prussia.

When he heard that, Otto looked more frightened than ever. As gently as he could, Ludwig got rid of him. Meanwhile he would return to Munich, briefly, to face down the conquerors.

They might have defeated him, but they would not see him flinch. He would show that for so long as he lived, then Bavaria would have a king. And after that, he would show himself no longer.

He remembered the Galerie des Glaces at Versailles, that interminable room with its mirrors, in which the Germans would be so uncomfortable, yet secretly so pleased to exalt themselves in France. He had not liked that room when he had walked there with Richard. It was strange, but typical, that with Richard he should have been so happy precisely in the halls of his next defeat. It was not a hall, but a corridor. Ludwig had no liking for corridors. They led nowhere, and the doors along their walls were always locked.

The Germans lost no time in parading through Munich. Ludwig defiantly wore black. What else could he wear? He stood at a window of the Residenz and watched the German troops deploy through the streets like toy soldiers, their crests waving gently as seaweed in a tidal pool. He saw Crown Prince Friedrich at the head of them. He knew he would never abase himself before that man.

Yet he would have to ride in this procession, his first ride as a vassal, and see another man at the head of his own troops. Applause meant very little now. It rippled
like laughter and sounded much the same. He let the curtain fall. As soon as he could he would leave the
capital
for good. There were too many mirrors in the rooms of the Residenz. He did not want to see his own face any more. He did not want anyone to see it.

He would grow a beard. There would be no more of the wild little brain, so extolled by Paul, and there had not been for a long, long time.

He had to find a mirror that would not break and that would not distort his features. He could not find it either in people or events. It must be some otherwhere.

So as he rode alone away from the city in his closed carriage, he said farewell to events, as he said farewell also to people. There was no room for him in the world of outer events. He was too big for it, and yet too small.

He could sense Bismarck behind him, like a stern father, gathering up the broken toys of statecraft and putting them away for good. Everything was a toy to Bismarck, even the arts. But the arts were not merely divertimento toys. Like the Spiritual Exercise of St.
Ignatius
Loyola, they were a discipline designed to prepare us for wisdom.

But the preparation was a long one. He was
twenty-five
. He had almost sixteen years to go. Still, if he had known that, he might have felt better, for the
Wittelsbachs
were long lived. He himself thought that he would have to drag his way through fifty.

W
hen a king loses his employment what is he to do? It was to Ludwig as though he had lost the power of speech. The years began to scurry by, like mice in an empty house. He was growing older, and the older we grow, the less alterable become our acts, particularly the distant acts of our childhood, whose momentum drives us
forward
into space, out of our own atmosphere, into the void where nothing exists either to stop us or to slow us down. As though our goal were a planet, we are impelled relentlessly towards a destination that will not be there until we arrive.

There are certain faces which, like those of Phocion, the Buddha under the green fire of the Bo tree, or
Alexander
flushed before the fires of Persepolis, we see very clearly even though no image of them exists to aid our memory. So it is with the face of the ideal, which hangs before us in our dreams, a Medusa which turns not only flesh to stone, but stone to flesh. We can never see the features of the ideal. Yet when it smiles, we are warmed by the familiar expression of a well-loved friend we have known all our lives.

For Ludwig the features were still those of Richard, but only when Richard himself was not present. Only when Richard came into the room did the face begin to fade.

It was to that face that his diary was addressed, in the hope of catching some expression of approval or remorse in those eyes. If we could see our own faces when we were sleeping, we should know much more about the nature of eternity. As it is, we search the face elsewhere.

Yet the human face ages; and it is only the face as first we saw it that we continue to love; so that all the people we know and love and see every day are only the souvenirs of themselves as we first met them, precious to us only for what they remind us of.

And to Ludwig his diary was the only escape he had from loneliness.

The times when he sat down to compose himself
before
making an entry were the only moments he had to himself any more, for it is only when we order our thoughts that we realize our identity. Absorbed in them, we are apt to forget that we are less than they. Day after day he sat before the book and looked at the volume before him. If his diaries were to hold his thoughts, then they must be put together with the same expensive care as some reliquary from the hoard of Liége.

These tall, bound volumes were his good intentions. Anything written in them was written for good.

They were bound in royal blue, richly stamped, and set in the covers, like medieval jewels with magic
properties,
were porcelain plaques of the woodsman he had seen with Paul. Often, at night, now, he reverently turned the pages of himself, found a blank sheet, and began to write. All around him his world had begun to die. There was nothing for him to do but to take its image as he watched it fade.

For certainly his retreat from life had been rapid. He did not live in the 1870’s as he had lived in the 1860’s. He had taken refuge from himself, as much as from the
world, in a dreamlife that pullulated around him, beyond his strength to control.

