Remember Me (5 page)

Next day he saw Cosima von Bülow riding across the Konigsplatz beneath his windows, in an open carriage. He knew who she was. He felt she had something to do with him. He pulled himself up abruptly, sensing
something
he did not quite understand, but only because he did not want to understand it, for the police brought him the town gossip every day.

He put his knowledge carefully away. And it would have stayed tucked away, had Wagner not chosen to overstep himself. Perhaps all favourites become
over-weaning
occasionally, but Wagner chose the wrong occasion.

The occasion was a command performance of
Tristan.
Ludwig had wanted them to share the work together. He
had sent over designs for the stage sets. Wagner, whose attention to detail was almost mentally unbalanced, would not have it so. He sent the designs back. It was another rebuff.

As deer come down warily to the water at evening, when the critics are away, so does royalty refresh itself uncertainly at works of art, afraid that its taste may be attacked, yet eager for nourishment. Sitting in the theatre, Ludwig did not greatly care. If he wanted his pennyworth of applause, Wagner should have it. It proved him the smaller man. But that afternoon Wagner had given him political advice, and in politics he had no right to meddle. Nor should the theatre be entirely his. After all, it was Ludwig’s theatre.

The performance had been tended with loving care. Wagner had insisted upon a royal audience. Almost the whole family was there. That he should look down at the stage and see his soul naked and exposed to the indifferent gaze of his relatives filled Ludwig with fury. It seemed to him that Wagner had boned him as one would bone a fish, and flung the fillets on the stage for the world to laugh at. Fortunately his relatives were too stupid to realize what was happening. Only the
Liebestod
roused part of their bodies against their will, in a sensual way. For it was not really spiritual music: it was emotional chiropractic, designed to manipulate a limping soul.

He began to watch eagerly. Lohengrin had failed, but perhaps this new work,
Tristan,
might provide the answer. For it is not for Isolde that Tristan dies, but through her. Only in casting her off, can he cast life off, and so be free. Ludwig became intent. As once travellers rolled cannon balls down the mystical corridors of Hadrian’s tomb, so would he vanish into the dark corridors of this
masterpiece
,
to hear his destiny echo at the end of it and to
forget
the man who made it.

It was very stirring. Ludwig decided to be
magnanimous.
When the curtain fell, he allowed Wagner to take his bow from the royal box, if only because it had the added merit of annoying the audience. Let Wagner be vulgar if he would, and if little pieces of ostentation like this pleased him, very well. He could produce a masterpiece, and that was all one could demand of anyone. A
masterpiece
was as rare as mutual love, perhaps because a mutual love was one. But Ludwig did not want to see any more of him. It was the work he wished to see. The man merely interrupted his thoughts. He fled after the
performance
to Hohenschwangau.

That was the highest and the most ancient of the family
schlossen.
It was from there that the original Lohengrin had set forth on his pilgrimage. Ludwig felt healthier among those heights and snows. He would not descend again to the capital until he must.

Tristan
had uplifted him. He wanted to think about it. He also wanted to try an experiment. He would always be grateful to Wagner for having written it, and the other operas also, but he no longer saw any reason to be grateful to him for anything else. Besides, if reports were true, he had the von Bülow woman now, and Ludwig did not want to think of that.

Meanwhile, having no one else to turn to, he had turned back almost regretfully to Paul.

Paul of Thurn and Taxis was a cadet princeling of that prolific and serious-minded house. He was the young man whose mere presence had given Wagner the
emotional
key to that first successful interview.

And he was the first friend Ludwig had ever had, the first to accept his love, and also the first to reject it. But
that he had accepted it at all, gave Ludwig hope. If he must make do with substitutes, then he must make do with the substitutes he knew. He had no time to seek for others.

He had first met Paul a year ago, in 1863. That was the year the family had finally recognized him as crown prince, and had given him apartments on the top floor of the Residenz. Having done that, they left him there. Along with the apartments, he had also been given two aides-de-camp. He had waited to meet them eagerly, but without much hope. Still, if they could not be friends, at least they would be company.