Now, in the winters, under the male moon, he would glide swiftly through the snow in his sleigh. The sleigh was like something out of a landscape by Boucher. As he rode, the moon always followed him over the trees, like an indifferent and yet kindly eye, so that merely to be seen by something bigger than himself was to survive.

If Richard drove him, then he wrote it down. Under that moon they had the only privacy they ever got.

But when he rode in the cutter, its gilt glittering against the blue shadows of the snow, wrapped up alone in a fur robe against the cold, with a gilt goddess holding aloft her lantern to the path ahead, then Richard was not there, for he would not have him like a footman standing on the step behind him. The bells jangled as the swift cutter swerved through a black wood. It was like
returning
to the Christmas of childhood. When he came out of the cold Fräulein Meilhaus would give him tea. Of course she never did, but still, he wrote it down.

These rides took place in and around Berg, and at the site of Linderhof, the first palace he was to build. His private name for Linderhof was Meicos Ettal, an
anagram
for L’état, c’est moi. Once he had thought that was the motto of kings. Now he began to perceive that it had another meaning even more disdainful. It referred to the country of the self, to which we are always pushed back, when we try to invade others. The self is a defeated country that tried to rule the world and lost. So he drove through the freedom woods of long ago. The breath of the horses rose like an offering. The rides might be freedom, but they ended always in an empty room. Therefore he tried to stretch them out.

Even when Linderhof was finished, at night, with all
the candles crackling down to stubs, he would take a walk through that palace and come eventually to the State Bed in its awful room. He would not get into the bed, but he would look at it.

Standing there, in the garish light that was worse than any darkness, he would begin to tremble. He could feel violence course through his veins like a poison, and knew that when eventually it reached his fingers he would do something unspeakable. Thus, finally, does a man in solitary confinement beat the walls, so that when the gaoler at last comes to free him, he assaults him brutally. He does not do so because he resents his solitary
confinement
. He does not do so because darkness has driven him mad. He does so because the walls are too high.

Often Ludwig would stare at that empty bed behind its sacred railing. He would feel too tired to dare to sleep. At midnight he would summon the sleigh or cutter and go out into the solemn wisdom of the moon. If the sleigh went fast enough, he might be able to catch up with laughter once again.

Others can trap affection into marriage, and keep it by them, even after it is dead. But to people of his
temperament
, the end is in the beginning, so that emotion
becomes
a certain sad tenderness and nothing more.

In the centre of every maze stands a pillar bearing a reflecting globe. The reflecting globe, like the eye, sees many peer within it, but retains the image of none, for none can see the hollow centre of the heart. The globe is deserted. It has no message inside.

Such were his thoughts. Steadily, year after year, he wrote them down. So did those caught in the Kraken toss out a bottle with a message to the world, only to see it enter the maelstrom before or after them.

There were not so many events in those years which
succeeded the Prussian war. Such as they were, he
treasured
them. For it is dreadful to live in a world without events. Like the world of the deaf, it is haunted by
voicelessness
.

In May of 1873 he called Richard back to him and took him to the Amalienberg and the Pagodenberg. But no revival is ever a first performance. It has not that excitement. Its interest is merely historical. It was as though they had both arrived at Verona, on different errands to Juliet’s tomb. Richard was married. The essential part of him belonged to someone else. Richard would always be indulgent. Richard would always forgive him even his physical necessity. But Ludwig did not want to be forgiven. He wanted to be enjoyed.

When he stood now in the long daisy allee at
Nymphenberg,
it was alone, and the baby no longer looked out at him from the window of his birth. That self had died. Nor was Richard beside him in the tall, wet grass. He wanted to escape. There was no escape. It made him feel violent, but violence he did not yet dare give way to.

For though political violence excites the applause of the masses, personal violence frightens them, for that endangers their own security. People fear the madness of others only as a danger to themselves. Of that true madness that sits alone in a room they neither know nor care, nor understand until they, too, come to sit alone in the room of themselves, and by then it is too late.

He had before him the example of his brother Otto to prove it.

Those years were very long. Those years were like walking down a narrow circular staircase, deeper into a crypt, and never to know when one would reach the bottom stair. The air grew stale. The walls grew damp. Then one heard the first cries from the dungeons below,
but did not dare to turn back, for the weight of darkness above.

Once one entered upon that narrow stair, so like the disused stair between his apartments in the Residenz and those prepared for Sophie below him, it was impossible to turn upward again. The steps spiralled relentlessly down, past iron rings set in the wall. He would gladly grasp at any of those rings, to rest a little while. It took all his energy to remain where he was.