He did not so much remember people as the rooms and places in which he had met them. To remember the people themselves was too painful, for he had the ugly trick of remembering them clearly as he first saw them, before he managed to pretend that they were what he wished them to be.

When the door opened and Sauer and Prince Paul came into the room, he was so nervous, that at first he saw nothing but their clothes. Yet the hermit crab,
foraging
under the weight of the sea and almost blind,
sometimes
finds by accident a fellow scavenger.

Paul had been a slim, manly youth, with a curiously arrogant and withdrawn head. His costume was court military. His features were blurred and indistinct. He had reached his apogee already, as the prototype of the athletic and agreeable young man. There was nothing left for him to do but decline. But when we see a statue or a painting walking around in the flesh, immediately we are curious. We want it. Ludwig forgot all about Sauer. To this day he could not remember the man. But on first seeing Paul he experienced that shock of recognition that is so much more dangerous than love.

And as though this were love, he immediately began
to try to fit him into the private corners of what life he had, to fill up the empty places and to chink the
disappointments
of the past. That was when the pattern of his life was set. The things he tried to do with Paul, he would after that try to do with everybody else to whom he was attracted.

There was a small hunting lodge up one of the valleys of the Watzmann. He took Paul there, for it was one of the places where he had always wanted to have a friend.

In the mountains of Bavaria the forests are like green fur. In the clear, invisible wind the nap of the tree tops wriggles affectionately. In the mountains he felt free. In the mountains the Wittelsbachs were kings as they were nowhere else. In the cities nowadays the
bourgeoisie
had a permanent lien against their betters. But in the
mountains
the peasants were loyal. The Wittelsbachs were men up there, the heads of their clan. In the cities they were merely constitutional monarchs, and a constitution has neither emotions nor loyalties. In the city a king is only a picture in a pie shop or on the palace balcony. In the mountain woods he gets his body back.

He had only had one perfect day with Paul. But he remembered every detail of it clearly, even when the image of Paul himself had faded. For in the days when he had first met Paul, he had felt only the emotion evoked in him, and not its social nature. His first days with Paul were part of that golden past before he had learned that the objects of our desire and of our love are not
necessarily
the same.

There are certain days in our life whose likeness sits in the mind forever. When we examine them outwardly, we cannot see why we remember them at all, even though they have the captive clarity and beauty of a snowstorm in a paperweight. They are those days when our senses
capture permanently the outward semblance of the world during some great inner spiritual event that transforms our lives. This one was a day in September of 1863.

He and Paul were alone together. It was the first time Ludwig had ever been allowed to be alone with anyone. It made him move with a curious self-conscious jerkiness of which he was agonizingly aware. He became the
puppet
of himself, and scarcely knew which wires to pull. He so much wanted to please Paul. And in truth Paul was easily pleased, though not by him. But there was no way in which Ludwig could know that.

They climbed one of the silent valleys of the
Watzmann.
The higher they rose the closer together they
became.
The day was intimate and warm. Rank,
conventions,
and reserve lay behind Ludwig on the slopes below him, like discarded clothes. He longed to touch Paul’s hand. He did not dare. He did not then quite understand the nature of his necessity to touch, but drew away from it instinctively. Instead he began to run.

Paul followed. He was, after all, an aide-de-camp. He had to do what his master did. They shot out of the forest like dogs after a rabbit, and found themselves in the middle of a little meadow.

Through the meadow ran a shallow brook, very wide over smooth stones. What energy it had was caught by a low dam, where it was allowed to spill over. A few dusty and abandoned fruit trees stood about in the knee-high grass. The forest rose beyond. Beside the dam there was a mill. Behind the mill was a steep-roofed farmhouse. The Watzmann lurked beyond. At the top of the Watzmann glittered snow.

In front of the mill was a yellow wooden bench.
Behind
the bench stood a young peasant, stripped to the waist. He had the face of a Siegfried, not that of a
Lohengrin
.
It was a heavy, sleepy, inert face full of shadowy laughter. His skin was slippery, but his body firm. He was sweating lustily. He was planing a plank.

Ludwig paused and was envious. He himself had the wrong body for a hero. And Paul was an idea, not a body. Paul he could have. The woodsman he could not. He transferred his emotions from one to the other. He had found an ideal figure at last and he would never be able to forget it. There remained his desires, and he was afraid of them. Paul had the slim, useless figure of a drawing-room officer.

Looking at the woodsman, Ludwig became both
reverent
and wary. He sat down on a stump. It was something that moved him deeply, a glimpse at the thing he and Paul should have had between them, but did not. For the aristocracy could make nothing. It was born without hands. It could only express itself through others,
otherwise
its message died.

The woodsman was wearing lederhosen and nothing else. The sweat clotted on his hairy chest and legs. His face was finer than he was. It was a face not to be lost. They shared their lunch with the woodsman. It was a communion of sorts, but communion with a god who could not answer.

Ludwig had found what he could never be. It made him sad. It made him suddenly see through Paul, to the amiable nonentity on the other side. Physical desires, though they should be denied, could be gratified
anywhere
. But what he needed was greatness. Greatness was the only thing he could love, and he despaired of finding it anywhere.

Then he had met Wagner, and there had been hope. But Wagner was not great. Only his works were so.
Wagner
was gone. The works remained. He had dismissed
Paul when he had found Wagner. Now, having dismissed Wagner, he called Paul back. Who else was there, whom he could call?

He called him to Hohenschwangau. He had a reason for that.

Together they went down to a jetty on the lake, below the
schloss,
towards evening. The experiment had
appealed
to Paul’s sense of masquerade, and Ludwig had known that it would. After all, there was nothing else in Paul to appeal to. For the moment Ludwig was willing to take what he could get.

A small boat was moored there, attached to a
mechanical
swan. Ludwig had had it manufactured secretly. For him it was a solemn moment, the moment of the test.

The two youths stood for a moment on the dock, watching the uneasy waters of the lake. Paul was wrapped up in a heavy cloak. He took it off and handed it to
Ludwig.
Ludwig tried not to watch. He did not want to see Lohengrin departing, but Lohengrin coming toward him. The light caught for an instant against Paul’s armour. The little boat went out into the lake, turned, and started back.

Ludwig had had his back deliberately to the water. Now he watched. The swan made a slight chugging noise, ploughing woodenly through the water. The gunwales of the boat were too low. Paul had to stand with his legs apart, in order to balance, but he was
undoubtedly
Lohengrin. And yet he was not. He was only Paul. He had the impertinence to grin, when he should have looked remote, stern and heroic. That grin cut through Ludwig like a knife, at the same time that he was thrilled. The music of Wagner seemed to surge around the edges of the lake, in the trembling of the fir boughs. Yet as the boat came closer to the dock, he could
see more clearly the cheerful, meaningless, wheaten face of Paul.

Abruptly his vision faded. His union with the works of Wagner disappeared. It had been wrong to call back Paul. He sent him away and tried on the Lohengrin armour himself, in the privacy of his rooms. He had to know how it felt to be Lohengrin, for if he was never to be saved by a Lohengrin, then he would have to be Lohengrin himself.

Paul was slighter than he, and so the armour did not quite fit. But wearing it did give him the delicious feeling of at last living inside somebody else, as though he were safe in being able to peer out at the world through
another
man’s eyes.

And yet in this case they were not eyes that saw very much. Perhaps the actor Rohde would see more. He hoped so, though subconsciously he did not believe it. It was only a way out of an increasingly tangled wood, the easiest one that he could take. He had been King for almost a year. The ministers were trying to remove Wagner. They were censorious about all luxuries except their own. They were agitating for his marriage, and politics were not agreeable. He decided to get away from them incognito.