Every repeated act was another step below him,
offering
itself deceptively to his foot. After each sexual act, each cloudy white outlet of the self, he was down another step. At the bottom lay the Procrustean State Bed, and he did not want to see the figure stretched out there.

After each step down, he swore to his diary that he would never take such another. But there are times when the body does not dare to be alone. So after each oath he reached down another stair and grasped desperately at another rusted ring on the accelerating wall. He turned another page of the diary.

In 1873 Wagner returned to Munich. It was another event to write down. But Wagner was no longer the Great Friend. He had changed masks: now he was the Great Man. Ludwig went in to Munich to see him, but as soon as the meeting took place, he sensed the difference at once. Wagner entered the room to meet him as a man would enter a bank, glancing around for a favourite cashier. Fame had made him impatient and his clothes had a cleaner smell.

Before this apparition Ludwig felt helpless. Thus must a sculptor feel, his model finished, when he comes back to see the enormous marble copy made by the
journeymen
, coarser in feature, made of an inferior material, almost unrecognizable, but undeniably his own work.

There seemed little to say. The meeting was a failure.

He wrote it down in his diary. He wrote it not as it had happened, but as it should have been. It was not exactly a lie, for lies are as absolute as the truth they seek to emulate.

At last, he wrote, he had seen the adored friend after a long separation. Unfortunately he could not adore the Friend. We cannot adore that which refuses our
adoration
: we can only praise it. No man is our friend, either, who accepts our emotion as a phoenix gathers kindling for its nest. Blessed embrace, wrote Ludwig, but it had not been a blessed embrace. It had been the embrace of a potentate accepting tribute from a state unknown. World fame had made Wagner an emperor. He treated Ludwig as one would an inferior.

The truth did not matter. The diary mattered. Happy hours, he wrote, faithful unto death. Unfortunately Wagner was faithful to no one, except perhaps to Cosima for taking care of him so well. Does our desire to retain a good servant prove we feel affection for her? Not at all.

Besides, no artist is faithful to anyone. He is faithful only to voices we cannot hear. An artist exists only in the work he has not yet written, which to others remains unattainable: he takes refuge from us there.

In the restless way he sat, the pompous movements of his hands, Ludwig could see that Wagner would never belong to him. Yet it was still agreeable to write in the diary that he could.

When Wagner had gone, Ludwig went to Berg. There on the lake he seemed to see not the swan of Lohengrin, but the ghostly creaking ship of the Flying Dutchman, condemned to search for a faithful woman, the ropes and rigging hanging like spider webs. Moonlight made the boat almost visible, as it sailed farther and farther away
from him. The boat had no crew. It sailed of its own necessity. When it returned, if it ever did return, it would bring only the vampire body of Nosferatu, a creature once human, who now valued human life only as a source of nourishment. Nosferatu was himself. Opening the diary, he wrote down his farewell from shore to ship. From ship to shore there was no signal, nor was there apt to be.

The circular staircase wound through sleep. Clutching his diary he took another step down. The dungeon came closer. Down there lurked the figure of an executioner, waiting for him. If we cannot have reprieve, then the executioner becomes a welcome figure. But even he will not come when he is called.

As Ludwig looked down the long line of his own
dynasty
, he saw that sweaty, yellow-booted executioner capering before him. With Richard he was still sometimes safe, but only for a little while. Richard had no real power to save him. Richard could at most console. There was no one else on that stair. Or rather the only figure on it was someone going down ahead of him, whose identity he did not wish to know, but did know. Otto.

His life hung before him like a torn web. Had Richard and he been man and woman, they would have whirled off in the arms of time, in a liberated waltz, a vision of tulle and pale pink roses, like his cousin, the Empress Elizabeth, who danced through experience towards her own death, but safe in the embrace of marriage. It was not fair. There was music, too, in his own soul, that leapt and bubbled like a dying fountain, even as leapt and fell the fountain in his bedroom at Hohenschwangau.

His music piped furtively under the leaves and in the random ambling of powdered snow, moved this way and that by the wind. In his mind he heard the piping,
plaintive
murmur of an almost inaudible procession that fifed him always out of every welcome town. Sadness is all the happiness we know. In its centre sits the soul that longs to smile. Two must dance, if dancing there may be.

Beauty is always sad, for beauty alone knows beauty is fugitive. Beauty is what we would do together, if we could be together. Out of the crysalis of any true meeting,
unfolds
the winged creature of memory, who can neither eat nor drink. There is no dance so heavenly upward bearing as the dance of those who cannot dance, and close their eyes along the wall.